gaza and sutpen, another unlikely couple (of fucking morons)

a spectre is haunting past film ng academia

thomas wartenberg challenges the well-founded assumption that narrative cinema inherently supports the dominant social interests, following from that melding of philosophy and cinema that began with cavell, and what better example than slutpod and gaza.

ok, so we all know they share numerous features. they're both inbred from their toes to their hairs. gaza can't help but jerk off if it isn't in front of his bedroom buddy's pc it's at the local public library. we all know his story. and yet, his obscure name-dropping is enough to pile heaps and heaps of drivel that wouldnt stand two seconds in a crowd with a minimum of experience in life and cinema. all his whining about how eisenstein, mizoguchi and tarkovsky doesnt surpass anything you'd expect from a texas red neck like doberman to know. and his skin-deep political economics, repeated line after line, paragraph after paragraph, show why even the most fanatic at chicago university wont have him and nobody will publish his books, even in these days of steven levitts and pinkers. it all sums up to his irritation that after kant, duchamp and foucault all the art he can offer is the circus and the theatre. 'art can't be taught' he'll say just because it can't be taught the way he wants it taught. cinema as an apparatus is his friend; all is fine and dandy as long as dvds are for sale and cinema degenerates into multiplexes and art belongs to the dystopian randite/stewe bogus world of intellectual property. that way he can hoard off the huge growth and revival of some of the greatest attitudes to cinema that we've had in the 20th century, back in town thanks to peer to peer file sharing systems like emule, pando, dc++ and a burgeoning film culture embodied in the likes of fileheaven, cinexilio or divxclasico. now art has found a hole throu the global village, in the worst sense of the term village, and marcel hanoun has his own website, rivettes, perlovs, ceylans, garrels, eustaches, ferraras, denis, alexander kluges, thom andersons, tsai ming liangs, kiarostamis, keillers, dumonts and a rich array of artists are now at the reach of one's fingers. not to mention a true portrayal of the iraq war. likewise, this feeds back to the directors, like with the recent i'm not there, a miracle to come out of a hollywood that hadn't produced that kind of stuff since the star wars debacle. so while before the massification and beastialization taken for natural, granted and positive were both sutshit's and gaza's only claims to reason, all of this has finally been proved to be a façade.

so as movie and music sales dwindle, these can leave the oppressive public sphere and finally become part of the private one. cinema and music no longer fall to the lowest common denominator and consist in that sweaty notion of all that makes us similar and the same, but rather belong to the freedom of the particular.

in no previous era had this happened. both these mediums before had suffered from the backlash of the fetish of property, which was the only superstructure that allowed figures like gaza and sutpen to be produced. as it now turns out, people were never listening to what they wanted, but to what the radio waves owned. as it now turns out, they were brainwashed and weren't allowed to share in a free art. they were watching what weinstein wanted them to watch, not what they wanted to if they had a chance.

so back to that unlikely couple. that foaming at the mouth far right idiot gaza is joined by the far left chomsky of the group sutpen in a desert of the real that recalls many of our post-political scenes. caricaturesque more like it, for chomsky spends his time on theory and grammatical terminology enough to make snoopy snoop, sutpen has only his attention-deficit addled brain as a claim to reason. what does his decisionism consist of? well it's damn similar to his married other; if he has attention problems, only responds to picture, can't articulate a coherent thought and thinks he can condemn whatever his fetish decides is pedagogical didacticism, it means the rest of the world, The People, think like him. humiliated too by the surge in file sharing, he has nothing left to whine about except for a lost american golden age that consists in a 90s hollywood that meets 30s and 40s straitjacked classical 'golden age'. most amusing are his attacks on 'academia' when he's the very embodiment of that term himself. only difference is his prose lies on the pompous side of gaza's repetitious aphasic and uniphonic tone.

and, hold on, what does slutpod's attention and fetish amount to? apparently, anyone who doesn't dig comics, movies over writing about movies, literature about dirt realism and about literature goes against nature because, well, slutpod is nature. if it isnt slutpod, it's a fabricated spectre of coerced interpretive communities. nobody wants to speak about what they're speaking, nobody means what they say, everyone's repressed if they dont follow sutpen's fetishes. so, eureka, we have yet another unit with the intellectual reach of a stewe. moving the goal-posts is just the tip of the iceberg. what hides behind slutpod? just how easy it is to criticise a teacher when you have 'everything' as your claim to reason. and why criticise a teacher, well because cinema can't be taught because slutpod was too busy jerking off to pauline kael and andrew sarris in classroom. which brings us back- and if this were another article in a true sophist's manner- full circle to gaza's agenda.