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ual it looks like a ritual because of its primitivism and it is endowed by justine s performative fiat with magical protective properties this ritual unlike the one claire proposed was clearly designed with the child in mind it was meant to include and to comfort him it also feels more authentic than either the wedding was or the glass of wine would be because it was tailored to this specific purpose a unique ritual for an unrepeatable event j l austin of course has argued that it is precisely the fact of their historical repetition that gives utterances such as with this ring i thee wed their power to make things true in the world but since at least wordsworth we ve expected powerful feeling to take the form of spontaneous overflows which seem difficult to square with the iterative nature of most rituals this is the kind of inauthenticity that the first half of melancholia deals with justine s desire to feel authentically leads her to wander out on the golf course in the dark instead of staying at her wedding reception and cutting the cake but the second half of the film presents a more durkheimian view of ritual as something that permits structures contains and maybe even produces powerful feelings one of the answers i expect my imaginary poetry and film students might give if i asked them what else does the planet stand for is justine s wedding at first the prevailing opinion of melancholia is that it will pass by the earth at an incredibly close distance and provide an exciting but safe astronomical spectacle it seems itself like a rite of passage humanity will have its brush with death but will emerge unharmed it is eagerly anticipated by claire s husband and son and presumably by many other people around the world but like justine s wedding what was supposed to be a transformative close encounter turns slowly and agonizingly into a catastrophic collision it s the very externality of the end of the world that makes the second half of the film feel less awful than the first half unlike justine s depression the planet melancholia is a real observable physical object that everybody eventually agrees is a huge bummer rituals to greet it therefore stand on far less ambiguous emotional ground than justine s wedding did both claire s proposed glass of wine and justine s teepee have specific situational goals and reflect specific attitudes toward the end of the world claire proposes a classic bourgeois down with the ship attitude akin to the orchestra on the titanic while what justine offers is something both more imaginative and more sacred but i don t think the film comes solidly down on the side of either formal ritual like the wedding or spontaneous personal ritual like the teepee the wedding scenes are utterly gorgeous and i think ultimately von trier presents the wedding not as a straitjacket from which justine needs to escape but as an ambitious failed project both this glamorous complicated event and the very idea of marital bliss are enormously difficult feats for a person with severe depression what is easy for such a person is of course the end of the world it seems like something justine has been expecting the planet stands for both depression and ritual then among other things and von trier asks us to consider the disconnect between situation and emotion in both cases if ritual is supposed to structure and produce powerful feelings it certainly presents problems for people whose feelings don t function in the usual way impossible loves essays december 12 2011 at 1 35 pm posted in personal 2 comments i am delighted to announce the publication of impossible loves essays when my friends heather and steve started up rock paper tiger press last year they proposed that their first book be a collection of essays from this blog and i was thrilled and honored the essays have been edited polished and a little de blog ized for publication and i hope you ll like them here s the copy from the back cover to read mcnellis s essays is to find yourself having one of those late night conversations you always thought awaited you those conversations where for two hours before dawn everything made complete sense she s good very good on ideas and thinkers excellent on poets and she s miraculous on love there is a real discursive ease of thinking in the essays a desire to communicate the difficult joys of being human and the reader can only hope to reciprocate dr timothy c baker ph d author of george mackay brown and the philosophy of community possible loves are for fools the wise have impossible loves reads a journal fragment from christian mystic simone weil whose life and works are examined here amid a seemingly unlikely assortment of topics an argument for maintaining a reverence for commitment while rejecting a traditional sentimental embrace of outmoded family structures becomes an inquiry into weil s drive toward self sacrifice a consideration of what weil might have had in common with libertine and frequent critic georges bataille develops into a discussion of timothy treadwell the tragic grizzly bear enamored subject of werner herzog s grizzly man later delving into the tradition of reticence in american poetry is brought into relief against the author s own experience at burning man where the beat never stops like a long discussion with a sharply intelligent friend impossible loves moves effortlessly from topic to topic without ever losing its focus nearly every paper in my academic career has the secret or not so secret message of please please try to love one another and i think it would not be exaggerating to say that many if not most works of art have exactly this message as well mcnellis writes admitting in the same essay that emotions are embarrassing embarrassing complex even impossible though it may be love is still the answer but that doesn t make the questions any less interesting you can get the book from amazon or you can order it through your local bookstore for those of you keeping track i have now finished my ph d in english and am about to stumble across the finish line of my first semester of adjuncting but i will have a nice long six week winter break during which i hope to bring you a slew of new posts on the occupy movement and on what i ve been reading cheers on violence and dreaming november 20 2011 at 7 20 pm posted in ethics excess film political violence 2 comments the spectacle of police officers at uc davis pepper spraying peaceful seated students last week has rightly caused an outraged uproar both within and outside the occupy movement bob ostertag a davis professor has pointed out that even in prison riots prison guards are forbidden to use pepper spray on seated prisoners because they are not considered to be an imminent threat and that when prison guards plan to use pepper spray they are required to have medical personnel on the scene to treat the victims today as a means of welcoming this blog back to the land of the living after my year long bout with finishing my dissertation i plan to investigate the significance of the davis police s actions in my customarily roundabout way last night i watched chris marker s la jetée a 1962 short french dystopian film about time travel and terry gilliam s 12 monkeys a 1995 film inspired by la jetée that as you probably recall stars bruce willis and brad pitt both films take place in a dystopian future where humanity has been forced to live underground due to the ruination of the earth s surface in la jetée the cause is nuclear war and in 12 monkeys it s a viral epidemic in both films the protagonist is forcefully volunteered by the draconian government of the survivors and is made to participate in time travel experiments designed to help humanity out of its desperate situation in la jetée the protagonist is sent back in time on a series of short visits where he befriends a woman seemingly tolerant of his tendency to literally appear and disappear unpredictably these visits to the past are eventually revealed to be mere rehearsals for the real work at hand once the protagonist has proven that he is mentally stable enough to handle time travel he is sent to the distant future to beg help from the more technologically advanced society that he finds there these future people equip him with technology to save his people but instead of being hailed as a hero the protagonist is sentenced to death by his draconian government now that he has served his purpose the people from the future offer to help him escape to their time permanently but he asks instead to be sent back to the past to live out his days with the woman he met there the people from the future do this for him but he is pursued by an agent from the draconian government of the present who guns him down as soon as he gets back to the past i am concealing the biggest plot twist from you out of the goodness of my heart 12 monkeys being a feature length studio film from the 1990s rather than a short auteur film from the 1960s makes many changes and complicates the plot immensely but the change that bothered me the most is that the circumstances of the hero s death are entirely different bruce willis is killed not in the midst of trying to build a life with the woman he loves but in the midst of trying to save the world from the very government for whom he has been forced to work he discovers that the plague which wiped out the world was aided and abetted by the draconian government that sent him back in time in the first place and is shot by agents of that government while trying to stop the man who will spread the disease what bothered me so much about this change is that it actually takes the teeth out of the original film s criticism of the power of the state it is not very difficult to imagine a corrupt government trying to protect itself by executing people who are actively trying to bring it down but what makes the ending of la jetée so shocking is that the protagonist is not trying to bring down the government at all all he wants is to be left alone and allowed to pursue his own happiness the state evidently views these desires themselves as a threat since they are in excess of its instrumental plans for this citizen viewing these films now in what some are calling the american autumn as a corollary to this year s arab spring i can t help but notice the parallels to the occupy movement and the power of the state that has recently been flexed in order to quash it the powers that be wish they were fighting bruce willis an enemy trying actively to bring them down if they were they d have a much stronger case about the need to use force against the protestors but in fact the protestors are much more like the nameless protagonist of la jetée the occupy movement s continued refusal to produce concrete demands has made it clear that for now at least what the movement is about is the occupations themselves members of the movement talk enthusiastically about the communities built at the occupation sites they have libraries social services first aid and many other communal resources many people who have been living at the occupations report that the occupy movement is one of the first communities in which they ve truly felt at home what they want in other words is to be left alone and allowed to pursue their own happiness this is not however an insular or apolitical demand as the fascist government in la jetée realized and as our own government may also be realizing unlike the communes of the 1960s which were generally set up out in the wilderness away from population centers the occupations are in our town squares and parks in our faces every day as matt taibbi recently explained in rolling stone the movement at its heart is about going on strike from one s own culture this is a visceral impassioned deep seated rejection of the entire direction of our society a refusal to take even one more step forward into the shallow commercial abyss of phoniness short term calculation withered idealism and intellectual bankruptcy that american mass society has become this idea is ultimately much more radical than a list of concrete demands such as increase regulation on the banks and remove money from politics could ever encompass the occupy movement points to the fact that daring to dream of a better and more free life than the one offered by the current economico political regime is a deep and dangerous threat to the powers that prop up that regime this is why the government in la jetée had to kill the protagonist of that film and it s why the police in zucotti park oakland seattle and uc davis feel authorized to use viciously violent force on peaceful protestors our challenge then is to continue to dream both because and in spite of the opposition next page follow me dr_mcnellis write me uncomplicatedly at gmail dot com read me read me recent posts vanishing and un vanishing from the monastery to the marriott vanishing point don 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