BLOG #14: DRAMA DOESN’T CUT IT ANYMORE

GRRR IT’S THE CRITIC MONSTER

Drama doesn’t cut it anymore. Once, I tweeted that it’s really easy to stop being complicated because you just stop being complicated. What I meant is that, in my personal life, drama can dissipate if you just let it. If you stop the manic pixie dreamgirl monologues on third dates because they actually aren’t as honest as you think they are. They’ll get you laid depending on the person but they’ll also doom you to being Cool Girl. Weird Girl. Girl Who Accidentally Smoked PCP That One Time at The Smell. You’ll be fun, but to a point. Not someone anyone can respect because your lack of self-respect is palpable in the stories you choose to tell, and the feelings you choose to admit. “Honesty,” but only superficially. No one knows how you feel or what you care about unless you tell them. So all the glitter and funky haircuts (see: me 2015–2021) and crazysexycool life experiences might be a part of you, but they’re not The Truth. They’re the I-Want-You-To-Want-Me version of it. Being honest about feeling, and feeling powerfully, is something completely different. And it’s scary as hell. But it feels really good to reveal, because that fear is a signifier of your life uncomplicating itself. Sometimes, a person inspires this. But ultimately, it is your decision to just be less fucking complicated. The “you” I’ve been referring to in several probably ungrammatical sentences is proverbial, of course. But “you” is also very much so me. And I hope you see “you” in you, too. 

 

I love being uncomplicated. I am happier. People like me more because I listen better. I eat the correct amount of protein for a woman my age who #crushesit at the gym. I go to the gym. I read way more books. I shut the fuck up for a bit and then flap my gums when I feel it appropriate. People on the street tip their hats on Sundays because of my sunshine-y demeanor. Maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s the Prozac. But it’s MEEEEE me me me me. Great to meet ya, no longer hiding in plain sight. 

 

Still unemployed. At lunch last weekend I told my friend A— that I can’t really consider myself a freelancer because I don’t do it enough for it to be a job. Spending too much time resembling a flaneuse, but I’m not that either. She said that more people should feel that way. I agree. 

 

Okay, so fuck Eddington. With a hard dick. I saw this movie with T— on kind of a perfect Wednesday (early morning Pilates, lunch and emails, nap, therapy, go to pharmacy, read Lonely Crowds by Stephanie Wambugu nearly in its entirety in Fort Greene Park). He had never seen an Ari Aster movie, not even Hereditary or Midsommar—taste. I went into the movie having not seen any trailers, had no idea what it was about, and honestly thought Eddington was a city in Canada and not the state of New Mexico. And…I hated nearly everything about it. Part of me thinks that if I screened it alone and not at BAM with like two and a half fellow minorities in the audience maybe I would feel better, but probably not. Kind of spoilers incoming but I wouldn’t recommend spending money to see this movie so it like really doesn’t matter. 

 

Formally, the movie’s visual language was stunning. That’s a plus for Ari Aster as a director (I’ve heard he’s got a great on-set direction style), but mainly yet another feather in Darius Khondji’s cap, the DP for Eddington. The canonical Aster-traveling-mise-en-scene shots were truncated in Khondji’s style, done with painful close-ups, pauses, and traveling shots. The same Aster-effect of vague paranoia and crippling emasculation still read true to the director’s style, but with the Khondji large-format sense of scale. That kind of myopia—again, we are talking visually—was stunning. Especially when contrasted by the final hour-ish of the movie (honestly, lost track of time) where hero(?) Joe Cross, played by Joaquin Phoenix, has to stand his ground against ninja-like Antifa figures in a manner best resembling first-person shooter games. 

 

Ok so, when I say “drama doesn’t cut it anymore,” I mean that the actual conceptual substance, or lack thereof, from this film created a whole bunch of noise that signaled literally nothing that hasn’t already been beaten to death by armchair theorists. While the overall theme of the film, a COVID-era Western psychodrama, is not a fraught one, there is no central thesis, but instead a confusing tangle of plots that lead nowhere. The central character throughline: Joe Cross, our intrepid sheriff for the small New Mexico town of Eddington, must defend his people from forces of evil. See, the western canon. But the contemporary edge is that everyone seems confused about the enemy, instead participating in the blame game Olympics that we all faced 5 years ago during the COVID pandemic. Cross’s first brush with justice? Anti-masking and urging people to treat each other like neighbors. He gets enraged seeing a neighbor refused entrance into a grocery store because he refuses to wear a mask, and later goes on a Facebook rant about the incident as a spur-the-moment decision to run for mayor. The standing mayor? Ted Garcia, played by Pedro Pascal, a very obvious nod to Ted Cruz (Pascal as a casting choice is funny because he looks like a yas-ified version of the real politician). And herein lies my problem with Eddington: Garcia’s politics in the movie are very Pacific-Southwest-Liberal showmanship, but he looks like Ted Cruz, a staunch Republican in real life. The parallel it feels like we are goaded toward as audiences is to think, “hm, liberals and conservatives are all the same, serving the mighty dollar.” Not only is this take like, ok yawn, but, to devil’s advocate, presents a really wonderful opportunity to add something to it. Aster fails, again and again. 

 

There is a clear theme of Eddington, with literally zero thesis. Eddington begins with a drooling homeless man speaking nearly unintelligibly, whose babble is situated to feel like “oh, this is the guy who gets it.” Drooling Homeless Guy’s drunken ramblings throughout the first act are considered poor man’s drivel, but really establish him as a kind of bard (Aster is a fan of this kind of Greek theatricality, as seen in the paper-animation bit from Beau is Afraid). In the opening scene, he walks past a giant Amazon-esque data center being built in the middle of the desert—in the later conflict between standing mayor Garcia and aspiring incumbent Cross, it becomes clear that Garcia is rather disingenuously promoting the data center as being able to save Eddington’s economy, and Cross, again, the sheriff, takes on the Western role as protector of his deputy from outside forces. What happens with the data center during the majority of the movie? Good question, we don’t revisit it…for the majority of the movie. Instead, like 90 minutes of Eddington is complicated with sub-plots like pedophilia rings (Cross’s weird-girl wife played by Emma Stone and Austin Butler’s forgettable anti-pedo conspiracy theorist character might as well have not existed), performative white teens of Eddington who support Black Lives Matter and try desperately to unlearn things, random love triangles between one of Cross’s police officers, a Black man named Michael, a barely-legal BLM white girl with a nose ring, and a nervous white teenager who desperately wants to get into her anti-racist panties. There’s also a 30-second clip alleging that Antifa is actually a government special-ops task force jetted around the country to incite violence. Once you start getting your wires crossed with who means what and why, Aster distracts with his favorite story technique: gratuitous violence. Cross kills Garcia and his son, framing Michael as the culprit. He also kills Drooling Homeless Guy. There is something interesting with this palpable tonal shift that is interesting to think about in terms of traditional Greek theater, in that choosing to kill the bard-as-story-guide does mark the undoing of the story, a rupture of logic that devolves into chaos. But, where there previously was no story, there’s nothing to backslide into other than more incoherent mess. That’s what the latter third of the movie is dedicated to, a wild goose chase by Pueblo authorities who are hot on Cross’s trail as the real killer, the big Antifa shootout (beautiful and meaningless), Cross gets knifed in the head. How it ends? Cross’s wife on tour with Austin Butler’s conspiracy theorist cult pregnant with his child (?? Haven’t seen them in a while), the white kid dedicated to unlearning racism so he could get laid becomes a Kyle Rittenhouse-esque figure, a foil to the real one (in the shootout he ends up popping out of nowhere and protecting Eddington from Antifa interlopers with a machine gun, like the leftist opposite to Rittenhouse). Cross, a quadriplegic drooling in a wheelchair whose mother in law (Emma Stone’s character’s mom) is now the standing mayor of Eddington, pleased to unveil what? The fucking data center. That we haven’t seen or heard anything about. For the past. Nearly 2 hours. 

 

Sitting in the theater, I did not laugh at the overwrought physical comedy built into the white-kids-learn-about-BLM subplot. I couldn’t, because I lived it. And there was something so dystopian about the fact that everyone in the BAM audience (white, somewhat unwashed, liberally educated, at least based on demographic statistics) felt really good about themselves being able to identify how fucked the George Floyd “unlearning” era was, blithely unaware that the kids in that movie were them. “Oh my god, he really like, captured a moment.” No he didn’t. Ari Aster created more cognitive dissonance by trying to critique it. And I think he knew that. That is how he is able to make really beautiful movies that mean nothing. More noise, more distraction, where his merit is as a guy using the camera as a spyglass, to say, like “hey, more noise = more distraction. Did you guys know that? Here’s 140+ minutes of noise for you to understand that relationship. Aren’t I so smart for pointing that out to you? You totally would have never got it if I didn’t hold up the mirror.” Someone jump this fool.

Still from Hereditary (2018)

Still from Midsommar (2019)

And here’s the thing…I loved Hereditary (2018) and Midsommar (2019). Aster is really good at this uncanny kind of horror that straddles grotesquery and psychological turmoil. Both gross and heady, literally, in the case of Hereditary. I shared this with H— who also thought Eddington was garbage. “Zero insight” was his description of Aster’s latest. Aka, all of the flowery detail of the shit I just said condensed in two words. As I explained everything I loved about Aster’s two first movies, both of which happen to be horrors (Florence Pugh crying her ass of, gruesome heads popping off or being smashed by mallets, psychosexual tension, Freudian nods to hating your mom, the jouissance and perfect harmony between plot and the work of Pawel Pogorzelski who DP’s the living fucking daylights out of both movies), H— disarmed me with the kind of insight only a man could have. “Maya, these movies are about insecure men who spend so much time hating themselves they must be crowned kings of evil,” or something to that effect. Which blew my mind because I wish I’d thought it myself. In Hereditary, a young man with a mean mommy realizes that he actually is Satan, he is crowned as the king of evil in the end, left to luxuriate in his new rule. In Midsommar, a clingy and traumatized girlfriend becomes a cultleader and kills her boyfriend and their friends just because she needs family that bad. Beau is Afraid is literally 148 minutes of turbocuck Joaquin Phoenix (thank you Nation for sharing this description with me, it is the most succinct way of talking about that movie) grappling with complexes his mean mommy (Patty LuPone, perfect casting) put into his head. Turbocuck surrealism, Aster’s best genre. That’s what makes this movie good, nearly un-rewatchable (took two personal intermissions). It is what it says it is, watching a cuckold of a man stumble through life and his seemingly surreal paranoia, led to believe there’s going to be some sort of “ah yes, men are pathetic” realization only to learn that yes, we actually are blaming women. Mean mommy was the problem. 

Bernard Faucon images that remind me of Midsommar

 

Still from Black Narcissus (1947)

Think about what you know and like about Ari Aster’s filmography, and ask yourself how much of it is the treatment, the visuals, the editing, and how much of it is the story. Aster is a good director and a shit writer with, again to reference H—, zero insight. The things you probably like about Aster’s movies come from Pogorzelski, the whole of art department, and the editing. My favorite parts of Midsommar are the color-grading resemblance to Bernard Faucon photography, and Black Narcissus (1947). Hereditary is bleak, tense, visually stunning, with an amazing performance by Toni Colette. I did actually kind of like Beau is Afraid, because it was about exactly what it said it was about, a man terrified of things because of his domineering mother. Here are the commonalities between all these movies: made-up cuneiform connoting ancient Satan-like ritual, prophecies written out and followed in those long-track shots so when the camera distracts, you remember the story and how everything that happens, no matter how jarring, is destined to happen within the film’s language. While there is nothing wrong with this technique it’s more of an aesthetic thing than anything. In Midsommar its this resemblance to a maybe-real Swedish inbred culture (?) that Aster’s horror operates in—uncanniness. Maybe, maybe not. The not-quite. The random 30-minute Beau is Afraid puppet quest, the city he lives in that is kind of New York or Philly or Chicago but really a non-place standin for all cities and the ills of cosmopolitanism, the Hereditary evil devil temple treehouse thing as also the yellow triangle building thing they set on fire in Midsommar. Are these traditions older than us, part of the human condition? What does it mean to paralyzed by culture, as a man, afraid of his mother, shameful of his penis, probably with a suffocation kink (I am making this up, but Aster loves a drooling guy in a wheelchair. I feel like he also has a lactation fetish but again just spitballing). It all comes back to him, filmic ways to hate yourself and not even in a cool way. That’s why I fucking hate Ari Aster.  

Still from Hereditary (2018)

 

Still from Midsommar (2019)

Still from the puppet show moment in Beau is Afraid (2023)

Penis monster from Beau is Afraid (2023)

I’m thinking about softness v. sensitivity, and how it mirrors an ongoing conversation about irony v. sincerity. I’ve written at length about this idea, both in fine art and politics and, most recently, fashion. We are in an era that recognizes the difference between irony and sincerity, and how the two are diametrically opposed; but the way we express the two is meant to be a mystery. Is that girl actually Catholic, or appropriating the symbols of sincere Catholocism? The choice is up to you—that is post-irony, where you cannot tell someone’s intentions based on their expression, aesthetic or otherwise. Most of the time, it doesn’t matter what someone meant, like in art or film or fashion, because the style of the expression is the primary language used to communicate an idea, where in this case, the idea is that we audience members can believe whatever we want. That is the new highbrow conceptual idea, and I kind of hate it. To me, intersubjectivity cannot be the end, it cannot be the superior idea. Really, what that concept does in practice, at least through Ari Aster’s films, is say “notice how I as the director was able to lead you one way visually but then present a question about what it means at the very end? What do you think it means?” 

 

I went to liberal arts school, so I think I possess the amount of life experience to say: that is bullshit. It is a copout to not actually having to build resolution into your plot points, or to take a stance on anything. For audience members, interpreting something as sincere when it was meant to be a joke, or interpreting a something as a joke when it was meant to be sincere, ultimately only serves the person who created it to be so clever, so mysterious, so apt in their holding a mirror up to society. But what do you stand for, Ari Aster? Or is everything you make going to present both sides so topically, aesthetically at least, that people are meant to think “wow, he’s really smart for asking the question.” Florals, for spring? Groundbreaking. 

 

This is the facile nature of people constantly asserting that moments in time, speeding up from ’90s grunge revival in the 2010s to the microtrends of the 2010s themselves, are “back.” Things need to be “back” for people to step out of their solipsism and acknowledge, for one moment, that something of merit existed before them. Still, by declaring something as “back,” these armchair critics cannot fathom the ideas that had nothing to do with the “it” they reference. Indie sleaze. Twee. Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes (the fact that this is discourse on Twitter, please kill me). Impact font (I am guilty of this one, it’s so abject I truly don’t think I’m ever going back). Pause to talk about Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes: the debate on Twitter is at once a live sparring between “was second-term Obama era hipster ironic or sincere?” and a meta-argument somewhat twin to the former, of people trying to son each other with the most authentic and therefore intellectually superior take. “Well, Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes were most definitely putting on an affect but does that make it less real?” “Why are we even talking about this can’t people enjoy anything anymore?” Flippant, joyously so. Delight in winning the QT wars of the day. 

 

In the end, the central takeaway is clear by the discourse itself: people today cannot tell the difference between irony and sincerity. This is the definition of post-irony, aesthetically as it bleeds into ideology: careening between “sincere but we are so jaded today it must be ironic” and “ironic but we lack so much media literacy today that people see it as sincere” and, the most complex, “at once ironic and sincere, where the aesthetics of sincerity can either connote irony or sincerity, depending on your personal level of media literacy.” What lacks, in the three aforementioned categories, is an opinion, and by way of that, the confidence to have one. So what if Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes are ironic hipster fodder. Do you like the way the music sounds? So what if Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes are sincere. Do you like the way the music sounds? Or will your stance oscillate between the two, irony and sincerity, in the constant performance of possessing an authentic, and therefore superior, point of view? The real authenticity comes from standing on fucking business, liking what you like in spite of which viewpoints seem to be winning in online “discourse.” To do that requires a confidence that feels lacking in a lot of critique today. That lack of confidence is why I fucking hate Ari Aster.

 

Here are some people I like. Valeri Rubinchik. Simone Weil. bell hooks. Nicolas Ghesquiere. Hussein Chalayan. Andre Leon Talley (may he rest in peace). Literally anyone in Appalachia who has ever played a banjo. This is my opinion and it is subjective. Now you pick yours! We can even talk about why we agree and disagree while exchanging ideas and our favorite one-liners. What do they call that kind of talking again? Starts with a ‘c,’ ends with -onversation. Have one!