Against my better instincts I watched SpringBreakers. I can't imagine many worse films and yet, for all that, I watched it to the end. Not just because I wanted to kill time, but what, then?
Why do you think you have an inexhaustible reservoir of good instincts that can be drawn on at will? Goodness is a habit, a way of looking (which means, of course, not looking as well), being surrounded by reminders, refuges, good people. There are stories you don't want to hear, that will do you no good if told to you. One of the biggest cons of late capitalism is the notion that greater availability (of books, music, images, information, etc.,) necessarily leads to greater character, knowledge, depth.The 'globalized' soul that must be everywhere, see everything, taste everything.
One can be drawn to the darkness. That much is obvious. What is less obvious, perhaps, is the appeal of seeming harmless drivel, the background hum that drains meaning away or that produces boredom, a grey indifference. The soul wants to be lost in daydreams, diversions, fantasy; it wants to meander, escape, doodle, take delight in its 'unknowingness', the way in which we slow down, stop, and gawk at the site of an accident, the mangled bodies in a crash, a natural disaster. The paradox being, of course, that this can sometimes serve creativity. What would be without the magnetic draw to what lies beyond us?
But there are ways, then there are ways. It goes without saying that in the absence of organized religion and practices the training of the defences is left, by and large, to the individual and to families. But what they're up against, first of all, is the pervasive idea that to talk of 'defences' in the first place is a sign of repression, dismissed as a throwback to 19th century prudery. This is not, you suspect, a legacy of the 1960s (weren't the '20s similar?). There are probably at once more specific factors and more general factors at play: the dynamics of capitalism and its determination to transgress all boundaries, to erase the very notion of frontiers, barriers; the general human desire, from day one, to resist definition, to break the mould winter has cast).
Spring Break, a rite of passage, a way of "finding oneself" by losing oneself: disrupting the humdrum and predictable patterns of one's life and cracking them open. We're drawn to Utopias where personal responsibility floats away ("lighten up, dude"). Is Utopia always an island, a pleasure island? [In a post capitalism world, a communistic fiction, there is no more labour or toil, just fishing and reading books..at last, art for art's sake]. Is there always a juvenile element to them: to distance oneself from the all-seeing eye of one's parents, God and society. No-one will judge you because you will just be a gleaming body under the sun, a body whose desires know no conflict, restraint, or guilt. I want it and I want it now, glide over here...
The film itself is full of the most awful cliches. I can't believe it wasn't made by a ten-year old.. Much is made of the slow-mo of heaving bosoms-no doubt a cynical attempt to bolster sales-but the real core of it, the nihilism, is portrayed in so fake a manner that you wonder just how superficial and nauseating can Hollywood get.
I could have-and should have-been reading Transtromer in that time. Cool, dispassionate, eagle-eyed...more an image-maker than a wordsmith (at least in English translation). Which makes you think: we suffer not just from an excess of images but, also, from a lack of the right type. There is a kind of nihilism involved in the proliferation of images, in the attempt to erase our judgement by saturating our senses, inch by inch. It is, paradoxically, akin to the nihilism of the iconoclasts. There are deserts in California, there are deserts in Saudi: a false austerity and a false infinity, both unbalanced, signs of disequilibrium, the cave in the heart and the virtual world equally unreal.
Today, more so than at any other time, we need ikons, or what Simone Weil once called 'bridges'.
Why do you think you have an inexhaustible reservoir of good instincts that can be drawn on at will? Goodness is a habit, a way of looking (which means, of course, not looking as well), being surrounded by reminders, refuges, good people. There are stories you don't want to hear, that will do you no good if told to you. One of the biggest cons of late capitalism is the notion that greater availability (of books, music, images, information, etc.,) necessarily leads to greater character, knowledge, depth.The 'globalized' soul that must be everywhere, see everything, taste everything.
One can be drawn to the darkness. That much is obvious. What is less obvious, perhaps, is the appeal of seeming harmless drivel, the background hum that drains meaning away or that produces boredom, a grey indifference. The soul wants to be lost in daydreams, diversions, fantasy; it wants to meander, escape, doodle, take delight in its 'unknowingness', the way in which we slow down, stop, and gawk at the site of an accident, the mangled bodies in a crash, a natural disaster. The paradox being, of course, that this can sometimes serve creativity. What would be without the magnetic draw to what lies beyond us?
But there are ways, then there are ways. It goes without saying that in the absence of organized religion and practices the training of the defences is left, by and large, to the individual and to families. But what they're up against, first of all, is the pervasive idea that to talk of 'defences' in the first place is a sign of repression, dismissed as a throwback to 19th century prudery. This is not, you suspect, a legacy of the 1960s (weren't the '20s similar?). There are probably at once more specific factors and more general factors at play: the dynamics of capitalism and its determination to transgress all boundaries, to erase the very notion of frontiers, barriers; the general human desire, from day one, to resist definition, to break the mould winter has cast).
Spring Break, a rite of passage, a way of "finding oneself" by losing oneself: disrupting the humdrum and predictable patterns of one's life and cracking them open. We're drawn to Utopias where personal responsibility floats away ("lighten up, dude"). Is Utopia always an island, a pleasure island? [In a post capitalism world, a communistic fiction, there is no more labour or toil, just fishing and reading books..at last, art for art's sake]. Is there always a juvenile element to them: to distance oneself from the all-seeing eye of one's parents, God and society. No-one will judge you because you will just be a gleaming body under the sun, a body whose desires know no conflict, restraint, or guilt. I want it and I want it now, glide over here...
The film itself is full of the most awful cliches. I can't believe it wasn't made by a ten-year old.. Much is made of the slow-mo of heaving bosoms-no doubt a cynical attempt to bolster sales-but the real core of it, the nihilism, is portrayed in so fake a manner that you wonder just how superficial and nauseating can Hollywood get.
I could have-and should have-been reading Transtromer in that time. Cool, dispassionate, eagle-eyed...more an image-maker than a wordsmith (at least in English translation). Which makes you think: we suffer not just from an excess of images but, also, from a lack of the right type. There is a kind of nihilism involved in the proliferation of images, in the attempt to erase our judgement by saturating our senses, inch by inch. It is, paradoxically, akin to the nihilism of the iconoclasts. There are deserts in California, there are deserts in Saudi: a false austerity and a false infinity, both unbalanced, signs of disequilibrium, the cave in the heart and the virtual world equally unreal.
Today, more so than at any other time, we need ikons, or what Simone Weil once called 'bridges'.
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