That point of Angelou's is indeed an excellent...

2011-06-01T13:27:01.860-04:00

That point of Angelou's is indeed an excellent one, and something I'm always reminding myself of, though I find that really few other people believe it the way I do. Because people don't want to believe they're capable of the things that they are. It's not just a defense mechanism, it's a challenge to their very conception of humanity and of reality.

As for Blue Velvet, you're reaction is interesting too, because I spent much of Blue Velvet annoyed at how little it disturbed me given the hype. I went into the movie with the sort of things DFW wrote about it already in my mind, as the conventional wisdom about it 25 or so years on, and just found that instead the whole thing came across as camp. I was so distanced from it that the violence actually didn't affect me the slightest, and the very things that were I think important about it at the time have themselves been drowned in cliche.

It's not simply that it was "bad" art, or that I didn't like it, but that I was incapable of experiencing it without a kind of intellectual mediation that ruined my ability to even take it for what it was. I had expectations.

This is not at all to say that Moff's Law is wrong - quite the opposite. You're absolutely right about the role of criticism, and moreover I agree that creating criticism is itself an important and often fun way of engaging with art. It's more to just say that disaffection is another thing that people do.

(And since you mention Funny Games, I imagine that movie was made for people like me, because as was mentioned, artists are, almost inherently, people who would would rather be hated than ignored.)

Comments on [Post]Modern College Life: What Maya Angelou Said

That point of Angelou's is indeed an excellent...