July 16, 2011
we hope you will expand your horizons with us
Andrew forwarded a post from Colin Marshall on The Tree of Life, and audience reactions to it. What caught my attention was the graphic he linked from a Connecticut theater warning its patrons about the movie they were about to see. I’m pleased the theater did it, but I’m not sure what to say about it beyond that. We live in interesting times. And I don’t think that’s a curse.
Thanks, Andrew.
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My initial response: unsettled. Beyond that, I’m with Deron (though maybe coming from a different place). I don’t quite know what to say.
Somehow I keep circling back to “America.” Although the rest of the world grows more and more like “America” with each passing year.
I guess I am trying to think my way past the reactionary old-guard stance, the harking back to the Golden Age when we had revival houses and campus film societies and critics such as Andrew Sarris. Because I don’t believe that is an altogether true picture of the past, and I don’t believe it offers the most helpful way to think about why it is, apparently, that so many moviegoers have been so conflibberated by The Tree of Life as for their conflibberation to be such a topic. That much said, I almost always go back to history when trying to understand the here-and-now. I’m just trying not to cherry-pick my history in trying to understand this particular here-and-now.
Sometimes I think it’s as simple as Brad Pitt. The movie wouldn’t be attracting people who feel unhinged by the unmooring of their narrative self without the initial confusion about what attracted them to the movie in the first place and what it is they are about to see.
Perhaps.
My theory–which admittedly has risen up through a massive headache and might be nonsense–is that the people who most object to the film are likely college graduates who regard themselves as educated and possessing of some level of sophistication. They are the product of a U.S. public education system that generates a stream of college graduates who think they know how to think. A film like this magnifies the schism between truly intelligent people and the masses who mistakenly believe themselves intelligent.
In other words–aggressive stupidity.
In still other words–year of junior college (YOJC).
Most of the people in the audience when I saw it were stupid middle/upper middle class, middle age, Dallas.
Exactly. It’s people who equate having “made it” with being smart.
So, essentially, Dallas.
uh-huh
Yeah, that makes sense.
I think Deron’s closer to the truth than Cindy. The people Cindy describes are exactly the sort that would go on and on about how great The Tree of Life is because they think that’s what they’re supposed to say.
This isn’t a big deal though, or a negative sign of the times. Hitchcock had to pay people to stand at the doors of theatres to stop people from wandering into Psycho halfway through as people were wont to do at the time. Progress has been made.
What is disappointing is the NO-REFUND policy. Fair enough if you watched the film but what if you couldn’t make it after buying the ticket ahead of time?