a primer for the gradual understanding of PTA, CMBB and now the master!

Started by Pubrick, December 03, 2009, 07:26:36 AM

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polkablues

Quote from: Pubrick on January 07, 2013, 10:10:14 AM
you guys. i'm sorry.

i have abandoned my flock.

i come back and people are clutching at straws.

70mm screening of the master was bullshit. the venue was shit. the trip was not a waste of money cos melbourne is an awesome place to explore but the movie was the lowlight of my time there. the sound was shit, the projection was fuzzy.. only good thing about that place is that they have a resident CAT who likes to roam up and down the aisles during screenings.

onto the movie after three viewings..

let's not kid ourselves people. just accept that what you chose to love when you became a PTA disciple was an artist of the utmost and highest possible level. this is not really a good thing for his audience, we're talking about someone who has pledged to some unknown god with unwavering decisiveness that he will follow his inner desires and indulge his own personal interests at the expense of making anyone any money and just as possibly making something no one understands. he's making movies for himself about himself.. THIS IS WHAT ARTISTS DO.. they are EGOCENTRIC.

this is usually a bad thing, when an idiot is egocentric everyone who is unlucky enough to be around him has to suffer through inane monologues about the most uninteresting things. but we're fortunate to have an egocentric genius with a unique access to his psyche whom, instead of denying it and trying to please us by giving us things to relate to in his films, he has only delved deeper into his most persistent and profound contemplations in the hope that by illuminating his own ambiguous, contradictory, base, ambitious, oddly sexual, eccentric and ultimately GENIUS nature, he will illuminate the most pertinent truths about the universal human nature and culture that we all are a part of.

the entirety of his career has clearly followed this trajectory. at the start he had bravado but he is now truly brave. with the first few masterpieces he aped many styles to get our attention and appeal to something we may have been comfortable with. now since PDL and definitively with CMBB that is why the latter had almost NONE of the usual stylistic flourishes we had come to know, he's gone to a place that is so i daresay primitive that it predates and precedes the emergence of this insecure crutches he used to rely on. i guess you could call it maturity but it's something more akin to what happens to William Hurt in Altered States. he's wrestling with his darkests beasts.

who among us even knows what the hell i'm talking about? let me ask you this.. why does PTA keep ending all his films with dedications to his loved ones? does anyone else do it with as much consistency and affection? the list is ever growing, he's still listing his dad, his wife, and now his children. in CMBB he listed altman, his cinematic father. is this just an embellishment of the "special thanks" section in most credits?

it's a very obvious and sincere statement that he is making films for himself, his loves, his memories, his demons, his own salvation or something. look at the ending of all his films, and you see reasons to keep living and ways to add meaning to your life.. more accurately he is just reflecting the meaning he has found in his own. the master ends with the feeling that freddie has found a way to free himself from finding meaning externally, and within himself, through the absorption of things he loved (which gave him true love) ends the film yearning and searching for meaning that doesn't dissolve. quite literally! he loves a SAND woman for god's sake. and the line he says to the english broad, who looks like the master in a way, shows he has absorbed something from this one person who gave him love and he's now trying to combine the two.. this specter of Dora and this specter of Dodd. in the end PTA is in constant search for meaning that doesn't dissolve.

Sydney/hard eight ended with the idea of holding onto the regret that gives your life purpose. this signalled the beginning of the father issue in his films and it remains the most intense of all, who knows what he's trying to work out there. in boogie it's about holding onto the world that gives your life meaning. the film is about love of cinema.. his pledge to give himself to it for better or worse, as it's something that apparently has saved him, redeemed him, giving his life a purpose, much like the freaks in the end of that film. Maggie is where he gave everyone a last chance to jump on his wagon, if the film is about 9 characters or whatever, why not everyone else in the world? we're all in it together, it's everyone's movie, not just the characters but mine too, he REALLY wanted us to know how he felt then.. and that feeling is to hold onto love even if it explodes in your face, even if the lens suddenly changes mid shot, even if a frog falls from the sky, in the moment where the shit goes down all the people in the film find a way to go on by holding onto that love.. jim delays his, being a selfless saviour of sorts, he redeems the most loveless character through his kindness. god what a great movie.

and by PDL he's found it you see.. it's just like a distillation of the most important thing. he's found love. or it found him, whatever. duh didn't he do that in real life too? that's maya stalking him in the red dress in the background isn't it? but the love isn't just about finding someone to have kids. that's boring as fuck. what we're talking about here is he resolved to depart from ALL known landmarks in defining himself. most interestingly, he's going travelling! where?

back in time of course! PTA will be to california what woodsy allen is to new york and kubrick was to the whole universe. but i digress.. the point i was trying to make is that PTA is venturing into his own dark heart, kubrick went into the dark heart of man in general, it's like he had the capacity to look into every one of us and stare deep into our very soul and BEYOND it towards that which makes us animals. that must be what people talked about when they said he had the most intense stare. well PTA is not doing that, he's saving us from that in a way, he's doing that with just one person at a time, those few people he becomes best fucking friends forever with that star as the central character in the new era of his career.

Sandler was the first real guinea pig in this experiment, but the real impressive one was DDL. did you guys get this impression watching PTA and DDL in interviews that they were like really really intense lovers? at times i remember they even touched each other physically in a gentle "i know what you're thinking" kind of way that you only ever see with genuine couples. they would look into each other's eyes when they answered questions, they seemed almost sad to be doing publicity cos it was gonna be the last time they got to spend THAT much time together. am i crazy? this happened i swear.

Plainview was a beast. he was a vampire, he was demonic, he was anti-human, he was even anti-FUTURE.. he didn't want children, he didn't want progress, he was apocalyptic. plainview was the "small hump" that Barry Egan couldn't get over, that thing that kept him from expanding his empire. the thing was though, he didn't have to annihilate that part of himself, he had to EMBRACE it. he kicked the shit out of those brothers, he took this fantasy internal love that made him stronger than anything we could imagine and he showed up and faced the beast of his external world with it, that is he mattress man, he faced him down and WON, he did the same with his sister as he threatened her on the phone. that thing in him is violent, it's in lena too, we see it in that moment when they are telling their deepest wishes to each other, and they just want to KILL. they want time to stop moving forward. that thing is an aspect of love.

CMBB is a microscopic look into that side of love, blown up to epic proportions. plainview is the greatest artist who ever lived, of the sort that does things only to feed himself, he has love for himself only. he is a vampire in as much as the only thing that can sustain his unstoppable ambition is the consumption of other people's ambitions and dreams. he says this himself. what happens at the end of CMBB is nothing short of a real honest to god divine miracle. why does he have to kill Eli? well apart from being a charlatan much like his "brother" who he also killed, eli share's plainview's desire to devour people's ambitions and goals to feed himself. eli wants to be a saviour but his drive is just to save himself. he is as future-killing and apocalyptic as daniel because he steals the minds of children, he kills the dreams of humanity with his superstition so they have no chance of fulfilling their true nature.. whatever that is.

there is a reference to the Dawn of Man sequence which has been well established, the bowling pins being the bones used to kill the ape dude in 2001.. but this is not to denote a devolution for plainview but rather an evolution in the right direction much like the ape in that original moment. plainview has gone back in time in this scene, to this youthful looking eli, to remembering and bringing up stuff that happened SOOOOOO long ago in the film's chronology. if barry egan had to embrace his plainview in order to continue, then plainview has to embrace his Master to go on.. or his words to "finish" (cos he doesn't believe in progress). is this why the next film will be a detective story? that Freddie had to embrace his "downey jr endlessly searching for a figure that remains just out of reach" nature? we'll have to wait and see.

so following on from what i've said, the way the characters have followed their nature, it turns out that inside love resides this killing/beast thing, and then inside that is surprisingly a spiritual base. the recognition of another person's dream, the belief in that dream, and the will to absorb that dream and replace it with your own.. that is what plainview gained at the end. don't get me wrong he wasn't converted into a religious person, quite the opposite, HE converted the religious person to his own philosophy.. he fought an insatiable spiritual vampirism with his own. he was complete because he found, by going so deep into his nature, that inside the killing thing there lies a contradictory fantastic seed for what comes after. his "finished" is purposely ambiguous, is he satisfied or depleted? it's like even within the seemingly purely dark anti-human anti-future, there is a pervasive force that fights back. this endless war is where the master begins.

Quoted for the new page.

I love these in-depth film-crit Pubrick posts.  He's like a Rob Ager that I don't want to hit with my car.
My house, my rules, my coffee

malkovich

  :bravo::bravo: :bravo: :bravo: :bravo: :bravo: :bravo:
        :bravo: :bravo: :bravo: :bravo: :bravo:

Jesus Christ, Pubrick, that's the single greatest thing I've read on here. Thank you.

Kellen


Drenk

Quote from: trashculturemutantjunkie on January 07, 2013, 01:17:16 PM
Quote from: Pubrick on January 07, 2013, 10:10:14 AM
did you guys get this impression watching PTA and DDL in interviews that they were like really really intense lovers? at times i remember they even touched each other physically in a gentle "i know what you're thinking" kind of way that you only ever see with genuine couples. they would look into each other's eyes when they answered questions, they seemed almost sad to be doing publicity cos it was gonna be the last time they got to spend THAT much time together. am i crazy? this happened i swear.
lol

i think you talk about pt like he's your grandchild or i dunno you love him, it's cool.

I found a quote of PTA about that

QuoteWe're still trying to figure out who the girlfriend is and who the boyfriend is in this relationship. When we first met I called him a few days later and I left a message saying: 'It's your girlfriend.' It feels like that. You are in a relationship with someone so intimate, every single day. I dare say there were moments when our spouses were jealous.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2008/jan/04/awardsandprizes
Ascension.

72teeth

Doctor, Always Do the Right Thing.

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