Art

Put another way, we don’t need art to tell us life can be shitty, that people can be shitty, and that most people are just making it up as they go along: we fucking KNOW this already.  Only the morally and emotionally numb need reminding of this.

What we need to see in art is what we DON’T see in ordinary life.  If you’re going to focus on the bad, take it all the way, as in tragedy.  Catharsis is a real thing.  I’ve felt it.

But the sorts of movies I like are those of a prolonged struggle, filled with mistakes and hidden vulnerabilities, but which finally emerge in a victory of sorts.  And there are many like me.  Such movies give us hope when things are not working out, courage when it is hard to see anything getting better.  Just hold on, they tell us.  Just hold on.

I have said this before, but comics in some respects are literally like modern myths, and as such arguably deeper than Robert de Niro getting a funny haircut, failing to kill a politician, then killing a bunch of pimps prior to trying unsuccessfully to kill himself.

I watched that movie, and thought WTF?  Not because I don’t do art movies, but because it had no point whatever that I could see.  I mainly wanted to see the context for the famous “You talking to ME?”  And needless to say, I was disappointed.  It’s really a stupid scene.  We all know people we can readily imagine doing that in the mirror, don’t we?  I know I do.  Where I live, they all have concealed carry permits, and they do pack everywhere they go.