“I hate people I don’t like,” Andréas Voutsinas, The Twelve Chairs
I haven’t written about movies here in ages, and what I plan on writing with whatever scraps of time I can muster between late Christmas shopping runs probably won’t invite any great hope that I’ll shorten the fugue next time around. If it’s any consolation.
So, here’s what the thing is. It’s New Year’s, and time once again for critics’ organizations to offer their awards and individual critics to carefully select their choices for the year’s most laud-worthy, life-changing pieces of grea-tuh ar-tuh. It’s a time of year I usually anticipate with the at very least bittersweet enthusiasm of a baseball fan awaiting the postseason (which I am and do and, this year, put heavy emphasis on the “bittersweet” part) … but all I can squeegee from my affiliation with cinephilia lately is death.
Though I still managed to see the #1 film in both the Film Comment and transported Village Voice critics’ polls, there’s no denying that 2006 was the year I truly gave up and committed cultural suicide, but I’m not convinced it wasn’t an assisted suicide. (Nor am I worried that I won’t be reincarnated some time down the road. Cinephiles, like Guillaume-en-Egypte, have nine lives.)
The Oak Street Cinema and Bell Auditorium have spent almost the entirety of 2006 in the throes of a protracted mercy killing (and I didn’t bother to pay my respects on the few choice weeks they played something that I’m told would have been worth watching like Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple), which leaves Minneapolis-St. Paul’s film culture as good as blind, with the likes of Landmark Theatres serving duty as our seeing-eye dog. I’ll finally get around to seeing one of last summer’s must-see films there in 2007.
Film Comment’s great contribution to film appreciation was a crusty attempt from a canon-defending screenwriter to repudiate pretty much every article that had ever been published in the magazine for the previous two or three decades, to endorse viewing film’s worth in the crepuscular past tense, and to absolve himself of the responsibility as a white male to recognize the work of those that aren’t. (I will back him on one count, though, since I am exorcising some bad faith: keeping current is not tantamount to maintaining perspective.)
I’ve seen radically less films in theaters and on video this year than in years past, and I’ve read very few defenses of purported masterpieces that lead me to regret my restricted diet. (On the contrary, many of the most compelling and heartfelt defenses of films these days fill me with pity.) I regard myself as one of the last remaining skeptics of the “TV is better than film these days” line of thinking, but I can’t deny that probably the only three movies I’ve seen this year I’d save from mass extermination — The Case of the Grinning Cat, Dave Chapelle’s Block Party and Jackass Number Two — are all, to varying degrees, products of television.
Lastly, Brian De Palma turned in a movie that I didn’t love unconditionally. This, more than anything, is the development that will not stand.
This can all be passed off as a natural low-tide in a cyclical love affair. It can also be blamed on the decrease in spare time I’ve found myself with since joining the real world (also something that will likely reveal its cyclical patterns in due course). What I can not ignore, though, is the pleasure I’ve gotten from hating on movies I expected to love. Movies that friends whose taste I generally reflect loved. Movies that got sucked off with relish for all the nourishment they’d provide by the scene’s most respected flick-suckers. It’s sick, but hating movies sort of helped me retain my connection with them in a sadly indifferent year.
There are some reasons why I feel that being an anti-movie cinephile, at least temporarily, isn’t necessarily a cause for alarm. First and foremost, Raymond Durgnat Serge Daney. His reputation as a connoisseur of cinema is practically unmatched, and he himself said that a true cinephile is in a near-perpetual state of dissatisfaction; that cinephiles are constantly being let down by cinema.
Another reason is that movies aren’t necessarily the primary target. Hating movies is, by extension, hating people who love movies you hate. I’ve never read Lacan, but I have been told one of his concepts involved the repulsion humankind feels when they are faced with a person whose joy is not contained, whose contentment exceeds their own. Even more intolerable, at least in the context of watching movies, is when praise extends into the rhetoric of “a shared experience,” which certainly informed my perplexed reaction to the final sustained note of Jennifer Hudson’s rendition of “And I Am Telling You” in the harmless but needlessly, self-fulfillingly beloved Dreamgirls. If you want to shush me for cracking MST3K-wise to my companion during a movie, I feel I should be allowed to shush people for having inordinately positive public reactions to unworthy films.
Additionally, hating movies restores the positive value you have ascribed unto other movies. You validate your discerning taste by reminding yourself that not every movie measures up to your exacting standards. You feel as though your tastes remain loose, unpredictable and mutable, even to yourself. Hating movies you are supposed to love gives you the impression that you are growing and learning, which goes a long way towards giving sustenance to the denial that you are devoting serious chunks of life to an artifact whose fragility ought to render it archaeologically irrelevant.
With that pathetic year-end detrius [sic] off my chest, I look forward to slapping myself in the nuts, digging into my mountainous stacks of unwatched DVDs and getting the hell over this phase. Hell, I just added 20 titles to my Netflix queue snatched from the IndieWire critics’ poll’s top 50 — including C.R.A.Z.Y., Inside Man, Battle in Heaven, Gabrielle, 4, Mountain Patrol: Kekexili, Idiocracy, Neil Young: Heart of Gold, The Descent, and, the one I’m most looking forward to, John Waters: This Filthy World. In the face of those potential masterpieces both old and new, I hereby promise to allow everyone to slap me in the face if I come back this time next year bitching anew.