Against Happiness: On Lars von Trier, Michael Haneke, Gaspar Noé, and the Feel-Bad Film

THESE DAYS, feeling good is less of an individual aspiration than a cultural, social, and political obligation. As Slavoj Žižek has noted, Western subjects have little choice but to follow the cultural imperative to “Enjoy!” themselves. Pharrell Williams suggests contemporary experience leaves the individual feeling like “a hot air balloon that could go to space” since, he croons, “happiness is the truth.” In his recent book,The Happiness Industry, which examines the close links between capitalist culture and the world of psychology, William Davies describes the “limitless pursuit of self-optimization that counts for happiness in the age of neoliberalism.” In late capitalism, anything that stands in the way of positive thinking and its corollary, blissful consumption, is viewed with suspicion.

BLUE SHUTTERS, BLUE MAILBOXES, a blue bus making the rounds in the blue-collar suburbs outside Lille; blue jeans and jackets and bags that brush together as teenagers circle one another in the schoolyard, and a blue scarf that a teenage girl named Adèle wears around her neck like a talisman; blue pen nibs bluing Adèle’s fingers as she writes in her blue notebook; blue sheets and blue pillows lining a bed where Adèle makes passable sounds of pleasure in bed with her first boyfriend, Thomas, who she later breaks up with on a bright blue bench under a cherry tree in full bloom; chipped blue nails hanging off fingers decked with cheap blue rings, fingers that belong to Beatrice — the first girl Adèle kisses and the first girl who, against the hard blue stalls of a girls’ bathroom, tells Adèle that the kiss was “nothing serious, just a spur-of-the-moment kind of thing”; blue smoke and blue light mingle with blue language at a gay club, where Adèle’s best friend Valentin takes her so she can leave her blues behind. Stumbling away from Valentin and his boyfriend, Adèle preternaturally makes her way to a lesbian bar around the corner. Here, among the searching glances of older, more self-assured women, she finds her true-blue love, Emma. Emma is resplendent: a vision in a faded denim vest, haloed by a shock of punky blue hair.

In his astonishing essay On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry, William Gass claims for the color blue an erotic charge that is nothing less than the essence of life. Blue Is the Warmest Color, the Palme d’Or winning film from Tunisian-French director Abdellatif Kechiche, imagines what the world might look like if this were literally true — if blue kept time with desire. In the life of Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos), blue is an envoy of curiosity, then lust, then love, then ecstasy.

Yale graduate student Merve Emre wears blue-tinted glasses in her essay, “Feeling Blue: On Abdellatif Kechiche’s ‘Blue Is the Warmest Color’”. Click through to continue reading.

Alfred Lee introduces us to the films of Thai independent filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul:

The movies offer the experience of floating, the levitation of E.T. and Star Wars and Thai ghost stories. He remembers a helicopter hovering over the sea, thousands of bank notes fluttering down from it like snow. Other myths hang overhead — TV costume dramas and sci-fi novels, jungle adventure books and his mother’s soap operas.

Read the whole thing here.

Image: Frank O'Hara and Grace Hartigan. Courtesy of Syracuse University Library.

Can poetry and movies talk about one another? Rebecca Morgan Frank starts off LARB’s new series of essays on poetry and film, But What About the Soul: Poets at the Movies:

An airheaded female character reads Bishop by someone’s bedside. A man reads Whitman to his lifelong love at both the beginning and the end of their epic love story. None of this deepens the characters or makes terrible movies better. And must they bring in poor Tennyson at the end of a James Bond movie? Does Hollywood really think it can give itself weight by dropping in the work of poets?

Read the whole essay here.

A remake of the early 80s cult-horror classic Evil Dead will be released next month, but the film made its debut at the just finished SXSW festival in Austin. How is it? In reviewer Ted Scheinman’s words, the crowd at the premiere was “unquestioningly delighted by scenes of impressive self-dismemberment and bloody vomit.” He’s got a lot more to say over at the Los Angeles Review of Books. Check it out.

Screenwriter and artist Tom Benedek reviews Kirk Douglas’s memoir I Am Spartacus:

“In the room” — in Hollywood meetings — creatives trade in fantasy. The execs, the writers, directors, and producers lubricate the business process with their fanciful concepts. Nobody calls them lies “in the room,” but in show biz meetings people make things up to move a project forward even an inch. Kirk Douglas, Hollywood fixture and veteran of the dream factory, uses this same methodology in his memoir to questionable effect and carries that ethos to historical events — to real-world matters — which doesn’t work as well.

Burnished dimple forward, Douglas sets forth a version of events placing himself at the center of the story as both star and protagonist in the breaking of the blacklist and promoting himself to a somewhat undeserved place there when in fact his role in these matters may actually have been less than central. Nevertheless, he has accepted standing ovations in media appearances, on television and in motion picture theaters, “humbly” taking credit for acts of political valor, treating the world as his “room” while on tour with the book since its publication this year.

Read the rest at the Los Angeles Review of Books.