the darjeeling limited pt II

What is Wes Anderson's art?

Is he doing what he thinks is cool or is he commenting on others? Principally, he is doing neither of these though his actors and co-writers no doubt bring material in this way. What we get is the Imaginary and the mixture of truth and falsity which it has on its never ending surface.

Firstly, lets say you have a seducer of young girls and a used car salesman. These people work in the imaginary as well, they can see by the way someone walks and moves alone how they are or aren't at home in their bodies and by their words and dress how much self-confidence and self-knowledge they have. They don't understand everyone or everything about the "sucker" but have become clever enough to spot the
the general signs of a person's naivete


Anderson's movie is driven by music which isn't deep or primal but rather stretches across a pretty but naive surface. Take Nico's 'These Days'-- there is no perfect moment of uniting words and music but rather overall it has a sensibility that you can get lost in. The same can be said for Van Gogh whose work taken singally doesn't have a world in it (unity of idea and gesture) but enough similar gestures which taken together have a mood. Sometimes enough things point to an idea to have something sublime but sometimes everything is disjointed and muddled.

In many ways this is not based upon a living creativity so much as channeling one's childhood impressions. If you look at Hotel Chevalier, the short before the Darjeeling Limited, you can see the room is filled with little childish trinkets like butter flys under glass, half-finished paintings, and the game of speaking in a different language and timing a song to play at the right time when someone comes in. There is a very strong delight in things of a 'unique nature' a savouring of the chocolate that has a wrapper indicating the Hotel and not some big company, one brother buying a deadly snake and receiving it in a box with skulls on it from a market when at a train stop. Everything is seen as a constant beginning, like so much could come from it.

David Bowie, who was used in the Life Aquatic is a good example, you can sense his creativity as suspended belief, a return to the childhood possibility or potential, the days where you see someone who is dressed up like a goth or biker or gypsy and imagine they have a secret life. But, that life doesn't exist and is only an amalgamation of all the childhood stories, TV shows, and hear-say in your head. But, these are only a beginning and a promise for life but life, the world, is not there. This kind of art is parasitic on your ability to find yourself beautiful and still believe in a future someone will come and take you to. This art is fantasy.

The line at the end where one brother relates how he'll miss the smell of India 'it smells spicy' seems to get across the point that it isn't reality being engaged with but rather it is overwritten with a mood (which is to be contrasted to it being overwritten by someone who checks off all the tourist attractions they've been to). I'm toying with the idea that Lacan owes much more to Jung than he lets on. Jung's introvert/extravert is basically the approach Lacan uses for the obsessional vs. the hysteric and I think in many ways Jung's character type of feeling can be taken for the imaginary phantasy in Lacan.

--more to come

The Darjeeling limited pt 1

I'm split. I used to be able to think purely in a personal intuitive way but psychoanalysis has begun to enter into my appreciation of things.

I can't help but see the father and mother as the frame of this story. The father is dead and they are carrying his luggage all around India on a journey which will eventually end with finding their mother. However, the dead father reappears symbollically as a deadly tiger that is haunting the nunnery where the mother is living. At the end the boys decide not to go back home but to remain for the rest of the time they intended to stay but in order to catch the train they have to leave behind all of their father's luggage which they've been carrying around which bears his initials. Basically the story here is one of the psychotic whose self isn't held together firmly and is as fragmented as the train is shown to be during a sequence when each room holds a different person and different style (or the ship in Life Aquatic, etc..). By creating a different name for himself (letting go of the father's name) he can hold himself together. I think the same thing is going on with Bob Dylan (Robert Zimmerman had so many different people and styles in him). With someone like Maddonna the process would be the same but rather than holding together a bunch of personalities her change of styles represent serving fashion and staying on top which is a protection not from mere guilt of not being anything but the psychotic fear of the Other behind the scenes who can devastate one's reality (aliens, demons, etc... when the break occurs and leads to delusions).


Though this psychoanalytic backdrop seems feasible to me we can say that the enjoyment of the film is never found there.


But the real story is in the childishness of the characters.

lives of others

lives of others

-the very beginning was good. Showing an interrogation which we naturally want to say is inhuman and unjust but then to show that the subject was indeed lying (people who are telling the truth can speak the truth in many different ways where the liars memorize certain phrases and repeat them -- this is how it works for philosophy professors too!)

-the agent's perspective strangely mirrored the normal experience of watching TV/film and wanting to help the characters, this bred a familiarity with him which otherwise wouldn't have been there because they spent little time developing his character.Any average, unimportant person, could imagine themselves as a hero if they were put in his place.

-I felt a strange nostalgia for the intellectual types. Beards, glasses, greasy hair, and clothing fashion which wasn't so different from everyone else but seems to consist more of dressing in clothes which were popular in older times and therefore legitimate because they were popular but subversive because they go against current fashion.

-the way that the artist passed up meeting his benefactor (the agent) after the wall came down and chose to write a book was touching. It was beautiful for the artist to turn him into a novel rather than use him as a priest who he could confess his feelings and guilt to.

-I don't know why but I like the villians who are fat/unattractive guys who using their power (implying that they obtained their power) in order to get sex. It seems to be a strong tradition in Eastern European society and one which has much honesty.

-I liked how the flaws of the artists were up for discussion.I like the way that the agent talked to the actress and that she was on drugs and didn't have confidence. Also, that the writer was "hysterical anthropocentrist" and needed to have people around and agreed that his friend was being too arrogant and deserved to have his travel visa to the West cancelled. In one way the movie seemed to want sympathy for the fact that artists had to bow down to the state in order to create but it never made them into great people.

-I also liked the scene where the agent was with his boss and a young official came in to tell a joke about the party leader. It really showed the feeling of what it is to live in socialism which really means to live under the caprice of individuals. Humour really must have walked a delicate line between allegiance to a state which consists of all too many lies and the necessary irony which any honest person must have towards this.


But all the things I liked didn't save the movie for me. The cinematography was dry, the characters were more symbols than people, and when I woke up today I only thought of the ideas in it and not the visuals. The central idea of the film takes place in the theatre after the wall comes down. Both the artist and the fat party official leave the play in order to get some respite from their feelings for the dead actress. The film-maker aligns himself with the fat official and says that we don't know what we lost in our little Republic -- even though we spent so much energy fighting the human spirit at least we considered it to be important.

stoicism

Stoicism emerges from decadence. Imagine that you have an aristocracy or an upper class which rules the merchants and peasants. Now imagine that you are in a position to see the ruler(s) from one generation to the next. Imagine you can see how one person could rule from natural authority and have the respect of others while the next ruler has only symbolic authority and none of the natural charisma or nobility. The time is decadent because the arrangements aren't made for values to be passed down through trials and tests. Now, you also notice that some other people don't even notice the change and still are just as servile to the ruler or assume the ruler capable of actions the old ruler performed when he clearly isn't. In short, you see that such people are beholden to the signifier and have immense blindspots in their interpersonal dealings with others. Since in decadence genius doens't necessarily beget genius or a moral man can have immoral children you can see the contingency of life and the irrationality of birthright when money or power are passed on through inheritance. The time is out of joint, and the person who would be able to rule and genuinely command respect doesn't even recognize their authority -- you realize there is no chance for you to change it. So you leave your community and begin to make a life that is outside the vagaries of money and power and something which isn't contingent... you become a stoic.

revisions about art

the first question in art

Did the person who made the piece make something that is an ideal for them or did they make something as a commentary on the ideals or lifestyle of others?

It's strange to think how much art (probably better called entertainment) is based upon finding the characters to be cool or them being something you want to be. The Matrix, Tarantino movies, Kevin Smith, Oceans 11, not to mention video games which are mostly this.... plus super-hero movies which are same things but for kids minds (though many adults could relate).

also related... at first interest in art comes directly from what is popular or what is passed on by the parents. Many people will betray what their parents gave them because it isn't popular when they are in school but then they will go back to it after they graduate and begin to feel closer to their parents then friends. But what interests me is neither of these instances because art isn't important to these people -- life is. What interests me is when a person decides they no longer like popular music, when they meet some 'non-conformists' and get excited on the prospect of being able to set themselves apart from the popular music fans and say they lack taste, complexity, etc... they attach themselves to some sub-culture and hold their cataogue to be the relevant one. However this game can still go on. When such a person meets other people who admire a similar sub-culture then from there he will begin a process of either saying that he likes some popular music and he's not really fully in the sub-culture or getting deeper into the fringe acts of the sub-culture (he can say that other people in the sub-culture like the 'popular' music of that sub-culture).

the second question in art

Does the artist present us with opposites or does he give us a something manifold?
Ascending art represents the manifold that the artist has tapped into (think Tarkovsky and Fellini and the world they give us). Opposites (good and evil, hero and villian, etc.) are more interesting in a certain sense because it offers to a riddle to be solved, why can't the artist overcome the contrasts he presents us (don't say the world is really that way because there is always a higer perspective from which the elements can synthesize). In this way art imitates life because the average person who is sick is more interesting than the healthy person who is the exception (though this value hardly redeems them in comparison).


Also related... when you can see that the person must make the painting, or film, or song about the exception and something rare that it's an idea of difference and not feeling different at work. The bad artist has to paint the rarest landscape while the real artist can paint something normal (almost cliche) and tease out all the subtlety.

pan's labrynth cont.

down to my central point

The pure child wouldn't have eaten the fruit and would have shed the blood of its sibling (the director got it wrong). Ofelia's story is about a child who is helpless with what concerns her parents and the adult world and therefore she dreams a world where she can have an effect. She made the dream-- the nobility in her-- and if a sacrifice was what it called for then she would have done it (to save her mother's life or her ownl life so she could have gone on to save her mother). Instead we are presented with the idea that the fantasy was something different, a test by her dead father, something morbid and somewhat cruel.

pan's labrynth (cont.)

A friend pointed out to me that the revolutionaries are the third element and was surprised to see I neglected them in my review. Maybe she is right, but their stogory isn't the focus and they are only introduced in a generic, negation of the existing regime, way. The story, if there would be any, would be the servant woman who helps the revolutionaries because her brother is numbered among them. The servant isn't following the law (the father) and is the only representation of the feminine in any active sense... but, I don't think we are presented with any growth or change in her character and thus she isn't the story (but along with several other characters i.e. the doctor) could have been more but why talk about what could have been? It's not the story.