Mike:
We agree that the more difficult great works of modern art have a deep coherence that only emerges with effort. But the narrative in Mulholland Drive is only apparently incoherent...it makes perfectly coherent sense from a Freudian perspective, once much of the film is read as a dream by the Naomi Watts character. What's really going on is shown in the last half hour...she had a relationship with the dark woman, only to be supplanted by the film director, and her attempt at a film career has been a bust. So the first part of the movie was her wish-fulfilling dream of starting over and having her beloved dependent on her. She wakes up in the shabby apartment, makes out with her beloved, and then has to face both the ignominy of being invited to the woman's engagement announcement party, and of witnessing the woman's cinematic success under the director's tutelage. That, coupled with her failure at securing a Hollywood career herself, drives her to suicide.
More briefly, I also think that the whole detective-voyeur-primal scene dynamic that animates Blue Velvet is explicitly Hitchcockian in its involvement of an innocent in a web of intrigue that his own need to see drives him to become entangled in.
Dan
-----Original Message-----
From: Film-Philosophy Salon on behalf of Mike Frank
Sent: Fri 10/17/2003 4:39 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Cc:
Subject: Re: NAM VET thinking the unthinkable [was KILL BILL]
>> 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.
i hardly meand to knock catharsis [aristotle was smarter than i
am] and
don't think i said anything that might be read that way . . . but
it seems
to me that the clinical view of catharsis, that is actaully creates healthy
[whatever that is] people and cultures, is a non-aristotelian
idea, and
actually a matter of fact . . . unfortunately it is a fact that
remains
indeterminate for we hae not yet devised any reliable way of
determining
whether porn makes us more sexually aggressive or horror more
prone to
violence in our real behavior . . . i would not want to defend
those genres
[which i quite like] in those terms
i also have some problems with the claim that
>> 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.
by this logic any text so screwed up that you had to drive
yourself crazy
sorting it out would be preferable to a cogently made case . . .
by extension
my students' critical papers, which really do make me crazy at
times because
of their incoherence, would be preferable to the kind of discourse
that
occurs on this list-serv . . . or, if we need to distinguish
between critical and
what is called "imaginative" work, that the creations of students
in a
poetry writing seminar is worth more than the work of great poets
. . .
sorry . . . i don't buy that . . . it's not the surface incohrence
itself that
makes work valuable; it's what more powerful coherence emerges
when one sees it clearly . . . so far as i can tell no such
coherence
emerges from lynch . . . nor do i see how BLUE VELVET is
insightful
on the subject of scopophilia; sure the protagonist takes great
but
comnflicted pleasure in looking at sexual behavior, but that's
nothing special . . . and the way that pleasure is developed and
treated in the film seem to me little more than grand guignol
mike
PS -- good lord!! . . . i'm getting very argumentative, almost
hostile i fear . . . wonder why . . . in any case i apologize if
i've offended; i'm just trying to sort things out clearly
|
