Mailbag: Films that Diminish Us

(Above: a film that diminished me - Horatio)


The following comes from the electronic correspondence of Kobe and Lord Horatio:

This is nice, but funnily enough says very little about the film [The Tree of Life]. I assume it’s just about a family going through life in the ‘50s. I like what Ebert had to say about prayer, his interest in spirituality caught me by surprise. He’s a very good writer, with a deep concern for ethics. This is what I like about Leonard Pitts, a columnist for the Miami Herald, even though he has a bad habit of going off the deep end at times. His brand of liberalism is intensely romantic, and therefore, entirely impractical. Actually, you might hate his writing. Abandoning this tangent, I enjoyed the way Ebert discusses films that “Diminish us.”

I also like that Ebert uses the phrase “masturbate our senses.” Is it masturbation if someone or something else does it for you? I think this is more correctly described as “collaboration,” which is kind of a nice way to think about films that diminish us. It makes me think of some ancient unspoken arrangement. Almost a form of prostitution, and there is something deeply sexual about film. Voyeuristic scopophila, psychoanalysts will call it (“....I like to watch, etc.”) But yes, an unspoken deal. The French call orgasm le petite mort, or “the little death,” which I think goes along well with the idea of exchanging entertainment for spiritual diminution.

This is because you sometimes get the feeling, walking into a film, that it will tell you almost nothing about your life, reality, philosophy, whatever. Those minutes and hours you spend inside the cinema merely evaporate, you never get them back. That’s entertainment. We brought the money, they gave us a show. 90-120 minute mental vacation. Collaboration.

In a sense, then, when Ebert says that Malick, the director, “shows that he feels what I feel, that it was all most real when we were first setting out, and that it will never be real in that way again,” he is not only saying that The Tree of Life is one of the those rare films that gives us a transcendent experience, but he’s also saying that every moment of our lives is inexorably a part of our piecemeal diminution, our inevitable dissolution. “It was all most real when we were first setting out,” and with each passing moment that reality loses something of its original luster.

Or something like that. I’m going to post this on the blog, where it belongs.

ST

P.S. I am not interested in seeing this film.


On 6/1/11 1:00 PM, "kobe" wrote:

I read a lot of Ebert's reviews and most of the time never see the actual movies. Thought you might enjoy reading this, very short but great.

http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2011/05/a_prayer_beneath_the_tree_of_l.html

-kobe