From the ending of Decision at Sundown (Budd Boetticher, 1957)
Saturday, November 14, 2009
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Odd
Unsettlingly, I have discovered a film blog whose author also signs posts 'ZC,' and whose links list overlaps some with mine (how did I not take note of this blog before?), and who even sort of "scooped" me on a Night Mail comment by a year and ten days: compare, my doppelganger's and mine. There is even a long post on Dumb and Dumber, which is something that I would love to one day do. I don't know if the author of this blog, Precious Bodily Fluids, has ever noticed my existence, but here on out I shall traverse the blogosphere with a mild, but augmented, sense of unease ...
Monday, November 09, 2009
Say It Again, Sam
Unfortunate metonymic cliches in film writing -
- Gorki on the "kingdom of shadows" (quoted in 97.6% of all pieces on cinema's origins, as well as in 29.0% of all books of film theory).
- Brakhage on the child who sees grass but does not know "green" (mentioned in 94.2% of texts that ever mention Brakhage).
Other suggestions welcomed ...
(NB: All calculations strictly tentative and provisional, to say nothing of impressionistic and highly questionable.)
- Gorki on the "kingdom of shadows" (quoted in 97.6% of all pieces on cinema's origins, as well as in 29.0% of all books of film theory).
- Brakhage on the child who sees grass but does not know "green" (mentioned in 94.2% of texts that ever mention Brakhage).
Other suggestions welcomed ...
(NB: All calculations strictly tentative and provisional, to say nothing of impressionistic and highly questionable.)
The Early Work of the Dead
'Primitive' flickers.
"What we call the twentieth century ended in 1915. Those artists who survived the collapse of civilization at that point completed the work they had planned before then, when they looked forward to a century of completely different character. Joyce wrote his Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, both implicit in the nineteenth-century idea of literature. Proust, aware that tanks were crawling like monsters out of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne over the poplar-lined road to Illiers, completed his account of the world which the war obliterated as the brimstome Sodom.
"What the war blighted was a renaissance as brilliant as any in history which we can only know by the survivors and by the early work of the dead—the Alain-Fourniers (Battle of the Meuse, 1914), Sant' Elias (Monfalcone, 1914), Apollinaires (1918), Gaudiers." —Guy Davenport, "The Pound Vortex"
*
The archaic, in aesthetics, provides a wellspring. The very fertile period of the flowering of the late 19th century (which existed, depending on how you slice it, up until 1913 or 1914; also the same time as the emergence of the feature film), when cinema was new, found one kind of reimagination in the flicker films. "Failures" they were, perhaps, but transfixing and alluring failures more durable than ninety-nine out of a hundred cinematic "successes," I'd say. The history of audiovisual art & communication is seasoned liberally with attempts to reach a neutralization, a ground zero or originary moment, in the very medium that allows an image to come into presence. Always trying to go back home, or to revisit the old family's pantry, to scrape away layers of paint and get at the hardwood. Flicker films tried it; Rossellini tried it; television tried it (we will control the horizontal, we will control the vertical); I think what we see in instances of people or movements or moments conceiving of a productive erasure (or call it whatever) is that the pathways one might have meant to get to but didn't. Time passed, last year's paths got overgrown, and now one searches for them. Depending on one's philosophical outlook, and how far one travels, we could say that one looks for homeland, or a second chance, or simply a new adventure.
This is interesting to me because it crystallizes perfectly my own intellectual state. But whether I am intrigued by the aptness or the comparison or construct the comparison merely to correspond to my intellect still escapes me ...
Bureaucracy
Grids / Grids 2. The reconstitution of time by space: the history of art as the emplotment of images in succession as though history itself were a matter of cinema. To perceive a historical progression of forms presents itself as a problem to be constructed through space. Bureaucracy would aim to pulverize this impulse, eliminate the perceptual pathways for conceiving of these nodes.
Sunday, November 08, 2009
Pears, Plums, Tomatoes
Alone. Life wastes Hans Epp (the merchant of four seasons). He, like Heidegger, goes for walks a lot, and thinks. Like Visconti with the aristocracy, Fassbinder was a filmmaker with a great understanding toward the (his) petit bourgeoisie. Manny Farber suggested that physical discomfort is at the core of RWF's work; and indeed there are so many moments where his characters simply fall, utterly exhausted, meeting the ground as though it were their mother's womb.
Monday, November 02, 2009
Ley Lines
... or, cranks on the porch ...
... or, any resistant individualism's tragic neutralization into farce ...
"Entirely apart from any willingness to preach history according to the ideas of the Berlin party, or to turn the class room into a hall of propaganda, the whole method of this German and American higher education was, is, evil, a perversion.
"It is evil because it holds up an ideal of 'scholarship,' not an ideal of humanity. It says in effect: you are to acquire knowledge in order that knowledge may be acquired. Metaphorically, you are to build up a dam'd and useless pyramid which will be no use to you or to anyone else, but which will serve as a 'monument.' To this end you are to sacrifice your mind and vitality.
"The system has fought tooth and nail against the humanist belief that a man acquires knowledge in order that he may be a more complete man, a finer individual, a fuller, more able, more interesting companion for other men.
"Knowledge as the adornment of the mind, the enrichment of the personality, has been cried down in every educational establishment where the Germano-American 'university' ideal has reached. The student as the bondslave of his subject, the gelded ant, the compiler of data, has been preached as a summum bonum.
"This is the bone of the mastadon ...
... this is the symptom of the disease; it is all one with the idea that the man is the slave of the State, the 'unit,' the piece of the machine." (Ezra Pound, "Provincialism the Enemy," 1917)
*
"Clausewitz, at the beginning of his history of the campaign of 1815, gives this summary of his method: “In every strategical critique, the essential thing is to put oneself exactly in the position of the actors; it is true that this is often very difficult.” The difficult thing is to know “all the circumstances in which the actors find themselves” at a given moment, in order to be in position to judge soundly the series of their choices in the conduct of their war: how they accomplished what they did and what they might have been able to do differently. So, above all, it is necessary to know what they wanted and, of course, what they believed; without forgetting what they were ignorant of. And what they were ignorant of was not only the result still to come of their own operations colliding with the operations that were opposed to them, but also much of what was even then making its weight felt against them, in the disposition or strength of the enemy camp — which, however, remained hidden from them. And basically they did not know the exact value they should place on their own forces, until these forces could make their value known precisely at the moment of their employment — whose issue, moreover, sometimes changes that value just as much as it tests it." (Guy Debord, Panegyric)
*
"This is von Clausewitz shit: total fucking war!" (Gerard Butler's character in Law Abiding Citizen)
"This is Sparta!" (Gerard Butler's character in 300)
*
"Thus it does not seem that so-called nationalisation of property leads to ground rent and surplus value being effectively nationalised, i.e. belonging to the whole people. There is no essential difference, except that the bourgeoisie is no longer the exploiting class that receives the surplus value, but it is the bureaucracy which is granted this honour. Naville identifies nationalised property with socialist property, which seems to us neither too scientific, nor too Marxist." (Bruno Rizzi, The Bureaucratization of the World)
*
"Nothing 'matters' until some fool starts resorting to force. To prevent that initial insanity is the goal, and always has been, of intelligent political effort." (Pound, ibid.)
... or, any resistant individualism's tragic neutralization into farce ...
"Entirely apart from any willingness to preach history according to the ideas of the Berlin party, or to turn the class room into a hall of propaganda, the whole method of this German and American higher education was, is, evil, a perversion.
"It is evil because it holds up an ideal of 'scholarship,' not an ideal of humanity. It says in effect: you are to acquire knowledge in order that knowledge may be acquired. Metaphorically, you are to build up a dam'd and useless pyramid which will be no use to you or to anyone else, but which will serve as a 'monument.' To this end you are to sacrifice your mind and vitality.
"The system has fought tooth and nail against the humanist belief that a man acquires knowledge in order that he may be a more complete man, a finer individual, a fuller, more able, more interesting companion for other men.
"Knowledge as the adornment of the mind, the enrichment of the personality, has been cried down in every educational establishment where the Germano-American 'university' ideal has reached. The student as the bondslave of his subject, the gelded ant, the compiler of data, has been preached as a summum bonum.
"This is the bone of the mastadon ...
... this is the symptom of the disease; it is all one with the idea that the man is the slave of the State, the 'unit,' the piece of the machine." (Ezra Pound, "Provincialism the Enemy," 1917)
*
"Clausewitz, at the beginning of his history of the campaign of 1815, gives this summary of his method: “In every strategical critique, the essential thing is to put oneself exactly in the position of the actors; it is true that this is often very difficult.” The difficult thing is to know “all the circumstances in which the actors find themselves” at a given moment, in order to be in position to judge soundly the series of their choices in the conduct of their war: how they accomplished what they did and what they might have been able to do differently. So, above all, it is necessary to know what they wanted and, of course, what they believed; without forgetting what they were ignorant of. And what they were ignorant of was not only the result still to come of their own operations colliding with the operations that were opposed to them, but also much of what was even then making its weight felt against them, in the disposition or strength of the enemy camp — which, however, remained hidden from them. And basically they did not know the exact value they should place on their own forces, until these forces could make their value known precisely at the moment of their employment — whose issue, moreover, sometimes changes that value just as much as it tests it." (Guy Debord, Panegyric)
*
"This is von Clausewitz shit: total fucking war!" (Gerard Butler's character in Law Abiding Citizen)
"This is Sparta!" (Gerard Butler's character in 300)
*
"Thus it does not seem that so-called nationalisation of property leads to ground rent and surplus value being effectively nationalised, i.e. belonging to the whole people. There is no essential difference, except that the bourgeoisie is no longer the exploiting class that receives the surplus value, but it is the bureaucracy which is granted this honour. Naville identifies nationalised property with socialist property, which seems to us neither too scientific, nor too Marxist." (Bruno Rizzi, The Bureaucratization of the World)
*
"Nothing 'matters' until some fool starts resorting to force. To prevent that initial insanity is the goal, and always has been, of intelligent political effort." (Pound, ibid.)
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Visitation
I was not the first person to notice that (as I make my way through The Sopranos) the painting that adorns, in detail, the wall above Tony and Carmella's headboard is Pontormo's The Visitation. I did find it interesting, however, that this too is the same image that illustrates the cover of Jean-Luc Nancy's The Ground of the Image (Fordham UP). More later, maybe ...
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Enigmatic
In startling images ... a bed scene in The American Soldier recalls Love Is Colder Than Death (or is it Katzelmacher?), while Margarethe von Trotta narrates the basic plot of the later Fear Eats the Soul. Fassbinder was a fellow who knew a thing or two about how to bind together some crucial elements (bodies, rooms, identities, representations, dead time, icons, strangers).
The enormous importance of Heraclitus lies in the fact that he stated with the utmost resolution the unitarily enigmatic character of reality. The experience of opposites did not lead him to a dualistic vision of the world, for it was within the same thing that opposites fought and coexisted or, more precisely, it was the same thing that both was and was not. At the very dawn of Western philosophy, we find in Heraclitus the most resolute and profound negation of identity and the most rigorous formulation of the nature of transit, at once a process of passing from same to same and a persistence of what is in itself different, a restful transmutation and a transmuting repose. Enigma does not consist in change, in the possibility of something new; change is possible only on condition that the thing remains the same and, equally, the thing remains the same only on condition that it changes: sameness is the principle of transit and transit the principle of sameness. It follows that the diachronic dimension is inessential: the present is the true tense of the enigma. Things have been, and they become, what they are. It is in the synchronic horizon of what exists: it is in the reply of the oracle, in the sign given by the Lord of Delphi and it is in the word of the philosopher that all the wealth of explanations and developments, flections and declensions, past and future, are implicit and enwrapped. It is easy at this point to grasp the difference between fold and enigma: for whereas the fold contains only ex-planations, de-velopments, flections and declensions similar to the fold, resembling one another, enigma is the coincidence of antagonists, the concatenation of opposites, the contact of things that are divergent, and even the antagonism of things that coincide, the opposition of the concatenated, and the divergence of things that are in contact with one another. (Mario Perniola, Enigmas, trans. Christopher Woodall, pp. 18-19).
Much of the above is sheer nonsense, of course - if one presumes that language is so impoverished that it can only speak to us directly, purely, and never obliquely.
{ ... In our new apartment, the whirr of Lake Shore Drive provides a pleasant white noise when the living room windows are closed. When they are opened, however, the cars are loud and present. Just a minute ago, for once, all nearby traffic stopped, and with the windows open I heard silence ... }
The enormous importance of Heraclitus lies in the fact that he stated with the utmost resolution the unitarily enigmatic character of reality. The experience of opposites did not lead him to a dualistic vision of the world, for it was within the same thing that opposites fought and coexisted or, more precisely, it was the same thing that both was and was not. At the very dawn of Western philosophy, we find in Heraclitus the most resolute and profound negation of identity and the most rigorous formulation of the nature of transit, at once a process of passing from same to same and a persistence of what is in itself different, a restful transmutation and a transmuting repose. Enigma does not consist in change, in the possibility of something new; change is possible only on condition that the thing remains the same and, equally, the thing remains the same only on condition that it changes: sameness is the principle of transit and transit the principle of sameness. It follows that the diachronic dimension is inessential: the present is the true tense of the enigma. Things have been, and they become, what they are. It is in the synchronic horizon of what exists: it is in the reply of the oracle, in the sign given by the Lord of Delphi and it is in the word of the philosopher that all the wealth of explanations and developments, flections and declensions, past and future, are implicit and enwrapped. It is easy at this point to grasp the difference between fold and enigma: for whereas the fold contains only ex-planations, de-velopments, flections and declensions similar to the fold, resembling one another, enigma is the coincidence of antagonists, the concatenation of opposites, the contact of things that are divergent, and even the antagonism of things that coincide, the opposition of the concatenated, and the divergence of things that are in contact with one another. (Mario Perniola, Enigmas, trans. Christopher Woodall, pp. 18-19).
Much of the above is sheer nonsense, of course - if one presumes that language is so impoverished that it can only speak to us directly, purely, and never obliquely.
{ ... In our new apartment, the whirr of Lake Shore Drive provides a pleasant white noise when the living room windows are closed. When they are opened, however, the cars are loud and present. Just a minute ago, for once, all nearby traffic stopped, and with the windows open I heard silence ... }
Sunday, October 18, 2009
A Matter of Life and Death
A phantom walks into the room, sees a movie on the TV screen, perhaps initially wonders who these images of dancing people are for: characters, surely, but not just them.
A person walks into the room, sees the same movie, imagines the phantom (who appears, but was already there).
The phantom watches the person. Specters haunt a mechanized, rationalized, secularized world and we sometimes establish coordinates for ourselves by triangulating ghosts that correspond to on-screen triangles. Off-screen space, spatial and narratological pauses, are mirrors to some of the creepy, wonderful, deep and terrifying things that help us orient ourselves in a profoundly disorienting set of phenomenological stimuli.
"The specter is not simply someone we see coming back, it is someone by whom we feel ourselves watched, observed, surveyed, as if by the law: we are "before the law," without any possible symmetry, without reciprocity, insofar as the other is watching only us, concerns only us, we who are observing it (in the same way that one observes and respects the law) without even being able to meet its gaze. Hence the dissymetry and, consequently, the heteronomic figure of the law. The wholly other—and the dead person is the wholly other—watches me, concerns me, and concerns or watches me while addressing to me, without however answering me, a prayer or an injunction, an infinite demand, which becomes the law for me: it concerns me, it regards me, it addresses itself only to me at the same time that it exceeds me infinitely and universally, without my being able to exchange a glance with him or with her." (Derrida, in conversation with Bernard Stiegler, Echographies of Television)
Friday, October 16, 2009
Friday, October 09, 2009
Sunday, September 27, 2009
Friday, September 25, 2009
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Extract
Judd Apatow is like a clumsy cartoon elephant, laughing at his own flatulence & drunk to the point of being painfully sentimental, trampling over piles of money he's made. Though he doesn't necessarily know it, Mike Judge is like this elephant's put-upon zookeeper, trying to explain why the beast behaves like he does. Both are 'poets of contemporary America,' if we understand that the America in question involves endless strip malls, traffic jams, prolonged adolescence, dismal wage (and salary) slavery, needless sexual frustration, McMansions, Mom's basement, and a constant casual interface between folks who do illegal drugs, folks who do legal drugs & folks who say they don't touch either.
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Victims or Masters?
On the Huffington Post, just a hair under half the readers who participated in the informal poll endorsed the multiple choice option (to the question, "Is It Acceptable Behavior To Interrupt A Reporter During A Live Report?"):
Absolutely not. If a journalist is doing a report live from a scene, they should be allowed to do their work without being shouted down or interrupted.
Indeed. This "absolute" right (the identification with the media, and with government) is where one draws a line between the left who conceive of actually-existing state power and its scaffolding as 'We,' a magisterial prerogative upon whose sanctity no mere peon can encroach for any reason ... and the left who conceive of it as a tool, at best, and a potentially dangerous one in addition. Obviously I have no political affinities with those who attended this "Values Voter" conference. Even so. The relation of these reporters to the people at the event strikes me as the relation of an imperial functionary toward provincial burghers. The latter, far from "shouting down" reporters, and trying to prevent "word" from reaching the public of "their event" (alternately insisted upon by the press as a matter of media rights & a matter of self-interest that the values voters are too stupid to recognize: ahem, media's noblesse oblige), at least showed decent manners in these clips.
Saturday, September 19, 2009
A Taste of Madison Avenue
I have recently watched the first season of AMC's much-acclaimed Mad Men. There are many compliments that can be paid to this show, compliments I endorse, but first I would like to express that I share more than a little empathy with the Siren's verdict:
"Such laughs as "Mad Men" affords are tethered to hindsight--"We never indulge in such sexism/racism/anti-Semitism/homophobia now, and even if we do, we sure don't smoke."
Back in those Good Ol' Days, something like clothing was considered valuable if it was durable, classic, if it lasted. Today, you can still get good custom tailoring, but a lot of expensive clothing is simply cheap. Fashionable: merely fashionable. The same sort of thing applies, just a bit, to the case of Mad Men. Very fine, very professional production values. Such good ones that they deserve more than the faint praise I'm giving them here. At the same time I feel like they're being used to hide a certain fundamental cheapness in the film's manner, a mercenary and cynical (but, due to the show's success, perhaps not inaccurate) understanding of its' viewers' minds. In the first episode, when new secretary Peggy (Elisabeth Moss) is being shown the ropes by Joan (Christina Hendricks), the latter explains as she unveils the "new technology" (an electronic typewriter) that it looks complicated, but they made sure it's easy enough for a woman to use. (It's missing a rimshot, which of course would be tasteless, but that's all it's really missing. The show provides a surfeit of moments like these.)
Who wouldn't, shouldn't grimace at this undignified gesture toward the enlightened viewer's very ... enlightenment? 'Ah, they were so sexist, so myopic, so unhealthy, so milquetoast, so closeted, so repressed, so hypocritical, so lacking in self-awareness.' And in 50 years the popular art of tomorrow will no doubt disparage us in ways that are unfair and self-congratulatory. C'est la vie (in an idiocracy). For one thing: Mad Men is good, but it's not even close to Tashlin's critiques. It remains exquisitely tasteful, on the surface, and ultimately middlebrow. Therein lie a few of the problems.
I use the term 'middlebrow' with a bit of a damning connotation, I admit, but only to continue to discussion, not to stall it. I have tried to understand just what it is about the middlebrow that causes some of us to struggle. Here, it's not that I think 'middlebrow' as an end result is the issue, but (if anything) the path that leads to the issue. Let me suggest one diagnosis: the reason middlebrow culture is tough for some of us to take is because it sets the bar for humanity too low, but then expects us to hover precisely at the height of that too-low bar all the time. Middlebrowism is fiercely intolerant of both the gonads & of magnificence. Of course, that's a harsh judgment that needs some leavening. Let's keep in mind that Raymond Durgnat wrote his great book A Mirror for England on the middlebrow British cinema, specifically to defend it even; and something like The Sopranos, which I'm also catching up with on DVD, may be a tad upmarket, but remains thoroughly middlebrow too. And it's excellent. Bertrand Tavernier is, or was, a middlebrow arthouse favorite, but Dave Kehr and Carloss James Chamberlin are two critics who've backed him, and most directors in this world surely haven't made a film as good as either The Passion of Beatrice or Capitaine Conan. The list goes on.
What strikes me in the current Age of Quality Television (not like Norman Lear's 1970s, or the classic days of old Ernie Kovacs, who's still better than anything on television I've seen, as well as most things on the big screen) is the relation to the symbol. Because we are, presumably, detached post-existentialist quasi-ironic consumer-viewers, in the 21st century (the convergence century), we cannot always take a symbol. So this is how tasteful narratives—I suppose—develop symbolism now. They take something and then make it an object of explicit or implicit contemplation for one or more of the characters. Recall: the geese in Tony Soprano's pool (season one), or in Mad Men, the pigeons & their relationship to meek wife Betty in the episode titled "Shoot." Wary of what we'd recognize as a symbol, cautious of a con job or of the exposure of stunted faculties from our high school lit courses ("in The Scarlet Letter the A symbolizes..."), we tasteful viewers demand not to be confronted with any overt symbol, but to treat them obliquely. The characters themselves bear a relation to a symbol ('birds'), ponder out loud or through their behaviors the significance of such birds ('freedom'?). Nobody then is forced to make an interpretation they take too seriously because the act of interpreting is oblique—it's for them, not for us.
How unaware they are, right?
"Such laughs as "Mad Men" affords are tethered to hindsight--"We never indulge in such sexism/racism/anti-Semitism/homophobia now, and even if we do, we sure don't smoke."
Back in those Good Ol' Days, something like clothing was considered valuable if it was durable, classic, if it lasted. Today, you can still get good custom tailoring, but a lot of expensive clothing is simply cheap. Fashionable: merely fashionable. The same sort of thing applies, just a bit, to the case of Mad Men. Very fine, very professional production values. Such good ones that they deserve more than the faint praise I'm giving them here. At the same time I feel like they're being used to hide a certain fundamental cheapness in the film's manner, a mercenary and cynical (but, due to the show's success, perhaps not inaccurate) understanding of its' viewers' minds. In the first episode, when new secretary Peggy (Elisabeth Moss) is being shown the ropes by Joan (Christina Hendricks), the latter explains as she unveils the "new technology" (an electronic typewriter) that it looks complicated, but they made sure it's easy enough for a woman to use. (It's missing a rimshot, which of course would be tasteless, but that's all it's really missing. The show provides a surfeit of moments like these.)
Who wouldn't, shouldn't grimace at this undignified gesture toward the enlightened viewer's very ... enlightenment? 'Ah, they were so sexist, so myopic, so unhealthy, so milquetoast, so closeted, so repressed, so hypocritical, so lacking in self-awareness.' And in 50 years the popular art of tomorrow will no doubt disparage us in ways that are unfair and self-congratulatory. C'est la vie (in an idiocracy). For one thing: Mad Men is good, but it's not even close to Tashlin's critiques. It remains exquisitely tasteful, on the surface, and ultimately middlebrow. Therein lie a few of the problems.
I use the term 'middlebrow' with a bit of a damning connotation, I admit, but only to continue to discussion, not to stall it. I have tried to understand just what it is about the middlebrow that causes some of us to struggle. Here, it's not that I think 'middlebrow' as an end result is the issue, but (if anything) the path that leads to the issue. Let me suggest one diagnosis: the reason middlebrow culture is tough for some of us to take is because it sets the bar for humanity too low, but then expects us to hover precisely at the height of that too-low bar all the time. Middlebrowism is fiercely intolerant of both the gonads & of magnificence. Of course, that's a harsh judgment that needs some leavening. Let's keep in mind that Raymond Durgnat wrote his great book A Mirror for England on the middlebrow British cinema, specifically to defend it even; and something like The Sopranos, which I'm also catching up with on DVD, may be a tad upmarket, but remains thoroughly middlebrow too. And it's excellent. Bertrand Tavernier is, or was, a middlebrow arthouse favorite, but Dave Kehr and Carloss James Chamberlin are two critics who've backed him, and most directors in this world surely haven't made a film as good as either The Passion of Beatrice or Capitaine Conan. The list goes on.
What strikes me in the current Age of Quality Television (not like Norman Lear's 1970s, or the classic days of old Ernie Kovacs, who's still better than anything on television I've seen, as well as most things on the big screen) is the relation to the symbol. Because we are, presumably, detached post-existentialist quasi-ironic consumer-viewers, in the 21st century (the convergence century), we cannot always take a symbol. So this is how tasteful narratives—I suppose—develop symbolism now. They take something and then make it an object of explicit or implicit contemplation for one or more of the characters. Recall: the geese in Tony Soprano's pool (season one), or in Mad Men, the pigeons & their relationship to meek wife Betty in the episode titled "Shoot." Wary of what we'd recognize as a symbol, cautious of a con job or of the exposure of stunted faculties from our high school lit courses ("in The Scarlet Letter the A symbolizes..."), we tasteful viewers demand not to be confronted with any overt symbol, but to treat them obliquely. The characters themselves bear a relation to a symbol ('birds'), ponder out loud or through their behaviors the significance of such birds ('freedom'?). Nobody then is forced to make an interpretation they take too seriously because the act of interpreting is oblique—it's for them, not for us.
How unaware they are, right?
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