I’m so tired I can’t figure out how to finish a sentence, but I really like David Weddle’s article, “Lights Camera, Action. Marxism, Semiology, Narratology,” in the LA Times. I have a lot of thoughts on it, the most basic being that he’s one of the first people I’ve ever read to make a strong argument for why film theory — and critical theory in general — is fucking ridiculous.
In the piece, he quotes Roger Ebert: “Film theory has nothing to do with film. Students presumably hope to find out something about film, and all they will find out is an occult and arcane language designed only for the purpose of excluding those who have not mastered it and giving academic rewards to those who have. No one with any literacy, taste or intelligence would want to teach these courses, so the bona fide definition of people teaching them are people who are incapable of teaching anything else.”
I do think that theory has some value; one of the most profound sentences I’ve ever read is “there can be no poetry after Auschwitz,” which effectively, in a few disputed words — I mean disputed because no one, not even German people, can figure out to fucking translate them correctly — renders the Enlightenment null and void.
But most theory makes absolutely no sense, and seems designed to make all but a few people who have the time —and interest — to learn the language feel ridiculously stupid. My personal theory on theory has something to do with what Roger Ebert said — the more arcane the language, the more you best an academic rival, making theory an ego-based moronic pursuit — and something to do with the fact that most of these motherfuckers are, if we’re being simple about it, just absolutely shitty writers.
There’s some problems with the article. Namely, why is the LA Times website so ghetto, isn’t it a major newspaper? And also, it’s a tad boring. But it falls into my wheelhouse of interest right now, which manifests in an internal argument, often spoken aloud in quiet rooms, about why people, intellectually, are so willing to play the emperor with no clothes game? And what sort of person makes the rest of the lemmings fall off a cliff — a sociopath? I wish I had more people to talk to, because I’m starting to feel like my skepticism might be a form of mental illness.
