“I’m sorry officer I’m too busy smoking to hyper-speculate”

About a year ago, when it was decided that my wife and I would move back to the US, I began to devour healthily any and all information I could about the US economy; catching up on the state of affairs back home. I felt it important to know just what I was getting myself back into and moreover what in hell had gone so wrong in the first place to create such dire conditions. The main culprit, as I have grown to conceive of it by wading through small daily doses of economy and capitalist theory, seems to be the practice of speculation. The actual figures or quality of items and work are no longer the deciding factors in investment or success; prices are set and decisions are made based purely out of trust and what one possibly could dub a process of hyper-speculation. Just ask the governments who based their budgets this year on exorbitant oil price that subsequently fell through the floor. Bets of this nature are common place and if a bet is wrong then things go to hell for the players involved; funny enough I’ve come to see a similar tendency within this topical series I have been writing about over the course of the last few weeks.

What  the logic of speculation has to do with this series is simple; the same type of mentality and tendency has begun to rear its ugly head in a place where it definitively does not belong. A great deal of news and info pertaining to cultural items such as upcoming film releases consist mainly of a glut of speculation, information and rehashing of pictures and trailers that try and guess how the film will turn out even before its first screening. There exists hardly any patience or restraint to reserve judgment until after exhibiting the materials, and one can definitely not, as I have previously posted upon, exhibit semi-objectively with a clear mind.

It is perhaps one of the macabre sides of postmodernism; we are there before we get there. We go on vacation first through the travel brochure, and then follow someone else’s trip. Some of us think the Stature of Liberty is closer to Brooklyn Bridge then it actually is because it appeared that way in a film. Finally now through pure and utter hyper-speculation, minus even someone else’s walked path, interpretation of distance or well founded review, we formulate our opinions on music, films and art in general that no one has yet to actually feast upon.

This year when I sat down and made a list of the films I had missed from 2008, I realized that it’s a full-time job for a person truly interested in culture to keep up. To obtain the essences present in the varying works and to be able to fully appreciate something and learn all one can from it requires a great amount of concentration, attention to detail and comparison to what one has carried with himself into the process. With all the opportunity that surrounds us to learn from an already released piece of literature or art I find it funny that any one has the time to participate in speculation. Perhaps someday soon we will experience our own cultural recession caused by over speculating that forces us to make whole sale changes. To focus on what matters; what is already here bearing down upon us. It’s one thing to stand outside a burning building and frantically scream that it’s on fire, another to run in and save someone and finally to be part of the crew putting out the flames. One of the three positions does not belong; it has simply parasitically attached itself there feeding off from the body of the spectacle.

Now that I have started to write about film I’ve naturally sought out the opinions of others, to aid my research, blog, and in general to juxtapose my thoughts. This intake of opinions coupled with a small conversation I recently had about film criticism led me to the importance of articulating another aspect in this overall series, namely to criticize the critics. I wracked my brain over the last few days and have found an appropriate clarification or at least a point of departure to open the matter up to debate. I included it under this series because it underlies some of the other points I have previously discussed and moreover most certainly impacts future posts in this series.

I’ve read and participated in many debates as to why criticism and review in any field is important, it “attempts” to impartiality give advice and help consumers pick the proper way to invest their resources in cultural products. To buy or not to buy, that is the question! The issue however is what makes any of our modern critics, especially the anonymous glut of those writing reviews on IMDB or on blogs such as this one, appropriately expert enough to slag off something they couldn’t in a million years improve upon? What in fact gives anyone the right or ego to say, matter of factly, this movie, song or art piece isn’t worth a piss? How does one’s own subjective opinion carry that much weight? How or why are we so easily swayed by an opinion formulated by another?

The answer is found in the death of universalism. A great intellectual friend of mine once explained that he thought the death of universalism occurred when nuclear scientists essentially possessed the knowledge (albeit specific knowledge to their field) that carried with it the potential to impact all of mankind. Up until this point the requirements to achieve this large of an audience were monumental, requiring years of interdisciplinary learning and study; spots typically reserved for brilliant philosophers, writers and other driven individuals. When this aforementioned fact became apparent, that scientists possessed such powerful knowledge, a fragmentation was created. No longer would the majority of societies intellectuals strive to be knowledgeable in all things, they could simply focus on just one thing in an attempt to become “impactful” or experts. This fragmentation however created a much larger need for something else, it necessitated a go between or “body” that appropriately could relay or choose for all the fragmented “experts” what was important on any given day in an attempt to fill them in and allow them to focus entirely on their pursuit. This de-emancipating body of course is the modern news media, which now extends onto the internet and the blogsphere.

This explanation is important as it explains why most reviews don’t really convey anything; they are simply journalistic and fragmented, and lack any kind of concrete theory. They stem from individuals that now exist, write and analyze from the void created when universalism fell. They attempt unjustly to tell people who are too busy with their individual fragmented pursuits how to think about things; very rarely making any attempts to put films into a larger discourse. As a classmate proposed to me, maybe we as critics, reviewers and theoreticians need to build the future of “criticism” upon a much more focused attempt at understanding the reason and reasoning behind any given film, to become more universal in our understanding of films and art in general; to cease with the shortcuts and reviews that only explain away our own individual shortcomings.

I recently read a very simple blog post, included in the newspapers “youth” section, describing in colorful summary the recent changes to the music industry. It got me to thinking, these changes are not only occurring in the music industry but in our entire culture, that this young man’s description on the music industry is applicable to a much larger, overarching change.

I remember in 2005 sitting at a university lecture about music appreciation, as part of an interdisciplinary communications course, thinking to myself how the future was going to look. I knew then that the mere fact of having access and or so many outlets to find new music was going to change the entire face of the industry, things were already in motion. The pure fact that I could download, illegally or legally, pretty much any album/track I wished caused my musical tastes to increase tenfold. I didn’t conceive of it then, as the aforementioned article in the local news does now in depicting the current state of affairs, that artists must now perform again. It is no longer acceptable to produce a studio album and have some talented producer “spruce” up the vocals/tracks; you have to sing for your supper, you have to be “talented”. Creating a much larger demand to see musicians live.

I have witnessed and continue to witness the benefit of these changes; qualitatively superior music that is cheaper, and my own willingness to attend concerts because the music is as it’s meant to be there. Everything is somehow more real or tangible. Top 40 radio, CDs and the predictability game have been slain; it is no longer possible to “push” music to the passive masses as they have become active. More so then losing profits on record sales (it’s been suggested this is a contemporary fallacy, now staunched) it is the loss of the power of predictability that angers and scares record company executives more so than anything else.

Sometimes ideas, like the ones presented on music in the paper, eerily coincide with information and debate found elsewhere in other adjacent areas of cultural life. The latest issue of Sight and Sound magazine addresses the film industry in a similar manner, the columnist Nick James suggests that UK based filmmakers might want to consider lobbying for lower ticket prices to combat the tide of illegal downloading of films in the country. To me his suggestion is all too familiar and widely applicable; it reminds me of precisely the same set of similar circumstances in 2005 pertaining to music. A quick educated guess is that film lags behind music simply because of broadband speeds, that if we hearken back to 2005 it took forever to get your hands on films you were looking for and then to download them, compared to now when it takes about 10-20 minutes (not to mention HD streaming), fast approaching the now instantaneous delivery of music, that was then precisely as film is now.

The film industry, just like the music industry, has suffered from qualitative problems from its product to its distribution methods. Both areas of interest I believe are now in their death throws. Living in Sweden where films are released months after their premiers elsewhere in the world provides illumination as to one reason for demand pertainting to downloading pirated films; it is of necessity in order to keep up with the global contemporary “lunch room” discussion that have migrated to the internet. This demand and activity shows that supply is not keeping up, distribution methods are far too archaic. There remains then the issue of availability of quality films; a scan of the local movie theatre, if you don’t live in a major metropolitan hub, will typically reveal limited choices that internet piracy does not suffer from. One can find the discussions online and then find the films just a few clicks away, removing the element of force feeding the “predictability complex” successfully acomplished when communication and mobility were a premium. In the end if the film industry is hemorrhaging money then I guess its acts and actors will simply have to begin performing once again, to sing for their supper, or improve upon the exhibiting experience.

I was prompted this morning to respond to a question provoked by Andreas as to where the next breed of film makers will come from, via the blog he writes for on filmstar.se. I say provoked but really his post reminded me that I wanted to write a similar post, having been goaded to do so on many accounts by various sources these past few weeks.

To be more exact, the details of Andreas blog post were, if the likes of Dalí, and Buñuel came from art school and if in the 90s and 2000s directors/auteurs seemed to stem from the world of music videos (Michel Gondry, Spike Jonze, David Fincher) tuning their craft there, then where will future directors come from? One of the examples Andreas provided, Michel Gondry, is again connected to a post I have been meaning to write the last few weeks pertaining to two of my favorite “one cut” videos Gondry directed in the 90s. Something I see as a bit of a highlight amongst the otherwise barren cultural landscape then, so I’ll kill two birds with one stone here:

Lucas‘s “Lucas with the Lid Off”

And Massive Attack‘s “Protection”

The response I conceived of to Andreas’ blog post, is that I don’t think these future auteurs will come from any set institutional setting at all; furthermore it is my hope that this will come to fruition as I have described as it is an extremely positive thing for culture in general. There are several key points to my response, the first of which I will present in the rest of this post, the others in subsequent post under the same heading, in effort to “divvy” things up a bit for my readers.

The fact is that the ability to record a film, create music, develop a picture, and communicate through art in general has become far less resource intensive then it used to be, a fact that seems to perpetually accelerate with technological advancement. A few illustrative examples here are, for starters, this article I read last year pertaining to Eskil Steenberg’s ability to both creatively and technically create a video game world completely on his own coupled with this video on vimeo.com that showcases what can be achieved on a relatively low priced Canon HD video camera and some digital video editing software,

These examples are not to state that one person can create something on par with what traditional institutional settings still can provide for (based on total resources), but they do showcase where skill sets can be trained and worked out, and that is simply where ever one wishes, dependent only upon ambition and drive. They also illustrate one other key fact that, as is stated in Brooks Landon’s essay, “Diegetic or Digital? – The Convergence of Science-Fiction Literature and Science-Fiction Film in Hypermedia“, it becomes increasingly possible for an artist or director, in what otherwise has been largely considered group formats, to have complete and total artistic control. Which has unheard of implications for the creative future of something such as film, music and computer gaming.

There was a time a while back; sometime late in that horrific period called the 90s, where it seemed, at least to me, that Kevin Bacon whipped out his “schlong” at very inappropriate moments. It was like a mutated form of the 80s mandatory tit shot. At any rate I’m here to tell you that Frost/Nixon (2008) is totally safe for people with penile phobia, and not half bad to boot.

I enjoyed Frost/Nixon mainly because I don’t know that much about arguably one of the most controversial/vilified American presidents of all time, nor had I ever heard of David Frost. To this extent it’s all well appreciated news to me. I also thoroughly enjoy the “lack” of action in Frost/Nixon, the emphasis instead placed upon dialogue and acting prowess. I suspect for this exact same reason some people will not enjoy the film, finding it to be dull and slow moving. However, then again I’m not so sure who would be expecting that, based upon the title of the film, in the first place. The supporting casts of Kevin Bacon, Sam Rockwell and Oliver Platt are excellent along with the two lead roles.

The real key gripe I do have is not with the film itself but its 5 Oscar nominations, specifically the one for best picture. That Frost/Nixon is there and The Wrestler (2008) is not, is to put it bluntly, “a fucking travesty!” That doesn’t diminish this film but it is out of the 5 nominees the one that least belongs, essentially stealing the spot from Aronofsky’s film.