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In Reply to: "I just can't shake this feeling like a needless or cynical trick." posted by rhizomatic on April 19, 2004 at 10:17:41:
why all the fancy complications? There's nothing essential about 'a day in Dublin' that warrants digressions in nine different styles of English, or a fantastical ball attended by women named after trees.You're right. Ulysses wasn't just about a day in Dublin. And there are reasons for its digressions in style, and those reasons, though many would disagree, generally aren't (merely) self-indulgence.
It's made, it's in the world, the structure is essential by virtue of the fact that: that's how it's structured.
Then we need not have this board, critical discussions, or criticism at all. Because things are essential by virtue of their being what in fact they are. Why is Mel Gibson not protected by this same reasoning?
I think a better argument could be made that linear narrative is a cynical, needless trick. Every film should come up with a new structure.
I'd like to hear that argument. In any case, restructuring the narrative should serve some sort of artistic function, should, in my mind, serve the content in some essential way (as should linear narration), just as free verse should be more than prose arranged perfunctorily on the page. Maybe it does in 21 Grams. I don't see it, though I've already expressed a desire to revisit the film again to reconsider. Will I change my mind? I don't know. I've been greeted by invective and tautology so far, which hasn't done much to convince me otherwise.
Or, how about this: the connection people have to one another is inherently fractured and gapful;
Agreed. But does the structure of 21 Grams really work to this end?
a linear telling of the same story would come down to some trite, six-degrees nonsense. It's a fairly implausible premise if taken as a straightforward story.
I think that's possible, and that's why I'm suspicious that the structure, at bottom, serves merely to conceal this fact.
Fracturing the narrative pushes the allegorical function of things to the fore; we have to construct the action ourselves. Memory is fractured, thought is fractured, and the lives of the people involved were broken, and each of them were in fact trying to piece them together.
Neat. I'd like to see the movie you're describing. I just don't happen to think 21 Grams is it. That's my point. That's my criticism.
I could understand this suspicion that it's a 'cynical' trick if it had some 'cynical' end. But Mel Gibson didn't make it. It wasn't the creation of a load of studio hacks. So where's the cynicism?
But so what. The Passion has been made, it's in the world (this sounds so ... Biblical), and all its elements are essential by virtue of the fact that those are the elements of which it is comprised....
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Follow Ups
- "And Ulysses couldn've 'just' been about a day in Dublin..." - Bulkington 11:15:00 04/19/04 (7)
- Rendering a tin man a straw man - rhizomatic 12:03:35 04/19/04 (6)
- Re: Rendering a tin man a straw man - Bulkington 13:17:16 04/19/04 (5)
- Well, well, SCREW YOU THEN! - rhizomatic 13:25:35 04/19/04 (4)
- Man, take that shit OUTSIDE - Bulkington 13:31:21 04/19/04 (3)
- Hey, back off the Rhizman...he's only fooling...I think. One never knows about commies. (nt - dennzio 16:26:57 04/19/04 (2)
- Yep. But Bulkington is going to see the film at least once more! - orejones 08:22:54 04/20/04 (1)
- Give me time! - Bulkington 09:32:18 04/21/04 (0)
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