Robyn, Body Talk Pt. 1

By the time you get to “None of Dem” on Robyn’s album Body Talk Pt. 1, a bass-loaded, dubstep-lite (which is an affixation with roughly the same metaphysical heft as a “small tank”) kind of pissed-off, drug-addled hyphenation-inducing song for that time that’s too early to be morning but too late to be night, you are sublimely ready for the not-quite blissed-out extrospection (aka dancing) it provides for. A video for the track has Robyn in a sweatshirt and knit hat in a darkened room, alone and dancing and seriously feeling the music, man. That it is her music she’s feeling seems to make no difference; she’s just as in thrall to it as you are, or will be, if you have not yet had the chance to listen to this sensationally well-constructed album.

Body Talk Pt. 1 is full of songs you like, then love, then really love, and then normally would get tired of and move on, but I’ve been rocking out to “Dancing on My Own,” that exuberant paean to being alone (if not quite to loneliness) at a very high rate for weeks now, and I want to keep doing it. That song is unquestionably the album’s high peak, for its sheer catchiness and singability (“I’m not the giiiiiiiiiirl you’re taaaking home, oooo oooooo”) and the way it revels in something a little stronger than melancholy, makes it desirable and unstoppable and an expression of whatever it is that substitutes for primal joy nowadays. There aren’t too many songs that give explicit license to back away from others that also offer this exuberant validation, to retreat to the corner (which is what you really wanted to do anyway) and be satisfyingly, gloriously emotional in time with the beat. In a word, it’s great.

It’s almost for the best that nothing else on the album reaches the same peak, because then Robyn gets to have that song. But nearly every track on the album is solidly written and even better produced, so that there’s a sense of balance maintained consistently, even rigorously, both both overall and within each song. “Fembot” has her trying on the character of, well, a fembot, to deliciously clever effect (as in, “automatic booty applications / got a CPU maxed-out sensation.” Sweet.). This song does well to show why she stands out from the crowd particularly now, as material that could have easily been pushed to extremes of ridiculousness by her contemporaries here instead remains very grounded. It’s safe to say although her music rises very high indeed, it is built firmly on the ground.

The video that sets her as a fan to her own music has the right of it, actually; this is relatable music for once, tracks that push up from our level rather than sound from on high. Robyn’s syllables are anything but nonsense, and her music makes sense, always. The overwhelmingly positive critical reception to both the album and her as a star is no doubt built on this aspect of her music and performance, its intelligence and honesty; and if she initially comes across as maybe just the tiniest bit blank, as a little less than a truly great singer, the minor quips are quickly discarded as overly hasty judgments about someone who is now a good friend. Flash and fire and fierceness are great from afar, but up close and personal with music wrapping around you in the corner, you’d rather have honesty, and feeling too. Her music is sustainable in a way that elides most pop.

The coda of the album — the straight-up ballad and now soon-to-be dancefloor hit “Hang With Me” and the classic Sinatra tune “Jag Vet En Dejlig Rosa” — is understandable, a respectable way to bow out and set the stage for Body Talk, Pt. 2. If “Hang With Me” is just a touch saccharine, with songwriting just a shade weaker than its minimalist arrangement allows for, it is notable only to appreciate that her songs work so well because of the greatly effective context they are in. And though it would be nice to be able to point to “Jag Vet Swedish” as lovely, it doesn’t really matter, and if anybody makes it through more than a third of that song without listening to “Dancing on My Own” again instead (“giiiiiiiirl”) I would be surprised.

The music is better to listen to than to think about, which is really just a way of saying that this is music that is meant to be music. Her music doesn’t make you feel morally compromised when you listen to it, which is all too often the case with pop. If it’s not quite deep either, that’s probably for the best, so that you can stay giddy and sweaty while still feeling, hard, if you want to. But only if you want to. It’s not going to force you there.

She’s somebody that you like if you give her a breath of a chance. She is somebody relatable. She is catchy and durable. Normally, this would be the point where one would work in a stinger, a shot of critical pithiness to dilute the compliments and strengthen the critique. But that would be cheap, and furthermore, unnecessary. She doesn’t pretend to be what she is not, which is saying something more than it seems. It would also be tempting to do a blow-by-blow comparison with other pop stars of the past few moments (and I will now mention a few in order to get more search engine hits: Beyonce, GaGa, Kesha, Katy Perry, Rihanna. Inception, Twilight, Edward, Jacob), but it is more tempting to let her stand — or dance, perhaps — on her own.

Greenberg

With Greenberg, I find myself questioning not its execution but its project, its impetus and its worth. Technically, I don’t find much to complain about in the film. Performances range from effective to good (it’s not really the kind of film that permits acting of either extreme), the writing is on point, it is shot well but not distractingly, etc, etc. It achieved what it was aiming for; the space in between the underlying intentions and the result onscreen is remarkably small, which certainly is a kind of success worth having.

And Greenberg is not the first work to depict a misanthropic, unappealing lead (protagonist doesn’t seem like quite the word). It will not be the last, and when I say that my problems with the film stem from how much I disliked its eponymous hero, it is not to cast aspersions on choosing topics for fiction that are less than ideal, or somehow bad, ugly, or otherwise wrong. The ineffectiveness of depicting only the things we would like to see ourselves as has been proven time and again.

I cannot help but view Greenberg and his younger love interest Florence (Greta Gerwig, utterly guileless) from my own perspective, which in this case means my own age. In the simplest way, Greenberg is in this fashion a cautionary figure for me: don’t be like this. But that’s not enough to satisfy, and I don’t think it’s the whole story either. Even the most unappealing characters must be in some way sympathetic. The forms this sympathy can take run the absolute gamut, from fascination to empathy to the camaraderie of people who have nothing in common.

But Greenberg is none of these for me. He hovers infuriatingly on the edge of reasonableness and comprehension, which makes his sheer social repulsion all the more unfathomable, caught uncomfortably in between an intellectual and a visceral response. I think I resent that he is placed in the position of a character with whom we should come to find sympathy, and this resentment is driven home particularly strongly because at the core of his neuroses, his misanthropy and his cruelty, is an inability to grow up. As a young person who is just starting out in the world and looking to the future, I refuse to accept that his is viable.

And similarly, I find Florence to be a frustrating character, in part because it’s impossible to make any intellectual leeway against her. She is so carelessly likeable, so unaffected, so open and yet so vague that any criticism I am likely to make is one she would readily accept. She incarnates a certain form of the sometimes artificially balanced worldview that is so prevalent now, finding a medium and a compromise between all things. In her case, this compromise leads to a certain impotence and self-defeating quality. I get a little indignant at the possibility that she is representative of a culture that I largely buy into. I want to say that it is her, and not the culture, that led to her own affable stagnancy.

And can I? I think so, and perhaps it is a function of my perspective that this affirmation requires a rejection of its opposite. From where I stand, Greenberg is not bad, but Greenberg is, when really, it should be the other way around.

Glancing back at The Hurt Locker

With The Hurt Locker winning the big prize recently, and consequently finding its way into conversations more often than not, it seems like an opportune time to take a second look at the film. Admittedly, I’ll be doing this without an actual second viewing, so I apologize if things seem built on generalities instead of specificities.

To begin with the direction, the film is wired for action and she's done a thorough job. It’s solid to the point where you can feel the metallic vibrations from the explosions in your bones, and live in that environment at least as much as any movie before. It is not the kind of film that resonates with completion, with rightness, with that irrefutable stamp of the Hollywood arc and emotional push points. Instead, it feels taut, like sinew over bone, or a film budget for a female director. And to get this out of the way now, that Oscar was vicariously very satisfying, because while Kathryn Bigelow may not have been head and shoulders above the competition, she had a fierce hairsbreadth of a lead that she earned beyond a doubt. That she is intelligent and adult, a professional and an artist both in her interviews doesn’t hurt either.

It is topical, but to its credit the film is neither polemical nor pedantic, maybe just slightly juvenile in its message in the way action films tend to be (the message: blowing shit up is cool.) That’s not meant as a denigration, just as a counterargument to those who say the lasting impression left by the explosions is cautionary. The Hurt Locker is not unsophisticated in its methods or even its conclusions, but it’s telling that the film’s final image is to adrenaline-pumping hard rock music with our hero walking into the desert, about as classic an image of badassery as you can get.

It’s an action movie, pure and simple, which strangely, makes it one of the best treatments of a tricky topic that I’ve seen. It knows its aims and achieves them squarely, shooting neither too high nor too low, and in that sense it is a classic genre film, working within a known context. And little about the film pushes the boundaries—that’s not what it’s about—but like its protagonist, does a single job with unerring and unsettling efficiency. There’s something extremely satisfying, and worthy, about that kind of ethos, a film and a director who strangely favor competence over pretension.

And that is perhaps part of the reason why it was nice to see Bigelow get the Oscar, because it wasn’t just a validation but a mandate: go do more. Although I perhaps wasn’t quite as enamored with this film as many of the critics seem to be (though I did like it), I’ll be lining up to see her next movie. And one small part of me wonders what it would have been like if Kathryn Bigelow had helmed Avatar, not that it ever would have happened, or that she even would have wanted to. But a person can dream about what a movie that would have been.

The stiflingly beautiful "A Single Man"

In terms of visuals, art direction, and even emotions, A Single Man is frustratingly immaculate. The costumes and hairstyles scream their perfection; the color-drained and -flooded frame looks exactly as it should. The framing is artful, the editing precise and striking, and every choice announces itself in every second of every shot. The performances constitute the one realm that escapes this constricting network of decisions, their more human aspects coming through almost in spite of themselves. On the whole, the film is too exceptionally lovely to make an impact beyond the kind of touching beauty of the way the story is told.

But it’s also a testament to the strength of that story that the film succeeds largely with the better half of a mixed bag. Colin Firth is very excellent, and the supporting actors—Julianne Moore and Matthew Goode, principally—are just as good. When they are onscreen—and particularly when they are onscreen with each other—you almost forget about the sets, about all the choices being made, and feel the poignancy and urgency of the grief and life underwriting the story. Its observations seem fresh and strikingly modern; I guess the way people make friends and flirt hasn’t changed much since the 60s, cinematically at least.

If only the thing weren’t so damn beautiful. It’s frustrating, and irritating, the way it incessantly announces its aesthetic choices. Every time you sink into the story, every time the truth of an interaction or a facial expression captures you and makes you forget about the movie you’re watching, within a few frames the screen will be reliably flooded with sepia-toned angst or another devastatingly sharp ensemble worn by a devastatingly attractive person and there you are, watching again.

It feels strange to complain about the movie looking too good, and admittedly I didn’t mind too much in the moment. But it was a constant barrier that stood between my senses and my emotions, a constant reminder that I was watching cinema, high art damnit, and I better acknowledge it as such. Consequently, the impact of the story was only glancing at best, while the rest seemed like a particularly weighty fashion shoot. (I’ve been trying to avoid saying that since the beginning because it seems like such the expected criticism of this director, but damnit, you brought it on yourself Tom Ford!)

In short, the movie is a museum piece that’s just effective enough to make you wish it were something more.

Un prophète (A Prophet)

A Prophet—a long movie of the kind that gets called gritty by critics, signifying its value as honest, honestly, even while potential viewers slump their shoulders a little bit because they now know it’s going to be less fun—is actually quite good. Malik, our unremitting protagonist whose presence fills every second if not every frame, is surprisingly and intensely sympathetic. If his environs are undeniably and pointedly contemporary, his story nonetheless has the ring of the classic to it, of fathers and sons and even of the biblical. But it is young and exhilaratingly unformed at the same time, and though there might be father figures, the film is conspicuously absent a true father; this story is Malik’s alone.

And from unwilling and unknowing entry inmate to killer and back again, it is his persuasively. It is a simple but strong compliment to say that a fictional character is empathetic, that his evolution is believable and compelling, and Malik’s youthful intelligence, his ambition that arises apropos of nothing except his youth, is convincing in the slow, visceral way it should be. He and his film demand respect both.

His initiation comes early in the long narrative, a messy, labored killing of a man in response to another threat of death. The starkly gruesome scene—there is little pleasure in watching it—hangs in a surreal aura over Malik for the next several years and all of our time with him, which director Jacques Audiard lets loose with startling and even wondrous technique from time to time. I would not have thought that surrealist impulses would make sense in this case, or that occasionally mannerist touches like a title card with the name of a significant character, or softly blacking out the screen except for some small, crucial detail would work in a film like this; but I would have been wrong. Perhaps they work because of the director’s and actor’s (called Tahar Rahim by the way, no idea what else he’s been in but fantastic here) discipline in execution, because this is not a film made on sheer impulse to genius or creative meanderings. It is regimented and open at the same time, constructed and told in such a way that it mirrors and does justice to its subject.

Its moral and visual palette are strict and circumscribed, and grow in response to each other. Their formality progresses with the narrative, and by the end of the film have each discovered some sort of stability (if not quite the usefulness of a tripod) and found a heft lacking before, filling in the monochrome with richer blacks and softer whites. By the end neither has quite found solidity, or even a structure to follow up on the narrative, which is maybe as it should be. But the insistently realistic treatment almost makes you wish for a framework to lend it weight, for a camera exterior to his world by which to view it.

It is this location within his world that guides the film aesthetically and otherwise, and which makes it tempting to declare something lacking, but not in the sense that it didn’t aim high enough. A Prophet shies away from the more spectacular means and effects of film, a decision to be lauded, but not one that necessitates going to the other end of the spectrum either. To be sure, it doesn’t quite go there, and the directorial presence is subtle but unmistakable. But somehow, the emotional impact was just a touch behind the intellectual and narrative one, just a shade less effective than the rest of it. Perhaps to force it into lockstep would have been a melodramatization and had the ring of something untrue; as it stands, I saw it and I lived it, but I never quite felt it.

In the film, as Malik passes trial after trial, it is tempting to see each moment as the moment of truth. So often, coming of age is portrayed as the decision made in a single instant, a dichotomy offered without a chance to consider it: forwards or backwards? Childhood or adulthood? Are you a boy or a man? But A Prophet eludes that reasoning. Malik’s growth can be measured in the instants for sure, but their plenitude renders his metamorphosis continual rather than instantaneous. He moves and changes and kills, and will continue to do so even after the last reel has played out. There is something of a reward at the conclusion, for both the audience and their protagonist, but the more lasting revelation is of Malik’s simultaneity: he is still the same person he was at the start. His contradictions are essential, his negotiations between extremes the thing itself. It feels true but not right, over but not finished; so all is as it should be, while at the same time it isn’t, an astute observation and spur to action both, and very much a film worth seeing.

Tino Seghal at the Guggenheim*

A friend from Philadelphia was visiting for the weekend, and she had said to meet her and another friend at the Guggenheim on Saturday. Going, I didn’t know what the current exhibition was at all; last thing I had heard, there was a big Kandinsky show up. Since I was running somewhat later than I should have been on Saturday, I received a text from my friend, which said something along the lines of “We will watch the people making out until you arrive.” I kind of laughed and didn’t think too much of it (people-watching in public places is a very legitimate urban activity), so imagine my surprise when I arrived in the Guggenheim to find that she was not referring to one of New York’s overly affectionate couples, but to the artwork.

The spiral of the Guggenheim was stripped bare, devoid of art to my eyes. In the center of the ground floor, a couple was rolling around, making out, groping each other, and occasionally striking poses from famous pieces of artwork, all in slow motion. My friends were positioned maybe twenty feet away, as were many other museum patrons, sitting on a free bench, watching the couple about as unawkwardly as it is possible to watch a couple make out in slow motion. This was a sculpture (dance piece?) by the artist Tino Sehgal, to which my reaction was, “Well. Okay,” and trying to watch without appearing too interested.

We headed up the spiral, and as I looked for whatever I was supposed to be looking for, a kid, maybe ten years old, walked up to us, said, “Hello. This is the exhibition. Can I ask you a question? (Yes.) What is progress?” I was totally disoriented and a little freaked out that someone had conscripted a child to work as a part of the exhibition, but followed him up the spiral with my friends somewhat hesitantly, talking about progress all the while. Then the kid led us up to a teenager, summarized our responses for her, and she took us up from there.

That’s the gist of the exhibition: talking and walking, a few big ideas posed to you by progressively older participants. It concluded at the very top of the rotunda, with a senior citizen, who finished by telling us the name of the exhibition and what a pleasure it was to have conversed. Simple, straightforward, direct in its methods and basic in its execution; disconcertingly one-note, but not a bad note to dwell on. I began thoroughly unconvinced, but finished energized, at the height of a spiral, looking down at a couple obliviously making out in slow-motion, feeling the same kind of subtle euphoria and optimism that I do after a good, long run.

It was effective because although it was one-note, that note wasn’t static; it grew and evolved and worked its way into my thoughts. It was staged, and it felt staged, which is part of why I was so disconcerted by both the couple and the child at first; but at a certain point, I came around to the realization that ideas spoken by actors are still ideas, that inauthentic shared experiences are still experiences shared. There was something about the medium of choice being conversation that made it invariably effective; a simulacrum of a conversation is, you guessed it, still a conversation. So that I do not know if what each actor said was utterly scripted or spontaneous, truthful or fabricated, but I do know that I had an interesting conversation with four or five different people (of increasing ages—a key point) no matter what. It wasn’t life-shattering, or even that revelatory, but it was true nonetheless. The best analogy I can think of is that it would be like taking a photo of the color red, and trying to distinguish between the photo and the original color; the distinction is in a way irrelevant: it’s still red. The truth of the perception is still there.

But with contemporary art, the question I almost always feel compelled to ask myself, explicitly or implicitly, is: is there something to mourn here? What is the loss? And with this: when all is said and done, what is left? I suppose there’s something to be said for art that is purely experiential (and this guy is all about the ephemeral, if documentation of the work is made, it becomes “inauthentic”), but something that constitutes a significant part of my art consumption is going back again and again, having the thing itself (or my experience of it) at my fingertips and eyes and ears. Perhaps part of the problem here is that this experience was good, but not great; compared to a great concert, or a great performance, I don’t think this would measure up. A lot of art that gets on my nerves confuses the intention with the result, and though I don’t think Sehgal’s committed that particular error, I don’t think it entirely works either. I often have to let things sit in the back of my head for a while before I can fully understand their impact, or before I can feel and not just know how they'll last. The problem here is that Sehgal’s piece isn’t in the back of my head; it’s still at the Guggenheim.

- the Guggenheim's page on the exhibition
- NY Times review of the exhibition
- interesting longer piece on him from NY Times magazine

*I believe the two works are called The Kiss and This Progress, though I could be wrong.

Olympics and Ceremonies

Coming from the meticulous Beijing extravaganza that opened the summer Olympics two years ago, Vancouver (thankfully) presented a different face. If the Chinese spectacle was all about the sublime heights that can be achieved by near unlimited resources, Vancouver shied away from grand cultural statements, which is not to say that culture was obscured by the incumbent light and noise; in fact, ostensibly, culture was at the very forefront of the ceremonies. But culture was not flung in your face simultaneously by thousands of identically dressed and choreographed extras; it was just kind of there, chilling out, doing it’s own thing, and if you wanted to join in, that would be great, but the future of the country was not hanging in the balance.

As someone who was both awed and a little put off by the spectacle two years ago, it was kind of nice to watch something where not every choreographed triumph carried an onslaught of portentousness. When one of the giant icicle-things didn’t rise up out of the ground at the end for the torch-lighting, it was just kind of like, “Oh well. Woohoo Olympics!” instead of “This betokens shame for the public face of our nation in the world.” There were nonetheless some really beautiful moments and innovative presentations, executed in a soft, gently artistic style that contrasted with the Chinese event without diametrically opposing it. The video projection-floor was genuinely pretty cool and used in such a way that continually surprised, and the merging of the two dimensional with the space above it was lovely and startling. Some parts were kind of over-the-top and kind of ridiculous, but it’s the Olympics, so I guess I can’t really blame the producers for deciding that this was the time to just kind of let go.

I think it was a measure of the difference in approaches that after the Chinese ceremony, I felt the need to make grand cultural proclamations, to boldly differentiate between their culture and mine, while after this one I just wanted to go hang out with friends or something. Neither reaction seems to me bad, and both seem within the Olympic spirit. I’ve always loved the Olympics: the competition, the diversity, the way in which it remains such a defiant symbol of global communication and interaction. Both a fierce dedication to your country being the best and a willingness to relax a little bit seem compatible with those things.

And though I’m hesitant to set up this ceremony as the true counterpoint to Beijing, being winter instead of summer, the flipside of the openness and intimacy (relatively speaking) of these ceremonies is that there was perhaps a bit of a void left at its center. When the slam poet spoke, it was kind of interesting to me for two reasons: first, it was largely the kind of neo-romantic rhetoric that I associate with proclamations of Americanism (not that surprising I guess, but still it was a little odd to hear all these phrases about dreams and diversity and then hear “Canada” at the end of them); and second, that rhetoric, while inspiring and kind of wonderful, really does leave a bit of an empty hole at its center, as it is less about what is now than what will be. That impulse makes sense to me; but it also leaves me a little bit curious about what’s really at the other end of the spectrum from what we saw two years ago. London 2012 maybe?

- video of the opening ceremony, part 1

Of the Blue Colour of the Sky (OK Go)

I’ve been waiting for months—waiting for years—waiting for you to change; but there ain’t much that’s dumber, there ain’t much that’s dumber than pinning your hopes on the change of another. And I still need you, but what good’s that gonna do? Because needing is one thing, but getting, getting’s another.

—from OK Go’s latest album, the pleasingly titled Of the Blue Colour of the Sky, the fourth track and my initial favorite, “Needing/Getting.” Like a lot of their lyrics, they’re clever, and unlike a lot of them, more than a little heartfelt. That seems to be where their latest is aimed, bringing the self-conscious, guiltlessly indulgent brashness of their particular brand of pop towards a place a little more enigmatic. It’s a worthwhile effort, one that even succeeds occasionally, but the problem is that the album equates restraint with sophistication, ambiguity with adulthood. The band distorts their lyrics nearly beyond recognition, a veneer of production—and it does sound very fine more often than not, crackling and crunching in all sorts of shades of white—usurping the feeling the words were meant to betray. The end result isn’t bad, just a little gray, and less saturated than you had hoped. It’s all surface, textured and nuanced but surface nonetheless. And that’s too bad, because what’s there is good enough to make you wish the band had decided to grow up in their own way instead of somebody else’s, forging their own paradigm instead of their idols’.

The album traffics in nostalgia, which is not a surprising move, for them or for us these days. It’s the flipside of that knowing sway, of that determined air that lends a direction to progress, the new adult who’s just a little too old to be young. It’s not a little expected, and because of that, disappointing in equal measure. When things seem as though they’re not working out, the wise choice, the right choice, is acceptance: acceptance without compromise. It’s an admission of fallibility but a wholehearted determination to invention, to moving forward even if it’s a little stupid to do so; because every once in a while a little stupidity is demanded, and never more so than when at the beginning of something. Nostalgia, while lovely and acceptable, is the easy route in a bad way when it constitutes the greater part of your reasoning.

And essentially, that feeling is: being lost. Whether citizens or rock stars, the one thing we can agree on is being stuck in that funk and wanting something to happen. The difficulty results from a plurality of options rather than their dearth, an experience that seems like growing up all over again and is confusing because it’s not. We understand that impulse to action and needing something to happen, and the call to hearken back is understandable but not excusable; there should be leaders, not shepherds, because when you’ve discovered something that feels disconcertingly like youth you’re not ready to be gently guided; you’re ready to be told what to do so that you can joyfully and ecstatically rebel. Moderation only means something in between extremes.

The first side of that equation is securely in hand. We have the brashness of youth underneath our belt, the boom years when everything was a discovery. But now we’re on the verge of finding everything a recapitulation, of letting that luxurious distortion of stored-up knowledge and sound obscure inherent originality. It’s easy to forget that things started in chaos, that seeming atrophy can be at least as much of a spur to newness as can order. You have to reject the false duality of escapism versus realism; there are escapes in this world that involve no compromise. It’s time to move forward.

Before the earth was round, there was no end to things; no one tried to measure what they knew. Everything was warm, and everyone would love, and every contradiction was true. The sun worked twice as hard, and the moon was twice as far, and the sky was still honestly blue. But when the time came, everything spiraled in, and everyone forgot what they knew.
—from Of the Blue Colour of the Sky, track nine, “Before the Earth was Round”

- WTF?
- This Too Shall Pass
- This Too Shall Pass v2

Avatar: A small footnote to a large movie

Upfront and to say it right away, I enjoyed Avatar. I was mesmerized for the better part of three hours, drawn thoroughly into a world so vividly rendered. Furthermore, the 3-D—about which I was more skeptical than not beforehand, expecting at worst to have to dodge crap flying at my face and at best a gimmick the novelty of which would wear off quickly—was kind of beautiful, underwriting the lushness of the film with an almost minimal elegance, a new aesthetic. The world had a depth which made immersion that much more effortless, and the varying planes of depth brought to mind those staggered dioramas, or those animations where everything takes place on two or three discrete fields of action.

It is a testament to the success of the world created by the film that I found the story within it compelling more often than not, a triumph of technique that emerges as artistic. That said, it’s a shame it wasn’t a better movie. If it was as awesome as it was with a narrative as lousy as it had, it makes me wish to see the movie that could have been made if the graphics weren’t the only thing doing the heavy lifting. And though it’s beside the point to say that if Avatar were rendered as a stage script with a minimal set it would be nigh-unwatchable, it’s worth saying once anyway if only to get it out of your system. What happens in its world is oddly, inexplicably compelling (I almost said subtly, but say what you will about it, Avatar is not a subtle movie), but that stems not from anything exceptional in its plot or characters or all that jazz, but the need to stay in its world for just a few minutes longer. That need could have been tied to virtually any motivation and be rendered nearly as urgent, as its environs would still demanded to be lived in, breathed in and stared at longingly through surprisingly cool glasses in wave-of-the-future 3D.

That its narrative is one of the most self-congratulatorily tolerant and fundamentally imperialistic narratives in the cultural lexicon is a matter of convenience rather than any deep-seated malice on the film’s part. The natives in this film—a mashup of virtually every quote-unquote indigenous or primitive cultural stereotype the film could get its hands on (real and fictional both)—are, as usual, in tune with nature and love one another and in really good shape and stuff. As the story dictates, their worth is uncountable as compared with the malignancy of what is corporate, and they deeply deserve to be left in peace after the friendly imperialist shows them the way to war, salvation, and their need for an enlightened leader.

But this is (rather unfortunately) nothing unusual; these convictions are skin-deep at best, because apparently that’s all three dimensions are good for. After we cast aside any noun to which the modifier “nominal” can apply, what are we left with? With what is still an engrossing world, a thoroughly awesome film. I admire the work’s dedication to that childish joy of creation and fantasy, and its success in reinvigorating the experience so thoroughly that to complain seems almost beside the point. I truly fell into the scope of its world, and there is also the critic’s satisfaction to be had of a pop-cultural phenomenon that can be legitimately got behind. But now, after having had some time to let it mull and stew in my head, it turns out the film was perhaps shallower than it seemed, that the resonance that comes from true depth was lacking. So while it was awesome, I wish it were better.

The Providencia Treatment

Providencia, at first glance, is exactly what it seems: tropical, remote, lush and overgrown, hot, humid, and communal. Then, at second glance, it stays the same. The third look perhaps shades in some detail, but the portrait remains essentially unchanged. This is a place that grows in its acquaintance by the depth of its themes rather than their variety, a perhaps needed reminder that composition comes in myriad varieties.
From its start, the visuals echo the narrative: vistas of stunning beauty join run-down buildings of a sort that would be called “charming” by a particular sensibility in the same breath that it would turn around and look for a resort. If Providencia doesn’t distinguish itself from its stereotype, it’s because it has no need to. Why bother, when even the idea of an identity crisis here seems bizarre, and when ulterior motives of that kind would seem (to me at least) as foreign here as, well, me.

The breadth of the panorama here joins together abstraction and specificity. The oft returned-to water is glorious when seen as water, but when sitting and daydreaming it’s equally easy to lose reference points in the blue field. One scene at night had the horizon line vanish during dinner on the beach. The storm relegated the sky and water to the same monochromatic status, and beyond the shore and anchored boats, the dark could as easily have been a canvas positioned just past the light from the restaurant. Sounds are subject to the same principle: so many crabs scurry away at your approach that the accumulation of noise approaches the purity of its ideal, a sound effect of crabs rather than the crabs themselves.

Though a good portion of people here probably qualify as living below the poverty line, using the word “poor” has not yet crossed my mind. Superficially at least, none of the problems associated with poverty seem in evidence: crime, hunger, housing. It may be only because of the superficiality of the observation, but differences from the familiar here seem to stem from diverging in standards rather than failing to meet them. It’s a tricky judgment to make, and one that I would rather stay away from altogether, except that avoiding it falls into the reverse trap. Overcoming the fallacy of cultural solipsism means avoiding the avoidance of judgment as much as it means a relaxation of critical standards. When you encounter a new place, it seems to me that neither saying “Everything here is different, and thus wrong” nor “Everything here is different; but it’s okay, because they don’t know any better” is the right response. (Yes, it’s an exaggeration, but exaggerating renders point-making that much easier.)

But almost as if to compensate, the narrative offers opportunities for learning: language, motorbikes, different kinds of fish. Learning of the specific sort, not principles but skills, offers a concrete point of access. Getting a handle on riding a scooter is pretty much the same no matter where you do it, and language acquisition, though lengthy and trying, can be incredibly rewarding both in terms of convenience and genuine understanding: linguistic revelations often lead to other kinds of the same. Learning offers a chance to both take and expand, to preserve and focus inward by opening up to the world around you. Learning can offer immense satisfaction too, both in smaller doses and grander ones, when you’re done and have a new skill in your arsenal.

With learning under our belts, we tackle the slow process that is acclimation (and here, acclimatization too). When all is said and done, there’s no real climax or chase scene—there rarely is—just the slow and quiet revelation of what was already known. With this location in particular, it’s the truth that your first impression was right, but insufficient. It comes in the feeling that underlies the action, in the reasons learned and invented for courses already taken. The initial beauty is still almost as beautiful (and the color of the water in particular comes to mind), but now the stunned beauty of first contact joins with a small, warm feeling of possession and ownership to gain depth, and if not permanence, then at least durability. The narrative is no longer abstract (though it still might be just a little fictitious), but concrete. There will be a homecoming, and then all of a sudden, this particular story, without further obfuscation or philosophy from on high, will end.

In Harry Potter's Defence

For me, the most miraculous aspect of the Harry Potter series is how wonderfully and richly it grows. On the joy of its fantasy it is worth reading the first book alone, but as it develops, it proves its worth as something more than a purely imaginative object. Rowling is not one of the great English authors: let’s state that to begin, and furthermore let’s clarify the obvious superfluity of that fact. Harry Potter does not pretend to canonical status, so let’s not waste time detailing the ways in which Rowling is not, in fact, Henry James. These books are at heart a children’s series; they have the simple joys and ease of access that define them as such. Even as their world deepens and darkens, they retain to the end their ethos of youth, and I mean that as a compliment.

Rowling matures as a writer in time to make her characters mature as well, and the somewhat surprising result is that over the course of seven books, her characters grow as believably and as thrillingly as could reasonably be hoped, even exceeding that expectation to become genuinely surprising. Her world increases its complexities to provide the room for that growth, and it is a testament to the scope of her vision that it happens naturally, with grace and pride. It does not achieve the security of inevitability but strives for something else instead, blossoming into a myriad of possible routes, revealing both the tenuousness and the tenacity of that individual choice.

Harold Bloom seems to find in Harry Potter a lack of imagination, originality, quality writing and effective satire. On that last count, he is indisputably, incontrovertibly accurate: the series almost entirely forsakes the dark undercurrent of the societal psyche, and consequently fails utterly as a satire. The series chooses other roads of appeal instead, and other routes towards imaginative flight. The initial thrill of the first book is one of vicarious fantasy, a thoroughly imagined and enchanting fantasy. It is not wholly original, if we define original to mean without precedent. It does, to a certain extent, rest on cliché. But synthesis is a form of originality as well, and if done with skill and joy can be as much a success in its own way as the fabrication of something wholly novel. There is more than one kind of creative act, and Rowling’s imbues the clarity of familiar, straightforward ideas with a richness and depth that render the cliché immediate and the stereotype utterly believable.

Her writing has been disparaged. It is not flawless; as was stated before, her hypothetical status in the literary canon is self-evidently suspect. But she is clever, and genuinely funny; she is inventive in small, memorable ways, and her writing endearingly mirrors her subjects. It is not high English, with a capital E and an imperious voice, but keep in mind that these are children’s books, and after all, lord knows, when you’re a kid, what you really hunger for more than anything isn’t imagination or liberation but the ability to distinguish between finely nuanced layers of prose styles. This is not to say that children’s books should not be written well; they should. But there are different kinds of standards, and Bloom’s is not the one to which Harry Potter adheres. Difficulty certainly has its worth, but the value represented by difficulty can manifest itself in other ways as well. Not everything rests definitively on the apparatus of its presentation.

There is inherent and inextricable value to entertainment, value that justifies itself. Belittling Harry Potter for taking entertainment and enjoyment as one of its core values seems plain curmudgeonly. Looking at the series retrospectively and contextually undoubtedly has worth, but it misses out on the thrill of that first contact high and the exhilaration of discovery. Children’s books can sometimes be read intellectually, but doing so only helps to chart the architecture that lends the narrative its fundamental appeal. To read it on a critical level alone refuses to acknowledge the point; it seems only fair to do the series the favor of at least trying to enjoy it. For me, the books grow in value as the series progresses and its world grows richer, more expansive, and more real. Why subscribe to an economy of narrative when you can revel in magic and adventure instead? These books perhaps do not work to justify their existence as the sole arbiter of taste and intelligence, but they do not intend to. Few things exist in a vacuum, and partaking in one type of enjoyment does not preclude experiencing others as well.

And this, to me, seems to be at the core of Bloom’s critique: the Harry Potter books do not align with his particular conception of quality literature. It is at heart a top-down critique whose varied aspects can all be traced back to the notion of the Right Way to Do Things. Having only read part the preface to Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence (because that’s what’s available on Google Books), this is a mode of thought that underwrites his thinking there as well: singularity joined to pervasiveness, and a unitary judgment from which all things can be derived. There, it is poetic influence (this is admittedly a hasty judgment to make, but I’m all about making grand inferences from small amounts of information), while here, it is what literature should be. This is a notion that gets under my skin, because the consequent worldview renders everything a variation on a theme. There are compositions based on different themes as well, and ones that turn their back on a thematic world entirely.

The Harry Potter books are fundamentally and wonderfully good-hearted. Like the books themselves, their characters are flawed, but good. Redemption is offered, but it is realistic, not operatic. They are underwritten with a deep sense of belief in love and friendship, an honest faith that is not maudlin in any way, and that, to me, seems good. Unlike Twilight (and that’s a whole another article right there), their fantasy carries no insidious subtext. For all its whimsy and fantasticality, the series is deeply and warmly human. Reading them does not involve any temporary relaxing of standards or demeaning of morals, demanding instead that each hold steady to their beliefs, as it itself does with pride. Rowling’s narrative is no weaker because her characters are sometimes dislikable or irritating, even for long stretches at a time: I find it admirable that she is unafraid to present temporary abrasiveness because the overall arc is rendered that much more compelling.

Why read Harry Potter? Because it’s fun. Because as it grows and matures and reveals its almost incidental master plan, the extent to which it becomes affecting takes you by surprise. Perhaps it is not universally appealing (though book sales would seem to suggest that it is), and like many children’s books, it probably takes a particular kind childishness to enjoy fully. I like fantasy generally, and as in much fantasy, the success of Harry Potter’s particular brand depends as much on its ability to be extended in the imagination of reader as in the mind of the author. The world is fully realized on the page, but more importantly, off it as well. The series’ greater literary merit or endurance or sophistication or whatever may be up for debate, but I enjoyed every minute of those books.

Julie & Julia

This past weekend I saw Julie and Julia with my family, and aside from the movie itself (it's light, cheerful, and maybe just a little—albeit in a truly wholesome way—subversive), the most indelible impression left is, unsurprisingly, Meryl Streep. She is an unquestionably superb actress, capable of incarnating a pop-cultural deity in a way that supremely announces her presence as a performer by vanishing, deft and quick, into the icon herself, but even more than that, she is a professional. This notion is perhaps one of the few modern myths that I buy into almost wholeheartedly. The idea of the pro: someone who performs their function quietly and efficiently, with a minimum of fuss and a maximum of success; one of the most enduring and realistic cultural legacies of a capitalistic society, and one that I cannot help but aspire to. What is the seductiveness in this notion of the professional, of someone who is not just good at what they do but good at being good? It combines an ability that is just crucially short of being unearthly with a sense of direction and duty that is forever grounded in the task at hand. It is perhaps the focus that makes the difference, the unrelenting drive to succeed. But that only accounts for part of the equation, and moreover, is too romantic a notion by far. The lack of romanticism is part of the professional's defining characteristic, and in its place a kind of clear-sightedness that leads to the endlessly practical. A professional is never a dreamer, never a cynic, but instead a pragmatic idealist: a realist with a firm belief in the unending power of ability. Perhaps the declaration of the professional as capitalistic was overly hasty, as a Marxian work ethic does not seem entirely incompatible. But in feeling, a pro is entirely too individualistic, and too far at odds with any sort of immediate collectivism.

The professional is attainably heroic, and only as capable as he has the power to be. A significant part of it is the sense of traditionalism, seen in the individual's utter dedication to the mastery of a craft. In the traditionalism is seen the existence within a community of professionals, though those of the past and future can suffice. Is the professional an anti-revolutionary figure? Perhaps, as they are almost necessarily dogmatic. Innovation is inevitably inefficient; inventors are always amateurs. Whether actress or soldier or banker, somebody who does what they do well, and for no other sake than to do it. The professional is a kind of livable crucible, a negotiation between extremes that does not compromise but draws strength from the tension instead. Part of it is that they must remain in motion, and dedicated to the task: a professional without a profession is nothing at all. I think the professional is perhaps a paragon of immanent idealism, if such a thing exists: a materialism (they must be craftsmen, not philosophers) that gives rise to a religion, one that exists in tandem with but independent of its origins. To be good, to be great at what you do; to have something to be great at, and know it.