Encounterculture

You'll notice - well, those of you who know me, anyway - that I haven't written anything about movies yet. This is not unintentional; in truth, I've only written one thing about movies (a lonely, incoherent polemic about the auteur theory which only made its way out to a few people) in the last few months. It's just that I've been going through this weird thing where I'm not sure if I have anything useful to say about movies anymore. I'm being unclear. Allow me to explain.

About a year ago, I had to watch Boys Don't Cry for class, and almost ended up tearing my hair out in boredom. I know it's an important story, and I know that the issue of gender identity is actually pretty interesting as it relates to philosophical centers of thought like semiotics and deconstruction (which I am shamefully interested in). But please believe me when I say that I could not have begun to care even the slightest bit, probably because I'd already realized all of the above.

That sounds awful, and I know it, and that's the root of the problem. Writing about movies has become institutionalized, and every institution is fundamentally ethical. There are movie critics piled to God's front door, clamoring at the bit to prove that they're really the ones with the Right Way to Look at Movies. I, to put it flatly, know that that's all bullshit - well, unless you want to view movies as a product with a specific use. Being someone who doesn't, well, you get the picture.

It's also worth noting that the reason why I don't look at movies that way is - well, that's inaccurate. I try very, very hard not to look at movies that way anymore. Pretty much up until the start of this year, I was one of those cocky little fuckups turning their nose down at Star Wars dorks (of course, I was one of them for a while too) and such, telling people why they should go see X or shouldn't go see Y. It's just not worth it. For one thing, I never learned a thing from a single movie I ever saw; I just got confirmation of stuff that I already knew. I mean, it's not like I didn't already know that women in China have it rough before I saw Raise the Red Lantern; it's just that I'd never really thought about it before. But is that any kind of standard by which you should pass judgment?

It's just that the movies that I really value are way more than that. The movies that I really love are the ones that let me engage the world from another point of view, because I'm really just starved for perspective. That, I think, is why I'm still stuck on movies; these days it's so difficult to find any source of perspective that the ones we really do get are all the more precious. Movies, in a very literal way, allow us to see how the world works without our being there, and considering how self-involved the world is getting, that's something that I'm willing to defend in print or anywhere else.

The problem, of course, is that now I have to unlearn about eight years of dogma when it comes to writing about them, especially when it comes to individual movies. It's one thing, after all, to link movies together under a concept, but it's another one entirely to talk about the merits of an individual movie, because in doing so, you have to assume a certain amount of elitism since you're prizing your experience with this movie over all the other ones you've ever had. Usually, you can pick up on this in the defensive tone critics tend to take; I could spend all day linking you to critics who spend large amounts of time in their articles either disproving the claims of others or warding off similar, as-yet-unmade deconstructions of their own interpretations. This is bullshit. In any war, to paraphrase Bill Maher, all defenses eventually fail.

The problem is that I'm not sure if people are interested in cinema as a whole anymore. Now that it has this overpowering ethical dimension of You Should Like This and Oh How Could You Like That, it's a pain in the ass; basically, it's become a form of entertainment which dangles escapism in your face, but can only be evaluated in terms of Right and Wrong, just like everything else in the world these days (since what else is all the hysteria over the war in Iraq, to pick one random example, except just a clash of ethical systems?) That's bullshit, and I can certainly see why people would be willing to tell movie critics to piss up a rope. God knows I've pretty much done the same with most contemporary critics.

Cinema, like all the arts, is always at a crossroads between decadence and subsistence, but right now seems like one of those times when stock really does have to be taken. The way of gaging a movie's critical value is increasingly simply to add up the number of items on the laundry list of concepts it contains or issues it references, and that's just as stupid as judging a movie's popular appeal by the amount of money it grosses (since The Princess Bride, The Shawshank Redeemption, It's A Wonderful Life, The Wizard of Oz, and about a billion other great AND popular movies made nothing at the box office). What matters now as much as ever is why we like the movies that we do, and what that says about ourselves, the world, and movies themselves that we like them.

You'll have to forgive me if I don't have a way to shoehorn Trainspotting into that rubric yet. But I'm working on it.