Doubleyou...Tee...Eff...?

I'm back. I swear.

So it's been a rough semester. Let me explain...no, there is too much...let me sum up. Here are all the things that have happened so far in my life as a Ph.D. student:

1. I survived my first semester. Barely.
2. I became obsessed with Walter Benjamin. More on that later.
3. I earned my first B in a course since Sophomore year of college. My GPA hasn't been this low since I was a Forensics major.
4. I got into a relationship. I was thrown out of a relationship. This is what I look like now:



I'll let you figure out which one I am.

5. In happier news, my work is going well, despite the B. I'm co-authoring a paper with my research professor, which has been accepted into the Pop Culture Association conference in St. Louis this Spring. I'd post it here, but because I'm co-authoring, and my prof wants to publish after the conference, I can't. Sorry. I know you were so looking forward to it.
6. Other little things: I dressed up as a Star Trek officer again for Halloween; I went to New York for Christmas; I spent New Year's Eve with the coolest girls on the planet.

Anyway, as I said, I'm currently obsessed with Walter Benjamin, who wrote, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility." Up until November or so, I'd heard of him, but I'd never actually read that essay. After November, he kind of became what was missing from my life.



So the paper I'm working on utilizing Benjamin's ideas involves poetry performance in film, particularly the film So I Married an Axe Murderer. Poetry, especially in performance, is considered high art, right? Most people feel like they just don't "get it." Well, according to Benjamin, this is because poetry has an "aura." It's blue. No, not that kind of aura. Here, an aura is that sense of history, awe, time-space, etc. that we consider a piece of work to have. So when you look, say, at Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "Sonnet 43" from Sonnets from the Portuguese, you think, "Oh, isn't this beautiful? People can't write like this anymore! Oh, to be able to hear her read it!" That reverence for a work of art is the aura. It maintains a place, a time, and a tradition.

Okay, Benjamin says this is bad. When we contemplate a work of art that has an aura, we get sucked into it. We stare at it (if it's a painting or a poem in a book), or we listen intently like we're supposed to. But we don't actually experience anything inside of ourselves. We experience standing there looking at a painting or sitting there listening to a poem or piece of music. And we feel what we're supposed to feel.

Film--and, in fact, any mechanically or digitally reproduced artwork--does the opposite. Film lets us absorb the work. It does this by degrading the aura of art. When we watch a movie, we get a whole new perspective on things, provided to us by tricks of the camera, editing, etc., and we receive a vastly different audio-visual experience. That seems complicated. So picture yourself standing in a museum admiring a painting of a girl screaming. You might feel something very powerful. But you probably also feel like you need to think really hard to get it. Or maybe that you're just not high class enough to understand it. Now picture yourself in a movie theatre. You're eating popcorn, drinking soda, and screaming at that stupid girl to run out the door instead of going upstairs because she's about to be slaughtered by the ghost of some dude with a chainsaw for a face. You're into it. It's absurd, but you feel the terror and the anxiety anyway. That's the magic of film.

Now, I'm not saying art isn't awesome. It totally is. I like art, and I like going to museums. And I'm also not saying that film can't be a form of art. It totally can, especially if it's an art film. All I'm saying is that film can allow us to experience art in a new way. This is where So I Married an Axe Murderer comes in. It's a pretty cheesey film, and it totally makes fun of the aura of poetry performance. But that's not all it does. Because it's a film, it allows the audience to experience poetry in a way that they couldn't if they were actually in a smoky coffee shop in the mid '90s. You don't have to be Beat-Chic to get the film. You just have to show up and follow the story. And, voila! You get to experience art/poetry in a way that's accessible.

There are, of course, people who totally disagree. Two such people are Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, of the Frankfurt School, who wrote, "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception." They argued that everything in popular culture is repetitive, and that we're all just cogs in the culture industry, and that, in fact, we ask for it. This is all true. Mass culture is about money. And we keep buying shit. And they keep producing shit. And everything in pop culture tends to be cyclical and repetitive. Basically, we're stuck in auto-tune land. But why exactly is that bad? Sure, pop culture can be used for the axis of evil (Hello, Mr. Murdoch), but really wonderful social and political changes can occur through pop culture. And to go back to my original point, sure, mass media does set up a clear upper class of people who own everything. But messages still get through to those of us who don't have 80 gajillion dollars or can see Russia from our porches. Just look at Avatar, which is clearly an anti-war, anti-big-business, pro-environment, pro-intercultural-relations film. It was released by 20th Century Fox. NewsCorporation owns 20th Century Fox. And guess who owns NewsCorp? Yep, that's right. And yet, we got the message. Now we just need to do something with it. Like not kill blue people...or something.

Now then, that's not my dissertation, but it's still something with which I'm currently obsessed. I think mass media is good. I like it. And I think it can do good things for people's awareness of their surroundings. I'm also trying to figure out how to link afterlife films to sci-fi starship voices (I think there's something about life's traumas in there...sex, death, and...religion, maybe?). And I'm working on fixing up my paper on lighting in the film Se7en. And I'm taking 4 classes. And I'm assisting on 2 research projects. And I'm writing a conference paper. And I need more coffee.