Franz Kafka and the Chocolate Factory

Willie Wonka (and/or Charlie) and the Chocolate Factory is puzzling in its politics. On the one hand, it is a sympathetic revenge story of class warfare: the bad guys (with the exception, perhaps, of Wonka) are almost uniformly from the ruling class, the good guy(s) (assuming there's a candidate besides Charlie) is from the working class. We root for Charlie, in part, because he's nice; in part, because he's an underdog; and very much in part because we have an unspoken conviction that all underdogs are basically good people and all top-dogs are at bottom bad ones. By rooting for Charlie, we root for good people who didn't get a fair shake, and by savoring, one little indian at a time, the Alighierishly delicious fates of each little rich boy, beauty queen, and spoiled brat, we delight in seeing our deep conviction that the game was fixed confirmed, and in seeing that fix turned against the winners. That is to say, the film's hooks and pleasures play on our resentment of social and economic inequality.

At the same time, so much of the film directly deflates the hopes these hooks promote:

- The good little boy wins only by being selected as the favored symbolic son of the biggest capitalist in town--by being adopted, as it were, into the ruling class and by implication betraying his comrades.
- He inherits not only wealth but also a position of absolute authority over a microcosmic capitalist universe, complete with its own slave class: the Oompa Loompas. (Perhaps this means that Wonka's croneyism represents a critique of capitalism based in nostalgia for colonialism and non-economically based social hierarchies?)
- He wins by cheating, making painfully clear the injustice of the unequal punishment the other cheaters receive, made outrageously unjust with the additional reward of inheriting the factory and fortune.
- Even if we ignore the indications that Charlie is the shining good person in this weary world, the fact that he can get his due only through the voluntary charity of Wonka further refutes any progressive interpretation of its politics.

All of this amounts, in the end, to a strong suggestion of both the inevitability and moral necessity of class inequality. Little Charlie (and by implication, the entire working class) is every bit as greedy, selfish, and corruptible as the ruling class. He is happy to accept the trophy knowing he does not deserve it. He is even happy to accept it, knowing that Wonka knows he does not deserve it. These elements of the film encourage us, against the revolutionary emotions that underline its pleasures, to believe in the rightness of the system. We never imagine for an instant that, upon taking over the factory, Charlie will (or should!) change it in any significant way. We see that every individual, even within the ruling class, is wrong, only to emphasize more strongly the rightness of the economic system that controls him.

We might try to see this film as a coherently reactionary one: it seeks to make use of rebellious sentiments by turning them against us. But this is unconvincing. The film goes too much out of its way to insist upon its overt critique of its protagonists: the questionable ethics of Charlie and his grandfather, the hints of a dangerous degree of mental derangement in Wonka, and the sheer moral ugliness of both Wonka and grandpa's hypocritical self-righteousness during the big argument scene. This cannot be a film that actively seeks to make us sympathetic to Wonka, Charlie, or the factory, and a coherent reactionary message would have to do just that.

So, to get around this dilemma, I'm going to read it according to the only artistic model I can think of that shares this troubling ambivalence between progressive hope and reactionary despair: Franz Kafka. Specifically, the novels The Castle and The Trial.


In The Castle, an outsider arrives in a village, seeking entrance into the castle that stands in its center. He discovers he cannot stay in the village without the permission of the castle, and that he cannot get into the castle without the help of the villagers. The villagers, in turn, are sometimes unwilling, more often unable, to help him. During the course of the story, it becomes clear that they have no real knowledge of what goes on in the castle or how to gain entrance. While it represents the foundation that supports, and the authority that governs, the entire village, the castle does not directly interact in any way with the villagers--it may as well be empty, as far as anyone can tell.


However we wish to interpret The Castle, the principle theme is the utter break between village and castle; the lack of continuity, connection, or sense between its activity and that of the citizens--and the failure of the people to recognize or acknowledge this gap. This disconnect between authority and subject, law and individual, is also the inarguable interpretative foundation of the more famous novel The Trial. We might think of The Castle as a prequel of sorts to The Trial. The castle may or may not be inhabited; a valid political, social, and moral authority may or may not be discovered behind its gates; the unknown may or may not be filled out reasonably upon entrance to the site of the law. In The Trial, however, we begin to see what's inside, even if ultimately to discover that we have barely glimpsed through the gate. The protagonist of that work, a man arrested without charge and without apparent consequence, discovers that behind the door of the law there is an utter absence of order, structure, or authority.

The ambivalence of both stories is in how we are to interpret the misery of their protagonists. If the castle represents the ideal of what the law or justice ought to be, the measure according to which the village or the human system of justice fall short, then we might be inclined to see "K." (the hero of both stories) as an innocent victim bravely demanding that human justice measure up to that absolute standard.


If, however, the utter inaccessibility of the castle (or the utter absence of any higher authority in the absurdly perverse, corrupt, and amateurish legal system of The Trial) is meant to suggest that the law, or any valid authority upon which to ground it, is non-existent or completely unknowable, then our reaction must surely be different. K. may be a tragic hero, but he is not a victim (there is no one bad guy pulling the strings); his resistance is absurd (he holds humanity to an impossible or imaginary standard); and his goal of proving his innocence, his right to his place in the world, is equally absurd (there is no authority that can affirm his innocence or authorize his existence).

These interpretations have very opposed ethical and political implications. One suggests that the gap between true law and human law justifies rebellion against the present order. The other suggests that this gap exposes the impossibility--and thus irresponsibility--of such rebellion; the futility and even injustice of holding the human world to a fantasized standard of perfection. One makes the system guilty; the other affirms the guilt of those who resist it.

So how resolve this? One way is to understand Kafka's view as a rejection of both sides of the opposition. The human order neither embodies the law nor falls short of it. On the one hand, the system is unjust, but not in virtue of its failure to measure up to a non-existent standard, but because it portrays itself as the pure embodiment of such a standard. By telling its subjects that it is the law, it becomes illegitimate.

On the other hand, the attempt to replace the false law with the true one is a self-deception. There is no true law to replace it with. The law does not exist--or is, at least, absolutely uncertain. So, the proper response for K. is neither to accuse the law of injustice per se (to measure it according to "true" justice), nor to submit to it as the measure of justice (as those he encountered do and advise him to do). The proper response is to resist the system by rejecting the conception of true law, or true justice. This places Kafka at odds with both the status quo and with the classical revolutionary, who insists upon replacing the false order with a fantasized true one.

So, the solution to the Wonka puzzle:

Wonka is not the big, bad capitalist pulling all the strings from behind the walls of his factory. He is not the figurehead of a false order to be overthrown by the workers in favor of a true one. Nor do we find, upon entrance into Wonka's castle, that he is the figure of true justice, the ideal which the outside world fails to meet (he is not, say, a temporary revolutionary dictatorship relinquishing his power to a dictatorship of the people). He does not, by punishing the brats and rewarding Charlie, right the wrongs they've done or suffered.

But Wonka is also not a hypocrite or a diabolical character. His brutality towards the other children, and his choice of Charlie, are not entirely arbitrary. Wonka's character is positioned "beyond good and evil." When he puts these children to the test (on trial, let's say), he does so with awareness of the absence of the law--that is, with awareness that his own position of social and economic authority is contingent (he is not a believer in meritocratic capitalism). So he does not test them according to an assumed true moral standard (for if he did, Charlie would lose), but according to their willingness to recognize the gap between human law and true law.

Charlie wins because he is willing to break the law without claiming the authority to do so. He wins because he breaks the law for the sake of the law: because he steps beyond good and evil. The crucial difference between his own crime and the other childrens' is his absence of a sense of entitlement. The other children, on the contrary, break the rules out of a perceived right to do so. Like the revolutionary idealist, they claim to replace a false law with a true one (this is particularly well illustrated in Veruca Salt's case, since she explicitly appeals to a second figurehead of law, a "true" father, to justify her actions).

Charlie recognizes the injustice of both village and castle, and chooses to defy Wonka while acknowledging he has no higher authority to appeal to in this act of defiance. In doing so, he becomes Wonka's true heir: he makes the law rather than appeals to it, just as Wonka has done. This resolves the ambivalence, but leaves the ending very much open-ended. Charlie recognizes of the absence of the true law, and so he recognizes the falseness of human law's claims to embody the true law. This in turn explains his willingness to take up Wonka's position: he does not have a right to it, but neither does he violate anyone's right by taking it.


Yet it also reveals the dark implications of this realization. No higher law necessitates that Charlie expose the contingency of his authority. Everything suggests that he will, as Wonka has done, allow the people to continue deceiving themselves, to believe that he has a right to his place in the system, and that his authority is true. In other words, he will continue screwing over the other little Charlies and Oompa Loompas of the world.

Difficulties, Technical and Otherwise

The principle difficulty being technical incompetence.

The occasional repeat visitor will notice the missing archives--the blog was intentionally deleted, along with (unintentionally) the backup files. So, everything not retrievable on the cached front page is permanently absent.

The occasional repeat visitor will also notice that some submitted comments never appeared. Also unintentional, since the author had no clue they had to be moderated before appearing. Apologies. You are more than welcome to try submitting unanswered comments again. Hopefully the settings are moderation-free now.

Masculin/Feminin: Remasculating Capital

I know Godard is often treated as an embodiment of the spirit of the 60's, but I see Masculin/Féminin as a critique of the phony progressivism of his day, in particular, of the ideology of sexual liberation. Very much in the spirit of Michel Foucault's critique of the 'repression hypothesis', the view that sex is repressed, that this repression plays a fundamental role in the social and political subordination of human beings, and that the history of the 20th century is that of the liberation of sexuality which is a key factor in political liberation.

Two key criticisms emerge. First, sexual liberation is shown to have no connection with political liberation (a great deal of the film is devoted to exposing the political ignorance and indifference of its young, sexually progressive, characters). Second, the ideology of anti-repression is shown to be reactionary--serving the subordination of the narcissistic pleasure-seeking individual to capital and to consumption. (These are the themes of the "children of Marx and Coca-cola" respectively--with the emphasis upon how this shared lineage is primarily a betrayal of Marx.)


The second theme arises in the saturation of the film with shallow consumption (best illustrated in the interview with the winner of Miss Nineteen magazine's model of the year contest, an interview in which a perfectly harmless and sweet 19 year old is cruelly and hilariously subjected to difficult questions about sex and politics. (A segment given the title "interview with a commodity," though it doesn't explicitly point out that she, like the popstar main character Chantal Goya, is first and foremost a sexual commodity, which would underline the way in which sexual liberation serves capital rather than revolution.)


The politically regressive nature of sexual liberation is further underscored by the constant interruption of utterly random and purely destructive (thus counterrevolutionary) violence from the movie's beginning to its end, closing with an apparent suicide.

The film critically anticipates the complete victory of the pleasure principle. This is not, it should be stressed, a victory of pleasure as opposed to the reality principle, for the reality principle is (as Freud emphasizes) in the service of pleasure. Instead, it is a pure negation of reality, of precisely the kind that dominates present day American culture and, most explicitly, politics. Masculin/Féminin proposes that this victory, so strongly endorsed by the sexual liberation movement, will ultimately release dangerously regressive drives that culminate in murder rather than peace, indifference rather than love. It is an excavation of the hidden, true spirit of the 60's, an era that ends appropriately in the community of Manson rather than Marx. An era whose children inherit the earth only to produce--surprise!--the world we inhabit today.

Who loves the little miss sunshine?

Backlash is usually a pretty reliable indicator of artistic merit. Thoughtless consumers of mediocre pop culture don't attribute intrinsic worth to nonconformity, so they're unlikely to produce a backlash to critical acclaim or popular success. No, backlash is the work of snobs, and snobs, thanks to experience and training, usually do have good artistic instincts, even if their elitism is often self destructive or counterproductive in relation to those instincts.

So, Little Miss Sunshine was a humble, unassuming film with restrained but serious ambition. And, in the beginning, it got credit for that. In the year since its initial critical success, however, the Ministry of Information has declared that it was overrated. Since these days doublethink has become second nature in the western world (and in the U.S., pretty much our only, and so by default our first, nature) we've quickly forgotten that we once really liked this film.

So it goes. In any case, lovely as the movie is, I've got very mixed feelings about it, as well as about the "Losers Are Winners, Too" genre of which it is a prime example. In most cases, this movement is innocuous, since it works primarily on the plane of acknowledged fantasy. In Wes Anderson's films, for example, as well as in Napoleon Dynamite, the loser fantasizes an alternate universe in which we are Free To Be You and Me. It is a perfectly innocuous exercise in wish fulfillment--or would be, if audiences were bright enough (or the Wes Andersons of the world cautious enough) to ensure that we are not duped by our fantasies. In Anderson's case, most were duped--which is why (as I've explained in an old posting) there was such a strong backlash against the Life Aquatic, which went out of its way to slap its audience back into reality. This is perhaps the most admirable aspect of Napoleon Dynamite: its resolute refusal to come to the ground, to inhabit any time or place, which would turn its charming Nerds Win fantasy to delusion.

There are marvellous moments of the bitter slap of reality invading the Losers Are Winners, Too fantasies of Little Miss Sunshine, but although the movie puts up a brave fight against delusion, in the end it so thoroughly succumbs that it's embarrassing. But those marvellous moments are truly marvellous. This is a comedy that has, as its first lines of substantial dialogue this pricelessly blunt-razored bit of post-suicide-attempt humor:

I'm so glad you're still here.
That makes one of us.



It's also a comedy that chooses this for its title shot:



There are many lovely little no-holds-barred moments like this throughout the film. For example, the Nietzsche-inspired, angry teenager who has taken a vow of silence and who requires a second shot after writing "I hate everyone" in order to show him underlining the word "everyone." Or the motivational speaker ending his "You can be a winner" speech to faint applause from an audience consisting primarily of empty chairs. Or, in response to a little girl's question about whether or not there is a heaven (translation: whether the winners are also the good guys), a father's refusal to say anything, and the uncle's refusal to say more than, "I don't think anyone knows for sure." Or the suicidal Proust scholar's shame when he runs into the boyfriend of his ex-boyfriend, the nation's number one Proust scholar. It isn't enough to run into his ex's young, stylish, and evidently wealthy new beau at the gas station, in the process of buying porn. He also has to get caught (Proust scholars, remember) buying a blueberry Slushie. Which he forgets to take. And is called back by the cashier to retrieve, mournfully. That's a finishing touch worthy of Thomas Hardy.


These are all moments that pin the film down to reality, restraining the fantasy that literally drives the film: the father and daughter's (the metaphorically eponymous and literally aspiring Little Miss Sunshine) belief that if they manage to drive across country and enter Olive into a beauty pageant she will win. Not only will she win, but the family will win. This is of course why the relatively trivial theme of the pageant is the driving force of the film, rather than the big themes of suicide (the uncle and potentially the son), mortality (the death of the grandfather), divorce (always threatening), and poverty (the father's floundering career).


Fundamentally it is a film about the "Be a Winner" ideology that the father attempts, without success, to make a living at selling. If Olive wins the pageant, it will, for the father, serve as proof that his motivational message is right--and, consequently, it would serve as a promise that he, and his whole family (and, if we get the message, the audience too) stand to win their own respective beauty pageants in life.


The film's opening announces that this ideology has its basis in delusion, by showing us that the principle exponent of this ideology is clearly not a winner. And it doesn't make this commitment tentatively: it carries it through to the end. The father's motivational speaking career definitively ends halfway through the film, and nothing, not a hint, of alternate possibility, raises its head by the end. It is not even indirectly withdrawn through the symbolism of the beauty pageant: Olive is a loser. That's never directly denied--only the meaning or significance of that fact is questioned.

So, clearly this is not a film that wallows in its delusions, but the stakes of my critique are to suggest that, brave attempt aside, it fails to free itself. Perhaps the most admirable and intriguing part of its struggle to remain conscious of its own status as fantasy, is not the dark cruel moments that frequently repin it to reality, but its vaguer, greyer tones. Black comedy is old hat, even a venerable tradition. But Little Miss Sunshine is quite striking for what can only be called its beige comedy. Not great sorrow, tragedy, or darkness--its real rejection of comedic denial or fictional delusion is in its open-eyed recognition of boredom.



Someone (probably Godard) once said that Bresson's version of Joan of Arc was the first one in which you really felt she burned. This is the first film I've seen in which you feel the characters really do get bored.


But to get back on track: there are no-holds-barred moments of delusion-crushing reality throughout the film, but they are ultimately undermined by the film's end. The ending is, quite simply, Napoleon Dynamite's dorky dance scene redux, but without the final applause (or at least, very little of it). The message is that Olive chose not to compete, not to play to win, but to "do what you love, and fuck the rest." as angsty vow-of-silence teenager puts it.


So, the family of losers don't get applause in the end, but don't need it, since they're not playing the game. The message is (and here the backlashers have some ground, but perhaps not as much as they think) less than elegantly presented--it's a bit cornily, and all too heavyhandedly, made clear that the family has chosen to Let Their Super-Freak Flag Fly.

This is the trap of bad faith that proponents of the Winners-Are-Losers-Too ideology always fall into. The message is supposed to be: it doesn't matter if you win or lose. You're here to do what you love, so losing the beauty pagent, or the number one Proust scholar award, or whatever, doesn't have any valuative weight. The bad faith is clear in the inability of proponents of this view to detach themselves from the language of "winning." They never do say, "it's okay that I lost." Instead they redefine "winning" as trying hard, or doing what you love, or whatever. They can't fully give up the reactive mode of evaluation that bases self-esteem in comparison to another (the winner's merit is inseparable from her superiority to the loser).

The bad faith involved is the having-your-caking-and-eating-it-too strategy of claiming to be indifferent to the stakes of the game while playing the game all the same. But when the game being played doesn't exist apart from the stakes, its clear that you are simultaneously rejecting the meaningfulness of losing and at the same time rejecting the status of having lost, which in turn reinforces the meaningfulness of winning or losing.


This is crystal clear in Olive's case. She goes ahead with the dance competition, but supposedly rejects the value of winning it. But you cannot "do what you love" in a contest while rejecting the meaningfulness of winning or losing it. I can't play the game without trying to win, or, rather, if I'm not trying to win, I have no desire to play the game. This is perhaps most painfully obvious in the ice cream scene--where the parents' dilemma is posed as one of rejecting a socially determined and imposed image of physical beauty and fitness while tryint to maintain the "private" dream of the child to be a beauty contest winner.

The same dilemma appears in the dance contest. Obviously, Olive can play for love of the game in some sense: she can love to dance, and not care whether she's better than others. But then why dance in the contest? To prove to herself she has the courage to do it, perhaps. But she's proving this fact by seeking an audience. In other words, she's redefining the game as: can I be courageous enough to risk embarrassment in order to live as I please? But she appeals to the audience for proof of her success. Which means she's no longer just doing what she loves (dancing), but doing it to win (to prove to the audience her defiance of the game).

The (almost lovely) symmetry of the film is that the end does not, as it seeks to do, defy or reject the father's Be A Winner ideology, but instead mirrors it and reveals its true essence. The father is a loser, paid by losers, to tell them to believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, that they are really winners, waiting for their chance to fully realize their fundamentally winning nature. It is the lesson of both son and daughter: losers, declare yourself winners! That may work for Olive, but what about the son? Shall he declare himself an Air Force Pilot? Vow, weightlift, and willpower his way to non-color-blindedness? What about our Proust scholar? Shall he henceforth write about Proust for his "own pleasure," and not for an audience? What does it mean to do what you love and "fuck the rest" when what you love is an essentially socially engaged activity directed to "the rest" we've told to fuck off?


Beyond bad faith and practical impossibility, the most significant problem here is that it props up the institution and value system it claims to reject. The Losers Are Winners, Too ideology is, in practical terms, a marvellous way of convincing losers to be content with their lot--and of protecting the winners from the resentment of the rest. It has the same backhanded helpfulness that Christ's messages of "turn the other cheek" and "render unto Caesar" had for the poor and oppressed of the Roman empire ("Always look on the bright side of life," as Monty Python's Christ would say.) Rather than inspiring anger towards an "meritocratic" economic and cultural system in which "life is one fucking beauty pageant after another," the film promotes a Stoic change of attitude, in which we declare everyone winners of the game, rather than dumping the game. Keep that little miss sunnyside, up, up, up!

Dr. Katz: The Art of Snacking

I Heart "I Heart Huckabees"

Although it is guilty of bearing the worst title in film history, I Heart Huckabees is a movie that truly deserves redemption. And not just as a quirky comedy, but as an intelligent and thought-provoking work of art. In that spirit, I am proposing a blog-a-thon devoted to the rehabilitation of the reputation of this unfairly maligned film. Any takers?

The Passion of Linda Blair, Part Two

While I'm too lazy to present a painstaking defense of my thesis that The Passion of Joan of Arc was an anticipatory remake of The Exorcist, I have encountered new evidence in its favor.

Dreyer's Ordet, it turns out, was also an anticipatory remake of The Exorcist. At times the resemblance is just uncanny and, in all seriousness, I have to wonder if the author, screenwriter, or director of The Exorcist was a Dreyer fan.

By the way, I'm not sure how surprising the film's surprise ending is, but for what it's worth: there will be information that might ruin the ending. This is not, I should be clear, a "spoiler alert." A Spoiler Alert is a hackneyed phrase used by bad, evil people who should be severely reprimanded, possibly with wiffle bats, at the very least with hurtful words.

Ordet is a film about a particularly perverse kind of possession. A talented, very serious student of religion becomes possessed by, get this, Jesus Christ. (A result of reading too much Kierkegaard, as the young man's father pricelessly explains.) Of course, that's not exactly how it's presented. We meet the young man as a lunatic who is convinced that he is Jesus Christ, only to be strongly prodded throughout the film to come to the conclusion that he was indeed the real thing.

The overarching narrative concerns the devoutly religious father's desire to free his son from this madness, and his gradually weakening faith in the face of this, and many, many other trials. So, if you're keeping score: a possession, an exorcist, and a trial of faith. Of course, the whole thing becomes ironic by the film's end, since we realize that the father was trying to exorcise the actual bejeezus out of his son, not madness. So his is not such the heroic narrative.

All the same. The secondary narrative revolves around a second son (there's a third subplot involving a third son, but skip it...) who has rejected religion outright. This part of the film revolves around a single, painful, and extended birth and death scene. The faithless son's pregnant wife goes into labor, but there are difficulties. There are long painful screaming sequences, long nervous clockticking sitting at the kitchen table and worrying if she'll die sequences, and a brief moment of relief when the doctor announces she'll pull through, even though the baby did not.

All of these scenes, where the quiet domesticity of the kitchen contrasts with the terrifying moans from behind the bedroom door, strongly evoke the feel and mood of The Exorcist. The father and son steel themselves each time they enter the bedroom, as if expecting to see the Devil himself. When they enter the room, we find an unholy trinity circling the woman: a doctor, a young man of no faith, and an older religious figure of weakening faith.

Ring any bells?

Just when you think the thematic parallels can't get any clearer, the successful delivery, or dispossession, of the woman from death (and the unsuccessful exorcism of her baby) is followed by a celebratory cup of coffee between doctor, heathen, and believer. In so many words, the doctor to believer: "So, did I save your daughter or did your God do it?"

The structure of this film is the opposite of its heir. The Exorcist begins by prompting us to believe in the devil: the repeatedly inexplicable events, the failure of every attempt to find a medical explanation or cure. But the film's end undermines this with the utter failure and impotence of the faithful priest. A careful viewer is less sure at the end than the beginning about the status of the girl's condition as possession or madness, and her cure as miracle or coincidence.

Ordet reverses this: everything tells us the son is bonkers at the beginning of the movie, but bit by bit it pushes us to believe he's not. And it does it in precisely the opposite way as the other film: by showing us again and again the success of the faithful: the son predicts every plot development in the movie in advance, the death of the child, the illness of the mother, her surprise death following the recovery, and, of course, her resurrection, which he performs.

But like The Exorcist and The Passion of Joan of Arc, Ordet also insists upon blurring the line between madness and faith. Even if the son, John, is indeed possessed by Jesus Christ, he's no less insane for all that. The movie insists on this: when John appears in the final scene, and makes for the coffin in order to raise the dead, despite all the confirmations the movie has made of his faith, it just screams crazy. We want to stop him, just as the nearby priest briefly tries to do. We feel particularly embarrassed for him because he's about to destroy his little sister's faith. He promised the girl he'd raise her mother from the dead--and he promised here precisely because she was the only one who believed he could do it.

[To be continued...]

Bande à Part

"Gang of Losers" is the title and centerpiece track of The Dears' new album, but it isn't really a reference to the band. It's the anticipation of a movement. This is not an album; it's a recruitment campaign.

Let's get this out of the way: this album's going to be a failure measured by its own extraordinary ambition. But that's only appropriate. There's no such thing as a gang of losers. Losers don't hang together, and winners don't join them. There's that. And then there's the fact that, musically, the album is pretty uneven. At its best it's spine-tinglingly stunning, but the highlights are hidden in a lot of songs that don't immediately seem distinctive, that only reward after many listens. This is an effective formula for a great album, but not one destined for greatness.

But this is a must-hear album. Its content profoundly outstrips its form, and thoroughly redeems its weaknesses. The message is so pure, so sincere, and so relevant, that any hesitations about the music seem trite. If you know the Dears, you won't think this is their best album, but you also won't care: it's their most important. Complaining would be like joining the other party because you don't like your party's campaign colors.

So, what's the party platform? It's pretty simple, and so blindingly true that it's bound to inspire ridicule, resentment, and condescending reviews. First, there's lead singer Murray Lightburn's assessment of the situation:

"Every single one of us is getting massacred."

He's dead serious, and the critics will, no doubt, punish him for it. These are Canadians, folks. They're a funny breed. They watch the news. Not Fox news. Not just the Daily Show. But the news. They feel guilty about stuff like dropping bombs. They're cute that way.

This will inevitably be taken for melodrama. Murray telling us he's getting massacred is, on the face of it, as silly as his impossibly cool and photogenic bandmates posing in front of the words "gang of losers." But you have to stop thinking like an American to figure this out. If an American says everybody's getting massacred, she means: my cellphone rates are a rip-off. When a Canadian says it, she means: see those people over there being torn to shreds by bullets and bombs? - that's us, that's me.


So the gang of losers is everybody, as the album stresses by directly addressing the audience. It addresses you loud and clear, and in true recruitment fashion, it's "you" excludes no one: you = we. In their first video they even put the word "you" in flashing 30-foot letters.

"You and I are on the outside of almost everything."
"You and I, we have the same heart."
"We'll find our place in the world, if takes all day and all night."
"Nobody wants you, but we want you."

There's a faint sillouette of a soldier in combat gear on the cover; a similar image boldly heads the band's website. The only thing missing is a Maple Leaf version of Uncle Sam, finger pointing straight at your chest. But if everyone's already part of the club, who's left to join this band of outsiders? Same answer: everyone. If every single one of us is getting massacred, every single one of us is doing the massacring. The gang of losers persecutes itself. There's no in-crowd to blame. So the same refrain of "you" that picks out comrades and ask them to join up is also the repeated "you" that is assigned blame:

"You can try to break my heart, but it just won't be enough."
"Just don't hate everyone cause you hate yourself; you'll hate everyone till there's no one else."

Gang of Losers is an invitation to every single of one us to join a war against ourselves: against the part of ourselves that casts out and destroys the outsider in every group and the outsider in ourselves. Following a long musical tradition, it identifies this part of ourselves as "hate," and the movement of resistance as "love." These are tired and abused words, but the Dears make a valiant attempt to reclaim them for the cause of sincerity and sanity.

"We'll be okay. We're all okay."
"The world is really gonna love you."
"I believe in love, I swear it to you."

These are hard lyrics to pull off. And even if they do pull it off, it's bound to inspire bitter resentment in critics and entertainment seekers who resent any signs of a depth of commitment and conviction that they themselves are incapable of experiencing.

It may fly better with the less-jaded Canadian audience. Canada has not only refused to dismiss North America's admirable history of social and political optimism as a passing fad that was rightly forgotten along with the Pet Rock. It has also politically and culturally appropriated many of that tradition's values in their truest, and consequently most militant, form--namely, the belief that love = good, and hate = bad. That's an outmoded line of thinking, especially to the ears of those living in a nation that has successfully extended the Five Minute Hate to five years. But the gang of losers to our north, the ones who have sheltered and protected American's best convictions after we've exiled them from our own hearts, is not about to let it go without a fight. Canada is America's conscience, consequently its truest friend.

I'm not kidding. This is a Canadian Revolution, and if we're careful, it could become ours. It's a running theme in the Canadian indie-rock invasion. Stars' breakthrough album, titled "Heart," began with an introduction from each band member: "I'm Evan, and this is my heart," because they knew that these days you have to put your heart on your sleeve as solid evidence that you're among the remaining few that have actually got one. Another Canadian indie luminary, Emily Haines of Metric, recently lifted the lyrics to John Lennon's song "love" in their entirety, singing them absolutely, utterly, and cringingly straight: "Love is real. Real is love."

To hear these lyrics out of their standard context in this way is positive shocking, particularly in the context of a culture and era where to refuse hatred is the highest act of insubordination. It's as if Dan Rather had, with utter conviction, ended the evening news with:

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too.

To express this kind of sentiment these days--unless it's a cute tribute to a beloved entertainer--is tantamount to treason. And it's not Cheney and Rumsfeld that are going to send Emily and the Dears into exile as punishment, it's Pitchfork and MTV. Maybe they'll lock down those borders this time.

Fortunately, the Dear's new album hasn't been released yet, so there's time to enjoy it before tepid reviews from the Ministry of Entertainment banish it forever from our cultural memories. The Dears want your body, they want your brains, they want your soul, brother. They want you. Join the losers. Sign up, tune in, get cast out. Five years after the purported end of irony and the beginning of the Five Years Hate, we have reached our Nuremburg. From here on out, you're either for hate or against it. It's time to choose sides.

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Video: Ticket to Immortality

Network in translation

Key passages from the script of the Oscar-winning movie Network, followed by English translations.

1.

The initial response to the new Howard Beale was not auspicatory.

The initial response to the new Howard Beale was not auspicious.

2.
You could give her two minutes of trance at the end of a Howard Beale show, say once a week, Friday, which is suggestively occult, and she could oraculate.

You could give her two minutes of trance at the end of a Howard Beale show, say once a week, Friday, which is suggestively occult, and she could pronounce oracles.

3.
There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multi-variate, multi-national dominion of dollars!

There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and huge, interwoven, interacting, multi-national dominion of dollars, involving a number of independent mathematical or statistical variables!

4.
I just had a fleeting vision of you sitting in an office with a craggy middle-aged man with whom you are or will be emotionally involved.

I just had a fleeting vision of you sitting in an office with a middle-aged man full of crags with whom you are or will be emotionally involved.

5.
Am I supposed to sit at home knitting and purling till you slink back like a penitent drunk?

Am I supposed to sit at home knitting and embroidering with gold or silver thread till you slink back like a penitent drunk?

6.
Last night, I was awakened from a fitful sleep at shortly after two o'clock in the morning by a shrill, sibilant, faceless voice that was sitting in my rocking chair.

Last night, I was awakened from a fitful sleep at shortly after two o'clock in the morning by a shrill, faceless voice that had, contained, or produced the sound of, or a sound resembling that of, the 's' or the 'sh' in sash and that was sitting in my rocking chair.

7.
I'll strangle him with a sashcord.

I’ll strangle him with an unnecessarily specific choice of objects.

8.
What's happening to me, Max, isn't mensurate in psychiatric terms.

What's happening to me, Max, isn't equivalent in psychiatric terms to an obsolete form of the verb ‘to measure’.

9.
AMUNDSEN: And you would describe Mr. Jensen's position on Beale as inflexible?
HACKETT: Intractable and adamantine.

AMUNDSEN: And you would describe Mr. Jensen's position on Beale as inflexible?
HACKETT: Yes.

10.
I see Howard Beale as a latter-day prophet, a magnificent messianic figure, inveighing against the hypocrisies of our times, a strip Savonarola, Monday through Friday.

I see Howard Beale as a latter-day prophet, a magnificent messianic figure, inveighing against the hypocrisies of our times, Monday through Friday. He’s just like that 15th century Italian reformer, you know, the one renowned for his attacks against the corrupt clergy, convicted of heresy, and executed, except Howard will take his clothes off, metaphorically speaking.

11.
He should do more apocalyptic doom. I think you should take on a couple of writers to write some jeremiads for him.

He should do more apocalyptic doom. I think you should take on a couple of writers to write some lengthy complaints for him in the style of the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah.

12.
Well, I don’t want to be the Babylonian messenger who has to tell Max Schumacher about this.

Well, I don’t want to be the one who has to tell Max Schumacher about this.

13.
We're talking about impermanent, transient, human truth!

We’re talking about transient, transient human truth!

14.
...all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.

...all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all lacks of interest interested.

15.
Note please the added thirty-five millions resulting from the issuance of the subordinated sinking debentures.

?

Because they wouldn't let us sell you the bones...

When the occupation of this nation by a hostile authoritarian government ends, there will be trials to determine the fate of the collaborators. To pass the time and keep hope alive during the long wait, I'm collecting names.


Congratulations, Mr. Stone. Pick carrion from your teeth much?

The Passion of Linda Blair

Project for another day:

A painstaking defense of the thesis that The Exorcist is an apologetic remake of The Passion of Joan of Arc. Everyone knows, of course, that La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc is one of the greatest horror films of all time. But few, including the director, have recognized the film for what it truly is: a penetrating study of demonic possession. The parallels might have been acknowledged earlier if Dreyer had not regrettably cut out Maria Falconetti's famous spiderwalk scene.

Still image from the hit video single, "Nothing Compares 2 the Flammability of U," written by Antonin and the Artauds for the soundtrack to La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc. Dreyer specifically requested Artaud's band, being an ardent admirer of their innovative "Adult Contemporary of Cruelty."

The Impossibility of Being Wes Anderson or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Hate on The Life Aquatic

I’m slowly realizing that my review-posts aren’t reviews of the work but of the audience. So, let’s make that explicit. Today’s review is the Life Aquatic. Its audience gets two thumbs way down.

Why does everyone think it’s obvious that the Life Aquatic is not as good as Rushmore or the Tenenbaums? Is it an after-the-fact plot to shore up their previous overestimation of the good but (like all Anderson films) significantly flawed Rushmore? You recall, don’t you, that many people thought Tenenbaums was quite a disappointment compared to the all-holy Rushmore? These days, however, Tenenbaums seems to have been canonized. The Department of Information has declared that Everyone Has Always Loved the Tenenbaums.

I am willing to admit that it’s arguable that Life Aquatic is more flawed than its predecessors. But only arguable, and far from obvious. The principle flaws are sloppiness of structure, triteness of plot devices (especially the wish-I-had-a-real-Daddy fixation), and the occasionally excessive attention to the pleasing surfaces of things, a candycoatedness that distracts from the chewy center. That is to say: the exact same flaws that significantly marred Rushmore and Tenenbaums. (I think Bottle Rocket is his best precisely because these problems are significantly less noticeable, but that’s an argument for another day.)(Sidenote on the charges of candy-coated superficiality: this criticism is often greatly exaggerated. For example, the cross-sectioned Bellafonte is often referred to as evidence. But it demonstrates precisely the opposite trait: an interest in the inner working and structure of things, as opposed to their surfaces and appearences. It's the Pompidou of movie sets.)

I find it very hard to determine which of the major three Anderson films exhibits these problems to the highest degree, but they all exhibit them to such a degree that I think a comparative ranking of these films should leave these issues aside. Instead we should ask which film best demonstrates Anderson’s strengths. But that’s a job for someone else. I’m here to review the audience.

Why are Anderson fans 1) in almost universal agreement about the inferiority of this film and 2) so strangely certain and inflexible in their judgment about this film (especially in a world where the platitude that "taste is subjective" usually pops up in any and every discussion of artworks)?

To answer this question, we must carefully observe the cardinal rule (first formulated by Nietzsche) for interpreting human judgments on any matter: human beings always choose the verdict that is most pleasing to themselves. This might be the one most flattering to their self-image, or the most profitable in the immediate moment or in the long run, or the most satisfying, or whatever. But the mistake to avoid is paying attention to their professed reasons for their judgments. Reasons always come after the fact to justify judgments. (I am perfectly comfortable with the self-implicating nature of my cardinal rule, by the way.)

So, what’s so unpleasing about The Life Aquatic? I think its displeasure has to do with one of its greatest virtues. It does what any good work of art does: it bursts the bubble of self-serving illusions rather than shoring them up. (I’d add that this is one of the virtues of Bottle Rocket, in contrast to the Canonical Two, but again: argument for another day.)

The most irresistible thing about Anderson’s movies is the wish-fulfilling fantasy they present that smart, sensitive, awkward individuals can find a world where they will fit in and be happy. In other words: you can be a Wes Anderson kind of person and still live a happy, successful life. This fantasy works in various ways: the geek is promised that he might get the girl, or achieve professional or artistic success, or find a true father and family, or some variation thereof. In any case, the most pleasing thing about these films is that they say, "Hey, Kind-of-Person-Who-Watches-Wes-Anderson-Movies! Yeah, you! You’re really cool, and someday the world will recognize that!"

And we, The Kind of People Who Watch Wes Anderson Movies, are all, like: "Aw, shucks. Thanks. You're pretty neat, too."

Here’s the place where I would address the many forthcoming audience counterexamples in painstaking detail, but I’m feeling lazy, so let’s make it quick. No, Rushmore’s geek doesn’t get the girl he thought he wanted, but he was wrong about what he wanted, so he got the girl after all. (Besides, it's obvious that Murray's girl totally wants Max, but she's, you know, afraid of being arrested and stuff.) And true, the Tenenbaum’s smart, sensitive, awkward leads are forced to keep their forbidden love secret, but that’s part of the fantasy, too: we’ll be able to create our own little band of outsiders, a Bellafonte of our own, which will stay afloat despite the uncomprehending outside world. And so on.


So, in The Life Aquatic Wes Anderson has the gall to pop the beautiful shiny balloon he gave us in the last two movies. Okay, that’s pretty mean of him—-since he started the myth. But it doesn’t make it a lesser movie. It’s done particularly effectively. In Tenenbaums, Boy Wonder regains a quirky family, embodied in quirky father figure who brings the family back together which then heals all wounds. Of course he dies, wrapping things up with a lovely bow. In The Life Aquatic, Anderson brings boy wonder’s quirky father back, signifying the family he has found in the boatload of lovable outcasts and misfits that he winds up on. But this time Anderson doesn’t off the father, he offs the boy wonder. The fantasy shared by boy wonder, Anderson, and his audience ("Can I call you daddy, Bill Murray, huh, can I, please, hey?") dies with him. (In the most effectively painful and tramatic looking crash scene ever made, incidentally.)

You see where this is going, right? Boy wonder dies, along with his juvenile fantasy of carving out a quirky, happy, self-sustaining world populated by his true spiritual family, leaving us with jaded old man Murray, who has seen his lifelong attempt to live out that fantasy fall apart. In the final confrontation with his Moby Dick, despite being sardined in a tiny sub with the entire cast, Murray looks very, very alone.


Finally, we see the screening of Murray's own movie, the one that wraps up his lifelong project, another reminder that his life was a fantasy that failed to realize. (It’s just a movie, after all.) Cue new very young, wide-eyed, replacement boy wonder, who Murray longs to be.

So, in a strange self-fulfilling prophecy, Anderson says: "Sorry guys, smart, sensitive, awkward individuals don’t grow up to find happiness and success: they grow up to be sad, alone, and nostalgic for their lost naivety." Appropriately, at this moment, boy wonder Wes Anderson’s charmed career starts to take on water.

The nerd who would be emperor: Napoleon Dynamite

There are two kinds of people: those who like Napoleon Dynamite and those who don't. I'm the third kind. My opinion of the movie changed over the course of watching it for the first time. My first impression was: too dry, too deadpan, not all that funny. My final impression was: perfectly dry, just deadpan enough, and very funny. But something else stuck with me, a sense that the movie was not as trivial as it seems at first glance.

The problem with the usual reactions is that the lovers love it for the same reason the haters hate it: it's just a chance to make fun of the yokels. If you enjoy doing that, the movie gives you some pretty prime targets. If you feel too guilty to enjoy doing that, the movie leaves you feeling grumpy and/or queezy. But the movie's much more interesting than that. It is, first and foremost, a parody of the 80's high school comedy: complete with a high school dance as the narrative's centerpiece, Alphaville on the soundtrack, and a "nerds win" moral. Like any good parody, it's a critical one. Napoleon reveals the essential identity of the Nerds Win genre with what it tries, and fails, to critique.


The 80's high school comedy tries to critique social ostracism: the social ritual of identifying, isolating, and persecuting an outgroup. But it does so by simply reversing the roles: the nerd, the rebel, the loner become the ingroup, and the jocks and cheerleaders become the whipping boys. It's a revenge fantasy, and like all revenge fantasies, it's motivated by envy. The losers don't object to the cruelty of the system, just to being at the bottom of the pile. (The one beautiful exception to this rule is Heathers.)

It is appropriate that this fantasy dominates the films of the 80's (even the popularity of the sci-fi action picture is an indirect version, affirming the victory of science over nature, of the nerd's intelligence over the athlete's brute force). For the 90's were, after all, the decade of the actualization of the Revenge of the Nerds in an economic and cultural revolution led by poster boy, Bill Gates. The coincidence of the new economy with the rise--and critique--of global capitalism underlines the point: the nerds and rebels are working for the system, not against it.

Yes, the rebels too. A key premise of the Nerds Win genre is the claim that the nerds and rebels are allies. So, it's no surprise that the 90's was the decade of the rise of the rebel as well as the nerd--the decade that alternative music and culture broke into the mainstream and became an economically successful industry. (Thurston Moore called the year of Nevermind's release the year that "punk broke"--an unintentionally ambiguous phrase. Perhaps the year we broke punk?) The coincidence of nerd and rebel, victim and victimizer, revenge and justice is wrapped up in the tidiest of packages at decade's end, in Columbine High. (One of those moments of Hollywood wish-fulfillment that, like 9-11, reminds us to be careful of what Hollywood wishes for, because Hollywood always gets what it wishes for.)

In Napoleon Dynamite, the main character is not Napoleon, but the city of Preston, Idaho. If the movie mocks the yokels, as some have charged, then everybody—including the filmmaker, cast and crew—is a yokel. The obligatory lead jock and head cheerleader are every bit as wincingly uncool as Napoleon. Unlike the movies it parodies, Napoleon does not begin by defining an ingroup and an outgroup; it begins by defining the entire universe of the film as the outgroup, and cutting that universe off radically (in time and culture) from any other world from the perspective of which the characters might be able to evaluate themselves.

If, as self-righteous critics have charged, the film shows contempt for its characters, scorn for the yokels, where does it come from? There is no narrative foothold for that scorn—no positively presented voice of the author. The movie’s deadpan, understated delivery only further protects it from the charge of contempt. No hint of unseriousness, mockery, or sarcasm enters into the delivery of the lines—which often reaches positively Bressonian degrees of understatedness. If you can imagine Bresson directing a John Hughes movie, this is is that movie.

Napoleon feeds his grandmother's lama.


The critics are right to sense contempt for the characters. It's inevitably there, but it doesn't come from the film. It comes from the only ingroup left, the audience. We project upon the filmmaker—upon the voice of the film—the contempt and shame that we feel for the yokels. The disdain we inevitably detect is our own.

Director Jared Hess, shown here in traditional Mormon costume, often addresses religious themes in his films.


This is perhaps the most strikingly perfect aspect of its critique of the Nerds Win genre: by identifying every character as the out-group and refusing to side for or against them, it forces the audience to act out the role of jock or nerd. Those who love the movie identify themselves as the ingroup, and delight in the characters of the film as ideal objects for their scorn. Those who hate the movie identify with the characters as an outgroup, and resent the self-hatred and resentment that they inevitably project onto the film.

"Would you like to look like this? Because for a limited time only, Glamour Shots by Deb are 20% off."


This aspect of incriminating the audience is probably best illustrated in the ambivalent status of the film as “hip.” The film’s financial success was ensured when it was adopted by the fashionably ironic hipster-set: the ones who wear, in mockery, the same perfectly out-of-date fashions and lingo that Napoleon and friends wear in earnest.

"Napoleon, give me some of your tots."


The characters’ out-of-dateness (bordering on outside-of-timeness) reflects their status as existing in a universe completely outside of the division of in-groups and out-groups: the near-complete cultural isolation of their little town from a world that could provide the contrast upon which designations of hip and unhip depend. The film’s stylishness serves the function of debunking the social, economic, and cultural hierarchy upon which style depends. It is, consequently, a radically subversive little movie.

Hess credits his sensitive portrayals of the lives of simple rural folk to his privileged background and elite education: "Poor people are generally too dimwitted and backward to be able to portray themselves appropriately. I mean, they're just too fucking retarded to recognize that their senseless, economically unnecessary suffering and humiliation is an absolutely georgeous metaphor for the fall of humanity into sin, the innocence of faith, and the sublimity of divine grace. Fucking rednecks."