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Rendering a tin man a straw man

Posted by rhizomatic (A) on April 19, 2004 at 12:03:35

In Reply to: "And Ulysses couldn've 'just' been about a day in Dublin..." posted by Bulkington on April 19, 2004 at 11:15:00:

there are reasons for its digressions in style, and those reasons, though many would disagree, generally aren't (merely) self-indulgence

Parse the difference. The reasons one gives for doing this or that, as an artist, can be 'justified' by any number things, but the decision to do this or that is, I think, finally based in self-satisfaction.

Then we need not have this board, critical discussions, or criticism at all. Because things are essential by virtue of their being what in fact they are. Why is Mel Gibson not protected by this same reasoning?

Who said he's protected? You're asking for some transcendental derivation of the film's structure; maybe there isn't one. So what? How does it function anyway, in lieu of that? Why isn't it 'valid' to pick some elements almost at random (even though this isn't what the director did) and then see how they fit together? David Lynch has no idea why he does the things he does. He believes in angels. Should any analysis of his films proceed from the fact that he believes in angels?
Why must we necessarily begin and end with the artist's intention? "Why did you structure it this way?" "I dunno. It looked cool." That's not even his explanation, but does that preclude any further consideration?
You're not willing to proceed speculatively from matters of fact to matters of value, you're insisting that there must, by law, be some justification of the structure before you're even willing to engage the fact that that is just how it is structured, and to try and tease out how that works for the film and doesn't. And you're reason for wanting someone to convince you is because you suspect the director is being 'cynical.' How? What does that mean? That he's playing into the public's demonstrable, slavish taste for alinear, fragmented plot structures? Since when is that a 'popular' or formulaic convention? What's 'cynical' about it? Do you just mean 'gimmicky'? But why 'gimmicky'? Because it's unusual? Why shouldn't each and every film that uses a linear plot be required to justify its use of linearity? Do you find the director's explanation unconvincing? Isn't that really how we do tell stories? What kind of explanation would satisfy you?

restructuring the narrative should serve some sort of artistic function, should, in my mind, serve the content in some essential way (as should linear narration), just as free verse should be more than prose arranged perfunctorily on the page

The very idea that the narrative has been 'restructured' is prejudicial. The idea that any 'deviant' narrative structure must justify itself vis a vis the default mode of 'linear' narrative (which, I suspect you know, is fraught with metaphysical connundra), is limiting.
The function it serves is immanent to the story itself. There isn't some isomimetic relationship between the plot and the structure, as there is in Memento, which I think is a lesser film. You spend time not knowing what's going on, the film proceeds the way one's recall of one's own life does. You have to correlate and correct different bits, and your internal sense of where you're 'at' in the plot is constantly shifting. Isn't the subjective experience of that interesting enough for you? Wouldn't it be far more 'cynical' or gimmicky if, a la Memento, there was some simple, wink-wink, it's structured this way because it has this one-to-one relationship with the content? Who needs that?

the structure, at bottom, serves merely to conceal this fact

Isn't that a bit like saying that the drums in 'When the Levee Breaks' are just there to conceal the fact that the song has no beat?

I'd like to see the movie you're describing...

Hmmm...are you sure you weren't high as a kite and watching the movie on a 12" TV screen? Somebody, somewhere in the world, should've months ago hipped you to the fact that this is a film that deserves to be seen in the theater...

But so what. The Passion has been made, it's in the world (this sounds so ... Biblical), and all its elements are essential by virtue of the fact that those are the elements of which it is comprised....

I never said the structure was essential by virtue of---oh wait, yes I did. OK, what I was getting at was sort of IT'S HERE, IT'S QUEER, GET USED TO IT argument. Art works can't be derived from transcendental structures. So to try and determinately ground them is unfair and fruitless. Your charge of cynicism would make more sense if there was a) profit to be made or b) some hackneyed use of conventions that didn't serve to express anything. Personally I think the fact that the movie requires you to work is enough; the juxtaposition of certain particular scenes next to one another, which couldn't be gotten from a linear plot, is affective enough to 'justify' the decision. It fills you alternately with dread and confusion. Like life. If it was structured another way, it would've been a less effective movie, probably. But that is a big 'if,' and I think if we're going to go around crippling artworks on the basis of how they might be weaker if they were significantly different, then that better than my points would render criticism irrelevant.

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