Zero Dark Thirty: Operation National Catharsis Is in the Motherfucking House

To start off with an appropriately Nixonian passive, a lot has been said about Zero Dark Thirty. Mostly it has to do with whether or not the movie condones torture; there's a welter of opinions on either side of that issue, and I don't want to touch it. Both sides, with the exception of articles by Slavoj Zizek and Kathryn Bigelow, have been sloppy in their reasoning and dishonest in their motivations. What interests me is the broader issue of "normalization": the common axiom is that the question of whether or not it normalizes torture is only pertinent because the movie is brilliant.

And it is: Zero Dark Thirty is an astonishing, terrifying movie, head and shoulders above most of the movies up for Best Picture this year (i.e. the movies that weren't Amour). It's a wildly ambitious film with an icy narrative focus, meticulously shot and designed, emotionally devastating and resonant on a level that few movies even try to approach anymore; at the very least it beats the hell out of Argo's one-liners and cheap tricks. In fact, if Get Your War On didn't exist it might even be the defining statement about the War on Terror.

Movies that attempt to peer into the oily depths of the American psyche have been pretty rare since 9/11, and Zero Dark Thirty occasionally seems to be trying to make up for every inch of lost ground. For hours it feels like the movie's whole mission is to reveal—from the barbed wire and sandbags of the black sites to the intelligence-community jargon of its heroes to, of course, the explicit depiction of waterboarding, the movie dedicates itself to showing us how things really were during the War on Terror. And not only through set pieces like the torture scenes; shots upon shots are crammed with Bush-era kitsch like AIM and old-model Toyotas. The movie frantically tosses things into discourse, knowing that over the course of the ridiculously retro decade it chronicles we got perilously close to complete aesthetic detachment from our own time. Fredric Jameson would probably sniff at the idea that a single movie could restore our culture's sense of its own continuing history, but futile or not, that's exactly what Zero Dark Thirty attempts: a total aesthetic excavation of the last decade, leading effectively right up to yesterday.

The movie focuses so much on this mandate that it narratively obliterates Osama Bin Laden, who is a total cipher throughout the movie. Zero Dark Thirty isn't a story about a hunt, isn't even really a procedural. We never see Jessica Chastain staring murderously at picture of her nemesis, and in fact we never get the sense that Bin Laden is doing very much at all, apart from hiding. The bombings and shootings that dot the film are never really attributed to Bin Laden, or even necessarily to Al Qaeda; in many cases they seem as random as gang violence, just workplace hazards whose narrative function is built on our understanding of Central Asia as a place where bad things happen. The bureaucracy embodied by Chastain's Maya operates in a dangerous environment; there's nothing more than weak implication to blame that danger on Bin Laden. There's no villain, just an environment. The hunt for Bin Laden is just a lens through which we watch that environment develop; more in the tradition of The Godfather than The Battle of Algiers, Zero Dark Thirty is an epic about America.

I'd like to dwell on that word, epic, as the basis for the rest of my analysis, because Zero Dark Thirty, for all its journalistic trappings, is well and truly a myth-making film. In fact, I'd argue that the hyper-journalistic style it affects is a critical tool in its myth-making.

Watching Zero Dark Thirty, as I've said, we're struck with the sense of a massive, disembodied process taking place: the American organization is so big and has tendrils in so many places that it's impossible to reveal all of it from the worm's-eye perspective the movie adopts, and the most it can do is point us, through Maya, at the greatest number of salient details in every scene. We never get an inkling of perspective on the causes or even many of the consequences of the American war machine; word just comes down from on high that torture is out, and so torture is out.

The point, though, is that the disembodied processes that govern life in Zero Dark Thirty start to feel a lot like magic. Their causes are obscure and their effects are unquestionable. American empire moves in mysterious ways. This is what really poisons Zero Dark Thirty: its realism is just a stylistic affectation, skin-deep, like its investigation of changes in American society.

This rule is best demonstrated by its exception, when Maya gets on a helicopter out of Central Asia. In maybe the only overtly "literary" moment in the movie, the pilot asks her where she wants to go next, and she stares at him, baffled, before bursting into agonized tears. This is a mawkish way of getting at the central message of the movie—that there's nowhere to go after we've killed Bin Laden—but it's redeemed by Jessica Chastain's heartbreaking performance. For just a few moments, the movie has the ability to see the forest for the trees, and Maya seems like a national avatar, broken enough by the War on Terror to stand in for all of us. It's raw catharsis, and it's all the more shocking because the only comparable end to a movie we've had for years is in The Social Network, which hinges on our jealousy and contempt for Mark Zuckerberg. Zero Dark Thirty's almost feels redemptive. But even this ending is ultimately hollow, because Maya's ascension to national avatar status comes too late; the whole movie has focused on her as a single actor in a complex system, a rigorously independent character who signifies nothing, and now suddenly she becomes a metaphor. Maybe it feels like a tragedy, but a personal tragedy, not a national one.

And that's the problem with Zero Dark Thirty: it focuses relentlessly on the personal at the expense of the national. The passive-voice ills that befall its antiheroes damage their sensitivities, but like Zizek identified in his review, the movie never gestures towards any damage to a whole ethical system, and certainly never looks for agents to attach to that passive voice. Maya's life is convincingly ruined by her pursuit of Bin Laden and the changing world around her, but the movie never imputes anything more far-reaching than that. The hunt for Bin Laden only hurts Maya, and the movie only lets Maya become a pharmakos at the very end, once the danger of disrupting its gearheaded visual style has passed.

I think this is what the movie's critics must be driving at when they accuse it of "normalization"—the movie's fetish for reporting detail necessarily means taking that detail at face value, seeing it as the inevitable product of social changes beyond our ken. It accepts ethical degradation dutifully, and restricts itself to examining the implications of that degradation insofar as they fit into the lives of its characters.

This is exactly how cultural hegemony works: it makes top-down change seem mythical, necessary and universal, reserving compassion and anger for the smallest and most ineffectual scales. Zero Dark Thirty implies that injustice is systemic and not simply interpersonal, but it's only an implication, and the only responses it can imagine to that systemic injustice are despair or, worse, obedience.

I've taken it for granted that this movie is attempting to make a political statement about the decay of the United States, because despite protests in support of its "apolitical" nature, Bigelow's avowed pacifism and the personal tragedy of the ending convince me that the movie is, if not a social critique, at least social. In this, I think it betrays one of the most disturbing trends in liberal thinking today: even in political movies like Zero Dark Thirty, "systemic injustice" is treated as a basically unknowable force, a fog that hangs in the air or, in the case of Zero Dark Thirty, creaks in social machinery that we can't understand. It's de-historicized, de-materialized, turned into magic. This is the failure, both aesthetic and political, of Zero Dark Thirty. For all its reportage, it's really oriented towards mystification, and for all the noise it makes, it's as critical of the bureaucracy as a sheaf of paper in one of Maya's binders.

Modernism and Pop Music: The Wrap-Up

This is my fourth and final post on modernism and pop music. Check out the other posts in the series here, here, and here.

Pop music is a probabilistic phenomenon.  For many media corporations, selling music comes down to a careful management of resources: gather up the most promising "talent", maximize their marketing, and then hammer the target audience.  But there's a final element that needs to be considered before these corporations restart the process: see what sticks.

Marketing dollars fail, scandals arise, and tastes change.  Corporations are forced to take a diversified approach because even with advanced metrics you can't always control taste.  So while what makes it to us from our friends at Universal and Sony has been selected and filtered, it still retains a modicum of differentiation.

The three acts that I've discussed in this series have each had different experiences with major labels.  The Weeknd is currently on the way up with a Universal contract.  Death Grips were thrown out of their deal with Sony for conduct not befitting of employees.  DEP has remained ardently independent.  All three remain nebulous figures to the people making decisions because while they are producing something that doesn't appeal to large swathes of a popular audience, each also has a direct relationship to an ardent fanbase. This fanbase has been established largely because of the internet.  This fanbase doesn't care what label they're on or how the music is being made.  This fanbase only cares how they can get their hands on it.

This situation of pop music is emblematic of the crisis of the newest breed of modernism that pervades our lives.  As anyone on the street can tell you, the first world is replete with choices, especially when it comes to media.  And this is especially true of music.  As recording technology becomes continuously cheaper and more mobile, the barrier for entry into the aural marketplace becomes nearly negligible.  Your "distributor" is Bandcamp and your "marketing" is Twitter.  The music industry has been forced into a conservative position; in order to hold on to the market, Viacom and friends have to resist or channel this decentralization.  Holding "competitions" and insisting that their artists have made it to the big leagues are familiar tactics from this playbook.  This strategy works, for the most part.  Ms. Minaj and Mr. Bieber have safe careers.  The industry may be dwindling, but it isn't going away.  Nobody is holding their breath for musical anarchy.

But the issue that I am highlighting here isn't really about the success of the music industry in this conflict.  It's about what this conflict represents.  Distributive technologies, the latest being 3D printers, lead to decentralization, for better or for worse. And industries that depend on the control of ideas are forced to adapt.

One way of thinking about epochs is as ways of defining limits.  Each era has a set of limitations that present it with a set of questions that it can answer. One aspect of Modernism is that it is an experimental epoch; instead of setting a limitation that allows us to ask a question, Modernism makes its limitation into a question. Just how much decentralization can we stand before we hit the hard limit of nonsense?

It's easy to dismiss this as blandly theoretical, but consider the full context.  Each of the artists that I've written about here are themselves decentralized.  The Weeknd tries to express the Jungian shadow of modern R&B.  Death Grips gets their energy from the nihilist void at the center of mainstream hip-hop.  DEP pushes the virtuosity of metal and then find themselves in jazz.  They all reproduce the larger movement of the industry within their own expressions.  And the industry has to confront the question of decentralization every day.

And so the industry at times acts uncomfortable because it recognizes that as an aggregate entity it's having to stretch into something it doesn't recognize.  It's having to embrace things that it can't deal with in order to keep up. When Death Grips gets corporate money in order to waste it in self-sabotage, they have found a real limit, for better or worse. After all, one of the problems of modern markets (and modern institutions) in today's context is that they have problems protecting themselves from things (and people) that are willing to destroy themselves.

We're fated to live in interesting times, and the music industry is an expression of that.  If you keep your eye on them, you'll probably have a pretty good idea of where the rest of us are going, and how we're going to get there.

Not Even Safe in Our Dreams: Thoughts on Slavoj Zizek

I just finished Slavoj Zizek’s slim 2012 book “The Year of Dreaming Dangerously”. Zizek, a Slovenian philosopher, is reviled by many other “professional philosophers” because of the obscurity of his writing and beloved by many undergraduates because of his funny accent. I guess I’m becoming the sort of person who thinks that Mr. Zizek is actually a very profound and (circuitously) lucid thinker, and I look forward to reading his larger works. I was first introduced to him by way of his appearance in Astra Taylor’s documentary “Examined Life”. When I first watched it I thought he was a babbling fool compared to the other thinkers interviewed; I thought this because he was the basically the only person in the documentary who didn’t just repeat liberal platitudes. He was saying something really new, so I reflexively dismissed him. Luckily, I’ve since managed to begin removing my mainstream-liberal-goggles, so now I can read Zizek and blog about it! Here we go, kids.

Zizek suavely evading flaming wreckage

In “The Year of Dreaming Dangerously”, Zizek attempts to analyze some of the most politically aware events of the 21^st century, including HBO’s “The Wire” and the Occupy Wall St. movement. Both of these are reactions to (as my fellow blogger Boros put it) the brutality of the modern situation: the Occupy movement being a group of activists who recognize the inadequacy of democratic institutions, and The Wire being a harrowing portrayal of the perverse relationship between law enforcement and poor black people.  Since both The Wire and Occupy Wall St. are vital cultural phenomena, Zizek’s discussion of them manages to frame his critique of ideology in such a way that it becomes accessible to a layperson like me.

Zizek quotes David Simon, the creator of “The Wire”, as saying that “we pretend to engage in a war on narcotics, but in truth, we are simply brutalizing and dehumanizing an urban underclass that we no longer need as labor supply”. Given this harsh formulation, what are we to make of Simon’s humane and even positive portrayal of police officers (McNulty, Bunk, Lester Freamon etc.)? Somewhat paradoxically, since Simon has few illusions about the function of law enforcement in post-industrial urban areas, he is better able to render the goodness of the cops who are attempting to effect change within a pernicious institution. Zizek calls the acts of the “good cops” on The Wire utopian, but in an unconventional sense. Typically, a utopian action would seek to reform an institution or perfect a system; i.e. a utopic action is performed with the assumption that the “system” one is working within is perfectible. Plato’s Republic would be a classic example of this: it was an idealized version of the framework Plato was working under as an Athenian, and Plato advocated that people act with this ideal in mind. The world Simon presents in The Wire is one drowning in the arbitrary effects of corporate capitalism and neoliberal economic policies; he makes it clear that capitalism as a system, rather than people’s moral decrepitude, is at fault. The Wire has been frequently compared to Greek tragedy, but Zizek thinks that they differ in one important respect: Greek tragedy presents fatally flawed characters, The Wire presents characters living and working within a fatally flawed system. Of course, a term like “the system” is so vague that it barely means anything on its own; how does The Wire portray this flawed “system”? Zizek writes,

Here we encounter the formal limitation of The Wire: it has not solved the formal task of howto render, in a TV narrative, a universe in which abstraction reigns. The Wire’s limit is the limit of psychological realism…          

The Wire’s panoramic final scene shows a series of long shots of various locations around Baltimore. This reposeful cinematic gesture allows the viewer to process the fact that new generations of drug dealers, cops and corrupt politicians will come to replace the ones we loved or loved to hate. I will elaborate more on this in the next section, but in Zizek’s mind, one of the functions of ideology is to set up chains of equivalences- such as “people are poor because they use drugs”- when in reality, the urban  poor of Baltimore are poor because the economy has rendered them useless and they are offered little to no opportunities to transcend their situation. Their neighborhoods are flooded with drugs and terrorized both by the gangs who sell the drugs and by the police. The “System” can be apprehended through an understanding of the absurdity of the situations it creates, not as an immutable or transcendental entity in and of itself. With that in mind, I’ll now discuss the Occupy movement and Zizek’s view of the status of activism in general in the 2010’s.

           
I remember when the Occupy Wall Street movement first began. The summer after my freshman year of college I began getting the email blasts from Adbusters Magazine spreading the word about a planned occupation of Zuccotti Park, and once it was underway I avidly read every article I could find about it and watched videos of various people speaking at it (including Slavoj Zizek). I tried to soak up as much as the internet would allow. What made the Occupy Wall St. movement special? And why were most of the appraisals of it by the mainstream press so vacuous? Zizek uses his psychoanalytic training, and his readings of Lacan and Hegel, to attempt to answer those questions.

           
Zizek uses a quote from the journalist Anne Applebaum, who writes for the Washington Post, to exemplify the mainstream (ideologically-sanctioned) reaction to Occupy. She first claims that Occupy protestors (who, by the time she wrote this article, were all over the globe) are correct in their view that democratic institutions are not capable of dealing with the problems created by globalization; several paragraphs after that she chastises protestors for not using those institutions to reach their ends, and even goes on to state that Occupy and related protests will have the negative side effect of hastening the decline of existing democratic institutions. This argument is obviously fallacious, and as such nothing intelligible can be derived from it. Its unintelligibility sheds light on how ideology functions; Applebaum manages to appear reasonable by both expressing tentative praise and haughty ambivalence towards protest movements. She politely acknowledges the unsustainability of the “system” while simultaneously declaring recognition of the “system’s” unsustainability unrealistic.

           
If you’ve taken a course in logic, you know that once a contradiction has been established, anything can be asserted. Well, the liberal apologist view that I (via Zizek) debunked above results in a smug contradiction which opens a space for new ways of thinking about and understanding our situation. I offer the following formulation as a Zizekian philosophical maxim: “The more obvious a teleological explanation of an event is, the more crucial the speculative surrender of the self to the absolute becomes”.  What the fuck does this mean? Zizek here deploys French philosopher Jean-Pierre Dupuy’s term “zero-point”; i.e. the economic and environmental collapse that capitalism is tending towards. In the face of coming ecological and economic crises, a politically pessimistic outlook seems justified. Pessimism of this kind is ultimately teleological because it equates the collapse of the” system” with nothingness, with the apocalypse. Zizek has many times criticized liberals for being better able to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism; but isn’t this indeed how ideology functions? Pessimism about the future of capitalism is certainly called for, and the brutal truth that our lifetime is going to be spent during the slow, violent death of capitalism is a truly shitty fact to contend with. The brutality of this fact and the pessimistic outlook it inspires aren’t grounds for a fatalistic anti-capitalistic viewpoint, though. Each crisis ostensibly brought about by “capitalism” simultaneously erodes capitalism as a functioning system. This is where the “speculative surrender of the self to the absolute” comes in. Zizek writes, “The only way to sustain the Real when it gets too close-that is, the only way to avoid psychosis- is to fictionalize it”. Attempts to reform a failing, inherently dehumanizing system are literally absurd; the only way to engage with the Real of systemic collapse is by speculating about how limited and small you are; about how unintelligible the forces working on you are. This is what Occupy attempted to do: engage with reality in a world that demands disengagement and abject ignorance at any cost.

My first post dealt with novelist Don DeLillo. His book Cosmopolis centers around billionaire hedge-fund manager Eric Packer’s aimless limousine ride around New York City. At one point, Packer gets caught in the middle of a riot thrown by anarchists and communists. He dismisses the whole event as a “market factor”, and indeed, once the riot subsides, business-as-usual resumes. During the riot, however, a man sets himself on fire Tibetan monk style. Packer can’t account for the jarringness of this event. It functions as sign, or perhaps a symbol, of both the untenability of the present and the necessity of the future. It makes sense that the final chapter of Zizek’s book is called “Signs from the Future”. In this chapter, Zizek quotes Blaise Pascal: “There is enough light for those who only desire to see, and enough obscurity for those who have a contrary disposition”.  Strangely, if one hopes to cultivate a rational disposition with regards to political thinking, a theological perspective is useful. John Locke says that if the government won’t heed your pleas, your best bet is to appeal to heaven. As democratic institutions become more and more useless, it would benefit us, Zizek thinks, not to adopt a dark fatalism, but rather to look to the heavens and recognize our own contingency.

Destroying Angels: The Mountain Goats' Uneasy Stylistic Purity

When the new Mountain Goats album, Transcendental Youth, came out last fall, I wasn't in the country to buy a copy anyway, which is good, because if I did I would have had to face how conflicted I'd gotten about John Darnielle's folk-rock-for-jaded-nerds.

I'd sworn by the Goats for a long time, practically ever since I first heard "No Children" through the tinny speakers of an old girlfriend's Civic. The John Darnielle-model concept album spoke to me in ways that old-style concept albums hadn't—The Dark Side of the Moon and Tommy had never done anything for me, but I loved The Sunset Tree and All Hail West Texas with all my heart. I loved the big, flexible, voluble first-person voice that John Darnielle had found, and I loved swimming in his murky, decentered narratives of abuse, drug addiction and marital disintegration. John Darnielle, for me, expressed something pure and profound about human life in America; naturally I was pretty excited about Transcendental Youth when it was announced.

But just before it came out, I read a review of the first single, "Cry for Judas", on Pitchfork, and in the way a little pinprick can deflate any big balloon, I started to get queasy about the Goats. On Cry for Judas, a big, heartfelt song full of horns and anthemic choruses, Pitchfork, in its snide, sneering, vaguely Christgavian idiom, wrote something like, "If you're the kind of person who gets emotional about Mountain Goats songs, you'll probably get emotional about this song."

Like any kind of snide, sneering criticism, Pitchfork writing often intends to make its readers feel bad for having strong emotions. A lot of the accusations of hipsterdom that get hurled at the site are rooted in this operation—Pitchfork, even more than most criticism, tends to push both love and hate toward a highly qualified indifference. It's not any cooler to look down your nose at Springsteen than it is to deify TV on the Radio. But the painful truth of that kind of criticism is that it never works unless you already know, somewhere in your soul, that you really are deluding yourself, that you really do feel stronger about the  than you should. Otherwise it would bounce off. 

The truth is, there is a kind of person who gets emotional about Mountain Goats songs; it's the kind of self-conscious, depression-prone nerd who's too emotional for sneering, one-note indie but too smart for pop anthems. There's a constant tension between the need to feel deeply, in the Elliott Smith vein, and a deep suspicion of that very feeling because, after all, the last stop on the earnestness train is Doctor Who. The Mountain Goats succeed with this kind of person because their albums are crafted to feel rich, eclectic, incorporating irony and colloquialism as much as confessions. The tone of the albums, roughly, dresses up their content; the humor vindicates the pain.

So, reading that article, I realized that the irrational, fanlike love that I'd felt for John Darnielle's band was, indeed, irrational. Once you peel back the sardonic, writerly tone of the Mountain Goats, you're left with a band seemingly as indulgent as The Smiths. Overnight, whole swathes of the band's catalogue became unlistenable—most of All Hail West Texas, big chunks of The Sunset Tree, and every rock number on We Shall All Be Healed became artless, overstated and clunky. Where before I had loved the agonized payoff of "Up the Wolves" and the howled final line of "Broom People," suddenly they disgusted me the way that only bad poetry can disgust a person.

The other side of this, of course, is that the snide, sneering critic that Pitchfork's style evidently aims to ape waxes quite poetic about the Goats. Flipping through his Consumer Guide on a whim, I was shocked to find that Robert Christgau, dean of super-concentrated rock-critic jive talk, who had damned Kid A with barely articulated praise ("Alienated masterpiece nothing—it's dinner music. More claret?") and wearily waved Gimme Fiction aside ("I wish this was still a world where the right guitar noise and a heaping helping of hooks were sustenance enough") had actually been a perceptive and even rapt defender of Darnielle's band all along. Not all his reviews are positive, but of The Life of the World to Come, Christgau writes, "this is literary rock as it should be," and on Heretic Pride he goes as far as to compare Darnielle to Dylan.

And the strange thing about Christgau's criticism is that he hymns the very things that Pitchfork denigrates—Darnielle's brutal, cathartic emotion, his focused projection of his own pain onto the outside world. Christgau's approach to rock criticism is very much centered on songwriting; anybody who's spent quality time with the Consumer Guide knows how much he esteems "real songs"—that is, songs that are well-crafted and well-proportioned, but also free of bathos and affectation. Christgau is no formalist; he's every bit as keyed into the broader world of hype and fandom as Pitchfork. So Christgau's appraisal of Darnielle as a great songwriter concerns much more than Darnielle's formal talent; it's an apology for Darnielle's entire persona and, in turn, an apology for getting emotional over Mountain Goats songs.

So, I thought, if the Mountain Goats have been poisonous for me ever since I started thinking about them clearly, it can't just be because they're earnest at the core, because that's the point. The bad songs come not when they're earnest, but when they're honest, when they're pat. Being pat equals bending to received wisdom, after all, being artless, and nothing is more artless than an honest confession. So, I reasoned, if this were the case then the best Mountain Goats material would also be the most artificial, the most fictionalized. And sure enough, the best Mountain Goats material, by all accounts, is on Tallahassee.

So, back to No Children. No Children is the Platonic Mountain Goats song—at first blush it almost sounds like Simon and Garfunkel, from the spartan arrangement to the close harmonies in the chorus to the military regularity of the verse-chorus pattern, but once you drill deeper into the song it morphs before your eyes into something very different. Darnielle's lyrics are rigidly ordered, wrapped tightly around a dactylic meter and a series of metaphors, each set up and then completed economically. In No Children, the relationship is a teetering fence for two lines, then a missed exit for two, then a junkyard for four; a shaving injury for two, then a dark night for four; then, finally, asphyxiation for six, with a few tangential lines inserted here and there to let the listener breathe. Darnielle's songwriting on Tallahassee is all like this, if not always as relentlessly metric—tight, ferocious lines that imbue the Florida landscape and everything it contains with the character of the collapsing marriage. In "Old College Try," the protagonist says that the light in his lover's eyes is "like a trash can fire in a prison cell / like the searchlights in the parking lots of Hell"; in "First Few Desperate Hours," the Alpha Couple's spirits "drop like flies" and "lean like towers / on a hillside." 

This stream of metaphors is what gives Tallahassee its resonance. We know next to nothing about the couple in question, beyond the fact that they live in a decaying house and drink like sailors; the power of the album comes from the way, on songs like "Game Shows Touch Our Lives," that Darnielle's first-person narration leaps from reportage ("dug up a fifth of Hood River gin") to aphorisms ("They say friends don't destroy one another / what do they know about friends") to the pathetic fallacy ("thunder clouds forming, cream white moon / everything's gonna be okay soon"), culminating in verses that juxtapose these elements:

Carried you up the stairs that night

All of this could be yours if the price is right.

I heard cars headed down to oblivion

Up on the expressway.

Songs like this give us a view of the couple's isolated, hopeless optimism, and the way the outside world reflects it—the suffocating Florida summer and the ecosystem of Greyhound buses, overripe plums, gravel roads and junkyards. It's a romanticism worthy of Friedrich or Byron, and it has the same bipolar structure. 

In the manic songs, like "Game Shows Touch Our Lives" we get a sense that the couple's optimism masks an obvious fear that neither of them is allowed to express; more impressively, in the depressive songs like "No Children", the protagonist's bitter sarcasm masks an undimmed belief in transcendence, which is all the more heartbreaking as we appreciate the hopelessness of his situation. That hope for transcendence, usually via annihilation, is the center of the album, and it's best articulated through one verse in "No Children":

I hope the junkyard a few blocks from here 

Someday burns down

And I hope the rising black smoke carries me far away

And I never come back to this town again in my life.

The image of purgative fire is ubiquitous on the second half of the album, from "Have to Explode" to "International Small Arms Traffic Blues" to "Oceanographer's Choice" ("we're throwing off sparks"), and, oddly enough, it's beautifully articulated on "Alpha Rats' Nest," a mere bonus track, which includes the line "sing for the flames that will rip through here / and the smoke that will carry us away." The sentiment here could be a manifesto for the Mountain Goats' whole project—flying away to a better, higher world on the smoke of your own failures. And, notably, it recurs on the cover and on the final track of Transcendental Youth.

The cover of Transcendental Youth shows three ragged figures rising among the faces of demons in the night sky, trailing plumes of smoke. With the album's peripheral materials in mind (evidently it's loosely organized around a group of kids living in Washington), we can surmise that these are the eponymous Youth, and that the album is making explicit the themes that were implicit in Tallahassee—the possibility to rise above your problems simply by wallowing in them.

And the album bears that out. From song to song—from the opener "Amy AKA Spent Gladiator 1," which kicks off with "Do every stupid thing that makes you feel alive," to the Frankie Lymon elegy "Harlem Roulette," which declares that "even awful dreams are good dreams / if you're doing it right" to the eponymous closer, which restates the rising-smoke image two separate times, modified slightly with "soar ever upwards on air gone black with flies" and then played straight with "sing high while the fire climbs"—the album gradually builds up the sense that Darnielle has just decided to dispense with all of the dancing around he did on earlier albums—the trappings of autobiography in The Sunset Tree, the psalms on The Shape of the World to Come—and cut straight to the heart.

Many of the songs, in fact, feel like crystallizations of the rapid-fire metaphor technique I identified above, particularly "Spent Gladiator 2," whose verses consist of nothing but a series of similes that gradually grow in frequency. There are innumerable lines, like the one from "Alpha Rats' Nest," that could be manifestos for the band. But the essentialization of the lyrics—the loss of real fictional storylines, irony, and the gradual buildup of nature symbolism that gives Tallahassee its power—impoverishes Transcendental Youth even as it focuses it. Concentrating his songs to focus on their healing mission, Darnielle has also sterilized them.

The fact is that the tight, concentrated aphorisms and sustained, cathartic mood on Transcendental Youth, powerful as they might be, don't have the richness of Tallahassee. Meandering and discursive, Tallahassee creates a much deeper space in which to act out the ritual at the heart of the album. And that depth in many ways comes from its very distance, its very artifice.

I'd like to stress that I don't mean this to sound vulgar. It's easy to say that fiction has resonance because of the "magic of the story" or some similar claptrap, but that is manifestly bullshit; what fiction does, at least for Tallahassee, is open the piece up to different tones, different rhetorical maneuvers, and therein lies its depth. When we hymn "focus" or "purity" in art, I think it often bespeaks a deep discomfort with complexity, with internal contradictions. It might be well-intentioned, and in many cases it's brilliant, but as a facet of artistic development it tends toward the reductive. 

That, I think, is the real flaw in Transcendental Youth. Some of the individual songs are staggeringly beautiful, the instrumentation has never sounded better, and the horn charts are integrated perfectly. It's a superb album, to be clear. But if John Darnielle wants to top Tallahassee, he's going to have to disavow Transcendental Youth's laser focus. "Liminal comprehensibility," as Christgau puts it, might not be such a great thing after all.

Melt Sounds: Miss Machine and Impersonal Construction (Modernism and Pop Music 3)

DESTROYER, THERE'LL BE ANOTHER JUST LIKE YOU

- The Dillinger Escape Plan, "Sunshine the Werewolf"

This is my third post on modernism and pop music. Check out the first two posts in the series here and here.

I stumbled upon The Dillinger Escape Plan when I was getting into metal in middle school and Between the Buried and Me's The Silent World was the heaviest record that I had ever heard.  Miss Machine had just come out and I was immediately interested when I saw reviews touting it as the brutal end of the genre.  I bought the record and immediately fell in love with it, but I was never impressed by it musically.  I was struck by it as a statement. Fair warning: if you had a hard time listening to Death Grips, it doesn't get any easier here.



In the original post that inspired me to write this series, I described Dillinger Escape Plan as an exploratory band. But it's not easy being truly experimental in metal.  They have choppy waters to navigate. The metal world, despite its increasing diversification, has often been slave to various images of inane masculinity.  From the moronic "virility" of the eighties to the tortured "pathos" of the aughts, the melodrama of metal through the ages is not hard to document.  Metal has also been a platform for every conceivable political perspective.  The genre is full of skinny metalcore guys that read Noam Chomsky's political writings alongside Game of Thrones, bizarro-country reactionaries, and unrepentant European neo-fascists. But DEP manages to deftly avoid these genre cliches and move toward something different.  Alongside their mathcore contemporaries The Locust and Daughters, DEP embrace the raw complexity of metal while eschewing the Power Rangers guitar heroics of acts like Dragonforce.  They embrace the intensity of metal while moving beyond the adolescent sentiments of their grindcore forebears.  In this respect, Miss Machine-era DEP fits cleanly into the constellation of other acts that we've covered in this series; like The Weeknd and Death Grips, they distill undertones of a genre into a well-formed and groundbreaking modern statement.

While DEP may indulge in some genre conventions, their particular brand of jazz-metal reveals the technically monstrous undergirding of the genre when the tradition and the histrionics are melted away. Like both The Weeknd and Death Grips, Dillinger Escape Plan modulates and contorts the human voice until it becomes profoundly impersonal.  I'm reminded here of their fellow mathletes Converge, whose lyrics would fit perfectly into a particularly erudite and fatalistic high school student's poetry diary, but whose vocal approach mutilates the human voice beyond recognition. Skipping away from this sort of underlying attempt at poetics and the genocidal pretensions of bands like Dimmu Borgir, DEP's lyrics display a distinctively cryptic cynicism.  Take, for example, the first lyrics of the opening track of Miss Machine, "Panasonic Youth", which reads like a mission statement for the rest of the record:

We wrote these plans, took the order, the architecture
And followed them to the end till the gears ground cold
And relentless, there was no remorse, we had none,
We kept on with no trace of a regret

Miss Machine is relevant and original because DEP realized that modern metal's narrative arc has been stuck in a rut, and conceivably entirely exhausted by the efforts of genre adventurers like Isis.  Even its literary forays have been fairly unimaginative. As captured by the lyrics above, DEP turned away from the straightforward agendas of its medium brothers and embraced the idea of metal as product.  Instead of sounding like organic compositions, the songs on Miss Machine sound like they were built.  And they weren't built with new materials; they were made out of scrap.  Any concessions to melody sound like they were cut out of another song because it was all that the bandmembers had on hand.  The "music" consistently takes a backseat to a haphazard structure.  Take, for example, "Set Fire to Sleeping Giants".  The weakest moments of this song sound like the blandest seconds of modern metal, but they're salvaged by the incorporation of careful jazz elements and a coda of unceasing hammering:



Black metal outfits have spent countless hours trying to convince us that their picture of the evil and explicitly anti-human nature of the world around us is a dangerously close look at reality.  DEP paints a much more convincing picture. They describe a world that is profoundly apersonal, consisting of melted together machines, both human and non-human.  The album cover of Miss Machine is instructive here:



In "Sunshine the Werewolf", Greg Puciato yelps "We fucked like a nuclear war".  In DEP's modernity, weapons, machines, and people overlap and muddle, bringing catastrophe to orgasm and vice versa.  This is not to say that Miss Machine represents a clean break from every record before it.  As mentioned above, DEP's originality is born from their commitment to the genre that birthed them. They managed to capture, for a moment, the ends and the limits of the genre of which they are a part.

Everybody’s Nowhere: Thoughts on Don DeLillo

“Capital burns the nuance off a culture.”- Don DeLillo, Underworld

“What terrorists gain, novelists lose…the danger they represent equals our own failure to be dangerous.” –DeLillo, Mao ii

I’ve been on a Don DeLillo kick the last few months; I read his novella Cosmopolis on a whim and was totally in awe of the way he both confronted and danced around political and philosophical incalcitrancies. Since then I’ve read a few other books of his, including “Mao ii” and the big postmodern doorstopper “Underworld”. Before I starting reading DeLillo, I had been reading a smattering of politically oriented texts ranging from Dostoevsky to David Harvey in an attempt to make sense of my own political disillusionment and societal dissatisfaction, and was beginning to get the sense that instead of gaining a greater or more realistic sense of the world around me, I was just loading my head with theories and in order to distance myself from the world. Like Dostoevsky in “Notes from Underground” and Saul Bellow in “Herzog”, one of Don DeLillo’s primary endeavors is to show how so-called “philosophical” thinking plays itself out in the real world. What makes his writing so interesting to me is that instead of offering a theoretical analysis of “the cultural leveling of late capitalism” or whatever, he shows (to paraphrase his own description of his work) the internal experience of people living through, and trying to make sense of, the upheavals of the late 20th and early 21st century.

In Mao ii, and less explicitly (although more profoundly) in Underworld, DeLillo seems to grapple with his own anxiety about the value of art in contemporary American culture. Mao ii revolves around a reclusive author named Bill Gray who has been writing and rewriting his magnum opus for years. The more he works on it, the more hesitant he becomes about publishing it: “The withheld work of art is the only form of eloquence left”. Gray refuses to publish his book because the more he writes, the more he feels that it reveals his own inadequacy as a novelist and the more convinced he is that publishing it, allowing it to be diffused in the outside world, will devalue it and render it unrecognizable.


Andy Warhol's portrait of Mao, which provided DeLillo with the title "Mao II"

Mao ii deals predominately with two binaries: the individual vs. the crowd and artists vs. terrorists. Bill Gray engages with both of these dualities; he agrees to be photographed for the first time in decades, and he agrees to travel to Beirut to speak out on behalf of a poet being held hostage by Islamic terrorists. He has an argument with a Maoist named George Haddad, an affiliate of the terrorist group, over drinks at the man’s comfortable home in suburban London; the irony of the comfortable location contrasted with gritty nature of the discussion doesn’t escape DeLillo. Light can be shed on the relevancy of intellectual discourse by describing where the actual conversation takes place-this idea is crucial to DeLillo’s writing. For instance, when Bill Gray and his agent are having lofty discussions amidst the sounds of grenades and car bombs in war torn Beirut, the eloquence of their discussion seems dependent on their ignoring the explosive tumult around them. Bill Gray and the aforementioned terrorist sympathizer discuss the similarity of novelists and terrorists. Do the novelist’s act of creation and the terrorist’s act of destruction spring from the same “secret life”, from the same “rage that underlies all obscurity and neglect”? Can art be dangerous to a society, can a novel be truly subversive, not being absorbed by the leveling processes of the system it seeks to criticize? Questions like these fuel both the tension and ambivalence that pervade the text. They aren’t definitively answered. During the argument, the Maoist says,

"There’s too much everything, more things and messages and meanings than we can use in ten                  thousand life times. Inertia-hysteria. Is history possible?…Who do we take seriously? Only the lethal believer, the person who kills and dies for faith. Everything else is absorbed. The artist is absorbed, the madman in the street is absorbed and processed and incorporated. Give him a dollar, put him in a TV commercial. Only the terrorist stands outside. The culture hasn’t figured out how to assimilate him. It’s confusing when they kill the innocent. But this is precisely the language of being noticed, the only language the West understands.”

This is an idealized portrait of a terrorist. It seems elegant, but only serves to confirm the pathology of a dissatisfied artist: the transient, one-dimensional nature of the world around them sucks all the humanity and poignancy out of their work, their work is just too good to be disbursed into the inane outside world. If relevant non-violent expression is impossible, acts of terrorism are seen as morally respectable in a bleak sense. This argument is of course full of holes. “What terrorists gain, novelists lose…the danger they represent equals our own failure to be dangerous.” Is there really a one-to-one correspondence between the failure of a novelist to adequately represent herself, to describe the intangible quality of her anxieties, and the terrorist who blows up an office building? I’ll open up the discussion to the very pragmatic Mr. John Dewey; in “Human Nature and Conduct”, Dewey writes, “The poignancy of situations that evoke reflection lies in the fact that we really do not know the meaning of the tendencies that are pressing for action.” Reflection, however it is documented (as a work of philosophy, as a novel etc.) is “poignant” to the extent that it describes and engages the disparity between the novelist’s medium and the tendencies pressing him to write. Acts of terrorism certainly aren’t poignant. If the hollowness of culture and life’s diligent resistance to being described makes worthwhile novels more difficult to produce, that doesn’t mean that blowing up a school is going to fix anything—it is in fact a despicably meaningless act.

Towards the end of Mao ii, the woman who had previously been enlisted to be Bill Gray’s photographer is in Beirut on assignment to take a portrait of Abu Rashad, a revolutionary militant. While there, she sees that the city is plastered with posters for Hollywood movies that are never going to be shown; glossy signifiers for signifieds that for all intents and purposes don’t exist. To DeLillo, image has lost track of meaning. The gulf between tendency and action has widened. Disillusionment and alienation occur more frequently and they are harder to pin down. Bill Gray refuses to publish his book (which he imagines as a drippy gray monster that hulks around his house) because it represents his frustration at his inability to articulate the aforementioned Deweyian poignancy rather than the poignancy itself. That doesn’t mean that the poignancy isn’t there. The real sadness is that in a world of trite Obamaisms, where images (even images that profess meaning) are rarely related to any compelling truth or meaning; adequate work is harder to produce and once it is produced, who will it reach? How will it function? “I’ve written a few lines I halfway like, but what’s the actual point?” Gray asks.

DeLillo’s endings are always amazing, and the endings of Mao ii, Cosmopolis and Underworld are of a similar character. In Mao ii, DeLillo ends by linking terror and imagery. Brita, the photographer stationed in Beirut, stares out the window of her hotel room early in the morning and sees several bright flashes. She experiences a moment of confusion: are these flashes the first semi-automatic weapons fire of the day, or flash photography (photographing the dead city one last time, DeLillo says)? Terror and the image becoming more and more indiscernible. Those “hope” posters sure look nice, but what’s all this talk about drones? The handsome multiracial face of progress explaining away the evils of oligarchy. What’s left when images, spectacles and signifiers have lost their meanings? Human beings, trying to describe their lostness. DeLillo pursues this line of thought more vigorously in Cosmopolis. At the end of that novel, a billionaire hedge-fund manager and his would-be ideological assassin sit across from each other. While the gun shakes in the assassin’s hand, the wall-street whiz kid watches his own death whimsically play itself out on a tiny screen embedded in his watch; this symbolizes the death of his wealth, his possessions, his status. After watching his own coffin lowered into the ground on his top-of-the-line wristwatch, he returns his gaze to the trembling assassin. “He is dead,” DeLillo writes, “inside the crystal of his watch but still alive in original space, waiting for the shot to sound.”

The World Will Be Tlön: The Hobbit as Parallel Reality

There's some relevant background to this in my post on Star Trek and Doctor Who.

The vulgar modernist in me takes a very dim view of Tolkien's books. When Tolkien was born at the beginning of 1892; Virginia Woolf was nine years old, D.H. Lawrence was six and Siegfried Sassoon was five, T.S. Eliot was two, and Wilfred Owen would be conceived in a year and two months. 

All these writers found productive, or at least articulate, methods of responding to the trauma of World War I, the pollution of England's countryside, the unstoppable expansion of its cities, and the unending sense of sickness, confusion and dread that accompanied full-fledged industrial modernization. It's a task so large that it's almost inconceivable today, to internalize a social change that devastating and reproduce the sensation of it in print, so maybe we shouldn't blame Tolkien from shirking from it, but we can't deny that he shirked.

Rather than face modernization, whether it was with Lawrence's fury, Woolf's hope or Eliot's despondency, the ready-made modernist narrative is that Tolkien ran from it, not only in his writing but in all areas of his life. He worked in a pseudo-aristocratic writing circle in the age of Yaddo and Gertrude Stein, taught philology while structural linguistics was on the ascent, and continued to smoke a pipe and wear tweed until his death in the 1970s. But his writing, obviously, is where this sense of retreat comes through the strongest. 

Even today, when there's a growing number of fantasy writers who make most of their living not with books at all, but rather with "campaign settings"—readymade worlds to set Dungeons and Dragons games in—Tolkien stands as an ideal so absolute and singleminded that he's almost grotesque. Middle-earth is both more expansive and more minutely detailed than any other fantasy world any writer has ever described, even into the successions of its kings and the geography of its sunken continents. More than anything, it's the languages that really make it compelling—the obsessively detailed lexicons and grammars that make it seem like Tolkien was just studying a world that the rest of us couldn't see.

And when we zero in on it, I think that's the basic axiom of The Lord of the Rings, and of most fantasy fiction. The rationalized modern world we live in is dull, bereft of any sense of adventure; the fantasy novelist has to compensate for that by being aggressively irrelevant, by creating a world that feels authentic on its own, without needing to lean on industrial modernity. What the Platonic fantasy novel would do, if it were realized, is immerse the reader in a parallel reality, a world so cohesive and complete that the reader wouldn't need the modern world anymore. Tolkien's books come closest to this ideal—they're falsehoods so rigorous that they get uncannily close to truth.

But Bazin saw the impulse to immerse as the basic project of Western art, culminating in the invention of film, which according to him is not so much a technology as it is a progress towards realism, and Borges memorably discussed fantasy's impending eclipse of reality, even predicting the language fetishism of Tolkien's fans in his discussion of Tlön's bizarre language. These are two of our most perceptive critics of emergent postwar culture; if they deigned to analyze him, I suspect both men would paint Tolkien not as a reactionary, but as a closet progressive, a progressive whose modernism is buried in his subconscious, untouched by his antiquarian style and conservative themes.

So if Tolkien is a modern in search of a modern style, a vocabulary to suit the modern world on the order of Woolf's or Lawrence's, then the true Tolkien is Peter Jackson. Reprocessed by the Jackson-Boyens-Walsh screenwriting team and a Hollywood editor, bereft of the Anglo-Saxon quirks of Tolkien's prose, the books can become what they're becoming—warm crevices of spectacle to crawl inside. The Hobbit, which is almost unrecognizable in film form, is clear proof of this. The entire movie is laced with so many references to the earlier movies, so much production-design glitz, that the mise-en-scene overpowers the plot completely. The shabby script and hyperactive editing immerse us in the world at every moment. Everybody in the movie drops hints; every shot flies through a cohesive space; every brooch and ring and braid jumps out at us.

So The Hobbit might be a terrible movie by classical standards—by reactionary standards—but as an experience it's superlative, as an experience that goes beyond the aesthetic and becomes a Wagnerian wet dream. Tolkien's project hasn't been bastardized, it's been liberated, freed from its quaint flower-power trappings and left to become the all-consuming juggernaut it always wanted to be. Until we learn to critique a world, movies like The Hobbit are always going to evade us—we might as well be critiquing the Holodeck.