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Thierry Jousse, editor of Cahiers du Cinema, wrote a piece in 1994 called "The Killers of the Image" in which he tried to understand the long-range consequences of such filmmaking:
Take, for example, Oliver Stone's film, Natural Born Killers. It's a child monster, a maelstrom of images, a whirlwind of colors and sounds, a sort of hash of gestures and movements, a magma of sensations and music. Can we speak here of the shot's composition? We need to find a new word to denote these incessant passages of images, simultaneously subliminal and convulsive—of electrons as much as projectiles. But decidedly, they're no longer composed shots. They're a space where everything is on the surface, like in a baroque sphere; where images never stop arriving, speeding into the eye and sliding over each other, in place of the old cinematic way, where the eye takes the road in order to scrutinize the shot. ... It's a video environment, a big live show as well as a self-cannibalization of cinema by the media, or a sacrificial ceremony with the immolation of the frame and the invocation of new images.
Jousse goes on to say that the use of such images in Stone's and Tarantino's films approaches the sensation of a drug, a "film-trip." He likens the irresponsibility, the lack of consequences, in Tarantino's films to a cocaine high. "You could call it a stylistic exercise, but it's also the same sensation procured by cocaine, a drunkenness of the intelligence verging on the absurd, a feeling of superiority detached from reality..." Ironically, Tarantino does not shun dialogue; in fact, his movies impress with their snappy talk. But the talk is designed to bounce back at us with a stylized, "off" quality, a tinniness further detaching us from reality, the way you hear words when you're high.
ooo
Reason, which is essential to keep the machinery in motion, necessarily contains its other. When you start to think, you cannot stop short at purely reproductive thinking. This does not mean that things will really work out like that, but you cannot think without thinking that otherness. The general stultification today is the direct result of cutting out utopia. When you reject utopia, thought itself withers away. [...]
a shaft of light from the telos falls onto labour. Basically, people are too short-sighted. They misinterpret the light that falls on labour from ultimate goals. Instead, they take labour qua labour as the telos and hence see their personal work success as that purpose. That is the secret. If they did not do that, such a thing as solidarity would be possible. A shaft of light from the telos falls on the means to achieve it. It is just as if instead of worshipping their lover they worship the house in which she dwells. That, incidentally, is the source of all poetry.
Freedom is not the freedom to accumulate, but the fact that I have no need to accumulate.
ADORNO: The more superfluous a job of work is, the worse it becomes, the more it degenerates into ideology.
HORKHEIMER: And the more it is misapplied. Work today is not superfluous as long as people still go hungry. Work is perverted. Automation. We should take greater care to help others, to export the right goods to the right people, to seek cures for the sick. Nowadays there is a false abolition of work.
ADORNO: It amounts to production for its own sake.
HORKHEIMER: I couldn’t care less about sending spacecraft to the moon.
ADORNO: There is nothing sacred about technology.
HORKHEIMER: Marx already has the idea that in a false society, technology develops wrongly.
The Chin Chin Man had a harder time finding a job. The home health service had hired him, but too many people complained once they saw him walk in the door.
[...] walking around with my father, she’d seen how America changed around big black men. She saw him try to shrink to size, his long, proud back hunched as he walked with my mother through the Walmart, where he was accused of stealing three times in four months. Each time, they took him to a little room off the exit of the store. They leaned him against the wall and patted him down, their hands drifting up one pant leg and down the other. Homesick, humiliated, he stopped leaving the house.
sad
I had never been to therapy myself, and when the time came for me to choose what to study, I didn’t choose psychology. I chose molecular biology. I think when people heard about my brother they assumed that I had gone into neuroscience out of a sense of duty to him, but the truth is I’d started this work not because I wanted to help people but because it seemed like the hardest thing you could do, and I wanted to do the hardest thing. I wanted to flay any mental weakness off my body like fascia from muscle. Throughout high school, I never touched a drop of alcohol because I lived in fear that addiction was like a man in a dark trench coat, stalking me, waiting for me to get off the well-lit sidewalk and step into an alley. I had seen the alley. I had watched Nana walk into the alley and I had watched my mother go in after him, and I was so angry at them for not being strong enough to stay in the light. And so I did the hard thing.
i get this
These mini-lectures on Ghana were delivered to the three of us with increasing frequency. My mother would gently remind my father that Ghana was her country too, our country. She nodded and agreed. America is a difficult place, but look at what we’ve been able to build here. Sometimes Nana would come into my room and pretend to be him. “In my country, we do not eat the red M&M’s,” he’d say, throwing the red M&M’s at me.
reminds me of me and eric lol
Most of the time in my work, I begin with the answers, with an idea of the results. I suspect that something is true and then I work toward that suspicion, experimenting, tinkering, until I find what I am looking for. The ending, the answer, is never the hard part. The hard part is trying to figure out what the question is, trying to ask something interesting enough, different enough from what has already been asked, trying to make it all matter.
But how do you know when you are nearing a true end instead of a dead end? How do you finish the experiment? What do you do when, years into your life, you figure out that the yellow brick road you’ve been easing down leads you directly into the eye of the tornado?
i dont like this - feels like unearned sentimentality/melodrama
When I was a child, no one ever said the words “institutionalized racism.” We hardly even said the word “racism.” I don’t think I took a single class in college that talked about the physiological effects of years of personally mediated racism and internalized racism. This was before studies came out that showed that black women were four times more likely to die from childbirth, before people were talking about epigenetics and whether or not trauma was heritable. If those studies were out there, I never read them. If those classes were offered, I never took them. There was little interest in these ideas back then because there was, there is, little interest in the lives of black people.
i dont like this either. feels too ... obvious? cliched? preachy?