Something about the footnotes being numbered, as grafs aren’t, leads me to rank them in my mind as I read--“this one my favourite, no, it’s second to this.” Very sophisticated on Nolan’s politics, too. I fear narrative art all washes over me somewhat... As artists intend, I’d guess.
Still have not seen Oppenheimer though you’re spot on about the defenses of imperial Japan etc. I’ll bite on the lore stuff: I wouldn’t feel too bad about that dark knight review – it’s written in a superannuated style now and you can feel that graduate student lightning running through the veins of the rhetoric but everything it says is still true more or less. One of my least favorite things about the general contra wokeum turn is the way one has to pretend that there was never genuine grievance with the world circa 2013 or so. The best and the worst thing about the old middlebrow was how it finally broke down and homogenized any element into acceptable liberalism: probably for the best in the long run but in a world historical moment like the war on terror intersecting with the great recession I can see why it felt like a dangerous poison flowing unseen into the reservoir of culture
Thanks! Yes, I mean, it was a right-wing film, I wasn't wrong exactly, but the tone is wrong, and the tone in its self-righteousness misses that the film's framing ideology—neoconservatism—was past its apogee to be replaced by various iterations left and right, finally culminating in Trumpism, of the rudderless anarchy the sublime of the Joker represented. And the little tics of left-wing polemic!—like bringing up Palestine at near random, which I parodied in the story "Right Between the Eyes" when somebody bring a Palestinian flag to the academic labor protest. The feminist point was possibly worth making at the time—and Nolan's been so boyishly uninterested in women that the merely prurient interest in Oppie seems like a genuine sign of maturation—but the resulting culture war hasn't exactly advanced things, given the dueling pink and blue films of this blockbuster weekend. Anyway, Nolan just channels the zeitgeist politically. Dark Knight was belatedly neocon with a hint of the emergent anarchy, Op has a hint of the residual anarchy (the JFK allusion, almost a QAnon dogwhistle) but is mostly left-NRx, which is where the liberal center is headed post-wokeum, where Noah Smith and Richard Hanania will rendezvous at dawn.
Lol did you see the states-where-Barbie-or-Oppenheimer-are-trending map? As several have pointed out, it's an electoral map with Barbie winning the Trump states and Oppie winning the Dem states. 2024: MAGA Woke Brutalism vs. Left-NRx!
I did! Although not having seen either I'm unsure what to make of this. It IS fascinating that this seems to break down so neatly along political (and perhaps more importantly, late 20th century cultural, with the southwest as spiritually MAGA even if they mostly vote blue these days) lines. I'm reminded of those graphics one occasionally sees as a political gotcha that map interracial and trans porn consumption- with similar results. In that case at least you have the return of the repressed, but here? Your guess is as good as mine lol
I'd have to see Barbie to know for sure, but the more sophisticated rightists are claiming its imagery exalting whiteness and sexual dimorphism in a sort of vaporwave neon way, irrespective of the fact that the movie is supposedly didactic, makes it truly reactionary. As for Oppenheimer, it could go either way but you can definitely get "trust experts, believe science" out of it (you could also get an anti-nuke message that in the present as in the past scans as pro-Russian though). The film's science-disbelieving villain was a conservative Republican in real life. Nolan doesn't say so explicitly, though he certainly implies it. I guess he didn't want to offend half the potential audience outright, i.e., he wanted to *avoid* didacticism. Some MAGA influencers, like Jack Posobiec, have also railed against Op for being "soft on communism" (a simplistic interpretation).
Btw really enjoyed Right Between the Eyes, I think it’s the best of your shorter fictions, almost like a capsule of most of what I think you’re trying to say in the pre- MA works. The importance of the arts and culture relative to their devaluation in our present austerity, Marxism and orthodox religion as two sides of the same coin, neither entirely workable, but orthodox religion the better of the two, leading a normal bourgeois life as maybe the best (and possibly most subversive) action of all.
Thank you! I'd agree if it wouldn't be immodest.... I think MA is in genuinely new territory, but I'm not sure. (It's mostly written—I know how it ends—I just don't know what it means yet.)
We are all, I think eventually forgiven the sins of our time-and who could predict the turn it all would take in the last fifteen years? The problem with feminist points is that they’re always worth bringing up even if it’s out of fashion and it’s not always clear how you get out of that impasse: for instance I mostly like Andrea Dworkin, while mostly thinking her prescriptions for how to get out of the abjection she describes as are mostly unworkable. It’s funny I’ve been in our conversations and in my own work served gently skeptical of Camille Paglia system of gender relations- I’m just not convinced that what she’s describing is quite as universal as she seems to think it is within the west- but man oh man when you watch virtually all of a certain kind of male-directed art film you really understand how someone could think there’s something to her thesis.
Yes, Kundera has a great long passage in Testaments Betrayed decrying the back-and-forth cancellation of fascist and communist artists/thinkers of the 20s and 30s as power changed hands in Eastern Europe from fascist to communist to liberal. This might be too exculpatory, but he said they were all, starting with Marx himself, men in a fog, not knowing what the future held as they did their work—a point relevant to Oppenheimer himself.
Re:feminism: Without getting into Dworkin and Paglia, I think at this point, when there are utopian calls either for universal parity in every production or even female dominance, I am more willing to accept that some genres (generally those descended from epic and tragedy, like Nolan's type of movie) are sort of inherently masculine, as other genres (perhaps whatever we'd call Barbie; romance and comedy to continue with N. Frye terms) are sort of inherently feminine, and some are dead center (like my preferred form, the novel with its epic-tragic-comic-romantic mix, where even male novelists who think they're Nolan-like author gods—Flaubert, Tolstoy, Joyce—write sympathetically from the woman's point of view, and vice versa for the female novelists). The pragmatic egalitarian stance would be to ensure an equal critical respect among the genres, lending itself to an equality in both production and critical response; since Barbie will out-earn Oppie at the box office, and appears to be getting more interesting critical responses, it seems doable.
Something about the footnotes being numbered, as grafs aren’t, leads me to rank them in my mind as I read--“this one my favourite, no, it’s second to this.” Very sophisticated on Nolan’s politics, too. I fear narrative art all washes over me somewhat... As artists intend, I’d guess.
Thanks, Alice! Nolan washes more than most: I confess I had to see the movie twice to write this. (A double denial of Barbie.)
Still have not seen Oppenheimer though you’re spot on about the defenses of imperial Japan etc. I’ll bite on the lore stuff: I wouldn’t feel too bad about that dark knight review – it’s written in a superannuated style now and you can feel that graduate student lightning running through the veins of the rhetoric but everything it says is still true more or less. One of my least favorite things about the general contra wokeum turn is the way one has to pretend that there was never genuine grievance with the world circa 2013 or so. The best and the worst thing about the old middlebrow was how it finally broke down and homogenized any element into acceptable liberalism: probably for the best in the long run but in a world historical moment like the war on terror intersecting with the great recession I can see why it felt like a dangerous poison flowing unseen into the reservoir of culture
Thanks! Yes, I mean, it was a right-wing film, I wasn't wrong exactly, but the tone is wrong, and the tone in its self-righteousness misses that the film's framing ideology—neoconservatism—was past its apogee to be replaced by various iterations left and right, finally culminating in Trumpism, of the rudderless anarchy the sublime of the Joker represented. And the little tics of left-wing polemic!—like bringing up Palestine at near random, which I parodied in the story "Right Between the Eyes" when somebody bring a Palestinian flag to the academic labor protest. The feminist point was possibly worth making at the time—and Nolan's been so boyishly uninterested in women that the merely prurient interest in Oppie seems like a genuine sign of maturation—but the resulting culture war hasn't exactly advanced things, given the dueling pink and blue films of this blockbuster weekend. Anyway, Nolan just channels the zeitgeist politically. Dark Knight was belatedly neocon with a hint of the emergent anarchy, Op has a hint of the residual anarchy (the JFK allusion, almost a QAnon dogwhistle) but is mostly left-NRx, which is where the liberal center is headed post-wokeum, where Noah Smith and Richard Hanania will rendezvous at dawn.
Lol did you see the states-where-Barbie-or-Oppenheimer-are-trending map? As several have pointed out, it's an electoral map with Barbie winning the Trump states and Oppie winning the Dem states. 2024: MAGA Woke Brutalism vs. Left-NRx!
https://www.reddit.com/r/blankies/comments/156qbvk/map_of_where_barbie_or_oppenheimer_is_trending_in/
I did! Although not having seen either I'm unsure what to make of this. It IS fascinating that this seems to break down so neatly along political (and perhaps more importantly, late 20th century cultural, with the southwest as spiritually MAGA even if they mostly vote blue these days) lines. I'm reminded of those graphics one occasionally sees as a political gotcha that map interracial and trans porn consumption- with similar results. In that case at least you have the return of the repressed, but here? Your guess is as good as mine lol
I'd have to see Barbie to know for sure, but the more sophisticated rightists are claiming its imagery exalting whiteness and sexual dimorphism in a sort of vaporwave neon way, irrespective of the fact that the movie is supposedly didactic, makes it truly reactionary. As for Oppenheimer, it could go either way but you can definitely get "trust experts, believe science" out of it (you could also get an anti-nuke message that in the present as in the past scans as pro-Russian though). The film's science-disbelieving villain was a conservative Republican in real life. Nolan doesn't say so explicitly, though he certainly implies it. I guess he didn't want to offend half the potential audience outright, i.e., he wanted to *avoid* didacticism. Some MAGA influencers, like Jack Posobiec, have also railed against Op for being "soft on communism" (a simplistic interpretation).
Btw really enjoyed Right Between the Eyes, I think it’s the best of your shorter fictions, almost like a capsule of most of what I think you’re trying to say in the pre- MA works. The importance of the arts and culture relative to their devaluation in our present austerity, Marxism and orthodox religion as two sides of the same coin, neither entirely workable, but orthodox religion the better of the two, leading a normal bourgeois life as maybe the best (and possibly most subversive) action of all.
Thank you! I'd agree if it wouldn't be immodest.... I think MA is in genuinely new territory, but I'm not sure. (It's mostly written—I know how it ends—I just don't know what it means yet.)
We are all, I think eventually forgiven the sins of our time-and who could predict the turn it all would take in the last fifteen years? The problem with feminist points is that they’re always worth bringing up even if it’s out of fashion and it’s not always clear how you get out of that impasse: for instance I mostly like Andrea Dworkin, while mostly thinking her prescriptions for how to get out of the abjection she describes as are mostly unworkable. It’s funny I’ve been in our conversations and in my own work served gently skeptical of Camille Paglia system of gender relations- I’m just not convinced that what she’s describing is quite as universal as she seems to think it is within the west- but man oh man when you watch virtually all of a certain kind of male-directed art film you really understand how someone could think there’s something to her thesis.
Yes, Kundera has a great long passage in Testaments Betrayed decrying the back-and-forth cancellation of fascist and communist artists/thinkers of the 20s and 30s as power changed hands in Eastern Europe from fascist to communist to liberal. This might be too exculpatory, but he said they were all, starting with Marx himself, men in a fog, not knowing what the future held as they did their work—a point relevant to Oppenheimer himself.
Re:feminism: Without getting into Dworkin and Paglia, I think at this point, when there are utopian calls either for universal parity in every production or even female dominance, I am more willing to accept that some genres (generally those descended from epic and tragedy, like Nolan's type of movie) are sort of inherently masculine, as other genres (perhaps whatever we'd call Barbie; romance and comedy to continue with N. Frye terms) are sort of inherently feminine, and some are dead center (like my preferred form, the novel with its epic-tragic-comic-romantic mix, where even male novelists who think they're Nolan-like author gods—Flaubert, Tolstoy, Joyce—write sympathetically from the woman's point of view, and vice versa for the female novelists). The pragmatic egalitarian stance would be to ensure an equal critical respect among the genres, lending itself to an equality in both production and critical response; since Barbie will out-earn Oppie at the box office, and appears to be getting more interesting critical responses, it seems doable.