ennui

  I like deliberate obfuscation. It is rare that you mean everything you say – rarer still that you say everything you mean. Conversation (and maybe all forms of correspondence) seems to be as much about what is unsaid or incapable of being articulated. It is why we depend outside the text for meaning. If talking was sufficient, facial cues would not matter, the tone of voice would convey little. The glint in someone’s eyes as they report mischief would be inconsequential. I like to play around with these things. Deadpan delivery, for instance, makes it very difficult to gauge the exact amount of truth or sincerity in a statement. A sort of post-ironic no-man’s land where anything can be said because the recipient’s immediate concern is the veracity of your narration rather than its consequence. A mutilation of form to engineer more uncritical acceptance of content.   A similar thing I can think of is listening to babies tell you stories. They sometimes make things up to nar...

  I watched Godard’s Masculin Feminin today. Paul is not good at anything he tries to do. He is not a good militant, he hates his job, he is not a good boyfriend, not a good a philosopher, is disillusioned with everything, and does not seem to have good relationships with anyone. His predicament does not appear radically different from anyone else’s in the movie. Even the movies he goes to watch with Madeleine seem to be sorry iterations of what he had built up in his head. There is nothing to look forward to and no love to receive. And yet there is something to envy. His comrade envies the infatuation Catherine has for him. Catherine envies Madeline for the love – inadequate and insincere as it is – she receives from Paul. There is something to Paul in his immediate surrounding that the audience knows better than to love or respect. The purposelessness of his life is accentuated in some part by the absurdity of his death. Narrated with little emotion by Catherine, Paul seems to ...