For some reason, it doesn't feel like Christmas time.
Blame the righteous holiday avengers, the one's who hound the very ideal that Christmas should be micromanaged in culture to include all respective holiday revelries (you know, the reason you can't say "Merry Christmas" but only "Happy Holidays" and the like), but I don't think that's why the holiday feels so out of touch this year. As someone who has never been part of the Christian faith, I celebrate Christmas on a societal level. I grew up celebrating the holiday; it's surrounded December like a waft of pine trees and cinnamon, and I never questioned the validity of my celebrations in respect to Saint Nicholas's wonderworks. I just woke up on the 25th to find sun shining through the windows, presents under the tree, and, inevitably, no one else awake quite yet. Anticipation always woke up me around 6am, quivering with the understanding that Santa wrote me a note thanking me for milk and cookies (I never noticed how much his scrawl looked like my mothers). So, ever since my non-religious awakening and the understanding that Christmas comes from the celebration of Jesus's birth, I still celebrate and buy gifts and decorate and listen to the music. It's not religious, it was the norm of the society in which I grew up, and I still want to celebrate that spirit.
This is why I feel ludicrous being asked to shuffle my holiday responses to normal celebrations. I would much rather cater to your specific holiday than waft over everything with a seasonal "Happy Holidays." It's a minor part of the retrograde, preferring "Happy Hanukkah," "Merry Kwanzaa," or "Blessed Winter Solstice" to the entirely impersonal "Happy Holidays." Doesn't that just promote ignorance rather than respect? Aren't you deliberately taking any meaning out of the words by generalizing the season so bluntly?
None of this is the reason it doesn't feel like Christmas. It's just poetic liberty.
We went driving to a neighborhood last night called "Christmas Card Lane." All the houses are dressed up in their thematic revels and they ooze Xmas Spirit. We drove there thinking this would incite some sort of Christmas riot within ourselves and suddenly the benevolence would shoot forth in candy cane rainbows and sugar plum parades. Even with Burl Ives blaring from the radio...it felt crowded and uncomfortable and when it ended there was no profound understanding of "this is what Christmas is all about," there was just "okay, so, how do I get back to the freeway from here?"
Christmas has gone missing. That intricate spirit that wades in the shadows of Thanksgiving waiting to jump into the snow machines of Southern California so we can play in the false nurturing of a fabricated holiday. But I suppose that's the problem...this year it feels fabricated. It feels false and pressured and obligatory rather than a relentless slew of warm memories and old friends. There's distance and dissidence to the spirit of Christmas, which prevails a false celebration. Musing about the societal nature of Xmas without spending much time in the throws of the society kind of limits perspective. Spending so much time avoiding crowds, entertaining individualistic activities, trying to force the spectacle of Xmas has diminished it's social value which is the whole argument I was making about the understanding of Christmas as a social tradition, and not a religious one.
Time to find the celebrations without confines. You can't force Christmas, but you can find it.
Thursday, December 22, 2011
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
Your Lego Days are Over, Baby
Hollywood has become culturally inept.
I speak solely, of course, of the blasphemous remake of a one Girl with the Dragon Tattoo that David Fincher has so unceremoniously dragged through the proverbial "remake machine." Not only has this film already been adapted from the world-wide bestselling novels by Stieg Larsson into a riveting 2009 Swedish film, but Hollywood has decided to rip from the pages a story which focuses on the deft human response to a culture which is not like itself.
My main problem comes cemented in the fact that this is America. The great U.S. of A. And here is Larsson, a man who wrote these novels as a testament to the treatment of women in Sweden. Mixed in his writhing narrative are facts about the negative treatment of women in his country, everything from unreported rape to public physical abuse. His facts augment his story as something that could have happened, an unrelenting mimic of a society in which ladies are second class citizens. This is a cultural manifesto, a societal quip, an allegory and a statement. The embellishment of this facet of the story is squeezed into Oplev's Dragon Tattoo with grace and impunity. The treatment of Lizbeth happens. It's vulgar and obscene but it's true to a certain extent, and therefore it is treated with retribution and denial. The cultural as well as visual significance cannot be denied: it is a pressing understanding of the culture in which it was made.
Which is why I just cannot fathom Fincher having any understanding of this.
The way he talks about this story, it's ripped from the headlines bravado with a vulnerable, taken-advantage of girl who must find herself in the pages of a murder mystery, seems to lack any tact. I don't understand how he has any bearing or understanding of how this story holds more weight than that of a crime drama.
More so, I don't understand why it's being made...
2008: Alfredson's Let the Right One In is released (Swedish)
2009: Oplev's Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is released (Swedish)
2010: Corneau's Love Crime is released (French)
2010: Reeve's Let Me in is released (USA)
2011: Fincher's Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is released (USA)
2012: De Palma's Passion is set for release (USA)
Give it a two year window and all of a sudden, it's ours for the taking. Do these movies not already exist? Is there not already a medium on which these films were made and available? This is in no way old hat to Hollywood. The Departed was originally Japan's Infernal Affairs (2002), and Vanilla Sky was the Spanish film Abre Los Ojos (1997). But what I can't seem to wrap my head around is, if the story already exists, why remake it? This is from a purely aesthetic and intellectual standpoint. Obviously it's for the money. There's a guaranteed audience who pay to see films in English, and outside of that there's a guaranteed audience who pay to see Hollywood fair. But from the point of authenticity, are you diminishing the value by duplicating? Aren't you splitting the template, removing the truth of an original by proving to yourself that anyone can do it? And, furthermore, aren't you taking credit for a product you did not actually produce? How is this not plagiarism?
What appears to be the audacious reality is that these directors and producers believe that they can make it better. The product, worn out from two to ten years of play, has outdated itself and must now be done again, only this time it will be better. "We have the technology" rings in my ears as I think this through. A salacious bid that now, we can do it right. We can do it better. We are the beginning and the end of this story. But by ripping the subject from its socio-cultural confines, you've already diminished the product's impact. Hollywood does this to itself as well.
Wes Craven is a director who has thrived in exploitation. Last House on the Left borrowed images straight from Vietnam news reels. This inoculation to the outside world by reincarnating it into a story of retribution and resistance gave audiences a spectator's way of dealing with external crisis. By viewing a reconciliation, no matter how brutal, the mind could deal with the outside forces that bore into their psyche. It's a basic principle of good horror, that it serves a duality of inoculation and entertainment. So, when Rogue Pictures remade it in 2009, is fared and bled and now sits on shelves of forgettable films released in the past decade. It's because it was removed, misunderstood and represented, and let go in favor of the original cult classic. This is happened on multiple occasions within this genre: Dawn of the Dead and growing consumerism, The Hills Have Eyes and suburban sprawl, most recently American Psycho and 80's extreme power in wealth. Outside of these social understandings, these films are not the impactful fan-fare which have trudged through decades to be the cult favorites they are today.
I'm left with a failed understanding of why foreign remakes exceed the impact of the original while remakes of our own fair poorly in the long run (obviously this isn't true of every film, Lola and Scarface being obvious exceptions). Are we that out of touch with the world around us that we must augment their realities to suit the needs of the remake machine? Are our ideas so lacking that we have to plagiarize the intellect of other nations to redeem the driving force of Hollywood forever? Our best director isn't even from the US (I speak, of course, of Christopher Nolan).
My frustration has outlived my purpose. I find I will forever lack the understanding necessary to succeed in such a succubus of an industry. I won't go see the Dragon Tattoo remake. I don't care if it's better than the original, and I don't care if that makes my argument uninformed. The fact is that I will watch the original and read the books with the knowledge and understanding that what I am watching is culturally relevant and not sampling of some misunderstood back beat.
The remake machine will live on, and stories will never be the same.
I speak solely, of course, of the blasphemous remake of a one Girl with the Dragon Tattoo that David Fincher has so unceremoniously dragged through the proverbial "remake machine." Not only has this film already been adapted from the world-wide bestselling novels by Stieg Larsson into a riveting 2009 Swedish film, but Hollywood has decided to rip from the pages a story which focuses on the deft human response to a culture which is not like itself.
My main problem comes cemented in the fact that this is America. The great U.S. of A. And here is Larsson, a man who wrote these novels as a testament to the treatment of women in Sweden. Mixed in his writhing narrative are facts about the negative treatment of women in his country, everything from unreported rape to public physical abuse. His facts augment his story as something that could have happened, an unrelenting mimic of a society in which ladies are second class citizens. This is a cultural manifesto, a societal quip, an allegory and a statement. The embellishment of this facet of the story is squeezed into Oplev's Dragon Tattoo with grace and impunity. The treatment of Lizbeth happens. It's vulgar and obscene but it's true to a certain extent, and therefore it is treated with retribution and denial. The cultural as well as visual significance cannot be denied: it is a pressing understanding of the culture in which it was made.
Which is why I just cannot fathom Fincher having any understanding of this.
The way he talks about this story, it's ripped from the headlines bravado with a vulnerable, taken-advantage of girl who must find herself in the pages of a murder mystery, seems to lack any tact. I don't understand how he has any bearing or understanding of how this story holds more weight than that of a crime drama.
More so, I don't understand why it's being made...
2008: Alfredson's Let the Right One In is released (Swedish)
2009: Oplev's Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is released (Swedish)
2010: Corneau's Love Crime is released (French)
2010: Reeve's Let Me in is released (USA)
2011: Fincher's Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is released (USA)
2012: De Palma's Passion is set for release (USA)
Give it a two year window and all of a sudden, it's ours for the taking. Do these movies not already exist? Is there not already a medium on which these films were made and available? This is in no way old hat to Hollywood. The Departed was originally Japan's Infernal Affairs (2002), and Vanilla Sky was the Spanish film Abre Los Ojos (1997). But what I can't seem to wrap my head around is, if the story already exists, why remake it? This is from a purely aesthetic and intellectual standpoint. Obviously it's for the money. There's a guaranteed audience who pay to see films in English, and outside of that there's a guaranteed audience who pay to see Hollywood fair. But from the point of authenticity, are you diminishing the value by duplicating? Aren't you splitting the template, removing the truth of an original by proving to yourself that anyone can do it? And, furthermore, aren't you taking credit for a product you did not actually produce? How is this not plagiarism?
What appears to be the audacious reality is that these directors and producers believe that they can make it better. The product, worn out from two to ten years of play, has outdated itself and must now be done again, only this time it will be better. "We have the technology" rings in my ears as I think this through. A salacious bid that now, we can do it right. We can do it better. We are the beginning and the end of this story. But by ripping the subject from its socio-cultural confines, you've already diminished the product's impact. Hollywood does this to itself as well.
Wes Craven is a director who has thrived in exploitation. Last House on the Left borrowed images straight from Vietnam news reels. This inoculation to the outside world by reincarnating it into a story of retribution and resistance gave audiences a spectator's way of dealing with external crisis. By viewing a reconciliation, no matter how brutal, the mind could deal with the outside forces that bore into their psyche. It's a basic principle of good horror, that it serves a duality of inoculation and entertainment. So, when Rogue Pictures remade it in 2009, is fared and bled and now sits on shelves of forgettable films released in the past decade. It's because it was removed, misunderstood and represented, and let go in favor of the original cult classic. This is happened on multiple occasions within this genre: Dawn of the Dead and growing consumerism, The Hills Have Eyes and suburban sprawl, most recently American Psycho and 80's extreme power in wealth. Outside of these social understandings, these films are not the impactful fan-fare which have trudged through decades to be the cult favorites they are today.
I'm left with a failed understanding of why foreign remakes exceed the impact of the original while remakes of our own fair poorly in the long run (obviously this isn't true of every film, Lola and Scarface being obvious exceptions). Are we that out of touch with the world around us that we must augment their realities to suit the needs of the remake machine? Are our ideas so lacking that we have to plagiarize the intellect of other nations to redeem the driving force of Hollywood forever? Our best director isn't even from the US (I speak, of course, of Christopher Nolan).
My frustration has outlived my purpose. I find I will forever lack the understanding necessary to succeed in such a succubus of an industry. I won't go see the Dragon Tattoo remake. I don't care if it's better than the original, and I don't care if that makes my argument uninformed. The fact is that I will watch the original and read the books with the knowledge and understanding that what I am watching is culturally relevant and not sampling of some misunderstood back beat.
The remake machine will live on, and stories will never be the same.
Monday, December 19, 2011
The Story of a Woman on the Morning of a War
Post-dated.
I hear about coming of age stories, and I realize they are all lies. You don’t come of age just once, but over and over again. Because, you see, it’s a universal fact of life, that you never stop aging. That’s the key-hole. So where’s the key? What is the significance of a coming-of-age story if there’s a continuation? How do you get past that first experience of it? So, say you come of age with some event that is personally significant, you feel profound and important. You don’t realize it’s a coming-of-age moment until, hey, you’re past it. But the point is, you had it, it was there. You had the key the whole time and you finally unlocked that door and passed through, escaping all the traps and trials and tribulations.
Actually, this kinda reminds me of Zelda.
See, we’ve been playing "The Legend of Zelda, Ocarina of Time" for N64. My ancient game is completed, with all hearts, all items, and 50 missing Gold Skulltulas but there is no point because all they give you is a giant rupee and I already have full rupees with the largest wallet (go figure). This isn’t the point, I’m just recounting the events.
Zelda is a coming of age story in every single dungeon, every single temple, every little cavern you have to traipse through to get the ice arrows or the hook-shot or the Spiritual Stone of Fire. What Link has to do (because, people, Zelda is not who you play as, Zelda is just the princess who gets in a lot of trouble, I guess) is run through these temples/dungeons/caverns and collect keys to open doors. You could go frolicking in a complete circle from the main room to some barred off other room in order to obtain a small key that is, in fact, needed to open a door in the main room which you left to obtain said key to begin with. Fact is, you went on this side trek to obtain the key to the door which only leads you deeper into the temple/dungeon/cavern. Sometimes, these door keys, they take you through a door that leads to a dead end and you have to, yet again, return to the main room before finishing the task at hand. This is never in vain, however. When you hit these dead ends, you leave with gauntlets, with mirror shields, with maps and compasses, with slingshots and longshots. Then you go back and do something you couldn’t do before because you didn’t have the gauntlets or mirror shield or slingshot or longshot. Or, my favorite, the bow and arrows. But it’s all about these small keys, and the small keys come in small chests without cut scenes. You just kick the chest and you get the key, and it’s a mini-feat. But it’s significant and substantial. You had to accomplish something just to get a key to go accomplish something else.
That’s why coming of age stories are lies. Because you do it, see it, smell it, taste it, feel it, and you get a key. That in itself is a coming of age experience. People have written substantial books about finding keys. People have made movies about finding keys. People have unlocked doors with keys, in the most literal sense of the word, and found something they were looking for, but then what? You come of age, you grow up and learn and you decide that bombs are the most efficient way to kill those laser-eye machine things (except for my personal favorite: just outrun them) and you learn that love isn’t easy and that strong people aren’t always as strong as they seem and that the Eye of Truth is really the only efficient way to win that chest game in Hyrule Village. But see, that’s it, you’re always coming of age and learning more.
But that’s why I’m always so disappointed when I turn on my game. I look at my double-lines of hearts, my full green magic counter, my full pack of arrows and my full weapons screen. I even took the time to get the fourth bottle, for crying out loud. And it’s because I literally have nothing else to do. My little Link animation is doomed to his existence of running around Hyrule in its still burdened state because do you want to know what happens when you win the game? You watch the credits pass. You laugh at the funny little cut scenes they’ve programmed in. Then you hit restart, plug back in, and your back right where you were before you went to kill Ganondorf. You haven’t saved Hyrule, you haven’t saved Zelda, you haven’t killed Ganondorf’s super "Ganon" beast form. You’re just there, still meek and sad and swinging your Biggoron sword you just had to get because (1)Lik-Lik’s die in one hit instead of three after eating you and stealing your shield, (2) It’s another feat you could complete to prove just how goddamn cool you are, (3) Link always looked a little emasculated in his Peter Pan meets A Midsummer Night’s Dream outfit and the sword compensates for that. But you never really get to win. You never get to see Link move on and finally just get with Zelda or the Zora Princess or Saria or that Gerudo woman who insists on wearing white lipstick. He never gets to live his life. He never gets to move on. It’s unfair, because he’s collected a lot of keys for this moment, and it comes and passes and warps you back to the decimated remains of a Hyrule terrorized by Ganondorf.
I want Link to come-of-age. I want him to become something and evolve. But he can’t and he won’t and he never will. And it’s tragic and unsettling and sad, but it’s also a video game, so it doesn’t really disturb my sleep at night.
And see, the only time Hyrule is happy and okay and content is when Link is a child. He can just replace the Master Sword and is warped back to the days when zombies do not scream at you in Hyrule Village, Ganondorf has no powers, and Zelda is just a crazy kid with a dream. You still have trials to overcome, but they are all voluntary. You don’t have to do them. If you really wanted to, you could just waltz around Kokiri Forest with Saria and not worry about the Great Deku Tree and his problems. But that makes it more real, because that’s the avoidance. You will never come of age, not once, if you remain in the past, if you put away the Master Sword, the tool with which you open new possibilities. You will just remain Link, the boy wonder, never amounting to anything other than the kid who is eternally annoyed by Navi the Fairy and her constant need for attention. (Ladies and Gentlemen, even game programmers understand that attention whores exist.) So even there, accepting that responsibility with age is learning that you have to overcome your trials, face them head on, and they never really stop because even if you were to warp back to a time of happiness and joy, Navi would just keep annoying you about saving the Princess (even if you’ve already done it ten to fifteen times just for fun).
It’s the process of getting there, you can’t just get a key and open a door and *bam* you win. You have to fight for it, earn it, and it’s the fun of it. What would life be if we just got dropped back to the beginning after coming of age? We would have learned some profound truth about ourselves and those around us, we would have understood some facet of being that was never fully understood before, and we would be content with that, but nothing would have changed. The beginning is the same as the ending, only you have more toys to get through it all. The doors are unlocked. You’re stronger and smarter. You’re older and more mature. But it’s still always there. So, I guess that’s just it. What would life be if we just got dropped back to the beginning after coming of age? The same as it is now, without the magic of actually being dropped back at the beginning.
I think that’s why Link can’t just run around happy-land Hyrule after you win, it’s the same reason you can’t just run around happy-land "Every Day Life" as though things will always be okay, because all those obstacles are still there...it’s just twenty times easier to do it in the end.
This is why we have to make shirts that say "I killed Phantom Ganon and all I got was this lousy medallion"
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