men must have legends, else they will die of strangeness
When critics join in ragged chorus somewhat ‘dis’ing’ a movie one is all the more intrigued to see for oneself. Joy is director David O.Russell’s bio-pic (co-written with a story by Annie ‘Bridesmaids’ Mumolo) of Joy Mangano who, in 1990, developed the prototype of her Miracle Mop. What took a human so long!
Joy Mangano: I think my products have been successful because they have mass appeal…I'm just like everybody else out there. I'm a mom, I work, I have a house to clean, things to organize. We all have certain similar needs, and I address them.
Critics thus far have been positive with reservations, “plodding” being one. Well: life is plodding, often without many thrills more faux pas. In so many ways Joy is rather less ‘hand wrought’ than Silver Linings Playbook, less flamboyant than American Hustle. Neither of those qualities mimic mopping floors (as I recall-well 'hand wrung' until Joy appeared). Dividing the film into time chunks of exposition/denouement in classic screenplay ‘Act structure’, Joy is rather formulaic and utilitarian. Is the voice-over gilding a lily? Maybe yes, equally if not more so maybe no. Great soundtrack songs-haven't heard the final pages of Prokofiev’s Cinderella in a while.
It’d be hard to imagine audiences not warming and weeping to this American ‘everyman/woman’ story. It shows America for what it is warts and all. Yours truly is ruly sick and tired of people in New York telling me to my face that life isn’t fair. Well why the ‘F’ don’t you do something about changing that instead of walking off into the distance like someone deserting a wounded beast? ! Cities everywhere are a jungle. And I am still ALIVE! How many, though, fall into life's traps like the characters in Respire? Smart humans unable to resist the need to be liked.
Jennifer Lawrence (Joy Mangano) called herself a “show pony” in a Stephen Colbert The Late Show interview. Well: Ms. Lawrence has the human gift of incandescent [ps-7.03pm Dec 23- I just read the Washington Post and they used the same adjective (9am) as moi 3pm-goes to show: check your patents via The Terminator carefully:) I am actually so... (Seth Rogan would say anal but that's not as pleasurable for me) - that I googled incandescent and worried Ms Lawrence may have a problem with my observation of her lightbulb abilities. To heck with it: what would the world have done without Sir Joseph Wilson Swan: the first theatre and the first public building in the world to be lit entirely by electricity) . If you’re a “show pony” Ms Lawrence you sure as hell frighten the living daylights out of those thoroughbreds.
Joy Mangano has no particular interest in being liked. Nor the time. “In America the ordinary makes the extraordinary every single day,” says Neil Walker (Bradley Cooper), an executive at the QVC shopping cable channel, whom Joy convinces that her mop will sell 50,000 units. It is never enough to have one idea (though sometimes that works). One must keep supplying a new idea for the crowd to run after, buy and embrace. In a sense it is Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon in reverse and perhaps totally in tandem:
Koestler: Now, every technical improvement creates a new complication to the economic apparatus, causes the appearance of new factors and combinations, which the masses can not penetrate for a time. Every jump of technical progress leaves the relative intellectual development of the masses a step behind, and thus causes a fall in the political maturity thermometer. It takes sometimes tens of years, sometimes generations, for a peculiar level of understanding gradually to adapt itself to the changed state of affairs, until it has recovered the same capacity for self-government, as it had already possessed at a lower stage of civilization. Hence the political maturity of the masses can not be measured by an absolute figure, but only relatively, i.e, in proportion to the stage of civilization at that moment.
When the level of mass-consciousness catches up with the objective state of affairs, there follows inevitably the conquest of democracy, either peaceably or by force. Until the next jump of technical civilization – the discovery of the mechanical loom, for example – again sets back the masses in a state of relative immaturity, and renders possible or even necessary the establishment of some form of absolute leadership.
This process might be compared to the lifting of a ship through a lock with several chambers. When it first enters a lock chamber, the ship is on a low level relative to the capacity of the chamber; it is slowly lifted up until the water-level reaches its highest point. But this grandeur is illusory, the next lock chamber is higher still, the levelling process has to start again. The walls of the lock chambers represent the objective state of control of natural forces, of the technical civilization; the water-level in the lock chamber represents the political maturity of the masses. It would be meaningless to measure the latter as an absolute height above sea-level; what counts is the relative height of the level in the lock chamber.
The discovery of the steam engine started a period of rapid objective progress, and consequently, of equally rapid subjective political retrogression. The industrial era is still young in history, the discrepancy is still great between its extremely complicated economic structure and the masses’ understanding of it. Thus it is comprehensible that the relative political maturity of the nations in the first half of the twentieth century is less than it was in 200 B.C. or at the end of the feudal epoch.
The mistake in the socialist theory was to believe that the level of mass-consciousness rose constantly and steadily. Hence its helplessness before the latest swing of the pendulum, the ideological self-mutilation of the peoples. We believed that the adaptation of the masses’ conception of the world to changed circumstances was a simple process, which one could measure in years; whereas, according to all historical experience, it would have been more suitable to measure by centuries. The people of Europe are still far from having mentally digested the consequences of the steam engine. The capitalist system will collapse before the masses have understood it.
While we are on the subject of people power please allow more philosophical indulgence:
Žižek: This utter passivity is the foreclosed fantasy that sustains our conscious experience as active, self-positing subjects - it is the ultimate perverse fantasy, the notion that we are ultimately instruments of the Other's (Matrix's) jouissance, sucked out of our life-substance like batteries. This brings us to the true libidinal enigma: WHY does the Matrix need human energy? The purely energetic solution is, of course, meaningless: the Matrix could have easily found another, more reliable, source of energy which would have not demanded the extremely complex arrangement of the virtual reality coordinated for millions of human units. The only consistent answer is: the Matrix feeds on the human's jouissance - so we are here back at the fundamental Lacanian thesis that the big Other itself, far from being an anonymous machine, needs the constant influx of Jouissance. Therein resides the correct insight of The Matrix: in its juxtaposition of the two aspects of perversion - on the one hand, reduction of reality to a virtual domain regulated by arbitrary rules that can be suspended; on the other hand, the concealed truth of this freedom, the reduction of the subject to an utter instrumentalized passivity. And the ultimate proof of the decline in quality of the following installments of the Matrix trilogy is that this central aspect is left totally unexploited: a true revolution would have boon a change-in how humans and the Matrix itself relate to jouissance and its appropriation. What about, say, individuals sabotaging the Matrix by refusing to secrete jouissance?
To ask Joy to have more 'bite' more 'warts' is surely asking for another film. Jennifer Lawrence recently told TIME that the movie is only 50% inspired by Mangano. As a life-story it varies only marginally from the truth. Life as we all know, though, is not just about ability and talent but equally luck and the tide. Is there an interesting jouissance discussion to be had after seeing 45 Years? It would be a plot spoiler to explain (he he - get out clause for me;) . Performances any less monumentally human wouldn't allow for that discussion.
Every December (10th anniversary) MoMA's Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You (in conjunction with quarterly publication Filmmaker) exhibits 5-6 films that fell between the year's cinematic alpine crevices. Frank V. Rich's Bloomin Mud Shuffle has dialogue you won't often see in a Hollywood movie. There's a 'sci-fi' H. whose strange observations are 99% fact based- hello Philip K. Dick's imagination. And Bob and the Trees stars a real life non-actor tree logger Bob alongside only one other 'real' actor in an engrossing film about being human and uhmm, natural. (In reality he really likes hip hop). So, guess the film follows Dogma rules. The film's final track is: 'a River runs Through It'.
