On the culture front, fabled film directors Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni dying on the same day was certainly a cold douche for my narcissistic generation of the 1960s. We who revered those great artists, we who sat stunned and spellbound before their masterpieces -- what have we achieved? Aside from Francis Ford Coppola's "Godfather" series, with its deft flashbacks and gritty social realism, is there a single film produced over the past 35 years that is arguably of equal philosophical weight or virtuosity of execution to Bergman's "The Seventh Seal" or "Persona"? Perhaps only George Lucas' multilayered, six-film "Star Wars" epic can genuinely claim classic status, and it descends not from Bergman or Antonioni but from Stanley Kubrick and his pop antecedents in Hollywood science fiction.Or like this:
The waning of art film has been just one of the bitter cultural disappointments that the baby-boom generation has had to endure. Rock music, which exploded in the artistic renaissance of the '60s and '70s, seems to have exhausted its formulas. At the moment, hip-hop and disco-derived dance music enjoy far greater prestige everywhere. It's no coincidence that the geriatric Rolling Stones are still going strong: Their style is grounded in African-American rhythm and blues, which the ultra-virtuoso Keith Richards still spiritually mainlines in hotel rooms on the road.Everywhere she looks she sees death and decline; the art world as a parodic shade of its former self. Because this is the age of the Revision, she is constantly trying to reinvest the past with her own autobiographical mythology. Nothing surpasses her own college years when Antonioni and the Rolling Stones were the gateway to intellectual enlightenment. Nevermind that in the intervening forty years, popular music and popular cinema have each found ways to destroy and reinvent themselves spawning new and emergent art forms: punk rock, hip-hop, independent cinema, digital film-making, and online distribution have all altered the way we relate to both art films and rock music.
Where would we be without The Clash, Public Enemy, Nirvana, Radiohead, and the Arcade Fire?
Where would we be without David Lynch, Pedro Almodóvar, Quintin Tarantino, Steven Soderbergh, or Wes Anderson?
It's not that these things have died, it's that they have so radically changed themselves from her overdetermined sense of what they should be, that she hasn't the intellectual framework to recognize them when they are right in front of her and everywhere. She's not alone in this of course, but her voice is the most persistent and grating.
When I think about my sequence of 1. Emergence, 2. Refinement, 3. Parody and 4. Revision, I find that there is a tension in that final stage, a tension that makes it both explosive and very interesting. In Revision, there are two arrows. One looks only backward, reinvesting the object only with nostalgia and longing for the "Golden Age" of Refinement when the power of the object was its strongest. But this arrow really only points leads to self-parody as we struggle to replicate the past with ever diminishing returns. The more we for truth and authenticity, the kitschier and more deadly laughable the results.
The other arrow points cyclically around the loop to Emergence again. If we can push the boundaries of the original object, reinvest it not with nostalgia but a strong grounding in the hopes and fears of the present day, we have the ability to make something completely new and unexpected. Something that can later be refined and sped along the course of history. It's the people who know how break things and make them more beautiful who should be at the forefront of cultural discussions.
Not these sad old people who can only say the same thing again and again.
