Relying on a formula either means we lack imagination or implies the necessity of a movie package intended for a target audience that wants a particular set of images, sounds, actors, story lines… Our choices are horror, adolescent comedy, sentimental comedy, dramatic comedy, educational animation, drama, historical film, war movie, sports flick, super-slow activist documentary (those that go beyond ideology are interesting)… There are many types of flops. In any case, this represents 84% of the movies now showing.
Another letter?
If you give me D, I propose Scorsese’s The Departed, a remake of an Asian film, since the best action films now come out of Asia (DiCaprio, Nicholson, Damon, tons of intrigue and serious dialogue, a mole within the police, a rat with the mafiosi, Boston, duel between DiCaprio and Damon, choreographed, naturalistic violence, the Scorsese touch—domineering masculinity with no safe conduct, moral conflict and Christian redemption in a dirty rotten world, the indecent brutality of life in the underworld).
Last one: S, The Science of Sleep by Michel Gondry (because it stars Charlotte Gainsbourg, because Gondry is an inventive director of music videos, because he directed Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, because he’s an exhilarating post-surrealist, the offspring of Orson Welles and Terry Gilliam, an aesthete still enamoured with the cadaverous beauty of cinema, the opulence of the complex frame). Alright? Shall we decide?
Seriously, I can be patient, but only up to a point… I’ll give you two days to decide.
Courrège
xx
* * *
* An Ordinary Life. (Trans.)
6.
The Guyaudian
being disguised. needing to be disguised. to slip by unnoticed, run through the streets, mount a campaign, dive into the flow. A seasonal necessity, a pretext for plastic junk and industrial sugar.
It was Halloween. A common celebration. In the future, once borders between countries disappear and only one central government representing the human race circulates goods and services in the hope that it will function like an automaton of justice, programmed like a paterfamilias for all its children, we will begin to think. We will realize that life is an ordeal we must tend to until death.
Meditating and moaning, going through hell and understanding.
Our whole life, we must suffer the suffering eyes of the multitude; catch the contemptuous or indifferent eyes of our fellow beings, our whole life; think we’re making a difference here, when, at the same time, everything lies in poverty there; devise utopias for our own sake, to put our minds at ease; taste poverty ourselves in a world of plenty, our whole life, see the need for frugality, for our ability to survive under the weight of our imperial, predatory foolishness, our whole life; and die in intense psychological pain, in ordinary solitude, borne by the courage of atheists.
Halloween was a time to ponder these questions, to get out of bed trembling with fear, contemplating the answers to these questions. Halloween was a seasonal illness, an amusing way to die all together.
In ICI (a weekly published by Quebecor), “just for fun” Michel Vézina asked the readers of his blog (today, anyone without a blog is just not an interesting human being): “Without cheating, how many of you could name five Quebecois novelists?” It was an innocent question, a curious challenge. Of their own accord, Quebec literary critics, of which Vézina is one, are rather pessimistic and tend to underestimate the knowledge of the general public. Despite the digital selectivity (a question asked on a little-read blog) that always cuts us off from at least 70% of the population (illiteracy, poverty, primary school education, and overwhelming lack of interest in the thing) and always calls upon the same 20% of citizens who are literate and online (post-secondary education, engagement, reading, general knowledge and desire to write), Vézina hit a wall: most of the top 20% knew at least five Quebecois novelists. I quote:
Comment by Amélie Bernard: Not too difficult... Patrick Senécal, Julie Hivon, Maxime-Olivier Moutier, Matthieu Simard, Marie-Sissi Labrèche, Natasha Beaulieu, Jean-Jacques Pelletier, Mélika Abdelmoumen... And cheating a bit (by looking at my own bookshelves): Gaétan Soucy, Bruno Hébert, Jacques Côté, Robert Malacci, Joël Champetier, Jacques Bissonnette. All authors read, often reread, and often several books by each.
There’s no doubt, this commentator is part of the upper echelon of the 20%. An avid reader who likes books published by Alire, a consumer of genre fiction (fantasy, horror) who keeps up to date, reads newspapers, is on the lookout for literary news. If she’s not a university graduate, she’s an autodidact who is curious and doesn’t need a credit rating to define her life. If all of ICI’s readers were as eclectic and informed, we would (almost) be living in an ideal world. Ergo problema. So let us, light-heartedly, consider this reader the exception.
Comment by Red Panda: Guillaume Vigneault, Chrystine Brouillet, Anne Hébert, Victor-Lévy Beaulieu, François Avard, Jacques Poulin, Jacques Godbout, Germaine Guèvremont, Francine Ruel... And many others, some even better, who have slipped my mind at the moment.
Panda names a compendium of authors taught in college or authors who appear in print media and especially on TV. Panda has no doubt graduated from college, maybe even university, watches TV, knows authors that make a splash, has popular but also literary tastes (these are not mutually exclusive). She is a diligent reader who likes the stars of Quebec fiction. She is undoubtedly politically engaged. She is at least thirty years old and comes from Montreal.
Comment by Johanne Sauvé: No one has mentioned Michel Tremblay; still, he’s one of the most well-known! There’s also Mark Fisher, Marthe Gagnon-Thibaudeau, Yves Beauchemin, Marie-Claire Blais, Charlotte Boisjoli and Leonard Cohen, to name just a few.
Johanne is part of the segment of readers born in the forties or fifties. Speaking up for Michel Tremblay is their right. Johanne is also a diligent reader, has not studied literature but appreciates good, fat books, historical sagas, sentimental novels. She is attracted to bestsellers: by mentioning Mark Fisher in her choice of authors, she admits being moved by enticing books like The Instant Millionaire or The Golfer and the Millionaire. Fisher’s goal: to show you how to become a millionaire by writing books, just like him, that will be translated into many languages. He uses a narrative technique that he will teach you for the modest sum of $300 at one of his weekend workshops and lectures. Dubious, but the man has all the arguments of popular success on his side. Under these conditions, it’s difficult to redirect the general public towards Le Grand Khan (incompatible greatnesses). Too underground, doesn’t consider his readers, writes in long sentences, no action. Doesn’t give his readers what they want. Mark Fisher is the archenemy of difficult books, the nemesis of all Jean Basiles.
Question: How many manuscripts written by Fisher’s disciples have I rejected in my line of work? Answer: Many.
So what did I learn by reading this blog? That readers remember the names of authors who make the news and appear in the media more easily. Okay. That most readers of Quebec novels are women (all three comments were made by women). Cliché. That out of the thirty authors mentioned spontaneously, nineteen are men and eleven are women. Surprising. That no one mentioned Jean Basile. Obvious. That no one remembered a novelist who was also a poet, except for Marie-Claire Blais. Normal. That most of the authors mentioned have published a book in the last five years [less than six out of thirty haven’t given a manuscript to their publisher in ages, unless they’re well and truly dead (Anne Hébert, Germaine Guèvremont)]. Realistic. And that to try to put Jean Basile’s name into circulation, we would need to find a contemporary novelist who would deign to talk about him or transform him into the subject of a novel. That the target audience would ideally be women.
Unlikely scenario.
* * *
Courrège and I at the movies. The operation was successful.
At the Paramount, the huge blue and yellow coil runs down the corner
edge of the building. Sainte Catherine Street is aswarm, everywhere: in the underground tunnels, the HMV, the Simons clothing store, and the endless sidewalks.
I stroke her neck. She squeezes my hand. I hug her briefly, she pats my shoulder, our friendship stealthily rushes in beneath the surface, despite ourselves. We play brother and sister.
We’ve settled on The Departed by Scorsese.
I get myself a huge bag of popcorn, Courrège will dip into it. I sprinkle it with a mix of flavours. I have a method, work at it in steps. First I sprinkle a vibrant orange layer of all-dressed flavour on top, then carefully shake the bag. When the colour has disappeared from the surface, I apply a second layer of white cheese flavour, shake the bag again, then finish with either a layer of barbecue flavour (also orange) or a (red) layer of ketchup flavour. The idea is to equally distribute the flavours in the bag, season every kernel of popcorn, spread the salt and artificial flavours as equally as possible. The most satisfying aspect of this method is that the popcorn never tastes the same a second time, thus giving me the sense that my taste buds never get bored. Scorsese is himself a mixture of several flavours.
Courrège and I have been attending Mass at the cinema for a few years. I sit right next to her, and we slip into the quiet couple–type.
We’re at the movies and, naturally, the film is about falsehood.
A ballet of choreographed violence, bird’s-eye view of stairwells, ambiguity, hatred, Irish Catholics, Boston police, corrupt emissaries of the Chinese government. Betrayal repaid with betrayal. Gunfire, blood, ass-kicking, a woman caught in the middle, a woman on the side.
The three protagonists die at the end. A convention turned inside out like a glove is still a convention. But the moral is safe, since falsehood is punished.
At the end, when we see Mark Wahlberg’s feet wrapped in anti-blood boot covers, we understand that this is not an amoral film, that truth will triumph, that scumbags will bite the dust and pay for their mistakes. Matt Damon will drink from the cup of sincerity at last.
Courrège and I leave a bit before the credits end. There’s nothing worse than trying to squeeze between people to get out, even though the audience is small (the end of film in theatres). Yet even these few people exasperate us a little. The experience of the darkness evokes our most philosophical individualism, and few people respect this spontaneous meditative state.
We also find it hard to admit that the cinema is an instrument of false happiness (the power of representation). We want to forget. We try to forget every day, every minute, every second. Psychologists say that we think about sex every seven seconds, so it wouldn’t be surprising to learn that we have a cinematographic fantasy every sixty seconds (often of a sexual nature). This is happiness; happiness works in 35 mm and in high-definition video. Ideally, happiness includes many sexual acrobatics, many violent scenes, much bloodshed, many crises of flagrant individualism and megalomaniacal episodes. We invent thousands of scenarios that always come down to a variation on the theme of “I am me!” or “Who am I?” We agonize over getting our turn to speak, and we become ourselves once more when kissing a woman for the first time.
Five minutes of silence, the sacred buffer of post-cinematic decanting. To allow our impressions to settle. Give the post-Scorsese excitement time to diminish and pass. Five minutes, it usually doesn’t take more than five minutes of normal, ordinary time. To get up from our seats, leave the theatre, gradually get accustomed to the light—five minutes to come down from the long train of fantasies, the therapeutic session of compensatory bloodshed. We also need time to disconnect from our process of natural identification. We think the film is good if we have identified with it, shared moments with the hero or one of the main characters, and we need to give up this emotional impression of having experienced the action along with the protagonists. Our bodies return to reality in five minutes. No more, no less. In any event, the process is never instantaneous.
After the statutory five minutes, I decided to chat about the film with Courrège. But I was more interested in the questions the film posed than in the film itself. I was bored with the “deceptive” impression that the police and the bad guys are interchangeable and that it’s very difficult to discover who is betraying us. The idea that falsehood and contempt do not have a particular physiognomy for Scorsese annoyed me. For me, the question of falsehood had become essential.
* * *
courrège: The Departed is a film about falsehood.
ghislain: Definitely!
courrège: A moral film about falsehood.
ghislain: Scorsese is always moralistic. The bad guys are punished.
courrège: Yes, but it’s more torturous and sadistic than a normal film.
ghislain: Scorsese is a perverse moralist. He revels in the hyperrealist spectacle of macho violence. He examines the relationships between the dominant and the weak. He loves portraying hierarchies and coded contexts. In this, he is a European director. A Europeanized American.
courrège: But to get back to the question of falsehood in cinema…
ghislain: We must first consider what falsehood actually is. What does it mean?
courrège: So what does falsehood actually mean?
ghislain: Well.
courrège: I feel like I’m in one of Plato’s dialogues.
Ghislain is thinking.
courrège: My name could be Courrègoras or Courrèganaximander!
ghislain: I want to answer you with an aphorism.
courrège: Okay give me an aphorism.
ghislain: Falsehood is a fantasy pretending to be reality.
courrège: Wow, that’s really clear.
ghislain: But I think it is perfectly clear.
courrège: Explain it to me in steps… Let’s say three steps, like a syllogism. If it’s too long, I retain the right to get impatient.
ghislain: I’ll use the perspective of a paranoiac to explain falsehood. All cinephiles and moviegoers become, for the duration of a film, paranoiacs in front of the screen… Though, perhaps I’m skipping a step.
courrège: No doubt more than one, but go on.
ghislain: Okay, listen. Reality is the obvious, the evident. We consider the evident as truth. The evident is true and falsehood distorts truth. Up to this point, we can agree: falsehood distorts the evident.
courrège: Yes, okay, that works.
ghislain: I’ll go on. The sum of all evidence forms the fabric of truth that we could call reality. We cannot consider that which is not evident as real or even as something that can be measured or conceptualized. It’s therefore logical to add all known evidence in order to form the totality of what we conveniently call reality. In itself, reality is the sum of all evidence. Everything else belongs to the speculative, the hypothetical, or the mysterious. To this sum of all evidence, I want to add one last evident fact: reality is not based on evidence alone. But, for the moment, let’s stick to this basic proposition: reality is the sum of all evidence.
courrège: Okay, fine. Does it bother you if I eat while I listen.
ghislain: No, listen, it’s very simple. Falsehood is a breach in reality, a denial of its evidence. For example, to use Scorsese’s elements: a policeman cannot be a policeman; a gangster cannot be a gangster. Analyzing the problem differently leads to a kind of paradox: falsehood does not accept the principle of non-contradiction. So, who are the people who are policemen without being policemen, gangsters without being gangsters? Only one solution solves the problem: we introduce contradictions. Falsehood is based on this about-face, this suspension of the principle of non-contradiction.
courrège: And fantasy, where does it come in?
ghislain: Fantasy, yes, I’ve actually just invoked this fearsome fantasy: it’s the principle of non-contradiction. To live in accordance with this principle is to condemn oneself to fantasizing reality. At this point, I can
reformulate my maxim. Falsehood transforms fantasy into reality.
courrège: But you’ve just said that reality stems from the evident?
ghislain: Wait.
courrège: I’m waiting.
ghislain: Falsehood fools us with the evident, deforms reality. It replaces the sum-of-all-evidence reality by a fantastical reality. The equivalence “a policeman is a policeman, a gangster is a gangster” no longer holds. The evidence no longer indicates any reality. Falsehood rules.
courrège: Yes, so, what next?
ghislain: All liars are fantasizers. So anyone who insists on understanding reality as a sum of all evidence will be fooled. So, then…
courrège: Yes, go on…
ghislain: So fantasy envisioned as reality blurs the set of evidence that suspends the principle of non-contradiction. Essentially, falsehood is reality under the regime of fantasy, which makes reality and this other evidence agree—evidence that masks the blurred or ridiculed evidence, like the principle of non-contradiction.
courrège: What you’re ultimately saying is that falsehood conceals the evident by transforming reality into fantasized evidence.
ghislain: Falsehood exists because we fantasize. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be duped.
courrège: Explain.
ghislain: The idea is very simple, actually. The more we distort the evidence of reality by projecting our fantasies onto it, the more we’ll be subject to falsehoods. The more we lie to ourselves, the more we’ll be fooled by others’ lies.
courrège: And if we take Scorsese’s film as an example, how would you apply what you’ve just explained to it?
ghislain: Well… give me a minute…
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