inspo/criticism

[...] The opposite of Faust, this troubled Portuguese soul traded in real life for the spiritual world of his writing. Perhaps most writers do this to some extent, but who has annulled himself like Pessoa? Not Joyce. Not Pound. Not even Franz Kafka. We can see Joyce as the brilliant conductor of his daringly dissonant narratives. We can see Pound hyper-actively promoting literary, political, and personal causes. We can see Kafka suffering—as it were in his own flesh—the agony of his negative metamorphoses. With Pessoa all we can visualize is what a handful of surviving photos show: a materialized nondescriptness endowed with a mustache. Pessoa was no language master à la Joyce or Pound. He wrote careful, elegant Portuguese, inventing new locutions and recasting worn-out clichés, but his project was not to deform and reform words and syntax. His project was the universe, with himself as the raw material. He was the object clay, endlessly molded, twisted, divided, and reworked by his writing. And in this autometamorphosis there was no torment or suffering à la Kafka. As if following the recommendation of a Reis poem to “Leave pain on the altar/ As an offering to the gods,” Pessoa stoically endured nonsuffering.

The hero is a man actively engaged in becoming himself—never a very reassuring sight. The villain, on the other hand, has already become something. Everything about Tsukigata suggests that he has arrived. There is not a wasted gesture, not an uncalculated movement. He has found what is to his advantage and acts accordingly. Sugata, by comparison, is all thumbs.

Kurosawa’s preference is the preference we all have for the formed man. In the ordinary film this man would be the hero. But he is not and, despite his admiration, Kurosawa has told us why. One of the attributes of all of his heroes, beginning with Sugata, is that they are all unformed in just this way. For this reason, all of his pictures are about education—the education of the hero.

After this superb battle … one might expect the picture to end with some kind of statement that he has at last grownup, that he has arrived, that he has become something—the great judo champion. This would be the logical Western conclusion to a film about the education of a hero.

Kurosawa, however, has seen that this cannot be true. A hero who actually becomes is tantamount to a villain—for this was the only tangible aspect of the villain’s villainy. To suggest that peace, contentment, happiness, follows a single battle, no matter how important, is literally untrue—and it would limit Sugata precisely because of the limitations suggested in the words “happiness” or “judo champion.”

[...] pop culture teaches best when it isn’t so conscious of its teacherly role, when it doesn’t underline every point five or six times. (It has this in common with, well, any sort of culture.) The low-budget shock filmmaker George Romero taught the audiences of his own period far more powerfully, and with much less fuss, simply by featuring Black characters in heroic roles and by listening when the actress Gaylen Ross said, during the shooting of the 1979 zombie epic, Dawn of the Dead, that she didn’t think her character would scream. We might say that Romero rode his mind at a gallop in pursuit of making a frightening movie, whereas our popular artists live betwixt and between, now trying to emulate the artworks that they love, now trying to impart a Very Important Lesson.

Why have we settled for this strange cultural compromise—lowbrow genres, done with middlebrow earnestness, in pretend revolt against a thoroughly defunded highbrow regime? The answer is simple and depressing. We have accepted the idea of the democratization of culture—we have accepted, rightly, that, say, opera is not inherently worthier than jazz, that superhero comics are not inherently dumb, that ancient epic poetry is not automatically loftier than rap (with which it shares some features), that all of these things can be done well or badly and that they serve different ends—without accomplishing democracy. I mean this in a dully straightforward way. We are not all equally in control of our lives, and we are afraid of what becoming so would entail, of the costs of democracy, of the mess of it. We are divided by class, race, and gender and united only in being the objects of a ceaseless corporate effort to accomplish our commodification. Having lost the economic battle to economic and political elites, we celebrate, again and again, our victory over the mostly imaginary cultural elite that would scorn us for watching 90 Day Fiancé. What you can’t do practically, you do symbolically, until it becomes a neurosis.

“Bleeding edge” is a techie phrase meaning beyond even the “cutting edge”—so new that it hurts. The irony of this as a title is that the novel is set mostly in the spring and summer of 2001. Pynchon offers such nostalgic references as Beanie Babies, Furbys, Pokémon, Razor scooters, and Jennifer Aniston still in Rachel mode alongside a presidency just stolen and a tech bubble just burst. Downtown, the towers of the World Trade Center throw their foreshadows over Wall Street. A stretch farther north, between TriBeCa and the Flatiron, lies Silicon Alley, a New York tech district that actually existed, or that was actually hyped to have existed—a real estate figment like NoHo or SoHa or even the West and East Villages (originally the Village and the Lower East Side).

Here, in Pynchon’s telling, two types prevailed. One consisted of generic deracinated White People who’d gone out West like the prospectors of yore, but who when they bottomed out amid the Bay’s Zen gardens and organic-smoothie chains found themselves yearning for real urban grit—or at least for the really yuppified grit of gentrifying Giulianiville. The other was made up of city lifers, the ethnically identifying—or not yet postidentity—strivers who’ve always served as New York’s color: the wise black bike messenger, the Irish cop and fireman, the social-club Italian, the backroom-fixer Jew; the “genuine,” the “authentic,” the huddled masses yearning for cash.