NOTES 3.2.16

Making of Anomalisa, Kaufman, 2015

Millicent Weems: What was once before you - an exciting, mysterious future - is now behind you. Lived; understood; disappointing. You realize you are not special. You have struggled into existence, and are now slipping silently out of it. This is everyone's experience. Every single one. The specifics hardly matter. Everyone's everyone. So you are Adele, Hazel, Claire, Olive. You are Ellen. All her meager sadnesses are yours; all her loneliness; the gray, straw-like hair; her red raw hands. It's yours. It is time for you to understand this.
Millicent Weems: Walk.
Millicent Weems: As the people who adore you stop adoring you; as they die; as they move on; as you shed them; as you shed your beauty; your youth; as the world forgets you; as you recognize your transience; as you begin to lose your characteristics one by one; as you learn there is no-one watching you, and there never was, you think only about driving - not coming from any place; not arriving any place. Just driving, counting off time. Now you are here, at 7:43. Now you are here, at 7:44. Now you are...
Millicent Weems: Gone.

Arthur Schopenhauer; drawing by Wilhelm Busch

The gift of genius is nothing but…the ability…to discard entirely our own personality for a time, in order to remain pure knowing subject, the clear eye of the world.

“Submission” is a novel of ideas, the ideas being that France and Europe are in decline, and that Roman Catholicism is dying, if not already dead, but Islam is alive; in the book’s view, since the Cold War, no one in France — besides Muslims — has found any larger political ideals to believe in.

In “Submission” and his other novels, Mr. Houellebecq’s protagonists are numb men who long for feeling, nonbelievers who crave belief. There’s graphic, joyless sex. Most women are lovers or mothers. Often they die, providing the desultory main character an opportunity to experience true feeling, until the feeling passes. In a scathing review of “Submission” in Le Monde, the novelist Christine Angot wrote of her offense at the author’s depictions of women and their “vaginal dryness.”

Put bluntly, the women in his novels are in bed — and then they die. “Yes,” Mr. Houellebecq said, pausing slightly for comic effect, “like all of us.” Was this his view of women, or that of his characters? “It’s the way my characters see women,” said Mr. Houellebecq, who is twice divorced. “I don’t get too involved.”

Then he glided into provocation. “Prostitution is a good idea,” he said. For whom? “Everyone.” But isn’t it a form of exploitation of women? “All work is exploitation,” he answered. Isn’t that a bit too easy? “But it’s true,” he said. So does he himself frequent prostitutes? “That’s none of your business.” Surely the police escort must complicate things? “No, no,” he said. Prostitution, he added, “is one of the foundations of Western civilization — it’s a corrective to monogamy.”

- Michel Houellebecq, Casually Provocative, NYTIMES OCT2015

Each of Malick’s films presents a conversation or debate between what he suggests is the dominant Western worldview and a competing perspective. Malick follows Heidegger in identifying the Western worldview with the Enlightenment drive to systematize and conquer nature. According to this point of view, man demonstrates his significance through technical and scientific mastery—and on an individual level, he falls into insignificance when he fails to win the acclaim of other men. The competing perspective in Malick’s films is the artistic or filmic perspective, of which the paragon example is Malick’s camera itself. Malick’s goal as a filmmaker is to educate the human eye to see like his camera does. If our habits of vision are characterized by ambition, skepticism and greed, Malick inspires us with the virtues of patience, appreciation and awe. He offers not new facts or arguments but persuasive images of the world as if filtered through such virtues. Alongside these images he presents a character in each film who expresses, with increasing confidence and dignity, the point of view epitomized by the camera. These characters conceive of a power or location they can only gesture toward with words: “Sometimes I wished I could fall asleep and be taken off to some magical land, but this never happened,” says Holly in Badlands. “I’ve seen another world—sometimes I think it was just my imagination,” says Witt in The Thin Red Line. -

-ThePointMag