Isegoria

In The final irony, Zoe Williams (a Brit) tackles irony (using some British allusions I don’t quite get):

Pretty much everything is ironic these days. Irony is used as a synonym for cool, for cynicism, for detachment, for intelligence; it’s cited as the end of civilisation, as well as its salvation. Pretty much every form of culture claims to be shot through with it, even (especially) the ones that conspicuously aren’t. I read last week that Bruce Forsyth hosting Have I Got News For You was an ‘ironic statement’, as if you could ascend into irony just by being old, as you used to with wisdom. I read, too, that it was ironic for Alan Millburn to leave his job to spend more time with his family, when the doctors and nurses under his care don’t have that facility; well, it’s not ironic, it’s just standard-issue self-interest, with maybe a smattering of hypocrisy. I’ve read claims of an ‘ironic’ interest in Big Brother — nope. Lazy, maybe. Possibly postmodern. Not ironic.

We have a grave problem with this word (well, in fact, it’s not really grave — but I’m not being ironic when I call it that, I’m being hyperbolic. Though often the two amount to the same thing. But not always).
[...]
Most pressingly, though, there are a number of misconceptions about irony that are peculiar to recent times. The first is that September 11 spelled the end of irony. The second is that the end of irony would be the one good thing to come out of September 11. The third is that irony characterises our age to a greater degree than it has done any other. The fourth is that Americans can’t do irony, and we can. The fifth is that the Germans can’t do irony, either (and we still can). The sixth is that irony and cynicism are interchangeable. The seventh is that it’s a mistake to attempt irony in emails and text messages, even while irony characterises our age, and so do emails. And the eighth is that “post-ironic” is an acceptable term – it is very modish to use this, as if to suggest one of three things: i) that irony has ended; ii) that postmodernism and irony are interchangeable, and can be conflated into one handy word; or iii) that we are more ironic than we used to be, and therefore need to add a prefix suggesting even greater ironic distance than irony on its own can supply. None of these things is true.

Now, after all that effort numbering and sub-numbering the points, I’m going to deal with them in the wrong order. That isn’t ironic, it’s just a bit sloppy.

In Lights, Camera, Action. Marxism, Semiotics, Narratology., David Weddle — who has a BS in cinema from USC and who works in the film industry — describes his daughter’s UC Santa Barbara film theory exam:

On the exam, I found the following, from an essay by film theorist Kristin Thompson:

“Neoformalism posits that viewers are active — that they perform operations. Contrary to psychoanalytic criticism, I assume that film viewing is composed mostly of nonconscious, preconscious, and conscious activities. Indeed, we may define the viewer as a hypothetical entity who responds actively to cues within the film on the basis of automatic perceptual processes and on the basis of experience. Since historical contexts make the protocols of these responses inter-subjective, we may analyze films without resorting to subjectivity…According to Bordwell, ‘The organism constructs a perceptual judgment on the basis of nonconscious inferences.’ ”

Then came the question itself:

“What kind of pressure would Metz’s description of ‘the imaginary signifier’ or Baudry’s account of the subject in the apparatus put on the ontology and epistemology of film implicit in the above two statements?”

I looked up at my daughter. She smiled triumphantly. “Welcome to film theory,” she chirped.

Welcome to film theory indeed.

I read from my daughter’s study guide to Gary A. Randall, who has served as president of Orion Television, Spelling Television, and as the executive producer of the TV series “Any Day Now.” “That’s what your daughter’s being taught?” he says. “That’s just elitist psychobabble. It sounds like it was written by a professor of malapropism. That has absolutely no bearing on the real world. It sounds like an awfully myopic perspective of what film is really supposed to be about: touching hearts and minds and providing provocative thoughts.”

From movie critic Ebert: “Film theory has nothing to do with film. Students presumably hope to find out something about film, and all they will find out is an occult and arcane language designed only for the purpose of excluding those who have not mastered it and giving academic rewards to those who have. No one with any literacy, taste or intelligence would want to teach these courses, so the bona fide definition of people teaching them are people who are incapable of teaching anything else.”

TNN has repositioned itself as the new TNN, the first network for men. Normally I’d applaud a new line-up of animation for adults, but I’m not sure where I stand on the new TNN’s animation behaving badly:

The cult cartoon classic Ren & Stimpy has returned, teamed with two brand new adult series, for a raw and raucous block of late night animation. ‘Toon in for the June 26th premiere beginning at 10pm ET/PT for the hot line-up of Ren & Stimpy Adult Party Cartoon, Stripperella, and all new Gary the Rat.

Stripperella?

From legendary Spider-Man creator Stan Lee and featuring the voice of Pamela Anderson — she’s an exotic dancer by night, a sexy superhero by…later night.

There’s a reason all movie phone numbers start with 555. From Woman Gets Phone Calls for God:

Dawn Jenkins isn’t in the new Jim Carrey comedy “Bruce Almighty,” but her phone number is — and that’s become a problem.

In the film, Carrey stars as a mortal who receives the powers of God. The character of God tries to reach Carrey’s character by repeatedly leaving a phone number on his pager.

But instead of the usual 555 prefix used by most television shows and films, God’s number is a common exchange — one too common for Jenkins’ liking. It’s her cell phone number.

She’s been getting about 20 calls per hour, with callers asking for God before hanging up.

Perhaps Jenny should call and leave her number.

I’m not familiar with Haneke’s The Piano Teacher, but Boos and Cheers for Cannes Hero Michael Haneke describes his latest film, Time of the Wolf, and it explores a hypothetical situation that fascinates me:

Talking to reporters afterwards, he said he wanted to see how thick the veneer of civilization was and to measure just how quickly moral standards crumble in adversity.

“I avoided describing the catastrophe,” he said. “How would you and I cope if the water did not come out of the tap? It is as simple as that.”

On the way home today, I heard the following story on NPR, NPR : ‘Buffy Studies’:

Buffy enjoys a special following among academics, some of whom have staked a claim in what they call “Buffy Studies.” NPR’s Neda Ulaby reports there are serious academic studies on the characters and themes in the series — titles like “Buffy the Vampire Disciplinarian: Institutional Excess and the New Economy of Power.”

The program cited Slayage, the Online Journal of Buffy Studies, and interviewed some really, really nerdy professors. (Seriously, listen to the audio.)

In Magpie mystic of the South Pacific, John Whitley summarizes tortured-artist Gaugin’s life:

Exactly 100 years ago next Thursday, Paul Gauguin died alone and in agonising pain in his shack on the Marquesas Islands near Tahiti. He was 54, heavily in debt, his paintings were almost universally derided and he was addicted to morphine — he may even have been killed by an overdose of the drug, which he took for the suppurating syphilis sores on his legs.
[...]
Raised among distant cousins in Peru, he returned to France for a formal education, then roamed the world as a merchant seaman. At 25 he married and settled down on the stock exchange, devoting his spare time to studies with friendly Impressionists, notably his mentor, Camille Pissarro, and Degas. Hit by the 1882 crash, he threw it all up to become a full-time artist, but poverty drove him to the cheaper artists’ colony at Pont-Aven in Brittany and then to Arles. There he may (or may not) have incited Van Gogh to hack off his ear.