Oy! Make it stop!

1-23-12

Hi michael,

I'll try very hard to make this quick and easy. It's my want to make things long and tangential (can you tell?) so lemme focus here.

Okay, have you seen Schindler's List and The Pianist? One respected the viewer with room for thought, reaction and contemplation. One used every weapon of film artistry to force the audience into only one train of thought, one possible reaction to every scene, no room for interpretation or individual reaction. Bet you can guess which is which. Yes, I'm insulted by artists who lecture me, who want to control my individual reactions to such a heightened degree that it becomes a kind of cultural heresy to criticize them. Those types of artists depend on fanatics and viewer laziness to keep my type of viewer from questioning. Lord knows, I've never publicly criticized Schindler's List.

[Others - Apocalypse Now vs Platoon, The Wire vs every other didactic urban drama, Beethoven vs Mozart, George Eliot vs Jane Austen, Charles Dickens vs Dostoyevski.]

Are you familiar with the 17th century artist Velasquez? He had 2 styles of paintings. In his court paintings, every bit of surface is finished, varnished and every detail glows with obsessive craftsmanship. These paintings are pure propaganda. They were made for only one distinct reaction from all who see them. Woe to those who don't share in the praise of the royal subject or the artist! Only now we have the centuries necessary to be bored by these paintings.

The other Velasquez is the master who created the most important single painting of Western Culture - Las Meninas. This Velaquez painted court dwarves and drunks and servants with rough, even violent, brush strokes in all sorts of living expressions. He uses little varnish. He leaves odd blank areas on the canvas and shifts the focus all over the place. Suddenly, the viewer is in dialogue with the subject, the techniques, the composition. Velasquez tempts us into these paintings not with force and glitz, but with a certain kind of...well...love. "Look what I've found! I'm as shocked as you are! Donja LOVE it!" The thrill rings over centuries with perfect pitch. I see the discovery in Las Meninas every time I've been lucky enough to view it.

I felt this for Badlands, Days of Heaven, A Thin Red Line. That wonderment. That "Can you believe this *beep* which makes me want to think more, watch again, be giddy on the path of new thought and ideas that seem to thrill Malick as well.

But Malick as no right, even as a past master, to demand my interest and enthusiasm on cue as he did in the Evolution sequence. He hasn't the right to demand my emotional compliance with that Mother thing. If I strip ToL of all it's manipulative qualities, it's simply a speech by Malick on Existence that won't be answering any questions at the end of the lecture. Is he being so obscure in ToL because he has a point or because he doesn't want to be questioned? Since it's so manipulative, I tend to think ToL is the work of a pompous jerk rather than a real thinker or poet.

It's the difference between an acrobat performing stale tricks and demanding 4 curtain calls and one who is delighted that his body, his mind, can perform those tricks. Who knew?! Ain't life, inside this cruel mortal coil, grand!

1-23-12

Fish,

That's my fault for writing off the top of my head. Sorry about that. It does read like a series of non-sequiturs. Love writing. Hate editing.

I found most of the images very heavy-handed and sentimental, almost consumeristic. Aren't there hundreds of calenders and greeting cards with big man hands surrounding a newborn's feet? Or older siblings touching baby for the first time? They even share Malick's soft lens and bokeh. The universe photos retouched in violent color to blare like trumpets? Yeah, that kind of thing turns me off.

Really, I'm not upset. Vexed is more like it, to lose another director or writer to the onslaught of rabid dogma and mushy concepts.

1-23-12

I'll admit one thing about TTRL, I didn't listen to much of the narration - or I don't remember it. It didn't strike me as words so much as sounds, part of a soundtrack rather than any resemblance to dialogue or inner monologue. I liked the way the human whispers imitated the rustling grasses, sharp words resembled gun shot. I did love that movie so much, still do. Perhaps I wouldn't so much if the narration were clearer and forced on me like in ToL.

Malick's themes are always present, that's true. The problem with ToL, for me, is his themes became dogma and he clobbered me with it. Malick seems to think he's isn't distilling ideas but has some corner on Truth now. I couldn't make heads of tails of this Truth. ToL explored nothing new for Malick, that's true. His conviction and heavy hand made it distasteful.

The "rabid dogma" I speak of is the recent tendency in USA politics and culture to award the brass ring to whoever shouts the loudest with the most incendiary rhetoric. It claims many victims, mostly subtle discourse. I see in ToL the same US tendency to hammer the same note over and over and over, in hyper-realistic colors, using mawkish symbols, paper doll caricatures, using familiar types and images to create an audience of babies screaming for more candy.