Friday, June 2, 2006

at home on friday night, writing a blog
I've been having some difficulty deciding what to do for my next article. A number of ideas have come up, but none of them have progressed to any kind of a stage where I can actually set words down in a convincing way.

First, I was thinking of writing something on Miyazaki... which I really couldn't do without being "critical," and not only because I'm contrarian as hell. There is a danger to what Miyazaki does, I think, which goes mostly unnoticed (well, except for the occasional polemic that never gets past surface condemnation). The difficulty in writing this would be, first of all, trying to schematize M's thinking (already an act of violence), following this up by bringing out what's left unthought there (what in effect M can't notice in what he's doing), and do all of this while avoiding being merely critical because he "missed" this or that. I am not yet in any way prepared to do this.

Second, I feel the need to try to confront a scene in episode 5 of Black Lagoon, the one where Levi/Revy talks to Rock about money. This is one of the best scenes I've seen in recent memory (also one of the most disturbing). I have to try to understand this thing if I'm going to be at all honest with myself, and I'd like to be able to do so without immediately falling back into Marx's understanding of money/private property (cf. the money essay from the 1844 manuscripts)... even though at base I think Marx and Revy understand money in the same way. But I'll really have to challenge myself if I'm to do justice in any way to Revy. Grasping what she means requires that I let her be right - which means bidding farewell the "emotional bulls***" that I've focused on in past months and trying to hear the world speak in terms of money, violence, and power. DIFFICULT.

Also, I've been reading and rereading one of the articles that got posted recently - the one on Advent Children and Freud. I feel an obligation to respond to it, especially since it's actually putting an effort in compared to many, but after several days I still don't know how. I'm worried about sounding like a prick ("too late!!")... not because I'm trying to impress anyone, but because I don't think the writers will learn anything from a take-apart. They frequently seem more intent on sticking characters into a preset system than actually evaluating the characters themselves. They understand Freud in too naive a way, or more specifically a way that doesn't ground itself in the question that Freud was really asking (they take the id, ego, and superego as "mythical forces" more or less, essentially no different from Plato's chariot analogy... which is a common enough misunderstanding, especially after Jung and Campbell, but it has nothing to do with Freud). I think a psychoanalytical look at Sephiroth (which was the intent, if I understand the article) is very plausible, and I applaud the authors for going for it. But they have more work to do before finding a secure enough ground to really successfully launch an examination like this... and unfortunately, I have practically no advice on how to get to that point. Thus the difficulty in how to respond... I don't know how to avoid being too vague, or simply dropping criticisms without being constructive, or writing the whole thing as "Freud 101" (which I think would be overlong and only marginally helpful). The point is not to be right, the point is to help learning to occur where I think it can. How will I do this?
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