/srs

 

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 narrate with complete sincerity. They are not lying in any appreciable way. The disconnect between hearing something fantastic from a narrator that is not doing it deliberately is not something you get to experience often as an adult.

Even when you are talking to just one other person, the search for meaning extends beyond their words. You want to be aware of the context, you will use all the characteristic information you know to be integral to the narrator, and without a doubt, your response will be a function of your extant relationship with them.

These things also manifest in text; the use of emojis as tone indicators is a truly fascinating phenomenon to me. A speaker who is worried about sounding harsh uses them to reassure. Someone who cannot bring themselves to type something vulnerable uses emojis to convey affection. Everyone is familiar with the use of ‘lol’ to soften the landing of something otherwise incredibly mean. Obfuscation is a lot easier on text. To type without emojis already presents a dilemma to the recipient: “how do I read this? are they mad at me?”

For me, this post-ironic tendency of being almost dishonest about the level of sincerity in narration is perfected in texting. There is significantly more room to play around; there is always more than one way to read a sentence. Without facial cues, tones, or even emojis, every message presents homework. A task in textual interpretation that also allows the narrator to say more than they would with the cost of being taken at face value. When I am texting, it might even be fair to say what is meant is much less than what is said. The excess is a buffer; a bubble wrap of sorts that enables me to overcome the hesitation of saying what I want to say, and risk being perceived as me myself.

Masculin Feminin

 

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 have fallen to his death in the silliest of accidents.

Going around interviewing people to try and understand life, we get the impression that he is no better off at the end of the movie than in the beginning. It is difficult to tell if his own insincerity and pretentious nature is any clearer to him despite the acknowledgment that his lack of objectivity taints his pursuit. Paul’s inability to articulate anything meaningful appears painfully manifest when he tries to record a message to his girlfriend.

The film was difficult to follow at times, and does treat itself as quite important (not that these are things I find off-putting). The deep-seated discomfort I felt while watching the movie stemmed (I think) from the fact that I could also see myself in the intellectual haughtiness Paul and his comrade display. This is not to comment on the validity of their opinions – they seem to have a sense of their place in the world. It is the fact that their political awareness (and activity) imbues them with a sense of self-importance which is its own reward.

Their politics also seems to have no positive influence in the way they carry their relationships (especially with women). Even the way the comrades talk about women seems not to be informed at all by the radicalism of their professed politics. Men who vandalize a US Army vehicle shouting “peace in Vietnam” have no qualms about repeatedly going up to a woman in a café so they might brush up against her breasts. Paul pushes a line of questioning to a woman who clearly has no idea what she is being asked so that she looks like fool when she says reactionaries are good people. There is nothing he can get right. Not even the reasons why he is not getting it right. The general disillusionment every character seems to have with the way of things resonates just as much today, if not even more.