adrian-193
A rejoint le janv. 2005
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Note de adrian-193
I must have been six feet under myself, to have avoided this show for so long. Either I wasn't listening or I just didn't get it. After watching the pilot last night (Series one, episode one), I sunk into the couch and played the rest of the first disc's episodes straight through. I wouldn't normally go out on a limb and post on a show this early into watching it, but its beginning really seems to set up an emotional logic that will serve the director's purposes for the show's duration that I'm going to climb out there and see what comes to mind.
In spite of its title, and its gimmick, the show is not about death. Yes, each episode kicks off when somebody kicks off (the big one; aka bites the dust, meets his maker, buys the farm up in the sky), but these are just dead people, not people who die. Since we're given their death at the beginning of an episode, we're not emotionally invested in what's happened to them. Instead, we'll become emotionally invested in what happens to the family as the death creates consequences requiring the family members' attention.
So it's not really about death, it's about an afterlife. In fact the family's been given a second chance by the death of their father (I'm not spoiling anything here). His death is a gift, sacrifice perhaps so that in his absence, members of the family might consider their own lives seriously for the first time. Each of the family members is eccentric in his or her own right. This tells us we're watching HBO. Characters, for being eccentric, will each have a greater range of action and reaction for the reason that they're quirky. But in many other respects, the show is conservative.
Though surrounded by death, the father's death gives the family a second shot at being a family. The first family was built on death, literally on the repression that bound a family to support a father's funereal existence. To individual family members, the family house was a funeral home. They were each living out a death sentence of sorts, whether by maintaining secrets, keeping the closet door locked, by lying about affairs, by struggling against conformity and family obligation while trying to be different.. In other words, the usual family dynamics!
If what it took was for the father to die in order for this particular family home to confront its deathly service, then so be it, but it's a TV show. What makes this second life interesting is that we're given a family of idiosyncratic individuals. They're going to repair and remake the family on their own terms. Isn't this the blueprint of the socially conservative, or hopeful indie? That conventional social organization won't get us there; but individualism will. And individualism can rescue dying social institutions after all. We'll each have to make our own choices, but if we're true to ourselves and honest with each other, it can be done. The recent hit "Little Miss Sunshine" followed the same line: a VW bus, quirky in its own right with a clutch gone bad and failing horn, propels a family barely contained across hundreds of miles of imminent disaster to support the hopeless but lovable dream of its youngest family spirit.
The genre is optimistic, probably as unrealistic as any other family drama, but at least optimistic. Not to mention just hilarious. So looking forward to the rest!
In spite of its title, and its gimmick, the show is not about death. Yes, each episode kicks off when somebody kicks off (the big one; aka bites the dust, meets his maker, buys the farm up in the sky), but these are just dead people, not people who die. Since we're given their death at the beginning of an episode, we're not emotionally invested in what's happened to them. Instead, we'll become emotionally invested in what happens to the family as the death creates consequences requiring the family members' attention.
So it's not really about death, it's about an afterlife. In fact the family's been given a second chance by the death of their father (I'm not spoiling anything here). His death is a gift, sacrifice perhaps so that in his absence, members of the family might consider their own lives seriously for the first time. Each of the family members is eccentric in his or her own right. This tells us we're watching HBO. Characters, for being eccentric, will each have a greater range of action and reaction for the reason that they're quirky. But in many other respects, the show is conservative.
Though surrounded by death, the father's death gives the family a second shot at being a family. The first family was built on death, literally on the repression that bound a family to support a father's funereal existence. To individual family members, the family house was a funeral home. They were each living out a death sentence of sorts, whether by maintaining secrets, keeping the closet door locked, by lying about affairs, by struggling against conformity and family obligation while trying to be different.. In other words, the usual family dynamics!
If what it took was for the father to die in order for this particular family home to confront its deathly service, then so be it, but it's a TV show. What makes this second life interesting is that we're given a family of idiosyncratic individuals. They're going to repair and remake the family on their own terms. Isn't this the blueprint of the socially conservative, or hopeful indie? That conventional social organization won't get us there; but individualism will. And individualism can rescue dying social institutions after all. We'll each have to make our own choices, but if we're true to ourselves and honest with each other, it can be done. The recent hit "Little Miss Sunshine" followed the same line: a VW bus, quirky in its own right with a clutch gone bad and failing horn, propels a family barely contained across hundreds of miles of imminent disaster to support the hopeless but lovable dream of its youngest family spirit.
The genre is optimistic, probably as unrealistic as any other family drama, but at least optimistic. Not to mention just hilarious. So looking forward to the rest!
This is a small indie by Lodge Kerrigan made in 94. Kerrigan's recent film Keane was astonishing (as was Damian Lewis). Like Keane, this film features a genuinely real and captivating performance by an actor playing a schizophrenic. The film's movement is fragmentary, roped together by a soundtrack that reveals the voices we might suppose are echoing within our character's unbound mind. His actions are confusing to him, and make us increasingly reluctant to watch, as watching makes us complicit with what he does, which is bad.
The use of sound in this film practically makes it worth watching in its own right, pun intended. In the critic's video essay that accompanies the Criterion release of this film, which is pitched to grad level film students (and that's not a complaint), Michael Atkinson remarks that the director uses "objective" sound, not "subjective" sound. It's true that the sounds that fill the film's soundtrack are given us from the external world, often through the protagonist's car radio and sometimes simply through the ether. But I'd disagree with Atkinson. I don't think this is just use of objective sound to a parallel the film's fragmented and "subject-less" subject and narrative. Yes, it's a different use of sound, but it's a complication of subjective sound, not a departure from it. After all we hear the soundtrack, and therefore we can't but believe that the subject hears them.
The use of sound here is interesting, I think, because the protagonist is not hearing them but producing them. We're given the sounds as he hears them, but they echo and resound within his schizophrenic mind, as they are the schizophrenic's world. Voices unattributed, perhaps real, perhaps recollected, but certainly not sounds that anchor the schizophrenic to reality. Rather, sounds that divorce him from the world, catching him as abruptly as an unexpected blow to the head. Short, sharp, shocks that knock about and bring into consciousness commands, put-downs, and other forms of verbal punishment that trouble us for their detachment. We don't know who's saying them. Which means we don't know why they are being said, which means (as Atkinson notes), we don't know what to think of them.
Where Atkinson hangs these sounds on a reel of film though, my sense is that they should be hung on memory, which is not a reel of film, is certainly subjective, if not multiply subjective, and is not objective in the slightest for the simple reason that memories can't be. Our schizophrenic protagonist's relation to sound is that he's caught in a compulsive listening, but cannot hear. The coup in Kerrigan's sonic genius, I think, is that in memory is the protagonist's pain, and it's a pain he suffers, often, without making the slightest of sound. But for the one that we hear.
The use of sound in this film practically makes it worth watching in its own right, pun intended. In the critic's video essay that accompanies the Criterion release of this film, which is pitched to grad level film students (and that's not a complaint), Michael Atkinson remarks that the director uses "objective" sound, not "subjective" sound. It's true that the sounds that fill the film's soundtrack are given us from the external world, often through the protagonist's car radio and sometimes simply through the ether. But I'd disagree with Atkinson. I don't think this is just use of objective sound to a parallel the film's fragmented and "subject-less" subject and narrative. Yes, it's a different use of sound, but it's a complication of subjective sound, not a departure from it. After all we hear the soundtrack, and therefore we can't but believe that the subject hears them.
The use of sound here is interesting, I think, because the protagonist is not hearing them but producing them. We're given the sounds as he hears them, but they echo and resound within his schizophrenic mind, as they are the schizophrenic's world. Voices unattributed, perhaps real, perhaps recollected, but certainly not sounds that anchor the schizophrenic to reality. Rather, sounds that divorce him from the world, catching him as abruptly as an unexpected blow to the head. Short, sharp, shocks that knock about and bring into consciousness commands, put-downs, and other forms of verbal punishment that trouble us for their detachment. We don't know who's saying them. Which means we don't know why they are being said, which means (as Atkinson notes), we don't know what to think of them.
Where Atkinson hangs these sounds on a reel of film though, my sense is that they should be hung on memory, which is not a reel of film, is certainly subjective, if not multiply subjective, and is not objective in the slightest for the simple reason that memories can't be. Our schizophrenic protagonist's relation to sound is that he's caught in a compulsive listening, but cannot hear. The coup in Kerrigan's sonic genius, I think, is that in memory is the protagonist's pain, and it's a pain he suffers, often, without making the slightest of sound. But for the one that we hear.
