Proust and Jackass 3D

Posted on 10/18/2010 by kunzelman

It’s probably better to have In Search of Lost Time up there, but we’re talking to Eternity here, so I can do what I want when I want–this is Proust, after all.

And why the hell would I start a blog post about Proust when I haven’t written in something like a month and everyone has forgotten about this blog?

It has to do with Jackass 3D. I know that isn’t the normal thing that would be associated with Proust, but these are the things that tumble around. They say (I don’t know who they are) that once you read Proust your life is fundamentally changed forever–they say that you don’t go back, that you see things differently; it’s like gazing into the abyss or something. If that’s true, I feel like I should be at least 48% fundamentally changed already. I’m about that far through In Search of Lost Time, the whole thing, and it’s about damn time that I see some kind of results.

But I’m not seeing them. I don’t think about time or art or the way that I fundamentally deal with the world. I just sit and mourn Proust’s neuroses for the most part.

And that’s what takes me to Jackass 3D. You see, I spent the majority of my middle school years emulating the things that those guys did on the show. It was perfect, really; I was the perfect age where we could do it and people would say, “Oh, it’s just kids being terrible fucks out in the country.” That could have been right, for the most part, because I don’t think that we were doing anything particularly unique. Like I said, we were emulating, and all the Jackass crew had on history was that they knew that they should be filming, always filming, and that’s where they found success.

We were always filming, too. Our group was a good one, mostly made up of guys with fucked up home lives that got together and ran around the woods and punched one another and got burned on the weekends. That was therapy, I guess, because it’s for damn sure that most, if not all, of us really needed it.

Watching Jackass 3D really brought that all back for me, and more than that, it contextualized it for me. Jackass originally aired on MTV about ten years ago, and we started playing the same roles about 2002 or so. I’ve grown up in the shadow of Johnny Knoxville getting hit in the balls by a sledgehammer hung from a fulcrum. That’s the most forming moment for me; not Oklahoma City, or 9/11, or the Iraq War, or even American Idol. It’s a giggling man who just loves to have riot mines go off in his face.

That’s memory. That’s fluidity. That’s how unreliable it all is, the mind and the body and everything in between.

So when the cast of Jackass sings a shitty Weezer song appropriately titled “Memories,” I have to deal with a lot of things. These guys are getting old, nearly forty, and the body can only be destroyed for pleasure for a short amount of time. It also means that I’m getting older, that my time for destruction is ending, and that a chapter of my life is fundamentally over. There’s no one else doing it like these guys did; the rest are all defined as “doing what that Jackass guys do, but more.” I don’t want that. I want Chris Pontius running through the streets of London acting like he’s a werewolf. I want Ryan Dunn trying to jump Snake River and never making it. I want Wee Man flying off a ramp into water.

In some sense I want it all to be new. I want to experience all those things again: the pain of dropping in a quarter pipe and fucking up my knee, the taste of everything in a fridge stirred in a cup, the fear of thinking that you’ve accidentally castrated yourself while reshooting all of The Fellowship of the Ring with only two people.

But I don’t really want them. I just want to remember them the way they were, like Proust would, recreating those situations through talk and conversation and circumstance. Always remembering, never rethinking, continually moving onward.

I wish the entire Jackass crew well, forever, because I’m fundamentally tied to them.

Johnny Knoxville is my Elvis.

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On The Blair Witch Project

Posted on 08/29/2010 by kunzelman

The Blair Witch Project came out in 1999. It affected me heavily then, when I was nine years old, and it still does now. I know that because I just watched it again in glorious high definition. I hear a lot of shit talked about TBWP, and I have to say that I’ve come out in defense of the film in most, if not all, instances where it’s come up. Like I said, I have a strong affective reaction to it, and I don’t really know why. I do know why it does things for me, however, and I’m going to try to lay that out here.

The film is all about what impossible for the viewer to see. The running scene, one of the few pieces of action in the whole film, has Heather Donahue screaming “What the fuck is that?” while pointing the camera off to the left. However, we see nothing–there’s just a mass of empty space, a blackness cut through by white streaks of trees. The ending of the film is similar, with the supernatural horror never quite being revealed, and you really only understand how terrible the ending is if you were paying attention the statements from the beginning. In any case, the field of view becomes important here, and maybe there’s a criticism embedded here. Certainly the whole thing is based on hubris, and on the idea of being able to see a path clearly where there is no path, which is a fundamental aspect of documentary filmmaking. Taking pieces of information, crafting a narrative from them, and then moving from there making the point that you want to.

So if the literal Blair Witch is something that takes advantage of hubris, eats you up for your mistakes, what does that mean for us as the viewer? Is it better to take it as a literal being or read the entire film as a metaphor for something bigger? I’m afraid of taking it too far in either direction, but I like the idea that the film can be taken so many ways. I like that it operates on several levels, and that you don’t have to push it too hard–the boundaries don’t break if you harp on it.

So that’s all I’m going to say about it.

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Douglas Burgdorff

Posted on 08/23/2010 by kunzelman

I just happened upon this guy–he’s brilliant. His name is Douglas Burgdorff. I don’t know anything about him, but he lives in LA, which means that certain LA readers should find him. Some of the videos on him vimeo are godawful art-school-shit things, but most of it is clever and amazing and it makes me want to shoot film, though I never will. His work is haunting, Lynch-like–but don’t carry that too far, it’s hard for me to say things like that about people and their work. It’s like comparing a dog house to the Dubai tower.

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On Planetary

Posted on 07/24/2010 by kunzelman

Planetary is the greatest work of comic literature ever produced.

That might not be true, but I do believe that it’s at least in the top five. There’s something visceral about it that I can’t really wrap my head around. Maybe we need to do a quick recap, and I will, but if you care more, then you can do the wikipage.

The idea is that there is a secret history of the world, and Elijah Snow has to chronicle it. That’s all the plot that you need–the plot is largely irrelevant, actually. The meat of the book is the secret history that it teases out. It’s a secret history that includes Sherlock Holmes, Dracula, and others in a cabal to save in the world during the 1800s. It’s the kind of history that features Galactus discovered by datatransmitting angels sent from the center of our galaxy to spy on our spiral arm. It’s the kind of secret history where the Fantastic Four are the worst people the human race have ever produced. Those things are fantastic to me, but more than that, there’s a kind of running commentary and criticism  to the whole thing.

What I’m really trying to get at is that Planetary is an artifact that comments on other artifacts. It is firmly in the early 2000’s as far as comics writing is concerned, but it comments all the way back to the 1930s. It is a comic that’s pretty much shit unless you’re familiar with the past eighty years of comics. And that makes sense to me. That makes me want to know more, to learn more, to think more about comics themselves. In one issue, John Constantine turns into Grant Morrison–and I have no idea what that actually means. It’s a throwback, a settling in time of the whole work.

So it’s something that’s interesting. It’s something that matters a little bit. It’s creative and it imagines the death of every important hero in favor of bringing back the 1930’s.

I just have a soft spot for any comic book that drops a Reed Richards hundreds of meters into the ground by displacing a bleedship.

Posted in Comics, General Features | Tagged , | 2 Comments