Mrs. Peel, We're Needed
Aug. 29th, 2003 03:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
malsperanzaAll these years I thought I was a high-culture whore; now I discover that I am really a pop-culture whore. Damn.
I have succumbed to temptation: I bought a DVD drive for my computer. I thought this was a good compromise because it maintains my home as a TV-free zone and also is not exactly the most comfortable way to watch movies. I thought, in my innocence, that this would prevent me from watching DVDs nonstop to the exclusion of all other human interaction for the rest of my life. Hah. The only thing preventing me from disappearing permanently into the Digital Maw is the fact that the drive seems not to like 1 out of 3 discs, and won't read them.
Started out fine. Started out with Ingmar Bergman, Joseph Losey's Don Giovanni, Berlin Alexanderplatz, other iconic works of high culture. Had every intention of watching lots of performance DVDs of Baroque operas--even got some Handel and Vivaldi discs. And yes, they were all splendid.
But then I had one tiny moment of weakness and bought (bought!) the boxed set of the entire run of "The Avengers (The Emma Peel Years)."
And that was that. Have spent the last two weeks painting in my studio (where the computer lives in the "office" half), while watching Diana Rigg in a leather catsuit with zippers, smacking people around and drinking Champagne. I may never emerge from Mod London again. I like it there. They drive amazing cars there, and wear astonishing clothes, and live in rooms that are painted strange candy colors.
As Rilke says, "A wave rolled toward you out of the distant past..."
Favorite moment so far, from 1967: Steed and Emma rescue a famous economist whose Utopian plan to unify the currencies of Europe "will bring a permanent end to poverty and debt." Aww, isn't that endearing?
The past is a very Futurist place.
I think we have nearly forgotten what pure style is. This show was too implausible to be action-adventure series; nor was it exactly a comedy; it was all about the style: the seamless, synchronized style of the sixties in the last days before all hell broke loose. It's about one relationship--never explicated, never resolved, the best extended example of UST I have ever seen on screen. It's about the rhythm and look of the world, not its substance. And it is wonderful.
We forget, sometimes, that good art (and I don't use the term lightly) can be a matter of favoring style over substance, rather than the other way round. High Style and Wit.
Style without substance always risks being shallow, but when it evades that pitfall, it is unbeatable. Yep
The One Spoon
Someone sent me to this website today:
Pretentious Blither
and I laughed and laughed when I got to the bit about Plato's Cave and the Spoon Itself.
Now there's a movie that relies on high style without substance and falls flat on its bloodysilly face.
Yay: long weekend ahead; much painting in store, also laundry; also, maybe, some work on the Opus Allegro (aiming for high style and wit, yes; poor X). That is, if I can bear to turn off the DVD long enough to open my wordperfect files. On the other hand, there is the boxed set of the complete run of "The Prisoner," which I also bought. My bad.
I have succumbed to temptation: I bought a DVD drive for my computer. I thought this was a good compromise because it maintains my home as a TV-free zone and also is not exactly the most comfortable way to watch movies. I thought, in my innocence, that this would prevent me from watching DVDs nonstop to the exclusion of all other human interaction for the rest of my life. Hah. The only thing preventing me from disappearing permanently into the Digital Maw is the fact that the drive seems not to like 1 out of 3 discs, and won't read them.
Started out fine. Started out with Ingmar Bergman, Joseph Losey's Don Giovanni, Berlin Alexanderplatz, other iconic works of high culture. Had every intention of watching lots of performance DVDs of Baroque operas--even got some Handel and Vivaldi discs. And yes, they were all splendid.
But then I had one tiny moment of weakness and bought (bought!) the boxed set of the entire run of "The Avengers (The Emma Peel Years)."
And that was that. Have spent the last two weeks painting in my studio (where the computer lives in the "office" half), while watching Diana Rigg in a leather catsuit with zippers, smacking people around and drinking Champagne. I may never emerge from Mod London again. I like it there. They drive amazing cars there, and wear astonishing clothes, and live in rooms that are painted strange candy colors.
As Rilke says, "A wave rolled toward you out of the distant past..."
Favorite moment so far, from 1967: Steed and Emma rescue a famous economist whose Utopian plan to unify the currencies of Europe "will bring a permanent end to poverty and debt." Aww, isn't that endearing?
The past is a very Futurist place.
I think we have nearly forgotten what pure style is. This show was too implausible to be action-adventure series; nor was it exactly a comedy; it was all about the style: the seamless, synchronized style of the sixties in the last days before all hell broke loose. It's about one relationship--never explicated, never resolved, the best extended example of UST I have ever seen on screen. It's about the rhythm and look of the world, not its substance. And it is wonderful.
We forget, sometimes, that good art (and I don't use the term lightly) can be a matter of favoring style over substance, rather than the other way round. High Style and Wit.
Style without substance always risks being shallow, but when it evades that pitfall, it is unbeatable. Yep
The One Spoon
Someone sent me to this website today:
Pretentious Blither
and I laughed and laughed when I got to the bit about Plato's Cave and the Spoon Itself.
Now there's a movie that relies on high style without substance and falls flat on its bloodysilly face.
Yay: long weekend ahead; much painting in store, also laundry; also, maybe, some work on the Opus Allegro (aiming for high style and wit, yes; poor X). That is, if I can bear to turn off the DVD long enough to open my wordperfect files. On the other hand, there is the boxed set of the complete run of "The Prisoner," which I also bought. My bad.
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no subject
Date: 2003-08-29 07:29 pm (UTC)However, I do prefer super posh! cultural-snob! you. You're fabulous dahling. :*
no subject
Date: 2003-08-29 08:26 pm (UTC)With regard to your observations about style over substance, I'm thinking about a movie reviewer like the late Pauline Kael, who loved individual movies for being what they properly should be, loved some trash that was unabashedly well-done trash. An epiphany for me here was her praise for a movie called Reanimator, a knockoff 80's movie that I loved that was based on an H.P. Lovecraft story about juice that turned dead people into pissed-off zombies. I remember it had an utterly unjustifiable and irresistible conclusion set in a morgue. Would one call that style exactly? What would you call enthusiastic, uninhibited over-the-topness?
The high-low thing is so wearying because I think we all catch ourselves using it for reassurance of one kind or another, and then veer in the opposite direction from shame! I prefer good art and good dreck to bad art and bad dreck, that's all I can say. And the credentialing of art . . . if you ever catch me feeling drunk and pretentious I will defend the thesis that Greek and Roman New Comedy is done in the exact same spirit as the Brady Bunch Movie. Anyway, on this spectrum, it's hard to know where to put the Matrix because the attempt at philosophy makes me gag but damn, it's a fun story with good action.
Do I have a point? No I guess not, just in a mood to babble. But I loved your post.
no subject
Date: 2003-08-29 09:24 pm (UTC)I think in some cases style=substance because the style speaks for itself--The Avengers being a great example. It's like...I love David Lynch and I remember some people claimed Twin Peaks was all style. To me, though, it was always so obvious when DL himself was directing because his style was substance while with other directors it really did often feel like they were just doing weird things for no reason. Good David Lynch is like being inside somebody's dream and I think dreams are often more style than substance too. But the style is everything!
I've been thinking I need to watch The Prisoner ever since The Simpsons did that take-off on it. :-)
no subject
Date: 2003-08-29 11:15 pm (UTC)Be Seeing You...
Date: 2003-08-30 03:30 pm (UTC)The rigid formula does get tiresomely visible if one watches several episodes at once--but that's probably inherent in how most TV series are made. The other fascinating thing about "The Prisoner" is its blend of 1950s Cold War paranoia and the 1960s reinterpretation of it (We Have Seen the Enemy and He Is Us), all done up in pink Surrealist ribbons, and with a lot of black humor.
It is, after all, the era that invented Pop in the first place.
I recommend The Avengers," but only the 3 years that had Diana Rigg in them. The rest of the series, before and after, was dreadful.
PS
Date: 2003-08-30 03:56 pm (UTC)Meant to add: LOL!
Not that I've seen that movie, but isn't that true of most comedy? It all comes from Commedia dell'arte, which in turn comes from the Romans, no? Makes sense to me.
no subject
Date: 2003-09-03 03:42 pm (UTC)The Prisoner was something else. Patrick McGoohan was drop-dead gorgeous when he was really young. Before the Prisoner he was in a series called Danger Man, and that has REALLY dated badly. I remember going up to London and finding the house that was the Prisoner's London home and getting my picture taken amidst the milk bottles still on the step. Remember seeing a documentary long years afterwards where they explained that they just didn't know how to end the series in the end. They were just making it up as they went along, which was why it got so weird, even for the sixties.
"I am not a number, I am a FREE MAN"