dustybooks wrote: ↑Thu Jan 28, 2021 1:27 pm
therewillbeblus wrote: ↑Thu Jan 28, 2021 1:13 pm
dustybooks wrote: ↑Thu Jan 28, 2021 12:14 pm
I agree that it is a fundamentally humanist film, and it accesses the pangs of adolescence as astutely as any non-period film on the subject, and in a context that I find quite bracing.
That's a really insightful point about adolescence, and I think you've come closest to 'cracking the case' on the challenge that I, and many of us, have expressing what Coppola is doing in her films that's so moving. Her characters are stuck in developmental stages of life that emulate that adolescent nebulosity, whether they're actual children or adults, and she treats them in a way that's humanistic but also humbly removed in allowing the humanity to exist as an enigma, which consequently only helps support that respect of one's singularity. Coppola always seems to be coming at her characters from a place of unconditional interest, where even in
The Bling Ring -a film that I can understand the hate for but find myself magnetically drawn to- these characters' ethical behavior must be shared with a contradictory but equally valid curiosity about what's important to them and why, forming a eccentrically compassionate satire than in another filmmaker's hands would be garbage.
Very well said -- I've found that film, for all its plastic ugliness, a subject of continued fascination for this exact reason: the contradiction of finding the absurdity in their limited worldview and taking them seriously as individuals (while also challenging the problems of environment and neglect that have partially or even mostly led them to become this way).
Exactly, though I really admire how Coppola refrains from endorsing any diagnostic reading as a cause for specified sympathy, and moves into a less concrete space of your first point - that a part of us needs to take them seriously as individuals. Of course, only a part of us!
It takes great skill to acknowledge the environmental factors without prescribing responsibility to them. In fact, what's wonderful about the film is that it's about a group of kids who are unquestionably objectively responsible for their actions, and instead of issuing a Blame Society counterpoint, Coppola recognizes that their worldviews contrast with those of the ingrained old-fashioned systems of issuing responsibility including law, and so the interest isn't about satirizing the assignment of responsibility so much as exploring that dissonance of how one contextualizes responsibility and ethics as fascinating (for if we do venture down that path, we should ask: if these kids are so far removed from our paradigms of order, do we pathologize the kids without evaluating the communication breakdowns between these systems and youth, starting with the systems themselves- and thus rhetorically our accountability there as teachers of the next generation?). If anything, Coppola's only position on responsibility is that, as human beings,
we have a responsibility to take any perspective seriously as of equal dignity and worth to our own.
Sure, some of these characters come off as ridiculous but they fully believe in their perspective and so we are expected to look at the events from two vantage points - first, judging from our own (after all, we need to validate our own points of view too, and anybody claiming not to have one here isn't paying attention or being honest with themselves) and second, pare back the judgment to glean the earnestness beneath the superficialities.
That's the satire- not a meanspiritedness toward one group of millennial materialism- but an exposure of the contradictions in the psychosocial experience, clashing perspectives against behavior indiscriminately in subject and viewer. These characters are after what many of us will declare to be shallow aims but they're looking to achieve a broadly relatable sense of identity and self-worth from those surface-level objectives, taking the bootstraps-ideology to an extreme and revealing its problematic context in the process; and most importantly, demonstrating that just because someone is recycling and imitating others to form their own views, philosophies, and image in postmodern applications of self-actualization, doesn't mean that it's not authentically-driven. After all, don't we all do the same to some extent, and if we view our process as less perverse or repelling, isn't that a subjective goalpost that by rigidly sticking to refuses to grant a humanistic length of rope to move beyond our solipsism? I'm sure past generations felt similarly about us, and so on down the number line.
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