Outside the frame
August 14th 2006 11:25
So much fan fiction is claustrophobic. There's a sort of tedious name-dropping, a repetition of reference to landmarks of the mythos.
And one sees the same frustration, time and again, in sequels. Even Godfather III suffers from this painful gesturing and homage, this binding repetition, this attempt at connection and authenticity.
… to ally yourself with the original, to umbrella yourself beneath its banner -- but at the price of no essential expansion. And the opposite danger is of jarring expansion -- for how can that same taste be recovered -- how can the memory live up to the real -- how can the new match the old? What is complete is complete forever; what is fashioned in one piece is unjoinable.
Films point outside the frame. The image cuts off at the very place your eye hungers. The buzz of a film is the evocation of a distinctive world -- with technology promising further technology, magic promising magic, horror expressive of the unimaginably horrific.
The tease of a film is of wonders, depths, heights, novelties to come.
After all, a complete world is infinite.
But the infinite, and the essential, can only be gestured at -- the minotaur of the lost Euripidean play could never have appeared on stage.
One wants more. One buys the album having fallen in love with the single. The Keren Ann song "End of may" is suggestive of an opus of similar feelings and sounds. Yet there simply is no more to be had.
Perhaps the best is like this, is inimitable precisely in the expansiveness of the world hinted at. Once you've make the first movie, written the first novel, you've already broken the mould.
Notes
-- Friday 14 December 2007: Schopenhauer somewhere writes, on the vividness of impressions, and the way one reads into them: "The reason the impressions we receive in youth are so significant, the reason why in the dawn of life everything appears to us in so ideal and transfigured a light, is that we then first become acquainted with the genus, which is still new to us, through the individual, so that every individual thing stands as a representative of its genus".
And one sees the same frustration, time and again, in sequels. Even Godfather III suffers from this painful gesturing and homage, this binding repetition, this attempt at connection and authenticity.
… to ally yourself with the original, to umbrella yourself beneath its banner -- but at the price of no essential expansion. And the opposite danger is of jarring expansion -- for how can that same taste be recovered -- how can the memory live up to the real -- how can the new match the old? What is complete is complete forever; what is fashioned in one piece is unjoinable.
Films point outside the frame. The image cuts off at the very place your eye hungers. The buzz of a film is the evocation of a distinctive world -- with technology promising further technology, magic promising magic, horror expressive of the unimaginably horrific.
The tease of a film is of wonders, depths, heights, novelties to come.
After all, a complete world is infinite.
But the infinite, and the essential, can only be gestured at -- the minotaur of the lost Euripidean play could never have appeared on stage.
One wants more. One buys the album having fallen in love with the single. The Keren Ann song "End of may" is suggestive of an opus of similar feelings and sounds. Yet there simply is no more to be had.
Perhaps the best is like this, is inimitable precisely in the expansiveness of the world hinted at. Once you've make the first movie, written the first novel, you've already broken the mould.
***
Notes
-- Friday 14 December 2007: Schopenhauer somewhere writes, on the vividness of impressions, and the way one reads into them: "The reason the impressions we receive in youth are so significant, the reason why in the dawn of life everything appears to us in so ideal and transfigured a light, is that we then first become acquainted with the genus, which is still new to us, through the individual, so that every individual thing stands as a representative of its genus".
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