Friday, March 21, 2014

People Who Have A Problem With Gravity


Alfonso Cuaron has been getting flack from some corners for being a shrewd Hollywood director, for revitalizing ideology rather than making art. At the end of conversations with friends and articles like those linked above, participants reluctantly admit that this is kind of the point of a film like Gravity. We don't always sit down in front of our projectors and computers and watch Bresson and Jean Eustache when we want to unwind, we don't all read Thomas Mann on the beach, we don't go to warehouse parties to dance to big band band jazz. If Americans figured out anything really interesting about modern culture it's this: that a steady diet of trash is not only permissible but necessary, and not just because our work hours so exhaust us or have us so caught up in their rhythms that, when we have some leisure time, we can only relate to a culture that has been as mangled as we have by our work days.