I think Alan's response is really interesting in this historical moment of the Age of the Downfalls. It will be interesting to see whether Utopia will resurface in film over the next while, as "The End of Everything We Know" is contemplated as a possible reality rather than a dystopian fantasy serving the function of the only possible alternative.



On 21 Nov 2011, at 12:42 PM, Alan Fair <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Hi,
The phenomenon that Henry alludes to is summed up by, I think Zizek, when he says that we (the collective western(?) imagination) find it easier to imagine the end of the world than we do the end of capitalism. I wonder if this ability to see either disaster or a kind of fascism (28 Days Later et al.) as the only alternatives to the present is some kind of collective will to death. What happened to Utopias? This is a genuine question.
By the by, has anyone seen 'Take Shelter' yet. This is one of the finest examples of the opposite of Gramsci's, "Optimisim of the will, pessimism of the intellect".
Peace
Alan

On Mon, Nov 21, 2011 at 12:00 AM, FILM-PHILOSOPHY automatic digest system <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
There is 1 message totaling 83 lines in this issue.

Topics of the week:

 1. Everybody Dies

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Date:    Mon, 21 Nov 2011 00:08:40 +0100
From:    Pei Sze Chow <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Everybody Dies

That certainly sounds like what Lars von Trier seems to be getting at (in a most oblique manner) in Melancholia!


On 20 Nov 2011, at 23:59 , Henry M. Taylor wrote:

> I think we have to go beyond narratology here and into the area of good old-fashioned hermeneutics. Jung wrote in reference to one of his patients that dreams of apocalypse and the end of the world are mental representations and signals of the dreamer's imminent psychotic breakdown. So, if in a film such as Knowing (2009) where at the end the whole of mankind dies, would this suggest that our culture/society is about to suffer such a fate, cataclysm/psychosis here being the trope for the collapse of the capitalist world system? Or is this interpretation too banal?
>
> Henry
>


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