Bad company.

I’ve been spending too much time with philosophers lately.

Me: Whatcha doing?
8 y.o.: Taking apart Sophists’ weapons.

I was briefly thrilled.

It’s always already been the end of epic film.

Whether he knows it or not—and “he” being Adam Kotsko, I’ll bet he knows it—this Weblog post is less about the formal fit between epic and the television serial than the relation of film to the episodic form.  I know that sounds backwards—what with MOVIES! being PRESENTED! on SCREENS! the SIZE! of WYOMING!—but the compounded facts of run time and the modern American attention span necessitate we consider film the proper realm of the self-contained episode.  Even films which promise sequels announce their completion in terms of whatever -ology they embrace. 

Films should be about something in the original, locative sense of the word.  They should surround some subject matter, be “on every side” “wholly or partially,” as per the OED.  They should be self-contained.  Not that they shouldn’t be sweeping—you can frame Guernica or a sublimely panoramic view of the Hudson River and slap it on a gallery wall without robbing them of sweep—but they should recognize their formal limitations.  Films can only intimate narrative epicness.  They can’t achieve it. 

“But!”

“But But But!” 

Try me.  Start listing epic films and I’ll start listing films with grandiose tableaux.  The Lord of the Rings?  Shot in that sewer of New Zealand.  Blade Runner?  The Lord himself envies Ridley Scott’s matte painters.  With film we confuse the formal qualities of narrative epic for the GIANT! SCALE! presented by the movie screen.  Cases in point: Iron Man and The Dark Knight. 

Both were hailed as epic upon release, and yet both are far superior films on the small screen.  Before you ask: I do remember what I wrote about The Dark Knight on IMAX, and inasmuch as it relates the experience of watching an obscenely high-quality image projected on the side of an eight-story building, I stand by it.  Watching the film on a small screen—one on which a bug of a Batman glides between five-inch tall skyscrapers while Heath Ledger’s Joker licks human-sized lips and establishes human-sized eye-contact—it’s impossible to deny that this supposedly epic performance is better suited to the televisual medium.  (This goes doubly for Iron Man, which barely passes for “good” on the big screen but shines when we connect with Robert Downey Jr. as a human actor in corporate world.)

Not that I think we should deny that the serial drama is also better served on the small screen.  A solidly written, solidly acted television show can be a better film than most films.  To wit: having finished the first four episodes of the blogosphere’s own Leverage, I can’t help but wonder what went so terribly wrong with Ocean’s Twelve and Thirteen. 

(x-posted about.)

More presents!

Kieran weighs in on the question of how to present the WPA data, following up on Duncan.

In effect, what I’ve done here is choose to break a different rule from Duncan. Instead of putting two scales on the same axis, I have made one axis discontinuous between panels, skipping values in order to compress the horizontal size. Hence the reminder at the top of each panel that you’re shifting up an order of magnitude each time. Despite the rulebreaking, there’s still some principle at work because instead of just putting a discontinuity right at the end (to incorporate the largest value) the panels are split consistently by powers of ten, and it makes sense to think of WPA expenditures as falling into groups like “stuff they spent billions on” versus “stuff they spent tens of millions on” or “stuff they only spent a few million dollars on” and so on.

I like this, too. I can foresee an entire lecture on different ways of presenting information about the WPA…. Students will be so happy.

Epistemologists of the Internet, raise your (known) hands!

Actually, Dick Cheney all those white dudes look alike Rumsfeld put his unknown unknowns in with my known unknowns…

I was at the airport, checking in at the gate when an airport employee asked, ‘Has anyone put anything in your baggage without your knowledge?’ To which I replied, ‘If it was without my knowledge, how would I know?’ He smiled knowingly and nodded, 
‘That’s why we ask.’

via.  (Probably one of those ‘what I should have said was….’ rather than reality.  But good!)

(More philosophy blogging as soon as I get an idea, kids.)

The top twelve posts at Cliopatria’s “Best Group Blog” for 2008 were…

1. Black people can’t swim, &c.
2. Stop lying about Roosevelt’s record.
3. Richard Cohen: Bad for the Jews
4. About The Edge of the American West
5. You asked for it, you got it.
6. Voter registration data; or, HERE IS YOUR HOPE, YOU FOOLS!
7. David Foster Wallace Dead
8. Sarah Palin’s “executive experience” round-up
9. Mayberry Machiavelli-watch.
10. Slavery did too cause the Civil War.
11. If Palin were 15, she could be Wesley Crusher
12. Too rude?

You’d think a “Best Group Blog” could manage to publish something more exciting than its “About” page.  More seriously, I think our top posts reflect the interests of the blog rather neatly: history, literary history, contemporary politics mixed with historical reflection, and solipsism.  (What?  You think other people are reading our “About” page?)

Philosophers are historians under certain conditions.

 

I’m not sure if that’s Eric or Ari with the stylus, but a handsome profile either way.

Wow, cool.    Thanks! (And thanks to silbey for the heads-up.)