This is about a hallucinogenic experience I had years ago... and how it relates to the way I look at movies. I can't say this psychedelic "revelation" altered my perception of cinema in any way; it just gave the perception a form, a metaphor. And I wasn't under the influence of an illegal synthetic drug, but an ancient (legal) herb: Salvia divinorum ("The Divine Sage"), which grows wild in Oaxaca, Mexico. Unlike LSD, which can induce an altered state of perception that lasts for hours, a hit of Salvia divinorum (smoked) provides a disorienting, headlong visual rush that may last for only a few seconds or minutes. Problem is, you could pass out for an instant before you hit the floor. (Salvia divinorum, although it's related to the common sage plant, has since been classified as a controlled substance in a few states -- and will become one in Illinois in January, 2008.)
But, talk about your theory of relativity: those seconds can last a long time. Here, as near as I can describe it, is what happened: I was "falling sideways," as some have described it, hurtling forward through what felt like a blurred tunnel of orange and yellow leaves (this was in the fall, of course). And near the end was the shape of an overstuffed chair, not unlike the one I was sitting in at the time. Only the texture of the chair, instead of being leather or some other kind of upholstery, was the leaves, and they were moving, too, fluttering in the breeze. It's not that the chair was made of leaves. It was that the idea of "leaves" and "chair" became inseparable, and they were intertwined fractal shapes, holding space and gently defining each other. You know how that is. The color and the texture of the leaves became one distinguishable thing, and that thing was a beautiful overstuffed chair. And then the chair was water. It wasn't wet, it wasn't made of H2O, it was still just a chair with the visual properties of water. It was transparent and currents or ripples slightly distorted the substance of it, as if you were peering into a soft, chair-shaped aquarium without any glass walls holding it together. (I guess you could say it was something like the "water tentacle" in "The Abyss," but it was more stable and not so in-your-face.)
Sometimes you have these so-called revelations in the moment (especially when dreaming or under chemical influence), but you don't quite know what is being revealed. Like when Tony Soprano takes peyote in Vegas and greets the morning sun in the desert with an ecstatic, cosmos-embracing: "I get it!" And then, the next week, as more time passes, he finds himself not only unable to explain to others what he "got," but wondering if he ever "got" anything to begin with. My response to the leaf/water chair was more like Roy Neary staring into his mashed potatoes in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind": "This means something."
A while later, I was reading a book about the human brain. (Was it something by Oliver Sacks, or Antonio Damasio's "Decartes' Error" or "The Feeling of What Happens," or Steven Pinker's "How the Mind Works," or Steven Johnson's "Mind Wide Open" or Malcolm Gladwell's "Blink"? My brain doesn't recall -- they've all run together!) I came across a passage describing the incredibly complexity of visual perception. We all know that the tongue can sense various qualities -- sweet, sour, salty, bitter and savory (umami). Well, vision consists of the ability to detect color, shape, texture, motion, etc. And if our brains didn't constantly process and assemble this information, we might be unable to recognize, say, a bouncing ball as a continuous entity, because all the aforementioned "dimensions" might come apart. So, we couldn't tell that, even though our perception of each of them is changing to some extent as the ball bounces, "the ball" remains "the ball." It doesn't become a shape disassociated from color, or a motion divorced from texture, or a bunch of distinct circles or spheres... It's appears to be the same ball, even as it moves and changes in space and time.
So, you see where I'm going with this, don't you? It's about the style/form/content stuff I've been writing about recently, because I can't stop thinking about it: I've come all this way to say that separating the "content" of a movie from the experience of the movie is like trying to separate the texture from the chair or the shape from the ball. A movie is an irreducible series of images and sounds. Those images and sounds don't "tell" a story or state a "theme." They are the story, they are the theme, insofar as a story or theme might be discernible. Strictly speaking, they do not encode or even express something in isolation from what they are, any more than my previous example of Picasso's "Guernica" does. (See that post below on the single image of the dust in the headlights, seen from below the riverbank, in "No Country for Old Men.")
Am I going a bit "out there"? Well, I'm having fun doing it -- and I feel I need to do something to get past the literalist approach to watching and talking about movies that's become so pervasive and conventional we don't even question it -- or notice it -- anymore. I just want to say to you (and me): Keep your eye on the movie.
Here's David Bordwell again, in a 2006 essay for cinema-scope that needs to be re-read again and again ("Against Insight"):
Film criticism lies at the centre of nearly all intellectual discourse about the cinema, and if we take criticism to be an effort to know particular movies more intimately, it probably deserves its prime place. But contemporary film criticism is failing. In academic venues, it mostly grinds Movie X through Theory Y, in the hope that somehow the exercise will yield political emancipation. Meanwhile, film magazines and free city weeklies promote that self-assured nonconformity which prizes jaunty wordplay and throwaway judgments.We read nonfiction for information, ideas, opinions, and good writing. Most orthodox criticism overdoes opinions, which create the critic’s professional persona. Soon opinions crystallize into tastes, and the persona overshadows the films. I realize the pressures here. Readers at all levels don’t take film as seriously as they take music or architecture, so film journalists are obliged to be superficially entertaining in a way that reviewers in other arts needn’t be. Still, most film criticism is fact-free (apart from festival buzz and chatty personal memories), and remarkably barren of fertile ideas. Go back and read, say, Rivette on widescreen cinema, or Sontag on Bresson, or Bazin on anything, and I think you’ll agree that most of today’s film critics have abandoned probing for posturing. They seem to have only one idea, and that surprisingly banal—that there is a zeitgeist and films reflect it....
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Notes on Salvia divinorum:
"Even experienced hallucinogen users say that the effects of Salvia divinorum are qualitatively and quantitatively different than any other hallucinogen that they have ever taken," Roth says. "It appears to cause an experience that we have dubbed 'spacio-temporal dislocation.'"Conclusion: a "No Country for Old Men" is better than hallucinogens.In other words, if the dose is strong enough, users take an instantaneous trip to another time and place, an experience many first-time users of salvia find too intense, disturbing and even frightening. Those who try salvia often don't like it and won't try it again.
"Most people who do it hoping to have just an interesting high find it confusing and disappointing," says Daniel Siebert, who has researched Salvia divinorum extensively and urges its responsible use. "It's not something that's fun to do. It doesn't have a stimulating effect. It doesn't really have a euphoric effect."
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"Go back and read, say, Rivette on widescreen cinema, or Sontag on Bresson, or Bazin on anything, and I think you’ll agree that most of today’s film critics have abandoned probing for posturing." That's certainly true for most paper, magazine and online reviewers but there is still a healthy community of writers that delve into the unknown and explore the language of film and find a home, whether it be with Sight and Sound, academic papers or the online blogging community. And in those more serious periodicals and academic settings I don't think they feel a need to dumb it down.
Anyone coming here probably already knows this but another thing we all know that Bordwell isn't saying is that none of it is going to change nor (and this is important) was it ever really that different. The great mass of moviegoers don't give a crap about exploring the language of film. They want to look at a review in the local paper, get a rating, and then see the movie regardless of the rating.
Was it ever any different? I don't think so. I'm fairly positive that the millions who flocked to see The Road to... movies with Bing, Bob and Dorothy weren't reading Andre Bazin before heading out to the theatre. We like to think that everyone had better taste or sensibilities back then but the fact remains that the top draws, as polled by the Quigley Publishing Group, have been John Wayne (25 times), Betty Grable, Bing Crosby, Burt Reynolds (he and Bing five years in a row each) and so on. Nothing against any of them (they've made some fine films, especialy Wayne) I'm just pointing out that there was never a time when the esoteric sensibility won out.
So while I agree that 95% of movie reviews suck and 95% of movie critics have no business calling themselves that and that most reviewers probably read other bigger critics first to see what they thought, I disagree that it was ever any different.
I was reading my Agee on Film last night, before coming upon this post, and was reading his orgasmic analysis of Zero for Conduct and L'Attalante and thought to myself, "Agee was huge. He was respected and very well read as well as very well known. And I can't imagine what he wrote here impacted these films popularity one iota."
The longer we don't accept that we are in the tiny minority that enjoys exploring the language of film and that it will always be a tiny minority the longer we will continue to flog ourselves over the state of film criticism. David Bordwell can punish himself under the illusion that once upon a time Rosie the Riveter was discussing Vigo and Cocteau on her cigarette break but the truth is it never happened. Rosie was talking about the new Grable movie and how she wished her legs were as good as hers. So David stop punishing yourself. All of us in the online community find discussing the language of film fascinating and before us it was those in the academic and periodical settings. And when Bazin was writing it was we here, in a different form (like the caretaker in The Shining) that were paying attention.
Let's keep discussing it. But let's stop pretending it was ever any different.
Let's keep discussing it. But let's stop pretending it was ever any different.
Exactly, Jonathan. When I mentioned "literalist approach to watching and talking about movies that's become so pervasive and conventional we don't even question it -- or notice it -- anymore," I was careful to avoid the word "recently" or anything like that, because it's not recent. It's just standard practice and, for reasons Bordwell mentions, it's been that way for a long time. Remember, movies still aren't considered something worthy of serious criticism (beyond the consumer guide approach) in many quarters. The form is only a little more than 100 years old...
I don't know if it was intentional, but Ebert's latest "from the archives," a review of Blue Velvet, seems like an interesting comment on your disagreement with Rosenbaum over No Country for Old Men. The final two paragraphs read:
All right. I have reacted to "Blue Velvet," too. As an experienced and clever film critic, I even know how to write fashionable praise about the film -- how to interpret the director's message, how to show I am bright enough to understand his subtleties. I can even rationalize his extremes and explain how only philistines will dislike the work.
I know how to write that kind of review, but damn it all, I would be reviewing the movie's style and ignoring its lost soul. Maybe some critics have seen so many movies they have forgotten how ordinary people look at them. For most people, movies aren't about style, they're about the characters in them, and what happens to those characters, and what it means. And in "Blue Velvet," there are some scenes in which a woman is degraded and humiliated and made to suffer obscenely, and other scenes in which we're supposed to giggle because the call letters of the local station are WOOD, and they give the time "at the sound of the falling tree." Sorry, but I just couldn't get my lips to smile.
I happen to be squarely in the camp that loves both Blue Velvet and No Country for Old Men, but I think Ebert has a point that a movie's "soul" is just as important as its style. (And, Jim, I'm not claiming that you disagree with this.) Again, I happen to think Lynch and the Coens have infused their work with great depth of soul, but I sympathize with those who are unable to tune into it. The question is (and, Jim, I think you've been trying to home in on this) is why can some viewers see the "soul" that informs the images, editing, music, etc, and others can't? Maybe it's just a matter of taste, but it seems to be something more.
I happen to think Lynch and the Coens have infused their work with great depth of soul, but I sympathize with those who are unable to tune into it.
DVC: It's funny -- I think "Blue Velvet" is fascinating (especially when it zeroes in on Jeffrey's consciousness, and the place where sexual fetishes are created, with the shots of the flame and their co-mingling bodies), but I find it too "jokey," as if Lynch is too afraid to pursue his brand of "surrealism" without winking at the audience (the robin at the end is probably the most obvious example, but they're scattered throughout the picture). Later, in "Inland Empire," "Mulholland Drive," "Lost Highway," I think we see more mature, unfettered and courageous filmmaking.
But that "jokey" charge is exactly what's been leveled at the Coens their whole career. In a review, however, I'd just like a critic to offer an example, something specific that can be discussed, not just a free-standing (and therefore impossible to challenge) opinion. You'll notice that Ebert cites specific moments, so you know where his opinion comes from, and can argue against it if you see it differently. (You just reminded me that I did a long post -- later expanded into a 6,000-word article for "Steady-Cam" -- which was in part a response to Rosenbaum's charge that Altman was ridiculing the character of Lady Pearl in "Nashville" when she broke down in a drunken monologue talking about "the Kennedy boys.")
I don't think anybody CAN'T see what's going on, moment by moment, in a movie. It's just whether a critic chooses to notice and write about it. We notice and feel things all the time in movies that don't register consciously -- because the individual images (which in many cases have been meticulously planned for years by the time a second or three is cut into a movie) go by so quickly and then we're onto the next and the next and the next, and patterns form and motifs are developed and... In the case of newspaper critics (even those who have the luxury of writing only one or two pieces a week, and who don't have to fit tight daily paper space requirements), I think it's more a matter of what David Bordwell describes: quick, (relatively) easy journalistic shorthand. Or, as he so cogently summarizes it, "They seem to have only one idea, and that surprisingly banal—that there is a zeitgeist and films reflect it."
My hand cramped and my head nearly exploded when I went back to see "NCFOM" and took notes. So many motifs and ideas developed so expressively without fussiness or waste. But that's what I'm trying to write about (and procrastinating because I'm overwhelmed) now!
Funny, this is how I've always felt movies should be viewed, even music heard for that matter.
I haven't written about
"No Country For Old Men" yet, but the level of visual storytelling used in the film goes beyond any film I've seen of recent years. You talk about the light in the dust (from a post I haven't yet read - God I've been busy...), well, to me one of the most amazing set of shots in the film is towards the end, when the Tommy Lee Jones character and the Javier Bardem character are peering at the missing lock hole from opposite sides of the door. Jones sees darkness seep through, Bardem a gold burst of light. Talk about theme and conflict rolled up into only a few shots. I was enamored by how fluent the Coen's have become in film language. It's movies like this that makes "Transformers" seem lifeless, cold and uneventful, even though they are called "event movies" and A LOT of stuff is blown up. When I left NCFOM I was wading through life, like everything around me had been elevated because of the film. There was more meaning to everything around me. To me that's what a brilliant film has the possibility of doing, taking our sense, shaking them up, and allow them to change the perception of the world around us - like staring into a light and it leaving an imprint on your eye that then follows you around the room, with everything you look at.
I have also seen it a few times and my brain is popping with possibilities. The idea of safety being more a state of mind when all it takes is the flip of a coin to spell out disaster, or the frequent references to Lobos and hell, as if Chugar was Satan himself, and Jones always left a step behind, the safety we've left behind or perhaps the God, or the safety that no longer feels like it can help. Ideas of safety in this day and age have become meaningless when the world is that much more menacing.
Love these guys.
what i find most striking about all this is the fact that the day after i first experimented with salvia divinorum is the same day you decide to post a blog mentioning the hallucinogen and relate your experience with it. perhaps i'm still feeling the effects... when will this end?!?
Excellent post. Might I recommend "The Art of Fiction" by Henry James to you? Though not writing about cinema, natch, I think you'll find someone sympathetic to some of the concerns you express in the post.
Jim,
I'm glad that you've been persistent in trying to find that elusive secret to the way we (and by we, I mean both the film community as a whole and each individual filmgoer) view movies. It can't just be the story that we react to, and it can't just be as simple as an aesthetic reaction to "pretty pictures". There has to be some alchemy of theme, action, mise-en-scene and that unquantifiable entity, an authorial "voice", that we react to as film fans.
I do agree with some of the previous posters that there is no point in bemoaning the state of film criticism. I have recently come to the conclusion that if you pick any one field or subject, 98% of the population will be ignorant of it. I love food, but I am ignorant of it (I don't have enough knowledge of the entire spectrum of food preparation, etc.) In my estimation, that number is slightly lower when it comes to movies, but not much lower. Most people simply want to be told a good story, but they also have an appreciation of qualities like the shape of a scene, the tempo of a movie, the arc of a performance, and several other qualities..even if they aren't always able to articulate why these elements effected their judgment of the film.
As far as the intangible qualities of a film go, I agree that it is crucial for a critic to provide evidence from a film and explain why they perceived something a certain way. Still, no matter how many objective facts are presented, at some point, criticism breaks down to a matter of subjectivity. (Your argument with Rosenbaum about Altman's supposed condescension in "Nashville" is a perfect example. Rosenbaum could, if he chose, have described the scene in minute detail, and proceeded to explain why precisely he found this to be condescending. But even if he had "provided the facts", as you say, would it have changed your opinion (one I happen to share) that the character is one of the most poignant in "Nashville"?)
I grow weary when one attempts to define rules or standards of film criticism (which is not to say I advocate an anything-goes, no-standards policy). For example, I think you share my opinion that dogmatic statements that close off an argument before it can even begin aren't very constructive. And yet you yourself said of "No Country for Old Men" (and I'm paraphrasing) that "if you don't see the artistry the Coens are putting forward, then at some point, you don't understand what movies are". I myself would make a similar statement about "Children of Men", and that's what leads me to believe that at some point, constructive criticism gives way to personal aesthetic preference.
I think that the crux of the problem may be the whole concept of merit when judging art. We live in such a results-oriented culture that it's difficult to resist quantifying art by comparing it either favourably or unfavourably to something else. Very often I find the most enlightening film criticism comes when the author is making an argument or presenting a thesis that does not require the reader to assent to a shared opinion about the film's "quality". For example, I'd love to read your thoughts on the way the Coens make the natural world almost another character in "No Country for Old Men", one that is expressive of the moral landscape of the film and its characters. Yet such a piece would not have to necessarily equate the Coens' ability to do this with the quality of the film. In other words, the author need not insist that "No Country for Old Men" is a great film because of all the little things that the Coens do in it, but by merely illuminating the artistry, a reader may not be swayed in the subjective realm of opinion (which, really, is the least interesting part of how people react to movies), rather, they will hopefully leave with a greater understanding of an individual film, and of the medium as a whole.
I'd read Ebert's "Blue Velvet" review back around when it first appeared, and I remember a lot of people scoffing at it and calling him out-of-touch. I didn't think that "BV" had been made by a man who wanted to offend people, but that it had been made by a man who did not fully understand how badly he could offend them. Just because you transgress against someone else's taste doesn't mean you're a genius.
I still think Lynch is a brilliant director, but that "BV" is one of his less worthy films.
Having read the theory that we learn languages up through the age of seven years of age by growing more brain cells to accommodate more information, I was reminded in your original post of what was probably my first 'real' movie going experience. I was about six years old and my mom took a friend and me to the Continental Theater in Tulsa to see "2001: A Space Odyssey" in 'Cinerama'. She sat us in the middle of the theater to see the film and being rightfully embarrassed to be sitting next to my mom, moved my friend and myself down to about the sixth row or so; my mom followed. I therefore did something I would never have otherwise done and which has, to this day, radically changed the way I experience film: I moved to the center seat in the first row. My mom stayed put, thankfully, and I was thrown for the first time into the world of 'adult' films in a way that allows me to feel 'high' to this day when watching a great film. "Woman in the Dunes", "Rules of the Game", "One, Two, Three", "All About Eve", "The Seven Chances", "Wings of Desire", are all as good as any drug on the market. "Blue Velvet", too. The quick shot of the light bulb blowing out near the end, waking us from our dream state, allowing us to gracefully exit the 'nightmare' while remaining in the film is just one of the marks of Lynch's genius.
"No Country for Old Men" is better than hallucinogens."
Unlikely. Obviously you've never tried LSD, you'll never be able to look at the world or nature in the same way again. Me and my friends recently tried salvia, we all described it as "going to another dimension". I didn't see anything which wasn't there anyway, but my mind couldn't register what any of it was. The first time was incredibly terrifying and bizzare, I didn't even realise it had started to take effect.
Peter: I was being somewhat facetious -- but the perception-heightening high I got from "No Country For Old Men" is not exactly like any of my experiences with LSD, but comparably pleasurable! (Although my most visual acid trips did show me things about fractal geometry before I even knew the word "fractal" -- and made my first trip to India much more illuminating than it would have been before...)
NCFOM is on my must list, as is a new bong err water pipe for my Salvia. I've found it far less intense since my first forgot-my-own-humanity trip several years ago. Especially if you're watching a movie or have something of a stimulating environment while doing it. If you sit in a dark room alone you will dissappear.
Mushrooms and movies, however... I about crushed my projector with my feet as I flew out of my chair when Duke nailed his Attorney with a melon. The intensity was almost unbearable, yet I could NOT take my eyes off the screen.
end of thread jack
great blog, btw!
Hey, I just tried Salvia for the first time a couple of nights ago and by amazing coincidence stumbled on this blog from it's link on the Roger Ebert site today having no idea it mentioned Salvia. Well, I'm 28 and an old pro at psychadelics. For some reason, I'd never been interested in Salvia until I'd read Terrance McKenna's thoughts on them, so I bought some. I'd done mushrooms, LSD, DMT and others many times without a sitter, so I thought I'd be fine with the Salvia. Well... I was wrong. I smoked it in my backyard, and the next thing I knew I was on my neighbor's lawn screaming like an idiot. Luckily, this extreme disorientation lasted a couple of minutes, but for a couple of minutes I was in some weird space-time warp and had no memory of my regular life, or of having smoked the Salvia -- I thought I was going to be stuck in this weird dimension forever. So yes, it was scary and powerful and interesting, but as people have said it had little of the euphoric effects of most other drugs, hence it's legality. As far as movies being better than hallucinogens, however, I don't think movies could have started the 60's Revolution, and many of our most visionary films were most likely inspired by hallucinogens (in fact, if you believe in Terrance McKenna's writings, ALL of them were inspired by hallucinogens, since he audaciously believes human consciousness came from when our ancesters ate psychadelic mushrooms back in the day). I DEFINATELY wouldn't judge all psychadelics by Salvia, whose effects reminded me of what anti-drug people probably imagine drug-trips to be like. Try DMT, which creates a profound, completely unique experience that WILL change the perceptions of anyone who tries it radically.
I've been selling salvia as my main business for a year now. I have to say that salvia is not as hard as people say. The youtube videos are just a bad description of what it is. Of course you can abuse with a high dose of 60x (highest concentration), but it will last 20 minutes, you'll be fine, have no hangover and no form of addiction what so ever.
hey guys, check out this site I just found about Salvia: www.salviasociety.org I heard about it on Fox News last night. The guy who owns it was talking how he's trying to stop legislation in different states from banning the herb. I hope he succeeds, meanwhile they just banned it in my State (Minnesota)
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