File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_2001/lyotard.0107, message 85


Date: Sun, 15 Jul 2001 22:26:43 -0100
From: hbone <hbone-AT-optonline.net>
Subject: Re: Can't buy me Love! - or Philosophy!


Thanks Eric and All,

Each person is victor and victim in the movie of one's life, a single,
unique, life-history; a
compendium of all thoughts experienced, all words heard, texts read, images
seen.  How much can be crammed into a two-hour movie?

Apparently, Moulin Rouge encompassed enough to be entertaining, a giant
mishmash  of popular culture of the latter part of the century

One can imagine a similar treatment of the tons of text emitted by the
most-read philosophers of the same era, how they were read, re-read,
mis-read.  It wouldn't be entertainment, but might emphasize the destruction
of the "self", the impossibility of a personal philosophy, when philosophic
trends make each human mind a constantly increasing landfill of the "other".

Whatever it is, its "yours", exclusive, and unbuyable.

I read unfavorable reviews of Moulin Rouge, but was tempted by your
description until the in the end it was compared with Titanic.

regards,
Hugh
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


Eric wrote:

> I went to see Moulin Rouge last night.  It is a movie difficult to
> describe.  One is tempted to say it is MTV meets Carmen meets American
> in Paris meets Nirvana meets 60's rebellion meets The Umbrellas of
> Cherbourg meets Ballywood.  It is a postmodern, multicultural musical
> entertainment with a vengeance.
>
> According to its very humorous anachronistic dialectics, every
> rebellious movement that has ever signified modernity is put into the
> cultural blender and it all comes out the same.  Bohemians, bobby
> soxers, hippies, punk, grunge are all revealed to share an ahistorical
> commonality in ways the movie reduces to ironic self-parody.  It is all
> so self-consciously reductionist you cannot help but laugh.
>
> At its core, this is a Marxist musical - Marxism lite. The plot centers
> upon the conflict between Money and Love in traditional, melodramatic
> ways.  Who will get the girl?  Will it be the poor, sincere passionate
> writer (Love) or the greedy possessive Duke (Money).
>
> Self-aware of every cliche it evokes, the movie nonetheless pushes this
> question of economic control and domination throughout in humorous ways.
> It shows how the romantic idealizations favored by bohemianism with its
> simple big 'honest' words like Truth, Beauty, Freedom and Love
> constantly trumpeted like advertising slogans by the children of the
> revolution are forever in danger of being trumped in the 'real' world by
> Money.
>
> As the courtesans, the ladies of the evening put it: you have to sell
> your love in the street in order to survive in Moulin Rouge.  Money
> changes everything!
>
> This is coupled with the insight that this foundational cash nexus
> produces a Society of the Spectacle. Everything becomes performance.
> This leads to a dizzying play within a play within a play structure in
> which both the opening and closing scenes are literally draped with
> theatre curtains.  At the climax of the movie, when the heroine Satine
> dies, the event occurs on stage in front of the audience who has been
> watching the play. They applaud, thinking it is part of the performance.
> We sit in the movie audience and watch them applaud.
>
> At one level, irony is the helpless gesture of one who is permitted only
> to observe, lacking the power to change the ways things are.  Hamlet in
> a wheelchair. (or Hamm) Social realism has died out in the arts because
> such a privileging of a single point of view as if it were the only
> point of view possible merely evokes further parody.  So, instead, jaded
> souls that we are, we prefer nihilistic self-referential musicals that
> leave us dizzy with a orgy of allusion before we succumb to a vertigo of
> atonished delight
>
> Even that hoariest of all chestnuts, the Proustian cliche that this
> fallen quotidian suffering may be redeemed because it can be
> transfigured into Art, is slyly addressed in Moulin Rouge.  At the end
> of the movie, the hero sits alone, with his manuscript wallpapering the
> tiny room.  He types 'The End' with a flourish and the implication is he
> has just told his story and by this very fact, Love has triumphed after
> all.  But wait - isn't this also just an obvious continuation of the
> overwrought Titanic parody the movie evoked earlier?
>



   

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