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Thursday, June 30, 2005
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BLOGSHARES, NIHILISM UD’s really feeling the pressure now. Some guy over at Blogshares is investing big money in University Diaries. UD’s not just blogging anymore; she’s feeding American families! If she doesn’t keep blogging, this guy’s kids go hungry! Sure, sure, it’s a fantasy blogmarket… sure, it’s not big money … not real money … Anyway! UD takes her eyes off of the American odometer for three, four, days, and the miles pile up … Allow her to roll the thing back and make a few comments. Woody Allen’s recent Der Spiegel interview upset a lot of Americans. James Lileks , for instance, dislikes and distrusts Allen’s sadness, as when Allen says: [T]hings are so sad, so terrible. If you didn't laugh you'd kill yourself. But the truth of the matter is that existence in general is very very tragic, very very sad, very brutal and very unhappy. Every now and then, something happens that's funny. And that's refreshing. But then you move back into the real world, which is not funny. You only have to pick up the newspaper in the morning and read about the real world and you see that it's rotten, just bad. Lileks thinks that a rich and celebrated man claiming sadness can only be a narcissistic poseur. Allen’s depression is the result of “a lifetime spent buying himself mirrors and painting them black.” Allen is “a tiny speck of compacted narcissism, revolving around the dead sun in an empty universe.” This is ye olde American sunniness taking umbrage, as it always does, at existential grief. Ridiculing it. When Allen goes on to say that “Nothing pleases my ego more than to be thought of as a European filmmaker. That for me is the highest achievement,” Lileks responds, “I’m not sure what he means by ‘European’ – it would seem to suggest some sort of artistic freedom unhampered by the marketplace, presumably propped up by state grants, unspoiled for smart chain-smoking people with white skin, black glasses, and an ineffable appreciation for the innumerable shades [of] gray.” Lileks packs a lot in here. A jab at smart people is a familiar element of the all-American worldview, of course; but there’s the equally familiar faux-naïvete of claiming not to understand something that you understand perfectly well -- for instance, that the European world view, and the European film industry, are indeed different from the American. They do try to protect filmmakers to some extent from the vagaries of the market over there, and UD isn’t sure that’s a bad thing. They do - having a better sense of history than Americans - tend to take more seriously the seriously depressive attitude and philosophy of some of Allen’s films. Au fond, what seems to piss off Lileks and other commentators about Allen’s comments is his sense of the irremediably painful nature of human life. Comedy is a transient distraction; for the most part we’re mired in sorrow. At best “you confront reality and you don't escape. And because you confront life, you learn to understand other people and you are more generous to them.” What people are really rejecting is Woody Allen’s perfectly familiar artist’s view of the world, a view which may, because of its interest in what Allen calls “eternal human feelings and conflicts,” be apolitical, and often defensively so: I don't find political subjects or topical world events profound enough to get interested in them myself as an artist. As a filmmaker, I'm not interested in 9/11. Because, if you look at the big picture, the long view of things, it's too small, history overwhelms it. The history of the world is like: he kills me, I kill him. Only with different cosmetics and different castings: so in 2001 some fanatics killed some Americans, and now some Americans are killing some Iraqis. And in my childhood, some Nazis killed Jews. And now, some Jewish people and some Palestinians are killing each other. Political questions, if you go back thousands of years, are ephemeral, not important. History is the same thing over and over again. People have jumped all over that 9/11 thing. But note that Allen says he’s not interested in 9/11 “as a filmmaker.” As a New Yorker he’s both interested in and traumatized by 9/11. As an artist he’s perfectly free not to incorporate it into his work. UD would like to point out that what Allen’s articulating here is a nihilistic sense of life and human history. She doesn’t share this sense, but she honors it when it’s held with integrity and self-consciousness. UD doesn’t even necessarily claim that Allen holds it in this way; she only wants to note that a principled belief in the hollowness of human life, often accompanied as it is by Allen with a belief that the moral imperative under these conditions is a deep-lying generosity in regard to other sufferers, is not necessarily, as Lileks insists, an adolescent, Kurt Cobainesque, sort of thing. It is a belief that can be held by grownups, in a grownup way. Allen’s remark that “History is the same thing over and over again,” produced a Literary Flashback in UD’s mindlet. She recalled a statement Geoffrey Firman, tragic hero of Malcolm Lowry’s great novel, Under the Volcano, makes, in a drunken rage, to his politically engaged brother-in-law: Read history. Go back a thousand years. What is the use of interfering with its worthless stupid course? Great novelists and filmmakers describe the way people actually behave and the way people actually think. Most of us aren’t suicidal drunks like Firman; but haven’t most thoughtful people struggled with just this sense of extremity, of having come to the end of reassurances? The only question that matters, if the subject is Allen or Lowry or Joyce, is the quality of their aesthetic depiction of nihilism. You can argue that Allen’s version of it is superficial, and that his films don’t capture it well or truthfully or deeply. But UD gives him points for trying. |