What makes a movie funny

Just found out two of my favorite comedies are by the same director, David O. Russell: Flirting with Distaster and I Heart Huckabees. I need to watch Flirting with Disaster again. I’ve been thinking about my taste in movies after having seen some comedies lately that got great reviews (e.g. Knocked Up, Wedding Crashers) and left me feeling disgusted, sad and angry.
David Denby said something interesting in his review of Huckabees in the New Yorker:

He’s [Russell] not as interested as he used to be in satirizing the way we live now; he’s become too impatient, too exasperated. In some of the tirades about the environment or energy abuse, one hears a profound liberal melancholy—Albert may discover himself, but the battle has been lost, and all the good people are going crazy.

When the End seems near

There was a tornado warning for my area today. This is in the midst of Art Fair, my town’s biggest annual event, during which much of downtown is closed to automobile traffic and taken over by tents selling all kinds of art and decorative objects. As someone who lives here and is trying to get stuff done, I feel a combination of pleasure at the change of scene, and the harnessing of the city’s dormant energy, and irritation at not being able to drive or even walk anywhere near the university without wading through crowds of pleasure seekers.
As I walked from the library through a Fair-filled street to my favorite coffee shop, I had no idea that there was anything going on with the weather. Inside, I overheard someone connected with the fair saying that there was a storm coming and he expected people to start flooding in here. Upstairs, where I always study, it suddenly became too dark to read (at 4:00) without turning on the lights. There was only one other person in the room; we exchanged remarks about the changing sky as he tried to get online to find out about the weather. He wasn’t able to get onto weather.com, but the person with whom he was chatting was (I have no idea why he could do one but not the other), and said there was a tornado warning for our county during the next 20 minutes.

Despite, or perhaps because of, coming from Tornado Alley, I have always hated tornadoes – they bring back childhood memories of crouching in our hall closet under a mattress, desperately wishing we had a basement, while my mother and older brother went about their business. (Their insouciance was probably what made me the most anxious – I felt that they weren’t invested enough in the situation to protect themselves or me if a tornado did come. It’s one thing to trust God in the face of impending catastrophe, another not to heed the signs that there is one!) Outside, the sky seemed to possess a new depth – of several shifting strata moving at different speeds and feeding into each other. The crowds in the street had disappeared in a matter of minutes; all that was left were vendors frantically zipping up their tent-booths and a few stragglers racing for cover. Then two more customers came up, and I overhead one (who looks to be in his late teens) boasting on his cell phone that he had just run through the street yelling “The End is here! The End is here!”

I was filled with anxiety – what if a tornado comes? Will a siren go off? The guy I was talking to said a siren had gone off a while ago, while it was still sunny – I hadn’t heard it. I was trying to decide if that was just a warning siren, if the siren system is different here than in Amarillo, where a siren only goes off if a tornado is actually sighted. I wondered if it was foolish to stay up here on the second floor, in front of the huge street-front windows – should I race to the gigantic university library, while there was still time?

Anyway, the boy that ran through the streets crying doom put his finger on what I was feeling. What if this really is the end – of life as A2 knows it, that is? Obviously, it’s only in very rare cases (e.g. Greensburg, Kansas) that a tornado really can disrupt life as we know it for long – but I was imagining tents and tables and art swirling through the air, crashing through windows, and buildings collapsing. At moments like these (e.g. during violent turbulence on airplanes) I always get the same jig-is-up feeling, of “S—t! What the heck have I been doing!?” I don’t think that Art Fair or being a student or patronizing coffee shops is wrong (obviously activities like these can’t be evaluated in black or white terms), yet when disaster seems ready to strike all of a sudden in the midst of ordinary life, I always feel like I’m about to be judged, to get what’s coming to me, and the ordinary life that I and others have been pursuing all of a sudden seems like vanity.

Happily, my second impulse is always to cry out to God, to repent of any conscious sin and trust the outcome to him. (Otherwise flying would be unbearable.) Still, I’m always amazed at the speed with which my consciousness of judgment, the need to repent, and dependence on God fades, to be replaced by my everyday concern with the mundane things of life. I’m reminded of Luke 17:26-27

- 26 Just as it was in the days of Noah, so will it be in the days of the Son of Man. 27 They were eating and drinking and marrying and being given in marriage, until the day when Noah entered the ark, and the flood came and destroyed them all.

Is it only evangelical protestants that grew up believing in the rapture and impending tribulation that feel like I do in times like these? Is it perhaps not a pre-millennialist response, but one stemming more broadly from the Western obsession with judgment and individual righteousness? Or would anyone raised in the framework of an apocalyptic religion (which includes Christianity, Islam and some strains of Judaism) feel this way? Does a Buddhist feel guilty and shown-up when disaster’s about to strike?

The Zizek bandwagon has a new member

Wow, is there a word to describe a feverish chase from one internet site to another, following the trail of various interesting ideas that branch off into several more, when you have several windows open and only hope you can follow up on all the emails you mean to send/comments to leave/articles to come back to?

If there’s not, there should be. I just had my first one of those that didn’t revolve around Duran Duran or the like. (I still remember my fascinated euphoria when I discovered, about a year and a half ago, courtesy of Wikipedia and Youtube, that the internet has gone way beyond cheesy fan sites in its resources for finding about one’s favorite groups.) It was sparked by reading a post of my friend Ksenya, which she referred to in passing as “obscene in a zizekian way.” That started me looking for a funny website I’d heard about, dedicated to what a rock star Zizek is, not b/c I thought I’d ever be interested in reading him myself, but because she’d enjoy it; looked at my brother’s website to find the proper spelling of this guy’s full name (Slavoj Zizek); saw from that that the guy thinks Marxism and Christianity should march hand in hand, which reminded me of how much I like Terry Eagleton and that he has a new book out called “The Meaning of Life,” in which, though not religious, he argues that it’s “to be found in ‘feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, welcoming to the stranger, and visiting the imprisoned.” Going back to my search for the funny/adulatory Zizek website I clicked on some various articles and interviews, and found that this guy ties together everything I’ve been thinking about lately! Namely, 1. the scourge of contemporary life (I know that’s really vague but won’t flesh it out except to say a) we have too many choices and b) the virtual world is taking over), 2. Islam and the West, and how I feel like I’m fighting a losing struggle against prejudice, and 3. related to my search for a dissertation topic, Ideology! (I didn’t even know till recently that the idea is thought passe, but thankfully he defends its relevance, though I haven’t read far enough to know on what grounds. Can I ever become au courant enough with critical theory to utilize it for my dissertation?)

Anyway, I’m excited about reading more of Zizek, though I’m definitely going to start small, i.e. with newspaper articles, interviews, and encyclopedia articles about him. Here’s a link to the article that made me think he talks about everything I’ve been thinking about lately.

http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/00000002D2C4.htm

I’m especially grateful for what he says about how terrorists “mirror our civilization,” contra Samuel Huntington and his “clash of civilizations” theory (another guy I need to read. To my dad’s credit, he’s the one I first heard about Samuel Huntington from, in the early 90s). Without having read Huntington, I think I’ve basically been buying into that clash of civilizations theory, and have been worried and felt guilty about the state of affairs and my own attitude toward Islam. I’ve been wanting someone to convincingly refute the increasing anger and disgust I feel toward “the Muslim world” (on the one hand, I know that phrase must be reifying something that’s not monolithic, if I’m using those terms correctly; on the other hand, the Muslims I read about in the media really do seem to have an awful lot of bad stuff in common), because it’s at odds with the cultural relativism that I espouse both as an aspiring academic and as a Christian. Well, I think I’ve found someone that might do it! This interview doesn’t go into too much detail – I need to read his own writings – but it’s good to be reminded that Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson’s reaction to 9/11 “was the same as the Arabs’, though he [Falwell] did retract a couple of days later. Falwell said the World Trade Centre bombings were a sign that God no longer protects the USA, because the USA had chosen a path of evil, homosexuality and promiscuity.”
When people throw Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson up to me as an example of how dumb or evil Christianity is, it infuriates me, because to me they are both so far from representative of American Christianity. Coming from Zizek, however, I guess because I know he’s not reflexively hostile to Christianity, I get the point – I did grow up watching the 700 Club, after all (I even thought Pat Robertson was kind of cute). Part of me thinks “most people hate them and think they’re wackos,” but I can’t deny that they did have a lot of influence – they may not be mainstream, but they sure had/have their followers, including people I used to go to church with.
So, it’s good to be reminded that it’s not only residents of East Jerusalem who were filled with self-righteous joy at the twin towers’ falling.
He also says,
“Regarding Islam, we should look at history. In fact, I think it is very interesting in this regard to look at ex-Yugoslavia. Why was Sarajevo and Bosnia the place of violent conflict? Because it was ethnically the most mixed republic of ex-Yugoslavia. Why? Because it was Muslim-dominated, and historically they were definitely the most tolerant. We Slovenes, on the other hand, and the Croats, both Catholics, threw them out several hundred years ago.

This proves that there is nothing inherently intolerant about Islam. We must rather ask why this terrorist aspect of Islam arises now. The tension between tolerance and fundamentalist violence is within a civilisation.”

Interestingly, though, it’s because I believe in cultural relativism that I’ve been bothered at how Islam seems to be the fly in my liberal ointment. Whereas he seems to be saying that cultural relativism (if that is akin to “multiculturalist tolerance,” the phrase he uses) is a form/thing that masks intolerance and prejudice. E.g., he says “Today’s racism is precisely this racism of cultural difference. It no longer says: ‘I am more than you.’ It says: ‘I want my culture, you can have yours.’ Today, every right-winger says just that.” and “The second thing I find wrong with this multiculturalist tolerance is that it is often hypocritical in the sense that the other whom they tolerate is already a reduced other. The other is okay in so far as this other is only a question of food, of culture, of dances. What about clitoridectomy?” He even references the thing got me on the web tonight to begin with! But his next point I don’t understand at all – “An even more important problem is that this notion of tolerance effectively masks its opposite: intolerance. It is a recurring theme in all my books that, from this liberal perspective, the basic perception of another human being is always as something that may in some way hurt you.” Not sure what he’s talking about there (though I clearly do think of Muslims as someone who can hurt me), but he says it’s important.

This is just an interview, which can only touch superficially on various aspects of his thought, and even that I don’t totally understand. But what I take away from the interview right now is that, on the one hand, I should not think of Islam as being a religion of blind, fact-defying interolance. Yea – I don’t want to, despite what seems to be mounting evidence to that effect. (This is probably due to a combination of the media and my own selective filter.). On the other hand, he seems to be saying that this does not mean that things like FGM or suicide bombings are not wrong. I’m not really sure what the answer is, but I’m inspired to find out more about ways that Islam is/has been tolerant, Christianity/the West is/has been intolerant – and to what extent tolerance is a good thing.

Maybe I’ll end up giving up cultural relativism after all, though the solution doesn’t seem to be to add up all the pros and cons of various religions/cultures, and pick a winner. It seems better to say that every culture has good and bad things (as I see them, and I’m certainly not going to give up value judgments) and is rooted in specific historical circumstances.

FGM and a certain religion

I was listening to the BBC tonight and a story came on about FGM (female genital mutilation), which is growing more common in Britain. Normally I would have turned it off immediately because, ever since I read an article about FGM in college and fainted on the spot, it’s not something I like to think about. However, I wasn’t really listening – until they played a tape of a little girl’s screams as/after it was being done. I have never heard anything like those screams. I immediately turned off the radio and cried out to God in thanks that nothing like that has ever happened to me, and in anguish for all the people that have to suffer such abuse – at the behest of their own families!
At which point a thought came into my head for the first time, a thought I am not proud of and would’t stand by, but which was there nevertheless. It was “I hate Is–m.” Immediately googled that statement – about 800 hits. “I hate Judaism” – about 900. “I hate Christianity.” – about 8,000. Interesting.
Anyway, I don’t usually feel hatred for Islam, and know that I need to learn a lot more about it and that it’s not one, monolithic thing. Also, it’s important to remember that FGM predated Islam (according to a WHO website. It’d be interesting to know what percentage of the people that practice it today are not Muslims). But anyway, I came across a couple interesting blogs through that first search. One of them was downright scary. It’s written by a Kurd that lived in Europe for several years and now is back in “Kurdistan” (Iraq), with a post about how much he hates the religion’s effect on his society/country. One of the comments was from a “Fallujah fighter” saying “let us know next time you visit Mosul, because we would love to chop your f–king head off.” Scary! I seriously hope there is no way of finding out who this blogger is. And then a comment that is clearly from an American soldier stationed in Iraq, directed at the “Fallujah fighter,” which was almost as scary and hate-filled.
Lord Jesus, come quickly!

Blogging

Man, one can spend a lot of time reading people’s blogs! I started to say waste, but didn’t, b/c that would be mean, and b/c it’s not a waste in that it’s not without return. My friends are brilliant (reading some of their blogs makes me laugh, think, and envy their facility with words and ideas), thought-provoking, doing worth-while things, and it’s good to hear how they are. Still, I feel like I could spend more time reading blogs than I do actually interacting with people, either face to face or over phone/email. And I suspect that for some, blogging has taken the place of direct, one-on-one contact a lot of the time.
This raises all my old objections to blogging: that it encourages people to spend more time on the computer, interacting with a virtual world world on their own terms and at their own convenience. (I eventually got over these objections, after seeing the quality of many blogs, and decided to start one in the hopes that it would encourage me to think more deeply and productively about things I care about, like Bach and the Christian life, rather than falling into my own time-wasting traps, TV and celebrity gossip. Maybe I’ll even gird my loins and blog about literature and cinema one day.) Which reminds me of a good book that I recently devoured – Revelations of a Single Woman, by Connally Giliam. (It’s not nearly as cheesy as it sounds.) She talks about how trying to maintain relationships in our increasingly fragmented world, especially if you’re single and your friends keep marrying off, is like “attempting to slake one’s relational thirst by sipping from a thousand little waxy Dixie cups. You don’t die of dehydration, but in your core, you increasingly long for a few deep wells (19).”