My last post made me think of Dorian Gray, as other things also did. Invariably, things give me Wilde thoughts.
Gray, while unaware of his inspiring charismatic beauty, was still a force for good.
As soon as he becomes aware of it and its power to manipulate, he falls in love with the power he can wield over others, & it is all over for him.
How well Oscar Wilde understood the bizarre fact that Life imitates Art.
This is a theme in Gemma Bovery in an explicit way, and in Clouds of Sils Maria (both films, both 2014) too.
Gray, while unaware of his inspiring charismatic beauty, was still a force for good.
As soon as he becomes aware of it and its power to manipulate, he falls in love with the power he can wield over others, & it is all over for him.
How well Oscar Wilde understood the bizarre fact that Life imitates Art.
This is a theme in Gemma Bovery in an explicit way, and in Clouds of Sils Maria (both films, both 2014) too.
And what
Robin Williams in Louie and his subsequent
suicide display tie in with this theme so very well and is one of these delicious happenstances in which Graham Greene (in The End of The Affair) & I both believe.
What
it seems to be: a role can drive a person into carrying out
the actions of the characters s/he played. Consciously or
not.
I went back to Wilde and re-read bits of his essay, The Decay of Lying.
It's fascinating to me how an actor can be affected by a role. It makes so much sense that David Lynch is in Louie! After all, what was Inland Empire? How actors enter a character, and the characters live in the actors and take over their lives while they themselves live the characters' lives. For work!
I went back to Wilde and re-read bits of his essay, The Decay of Lying.
It's fascinating to me how an actor can be affected by a role. It makes so much sense that David Lynch is in Louie! After all, what was Inland Empire? How actors enter a character, and the characters live in the actors and take over their lives while they themselves live the characters' lives. For work!
It's
probably not the case for all actors, far from it. I do think it is the
case for those actors who play characters whose lives have elements
which connect, somehow, with their own "real" lives (Binoche, Dern, Williams, etc), which in the case
of actors is a bizarre thing, given their "real" lives are made by the
characters they play. I think the best actors are those who have
no real life LOL.
Juliette Binoche's character in Clouds of Sils Maria says, while rehearsing with her assistant (she plays an actress who has to play a part in a play): "it is too difficult for me to play this character...you think it is easy because you're reading it, but I am living it."
Then, I think about actors who are all about:
"I go to Africa and adopt kids, I build houses for the ppl affected by Katrina, I join Kabbalah, I vote for Obama, I care about the little kids in El Salvador, I am a good person with many interests, I am against the death penalty, I am An Activist," etc etc blah. It is not a good thing for actors to let us know about themselves at all. They can do it, sure. They have "a right" to an opinion, no question. They're citizens, like any other, no problem. When they let us, the public, their spectators, know about their positions & personal commitments, they do themselves and their craft harm.
Because when they're in a role in a film, all those things which we, the audience, ought to focus on (the role, the character) is affected by the actor's "real life" (not real at all, on top of it! but put on for public consumption), making the role secondary, which defeats the whole purpose of art! It becomes harder for us to focus on the character and for us to enter the world of fiction, in which The Truth in The Real has the potential to reveal itself to us.
I know nothing about the "real" lives of some of the actors I like best. I don't want to, either. Yeah, OK, except for Brad Pitt. But his life? That don't impress me much.
So, Wilde's essay The Decay of Lying, which is about fiction and "real life" is one of the most powerful Socratic dialogues I ever read. :
'(...)
Many a young man starts in life with a natural gift for exaggeration which, if nurtured in congenial and sympathetic surroundings, or by the imitation of the best models, might grow into something really great and wonderful. But, as a rule, he comes to nothing. He either falls into careless habits of accuracy "
VIVIAN. Please don't interrupt in the middle of a sentence.
"He either falls into careless habits of accuracy, or takes to frequenting
the society of the aged and the wellinformed. Both things are equally fatal
to his imagination, as indeed they would be fatal to the imagination of anybody,
and in a short time he develops a morbid and unhealthy faculty of truthtelling,
begins to verify all statements made in his presence, has no hesitation in
contradicting people who are much younger than himself, and often ends by
writing novels which are so like life that no one can possibly believe in
their probability."
(...)'
I beg to agree with Wilde on this. He says "lying", provocatively... of course he is talking about fiction.
Those things which are so crafted as to make Truth (and not the banality of facts) appear out of and within fiction are those things which end up making life imitate Art.
Prapps Williams had already been considering killing himself... "knew" that he'd kill himself before he did. Then the role he played in Louie awakened in him the emotions and sustained state of mind that brought to his consciousness the desire to off himself, giving him the push to finally do it.
It is a vast and grave mistake one can make to dismiss art or "entertainment" as anything other than essential. It is so precisely because it is useless in practical terms. Anything that has a practical use is not art. It can come to be art at some point, when its practical use proves to be inexistent.
While watching Gemma Bovery and Clouds of Sils Maria I immediately thought of Wilde's essay.
I even commented with my aunt, with whom I speak daily, that I'll have to start to read synopses before I watch a non-action film.
It is not always good for me to see a film with potential to get in my head/heart and confirm a particular thought or emotion that is living inside me at the moment or period right before I watch a film, as that confirms and intensifies such thought/emotion.
Contrast is better sometimes. Contrast is very important.
Yes, sometimes it is good to indulge (in) one's emotions... a sad film when we're sad... a happy ending one when we're happy etc etc, because it can act as a mechanism of relief, to bring out those emotions we have buried in us and which need to be let out of the bottle where the fireworks are trapped. Crying or being melancholic or nostalgic or laughing or identifying with Beauty and Truth from something that took place in one's own life. Film, music, or painting. Or anything. I get that, I finallly get that. It didn't used to be the case for me. I used to cry from the beauty yes, ever since I was a fetus, but it used to have absonothing to do with my own emotions or life. It used to be as if I was completely outside whatever was taking place in that art.
Now it is different. Now I watch things and whatever I see in it that has a direct connection with my own life, I see at once. Is why action films are never going to make me cry! haha (Although! Coriolanus directed by Ralph Fiennes DID! Because of the language. That's where the Beauty is! There stood Shakespeare, he could do no other!)
Generally, I don't like this development v much, the one that makes me see myself on the screen or in a book. It ends up having the effect of making me look at my own life and self instead of the thing I am watching, paradoxically... while at the same time, I recognize Truth in the thing, because it had such an effect on an actually existing person, to put it in Marxian terms LOL.
It is seldom good to turn inward entirely and for too long. We are shaped by the world, and we shape it too. Plasticity involves a triple movement at least. We're enriched by what's outside, we enrich it, which, in turn, enriches us. And 'sho on, and sho fort', the way Slavoj Zizek would say.
The massive advantage Music has over Literature, Art, Film, and Series, is its lack of inherent meaning. There is no way I'll think of my own life while listening to Schumann's 2nd symphony, which I listened to today, conducted by Szell, or Rachmaninov's 1st piano concerto played by Sviatoslav Richter and conducted by Sanderling.... omG they are gorgeous.
Though I can't read them like I do a book, I can hear them. And feel them. That is the most efficient & direct language that exists.
Juliette Binoche's character in Clouds of Sils Maria says, while rehearsing with her assistant (she plays an actress who has to play a part in a play): "it is too difficult for me to play this character...you think it is easy because you're reading it, but I am living it."
Then, I think about actors who are all about:
"I go to Africa and adopt kids, I build houses for the ppl affected by Katrina, I join Kabbalah, I vote for Obama, I care about the little kids in El Salvador, I am a good person with many interests, I am against the death penalty, I am An Activist," etc etc blah. It is not a good thing for actors to let us know about themselves at all. They can do it, sure. They have "a right" to an opinion, no question. They're citizens, like any other, no problem. When they let us, the public, their spectators, know about their positions & personal commitments, they do themselves and their craft harm.
Because when they're in a role in a film, all those things which we, the audience, ought to focus on (the role, the character) is affected by the actor's "real life" (not real at all, on top of it! but put on for public consumption), making the role secondary, which defeats the whole purpose of art! It becomes harder for us to focus on the character and for us to enter the world of fiction, in which The Truth in The Real has the potential to reveal itself to us.
I know nothing about the "real" lives of some of the actors I like best. I don't want to, either. Yeah, OK, except for Brad Pitt. But his life? That don't impress me much.
So, Wilde's essay The Decay of Lying, which is about fiction and "real life" is one of the most powerful Socratic dialogues I ever read. :
'(...)
Many a young man starts in life with a natural gift for exaggeration which, if nurtured in congenial and sympathetic surroundings, or by the imitation of the best models, might grow into something really great and wonderful. But, as a rule, he comes to nothing. He either falls into careless habits of accuracy "
CYRIL. My dear fellow!
(...)'
I beg to agree with Wilde on this. He says "lying", provocatively... of course he is talking about fiction.
Those things which are so crafted as to make Truth (and not the banality of facts) appear out of and within fiction are those things which end up making life imitate Art.
Prapps Williams had already been considering killing himself... "knew" that he'd kill himself before he did. Then the role he played in Louie awakened in him the emotions and sustained state of mind that brought to his consciousness the desire to off himself, giving him the push to finally do it.
It is a vast and grave mistake one can make to dismiss art or "entertainment" as anything other than essential. It is so precisely because it is useless in practical terms. Anything that has a practical use is not art. It can come to be art at some point, when its practical use proves to be inexistent.
While watching Gemma Bovery and Clouds of Sils Maria I immediately thought of Wilde's essay.
I even commented with my aunt, with whom I speak daily, that I'll have to start to read synopses before I watch a non-action film.
It is not always good for me to see a film with potential to get in my head/heart and confirm a particular thought or emotion that is living inside me at the moment or period right before I watch a film, as that confirms and intensifies such thought/emotion.
Contrast is better sometimes. Contrast is very important.
Yes, sometimes it is good to indulge (in) one's emotions... a sad film when we're sad... a happy ending one when we're happy etc etc, because it can act as a mechanism of relief, to bring out those emotions we have buried in us and which need to be let out of the bottle where the fireworks are trapped. Crying or being melancholic or nostalgic or laughing or identifying with Beauty and Truth from something that took place in one's own life. Film, music, or painting. Or anything. I get that, I finallly get that. It didn't used to be the case for me. I used to cry from the beauty yes, ever since I was a fetus, but it used to have absonothing to do with my own emotions or life. It used to be as if I was completely outside whatever was taking place in that art.
Now it is different. Now I watch things and whatever I see in it that has a direct connection with my own life, I see at once. Is why action films are never going to make me cry! haha (Although! Coriolanus directed by Ralph Fiennes DID! Because of the language. That's where the Beauty is! There stood Shakespeare, he could do no other!)
 | ||
| Coriolanus, 2011, Ralph Fiennes |
Generally, I don't like this development v much, the one that makes me see myself on the screen or in a book. It ends up having the effect of making me look at my own life and self instead of the thing I am watching, paradoxically... while at the same time, I recognize Truth in the thing, because it had such an effect on an actually existing person, to put it in Marxian terms LOL.
It is seldom good to turn inward entirely and for too long. We are shaped by the world, and we shape it too. Plasticity involves a triple movement at least. We're enriched by what's outside, we enrich it, which, in turn, enriches us. And 'sho on, and sho fort', the way Slavoj Zizek would say.
The massive advantage Music has over Literature, Art, Film, and Series, is its lack of inherent meaning. There is no way I'll think of my own life while listening to Schumann's 2nd symphony, which I listened to today, conducted by Szell, or Rachmaninov's 1st piano concerto played by Sviatoslav Richter and conducted by Sanderling.... omG they are gorgeous.
Though I can't read them like I do a book, I can hear them. And feel them. That is the most efficient & direct language that exists.
2 comments:
Subtle and clever. Good stuff. I tend to think that life imitates art because life is formless and we use narratives to give it structure- 'life is story shaped'
Thanks! I agree.
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