The term 'graphic novel' comes back into vogue
Comics creators currently avoid using the word 'graphic novel' in order to a) distance themselves from what might be perceived as a 'fad', b) claim 'authenticity' as ambassadors from a 'comics scene', c) bring back the word 'comics' instead, kind of like the way nerds 'brought back' the word 'nerd'.
Graphic novels 'make sense' now, economically and culturally. It has been comics' only way to 'break through' the alt mainstream (ie npr), first with 'maus' and then with 'ghost world', 'jimmy corrigan', and now 'bodyworld'. Dash Shaw is 'the future' in the sense that he is a young person 'pumping out' lengthy graphic novels with a manga mentality. Every book promises to be 'more epic' than the last, whereas most cartoonists imagine they will accomplish only 1 epic in their lifetime.
The 'zine' becomes main/altstream
I feel like Marjane Satrapi, Allison Bechdel, and other alt/mainstreamers will make zines in the next decade in order to a)'keep it street' and b)keep it high class. The graphic novel is like Whole Foods or NPR - it is the lowest common denominator of the educated class. It has become such a dominant class that it has become boring, and anything outside of this class is eagerly sought.
Marjane Satrapi offers herself as an easily accessible cultural commodity, like something from Trader Joe's. Just as she claims authenticity as a 'liberated other', she also claims authenticity as a cartoonist:
"chain smoking and rad, marjane satrapi kept correcting her interviewer to say 'comics' not 'graphic novel' because 'that is what people say to get embaressed bourgeois people to buy comics'!"
(via ocelot trot)
the zine is the perfect fetish object for this economy, the perfect flip side to the graphic novel. It allows people to 'go back' to a pre-internet age, when limited runs and silkscreened covers promised exclusivity and authenticity via capitalist interchange.
After Adrian Tomine completed his graphic novel 'Shortcomings' he decided to make a low-run minicomic. In an interview about this change he describes "going back to the format" and experiencing "the rawness" as a "liberating feeling". In the alt mainstream it is necessary to remind people that you represent your roots / your heritage / your scene.
The image loses influence
Critics who have been emphasizing 'the image' in comics in the past decade:
austin english
frank santoro
dan nadel
andrei molotiu
me
How long can this last? The past few years saw a 'Comics Are Not Literature' panel at San Diego and an 'Abstract Comics Anthology' released by Fantagraphics.
Feel like this meme is running out of steam.
Feel like the idea of 'images' as magical, self-contained entities will seem silly as tumblr becomes more popular.
people seem to think there is still something 'magical' about the creation of images, that there is some sort of 'truth' in the lines. especially in cartooning, everyone still thinks that quick, clear lines capture some zen-like reality or are revealing in the way that a signature is. I feel like it won't be long before people realize this is not the case. but I can also see a post-ironic fetishization of the 'artist' communicating his 'message'.
people will realize henry darger is ridiculous
Corporate becomes cool
Seems like this idea has been memed in the past, most successfully by Warhol, and has been building up in comics over the past decade. A rise of art collectives, an emphasis on anonymity, and renewed critical praise of comics created in industry conditions all seem to be leading to this point where the corporate model will become post-post-ironically cool. Less emphasis on the soy based inks used to make a comic and more emphasis on the success of the comic within certain demographics.
Can't believe Fantagraphics still 'gets shit' for having an erotic line of comics on the side. Feel like all publishers should have a cash cow that exists for purely exploitative means. Feel like Brandon Graham and Bryan Lee O'Malley 'get' it re the capitalistic/fantasy origins of comics. Feel like Japan *really* gets it.
Manga continues its cultural domination
don't really know much about this one. I hear the next generation of consumers/producers is 'obsessed' with manga. have seen a lot of manga influence in zach hazard, dash shaw, sam gaskin, and brandon graham.
Also:
everything goes online (where's the torrent for the new cf mini?)
the return of cinematic language in comics criticism
comics profit in the decade of 'trans'
comics homogenizes its subgroups: art, literary, manga, and web all cross-pollinate
decent comics criticism emerges in the mainstream
imgs by dave kiersh, cf, adrian tomine, aidan koch, grant, john campbell, jesse mcmanus, donald dixon (thanks gubia), Rumiko Takahashi (thanks, sam), zach hazard vaupen
54 comments:
awesome, think you are right on
you do realize that this all sounds like the ramblings of someone too obsessed with the place their work has in the world, right? when you start addressing claims of authenticity with people you dont even know that's where you lose me a bit. for instance, maybe the liberating feeling Tomine was talking about wasnt the 'rawness' of the 'zine' but the fact he just got done with a relatively strict schedule of working on one story in the same method over and over again and then doing promotional work for it and it felt good to be able to chase whatever ideas he wanted?
Speaking for myself, my emphasis on "the image" (if that's what I've been doing), has nothing to do with "the idea of 'images' as magical, self-contained entities." It has nothing to do with thinking "there is still something 'magical' about the creation of images." It has nothing to do with finding "some sort of 'truth' in the lines." It has nothing to do with believing "that quick, clear lines capture some zen-like reality or are revealing in the way that a signature is."
As far as I'm concerned, and as far as I can tell in general, abstract comics have nothing to do with any of these things.
more sam gaskin posts abuot lesser knwon comics! yay!
Needs more misspellings for that true HRO feel.
God damn you, Blaise! I am SO authentic!
@anonymous i am not questioning tomine's authenticity in suggesting that he felt nostalgia when he made a minicomic.
@andrei 'As far as I'm concerned, and as far as I can tell in general, abstract comics have nothing to do with any of these things.'
i feel like many people who make 'abstract comics' allude to abstract expressionism, which i think does treat the image as magical.
@sean 'damn'
this makes me want to crawl back in bed
Responding to your writing is like kicking a puppy.
"people will realize henry darger is ridiculous"
I must be from the future.
EPIC. For me, tumblr emphasizes the power of the anonymous image.
I think cartoonists and those who want to do "sequential art" are going to move more into animation actually. All these things you list may come to pass but think about the two examples of Shaw and Satrapi. Both are involved in animation to some extent.
Also, I think slide shows of still images, like a youtube video in a way, that connects with the author's online presence of web comics and links buy print comics will all co-mingle. It makes me think of Jamie Hewlett (Tank Girl, Gorillaz) and Kyle Baker who is also doing an animated TV show of his comic. As is Peter Bagge.
So, zines in vogue, etc sure, but in addition to all of the above. Not so insular anymore.
Yeah but Frank, once they move into the field of animation and outside the field of comics then the topic is no longer comics. I certainly don't take the Persepolis film into consideration when I think about what Satrapi has contributed aesthetically to the comics medium.
Sure, animation helps bring more exposure to it, but anything else is almost like saying the Spider-Man movies somehow say something about Steve Ditko as a cartoonist.
People move outside of comics for money. Plain and simple. There is no money in comics, everyone knows this. I'm fine with that. It's actually one of the things that keeps it so pure in my eyes. When I see comics, especially fringe comics I know that the artist is doing it for the love. It's one of the backwards and demented things about comics that make them so alive in my opinion.
I agree. I do think however that when cartoonists I'm interested in move into animation it is different than a property being turned into a movie. I still consider Miyazaki's films "comics" in a way.
The real question is, will what we think of as "art comics" go to the web over the next decade? While comics certainly went digital in the last decade, it was mostly straightforward humor comics. On the other hand art comics reached a new level of print-fetishism with a full on creative investment in the DIY arts culture.
Bodyworld was the first hint at aesthetically sophisticated comics carving out their own territory on the web, but who's followed Shaw example so far? You've got Forming, but from talking to Jesse personally for him it's more about being able to work in color on a regular basis. I think he ultimately wants forming to be a book.
Will the beautiful object fetishism of the DIY arts generation evolve over the next decade, or will the young artists discard it all together? It's worth noting that CF, someone whom this blog has explored as a huge influence on young artists, has almost zero web presence. Hell even paperrad.org has closed up shop!
I still think there are some major aesthetic limitations to digital art. Artists like control, and that includes context, size and scope, as well as texture. You can get those things with a zine but you can't with a website.
You're chasing phantoms through webs of associations. None of the premises are offered support. It's just kind of a paranoid and obtuse guessing game that has nothing to do with actual motives of anyone mentioned here, and everything to do with the anxiety young artists often feel because they have no idea what's actually going on.
It's really, really arrogant.
I've been around long enough to know that zines and minis and small press "objects" will survive for years to come. Cool. The thing that we low readership and low sales cartoonists and artists don't understand is the "where to go next" ceiling. I think someone like Kyle Baker is doing animation for money, yes, but also because he's just lapped everyone else in the business. It seems to me he's interested in doing both comics and animation and web comics, etc.
As for art comics on the web: uh, I consider my cold heat blog a zine and I think CF's blog is like a zine. Forming is totally like a zine. And now there is "whatthingsdo" dot com. So I dunno, it's happening.
I'm sure you'll come back and make some good points but I'm signing off..
post-oel amerimanga
"comics man" painting by donald dixon (okaysorry.com)
god, blaise is such an arrogant bastard
predicting the future is awful
especially when it involves children, comics and the potential for serious criticism of the comments section
atleast his predictions have a good one or two decades to come into flowering
atleast he is de-flowering commercialism
and re-flowering a good tale or two to tell
blaise is re-flowering comercialism
and giving us all a break
so we can fall asleep at our drawing boards
and not get pelted witb spit balls
(formed from bristol-shred and tobacco-shreds)
give the youngin' a break
and let him espouse his views gladly
i hate typos
i wrote five of the comments above, and detest modern civilization. read me as you will, be i'm here to vie for the destruction of all mediums and forms of productivity. i've got a couple volumes in my cupboard, aye, but they all pertain to recipes.
and all those damn fucking recipes involves captives and flayed natives. give me a country, i will flay them, and note them in a recipe book. i keep a separate book for people recently flayed.
don't take this post lightly. no grain of salt. what about a comparison between video games and comics? opposing ends of the technological path? but aye, similar ideological resources.
we have plenty of time to think, we do, out at sea. we have plenty of time to plan for the next narwhal or great white. but truly, we spend this time reading a complete, square-bound collection of "the sands" by tom hart.
it breeds nostalgia. we're caught in a coral flux with this sort of scrappy jump of form and content. when one of our brothers manages anything but an elegant cursive in our guestbook we reel back and hope a shark rears it's head. we could not hope for literature.
and neither should you....arrrr! or perhaps ye should. a peg-leg is the next variety of mini-comic, buy my own sorry estimate. it contains pulp, weight, heavy labor. not too many distinctions can a man make.
wait, and what about the internet? do they still make those sorry light boxes? is this santoro gent a bull-fighter? yarrrrrrr.....seems so.
i have a cape myself. if he's left the arena, my dance continues, but no point will i make. i'll just move slightly, and hope the bull takes me to a new realm, before the night falls, and i'm tempted by the wonders of females, lingering door-side. they do so love a man who has tempted sure destruction.
speaking as a woman, i approve of bull-fighting, good prose, substantial meals, and indistinguishable voices between participants in a loose "future of everything" sort of conversation.
if only we had a pile of lentils, a cart full of robert mccloskey, and a subtle dose of leo lionni, we could really make a mark.
not to mention sendak and scarry. i wonder what they would have to say?
speaking as a woman, i approve of bull-fighting, good prose, substantial meals, and indistinguishable voices between participants in a loose "future of everything" sort of conversation.
if only we had a pile of lentils, a cart full of robert mccloskey, and a subtle dose of leo lionni, we could really make a mark.
not to mention sendak and scarry. i wonder what they would have to say?
for the record, i think Blaise Larmee is a cool dude, and should continue his pursuits of absurd peer-praising, not to mention epic vaults of book-making.
whatta maestro!
JUST KIDDING, I PREFER JOE SACCO
actually, all is well in the universe
let's just continue with the books and shit
i think it's a good i idea,
all of this stuff
Is nonsense cool now, or something? Or is it just a certain kind of smug, knowing nonsense? Can I "meme" that? ( Wait, "meme" just means "idea" in the way it's used around here, right? What benefit does using "meme" offer? Hmmm...)
All this might feel good and "free" and all that— like you can take anything you read and apply it to anything that might pass through your head ( or do you call it "meme-space", or something? Has it been queered yet?) — but it's going to bite you all back when you can no longer feign relevance in a believable way.
I re-read the guys post. Really nothing stands up to even a basic read through, and any naive charm it might have is spoiled by the smarmy, arrogant tone.
@Frank -
I think the main difference between Bodyworld and the other webcomics you mentioned is that Bodyworld fully embraced the formal landscape of web design. The most glaring example of this is his complete discarding of the form of a "page". How am I supposed to believe that other long format webcomics have their heart in their media when they are still using pages as a formal device? Pages are a formal relic of books, it's like filming a movie on a stage. (Something that was also done during the transition from stage to screen.)
With Forming, Cold Heat, and the stuff on whatthingsdo.com I feel pretty confident that those comics would work better as books. With Bodyworld there is no way the book will be as good as the website. Isn't thar rule #1 of creating art, maximizing your medium?
All signs point towards a mass exodus to the web, but I really wonder whether or not young urban artists will actually embrace that. Not everybody has the Rozz Tox ethos of Dash Shaw. It seems like most young artists are pretty content making "art for artists", and as long as the gallery continues to be the nexus for what we consider "fine art" i think physical objects will continue to reign supreme in art comics.
@Everyone else -
Lay off Blaise. He's riding the whirlwind. If you don't like this kind of writing go read another blog. I can relate to Blaise, he's in a certain stage of his development as an artist, and one I bet every single one of us would love to be back at.
"..." = Rumiko Takahashi
or was "..." intended? Ah, well.
thanks @gubia @sam links are updated
I think that comics is a post-historical medium from its inception and that you're making hash trying to break it down into trends and "memes" like this.
Vlad: "comparison between video games and comics?"
'post-historical medium' can you clarify?
blaise:
It seemed to me that your approach to analyzing comics is kind of deterministic, as in the idea that there are certain trends that define a given moment in the development of a medium. I guess that would imply you believe in some kind of unified art-historical "progress" for comics, which I don't think is the case for any medium right now but especially not for comics, which as a commercial medium has never had an art history. Obviously, this is a simplification-- I would have to be kidding myself to think that you actually believe this. In fact, it's probably the case that your analysis of the aesthetics of comics in terms of "memes," and the whole idea of "memes" in general, is totally post-historical in that it wrenches aesthetic values or trends from the teleological or hierarchical structures that the great white cultural arbiters of the past kept them locked up in and throws them all together in a big pile, with the coolest ideas being the ones that end up on top . . . you know, like a Tumblr image blog, or "Pogs." It doesn't seem like this kind of analysis leaves any possibility of saying why some trends come to the forefront besides "some stick, some don't." I don't even care about the answer the question because I would rather put things together in a way that is meaningful to me, and try to express what that meaning is. It's still the same thing . . . just making piles. But I don't think there's a lot of potential for creating new meaning by worrying about these big trends.
@c-bren
to say that there is no trend in comics, that there is no "history" line, is ignorant. Of course not everything falls into a perfect line. There are always notable works that seem outside of the stream, but i assure you, comics has always been about trends. Even when it was a "commercial" medium. The importance of art history, and comics history is to take into account that things don't just "happen," people are influenced by each other. It is important. It's not simply, what sticks and what doesn't. There are many different streams and dialogues going on in this medium, and if you are interested in comics. If you have any respect for it as "Art" you should take note of the trends, pay attention, it will only serve you, and give you a better understanding of why things are the way they are. Everything has a history, no work is singular. I think your idea of "the coolest ideas landing on top" is a negative reaction to this moment. you can't see any furthur than the wall right in front of your face. At one time, everything that you like, or think is good, was "cool" and "hip" and seemed shallow, and was questioned. but now that it is buried in the past, it has gained value and acceptance. this is how history works.
-Ben Hughes
i enjoyed c. bren's comment
can you really say though that we're at a point in which there is one determinate fate of any medium? today the trend seems to be to re dig up artists from the past as new ones are making their way on the scene. it also seems that in hindsight there are a million unturned narratives in the history of 'art' and that the Western narrative was for a point in time the only one to talk about-- and much like western thought it then broke down the chronology of painting and art into one neat continuous strand.
however, this is not the case. 'history' is more fluid than one long stream. For instance, what about that 93 year old who is becoming famous now, the content of which is minimalism predating minimalism? or henry darger, an artist discovered in the seventies but popularized today? or something like 'Art out of Time' that takes artists from another era and recontextualizes them for another?
absolutely, there is not one stream of history. there are many different streams, and many overlap and jump ahead of each other in time. It is not neat. I have never seen any form of art history that is neat. To say that art history is showing you everything is also ignorant. It is only a tool to be used, it is not the end all, but it is something to be conscious of, and if comics will every be respected as a form, it should be conscious of it's history, which is very present (whether you like it or not) through our the medium.
-Ben Hughes
Carrie, are you kidding me? Not towards what you wrote, but that we don't talk about stuff like this in person, you goof. I had no idea!
Just to clear things up, the concept of a "meme" is not post-modern, post-structural or post-historic in origin. It's a concept developed in evolutionary philosophy and has nothing to do with the lineage of classical western metaphysics.
A lot of post-modern mumbo jumbo gets thrown around on this blog, so I wouldn't want anyone to get confused and think that memes have anything to do with it all.
@sam 'For instance, what about that 93 year old who is becoming famous now, the content of which is minimalism predating minimalism?'
i think people can look at their lives as an infinite amount of narratives, and one of those narratives can be an exclusively singular and dominant narrative.
otherwise, how could we tell a story?
"i think people can look at their lives as an infinite amount of narratives, and one of those narratives can be an exclusively singular and dominant narrative.
otherwise, how could we tell a story?"
I guess it's just me but that just sounds like dangerous pragmatic Western thought. I have far from a degree in sociology or have little experience in it, but I dont think that things are that simple anymore. it seems to me that when forming a narrative to be looked at in textbooks, it is about being 'objective' and defining moments on their absolute quantifiable terms.
however, as time as shown, very little is quantifiable. I think it's dangerous when talking about any practice to be pragmatic about things. what makes Western art so much more important? what is it about that specific obsession with the figure, or abstraction? or what makes the ipod a great innovation when design firms are making huge strides in industrial design for third world countries? these things have no quantifiable terms and are more likely made up out of socioeconomic circumstances rather than some kind of overall version of importance.
this is kind of offtopic, I know, and I'm rambling. But that's what's tricky about trying to be a shaman and predict the future. if you were in comics 10 years ago and you were super into art spiegalman and his crew, would you have ever predicted the huge explosion of japanese comics, let alone the profound effect of a technology not yet invented?
when you tell a story, you are picking one narrative. that's why there are stories about 'unimportant' things, like drinking coffee and taking dumps, and 'important' things like your first love.
Did I miss the part in this post where you became a 'critic' emphasizing anything at all?
I disagree with Uland's characterization of this as 'chasing phantoms through webs of association,' but only because that sounds kind of exciting, and implies a kind of pursuit that actually gives this kind of thing too much credit.
Or maybe: chasing phantoms isn't inherently interesting but it's better than chasing 'memes,' so just drop it!
I think chasing fantoms through webs of associations is futile. There is nothing that can sustain there, it's just random sensation, ultimately.
There is nothing to draw it out into terms related to how we actually experience life.
If art isn't for that, what is it for?
I feel like a lot of this language ( wherever it might derive from, Ian) is used to avoid the hard work specificity requires; of drawing coherent connections between A and B. I think the motives for that have a lot to do with wanting to avoid having to talk about real motives for making comics, reading them, etc.
I think if those motives don't reach toward some kind of real, coherent desire, they will never satisfy. You'll be trapped in those anxiety webs of phantom associations.
In that web, those that deal in more direct ideas about the human condition, and earn recognition for it, are viewed cynically; they're really presenting false fronts, and suckers are buying into it.
Their chief offense is in challenging you to do the same.You respond by attempting to reveal their *actual* motives, which are, of course, economic or social. This reduces them to terms you can deal in.In a way, it brings them down to your level, which allows you to feel some kind of empowerment, or a sense of mastery; not only do I know their motives, I know what they'll do next.You demand they become as incoherent as you are, which gives you a leg up, as you've affected terms that make it sound as though you're very secure there.
********
I don't really understand what the objectives are, around here. Is this all to help yourselves, and others, understand what you're trying to get at with comics?
That's a good idea, but I think you need to start at square one and write about your own motives.
This talk is so much salve on the wound; I think you need to air it out and risk infection .
I apologize for being over the top. This stuff riles me up.
Some of my the art I like best is about how humans experience and move through the world in a really direct, basic way. Examples would be John Porcellino or Johnny Cash. Then there are things like Grizzly Man or Pop. 1280 that are about "the human experience," but in a more mediated way. They're about how difficult it is to be authentic when the information assailing your consciousness is continually changing. But I also like works like Barthelme's short stories, Gary Panter's Jimbo in Purgatory, Teratoid Heights, Eno, Neuromancer, Duchamp, or Miracleman that are about creating a thing or idea where it didn't previously exist. These can be merely aesthetic (see my previous post on Jim Nutt) or viral like the Burrough's essay or religion - ideas that can change your perceptionnin a fundamental way, blow your mind, etc. Maybe this act of perceiving the world through the prism of a thick, oblique idea is also merely aesthetic. It may not satisfy the anxiety inherent in living, but it can make living more exciting, interesting, or simply bearable. As stupid as it may sound, when I think of the way William Gibson describes Laney's nodal apprehension in the Bridge Trilogy, I feel intense delight though I know it has nothing to do with the way things work in the world. It's just shiny and pretty.
I think Jason is on to something. It's the reason why post-modernism remains so popular amongst intellectuals, specifically when it comes to aesthetics. All the semiotics and word games and deconstruction, it's a type of poetry unto itself. Post-modernism, being the wildest extension of western metaphysics is like the highest form of fantasy. The implicit danger of it all is very exciting and inspiring to artists.
Doesn't mean it actually tells us anything about how the world works of course. On the other hand a discipline like evolutionary psychology, which actually tells us quite a bit about how the world works, even more specifically with how human experience and perception works, hasn't really made any inroads when it comes to aesthetics. Why is this? Because the world it suggests lacks the drama and poetry of metaphysics.
Artists want to believe above all else that their work means life and death. That art itself is perhaps the primary driving factor in the arc of human history. Old habits die hard.
I'm not trying to suggest that art is some kind of utility by which we explore the human condition, as in our direct experience of life. I used that term because I see that it work in Satrapi, and others mentioned here.
I do think that's ultimately what it's about, but that can take many different forms.
I see the attraction to that kind of language.It is mystical, in nature, but it's a neutered kind of mysticism; there is no possibility of transcendence.It demands revelation in the here and now, and the use of the language affects in the speaker the idea that that's been achieved.The language is the revelation. It really is the Emperors clothes.
It's like a kind of materialist/gnostic rite, but it reads like a list of symptoms, or a diagnosis, rather than a system of questions.
It's a lot like the language of modern finance and banking, imo. It's a willful repackaging of concepts into terms that effect greater profitability. In both, there is very little restriction that would bind the terms to actualities; it's bound only by the individuals' willingness to buy into it.
So, it ends in nihilism. In finance, it's in believing that there is no actual wealth, or in theory there is no binding reality that must be dealt in.
The bright side is that all of this causes anxiety.In fact, they both depend on the anxiety they cause to maintain relevance. Anxiety can only be aestheticized for so long before it results in suicidal nihilism. Luckily, human nature ( a concept a lot of this theory knew it needed to do away with as a first principle. Telling people tragedy is not implicit and that we could "progress" beyond it was a pretty easy sell ) usually has us look for ways out.One way is to acknowledge tragedy; that we really won't achieve the mastery over life as a mechanistic system that materialist ideologies promise us.
Part of me totally agrees with you, and I want to look for real, nourishing culture or experiences, but I also think that this is making the question too binary. When the I that is actually sitting here typing this right now has to deal with choices about what things he'll experience or culture he'll take in, it's way less philosophical. I read what is interesting to me, do what I think I'll enjoy. These high-falutin' ideas are just entertaining notions like Idoru is an entertaining book. They may be meaningless, but does that matter? Yes, the emperor may have no clothes, but just because there's a story with a moral, it doesn't mean I have to agree with the moral. And I think that maybe you're projecting a little onto Blaise. You are demanding that he become as concrete as you are, that he deal with language in a mechanical way instead of seeing it as only a map and not the territory. His post was just a joke. It's a satire of predictive lists. He doesn't know what's gonna happen anymore than the rest of us do. He's not that pompous.
I think if you pursue it like in order to appreciate "Western Culture", you have to abandon everything and move to a monastery, yeah, that is really binary.
I participate fully in modern life. I watch TV, I read novels, go to movies.
Before I became interested in this type of thing, I was critical of all of that stuff for certain reasons, now I'm critical for another set of reasons.
It's not like I'm suggesting you go become an apprentice to a classical sculptor, or something. I don't think that you have to reject everything outright.
I watch a film like Synechdoche, and I think it's an amazing film, but I see the kind of solipsism in Hayden Cotard/Charlie Kaufman as more of a symptom of something gone wrong than as an example of how things really are. He's a character that doesn't have anything to let his self be subsumed by, so he builds this cathedral to his self, and it's absurd and tragic that it won't cohere— not tragic because it's impossible for any of us to do so, as the film suggests, but tragic because we can't see any other possibility.
So, yeah, I think I'd have an easier time of it if I didn't have that critical tension with so much good stuff. I'd love to just get behind that film without a word, but in an odd way, that tension is much more interesting.It never lets you off easy.
I'm totally with you. Not sure if I like or hate that movie for the same reasons. Is it a description of an actual state of affairs or an elaborate game? I've been trying really hard lately to make work that's not just a po-mo game. On the other hand, I find the idea of authenticity dubious. I'm fucked whatever I do.
I really like the movie.I've watched it about 5 times now. I think it does offer some real tragi-comic insight. I think it's got to be more about writing life than living it, or the tension between those things. It's redolent of what I imagine David Foster Wallaces' endlessly looped and metastasizing internal monologues might've been like before he committed suicide.
Only seen it once so it's on my agenda. right on, re wallace.
hi, im Donald Dixon. you put one of my drawings in this article that you wrote. i have to be honest, i have no idea what you are talking about in this thing. maybe im just dumb. or maybe you are full of shit. who knows..
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