Mike:

   First, about David Lynch.  Mulholland Drive is a great film from my perspective, in part because it compels you think about it...the narrative thread is so skewed that you can only make sense of it by doing so.  Freudian critics have pointed out that it makes perfect sense if you read most of the film as a dream of the main character, a wish-fulfillment in the face of a very discouraging actual world.  In Robin Wood's sense, this is also a subversive film, just as Bertolt Brecht sought to subvert linear narrative for more explicitly political ends. 

     Blue Velvet is Lynch's masterpiece, in no small measure because of how it reenacts the primal scene, and the transition from boyhood to manhood, in allegorical fashion.  In the absence of the good father, the protagonist takes a walk on the wild side.  Dennis Hopper is the bad father that the Kyle McLaughlin character gets to slay, and there is no better (or more critical) film on the subject of scopophilia (our pleasure in watching), except perhaps Rear Window.

     I am not a Freudian, yet I wonder what the knock on catharsis is, if, like Aristotle, one believes that cathartic experiences make us less (and not more) likely to act out our forbidden desires in real life.  As the Nixon commission on pornography concluded, male sex offenders were less exposed to pornography than the average man; there might be a lot to be said for catharsis.

     But apart from that debate, both Science Fiction and Horror have attracted philosophical types from their inception as literary genres,  because the hypothetical scenarios in which both deal are perfect venues for philosophical inquiry.  And if most of the viewers miss these nuances, part of what I am trying to do in my film classes is make my students more self-conscious viewers (and I use Robin Wood as one of my role models in that regard).    

Dan
            

    

-----Original Message-----
From:   Film-Philosophy Salon on behalf of Mike Frank
Sent:   Fri 10/17/2003 2:05 PM
To:     [log in to unmask]
Cc:	
Subject:        Re: NAM VET  thinking the unthinkable [was KILL BILL]
i feel like one of those  poe narrators who begins his
story with the assertion "i am, as everyone knows, the
most mild mannered of men" and then goes on to
prove that he's  a class A maniac

i usually maintain an even keel in reading these responses
and can see where a variety of opinions come from and
what validity they might have . . . so  i surprised myself by
becoming really angry at martha's latest message, especially
when i so much admire the quarter from which it comes

then it occurred to me that perhaps what we have here is
a failure to communicate on a simple lexical level . . . the
specific question at hand is whether horror [or perhaps
we should say "good" horror because presumably not all
horror works this way] allows its audience to think the
unthinkable . . . and it seems to me that we should reserve
the word "think" in this context to  that which takes place
in what martha calls  "cramped barriers of ordinary language and
logic" . . . i have no doubt that there are important spaces
that are not enclosed by these barriers --perhaps the most
important spaces lie outside these barriers . . . but please,
please let's save the word "think" for what goes on inside
these barriers -- just so we can understand each other

similarly, while i'm not at all sure that saying things obliquely
is "the foundation principle of poetry and all art" i'm pretty well
convinced that the issue here is not whether art expresses
the unspeakable obliquely but whether that oblique
expression allows most viewers to then think the unthinkable

finally -- and here i think the argument is substantive rather
than merely terminological -- i'm baffled by the claim that
"David . . . Lynch's movies are certainly examples of a poet who
permits us to keep our sanity by thinking the unthinkable in the
largest sense" . . . i've been thinking, or trying to think about,
and teaching lynch films since i first saw BLUE VELVET and
more and more the only thing they allow me to conclude
is that he's a self-indulgent poseur

none of this is to deny the validity of what robert andrew
says; if he claims that seeing KB allowed him to free himself
of some dangerous demons i take that as a matter of fact
. . . having never been trained to fight, much less in anything
as nasty as nam, i cannot possibly know what such films do
to him, or to other members of the audience for that matter

but if films like these allow us to THINK the unthinkable then i
would like someone to explain what this thinking is, and
how it works

mike

PS-- i feel defensive enough to add that i remain someone
who "enjoys" much horror -- if choosing to see something
is some indication of "enjoyment" . . . it's not the value of
horror that's being argued; it's the idea that horror allows
a special kind of insight