Once Upon A Time In.... Hollywood - Esquire Interview with Tarantino,DiCaprio, Pitt By Michael Hainey

What An Interview!

Reading this interview with The Three through Leslie Fiedler's critical essays, Le Carre's character Leiser in Looking Glass War, Roberto Bolano's 2666 and of course Luce Irigaray's SPECULUM of the Other Woman. 

Leiser smiled. It was the best ever, that week, John. It's funny, isn't it: we spend all our time chasing girls, and it's the men that matter; just the men. From 

Le Carre's Looking Glass War

SOME EXCERPTS:

The beginning of the interview

Pitt settles in, looks into a small...rise. He looks up and says, "There's nothing I can do about boner pants, is there?" 

Tarantino looks at him confused.

"Remember that Curb Your Enthusiasm episode?" Pitt says. "Where the woman thinks he popped one in the movie theater?" Tarantino laughs.

I offer Pitt a pillow. For his lap. He tries it for a minute and then flips it to the side.


Brad Pitt refers to his unintentional erection attributing it to his pants? Too tight? Hainey refers to women as CHICKS and that completes this good ol boy group sealing him the writer into its seams. 

Any woman is aware that in these days, if she were present, they would not be speaking this way. It would not be a Male Discourse only which is what we are reading.

This is the way men speak when women are not present.

In Bolano's 2666 it will be constantly  brought to your attention, especially during The Part About the Crimes - 300 plus pages of autopsies -  as the officers discuss the bodies, the crime scene, of the murdered women or their dumping as road kill in the desert,  as if they are commodities rather than victims of men. The only exception is the murdered bodies of the two kidnapped girls ages 14 and 9 is it? One of them weeps.

This is the way they talk about us when we are not present. Margot Robbie is in this film but she is not present at this Esquire Interview. 

Bolano will tell us that in these crimes in St. Teresa - exact copy of the real ones in Cuidad Juarez  - conceals

The Secret of the World.

Luce Irigaray will be more direct:

The world is ruled by male homosexual, homoerotic collusion that they know but do not know they know. Heterosexuality is the MASK that conceals this. 

Men hate openly gay men because then they have made themselves into commodities just like women. 

To be accumulated and exchanged.

And anyone familiar with the reviews, essays and writings of Leslie Fiedler will already know that ALL his work was directed at this undetected homoerotic homosexuality permeating all group activities where men gather together. He hones in on the great American novels: Moby Dick; Huckleberry Finn; and those of James Fenimore Cooper. Nor does Hemingway escape. He takes on football and the men who arbitrated the Treaty of Versailles to end up giving us Hitler and World war II. My rude awakening when I read Come Back To The Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey! (LINK is pdf for you) led to associations of my own that I had felt, but never uttered and hardly even dared to think I might have intuitively grasped something universal in the world until I was validated. Now of course I see it everywhere so here is a recent recognition in this Esquire interview which I am sharing here. 



As things are changing in Hollywood in 1969 Michael Hainey summarizes: 

MH: What's fascinating __ there is the rise of the pretty leading man, but there is also the rise of the anti-leading man. Again, look at 1969. Dustin Hoffman plays Ratso Rizzo in a corrupted western, Midnight Cowboy. And then, who is the complete embodiment of the new anti-leading man? Charles Manson! He's hairy and charismatic and young. Plus, he gets the chicks. And he literally steals the old dream factories from these guys; he's living on an old movie set. Manson usurps it all! Even the headlines. He becomes more famous than all of them.

BP : Right! Well put, well put.

Here Pitt comments on what Hainey has said. He does not say Wow! Nor does he just nod his head in agreement or say yes. The subtext I am reading here is the misogynist male automatic comment of placing a judgement on what Hainey has said. Right! Well put. well put. Pitt has assumed dominance here in the masculine DISCOURSE of this  conversation where Hainey is not asking questions but commenting on what the Three are saying, often to each other. Sort of like women tend to do in this situation.

Or is Pitt assuming the femme position of agreeing and praising? Is this becoming trans now?

But above Hainey has done the same thing:

QT: But the thing is, Rick was sold a bill of goods everyone else was sold. To be a young leading man is to be macho and masculine and sexy and handsome and chiseled.

MH: Well, for his generation, that's the epitome of manhood, of male identity. And here Hainey is agreeing and rephrasing Tarantino. He is not the journalist asking questions that can be labeled "interrogative" forcing their replies into the Binary Discourse. This interview is free association. That makes it different.

_________________________________________________________________________________

LD: As I'm thinking about it, I've had these relationships in the industry too. You need your support system. You need that guy you can sit there and watch TV with and not say a fucking word with for five hours. You need to know somebody is "there." When we were doing the movie, my relationship with Brad clicked. It was very early on where he improvised a line and it changed everything. In the scene, as it was written, I'm coming to set hungover and I am basically getting my fate handed to me, discovering what my future is going to be in this industry. And I'm really down. And in the scene, Brad ad-libs. He just comes out with this line: He looks at me and says, "Hey you're Rick fucking Dalton. Don't you forget that."

I find this use of another guy to just be there very like the guy who wants the woman - eye candy type? - to just be there, chilling. This is exactly a description of rapprochement from psychoanalysis telling about that early pre specking stage of development when the young child plays in the room where the mother is. Mother does not have to be interacting with her child, she just has to be there. If she gets up and goes to check the oven the spell is broken and the child follows her rather than continue playing. Mother's presence is a necessary part of this tiny world the child requires to play creatively. Mahler's work on Separation and Individuation. clearly Leo has not completed this stage and the fact that he talks about it means that he wants to understand it.

________________________________________________________________________________

They are talking together about how the movie industry is changing now. That we are in a moment in time where it is shifting just as it did in 1969. And yes it is. I have felt it for a long time.

BP:  What I always loved about going to a cinema was letting something slowly unfold, and to luxuriate in that story and watch and see where it goes. I'm curious to see if that whole form of movie watching is just out the window with the younger generations. I don't think so completely. 

Walter Benjamin has written beautifully on this understanding. Time is slower. There is time for contemplation, for memory. Today's young people are mostly ADD - medicated or not - and they want FAST. They want to be entertained, amused. They are not looking for contemplation, associations with their memories or connecting dots with other films. 

The classic BP must read

QT: It requires the right kind of movie - one that hits the right kind of nerve where it becomes a conversation.  "Get Out" achieved that. Everyone was talking about it, and the whole metaphor of the Sunken Place was something everyone started to use. It sparked genuine conversation. It used to be movies were the pop-culture conversation and it was much rarer for a TV show to break into that place. But now that's where it is.

For me in the early 1960's while teaching in an elementary school the topic in the teachers's room was always TV and rarely movies. I dont think these three know that.

Leo goes on to say that there is always that chance to do something really fine with your part. Yes there are those wonderful moments when a mediocre film comes alive when that great moment comes. Who can ever forget James Dean in Giant when his oil well hits and he is telling the group all covered in oil and happiness. It was a rare moment then in those times and we all felt it. The same is true in that moment in Thelma and Louise when Brad is caught and being dragged away and shouting to Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon. It was a WOW moment and I just knew, sitting in Singapore watching it, that Brad was going to be the new big star. It was his time to take a small part and make it great.

_______________________________________________________________________________

QT:  Then you ask, "How does the Manson Family fit in?" Well, that's the trick. And that is, actually, how it is supposed to work. "How does this rancidness figure into everything?" And I want the audience asking that question, and I hope that's one of the things that helps lead you to the theater. It's like we've got a perfectly good body and then we take a syringe and inject it with a deadly virus. 

FLEETING MOMENTS

MH: One of the crazy facts about Manson:He was not an outsider in Hollywood. He crosseed paths with many famous people in town. Like Brian Wilson. Or like doris Day's son, Terry Melcher, the record producer. you guys have lived in this town a long time.what six degrees of weirdness do you have?

BP: I remember back in the early days I hung out with Brandon Lee.....We went out one night and everyone else had peeled off, and we ended up back at his place and it was like six in the morning. A real, you know, drunk and stony night, and he proceeded that night to tell me how he thought he was going to die young like his dad. And I just chalked it up to, you know, stony 6:00 A.M. talk. Then he got The Crow next year.

LD: I have one. One of the most ominous and sad ones. I grew up revering River Phoenix as the great actor of my generation, and all I ever wanted was to have just an opportunity to shake his hand. And one night, at a party in Silver Lake, I saw him walk up a flight of stairs. It was almost like something you would see in Vertigo, because I saw there was something in his face, and I'd never met him - always wanted to meet him, always wanted to just have an encounter with him  - and he was walking toward me and I kind of froze. And then the crowd got in my way, and I looked back and he was gone.  I walked back up the stairs and back down, and I was like, "Where did he go?" And he was ...on his way to the Viper Room.  It was almost as if - I don't know how to describe it, but it's this existential thing where I felt like ...he disappeared in front of my very eyes, and the tragedy that I felt afterward of having lost this great influence for me and all of my friends. The actor we all talked about. Just to be able to have that, always wanting to just - and I remember extending my hand out, and then ...Two people came in front and then I looked back, and then he wasn't there.

BP: I'll tell you one of the greatest moments  I've had in this town: getting to spend two days with Burt Reynolds on this film. 

QT: Yeah.

LD: Yeah.

MH: He was originally cast to play George Spahn, correct?

QT Yeah. The last performance Burt Reynolds gave was when he came down and did a rehearsal day for that sequence, and then the script reading. And that was really amazing.

BP: It was a fucking pleasure.

QT: I found out from three different people that the last thing he did just before he died was run lines with his assistant. Then he went to the bathroom, and that's when he had his heart attack.

________________________________________________________________________________

Did anyone notice that all these "moments" were about other men? 

Tarantino is an original and accomplished writer and director of unique films. Leo and Brad have been the objects of desire for many women. Yet none of these three have ever been able to sustain a mature emotional relationship with a mature emotional woman, have they. Brad comes close with Joli but they have a public breakdown on an airplane! Over the eldest son's public argument with his adopted father. so Maddox and Brad go at it and it seems Brad is abusive. This is a very normal occurrence between teen sons and fathers. The old Oedipal who owns the mother, the son or the father? Evidently that was never addressed in the family dynamics. Why? IDK. 

CLOUD ATLAS: A Reading Through Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project, By Friedlander and Fenves

Sonmi - 451 Genomed Clone

Domestic:	$27,108,272	20.8%
+ Foreign:	$103,374,596	79.2%

 The foreign market is more intelligent and discerning I think

Domestic:

 $27,108,272

   20.8%

+ Foreign:

 $103,374,596

   79.2%

There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim. - WALTER BENJAMIN - THE ARCADES PROJECT

HERE

Walter Benjamin -  Ayala Tal

In a coda, The Messianic Reduction fast-forwards to the 1940 essay, “On the Concept of History,” finding the non-linear “shape of time” writ larger here in the late philosophy of history: now the messianic is the making-congruent of the local shape of time and the larger shape of history, and the messiah is a name for the force that accomplishes this temporal structuring. Peter Fenves’s The Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time

“Walter Benjamin” in this second study should not be considered a person, but, first, as a prodigious structure of capacities, capable of gathering thought into form, creating written images which address, absorb and ultimately reshape historical time, and, second, as the corpus of significant texts made in the crucible of this knowledge. All that matters is what has been read and what comes to be written. There is no need, in this analysis, for Berlin or Port Bou, Dora or Asja, the angry father or the neglected son. FENVES

The messianic, for Benjamin, was nothing so simple as a redeemer arriving to call time and distribute justice at the end of days. Rather, it referred to something like a structure of temporal experience, but an “experience” that goes beyond the individual and even the social. To use the Benjaminian terminology that Fenves brings into sharp relief, it is the immanent tension that is the fact and the force of divinity in the world, permanently present, endlessly mutable

For Benjamin, the “reduction” mediated a sphere of experience beyond the conditioned framings of conscious thought. But, as Fenves reads him, Benjamin granted this subjectless experience of pure receptivity a near-mystical valence. The “reduction” was an opening onto a kind of paradise; the stubborn “natural attitude” was both analog and agent of the fallen, guilty state of mankind. This also underlay Benjamin’s disagreement on questions of method. Unlike Husserl’s willed “bracketing” of philosophical assumptions — a carefully prescribed method for dismantling the self-evident — for Benjamin, getting beyond the “natural attitude” was not a matter of decision, for the philosopher or anyone else. Not that the impossibility of a chosen path implies the non-existence of the divine, or even, strictly speaking, its inaccessibility: the divine is something that can be thought and experienced, but always as the irruption or appearance of an outside, never commanded forth by a direct action of human will. The “reduction” was done to the philosopher, not by him. ( Can we think of this moment as a moment of salvation?)

Reflecting on his method, Friedlander alludes to Benjamin’s notion of “origin,” developed in The Origin of the German Tragedy: not the start of a linear development, but an intense vortex of transformation, in which elements of the past undergo a complex process of rearrangement and recognition, disappearance and endurance. Via restructuring, the dialectical image — Benjamin’s work — appears as a higher form of origin, a node of immanent intensity in which the potentiality of created nature is made manifest, and truth and life are concentrated and brought forth anew. 

It is the forceful insistence of these metaphysical claims that, more than anything else, distinguishes Friedlander’s book from other recent unpackings of Benjamin’s philosophical baggage, as his intervention commits itself to an extraordinary degree, venturing far beyond the safe ground of academic analysis. In this reading, Benjamin’s amalgam of temporalities fabricates a framework for the manifestation of “divine force,” the display of “divine power.” The divine here, as with the “messianic reduction,” is not a transcendent or static godly presence; it inheres in the weave of earthly existence, immanent and intensive. Crucially, however, Friedlander’s reparative vitalism is also a work of memory. The creation of the dialectical image bids farewell to the past in order that life — bare life, creaturely life, inorganic life, historical life — can go on. To put it in terms worn down from overuse — and at the risk of banalizing a book that is, whatever else, hardly banal — the force within Benjamin’s work enables a coming to terms with the past. While never made entirely explicit, it is not hard to read Friedlander’s book, above all his concluding chapter, as a response to the concrete atrocities and losses of twentieth-century history, with theories of trauma and memory wrought into a philosophy of history in which Benjamin’s work serves as the central mediating device.

Walter Benjamin: A Philosophical Portrait - Friedlander

Neither the reasons for Benjamin’s choice of material, nor the political stakes of his work, then or now, ever becomes clear. Granted, it posits a construction of truth in one sense — located in the dialectics of recognition that passes between past and present — but historically specific regimes of truth are neither a fact nor a problem. The power that invests knowledge here is of a spiritual and divine order, emphatically not a social or socio-epistemological one. And as truth is re-enthroned, problems of textuality evaporate. 

The Symbolic Order of Seduction:The Tree of Life - The Order of Production and Exchange: Water For Elephants

Please follow me. - Jean Baudrillard

I'm trying.

I saw The Tree of Life for the second time tonight. Not since Pasolini have I seen such images photographed with such love. The beautiful still face of Jessica Chastain. The no longer pretty boy face of Brad Pitt, but a face with a deep depth  of character, fearless, and the beautiful ravaged face of Sean Penn. Hunter McCracken as Jack the young boy is astonishing. Here are faces of such seductive beauty, such portraits, every one, of pure appearance.

 

 

Now consider how Francis Lawrence uses the face of Robert Pattinson as a prop in Water For Elephants. He has said the camera just loves him, and he has put Pattinson in every scene, close up after close up and you can feel Pattinson's uneasiness. Just as Lawrence has constructed a 1930's circus simulacrum as a prop and to pimp it for all its worth, he has used Reese Witherspoon and Waltz as props also. Not to mention Tai the elephant dragged to the city for a premiere to pimp her too. This is what Lawrence knows how to do: use the set and his actors as props. Pattinson's face is the message, the cliched content of the scene is secondary filler.

 

Terrence Stamp

Here are some Pasolini portraits from Teorema:



For this film go to http://www.netflix.com

Silvano Mangano

Walter Benjamin comments on using props in his seminal essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Robert Pattinson's face has been down this road before in The Haunted Airman along with numerous cigarettes. Or his face has led to effacement. Edward Cullen was a departure whenever Catherine Blabbermouth Hardwicke got out of the way. I suspect Cosmopolis will not travel the cliched path.

The Tree of Life and Philosophy: The Phenomenological Roots of Terrence Malick (co-edited with Vernon W. Cisney)
The aim of this project is to produce a volume of essays on Terrence Malick's 2011 film "The Tree of Life", working to draw out philosophical themes from this important piece of cinema. 

Review: The Tree of Life Terrence Malick

The Tree of Life fulfills the promise that the technology of film reproduction promised. It cannot be discussed within the dominant discourse of film criticism.  It is a Foucaudian cut in the history of film. This film is a miracle. Time has slowed for us in this film. We inhabit our own lost time or a time we never knew. The experience is the same as reading In Search of Lost Time by Proust.


The dialectic rhetoric does not apply to it. When reviewers discuss it in words that portray it as revered, loved, adored, a prayer, a revelation contrasted with boring, hated, intolerable, and walk-outs, their flat earth thinking is displayed. When they go on to wade into the interpretive psychological swamp of Oedipal relations between the boy and his father, they are done for. 

Synopsis

The film follows the life journey of the eldest son, Jack, through the innocence of childhood to his disillusioned adult years as he tries to reconcile a complicated relationship with his father. Jack finds himself a lost soul in the modern world, seeking answers to the origins and meaning of life while questioning the existence of faith. Through Malick's signature imagery, we see how both brute nature and spiritual grace shape not only our lives as individuals and families, but all life. (Fox Searchlight Pictures)

It sounds good doesn't it? Freud himself lamented against this tendency, in his time, in his essay Wild Analysis. What is revealed is a complete ignorance of Foucault's The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language a long detailed analysis against the futility of psychological, historical and scientific interpretation, Jean Baudrillard's dismantling of it, and Susan Sontag's great essay Against Interpretation shredding it, as only she can.  This is the reason contemporary reviewers are so inept, so complained about, so uninformed, etc etc etc. And also why they are taken to task, disagreed with, praised, and all the other aspects of the dialectics. 


We are no longer in liner time. There is no longer any orderly progression which depends on linear time. We are moving into simulation. When simulation becomes total, we will be in Virtual Reality, which is irreversible. The last World War is being fought before our eyes and ears. It is the war of Speed described by Virilio.

Baudrillard in Fatal Strategies suggests opposing speed with extreme slowness. And Tree of Life is obeying his dictum. We become immersed in a world of slowness. A world of lost time now. A time when there was contemplation, when connections could be made, when cause and effect linkages were perceived, when meaning existed independent of media manipulation, when the dialectic ruled. Values, aesthetics, rules, ritual, the law, were all a part of human behavior in Western societies. We see the beginnings of disintegration in this film. The father cannot live in a post World War II with his values intact and neither can his son in his. This has little to do with Oedipal conflict.


Walter Benjamin's seminal essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Illuminations pp 217-251) warns us what to expect. Malick has taken notice. He doesn't disappoint.


I saw it in Springfield Missouri at the independent film theatre The Moxie. I am grateful for their presence here in the Ozarks. What was astonishing was the faces of the audience as the lights went on at the end. Every face was bathed in beauty, all 21st century angst removed as if by magic. I saw traces of an unhoped for joy on them.