In the comments section on my post on being in the Oakland Museum – and the New York Times – Tracy Grubbs wrote Your layout reminds me of that scene in Blade Runner. If you keep zooming in you'll find those fake snake scales on her sweater, really. About two weeks ago, an economist from the Obama Whitehouse referenced the Matrix.
Both comments sort of surprised me. And neither one should have. Blade Runner and Matrix are part of the New Canon. They have become larger than they were when they were just movies. They are part of our culture, like Casablanca or Anne Hall. They somehow exemplify the new zeitgeist.
This Nike ad, -directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, the director of Amores Perros and Babel, among other movies – is really an amazing short film. It is so quick and so frenetic that it is hard to follow at first. It took several viewings and some Cliff Notes before I got the story line.
The players envision real-world consequences of their plays….after
sending a pass that gets intercepted by Ribery, Wayne Rooney stares
himself down in a mirror and throws a bottle at his reflection; the
stock market crashes in England; the papers diss Rooney; he grows a
beard and a gut and winds up cutting grass in the stadium; he lives in a
trailer under a billboard of Ribery. Back on the pitch, we see Rooney
shake off this hallucination, chase Ribery down and tackle him.
I am not a big soccer fan and, like pro-football, I think that the vignetted scenes with Wagnerian music and a deep base voice-over make it much more dynamic than actually watching a game. But the world cup is a big, big, deal; maybe bigger than the Olympics.
A couple of nights ago, we saw "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" with Laura Atkins and Neil. It is a Swedish movie with lots of subtitles. It is a hack story with lots of gore, a horrific rape scene – two rape scenes, I guess, depending on how you count them – and shot in Rembrandt lighting minus two f stops. I heartily recommend it.
It got me thinking. Why is this a hack story? because I have seen it before? Several times? This is a story of Buffy Summers and River Tam, it is the story of any woman in any Luc Besson film. Or, as far as that goes, like the Marine Lioness Program . Then I started thinking What if it isn't a hack story, but a new female archetype?
It is an archetype of a young woman as the most powerful person in the
Universe of the story.
Buffy Summers is all that is between Sunnydale and the hoard of
Vampires that will destroy the world. There are men who, maybe, can help her – often
not very well, atleast, compared to her – but she is the only one that can save the world. The men are there to hold the structure, but Buffy holds the power.
Part of the Buffy story is that she is both damaged and vulnerable and River Tam even more so. Mathilda, in Luc Besson's The Professional is incredibly vulnerable and damaged but, in the end, she is more powerful than Leon, her protector.
I think that this is a new myth. A New Story. Granted, my education in myths is preeeety shaky, but I can't think of a Grimm's Tale or a Greek Myth where the female is young, vulnerable, and straight up, kickass, powerful.
And, like any archetype, it is coming out in stories because it exists in the real world. One place, for sure, the archetype is starting to manifest itself is the Marines Lioness Program. The Marines are now training women to go on patrols because they can interact with the local women in Afghanistan and Iraq. In other words, they can go where the men can't. They have power the men don't.
When we read about the war in Afghanistan, we almost always read about it from the US point of view – duh! – or a Marines point of view, or a NGO peace workers point of view.
A couple of days ago, I read a blog in the NY Times (it is amazing how much good stuff is in the Times, I wonder, and not in a good way, where it will go after the Times folds – if it doesn't just disappear) that talked about why the Taliban are such poor shots. And it sort of talked about it , inadvertently, I think, from the Afghans point of view. Among a long list of problems like having and using equipment in poorly maintained condition, relying on automatic fire rather than aiming, using mismatched and bad ammunition, was
a matter of public health. Many Afghans suffer from
uncorrected vision problems, which have roots in factors ranging from
poor childhood nutrition to the scarcity of medical care.
Sunday afternoon, while the rain feel all afternoon, I watched Afghan Star
The two of them, together, left me with an almost overwhelming feeling of how poor Afghanistan really is. Not We have no doctors, poor. but We have no good sanitation poor. Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries on Earth. So poor, most of the adult population can't see very well.
And there is a huge minority of the Afghan population that is afraid to move away from that poverty,. Afraid that they will lose more than they will gain. Maybe they are right – they will lose community, they will lose their convictions and answers – I don't think they are right to be afraid, but, then, I've eaten from the apple a long time ago. I am biased.
I just finished reading The Blind Side by Michael Lewis and I would recommend it to anybody who is interested in football, or US social policy, or the human potential, or race relations, or, for that matter, just wants a good read.I just finished writing about David Foster Wallace and how much I have enjoyed his writing and The Blind Side is the polar opposite.
With DFW, I am always aware of, and dazzled by, the writing. In the The Blind Side, the story is everything – more accurately, what is being told is everything. All the words, all the sentences are pushing a narrative forward. And I mean that in the best possible way.
At this point, I think everybody knows the basic plot – how a poor black kid, Big Mike who become Michael Oher, is discovered (not quite the right word, maybe found) by a very rich, white, Christian, family and how his life and their lives are changed. That does not do it justice. Michael Oher is a 350 pound, 6'4", freakishly quick, and astonishingly graceful black kid who is invisible. He goes to school, sort of, but nobody cares if he learns anything – they just pass him on to the next grade where he is invisible again. He is one of those kids we read about every once in a while that just slipped through the cracks. At 6'4" and 350 pounds!
Except that, when he is starting his junior year in high school, everything changed. Michael is very likable but he is very lucky. As the book says, among other things, Pity the kid inside Hurt Village who was born to play the piano, or manage people, or trade bonds. This book made me realize, again, that we, me and the people who read this blog, were all born on third base, at least, and, even on our best days, think we hit a double.We didn't we are just enormously lucky.
