Tummy Bug

[blp]

This is the script of the little film I've been making. A slash in dialogue (/) indicates the point at which the succeeding speaker begins to speak, overlapping with the current speaker.

>>>


Tummy Bug

The characters are Dave, Jenna, Trudy, Don, and Colin.

Int: Jenna and Dave’s house, day
Dave is sitting in an armchair reading a newspaper. Jenna comes in.
Int: Jenna and Dave’s house, day
Jenna
How are you, Dave?

Dave
I’m well thanks, Jenna. How are you?

Jenna [SITTING DOWN]
Really sort of queasy and shivery.

Dave
Do you think you’re ill?

Jenna
I guess so.

PAUSE.

I might just have something on my mind.

Dave
That doesn’t sound good.

PAUSE.

Maybe you should lie down for a bit.

Jenna
Do you think so, Dave? I don’t think I’m tired.

PAUSE. SHE THINKS ABOUT IT.

I don’t know if it’s that I’m tired. I mean, I might have eaten something, no I mean I think I’m quite annoyed about something. I mean, no, I’m not annoyed exactly. Not at all in fact.

PAUSE.

Dave
Well, you should really try and look after yourself.

Jenna
Do you think so?

Dave
/Yeah.

Jenna
It’s just I’ve sort of got to go out now.

BEAT.

I think I’ll be alright if I don’t sit down.

Dave [making vague motion with finger pointed at temple]
Of course the first thing is always going to be to sort out your mental attitude.

Ext: park
Trudy and Don are sitting on a lawn with a thermal flask and sandwiches.
Ext: park

Don
Do you think evolution occurs in the same way on other inhabited planets, Trudy?

Trudy [going over a printout]

In the same way as what?

PAUSE.


Jenna [arriving]
Hi, Trudy.

Trudy
Hi, Jenna. My god. I don’t think you’ve changed at all.

Jenna
Neither have you, really. Except for your hair of course.

Don
How long has it been since you two last saw each other?

Trudy
Different lengths.

Jenna
Is that tea?

Trudy
Would you like some?

Jenna
Thanks.

Don
Some really gummy bad taste in my mouth.


Trudy
Hey. It’s nice to see you. This is Don. I work with him.

Jenna
Hi.


Trudy
What have you been up to?

Jenna
Well, I’ve just been to a shop to get something I wanted, but they didn’t have it. It’s typical really. You’d think the point of shops would be to have things you wanted, but they never seem to have anything you want, only things you don’t want. I mean, what’s the point of that?

Trudy
And what is it you want?

Jenna [RESIGNEDLY]
I don’t know.

PAUSE.

Don
I suppose the thing is if you want to get something you want, then it’s gonna cost you.

Jenna
And what do you want from life, Trudy?

Trudy [JADEDLY]
Oh…family, kids, nice house.

BEAT.

To try to stop being dysfunctional.

PAUSE

I don’t know.

Jenna
Do you think not getting what you want can make you ill?

Trudy
I know you can get ill from being overtired.


Jenna
I had a piece of plastic stuck to my hair for six months once with static electricity.

Jenna
Eventually I had to reverse the current using magnets.


Ext: street, day
Jenna meets Colin by chance

Colin
Hello.

Jenna
Hi, Colin. I haven’t seen you for ages.

Colin
Really? Has it been ages?

Jenna
I’ve just been having tea with Trudy. Do you remember Trudy?

Colin
Do you mean Trudy Krennline?

Jenna
No. I don’t think I know her.
Who’s Trudy Krennline?

PAUSE.

Colin
Nobody. She’s nobody.

Jenna
It’s nice round / here.

Colin
Just someone I knew once.

Jenna
Sorry?

Colin
Nothing. What did you say?

Jenna
I said it’s nice round here.

Colin
Oh. Yeah, it’s OK. It’s a bit trendy.

Jenna
Yeah, it’s a bit trendy isn’t it? What are you doing here?

Colin
Just being trendy I guess.

Jenna
It’s funny.

Colin
Is it?

Jenna
Yeah, I don’t know why I’m here either. I suppose you could say I was just out for a walk and I just went to see a friend whom I hadn’t seen for ages. I hadn’t seen her for fifteen years and uh, it ended sooner than I thought it would and I guess I’m just walking around and…

Colin
How long did you see her for?

Jenna
Oh, I don’t know. fifteen minutes. Something…

Colin
Didn’t you get on?

Jenna
Well we got on OK, but I suppose you could say that our lives have just moved on. I don’t really know if we’re still friends.

Colin
Sounds exhausting.

PAUSE.

Jenna
It was actually.


Ext: street, day
They walk for a while.
Ext: street, day


Jenna
You know, because I’m generally quite a happy person, I always feel a bit sluggish when I have to be around depressive people.

Colin
I think what you’re saying there is something that depresses everybody.

Jenna
My boyfriend’s got a lot of get up and go. He keeps going away on all these trips. That’s the thing, you see. I haven’t got anything like that.

Colin
Does he travel for his job?

Jenna
No, he doesn’t have a job.

Colin
How does he afford to go away all the time then?

Jenna
I don’t know you know, Colin. That’s a really good question actually.

Colin
Do you ever go with him?

Jenna
I haven’t got the money, Colin. I went on holiday with him once to La Rochelle in France, but I came down with something really weird on the first day and I didn’t go out of the hotel room, not even once.

Colin
What was it? Some kind of tummy bug?

Jenna
No, it was weirder than that. I don’t know what it was to be honest. I just felt really disorientated and drowsy really.

Colin
How weird.

Jenna
It was really weird.

Ext: street, day
They walk on for a bit.
Ext: street, day, outside Jenna and Dave’s house

Colin
Maybe he was poisoning you.

Jenna
In the end I decided it was probably an existential problem. Well, this is where I live. You can come in for a cup of tea if you like.

Colin
Oh right.

PAUSE.

Is your boyfriend gonna be there?

Jenna
I don’t think so. I think he said he was going away today to Swanage in Dorset.

Colin
No, yeah, alright I’ll come in then.

Jenna [going into the house]
Don’t you want to meet my boyfriend?

Door slams behind them.



Int: Jenna and Dave’s house, day
SHOT ON DINING ROOM/KITCHEN. JENNA AND COLIN ENTER [OFF] AND JENNA IS HEARD CALLING OUT TO SEE IF DAVE IS THERE, WHILE COLIN ENTERS DINING ROOM AND STANDS LOOKING TOWARDS THE WINDOW.

Jenna [off]
Dave? Da-ave? Da-ave?

SHE ENTERS THE DINING ROOM

I guess he’s gone.

Colin
I must say, I like these blinds, Jenna. Did you buy these yourself or did they come with the house?

JENNA LOOKS AT THE BLINDS AS IF SHE’S NEVER SEEN THEM BEFORE. THE DOORBELL RINGS.

Jenna
I’ve got to go and answer the door.

SHE GOES TO ANSWER IT AND IS HEARD LETTING TRUDY IN.

Jenna [off - surprised]
Hi Trudy.

Trudy [off]
Hello.

Jenna [off]
This is a nice surprise. Do you want to come in?

Trudy [off]
I’d like to for a bit.

THEY ENTER THE DINING ROOM. TRUDY IS FIDDLING WITH HER SHIRT SLEEVE, WHICH IS CAUGHT UNDER THE SLEEVE OF HER COAT.

Colin
Trudy? Trudy Krennline?

Trudy
My sleeve has got stuck.

Jenna
Oh, let me help you with that.

JENNA PULLS AT THE SLEEVE AND MANAGES TO GET IT DOWN.

Trudy
Oh that’s better. I hope you don’t mind me coming round. It’s just, I thought at our meeting today you seemed a bit cold or… perhaps, closed off. I felt I wasn’t really seeing you as you really were. I don’t know if that’s because you used to be fat and now… but, I know you’ve been having a bit of a hard time lately and, the thing is, I don’t know if you were aware of it, but I used to be quite scared of you and / now –

Jenna
I haven’t been having a hard time.

Trudy
You see, I was just at the library and I heard…It was the most awful thing. There was this bird stuck in a fireplace behind where it had been boarded off and I could hear it flapping around and tweeting and I thought, we’ve got to do something for this bird. It’s going to die. We’ve got to save it. But then I went to the librarian to see if she could remove the partition and let the bird out and she said it was impossible that there was a bird stuck there because it wasn’t a real fireplace. It wasn’t a real fireplace, so there was no chimney. And I thought this was like… it reminded me / of –

Jenna [drifting away]
Oh look. Dave’s left me a note.

SHE PICKS UP A NOTE FROM THE TABLE AND BEGINS TO READ.

Colin
I’m seeing you in a whole new light, Trudy Krennline. Your hair, for instance, is totally different.

Trudy
I don’t really call myself Trudy Krennline anymore.

Colin
Do you know something? Whenever I’ve had to type your name, I’ve always made a mistake and typed ‘Turdy’.

Trudy
Oh, Colin, I never meant to hurt you.

Colin
I never expected you to change your hair.

PAUSE. JENNA IS LOOKING PERPLEXEDLY AT THE NOTE. TRUDY LOOKS AT HER AND THEN LEAVES.

Colin
Trudy Krennline. What times we had. [HE TURNS TO JENNA]

Jenna
I can’t believe she thought I used to be fat.

Colin
What does he say?

Jenna [READING]
He says he wants to set up the synergies for a cogent exchange forum within the strictures of an environment designed for maximum mutuality.

PAUSE.

Colin
I don’t understand.

Jenna [PUTTING DOWN THE NOTE, HEADING FOR THE KITCHEN]
Do you want a cup of tea?

Colin [INDICATING LITTLE CAKES LEFT ON THE TABLE]
I wouldn’t mind having one of these cakes.

Jenna
I’d rather you didn’t. I don’t feel very well you see.

Colin [SITTING DOWN]
Why don’t you sit down then?

Jenna
Well you’ve just taken the only chair.

Colin
Why don’t you sit on the floor then?

Jenna
I think that would make me feel bad.

Colin
Well you already feel bad.

Jenna [GOING INTO THE KITCHEN]
Do I?

[TodHackett]

blp--

I'm not sure what to make of this. Is there a point to it? Is there some over-arching idea here (in the script), or does your film use setting and camera work to add layers to this?

[blp]

It's filmed pretty straight, but things do seem to become clearer to some people when they actually see it. I don't really know why - it's always been clear to me what the point of it was.

I'll try a little to explain later, when I have more time.

[Unspar]

Very Pinter-esque. But the one thing that distinguishes it from Pinter for me is that it's not consistently subtle. Like the line, "I felt I wasn’t really seeing you as you really were," struck me as too obviously making this about the superficial vs. inner depth dichotomy and what makes reality. I like the idea behind it (like how our previous impressions--her being fat--affect our current perceptions of reality), and I like the "fat" transition, but this line is too overt for me. I don't know what you could do with it, though, and I don't think it damages the piece much. It's still...well, Pinter-esque.

[blp]

Thanks, Unspar. I can see your point about that line, but I'll defend it - I don't see it as something to be taken literally, but a deliberately stupid cliché, the flattest, most obvious way possible of referring to a rather standard emotional situation before undercutting it with the thing about being fat.

[blp]

I said I'd try to explain, but I'm not sure, after all, if I can. Tod, you say you can't see the point and, lame as it sounds...no, I can't even bear to say it.

I was thinking about things that weren't literature - things like minimalist cubes or an early Damian Hirst (he's lost it now, but let's try not to hold that against him) composed of nothing but fish encased neatly in blocks of resin - things that had made me think 'why is that art?' I didn't think it would be possible to make a piece of writing work like that, but I thought I'd try, assuming I'd fail. I wanted reasonably plausible, but expressionless dialogue and I wanted to go as far as I could with that without it meaning anything, which I also didn't think was possible (Alan Ginsberg said it was almost impossible to write anything completely meaningless). And I don't think it did end up being meaningless.

[TodHackett]

I was thinking about things that weren't literature - things like minimalist cubes or an early Damian Hirst (he's lost it now, but let's try not to hold that against him) composed of nothing but fish encased neatly in blocks of resin - things that had made me think 'why is that art?' I didn't think it would be possible to make a piece of writing work like that, but I thought I'd try, assuming I'd fail.

This is something I have never understood.

So, say you're an "artist"-- someone like Damian Hirst. Now, you go through school (or not), and you produce some works (or one work) that somebody in the field hails as "genius" or "groundbreaking" or whatever. Now, you have carte blanche-- you know that whatever you do next, be it scribbling on a napkin or pissing in the snow or casing fish in resin or whatever, will be "art". You know this, b/c you are now an "artist", which means you are eminently more qualified than your audience to judge what is "art".

What does this sort of activity ultimately lead to?

Well, you alienate your audience, make art appear more and more culturally irrelevant, and martyr yourself for the "cause of art" (or whatever label you want to put on it) while fewer and fewer people are paying attention to art, b/c they just don't care anymore.

Bravo. Nice job.

This is precisely why I believe, along with Eagleton, Berger and a host of others, that the category of the aesthetic is rapidly destroying itself. And heck, maybe it should. But one of the results of this process, for better or worse, is the elimination of the "artist"-- that is, the elimination of people whose work is "sacred" enough, a priori, to be placed in museums. Ultimately, it means the end of museums. For better or worse. (I like museums, but hey...)

I feel bad even writing this. I dunno... maybe I need to read more Danto. Ah, well... to continue:

Having said that, I can also say that I enjoy, and find value in, many works that I have come across that might be considered "avant garde" by most standards. So I, for one, wouldn't want to see funding yanked from the NEA (for example). But at the same time, I can totally understand the attitudes of those who would.

I guess it's more the tension that bothers me, and the fact that I have to remain highly suspicious of "high art"-- when an artist refuses to explain his/her work, often by claiming some sort of variation on "executive priviledge", I never know whether it's in an earnest effort to better his/her craft, or a blatantly self-serving attempt to confuse me or piss me off. Being a person who doesn't like it when people who are "better" or "more cultured" than me try to keep secrets about things that are in my interest, I generally default to the latter. You alienate me, I'll ignore you, and we'll see who's the better for the exchange.

I believe that the "artist" should bend over backward to help us understand his/her project, b/c if they're so anxious to show us their work, we're doing them a favor by looking at it. I believe, further, that in looking at such works the end question should be less "why is this art?" and more "why is this personally or culturally relevant?" or "why should I care?"-- I say this, b/c for the reasons stated above, I believe the category of "art" is little more than a hollow signifier. And I believe that "artists" have made it that way, which is a shame.

So, my end question to you, blp, is this: why engage in a project like this at all? Do you believe it genuinely improves your writing? Do you believe you benefit from it? That your audience benefits from it?

These are honest (dare I say, "desperate") questions, and I'm looking for honest answers. So-- please, please, PLEASE give me a reason to believe in art-- and especially the avant garde-- again!

[Xamonas Chegwe]

Alan Ginsberg said it was almost impossible to write anything completely meaningless

But he didn't have the benefit of seeing a Microsoft help page at the time! ;)

[Xamonas Chegwe]

I liked this piece. And I can agree, up to a point, with Tod's last post. I like the way the dialogue keeps you guessing, keeps you reading (and in the case of the film, I assume, watching) right to the end. Ultimately meaningless it may be (and I'm not 100% sure on that either) but interestless it isn't. I really like the way it hints at things without resolution. Is Jenna being poisoned? Was she ever fat? What is the mix-up over Trudy's Surname all about? There is a Pinteresque element to it - tell me blp, are there pauses? ;) And also a slight Beckett feel to my eyes (subtly Beckettsian though, if there is such a beast).

It reminds me of reading a poem that I feel is telling me something, but not telling me exactly what. This sort of confusion delights me. Keep up the good work.

There is a lot of "Art for art's sake" about, but I don't think this fits in that category.

The only thing that jarred for me was the contents of the note read by Jenna near the end, "He says he wants to set up the synergies for a cogent exchange forum within the strictures of an environment designed for maximum mutuality. " It comes across like computer generated management speak and doesn't fit the very human, albeit bizarre, feel of the rest of the piece - maybe it works better in the filmed version.

Thanks for sharing this,

XC

[blp]

Funny you should say this, Tod. Here's what I wrote about the current Tate Triennial of British art on another site (if you don't feel like reading it all, skip down to the asterisks):


These things tend to go in cycles I suppose. I hated contemporary art in the eighties, liked it in the nineties, now I hate it again. It was bad all over in the eighties and neo-expressionism was the seemingly willful standard bearer of badness, but England depressed in its own furrow with the deathly dull large professionalism of Helen Chadwick, Richard Deacon, Anish Kapoor, David Mack.

I remember the first time I heard about the Goldsmiths generation, seeing Damian Hirst’s fish in resin piece in a Sunday magazine, Opposing Forces Swimming in Different Directions for the Purposes of Understanding and thinking ‘why is this art?’ and being interested in my own art moment - for the first time really. I still think they were good, the best of those people, in their day: Hirst, Lucas, Wearing, Wallinger, Whiteread, Fiona Rae, Steve McQueen, even Georgina Starr very early on, though one grows up and realizes that some of them, I mean Douglas Gordon, were just very very lucky little chancers.

A lot of younger artists seem to hate these people now. One or two have told me that they do. It shows in the work. At some point, some general feeling seems to have arrived that something was to be said that couldn’t accommodate the clean edged rectangle that defined minimalism and engendered conceptualism. Suddenly, bursting out of those straight lines, it’s all baroque phantasmagoria, already patinated with the brownish grime of junk shop history.

Adrian Searle’s review of the try-anythingial talks about the stated curatorial ambition to represent art dealing with appropriation without irony or jokes. Maybe the lack of jokes is because of a lack of any intent of detachment. The idea seems to be now, if you like it, just point at it or make it again: recreate performances you’ve seen in books, design things that look like the trash culture you grew up with the eighties, use film rather than video to get that Kenneth Anger look you like and, when you frame things up, use gilt and curlicues – anything to avoid those minimalist sharp edges.

The lack of faith in the present – even in the possibility of critiquing it – is palpable and suffocating. We’ve had postmodernism for years and referencing the past was nothing new even before that, but supposedly avant-garde art has never looked or been so reactionary. Pound’s dictum ‘Make it new’ is always about a relationship with the past. The only thing new now, ironically, is revivalism – fashion-driven nostalgic salivating over romantic pasts. Seventies revivalism never muddied up the nineties cool school, however much it did the culture at large, but eighties revivalism’s all over the current stuff like ****. There is no intent to critique and nothing to critique, the past being gone, just a desire to live out a fantasy (think of the way Michael Jackson would say the word to get my full revulsion for it). The fallacy is that, intended detachment or no, the artists are detached from what they’re referencing whether they like it or not. Nothing ends up being revived. We just get a bunch of mummified corpses dragged into the gallery and crudely reanimated. Meanwhile, in this dimwittedly permissive theoretical environment, the door swings open to all kinds of other rigourless tat – even fantasy art itself.

You could argue that, by setting up the minimalist box against this, I’m just engaging a subjective clash of tastes. But that boxiness was never just about the look of the box itself, but about the relationship of the box to the space around it and the viewer, an acknowledgement that art was not hermetic, but had an unavoidable relationship to its context, to the reality around it and a professed desire to be part of that reality. That’s how we got from there to conceptualism. Critics such as Harold Rosenberg warned at the time of the dangers of minimalism being no more than design and, of course, later artists like Julian Opie ignored the warnings (and got rich), but it doesn’t matter. The core idea was good and it’s that that I’m lamenting, not some style I just happen to like better than the one around now. What’s gone – arrogantly, contemptuously gone – is the contemplative, any sense of fascination with phenomena and, therefore, anything that might wake a viewer up. We go to sleep, instead, in perfumed rooms, and dream up monsters.

***

So I may not be the best person to aks about contemporary art. The difficulty for me in addressing your distress is that I half agree with it, maybe even feel it more strongly than you do, because I feel that some of it really is charlatanery. But I also know that the other half, the half I really like, often looks like charlatnery to a lot of intelligent people. The whole thing makes me feel a bit tense, which I suppose might at least help to show that I'm not just trying to **** a snook.

I guess that bad half gets by partly on the fact that, so often in the past, when someone seemed to be flinging a pot of paint in the public's face, they were actually painting masterpieces. There's also a market, which, as you suggest, works on brand names that, once established, can often get by on some pretty shocking rubbish. Hirst is a good example. So's his contmporary, Sam Taylor-Wood, though she was never much good. Roy Lichtenstein's an even better example because his career describes a trajectory from alleged paint pot flinging to infallible brand name success. Robert Rauschenberg said about Lichtenstein's first show at Leo Castelli in NY in the early sixties, 'I didn't know whether it was bad or good. And tI liked that feeling.' The person whom he initially showed his work to at the gallery said, 'Can you do this?' By the time he died, his work had become dull and repetitive (an awfully common syndrome), but his work was selling for millions.

Still, good or bad, a lot of what looks like charlatenery in the artworld probably isn't. Artists are at least as vain as writers and they do want their work to be good and want people to appreciate it. At times, some of them probably even feel a sort of generosity to the viewing public - and, mixed up as that may be with vanity, that generosity, more than arrogance, may explain why some artists are reluctant to explain their work. The sculptor Barry Flanagan is a standing joke among younger artists because he makes nothing but large sculptures of elongated, somewhat anthropomorphicised hares - and sells them for a lot of money. He was asked why recently and responded irritably, 'It's not the right question. You have to walk round them'. And it turns out, from what I've experienced, he's right. Some friends and I were at a sculpture park recently and we could see one of Flanagan's sculptures, a particularly big, matt black one, off in the distance. Feeling somewhat ironical about it, we went down for a closer look. Up close, for reasons that are very difficult to explain, we were awestruck. Difficult to explain, but it felt very generous.

Gift giving is complicated and part of the complication is that it lessens the impact if you go around mawkishly telling everyone how generous you feel towards them. So all I can tell you is that many of the art experiences I really treasure have involved hating or being mystified or frustrated by the work for a while. I suppose that might sound masochistic, but I think it's more that, by not being just what I would have wanted and even, in a sense, seeming quite wrong, they gave me more to chew over - even if their initial appearance was of less.

I can't be sure about this particular piece. it's a gamble every time, for the reader/viewer and the writer or artist. That doesn't mean I just wrote whatever and hoped for the best. There's no point taking a risk on something you don't give a crap about. In the end, as I say, I think it does mean something, but I'm more interested in the experience of the thing - whether as a piece of writing or a film - which is why I tried to resist meaning as much as I could - a sort of zenny impulse maybe - resisting anything that gives leeway to 'the ceaseless chatter of the mind'. Partly, this is a matter of feeling caught between art, where you can be as non-verbal and experiential as they like, and writing, where the inherent verbosity generally leaves you feeling there's not much choice but to either make sense or be overtly nonsensical. I wanted an appearance of sense, but without much sense - because either of the other two would be too easy to accept or dismisss; and I think I got it and, to be a little boastful, though maybe not about something you'd see as worth bragging about, it wasn't easy!

Hope for the avante-garde? I dunno, Tod. I want there to be some, but I kind of think contemporary art really is clapped out. I like older artists: Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman, Sophie Calle, Fischli & Weiss, Ed Ruscha, Robert Ryman, Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy. Lucy Mckenzie's an interesting younger artist. Also, Martin Westwood. It's good actually - having to think what I might find to care about in art right now. Not much is, unfortunately, the answer.

[blp]

I liked this piece. And I can agree, up to a point, with Tod's last post. I like the way the dialogue keeps you guessing, keeps you reading (and in the case of the film, I assume, watching) right to the end. Ultimately meaningless it may be (and I'm not 100% sure on that either) but interestless it isn't. I really like the way it hints at things without resolution. Is Jenna being poisoned? Was she ever fat? What is the mix-up over Trudy's Surname all about? There is a Pinteresque element to it - tell me blp, are there pauses? ;) And also a slight Beckett feel to my eyes (subtly Beckettsian though, if there is such a beast).

It reminds me of reading a poem that I feel is telling me something, but not telling me exactly what. This sort of confusion delights me. Keep up the good work.

There is a lot of "Art for art's sake" about, but I don't think this fits in that category.

The only thing that jarred for me was the contents of the note read by Jenna near the end, "He says he wants to set up the synergies for a cogent exchange forum within the strictures of an environment designed for maximum mutuality. " It comes across like computer generated management speak and doesn't fit the very human, albeit bizarre, feel of the rest of the piece - maybe it works better in the filmed version.

Thanks for sharing this,

XC

Hey, XC. A pleasure. So glad you enjoyed it. There are pauses, yes, and they're in the script written as PAUSE. I may need to find a way of making them more noticeable though - or, well, you'd be surprised how diffficult it is to get actors to pause.

I wasn't thinking of Pinter or Beckett through the writing of this really, except in a very vague way as part of a landscape of things to avoid. Nothing against them, it's just that they're familiar now - also, a lot of young playwrights write in an arch, stylised way that's obviously sub sub Pinter and doesn't owe much to observation, whereas a lot of what's good about Pinter is his ear for dialogue. So, to the extent that it sounds like them (it doesn't to me and it deliberately eschews their undertoes of violence or unease), I wish it didn't. Still, when I was replying to Tod just now, I was thinking a lot of Beckett's famous quote from his dialogues with George Duthuit, which Unnamable's quoted recently too: 'The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express.' Not that I'm saying that was exactly my point.

On that bit of management speak in the note, well, I don't know. It may be subjective, or, yeah, it may work better on film. It's sort of where I could get into the likely meaning of the piece, which is, probably, about attempts to make meaning - clunky ones - or perhaps, in a way, obstruct it. Something that interested me, and which might need more thought in another piece of writing, is the question of how resistance of meaning in art relates to resistance of meaning in contexts such as politics and the workplace. If I'm not being very clear, it's because it's a loose thread. But your Microsoft joke up there is curiously apposite.

[HollyGoLightly]

To see minimalist art in its true light, you have to look at the spectrum and history of art in general. Just as an individual artist should grow and explore new things after they have mastered a particular skill, humanity in general needs to push the boundaries of existing art. If everyone still sculpted idealized human form like Michelangelo's David, what's the point. We've seen that. He was brilliant because no one else had that much skill, but in an age where we have learned the proportions and mastered the technique we need to do something new. In short we need to create, and rehashing old stuff is not creating, unless you are able to put a new spin on it--make it yours. As a culture we spent generations upon generations learning to paint and sculpt perfect idealized imagery. Then we devolped Realism, where we stopped painting the perfect form and started painting everyday scenes with everyday people--we threw away the need for perfect beauty. From there we moved on to Impressionism, where we stopped focusing on the traditional training and application of paint, to focus only on the visual sensations (i.e. sunset on the water). Move into cubism and we take away the need to acurately represent visual sensations. This evolved into moderism. Take a look at the abstract expressionists who threw away subject matter. When you get to the minimalist they have nothing left to discard, but pictorial space and finally the artists 'hand'. Ultimately you get sculpture that is about nothing but form--a giant steel cube. It is saying something and it is saying something that has never been said before. Ultimately, things like sculpture are meant to be physically experienced. You cannot truly appreciate a giant steel cube, or any sculpture for that matter, until standing next to it and having it invade your space. And anyway where else could art go that it hadn't gone before?

Didn't Dadaism explore literature in an 'art for art's sake' kind of way?

[blp]

Didn't Dadaism explore literature in an 'art for art's sake' kind of way?

Yes - right down to sound poems with no recognisable words. But as I say, I didn't want to write nonsense. I wanted, as much as possible, to write something that sounded like sense, but wasn't.

[Grumbleguts]

Ultimately, things like sculpture are meant to be physically experienced. You cannot truly appreciate a giant steel cube, or any sculpture for that matter, until standing next to it and having it invade your space.

You can't truly appreciate a sculpture without touching and feeling it. Looking is not enough. Sculpture is as much about texture as it is about shape and form. Sadly, museums don't let you do this.


I didn't want to write nonsense. I wanted, as much as possible, to write something that sounded like sense, but wasn't.

And I think you succeeded. This was good enough to make me read it twice. I agree with most of the other positive comments above. I would like to see the finished movie, will it be posted online anywhere?

[blp]

And I think you succeeded. This was good enough to make me read it twice.

:) :) :)


I agree with most of the other positive comments above. I would like to see the finished movie, will it be posted online anywhere?

I don't quite know what I'd have to do to post it, but I'll definitely try. I'll post here when and if I sort it out.

[Scheherazade]

I wanted to go as far as I could with that without it meaning anything, which I also didn't think was possible (Alan Ginsberg said it was almost impossible to write anything completely meaningless). And I don't think it did end up being meaningless.I don't think this piece is meaningless and I do agree with Ginsberg (I know; he would have been delighted to hear this) that it is impossible to create something all together meaningless, especially in case of a movie. The things we see and hear are bound to remind us something, make us relate to them in some way. We read their facial expressions, detect the changes in actors' voice and draw our meanings. Would these necessarily be the ones the director/writer mean? Not necessarily but once they present their work, it becomes ours as much as they are theirs.

The script reminds me of our daily conversations. If we place hidden video cameras in our houses, I am sure the interactions we see will be similar to this. Hardly complete sentences, irrelevant utterances, inside jokes and silence... Dear silence! ;)

[blp]

I don't think this piece is meaningless and I do agree with Ginsberg (I know; he would have been delighted to hear this) that it is impossible to create something all together meaningless, especially in case of a movie. The things we see and hear are bound to remind us something, make us relate to them in some way. We read their facial expressions, detect the changes in actors' voice and draw our meanings. Would these necessarily be the ones the director/writer mean? Not necessarily but once they present their work, it becomes ours as much as they are theirs.

The script reminds me of our daily conversations. If we place hidden video cameras in our houses, I am sure the interactions we see will be similar to this. Hardly complete sentences, irrelevant utterances, inside jokes and silence... Dear silence! ;)

Thanks, Scher. I agree wholeheartedly with the second half of what you say. I'm really fascinated by speech patterns and have been paying close attention to them for a long time. It's sometimes frustrating being involved in a ropey communication like the kind you describe, but listening to this sort of thing can be strangely soothing, as well as amusing. And the quality of it can be more dreamlike than surrealist poetry.

To try to explain a bit better what I'm on about to Tod, think of the way a lot of pop songs start: a bit of guitar or bass, either the main riff or something introductory. Most of us can probably recognise the pattern and, even if we've never heard the song, we know exactly when the drums are going to kick in and the song's real action is going to start. And it's so moronic, it's awful. Imagine if it didn't go like that and the intro, repeated for four minutes, turned out to be the whole thing. What a surprise that boringness would be. Most people would probably be exasperated for a while at not getting what they expected, then, with a bit of luck, something would snap and some of them would realise this was all you were going to get, there wasn't going to be any 'action' and, alright, you're not going anywhere, but at least you're here.

It's the same with short films. A lot of them start beautifully with a shot of someone walking down a street or saying a few words into the phone or something - something the filmmakers felt they had to do to set a scene. It's when they start getting into what they supposedly wanted to say that the things become (often unbearably) wearisome.

Those nice beginnings are often little accidents, but to get the same feel throughout any piece of work is not so easy - and I'm not saying I've done it, but I'm pleased with how far I've got. I've watched and read loads of things that seem as if they've simply held a frame up around a bit of reality and shown its oddness. The best of them make it seem very easy, but it's not. The temptation to groovy it up, put vagrants in trendy clothes, use dumb jokes, dialogue or plot clichés, overstyle the shot, hamfistedly rip off stuff from other people's work without understanding it, make it exciting, 'important' or, in fact, at any moment, give in to your own subjective preconceptions of what might be really good rather than trudging along trying to find what actually works is enormous. Compare any lame modern brit gangster film with its relentless, escapist grooviness and indie-pop soundtracks to the Michael Caine classic Get Carter - a rigorously realist film that is also deeply odd.

So Scher, I'll let myself be a little flattered maybe if my script makes you feel it's as simple as your first paragraph suggests. But it wasn't that easy for me...

[TodHackett]

There's a line from Theodor Adorno's essay, "The Culture Industry"-- "The Culture Industry perpetually cheats its customers out of that which it perpetually promises", or some such. It was this essay (I believe) that Nathanael West was referencing when he wrote his novel, _The Cheated_, which was eventually re-named _The Day of the Locust_.

Anyways, now that I look back on it, I can see how your piece turns on the same idea-- perpetually promising, always cheating. Maybe I saw that before, and that's what bothered me about it. Maybe.

[Xamonas Chegwe]

There's a line from Theodor Adorno's essay, "The Culture Industry"-- "The Culture Industry perpetually cheats its customers out of that which it perpetually promises", or some such. It was this essay (I believe) that Nathanael West was referencing when he wrote his novel, _The Cheated_, which was eventually re-named _The Day of the Locust_.

Anyways, now that I look back on it, I can see how your piece turns on the same idea-- perpetually promising, always cheating. Maybe I saw that before, and that's what bothered me about it. Maybe.

Maybe it depends on whether you consider the arrival more important than the journey?

[Scheherazade]

So Scher, I'll let myself be a little flattered maybe if my script makes you feel it's as simple as your first paragraph suggests. But it wasn't that easy for me...Be my guest! ;)

However, I would like to clear something up. Even though I think it is impossible to create something altogether meaningless and little things such as tone of voice, a familiar sweater or an expression might help the reader/audience relate to a certain work of art at times, this does not necessarily mean that the work itself is simple. As the saying goes: 'Simplest things are the hardest.' Like cooking the 'perfect' soft egg or sunny side up.

Think of cumming's:

1(a

le
af
fa
ll

s)
one
l

iness

How simple it looks but no one here would claim that because of that it was easy for cummings (if anyone hasn't noticed, I love his poetry! ;)) or would be easy for anyone else to come up with something similar.

So, blp... Please go ahead and let yourself feel flattered some more because not only I felt 'it's as simple as [my] first paragraph suggested' but also appreciate that it was not so easy for you to make it look so! ;)

[blp]

Be my guest! ;)

:) Thanks, I will! :)



There's a line from Theodor Adorno's essay, "The Culture Industry"-- "The Culture Industry perpetually cheats its customers out of that which it perpetually promises", or some such. It was this essay (I believe) that Nathanael West was referencing when he wrote his novel, _The Cheated_, which was eventually re-named _The Day of the Locust_.

Anyways, now that I look back on it, I can see how your piece turns on the same idea-- perpetually promising, always cheating. Maybe I saw that before, and that's what bothered me about it. Maybe.

Sorry, I haven't read Adorno, but from what I know about him, I'd have thought 'the culture industry' referred to mainstream culture and that what he'd be talking about is the stuff that cheats you without you knowing it. But I'll try to look it up and get back to you.

[blp]

Sweet. It's really easy to find:
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/adorno/1944/culture-industry.htm

[blp]

I dunno, Tod. It could smart a bit being compared with the thesis of that essay, but mainly it's just a pleasure to read. Anyway, it feels like my credo, better expressed than I could and I find lots to back up what I was trying to do with this script. Funny you should mention it, anyway. I was just thinking earlier today that if capitalism was a country, Don't Worry be Happy would be its national anthem.



The man with leisure has to accept what the culture manufacturers offer him. Kant’s formalism still expected a contribution from the individual, who was thought to relate the varied experiences of the senses to fundamental concepts; but industry robs the individual of his function. Its prime service to the customer is to do his schematising for him.
This seems to be getting near the point for me. '..a contribution from the individual...'

And the following delighted me by being so close to what I said earlier about pop songs.


As soon as the film begins, it is quite clear how it will end, and who will be rewarded, punished, or forgotten. In light music, once the trained ear has heard the first notes of the hit song, it can guess what is coming and feel flattered when it does come.

I love that 'feel flattered'. This is why I'm often as irritated by art house films as Hollywood junk. What's the alternative? The obvious answer seems to be for the viewer to feel insulted. This is tricky, because we often end up feeling pretty insulted by really stupid mass culture anyway and the critical descriptions of mass culture can sometimes sound close to approving ones of avante garde art. I think the reason for this is pretty simple. The avante garde stuff is trying to expose experientially the same stuff the criticism is trying to expose through description. In the case of the art, this is what's sometimes referred to as détournement - turning the weapons of oppressive cultural discourse on themselves; getting inside them to give their dumbness full expression rather than standing outside them to point out pedantically what's wrong with them.



Real life is becoming indistinguishable from the movies. The sound film, far surpassing the theatre of illusion, leaves no room for imagination or reflection on the part of the audience, who is unable to respond within the structure of the film, yet deviate from its precise detail without losing the thread of the story; hence the film forces its victims to equate it directly with reality. The stunting of the mass-media consumer’s powers of imagination and spontaneity does not have to be traced back to any psychological mechanisms; he must ascribe the loss of those attributes to the objective nature of the products themselves, especially to the most characteristic of them, the sound film. They are so designed that quickness, powers of observation, and experience are undeniably needed to apprehend them at all; yet sustained thought is out of the question if the spectator is not to miss the relentless rush of facts.
Leaving aside objections to the sound film, which I don't share, what he's describing is an experience of fullness - one that is oppressively pacifying - exactly what I don't intend to provide.



All the other films and products of the entertainment industry which they have seen have taught them what to expect; they react automatically.
Ditto.



That factor in a work of art which enables it to transcend reality certainly cannot be detached from style; but it does not consist of the harmony actually realised, of any doubtful unity of form and content, within and without, of individual and society; it is to be found in those features in which discrepancy appears: in the necessary failure of the passionate striving for identity. Instead of exposing itself to this failure in which the style of the great work of art has always achieved self-negation, the inferior work has always relied on its similarity with others – on a surrogate identity.

So good. '..the necessary failure of the passionate striving for identity..' The idea of a discrepency in style. It's just what I want.



The culture industry did away with yesterday’s rubbish by its own perfection, and by forbidding and domesticating the amateurish...
Yes - the amateurish - more of what I want.



Often the plot is maliciously deprived of the development demanded by characters and matter according to the old pattern. Instead, the next step is what the script writer takes to be the most striking effect in the particular situation. Banal though elaborate surprise interrupts the story-line.
He loses me a bit with 'the old pattern'. I'm bothered by the idea of any recognisable pattern at all - more flattery it seems to me. But I'm right back on board when he starts objecting to striking effects and banal though elaborate surprise. And now we're onto the passage in question...



The culture industry perpetually cheats its consumers of what it perpetually promises. The promissory note which, with its plots and staging, it draws on pleasure is endlessly prolonged; the promise, which is actually all the spectacle consists of, is illusory: all it actually confirms is that the real point will never be reached, that the diner must be satisfied with the menu. In front of the appetite stimulated by all those brilliant names and images there is finally set no more than a commendation of the depressing everyday world it sought to escape. Of course works of art were not sexual exhibitions either. However, by representing deprivation as negative, they retracted, as it were, the prostitution of the impulse and rescued by mediation what was denied.
And yes, some of it could be seen as a description of what I've done. But as he goes on to make clear, the cheating is in denying that the fulfillment never takes place. What he's saying is that mass culture's lack of fulfillment is perpetually presented as fulfillment. He's talking about an assault on the unconscious. I'm really trying to do exactly the opposite - say from the outset, this is not real. Admit the limitations and relax the rush of identifications; allow a bit of space and peace - even though it might be slightly tough love.



The secret of aesthetic sublimation is its representation of fulfilment as a broken promise. The culture industry does not sublimate; it represses. By repeatedly exposing the objects of desire, breasts in a clinging sweater or the naked torso of the athletic hero, it only stimulates the unsublimated forepleasure which habitual deprivation has long since reduced to a masochistic semblance. There is no erotic situation which, while insinuating and exciting, does not fail to indicate unmistakably that things can never go that far.

The mass production of the sexual automatically achieves its repression. Because of his ubiquity, the film star with whom one is meant to fall in love is from the outset a copy of himself.

And he goes on to link this pornographic tendency to fullness, always ultimately more about dissatisfaction than satisfaction, with another kind of pleasure, which one might have been more inclined to dismiss as harmless:



In the culture industry, jovial denial takes the place of the pain found in ecstasy and in asceticism. The supreme law is that they shall not satisfy their desires at any price; they must laugh and be content with laughter.

Pleasure promotes the resignation which it ought to help to forget.

You can get addicted to this stuff. And you can start to see it as constituting quality. Something - anything - is seen as being better than nothing.

And on advertising:



the object is to overpower the customer, who is conceived as absent-minded or resistant.

and my objective is - it's obvious isn't it? - not that. What's overpowering about something you can't see the point of?

I like this next quote in relation to the way language operates in my script. Again, from the point of view of a détournement, it's something to shoot for anyway:



the more purely and transparently words communicate what is intended, the more impenetrable they become.

And then, this last, I just like:



All are free to dance and enjoy themselves, just as they have been free, since the historical neutralisation of religion, to join any of the innumerable sects. But freedom to choose an ideology – since ideology always reflects economic coercion – everywhere proves to be freedom to choose what is always the same.

I don't know if I've made my position any clearer, but Adorno's made my position clearer to me. There's a big difference between what he's describing - apparent pleasure that is actually its negation - and what I was attempting - which did involve a certain thwarting of various kinds of pleasure.

When I was writing the script, I was thinking a lot about what the critic Matthew Collings calls 'shock art' - things like the Chapman brothers' sculptures of children with penises for noses - and how it was precisely what I didn't want. For a while, this stuff also got called 'transgressive', but it seemed to me that the real transgression was not to give people something obvious like this, but to leave them puzzled and feeling like the experience wasn't adequate or adequately definable. What I really want, because it's the thing I've valued most of all in other people's work, is to give people an experience of themselves; and of themselves thinking. Some way to go yet, I think.