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I'm not really great at returning to something I started in the past. On another metalevel, however, now I can see the difference between the natural expulsion of ideas and the attempt to rekindle and nurture the same idea a few days later. Sort of like making a green tea with the same tea bag I used earlier, the essence is the same but it's not as vibrant a concoction.
But life isn’t so easily forgotten and pain that we have endured, that has caused us to lament on our sofas and escape reality in a torrent of trending or transient images. The very real pain that one only feels in the depths of continued and unrelenting suffering, such as having a goddamn fucking smoke alarm go off for almost an entire film without a single character mentioning it or a single person involved in making the film think, hey that’s really annoying. It is in these moments of the abyss that we as people can transcend ourselves and push our souls beyond their previous incarnation. Giving up on life is not an answer, while it may seem completely justifiable as you sit watching a man explain semi-porous gas is turning people into rage zombies and your best chance of survival is to wear multiple jackets, beep. Yet as a person saturated with the buttery literariness of your common stone, I seek to expunge the hardships of my soul through catharsis. Finally, to be rid of the plagues of Night Zero.
(Like the problem of unconscious bias but in a good way. Or at least that's how his sagacity presents it) Influenced by Dune and Gladiator, accused of imitating Star Wars, what journey through intertextuality can be constructed and what questions posed of Hirokin: The last samurai. In order to add a little more content for people genuinely interested in study rather than the opinion pieces of a thirty-four-year-old man, I’m going to throw in some information when I start doing these informal hermeneutic reviews. I heard one of the characters say that quote I’ve prefaced at the start of the post and it struck an intertextual nerve within me, so given my complete and unconditional love of Serendipity I went with that. – For context, I called my daughter Serendipity, because I got lucky - bwahaha. My willingness to be clandestine with language for amusement is core to my being. But seriously, I do really like the word on its own merits and it resonates with my subjective interpretation of creation and my role within it. I also called my dog Clover. If you read my dissertation you’d notice I have a strong affinity to Dandyism in my approach to play on the principle that I value luck as a transcendent quality of a person. But I digress, or do I? Intertextuality bitches!
**Contains spoilers**
Hence, today I‘ll actually apply a bit of academic criticism to the film because I can. - I might keep returning to this one as I develop the idea further.
Imagine my surprise when I saw that, as I had guessed writing a review of Superman V Batman, there is already a Justice League film. Not very surprised. Like I said at the time there’s so many of these things coming out I can’t notice them all. But when I did, and the divine Gal Gadot is involved, I thought I’d have a look. How can I make this review different from the last? Reviewing Cars 3 was more of a platform for a discourse on reality and narratology, BVS was a reactionary take, and I am Dragon a more literary practice than review. What Deleuzian assemblage of criticism and media can I find to keep a freshness to these forays into films? Criticism can come from many different angles and focus on any number of things between symbology, scene and story. Which Lego pieces shall I combine here? As yet, I’ve touched upon these films with broad sweeping strokes and not got down and dirty with the details. What I am looking for here is how the elements work together. As inspiration comes from Lego then as Lego combines itself, what is the significance of certain pieces. I cannot and do not want to look so deeply into the structure but pull from it moments that speak to me as a neo-pragmatist and explain why they called to me. Yet what would I be if not a little contradictory, Superheroes are what people aspire to be. Those great and noble beings who have risen above the world and taken the mantle as honourable defenders of justice. But, I am no hero. Not at all. So to adopt a neo-pragmatist angle and to understand what I am not, this review takes the form of three fears drawn out by the film. Three very personal fears and ones that are raw to my being. These are part of my origin story.
I have finally worked out where Paradoxia Grande is going and how it ends – roughly. But, I need to get a bit better at writing. My problem, perhaps as a symptom of being autistic, is a terrible tendency to get a bit repetitive accompanied by a lack of descriptive writing. My sentence structures also follow a strange violation of English, not in the deliberate fragmented Joycean manner but in the way I try and say too much or give too much detail in a single sentence so that it stretches on longer than a person could ever hope to retain the breath to speak and therefore, assumedly, be able to consider in one singular thought without having to double check they read it correctly and thus break themselves out of the flow of reading and lose the immersion that good writing inspires in people to better facilitate their involvement with the rich inner lives of the characters and the emotions or events that are being described. Where to go with this terrible propensity to be overly boorish? Back to Austen I thought, and free indirect discourse. That’s what I love about writing a book how you want it written, there’s absolutely no reason you can’t change how to narrate at any point during the course of it. With that in mind, I wanted to start looking at moving away from the first-person narrative which occurs probably around 1/3 of the way through and for the next chapters move onto F.I.D. Which is probably a lot more like the initial style.
Wait there, this is a film review you may be quandering, what is the relevance of all this? Well, funny you should ask. The name of the film is “I am Dragon” and I wanted to move away from first person things and so in my mind there was a mystic connection between the film and I. Serendipitous in its overt first-personiness, I thought it may be worth a bash. This will hopefully be a free indirect review of a film, it may not be great, but we’ll see.
Trigger rating: 7/10 - I'm not going to hide the fact I think social justice has gone a little whacky of late, I'm not a hateful bigot or anything but I do like to have a jolly laugh about things which are a little sensitive to some. If you feel that you may be too offended by reading some jokes about Antifa and things. You need to calm yourself down. Society has always been chaos, just laugh manaically into the void rather than get mad about it. **Massive MASSIVE spoilers alert** Do not click read more unless you want to completely ruin the film for yourself!!!! Seriously So why you may ask am I doing this? We see a lot of ‘reaction’ video on platforms or maybe we did. I wouldn’t know I never really got into the whole reaction to things scene. I tried Gogglebox for a while but as soon as they put on that awful vicar lady, apparently, she lives not far from me, I couldn’t watch it. All the good ones went on to do other things or just gave up and we sorta got left with these b-list average people. Must be hard being a b-list average person on TV, finding out you are boring and unremarkable to the whole world rather than just your friends and family. Anyway anyway, So I got to thinking; since my first reaction to the film was that Batman v Superman is no different than Batman v Lex Luthor essentially, in either case Superman is pitted against some rich guy. My first reaction to the film was a reaction, hence I got wondering….Why are there no reaction reviews? There might be, but I’ve not bothered to look. I can tell you now that reverse engineering a video medium sensation into written work has difficulties, but we’ll see where this goes. It might be a long one, the film looks two hours and I’m very chatty.
My original thought before the film starts is that this isn’t much of a fight, but we’ll see. I’m beginning this as I watch the film so there will be spoilers this time round as it’s more of a reaction review than a philosophical reflection.
So, among the many things I ponder while watching Cars 3, any of the Cars films, is how a society can exist that is made of cars. This may seem like I’m not giving the film a chance, not in Coleridge’s words suspending my disbelief. But, I ask, how am I supposed to overlook such a difficult thing as a world which is made of cars and for all appearances contains no humans. I remember the second film, the main bad ‘guys’ were the less loved cars who faced a crisis when society has ceased to produce their parts. Ceased to produce their parts, electively killing off an entire race, no pun intended, of cars. Surely one can only assume from this that the Cars universe is the ultimate evolution of eugenics. These cars do not seem to question this system of evolution, or technological advancement as we may consider it. I don’t remember, well, I’m writing this without doing any research, that there was a public outcry about the nature of this world we are meant to enter into. Jackson Storm, the evolution of race cars puts Lightning McQueen into a spot of bother at the beginning of the film. Naturally, if we humans were to face a similar world, let us just imagine that for a moment. When our technological progress begins to improve not only our physical attributes but may one day augment our mental capacities. This leads us to a society similar to one found in Gattaca (Niccol, A. 1997). However, unlike Gattaca, the cars seem largely indifferent to one another’s capabilities outside of the race track yet still must face the concern that their parts may cease to be created. Maybe I’m asking too much of a children’s movie? Or reading too deeply. To combat my difficulties in accepting the premise of Cars’ world, I may adopt a narratological view called Parallel worlds theory. Now, in brief, ‘Parallel World’ theory (the link is to ML Ryan's work) postulates that there is an infinite amount of variations on reality. To the extent that any story, novel, film or whatever, may in fact be realised in an existence no different ontologically or existentially than our own. So, is Cars real somewhere in the multiverse? Well I have one view broken into two conceptions which then reconstitute into one whole again. That may seem a little odd, but I shall explain. If we are to accept an infinite number of worlds, then logically each and every permutation of existence must factor into that creation. However, looking a little further at this we notice a problem. We should be allowed to say two things; one, that there exists a world which in some fashion bears an essential or accidental property with all other worlds, even if this world is itself infinitely large to accomplish this task. On the other, we must also accept the appearance of a world that is thoroughly distinct from all others. In this arises a bit of a contradiction, if anyone has read my dissertation they will notice I don’t have much of a problem, with contradictions when we are discussing elements within the ‘magic circle’ of games. Out here though, is the same affordance offered to our understandings? Can both of these worlds even in contradiction be permissible. It was on this notion that I came to realise there is one avenue which supports both sides of this contradiction. That allows us to resolve, in one fashion, the acceptance of this contradiction. Let us consider a game of chess as a metaphor for reality, we may just as easily, and more aptly use Go but I have never played it so I shall stick to chess. Reality can follow many different moves, and in these realities any piece may move anywhere it likes. There is no postion of pieces on the board that cannot exist. There may be boards consisting entirely of pawns or ones where you absolutely cannot move a piece on to D4. The permutations of rules in accordance with the permutations of pieces is the parallel worlds which each share an essential quality in the way we may recognise them as being in some semblance chess. Leaving behind Leibniz’s law of indiscernibles as it becomes a little beyond the scope of a Cars review to discuss the existential similarities of pawns between parallel worlds; for it would require the same pawn to be simultaneous in multiple realities and we may consider this as one singular pawn among meny worlds or many pawns of the same properties differentiated by the distances we can imagine between these infinite worlds. Nevertheless, we can conceive that there exists infinite variations of chess. Now here is the interesting part, how can one world be unique and be related to all otherworld without bearing any similarity to them? Any guesses yet? Take a moment…..Well consider this only one of them is ‘real’ and all the others are simulated. It is the most obvious and simple resolution to this problem. One real, infinite simulated. It is unique in its realness and hence bears no similarities to all the others and the world which bears a resemblance to all others can mimic the appearance but is always irrevocably different from the ‘real’ world. No level of imitation of properties allows it to subsume the real into its simulation. Thank you Cars 3 for occupying a few moments of my time in a way I had not expected when I entered into the contract between viewer and media.
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