Three quotes about time/progress/development, from three things I read in the bath just now
From “A Storm Is Blowing from Paradise: Disco Elysium on the Past and Present” by Alastair Hadden
Like every CRPG before it, Disco Elysium contends that its player-character can improve with experience. Games are inherently optimistic this way: by accepting tasks and completing them, we steadily become more capable. There’s room to reshape ourselves, too; we can build ourselves better than the next cop, given time and effort and deliberation. That said, one of the game’s few middle fingers to the lineage of Dungeons & Dragons is its notion that a skill can be too developed; a detective can be too smart for their own good, too sensitive, too tough. And it’s noteworthy that almost all of the game’s Thought Cabinet projects and clothing bonuses come with debuffs and drawbacks, too. Progress requires trade-offs, the game wants to say. Everything in this world is compromised.
From “Béla Tarr Reflects on Making Seven-Hour ‘Sátántangó’ 25 Years Ago and Life as an ‘Ugly, Poor Filmmaker’”
Most films just tell the story,” he said, “action, fact, action, fact, I don’t fucking know what. For me, this is poisoning the cinema because the art form is pictures written in time.” He coughed hard between breaths, as if expel that sickness. “It’s not only a question of length,” he said, “it’s a question of heaviness. It’s a question of can you shake the people or not?”
So far as Tarr is concerned, Marvel movies aren’t the problem as much as they are the clearest symptom of a broader disease that has spread between genres. “Most shit today… they aren’t films, they’re just comics,” he said. “It’s just blub-blub-blub, a bubble of a sentence and then we go to the next section.” Forget about Netflix: “I’m just deeply sorry for somebody who is watching movies on this shit because they miss everything.”
Our problem, Tarr argued, is that most cinema leaves us stuck on the surface. “People just tell a fucking story and we believe that something is happening with us,” he said. “But nothing is happening with us. We are not really part of the story. We are just doing our time, and nobody gives a shit about what time is doing to us. It’s a huge mistake. I just did it a different way.”
From Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life by Adam Phillips
Darwin showed us that everything in life is vulnerable, ephemeral and without design or God-given purpose. For disillusioned non-believers -- who, of course, pre-dated Darwin and created the conditions for his work and its reception -- belief in God (and providential design) was replaced by belief in the infinite untapped talents and ambitions of human beings (and in the limitless resources of the earth). It became the enduring project of our modern cultures of redemption -- cultures committed above all to science and progress -- to create societies in which people can realise their potential, in which “growth” and “productivity” and “opportunity” are the watchwords (it is essential to the myth of potential that scarcity is scarcely mentioned: and growth is always possible and expected).
