15:04 by
Klaus Bubblehammer
, under
This is a photograph I took of my daughter. She was sitting on the chair in the corner by herself in protest at my refusal to buy her a snake from the petshop I'd taken her to see earlier.
I tried to explained to her that the snake in the shop was just a baby python. He'd have to be fed live mouses for dinner, and when he got bigger he'd want to eat rabbits, cats, or even Hercule, the doggy. Soon, we'd have to move out of the house, because the python's head would be on the kitchen table, while his tail would be upstairs sleeping in her bed.
She didn't believe me, said snakes weren't as big as that, and we could get a snakearium with lights and a little house for him to sleep in. She'd been crayoning pictures of snakes since we got back from the shop, and she took her best one and tore it up, crumpling the pieces and chucking them on the floor.
She said she was going to sit on her own on the chair because she couldn't have a snake, and I was telling lies about pythons. He wouldn't eat Hercule for dinner.
You could have a turtle in a turtlearium, I told her, or a cheese lizard, which is a vegetarian.. But she only wanted that python called Jeremy in the petshop.
When I called for a smile for the photograph she made herself look sadder.
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We know that philosophy began as a vast discussion with tragedy, with the theatre, with the impurity of the visible and performing arts. The essential interlocutors of Plato were on the stage, and included in this broader rhetorical visibility are the public stage, the democratic assembly, the performance of the sophists. We should not be surprised today that philosophy is, for an increasing part of its activity, a vast discussion with cinema. Because cinema and its derivatives, including television, represent on a human scale, after Tragedy and Religion, the third historical attempt at the spiritual subjugation of the visible, available to all, without exception or measure. Also present at the meeting, the democratic politicians and their sophist advisors, renamed "public relations consultants." The screen has become their supreme test. The question has changed in destination only. It goes: "if there exists a sovereign technique of semblance, and if this technique, when it is cinema, is also capable of producing a mass art, what torsion, what metamorphosis does this art impose on that by which philosophy supports itself, and which has the name 'truth'"? - Alain Badiou,
Cinema as a Democratic EmblemTrue. I'm not a philosopher, but, as many of these blog posts will confirm, much of my intellectual life has been an engagement with what I've seen at the cinema.
Badiou is supposedly a fan of
The Matrix - just the first one, surely. Zizek often uses 'Welcome to the desert of the real' as a Lacanian catchphrase. I had an immediate problem with that film. Having an engineer's mind I couldn't fathom why the hyper-intelligent machines would choose to use human bodies as an energy source, rather than another less problematic species, pigs for instance, which can, among other benefits, breed more profusely and develop much quicker. And anyway, surely these intelligent entities would have solved the problems of nuclear fission, thereby realising an infinite energy source. Using living meat as batteries is frankly preposterous, as is the notion of generating billions, nay trillions, of lines of computer code for the sole purpose of deceiving human beings. Why not just off the lot of them and have done with it?
No doubt a
Matrixian will offer to enlighten me about these quibbles. I remember seeing a 'making of
The Matrix' documentary, where it was claimed that the Warchovsky brothers were inspired by a close reading of European philosophy, citing Baudrillard, among others. The film was intended to ask searching questions about the nature of reality. Bollocks. Thought experiments can't be constructed on such flawed foundations.
This is why most science fiction on film is little more than overblown space opera, or like
The Matrix an extended shoot 'em up. I can only think two good ones - the original
Solaris, and Tarkovsky's
Stalker. Tell me I'm wrong.
Speaking of pigs. In a recent post I spoke sceptically about the prospective outcome of psychoanalysis. Here's an interesting paper by the Lacanian analyst
Anne Shane that uses the film
Babe to describe the outcome of analysis. This curious film I know really well, having watched it perhaps a dozen times with one of my children. It's superb piece of cinema, not least because of its soundrack, which includes three mice squeaking a beautiful refrain from Saint Saen's Symphony Number Three.
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This is a photograph I took of my daughter. She was sitting on the chair in the corner by herself in protest at my refusal to buy her a snake from the petshop I'd taken her to see earlier.
