Saturday, March 20, 2010

Intellectuals, Intellectuals.

There is a grave problem with that word – intellectual – and the way we have come to use it in contemporary conversation. When you think about it, there has always been a problem. In the days of yore, those who were well read, and usually on the side of the establishment were intellectuals. They were renaissance men oriented towards the classics, comfortably modern philosophy, scientific rationality, with refined tastes that only the elite could afford to successfully pursue. Those who were women, expressed ideas too radical or partook of common, vulgar culture, were not.

Today, an intellectual cannot favour the establishment. The scientist is not an intellectual. The bookworm, that vast repository of knowledge, expressing herself in awkward phrases, is not an intellectual. Anyone of the right wing is not an intellectual. Anyone who contradicts absolute equality is not an intellectual. And we still exclude the culture of the vulgar.

That leaves us with an inadequate sort of intellectual. One who has the wherewithal and panache to speak out in public, be a bit of an anarchist with a sufficient amount of patriotism, be able to speak with a hint of that global citizen accent, indulge only in the refinement of the elite, while only in word defending the equi-stature of other sorts of culture. An intellectual must also not be comfortable with technology, look presentably good and allude to literature, music and cinema that his company is unlikely to have heard of.

Allusion, in fact, is the most integral component of the sort of intellectual we savour today. Refer to things in order to be taken seriously. Refer to the most obscure. Creativity, at least in social company, the simplistic sort that reduces problems to apples and oranges, is not a sign of intellect. But watch out for that man over there, referring to a paper the latest neo-marxist toast of the season wrote for that journal. Watch out for the lady that just quoted Bertrand Russell, and name dropped Rembrandt and Umberto Eco. These collectors of information about other people have reduced the exercise of intellect to a contest – who can use the biggest word in the room?

I humbly suggest that if we are to so grossly misrepresent, and more importantly, usurp the word to pedestal some people, and omit those who are genuine and sincere in their entreaties, then do away with the word entirely. Because using Latin phrases will neither get your point across, nor serve the cause of intellectual human progress.

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

In light of recent awards, a review of 'The Hurt Locker', and bravo Kathryn.

One’s primary motivation for wanting so badly to watch The Hurt Locker was because it won an Oscar not too long ago, and because a woman has finally broken the mould to win the night’s most coveted prize. And also, I was getting to watch it at one of the University’s film festivals, which become all too ubiquitous when the first traces of election season are in the winds.

And then one was pleasantly taken by the cinematic experience itself. There is no short answer to the question ‘How was the movie?’, except this – it is an exquisite piece of filmmaking that deals with some great artistic paradoxes. How do you make a philosophical film, and keep it real, so it is not whimsical? How do you keep all the light heartedness of real life, and portray also, all the hell that life can be? How do you make something that is both serious and witty without being insensitive? Kathryn Bigelow is able to do all three things with finesse, and make a gripping war movie while she’s at it.

On the surface, ‘The Hurt Locker’ is about the theatre of war, and a few actors. What its really about, is reality. That is the one thing that will strike you – the complete lack of pretence. There is heroism, but behind the hero, there is a real everyday individual, without the melodrama of a superhero’s alter ego ordinaire. It’s a war movie, but the question of patriotism never comes up. The individual is always at the heart of the narrative. The mundane details of daily life blend easily with the terror and turmoil of war at its worst. The story in itself is not your mainstream, streamlined, ‘point A to point B’ plot line. Neither is it a complex labyrinth or a series of episodes. It’s something else entirely. It’s what real life is. 

This is not Hollywood style war, which inexplicably seems to reduce itself to dense smoke, shrapnel, and a carefully placed romance with all the effect of a Greek tragedy. Neither is it the typical Indie anti-war film with grand rhetoric about neo-imperialism. The Hurt Locker has all the artistic value of a candid photograph - the wedding ring among bomb parts and what follows it, the Iraqi man on his knees, begging to be saved, Beckham - the dvd boy, the supermarket shelves, the blood stained bullet, the work of a bomb diffuser, and one is in the midst of it all, without the dense background music of a thriller, but with a more real, grotesque sort of panic that affects the audience. 

One appreciates the honesty of it all. And when a movie is about American soldiers in Iraq, and its characters speak a language one completely comprehends even in a context far removed, one could say that one has watched a very successful film indeed.