Notice that the "for" indicates a "in response to," not a "for your response
only." Context and past practice have made that heretofore obvious.

Now to begin the sort process: I will let Tim Bostwick explain his argument
about "richly happening events" and the "new" if he so desires, but as far as my
argument has been mixed in with his, here is what I want to detail.

Perhaps I should have already attempted to answer the question, 'So, what *does*
_Pearl Harbor_ "newly reveal of the world"?  If that's your criteria for
critical inquiry...what then?', but this question is not addressed to a specific
"you."

One of the problems with the new has to do with physics and the Aristotelian
principle of contradiction: that A cannot be A and not-A. Indeed, the
long-standing problem of difference and sameness, which is also the problem of
newness, has to do with the idea that one cannot step into the same river twice.
Yet we only need to consider the river as a geographical entity in a three
dimensions in order to describe it as a single entity in terms of space
occupied. It is in time-space that the single entity of the river becomes a
statistical entity, single only as a composite. (With this in mind, one might
look to film as a stream of composite frames.) Time problematizes space and,
with space, the idea of being. Defined in terms of space, being remains
differentiated from other being by means of position. Time, however,
differentiates being against itself and thus renders being becoming.  Time makes
the river always new and so to the space occupied, the flow, . . .   .  So it is
that we shift between the world of being, a world defined in three dimensions,
and the world of becoming, a world defined in four dimensions. So it is that
becoming is always new.

To address Gary Norris, who claims 'The value of a product remains the same, its
meaning remains
unchanged, its contents coherent and concrete.  It is the appearance that
changes, its spectacle.  I will always argue that there are films that have
nothing new or unique to offer, films that are "worthless."  In fact these
films refuse to participate in the new due to attachment/reliance upon nostalgia
and to dependence on audience response/marketing research,' is then rather easy
in terms of this physical model:  No, it is being which is the illusion, the
statistical composite. Appearance is all that the world of becoming allows us.

To address the faultiness of Gary Norris's economic model is easy too. Value,
after all, tends to be the hardest term for a market to clarify and so the
'value of a product' rarely remains the same though, over a time period, its
relative value may prove constant when adjusted for inflation . . .  .  Also,
the economic worth of a film is something entirely different from a critical
judgment of "worthless" though, when critical judgment drives the market,
"worthless" means "worthless."

Gary Norris claims that films developed according to marketing principles "fail
to participate in the new," but he undermines his own position when he says,
"these films refuse to participate in the new due to attachment/reliance upon
nostalgia and to dependence on audience response/marketing research." The reason
for the research into "audience response/marketing" is because these items are
relative to a product and because the audience base shifts over time. A pool of
fifteen to twenty year-olds today will be a different pool ten years from now.
What the twenty-five to forty year-old audience has nostalgia for today is
likely to be different from the nostalgia a twenty-five to forty year-old
audience ten years from now will have. Reliance on these models does not
constitute a failure to participate in the new; rather, it signals that a movie,
whether or not it succeeds artistically, will be participating in its age.

To answer the question, 'So, what *does* _Pearl Harbor_ "newly reveal of the
world"'? It reveals an America concerned with betrayal, even of the sexual kind
. . .  .  It reveals an America--as I hope to have shown earlier--in the age of
Columbine and the Oklahoma City Bombing.  It reveals an America . . .  .

JMC