Counterculture, my ass!

"Forget the term indie. Forget cutting-edge. There is no such thing as originality in our times. In fact, modern life is marked by the repressed ambition of the masses to become ordinary. Look at your peers, most of them consume anything the media labels alternative. What a waste. Everyone is obeying the same command, yet they are convinced they are following their own desires. Just as modern mass production required the standardization of commodities, our social life took the same route. We call ourselves the so-called rebels, while actually we are working for the powers that be!"

—A friend's over-the-top speech on counterculture today, which strangely amused me and predictably reminded me of FIGHT CLUB (David Fincher, 1999)

Death and dames in film noir

Film noir is one grim joke. The butt of the joke is the male protagonist. He is trapped in a Kafkaesque world, where he is subjected against two fascinations: death and dames. Both transfigures as the two poles that render his life absurd and meaningless. Both conversely play different roles. Death is the sad finality that wrings his private lives. Everytime he is about to prove his worth, death comes knocking and undoes all the good works he has done. Dames become the only resort for him to gain control in his troubled life. Only in love, he could  make sense of the world around him. Women conjures in him the initiative to create something. Unfortunately, in film noir, death and dames is one cruel cycle. After death, woman. After woman, death. Our hero is never fully redeemed.

—A paragraph I wrote as a side note for my final assignment, inspired by several existential literatures and DOUBLE INDEMNITY (Billy Wilder, 1944) 

Saying I-love-you is an evil thing to do

I-love-you has no usages. Like a child’s word, it enters into no social constraint. It can be a sublime, solemn, trivial word. It can be an erotic, pornographic word. It is a socially irresponsible word.

I-love-you is without nuance. It suppresses explanations, adjustments, degrees, scruples. In a exorbitant paradox of language, to say I-love-you is to proceed as if there were no theater of speech, and this word is always true. It has no other referent than its utterance: it is only a performance.

I-love-you has no “elsewhere”. It is the word of the dyad, both maternal and amorous. In it, no distance, no distortion will split the sign. It is the metaphor of nothing else.

I-love-you is not a sentence. It does not transmit a meaning, but fastens onto a limited situation: “the one where the subject is suspended in a mirrorlike relation to the other.” It is a hollow phrase.

I-love-you, though spoken billions of times, is outside our daily vocabulary. It is a figure whose definition cannot transcend the heading.

—A passage from Gilles Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy, which reminds me of the menage a trois in THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING (Philip Kaufman, 1988)

The sexual politics of seeing

Society sees men and women differently. Both has their own way of being. A man’s existence is connected to objects outside himself. A man becomes significant if he could do things that are considered significant in his environment. If not, he will be considered either useless or eccentric. Therefore, a man could engineer his value among his peers. He could pretend to do things he could not, and still looks important.

Pretense however does not work with women. A woman’s existence is limited to herself. A woman’s identity is manifested in her gestures, voice, opinion, expressions, clothes, and tastes. For a woman, identity is a very intrinsic issue. Therefore, what women do is always judged against themselves. The judge is either society or the woman herself.

The problem is: when a woman is born into this world, she is also born into the gaze of men. Imagine this: a woman is walking alone in a cafeteria on lunch hour. one of her buttons comes loose, and everyone gets a glimpse of her bra. Her best friend grabs her and points to what seems to be the focus of interest. she feels ashamed. the question is: does she feel ashamed for not being careful enough, or for being seen half-naked by men in the cafeteria?

Like it or not, women turn and treat themselves as spectacles. It is a well-kept tradition that has been going on for generations. From early age, women are taught to watch themselves continually. Speaking softly, drinking quietly, dressing properly: these have been several of women’s daily concerns. How a woman appears to others defines what can be done and what cannot be done to her. The appearance of a woman signifies how she wants herself to be treated.

Unfortunately, the proper appearance is not women's to decide. They are men’s. What men consider acceptable becomes the guideline for women to behave properly. After all, mothers always taught their daughters that the acceptance of men is the crucial factor for success in life. Society merely reproduces that belief as a general unconscious consensus.

To gain some control in this unfair game, women utilize the trick of manipulation. Women manipulate their appearance to be as close as possible to what men consider acceptable. Through her constructed presence, women fool men and themselves to get what they need and want. Such a life divides women’s way of being into two roles: the watcher and the watched. Women watch themselves being looked at, men define what is worth to be seen, and women see themselves from the eyes of men. This way of seeing not only determines the relation between men and women, but also women to themselves.

—A re-edited old writing on the state of woman, to some extent inspired by BROKEN EMBRACES (Pedro Almodovar, 2009)

Self-disgust is self-obsession, honey

For people who consider me important, I am the spark they will dearly miss. Yes, I am significant, but only a spark.

—A late-night conversation with a friend, and a good enough reason to watch ANNIE HALL (Woody Allen, 1977) for the 57th time

Of melancholy and dazzlement

“Here I was born, and there I died. It was only a moment for you, but you took no notice.”

—The infamous quote of VERTIGO (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958), immortalized in SANS SOLEIL (Chris Marker, 1983)

"Meeting people is easy,...

…holding onto them is hard.”

—A line I scribble on some cigarette box, inspired by a documentary about Radiohead, MEETING PEOPLE IS EASY (Grant Gee, 1998)

Which came first: memory or misery?

Romantically speaking, the unhappiest people I know are the ones who like remembering the most. I don’t know whether failed memory has caused this unhappiness, but I do know that they’ve been remembering their sad memories longer than they’ve been living their lives.

—An old note I found while cleaning my room. Must be inspired by HIGH FIDELITY (Stephen Frears, 2000)

Socialism today

A Stalinist prays for third world liberal-tolerant intellectuals:

We practice solipsism and call it cosmopolitanism.

We’re enjoying leftist pornographic parlance and call it political correctness.

We celebrate reactionary politics and call it counter-culture.

By rioting and slacking and culture-jamming and being punk (all in vain), we are only narcissistically amused by false ideas of doing serious blow to the Party nomenklatura and call it anarchism.

We’re totally rejecting enlightenment and progress and call it multiculturalism.

We are only too incapable to employ class analysis, organize workers, thus wage a full-scale class war and call it cultural studies.

We have been totally out of touch with reality due to our enormous wealth that we only pretend to share with the less fortunate and call it liberalism.

—A friend's parody of Billy Graham’s prayer. It reminds me of Julio and Tenoch from Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN (Alfonso Cuaron, 2001)

Forget morality, aim above mortality

You once said to me, that you wanted to see monuments of my ideas. I guess I am the monument, a living monument, complete with my loss and failures.

—A text message from a friend, which instantly brings back images from HAROLD AND MAUDE (Hal Ashby, 1971)

The whole and its parts

Love letter is a fragment of its writer. When writing a love letter, people think about one part he or she wants to expose.

Meaning: they who write love letters are exhibitionists.

—An excerpt of my essay about love letters, inspired by 2 OR 3 THINGS I KNOW ABOUT HER (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967)

Social status determines the lovely and the lonely

U, two years ago, in an all-male boarding house, drunk: 

“I guess I don’t stand a chance. She is in possession of three things I’d never have: academic grades, money and faith. We are three worlds apart.”

M, not-so-distant past, on the second floor of a library, caffeinated:

“I really like films about a poor guy going after a rich girl. Somehow that mirrors what I am going through now: masculine inferiority complex based on class difference.”

—Testimonies of then-lovestruck friends that echo in my head, while I’m watching ONE HUNDRED DAYS AFTER CHILDHOOD (Sergei Solovyov, 1975)

Happiness is a zero-sum game

“The first image he told me about was of three children on a road in Iceland, in 1965. He said that for him it was the image of happiness and also that he had tried several times to link it to other images, but it never worked. He wrote me: one day I’ll have to put it all alone at the beginning of a film with a long piece of black leader; if they don’t see happiness in the picture, at least they’ll see the black….”

—The opening narration of SANS SOLEIL (Chris Marker, 1983)

The Garden and the Tower

I once read a book called The Garden and the Tower. It is an obscure literature, written by a priest-cum-linguist Jew by the name of Peter Stillman. Rumor has it that the book is now out of print, and no attempts have been made to reprint the book. I am lucky enough to find a copy in a used book store near my house.

In his one and only book, Stillman argued that the Fall of Man is the turning point for the development of human language. The Fall of Man is the event when Adam and Eve is discharged and forbidden to set their feet ever again on the blessed soil of Eden. His examination relied heavily on John Milton’s Paradise Lost. It is an 17th-century epic poem that is divided into ten books. The poem chronicles the journey of Adam and Eve from their birth to their dismissal from the Eden. In his analysis, Stillman focused on the line it was out of the rind of one apple tasted that good and evil leapts forth into the world, like two twins cleaving together.

What fascinated Stillman was the word cleave. In linguistic terms, the word cleave is inherently paradox. It has two contradictory meanings: to join together and to break apart. For Stillman, this paradox reveals the contradictory nature of the whole book. Each key word in Paradise Lost has two meanings: one before and one after the fall. The former is characterized by its freedom from moral connotations, while the latter is distinct by its awareness of knowledge of evil. Therefore, it was only after the Fall that mankind as we know it came into being. For if there was no evil in the Garden, neither was there any good. Language before the Fall, as claimed by Stillman, is the purest thing human ever invented.

Based on his findings, Stillman concluded that Adam’s real task in the garden had been to invent language. Born into a world of purely divine creation, Adam was basically an innocent being. His mind is nothing but a blank sheet of paper. In that state of innocence, his words had revealed the essences of things. In naming things, Adam was not troubled by knowledge and moral consciousness, because he knew nothing. He spoke only what he desired. The first sensation he felt became the name of things that gave him the sensation. In short: before the Fall, one word was only good for one thing. There were no such things as double meanings.

The purity however did not last long. Devil came into play and through his intervention, the first humans evolved into knowing beings. Knowledge bred suspicion, and suspicion bred shame and disgust. Adam and Eve began to rationalize things around them, and failed to see things as they used to do before the Fall. Their body sans clothes became their first source of shame. Before the Fall, nakedness was fine because human had not been plagued by morality. After the Fall, this was no longer true.

The story therefore records not only the Fall of Man, but the Fall of Language. Knowledge became the knife humans use to detach names from things. A word now could easily lead to different layer of meanings, according to its uses and gratification. For Stillman, this brokenness of language is most apparent during the Tower of Babel episode. The tale is the last prehistoric incident in the Bible. The tower was built by a united mankind of one language and speech. Men at that time desired to be the equal of God by building a tower high enough to poke the heavens. This desire enraged God. As divine punishment, one third of the tower sank into the ground and another third ravaged by fire. The survivors were cursed by the spell of forgetting. Whoever looked back upon the ruins of the tower would forget everything. Many looked back and lost their language.

Stillman claimed that the damage is irreversible. For a long time people have been creating new words, words that never belong to the vocabulary of the first humans. The only way to undo the fall is to undo the Fall of Language. Stillman assumed that one must recover the state of innocence within, either through divine interventions or metaphysical means, then one could learn to speak the original language of innocence again. However, until the end of his life, Stillman never really found out how such state could be reached.

For his failed attempt in finding the wayback to the state of innocence, Stillman left a gloomy note for us: Our freedom is a joke. We will be free once we have died from the shackles of language and measurable time.

—A shaggy dog tale, that I wrote after watching PERSONA (Ingmar Bergman, 1966)

If white america told the truth for one day, its world would fall apart

“Heavenly Father, we come before You today to ask Your Forgiveness and to seek Your Direction and Guidance. We know Your Word says, Woe to those who call evil good, but that is exactly what we have done. We have lost our spiritual equilibrium and reversed our values.

We have exploited the poor and called it the lottery.

We have rewarded laziness and called it welfare.

We have killed our unborn and called it choice.

We have shot abortionists and called it justifiable.

We have neglected to discipline our children and called it building self esteem.

We have abused power and called it politics.

We have coveted our neighbor’s possessions and called it ambition.

We have polluted the air with profanity and pornography and called it freedom of expression.

We have ridiculed the time-honored values of our forefathers and called it enlightenment.

Search us, Oh God, and know our hearts today; cleanse us from every sin and set us free. Amen!”

—An American friend citing Billy Graham’s prayer, which strangely reminds me of DR. STRANGELOVE (Stanley Kubrick, 1964)

Revolution is indeed the opium of the so-called intellectuals

Your plan for a revolution is nothing, but a long dirty joke. Don’t blame us for not believing in your ideology. Blame yourself. Blame your ideology for not believing in us people.

—An angry note I wrote for a friend, while struggling sleepily through NIGHT AND FOG IN JAPAN (Nagisa Oshima, 1960)

Non, je ne regrette rien

“What a sad and beautiful situation we are in. I am sad, you are beautiful.”

—A line I scribbled after watching PUNCH DRUNK LOVE (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2002) for the fourth time

On deathly desire

“If free will does exist, then every death should be considered as suicide.”

—A friend quoting her friend’s facebook status to explain MABOROSI (Hirokazu Koreeda, 1995)

How I learned to stop worrying and love the girl

I believe every love affair hinges on a trilemma. There are always three things at stake: personal honesty, sincere support of the relationship, and intelligence. You could only commit to two, but never all three. If you are honest and smart, you are not supportive of the relationship. If you are honest and supportive, you are not very smart. If you are smart and supportive of the relationship, you are surely not honest to yourself.

—A grim joke with a friend after watching 500 DAYS OF SUMMER (Marc Webb, 2009)

Us

I named you amnesia. Silhouettes on a black background, dreams in your green room. Let’s just call it Norwegian Wood for today. Tomorrow we might be Joel and Clementine, because you didn’t answer me when I asked you the time of our death. You never expect us to be there.

You named me hysteria. Still knives in a empty homeground, smiles in my white room. Let’s just call it Sputnik Sweetheart for today. Tomorrow we might be Tomas and Tereza, because I didn’t answer you when you asked me the name of our birth. I always expect us to be there.

We could still work it out.

—A prose inspired by ME AND YOU AND EVERYONE WE KNOW (Miranda July, 2005). Dedicated to a former significant other, forever ago.