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.
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
Monday, May 7, 2007
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.
Tuesday, May 1, 2007
review Pan's Labrynth
The overwhelming impression at the end is that it was written for someone. "For those who know where to look there are still signs of her". He can still see the signs of that someone and the remark must have been self-referential because he never showed us a way to look for her in our world.
Pan’s labyrinth... it’s called a fairy tale for adults
The question is: why this mixture of innocence and purity with the horrible and cruel? Why doesn’t the writer reconcile the two (which side can’t he understand and therefore portray them both as separate?).
The answer isn’t cruelty... it is the innocence he can’t deal with.
The innocence is what must become mythical while the cruelty is what he deals with in ‘reality’.
The story of the child isn’t the centre story but is given equal weight with the corresponding "real events". The child’s story is equal with the story of the captain but both their stories are really the stories of their loyalty to their fathers.
Ofileia remains true to her father and doesn’t address the captain as her father.
The captain too stays true to his father by disowning his father legacy and the watch (at the dinner table he denies the story).
Ofelia disobeys Pan and eats the fruit (and kills 2 fairies), it is not because of her purity that she is rewarded by seeing her father at the end. The writer doesn’t understand innocence. Ofelia is rewarded by her father by following the ‘law’ of not harming others (she won’t even spill a drop of her brother’s blood). However, this following of the law (of not harming others at all) makes her into the captain. As the Doctor says to the captain "only men like you can obey without questioning." Ofelia too obeys without question but in doing so she isn’t innocent or pure because these things don’t follow laws (in the end only cruelty does).
We don’t take the captain to be ‘evil’ once we find out that he is only following the laws of his father. He is only cruel. He only wanted to be like his father and when we see that he wanted to pass on his father’s watch to his son we know that he too endured much misery with his burden (but he didn’t know who he could be without it; this is the law of cruelty). His wish to have a son is the wish to see the debt-fulfilled and an admission it remains unfulfilled. (The captain kills the father and the son who were only out rabbit hunting on account of the son making excessive appeals of his father’s innocence; this is why the writer understands cruelty and not innocence).
If you pay attention the captain was never a part of Ofelia’s life. He was never cruel to her. She missed dinner and came back with a soiled dress but she wasn’t punished for it. The two stories never cross paths but each is the shadow of the other. The girl is the one who fulfills her father’s debt while the captain doesn’t. The captain is the one who had power while the girl was powerless in hers. Additionally, both mothers in the story are absent. We find out nothing of the captain’s mother and Ofelia’s mother is only the plaything of outside powers, with no will of her own. It is in the feminine that innocence and purity exists and this is more evidence the writer doesn’t understand it.
We finish the story with the death of the one father (because the captain’s child didn’t receive the watch) and the little girl returning to the side of her father who represent’s the law of God.
This fairy tale for adults is only a return to the Judaeo-Christian legacy. Though it is dressed up in the fur of paganism underneath is the cold inhuman law of the father.
Pan’s labyrinth... it’s called a fairy tale for adults
The question is: why this mixture of innocence and purity with the horrible and cruel? Why doesn’t the writer reconcile the two (which side can’t he understand and therefore portray them both as separate?).
The answer isn’t cruelty... it is the innocence he can’t deal with.
The innocence is what must become mythical while the cruelty is what he deals with in ‘reality’.
The story of the child isn’t the centre story but is given equal weight with the corresponding "real events". The child’s story is equal with the story of the captain but both their stories are really the stories of their loyalty to their fathers.
Ofileia remains true to her father and doesn’t address the captain as her father.
The captain too stays true to his father by disowning his father legacy and the watch (at the dinner table he denies the story).
Ofelia disobeys Pan and eats the fruit (and kills 2 fairies), it is not because of her purity that she is rewarded by seeing her father at the end. The writer doesn’t understand innocence. Ofelia is rewarded by her father by following the ‘law’ of not harming others (she won’t even spill a drop of her brother’s blood). However, this following of the law (of not harming others at all) makes her into the captain. As the Doctor says to the captain "only men like you can obey without questioning." Ofelia too obeys without question but in doing so she isn’t innocent or pure because these things don’t follow laws (in the end only cruelty does).
We don’t take the captain to be ‘evil’ once we find out that he is only following the laws of his father. He is only cruel. He only wanted to be like his father and when we see that he wanted to pass on his father’s watch to his son we know that he too endured much misery with his burden (but he didn’t know who he could be without it; this is the law of cruelty). His wish to have a son is the wish to see the debt-fulfilled and an admission it remains unfulfilled. (The captain kills the father and the son who were only out rabbit hunting on account of the son making excessive appeals of his father’s innocence; this is why the writer understands cruelty and not innocence).
If you pay attention the captain was never a part of Ofelia’s life. He was never cruel to her. She missed dinner and came back with a soiled dress but she wasn’t punished for it. The two stories never cross paths but each is the shadow of the other. The girl is the one who fulfills her father’s debt while the captain doesn’t. The captain is the one who had power while the girl was powerless in hers. Additionally, both mothers in the story are absent. We find out nothing of the captain’s mother and Ofelia’s mother is only the plaything of outside powers, with no will of her own. It is in the feminine that innocence and purity exists and this is more evidence the writer doesn’t understand it.
We finish the story with the death of the one father (because the captain’s child didn’t receive the watch) and the little girl returning to the side of her father who represent’s the law of God.
This fairy tale for adults is only a return to the Judaeo-Christian legacy. Though it is dressed up in the fur of paganism underneath is the cold inhuman law of the father.
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). Descending art is 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).
Ascending art represents the manifold that the artist has tapped into (think Tarkovsky and Fellini and the world they give us). Descending art is 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).
Zizek's 300 comments
"Zack Snyder's 300, the saga of the 300 Spartan soldiers who sacrificed themselves at Thermopilae in halting the invasion of Xerxes' Persian army, was attacked as the worst kind of patriotic militarism with clear allusions to the recent tensions with Iran and events in Iraq - are, however, things really so clear? The film should rather be thoroughly defended against these accusations"
Zizek wants to say that the US should be compared to Xerxes' multi-cultural empire and the 300 are those who wish to keep with the enlightenment program of standing against mysticism.
"Xerxes's words when he attempts to convince Leonidas to accept the Persian domination, definitely do not sound as the words of a fanatic Muslim fundamentalist: he tries to seduce Leonidas into subjection by promising him peace and sensual pleasures if he rejoins the Persian global empire."
"against the reign of mystique and tyranny, towards the bright future," further specified as the rule of freedom and reason - sounds like an elementary Enlightenment program, even with a Communist twist!"
The problem is that both accounts are political while the majority of Americans aren't. The 300 are portrayed as courageous and strong and people will identify with them regardless of the fact that they (the people) are neither. In their unsensuous imagination, or as a pure matter of signifiers, people can identify with them and enjoy the pseudo-visceral experience which contemporary action movies have. This won't fuel any political fires. Rather the point is that movies like this allow the average person (with the little amount of humanity they actually possess) to entertain infantile wishes of omnipotence though they are so out of proportion to the way that they are living (their lack of strength and will-power).
Marx said revolutionaries must make the masses fear themselves (what they've become, their way of living). Most socialists focus on inequality and justice but it obviously does nothing to appeal to altruism or what's in the best interets of people. They want capitalism because they are allowed to daydream (there is enough isolation that they can hide in their houses without being reminded of their mediocrity just like the Dostoevsky's Notes man did with books more than 100 years earlier).
Zizek wants to say that the US should be compared to Xerxes' multi-cultural empire and the 300 are those who wish to keep with the enlightenment program of standing against mysticism.
"Xerxes's words when he attempts to convince Leonidas to accept the Persian domination, definitely do not sound as the words of a fanatic Muslim fundamentalist: he tries to seduce Leonidas into subjection by promising him peace and sensual pleasures if he rejoins the Persian global empire."
"against the reign of mystique and tyranny, towards the bright future," further specified as the rule of freedom and reason - sounds like an elementary Enlightenment program, even with a Communist twist!"
The problem is that both accounts are political while the majority of Americans aren't. The 300 are portrayed as courageous and strong and people will identify with them regardless of the fact that they (the people) are neither. In their unsensuous imagination, or as a pure matter of signifiers, people can identify with them and enjoy the pseudo-visceral experience which contemporary action movies have. This won't fuel any political fires. Rather the point is that movies like this allow the average person (with the little amount of humanity they actually possess) to entertain infantile wishes of omnipotence though they are so out of proportion to the way that they are living (their lack of strength and will-power).
Marx said revolutionaries must make the masses fear themselves (what they've become, their way of living). Most socialists focus on inequality and justice but it obviously does nothing to appeal to altruism or what's in the best interets of people. They want capitalism because they are allowed to daydream (there is enough isolation that they can hide in their houses without being reminded of their mediocrity just like the Dostoevsky's Notes man did with books more than 100 years earlier).
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?
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