I hear you about the moral hypochondria-it's the central problem I have (though he is still probably the critic/thinker who most impacted me) with Trilling. With him I think the problem is less that he was averse to major statements and more that he seemed uncomfortable with the probing, prophetic, almost gnostic half of America literature, that national voice that says (to borrow something from Bellow, who doesn't quite belong to this vein) "I want, I want!" his dismissal of Sherwood Anderson's Winesberg, Oh being exemplary. I sometimes think he'd have had us remain with the Victorians for the rest of time, and that just doesn't seem viable.
I'm curious about your negative perspective on the film, as I've been hearing mostly unqualified praise from my cinephile friends. The association of childhood with life and adulthood with stultification and regretful loss of potentiality is such a ubiquitous millennial tic that I find it almost hard to condemn any one artist for it, even as it's a pet peeve of mine as well.
Bellow seems like he took the best path among that cohort (similar to Murdoch in the UK, as I've compared them before): becoming politically conservative but never artistically conservative.
I'm not usually a stickler for verisimilitude in so stylized a work, but the film insists it begins in a big suburban public high school in 1996, where a queer proto-enby girl inducts a young proto-transwoman into the queer cultural life. Then it portrays the whole scenario as if it were 1896—actually 1896 might have been more vibrant than Schoenbrun's 1996—and only a single children's show and its subtext was their cultural outlet. I just don't get it, especially if you're going to flash "1996" on the screen and expect us to believe that. Why didn't they just change the channel from Nickelodeon to MTV and watch Sex in the '90s? I attended that high school in that year and I even went out with those girls. They didn't watch kids' shows; they were into all kinds of weird adult stuff, movies and music and literature and everything. To invoke our old favorite Grant Morrison: we didn't need subtext, we were literally reading The Invisibles! It feels like Schoenbrun deliberately falsified the real richness of the period to set up the children's TV show as (to use Auden's word) salvation. Among other things, this evades what might have been a more complex story about why a person who has actually led a fully contemporary life would decide not to transition if the answer isn't infidelity to a youthful love for Are You Afraid of the Dark. It seems an especially extreme example of what you rightly describe as a generational tendency. I also found it slow and derivative. Plenty of effectively eerie imagery and a killer soundtrack, though—can't take that away from it!
I haven’t seen it yet myself (I do plan on it!) but that makes sense to me. I feel that way as someone who grew up somewhat later about media that doesn’t acknowledge the internet-if you’re not acknowledging the whole multitudinous shadow world outside you’re not doing it right!
"to look back longingly to the conservative suburban late-20th-century world it ostensibly condemns, yearning for the very closet it mourns its hero-heroine for being self-condemned to..." many such cases unfortunately! It's not worth reading but Halberstam's Queer Art of Failure is sort of the crystallization of the "immaturity is queer" thesis of world-refusal...
Looking forward to your Levy review, although hoping you don't join Gasda, Stivers etc in discovering supposed virtues of her prose! This shit all seems about as innovative as some 1970s post-avant-garde Philippe Sollers/Renaud Camus b-sides (guys who also went on back and forth journeys between political insanity to merely annoying literary 'experiment' and were gassed up for some years by the critics in their scenes, who ought to have known better... it's a bit like reading, today, Harold Bloom praising forgettables like Alfred Corn or Alvin Feinman as near-peers of Stevens and Crane)...
If that's the one with the eulogium to Finding Nemo, I unfortunately think I read it! The review will be too diplomatic for your tastes—this is, as we all know, her first book!—but it's also more severe than almost any other I've seen, given what has so far been (not to impugn Gasda or Stivers whom I generally appreciate) more a publicity blitz than any kind of critical atmosphere.
Lol yes that's it...someone will have to defend the pleasure of adulthood against the fantasies of adolescence as regression/rebellion/innocence/zeitgeistiness whether queer-coded or as Levy's "I'm a schweepy baby"... and this was I suppose one strand of modernist sensibility (eg Woolf on I think Middlemarch, 'the first English novel for grown-ups'--whether or not true of Elliot a revelatory critical desire)
I hear you about the moral hypochondria-it's the central problem I have (though he is still probably the critic/thinker who most impacted me) with Trilling. With him I think the problem is less that he was averse to major statements and more that he seemed uncomfortable with the probing, prophetic, almost gnostic half of America literature, that national voice that says (to borrow something from Bellow, who doesn't quite belong to this vein) "I want, I want!" his dismissal of Sherwood Anderson's Winesberg, Oh being exemplary. I sometimes think he'd have had us remain with the Victorians for the rest of time, and that just doesn't seem viable.
I'm curious about your negative perspective on the film, as I've been hearing mostly unqualified praise from my cinephile friends. The association of childhood with life and adulthood with stultification and regretful loss of potentiality is such a ubiquitous millennial tic that I find it almost hard to condemn any one artist for it, even as it's a pet peeve of mine as well.
Bellow seems like he took the best path among that cohort (similar to Murdoch in the UK, as I've compared them before): becoming politically conservative but never artistically conservative.
I'm not usually a stickler for verisimilitude in so stylized a work, but the film insists it begins in a big suburban public high school in 1996, where a queer proto-enby girl inducts a young proto-transwoman into the queer cultural life. Then it portrays the whole scenario as if it were 1896—actually 1896 might have been more vibrant than Schoenbrun's 1996—and only a single children's show and its subtext was their cultural outlet. I just don't get it, especially if you're going to flash "1996" on the screen and expect us to believe that. Why didn't they just change the channel from Nickelodeon to MTV and watch Sex in the '90s? I attended that high school in that year and I even went out with those girls. They didn't watch kids' shows; they were into all kinds of weird adult stuff, movies and music and literature and everything. To invoke our old favorite Grant Morrison: we didn't need subtext, we were literally reading The Invisibles! It feels like Schoenbrun deliberately falsified the real richness of the period to set up the children's TV show as (to use Auden's word) salvation. Among other things, this evades what might have been a more complex story about why a person who has actually led a fully contemporary life would decide not to transition if the answer isn't infidelity to a youthful love for Are You Afraid of the Dark. It seems an especially extreme example of what you rightly describe as a generational tendency. I also found it slow and derivative. Plenty of effectively eerie imagery and a killer soundtrack, though—can't take that away from it!
I haven’t seen it yet myself (I do plan on it!) but that makes sense to me. I feel that way as someone who grew up somewhat later about media that doesn’t acknowledge the internet-if you’re not acknowledging the whole multitudinous shadow world outside you’re not doing it right!
Yes, and people went online in 1996 too. I mostly didn't, but the types of people in the movie did, which might also have changed things.
"to look back longingly to the conservative suburban late-20th-century world it ostensibly condemns, yearning for the very closet it mourns its hero-heroine for being self-condemned to..." many such cases unfortunately! It's not worth reading but Halberstam's Queer Art of Failure is sort of the crystallization of the "immaturity is queer" thesis of world-refusal...
Looking forward to your Levy review, although hoping you don't join Gasda, Stivers etc in discovering supposed virtues of her prose! This shit all seems about as innovative as some 1970s post-avant-garde Philippe Sollers/Renaud Camus b-sides (guys who also went on back and forth journeys between political insanity to merely annoying literary 'experiment' and were gassed up for some years by the critics in their scenes, who ought to have known better... it's a bit like reading, today, Harold Bloom praising forgettables like Alfred Corn or Alvin Feinman as near-peers of Stevens and Crane)...
If that's the one with the eulogium to Finding Nemo, I unfortunately think I read it! The review will be too diplomatic for your tastes—this is, as we all know, her first book!—but it's also more severe than almost any other I've seen, given what has so far been (not to impugn Gasda or Stivers whom I generally appreciate) more a publicity blitz than any kind of critical atmosphere.
Lol yes that's it...someone will have to defend the pleasure of adulthood against the fantasies of adolescence as regression/rebellion/innocence/zeitgeistiness whether queer-coded or as Levy's "I'm a schweepy baby"... and this was I suppose one strand of modernist sensibility (eg Woolf on I think Middlemarch, 'the first English novel for grown-ups'--whether or not true of Elliot a revelatory critical desire)