#comparitive lit

[merricatvance]

Ada Limón -- The Conditional || The End of Evangelion || John K. Samson -- Alpha Adept || Girls’ Last Tour || Black Dresses -- doomspiral || Mary Ruefle -- Kiss of the Sun || The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King

[merricatvance]

Ada Limón, The Conditional / Roxana Halls, Laughing While Leaving

[merricatvance]

Porpentine Charity Heartscape, Psycho Nymph Exile | Mary Oliver, Wild Geese

[doormouseetcappendix]

best movie ever...

there is so much to unpack in how we categorize which narratives are better than others, and one of the main factors here is genre, which affords viewers with, a kind of, regional accent that will color the language of the film itself. I think most critics just talk about the message of the film, and forget to mention that certain films exist as entirely different languages. Even if you could ask a better question of say what the scariest movie is, or what the funniest film is, you are still limited to your subjective bias of scary and funny. Like when I watch a spanish language film with a spanish speaker and I am reading subtitles they are due to their pre-existing familiarity with the vernacular, having a much more intimate, direct, and in all likelihood accurate understanding of the movie than I as a non-spanish speaker would. A life-long horror-film fan is going to enjoy James Wan and Dario Argento more than someone who loves pixar and disney, or someone who loves Japanese new wave, but we insist that all of these various cinematic languages be forced to compete for dominance as “best”. 

I bring this up because most serious critics speak western “tragedy” fluently, (usually with a pretty straight forward definition from “poetics”), and hold pretty open disdain for everything else. This is why in order to be considered art, genre films have be “gritty”, “bleak”, and “realistic”. Narrative art whose aim is not to provide the catharsis of tragedy, but other emotional and physiological states like excitement (action/adventure), fear (horror), laughter (comedy), awe (surrealism/experimental), lust (porn) etc are seen as inherently inferior. This is pretty clearly reflected by most film critics polls and academy award winners, deviating occasionally where a film need only provide social catharsis of being “timely” or “relevant”, without being otherwise overtly tragic. 

We privilege art which provides specifically tragic-catharsis; a purge of repressed emotion, over genre-catharsis; a recreational play with emotions or sensations (consider musical accompaniment of the lyric poem, as a “sensation” outside of text). In genre-narrative one already knows that the plot is not the most meaningful aspect of the narrative; there are predictable elements/tropes/effects that will be followed at the expense of identification with the protagonist and hero that is necessary for tragic-catharsis, but these other elements besides plot will excite new sensations where they fail to purge buried emotions. 

This is what I think about when asked about what I think is the best movie/book/comic/story ever? Is hot chocolate better than ice cream? It depends on the temperature outside when you ask me.