The imbecile, philosophy and cinematography
This is the English version of an older article (Imbecilul, filosofia si cinematografia) which was recently mentioned. Sadly the original loses a lot from being forced into a language with an inferior vocabulary, but what's to do.
It is said there's nothing more dangerous than an educated fool. This saying is true.
On the recommendation of the same cinematic nymphomaniac which we won't mention by name again as you know her I looked at The Pervert's Guide to Cinema, written and read by Slavoj Zizek (directed by Sophia Victoria Twisleton Wykeham-Fiennes, an irrelevant dumbass).
I had forgotten how annoying it is to try and follow English spoken as a second language by eastern Europeans. It is horrifyingly annoying, not a single vowel is correct, all the syllables are bitten, all the words are chewed, after two hours of such treatment you get a headache (the documentary weighs at two hours and a half - they seem five). I had forgotten how annoying it is to watch amateurs speaking for the camera, jerking in all directions, swirling like leeches in water for no apparent reason but in fact desperately trying to ease the anxieties and terrors provoked by the happenstance that oh noes! recording! It's very, very annoying.
That aside, the theoretical basis of the documentary consists of some basic notions in representation theory. At the level of an introductory class (maybe even principal in a smaller university intended for the needs of the intellectually mediocre children of poor parents) they're perfectly acceptable. The Freudian-feminist-communist perspective probably would delight confused youths. A solid string of banalities, in the end, some fragmentary but present comprehension of partial truth, in sum a collection entirely sufficient for the mass market in this niche.
I won't bother to discuss them, I've neither the inclination nor the patience to retrace for the thousandth billionth time the revelations of sheep, enslobbered over the endless, forgotten generations. I will however underline the problems, because that's what amuses me.
Firstly, it must be pointed out that theoretical feminism is an exercise in imbecility. I understand that the evident, marked inferiority of the female gender, repeated q.s. during two to three millenia of cultural evolution yielded recently a sort of revolutionary travesty, in which we play-pretend that it ain't so, but on the contrary. I've nothing against the idea, it's even amusing, a little trollage hurt no one ever. Still, it may be worth pointing out that the idea is a) very, very tired already and b) always and everywhere a game. Nobody ever took it seriously. We've been pretending we're wearing socks on hands and gloves on feet a few moments, to see "how it is", to be free spirits and to take into consideration alternatives, we've played, we had fun. It's ok. But those who take play seriously are generally ridiculous, at thirteen or at thirty-three or fifty-three.
In the verbiage of the narrator the feministoid aberrations bother something fierce, perhaps because the theme is so serious as to put in a very, very cruel light the infantilisms of "limitations" of men and "desperation" to catch up to women etc. To be very plain : the only path to joy open to women involves men. The only raison d'etre of women is men. The converse does not hold, men can live for the world, or for abstractions, or for other men, or for women and their progeny or even for the self. Women can live for the self if they masculinize mentally to the point of autocastration, but can not live for anything else except for and through men.
The above, by the way, is not ideology and is not a theoretical proposition, it's not a sort of antifeminism, it's not a construct that could be put on the same footing as feminism and eventually compared to it. The above is a superstructure of feminism, with which feminism can never be compared in exactly the same way a random dream can not be compared "equally" with theoretical mechanics or string theoryi, and at the same time it is truth so raw and so banal in its immediate evidence so as to make it not worth arguing for or about, such being an exercise even more pathetic than feminism, which at least has that bit of ludic and homo artifex, "looky what great sandcastles we can make". Perhaps equally pathetic would be to sit at the entrance of a cave screaming "the echo doesn't exist" so that the echo doesn't exist.
Secondly, it must be pointed out that whosoever pretends to intellectual life and draws his structures of representation from Marx and seriously references Stalin is implicitly an imbecile, the approximative equivalent of an anthropologist who builds his research atop quotes from F. J. Gall, or an endocrinologist who states his diagnoses in humoral terms. Such may pass as a joke, a subversion, something Dali-esque, with chances of working among people subtle enough to take it as such. Otherwise it's ridiculous to the degree of sad, almost funebral, "here lies a brain fried on the spits of academic mediocrity".
Thirdly I wish to thickly underscore that the author is an idiot when it comes to pornography. Let it be plainly stated that stupid dualities of the ilk of "either emotion without exposing physiology, or else physiology without emotion", spoken with the airs of enunciating truths beyond the world sensible are so fucking ridiculous as to overwhelm words. The only reason porn screenplays are poor is because people don't bother, as they know there's no actresses capable of good work in porn, and this because a bunch of mediocre idiots and imbeciles, well represented by the mediocre idiot speaking, educated generations of women with this idea, ridiculous as it's stupid and besides false, that it's "bad" to expose their cunt in public.
Fortunately these idiocies died, killed precisely by the generation to which I take pride in belonging to. As such, good movies in which sexuality has its normal and deserved place, exposed in its entire nude mechanical physiology are starting to crop up. Soon enough the so-called "pornography" and the so-called "cinema" will fuse, and we will for the first time enjoy film in the proper sense (no, footage in which sexuality fails to appear represented through its physiology is not, nor could ever be a film, it's dumb pigfodder, useful at the most to illustrate the flaws of a troglodyte time, and of the troglodyte populations that moved it, limply).
In the fourth place I will insist on specifying just how much an imbecile one'd have to be to take something like Dogville seriously. That thing's an exercise, it means and exists strictly as homework, and can not be taken for a film. The author finds himself approximately in the position of a sculpture "conaisseur" trying to buy the fire extinguisher, or the depiction of evacuation routes in case of emergency. To flail your arms in a tizzy about how Dogville makes us feel who knows what and similar nonsense is, again, ridiculous. Fortunately this is the zenith of nonsense, and the rest of the discussion does not show equal selection and comprehension capacity.
Finally, the examples are poorly chosen, which is in the end the curse of any theoretician, where by "theoretician" we here mean an apprentice, brought to the blackboard by the professor to explain what he knows. The result will necessarily be an imbalanced picture of the subject matter, given that every disciple will speak of what he knows, and avoid what he didn't read, doesn't remember, hasn't comprehended and never understood. It might suffice for a PhD, but little else.
In short, it's an interesting documentary if you're entirely clueless in the field, and otherwise it can be a laugh, if you know your way around it. And if you're neither experts nor clueless, it is rather a dangerous object.
But as there's no gain without risk, I say go right ahead. There's certainly naught more you can lose besides your own life.
———- A pun in Romanian, as coarda could mean chord and therefore string, but also whore. [↩]
