Tonight we had the rare opportunity for An Uncorrupted Double Feature (viewing two new {to me} movies, one after the other, thereby linking them forever in my mind and creating thematic linkage).
As an unchilded human, this might seem on offer more often than to others, but it is, truly, a real rarity... The first offering was Vengeance - a 2022 dark comedy by B.J. Novak, who quite possibly might turn out to be the most talented person to have been on The Office. Vengeance is Novak's directorial debut, and in addition to being highly entertaining, it's possible that it may also turn out to be a defining film of the era. It's the best kind of lowkey potentially great movie where it is surface level charmingly clever, spreading some sort of message that feels sort of important and profound (in the case of Vengeance there are 3 or 4 of these differing, but related messages), but nothing too scathing or cynical; and then on further reflection and examination it starts to dawn on you that this movie may in fact be not only deeply meaningful and great, but, in fact, important.
"Important" works of art are ones that are not just elegant or profound or even sublime, but I think most importantly they are the ones that are exceptionally timely. What the world needs now, is aptness, sweet aptness. Very often the messages that are needed at any given time are political (which is why so many "important" movies or "important" art generally is often political), but I think just now the messages we might most need are cultural and critical (in the academic sense) in nature.
At one point in Vengeance, Ashton Kutcher's character (Quentin Sellers) says by way of critique of our current moment we find ourselves in: "Everything means everything, so nothing means anything." The quote diagnoses the extent to which we have entered, just in the past few years, a postmodern cultural era. Postmodernity is a complicated thing to define (just ask Fred Jameson who spent 500 pages or so in an attempt to do just that). Possibly my favorite attempt at a definition is in Jameson's introduction to his book (and in postmodern studies, you only ever have to read introductions to books... or even just the marketing blurbs!). He offers it somewhat glibly, but I think we can retrospectively now take it somewhat seriously... He says something like:
"the Postmodern is thinking about the present historically in a world that has forgotten its history"
We are living in an era of supreme subjectivity where everyone's thoughts and identity have become significant and actual meaning and complexity and depth have become tertiary. We have fully blown past Colbert's Era of Truthiness, briefly paused at the moment of "alternative facts", and now exist in a time when claims of "I feel that ____" and "I know the __{insert expert here}___ says ________, but I believe that ___________" have equal epistemological standing to previously 'absolute' truths like 3 + 3 = 6 and "water is made up of 2 parts hydrogen to 1 part oxygen". And this, I think, is closer to a postmodern sensibility:
"Nothing means anything, so everything means anything"
That mentality is perhaps more akin to a less thought about branch of postmodernity called supermodernity (which itself is thought of as a branch of hypermodernity) which I think of as the notion that the meaning of the whole of anything can be ascertained by closely examining and understanding any part of it. It's what Walter Benjamin was on about in his unfinished master work The Arcades Project, but I think it's also what's going on, in a satirical way, in Vengeance. In the movie, one of the Shaw daughters primary aspiration in life is to be famous - when this gets interrogated, and she is asked what she wants to be famous for - does she want to be a famous singer, or a famous actor, she decides she wants "to be a famous celebrity" - and this pretty well encapsulates the thesis of the movie, but is a throwaway joke line, soon forgotten.
And so (i haven't forgotten) we come on to Juliet, Naked, a bizarrely un-timely movie that came out in 2018, but is about email - in a moment after "email is over". It's based on a book by Nick Hornby from 2009, a time when email ruled - and the adaptation took the material straight (which is generally the best choice when adapting Hornby - who has kinda always already gotten it...), but that makes for a weird unmoored feel to the movie.
Given its excessive untimeliness, Juliet, Naked is anything but important, but as is so often the case with Nick Hornby, it captures aspects of the modern human experience, and interrogates them from a myriad of angles. Here we find an investigation of highly curated fandom - questions of who owns a work of art, the artist or the appreciator of the art. The movie is about the fraught-ness of an artist putting themselves out there, but also the fraught-ness of putting yourself out there - committing yourself to someone despite all their foibles and obsessions and insecurities.
As with Horby's best works - really all of his work that I've encountered, whether in writing, film, or song - the central question being asked is, "what is a life?" or maybe, "what should I do in my life?" What to do with your life feels all-encompassing, and final, but what to do in your life feels like a good question to ask - where to spend your energies, what (and who) to give your attention to.
Life is like a weird dry run where only at the end of it we realize it was practice for a performance that's never going to happen
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