Tarkovsky's Asshole

Anonymous asked: Do you think Ingmar Bergman's Persona was pretentious? And what do you think of David Lynch's "Mulholland Drive"? Perhaps it isn't fair to compare the two, but somehow I can't help it. How do you feel about it? I don't have an account here. But I am on Facebook. I am Ismael.

Ah, pretentious. Perhaps my least favorite adjective to use when it comes to describing art, yet one of the most frequently thrown around. Not that I’m not guilty of this myself; after all, the very idea of pretension (of something affecting an air of intelligence that it actually lacks), is one of the easiest to latch on to when discussing art, especially “high” art. Still, while I’d hate to turn this into a conversation on semantics, I think it’s important to lay done how exactly I use “pretentious” when discussing film.

To start with, it’s important to note one of the greater debates that’s haunted film since its inception: that of competency versus ambition. Film is an extremely commercial art, perhaps the most commercial one there is, one that, due to the huge budgets it often requires, often demands a knowledge of and (depending on who you ask) a certain amount of curtailing to one’s audience. Thus, the question becomes what is greater: the film which does what it does (whether that be straight drama, a form of genre, art cinema, etc) well, or the film that tries to bend the boundaries of the medium itself, the “ambitious” film? Ideally you’d have both, but since this often cannot be the case, I’d personally have to say the latter, while I believe most people would say the former (not to knock genre cinema, but I believe this interest in competency is why genre films tend to be so popular: a well-done genre film allows the viewer to feel both comfortable in a set of boundaries they’re familiar with [hence, genre], and satisfied that they get to see great craftsmen do their work, a trait that is often confused for “artistic”). Thus, the usual usage of pretentious, coming from the perspective that competency is better than ambition, is often used to knock works which try something unusual and either do not succeed or succeed in an unfamiliar way which does not line up with how the viewer thinks the cinema should “work,” so to speak. When I use the term, however, I usually tend to use it to describe perfectly average films which try nothing new yet put on the air of being films of great intelligence, or of espousing some great idea. For example, “The Cabin in the Woods” is a perfectly fine film, but it’s entire structure is built on the idea that horror films have archetypes, and that audiences like that. This is completely true, but it doesn’t take a great thinker to come up with that idea, and yet the film is being treated in some corners as if it’s a great deconstruction of the horror genre. Yet, in reality, it’s sort of just pointing out that there is a thing in horror movies that you could deconstruct, if you wanted to. Hence, to me, pretentious. (For another, even more pertinent example, “American Beauty” is, to my mind, possibly the most pretentious film ever made, probably for reasons I don’t have to actually go into, considering how much that film gets ripped into. It’s a perfectly decent piece of craftsmenship, but the ideas at its center are rotten to the core).

Thus, my answer to your first question is no, I do not think “Persona” is pretentious. Yes, it’s a little odd, and it breaks down barriers in film’s visual language which are usually in place for perfectly legitimate reasons, but as a piece to think about it works wonderfully, and, because I believe Bergman was deliberately shunning any one individual meaning with that film, it’s difficult for me to find any one idea to label “pretentious.” The same goes for “Mulholland Drive,” although I think the meaning there is a little clearer, it still appears to me to be a film that deliberately shuns the form such a tragic picture should take, and thus works both as the tragedy it intends to be, and as a weaving of the protagonists inner life as imagined (the “dream” state Lynch is so often accused of plumbing) and as felt, with these two states each occupying roughly one half of the film’s structure. How the events of the film actually happened matters very little, and I think Lynch does a spectacular job of allowing the emotions and implications of the situation to linger without wasting time on specifics of the situation itself, something of an enormous feat in and of itself. It’s been some time since I last saw “Persona,” so I can’t offer up quite as specific an opinion, except that, where Lynch’s film is intensely intimate, I believe Persona is the opposite, one of the hundreds of films where the act of watching it is the most important thing about it, yet one of the few that manages to incorporate this seamlessly into the work itself, perhaps because the work has so many seams. It’s a film of holes, one that takes those holes and uses them to deliberately question itself, to question us. It’s also a fantastic mood piece, and I’ve forgiven much lesser films their flaws for an abundance of moodiness. So, no, not pretentious, but I would certainly hear arguments to the contrary.