Hey now, I wasn’t passing judgment on all of PH’s works. I liked Robocop well enough, and Total Recall entertained me.
My stock response: Is James Joyce a bad writer because his material is not immediately comprehensible to the average reader of Scrooge McDuck?
Some of us believe film can have the depth of literature. We understand that just as a book may not reveal its complexities on first read, a film may require several viewings to completely understand. A novel that gives its reader everything it has to offer the first time through is basically a beach read, and that’s not a bad thing necessarily; a book like that certainly has its place. I am entertained by reading James Patterson, but I am equally entertained by multiple re-reads of Shakespeare. Likewise, while I enjoyed Pirates of the Caribbean and don’t see the point of picking through it, I’d be a fool if I thought one viewing of Barry Lyndon or Amores Perros would be sufficient to understand everything that’s going on.
I’m not going to defend Showgirls in depth here, because I said everything I want to say about it in the other thread, but I will say that I didn’t start to recognize its intentions until the second viewing, and it took a third viewing to really confirm my suspicions.
But hey, taste is relative, and you’re free to hate it if you want. I dump on popular stuff like Forrest Gump for similar reasons, and I don’t apologize.
I like the James Joyce analogy, Cerv. Never thought of that one; I always just try a long boring defense of what’s often called “elitism,” which, needless, doesn’t usually come off very well.
A large part of the difficulty, I think, is that Verhoeven seems on the surface to be catering to that segment of the audience that is LEAST likely to want to dig for layers. He manipulates the imagery and vocabulary of Hollywood schlock almost at cross purposes to itself. His work seems, in other words, to be addressing one audience on the surface, and another audience below the surface. Or not two different audiences, but two different approaches to movie watching. Or something.
And again, Hitchcock and Sirk did exactly the same thing–wallowed in Hollywood surface while smuggling a more subversive subtext–as did Von Trier in “Dancer in the Dark.”
Joyce did something similar, but his “sources” were more highly falutin, though he mixed in a lot of popular culture too.
–personally, I tend to ignore arguments that defend ignorance as a desirable state. The defensive anti-intellectual argument that many film discussions eventually devolve into. The people who insist that it’s the director’s job to spoonfeed the audience every single point with a spoon like a back hoe.
What I don’t understand is why films that DON’T do that INCENSE some people so much. If you’re not entertained by engaging a little extra effort, like viewers such as Cervaise and Ilsa and me et al., then fine. Watch something else. But why spend so much energy hating Verhoeven? Or Joyce, or whoever the current anti-intellectual posterchild is.
I know it’s not their explicit intention, but their ire at artists who produce complex works smacks, to some degree, of censorship. What I mean is, instead of saying, “Well, he’s not speaking to me; multilayered puzzles are not what I want from my moviegoing experience,” there’s this active attack. I suppose it’s possible that it’s Verhoeven’s (e.g.) underlying misanthropy that colors people’s reaction to his work. But you’ll hear the same kind of defensive attacks on ANY kind of “difficult” art or poetry or literature or whatever. Anything that requires effort on the part of the audience is likely to engender cries of “elitism!” or the current favorite, “if you have to explain it it wasn’t successful.” Which of course is bullshit; what they’re really saying is, “if you have to explain it to ME then it wasn’t successful.” Not everyone will get every work of art in exactly the same way. No one had to explain “Starship Troopers” or “Showgirls” to me; does that mean I can make the universal declaration that those films ARE successful? Of course not. So why are they universally unsuccessful–inarguably bad–if YOU, as an individual, didn’t understand them in the same way?
The hubris of some people really amazes me. “I didn’t like the movie, so what you claim to see in it SIMPLY ISN’T THERE.”
Why can’t you just say, “I didn’t get the same thing out of it that you did” and leave it at that? Why the effort to try to PROVE it’s bad? I’ll never understand it.
Killer: What’s your favorite scary movie?
Randy: Showgirls. Absolutely frightening.
Not really sure if you’re aiming your little diatribe at me directly or not, lissener so it’s hard to know whether my response should be an attempt to further the discussion or a hearty “fuck you.”
So instead I’ll talk about kittens.
No, actually I’ll talk about how I was discussing Showgirls with my friend on a car trip yesterday and I decided in the course of that conversation that I liked it more than I did upon watching it. The story is interesting but for the most part the execution is weak. To the list of high camp scenes I noted previously I’ll add the dancefight sequence between Nomi and Cristal from right before the Big Push. Had there been a few more scenes along those lines, had some existing scenes (like the audition scene) been better executed along those lines and had the whole subplot with the black dancer/choreographer/bouncer guy been excised I could even recommend it. But as it stands I still think that for the most part it’s crap.