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Notes -
I watched Sinners last night.
It’s a flick about 1930’s vampires set in the American bayou. It’s a black flick. It’s about blackness, being black, black music, black stuff. Very black.
I love black cinema. From Life with Eddie Murphy to exploitation like Sweet Sweetback’s to Don’t Be a Menace to Friday I dunno whatever, even Scary Movie maybe. I’ve seen several dozen of them. They’re all ‘ black ‘ and pretty watchable for anyone. Plus anyone with even a hint of social awareness can watch them just fine.
The movie I’d most compare this to (it’s where my mind went for some reason) is Idlewild - basically OutKast (the musical group) in Atlanta in the 30’s … also very black. I love this movie.
The black characters in all these films are … black. They seem like normal people, just black. Rich black. Poor black. Dumb black. Smart black. Teacher black. Funny black.
I was born in Poland so I e always watched (not enough) a bunch of Polish cinema. Same idea. The Polish characters are Polish characters in a myriad of ways and if you’re Polish then you get it, and if you’re not, you can still be entertained and understand.
Well with Sinners - and even before really over the last few years … it just seems like the blackness is performative. It’s not that I don’t believe Michael B Jordan isn’t black, or that the writer or director don’t know about being black, it’s that I think now they’re starting to act as a fictional black narrative.
Being a 1930’s black man is no longer believable on screen. It was believable in Idlewild. Friday is believable - it’s caricature of course, but believable! I believed Dr Dre … I don’t believe Kendrick Lamar. I believed The Wire … I don’t believe (basically any ‘ black ‘ show I’ve tried to get into lately). I haven’t watched the show Atlanta but I’ve heard good things but mostly from white people, and mostly the writer and actor falls into this land of unbelievability as well.
I think there’s this black (black American) malaise that I can’t describe or catch onto over the last decade or so that makes black entertainers over perform their blackness in a subtle way.
I’ve always felt black Americans are Americans, just black. More recently I feel like they’re trying to be in some way more so.
If I were a pessimist I would say this is part of the ‘ we were kings ‘ meme that has been overloaded into the cultural psyche - if I were an optimist, I’d say it’s a culture trying to find itself and strive for a cohesive core to begin to become something other than ‘ black Americans ‘.
I’m usually optimistic in all respects but I have a lot of negativity towards, in respect to this post, black entertainment. Or at black entertainment that attempts to be mainstream.
This hits on an idea I was thinking about recently. In order to genuinely enjoy any sort of fiction, you have to be able to suspend disbelief. Almost all fiction has fantastic, or at least slightly unbelievable elements. While sometimes these are the crux of the work, other times they serve more mundane functions like the simplification of an overly complex plot.
What I've been noticing as I get older is that I'm able to do this less and less. When you consume new media while young, you are able to gloss over inconsistencies with ease. As you age, these become more jarring, eventually making consumption of new plot lines kind of difficult.
In light of this, I find myself wondering if a lot of new shows are as bad as they seem, or if I'm simply unable to overlook their flaws (or inadvertently comparing them to the best-in-genera alternatives)
For me effective suspension of disbelief comes down to whether or not the there's internal consistency. It's not about how outlandish or even stupid-on-its-face the impossible element is, it's whether or not the story acts as though it believes in that impossible element. As soon as the story stops believing its own impossibility, then how am I supposed to believe in it?
Example. Magic exists? Okay sure why not, magic exists. Magic exists and it's a blessing to women and a curse to men? Okay sure, that gets explained well so it's all internally consistent. Magic exists and it's a blessing to women and a curse to men but men are still in charge of everything and women are poor downtrodden and oppressed? Wait hang on a second, how does that work? That doesn't make any sense, it should be the other way around if anything, and then I'm yanked out of my suspension of disbelief and I can't enjoy the show anymore.
Or when the show/movie/book/whatever starts piling on new impossible elements and just hand-waves their existence.
Example. Magic exists? Okay sure why not, magic exists. This group of soldiers are the best soldiers in the world? Okay sure why not, there are good soldiers and bad soldiers in our world, that's fine. This group of soldiers are the best soldiers in the world but now they're all going to act unbelievably retarded because we have to further the plot? Wait hang on a second, I thought these were the best soldiers in the world! Why are they acting like mouth-breathing retards now? Oh we're just glossing over that? They're all dead? Wait now they're all alive again? How did they teleport a thousand miles south in a week?
You have to give me grounds to suspend my disbelief, you can't just demand it, but I'll happily suspend my disbelief for any kind of media that tries to work with me. It doesn't even have to be good grounds to suspend my disbelief. Stories rarely go back 10,000 years in time to the first discovery of magic in the world and the painstaking process of discovering why it exists, it's usually just presented as a trusim. Magic exists in this world. And that's fine! That's good enough! Dragons exist in this world, sure why not, sounds fun! As long as there is an iota of "look this is essential to the story so just go with it" or "here is the history of how magic came to be" I'll run with it because that's how you get to enjoy the story. It's laziness that pulls me out.
I keep being amazed by how few authors grasp this. A story should be internally consistent and stick to how things work in the real world except where explicitly noted in the text, as clearly (and largely unambiguously) established in the genre conventions or where the differences are gradually hinted at and revealed.
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I am once again going to plug the late, great Shamus Young's post on Story Collapse.
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No not at all. "Suspension of disbelief", as if you were hoping that you could be "taken for a ride" if you could only make yourself believe that the story really was a window to another world, is an immature way of approaching art (immature in the sense of pre-critical, pre-reflective, pre-self-consciousness).
The mature, critical way of approaching art (which actually just turns out to be straight up more fun) is to start from the recognition that the artwork was deliberately constructed as a product of human intentionality. Like all other artifacts of human labor, it was designed according to certain specifications in order to serve certain purposes. So our analysis begins with questions like, why was this created, what narrative did the artist tell themselves about why it was created and is it in any sense different from the truth of why it was "actually" created, what is the background casual chain of social/material conditions that lead to the production of this specific work in the specific way that it was produced, how are its formal features related to the conditions of its production, how do its formal features relate to its conceptual features, etc...
Some works reveal themselves to be richer and more amenable to this type of analysis than others, which is how the term "genre fiction" came to take on a derisive connotation.
The fact that a magic trick falls apart if you look at it too closely doesn't mean that wanting to see a magic trick is immature. Sometimes the point of an experience is the visceral immediacy of it.
Thinking that wanting to be immersed in a fiction is the same thing as that fiction being real is how a lot of media gets ruined by people who now feel they have to manage your perceptions.
I recently watched F1. The movie, like Top Gun before it, is bullshit in its specifics. And there's probably an interesting critical take to be written about what it says about the generational conflict in the West right now (both movies represent a rejection of the need to pass the torch, which is itself a backlash against "woke" reboots which also functioned as forced retirement for the Boomer celebrities and their IPs)
But I don't give a fuck about any of that, because I wanted to see fast cars and improbably skilled and handsome people in an IMAX theater. I wanted to be so engrossed I didn't care. And I was. Mission accomplished.
Various 20th century artistic practices that are now grouped under the heading of "abstraction" could be described in precisely this way, as an attempt to "look at the magic trick closely". Artists set out with the self-conscious intent of "breaking the illusion", of foregrounding the process of creation that normally remains hidden; in painting this took the form of abstract painting, painting that embraced the "flatness of the canvass" instead of trying to retreat from it into the illusion of 3D perspective, painting that owned the fact that it was nothing more than blobs of colored goo.
The idea was to ask whether it was possible to construct an art without illusion, an art that would endure even when the magic trick was ruined. Surely you can agree that this is at least an interesting question, even if you think it must ultimately be answered in the negative?
It's not so much that I have a definitive stance on the question (which I can grant with no issue is interesting) and more that I don't think all forms of art are or need be set up to deal with that challenge.
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Yeah I strongly disagree that critical analysis is more fun. It is a different type of fun, almost too different to compare, but definitely not more fun than immersing yourself in the media you are consuming. I think, based on your first paragraph in particular, that you have not sufficiently suspended your disbelief. Maybe suspension of disbelief isn't for you? But also maybe you have been poisoned by the media analysis framework. And it is a poison, because embracing suspension of disbelief is not pre-critical or pre-reflective by necessity, that's just critical analysis promotion, the willing, deliberate and conscious suspension of disbelief is a sacrifice the viewer makes to fully engage with the story's world and emotions. It is prioritising emotional connection over intellectual dissection and emotional connection is the heart of good art.
I'm always in an unenviable position in these discussions, because I'm always trying to bring people to a more refined and complex position than the one they currently inhabit, regardless of where they're starting out from. If I'm talking to stuck-up hipsters who say "well, there's obviously a divide between High Art and 'pop culture', the former being more valuable, more intellectual, etc" then I say, no no, let's stop and examine that assumption. But conversely if people say, "well art's just about having a good time, I know what I like, you don't have to make it complicated with all that fancy shit", then I just as forcefully say, no no, let's stop and examine that assumption. It's never supposed to be a direct denial of the starting position, but rather an invitation for us to walk the endless spiral of the Hegelian dialectic, together, as a team. But it always seems to come off as a direct denial. That's my fault; I need to work on my presentation.
Now, regarding my own capacity for "suspension of disbelief". I just finished up playing a VN recently. Fun game. I binged it as fast as I could, I was on the edge of my seat waiting for each plot twist, I got weirdly obsessed with one of the girls and wanted to waifu her, I cried when important characters died (yes I am a grown man who cries at video games). So am I incapable of enjoying stories like a "normal person"? Not at all! There's nothing I love more than a good story, it's basically what I live for. But, you know, you eventually want something more, you want to move the conversation forward. So you ask yourself: yes, I had this experience, this particular type of experience, but what of it? Well for starters, we can question the "naturalness" of this type of experience. We can ask ourselves if this type of experience might not be historically and spatially delimited. (Did the Iliad have "fans" in ancient Greece? How was their experience of the Iliad different from how we "experience" "stories" today? On the one hand, I think it may not be as different as some might suppose. But on the other hand, it might be utterly alien.) I had this experience, but what is this experience, really? What does it mean? What is it symptomatic of? Where did it come from, and where is it going?
It's as much about making your self and your own experience an object of critical inquiry as it is about inquiring into the artwork and the artist.
Not at all! Not in any way. Not that the two could ever be separated to begin with.
But, you know, this question about the connection between art and what might be called "emotion", it's a highly complex and fraught question. The way forward is not at all clear.
Adorno defined "kitsch" as "art that tells you how to feel". Genuine artworks don't tell you how to feel. Meaning, there's something fundamentally manipulative and coercive about an artwork that sets out with the explicit goal of inducing a certain emotional state. When the sad music plays and the camera zooms in dramatically and all the characters start crying, you know you're supposed to feel sad. The work is telling you to feel sad. We've left the domain of art and we've entered the domain of the "culture industry", the domain of pseudo-art and pseudo-emotion, the domain of mass market objects produced to fit utilitarian specifications. Or so this theory would have it.
Is this the same as saying that art should be "emotionless"? Not at all. Adorno was a great lover of Mozart after all, and Mozart's music could hardly be described as emotionless. But I do think he correctly identified a very real and very serious problem here, namely that an attempt to control the emotional resonance of a work too tightly can collapse into simple didacticism.
I don't understand how you can call immersion pre-critical, pre-reflective, or pre-self-consciousness then (I would drop immaturity from the conversation entirely if you want to avoid getting people's hackles up). While it can be that, you personally have to willingly suspend your disbelief to cry during a VN (which VN btw?) - your immersion isn't pre-critical, you deliberately gave that up to engage with the story.
And you are right that the connection between art and emotion isn't clear. But it is definitely strong. And of course Adorno is right about kitsch (imo), but I was looking at it from the other direction - an artist shouldn't try to manipulate the viewer, what they should do is try to express themselves, express their vision. Because if they can get their vision out, the person who connects with it - who can't not connect with it - will be moved to tears. It feels like you are trying to intellectualise that away by referring to 'emotions', but that would just be diminishing yourself.
That's why we hold up auteurs, even as movies rack up thousands of staff members - we respect the auteur because it's his vision, and he has demonstrated the ability to connect with us emotionally. Sometimes that's not because of the auteur, but he or she is usually our best guide. Sure Marvel can put out a dozen capeshit flicks and manipulate the audience with clinical precision - I would call that kitsch. But someone with an actual vision, who puts it on the page or film or score sheet, they might use camera techniques or bass heavy music to manipulate the audience, but it isn't kitsch when it's done in the service of connecting the audience to the inside of the auteur's head. The challenge in my view, is finding auteurs and other authentic artists. Sure we are all trapped in the same post-modern hellscape constantly trying to push us towards slop - even the auteurs are, blurring the lines - but true vision can still cut through.
Yeah, I have to work on my presentation. But at the same time, I really do have to ask my readers to suspend certain pre-existing conceptual and emotional associations they have around certain terms, y'know? Not erase, just temporarily suspend. Otherwise we can't make any progress.
There was a conversation here a few weeks ago where I said that love is impossible. That got a few people upset. But did I ever say that people shouldn't do things that are impossible? Did I ever say that there's no place in the world for impossible things? Not at all. Similarly, did I ever say that a certain amount of immaturity is not warranted? Not at all. (I suppose the Hegelian way of talking about it would be, you have to go through maturity to arrive at a mature immaturity.)
The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy
Not at all! "Intellectualize"? Goodness gracious no.
We're in complete agreement that there is an intimate link between art and what might be called "emotion". But this phrase, that an artist should "express themselves", makes me nervous, increasingly nervous, for reasons that I don't fully understand myself and have never been able to entirely articulate. There's clearly something right about it, and yet we should also be cautious. Taking a shot in the dark, some of the reasons may be:
Ah, Kodaka's works, one of my favorite subjects.
That's because the implication, which is "[express themselves] within the service of a greater whole", has been lost. (Can't imagine why that would be more likely to apply to artists from highly conformist cultures at all, or why audiences from those cultures would be more likely to see it that way.)
This is also the problem with 'modern' art, by the way: when the creation of a thing is not only fundamentally selfish (it isn't interested in how you'll view it), but the work itself doesn't serve any other aesthetic purpose. It's the "doesn't owe you femininity" of the art world.
Ever notice that, especially evident with how the Western world interacts with other Kodaka VNs, that 'how the presentation will be perceived' is a central element of every ambiguous-gender character (Chihiro [Danganronpa] and Halara [Rain Code])? Progressive critique falls over itself complaining about what pronoun to use [which is the exact opposite of this], but most of their character arcs again involve that perception and service to a greater whole, where their presentation is merely an incidental/a tool to do other things.
Made in Abyss is also a pretty good example of this (and an even better one if it makes you uncomfortable)- it's extremely offensive to Western sensibilities, and it would be to mine as well if the work was just one big centerfold of a naked limbless Riko- but the fact the author thinks that way is harnessed into a narrative that flat out doesn't work if the main characters either aren't children or have the invincibility child characters usually have.
(This is also something Kodaka does when he can get away with it re: Ultra Despair Girls; Omori does this too in its own way [if you compare the Omoriboy comic, the tissue box serves the same purpose in both works, but in an extremely meta sense in the game compared to the comic]).
Which one? The first one, the tomato, the tomboy, the onii-chan, the girlboss, the swordswoman, the one that makes fun of the audience for being Danganronpa-obsessed, Hulkamania Sister!, the ahegao-faced one, the secret one, or the enemy (not that one, the other one)?
I kinda think that's just true though! The artwork doesn't owe you anything. In fact, it's a good exercise to ask yourself what you owe to the artwork.
Walter Kaufmann said of Kierkegaard, "there's no other author in world literature who gives me such a strong impression that my soul has been placed on the scales, and found wanting". I think that's what great art should aim to do. There's something fundamentally anxiety-inducing about it.
Of course, if the work serves literally no purpose whatsoever, aesthetic or otherwise, then yes, by definition we would have to question what the point of making it in the first place was. But it's actually quite hard to find a work that meets that criteria; maybe impossible. You know, even something like Joseph Kosuth's "Art as Idea as Idea" where he would print placards with dictionary entries on them and hang them up in an otherwise empty room... even something like this produces an aesthetic experience. It has its own kind of texture, it induces its own kind of perception. It's more subtle but it's there if you can grab onto it. He probably didn't even want that work to induce a "classical" kind of aesthetic experience, and yet it does, because it's inescapable.
Well, that's a result of the fanbase being largely tumblrites.
I've loved Danganronpa ever since SDR2 first released in English but I never really interacted with the community, so I was surprised to see what a big tumblr/fujo following it had. I suppose it was a result of Danganronpa being relatively "gender neutral", and having some pretty boys like Nagito to latch onto. Although I was even more surprised that the fujo contingent showed up for Hundred Line as well, because that one is much more unabashedly targeted at a straight male audience.
I want Hiruko to step on me!
V'ehx is close though, god damn they did her dirty by giving her such a short route...
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Personally, I see no reason the two are mutually exclusive. You don't have to turn off your brain to feel things and keeping your brain turned on doesn't stop you from feeling. A really great movie watching experience, to me, is seeing something that makes me feel strongly, understanding why and how it's making me feel those things, and then layering that intellectual appreciation of the technique on top of the emotional appreciation of the scene. I picture the scene in "Amadeus" when Salieri describes Mozart's music. His appreciation of the art is enhanced by technical understanding, not diminished. Understanding the camera tricks that make Hannibal Lector so intimidating doesn't make the scene boring, it makes watching the scene more compelling. When you see a brilliant musician play a great piece of music, there is beauty in both the sound of the music and in the masterful playing itself. Noticing one doesn't preclude noticing the other, they enhance each other. For me, it's the same with movies.
Immersing yourself in the media is not switching your brain off though. I would like to think my post history proves that critical analysis of media is one of my primary passions, I am not trying to shit on it - by prioritise I didn't mean to imply they were exclusive.
What I took @wingdingspringking to mean by truly enjoy media, particularly with their comments about struggling with it as they age, is immerse yourself so fully that you forget you exist outside of the media. That is a transcendent experience when it happens, and maybe this is just wingding and me (or maybe just me?) but once you have done it, critical analysis just doesn't compare.
Usually when I find media like that I obsess over it, and then I analyse it endlessly.
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For me, that doesn't sound more fun or mature. It sounds like an absolutely miserable way to experience art, and like it's trying too hard to be adult as with one who is insecure about their own adulthood (cue CS Lewis quote here). If you find it more enjoyable I can't really argue with results, but it isn't for me at all.
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Nah. A well-written show leaves you something else to mull over as your grow older. Maybe there's more depth to a character than you could even begin to understand when you were young (imagine thinking Boromir is just an asshole... couldn't be me!), or it touches on some abstract ideas you couldn't grasp earlier. Sure, I could flip the table over TNG's retarded security protocols that get broken regularly, and I probably would, if there was nothing else to redeem the show.
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