Dionysos

The view challenges, the heart tempts, the circumstances urge - the coward runs away: Yankee has recently awakened and turned his favorite genre, the road movie, into a tool for self-criticism of his own life project. The neurotic man (that is, the majority white so-called "normal" subject) has reached the end of his historical journey and, as he has so often realized, lacks the courage for the ultimate fulfillment of his desire. It is therefore finally deservedly left by the roadside of history. Tomorrow belongs not necessarily directly to women, but at least not to men (and if the future were at least half as beautiful as Talia Ryder, Jordan Peterson, the prototype of a fighter for male historical supremacy, who must take antidepressants and anti-anxiety pills...) would certainly dare to enter it, for example, as the archetype of today's North American defenders of old conservative orders. The Sweet East, just like this year's Beau Is Afraid, brilliantly shows male weakness and inability to fulfill their role, while Tom Cruise still probably managed to produce the appropriate reaction to Nicole Kidman's "Fu*k" in Eyes Wide Shut. Contemporary American heroes can no longer do that - whether it is shown to us through the surreal introspection of the male soul in Beau or, on the contrary, negatively through the fate of a girl whose vicissitudes are fundamentally shaped by male incapacity to achieve what they want for their cultural-political self-delusions... Fortunately, American cinema is partly getting rid of its Hollywood self and offers at least in these two cases films that are not afraid to step at least a little off the beaten track of cinematic storytelling.

I have long noticed that my comments repeat a few of the same thoughts year after year. My "reviews," as FilmBooster euphemistically calls these creations of mine, describe the orbits of predictably recurring ideas. Their cyclically closed ellipses circle around the radiant Star, never touching it, but as if with the first repetition they might finally succeed, although, like a cockroach in the shadow of a burning building, I have known from the beginning that they never will. And once again, I will escape from failure into the safety of the darkness of another basement, where I will look up at the next revolution. Chazelle built his cinephile monument on the transition from a revolution in the modern sense to the revolution of the classical origin of this word, which means to return, to rotate around in a circle. It is his Stars of the Silver Screen. His Film not only returns backward in terms of costumes but allows the cinematic idea of itself to cycle - the Idea of the material return of the same as the essence of the film, which is constantly changing and, like a modern revolution, seemingly devours its children. But in reality, it only repeats eternal sameness, giving these seemingly dead children the ability to survive forever through the idea of the essence of film itself. Like a cockroach, the moviegoer always gets what he wants because, even unconsciously, he knows what to expect. A perfect ideological self-deception, which Hollywood has an obsessive tendency to project onto everything, everyone, everywhere... - recently, increasingly into the past (anachronistic rewriting of history according to current politically correct measures, and more), but it is not afraid of a utopian future either, as seen recently in the over three-hour "opus" Avatar 2, where a captivating race of beautiful pseudo-people fulfills a story about the Christian duty of a nuclear bourgeois family connected with a new-age climate greenwashing fantasy of merging with unspoiled nature, delivered to us by a complete CGI oversaturated creation worth millions. Fortunately, in the second half, Chazelle showed the other side of the Film planet, which Hollywood often neglects when creating its perfect products. However, his supposed cinephilic epiphany only reproduces with its entire being the conventional linear plot of love story-desire-collision-crisis-catharsis, etc., which is presented to us as the essence of the cinematic Idea.

Neo-Baroque lost its neo and only baroque remained, whose weight of gilded encumbrance may have been another bead in the rosary of genre-ironic creations of cinéma du look, but the repetition of the prayer mantra reveals itself here as a doubly double-edged sword, which Carax cut himself with this time: by repeating the form, its true power was diluted, the power of negation through a convention-incompatible form, to such an extent that the negation of negation (= form) evoked simple mathematics - multiplying two minuses gives us a plus, which is nothing but the valorization of the content itself. And in the content, I saw nothing but convention, to which only a different narrative vector and occasionally a comedic tone could not suffice to break free from it. Symptomatically, here, the undermining and playing with genre forms (musical, melodrama, fairy tale, etc.) is nothing more than something we have already seen in other more commercial works because such "postmodernity" has long been privatized by Hollywood. Hollywood has finally caught up with and absorbed Carax like a depth that is truly dangerous to look into because, from this perspective, cinéma du look can turn into cinéma du don't look. Neo-baroque always started in apparent kitschy sweetness only to turn bitter, but this transition was (in the best works) caused precisely by the inversion of conventions of given forms, while when we want to repeat this Neo-baroque dramatic arc only on the level of content, we always end up with nothing but convention sneaking in through the back door. Perhaps the transformation of the puppet into a living being was supposed to be an interpretive indication of the author's mise en abyme, with which Carax wanted to convince the viewer at the last moment that his film is not just a bloodless marionette swallowing the budget, but a work containing life, yet even in this final attempt (which is nothing other than a replication of Hollywood desires), he failed.

Two eyes of the glassy gaze of old age, to which illness has flattened life into a thin surface without the depth of the field of the past and future, completely adhering to the technique of dual projection onto a screen, whose flatness at the level of the media is coextensive with the targeted content of the work, which is increasingly dulled and emptied staring into the eyes of death, and where the extension of cinematic time only timidly reminds us of the actual length of the real final countdown, of which both cinematic eyes can tell us nothing new, precisely because the eyes of the film are the eyes of its protagonists. Where there is no past and future, there can fortunately never be a conventional entertaining plot, and so the viewer can truly only wait for liberation along with the characters. That is also the contribution of Noé's film, that through the split screen, which is not just an end in itself, he allowed, at the core of a conventional dramatic film, one eye to peek at the techniques of direct cinema, and thus get closer to the documentary reality through fiction.

Anti-linear film logically offers an insightful lesson about any linearity of human behavior - a vector never leads to a goal, success, or end; it just returns in an infinite loop to its starting point, and we observe: a longing to change, a sense of missing, a search for termination; a new beginning. The villain, who believes they control time, always loses through it; humanity, fearful of its annihilation, will always be reborn after it; the hero, gradually building self-awareness as both substance and subject, is always thrown back to the beginning of the search: the beginning of the film, which is both the end and the beginning. The only lesson is that it's all completely insignificant. Blockbuster nihilism. A person is merely an unconscious mover of their own unconscious decision, about which it cannot be said when it originated because it is always decentralized from its consciousness. The inherent paradox of the film is that its time cannot be reversed: afterward, errors in the script will undoubtedly become apparent. Similarly, the film cannot be stopped because people would then have time to contemplate things, and the magic would be lost. But! Time cannot be stopped either, so these arguments are not valid in this context at all.

Repetition to the new, or a direct route to always the same thing? A clear example, obviously escaping the authors: the original book logo MaM changes to MM in the miniseries, and in this difference everything is contained - the illusory conjunction & created internal differentiation and the appearance that two M's are something different than the single person Milo Minderbinder, who stands behind all the business: we thus had sameness that differentiates itself from itself and creates something new, a constantly expanding world within a world, a circular economy from M to M with the symbol &, full of twists and circularity of time. In contrast, MM connected by a common vertical line where one M ends where the other begins refers to unidirectional verticality of time, also known as linearity of time and storytelling, which in the case of American TV series, Netflix series, Apple TV products, HBO miniseries, and Hollywood films is always the same, an eternal return of the same narrative pattern, visual and narrative clichés, and with it, the smoothed contents that are so contrary to the very basic building block of the book source that this cannot be reflected, as it is not a legitimate change (because any adaptation from a book to a film is always perceived by the original readers as simplification/distortion, etc., which is not the case with this rape of the basic narrative structure itself), but it is political, ideological, and Artistic with a capital A, against which one must fight always and everywhere and by all means!

Can the space of a movie theater for watching cinema be replaced with something else? Not at all - otherwise the viewer would be deprived of the trailer for another film before the start of the actual film: in this case, an advertisement for the film La belle époque, in which pensioners create an experiential agency in a film studio set in the 1970s, so they can relive their first love there... It has also been proven that Alzheimer's disease is best stopped in older people by placing them in period settings, with original furniture from their youth, exposing them to their memories, etc... Although Bellocchio, in his age as an author, logically lost many of his artistic iconoclasm and formal inventions, he is not only still above the level of ordinary conventional cinema, to which this film belongs in terms of its category but also functions as Bellocchio's historical tribute to the Italian film belle époque: a blend of poliziotteschi and Italian politically-engaged police thrillers, within which Bellocchio created one of his famous films, Slap the Monster on Page One from 1972. Italians to this day prove that they are the best in Europe at making American films.

The car is an industry act and the film is an industry act. Both the car and the film grow from the soil of capitalism: after all, cars and films were already born in the advanced stage of industrial society, they are its children. In order for a product to grow, we need to water it: on the level of the base, with market mechanisms, and on the level of the superstructure, with ideologies. There is too much money in both cars and films for capital to give up its offspring. Why use the vocabulary of nature to describe human activity? The good old Barthes will answer: capitalist mythology delights in the naturalization of human relationships, making them something eternal. The film - the Hollywood one, the (so far?) only real one in its influence on humanity, yes, we have to admit it - as long as it remains the fruit of the capitalist film industry, it will forever repeat the same myth-making clichés (not to mention the myriad of already exhausted and repeatedly used narrative and visual clichés!). The wheels of industry, the racing car, and the film reel must never stop because it makes production more expensive. Everything must rotate smoothly and predictably so that profits can be predictable and reproducible. Films must be made to be watched and cars must be produced to be sold. The entire film is just the fulfillment of one myth, which Barthes just described directly in connection with the film: it shows us that greedy unscrupulous Management is bad, but it immediately negates this criticism by showing us that even under this cover of bourgeois power, one can live in accordance with their inner authenticity, preserving a healthy core. The result is that the individual remains a subject of the Company - they submit to its mechanism, but they live under the illusion that they have retained their freedom and achieved their own goals. No one stands up against the Company, capitalism continues to live on. We are in the perfect sphere of ideology: "I know well that a film or a car is just a product of industry, that its raison d'être is always primarily profit, but still...” And now, honestly, dear petrolheads like me, dear cinephiles like me: when you drive your Alfa Romeo like I do and when you watch a film that you enjoy like I do... How difficult is it to realize that your idea, that even though you drive an industry act, but in those moments, exceptional moments, when you forget about it and when you let yourself be convinced that your car was also created to fulfill the desire for speed, driving characteristics, etc... that... you are just giving in to self-delusion? It's difficult, I know, impossible - maybe. Perhaps not? Perhaps something needs to change so that it isn't like that...

Almost every other better film critic has outlined a quick, more or less modest parallel between Bosch's depiction of Hell from the triptych "The Garden of Earthly Delights" and the second part of Noé's film, i.e., the "horror" part. It would be a mistake, as every other critic does, to separate the first part (before things go wrong) and the second part of the film, just as it is impossible to separate the parts of the triptych. Here, we can rely on the idea that was expressed in Jean Eustache's film about Bosch's Hell: "I really feel that it is in the third painting, in the description of Hell, where Bosch finally lets himself go. He lets himself be carried away by the description of pleasure, senseless and complete. This pleasure is so complete that even its consciousness is not present." If the relationship between painful pleasure and the attractiveness of terror is only a conscious contradiction, while at the level of the unconscious, it is the desired goal of the death urge, towards which we willingly walk with joyful tears of horror immediately after LSD disables our social inhibitors, it is a possibility that Noé does not precisely examine - he only shows it. That is his classic position for me: a mixture of shallowness and a desire for depth. Fortunately, we already know that contradictions are not mutually exclusive, but collide with each other, so it is not possible to give up on Noé's work for such reasons, just as Bosch also had a troubled relationship with perspective and, therefore, with the depth of the field; criticizing Noé for shallowness would be nothing more than bourgeois attachment to the conscious sphere of film.

An unpaneled window into the soul of residents, a voyeuristic view of the camera into the apartment of a contemporary Heideggerian stay, from which we see nothing more than everything. This is because maybe there is nothing behind the blind angle of the wall; and maybe everything is there, just hidden behind the limit of the camera. Everything will only be there when we want to dream the dream of an evening serenade, of a terrace against the backdrop of a sunset, of peace after a day at work. For those who believe that a camera is a tool of knowledge as powerful as a pneumatic hammer, the camera reveals that the orthogonal world of a residential building, the window frame of a life's image and a television masterpiece canvas, shining into the darkness with colors a million times more saturated than the reddest of sunsets, cannot do without the isomorphism of all elements, whose necessary visual counterpoint and at the same time ideological complement shall be the absence of life outside the delimited zone of interest. A square and a rectangle (the basic building block of the life's prison of contemporary humanity) teeming with empty life against empty streets and a sky without humans.