Today’s haul from Stories

Man, Emily Wilson sure took Chris Nolan and The Odyssey to task in her review and I am all for it. If you’ve seen the film, the entire piece is worth reading—but the conclusion really brings her point home:

Nolan’s Odyssey lacks many of the elements that make the poem great. It has nothing convincing to say about time, memory, history, war, or about the relationship between one warrior’s glorious return and the lives of his family, adversaries, comrades, friends and neighbours. It lacks psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth. Its narrative structure is gimmicky. The writing is abysmal. None of the characters has convincing motivation for their actions or words. There are no sex scenes, and all the food looks horrible.

The most troubling ethical problem with Nolan’s Odyssey concerns the decision to film part of the movie in the occupied territory of Western Sahara, thus normalising the ongoing violence against the indigenous Sahrawi people. It is particularly galling that Nolan used this land simply as a visually striking backdrop for a film that centres, aggrandises and redeems the hero of a territorial war on account of his belated and partial acknowledgment of his own guilt.

For far too long, Chris Nolan has been relatively immune to criticism for reasons unknown. Perhaps it’s the striking imagery he’s been able to create—the black hole in Interstellar, the folding cities of Inception, the bomb in Oppenheimer—or maybe it’s that a couple performances have been Oscar-worthy (I would say Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight is the only truly great performance in a film of his, though). Whatever the reasoning, he’s considered critically by many journalists and social media cinephiles alike as one of the premier directors of this generation and I am absolutely dumbfounded as to why (I find Interstellar and Oppenheimer both to be as overrated as The Odyssey).

Good writing is the foundation of any cinematic achievement and none of Nolan’s films have had an above-average script. Worse still is his direction of conversational dialogue, which is often choppy on top of being drowned out by sound design that favors background environments and nonstop scores. His female characters are often hollow and disposable (and even the men are largely one-dimensional). He excels in aesthetic scale but consistently fails to deliver on any emotional, human level. It raises the questions: What are modern audiences looking for in a film, anyway? Why are these movies considered among the best of our time?

I can’t help but think this is less about Nolan being a bad director than it is more a sign of what art means to a society so molded by the vacuous, profit-driven ambitions of capitalism. Humanity must be stripped from most endeavors or people might feel guilty about the collateral damage that ensues from endlessly prioritizing financial well-being over that of the communities this economic model ‘serves.’ Under this ideological weight, art is chipped away at until it becomes nothing more than shallow entertainment—unchallenging to the audience or the interests behind the scenes that fund it. Consequently, we get these grand films of empty rhetoric which, more than anything else, become statements on the decline of our appreciation for the potential of culture in America.

Frogtown is an interesting neighborhood because during the day it is abuzz with people walking along the river, but at night it remains relatively quiet. Events might be happening at various hot spots, and there might be limited parking, but it’s one of the places in LA where there just aren’t a ton of people wandering. It keeps pretty quiet once the sun sets, sort of like you have to know what’s happening where to actually run in to anyone. I saw maybe three people on my walk to a sold-out Big | Brave show at Zebulon.

In many ways, protest art doesn’t really make sense now. While one would think the rise of fascism would make for ample space for artists to respond, the truth is the parody Donald Trump and his cohort have made of media in general makes it difficult for any kind of traditional creativity to resonate. The ether of media has become a battleground where lines are drawn around political affiliation and people disregard or appropriate art for their own personal interpretations and could give a shit about the rest. Look no further than Elon Musk promising a ‘historically accurate’ AI version of The Odyssey.

Another recent case in point is Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s No Title As Of 13 February 2024 28,340 Dead, which cited the ‘official’ death toll in Gaza—at which point people supportive of Israel would go around ‘correcting’ the album. (Other modern ironies are conservatives who listen to Rage Against The Machine to the point where Tom Morello had to explicitly tell them the music was not intended to support their perspective, or pro-police ilk adopting the Punisher skull without understanding its true history.)

I think Olivia Laing said it best in Funny Weather—

Can art do anything, especially during periods of crisis? In 1967, George Steiner wrote a famous essay in which he observed that a concentration-camp commander could read Goethe and Rilke in the evening and still carry out his duties at Auschwitz in the morning, regarding this as evidence that art had failed in its highest function, to humanise. But this makes art sound like a magic bullet, which should reorganise our critical and moral faculties without effort, while simultaneously obliterating free will. Empathy is not something that happens to us when we read Dickens. It’s work. What art does is provide material with which to think: new registers, new spaces. After that, friend, it’s up to you.

It is true that once a piece of art is finished, you can’t really control how it is interpreted by the audience—and while that has always been part of the beauty of creativity, in times when people use art in ways that are distinctly antithetical to its obvious intention in order to promote oppressive messages, it makes it increasingly difficult to portray an idea of dissent. Even as political affiliation has become entrenched in personal identity, people still don’t want to feel excluded from culture—however when your view of the world includes domination through violence, it’s tough to find art that supports that outlook.

Like everything else in the world currently in flux, it remains interesting to see how art responds to the progressively contentious political environment (and the world of art being increasingly intertwined with the capitalist systems that are obviously right-wing). Journalism has all but completely failed to hold the state accountable for its actions, and most art feels like it’s right there too. When all is said and done with this era, how art critics and historians write about what is happening now will surely be a good read.

WU LYF at the Lodge Room

Fifteen years ago, WU LYF were all the hype and they had this lore about their live shows being a hefty dose of energy amidst a bland, guys-with-moustaches-and-banjos indie rock scene. After being broken up since 2012, they’re back with a solid new album and a tour to boot.

I can’t tell if I’m just getting older, or everybody is, or there’s a legitimate disconnect in live shows now against back then, but it’s just so strange to watch a crowd stay relatively still for pretty dance-worthy music. Maybe it’s just because I came up from the punk scene where any given show would have complete strangers falling over each other and helping one another up in a communal joy, but it’s weird to see a rock band have a fairly sterile response (at least considering the energy they provided).

Nevertheless, they were solid, but I spent a lot of time wondering about if the relatively dormant crowd was a sign of an increasingly broken society, or if we’re all just fifteen years older and our knees can’t take jumping around as much as they used to.