JUDY GARLAND: OVER THE RAINBOW

What did Judy look like in this outtake? What we can hear is precisely what we can’t see and aren’t shown. My feeling is that Judy/Dorothy was supposed to cry during this scene, only not like this. Not this much and not this hard. Dorothy is finally going home, after all. She is sad about leaving Oz, but what’s calling her home is supposed to be stronger than the intimate bonds she’s forged on her odyssey. But the line between emotion and real pain—between the emotion you are asked to tread, to supply and to invent; to bring to a scene, and the real pain that shows up and intervenes; causing a breach in the fiction and a break in the breach (all the breaches that are enacted and received in a lifetime)—are devastatingly blurred. It’s too much for Judy, not Dorothy. It was often too much for her. These are Judy’s tears, not Dorothy’s, and they are not the result of the fiction of movies, but of the reality of having lived them and made them.

From Masha Tupitsyn's Beauty Talk

HERE

In “Kleptomania” I describe Garland’s voice as “a blue bird hitting the windshield of a car.”

What truth are our faces allowed to tell/show today? Think of how men instruct women to smile while they’re walking down the street. If Hollywood and mass media are any indication, nothing is faked and enacted more these days than a face, especially a woman’s. A woman’s face is something she has to fake almost all of the time—from the wearing of make-up to the surgical enhancement and modification of facial features, to the lightening of eyes and skin, to the concealment of age, to the facial expressions we make or don’t make. Faking is not only the modality par excellence of late modernity, the fake/r (not the real or original, as Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy demonstrates) is the thing to imitate and strive for. And based on the 21st century fiction and artifice of celebrity consumer culture, there is no greater truth than a successful lie. Than a lie that functions and succeeds in public, even if and especially when it inevitably performs its disclosure-as-lie and breakdown-of-truth as just another show (Reality TV). The lie (or the secret of ideology) is no longer something to conceal, for, in the era of cynicism and instant commodification, dissemblance is the only truth worth telling (living). Truth, along with reality, is merely a performance, and vice versa, performance is reality.

Before we believed that a lie was the truth, we believed that what we were seeing was real, which means we believed what we were told. The fiction was not meant to be interpreted purely as fantasy or pure-fantasy, but as the ultimate-real. However, now that we know that the fiction is a lie, that the truth is a lie, we have learned to approach it as such. We live in the name of truth, even though, and because we know, the name of truth is fiction. We tell ourselves that it’s not that we have a more dishonest or corrupt relationship to truth, it’s that we have a different kind of relationship with the lie. That is, with the staging of truth.

When I watched Garland’s performance of “The Man That Got Away” from A Star Is Born for this essay, I broke down in tears almost immediately. Garland’s heartbreak is my heartbreak. A heartbreak of women watching women. Women being women. It is my invisible (off-camera) face coming undone as it bears witness to the brave face another woman puts on for the whole world. Garland is giving us her heartbreak so that we can survive and better understand our own. 

Read the whole post from Masha Tupitsyn

HERE

EVER SINCE THIS WORLD BEGAN

Review: Silver Linings Playbook

No this is not a perfect film.
Yes, Jennifer Lawrence is superb as is everyone else. 
No the screenplay is not great and there are so many cliches especially at the end.
It is not a movie about two damaged people getting together.

It is NOT a movie about two damaged people getting together.

First it is about a particular dysfunctional family showing in a crystal clear way how the dysfunctional family creates madness. In this case what is diagnosed bi-polar disorder or ADD, for the purpose of labeling to prescribe meds.

In writing this book Jules Henry went to stay with a number of families. He ate with them, shopped with them, slept there, and went everywhere with them, recording everything. If you read it and then imagine living for awhile with the family in Silver Linings Notebook you will understand that it is not Pat who is damaged, but this entire American dysfunctional family that is damaged. They are the norm, not the exception.

Tiffany reads very much like Francoise Dolto in her case study Dominique: Analysis of An Adolescent Boy with her scene putting together the winnings of the teams and her presence with Pat during the plays of the teams. This is purely the chain of signifiers for those who have read and understood Lacan. If you haven't then it sounds crazy and schizophrenic. However it cuts into the resistance and resolves it, whether you are considering the case study or the movie.

These are two people who are realer than real. Our only way out of this mess we are all in.  Go on with your psychologizing and enter the "swamp of psychological interpretation" (Foucault) if you want. I won't meet you there.

http://www.amazon.com/Sanity-Madness-Family-Families-Schizophrenics/dp/0140211578/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1362635350&sr=1-1&keywords=laing+madness+insanity

http://www.amazon.com/Anti-Oedipus-Capitalism-Schizophrenia-Penguin-Classics/dp/0143105825/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1362635696&sr=1-1&keywords=deleuze+anti-oedipus

Review: KILLING THEM SOFTLY

KILLING THEM SOFTLY lasted just one week at the discount theatre in Brad Pitt's home town Springfield, Missouri. This is absolute proof of its exceptional excellence.

This is a perfect film. It is relentless without a shred of seductive illusion, illusionary seduction in it. There are no throwaway laugh lines either. It is a completely post modern look at our world. Ayn Rand would have loved it. Pitt's fingerprints are all over it, and he is so fine in it, but then so is everyone else.  The violence is viewed in slow motion, a choreographed dance of shattering glass, bullets and blood, and bodies. No vicarious testosterone release at all. It is Tarantino,  pared down, without the charm.

This movie is NOT an entertainment. It is a noir that is more than a noir film. Uncomfortable.

Pitt comes on the scene to handle an inside job of a stick up at the local mafia poker game by the manager of it. He had been beaten to teach him a lesson. But then another one gets the idea to copy cat it. Pitt decides the one who originated the first one has to die although he didn't do it. And then he says the crucial line, "It doesn't matter if he did it or didn't do it. What matters is that he appears to have done it." (And the foundation of our so called justice system comes crumbling down.)  And there we have it. In Simulated Reality that's all that is required. Pitt is correct. People must take responsibility for their actions and for the following consequences. He has been called in by the mafia suit guy who welshes on the idea of killing anyone, just beat them up. Pitt maintains he must die as well as the ones who did the second hold up. He is the only one who seems capable of making a strategic decision and carrying it out. As we switch to the TV and the car radio of the 2008 election we get the same waffling by the candidates with their use of sound bite ready-mades full of empty meaning.

Mr. President Hope and Change

For those who have a memory when media is trying 24/7 to erase it from your heads, the 2008 election took in the derivatives's crash. If you don't understand this here is an explanation and review of the movie Margin Call HERE.

The campaign of 2008 ran on a FANTASY of Hope, Change, Unification, Community, a united America and a myriad of other idealistic ready-mades Americans have all grown to love and be familiar with. This is propaganda 101, Appeal to the Idols of the Marketplace,  so warned against by that sage in the 1500's Francis Bacon.

.... it is a fantasy that is expected to be maintained. And as 

we have learned from Stalin, the moment appearances are 

ruptured, reality itself collapses: it is not just that one has to 

agree with Stalin all the time, one also has to maintain the 

illusion that free discourse is possible; otherwise the fantasy 

that Stalin has been freely chosen to lead the people, that he 

is the first servant as it were, is destroyed. And the whole 

game comes crumbling down. 

In defense of lost causes; On teaching or, to sir with love …

Posted on February 6, 2013 by Jeremy Fernando 

So while these small town poker players are gambling and having their money stolen the premier investment bankers in New York City have been gambling with their OWN AND OTHERS' assets and have vanished this money, threatening the collapse of the dollar and with it the US government. The US government interrupts the campaign and the opposing candidates go to DC to rubber stamp the transfusion of money - and we are talking trillions - to these defunct gamblers at the top of the food chain. And middle and small town America were looted to do it. Interesting parallel metaphor eh, as it cuts in and out of the ongoing shabby story of squalor.

The mafia suit accuses Pitt at the end of a disgusting cynicism. While watching Obama's speech on the unification of all colors, all peoples, rich and poor on the TV Pitt's character replies with his comment about our revered Thomas Jefferson, who sat and drank his wine while he coined all these lovely words of freedom for all that others died defending, fucked his slave and allowed his children to grow up in slavery. And his final retort on the "unification of this country" he says we are all on our own,  that America is not a country, it's a business. 

The Reality of the home of the free and the brave has come crumbling down.  It's no wonder this movie has made so many so uncomfortable that they couldn't review it properly nor give it the box office it deserves. No matter, it will become a forever classic, and Pitt probably wants that anyway. 

Don't see it unless you are going to be on high alert the whole time. 

_______________________________________________________________________

On TRICKLE-DOWN THEORY: Things trickle-down but not money. Just false idealism ready-made sound- bites.

For an incredible review of Killing Them Softly go to darren's prize winning blog in Dublin: http://them0vieblog.com/2012/09/21/non-review-review-killing-them-softly/

The Will To Truth:Eric Maddox - Interrogator - Capturing Saddam

FOUCAULT

The pleasure that comes of exercising a power

 that questions, 

monitors, 

watches, 

spies, 

searches out, 

palpates,

 brings to light;

and on the other hand, 

the pleasure that kindles at having to evade this power, 

flee from it, 

fool it, 

or travesty it.

The power that lets itself be invaded by the pleasure it is pursuing;

and opposite it,

power asserting itself in the pleasure of showing off, 

scandalizing, or resisting. 

Capture and seduction,

confrontation and mutual reinforcement:

parents and children,

adults and adolescents,

educators and students,

doctors and patients,

the psychiatrist with his hysteric and his perverts,

all have played this game continually 

since the nineteenth century.

These attractions, 

these evasions,

these circular incitements 

have traced around bodies and sexes,

not boundaries not to be crossed,

but

perpetual spirals of power and pleasure. 

The Foucault Reader:Paul Rabinow, editor
The Repressive Hypothesis - The Incitement To Discourse; The Perverse Implantation (p. 324)

Roadside Attractions: Project Nim: Intellectual Torture - Terrace Pimped the Chimp

Nim

________________________________________

People know what they do.

They frequently know why they do what they do.

But what they don't know is what they do

does

Michel Foucault

__________________________________________________________________________________

http://www.moxiecinema.com/

From the Academy Award winning team behind Man on Wire comes the story of Nim, a chimpanzee who in the 1970s became the focus of a landmark experiment which aimed to show that an ape could learn to communicate with language if raised and nurtured like a human child. What was learned about his true nature -- and indeed our own -- is comic, revealing and profoundly unsettling. (Roadside Attractions)  

The Young Bob Ingersoll and Nim - the only two in the film who are fully realized human beings - link to NPR article

1974 Lectures - Abnormal  - College de France

These lectures were written to be read to an international audience during 1974. They read as if you are listening to them. Foucault is never an easy read, but the oral lectures are his most accessible works. This is mesmerizing and had the idiot scientists understood his work Nim would never have had to suffer at their hands at the same time these lectures were being given. 

Madness and Civilization - A Genealogy of The Great European Confinement and the First Incarceration of People Considered Abnormal

Foster Mother

Nim with Cat - he loved cats

I am avoiding a psychological interpretation of the people in this film. I can only say they are sub-human specimens of humanity, and stupid in addition, even the supposedly well intentioned ones.

Roger Fouts taught Washoe ASL and then had to fight for her to save her life after science was finished with her.
She had someone who loved her from the beginning who pulled it off. Lucky Washoe, unlucky Nim.

“Project Nim” Reveals a Scientific Scandal

Everything Bolles says is correct. Only all of it is a floating sign that conceals the

DIRTY LITTLE SECRET

Here is Nim in happier times. His foster family was non authoritarian with him but no one signed during his crucial and early years. As if a baby grew up in a home where no one talked.

Here is smug Herbert Terrace driving him in the car. I don't think this was the day he abruptly took him from his family.

Here he is with his first sign language teacher, a grad student assisting Terrace. They were very very close and now you see that he has grown, no longer the age and size of being carried around, bigger than in the car photo.

Now see her with Terrace and Nim. In the film you see how lovely she is, and how close she is with Terrace. Very close. Rob Pattinson and Kristen Stewart watchers will notice all the nuances.

Then a new sign language teacher comes on the scene. Another young enthusiastic pretty blond one. She and Terrace are very close and she is very close with Nim. 

An uncomfortableness arises between the two young women. Terrace gives the new one a title for the project that will look good on her future resume.

2nd teacher I think - lovely eh

His first teacher packs up and leaves abruptly. Nim clutches her. It takes six people to pull him off her as he clings to her. Again Kristen Stewart and Rob Pattinson watchers will see what is really going on here.

Bob Ingersoll Who Stayed to the End with Nim

Sundance Premiere Photos
http://www.zimbio.com/pictures/TZkMphyDmRr/Project+Nim+Premiere+2011+Sundance+Film+Festival/YUGo95nMEnQ/Bob+Ingersol

You have a chimp growing up, moving into puberty, probably smelling sex on the people around him, people who have not neutered him but do not intend to breed him, and then who wonder why he bites his caretakers, until he so viciously bites the 2nd teacher in the face that the project is discontinued and Nim is sent to a medical facility, locked in a cage, where they do HIV, Hepatitis, etc research. A few caretakers learn some signing there. And then years of abuse follow after a happy childhood.   Basic principles of psychology and learning are ignored or not even known. Only Bob Ingersoll is aware while he plays with Nim.

This film is an indictment of highly educated human beings who cannot seem to connect the simplest dots in this puzzle of Nim nor go to anyone who knows for advice.  Terrace got to live in a beautiful estate with extensive grounds, donated for the project, with two adoring young very pretty grad assistants. 
The Dirty Little Secret

Student fucker: 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

When he first arrived in New York, Nim was put into the custody of Stephanie LaFarge, a hippie mom who was a former Terrace student (and lover). She breast-fed the chimp, which was accepted as a “brother” by LaFarge’s seven children. She and the people who subsequently cared for Nim were not well trained in ASL, and they didn’t use it exclusively.

my bold.

Well, fuck me crooked, looks like he fucked them all. I must be psychic.