I recently bought Hard Core Logo on DVD, and I was really upset to find the DVD case tainted with Quentin Tarantino's name. To make things worse, the positioning of his imprint makes it appear that he directed the movie. Have a look for yourself:
All of which got me thinking about what I have against Tarantino anyway...
The problem with criminal-as-protagonist movies is that, somewhere along the line, they seem to have forgotten why the criminal was a compelling antihero. "Criminal" only denotes the violation of laws, which are sadly often far removed from correct behavior. The criminal, therefore, was not necessarily immoral. The smuggler, for example, might be heralded as a free market pioneer. The drug user might be a civil libertarian and a perfectly upstanding, moral individual. But there seems to have been a conflation between those who break the law yet are not immoral and those who are immoral for the sake of immorality. The transition happened in phases, and obviously these aren't in chronological order so much as general trends:
- Virtuous criminal as hero: think Spartacus. Nominally, he's a criminal, but in reality he's supposed to be understood as a tragic hero. (Disregard historicity, for simplicity's sake.)
- Self-interested but not necessarily immoral criminal as hero: Han Solo. Sure he's a smuggler, but he's just trying to make a living and those laws were probably arbitrary anyway, right?
- Reluctant, immoral criminal: Michael Corleone, the upstanding war hero who wants nothing to do with the family business gets pulled into being a mob boss anyway. At this point, you can still sympathize with the man, even though you know he will do evil deeds.
- And here we reach the worst of the lot: unapologetic criminals who are often shrouded in byzantine plots meant to further portray their moral ambiguity (Reservoir Dogs or Snatch). But there isn't really too much moral ambiguity in these scenarios after all, we are meant to sympathize with "bad guys" doing bad things.
Obviously, I don't have a fully fleshed-out thesis here. But I do find a lot of (needlessly) violent movies repulsive (sometimes sickeningly, stomach-turningly so) because I feel they're asking me to root for people doing things I find abhorrent.
Labels: film, media, philosophy
Jenn
mentioned a blog
post about the difference between apartment and house dwellers that focused on the words "home" and "house" in the common understanding. It reminded me of one of the interesting things about the word "home," namely that it is the only remaining example of the
locative case in the English language.
Labels: english, grammar, linguistics
A couple years ago, I wrote an essay that considered the work of the modern historian Marc Bloch (who was a hero), as described in The Historian's Craft, and the work of the medieval historian Bede. Here's the conclusion:
The powerful intuition of students of history, amateur historians, and the general educated public has always been that history is a "mirror" of present society. Beginning with the decline of God (who had kept Descartes' evil demons at bay), many thinkers in the nineteenth century began to doubt both the existence of objective reality and our ability to perceive it if it does exist. This extreme skepticism led some scholars to completely solipsistic worldviews (like existentialism or Freudian analysis of history, for example). On the other extreme, this skepticism was wholly rejected by some theorists like Marx who held that we could measure the arc of history using economic rubrics alone. Against this backdrop, historians had to find a way to justify their discipline both to themselves and to others. Some turned to very narrow specialization in an effort to make history more like a science. In fact, there is a direct echo of this sentiment in Marc Bloch, who very much wanted to consider "history" the "science of men in time." If there is one thing that scholars have learned from twentieth-century science it is this: even overwhelming intuitions can be wrong, the paradigm case being Einstein's special relativity. But even with such a powerful injunction away from assuming the historian can purport to learn how the world "really was" at a certain time, it is nonetheless overly cautious to treat all societies (or periods) as if they happened in a vacuum. It would be overstating Bloch's case to accuse him of doing this, but it is clear from his fear of seeking origins that he is more sympathetic to this counterintuitive idea than he is to a sober application of the traditional norms. Bloch's skepticism of our ability to make objective judgments about history extends beyond the idea of origins:
Are we so sure of ourselves and of our age as to divide the company of our forefathers into the just and the damned? How absurd it is, by elevating the entirely relative criteria of one individual, one party, or one generation to the absolute, to inflict standards upon the way in which Sulla governed Rome, or Richelieu the States of the Most Christian King!
And it is here, finally, that the medieval historian (Bloch) can learn from the medieval historian (Bede): humans are not so incomprehensible that we of one generation cannot learn to consider the values of another's. There is nothing that is so alien in human experience that we cannot, with open minds, learn to grasp. We may never appreciate the desire to enslave Africans and abuse them as human chattel, but surely, as uncomfortable as it would make us, we can understand that desire. We cannot be compelled to sacrifice our own children to Baal, but we can find powerful modern analogues to approach an understanding of how Carthaginians would be driven to do so. Unlike Bede, we may not be able to apply a stable moral framework (i.e. the relatively stable absolute morality of orthodox Christianity) against the deeds of our predecessors, Bloch is right in that; but this should not mean that we cannot purport to understand our forefathers nor should it mean that we cannot trace our own origins to those very slaveholders and child-sacrificers. It is, after all, not just to them, but also to the people whose values we still share that we owe our present. It is no wonder, after all, that Joseph Strayer, who obviously admired Marc Bloch, wrote the introduction to the English translation of The Historian's Craft. Indeed, Bloch is right to describe the ideal historian: "This faculty of understanding the living is, in very truth, the master quality of the historian." In order to understand the living, Strayer and the overwhelming majority of historians before him (and a growing number today, even) are right to seek the origins of our social structures, biases, institutions, and cultures in those of our past.
Labels: europe, historiography, history, medieval
I didn't modify the colors at all: it was dark, gray, and overcast where I happened to be standing in downtown Manhattan, but it was clearly bright and beautiful somewhere nearby. I just wish I had a decent camera to snap this shot instead of my phone's.
Labels: media, new york
Everybody says they want a million bucks, but I'd rather have a million days with you.
When I was younger, I always found that lyric to be (more than a little) silly but sweet. It never occurred to me that it was entirely self-interested. After all, wouldn't
you trade a paltry million dollars for a 2739-year lifespan?
Labels: funny, music
So several years ago, the Rutgers radio station (
WRSU) had a contest. I don't remember what I did to win it, but somehow I
did win it. And the prize they were supposed to give me was all of
Mary Lou Lord's records up until that point.
So I never got my records.
I was bitter. Even though I really liked her voice, I couldn't bring myself to buy any of the music that I was supposed to get for free. I ended up buying one of her EPs (
Martian Saints) used a long time ago. I listen to it rarely, but it's really good, actually. I've listened to it twice this week. I'm still pissed I never got my free records. Now I'm trying to figure out if I ought to break the moratorium, give in, and just start buying them myself or what.
Labels: media, music, sham
