Links & Looks. January 18, 2023
Further Screenplays FYC; Laughing At Older Movies; Productive, Prolific Greil Marcus; Godard Par Quandt; Ankler: Netflix Gilds The Globe
Louche Living.
For Your Consideration screenplays: Aftersun, The Fabelmans, The Banshees Of Inisherin, Living and A Man Called Otto.
Anachronisms in movies have long compelled “knowing” audiences to laugh, if not sneer. They’re back on their bullshit?
Ever-prolific Greil Marcus is filling pages at Substack under the rubric “Letters From The Ether,” since a recovery from health issues.
“I needed an editor—not just someone with good what-to-leave-in-what-to-leave-out judgement, but someone to come to my basement office and go through everything, just as the late Ed Ward did when crates of Lester Bangs' writing collected by his friends and colleagues from all over arrived and I knew I could never make even a stab at the millions of words alone. Finally, what I found myself thinking about was some sort of omnibus combined with books comprising the entire runs of certain columns, as I've done with the migrating “Real Life Rock Top 10” columns—the “Undercover” book column I wrote for Rolling Stone 1975-80, the Interview columns from 1992-2008.
It began when the late Ingrid Sischy, who I'd worked with so happily at Artforum for years—she was a great editor, an inspiring person, someone who'd schedule an open-ended edit at the office at night and go for as long as it took for some ridiculously complicated project that paid off—asked me about a music column for Interview, where she’d taken over… I could never say no to Ingrid and never wanted to. We called it “Days Between Stations,” after Steve Erickson's first novel. The idea of drifting between radio stations or getting caught in some nowhere on the dial—the way Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller described the soul vocal and the harsh and pounding strings on the Drifters' "There Goes My Baby" as sounding like something that was stuck between Top 40 and classical stations—seemed so evocative… The column was about music and elections, and if felt to me that the columns were letters to each other. That’s why I wanted them together as a book, even if, reasonably, no one would want to publish it and no one other than a hundred people here and there would want to buy it.”
Film Socialisme, Jean-Luc Godard (2010).
James Quandt at ARTFORUM takes another draught of J-LG.
Godard had fully transformed into what Edward Said called a “lamenting personality,” increasingly prone to requiems and memorials, threnodies and elegies… When not apocalyptic, invoking nuclear conspiracies and the “mass extinction of species,” Godard’s vision could turn baleful or bitter, even as his imagery strove for maximum beauty and animals turned in delightful cameo appearances: a donkey with a television strapped to its back; a bemused llama muzzled in a gas station; two kittens performing a call-and-response karaoke; Godard’s adorable dog Roxy Miéville romping through a forest.
“The Way Of The Househusband”/Netflix.
Astute observer of The Service, Richard Rushfield, responds to Rachel Syme’s glammy portrait of a jet-setting, continent-creeping Netflix executive at The Ankler and finds the company’s “firehose” of “content” suspect:
Netflix retains this enormous advantage of, for a huge swath of people—the biggest swath of subscribers—remaining the default service; the thing that's just always on, for the four hours every day the average American spends viewing. And maybe, they are on to something that what people are looking for in those four hours isn't necessarily a meticulously composed, dark, slow-moving operatic drama, but a firehose of a bunch of stuff thrown at them that keeps them engaged, filling in for the phone they've been fed by all day.
If you ask me, this tech-driven world of maximized engagement has already done unthinkable damage on so many levels and the worst is probably ahead, but if you're running a meglomanical company and you want to become the default service for the biggest possible block of people, it's hard to argue with. And for all the talk of the competitive market, no one is challenging them for that. Disney and HBO are serving particular audiences and not in the volume game. Paramount, Peacock and Hulu aren't in positions to do that. Apple and Amazon could, but don't seem to want to.
Ultimately, you take a step back, those services are capturing a niche, while Netflix is trying to capture the world. It’s a goal I’ve been very skeptical of, but we look at this point in the streaming wars, and, as I say, no one is challenging them for it. The biggest problem with becoming a rich person's TikTok, or YouTube, however, is that the more you turn entertainment into content, the less you make produced shows and movies larger than life experiences and just think of them as a Tower of Babel, spewing stuff out of the firehose, the less need there is for any of it. Sooner or later, TikTok or YouTube clips will be all the firehose they need.