Sunday, 17 May 2009

Fiction from Fiction

Whilst watching Synecdoche: New York I became aware that I was looking for a message; or rather, the message. 'What is this all about?' a worried voice within me urged. 'What can it all mean? ... maybe becoming aware of looking for a message is in fact the message ... '

Synecdoche is a bewildering experience, due in part to the way it consistently pulls the rug from under your feet, time and again denying the passive comfort of an overarching 'message' to make sense of things. It made me think of how often we watch a film with this expectation; that, when the film ends, we will have had some kind of truth imparted to us: from the film - the active party, the one with something to say, something to tell - to us, the undergraduate, eager to receive. Which isn't to say that Synecdoche is lacking in truth; in fact, the opposite seems to be the case - it feels like it is bursting with truths (as many truths as it has characters, which, including extras, is a lot), firing off in all directions, and often cancelling each other out.

Synecdoche is a time bomb for the mind, its detonation sending thoughts colliding into other thoughts in an ever-increasing flurry of synapses. It left me feeling excited and full of energy and ideas. Through refusing to pin down a meaning, to point towards one path and say 'here, this is it!', it entertained possibilities, allowing the mind to explore numerous avenues of thought. Its possibilities engendered discussion, and the chance of more doors being flung open.

Its characters think, but they think for themselves, not for us. In this sense, the creation of meaning is in our hands; fiction compelling fiction.

Psychologist James Hillman describes this refusal to pin down meaning - to make it practical - as 'entertaining ideas': "For ideas to be therapeutic, that is, beneficial to the soul and body politic, they must gather into themselves, garnering force, building strength, like great movers of the mind's furniture, so that the space we inhabit is rearranged. Your thoughts, feelings, perceptions, memories have to move around in new ways, because the furniture has been moved." The film facilitates this rearranging, providing the energy we may need for the move, whilst refusing to dictate what gets moved where: what we move, what we make, is our decision.


Related posts:-
The Shock of the Unintelligible
Entertaining Ideas
Contain Conflict
Dreams from Dreams
Memoria
Integration
Posted by Forever Becoming at 11:10

10 comments:

  1. ... is it always necessary to conclude that the movie's creators have somehow "failed" because the reviewer cannot wrap his/her arms around the piece?

    I think that great art succeeds partly due to its mirroring of life, in the sense that it cannot be fully understood in reductive terms. Mr Edelstein makes clear in the 3rd paragraph of his review that he understands the non-reductive nature of this particular film, yet he still insists on its failure.

    Shouldn't great art succeed on its own terms? Isn't that the delineation between art and science - whereas science must obey universal standards, independent of perception and beholden to analytical rigor, art is free to exist in different realities based on different perspectives?

    Or I suppose my argument is essentially circular, as Mr Edelstein - an alpha player in the world of cinema criticism - is simply creating his own gravity-heavy reality, based on his perceptions, standards, and analysis.

    Regardless, I understand the instinct to analyze, and I also understand that when it comes to art, analysis can be both informative and misleading. I think that's why intuitive description of the synthetic whole often provides a better understanding of cinema than analysis, or at the very least is an excellent compliment to analysis.

    Of course, it's also much harder to express in words (than analysis) - I suppose that's why art is art and not analytically-driven bullet-point social science.

    And I'm not suggesting that Mr Edelstein and his fellow reviewers are incapable of non-analytical expression, only that they seem to ultimately give more legitimacy to reductive approaches. Hence his cognitive dissonance within the concluding line of the Synecdoche review ("It's heartbreaking...")

    [JJAC]
    Response to review of Synechdoche: New York, on New York magazine website (http://nymag.com/movies/reviews/51391/comments.html)
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  2. No one has yet succeeded in inventing a philosophy at once credible and self-consistent. Locke aimed at credibility, and achieved it at the expense of consistency. Most of the great philosophers have done the opposite.

    The most fruitful philosophies have contained glaring inconsistencies, but for that very reason have been partially true. There is no reason to suppose that a self-consistent system contains more truth than one which, like Locke's, is obviously more or less wrong.

    [Bertrand Russell]
    History of Western Philosophy, p.558
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  3. Life refuses to be understood by overarching philosophies or meanings. One cannot contain all.

    Inconsistency, failure; in fact, these things may more truly reflect the state of things.
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  4. We are awakened to the problem by an encounter with a "problematic object" or event, which exceeds our representative capacities, but for the same reason provokes the exercise of all our powers, creating a relay between sense, memory, imagination and thought.

    [Melissa McMahon]
    Gilles Deleuze: Key Concepts, p.47
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  5. Process Orientation vs. Outcome Orientation [Langer]

    We need to understand it so that we can resolve it, and so move on to the next thing. Rumination creates stasis, which can be uncomfortable. It lingers, unresolved. Our education teaches us to find answers because this is how we know we are clever, and so is one way of establishing our worth (to society).

    Art galleries do not adhere to this idea, advocating instead the viewpoint that understanding - getting to the answer, the outcome - may not be the only way. They encourage us to hold conflict, to let it do its work within us.

    We may not be prepared for this because we rarely come across this approach, if at all.
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  6. I think people today are incredibly good dismantlers. At the moment I’m thinking about our relationship to objects through using a set of objects as a collection of meanings… almost as scenes in a film as much affective or evocative as explicitly readable.

    I hope to use objects and images as props in a set that the viewer creates the script to. The objects talk about something and hope to engage the viewer in the discussion. Rather than giving a canny piece of information that appears to sublate a multiplicity of readings. I am interested in creating a temporary landscape that contains a possible narrative over narrating a content.

    [Corin Sworn]
    Interview with Whitehot magazine: http://whitehotmagazine.com/articles/october-2008-corin-sworn-interview/1598
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  7. Cultural conservatives who demand that a work of art should say something, join forces with their political opponents against atelic, hermetic works of art. Eulogists of "relevance" are more likely to find Sartre's Huis Clos profound, than to listen patiently to a text whose languages jolts signification and by its very distance from "meaning" revolts in advance against positivist subordination of meaning.

    [Theodor Adorno]
    On Commitment, Chap. 2, para. 2
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  8. Charlie Kaufman: "I intentionally tried to go hookless this time, which I think is maybe one of the reasons that people are having trouble knowing what they think of it because I'm not telling them what to think of it. I wanted to do that intentionally. I wanted to not give people the easy out that I feel like sometimes they can have when they go, 'Oh, the memory's being erased,' or 'They're inside John Malkovich.' I think people were waiting for that in this movie and no, it's a man's life. There are no answers and he dies. That seemed like kind of an honest thing to me, so that's what I tried to do."
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  9. we are dealing with an event originating in unconscious nature; with something that achieves its aim without the assistance of human consciousness, and often defies it by willfully insisting on its own form and effect.

    [with art of this type] we would have to be prepared for something suprapersonal that transcends our understanding to the same degree that the author's consciousness was in abeyance during the process of creation.

    We would expect a strangeness of form and content, thoughts that can only be apprehended untuitively, a language pregnant with meanings, and images that are true symbols because they are the best possible expression for something unknown - bridges thrown out towards an unseen shore.

    [C.G. Jung]
    On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry
    found in The Norton Anthology: Theory and Criticism    , p.997
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  10. But the effect was somehow baffling; one could not see a wave heaping itself, a crisis coming round the next corner. Therefore I could not plume myself either upon the depths of my feelings and my profound knowledge of the human heart.

    For whenever I was about to feel the usual things in the usual places, about love, about death, the annoying creature twitched me away, as if the important point were just a little further on.

    [Virginia Woolf]
    A Room of One's Own, p.106
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