Forget the brain tumor—did you know that whenever you use a cellular telephone you're destroying your own existence? Convenience dissolves contingency, and as the facts of your current state fade to insignificance you are melting! melting! Who knew you were so soluble?

It started with the telegraph. For about ninety-eight percent of our history and all our existence before that, the top speed at which news could generally travel was that of a rider on a horse. Except for a little semaphore here and there until around 1840 nobody ever heard about any event until somebody else came to them and physically brought the word. This meant the event at point A could have no effect at point C until it had come through and affected point B. And, like any other effect of living matter, news was impeded or sped by geography, weather and season.

This bound the human world tightly to the physical world; there was a necessary mapping between the two, and human events could never happen without the mediation of their environment. This made society a solid; as in a crystal, where each atom has a fixed position, the degree of relationship between two places tended to be determined by their distance and placement.

The invention and development of instantaneous communication obliterated this bond. Now the news of an event can arrive at all points simultaneously, sparking a global reaction-flash. Society is now a gas, with no necessary relationship between different places and a tendency for any event to happen both in its place and everywhere else. The world hasn't grown smaller—it's become infinitely small; we inhabit a point.

Obviously the effect isn't absolute; we're still subject to limits and relationships in our need to move physical things around from place to place. Still, we've reduced these relationships too with machine transport, and as a rule the specific space that needs to be crossed matters less now than the characterless time necessary to cross it.

The telephone was an improvement on the telegraph and refined the effect, and getting telephones into houses amplified it. And then information instantaneity reached essential perfection with portable telephony—beyond this there's no place to go but straight into your head.

The ordinary telephone is a limited space eradicator. Whenever you use one you erupt violently and immediately into the dimensionless presence of your callee, but both of you do have to be at home, in your offices, or some other particular, specific place, and your two loci can't change or the connection breaks. Ordinary telephones are like mountain overlooks—they give an inordinately large range to your informational capabilities but they only work when you go to them. There are still limits—if you call someone when they aren't at home you can't talk to them; if you're expecting an important call you can't go out before it comes. There is still space and spatial discipline.

With cell phones you carry your overlook wherever you go; Zarathustra need never come down from his mountain. You're never not home and you're never not at your desk; you're in constant potential contact with everyone who knows you and many who don't. It's very convenient—none of the contingencies of your living can interfere with your universal access to everyone.

But while you're out of touch less this way, you're also less in touch. When calls are made on ordinary phones you both know at least where the other is, possibly what the environment is there, and something about what they're doing—most importantly they're talking to you. You're both someplace in particular, the telephone is a bridge between your respective, state-creating places, and the difference between your two states determines part of your relationship to each other.

But when you're using a cell phone your location and situation are irrelevant except as a matter of possible curiosity. It doesn't matter where either of you is since you haven't had to be there on purpose to make the call. You could be at home, but since it's irrelevant whether you are or not you get no state of at-homeness—you get a state of nowhere-in-particularness.

This is most true of the most common use of cell phones: talking while in transit. Modern transportation already makes travel more a matter of generic duration than of crossing real places; when you then link yourself to someone in an irrelevantly different place to kill that time, you eliminate the space and the time components of your state, leaving only the dimension of chat. As long as you don't lose that connection you don't care where you are or how long you're there, because the travelling that you're doing isn't what you're doing anyway—though the conversation is also not what you're doing since you need to watch the road. Now people have taken this dimensionless travel out of their cars and begun practicing it on foot, so everywhere you can see them walking around not being where they are, neither with the people they're talking to nor apart from them.

With cell phones the opportunity cost of talking to someone is effectively zero—that's what convenience is. But without opportunity costs there's no such thing as priority: since they can happen any time and any place, all conversations are reduced to the Incidental level of importance. No conversation can be so important that you'll need to change other plans in order to have it. At the same time, no plans will ever be important enough that you'll abandon a potential conversation—you were going to bring your phone anyway.

This is a big step towards a loss of importance for all activities. When you decide to marry someone it's very nice that you're choosing to spend the rest of your life with someone, but the real significance comes from the fact that you're choosing not to do that with everyone else that you might; you're saying "This one is worth more than all those together." That's why people object to adultery—your tawdry flings void the opportunity cost that makes the marriage valuable.

I was out with a friend recently, having a beer and discussing airline mergers, when his little phone rang. It was a coworker of his who had called to get his opinion about the guy she was right at that moment out on a date with. For about five minutes my friend discussed her situation with her. He was no longer with me, and the coworker was no longer with her date; I'd been evaporated and the date was being two-timed before there was even a relationship. For this to be possible means that my friend was never entirely with me to begin with, since this or a similar call could have come at any time, nor was the coworker entirely on her date. In another year or two it'll be possible for her to send a quick Instant Message to all her friends' phones at once, describing the dude and asking them to vote on him on the spot. So where, at that point, will she come into it anymore? The total communication system makes her—and every—presence ghostly and superfluous.

This isn't a problem of manners; people have always been rude or polite, and the ways they do so go in and out of style with the things they use. This is a matter of the discipline imposed by places and environmental contingencies. They provide a structure that we have (had) to determine ourselves against; not-us stuff that we need to account for and deal with if we're ever going to do anything. All our tools are for overcoming or ameliorating the limitations and conditions of Nature, enabling us to live in a human World, but it's only in relationship to those limitations and conditions that we're human—in isolation we're nothing but a collection of processes. Any process which is capable of amplifying its own action—like erosion, finance, or conformity—will inevitably do so until it runs against an external limitation that breaks the positive-feedback loop; in a collection of processes the ones that do this will quickly take over, dwarfing or destroying the ones that don't. So without the constraint of limitations not chosen by us, such as distance and unavailability, our activity (and our thought) is free to boil out into unbounded, positive-feedback tumescences.

That's not human. And that's the real reason you should hang up and drive.

March 7, 2001

You can't just say "Special effects are bad." As the fireballs billow around you you might want to, but it's just not necessarily so—if you're making a sci-fi movie and the story involves combat, if you think the movie's world might allow for zap-guns then there's no reason to avoid having a lot of attractive, physically improbable flashes and blasts all over it. And while clever visual elisions can be effective in the right place, if your story is about a woman who's killing people with the fanged phallus in her underarm it would be a ridiculous distraction not to show the hideous thing at least a little. Special effects are only another technique, and like any other can be well or badly employed.

But there's a family of special effects which is always bad, which can't ever be used right because they don't have a right way of use. It's unclear whether movie production committees know just what they're doing when they use them—they may think they're only making more regular special effects—but they use them often and insistently. These can be known as extra-special effects.

What's typical of these is that unlike the sound of a church-bell in the distance or blood packets showing where everyone's been shot, the extra-special effect is not a consequence of the story—it's whipped cream on top of the cherry. The immense size of the Death Star, the glow in E.T.'s finger when he heals an Ouch, and Willie the Whale leaping to freeness over his little boy all have one thing in common: they're too much. WAY too much—too much by too much and a half. They are alien intrusions.

Every zap-gun does need its blast or nobody can get hit, but having to deal with a ship the size of a moon is a serious military handicap; since we're already pretending there's a planet-destroying ray, is there something wrong with also pretending it's a usable size? But the Death Star isn't there to be a battleship; the Death Star isn't even there to destroy the planet. The Death Star has come just so it can be SO BIG, because the one advantage that monstrous Death Stars have over sensible ones is that they make the audience open wide and say "OOH!"; planet-destruction is an afterthought. E.T. could have done his faith-healing just as well without lite-up fingers, but if you do light them up—and get the OOH out—you have a sight-bite suitable for framing in posters and happymeals. In this respect the movie is only a matrix in which advertisements for the marketing of the movie can be embedded: recursive product-placement.

So we can account for part of the non-relationship between an extra-special effect and the story it's inserted in by this fact that it's motivated by concerns external to the film in the first place; since it works for a different department there's no way it can be fully integrated. But to be a really good ad for its marketing it needs a further non-relationship, which is why the OOH is there.

Every work of fiction needs you to offer it a suspension of disbelief; for the duration of your relationship with it you agree to go along with its propositions despite your knowing that these events have not really happened. Regular special effects are here to offer their support for this agreement; they enrich the fiction's world—or maybe provide shortcuts through uninteresting areas; in any case, they help make the proposed world live.

Extra-special effects have the opposite function. Rather than helping you think along with the movie their purpose is to stop you from thinking about it at all. Instead of boosting that world's reality they assert its Truth, and they do so by astonishing you away from your capacity for evaluation.

The extra-special effect's antipathy towards the movie which surrounds it is prominent in something like Thelma and Louise, whose basic premise—it's possible to get so entangled in a situation that the only freedom left might be suicide—is one you might do a lot with if you care about it. If you don't, then when the time comes for the final reckoning you can accomplish it with glamorous girls magnificently driving their fabulous car into a spectacular canyon; they'll drag any thoughts the audience might have had about urgency and constraint along with them, and up they all go together in a big puff of myth.

The destructive power of that particular extra-special effect (any such death-by-heartwarming actually belongs to the subcategory of very-special effects) was evident in the confusion displayed on Honda Civics everywhere, which subsequently sprouted bumper stickers saying "Thelma and Louise live!" E.T. had also had a popular sticker noting that he lived, but in his movie he did—twice—and while metaphoric immortalities are nice the only serious point that could have come from Thelma and Louise is bound to literal death. By making that death so very fabulous that there was nothing to be said about it but "OOH!" the movie stopped them from dying and stopped itself from meaning anything it might have.

An extra-special effect simultaneously rouses and caters to a nonspecific belief-lust, or extra-special affect. Real belief, correct or false, is always belief in something; an extra-special effect creates intransitive belief—a kind of mental singularity, with an attraction so strong even thought can't escape its pull. Typified by the "I Want To Believe" poster on Agent Mulder's office wall, it only is: a general credulence, answering "yes!" where no question has been put. It's a belief which neither asserts nor denies; doesn't advise one action or discourage another. The aim of the extra-special effect is to create the awe of the slack-jawed yokel seeing the City for the first time. He knows full well he can't buy the little bridge over his local creek, but maybe he can buy this huge bridge here, because where there's an Empire State Building, couldn't anything be possible? And as with Brooklyn Bridges, so with happymeals.

Extra-special affect is the resolution of the paradox Hannah Arendt pointed out in the members of a desocialized, mass society, who come to be simultaneously utterly cynical and totally gullible: you can't believe anything They tell you, so instead look for all the things They aren't saying—untold stories, unsolved mysteries, the shocking truths behind all the scenes. When people will only believe the incredible you have to expect that their belief will be intransitive, since pure preposterousness can't support and doesn't want any organized principles. That's why so much of Fox's programming is devoted to alien autopsies and other world records. If they can show you someone spinning more basketballs than any human has been known to spin before, what is there to say but "wow"? And having said "wow", can you then deny the significance of what you've seen?

Robin Williams is an extra-special effect all by himself, as is William Hurt. The low, low budget of The Blair Witch Project was used as a post-production extra-special effect, so flogged in every piece of publicity that admiration of its economy was part of its viewing experience; had there been Blair Witch happymeals—as there certainly should have been—the boxes would have been printed with the little stick-man on the sides and spreadsheets on the ends. And of course, all that Disney touches turns extra-special—they do the really advanced work, fabricating extra-specialties that carry their OOH for ninety minutes at a time. Fantasia 2000, which starts with flying whales and ends with a volcano which is Evil, is a gasp riot.

It's all about sex in the end. What's the last thing on your mind at climax? Everything. And that's the way you provide the production committees with the best value for their investainment dollars.

October 18, 2000

Worthlessness is seriously undervalued nowadays. So little is it admired, in fact, that wherever we find it we root it out and replace it with something more estimable. Consider the shore of the ocean: Less fertile than inland locations and subject to difficult, even destructive weather, it's a hard place for humans to support themselves. Until about two centuries ago, therefore, we pretty much avoided it, except for small, backward communities of impoverished fisherfolk. Nobody with the means to live elsewhere had anything to do with the shore—it had nothing to offer but misery.

But at roughly the same time as this great nation was founded, romantical Europeans began to discover a value for the shore precisely as a wild, dangerous place. If you should feel suffocated in the effete culture of your hyper-civilized city you could travel to the end of habitation and expose yourself to bracing, difficult conditions exactly unlike your pleasant, comfortable, genteel, and accustomed situation. The shore had the power to refresh by its perpetual demonstration of the inhuman All.

A few people discovered this refreshment and found it valuable; they recommended it to those of their acquaintance who might also benefit from it, and who in turn did likewise. Visiting the shore came to be a popular, entirely uneccentric thing to do; the increasing number of visitors required lodging and other facilities; facilities grew more civilized so the visitors wouldn't be uncomfortable and eventually they became resorts.

And now we go to The Beach, the most comfortable place in the world. The coasts are rimmed with unbroken lines of snug houses and fabulous hotels; we ride the waters on individual gasoline-powered water-riders, and in the evenings there's a Fuddrucker's for every taste just five minutes up the road. We go to The Beach because it's more comfortable than our civilized places; we go there not for stimulation but for relaxation in a place where no demands at all are to be made on us. The Beach means Fun; The Beach means Sport; The Beach means a style of attire and implies a kind of physique. As a hostile waste the shore provided mental freedom: Everything back in the town was constructed, construed, and identified; the meanings were all given, and participation in society required acceptance of them. At the shore there was chaos, indeterminacy, and emptiness; any meanings you found there were your own, and no one else's preexisting claim could gainsay you. Now The Beach is our common Paradise—we all know what it means to go to The Beach, what there is to be done there and why you would want to do it. The Beach is the shore domesticated and recast in our image; that means there's one less thing in the world which is not us, one way out the fewer. What once provided great value precisely by its worthlessness has been rendered priceless and universally sought-after.

This is a great shame, and a loss to us all. Other wastes remain, but like the shore, the good ones are all rapidly crystallizing into Real Estate. We suffer a similar loss, to a greater or lesser extent, every time an actor becomes a star, a style becomes a fashion, or a band becomes a phenomenon. Remember the bands you liked before they were cool? They were just what you were looking for back then—then they got big, and before too long you had to give them up because they were no longer doing what you needed. What happened?

Sometimes it does happen that someone's later work might cast unfavorable light on the earlier stuff, making it retroactively worse. Take Talking Heads: I'd been enjoying them just fine until out comes "Burning Down the House" bearing suspicions confirmed by "And She Was," and suddenly Remain in Light was less fraught than before. Likewise Robert Altman—hardly the most dependable of directors, but Three Women had always thrilled me and I liked The Player a lot... until Short Cuts came out (friends who saw them in reverse order mostly never liked The Player at all); Prêt à Porter really gave one pause, and I regret very much to say that The Gingerbread Man casts a serious pall over the man's whole oeuvre.

What happened? Did Altman and Talking Heads "sell out," taking the Chili Pepper path into corporate employeedom? Maybe, but "selling out" requires one to have had some sort of original intention—no matter how primitive—that is later compromised for unrelated goals. You can't call it selling out if you got cozy with an artist simply because they're more unobjectionable than the majority—which is certainly positive but is less than a plus—and later when they're beset by popularity the subsequent overexposure reveals that really all we have here is a failure to aggravate: The Breeders sounded great for a while. Or maybe they happen to deplete their store of useful things to say right around the time they get noticed—diminished content brings increased unobjectionability which always is an aid to popularization: They were Devo. There's much more petering out out there than selling out.

Wrong connection made, non-connection revealed, all out of connections; common ways to lose an edge. But you don't have to fail on your own merits; you really can be destroyed by popularity alone, and the ensuing loss of your worthlessness.

Anything that nobody's paying attention to is automatically worthless in the cultural marketplace, like the uninhabitable shore: Because it's not visible, desired, or claimed it can't be referenced, exchanged, or applied. This has nothing to do with the thing's "merit," however determined; this only means that for the purposes of the informational transactions which are cultural activity—which are, in fact, the culture—the unattended thing does not exist. As far as I know, for instance, nobody has any interest in the food eaten by the Berbers of the Sahara. There are no Berber restaurants and no books of Berber cuisine, and because of this you can't tell someone they're as sweet as tar'gobbuleh and you can't title your novel Ankabahs Are Not the Only Fruit. Not around here anyway—we won't know what you mean. For us, Berber food is worthless.

Instead of having cultural value, an unknown thing has only intrinsic qualities, which are just what early discoverers of the thing will prize. Until someone finds and begins to share them they remain the currency of a null nation.

But once found the thing will begin to have a cultural worth as its appreciators convert those intrinsic qualities to applied values: Five dollars is worthless until you decide to apply it to the purchase of your lunch—at which point it becomes worth five US dollars to you—and so is They Might Be Giants' feckless romanticism until you find refuge there from the milling specters of all your failed relationships. Feck-less romanticism, a quality, will simply sit there inert until you adopt, mimic, pervert, or co-opt it to your own ends, which might be the delights of plain appreciation, the stimulus to produce a work of your own, or the rumble of a business proposition.

Now each beauty being fabricated in each eye of each beholder, on being confronted with an unpopularized thing to appreciate, what you'll see there is the intrinsic qualities in it that are the most salient to you—whether anybody else thinks those things are there or not—and to those you'll attach application values according to your needs and situation and understanding; that's as it must be. You won't necessarily be "right" about what you find—your discoveries may or may not match anyone else's ideas about what's there, including, if it's art, the creator's—but if you can find it, that means it was, in at minimum some erratic, potential way, there to be found or invented.

With the application values in hand you'll be able to use aspects of the thing as cultural coin when you want to exchange related ideas with like-minded people; from the incomprehensible totality of the object's full existence you will have extracted a few bits of tradable meaning. When an object is in this condition of cultural availability—after a couple of Berber restaurants have opened but before review-readers everywhere are screaming "Don't you just LOVE Berber cuisine??" and review-writers everywhere scream back "You just LOVE Berber cuisine!!"—while the thing's popularity grows its value will rise, since it will be possible to use it for exchange with more and more people, allowing you to say things like "It's too much like L.A."; "It's like that time on Friends when the Olsen twins were stalking Ross"; "Hey, lookit me! I'm Christa McAuliffe!" You offer these tokens and anyone who subscribes to the cultural monetary system that recognizes them will quickly understand you, for better or worse.

At this early stage—which many things will never surpass—the object of attention may be widely present but is still undamaged. It has lost some of its worthlessness, true, but that has been fairly traded for a comparable amount of intelligibility. But if the thing's popularity begins to swell too greatly it may start to suffer from celebrity, the cultural equivalent of malignancy. As with biological cancers the condition may be triggered by a variety of as-yet weakly understood causes, but essentially it results when the culture's signifying machinery runs amok and begins emitting references to the thing in the absence of any specific relevance. This will all too often cause an exponentially spreading familiarity with the thing in the society, and it's at this point that the damage to the organs of comprehension begins to accumulate and communication begins to deteriorate.

Two related types of damage are suffered: one in the thing itself or among its close adherents, the other in the celebratory atmosphere surrounding it. The internal damage begins when earlier devotees of the thing notice that they're not alone. Things which support a cultural interest are taken as territory (and sometimes literally are, as when the thing in question is the cutest little beach town you ever saw) and external interest is often taken as invasion.

More and more eyes are directed towards the thing by the amok-running signals of the celebration and it experiences a significant increase in the ambient attention pressure. Although a celebrified status is often actually sought, sometimes the thing or its representatives will react to this pressure with resistance, insisting ever more vehemently on the "true" application values pertaining to the thing. "No!" they'll say; "That isn't what t'ai chi is all about." It may even be important for them to do so in those cases where the celebree is something like a religion or a nation, which holds a lot of the defenders' world-comprehension equipment. But think of all those times when you and your posse were out doing some loitering; a cop approached and your friend hissed "Act natural!" Your local reality was immediately degraded because suddenly all movement was confined to that tightly restricted little realm of Unsuspicious Behavior and directed towards the maintenance of an especially unmarked state; such a defensive posture makes continued living impossible and the only thing you can do anymore is become a flat parody of yourself.

As long as the celebree or its people maintain this condition—functionally the same as maintaining a pose—the object of adoration is dead. Anything in which people naturally participate evolves: New uses develop, new interpretations are advanced, some wiseacre juxtaposes two internal elements in a way that exposes a previously unnoticed inconsistency and fellow constituents react to that. The fans of a cherished object besieged by popular infatuation can't afford that, though; the object's natural meaning-oscillations might hit a threshold and make the thing transform into something other—an undefended martial art suddenly becomes a new form of dance, leaving all its former adherents suddenly undefined. Much better, they reason, to preserve their thing in righteous amber. They may not be able to eat their cake anymore but they sure will have it, and they can continue doing just what they're doing now forever, with no worries about the disturbances of development—which is fine if, as some do, you consider death the ideal state.

The second, external type of damage develops as the surrounding cultural medium exudes more and more undermotivated references to the object, poisoning the mental environment with celebratory, countercommunicatory noise—the source of the attention pressure the early fans of the thing have noted and taken fright at. Any mass convergence of interest will cause some degree of this, but in a case of celebrification it's combined with a high rate of value formation by parties lacking direct exposure to the object's intrinsic qualities. It can't be helped—if you're exposed to a few random headlines or an NPR story about a book, a band, a city, or a new kind of satellite cell-phone, you're going to have to make up some kind of understanding of it and probably an opinion to boot. Unbound information is unstable and seeks synthesis; if denied at least the emulsification of an attitude it will quickly evaporate. Having an attitude is the lowest form of allowing something relevance, so if you won't go that far with it, how will you retain the datum? Why would you? As long as the signal doesn't escape out your other ear you have to think something about it, but unless you actually go read the book, hear the band, live in the city, and use the phone—which given the extreme rate of thing-presentation this cultural economy inflicts, you're just not at liberty to do—then your opinion will be ignorant and you are now a member of that object's audience. It's like getting drafted.

What's happened is a kind of inverse cancer: It's not that the object has metastasized and begun invading all corners of the culture, but rather that the cultural uproar system has appropriated the celebree—now a celebroma—and seeks to install it everywhere, delightedly directing behavior towards it in all situations. Suddenly ALL the bumpers demand to know where the beef is or whether you have some milk, without any grounds to justify even a rhetorical inquiry. Unless you have some idea of your own what beef you seek and where you think it should be, you have received the celebroma and it's faking your communication.

Many such out-of-control references are made by people who as a matter of professional ethics are unfamiliar with the things they talk about, such as news reporters, who call their unfamiliarity "objectivity," and they make these references specifically for other, lay unfamiliars. Frequently these references will invoke aspects of the object that don't exist at all—Hollywood computers for example give off all sorts of behaviors that bear no relationship to what's possible in a real machine, from Doogie Howser's cursorless word processor to the terrible things that happen to dear Sandra Bullock in The Net. These fantastic functions are invented by writers who don't care to understand anything about the stories they're creating; their job descriptions say nothing about sense or communication. Their function is to put out product which is effective. Reality isn't necessarily effective and so is of no necessary interest; what's effective is the message people keep hearing and have developed reflexes to, so the reporters, writers, and other imagineers are free/required to wash us over with unknowledge and misunderstanding.

This is not to say that the person with first-hand exposure to something is blessed with an experience more correct than that of anyone who only hears about it on a late-night talk show. What the person with only secondhand exposure gets is their own exactly correct experience of being told about the thing, but they very frequently mistake that for knowledge of the thing itself. This causes two errors: false belief about the thing and false belief about the experience. There's where the alienation of celebrity comes in. If I talk to you about Franz Kafka, whose work you have never read, as long you make up your own mind about what you heard me say and always remember every subsequent time you have occasion to think of Kafka that you still haven't ever read any and, since you're not me, might have a completely different opinion if you did (and that until you have read some you must never use the word kafkaesque), there will be no error. Celebri-fication helps us forget that, with constant reexposure to interpretations far removed from their source material, until the second-, fourth-, eighteenth-order chatter so outvotes the original that it becomes irrelevant and of no interest except to Experts.

With enhanced popular misunderstanding of an object comes increased misapplication of it. The fourth time you hear someone refer to some spectacular but inessential aspect of a celebrated being you will be obliged to accept that aspect as the object's Meaning, since if ever you communicate with anyone about it, it's most likely by far that this aspect will be the coin exchanged. That's why I have yet to discuss Sharon Stone without having visions of wide-open beaver stuck in my head--and I never even saw Basic Instinct! She happened to also be excellent in Casino, but that in turn you can't discuss without instantly referring to heads in vises. The actress and the movie have been decoupled from their own natures and the intrinsic qualities they might offer, from whatever real or imagined stuff it is in them that you might have found for yourself and had thoughts about if someone hadn't already done it for you. Too many extraneous impressions of them surround you for you to be able to reach the originals and make any discoveries; all other possible meanings have been lost. Even something as brassy as Sharon Stone is too subtle to be detected amidst the self-feeding ruckus raised over "Sharon Stone." What you receive—and may in turn offer—concerning any celebrified entity refers not back to the original but to a tattered Classic Comics interpretation of it.

Once the celebration has reached this pitch it's no longer the object but the celebrating culture that determines the values made available to us by the object, and in the fever of its arousal the celebration will cease to consult the object itself regarding its qualities and instead project upon it those values that the culture wants to see or have or be. Celebratory value-projection is not simply a larger-scale version of individual value-invention; what the individual does is a function of imagination—a power the culture does not have and should not simulate. You are free—and I encourage you—to find your god in a tortilla, but when the culture takes it into its reflex system to seek gods in tortillas and to say "There is no god but in a tortilla" and "It just ain't a tortilla unless it's got god," that damages both god and tortillas and directly blocks your path to appreciation of either.

And so for instance the man Donald Trump, one of the worst Great Businessmen of the American Century, pararepresented as the name and cultural token "Donald Trump" nonetheless stands for Sharp Dealing and Fabulous Wealth. It's not even that the public has been misled—Trump's various fiascoes have been covered in perfectly reasonable detail in the general press, and his stock is down, down, down the drain. Nevertheless, when talking to someone you don't know about economic greatness Trump will serve very well as your icon, and it's because of this that PepsiCo has employed him in a recent ad for their Pizza Hut restaurants despite the fact that his accepting the assignment means he can use the money. The strength of celebratory misapprehension is such that it easily overcomes self-contradiction.

For this reason it's impossible to do anything with respect to the celebrated without being mistaken. Even right here in this article, if I refer to Sly Stallone, Bruce Willis, and Arnold Schwarzenegger they'll come barging into the argument flexing their machismos, throbbing their bravados, and reeking of natural heroism in complete disconnection from their realities as "actor"/restaurant-owners. Indeed, it wouldn't make sense for me to bring them up for any other reason. The reason I describe them as restaurant-owners in the first place is because the contrast between that petit bourgeois business activity and our common understanding of them as Action Figures is funny. You know what I mean. I know you do. There is no escape.

No mercy, no quarter: The disassociated ubiquity that brings celebrification also means, logically, that the celebrated value and interpretation of an object won't just tend to but must become the best known, and that these will be required readings for intercourse in the general community. In order to speak at all we have to all agree to agree on the meanings of words; likewise, to act as members of a culture we have to subscribe to the set of values and meanings it has determined, even if all our subsequent activity is devoted to contradicting them. To do otherwise is to act idiosyncratically, i.e. without relation to the community. You're always free to do so, but because you aren't speaking its language, the culture can only offer you one of two responses: antipathy or disregard. If you're met with tolerance and work in marketing you may be able to impose a new value of your devising for something on the culture, but then you're once again in amicable subscription with your peers and the majority continues to rule. It's possible for specialist communities to keep special values—in the community of Big Financiers the value of "Donald Trump" is likely to derive more from his performance than from his name and may be a token representing Magnificence In Failure. When it needs to communicate with the rest of the world, though, that specialist community will have to leave that token behind. Within your little circle of friends it may be understood that Sandra Bullock is not America's new sweetheart, but outside that group you will have to acknowledge that it is she who presently holds that role and no other. Maybe you all are of the opinion that ankabahs are the only fruit, but the culture doesn't know what they are, and fills itself with oranges.

Celebrity serves always to diseducate us. As tenuous as the link between our understanding and any reality is, celebrification unfastens even that feeble fiber, and not as respectable propaganda might, by offering tasty agenda-serving lies and half-lies, but by perfect obliviousness to whatever shreds of reality are there. In a celebrifying culture real objects serve as seed impurities around which crystals of the society's hopes, fears, and other fetishes can grow, entirely smothering the things' peculiarities in a nice, regulated angularity. Eventually the separate crystals grow together and fuse into a single, glittering, rigid mass, all idiosyncrasy and rumor of idiosyncrasy deeply encased and only recoverable by destructive analysis. The original, unfettered worthlessness is almost impossible to preserve: Population growth converts the wastes, and our entertainment-lust demands fast, fast interpretive relief. Just to note worthlessness is to diminish it, and to live relevantly in our community we must in some degree subscribe to community thoughts.

Celebrity is not something that can be defeated or even avoided—it's a natural side-effect of a mass-media society—but defense is possible. All that's required is that you keep your wits about you, limit your experience and pay less attention. Avoid tourism, television news, and as many other sources of recreational information as you can. Don't read the review—just go to the restaurant and decide for yourself. Stay in your own neighborhood. Put a sign on your desk that says "Amok stops here." The celebration is everywhere, but it can't hurt you—as long as you don't believe it's real.

October 6, 2000

If you've ever been to a movie theater then you may also have been outside the theater or in its lobby. In these places on bad days you might encounter people in flagrant violation of the Golden Rule of cinematic etiquette: Keep your fool mouth shut about this movie, other movies, and anything that's ever been associated with a movie. The reason is that when you fling wide your pie hole and pass opinion in public you're exposing people who have never done you any harm to attitudes against which they are particularly defenseless on account of having either just formed some of their own or readied themselves to form some, and in consequence of this one or more of them may have to strike you dead on the spot. Restraint here is a matter of etiquette rather than self preservation because it's entirely your affair whether you choose to live or die, but it's inconsiderate in the extreme to expose perfect strangers to the risk of life imprisonment simply because you can't wait till you get to the car before you release your foul interpretations. I most certainly do not exempt myself from this restriction; on the contrary, as will be seen it's among my fondest wishes that there be someone at every feature I attend who would be incapable of not murdering me for thoughtless venting; as I hope for them to remain happily at large, my word is "mum."

These people are fine; they are your friends. They only mean you harm, and if they do happen to kill you it will be entirely personal. The ones you want to fear and shun are the ones who on overhearing one of these unfortunate broadcasts—which could be your own if you're not looking sharp-turn to their dates, roll their various eyes and chuckle benignantly: the Scorners.

What is it like, this scorn? Well, if you've ever been to a movie theater where they were showing a movie more than about fifteen years old, unless you were very lucky it was all around you. I recently saw the revised rerelease of Touch of Evil, an Orson Welles joint, and enjoyed it very much; I think it's a swell picture. Current audiences don't necessarily dig it though so at the end when Marlene Dietrich pronounced the story's judgment on Orson Welles' unsanitary old detective most of the house broke into titters mainly provoked, I think, by Dietrich's now-unfashionable solemnity. It wasn't the first unintended comedy they'd found in the work, but because they'd come to see a Classic and had been entertained they left the theater feeling benign, edumacated, and content. This is genial scorn, the kind that starts to smile when the movie begins because, tee hee, it's only black and white: Sure, they did their best trying to make movies in olden times, but the technology was too primitive to do anything that looked real, so you know when monkeys make faces that look like they're thinking? It's like that. Tee hee; tee hee hee.

I have a report, however, of a showing of this same picture maybe fifteen years ago, when it was less a Classic than an Old Movie. In those days the audience apparently didn't so much chuckle at its quaintness as roar at its out-of-date inanity and impossibility. When the lights came up the female of the prosperity-in-sight young couple seated in front of my informant laughed to her man, "Well THAT was the worst movie I've ever seen." Actually it was very likely the best; she may also have gone to see the rerelease and been "very impressed" by it, never remembering having seen it back when it was old-fashioned and terrible instead of a charming attempt and a fine example of what could be done even back then with such limited means. A sufficiently official Seal of Approval will always sway the opinion of a Scorner; once you've stamped their brains they'll greet your product not with Scorn, but Delight.

Now the reaction of this young lady—let's call her Leslie—to a movie she thought was terrible was amused scorn and disdain. If you cock your head and squint a little you can see fodder for that attitude in Touch of Evil: Charlton Heston doesn't "seem" like a "Mexican detective"; Welles is certainly very fat; Dietrich's languid cynicism must be a put-on because who ever feels like that? The world's Leslies and all their dates could not be more perfectly wrong about considering any of this grounds for even the simplest criticism, but these are the sorts of things to which they enjoy reacting.

So what, by contrast, do the theater-lobby massacrists feel? I happen to know: On hearing a good movie scorned they feel much the same as I felt after I saw Chasing Amy. It made me angry. Sure, sure, I know Chasing Amy gives the impression of being less an offense than a simple critically-acclaimed-pathetic-spectacle, but if you think about it its relentless, recursive falsity can make you see the brightest red.

Take it from the top—in the very first exchange we have an overweight comix fan enthusing to Ben "Beady Eyes" Affleck about the heroes of the book he puts out: "They're like Bill and Ted meet...Cheech and Chong!" Well, that's pretty lame-brained, but the guy's supposed to be a lame-brain, so let's allow it. Holden's smirking response, however, is "yeah.. I kinda like to think of them as Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern meet Vladimir and Estragon." Not just lame-brained with a whole Bachelor's in English Lit, but really nasty to boot; you can tell the line is actually supposed to end, "...Vladimir and Estragon, asshole." Right up front "writer-director" Smith is telling you this is his idea of a proper relationship between artist and audience; and since Smith makes Affleck—"Holden", for crying out loud—his transparent stand-in, he's saying that this is what he thinks of YOU.

Is that a problem? Must the artist feel love and respect for every specimen that might drop by the theater because it's hot outside? Of course not. But any proper work of art must be an act of communication—or at least an attempt at it. Your medium, milieu, talent may not be up to the demands of the message, but communication is what it must seek to be. Of anything—doesn't matter what; suit yourself—but the only thing that can MAKE it art is your attempting to convey whatever your ridiculous point is despite the mighty barriers separating all our conflicting understandings. "Expression," as an artistic credential, is for the idiots who paint the terrible pictures for sale in cafés; communication is what you do with the things you need to share, and for that you need to believe in an audience you respect. If necessary you may distinguish your audience from the mass of folks who just happen to get exposed to your work and towards those latter you may be as disagreeable as you please—if you really feel you must—but your proper audience has to receive your respect. They may be purely hypothetical or not born yet or all dead or all humans everywhere-you may even hate them—but you have to be addressing SOMEBODY whom you expect to Get It or you're just jerking off. To create art that doesn't intend communication is to commit art for art's sake, which is no kind of art at all; it might be very lovely, and so is an orchid. If you happen to like orchids. Even if what you're telling your audience is "Attention, Shoppers: you suck!" you're respecting them by a) crediting them with the wit to apprehend your meaning as well as the life to have a reaction, and b) implicitly finding them sufficiently significant that you're motivated to tell them so instead of not bothering. You just had to share that.

Smith on the other hand is content to amuse himself saying things he KNOWS the audience isn't going to understand, like "Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern meet Vladimir and Estragon"—the kids at the Octoplex may have read the Shakespeare (though without remembering that part), but not the Beckett and certainly not the Stoppard. Is the line structurally required or helpful? No, it's a throwaway—doesn't advance anything. It's nothing but Smith explicitly saying "You ignoranimus! Here, I'll spit in your face and you'll like it just because I'm talking to you! There!" What he's doing is Expressing Himself, for the benefit of that guy across the aisle who chuckled extra loud at that line so everyone would know he got it. Smith isn't communicating because he isn't saying what he says—what does that mean, "Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern meet Vladimir and Estragon"? What would it be like if you did blend those characters? A great deal of very little, right? But we know from other scenes in the movie that that's not what those comic-heroes of Holden's are like—they have sex and kill people and all sorts of regular comix stuff; they are HEROES and not ANTIHEROES. So Smith specifically does not mean exactly what he's saying; whatever he's saying, he means not that, and is not saying it to say it, but for the effect of having said it, which isn't communication. He's saying it so the guy he isn't addressing, the chuckling one, will know he's cool.

He loses interest in us popcorn-munching no-accounts pretty quickly though; a few other fans appear and receive similarly low regard but mostly we're beneath his notice. Black nationalism is also randomly picked up and casually dismissed for laffs: Holden and sidekick attend the lecture of an Angry Black Cartoonist who has a lot to say about cultural colonialism and the like; sidekick baits him with stupid questions to the improbable point that the ABC pulls a large pistol and shoots him, causing the rest of the audience to scream and flee in terror. KIDDING! It was all a GAG, everybody—we're friends! We used blanks! Are audiences stupid or what? Har har har.

The most significant truth about Black nationalism, see, is that it's a put-on used by slightly artistic fags for marketing purposes. This, apparently, is the level to which Smith is prepared to respect anything which isn't himself: the level of utilization. No, Smith's real deal, his one true thing, is that this GUY really digs this GIRL, see, only she's like kookoo, a lesbo-whoa! Can you get your head around that? The chick's cool though, she's thought it through—you can tell because she talks like a textbook of Alternative Lifestyle Sociology. Okay, yes, I'm scorning here—in the important respects the awkwardness of Alyssa's lines is no more relevant than the squeakiness of her voice. But those of you who are orientated towards women (if you're the man-liking type just follow along here; the situation is actually even more horrifying if the sexes are switched, the same way a Democrat can get away with the SDI the Republicans couldn't have), imagine that you've just begun what seems like a really nice new relationship; you're lying there ill-advisedly smoking in bed having done it till you can't do it no more, and, like, you want to know—you ask her the "how come me?" question, and in this case with the especially charged rider "since you always liked (the other kind) before." And this new girlfriend of yours says, "Historically, yes, that's true. I've given that a lot of thought—now that I'm being ostracized by my friends I've had a lot of time for that—and what I've come up with is really simple. I came to this on my own terms. I didn't just heed what I was taught: Men and women should be together, it's the 'natural way,' that kinda thing. I'm not with you because of what family, society, life tried to instill in me from day one. The way the world is, how seldom it is you meet the one person who just gets you—it's so rare."

Carita! You know what it does to me when you speak social theory! She goes on like that, believe it or not, in this same mode that used to make the fifes play for Oliver on Green Acres—back when people knew nonsense when it climbed into bed with them--and then they have a pillow fight.

Smith lets on that this whole shenanigan is somehow autobiographical when he appears himself and tells an abbreviated version of the whole story, and hammers this into the ground at the end with the display of a comic book by Holden commemorating his failure (comic, movie...movie, comic...get it? I SAID DO YOU GET IT???). There's nothing wrong with telling stories on yourself at all—after all, what else are you going to know? The trouble is that this entire time—and obviously through his original relationship itself—Smith refuses to allow any character but Holden and any thoughts but Holden's the merest smidgen of reality. It's aaaallllll about Holden. He makes some remarks about a Catholic upbringing but then never seems to notice that what he's made of Alyssa is a chimerical motherwhore who never gets to speak her own human lines.

He wraps up the hideous confection with a bittersweet bow: Holden loses Alyssa, but he's so sweet about it you just know she's wrong. Well of course she is—she's a woman! And a lesbian, ergo insane, and formerly promiscuous, i.e. bad. Poor Holden never really had a chance, is the thing; Sidekick was right when he said all those harsh things about how it's impossible to love people who are different from you. They're only going to hurt you. We just should've listened to Sidekick.

Is this what Smith really means? Would Mr. Indie say out loud "Stay away from anyone who's different"? No—it probably is what he thinks, but only at a level deeper than he'd care to take public responsibility for. This subtext is an illusion; before you can have a subtext you have to have a TEXT, which is precisely the communication that Smith avoids. He has made some puppets that look like his feelings about the way everybody relates to him, and with them he's put on a puppet show about his idea of your idea of the sort of romantical story that you'd like to look at. He's pulled out some wads of his own unexamined perceptions and flung a thing together that he hopes will correspond to just what you want to hear in just the way you want to hear it.

Everything in the movie that's not about Holden is a red herring: cartooning is a stage prop, Black Nationalism is a minstrel show, even the nearly threatening lesbianism has nothing to do with what goes on between these characters; Smith has carefully carved away everything from his story which is inessential and made his movie with those scraps, because he doesn't care about the shape underneath and he doesn't think you'll pay as much to see it.

It's not an experiment, successful or failed, in discovering whatever might happen when a straight man and a queer woman love each other; instead it's his semiautobiographical excuse for his inability to make a relationship work, relying on ego's-eye views of the strengths, weaknesses, thoughts, and appearance of the parties involved while omitting the decency of an indication that the tale itself is biased. It's the kind of story someone tells who is so unconcerned with truth that it doesn't even occur to them to lie about it—they just avoid it, and under the influence of motivations not even related to their material they fabricate falsity.

And that, fellow popcorn-munchers, makes me angry.

So I've seen something I've disliked and been enraged; Leslie saw something she didn't like and she sneered; what accounts for the difference between these two kinds of negative reaction? Why don't the heathen rage? Partly it's just that there are different ways to receive cultural product. Some years ago, when the job which supported me was even crappier than the one which does now and that of my then-mate crappier still I went with her to an episode of workgroup-goes-drinking. Bonding pretexts in those situations are pretty tenuous, and in less than a beer I was chatting with a fellow we should call "Jake," the binder of our conversation being our agreement that we sincerely enjoyed getting high and watching old cartoons. Like there's this game I like to play, pretending that either I or the cartoon is Russian; I know next to nothing about Russian culture so anything in the cartoon that requires cultural membership I get to lose. My favorite is a 1946 Porky Pig that takes us on a tour of American history—George Washington at this, Patrick Henry at that, Abraham Lincoln at the other—but nowhere are any of the people or events named: the whole thing is a mystery to the outsider; it's Ivan the Terrible at the Sack of Orksputsk, Peter the Great consecrating the Festivity of Arkank, Molotov's Great Address. You remember those—it's all the stuff you had to stand up and recite the dates of in Russian History class.

So Jake mentions a taste for Popeye. "Mm," I agree; "or anyway the ones before Paramount took over in '39." Definitely—I love the muttering Popeye; anybody who's got that much to say to himself is okay by me. He's my main man. Paramount Popeye, on the other hand, sucks. You can no longer communicate with him in internal dialogues, there are gratuitous nephews, there's only one plot. Forget it; it's no kind of Popeye at all.

"Oh, well," says Jake. "I don't know anything about the dates, and all that."

"Oh. Oh! OH." I realized to myself. "You mean you like watching cartoons!" In the cartoon-watching sense, that is, where you feast your eyes on the pictures and relish the action. That's different.

Not that there's anything wrong with it. Everybody watches cartoons sometimes, and you can do it with movies, music, Great Literature, or State of the Union speeches; having a good feel for just looking at the pictures is important, in the same way that it's important to have a certain amount of experience with and understanding of various drugs. Lots of things only are cartoons in the first place and it's a silly mistake to think of them otherwise--Pecker, The Impostors, and Freeway are cartoon movies I liked very much. But the intoxicated state, while useful, is inherently irresponsible, and though it can do your responsibilities a lot of good to take periodic breaks from them it furthers no purpose of your own to be doped to the gills every blessed day of your life. Watching Cartoons you never see more than exactly what's presented to your literalist eyeballs. You can regard those things with more or less acuity or sophistication, noticing or not that the backdrop jiggled or that this hand-drawn animation is especially fine or weren't the President's eyes brown before, but all your attention will be delivered over to elements of presentation and the experience will be one of reception.

It makes sense that from this mode you won't be able to generate any greater indignation than "yeah, right." Somebody's offering you a reality and asking you to go along with the story they claim about it, but you can see the zipper on the monster's rubber suit—yeah, right. That is so fake. Real monsters don't have zippers on their rubber suits. Seeing through pretense means your perception is stronger than the deception, so you're better than it is and licensed to be smug.

But can't we all keep our shirts on? This movie...it is a movie. It's not real. Is there really much credit to be gotten by discovering the distinction between reality and make-believe? You did notice, didn't you, that before the princess was abducted and the sorcerer let the demons out somebody stopped you and asked for eight dollars? That's a tip-off—nobody's trying to keep it a secret that the princess is an actress-impostor—we're just pretending. That spaceship—not really a spaceship. That ferocious dinosaur—not even a model; a cartoon in fact: Watch it!

When you're offered a creative work the first thing its creators want from you is to please suspend your disbelief, to go along with this gag; just for the sake of argument, consider a forty-foot ape; let's call him Kong. That concession granted they then mean to spin you a little thing that looks sort of like the reality you came from IF that also contained also whatever unreal elements they need for the narrative: if we brought our Kong to your Manhattan, what might happen then? The contrived elements are a hypothesis, the tale an experiment.

But because of the necessary resemblances of the tale's reality to our reality many people, it would seem, skip ahead to attempt straight belief and acceptance. If coincidentally sane they understand that the events depicted are not supposed to have happened to them but still they take them as news reports from some other place. They enter the experience with only one reality-slot available in their heads, and just swap out the regular cartridge for the depiction's. As long as that depiction remains solid there are no objections; discontent arises when seams appear, signs that the depiction is a forgery, that it comes in fact from the same reality that we did before we went into the show. For someone operating in this mode the illusion-shattering ends the experience, which is judged to have failed in a silly and dishonorable fashion: That was a wire! I no longer acknowledge your so-called "Kong."

Tee, hee hee.

Leslie and other cartoon-watchers who laugh at old movies because they aren't new or boo old racial stereotypings because they aren't the ones we make now are indulging in an apathetic one-eyed fanaticism. They insist on everything being exactly the way they know it must obviously be but can't be bothered to focus a little energy and decry the violation of their flaccid principles.

I can suggest one substantial reason for you to find fault with Touch of Evil if you want: Like much of Welles' work it's overblown and black-and-white gaudy. These are qualities that affect—and effect—the story being told you. They are unnecessary divergences from the story that may serve no other purpose than to get you aroused, and you might, as I do, like that in this case but it should make you suspicious of what you're being told. It happens that one of the things I like about Welles is not this excess vivacity but the fact that he can be excessively vivacious without having that special effect corrupt his story. It is NOT relevant to the movie that Charlton Heston can't speak Spanish—see, he also isn't really a narcotics officer: He's just PRETENDING. Mexicality is not crucial to the movie's themes—what the picture's about is integrity and necessity. If Heston can't give you the impression of integrity bewildered by situational ethics then it's maybe the worst movie you ever saw; if he can't give you an impression of Spanish, who cares? You want nice Spanish, go see Carmen.

Now like I said, there's nothing wrong with a little light superficiality-Jakerie-per se. It's when you try to make something from that that you get yourself into fits of Leslieism. Jake's an easy-going guy-Jake Doesn't Mind-but Leslie says Touch of Evil isn't in color, like other movies are; Leslie says Charlton Heston doesn't speak Spanish, like Antonio Banderas does; Leslie says "Oh my god-that guy was SO FAT." Leslie takes the things she sees and compares them in a connect-the-dots fashion to all the other things she's exposed to most; her process is a lot like morphing, that obscene computer technique developed for making cats and dogs smile on the TV to sell cat and dog food to the humans. To morph from one picture to another you don't make any comparisons or contrasts, you don't do any analysis or synthesis; morphing is the computer-assisted path to making two dissimilar pictures be the same picture, and the more distinctions you obliterate the better. So if the pictures Leslie sees don't match, if the cat won't smile, Leslie gets attitude.

Leslie doesn't assess value; instead she checks to see whether the thing she sees matches everything else and if it doesn't she scorns it. Her Everything Else may be drawn from High Art or checkout-stand disposables, from the Western Canon or the avantmost garde-scorn comes in all brows and traditions. Leslie finds Stephen King scary and Mary Shelley boring, not because King is simpler to read and Leslie is a simpleton (she may be or not) but because King produces "stories" that have just the same kind of scariness as all the other scary Leslie sees when she goes looking for something scary (he is after all responsible for most of those things). It's much easier this way; the cues are all familiar so she can always tell when she's just been scared/touched/delighted/aroused and when she hasn't.

Scorn judges a thing successful when it can tell by similarity that what it's being fed has been put together in accordance with The Way These Things Are Done, deviation from which demonstrates an inability to get it right. On its days off scorn returns lattes that aren't nonfat, the way it ordered them, hello! Things succeed for Leslie to the extent that they don't stimulate you with irritating differences. Scorn is critical soma.

By contrast, what your angry reaction has done is to reach out to and possibly into the work to try and discover what it means to mean on its own terms, and, having grasped that, made a decision about whether that meaning on those terms is sensible, truthful, beautiful, shameful, intolerable, execrable or whatever else the production itself may seem to be. It doesn't take a Creation Scientist—all it requires is the same honest attention you give any person who's standing there telling you something you feel you should try to understand. In school they call it "paying attention," in relationships it's "listening"; in any of these scenaria if you neglect it you'll presently be finding yourself in some kind of trouble. Once you've heard you evaluate and decide whether your addressor is full of shit or has an excellent point, and you respond accordingly. It's nothing in the world but the respect due someone who's speaking to you.

Leslie never touches the things she's shown; she just sits back glaring at the surfaces, detecting matches and mismatches—"I mean like they come into the room and the clock says 1:20, and then in the next shot it says 1:15!". Where anger is engaging and creative, scorn is obedient, always subject to the material presented to it and one or another set of rules for dot-connecting. Leslie herself never even enters the picture-the whole thing can be done entirely without her. Very likely someone is about to open a Web site offering scornbots that will go out and despise stuff for you, searching the Internet for everything you wouldn't like; when the search is complete your bot comes back and tells you nothing about the things it found except for how terribly unlike your preferences they all were. Buy the stock now—it'll be big big big.

Chasing Amy shares Leslie's refusal to engage—neither Leslie nor Smith has any intention of communicating; they may not even dream of it. Smith assembled a golem of a story, and populated it with a bunch of semblances that flap their mechanical gums to the beat of whatever notions offer the least disruption to his self-conceptions; it's a movie about life in a Holden-shaped hole with decals of friends stuck to the walls-real friends might not always match your preferences. The fake black militant scene is probably the true core of the movie; with all the hollering and shooting there's a lot of noise and commotion and until the gag is revealed it even seems politically threatening. But no, after all—whew!—nobody present really thought what they said or really did what they pretended; it was all void, all a lie, performed for the sake of its resemblance to other things which have been superficially perceived to exist. Scornful, lying production: The cat smiles, and Leslie the lying listener is content.

So do yourself a favor: Get bent out of shape. Join me—won't you?—weeping with rage as spurious Dharma lies to Claymation Greg about feelings unrelated to the experience of every human person; gnash your teeth with me as pretty Meg Ryan delicately expires and sees the angels that were right there all along; feel your blood run dry as a small boy finds love and laughter in a Nazi death camp. And next time you slip up in a theater lobby and get the bejeezus beaten out of you, shake your assailant's hand and thank them for caring. At least you'll know there was someone else in there with you. 

This article orginally appeared in Hermenaut 15, 1999.

Early this summer movie enthusiasts of my acquaintance spent some weeks in amicable dispute over the relative merits of Armageddon and Deep Impact. I lost track of how the tallies went; I don't think it got to the point where folks were taking sides championing one against the other--mainly the discussion remained a level-headed consideration of the particular strengths leading to the respective successes. I think Deep Impact was felt to have better character development, while Armageddon was gifted with superior special effects, particularly the exceedingly loud soundtrack, which was found to help you get into the story more. The camera work was better in Deep Impact, but Armageddon's comedy was deft. Nobody liked Bruce Willis. I couldn't participate.

It's not that I think the enthusiasts are wrong and that I want to be polite about the difference of opinion--that sort of difficulty is trivial, requiring nothing more than a cooperative spirit and a little friendly dissimulation. The trouble here is that the propositions offered, even the whole topic, perfectly fail to correspond to anything in my mental landscape. If you were to ask me I'd say that there is no comedy without wit; that special effects obviate camera work; that you can have Bruce Willis in a movie or you can have characters, not both. Most of all, a thing isn't a movie (or a tale, lie, anecdote or action) unless it was created and realized with semantic intention--this is really no more than the scientific requirement that a hypothesis be falsifiable. If I approach you with a story to tell it must be for one of two reasons: Either I want to tell you a story or I want to do something else, like distract you while my beautiful assistant here picks your pocket (thank you, Mavis). If my telling comes from the latter motive then I'm not really telling you a story, am I? What I'm after in that case is not to share some ideas with you which mean something to me, but to deliver a pattern of sounds which will elicit from you the behavior I desire; the content of the latter can be anything at all that doesn't interfere with the effect. 

So in terms of believed information conveyed these apparent movies are existentially not there at all. The disjointed little bits of intentional muscle the things possibly could contain are richly smothered by the disjointed bits of ulterior fat; without the semantic intent no choice was involved in their assembly, and the seeming activity of filmmaking was thus without effect. What was displayed in theaters near you was not movies but certain side-effects of a large-scale fleecing project. From the get-go, therefore, there's nothing here to talk about. Nobody meant for there to be any characters, so there can be no development; nobody cared about doing anything funny--they simply wanted ticket purchasers to laugh. (Do note that there is such a thing as accidental art, an important category in which the merit of a piece can far surpass its original conception. For a work to develop this characteristic, however, requires a secondary reception, substantially removed in time or context from its original point of emergence; here I'm only concerned with primary receptions.) 

Of course this is just my view. Not opinion, mind you, because the principles of judgment I've cited are structural parts of my world-apprehending apparatus and operate automatically and prior to the emotional investment that gives one an opinion; they are among my mental rods and cones. If in some other system than mine there is any appreciable merit to these movies, the kind that gives you leverage to pry open a piece of the world and understand it, then I am no more able to detect that than I am the ultraviolet wavelengths that stimulate a honeybee's eye. And as no amount of argument can induce me to see ultraviolet reflections, neither will any amount of jollying cause me to have any concern for these pictures but to avoid them. Not, God forbid, that every picture you go to should make you into some kind of a Better Person, or that we should never come out of a theater without having Learned Something. Actually after a really good movie you might find you know less than you did before. What's to be avoided are those emissions that putty over the wrinkles in your cerebral cortex and clog your spiritual arteries with individually-wrapped slices of processed American cheese-food morality. 

Which is not to say you can't find nice things there if you are under the impression that you can. Many moviegoers can see patterns in those carcinogenic frequencies, and logically enough are not apt to understand how these features--a bracing thrill-ride; reminders of the importance of teamwork and, conversely, individualism; good value for your entertainment dollar--could be missed; in fact they'll be disinclined to believe it possible. You must be duller than expected, or lying, or most likely just being difficult with your tired old intellectual-elitist disdain for anything that's not Great Literature, and go on back to Berkeley why doncha. 

Or feelings to that effect. But honestly--it's not like that. Not on good days it isn't. Thing is, you may lead me to grope blindly at your ultraviolet action-adventure elephant but all I'll be able to detect is a long tube with a powerful vacuum on one end. "What is this thing?" I'll say, "It sucks. Certainly it's not an animal, like what you'd see in a movie." And then I for my part will be perfectly unable to imagine how you could not perceive that Skidoo enhances your ability to make sense of the world while Chasing Amy tends to gum up that faculty (or destroy it outright), or that the world is a better place because of Heavenly Creatures but every soul has lost something that was exposed to City of Angels. How can you not see THAT? Can you not see me sitting here before you? It's obvious. 

This is not at all the same thing as there being no accounting for taste. There isn't, but taste is why of Preston Sturges's movies I prefer Miracle of Morgan's Creek to Sullivan's Travels, and why my enthusiast friends have a preference for either of two earth vs. the asteroids movies. I also like kale, pork rinds, and stylish beers from the Northwest. This is unaccountable--but discussible. I can tell you I like Morgan's Creek better than Sullivan's Travels because the one is daft where the other is preachy, and you may tell me I've got it backwards or that preachy is actually better. Whatever you unaccountably think, we will already be in agreement on the nature of the objects under discussion; this may not be the case should we begin arguing the merits of Nutrasweet, which you think is not as good an artificial sweetener as saccharine while I think it's a plot more devious than fluoridation. You have a taste for certain sweeteners and I have a taste for industrial biochemical conspiracy; you think me mad and I find you hopelessly naïve; and these tastes of ours are mutually irrelevant and inaccessible. 

There are as many Nutrasweets as there are packets in the world; each of us must find the right one and use as directed. Same goes for everything else. If art doesn't have the same position in your affairs as in mine then the same values can't be applied to works of it, let alone the same valuations. Twice I tried to read Tama Janowitz's A Cannibal in Manhattan, a popular book; twice I flung it across the room around page 40. It wasn't that I thought it was so bad--the thing just pissed me off because it was odious. It doesn't make sense to everybody that fiction might make one angry, because not everybody believes that creative work is an habitation of truth and morality. If you don't then probably what you find there is merely greater or lesser entertainment--if a category means little to you, you are free simply to like or disregard its representatives. Your thing might be urban planning, and how I can get so worked up about a novel just goes to show what sort of nonsense people will get all excited about when they don't have the wit to really appreciate a good zoning plan.

It comes down to what is essentially a religious question. If I am approached in good faith by a religious acquaintance who enthuses to me "Isn't it great how the bread becomes the Body of Christ and helps us towards salvation?" there is no response I can offer that will be simultaneously honest, relevant, and sociable. "Yes, it's great"; "You must be nuts"; "I worship Moloch": None of these will get us anywhere, substantively or socially. To say either yes or no is a lie, since none of the events and entities described exist in my universe--least of all the "us"--so I can't validly affirm or deny them, or assess their greatness with any certainty. They don't exist to me even as the misinterpretation of something I do believe in. On the other hand any attempted demurer I offer must be a rejection--to say "I'm Jewish," or "As a Lutheran I don't believe that that happens," or at worst, "I'm an atheist," point blank refuses the community bond they were honestly offering despite any amount of friendliness I may feel towards them. Certainly they erred in assuming the universality of their creed, but that's exactly the error that does happen, and most especially when a person feels well-disposed towards you. The true answer is "It happens that though I appreciate your faith I'm not religious and can't engage in this discourse; we'll perhaps have better luck with another." Unfortunately the fact that they overuniversally included me (which after all is neighborly) is demonstrative of an underdeveloped facility for anticipating and dealing with other cognitive worlds than their own, and they may not have a way to navigate the disjunction they've just encountered. Those subscribing to the most popular cosmologies will naturally encounter less popular models much less often than alternativists will run into counter-worlds, so it's to be expected that believers in popular concepts like major religions or special effects will nearly always assume your co-enthusiasm. It's not that they're innately hostile to differences of opinion, but when all of a sudden you appear in your guise as the Other they're liable to seize up and not know how to proceed. This will anger some of them; others will get sullen about how you think you're so great; many will be initially baffled but then amused at your quaint and ridiculous ideas, and will joke with you about them for the rest of your life.

As with religion, so also with Star Wars, which according to your own rods and cones is probably either a) a monument of American cinema and the essence of the best our good-guys-win-seriocomic-heroic-cowboy national nature has to offer or b) a juggernaut of American cinema and the stuff false consciousnesses are made of--and note that whichever precept you entertain or entertains you will only be strengthened by last years's rerelease of the thing. Again, these are not matters of varying opinion but of varying truth. If you and I are both Star Wars enthusiasts we may differ in our opinions about it and you might be able, despite my initial resistance, to convince me that actually the Death Star should have been a cube (and please note that no matter who you are you know that it was not one; this itself is part of the problem--but that's for another time), as that would've been more emblematic of thusandsuch. Whether you succeed or not, we will likely both enjoy the disputation as beer follows beer. But if we get our truths from different places, one of us being a Star Wars enthusiast and the other a Star Wars revulsionist, we have the very different and remarkable situation that anything either of us says about the movie will depress the other and lead us both to no other conclusion than "Truly, this here is one sorry jackass." The beer will be as ashes in our mouths, and we will have no more than two. Conversions are possible but very rare, and are necessarily more epiphanic than concensual: You'll never get as substantial a conversion by use of arguments as will be achieved by an internal revelation like "Wait a minute--Yoda is a MUPPET!" 

The generally unnoticed thing is, this gap is far greater in kind and magnitude even than that between a Socialist and a Republocrat; these at least will concur on the objects under consideration, the meaning of "goal," and the fact that their strategies conflict. But if one person watching a movie sees a collection of characters engaged in an interplay of competing interests which achieves the goal of entertainment where the other sees a pastiche of unsupported fols de rol which accomplish the accident of diseducation, contaminating the minds of the young and reinforcing the folly of the previously contaminated, where will the common ground be upon which this hash can be settled? 

There is none. But more than the difference itself, it's the failure to note the nature of the difference that leads to mischief and shattered careers. If your boss or someone you hope to take home tonight says to you "Hey--I just got the video of the new Star Wars release for my birthday! Is that great or what?" the closest thing you've got to a corresponding opinion may be the Hatebath maneuver: "The only reason you like that movie is that you had the sheets and pillowcases when you were twelve." And factually you might be exactly right, but if you express this truth you have failed in two ways: Conversationally you have mistakenly addressed a topic which only appears to be the one they led with, and pragmatically you will soon be fired, or go home alone yet again. 

And yet by convention some response is required. Some response is required. I've been after this grail for some time now and must confess myself as much at a loss for useful gambits as ever. What I have got though is a little stratagem that may at least keep such situations from spiraling out of control. First, borrowing from Soviet military tactics, you must determine what category of situation it is that you find yourself in. This information may be found in the nature of your immediate reaction. Given the opportunity to help someone watch their Star Wars commemorative release video, if what you're about to say next is "I think it's terrible how they mucked it all up with the new footage," well and good. What you are experiencing is merely a difference of taste and you may feel free to have it out in whatever manner best suits your personal lifestyle choices. Enjoy the show. If, however, you're about to say "What are you, some kind of idiot??" you should judge that you have encountered a denominational conflict and must proceed with caution. It is a borderline case if what occurs to you is a snappy comeback of some kind; in this event you'll have to evaluate your proposed retort. If it's snappier and more delicious than your average you should probably disengage--note that between the honest poles of uncritical enthusiast and overwrought acolyte lies the insupportable position of the asshole, arch and knowing: movie-school graduates, MFAs, twenty-three-year-olds and other paraphiles, delicate bullies who will scoff even in your face if the piece that pleases you is on their Pope's list of the "sub-moronic." Asked what they do like they'll strain themselves to produce only examples you can be expected not to have heard of, and to muddy what little clarity you've got. Like the dissimulators who emit footage or pages because it suits their other purpose, the knowledge of the knowers is not for sharing but for wielding: They don't care to know, they want only that you should not. They are disingenuous; don't speak to them. We concern ourselves only with the incompatible honesties of simple enjoyment or principled ardor.

If it does seem that caution is called for, then your next move should be to create a diversion. "Look over there!" may be just fine but probably won't work more than once per interlocutor. One that may be more reliable as well as reusable is, for example, "Well it sounds like you sure enjoyed it!" Or didn't, as the case may be; it doesn't matter how they feel so long as you can get their own wool pulled back over their eyes. The urgent goal at this point is to remove yourself and your views from the field of consideration; replacing yourself with your amiable opponent and encouraging them to talk about their own incorrect analysis will win you extra friendliness points, which may be strategically useful--though tactically the purpose will be as well served by developing a sudden nosebleed (which of course in some of these situations may be exactly what happens). 

After this you're on your own. I, at this point, am most likely to smile blankly for a while and as long as they keep talking there usually isn't a problem; you can probably do better than that. At any rate what follows should be no worse than any other cocktail party and probably nothing bad will happen. If you're up to it you might try the merest sublethal bit of evangelizing of your own principles, but strictly offhand, and with no evident end in mind. Most important to remember is that whatever your point may be in this discussion, it cannot be made.

This article originally appeared in Hermenaut 14, 1998.

Well now we've gone and done it.

It's been long understood and scarcely contested that human nature is a destructive nature; acknowledged and frequently demonstrated that whatever we put our little hands to will prove, to greater or lesser extent, our undoing. All great religions have devoted the bulk of their teachings to some aspect of our untrustworthiness; all political groupings, from tribe to superpower, have devoted huge, often insupportable quantities of resources to nonproductive penal and war organizations. We actually have an explicit, named expression for the concept that we ought not to do things that we wouldn't like done to us because the corresponding generous and cooperative behavior doesn't naturally occur to us as a possibility. We require ten commandments written in stone, each of them a particular elaboration of the general directive "Don't be an asshole," because we just don't get it. 

For centuries we've slaved to eliminate the environment in which we live. Not long ago we figured out how to eradicate ourselves along with it using atomic explosives. We've generated enough information to forevermore confound understanding, made it possible to live longer with a greater variety of debilities and isolated ourselves from each other using technology that advances so fast it no longer has time to break before it's worthlessly obsolete.

Our bodies, homes, and communities are fully contaminated, devastated, and dissipated. Our work here would appear to be done. There had remained, however, a lingering aspect of our being which was conceivably ennobling—at least satisfying—that rested relatively untouched: our Destiny. There appeared to be a cause for which we were primed, justification through Judgment, an Ultimate Measure of Our Worth, which, even if it turned out to be lowish, would still have been taken and considered; our gods have always promised us this. But now we have managed to strip ourselves of the last dignity: The species formerly known as human has pissed away its very own cataclysm. 

When I was coming up the End Times was something you could count on: a nice, solid end-of-the-world all filled with Wrath of God, devastation über alles, signs and rumors of signs, most folks graduating to eternal hellfire. Even if you did happen to be one of the Elect you were still going to be obliged to fasten your seatbelt against the bumpy Night. 

I didn't expect to actually see the hellfire because though I'm neither Presbyterian nor Catholic nor Jew I am innocent, and will go to Heaven instead. But woe betide those who etc., etc., because they aren't innocent and are going to pay. There was a Grand Finale ahead, waiting for us - for everyone. For the wicked, unjust and sinful there were to be torments and privations; for the righteous and wholesome, all Heaven's raptures. Nothing plainer than that. In those Awaiting-the-End-Times times life was good or we'd know the reason why. 

And the End Times were obviously on their way; until recently it looked like we were just about there. Falling, falling was Babylon the Great into dissolution and despair and things, rancid were the waters and it hasn't been stamped on our foreheads yet but we're all carrying the mark of the Beast on signed pieces of plastic worn over all our asses.

But NOW look. Something went wrong—I'm not sure—somehow, in these last few years, everything went...flat, and our screaming plunge towards Doomsday levelled out into Dante's Steam Train at Six Flags over Hell. Where once we had War, Pestilence, Famine, and Death to contend with, now there's Limited Engagement, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Olestra and, true, Death, but if you want we'll cut off your head and keep it in a tub of liquid nitrogen with your gonads so MAYBE you won't REALLY be dead (AIDS isn't worth much as a plague really since it's so hard to catch—what you want for a plague is something that'll hit two out of three people for no apparent reason, involve horrifying buboes that will grotesquely disfigure the survivors, and be transmitted by rats).

We display a serious lack of commitment. The Pentagon devotes an increasing amount of funds to inventing weapons that don't kill you; the right hand of each oil company dumps filth everywhere, fully aware that the left is funding environmental education groups; politicians all claim to hate government and compete viciously to reduce its control over us while simultaneously increasing its control over us. Evil-doers everywhere are all having a big fat horrible Summer of Love; the only Beast in sight has a girlfriend called Belle and a real nice singing voice, and Leviathan goes by "Willy" and requires the assistance of little boys to escape a life of jumping through hoops for herring. Where have all the supervillains gone? Superman is DEAD already—MENACE ME! 

And no better are the righteous, I'm afraid. Revelations 11 says that near the End two good men will go around making prophesies about what's to come (and will quickly be murdered, as all good men must be). They're here! On TV! On This Week in Bible Prophecy (check local listings), Peter and Paul give weekly updates on how current events fit into the scheme laid out by St. John. They also have a web site, which offers the TWIPB Statement of Faith, the scripts from each show, scheduling information and a large selection of unattributed articles on subjects such as "World Government" and "UFOs and ETs." They do some fine prophesying but seem regrettably concerned with selling their many video tapes, such as "Last Days: Hype or Hope?" ($30), "Final Warning Video Set" ($35) and "Super Money Management for Christians" ($45; "A Set of Six Audio Tapes that Will Secure Christians' Financial Future!"). Now how do you suppose the Lamb feels about THAT? I smell mint sauce. 

But the true measure of our fall from Fall may be taken not from the disappointing nature of the signs we've expected as they've been realized, but from their origin. Nostradamus always told us that the End would be initiated by a man in a blue turban, brought to us by the AntiChrist. When Iraq invaded Kuwait it was widely figured that Saddam must be that man—though he has not to my knowledge been seen in a turban of any color. But the man has made his appearance—he is not Saddam Hussein, but Jafar, the evil vizier in Disney's Aladdin (If Mr. Damus foresaw Robin Williams appearing as a blue man in a fez he either didn't get it or couldn't bring himself to relay such dispiriting news). THIS is what we have come to, that our mortal foes and enemies of light should be not hellspawn, but Happiest-Place-On-Earthspawn. We SUCK. Dieties worldwide have spent millenia punishing us in the hope that we'd figure out how to be good and here we are now, still no good and can't work up an evil worth a crap anymore. Useless. 

I need to point out something very important: Michael Eisner is NOT the AntiChrist, no matter what he thinks. The real AntiChrist is not authorized to send ANY of his principal minions in the form of cartoons which cannot in any way, by any construal or at any dosage frighten, offend, or dismay (Rev. 39:18). Michael Eisner is a FALSE AntiChrist; do not worship Him. The fact that He has sought to destroy our very destruction merely indicates the wretchedness of our condition and should in no way be considered an indication of aptitude or even love of his work. As Dark Powers go he's strictly a no-account hack. We find ourselves in the pathetic situation of having Satan himself abandon us in disgust at our lack of natural gumption—our wickedness and goodness alike lack authenticity. If we would be saved we must wrest our Abyss from the Contentedness over which it teeters, embrace our End and properly enjoy what ought to be inevitable—if we have yet any talent remaining for doom, which I doubt.

This article originally appeared in Hermenaut 11/12, 1997.