i have sent them you, my only son
by jebni on November 19, 2005
Wow. I actually shed a tear watching the teaser trailer for Superman Returns. The old elements from Richard Donner’s original film — Marlon Brando’s godlike voiceover, the John Williams score — are so elegantly integrated. Interestingly, these things stand not just for the franchise’s past, but for “the past” in general: words and music from Krypton, to contrast with a re-visioning of its only son’s life on Earth. “The Planet Krypton” (available as an MP3 here), an elegy for a dying civilization, is one of my favourite John Williams pieces, and it becomes all the more moving when a montage of Smallville farmboy-isms is set to it. It’s totally a by-the-numbers approach to “epic” — repeat a melodic figure over a slowly mutating chord progression — but It Works. Of course, it’s all christofascist bunk, but I can’t resist it…
EDITED — Oh, okay, here’s the antidote, courtesy of Superdickery:
[ tags: bryan-singer, film, marlon-brando, music, pop-culture, racism, richard-donner, superman, superman-returns ]
3 comments
“christofascist bunk”
Hmmm… That such imagery can have resonance across political lines suggests to me that it’s to some extent ‘up for grabs’ — i have some faith that Bryan Singer, as a reasonably politically astute film-maker, is able to work these resonant images into something interesting. Wasn’t it one of Stuart Hall’s points (I’m less than half-remembering here) that if we abandon populist tropes to the right, we abandon all and any hope of progressive engagement with our culture(s)?
by Nick Caldwell on 21 November 2005 at 2:34 pm. #
On populism and the popular: well, the entirety of my blog is pretty much evidence that I’m not into any disavowal of the popular. But I guess populism — which I interpret as a particular relationship to the popular that involves a reductive interpellation of “the masses” — might be another thing entirely…
For instance, I’m really skeptical of Hall’s involvement in the Communist Party’s grab for a slice of the Thatcherist pie — as if they could swap out the ideological content of right-wing populism with a nice, well-marketed designer socialism. The way I see it, Marxism Today’s New Times project was simply a naive PR job for a “progressive”, postmodern capitalism. Sure, at least they weren’t being paranoid and reactive, like a lot of the Left, and there are interesting, non-reactive things that can be said about the simultaneously enabling and horrific aspects of postfordist flexibilisation — I’m thinking of the movements around the question of “precarity”, for example. But the latter are interesting because they seem like actual interventions into the historical moment, rather than an attempt to make socialism sexy for a virtual Thatcherite constituency, which I think is an obvious dead-end.
This is kinda related to my comments about popular culture and hegemony in the preceding post — I’m now thinking about political struggles in culture as being far more about enabling new networks of circulation and meaning-making, and creating new models of sociality, than about some eternal competition over the mindshare of populist consent and consensus. This might indeed involve a bunch of unlikely, popular stuff like Superman, but I do think this differs significantly from populism itself.
by jebni on 21 November 2005 at 5:00 pm. #
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