Thread for mundane ironists

[iambiguous]

In The Loop

Toby: Suzy, this is probably going to sound a bit odd under the circumstances, but…
Suzy: A quickie?

Meanwhile, back in Baghdad…

Gen. Miller: No, you’re doing Linton’s dirty work. You’re his English bitch and you don’t even know it. I bet if I went into your hotel room tonight, I’d see you on all fours, little fishnets on, him hanging onto the back of you.
Malcolm: Oh, that’s nice, that’s nice. That’s tough talk coming from a fucking armchair general. Why don’t you put your feet up on a poof and go back to sleep?
Gen. Miller: Tucker, you might be a scary little poodle fucker, back there in London, but here you’re nothing. You know what you look like? A squeezed dick. You’ve got a little blue vein running up the side of your head. See, that’s where I’d put the bullet. But I’d have to stand back, cos you look like you’d be a squirter.

Meanwhile, back in Kabul…

Malcolm: We have got the fucking intelligence.
Simon: I haven’t seen it.
Malcolm: The intelligence we’ve got is so deep, so fucking hard, it’ll fucking puncture your kidneys.
Simon: Where’s it coming from?
Malcolm: There is an informant. Ice Man.
Simon: Ice Man?
Malcolm: I don’t name them. Ice Man. Yeah. And the fact is, the stuff that he’s given us is… I’ve seen it. It would make your blood run cold and clot and turn your insides into fucking black puddings.

For those of you who might have forgotten, that’s “Curveball”.

Malcolm: Right. Was it you?
Simon: No, it wasn’t. No. What?
Malcolm: You do know what I’m talking about, don’t you?
Simon: No. And…And…whatever it was, I almost certainly didn’t do it.
Malcolm: Was it you, the baby from Eraserhead?
Toby: No, no.
Malcolm: Then it must have been you, the woman from The Crying Game.
Judy: It wasn’t me.

Was it you?

Gen. Miller: So you’re not resigning?
Karen: Are you still playing the hawk?
Simon: Well, in…in a way I’m playing a much cleverer game than that. I’m a fake hawk.
Gen. Miller: [pause] A what?
Simon Foster: …Fake hawk?
Gen. Miller: [pause] You’re an idiot. Or are you being a fake idiot?

The best and the brightest!

Gen. Miller: So you’re not resigning?
Karen: Are you still playing the hawk?
Simon: Well, in…in a way I’m playing a much cleverer game than that. I’m a fake hawk.
Gen. Miller: [pause] A what?
Simon Foster: …Fake hawk?

The best and the brightest!

Gen. Miller: My loyalty is to the kids. I am a soldier.
Karen: You’re not a soldier.
Gen. Miller: I’ve been a soldier my whole life! What do you mean I’m not a soldier? I’m a soldier! Look at the uniform - what, do you think I’m one of the fucking Village People?
Karen: When did you shoot a guy last?
Gen. Miller: What, just because I haven’t shot someone in fifteen years. I’m not a soldier? You know, the Army doesn’t make you drag some bullet-ridden bloody corpse into the Pentagon every five years to renew your soldier’s license!
Karen: The war is unnecessary! And if you were a good general, you’d have some balls!
Gen. Miller: Look, shut up about my balls. My balls have been around. You’ve got no idea where my balls have been.
Karen: I can talk about your balls all you want, cos I remember when…
Gen. Miller: Oh, I fucked you once 20 years ago, and I never hear the end of it! Every time we’re together, I hear this shit. I don’t even remember it!
Karen: Come on, Chad. We have to draft resignation announcements.
Chad: Actually, I think I might stay with the General, if that’s OK. If he’s staying, I might stay with him, see what assistance I can furnish.
Karen: OK…General Shrek and his faithful, talking donkey.

Uh, touche?
Uh, both sides?

[iambiguous]

A bunch a fuckin losers? Sure. Nickel and dime stuff day after day after day. But you still practice not saying it to their face. If you’re in the neighborhood.

And they ain’t exactly living their lives like zombies. This being, you know, a man’s world.

Still, sometimes I think folks like Scorsese and Tarantino make films like this so they can use the N word. He said in jest.

Supposedly the film is based on actual experiences in Scorsese’s life. Well, it’s up to you to figure how true that is.

98% fresh rating at RT. One critic out of 48 didn’t like it. “Doesn’t cut it for me, I’m afraid”, said Luke Thompson of New Times. Sometimes I feel that way too. But sometimes I don’t.

Mean Streets

Scorsese [voiceover]: You don’t make up for your sins in church. You do it in the streets. You do it at home. The rest is bullshit and you know it.

Well, we do now.

Charlie [voiceover]: Okay, I just come out of confession, right? Right. And the priest gives me the usual penance: Ten “Hail Marys”, ten “Our Fathers”, ten whatever. Next week, I’ll come back and he’ll give me another ten “Hail Marys” and… …another ten “Our Fathers” and… I mean, you know how I feel about that shit. Those things, they don’t mean anything to me. They’re just words. Now, that may be okay for the others, but it just doesn’t work for me. I mean, if I do somethin’ wrong, I just want to pay for it my way. So, I do my own penance for my own sins. It’s all bullshit except the pain. The pain of hell. The burn from a lighted match increased a million times. Infinite. Now, ya don’t fuck around with the infinite. There’s no way you do that. The pain in hell has two sides. The kind you can touch with your hand; the kind you can feel in your heart…your soul, the spiritual side. And ya know…the worst of the two is the spiritual.

Finally, the Mob and the Lord explained.

Charlie [voiceover]: You know something? She is really good-lookin’. I gotta say that again. She is really good-lookin’. But she’s black. You can see that real plain, right? Look, there isn’t much of a difference anyway, is there. Well, is there?

Well, is there?

Joey: We’re not payin’ because this guy…this guy’s a fuckin’ mook.
Jimmy: But I didn’t say nothin’.
Joey: And we don’t pay mooks.
Jimmy: A mook? I’m a mook?
Joey: Yeah.
Jimmy: What’s a mook?
Johnny Boy: What’s a mook?
Charlie: I don’t know.
Jimmy: What’s a mook? You can’t call me a mook.
Joey: I can’t?
Jimmy: No!
Joey [punching him in the face]: I’ll give you mook!
[All hell breaks loose]

Hey, this ain’t exactly the Godfather here.

Teresa: You help yourself first.
Charlie: Bullshit, Teresa. That’s where you’re all wrong! Francis of Assisi had it all down. He knew.
Terresa: What are you talkin’ about?
Charlie: He knew.
Teresa: What are you talkin’ about? Saint Francis didn’t run numbers.

As far as we know?

Michael [showing a picture of his new girlfriend]: You think she’s good-looking? She’s smart, too. She’s gonna be a teacher.
Tony: Let me see that. Oh, I know this girl.
Michael: Yeah?
Tony: Yeah…I saw her kissing a n***** under a bridge.
Michael: What? What do you mean?
Tony: A n*****. As in black. A n*****.
Michael: But what do you mean?
Tony: [rolls his eyes] I mean…kissing. Her lips on his lips. Kissing.
Michael: [worried] I kissed her.

Take this to wherever your brains compel you to.

Charlie: I swear to God, if you open your mouth about any of this…
Johnny Boy: About what?
Charlie: You know what I’m talkin’ about.
Johnny Boy: About what? You two? Who cares? I won’t even say nothin’ to my aunt and uncle. The guys don’t give a shit. What do they care? I won’t even say nothin’ to your uncle, Giovanni. I wanted to ask you somethin’, Charlie. I always wondered about her. This is the God’s honest truth. I always wondered about what happens when she comes. She get a fit?

She’ll lose control again.

Johnny Boy: You too good for this ten dollars? It’s a good ten dollars. You know Michael, you make me laugh. You see, I borrow money all over this neighborhood, left and right from everybody, I never pay them back. So, I can’t borrow no money from nobody no more, right? So who would that leave me to borrow money from but you? I borrow money from you, because you’re the only jerk-off around here who I can borrow money from without payin’ back, right? You know, 'cause that’s what you are, that’s what I think of you: a jerk-off. You’re a fucking jerk-off! You’re laughing 'cause you’re a jerk-off. I’ll tell 'ya something else,
[lights ten dollar bill on fire]
Johnny Boy: I fuck you right where you breath, because I don’t give two shits about you or nobody else.
[Michael jumps at Johnny Boy and they both fight but Charlie breaks them up, Johnny Boy pulls out a gun]
Johnny Boy: Come on… Come on… fuck face! Come on… ‘ya motherfucker! Motherfucker!.. come on! I got somethin’ for 'ya asshole!
Michael: You don’t- you don’t have the guts to use that.
Johnny Boy: Oh, I don’t have the guts, huh? Come over here, I’ll shove this up yer ass! Come on!
[Michael leaves]
Johnny Boy: Hey asshole, this is for you asshole! He’s a fucking asshole!

Now’s the time.

[iambiguous]

The orgies are the least of it. Most of it revolves around some rather pithy [and witty] observations regarding human sexuality. Anything goes all the way around here.

It’s really about the holes in our head we can’t fill…by, for example, becoming preoccupied with filling all the other ones.

It’s over the top at times – like going back to the days of the hippies – but how many films like this are there from which to draw comparisons.

Shortbus

Jesse: Are you a top or a bottom?
Severin: I beg your pardon?
Jesse: I mean in real life.
Severin: This is real life.
Jesse: Let me put it this way: do you think we should get out of Iraq?

Not many in the middle there.

Jesse: Can you describe your last orgasm?
Severin: It was great. It was like time had stopped and I was completely alone.
Jesse: Were you sad afterwards?
Severin: Yeah.
Jesse: Why?
Severin: 'Cause time hadn’t stopped and I wasn’t alone.

Let’s get back to them.

Jesse: If you could have any super power what would it be?
Severin: The power to make you interesting.

Let’s get back to them.

Jamie [to Sofia, the “couples counselor”]: Come on, give me a breakthrough, you gave him a breakthrough!
Sofia: You don’t just dole out the breakthroughs!
Jamie: Sure you can. Really, give yourself a breakthrough.
Sofia: I don’t need a breakthrough!
Jamie: We all need breakthroughs!
Sofia: Sit down! Sit down!
[She slaps him]
Sofia: I am so sorry…I’m not going to charge you.

He tried to imagine a breakthrough here…

Justin [to Sofia]: These bitches sucking cock and eating ass…then they show up at the buffet and say they’re vegan.

Tee-hee?

Bitch [to Sofia]: So you’re a sex therapist and you’ve never had an orgasm?

Uh, sure, why not?

[iambiguous]

Logic

“Yeah, all right, but everyone knows they torture people," mumbled Sam.
“Do they?” said Vimes. “Then why doesn’t anyone do anything about it?”
"'cos they torture people.” Terry Pratchett

“Or else!” on steroids?

“It is obvious that leftists are not cool-headed logicians systematically analyzing the foundations of knowledge. They are deeply involved emotionally in their attack on truth and reality.” Theodore Kaczynski

Next up: the logic of what he did.

“It’s a fool that looks for logic in the chambers of the human heart.” Joel Coen

Or, for some, it’s a fool who doesn’t.

“Logic is immaturity weaving its nets of gossamer wherewith it aims to catch the behemoth of knowledge. Logic is a crutch for the cripple, but a burden for the swift of foot and a greater burden still for the wise.” Mikhail Naimy

He left out a context, but point taken.

“You say that I’m nobody, and you agree that nobody’s perfect.
Based on logic, I’m a perfect person according to your opinion.” Toba Beta

See what I mean?

“How can we satisfy ourselves without going on in infinitum? And, after all, what satisfaction is there in that infinite progression? Let us remember the story of the Indian philosopher and his elephant. It was never more applicable than to the present subject. If the material world rests upon a similar ideal world, this ideal world must rest upon some other; and so on, without end. It were better, therefore, never to look beyond the present material world.” David Hume

And so on.

[iambiguous]

Shortbus

Jamie: Ah! You got a boner!
Shabbos Goy: That’s my cell phone, you fuckin’ albino butch faggot!

Leave me out of it.

Jamie: Was that the first time someone sang the National Anthem into your ass?
Ceth: No.

Next up: the gerbil.

Sofia [to Severin]: You are so far behind you think you are first.

Behind what, you might ask.

Severin [to Sofia]: Look I know I can help you have an orgasm, and maybe you can help me to, like, have a real human interaction with someone.

Fair is fair.

Justin [looking at the clients of the Shortbus, having group sex]: It’s just like the 60’s. Only with less hope.

A hell of a lot less hope.

Justin [looking at the orgy]: Oh my God, for a minute there I thought that man didn’t have an arm.

Let’s not go there, okay?

Justin: As my dear departed friend Lotus Weinstock used to say: “I used to wanna change the world. Now I just wanna leave the room with a little dignity.”

Same here?

[iambiguous]

Epistemology

“We don’t get to say. Not if we want to save ourselves. We can’t question everything. We have to be able to give the help that is asked for. Not what we think is needed. What is asked for. We justify ourselves with a thousand small acts of grace and charity. It’s all meaningless. We want to be liked. To be liked. (He is staring out at the sea. He lifts one hand and lets it fall again) God. It goes beyond lacking all conviction. At the very core of despair is the conviction that convictions do not exist. That their reality exists solely in the claims of criminals and lunatics. I was on the beach last night and there was a bright light out to sea. I don’t know what it was. A flare. Something. And I thought: What would happen if chaos should come? Would we be worse off? What if this were the sun misrisen at midnight. What if all order were suddenly in abeyance, the skies given over to the access of sudden random moons, everything mindless and migratory. So that all we knew was to be set aside and we found ourselves dwelling in a silent pandemonium. Would we be worse off? Would we be more damned under the transit of constellations unknown to us? What if we suddenly knew nothing? Nothing at all?” Cormac McCarthy[/b]

Yeah, what about all that?

“The highest rational achievement of the finest intellects consists in grasping that certain matters lie beyond their powers to grasp.”Stendhal

See, I told you!

“Philosophy is the art of making distinctions.” Robert Sokolowski

Define art?

“Despite how certainty feels, it is neither a conscious choice nor even a thought process. Certainty and similar states of “knowing what we know” arise out of involuntary brain mechanisms that, like love or anger, function independently of reason.” Dr. Robert A. Burton

Unless, of course, he’s compelled to be wrong here.

“What is the proof that I know something? Most certainly not my saying I know it.” Ludwig Wittgenstein

Let alone you saying that you know that.

“When we turn the Bible into an adjective and stick it in front of another loaded work (like manhood, womanhood, politics, economics, marriage, and even equality), we tend to ignore or downplay the parts of the Bible that don’t fit our tastes. In an attempt to simplify, we try to force the Bible’s cacophony of voices into a single tone, to turn a complicated and at times troubling holy text into a list of bullet points we can put in a manifesto or creed. More often than not, we end up more committed to what we want the Bible to say than what it actually says.” Rachel Held Evans

Next up: your manifesto?

[iambiguous]

Anarchists imagine a world without government. It would look like this I suspect. The jungle. And, in some parts of the world, even with governments, it looks like this.

What do you do to fight these monsters? It comes down to what you can do. And then what you have the courage to do. You are incensed at what they do to these young girls but if you go after them they come after you. And these are vicious, cold-blooded sociopaths. Way beyond reasoning with. But hardly stupid. Thugs and gangsters who live outside the law like breathing in and out.

And maybe the authorities [here it’s London] can protect you but maybe they cannot.

So there it is: outrage and fear:

Anna: She was 14! She was 14 when he raped her. You bastards murdered her.
Nikolai: Anger is very dangerous. Makes people do stupid things. Please, forget any of this ever happened. You’re in very wrong place. You belong in there with nice people. Stay away from people like me.

I can just see the moral objectivists in here holding their own in a debate with them.

Of course, you can be defiant as hell when it’s all scripted.

Nikolai’s tattoos:

Three Cupolas (Towers) on back: Three terms in prison;
Virgin Mary with Child on abdomen: I am true to my friends / My conscience is clear (could also mean “prison is my home”);
Raven on shoulder: Death, I am not yours;
Starburst on finger: I became a criminal because of poverty and a broken home;
Cross on finger: I was in the Crosses (a prison in St. Petersburg);
Black-and-white diamond on finger: I deny official authority / I disobeyed rules while in prison;
Grim Reaper on abdomen: Death is always waiting for me;
Sun and sea with Cyrillic meaning “NORTH” on back of hand: I was in prison in the North;
Crucifix on chest: Professional Thief / I will not betray you;
Skull on shoulder: Stay away from me / Murderer;
Tattoos around ankles: “Where are you going?” and “What the fuck do you care?” written in Russian.
The stars on his knees: Mean that he has been made a lieutenant in the vory v zakone and he will never kneel (literally or figuratively) to any authority again, IE, kneeling on the stars is a grave insult to the new rank. The number of points on each star are also meant to indicate the number of years served in prison.

Eastern Promises

Stepan: Anna, how is it that your boyfriend wasn’t here to carve?
Anna: I don’t live with Oliver anymore, Uncle Stepan. Living back here for a bit.
Helen: For as long as you want.
Stepan: I knew he would run away from you.
Anna: He didn’t run away. Christ, you make me sound like a burning building.
Stepan: Black men always run away.
Helen: Oh Stepan!
Stepan: I’m not allowed to be honest?
Helen: He was a doctor, Stepan.
Anna: What has that got to do with anything?
Stepan: It’s not natural to mix race and race. That’s why your baby died inside you.

It all fits in here somewhere…

Kirill [on phone]: I said ‘coast’. No, not the beach is clear. It’s an English expression, you fucking baboon. It means there are no police.

Pinheads everywhere let’s say?

Kirill [regarding Nikolai]: He is not the driver, he is the undertaker.

Among other things.

Nikolai [staring down at the frozen corpse]: Have you got a hair dryer?
[after thawing Soyka’s corpse]
Nikolai [to Azim after thawing Soyka’s corpse]: Are you finished cutting his hair?
[Nikolai takes out Soyka’s frozen wallet]
Nikolai: I thought you might want the $6.50 from his pocket. Okay. Now I’m going to do his teeth and cut off his fingers. You might want to leave room.
[Nikolai motions for Azim to go away, and then puts out his cigarette on his tongue]

Though for some here, no doubt, they’d rather stay.

Anna: Have you ever met a girl named Tatiana?
Nikolai: I meet lot of girls named Tatiana.
Anna: She was pregnant.
Nikolai: Ah, in that case - no, I’ve never heard of her.
Anna: She died on my shift.
Nikolai: I thought you did birth?
Anna: Sometimes birth and death go together. She came in with needle punches all over both arms. Probably a prostitute, at the age of fourteen. Do you think Semyon’s son knew her?
Nikolai: [growing agitated] I am driver. I go left, I go right, I go straight ahead - that’s it.

Next up: shifting gears.

Yuri [noting tattoo on knee]: He was a member of vory v zakone. Stars on his knees means he’d never kneeled before anyone. In Russian prisons your life story is written on your body in tattoos. You don’t have tattoos you don’t exist.

And sometimes, if you have the wrong ones, you cease to exist too.

[iambiguous]

Eastern Promises

Stepan [translating Tatiani’s diary]: "Kirill came down after me and he hit me until I was bleeding. Then he tried to rape me but he couldn’t do it…He just got madder and madder and kept hitting me. In the end his father came down. It was the father who raped me. He shouted at his son…’if you don’t break a horse, it will never be tame, Kirill’.

Let’s try to remind ourselves that all men are not like this.

Titiani [voiceover]: I am not sure I can carry on another day. The windows won’t open so I can’t throw myself out. They inject me every day with heroin.

Thousands upon thousands of kids are forced down this path around the globe year in and year out.
Right, God?

Anna: So you’ve read the diary. How can you keep doing what you’re doing?
Nikolai: I’m just a driver.

Following orders as it were?

Nikolai: Sometimes, if things are closed, you just open them up.

And all that’s necessary is the actual option.

Zemyon: You are being very, very honest.
Azim: I fear you more than I fear them.

You truly get this or you don’t.

Anna: Tell him what I said. He is the father.
Nikolai: Tell him what. There is nothing to tell. Slaves give birth to slaves.

One way to look at it. Even if it’s not yours.

[iambiguous]

Eastern Promises

Nikolai: Yes. I have no mother and no father. There is only the code, the vory v zakone code which I have always followed.
Valery: That is why there is an empty place above your heart. Where the stars will go. And why there is an empty place on your knees.
Nikolai: I am dead already. I died when I was fifteen. Now I live in the zone all the time.

So, what code do you follow? If you’re already dead yourself.

Anna: My uncle has gone missing, since I told you about him translating the diary.
Nikolai: Your uncle is fine, he is in Edinburgh, in a 5-Star Hotel. I was ordered to send him to Heaven with a bullet in his brain… instead I gave him a first class ticket to Scotland. It’s okay. He is old-school, he understands things…exile or death.

Ever and always in this world: What to believe?

Nikolai: I need you to take Semyon out of the picture. I want you to arrest him.
Yuri: Arrest him for what?
Nikolai: Rape. The girl was 14.
Yuri: And of course she will testify?
Nikolai: She is dead, but she had Semyon’s baby. If you can prove baby was his, and girl was underage, that is statutory rape. You have baby, you need Semyon’s DNA. For poetic reasons, I suggest you take his blood.

Logic let’s call it.

Anna: I need to know who you are. Why are you doing this, why are you helping us?
Nikolai: I can’t become king if someone else sits on the throne.

Logic let’s call it.

Nikolai: Kirill, we don’t kill little babies.

Though others will. After they’ve raped them.

Tatiana’s Voice: My name is Tatiana. My father died in the mines in my village, so he was already buried when he died. We were all buried there. Buried under the soil of Russia. That is why I left, to find a better life.

If only for her baby. The father of whom raped her. Sometimes, in this shitty world, that’s as close as some get to a happy ending.

[iambiguous]

Muriel Barbery

We musn’t forget old people with their rotten bodies, old people who are so close to death, something that young people don’t want to think about. We musn’t forget that our bodies decline, friends die, everyone forgets about us, and the end is solitude. Nor must we forget that these old people were young once, that a lifespan is pathetically short, that one day you’re twenty and the next day you’re eighty.

Me? Forget about it.

…I am an anomaly in the system, living proof of how grotesque it is, and every day I mock it gently, deep within my impenetrable self.” Muriel Barbery

He wondered what that made him then.

Music plays a huge role in my life. It is music that helps me to endure…well…everything there is to endure.

And then one day hardly anything at all.

Melancholy overwhelms me at supersonic speed.

Watch mine keep up.

…when I say that “he’s a truly nasty man,” I mean he has so thoroughly renounced everything good that he might have inside him that he’s already like a corpse even though he’s still alive. Because truly nasty people hate everyone, to be sure, but most of all themselves. Can’t you tell when a person hates himself? He becomes a living cadaver, it numbs all his negative emotions but also all the good ones so he won’t feel nauseated by who he is.

Let’s name names.

What does Art do for us? It gives shape to our emotions, makes them visible, and, in so doing, places a seal of eternity upon them, a seal representing all those works that, by means of a particular form, have incarnated the universal nature of human emotions.

Run that by me.

[iambiguous]

The photography alone is just…

Well, here’s the trailer: https://youtu.be/LlZDsMCW0U4?si=GRyeXM6QuWxti0__

Once you become “political” you begin to see most everything in terms of “class”. This one is bursting at the seams with it. It’s mostly in what you own. And what you inherent. And the circumstances of your birth.

And the shit you have to take from those who [for all practical purposes] come own you. By the hour.

What’ll you do for money?

Mostly it’s about how, in the blink of an eye, things can go from bad to good and then back again. And how, sometimes, you only have so much control over it either way.

Days of Heaven

Linda [voiceover]: There were people sufferin’ in pain and hunger. Some people their tongues were hangin’ out of their mouths.

Of course, that’s still going on.

Linda [voiceover]: You know how people are. You tell them something, they start talking.

Cue Benjamin Button, among others.

Foreman: Man can earn $3 a day if he works hard.

Really, really hard, anyway.

Harvest Hand: Your sister keep you warm at night, does she?

They’re lovers actually. Linda’s the sister.

Bill: I saved your life today.
Abby: Yeah?
Bill: Yeah. I killed a shit-eating dog.

The context, of course.

Linda [voiceover]: He was tired of living like the rest of them, nosing around like a pig in the gutter. He wasn’t gonna move no more. He figured there must be something wrong with it and he ought to get it straightened out. He figured some people need more than they got and other people got more than they need. It’s just a matter of getting us altogether.

That and the law of unintended consequences.

Bill: I hate seeing you out there stooped over. Men looking at your ass like you were a whore.

Probably looking at his too.

Linda [voiceover]: All of a sudden we lived like kings. Just nothing to do all day but lay around. We didn’t have to work. I’m telling you, the rich got it figured out.

Capitalism, let’s call it.

Linda [voiceover]: Instead of getting sicker he just stayed the same. He didn’t get sicker, he didn’t get better. They were kind hearted. They thought he was going out on his own speed.

Tell that to the locusts.

Linda [voiceover]: This girl she didn’t know where she was going or what. She didn’t have no money. Maybe she’d meet up with a character. I was hopin’ things would work out for her. She was a good friend of mine.

Go figure. Bill’s still dead though.

[iambiguous]

Slavoj Žižek

“Over the last several months, public figures from the Pope downwards have bombarded us with the injunctions to fight against the culture of excessive greed and consumption. This disgusting spectacle of cheap moralization is an ideological operation if there ever was one: the compulsion (to expand) inscribed into the system itself is translated into a matter of personal sin, a private psychological propensity. The self-propelling circulation of Capital thus remains more than ever the ultimate Real of our lives, a beast that by definition cannot be controlled, since it itself controls our activity, blinding us to even the most obvious dangers we are courting.

Next up: the workers of the world unite! And, no, eventually, not around Trump.

…it was the populist new Right which succeeded in capturing this deeper discontent with capitalist modernity.

They out-woke us!

When, in 1953, Chou En Lai, the Chinese Prime Minister, was in Geneva for the peace negotiations to end the Korean war, a French journalist asked him what does he think about the French Revolution; Chou replied: “It is still too early to tell”.

Hell, we may never know…objectively?

Perspicacious theologians know very well the paradox of a decision which retroactively posits it’s own reasons: of course there are good reasons to believe in Jesus Christ, but these reasons are fully comprehensible only to those who already believe in him.

Start here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3gdeV4Rk9EfL-NyraEGXXwSjDNeMaRoX

…today, those of us who still recognize ourselves as Communists, are liberals with a diploma—liberals who seriously studied why our liberal values are under threat and became aware that only a radical change can save them.

Any day now…

Trump’s twisted ‘greatness’ is that he effectively acts - he is not afraid to break the unwritten (and written) rules to impose his decisions. As we learned (not only) from Hegel, our life is regulated by a thick web of written and unwritten rules, rules which teach us how to practice the explicit (written) rules. While Trump (more or less) sticks to explicit legal regulations, he tends to ignore the unwritten silent pacts which determine how we should practice these rules - the way he dealt with Kavanaugh was just one example of it. Instead of just blaming Trump, the Left should learn from him and do the same. When a situation demands it, we should shamelessly do the impossible and break the unwritten rules. Unfortunately, today’s Left is in advance terrified of any radical acts - even when it is in power, it worries all the time: ‘If we do this, how will the worlds react? Will our acts cause panic?’ Ultimately, this fear means: ‘Will our enemies be mad and react?’ In order to act in politics, one has to overcome this fear and assume the risk, make a step into the unknown.

Next up: the unwritten rules here.

[iambiguous]

She chooses to do what the writer and the director tell her to do and then it is up to us to start connecting all the different dots in all the different ways that all the different narratives can impose a “reality” on them.

And [as always] when you are coming of age as a beautiful and precocious young woman your options tend to increase in relationship to all the men seeking to impose their own on you. And so much begins at home. To what extent then is any of this ever wholly autonomous? Let alone understood. Context: Strictly middle class. Strictly apolitical.

And, of course, it is slanted in the direction the French cinema tend to approach these things.

Or maybe it’s just garbage in, garbage out. This is one profoundly fucked up family. And the father daughter relationship is…strange?

So many, many variables careening and caroming helter skelter.

Look for Alice from Monsieur Hire.

A Nos Amours [To Our Loves]

Father: You go out at night now?
Suzanne: It’s not a date. Just friends going to the movie.
Father: I want you to call it off right now.
Suzanne: You think bad things happen only at night? I can do what I want all day, but at 8:00 p.m., it’s all over?

Father knows best.

Suzanne: Where are you going?
Mother: I’m meeting your aunt to tidy up the grave.
Suzanne: A lot of good that does Grandpa.
Mother: I didn’t ask you to come.
Suzanne: I wouldn’t go anyway. Except the day they bury you.

All in the very fucked up family.

Suzanne [after being slapped in the face by her father]: Are you crazy?
Father: Stop treating me like some kind of idiot!
Mother: Hit her all you want but not in the face!

She has her reasons.

Suzanne: I can’t imagine you with another woman.
Father: Tonight I imagined you with Bernard.

Are they or aren’t they?

Brother [slapping Suzanne again and again]: So you got screwed, huh, bitch.
Suzanne: Mom!
Brother: Who reamed you this time, bitch?
Suzanne: Well, it wasn’t you! Jealous?
[she spits in his face – he atacks her – the mother is hysterical]

A day in the life as it were.

Brother: I like to live in the moment.
Michel: Moment—it sounds like “mommy”.

If you get his drift.

Brother [at dinner party]: I don’t like him touching her. [To Jean-Pierre, her husband] Quit pawing her.
[brother moves over to sit next to Suzanne]
Brother [whispering to Suzanne]: Are you out to make it with Michel? Poor Jean-Pierre. What about Jean-Pierre’s buddy? Romain, with the big feet. Did you make it with him too?

Meanwhile, Dad is long gone. Or long enough anyway.

Brother [to Suzanne of his father]: You never told me you visit him.

Let’s leave it at that.

Father [to the son after the mother slaps him]: Go ahead. Defend your mother – who hit me. I hear you practice on your sister.

Alas, however, in regard to these family follies, practice dows not make perfect.

Brother: Life’s weird, huh?

Oh, yeah.

[iambiguous]

The hate. The hate that breeds hate.

Race, immigration, the working class, housing projects, men: Boom!

One is a Jew, one is an Arab, one is a black African. The rest: Various ethnicities comprising all manner of conflicting traditions tossed together into the same impoverished dumping ground. And then there is the white majority “out there” somewhere only more or less interested in what happens to “them”. Gee, what’s that a recipe for? Especially with the reactionary politicos and hate groups stirring up nativist sentiment. And the ubiquitous macho bullshit!!

Of course, some dudes thrive on it. They know nothing you can do will change anything. So they feed on imagining doing what you can’t do.

The solution is obviously political. But, just as obviously, no one has yet to figure out a way to translate that into reality. And the decades are ticking by. 20 years later and these explosions still pop up in the news from time to time.

La Haine

Hubert: It’s about a guy who falls off a skyscraper. On his way down past each floor, he keeps telling himself: “So far so good… so far so good… so far so good.” But it’s not how you fall that matters. It’s how you land.

No getting around that part.

Vinz: Why aren’t you in school now?
Sister: It burned down.

Does that count?

Printed on Walmart’s t-shirt: ELVIS SHOT JFK.

Anyway, he was definitely in on it.

Man: I don’t know the pig who lost his piece but I’d sure like to know the guy who found it.

In other words, this is in France and not, for instance, America.

Hubert: What are you going to do with it.
Vinz: Depends if Abdel dies.
Hubert: You gonna kill a cop?
Vinz: It’ll get me some respect.
Hubert: Icing a pig will get you respect?
Vinz: At least it will even the score.
Said: One thing’s for sure. With that piece you’re the big man in the projects.

Again, in France.

Hubert: Kids want to punch more than bags now.

And more than punch too.

[iambiguous]

Ludwig Wittgenstein

“Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.”

On the other hand, who decides?

Only describe, don’t explain.

You first, okay?
You know, in order to describe and then to explain the difference.

A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that’s unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.

A really, really stupid man, maybe.

If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.

Or, sure, simply define it to mean something else.

Don’t for heaven’s sake, be afraid of talking nonsense! But you must pay attention to your nonsense.

And then one day, who knows, you bring that nonsense down out of the clouds.

Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.

Also, more to the point [mine], the intelligence [or lack thereof of] of all the suckers.

[iambiguous]

La Haine

On Billboard: THE WORLD IS YOURS. Said changes it to THE WORLD IS OURS.

You know, even when it is still unequivocally theirs.

Vinz: I’m fucking sick of the goddamn system! We live in rat holes, and you don’t lift a fucking finger to change things. You’re my home boys, so I’m telling you. If Abdel dies, I hit back. I’ll whack a pig. So they know we won’t turn the other cheek now.

Now that everything is “ours”.

Saïd: Wow, what a speech! Half Moses, half Mickey Mouse.

Next up: What a post!

Hubert: Bullshit! You pointed a gun at a cop! We coulda been killed!
[an old man flushes the toilet and walks out of the stall]
Old Man: Nothing like a good shit! Do you believe in God? That’s the wrong question. Does God believe in us? I once had a friend called Grunwalski. We were sent to Siberia together. When you go to a Siberian work camp, you travel in a cattle car. You roll across icy steppes for days, without seeing a soul. You huddle to keep warm. But it’s hard to relieve yourself, to take a shit, you can’t do it on the train, and the only time the train stops is to take on water for the locomotive. But Grunwalski was shy, even when we bathed together, he got upset. I used to kid him about it. So, the train stops and everyone jumps out to shit on the tracks. I teased Grunwalski so much, that he went off on his own. The train starts moving, so everyone jumps on, but it waits for nobody. Grunwalski had a problem: he’d gone behind a bush, and was still shitting. So I see him come out from behind the bush, holding up his pants with his hands. He tries to catch up. I hold out my hand, but each time he reaches for it he lets go of his pants and they drop to his ankles. He pulls them up, starts running again, but they fall back down, when he reaches for me.
Saïd: Then what happened?
Old Man: Nothing. Grunwalksi froze to death.
Said: Why’d he tell us that?

Could it be more obvious?

Vinz: I feel like an ant lost in intergalactic space.

Imagine then how the ant feels. Oblivious to it all, for example.

Hubert [watching a man come down the escalator]: Look at all the sheep caught up in the system. Look at that guy. Doesn’t look so bad all alone in his fancy leather jacket, but he is one of the worst. They let the system carry them along just like this escalator.

“Going up?”
“Yes. The clouds please.”

Vinz: I know who I am and where I’m from!
Man: Then go back there and shut the fuck up!

Now all we need is a border.

[iambiguous]

There are people who imagine what they would do if they stumbled on the plane. Others imagine what they ought to do. But the point seems to be you never really know about things like this until you actually do stumble upon them. This is one particular trajectory. But there are hundreds and hundreds of others.

In other words, what’s in the plane is lots and lots of money. Four million, four hundred and ninety thousand dollars to be exact.

Money. Come on, let’s cut to the chase: In this culture it’s damn near everything. Or it can [or will] be sooner or later. Unless, of course, that’s not who you are. Which just leaves more for those who are that way.

As for the ending: I’m with Sarah.

A Simple Plan

Hank [voiceover]: When I was still just a kid, I remember my father telling me what he thought it took to make a man happy. Simple things, really…a wife he loves, a decent job, friends and neighbors who respect him. And for a while there, without hardly realizing it, I had all that. I was a happy man.

Let’s run that by Sarah.

Lou: It’s the American Dream in a goddamn gym bag! And he just wants to walk away from it.
Hank: You work for the American Dream. You don’t steal it.
Lou: Then this is even better.

Good point?

Hank: What if you were walking in the woods and you found a bag full of money. Let’s say four million dollars. Would you keep it?
Sarah: Of course not.
Hank: Why not?
Sarah: Well, to start with it would be strealing…I wouldn’t take it. It’s not right. But that’s just me. I wouldn’t.

Then Hank dumps the cash on the kitchen table. She sees it. Her eyes light up. It seems that’s not her after all. At first, she tries to talk herself out of it…but eventually she becomes the most calculating, ruthless one of them all!

Sarah [showing Hank newspaper article, “Heiress’s Body ID’d By Feds”]: A 4.4 million dollar ransom.
Hank: We can’t say it isn’t stealing anymore.
Sarah: Well, Hank, it’s always been stealing, we just didn’t know who we were stealing from.
Hank: But we thought it was drug money.
Sarah: No, you thought that. This is good. I’m glad…
Hank: It’s good?
Sarah: Yeah, it’s good we know where it’s from, because I was starting to get worried. I thought it might be counterfeit or marked.

For Sarah, it’s all about getting away with it now.

Hank: You didn’t kill him. We both did.
Jacob: What are you talking about?
Hank: He was alive when you left. I had to smother him. I guess that makes it my decision.

Of course, we know why he is telling him this.

Hank: I put myself out for you. What do you do, you betray me.
Jacob: What are you talking about?
Hank: What am I talking about? It’s like there’s 2 sides now.
Jacob: Why are you both talking about sides? There’s no sides here.

Boy, has he got that wrong. He underestimated Sarah’s newfound greed. Not knowing about it, for one thing.

Sarah: Try to remember how people see you. You’re just a normal guy. Nobody’d ever believe that you’d be capable of doing what you’ve done.

You know, being practical.[/i]

Sarah [after Hank says he is going to get rid of the money]: Is that what you want? Walking off to the feed store every morning waiting for Tom to retire or die so you can finally get a raise? And Amanda. Do you think she is going to like growing up in somebody else’s hand me down clothes and toys?
Hank: Don’t say anything more.
Sarah: And what about me? Spending the rest of my life with a fake smile plastered on my face checking out books in the library and then coming home to cook dinner for you? The same meals over and over again, whatever the weeks coupons will allow. Only going out to restaurants for special occasions. And even then always having to watch what we order, skipping the appetizers. And coming home for dessert. You think that’s going to make me happy?
Hank: That’s enough.
Sarah: No, no. I haven’t done Jacob yet. It’s back to the welfare office for him. The occasional odd job. But with Lou gone now. Just himself and his dog all alone in that filthy apartment…how long do you expect him to last?
Hank: STOP IT!!
Sarah: Sounds wonderful, doesn’t it? Everything just like it used to be.

Eventually, she does. But I suspect that nothing will ever be the same.[/i]

Baxter: Well, it looks like we’re both going to have a lot of explaining to do.
Hank [shoots him]: No, just me.

If he gets caught.

Hank [voiceover]: There are days when I manage not to think of anything at all. Not the money. Or Jacob. Days when Sarah and I try to pretend we are just like everyone else. As if none of it had ever happened. But those days are few and far between.

I can imagaine.

[iambiguous]

Go ahead, Francesca, make his day.

This is about a man who loves what he does and gets paid to do it. And about a woman who wants more than she’s got just a little bit less than what she is willing to give up to get it. This, in fact, is how dasein is embodied. Your life revolves existentially around the parameters of its own making. And, in this context, the choices you make. But every once in a while something new comes along and it has a chance to go in an entirely different direction. But an actual lived life, not the kind some talk about here. But it is less about making the right choice than in acknowledging just how complex [and situated] these things can become “out in the world”.

You see, she is up there and her fanily is down here. But not at all in the way I usually mean it. Personally, I think she was a fool for staying. After all, her children were practically grown. But what the hell could I possibly know about her reasons.

Bridges Of Madison County

Francesca: You just got off the train in Bari and stayed without knowing anyone there?
Robert: Yeah.

The balls!

Robert: Things change. They always do, it’s one of the things of nature. Most people are afraid of change, but if you look at it as something you can always count on, then it can be a comfort. Not many things you can count on for sure.
Francesca: I guess. Except I’m one of the people it frightens.

Well, there’s things change bit by bit from day to day and then there’s things change smack dab in the middle one or another true calamity.

Francesca: Just because I have never seen a Gazelle stampede doesn’t mean I’m asleep in my life.

That’s just it though, isn’t it?

Robert: If you want me to stop, tell me now.

On the other hand, if she’s profoundly fractured and fragmented?

Francesca: And in that moment, everything I knew to be true about myself up until then was gone.

Mine, of course, was Song be. You either have one or you don’t.

Robert: When I think of why I make pictures, the reason that I can come up with just seems that I’ve been making my way here. It seems right now that all I’ve ever done in my life is making my way here to you.

Meryl Streep, in other words. Though not even close in “real life”.

Robert: Don’t kid yourself, Francesca: you are anything but a simple woman.

Again, however, that’s the point!

Francesa: I was just going to have some iced tea and split the atom, but that can wait.

She’s getting closer and closer to that point of no return.

Caroline: Who knew that, in between bake sales, my mother was Anaïs Nin?

Exactly!

Robert: We’re hardly two separate people now. Some people search all their lives for this and never find it. Others don’t even think it exists.

We know it doesn’t exist, right, Supannika?

Francesca: Robert, please. You don’t understand, no-one does. When a woman makes the choice to marry, to have children; in one way her life begins but in another way it stops. You build a life of details. You become a mother, a wife and you stop and stay steady so that your children can move. And when they leave they take your life of details with them. And then you’re expected move again only you don’t remember what moves you because no-one has asked in so long. Not even yourself. You never in your life think that love like this can happen to you.
Robert: But now that you have it…
Francesca: I want to keep it forever. I want to love you the way I do now the rest of my life. Don’t you understand…we’ll lose it if we leave. I can’t make an entire life disappear to start a new one. All I can do is try to hold onto to both.

And around and around and around she goes. On the other hand, this is Clint Eastwood. It’s not like she’s Annie MacLean and he’s Robert Redford.

Francesca [voiceover]: I realized love won’t obey our expectations. Its mystery is pure and absolute. What Robert and I had, could not continue if we were together. What Richard and I shared would vanish if we were apart. But how I wanted to share this. How would our lives have changed if I had? Could anyone else have seen the beauty of it?

Like her own frame of mind back then was any less ambivalent. She took a “leap of faith” to Richard and the kids. No more, no less.

[iambiguous]

A good movie is one where you really, really don’t know for sure what the hell is going to happening next. Especially in a context this potentially volatile.

Still: Is every working-class family in England exactly the same? Well, if all you know about them comes from what you see in the cinema then, yeah, I guess they are.

And, in describing them, dysfunctional is right at the top of the list. And then impoverished. They seem to go together. It’s all their own fault though. Any conservative can explain why.

But everything is really about the gaps between the exteriors some show the world and the interiors that are considerably more vulnerable. People live this way. I once lived this way. And if you never have, what the fuck can you really know about it?

There’s hope though: Hip Hop. Dancing. Being an “artist”. And how hopeless is that? For most of course. And the audition turns out be for “dancers” of an entirely different sort anyway.

Fish Tank

**Mia [shouting to Keeley’s father]: Can you give Keeley a message for me? Tell her I think her old man’s a ****. **

In a more or less dysfunctional working class community, let’s say.

Tyler [little sister]: Whatcha doin?
Mia: Mind your own fuck face.
Tyler: If I’m a fuck face, you’re a c*** face.

That kinda working class family.

Tyler [to Connor leaving the house]: I like you. So I’ll kill you last.

She’s five years old.

Joanne [Mia’s mother, to Connor]: She’s never had a boyfriend.
Mia: I just fucked him upstairs actually.
Joanne: Oh, that’s nice.

And maybe she actually did.

Joanne [throwing an envelope at Mia]: It’s about your new school. You get to stay there. You can fuck as many ASBO boys as you like there.

Dig deeper?

Mia: I ain’t going.
Connor: That place might teach you some manners.
Mia: It’s nothing to do with you, is it?
Connor: You need sortin’ out you do.
Mia: So you keep saying. But you’re nothin’ to me, so why should I listen?

Though from time to time he’s only next to nothing to her.

[iambiguous]

Fish Tank

Tyler: Why do you need so much stuff?
Mia [packing]: Just in case.
Tyler: What about the referral unit?
Mia: You can have my place.
Tyler: I don’t want it. They’re full of spastics and idiots.

Did I mention that Tyler is about 5 years old?

Mia: I’m leaving then.
Joanne [dancing]: This is one of your CDs.
Mia: Yeah. It’s Nas.
Joanne: Yeah, it’s great.
Mia: You can keep it.
Joanne: Well, go on then. Fuck off.

Okay, Mom.

Tyler [burying her face in Mia’s abdomen] I hate you!
Mia [tenderly]: I hate you, too.

Now that takes me back.

Tyler [to Mia in a car heading for Wales]: Bye, you skank! Don’t forget to text me. Say hello to the whales!

Music from Nas over the closing credits: https://youtu.be/c_1-DSzBDwc?si=Ab91nWhKD3ot_rkW