Wednesday, March 25, 2020

Coping

As I age, I find it more and more difficult to rank films that I love. I'm increasingly sensitive to the contingent, circumstantial aspects of watching movies. What if I'm tired, what if I'm distracted (all too true these days), what if ...? I can often project some sense of myself when I realize I'm not watching something in the optimal way--i.e., I can think, "I know myself well enough and I have seen enough films to have a quite reasonable sense that if I watched this movie (that I'm not really grooving with now) in a different headspace, with a slightly calibrated critical matrix, at a different time, I can see clearly how I'd appreciate it more."

It's one reason why filmmakers who can often be divisive in film culture, such as the Coen brothers, are challenges for me. I can see exactly why people love them, hate them, and everything in between.  Occasionally this multiplicity of responses is external: I have my own responses to a work, but I can see and comprehend different responses. Sometimes, however, I have more than one response myself and vacillate between two or more emotions, two or more interpretations, two or more criteria. Consequently I will have my own range of responses that run this gamut, and they will all feel equally genuine.

Now in my late thirties, I've accepted that this is just part of who I am. My twitter picture is the famous duck-rabbit:


And when it comes to keeping lists of favorites, whether for personal records or to contribute to a poll or something, it gets to be difficult. It's almost impossible for me to come up with a list of, say, my top ten films of the 1970s anymore.

Speaking of the 1970s, I've been watching some movies lately, including some from the master of Italian political narratives, Elio Petri. Todo modo (1976), based on a Leonardo Sciascia novel, explores the hand-wringing and factional in-fighting of the Christian Democratic party as they hole up in a stony, minimalist bunker while an epidemic starts to spread across Italy.




Petri's final film, Good News (1979), which meanders in mundane unpleasantness and uncertainty, prefigures the Peloton wife and presents sanitation breakdown as a matter of background detail, seems lighter than Todo modo, but more resigned.





Good News imagines life and political collapse as a kind of spectatorship (which is what it often feels like today).



Screens punctuate the film: hucksters, newscasters, pornography ...




... and then there's the slow build of things that go missing, like the trace of blood on a hospital bed that signifies a character's death.




And like Giancarlo Giannini's character in the film, I find sometimes that I might consume too much. It's possible to do. Since I have a job and have a "life," sure, I'm not a recluse who only watches movies, reads books, and listens to music. But I also do try to fit a lot of kulchur in the cracks of my precious leisure time. My backlog of "things to get to" is immense and insane and impossible.

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