Review: Fincher's Gone Girl

Newly added to the Cabinet . . . .

 

I have been a Fincher fan since Alien³, and indeed I've considered him one of the top directors in the U.S. pretty much since he successfully followed up Se7en (and The Game) with Fight Club. In truth, I consider him one of the few who might be able to step into the void created in the realm of film as artwork by Kubrick's death.

Which is not to say he is without criticism. For me, while it is a very interesting go at a very restrictive genre, I think Panic Room falls apart well before its final moments. But of more concern for me – speaking as a fan – is that it seems that in the last few films he has abandoned aesthetic creativity for narrative realism. While I am still in consideration of my position on them, The Social Network, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo[FN], and, now, Gone Girl are to me a regression into cinematic realism. Visually, as films as opposed to narratives, they may be meticulous, technically well executed, but they are to me rather uninteresting aesthetically. Up until Social Network, you could track Fincher's directorial choices as an exploration of genres, moving from one to another, never back tracking: Alien³ = science fiction; Se7en = horror; The Game = mystery; Fight Club = psychological thriller; Panic Room = lady in a cage; Zodiac = (60s-70s style) cop drama; Benjamin Button = literary fantasy (that might be called magical realism).

Something I Read #10 - Wallace Stevens

I used this in a recent post on the PDC, but I'll put it here as well. From "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words" in Necessary Angel:

There is not a poet whom we prize living today that does not address himself to an élite. The poet will continue to do this: to address himself to an élite even in a classless society, unless, perhaps, this exposes him to imprisonment or exile. In that event he is likely not to address himself to anyone at all. He may, like Shostakovich, content himself with pretence. He will, nevertheless, still be addressing himself to an élite, for all poets address themselves to someone and it is of the essence of that instinct, and it seems to amount to an instinct, that it should be to an élite, not to a drab but to a woman with the hair of a pythoness, not to a chamber of commerce but to a gallery of one's own, if there are still enough of one's own to fill a gallery. And that élite, if it responds, not out of complaissance, but because the poet has quickened it, because he has educed from it that for which it was searching in itself and in the life around it and which it had not yet quite found, will thereafter do for the poet what he cannot do for himself, that is to say, receive his poetry.

 

One of the curious-not-so-curious subtexts that can be seen within the discourse of poppoetry is the effort to deny such a thought.

Shining Books

This is a new essay added to the Cabinet, which thus can also be found here. It is a bit I have been wanting to do for a while. A little something for you Shining obsessives.

 

What I want to do here is mostly point out a curiosity I noticed with Kubrick's The Shining as regarding books. It's nothing groundbreaking; mostly a curiosity. Though, with Kubrick's well known attention to detail I think it is safe to go beyond mere curiosity: these are not accidents within the film, but designed and attended to details. How successfully you can read something out of these details is a matter of what it is you want read out of them. I myself will intend only safe steps.

For me, I think there are three such places to go. First, there is the simple issue of visual effect. Second, there is a relationship between books and the characters of the movie. Third, I believe that relationship works if but as one piece of evidence (and not a terribly important one at that) to disrupting what I believe is a false idea about the Overlook Hotel: that is, I believe most people want to read the movie as a haunted house film, that there is something inherently evil about the hotel. I do not read the movie as such: I read it that while there may be evil within the hotel (room 237 is most definitely a negatively defined place), the hotel itself is, as a whole, neutral. Yes, as Halloran says, the Overlook shines. But shining is not in itself evil. Perhaps, to use a theme not absent from The Shining, the Overlook's shine is like a mirror: you get out of it greatly what you put into it.

There and Back: An Expeditionary Journey by Way of Manifesto

Something new to the Cabinet (you can find it here), an exploration of Sontag's "Against Interpretation," as well an indirect presentation of some of the ideas underlying the aesthetic modality. This was not my first engagement with Sontag's essay; but it is the fullest. (I will grant, it get's a bit confusing toward the end.)

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As an essay, I have always enjoyed reading it – for the ideas, yes; but as much for the panache and bravado of the rhetoric, as well as for the pleasure of its structure of a layered expansion closed with a sudden contraction. But let there be no mistake: I would be the first to admit that Susan Sontag's "Against Interpretation" carries with it certain difficulties. Because of its rhetoric, it can only ever have something of a disadvantageous existence within a dialogue on aesthetics: its rhetoric is, after all, that of a manifesto, of something intent more toward proclamation, declamation and mustering than toward a subtle or cooperative engagement of ideas. As Sohnya Sayres speaks of it: "To ears trained in the nuances of literary goodfellowship, this is sophomoric, rebel talk, written as if the critical mind itself held no fathomless ambiguities. [. . .] The aroused march of Sontag's essay is drummed along by her instinct for the essence of a polemic."

Which is not to say that reading, enjoying, or the value of "Against Interpretation" can never be more than rambunctious and inspiriting yowling. The essay does operate well as a kick in the backside in prompting the interested or obliged – if naïve – reader of literature to the possibility that there are other ways of engaging a literary text than as autobiography or as personal or cultural history. Yet, even as such there is an inescapable sense of its own limitations: "If she had an antiprogram in mind, she has lost" (82): all passage from the essay out into the greater discourse of literary aesthetics is cut short by the arm waiving and table pounding. It plays and winds through its own mechanics, spends the energy it has to spend, and hopefully prompts the reader toward possibilities not before considered, or charges the reader for whom the possibilities are already beyond considerations; then, after its flamboyant final gesture, the essay is left with nothing more to say, nowhere else to go, and no means to move beyond the momentary performance. What is there is what is there, and for all it is worth. To move beyond would require the addition to or substitution of the polemic with less a monologic and more openly dialogic text, a text less proclamatory and more participatory within in the greater discourse of art and the aesthetic.

"Or," as Sayres writes, "perhaps not."