I've been in Canada; I've been putting my spring classes together; I've been sick. When I get it together, I'm going to start writing a bit here about my plans for a Sex in American Cinema course at St. Mary's College in May. Meanwhile, I don't have to say anything at all about Brokeback Mountain, because Mark Simpson, who is as practically perfect as his compatriot Mary Poppins, has said it all already. Mark Simpson invented the term "metrosexual" and here he outdoes it with "retrosexual" (yum) and "fauxmosexual" (and you know who you are). At first it may appear that he's just complaining that we don't see Jake and Heath doing it--and he has every right to complain, God knows--but instead, he is, as he often does, pointing out the obvious that everyone ignores: Brokeback Mountain is about acceptable styles of masculinity, and avoids its ostensible subject of sex almost completely.
I love Mark.
By the way, the image of Brokeback recast comes from a Chinese website, and I have no idea what the context is. But I find I get kind of a charge out of it.


LONESOME METRO-COWBOYS
By Mark Simpson

Is there a support group for people who didn't like BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN? We must, if the rave reviews and newspaper reports are to be believed, be a very tiny - not to mention vulnerable - minority. Am I dead inside because I didn't experience the torrent of emotions I've been reading about in newspapers and in movie forums? Am I as emotionally crippled as Ennis because I didn't blub and hug after sitting through this `visceral' movie, but instead wanted to go and `help with the round up'? Am I suffering from internalized homophobia?

Probably all of the above. But this doesn't mean that this film which has become a phenomenon, isn't as tedious, mawkish, lifeless, unconvincing and bizarrely hypocritical as I found it to be. I wish now that I'd left after the first 15 minutes with the two bored, gum-chewing teen girls in front of me at the multiplex and gone shopping with them for the latest Westlife album instead. There would at least have been more sex.

OK, so there's a hurried joyless near-rape in the dark at the beginning, but we've seen all that before in more detail in prison movie films like SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION. Although true to Annie Proulx's original short story, this, the only sex scene in this `love movie' seems to owe more to director Ang Lee's awkwardness and impatience about MANSEX than Ennis'. This filmic essay on homophobia and its terrible toll goes out of its way to shield us from what it is that these two men have together or what it is that they do when together - or why they would bother to go to the trouble of trying to relive it every year for decades. Across thousands of miles.

Even when they kiss, it's carefully shot so that we never really see them kiss, the shadows in the tepee artfully falls across their mouths, or if somewhere better lit they appear just to be pushing their faces together, lips and teeth gritted. This makes the scene in which Ennis' wife spies these desperately `closeted' guys `kissing' outside her home all the more unconvincing and ironic. The realisation suddenly hits her: `Omigod! My husband is a fauxmosexual!' No wonder she's distressed.

Their boss also clocks the lover boys from a distance. But why their boss would assume they were queer because they liked to wrestle with their tops off rather than wannabe Abercrombie and Fitch models I don't know; maybe he had special binoculars. But I have to say that I sat right at the front of the theatre and I'm still not really sure what the hell they get up to on Brokeback Mountain. They don't talk much. They don't shag. They don't kiss properly. As Ennis' wife complains, `You go fishing but you don't bring back any fish.' The film tells us they're lovers. Insists that they're lovers, goddammit. But fails utterly to show it.

Perhaps I'm merely a jaded homosexual. Perhaps I've seen too much. Perhaps it's absurd of me to expect a proper snog between the lovers in a `love film', especially in a film that is telling us over and over again in painfully didactic fashion how bad homophobia is and a film which has been trumpeted for it's `courage'. But in the small provincial town in England's equivalent of Wyoming where I now live, I've several times seen (or rather stared at) drunken young soldiers snogging one another, `for a laugh', tongues and everything, in the middle of crowded pubs, much more convincingly, passionately and lingeringly than these actors who have been told by a thousand interviewers how `brave' and `committed' they were to do these scenes.

But then, there's not much realistic about this film. Even the impassively beautiful Wyoming countryside seems to have been wrapped in cellophane and Brokeback Mountain a big ribbon bow stuck on top of it. The boys are also very appetising, but while Heath Ledger turns in a fine performance with an almost impossible script and bloodless directing, both of them are too pretty - Jake Gyllenhaal in particular, lovely as he is, looks too metropolitan, too confected, too DETAILS fashion-shoot with a Western theme. By the time he reaches the 70s he looks he like the cowboy out of the Village People: the same haircut, the same black moustache, the same Stetson. But maybe this shouldn't be so surprising since the cowboy from the Village People, I discovered later, was the `gay cowboy consultant' on this metro-cowboy movie; very Queer Eye For The Western Guy. (Personally, I wished they'd hired Nancy Walker, director of CAN'T STOP THE MUSIC in place of Ang Lee).

BROKEBACK is not a serious exploration of rural retrosexuality and its discontents, and certainly not a love story, but rather it's feature-length propaganda for contemporary, metropolitan metrosexuality. It is an attack on retrosexual repression in general and old-style, `outmoded' stoic masculinity in particular. This is the real reason for its tremendous, zeitgeisty popularity.

Both cowboys, Ennis in particular, are prisoners of their problems with expressing feelings: homophobia, internal and external, is just the biggest symbol of this. Their fat bald boss is an unfeeling bigot. Ennis' father took him to see the castrated corpse of a local queer when he was a small boy (`for all I know he mighta done it himself'). Jack's abusive father is uptight, cold and resentful. His father-in-law is a bullying buffon (who turns out to be a coward for good measure).

None of the older males in this film are fully human - because they aren't in touch with their feelings. They are all twisted, mean and nasty. Jack and Ennis, a product of that world, are stunted too; they're just not so mean and nasty. This is why they are also the only attractive males in Wyoming. Their desirability is proof to a modern, metrosexual audience of their sympathy, of their goodness, of their modernity, of the awfulness of their retrosexual predicament.

Because retrosexuality rather than homophobia per se is the real target of this film's didacticism, the emotional hobbling is hetero as well as homo. Ennis is portrayed as someone who is not just closeted about his passion for Jack but closeted in all his relationships. Whenever confronted with the need for a commitment or a demonstration of love, either for Jack, his wife, his daughter, his new girlfriend after his wife divorces him, he starts mumbling `ahh don't know. roundup is comin.'. Fear and loathing of homosexuality, of male emotionality and sensuality, of explicit tenderness between men is presented as a continuum.

Which, to some degree, it is. As the `father' of the metrosexual, I have some sympathy with some of the ideology behind this film, if not the execution. And at least in BROKEBACK male sensuality, aestheticism and homoerotics is not displaced into flip-flops and facials and appropriation of stereotypically effeminate homosexual traits as it was in the spayed marketing version of metrosexuality - even if it is somewhat fetishized here into jeans and carefully beat-up pick-up trucks.

But dress it up purdy or plain, or call it by any other name, like the marketing version of metrosexuality that preceded it, BROKEBACK is nevertheless also an accessorisation of homosexuality. This is effectively a film about two straight men who have a homosexual love-affair. After all, the two protagonists are married, the actors who play them are straight, as is the director, the author of the short story it's based on, and the vast majority of the audience. Even the sex is `straight' - there's rather more hetero sex than homo. BROKEBACK is literally acting out the culture's current fascination with homoerotics and male sensuality. Which, in itself, is no bad thing. Homoerotics and male sensuality are not the unique property of homosexuals. In fact, they make up a small fraction of those human beings who are affected by these things.

And yes, the reticence of the film in regard to actually showing Jack and Ennis' love for one another, either sexually or in any other way, and its generally unconvincing air, may not be entirely down to Hollywood's nervousness or hypocrisy. If their love for one another is merely symbolic, to actually show it instead of just asserting it might diminish its metrosexual message.

But what makes a film a cultural phenomenon doesn't necessarily make it any good. For me BROKEBACK's metro-cowboy propaganda is right smack dab in the place where it's supposed to have a big bleeding heart and is the very thing which makes it so disappointing. The ultimate irony is that BROKEBACK the `breakthrough' movie depicts less credible warmth, intimacy and tenderness between the male lovers than a movie like say, BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID. Now nearly forty years old.

Palpably BROKEBACK is not the movie that people seem to want it to be - but it is a movie which, in it's vagueness, ellipsis and coyness, and even its hypocrisy, allows itself to be misrecognised as the modern explicitly male romance movie people clearly need it to be. Let's hope that its success means that someone out there can now make a movie that is a little more convincing.

Or even just one in which men in love kiss with their mouths open.

Copyright Mark Simpson 2006Mark Simpson's SAINT MORRISSEY has just been published in hardback by Simon & Schuster.

This is a comment from William Gibson's blog, not a bad thing to remember when you're astounded, as I often am, at how little actual work you're getting done:

I suspect I have spent just about exactly as much time actually writing as the average person my age has spent watching television, and that, as much as anything, may be the real secret here.

How Come There's Never a Barbarian Around When You Need One?

Falling ill at the wrong moment, the unfortunate [Manius Aquillius, Roman commander] was captured and dragged back to Pergamum, shackled all the way to a seven-foot barbarian. After tying him to an ass and parading him through jeering crowds, Mithridates next ordered some treasure melted down. When all had been prepared, Aquillius' head was jerked back, his mouth forced open, and the molten metal poured down his throat. 'Warmongers against every nation, people and king under the sun, the Romans have only one abiding motive--greed,deep-seated, for empire and riches.' This had been the verdict of Mithridates on the Republic and now, in the person of her legate in Asia, he exacted symbolic justice. Manius Aqullius choked to death on gold.

-Tom Holland, Rubicon

Dream: I Have to Tell My Parents They're Dead

I'm living with my parents and brother in an apartment that has about ten rooms and seems to spread out in all directions. It seems to be in Montreal. My mother is sitting at the dining table paring vegetables or something; my father is sitting in a ratty overstuffed armchair reading the paper. They're in their forties or fifties and my brother and I are in late teens. My brother and I are discussing what will happen when we have to tell them they're actually dead. Will they take it as bad news, like you would if you found out you were going to die, will they refuse to believe it, or will they just disappear like a puff of smoke? My brother says that my father will probably just disappear, because he didn't really want to be alive anyway, but my mother's going to take it very hard. We dread telling her.

Me and My Shadow Figure

Yes, it's getting to be the tiredest image in my repertoire, but it works for me. Donnie Darko (with his ax) takes me to the Other Side, and I have my best dreams there. Last night:

There's a small gathering, something between a social-obligation dinner party and a bunch of people trapped in a wing of a building they can't find their way out of. Like No Exit but even more like The Exterminating Angel. It's mostly Corcoran faculty. There's one person widely and pretty openly disliked and disapproved of; he represents a bureaucratic, bullshitty attitude toward both art and education that focuses on marketing and positioning yourself, adopting fashionable positions and ingratiating yourself with administrators, and not, as we would think of it, asking any really interesting questions about either art or education. But I want to draw him into a conversation and perhaps find common ground, so I ask him a question about teaching. He answers, in a condescending tone that's very true to his real manner, "I don't think the contemporary instructor should be thinking about teaching. What I do in my classes is facade performatively." I am gobsmacked. After a moment I recover and say, "Who gave you the right to use facade as a verb?"
After a little further discussion he seems to reconsider and retreat from his position. (This is also extremely familiar from his behavior in waking life.) He begins casually taking his clothes off and strutting around naked, apparently to show that he's just one of the guys. He climbs in my lap and drags his genitals and ass across my face. He's really surprised that this does not seem to please me, and he's starting to look panicky. He takes off the wool cap he's wearing and I see that he's bald on top and his hair on the sides is sticking out in all directions and is cut very unevenly. He looks very weak and sick. He lies in my lap naked and reaches his arms up to wrap around my shoulders. "I love you," he says. "Don't you love me?"

A Man Killed by His Dream

The Zuo Zhuan (about fifth century BC) tells the story of Shushun Bao of Lu, who traveled to Qi to meet his bride. Along the way he stopped at Geng Zong, where he met a woman who offered to bring him food. He spent the night with her.
Sometime after the birth of his two sons by the woman from Qi, he dreamed that the heavens were falling on him and crushing him to death. He called for help and saw a small, deformed man. "Niu (cow-like)!" he cried, "Help me!" But Niu did not assist him; he stood aside and watched. Shushun Bao pushed hard against the heavens and escaped. When he awoke he described the man in his dream and told his councillors to beware of him.
Years later he determined to return home from Qi to Lu. Along the way he stopped at Geng Zong, where the woman he had met long ago presented him with his son. "Niu," Shushun Bao said, before introductions could be made. "Yes," said the boy.
Niu accompanied Shushun Bao to Lu, where under the guise of protecting his father, he arranged the execution of his older half-brother and the exile of the younger. Attending his father Shushun Bao in illness, he withheld his medicine and watched as he died.

I Normally Don't Do This Kind of Thing . . .

but I do so enjoy the posts at TomCruiseIsNuts.com. Here's a sample:

November 7, 2005

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

The Cruiser hoping to convert Oprah to Scientology. Operation "Evil Celebrity World Domination" enters Phase 2 [insert evil laugh here].

From Bodog : "Tom Cruise plans to lay out $15 million to buy a place in Montecito, Calif., just two doors away from Oprah's $50 million estate! Are these two A-listers just really, really good friends -- or is something else going on? Is it chemistry -- or Scientology? According to a source, Tom, 43, wants to covert Oprah "I think he really thinks he can convert her. Tom seems really eager to lure Oprah into the church because he feels she would be a fantastic spokesperson and attract a whole new set of followers."

So it's finally here, the End of Days. Once they have Oprah, there will be no stopping them. We tried to warn you. So as there seems to be nothing we can do to stop this coming apocalypse, we've done the next best thing and found a way to profit from it! Check out the current odds at Bodog.com on Oprah's conversion. We plan to make some serious money on this... at least then we'll have enough funds to tithe to our future Scientology masters to avoid "re-education" at an "Oprah Camp".

---

November 3, 2005

"Eww! A girl is touching me! Get it off, get it off!"

Kidman "devastated" about the Cruiser's "baby"

From MSNBC : "Nicole Kidman is said to be “devastated” by the news that her ex-hubby, Tom Cruise, is about to have his first biological [cough, cough] child [spawn] with fiancée Holmes [CSCV] . And, although Cruise and Kidman are said to be in regular contact with one another, the buzz is that Kidman found out that he was an expecting dad from television. “Nic learned about Tom and Katie’s baby [spawn] the same way as everyone else — from the TV,” a friend of Kidman’s told Britain’s Grazia magazine. “She went shopping immediately after hearing the news to try and take her mind off it, but that just made things worse. She says people pointed at her, and everyone was whispering as soon as she turned her back. She’s taking it very hard.”

Of course, with the Cruiser's newly discovered "Remote Spawning" capability, she should be very careful what she wishes for, he could probably impregnate her cold, barren womb from Toledo. Oh, and Bewitched? Not funny.

---

November 2, 2005

Ex-Montreal Expos' mascot Youppi loses job. Vows bloody revenge on Martin Holmes. "Grandpapa! Grandmama! I wuv you... NOW BOW DOWN BEFORE YOUR ALIEN CONQUEROR, HUMAN SCUM!"

The prenup saga continues. The Cruiser Spawn Carrying Vehicle (the CSCV) shakes up legal team. Youppi out, her father in. Youppi "devastated".

From MSNBC : "Holmes’s father, Martin, is a lawyer and is representing his daughter in the negotiations, reports the upcoming issue of The Star. Martin Holmes “is playing hardball with the prenup negotiations,” according to the tab, which quotes a source as saying that Holmes wants to make sure that his daughter will receive “a lump sum payment in the millions if the marriage should dissolve before the five-year mark.” Such terms are unusual for a prenup, which usually awards a spouse more money for a longer marriage, but, the source tells the mag: “The Holmes family would never tell Katie if they thought her marriage was doomed from the get-go, but they are pressuring her to hold out not only to protect her interests, but those of her child.”

Wow, have we just found the only sane people in this entire fiasco of a disaster of a train wreck of an Armageddon? Way to go Holmes family! Now if only you hadn't raised your daughter to be a complete moron who allowed herself to be impregnated by an alien space spawn, you guys would really be the best parents EVER! But, hey, 1 out of 2 ain't bad... at least you're getting a prenup! Mazel tov!

---

November 1, 2005

The Cruiser asks the Cruiser Spawn Carrying Vehicle (the CSCV) to sign a prenup. The CSCV displays brilliant legal mind and "Freaks out"

Katie's crack legal team, led by ex-Montreal Expos' mascot Youppi, comments on prenup. Thumbs up!

From upcoming Star: "Holmes was recently shocked when love-of-her-life Tom Cruise asked her to sign a prenup. "She's freaked out," the source says. "I think she thought it meant that he wasn't sure their relationship would last." [NO! well that thought certainly never crossed our minds] The source says that the idea of a prenup had never occurred to Katie. [but converting to his alien parasite religion was just fine] "She is head over heels in love with him and couldn't bear the thought that he might not be equally as in love," the source said. He told Katie that the prenup was for "her protection." [hey, wait a second... this sounds suspicious..] "He explained that at 43, he's more than 16 years older than she is," [okay...] said the source, "and although he's healthy, who knows what life has in store?" [uh-oh, we can see where this is going... here it comes, Katie...] Worried that he might die young like his dad, Tom told Katie, "he wanted to create a prenup so that she will always be taken care of, no matter what." [And, BINGO! Nice one Cruiser, very subtle. But, um, isn't that what the will is for? Not that we're lawyers or anything... Just wondering....]

Since You Asked

I think the classic definitions of the uncanny differentiate it from horror (and terror) as these are defined by one's physical responses to the object (whatever theories people have about the psychological sources of those feelings). The uncanny is both supernatural and disturbing or eerie--that is, one the one hand, it's defined by being inexplicable according to the ordinary operations of nature (thus, a rotting corpse is not uncanny though it may be an object of horror); on the other, by not being very nice (therefore miracles and God are not uncanny).

Freud's way of looking at the uncanny is interesting and very influential: It makes the familiar strange through some transformation that is generally to be explained as a psychological mechanism of defense, denial, alienation, and thus undermines our sense of the reality of reality, or ability to discern the real from the imagined, illusory, or subjective. Thus, typical uncanny themes are ghosts (much better when they are the ghosts of someone known); vampires (ditto, as they generally are in classic folklore); zombies (which confuse the categories or life and death); doppelgaengers (isn't that me? But I'm me!! Aaaaaagh!!!!). That's why my list tends to things like The Turn of the Screw, which are very decidedly ghost stories without necessarily being in the horror genre. Bartleby is interesting because, like Kafka and Borges, it skirts the issue of the supernatural. I am especially interested in situations where the uncanny effect is created not primarily by the device of a ghost, etc., but by a literary technique such as multiple points of view (as in Dracula or Rashomon), nesting of stories (as in The Manuscript Found at Saragossa), or weird narrative puzzles (as in Ubik). Personally, I think Stephen King is a very good writer of horror novels but only occasionally really interested in the uncanny, and then the effect is forced; Phillip K. Dick and Peter Straub are just deeply attracted to the uncanny. The title of Emmanuel Carrere's biography of Dick is pretty uncanny itself; at least it's extremely eerie: I Am Alive and You are Dead.

Unlike the basic category of the horror novel or film, the category of the uncanny fits pretty well with other things I teach, try to read up on, and hope to write more about: the nature of dreams; the theme of cannibalism in psychodynamics, esp. of childhood; and the identity issues posed by artificial persons in novels and film. On the latter, I think there's a lot in genuine philosophy and cultural theory lately, but very little that's psychodynamically oriented, so recognizing the continuity between , say, Blade Runner and Edgar Allan Poe on the living dead, automata, and doubles could be kind of interesting.

Dreyer, Vampyr

The Uncanny

I've been considering proposing a course on The Uncanny in Film and Lit. Unfortunately, I don't have time right now to go into why I'm feeling "The Uncanny" helps me to get at something I couldn't do with a course on Horror or The Gothic, but it basically comes down to seeing The Uncanny as an issue in representation rather than underlying beliefs--that is, the supernatural premise or incident is treated as defining subject matter and context for conventions in an analysis of the Gothic novel or the horror film, but I want to get instead at the creation of the sensation of the uncanny (and the conventions and premises, etc.) through the limitations and possibilities of representation, in narrative fiction and film. (Admittedly, this what a lot of theory-heads would do anyway, but I would be happier starting things out rightside-up by turning the conventional assumptions about the relation between reality and representation in art upside-down to begin with--that is, to admit, that supernatural belief is a function of narrative rather than assuming that narrative conveys supernatural belief.)
One reason I know this would be interesting for me to do is that the list of texts comes so easily:

Fiction
E. T. A. Hoffman
Keats - the gothic poerms
Poe (M. Valdemar, The Black Cat, The Tale-Tale Heart, Ligeia, William Wilson, a lot of others, really)
Washington Irving - The Stranger with a Bag, maybe Sleepy Hollow
Hogg - Private Memoirs and Confessions
Eliot - The Lifted Veil
Potocki - The Manuscript Found at Saragossa
Dostoevsky - The Double
Melville - Bartleby?
James - The Turn of the Screw, The Friends of the Friends
Dracula (esp. the uncanniness created by multiple and partial views)
Stevenson - Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
M. R. James, E. F. Benson
Six Characters in Search of an Author
Kafka - In the Penal Colony
Borges, Calvino
Shirley Jackson, Muriel Spark
Dick - Ubik, The Man in the High Castle
Peter Straub - Ghost Story
This leaves out, among other things, excerpting Montaigne, Thomas Browne, Robert Burton on considering the uncanny; and probably some orientation to the influence of Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, and Hamlet on the Romantics' sense of the Uncanny. It'd be nice to find something in Hazlitt and DeQuincey.

Film

The Golem
The Student of Prague
Vampyr
The Dybbuk
Cat People
The Uninvited
Ugetsu
Rashomon
Kwaidan
Vertigo
Psycho
The Innocents
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Les diaboliques
Rosemary's Baby
Total Recall
And in art generally, there'd be Goya, Fuseli, the Pre-Raphaelites, Surrealism, the Chapmans, Tony Oursler . . .

Key issues: This'd let me go into:
Anomalous psychological experience
Threats to identity
Dead/Alive
Real/Unreal
Doubles
Mulitiplicity of view, subjectivity, transcendentalism
Metaphysical paradox
Self-reference and Romantic irony
Gender and sexuality
I wouldn't base it on Freud, but a psychoanalytic view especially with a lot of Klein (reparation as haunting) would be good. Todorov. Mary Douglas probably has something relevant, too; structuralism is a very good approach for establishing the Uncanny.
I'd be very happy to have the chance to go into this while thinking about some of the films (I've never written up my talk on The Dybbuk for an article) and working on the Double novel.

I'm very glad that my work--maybe that should read "work"--gives me the opportunity to read Divine Hunger: Cannibalism as a Cultural System, by Peggy Reeves Sanday. Normally, I don't have any interest in getting started on polemics in the classroom. And normally, I don't want to push psychoanalytically-inflected theories of behavior too hard. But I'm hoping some of the students in my Humanities course, as we discuss the Friday sections of Robinson Crusoe, Heart of Darkness, and some excerpts from Reeves' book and the cannibalism section in Gustav Jahoda's Images of Savages, will notice the connections between the rationales for cannibalism in some of the societies that practice it, as well as the fury directed at purported cannibals, and the justifications offered by the government of the United States for reserving the right to practice torture.
You can feel like something of a nutcase taking an interest in cannibalism at all, even when anyone who's considered it is aware of the deep relation between cannibalism and the roots of aggression, sadism, and violence (as well as the imagery of the nightmare, which is an area I'm primarily interested in)--and still more so when you are noting a connection in the psychology of Jeffrey Dahmer and George W. Bush. But it's there--not a whole lot more than in the rest of us, but then most of us don't, whether intentionally or incidentally, kill a whole lot of people.

I had been telling him how the Devil was God's enemy in the Hearts of Men, and used all his Malice and Skill to defeat the good Designs of Providence, and to ruine the Kingdom of Christ in the World; and the like. Well, says Friday; but you say, God is so strong, so great, is he not much strong, much might as the Devil? Yes, yes, says I , Friday, God is stronger than the Devil, and therefore we pray to God to tread him down under our Feet, and enable us to resist his Temptations and quench his fiery Darts. But, he says again, if God much strong, much might as the Devil, why God no kill the Devil, so make him do no more wicked?
I was strangely surpriz'd at his Question, and after all, tho' I was now an old Man, yet I was but a young Doctor, and ill enough quallified for a Casuist, or a Solver of Difficulties: And at first I could not tell what to say, so I pretended not to hear him, and ask'd him what he said. But he was too earnest for an Answer to forget his Question; so that he repeated it in the very same broken Words, as above. By this time I had recovered my self a little, and I said, God will at last punish him severely; he is reserv'd for the Judgement, and is to be cast into the Bottomless-Pit, to dwell with everlasting Fire: This did not satisfie Friday, but he returns upon me, repeating my Words, RESERVE, AT LAST, me no understand; but, why not kill the Devil now, not kill great ago?

And Then There's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg

which has a weird sort of hidden relationship to The Threepenny Opera, which, when you think of it, is kind of inevitable--how many models are there for a really interesting 20th-century opera, self-consciously aware of its relation to the past? The relationship is coded into the musical score by Michel Legrand, which, I've always thought, has several moments that are precise transformations of The Threepenny Opera (which is also true of the American film version of Pennies from Heaven and of Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd). But in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, the irony swings the other way. The Threepenny Opera seems like a black-and-white film even when it's performed live on stage; The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is more "about" color than maybe any film outside of Paradjanov. The Threepenny Opera is one of the few entirely successful examples of political art in the twentieth century; The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is a self-consuming artifact of the growth of cinematic connoisseurship. It goes to the other extreme, but it works. I never quite understand people who say they don't get it. Maybe they expect it to be something other than it is. I wouldn't trade a good Douglas Sirk movie for it, but it's still great in the same way.

Is It Me, or Is There Something Just the Tiniest Bit Familiar About

the Route of the 30th Marine Corps Marathon?

Now Look What You Made Me Do

Yesterday morning I spent a bit more than an hour revising my list of favorite movies. I'm still dizzy; I have papers to grade; I'm really into this idea for a new course; I've got three meetings coming up to plan; I have course descriptions to write for the department; and I actually have a short story sitting here for revision. But I worked on my favorite movies list for over an hour. Why? Because you, my public, all two of you, heckled me about it.

This officially makes me a blog nerd. Without any possibility whatever of getting rich off of it.

Cat People, Of Course, Cat People. But No David Fucking Lynch.

When I looked at my list, I was shoked--shocked--to discover I'd left a ton of my personal favorites off. I quickly revised my list to include: Cat People, La regle du jeu, Days of Heaven, If . . ., Man with a Movie Camera, Rashomon, The Searchers, A Matter of Life and Death, L'Atalante . . . I revised the order, too, but I'm not going to post the whole list now because:

I Don't Want to Get Started on This with You, Dude

But I have to say that I have an auxiliary list of movies I have to see again sometime before I decide whether they're among my absolute favories, or movies I've never seen but imagine will be among my absolute favorites once I get around to them, including:

A One and A Two . . .
Andrei Roublev
Belle de jour

Celine and Julie Go Boating
Close-Up
Daisies
Day of Wrath

Fanny and Alexander
Gertrud
La Belle Noiseuse
Les dames du Bois du Boulogne
Let’s Scare Jessica to Death
McCabe and Mrs. Miller
Mirror
Notorious
Oharu
Ordet
Pierrot le fou
Sansho Dayu
Silence of the Palace
The Curse of the Cat People
The Home and the World
The Innocents
The Story of the Late Chrysanthemums
Z

There is probably nothing so interesting as a list of someone's favorite movies. I went through the Sight and Sound 2002 survey of directors' and critics' Top Tens yesterday, too, and they were often interesting, often irritating. (Irritating: People who put Schindler's List, Gone With the Wind, Jaws, Blade Runner or The Piano on their Top Ten lists; people who leave off Citizen Kane because it's "the definitive white male movie"; and really, is there anything as pretentious as pretending that Rope is your favorite Hitchcock movie?) There's just this very clear line between people who like movies because they're good movies, and people who like movies because they approve of what they're saying, or want to be perceived as approving of what they're saying, whether they actually do or not, or want to be associated with some specious glamor, aura, or depth they imagine the film represents. I could just spit.

But nobody, including me, really much wants a list of actually, really, seriously good movies. It's more interesting to do a list of movies you know not everyone likes or even sees but that are somehow to your taste. And this is the thing about criticism in the recently morbid age of theory: the totally dumb smart-guy pose of supposedly avoiding the vicissitudes of personal taste while at the same time establishing an if-you-have-to-ask-why-you'll-never-understand Canon of Cool. (There's not a thing wrong with jazz, for example; it's academic talk about jazz that kills all the joy in life.) And that is why people like Dave Hickey: He elaborates on his taste, like Baudelaire, or Frank O'Hara. Oh, but you knew that.

Oh Crap, I Left Off Rosemary's Baby

My short list of movies not everyone loves that I can watch over and over again--the personal sensibility list:

Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T
Bride of Frankenstein
Imitation of Life
The Gang’s All Here
Hiroshima mon amour
The Celebration
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
RoboCop
Shadow of a Doubt
Week End
Providence
Ohayo
If . . .
A Slave of Love
Love Me Tonight
Law of Desire
Mon oncle d’Amerique
Targets
W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism
All That Heaven Allows
Topsy-Turvy
Cat People
The Devil, Probably
Thundercrack
A Matter of Life and Death
Trash
The Idiots
The Long Day Closes
Double Suicide
The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek
The Terminator
The Dybbuk

Theatre of Blood
Boggy Depot
Talk to Her
Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills
God Told Me To
The Uninvited
The Crime of M. Lange
Last Summer in the Hamptons
Black Moon
The Haunting
Die, Mommie, Die
Devi
Scotland, PA
Sex and Zen
Dracula’s Daughter

And now I'm going back to work.

History for Snot-Nosed Leftist Bastards

I've been thinking this would be a very good time to know more about the role of the sinking of the Lusitania in bringing the United States into World War I. It could make a very good premise for a play. (The sinking of the Maine is the same kind of thing but is a better-known story, and has less ambiguity, I think.) No one says it wasn't a catastrophe--but how did it happen? Did anyone argue it was being used as a pretext? There might be an opportunity for some nice arguing.

File Under "Good Advice"
When you start a blog--and you will--never post a list of your favorite movies.

My Brain Hurts

I'm trying to do notes for my cinema class tomorrow--summarizing Ernest Hartmann on dream as metaphor, Mark Blechner on dream as extralinguistic thinking, Medard Boss, Fritz Perls, and a lot of what is obviously too much stuff to cover in one session--and for some reason my mind keeps wandering back to De Qunicey's essay, "On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts." Maybe it's because when I am actually taking up an intellectual subject and making some pretense of treating it analytically, I slip into self-parody--and there isn't a better satire of the academic dilettante holding forth than De Quincey's essay.

It is a dry kind of humor:

My infirmity being notoriously too much milkiness of the heart, I find it difficult to maintain that steady equatorial line between the two poles of too much murder on the one hand, and too little on the other. . . . I believe, if I had the management of things, there would hardly be a murder from year's end to year's end.

My great discovery a few weeks back was that I'd really like to do a class on Sex and Sexuality in Cinema, so ideas about it pop into my head from time to time. My great discovery this week has been that I'd really like to do a class on The Uncanny in Film and Lit--not the Fantastic, as I've sometimes thought, but the Uncanny precisely because, to put it crudely, when theorists make the Fantastic their subject of study they begin with an idea of some class of things represented in lit or film--whereas I am interested in looking at the Uncanny, the sense of the uncanny, as a product of representation itself, not something represented. That is, the seeing the ghost, say, comes first, as a product of the problems in how we see, then the belief about ghosts. The perception of the fact of mortality necessarily creates the idea of immortality, as an idea one can play with in literature, art, belief systems. The problem, as in medieval proofs of the existence of God, is in a representational theory of thought and language--in assuming that the fact that something can be thought of is somehow an argument for even the possibility of its existence, rather than a feature of how representation works.

This would be much more interesting if one were applying it to Poe, or The Uninvited, or that very hit-or-miss TV show, Medium.

Shuffle function

Mahler's Sixth Symphony

So I was in New York at a conference Thursday and Friday, everything went fine, I was smart and funny and met interesting people, and Saturday morning I woke up with Vertigo--like, seriously, the room spinning round and round. Poor Grady had to get me to the emergency room as I kept throwing up; doctors looked at me, said, "Yeah, you've got vertigo, all right, isn't it the darnedest thing?" and I spent the night in the hospital. Now I'm back and walking a little bit like a drunk, otherwise OK but not quite ready to stare at a screen for any length of time.

So this may be as good a time as any to insert the list of my 97 (so far) favorite movies, which I made to kill time and clear my head, playing around at http://www.imdb.com. This kind of list is an awful lot of fun to do, especially the minute differences in favor one accords various entries--Do I really love All About Eve more than North by Northwest--and almost all my choices will seem incredibly pedestrian, except, of course, for the ones that are bizarre and inexplicable. I'm putting the list here because it's such a Live-Journal, What-kind-of-tree-would-you-be kind of thing to put on your blog but also as a reminder that even if Vertigo is my number 10 here, I would:
1) Happily watch it more often than most of 1-9, for what that's worth
2) Gladly avoid actual vertigo for the rest of my life because it really sucks.

Citizen Kane
City Lights
Dr. Strangelove
Wild Strawberries
Earth
Double Indemnity
Bride of Frankenstein
The Grapes of Wrath
Pinocchio
Vertigo
Children of Paradise
Imitation of Life
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
Bicycle Thieves
La Jetee
Persona
Sunset Blvd.
M
Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
The Wizard of Oz
The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T
South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut
RoboCop
Orphee
Rome, Open City
Modern Times
His Girl Friday
The General
Hiroshima mon amour
Metropolis
All About Eve
North by Northwest
Rear Window
Sherlock, Jr.
Nashville
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Zero de conduite
Closely Watched Trains
Duck Amuck
Law of Desire
The Celebration
Week End
A Zed and Two Noughts
Topsy-Turvy
Mon oncle d’Amerique
A Slave of Love
Ohayo
Stagecoach
Grand Illusion
Wings of Desire
The Idiots
Ugetsu
The Terminator
Targets
Fantasia
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Waking Life
W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism
Trash
Terminator II
Sullivan’s Travels
Double Suicide
Shadow of a Doubt
Providence
Pennies from Heaven
The Passion of Joan of Arc
The Lady Eve
Pickpocket
Kameradschaft
The Gang’s All Here
Cecil B. Demented
Y tu mama tambien
Kagemusha
The Maltese Falcon
Boggy Depot
Forbidden Planet
The Conformist
Breathless
Velvet Goldmine
Pee-wee’s Big Adventure
Hamlet (2000)
Scotland, PA
Death in Venice
Gattaca
The Devil, Probably
Apocalypse Now
Thundercrack
Before Night Falls
Die, Mommie, Die
The Women
Theatre of Blood
Black Moon
Prospero’s Books
Peeping Tom
Dark Eyes
Ninotchka
God Told Me To

I Work My Ass Off
Today I can't say anything at all because I'm working on a conference presentation. I have to focus all my energies on remaining human and sticking with what I actually find interesting about the subject so that it doesn't generate into exactly what you think of when you hear the phrase "a conference presentation. I mean, the energies I'm not using in fretting, catastrophizing, and self-flagellating. I'll be back on the weekend.