joanna bujes wrote:
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> Both characters, Murray as a successful star, and Scarlett as a Yale grad are portrayed as people who do not identify with their "success" and who are suspicious of various offers-of-entry into a world without depth or sense. They are wise enough to realize that there's no there, there. Their romantic/human encounter briefly offers them a meaningful emotional and human space, and the only way in which they can protect that experience from dissolution is to keep it private and personal ... and to guard it from "consumption." Kind of like the refusal to pick a fragrant rose. The movie is made with a very light touch and the acting is superb.
It sounds like an excellent movie -- but if you take it to another level of abstraction, it is as deeply imbued with capitalist ideology as a Fox newscast. Alienation, it reveals, is NOT a necessary and "objective" property of capitalist relations but the result of the (isolated) individual's failure to be "wise enough" to seize on the unalienated life which is available to all.
It is, then, a complicated manifestation of the ideology of blame the victim.
And this brings up a puzzle concerning the last minute or so of two great films, _The Bicycle Thief_ and _Citizen Kane_. We can use "Dover Beach" (interpretation of which can also be controversial) to provide a perspective.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
................
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Several people I've discussed this with over the years have argued that Arnold's ending (as well as De Sica's) is ironic -- that it intends the incapacity of "being true to one another" to redeem the world it describes. De Sica's ending, father and son reconciled, walking hand-in-hand into the sunset, is also then ironic????
The reporter searching for the "meaning" of Kane's life seeks a "key," and the ending _can_ be taken as showing something like his (the reporter's) failure to see how that key could be a single childhood disappointment, as the key (rosebud) is thrown onto the fire with all the other detritus of Kane's life. Or the movie could be exhibiting the foolishness of even looking for such a 'key.'
(Incidentally, try to imagine the movies that would have resulted if De Sica had directed Modern Times and Chaplin had directed The Bicycle Thief. It just occurred to me as I wrote this post that only slightly abstracting one could give identical summaries of the two films.)
But anyhow, do all three (or four) films (and Arnold) take modern life as simply life, TINA, and see the human challenge as somehow creating "non-alienated" relations in an ontologically alienated world?
Carrol