A couple minutes from my apartment I got a nice terrazzo bar overlooking the Tagus that I like to go to on the weekend to get a coffee and read a bit. Today isn’t a weekend but I did just finish the first semester so I went for a bit to relax and some guy came up to me and really excitedly starts speaking Ukranian to me. Now I’m obviously an American since I’m drinking a latte at midday so I didn’t know what made him think I could understand his language since Americans are monoglots primarily (although some I would consider without any proper language since they haven’t yet figured out their mother tongue—what would that be called, semglots? Nonlingual?) Anyway, I was confused because I at first thought he was speaking Portuguese to me in some weird accent and I didn’t understand any of it. So I asked him in Portuguese to repeat what he said and then he realized that I wasn’t his long lost Ukranian friend and that he had mistaken me for. So I guess I look a bit Eastern. I can add that to my list. I’ve already been told by several Germans here that I look like their grandfather or great uncle when they were young. A few have told me they will send me pictures to prove it. This is a little disconcerting for me because given the age of these people that would place me as a late-twenties/early-thirties male in Germany during the late 30s/early 40s--not exactly the look I’m trying to pull off.
Yesterday we had a big feast pot-luck during the last day of classes and so the day before I decided to make Guacamole since apparently no one in this continent has any clue about Mexican/Caribbean cuisine. So I decided I would go to the terrace with my computer and while Betty and I prepared our dishes we could watch the 2nd episode of the current Project Runway. Unfortunately I couldn’t hear shit because at the same time the 75 year-old owner of the house decided to do some couch repair (read: random over-zealous hammering) right next to us. So I watched it but was often confused as to what was happening because when he wasn’t hammering his old ball chain would be yelling at him about everything from leaving the stove on to his stupidity in clinging to the antiquated communist party line in Portugal. I wanted to say something like, “would you fucking shut up so I can watch this show” but since I’m a visitor I kept quiet. Afterward a group of us went to see the new Batman (O cavalheiro das travas) since it just arrived and somehow I had convinced a group of ten Europeans to see a Hollywood action/fantasy film with me. Whenever I have an idea to do anything I usually end up with a large group along since if you invite one person in the house you really need to invite everyone if you don’t want dirty looks and cold shoulders for the rest of the week. I don’t mind of course since I love travelling in small communities, but when I went to the movie my French buddy talked through the whole thing. I’m used to this because my sister likes to go to movies more for the purpose of catching up than actually watching whatever is displayed before us, much to the dismay of those around us. Gerald was more interested in commenting about the ridiculousness of every scene which made it even harder to understand the film due mostly to the fact that, although it was subtitled, I can’t help but read the words at the bottom of the screen even if it’s an English-language film. So the following commentary maybe a bit confused since I may not have captured some of the subtleties intended by the author.
I thought the film in itself was an interesting abstraction of the grey areas of morality and heroism and it’s opposite. The most brilliant introduction to the latter in any film ever was the self-conscious Joker stuttering uncomfortably in a room of mob heads. With the pencil trick he displays the spectrum of schizophrenia and composure, false nerves and controlled chaos. Throughout a lot of the movie I couldn’t help but sympathize with what he was saying. The heroes (or anti-heroes?), however, were all plagued with questions of control vs. liberty. O cavalheiro became big brother to find the Joker, his commissioner buddy decided to bury history to further the hopes of humanity, every cop dismissed prisoner rights in an instant, and Gotham clandestinely colluded to extradite an international outlaw without a second thought. So Morgan Freeman took the high road, Dent took the low road, and a mass of floating civilians and prisoners took the middle. What does that tell us except that, in this day in age, there is no correct path. All humanity is deluged with multi-faceted unanswerable dilemmas that leave us politically paralyzed and socially stagnant in the face of the pseudo-threats that face us today. There are none of the black and white heroes of old in this movie, because the present era has left us with a broken compass and a moral map that looks like the streets of Alfama. After the fall of 19th century humanism, and the subsequent political rift amongst fascism, communism, and capitalist democracy, we have discovered that we can’t trust anyone, and no one is going to save us from ourselves. So even our superheroes are confused as how to deal with a society in which corruption has affected all levels of the body politic and any leadership that is at all human will sooner or later fall into the same trap. So do we target the whole system or just the free radicals that are rotting the system like a virus? The joker seemed sort of like the latter with designs on the former. What does this movie mean politically to Europeans as opposed to Americans? This I would like to discuss.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t really talk this stuff over with most of my friends here because geopolitics seems to evoke exaggerated yawns amongst many Europeans. The European youth today must seem pretty disappointing when seen through the eyes of the older generations that lost limbs, lives, loves, and basically gave up everything for wars fought mostly over political ideology. Even when seen through their parent’s generation who were often indulgent, self-righteous Eurohippies, the kids today lack a cause for which to get high. These disenchanted digital boys of the 21st century represent the culmination of all the blood and toil, as well as death and destruction, of the generations before. And they don’t give a flying fuck about anything. That’s why I think the Batman movie has an interesting chronological movement as a metaphor for the 20th/21st century. The movie starts with heroes wrapping up the last vestiges of organized crime and tyrants, but then (when the joker is let out of the box), as soon as control is slipping from the fingers of the heroic they desperately grasp at methods that are morally questionable and their paranoia (combined with the quick-thinking, quick-acting trait of the superhero) ends up causing more problems than if they had done nothing at all. In the end, all of their efforts, all of their politicking and policing, big brother vigilance, lies, and preaching end in complete destruction of Gotham with no end in sight to the violence and no hero to save them, but rather some vague concept of “more than heroism” which seems to me to be somehow intimately tied with “more than villainous”. As Mick Jagger said, “cause saints and sinners are quite the same”. I think that the 20th century, if considered at all by the youth of today, is perceived this way which leads one to question why have any beliefs at all. And this is very evident in Europe today, a society in which almost everyone calls themselves Catholic but don’t really believe in anything more than some superficial idea of an indeterminable God, and in which the many socialist and communist parties that run the levels of government here aren’t that readily distinguishable from the rest of the more “central” political parties. Family as well has little impact on their daily lives, and so all the prior institutions Europe had held dear are of little import to kids today. So is this the answer then--we just all pop some prozac, turn up the ipod and let the joker be wild? I wonder what Heath Ledger was thinking the night he fell asleep for the last time. He may have had the answer.
Yesterday we had a big feast pot-luck during the last day of classes and so the day before I decided to make Guacamole since apparently no one in this continent has any clue about Mexican/Caribbean cuisine. So I decided I would go to the terrace with my computer and while Betty and I prepared our dishes we could watch the 2nd episode of the current Project Runway. Unfortunately I couldn’t hear shit because at the same time the 75 year-old owner of the house decided to do some couch repair (read: random over-zealous hammering) right next to us. So I watched it but was often confused as to what was happening because when he wasn’t hammering his old ball chain would be yelling at him about everything from leaving the stove on to his stupidity in clinging to the antiquated communist party line in Portugal. I wanted to say something like, “would you fucking shut up so I can watch this show” but since I’m a visitor I kept quiet. Afterward a group of us went to see the new Batman (O cavalheiro das travas) since it just arrived and somehow I had convinced a group of ten Europeans to see a Hollywood action/fantasy film with me. Whenever I have an idea to do anything I usually end up with a large group along since if you invite one person in the house you really need to invite everyone if you don’t want dirty looks and cold shoulders for the rest of the week. I don’t mind of course since I love travelling in small communities, but when I went to the movie my French buddy talked through the whole thing. I’m used to this because my sister likes to go to movies more for the purpose of catching up than actually watching whatever is displayed before us, much to the dismay of those around us. Gerald was more interested in commenting about the ridiculousness of every scene which made it even harder to understand the film due mostly to the fact that, although it was subtitled, I can’t help but read the words at the bottom of the screen even if it’s an English-language film. So the following commentary maybe a bit confused since I may not have captured some of the subtleties intended by the author.
I thought the film in itself was an interesting abstraction of the grey areas of morality and heroism and it’s opposite. The most brilliant introduction to the latter in any film ever was the self-conscious Joker stuttering uncomfortably in a room of mob heads. With the pencil trick he displays the spectrum of schizophrenia and composure, false nerves and controlled chaos. Throughout a lot of the movie I couldn’t help but sympathize with what he was saying. The heroes (or anti-heroes?), however, were all plagued with questions of control vs. liberty. O cavalheiro became big brother to find the Joker, his commissioner buddy decided to bury history to further the hopes of humanity, every cop dismissed prisoner rights in an instant, and Gotham clandestinely colluded to extradite an international outlaw without a second thought. So Morgan Freeman took the high road, Dent took the low road, and a mass of floating civilians and prisoners took the middle. What does that tell us except that, in this day in age, there is no correct path. All humanity is deluged with multi-faceted unanswerable dilemmas that leave us politically paralyzed and socially stagnant in the face of the pseudo-threats that face us today. There are none of the black and white heroes of old in this movie, because the present era has left us with a broken compass and a moral map that looks like the streets of Alfama. After the fall of 19th century humanism, and the subsequent political rift amongst fascism, communism, and capitalist democracy, we have discovered that we can’t trust anyone, and no one is going to save us from ourselves. So even our superheroes are confused as how to deal with a society in which corruption has affected all levels of the body politic and any leadership that is at all human will sooner or later fall into the same trap. So do we target the whole system or just the free radicals that are rotting the system like a virus? The joker seemed sort of like the latter with designs on the former. What does this movie mean politically to Europeans as opposed to Americans? This I would like to discuss.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t really talk this stuff over with most of my friends here because geopolitics seems to evoke exaggerated yawns amongst many Europeans. The European youth today must seem pretty disappointing when seen through the eyes of the older generations that lost limbs, lives, loves, and basically gave up everything for wars fought mostly over political ideology. Even when seen through their parent’s generation who were often indulgent, self-righteous Eurohippies, the kids today lack a cause for which to get high. These disenchanted digital boys of the 21st century represent the culmination of all the blood and toil, as well as death and destruction, of the generations before. And they don’t give a flying fuck about anything. That’s why I think the Batman movie has an interesting chronological movement as a metaphor for the 20th/21st century. The movie starts with heroes wrapping up the last vestiges of organized crime and tyrants, but then (when the joker is let out of the box), as soon as control is slipping from the fingers of the heroic they desperately grasp at methods that are morally questionable and their paranoia (combined with the quick-thinking, quick-acting trait of the superhero) ends up causing more problems than if they had done nothing at all. In the end, all of their efforts, all of their politicking and policing, big brother vigilance, lies, and preaching end in complete destruction of Gotham with no end in sight to the violence and no hero to save them, but rather some vague concept of “more than heroism” which seems to me to be somehow intimately tied with “more than villainous”. As Mick Jagger said, “cause saints and sinners are quite the same”. I think that the 20th century, if considered at all by the youth of today, is perceived this way which leads one to question why have any beliefs at all. And this is very evident in Europe today, a society in which almost everyone calls themselves Catholic but don’t really believe in anything more than some superficial idea of an indeterminable God, and in which the many socialist and communist parties that run the levels of government here aren’t that readily distinguishable from the rest of the more “central” political parties. Family as well has little impact on their daily lives, and so all the prior institutions Europe had held dear are of little import to kids today. So is this the answer then--we just all pop some prozac, turn up the ipod and let the joker be wild? I wonder what Heath Ledger was thinking the night he fell asleep for the last time. He may have had the answer.
6 comments:
Of course I have to comment on the most superficial aspect of your blog, but I love this: "given the age of these people that would place me as a late-twenties/early-thirties male in Germany during the late 30s/early 40s--not exactly the look I’m trying to pull off."
I think it's the pale blue eyes, their sad slant, strong jawline, close-cropped hair, and your clothes are usually a bit tattered and you gravitate toward Depression-era accents (rolled cuffs on your pants, suspenders, moth-eaten wool sweaters). We are in a new Great Depression, so why not embrace it?
-jahna
yeah dust bowl tramp I dig, not nazi sheik.
From: rbrockley@neb.rr.com
Subject: Re: mgmt
Date: July 29, 2008 1:00:02 AM CDT
To: lacasa@bitstream.net
heath we like the continuous lip licking. have fun with it.
http://wsj.com/article/SB121694247343482821.html?mod=fpa_editors_picks
Interesting also to me was the Joker's complete, at least ostensible, lack of motive. Sure, it can be attributed to society or upbringing, but so could Charles Manson's, right? Sometimes, however, isn't it just complete and utter pointlessness in a sea of pointlessness? Just malice in an already malicious scene? He doesn't want money. He doesn't really need power. He just wants to show you the absurdity of what is already absurd.
I am not yet so drunk that my passwords are forgotten but this thing wants to shut me out.
I feel like leaving a large Jokerish deathwing of flame on their servers but sadly I lack the skills.
Miss you Mikal but if writing like this is the result we should kick you out of the country more often...
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