Feeling more in More than a Feeling

I’ve had a funny, yet wistful, experience today. I consider the art I’ve experienced to be a part of my identity. The experiences of the art are embedded in my memory, and re-experiencing the art not only reignites the memories of when I first experienced it, but some of the other times I’ve experienced it, and any of the other subsidiary memories that are connected to it. To give an example of this loose law of association (I’ll call it), I remember driving down Forestbrook road one day with the windows down on a particular balmy day when the smell of burning leaves whisked its way into my car and in my imagination I was immediately transported to memories that had been lying dormant for years, even decades. The result was an experience of a certain kind of wistful painfulness, a longing to return to those memories, a sadness that I couldn’t, and a thoughtful disappointment that even if I could, I’d probably feel, after a while, bored and disappointed at the banality of the memory: this would lend a suspicion to the level of sacredness I had with all my cherished memories. I say all of this for prefatory purposes. The main point I want to get across is this. With the particular art of music, since different musicians can give to songs their own interpretations, approved or disapproved by the original musician, the song itself, connected as it is with my identity, memories, and imagination, can take on a whole new meaning in the medium of these varying interpretations, and can thus effect sudden changes in the identity, memories, and imagination that were already in the song's hold. For example, I will never forget (If I live to be 85 years old, this memory will never leave me) the first time I heard or began to pay conscious attention to a type of music that affected my soul like none other I had heard up to that point in my life. The music was off Boston's first album and I remember each song having a power and poignancy to it that made me feel different than I had ever felt before. It was an experience and memory of beauty to my mind. This experience was in the mid to late 90's. Now, in 2011, I could hear a beautiful acoustic cover of this song by a gifted musician, reignite the memories of the experiences I had when I first listened to the song on that fateful day in the van (Matt J., you know what I'm talking about!), notice the more-than-a-decade span that has intervened since the two events, ponder all that has happened in my life in the interval, and the new interpretation of the song can actually make me notice the pathos of my life as the last years of my youth are slipping away.

Where there's a Will there's a way

Arthur Schopenhauer's aesthetics result from his doctrine of the primacy of the Will as the thing in itself, the ground of life and all being; and from his judgment that the Will is evil. Schopenhauer held that art offers a way for people to temporarily escape the suffering that results from willing. Basing his doctrine on the dual aspect of the world as will and representation, he taught that if consciousness or attention is fully engrossed, absorbed, or occupied with the world as painless representations or images, then there is no consciousness of the world as painful willing. Aesthetic pleasure results from experience of the world as representation [mental image or idea] without any experience of the world as will [need, craving, urge].

I agree with this when I put my own spin on it. I do think The Will is the thing in itself. Perhaps not Kant's thing in itself. But I do think it is the ground of all being and life, since God's will is such a ground. What I particular love here is S.'s belief that art allows you to escape the suffering that results from willing. I want to distinguish this 'willing' from C.S. Lewis' desire for Something otherworldly, something outside of this space/time. I believe this 'desire' is the desire to merge with The Will. I also believe in this will/representation distinction. That it is another form of Lewis' contemplation/enjoyment distinction, and Kierkegaard's subjective/objective distinction, and Nietzsche's Apollonian/Dionysian distinction. Perhaps it is this 'painful willing' which I shed for the moment that I am taken away by the music. But a part of me is suspicious, because there is an acute kind of pain which I feel during melancholy songs. But perhaps this is the feeling of catharsis, that my nameless, inner feelings are given musical expression, and the unspeakable feeling is given somewhat of a form in my consciousness, and it is in this sense that I shed 'painful willing' in S.'s sense. This sort of satisfies the thought that when we merge with God in the afterlife, the bittersweet desire that's been with me all my life will be swallowed up, that God will stoop to suit my puny representational capacities, like an ocean suits a canoe at that little part where the canoe happens to be floating.

For Schopenhauer, the Will is an aimless desire to perpetuate itself, the basis of life. Desire engendered by the Will is the source of all the sorrow in the world; each satisfied desire leaves us either with boredom, or with some new desire to take its place. A world in thrall to Will is necessarily a world of suffering. Since the Will is the source of life, and our very bodies are stamped with its image and designed to serve its purpose, the human intellect is, in Schopenhauer's simile, like a lame man who can see, but who rides on the shoulders of a blind giant.

It's amazing how close S. was to God. I wouldn't call it aimless. This is more in line with the 'elan vital' that Bergson spoke of in his book Creative Evolution. Or what Lewis hinted at when he spoke of the insolence of Nature to grow. And I think S. focused on the bad part of the Will to the exclusion of the good, and falls into the error (though a noble one) of the Buddha. I believe this Desire I have for God to be 'engendered by The Will', but I might not call it the root of all my sorrow, unless S. means the sorrow I have because that Desire isn't satisfied until Heaven. But his plan is to cut off the Will in this life for the negative of 'will-less' nirvana. He wants to remove the stomach because we're always hungry; I want to feed it eternal life. I'm with Nietzsche in thinking that S. was too negative and pessimistic, metaphysically. I love the metaphor of the intellect, like a lame man on the shoulders of a blind giant.

Schopenhauer's aesthetics is an attempt to break out of the pessimism that naturally comes from this world view. Schopenhauer believed that what distinguished aesthetic experiences from other experiences is that contemplation of the object of aesthetic appreciation temporarily allowed the subject a respite from the strife of desire, and allowed the subject to enter a realm of purely mental enjoyment, the world purely as representation or mental image. The more a person's mind is concerned with the world as representation, the less it feels the suffering of the world as will. Schopenhauer analysed art from its effects, both on the personality of the artist, and the personality of the viewer.[1]

It's interesting that even S. thought his philosophy was pessimistic. His solution, which I have complete understanding with, is that aesthetic experience is a temporary release. I feel intensely a sort of self-forgetfulness when I listen to War Pigs by Black Sabbath. My attention is focused completely outer and other. I melt away. Because of the 'contemplation of the object'. But it's a special kind of contemplation only possible because of Lewis' 'enjoyment' (as distinct from Lewis' brand of contemplation, inspired by Samuel Alexander). This is why it is then called 'purely mental enjoyment'. This probably completely explains the peace I feel with the so-called problem of suffering when I watch that part in the movie Philadelphia when Tom Hanks' character narrates during the Opera. Or why God answered Job the way He did in The Book of Job, in the spirit of the way The Tree of Life did it.

"Perhaps the reason why common objects in still life seem so transfigured and generally everything painted appears in a supernatural light is that we then no longer look at things in the flux of time and in the connection of cause and effect …. On the contrary, we are snatched out of that eternal flux of all things and removed into a dead and silent eternity. In its individuality the thing itself was determined by time and by the [causal] conditions of the understanding; here we see this connection abolished and only the Platonic Idea is left." (Manuscript Remains, Vol. I, § 80)

Wow. Perfectly said. We are 'snatched out of that eternal flux'. Doesn't all art do this? And this is the sense in which only the Platonic Idea is left. Through art we can harness the Platonic Ideas. I couldn't agree with him more.

Interpreting the trailer for TDKR

This is a good assessment of The Dark Knight Rises trailer I read.

The beginning of the teaser is little more than footage that looks similar to that of images from BATMAN BEGINS along with dialogue Liam Neeson gave from that film with text indicating every hero has a beginning and an end. From there we see Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman) lying on a hospital bed on his side seemingly in a lot of pain basically begging who we can only assume is Bruce Wayne to bring Batman back. This begs the question that apparently Gordon now knows Bruce is Batman? Also, we assume that Bruce will hang up the suit at some point or perhaps right from the beginning and will be pushed back into action with the powerful threat of Bane now terrorizing the city.

From here Gordon says Batman must come back, followed by a blurry image of Bane and then a much clearer image of him starring into the camera, wearing what looks like a leather jacket. Then we see the teaser poster image with actual falling debris as it zooms in until the screen is completely white and the title card fades in. The final shot of the trailer is an awesome and brief glimpse of Batman backing away and getting into a weak fighting position as Bane lumbers in from the left side of the screen and then cuts to text that indicates we will see the end of the Batman legend.

I’ve watched the trailer over and over, but specifically the last shot trying to soak every inch of it in as I possibly can. I kept wishing I could see more of Bane, more of whoever that is standing in the background of the right hand side of the screen, but more importantly, just wish that I could watch more of this scene play out. I don’t have a single answer for any of the questions the trailer presents and that’s why I love it and believe it succeeds as a teaser trailer. Teasers are not supposed to provide closure or give you everything you want, they are supposed to do exactly what it’s called, a tease.

I have read lots of descriptions about the trailer before it was released, and lots of post reactions now that it’s been released and here is my take of the last shot in general. I’ve seen a lot of people say that what they interpret is Batman backing away scared or terrified that Bane is approaching him; that’s not what I see. What I see is Batman backing away completely exhausted and trying weakly to get his footing to try and fight off an impending attack and Bane walking relentlessly towards him unconcerned about Batman’s defense. The look on Batman’s face to me says “I have no clue what to do” where as the look of Bane’s walk is that of determination and no fear whatsoever of Batman. This gets me excited because if that’s the case I think we are in for some really tense stuff for the finale. I also don’t think that what we see here is the final battle between Bane and Batman. We are a year from release and to think the first footage we see would be part of the ending would be disappointing to me and unlikely. I would call this similar to when the Joker crashes Bruce’s fund-raiser looking for Harvey Dent in TDK and ends up in a tussle with Batman; so I would think this is an early tift between the two.

My last assessment of this scene is what I think the context of the scene is. There were viral videos released depicting a mass escape of Arkham Asylum and chaos with lots of chanting, which can be heard in the trailer as well. I believe this scene to be Batman going to intervene with what might be a riot at Arkham only to be overpowered by an escaped Bane and that the guy in the corner is a guard or another prisoner maybe. My problem with my own assessment is that Commissioner Gordon appears to have been injured severely by Bane and is begging Batman to come back, which wouldn’t quite fit with my thoughts and would be a conflict in the timeline of events.

He ignores the figure climbing out of the well and doing push-ups. Are those Bane too?

First Trailer for The Dark Knight Rises

Jim Gordon: [lying in a hospital bed] We were in this together, and then you were gone. And now this evil rises. Batman must come back.
Bruce Wayne: What if he doesn't exist anymore?
Jim Gordon: He must... he must...

This looks like this is going to kick some serious butt.

FROM MTV SPLASH PAGE: "The Dark Knight Rises" trailer took the web by storm yesterday, and it's no wonder why: between the introduction of Bane, the possible retirement of Batman and the likely destruction of Gotham City, all signs are pointing towards an epic conclusion to Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy.

The Thing: a Prequel

The Chicago Film Critics Association puts The Thing (1982) in 17th place among the scariest movies ever. I'd put it higher. I consider The Thing to be one of the best horror films of all time. Unknown to me, "Carpenter considers The Thing to be the first part of his Apocalypse Trilogy, followed by Prince of Darkness and In the Mouth of Madness." It is billed as a remake of The Thing From Another World, "a 1951 science fiction film based on the 1938 novella "Who Goes There?" by John W. Campbell, Jr."

It tells the story of an Air Force crew and scientists at a remote Arctic research outpost who fight a malevolent plant-based alien being.

I've never seen the original, but John Carpenter's remake I have seen. And I could see it over and over again for the rest of my life. So, what is this Thing?

The film's title refers to its primary antagonist: a parasitic extraterrestrial life-form that assimilates other organisms and in turn imitates them. It infiltrates an Antarctic research station, taking the appearance of the researchers that it kills, and paranoia occurs within the group.

The special effects were ahead of its time. Read: no CGI. And the dread remains. "Most of the horrifying special effects were designed and created by Rob Bottin and his crew, with the exception of the dog creature, which was created by Stan Winston."

The film's ground-breaking make up special effects were simultaneously lauded and lambasted for being technically brilliant but visually repulsive.

Ebert says it's "among the most elaborate, nauseating, and horrifying sights yet achieved by Hollywood’s new generation of visual magicians."

Now in the works is a prequel, which is supposed to explain where The Thing we saw in the 1982 version came from. "The film will take place right before the first film, following the exploits of the Norwegian and American scientists who originally discovered the alien." Three days before, to be exact.

Paleontologist Kate Lloyd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and her two assistants Davida Morris (Davetta Sherwood) and Adam Goodman (Eric Christian Olsen) join a Norwegian scientific team that has stumbled across a crashed extraterrestrial spaceship buried in the ice of Antarctica. They discover a creature that seems to have died in the crash eons ago.

When an experiment frees the alien from its frozen prison, Kate, Adam and Davida join the crew's pilot, Carter (Joel Edgerton), to keep it from killing and imitating them one at a time, using its uncanny ability to mimic any life form it absorbs through digestion, and potentially reaching civilization.

The filmmakers seem legit. Producer Eric Newman said:

I'd be the first to say no one should ever try to do Jaws again and I certainly wouldn't want to see anyone remake The Exorcist... And we really felt the same way about The Thing. It's a great film. But once we realized there was a new story to tell, with the same characters and the same world, but from a very different point of view, we took it as a challenge. It's the story about the guys who are just ghosts in Carpenter's movie - they're already dead. But having Universal give us a chance to tell their story was irresistible.

And I'm charmed and reassured that "Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. explained that he created the film not to simply be a horror movie, but to also focus largely on the human drama with the interaction between characters, as the first film had." That's what I loved about the 1982 version: character studies in the midst of terror and chaos.

Scary Movie Update

Check out The Silent House!



Plot:

The plot is based on a true story that happened in the late 40's in a small village in Uruguay. The film focuses on Laura, who, second by second, intends to leave a house which hides an obscure secret, unharmed. Laura and her father Wilson settle down in a cottage they have to renew since its owner will soon put the house up for sale. They will spend the night there and repair the following morning. Everything seems to go smoothly until Laura hears a sound that comes from outside and gets louder and louder on the upper floor of the house. Wilson goes up to see what is going on while she remains downstairs on her own, waiting for her father to come down.

We learn the house knows all your secrets and nightmares. True Story!? Can't wait to see it. I guess it was already released in 2010 where I'm at, but it'll be released soon in the states because it made such an impact.

Again:

The plot is based on a true story that occurred in the 1940s in a small village in Uruguay. La casa muda focuses on the last seventy eight minutes, second by second, as Laura tries to leave the house unharmed and discovers the dark secret it hides.

Like Hitchcock's film Rope, this movie is one, long, sinuous shot, which makes it all the more intriguing.

La casa muda was shot in real time in one continuous 78 minute take, with no cuts. It is one of only a handful of theatrically released movies to be shot in one continuous long take, and it has been billed as the first ever single-take horror film, though this claim is the subject of some dispute.

A film called Infection (2005) might have beat it to the punch. Either way, can't wait to see this!

Open Your Eyes . . .

David: My dreams are a cruel joke. They taunt me. Even in my dreams I'm an idiot... who knows he's about to wake up to reality. If I could only avoid sleep. But I can't. I try to tell myself what to dream. I try to dream that I am flying. Something free. It never works...

I consider Vanilla Sky to be one of my favorite movies. In the beginning we are flying over various parts of New York City like a spirit from another world. Then we zero in on the flat of David Aames asleep. ‘Sabrina’ with Audrey Hepburn plays on his disappearing television symbolizing the dream of romance. His alarm clock is a recording of Sophia saying ‘Open Your Eyes’. The cover of Bob Dylan’s Freewheelin’ is seen in the background. The point is that we are beginning to see his world, what makes him who he is. He plucks a couple gray hairs, another symbol for the desire to live forever. David is off to work. Yet something is not right. There is not a soul in the busiest part of the busiest city in the world. As he gets out of his car, and he is running furiously through Time Square, every advertisement that flashes before his eyes seeks to be a cure for his loneliness. They are all band-aid solutions that don’t really solve the problem of the human condition in the long run.

But alas it is all a dream. We are disoriented. We now know that this movie is meant to disorient us, so we don’t know what is real and what is a dream. We now know that a dream about being in the most populated city in the world alone is a dream that perhaps a lonely person would have. This is the point where we realize that this isn’t going to be a simple, linear story. The structure of the movie is a flashback from a dialogue between a masked David and court psychologist Dr. McCabe (Kurt Russell) in a holding cell (almost a symbol for the inside of a trapped mind) trying to get to the bottom of why David was sentenced to a mental institution and why he was accused of murdering the love of his life. But it is also David telling Dr. McCabe his autobiography, the story of his life, how he became the man that he is, and how Dr. McCabe becomes the father figure he never had. We can even view glimpses of scenes from To Kill a Mockingbird (in which the motif of fatherhood is on view) in the room where the security guard is on post.

We discover Julie Gianne (Cameron Diaz) with whom he has casual sex, even though she secretly is in love with him. David is a man who has it all and yet is missing something. They are pretending to be in love. Jason Lee plays Brian Shelby, David’s best friend, who has a love for Julie, Radiohead, and has little pearls about life, the bitter and the sweet. He is a loyal friend and a talented writer, which David willingly funds and supports. I sense a nod toward similarities between Brian and Cameron Crowe himself. As David arrives to work at a Manhattan high-rise, we learn that he has 51% control of the company, while 49% belongs to the envious ‘Seven Dwarves’. David believes he was set up by the Dwarves for the murder of Sophia in order to gain control of the company. David’s father was a lover of adventure, but David feels like he let his father down, since he had do deal with petty issues like a fear of heights. Now he is at the reigns of an empire the Dwarves don’t feel he has the courage to lead. He is in the shadow of a father he never really knew and from whom he never got approval or love. David fears the heights that he has by chance reached.

“There are five basic emotions in life, David. Tell me, what emotion gripped him before he entered that cell?”, asks Dr. McCabe. “Was it guilt? Hate? Shame? Revenge?” Pause. Music. “Love?” I must say the editing in the movie was excellent, and I have a newfound respect for movie editors. With my recent fascination with the art of the movie montage, and my own thoughts about how I’d construct one of my own, I’ve paid more attention to the art of editing. Usually, I pay attention to cinematography. The photographic quality of an image, including the actors, background, angles, and lighting, are all fascinating to me. But editing is what juggles all of this artistry around, and weaves all the threads together into an organic whole. For instance, when Dr. McCabe mentions love as the possible reason for David’s descent into madness, there is a gradual close-up, a blurry transition, and then a past scene of David’s birthday party in his penthouse. It is one thing to write this; it is quite another to feel and experience the way the music, images, and dialogue are edited together to create a sinuous emotional element in the viewer. There are many mini-montages like this in the film, giving it more depth, poetry, and power: when David tells Dr. McCabe about his father, during David’s emergence from a coma, his resurrection from a Howard Hughes-like isolation (compared in the movie to the Normandy Invasion), the quick succession of images with a voice-over of all the things in David’s life he found meaningful as he plummets off a skyscraper in a Kierkegaardian leap of faith to awaken from what he now realizes is a lucid dream gone awry, because of his choice to prefer reality to fiction. All of these scenes gather power from the editing.

There are many cries from critics that the movie is a jumbled mess, that Crowe is out of his league and has wondered into unfamiliar, cinematic territory. But based on my own experience of seeing the movie, upon repeated viewings, the movie makes perfect sense. And even if it didn’t, what is wrong with admitting a few irregularities in a movie that admits to being science-fiction and fantasy? All seem to agree about the structure of the movie: the present timeline of David and Dr. McCabe in the holding cell and the past flashbacks. But the confusion begins after Julie crashes her car, sending David into a coma. There is a dream of a reunion with Sophia, but it isn’t yet the lucid dream manufactured by the program “Life Extension”, designed to put people into cryogenic sleep in order to give them a lucid dream in which past pains are erased and the preferred fantasy that the recipient desired comes to pass. But if there are problems, glitches in the program, ‘Tech-support’ is sent into the mind in the form of a person who helps the recipient escape the dream turned nightmare. All of this is the science-fiction portion of the movie, a part I think plays out very well. However, if you follow the sequence of events after he awakens from the coma, when he awakens on the sidewalk to Sophia’s ‘Open Your Eyes’ after he had passed out, the lucid dream sequence has begun, as evidenced by the sky which purposely resembles a Monet painting, since that same Monet painting was an integral part of David’s life and memory. The rest of the irregularities are explained by the glitches within the lucid dream. It’s as simple as that. In reality, when he awakened on the sidewalk, Sophia didn’t help him up, he attempted suicide (as the film explains), fails, and decides to undergo cryonic sleep to erase past hurt and renew a painless fantasy. In the end, though, the fantasy turns into a nightmare and he chooses reality, with the bitter and the sweet, and makes the leap of faith into reality. I would love for someone to explain to me what is so illogical about this plot.

I came away from this movie knowing more about myself, love, and life. The movie is an allegory of the human condition. We are all spiritually asleep and trapped by egoism and hedonism in our own ways. Once or twice in our lives we meet true love and our desire to unite with it is the beginning of our awakening to something real. The movie explored despair in a real and harrowing way. The facial disfigurement added a layer of horror. I especially enjoyed Diaz’s performance as Julie, the saddest girl to ever hold a martini. She is 27, an age where you start to have enough wisdom to know that you’ve blew a few opportunities, that you are passing your prime. There is a despair just beneath the surface of her eyes, especially as their color matches the car she was driving when she drove off the bridge. She is a spurned lover, and though people are quick to attribute her off color remarks about ‘swallowing David’s cum’ to a mental imbalance, I’d ask people to really notice that these aren’t the cries of a confused mind, but a mind thinking very clearly in response to her despairing situation. People are way too quick to attribute, for example, suicide to temporary insanity. I think that is too simple, and doesn’t pay tribute to the complexities of the human psyche as it relates to true despair. Those who say it is because of temporary insanity, I surmise, haven’t gone deep enough into their own despair to know exactly what they’re talking about.