I went to the opera for the first time and it was stunning. There was a live horse! I cannot overstate the elation I felt watching a whole ass horse emerge from the wings of a theater. We saw La Bohème, which begins in Rodolfo’s ramshackle one-room Parisian apartment and then explodes into a packed Quartier Latin for the second act. The stage was so deep that from our vantage point in the highest balcony I could not see its end; it looked like it stretched back forever, 1830s Paris dropped in the middle of Lincoln Center. Hundreds of people were bustling about onstage: packs of children running after a man on stilts, street vendors, Musetta throwing plates, a brass band parading, a donkey, a horse! It was very difficult not to clap and point at every new entrance; I felt the kind of breathless wonder that only comes from pure spectacle. It was like peering into a crowded little snow globe, like jumping into one of Mary Poppins’ chalk paintings.
Three days after La Bohème I saw Farewell My Concubine, a three-hour Chinese drama directed by Chen Kaige that follows two boys trained as Peking opera performers through thirty years of China’s tumultuous political history. The film was at times very hard to watch—the boys’ talent comes by the violent and exacting hand of their master; and their later struggles with addiction, abuse, and war are no more palatable—but it maintained a tender focus on the love between the two men and the love they dedicate (and betray) to their art form. It was the most comprehensive Chinese history lesson I’ve ever had without feeling like I was watching stylized lecture notes.
This summer I felt a sort of malaise about contemporary media. I didn’t love Barbie or Oppenheimer but not in any critically incisive way. I was surprised that I had very little to say about either of them. This in stark contrast with Age of Innocence, which I saw by myself in an empty theater and then boldly claimed was the last movie ever made. I thought I might be succumbing to my habit of only liking films where people are wearing gowns, but then I came across an interview with Passages director Ira Sachs. (Passages, Sachs’ most recent film about a hot bisexual love triangle, renewed my faith in art and love and the eroticism of sweaters.) When asked about his attention to fashion and its impact on visual style, Sachs recalls watching Grease for the first time: “I’m talking about being overwhelmed with both pleasure and desire for the images on screen…” La Bohème, Concubine, and Passages are all visually and emotionally overwhelming where Barbenheimer is overstimulating. Sure, there is enough happening with Margot Robbie and patriarchy musical numbers and naked Cillian Murphy to keep your attention, but not much more than that. I wasn't arrested, I never experienced a “shudder.”
In an essay about craftism (style-over-substance writing), the shudder is defined as:
a “primordial sensation,” “as if goose bumps were the first aesthetic image.” It produces a spontaneous feeling of being overwhelmed, of “being touched by the other” for a few moments during which the “I” becomes aware of the possibility of letting self-preservation fall away. But to experience that feeling of “being touched” there has to be something that speaks to you.
This author argues that the MFA-influenced focus on the perfectly crafted sentence is sucking the life out of the novel. I am arguing, I don’t know, that the trend towards messaging above all else is stripping film and theater of it’s more human, juicy, goosebump-inducing moments: the feminist manifesto of Barbie, the war is bad and it is hard to be a genius (??) of Oppenheimer, the confusing shoe-horning of “correct” gender politics in & Juliet—a blockbuster Broadway spectacle I really enjoyed, except for the moments where it felt like I could actively see the board room negotiations about the show’s nonbinary love interest playing out onstage. Instead of pleasure and desire on stage or screen I feel like we are often getting seminars.
On the one hand, this literally does not matter. Trends come and go, terrible things are happening in the world. But in some ways the glossiness I have an aversion to in contemporary movies is the same glossiness of Instagram, is the same glossiness currently taking over our brains and turning us into people incapable of complex thought or emotion. The week has been operatic. I do not mean to compare a traditional theater form with international tragedy, but I cannot help but find connective tissue in their presentation—an onslaught of violent imagery designed for raw emotional response. I again wonder what sort of empathetic collapse we are running towards by engaging with social media in the face of heinous events. I have written before about the fact that we are not meant to process the world this way and return to a passage from Haley Nahmann, who is herself quoting an essay by Max Read:
“The main purpose of social media is to call attention to yourself”…the fact that anyone can join social media and publish an opinion lends the industry a democratic air while it profits off of our every spare thought. We’re lulled into a stupor and call it participation. “Each new byte of information adds confusion and entropy, and takes us further away from meaning and consequence,” Read explains.
Confusion, entropy, and I would add, a kind of ecstatic rage.
xx
Mia