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I’m not that smart. Woody Allen is a genius. He’s really funny, and it all just pours out of him in a really funny way. I feel kind of limited, in that I have to work on things a lot to get them to a level that I consider respectable. So that’s one of the time factors. Also, I think that the first ideas I get, like a lot of other people’s, are just total clichés.

-Whit Stillman

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Love non-geniuses, ‘cos they have to work a little harder.

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“One part is conceptualizing and ordering the world, and the other is accepting the world as it is. These two things together shape the visual arts.”

— Agnes Varda (via heidisaman)

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Catching Up #24: Local Hero (Bill Forsyth, 1983)

At first glance, Local Hero feels like little more than cult movie which steadily improves with age. As with any cult movie, the film owes its status to a kind of earnest peculiarity comprised of many strange notes and touches which never all cohere, but yet inexplicably don’t push each other apart either. Cult films (it seems) only ever come about by accident, at those rare instances when a writer/director pens a script full of darlings that no one makes him kill off. Throughout the film I wondered at intervals why no financier ever objected to certain moments – like Urquhart’s decision to kill and serve the injured rabbit, or the loopy actions of Happer’s fired therapist, or the impersonations of classic Hollywood actors traded between two old men – as being too odd or incongruous. But I guess no one ever did, and they stayed in.

On top of that, the plot is loaded with uncommon juxtapositions and reversals: an African priest ministering in coastal Scotland, a Russian fisherman crooning a song about Texas, and the oil-company executive from Texas gathering seashells while the townspeople talk global economics in secret. In one way or another, these peculiar pairings all point to a central confrontation of the film: the relationship between the global and the local. Though the plot ultimately resolves unsatisfyingly, almost by retreat into cliche, this central confrontation remains poignant over three decades later.

This confrontation points to still broader ones. In an early scene, MacIntyre, the executive tasked with buying this remote Scottish village so that an international petroleum corporation can build a refinery there, strolls along the coastline at dusk, chatting with Olsen, his driver/assistant. "Some business!“ Olsen sighs. MacIntyre responds: “It’s the only business. Could you imagine a world without oil? No automobiles, no paint, no ink, no nylon, no detergents…” The film cuts to an extreme long shot of the two tiny figures against the sand, ocean, and faintly glowing sky while they list more ubiquitous industrial products made from oil. And a hush falls over the film. Here is a movie about the fate of humanity, about tiny people upon a big planet who have the power to save or ruin it, in one way or another.

Happer, the eccentric CEO of Knox Oil, is obsessed (as only a very wealthy man could be) with his legacy and with signs from the cosmos. Over the phone, he exhorts MacIntyre to look heavenward nightly in search of comets and other celestial omens. He wants to name a comet after himself, among other things. In this way, Local Hero also encompasses mankind’s confrontation with the sublime. From this seaside town, MacIntyre witnesses a meteor shower and the aurora borealis. But when he goes to buy the beach, he’s hampered by Ben, an old man in a bric-a-brac shack whose family has owned the beach for four centuries. For a while Ben refuses all offers, but then he picks up a handful of sand and tells MacIntyre that he’ll sell the beach for a pound note for each grain of sand he’s holding. Unable to estimate so great a number, MacIntyre balks. Ben insists that he could’ve had a great deal, since he reckons he was only holding about 10,000 grains.

That seems like a very low number to me, but it underscores the equal trouble humans have in counting sand, numbering the stars, comprehending the power of the ocean, or managing the energy sealed in the world’s oil reserves. Local Hero stands at the improbable intersection of all these concerns. In all cases, we resort to money as a medium of exchange, a way to reduce the incalculable incalculable and the incomprehensible to a familiar quantity. Money cheapens the universe, to be sure, but it also fools us into thinking that we can hold it. own it, or contain it. To the extent that Local Hero still works, it works because it advises humility on these momentous shores.

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Wonderful writing on my favorite movie.

Metropostin to celebrate 7 long years of the slutch

#whit stillman #metropolitan #persuasion #decline of the west

“i have almost no defense for my enjoyment of slasher films, which one might argue are more simplistic, predictable, and creatively bankrupt than the aforementioned genres. i can’t explain it. i think the main thing is probably that they have to do with visceral, pathological violence–violence for its own sake, or for the sake of perversion, and not violence in the service of displays of power, acquisition of territory, sexual enslavement, or accumulation of wealth. for me, this purer violence correlates desirably with either an unknowable deformation of human nature, or with some primal frisson that resonates uncomfortably with the contents of our reptile brain. i’m much more interested in that than in dramatizations of the kind of bullshit that just goes on in society all the time.”

love it every time you post

Damn yes.

”The reasons why I do things are difficult for me to understand and difficult for me to explain.

This has been uncomfortable and embarrassing and I do not feel anything productive will come of it.”