Office Space by Judge, 1999
This dude with the fish, he’s had an epiphany. If you had a million dollars, what would you do? Nothing, is his answer. He already told the downsizing consultants that he does, what, maybe 15 minutes a day of real work? So here he’s putting his work space to good use.
Here’s the writer/director making his Hitchcockean cameo.
Company picnic.
This guy is about ready to blow…
Like I said.
This is a pretty good story. What would make it better?
The software writers are getting let go to lower costs, thereby enhancing stock value by a quarter point or so. So the boys hack a little drain into the corporate cashflow, channeling the money into their private account. The guy who hatches the ripoff scam even acknowledges that he ripped off the idea from a Superman movie. Now this might have been kind of interesting to play out, but the hacker makes an error that results in a tenfold accumulation of skim, making detection inevitable and pulling the plug on the scam. To make matters worse, the hero gets an attack of conscience, ready to confess and to return the money.
There’s one guy who got fired five years ago but who through a recordkeeping snafu retained his cubicle and kept getting his paycheck. The shareholders don’t do anything either but they keep getting paid. And it’s this guy who finally sabotages the company in a serious way and who winds up with the money. We see him at the end of the movie sitting on a beach, bitching about bad service from a waiter, threatening to shut down the restaurant by putting strychnine in the guacamole. This would have been better if he’d threatened the manager rather than the waiter.
At the end, the hero’s partners have taken jobs at a competing software firm. They say they can get the hero a job, but he doesn’t want one. He’s working at the site where the old office was, cleaning up the rubble after the fire. I thought that was good, for him to find some pleasure in dismantling the infrastructure.
Amores Perros by Iñárritu, 2000
Poesie
(gouache by Kenzie Doyle, with permission)
A Dream Within A Dream
Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow-
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.
I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand-
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep- while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?
– Edgar Allan Poe
Dekalog 6 by Kieslowski
Dekalog 4&5 by Kieslowski
In this scene from the fourth enstallment, the man in the foreground is father (or is he?) of the girl in the background. The vodka glasses and the ashtray are objects associated with adult behavior, perhaps also of seduction. They’re also empty vessels, feminine. The father’s hands frame his groin; his hands and his groin loom large, dominating the scene, deciding what will happen next. The girl’s mother died shortly after giving birth to her; a friend of her father says that she is just like her mother. With his index finger the father has been nudging the one glass closer to the other: with the next shove they will touch, becoming interchangeable. But the two glasses, both empty, can never again be filled, dominated by the presence of the absence that is the dead mother.
Part five: Like altar boys the policemen stand by the young man as the priest administers the sacrament; behind and to the right, partly occluded but with his head, pallid and ghastly, fully exposed, the executioner awaits.
And in Local News…
‘Fight club’ busted at Fairview High
Officers: As many as 60 students gathered to watch street brawls
A group of Fairview High School students is suspected of organizing an after-school “fight club” that involved at least 12 students and as many as 60 spectators.
Boulder police spokeswoman Sarah Huntley said Thursday that 10 Fairview students, all boys, have been ticketed on suspicion of public brawling. Police think they were part of a club of friends that regularly met near the South Boulder Recreation Center for public “street fighting.”
“Apparently, they were gathering in the field after school hours … where they were engaging in fights,” Huntley said. “They see this as sort of a recreational, spectator-type sport where they just wanted to go out and fight.”
Huntley said police started receiving calls about the fights in February but were never able to catch anyone in the act — until a female Fairview teacher broke up one of the fights March 6, which resulted in two teens being ticketed.
After the students were questioned by Fairview administrators, a police investigation led to eight more tickets being issued Thursday to students connected to the club, Huntley said. Police expect to ticket two more students they think were involved sometime today, she said.
“First and foremost, we’re concerned about injuries to kids,” Huntley said. “This was not supervised wrestling or boxing. … This was basically street-fighting for fun.”
All of the boys allegedly connected to the club range in age from 15 to 17, Huntley said. Their names are being withheld because they are minors, she said.
Boulder Valley School District spokesman Briggs Gamblin said school officials are working with police to investigate the club, which he said violates district policies against fighting even though the brawls took place off school property.
“The administrators are working to figure out who’s involved and how to stop it,” Gamblin said. “The feeling is there’s several others they need to find.”
Fairview Principal Donald Stensrud said he has taken some disciplinary actions against the students who have been cited, but he did not disclose details because of confidentiality rules. He said suspensions are a possibility.
“It’s a blood sport,” Stensrud said. “It is so antithetical to what we want our young men and women to do, and what we teach them to do.”
He said an assistant principal at the school searched online sites including MySpace, YouTube and Facebook for video evidence of the fights but did not find anything.
Stensrud said school administrators will work with counselors, psychologists and sociologists to come up with an appropriate way to talk with the students who were spectators at the fights and all Fairview students about how to make better choices than cheering on a fight.
“I think we’re going to figure out what to do as a building and how to address this,” Stensrud said.
Stensrud sent an e-mail to Fairview parents Thursday explaining the situation and calling for parents to talk with their children about the fights.
“I assure you that FHS administrators, faculty and staff are working along with the Boulder police and our school resource officer to identify those students involved — especially those students responsible for organizing this very high-risk activity,” Stensrud wrote. “I am asking that you discuss this issue with your student and urge (him or her) to come forward if she or he has any information that will help us bring this behavior to a halt.”
The two Fairview students ticketed for the March 6 fight have Boulder Municipal Court appearances scheduled Tuesday. The other eight cited so far are due to appear in court March 25.
The citations carry a fine of up to $1,000 and a maximum of 90 days in jail.
The spectators did not break any laws by watching the fights, according to police.
Badiou on the Void
[From “Meditation Four” of Alain Badiou’s Being and Event]
It must certainly be assumed that the effect of structure is complete, that what subtracts itself from the latter is nothing, and that the law does not encounter singular islands in presentation which obstruct its passage. In an indeterminate situation there is no rebel or subtractive presentation of the pure multiple upon which the empire of the one is exercised… The logic of the lacuna, of what the count-as-one would have ‘forgotten’, of the excluded which may be positively located as a sign of real or pure multiplicity, is an impasse — an illusion — of thought, as it is of practice…
And yet, the correlate thesis also imposes itself: that there is a being of nothing, as form of the unpresentable. The ‘nothing’ is what names the unperceivable gap, cancelled then renewed, between presentation as structure and presentation as structured-presentation, between the one as result and the one as operation, between presented consistency and inconsistency as what-will-have-been-presented… By itself, the nothing is no more than the name of unpresentation in presentation…
It would already be inexact to speak of this nothing as a point because it is neither local nor global, but scattered all over, nowhere and everywhere: it is such that no encounter would authorize it to be held as presentable.
I term void of a situation this suture to its being. Moreover, I state that every structured presentation unpresents ‘its’ void, in the mode of this non-one which is merely the subtractive face of the count.
I say ‘void’ rather than ‘nothing’, because the ‘nothing’ is the name of the void correlative to the global effect of structure (everything is counted)… Void indicates the failure of the one, the not-one, in a more primordial sense than the not-of-the-whole… The name I have chosen, the void, indicates precisely that nothing is presented, no term, and also that the designation of that nothing occurs ’emptily’, it does not locate it structurally…
But for the moment we must hold that in a situation there is no conceivable encounter with the void. The normal regime of structured situations is that of the imposition of an absolute ‘unconscious’ of the void…
One of the acts of this annulment is precisely to posit that the void is multiple, that it is the first multiple, the very being from which any multiple presentation, when presented, is woven and numbered.
Spectres of Hauntology
[I had some further thoughts about the movie Ghost World, some images from which constituted a post about a week ago. Somewhat reluctantly I’m setting these thoughts apart as a separate post, though it remains connected in part to the film.]
The ghost world is the trace in the present of a more authentic past. Some of the objects from this past world still exist, like old 78 records, but they’ve deteriorated with time, their surfaces cracked and warped and scratched. These defects only serve to authenticate the objects to which they’re attached, as if the process of deterioration serves to intensify their authenticity. One can envision a day in the future when these objects are completely effaced by the effects of time, leaving no material trace of the past authenticity to which they testified. Alternatively, one could be left with the impression not that the authentic objects are gone, but that they’re hidden. The gradual deterioration of the surface only serves to intensify the authenticity of what’s behind the surface. When the surface is completely destroyed, the authenticity is all that remains, as a kind of permanent spirit of the authentic object.
Once all the old surfaces are completely gone, then the authentic past is entirely hidden behind the new surfaces of the world, a whole world of authenticity that’s been rendered invisible. And this invisibility is a form of transcendence, an invisible spirit of the Real that cannot be seen or touched but that can only be intuited or remembered or imagined. The authenticity of the Real becomes indistinguishable from the imaginary. But the imaginary doesn’t reside in the image; it’s hidden behind the image. Instead of image being the outer sensory interface of solid material, the image is a hollow fetish that hides the invisible authentic and spiritual and immaterial presence of spirit that lurks behind it.
Derrida coined the term “hauntology” to describe the intangible, immaterial value that consumers attribute to commodities in Marxian economic theory. Hauntology is the ghostly essence of commodity fetishism, the intangible object of desire that drives capitalist consumption. The surface of a commodity is the interface of its tangible use value, but the surface serves also as a disguise hiding the commodity’s ghostly fetish value.
There’s a lot of capitalist activity that goes on in the movie Ghost World, most of it involving the sale of junk food through chain retail outlets. But Seymour is always selling too. He sells records at garage sales; his “party” is really another sales promotion he operates out of his house. The idea is that there’s an authentic shopping experience to be had if you know where to look for it, that some stores and some products really do possess hauntological plenitude.
One such authentic commodity, it could be argued, is this movie itself. It’s selling an alternative consumer model of hauntological authenticity. The movie reinforces the idea that it’s possible to find authenticity in artifacts, and that these authentic artifacts can be bought, and that possessing these artifacts both verifies and enhances the plenitude and authenticity of the person who buys them. Buying a ticket to this movie serves this function, transmitting its hauntological consumer fetish value to the viewer.
I wonder whether hauntology, in contemporary parlance referring to the ephemeral, vaguely mournful aura of presence-in-absence that’s crafted into many pop-cultural artifacts, retains traces of Derrida’s original meaning. Does this new cultural hauntology valorize commodity fetish value by making it at least vaguely tangible? Or in this making-tangible does the new hauntology dissipate a power over consumers that has always depended on its spectrality?
Young Frankenstein, 1974
From The Writer’s Almanac for 11 March (thanks to blueVicar for the reference):
“It was on this day in 1818 that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was published. Shelley was only 19 years old when she wrote the novel, and the first edition was published anonymously with a preface written by her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelly. She revised the novel and published it under her name own name in 1823. The story of Frankenstein’s monster was first staged as a play in 1823 in London and was followed shortly thereafter by a musical burlesque. Today there are more than 80 films that carry ‘Frankenstein’ in their title.”
According to Wikipedia, “The original version of Berlin’s song included references to the then-popular fad of well-dressed but poor black Harlemites parading up and down Lenox Avenue. Berlin later revised the lyrics to apply to affluent whites strutting ‘up and down Park Avenue’.” Lenox Avenue is now co-named Malcolm X Boulevard.
Dekalog Trzy by Kieslowski, 1987
Sorry, I didn’t recognize you.
Goodbye.
Dekalog Dwa by Kieslowski, 1987
Our marriage is a very good one. I love him very much.
- I returned… from there. I had the feeling the world was disintegrating around me. Everything became ugly, distorted, as if someone did it on purpose, to try to make me regret it less. And now… I can touch the table.
Rendition, 2007
I was going to put up a couple screengrabs from this movie but for some reason in won’t play on VLC, which is my grab-technology of choice. I had two shots in mind: First is a scene where dissipated, conflicted and passive CIA operative Jake Gyllenhaal takes over from the third-world torture thug and actually starts throttling the renditioned prisoner himself. The other scene shows Jake talking on his cell phone, sitting on a balcony high above a vast Middle Eastern market square. It was during this scene that I recognized the location as Marrakech, a place I visited many years ago in my vagabond hippie days.
Briefly, the movie should have stuck with the main story of rendition, rather than weaving in some Romeo-and-Juliet tragedy, then unduly confusing the narrative with a time-twist gimmick like the one used in Babel. Even that wouldn’t have fixed the movie — here’s an excerpt from a review in Slate:
But forget the thin characters and showoffy temporal structure. Rendition‘s worst flaw is its political deck-stacking, with its willingness to win the viewer’s sympathy by showcasing the least defensible instance of extraordinary rendition imaginable… The movie appeals to our classism: Anwar’s rendition must be a scandal because, my lord, he’s an upper-middle-class professional! Who got a Ph.D. at NYU and married Reese Frigging Witherspoon! …If I were a filmmaker taking on the all-too-topical subject of state-condoned torture, I’d take pains to remember that the human rights of a homeless illegal immigrant—even one who might, in fact, be linked to acts of terror—were no less worth defending than those of Mr. Legally Blonde.
Girl with a Pearl Earring, 2003
This movie played at the Rialto, a 5 minute walk from our apartment and a block away from the opulent Hotel Negresco. It was in front of the Negresco where, in 1927, Isadora Duncan got her scarf snagged in the wheel of her Bugatti and strangled to death. My wife, daughter and I saw Pearl Earring with our daughter’s amie d’école Laetitia and her parents. It’s strange watching an English-language movie with French subtitles — makes you think you’re seeing an art film.
The next week we set off on a short vacance to Belgium and the Netherlands. While in Antwerp we decided to take a quick train ride to The Hague for the sole purpose of seeing Vermeer’s famous painting at the Mauritshuis. Walking back to the train station from the museum we passed a movie theater: guess what was showing?
When we returned to Nice our daughter told Laetitia that she had seen the Pearl Earring painting, the real one. Laetitia was amazed: “You mean they made a real painting based on the movie?”
Ktismatics 