I just watched the dreadful, dreadful Southland Tales, Richard Kelly’s followup to the (apparently accidentally) brilliant Donnie Darko. As is my wont, I went out looking for what others had to say about the fiasco.

In the comments to this review, someone made a statement that’s common among the film’s defenders:

The film is obviously somehow about how the new generation self-medicates through loads and loads of every media imaginable and so that’s how the film itself it told: through the same ennui plagued short attention span.

That sentiment pops up again and again, and it pisses me off.

It pisses me off because my biggest complaint against the film is its excruciating tediousness. This is not in any sense a short-attention-span film; every flatly-composed shot, every dull-witted sequence composed of those shots, every dull-as-piss segment composed of those sequences is dragged out well beyond what is necessary.

This isn’t the good kind of extension found in Altman and Kubrick, where the camera’s refusal to cut away forces the audience to fell the discomfort and insight borne of estrangement. This isn’t the good kind of extension found in, say, Family Guy in which a gag stops being funny and then, through repetition, becomes funny again. This is the clod-footed sort of extension common in 1970s made-for-TV movies.

“Short attention span” my ass. As near as I can tell, this mistaken sentiment arises from the fact that a lot of the imagery is framed within, and presented as programming on, television screens and computer monitors. Well, kids, Citizen Kane perfected that trick a good sixty-some years ago; it may be effective (and, to be honest, these are about the most effective scenes Kelly can muster), but it’s not some nu-generational thing.

Kids. What’s the matter with kids today?

A situation you want to go forward, but which you simultaneously and equally strongly want to be taken off the table.

Not ambivalence, at least not in the sense we usually think of ambivalence. Not something that you could go either way on, something for which the pros and cons pretty much balance out; no, instead this term would describe something you very strongly desire but also very strongly dread.

It is the stuff cognitive dissonance is made of, maybe.

or, Lies, Damned Lies, and Foma.

You probably know about Post Secret, the website that publishes people’s deepest secrets in anonymous postcard form.

You probably also know about how people tend to view the world less through an a cold analysis of their experiences than through the stories they are told, and tell themselves, about the world. See the literature on false memory syndrome for some fascinating demonstrations of this, or the work of Terry Pratchett for light literature with this as a frequent theme.

One of the recently posted secrets was from a fellow who said he’d rejected many offers of no-strings sex because he was holding out for his best friend, with whom he is in love. A bit naive and too sappy by half for my taste, statistically almost doomed to frustration, but not necessarily horrible in itself.

Then came the Post Secret forum thread related to the secret, in which some of our culture’s nightmares were put on display.

Within 90 minutes came the screed of a Nice Guy, watered down and dog-whistled just enough that it might pass as the slightly-embittered voice of experience to a reader not familiar with the type. The reference to the girl in question “[taking] Johnny football quarterback over you… every… single… time” gives the game away, though.

The Nice Guy was to be expected in a thread like this, the only surprise being that it took one of them over an hour to appear. It’s not a high-traffic board, though, so allowances must be made. It was a post from later in the day that boiled my kettle:

i am almost 100% certain that my older brother wrote this. even the use of that particular sculpture is so like him. i am so proud of him and i look up to him so much. (i also hate the girl who ripped out his heart by telling him she just wanted to be friends.) (empahsis added)

And there’s the corrosive story we tell ourselves, wrapped up nicely and presented with pride. If a boy loves a girl, the girl is required to reciprocate. Anything less is a violation of the Natural Order of Things, the actions of a heartless shrew who probably secretly enjoys being date-raped every Tuesday and Thursday evening. The boy loves her, and she obviously enjoys his company, so why is she withholding her affection (and, more importantly, her body)? She must be defective in some way, worthy of decent society’s scorn.

Women, after all, can’t choose who to fall in love with. Left to their own devices, they’re likely to go off pull down there panties for some studly handsome jock, leaving the pimply but dedicated puppy dog to pine away in (never declared to her, but loudly proclaimed to his male buddies) loneliness. Better the woman wait for some man, any man, to fall in love with her and then follow suit; that’s what the angels want, and it’s less trouble for her fluffy little head.

Women are such nutty creatures, wanting to date men who treat them badly. Why can’t they be more like the Nice Guys, who only want to date the girl who (they believe) is treating them badly?

That’s the trouble with putting a story at the center of your life: stories don’t have to bear any resemblance to reality, and they certainly don’t have to make sense. In a story, the hero and the (character ultimately revealed as) the villain can have the same motivation and the reactions, but they are assigned black hats or white hats depending on whether they are meant to be stand-ins for the audience. (This is Jabootu’s Designated Hero observation.) In the stories we tell ourselves, we are both protagonist and audience; this gets us in a hell of a lot of trouble.

Outside the story, we have two people who are being honest with their emotions. Looked at through the lens of story, though, we boo the boy and hiss the girl because Story demands that love be returned in kind. Of course, we typically only tell this story when the boy is lovestruck and the girl isn’t; one wonders why that is, hmmm?

Interestingly, when claiming the bitterness to which the Story entitles him after ultimately accepting the spurning, the boy is allowed to castigate the girl for exactly the same behavior that entitled him to his role in this little drama. The girl is accused of only falling for “bad boys” who “don’t treat her right”. Of course, by definition the boy saying this is “guilty” of falling for a girl who “didn’t treat him right”, but he (and, curiously, most of his audience) remains oblivious to this. Basing one’s life on Story allows, even encourages, such selectivity and amnesia.

And again, I trail off without a proper conclusion. It’s my specialty.

Cliffhangers in general are fair game, but one like that? At least a triple hang, by my count, and I’m sure it would’ve been four if Martha Jones hadn’t (as always, sigh) gotten lost in the shuffle.

(Seriously, can it be wholly coincidental that one of the best developed yet underwritten companions ever just happens to be the only black companion? It’s especially galling when weak-tea Ianto from Torchwood keeps getting so much screen time. He’s not half as cute as they pretend he is, either. Unlike Martha. Hmph.)

And they didn’t even show clips from next weak. Teases.

So this week’s 30 Days had a Fundie mom go spend a week with a household made up of four adopted kids and two gay dads. If nothing else, it painfully demonstrated how rationality is of no use with these creatures.

On Gay Marriage

Fundie Mom: I just can’t understand why y’all are so upset with me, I’m just expressing my opinion.
Gay Dad: Well, your opinion is that the law should be used to deny me and my beloved partner the benefits and status that you and your husband share.
FM: Well, that’s my opinion.
GD: And your opinion is stepping on me.
FM: (flustered) Well, your opinion is stepping on me!
GD: (quizzical expression)
FM: It’s stepping on…on my very moral fiber!

In this, and many other, encounters, Fundie Mom could never even begin to grasp that there is no fucking equivalency between a state that affects people directly and an opposing state that effects people very, very indirectly, and then only if they go specifically looking to get some indirect affection.

And then there was On Gay Adoption

GD: So you don’t think I should have been allowed to take my children into my home?
FM: I believe every child deserves a mother and a father.
GD: But these kids had neither.
FM: I believe every child deserves a mother and a father.
GD: Like so many other children in foster care, they probably would have aged out of the system and found themselves alone, on the street, with no support structure.
FM: I believe every child deserves a mother and a father.
GD: Here they are safe, and provided for, and most importantly they are unconditionally loved.
FM: I believe every child deserves a mother and a father.
GD: OK, so that’s your opinion. But what if that’s not an option? Why shouldn’t they have a family that loves them?
FM: I believe every child deserves a mother and a father.
GD: So you’d use the force of law to keep kids bouncing around from home to home until they ended up alone and with nobody at all to help them?
FM: I believe every child deserves a mother and a father.

Head full of slogans, or at least slogan. Her entire view of the world is reduced to a bump sticker, and she is blind to the reality that extends far beyond what is covered by a trite phrase. The law can approve only of what she considers to be an optimal solution, and to hell with the thousands of real people destroyed in consequence.

Fundie discussion proceeds from the realm not of pure abstraction but instead its polar opposite: kitsch. Per Milan Kundera, “Kitsch is the denial of shit.” Fundies think in terms of Hummel figurines, not people. Law must be crafted as if it were to be deployed in a world of porcelain, not dirty flesh.

And here’s where the thoughts start branching, running off into a dozen directions but none that are appealing. This is why I usually end posts abruptly; the conclusions are always in the hazy distance, and there are too many forking roads between here and any one of them. I was originally going to work into how this attitude, and its prevalence, demonstrates how the message of The Invisibles was either willfully naive or actively evil, but that’s too much work now that I’m here. There’s also the temptation to talk about similar sloganizing among the anti-choice crowd, but that ends up requiring a bit more than I have in me. A comparison with last week’s episode of the same show would be good, but it would require way too much exposition. The effects of this attitude on legislation? Good, but preaching to the choir and a bit stale. And so I’ll just stop, without an end in sight.

“In my mind I’m pro-guns, but I’m not, I’m really pro-gun-control.”

Said with the mild bewilderment that accompanies the kind of mid-life self-discovery following from learning what common terms actually mean, this tells us just about everything we need to know about the American (or any-nationian, really) electorate.

My biography is fictional reality, I reckon.

But, oh, what fun it can be.

This week’s Doctor Who was amazing. I thought Catherine Tate would be a travesty, and it took me a while this season to warm up to her, but when she’s given great material–like this–she rises and excels. I was all set to lavish praises on this episode and this actress, but then…

…but then there were the cloister bells, and the excitement began. And then the trailer for next week, and anticipation for that has trumped appreciation for this week.

It’s a-gonna be a long seven days.

So there was this conference call, half an hour of our customer-support rep introducing the support ticket system. And what did he do?

• He laboriously explained that support is provided through a ticket system. He avoided using technical terms like “support ticket”, though, instead choosing to explain in extensive yet vague detail what a ticketing system is.
• He explained that tickets are opened by going to the support site, and proceeded to show us how to log in. It turns out that you enter your username in the “Username” box and your password in the “Password” box. Fancy!
• At the top of the ticket form, there are several blank boxes. Beside each box is a brief phrase. When submitting a request, one is to fill each blank box with the information described by the brief phrase beside that box. What will they think of next!
• There is also a large blank box on the page. In this box one is to enter a description of the problem. He asked that the problem be presented in sufficient detail that the person reading the description might understand what you’re talking about. Brilliant system, that.
• And then he thanked us for our time.

And that took half an hour. It took us half an hour to learn how to fill out a basic web-based form.

Oddly, of the three of us in attendance I was the only one ready to strangle the presenter. The other two didn’t see anything odd at all.

I’ve learned to appreciate the fact that they don’t know how to pronounce simple words like “garage” and “schedule”, but I continue to resist their carelessness with surnames.

For one thing, a surname is always one word, never two (hyphenates excluded, of course; let’s be civil). “Conan Doyle” and “Lloyd Webber” aren’t surnames; they are a peculiar insistence on maintaining a standardized middle name down the family line.

And now I’ve just finished watching the series[1] two finale of Torchwood, via a video file ripped from the original broadcast[2]. There’s a bit of the announcer at the end saying John Barrowman and series creator Russell T. Davies would be interviewed on a later program[3], but the silly man insisted that “Davies” is homophonous with “Davis”, when in fact we all know it should be pronounced DAY-vees.

Hmph. Just because they invented the language, they think they can do whatever they want with it.

[1] What’s wrong with “season”, eh?
[2] Which, like the recent series of Doctor Who, I would be more than pleased to burn to DVD and ship off to, say, Bolivia.
[3] And I certainly shall not get with the “programme”.

(And now I shall see what kind of damage my new ACME Tongue Extractor does to my poor cheek.)