(Above: buckle up, or else. Read all about it in that wretched leftie propaganda machine here in The New York Times, a good news story from 2008).
Frankly I'm shocked and appalled that Kathryn Bigelow won those Oscars.
If you take a look at her CV, you realise she's got alarming signs of leftism, intellectualism, and academicism in her past.
For a start one of her professors was Susan Sontag. That's enough in its own right, but throw in Vito Acconci, a master's in theory and criticism at Columbia, early work as a painter, and a time in bed with conceptualists like Lawrence Weiner, and you can see the latte trickling out from her ears and nose.
No wonder The Hurt Locker tries to deconstruct war:
Hang on, unpack, deconstruct? Oh yes, Bigelow knows how to talk dirty filthy talk:
"It took all my semiotic Lacanian deconstructivist saturation and torqued it," she says. "I realized there's a more muscular approach to filmmaking that I found very inspiring."
Why this dirty talk? She'd watched a double bill of Mean Streets and The Wild Bunch, the latter film surely the one most responsible for the decline and fall of western civilisation as we know it.
Cue The Hurt Locker, and the sort of fancy talk in the New York Times that can make a poor bear's head spin:
“The Hurt Locker” doesn’t traffic in the armchair militarism of Hollywood products like “Top Gun” and “Transformers,” but neither is it an antiwar screed. It’s diagnostic, not prescriptive: it takes an analytical if visceral look at how the experience of war can change a man, how it eats into his brain so badly he ends up hooked on it. And, like all seven of Ms. Bigelow’s previous feature films, this new one is also as informed by the radical aspirations of conceptual art as it is by the techniques of classical Hollywood cinema. (here).
Say what? It's not just about blowing shit up, it's got the radical aspirations of conceptual art? Oh I love the smell of hot foccacia in the morning.
She learned from the masters — De Kooning, Peckinpah, Goya, Pasolini, Rembrandt and on and on — in order to become her own woman.
The number of male mentors and aesthetic influences seems instructive as does her seeming discomfort when I ask why she likes to make movies about men. It’s one of the few times when she searches for her words. She mentions Richard Serra, whom she’s known for years, and “Torqued Ellipses,” his curvilinear steel sculptures that weigh about 40 tons apiece and which she describes as “real statements of power.” Suddenly I’m reminded of the moment in “K-19” when the camera glides between two submarines sitting parallel on the surface of the water, a glorious image of heavy metal that is itself a statement of power. When she was painting, she says, she loved “big, gestural, visceral, raw, immediate pieces.” She starts to move her fingers, as if she were sewing.
The number of male mentors and aesthetic influences seems instructive as does her seeming discomfort when I ask why she likes to make movies about men. It’s one of the few times when she searches for her words. She mentions Richard Serra, whom she’s known for years, and “Torqued Ellipses,” his curvilinear steel sculptures that weigh about 40 tons apiece and which she describes as “real statements of power.” Suddenly I’m reminded of the moment in “K-19” when the camera glides between two submarines sitting parallel on the surface of the water, a glorious image of heavy metal that is itself a statement of power. When she was painting, she says, she loved “big, gestural, visceral, raw, immediate pieces.” She starts to move her fingers, as if she were sewing.
Naturally the effete ponces at places like The Guardian loved the show and its message which is not so much a message as a meta-message, coded and requiring deconstruction:
How weird and ironic, then, that the nearest thing we have to Wayne is also the best and most insightful anti-war film about Iraq: Kathryn Bigelow's blazingly powerful action movie The Hurt Locker, whose unpretentious clarity makes for a refreshing change. Bigelow is, in dramatic terms, on the side of the soldiers. She has a single location – Baghdad – and wants to find out what is going on inside the US combatants' hearts and minds. Debating the purpose and origins of the conflict is not the point. Yet, for my money, Bigelow says more about the agony and tragedy of war than all those earnest, well-meaning movies that sound as if they've been co-scripted by Josh and Toby from The West Wing. (here).
John Wayne is in an insightful anti-war film?
I was so shocked and appalled by all this jibber jabber that I turned to the one unfailing, always reliable source who would expose this woman for the hollow transparent typical Hollywood bagel munching soya milk sipping liberal arty deconstructivist sham that she is.
Calling Miranda Devine.
Ah yes, and here she comes with A salute to brave soldiers in a nerve-racking theatre of war?
Say what? The Devine's penned a paean of praise to Bigelow for thrashing that leftie greenie ex-hubbie Jim Cameron and his silly blue creatures, and for saying nice things about soldiers in her two acceptance speeches?
You see, it's not anti-war at all:
While some critics have seen the movie as yet more anti-war Hollywood propaganda and soldiers have blasted it as inaccurate, it is really just a snapshot of the nerve-racking reality of warfare in Iraq in 2004 when violence escalated before the successful troop surge of 2007.
It is about the understated nobility of generation Y soldiers who shoulder the greatest burdens, who willingly risk their lives on foreign battlefields because they believe they are doing good.
Proving once again that people will always see what they want to see, and that you'd have to hit Miranda the Devine over the head with a baseball bat to drum some sense into her. But at least watching all that television and playing those computer games has done some good for the noble warriors of generation Y.
It is about the understated nobility of generation Y soldiers who shoulder the greatest burdens, who willingly risk their lives on foreign battlefields because they believe they are doing good.
Proving once again that people will always see what they want to see, and that you'd have to hit Miranda the Devine over the head with a baseball bat to drum some sense into her. But at least watching all that television and playing those computer games has done some good for the noble warriors of generation Y.
Because you see you can hate war but praise soldiers and make a film that isn't anti-war, but somehow is anti-war, and the Devine will watch her version of the movie in her head.
The Devine even quotes Bigelow thus:
Bigelow hates war. Before the Oscars she said: "I'm a child of the '60s, and I see war as hell, and a real tragedy, and completely dehumanising. You know, those are some of the great themes of our time, and we made a real effort to portray the brutality and the futility of this conflict."
The futility of war? And this conflict? Namely Iraq? And yet the Devine cheerfully rabbits on about what tremendous insights the show offers into war, and how well it treats the soldiers.
Well we all know never to trust the artist, always trust the tale. And if you don't like bits of the tale, you can always elide over them. (and thank you D. H. Lawrence for that insight into American literature).
Because you see Iraq has been a tremendous success, and the country is now so coherent and organised and stable, people have even rejected the libertarian refusal to wear seat belts:
One New York Times piece compares the way the streets of Baghdad appeared on Sunday to how they were in the first election five years ago. Today, there are traffic lights and solar panels on the lamp posts and Iraqis reach to put on their seatbelts as they approach police checkpoints, as law and order is slowly restored.
Um, they drive without their seat belts, and then when approaching a check point, while still driving, they reach out to put on their seatbelts?
Never mind, the election was a great success, if we don't mention a few bombs, a few assassinations, and a few murders. Just a standard election really.
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Arabian Rights | ||||
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And ain't it grand that ABC2 is now playing Jon Stewart and Colbert, and there's no need to watch the news or the direly dull carrot top. Suddenly I've been lured off line.
But I digress. What's really shocking is the news that the Devine reads the New York Times.
Oh no, say it ain't so. Stop it, my head is spinning, the centre will not hold. Nothing is but what is not, a war movie which is driven by a concept involving the futility of war is a successful film because it doesn't preach about the futility of war? It just shows you in a visceral, and as we liked to say at film school, impactful way ...
And when thou hast on foot the purblind hare,
Mark the poor wretch, to overshoot his troubles
How he outruns the wind and with what care
He cranks and crosses with a thousand doubles:
The many musets through the which he goes
Are like a labyrinth to amaze his foes.
Mark the poor wretch, to overshoot his troubles
How he outruns the wind and with what care
He cranks and crosses with a thousand doubles:
The many musets through the which he goes
Are like a labyrinth to amaze his foes.
Which is to say if you show respect and restraint and reticence, and avoid heavy-handed cinematic moralising, unlike that evil ex-hubbie Jim Cameron in his greenie extravaganza, you can get the Devine to enjoy a cup of extra strong latte and an anti-war movie.
Whatever you do, don't daub yourself with red paint and fall on the ground pretending to be dead, for that would just be baby boomer destructive Vietnam era foolishness.
Instead study the words of Susan Sontag, learn how to deconstruct, and soon you'll be selling anti-war pups to the Devine, and she'll be a happy contented buyer.
What a joy the world is.
(Below: now remember, it might be handy to wear seat belt in Iraqi traffic, when if you're going to die, die comfortable. So when taking out a bomb, always remember to take off your protective armour. It only slows you down.)
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