Bryan Atinsky wrote:
>
> Dennis Perrin wrote:
> >> What's wrong with "American Beauty" and "Revolutionary Road?"
> >>
> >> Joanna
> >
> > American Beauty is a guilty pleasure for me, though it has numerous
> > flaws. This was back when the Michael O'Donoghue remembrance camp
> > thought that Kevin Spacey would make a great Mr. Mike (which he would
> > have). Still, I prefer Todd Solondz's Happiness, which is a far
> > darker, much better assault on American suburbia.
> >
> > Revolutionary Road, another Sam Mendes effort, seemed forced, though
> > again, I enjoyed it. Problem is, it came out in the Mad Men era. Bad
> > timing there.
> >
>
> I don't know, there is something about the ideological lesson of those
> movies (happiness not in this category), and say like Thelma and Louise
> and hundreds of others, which ALWAYS make the payment for breaking the
> boundaries of social norms to be the protagonists death.
> Sacrifice/payment must be made to re balance the disturbing of the
> symbolic order.
>
> So, on the one hand, they want you to identify and sympathize with the
> ideals of the heroes, but make sure you understand that to actually act
> on any subversive or 'revolutionary' activity/mindset, is bound to fail,
> will lead to your ruin or demise.
>
> What they would perhaps call realistic, is still somehow cynical and
> anti the possibility of revolutionary...
This seems right to me - but I am not sure at all about the implied judgment of the fhese films, for that depends, I think, on the Nicson Postulate Re Pornography. - namely, that there is a one-to-one correlation between what the film urges on the audience (something like rebeellion is good but don't you try it) and what the audience in fact takes away from viewing the film.
Bryan's post, for example, illustrates just the opposite: what _he_ took away from Thelma and Louise_ was a deeper understanding of bourgeois art of the 20th-c. That is, this film, ideologically vicitous was not in practice ideologically vicious because sit enabled Bryan to be in a better position to talk to others about these films in a way which would deepend _their_ understanding of the world about them.
So just because Thellma & Louise is a counter-revolutionry film it is in fact a tool for revolutionary propaganda and organizigng.
Contra Nixon, I would argue that neither bad art nor good art has any direct effect on the intelligence, feeling, perceptions, or politics of its "consumer." For a given individula, some grade-b movie of the '30s might turn out to be profoundly life-changing in a desirable direction. You cannot even _begin_ to predict effect through analysis of the text.
Incidentally, bad art is always with us. Doug has argued for along time about the evil of nostalgia, but claiming that there is something extra corrupt about current Hollywood is just the same as longing for the good old days of (reactionary) local papers controlled by local despots rather than the monopoly press of the present.
Carrol