puppets

I'm not a critic and don't really have the background or vocab or chops to talk about this idea that I have, but I might as well give it a shot.

I few weeks ago I got really high and watched Whit Stillman's Last Days of Disco. I've enjoyed Metropolitan and Barcelona in the past and had a time with this one too. But there's this thing I've noticed when I'm high and watch a movie about educated people. Like the movie A Single Man, the Tom Ford Colin Firth movie about a gay professor in the 60s, I just couldn't take it serious while high. What I imagined was a somber portrayal of deep longing and loneliness, I could only see as an indictment of a phoney milieu, po-faced sincerity like a thin veneer over pea-brained nothing. Empty gestures sorta miming erudition or intellectual restraint. Maybe that's what they were going for, but I doubt it. And if I watched it sober, who knows what I'd think.

So, Last Day of Disco. The movie follows a number of well-heeled, upwardly mobile young people in advertising or publishing in manhattan in the 70s. They talk about fancy subjects and use multisyllabic words in a dry way that has all the trappings of wit, but again I was high and could only see it as empty, and in fact an intentional coldly cynical evisceration of the pretenses of this type of person, or of a whole caste/class/whatever

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I think animals have emotions of sorts, I'm not some old-timey cartesian who thinks they're mindless automata, but I also don't think they have the same rich inner lives that humans have. And a stupid exercise I do is: I see a picture of a dog with its mouth open and it looks like it's got this big smile on its face, but I know the dog is not actually smiling so I cover the mouth with my hand to see just its eyes, entirely emotionless, blank, empty, and mute.

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When I watched Barry Lyndon, I went into it with this idea, gleaned from who knows where, that Ryan O'Neal was not a good actor and Kubrick knew this and used that to create this effect of a soulless forward-moving striver, a pawn of history, and that this was a brutal cynical take on, I dunno, humans, aristocrats, hollywood actors, etc etc. And I'd like to interpret Last Days of Disco this way, like a sort of ecce homo, but not of a frail and flawed and humble subject, but of a denatured, dessicated, lobotomized striver class, playing a certain filigree role in as part of the superstructure to some brute base. The height of wit or culture is just profoundly stupid and we're just watching marionettes go through motions barely comprehending the horror of their situation.

This sort of contempt for the subjects (again something I might just be making up and misinterpreting, who knows) reminds me of Lars von Trier using some sort of brechtian artifice to make a similar point in Dogville or Todd Solondz putting his characters in brutalizing situations (though his characters seem to have some sort of internal life, however fucked up).

Maybe I've got it all wrong and Stillman's stuff is sincere and sophisticated, but it's funner to see it as a scathing trick played on the characters and a good chunk of the audience. Disco was never this white, never this straight, and the characters were enjoying probably an ultra watered-down gentrified version of it, tamed and sold to them by those who know their marks. This delusion the characters share might be hinted at at the end of the movie where there's this surreal dancing-in-the-streets montage of regular people discoing on subways and stuff. Maybe it finds its modern incarnation in Pride or Drag or Burning Man, no clue. The last days of Pride. I'd watch that