TLC 8740 post in progress

First of all, it looks like the link that I posted to Laurie Anderson's Only An Expert has gone kaput, so here's another:

Only An Expert

And while we're cruising YouTube, how 'bout this one too:

The Shining Elevator Scene analysis

Ok, ok, I know, I already demonstrated my ability to derail a reading response with a tenuous analogy connecting the readings to a movie I've recently watched, but bear with me because this so totally relates to Eisner, Freedman, and Barrett...

As I read Eisner's reproduction of a student's response to the red dye creepily saturating a glass of water (p 60), I couldn't help but think of this scene from The Shining because the day prior I received reassurance that I wasn't the only Kubrick nut rattling on semi-coherently of late. Check out this article.

Now, being a proper fanboy, I was already aware that The Shining has been interpreted as a comment on the destruction of the Native American peoples. But since it's not one of my favorite readings of the film(PING Barrett: some interpretations are better than others), I doubt it would have came to mind if I hadn't just recently been reminded of it by this article. But far and away, my favorite thing about this article and the YouTube clip is that they provide more linguistic snd conceptual fodder for my thoughts on Kubricks's films because "the ability to transform qualities of experience into speech and text" (Eisner, p 86) is important and film, which includes a temporal element, is so nearly experiential that without those intermediaries the experience can slip away. Also, it's good to know that someone else out there is watching closely enough to have called out the Times article's author on his tuxedo/top hat mix up (see article correction) and to see that Lichanos' comment on the bottom echos the observation I made in my last post about the homicidal apes in 2001 (because that helps me as I seek to balance personal and communal interpretations; PING Barrett again).

All of this serves to reinforce the notion I already held that Kubrick's work serves as what we called in my days as a lit student a Rich Text. Rich texts are works that reward repeated readings/viewings; works that grow and change as we do. The reason I've got Kubrick on the brain right now is that I got his collected works on blu ray for Christmas. I already had them all on DVD since they were among the first DVDs I bought back in high school when I got my first DVD player and some of them I had on VHS before that, so I can testify to their quality in this respect, but I don't really need to since a wealth of literature has grown and continues to grow around them. Which is the only quantitative means of determining a rich text: how many other works exist that draw on or discuss the work in question. The Bible and Shakespeare are among the richest texts extant, but, as Barrett mentions in passing, volumes of work on Magritte were likely consulted and whittled down into the encyclopedia entry that he reprints, so Magritte's work constitutes a rich text as well.

But how does that happen? How does one text become richer than another? Freedman uses two Kubrick films as examples of the type of "popular films that have postmodern forms [and] are edited in a pastiche that focuses the audience on structure and process" (p 34) and that, I suspect, is one means by which a work achieves such status--by leaving ample room for interpretation. In this sense, it is partly the medium and its handling that creates the condition. For Shakespeare, it's not only the breadth of his vocabulary and the quantity of material he left behind, but that his works are plays and lean upon the reader or theater professional or film maker to complete them. The Bible's variety of cultures, time periods, authors and styles make it an extraordinarily malleable reference point for a variety of ideological and creative ends (though, I would argue, it's a bit of a mixed bag in therms of Richness).

I'm misusing Freedman a bit though because in that passage, she's actually suggesting that these films are an examples of a new phenomenon and the two examples I've just given are very old. But I think she's misusing Kubrick, so turnabout is fair play. Freedman asserts that "no audience in a postindustrial democracy can be considered visually naive" and makes use of Kubrick as evidence for that statement but of Kubrick's and the other films listed in those parentheses, I would count none--with the possible exception of Pulp Fiction--as solid examples of popular culture in a postindustrial democracy. The reality is that the most mainstream of films in our postindustrial culture still adhere quite faithfully to the machinations of the invisible narrator. Which is not to say that she does not have a point, just that she should have narrowed her argument: given the proliferation and dominance of visual information in our culture, audiences are only as naive as they would like to be--alternatives are available. What she touches on, though, in suggesting that these are "popular" films, is the other means by which a text becomes rich--popularity--and that popularity may have little to do with any inherent quality in the material, it's just that a bigger audience results in a bigger audience response. And that bigger audience can be as much from luck as anything else. One of my favorite examples of blind popularity enriching a text is the phenomenon of film/album synchronicity, as exemplified by the pairing of the films version of The Wizard of Oz and Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon (there's a whole culture of looking for such pairings on the Internet if you care to search for it). These are wholly unrelated works of art being used by their audiences to build new communal meanings.

What has really happened with visual culture over the past century is not that it has become more sophisticated, as Freedman suggests, but that it has become more popular. Any perceived increase in sophistication is likely a residual effect of that popularity. Freedman goes on to elaborate on the new need to reassess aesthetic study of visual culture because of this proliferation with reference to Theodore Adorno's "lament" at "the collapse of the boundaries between fine art and popular culture" and she later (p 41) brings Adorno back up as a contrast with Dewey's "neopragmatist" approach, at which point she works a bit of her own aesthetic magic by using what I believe is the only first-person singular pronoun in the entire chapter. "I have always been uncomfortable with the apparently elitist perspective of Adorno's aesthetic..." she confesses. This is in spite of the fact that the very first marginal note that I wrote in this chapter was right next to the very first sentence: "active-ist."

From her first sentence, it is clear that Freedman has an agenda; that she is making an argument.  Yet, her writing style has the peculiar habit of hiding her voice.  In other words, right up until the imaginary fourth wall is broken by her confessed discomfort, Freedman has been hiding the narrator.