Edit: this is more or less a stream of consciousness post, as I read it, having once posted it. This will have to do. I could have done this privately, but felt it might be useful to someone like this, so here it is. I am trying to survey a landscape, and what you will see are frequent transitions in perspective and elevation.
This will be the first in what I foresee will be 3-4 posts oriented loosely around romanticism, the radicalism in the cinematic careers of Leonardo DiCaprio and Johnny Depp, and some ideas I want to develop about what I think I will call the “sacrificial ethos”.
This is a large arena. The ideas are formed in my head, but they exist as a whole, as a Gestalt, that is somewhat synesthetic, which is how I process things. I have feeling pictures, that are there, then I start typing, and sometimes something approaching what I had in mind appears as I type. Writing and reading are not only two dimensional, but they are necessary linear. You can jump around from place to place, but those jumps happen in the same sequence every time.
I have actually thought it would be interesting–if difficult or impossible to achieve practically–to have texts which move around randomly like the stairs at Hogwarts. I don’t know if this is postmodernism, or what the label would be. It’s just that life is change, and our art needs to reflect that. Thinking about that: how could you achieve narrative unity in a text that evolves? What algorithym would you use? Principle, it seems to me.
If life–defined as our internal experience and following understandings of what we do and what happens to us–is a chaotic system defined by our chosen perceptual and behavioral parameters, then logically there are two levels of emergent order: apparent order, as defined by the perceptual prism we use; and measurable order, as seen in consistencies in behavior and outlook. That’s actually an interesting point, which may be as clear as mud to any readers I may have.
A self evolving text, then, would integrate a perceptual order–a meaning system–whose deployment alone varied. I can imagine self evolving visual art, too. Or drama: that is done today, as improvisational theater. That is enough on that, though. I’m thinking out loud.
The big theme I intend is “From love to skulls”. Much of this will be free form, and if and when I get it sorted, I will write something formal, and post it on my other site.
To the posted topic, Titanic. Key phrase: “It doesn’t make any sense. That’s why I trust it.” Hearing this line, I sensed instinctively that her character–with whom Winslett plainly sympathized–was going, in coming years, to be attracted to radical causes. When DiCaprio and her made a movie called “Revolutionary Road”, it didn’t surprise me in the slightest. What was it about? The discomforts and trials of normalcy. Winslett played a role in a sympathetic portrayal of the life of the Marquis de Sade. DiCaprio plans, in the next year or two, to make a movie about the life of serial killer H.H. Holmes, who in many cases killed his victims by suffocating them slowly, then filleted them and sold their skeletons to medical schools, and their organs to whoever paid for them.
All of this was prefigured in that ethos: it makes no sense, but it feels right. This is the hippy ethos. It is the Bohemian ethos. It was the ethos of the Fifties radicals like Frank Marshall, author of Sex Rebel:black, where among other things he brags about seducing a young girl, 13 I believe, 14 certainly, with whom he had group sex with another woman.
If it feels good, then it is OK, we are told. This starts out simply enough. You can run away from social obligations, like Rose did. They painted her mother as quite petty and mean-spirited. Her suitor, of course, was capable of cruelty. You see why she would run away with Jack.
Yet, if you think about it, what happened was her mother did wind up living a poor, lonely life as a worker in New York’s Garment District, if she didn’t kill herself. She mentions the fate of her suitor, but not her mother, with whom she presumably never reestablished contact. Her mother spent years of her life tending to her, and caring for her. She had plainly been through tough times after her father had died, and it was her vanity and her concern for her daughter that kept her going. Rose would have been able to paint, or ride horses, or any number of other things, had she married what’s-his-name. She might even have been able to divorce him eventually. Her mother would have been cared for.
But instead she followed her “passion”. We see this word all the time. What does it mean? Can it be controlled? What it means, is that some wind has blown into the life of a lost person, filling them with meaning in an unpredictable way. It cannot be controlled. People fall in and out of love.
As I visualize it, in an intact society, you have goal posts on either side of you. You can move within those goal posts, and you can move UP infinitely, but you cannot go beyond those boundaries. Those boundaries serve both to limit your action, but also to define WHO YOU ARE.
In the Romantic spirit–and you can hardly call it a creed–you have unlimited freedom of movement. You can go wherever you like. You can pursue whatever “muse”, or creative endeavor, or evanescent emotion, or sensation you want. You can follow the wind. Nothing needs to make sense, or be reducible to cognitive structures, provided it creates in you a sensation you find desirable.
To my mind, a part of Reason is evaluating the connection between a chosen path of living, and the outcome. The very point of reason is that you stand back from what you WANT to be true, and look as dispassionately as you can, and ask yourself what IS true.
What I see with Romantics–and I have taken several courses on the actual literary and philosophical movements in England and Germany–is in the end an obsession with death. Novalis called it the “Sehnsucht nach dem Tod”–Lust for Death. In his case, he had lost the love of his life, and wanted to reunited with her, as I recall.
But more generally, what happens, in my view, is that you get this freedom, to pursue whatever you want. What do you pursue? Well, art, that’s always a good choice. You paint or compose or write. You express yourself. But it never feels quite as good as it’s supposed to. You get high moments, but they don’t last. You always feel like a “sinner” if you are not getting continual new highs.
This in turn leads to a thirst for sensations, of various sorts. Some call this a “lust for life”. I call it Qualitative Consumerism. There is in my view no foundational difference between collecting cars, and collecting experiences, if they are not encapsulized within a meaning system.
You meet these people in San Francisco, and New York, and college towns around the country. They just got back from Nepal, or Tanzania, or India. Tres romantique. Tres merveilleux.
To be clear, I am not condemning seeking life experience, per se. My criticism is doing it FOR IT’S OWN SAKE. Experience for experience. L’Art pour L’Art.
Our foundational task in this life, in my view, is building beautiful souls. What makes us more loving, more understanding, braver, tougher, more sensible–or any of a host of desirable character traits–is desirable. This can be done in a small town. The metaphor of George Bailey in “It’s a Wonderful Life” is useful in this regard. He wanted to build giant skyscrapers. He wanted to travel around the world, work on tramp steamers, meet exotic people, and maybe never return to his humdrum existence in Bedford Falls. He is unable to do any of that, but finds himself overflowing with fulfillment in the end. This is a counter-Romantic narrative. It is a valorization (academic for “finding good”, roughly) of normality, of the normal workaday life that most people ACTUALLY are able to lead.
Contrast this with Revolutionary Road, where suburbia is a trap, and where, yes, the “heroine” dies in the end, reminding us that abortion must remain legal.
Here is what the author had to say about it:
I think I meant it more as an indictment of American life in the 1950s. Because during the Fifties there was a general lust for conformity all over this country, by no means only in the suburbs — a kind of blind, desperate clinging to safety and security at any price.[3]
Can I point out that roughly a quarter million Americans lost their lives in WW2, many more came home physically and emotionally wounded. and that virtually everyone was affected by the war in substantial ways? After massive national traumas, is it so unreasonable to want to live something other than a Bohemian, commitment-free life? Can I point out that throughout the 1950’s, the threat of nuclear war loomed large in our collective consciousness, or that we fought another war in Korea? Do we need to ask Yates’ politics?
Where do the “protagonists” of Revolutionary Road want to go? Where else? Paris. French is the “language of love”, right? Paris is the home of romanticism, of passion, of a commitment to LIVING.
It is also the home of Communism, the most murderous creed ever introduced to the Planet Earth. My lineage on this is pretty simple: Communism is named after the Paris Commune, and the Communistic ethos–including large scale, State-initiated Terror–that of the French Revolution. I see Sergei Nechayev as the intellectual Godfather (in both senses of the term) of Lenin, and Robespierre that of Nechayev.
Obviously, on close analysis doctrinal differences on the order of the difference between Trotsky and Lenin may emerge, but that is a pedantic discussion that doesn’t interest me. The big picture idea is this: you have to destroy the old world to create the new world. There is to be no gradualism. Your impatience and rage are to be indulged at every turn, once you are able to seize power.
This raises a point: if the point of life is sensation, is there a moral difference between love and hate? Is there? Is there a point in discussing morality, when sensation is the arbiter of good and evil? Further: if sensation is the sole good, then lacking sensation is the sole evil. This means you need to seize whatever STRONG sensations present themselves.
Human psychology being what it is, hate is a far easier path to follow than love. It is far easier to indulge childish impulses than to feed and clothe your adult impulses towards order, restraint, and gradualism–particularly if you can get others to indulge the same impulses at the same time, thereby socially validating them.
This is how love turns to hate: it is EASIER, in a landscape denuded of absolute moral and social laws. Waking up every day trying to feel grand passions is exhausting. Most days, for most people, are ORDINARY, and if ordinary is the enemy, then REVOLUTION is in order.
This thirst for sensation anchors the durability of the Marquis de Sade. As already mentioned, Winslett–with Geoffrey Rush–made a sympathetic movie about Sade titled Quills.
Sade was not a rock star. He was not just a “pornographer”. The project he set himself, more or less, was imagining every act of gratuitous cruelty and perversion possible. Torturing children. Cannibalism of the same children. Necrophilia. One cannot read Sade and fail to grasp that his was a mind that sought to attack the very possibility of moral coherence. As I have said before, this is the most profound act of evil possible, in my view. Committing acts of evil is one thing, but actively seeking to destroy the meaning systems of others is as vicious as it gets.
So we have Winslett in Titanic, saying “this makes no sense, so it makes sense”, deeply in very superficial love with Jack. The contradiction there, of course, is that love is not something you fall into, but something you do. Had they stayed together, odds are quite good Jack would have bored of Rose sooner or later. Certainly, absent some growing up of both of them, their marriage would not have worked. It was to Rose’s advantage that she only remembered the happy moments of “love’s” first bloom, and not the troubles that would have come inevitably, and been overcome or not, as their characters dictated.
Then we add Rose/Winslett to a movie about a man dedicated to the elevation of raw sensation above all possible moral restraints. Then we see her stuck in the suburbs. Jack we see in all sorts of movies, that I will discuss in a post of its own, but the logical end of which is a movie glorifying sadism. What catharsis can there be in a movie about a man who got away with his crimes for a very long time? None that I can see.
Emotions have logic. Rejected love turns to hate, at least for the vain. What I have been trying to do here is show the emotional progression inherent in the life gestalts–let me use a different word–morphogenesis that flows from the basic principle that sensation is King.
In France, the King represented not just a power structure, but a metaphysical one as well, in which God favored the King and his Church. Whose diamond did Rose toss into the ocean–symbol of turbulent and deep emotion–implicitly rejecting in the end all it stood for, except for Jack? Louis the Sixteenth. This was not an accident, although Cameron no doubt figured few would catch that reference. She could have given it to them. They were decent people. She chose not to, in one final act of self indulgence.
That will have to do for now. This is trending about right, but far from complete.