Wow, I go away to see one extremely awful Chinese movie, and you have flipped “The Breakfast Table” over like Ed Harris in everything! The wonder, the fury!! I’m not sure where to begin, but I hope Robert Downey Jr. is following our bouncing ball.
Celebrity addiction is so weird. But I have to believe that Aaron Sorkin and Matthew Perry are like: “Thank God.” I hate that the debate over what to do with a guy like him always hinges on the argument over whether he’s a genius. He is not. A real genius, after said relapses, slithers his way into a Woody Allen flick or onto Penélope Cruz’s arm. He just rescued Ally McBeal. He is, however, brilliant in the way he rolls with the punches of his mistakes without troubling us with his bruises. I say we give him that Stephen Gaghan guy’s number for rehab counseling. What to do with him? I think MTV should co-opt him in one their new ads. His saga has miniseries written all over it. In the meantime, the last thing I think we need is more Hollywood squares pleading his case. Dude, loved you in Home for the Holidays, but tell it to the judge.
Moving right along: Our discussion-turned-sparring-match-turned-brawl over this MTV business is really fascinating and has everything to do with that suspicion I raised earlier. I don’t think we’re misdefining culture at all. As I understand it, culture is the coffeehouse of communicated ideas. Morality exists on an entirely different continent and to get the two to summit requires federal outrage–the exhumation of Krzysztof Kieslowski. And maybe one of the points I think we bypassed in the midst of our critics crisis yesterday has a lot to do with that discrepancy. Life–one that includes sensitivity, morality, etc–doesn’t begin when we switch DVDs or slip off our headphones. It continues. John Sayles is a firm believer in the art of life, and his movies reflect his having lived in a world that includes the incredible bounty of life’s tragicomedy.
I tend to enter the world with a panoply. Some days I’m a camera, others I’m a sponge, and as a critic I’m afraid I live in a cultural vacuum. At the expense of my humanity, I sometimes see only semiologies and their implications as they concern other semiologies–not life, not other people. My mother firmly believes I live in a celluloid tower. I should get a kid or a mortgage or lose something important, she says. There happen to be no moral implications in my vacuum. I’m not as bad as the people who see an accident and just stand there as it happens, witnessing it, afraid to interfere like a reality TV camera and alter the happening. (Am I outing myself as a huge, cold freak? I’m not a Radiohead record. I’m not the new Spielberg movie. I’m a real boy. I care and want to be loved.)
Those MTV ads have the power to offend, and depending on which country you live in–Culture or Morality–they emit contrary or at least grossly divergent meanings. The now-hibernating Eminem skirmishes underscored the magnitude of this perspective discrepancy. And here we have another in the form of Jackass. Co-opting the language of the language of the PSA, which at least for our generation was co-opted from those extremely kitschy, exceptionally paranoid health and hygiene films from the ‘50s. (If you haven’t seen them, they’re worth digging up. They were traveling from city to city last year.) Something ticked me off about the MTV ads.
But it wasn’t the insult to kids living with syphilis, rather it was to the people who actually tune in and find the gross incongruity between the ads and the actual content. My priorities are weird but, like many people, I think, I’m an empirical moralist: Had I or someone I love a case of the itch-down-theres, I might be more immediately compelled to consider the human factor, something that I think obfuscates conversations about Robert Downey Jr.
Subject shift. This will be stale tomorrow morn, but we really have to have a few words about Michiko Kakutani’s piece about the ‘80s. That’s my girl. But baby, where’s the beef?
’Night boys,
Wesley
