The problem with many otherwise perfectly good science fiction movies is the way it splits the audience. It's that point where something happens on screen completely at odds with science or history or the mundane course of human perfidy ("Bond, I will tell you exactly how my scheme works before I kill you"), something totally insane. The majority of the audience will at that point shake their heads and proclaim that all science fiction was ever thus. Another small minority will actually start chewing on their own fists. That decisive moment happens in the new MIA video at the 6:50 mark, at which point one realizes that these antagonists want neither food nor money nor information nor revenge. They are a fantasy before which we are rendered utterly aesthetic, utterly helpless, like Obama T-shirt silkscreeners:
M.I.A, Born Free from ROMAIN-GAVRAS on Vimeo.
2 comments:
I think David Denby had a similar thought:
Alfred Hitchcock used to complain about moviegoers who refused to yield to the pleasures of narrative. “The plausibles,” he called them—viewers who, rather than enjoying one of his stories about two ordinary people caught up in some sort of sinister affair, would nag at minor details or ask, “Why don’t they call the cops?” To narrative filmmakers, the plausibles ask the wrong questions and make the wrong demands. They should care not whether a thriller is absolutely consistent but whether it gives good, nasty jolts.
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/cinema/2007/06/11/070611crci_cinema_denby#ixzz0o3OyPRlG
Yes. That's an idea he got from Pauline Kael, a very popular idea, and a big part of the problem with the way the fantasy of movies are perceived. The cultural stereotype of the nerd is that she's up there asking William Shatner why, in episode such-and-such, he was wearing an epaulet on his left side but in a later episode it was worn to the right. She may deserve a wedgie, it's true, but you can't say she isn't taking pleasure from what she's doing. In speculative stuff, even speculative agitprop like the MIA video, the inconsistent narrative--we're not talking about veracity, here-- is a betrayal of that pleasure, just as if, in a romance, the leading man were to belch in his partner's face after the big kiss. The pleasure-loving New Yorker critics always, always get this wrong when it comes to reviewing science fiction.
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