10:13:24
Watchers, 1988. NSO stands for NSA in the movie.
“The film critic in me was virulently at odds with the conspiracy researcher.”
-Jasun Horsely
It is baffling to me that there are still critics, thinkers, and cinephiles who take movies at face value, discussing them strictly as entertainment or “art” (whatever that word even means at this point. To me, real art requires integrity. Marshall McLuhan tied art with corruption, telling us, “Art is what you can get away with.”) without using the lens and background of deep politics. Deep politics, not identity (shallow) politics. To do so at this point, however much we may all want to do so, is naive, unsophisticated, lazy, and dare I say, cynical and bourgeois. I want to go back to the way it was—to the way I used to be able to watch things—and sometimes I do; mostly I do this with old films, which I (re)visit for this purpose alone, to be with what was. But, the truth is, it never really was. It was as time, and I guess that’s the feeling I’m always after—the way time looked. And felt. The way nothing and no one looks or feels anymore.
The movies were what never was. Or is it the other way around, as I have argued for two decades in my books?—what never was were the movies.
Either way, the film critic, film lover, and conspiracist can no longer be at three different places at once, pretending the other doesn’t exist. They all must sit in one room together now, and talk, bearing it all in mind.
And I do mean bear.
The plot thickens, as the say. Every day the plot thickens. As it also dilutes into nothing. Knowledge always thickens the plot. But with people being the way they are now, all this knowledge, both lost and found, has nowhere to go.
But also: we had no idea just how heavy and viscous and gut wrenchingly vicious it all really was. I always suspected but I didn’t know. We were too busy dreaming their false dreams. So busy we lost everything, lost ourselves.
