Love Stories With Only One Character, OR, Nature Programs
October 8, 2009 3 Comments
Here are two. In the first, many things fall and have to be picked up, and the converse is also true. What SEEMS like seven and some minutes of effortful tidying up is really a story of heartbreak. There is drama. There is an inexplicable surplus of tires. Shirtwise, there is feast and there is famine. It could only be helped by a David Attenborough voiceover saying “Very impressive, but no one is watching.”
Luckily, in our next video, David Attenborough says THIS VERY THING. If you must, fast forward to 1:59, but I advise against it:
In a perfect world the star of One Man, One Dream, One Chance would do a buddy film with the bird of paradise. There would be a really intense danceoff to Eric Carmen’s “Hungry Eyes.” It would end happily, in a muscular embrace. And it would be called “Birds of a Feather.”
Carla Fran
millicent
Millicent and Carla Fran
Oof. So I watched the dude video a second time, Millicent, and I still see no signs of satire. I will say, though, that in addition to my initial gut reaction (creepy! manipulative!), I think there’s some room for Marxist analysis here, along the lines of Thorsten Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class. What would be the opposite of “conspicuous leisure”? Because as I see it, all the tidying up, especially the haybales (now he’s pitching them up into the loft! now he’s taking them out of the loft!) is wasted effort.
One could make the case that art, too, is a kind of wasted effort. But I don’t think the converse is necessarily true. That discordant “you” on the end of “I….. loooooove ….. youuuuuuu”? Is not art.
R, I like that; my first thought was to marvel at how the displays that are intended to show him as a good mate all reference a sort of “rural provider man” set of tropes (tractor, hay-barn, fields, etc) while each having been completely evacuated of any actual content (the hay goes in, the hay goes out). A woman doesn’t so much want a man who’s a provider, he seems to think; she wants a man who’s got all sorts of provider-type props. She doesn’t want a man with big muscles because he’s strong and will protect her from wolves or whatever; she wants a man who’s got muscles that have no actual utility. It’s sort of sublimely stupid.
RachelB–thanks for the mention over at Shakesville! ZZ, hello!
Millicent, gads, what a find.
Every time I watch this, I marvel at the costuming. His pants are so tight! His shirts are so crisp and unlogo-ed. He is the leader of the church group, the just showered male, the one that doesn’t understand irony and makes a mental note to buy wine in a box when his blind date says she loves wine in a box. It has to be farce, right? It has to be statement. Even the bench and rose are so perfectly, earnestly wrong, that I cannot accept this as sincere. It is all comment, in the style of off brand men’s underwear packaging?
I’m currently teaching DFW’s “A Supposedly Fun Thing…” where he brings up how advertising can never be art, and getting pampered by a paid staff can never be truly delicious, because both ultimately want something from you, whereas art (or your mom cleaning your room) are starting from a generative source (love, expression, etc.). If this guy is for real, then art it ain’t, because it’s so grabby. Did the starting music remind anybody else of that Tom Cruise/Nicole Kidman pioneer movie?