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August 30, 2005
Dear American Friend
And they say that we Europeans are depressed, that we are painfully drawing out our last gasp on this earth, that vieux Europe will be outlived by the glory of American civilisation. Please, friend, tell me that Me and You and Everyone We Know is not what passes for searching profundity where you live. Surely it is rather the degenerate romanticism of a culture so far advanced in its process of decay that it cannot even any longer boast the pungency of putrefaction.
True, the winsome, precious, self-pitying whining of your suburban imbeciles makes me feel profoundly depressed, sick and hateful, but at least I know that for me this condition is temporary, that I can acknowledge it, and, in removing myself from your sphere of influence, can escape it. It is clear that your people no longer have the strength to address their sickness honestly, but please do not let them labour under the illusion that this quirky, charming, tinsel-strewn little hideout they have made for themselves amounts to anything more than the rancid lies of an inveterate addict who, whilst dribbling and shitting himself, still secretly preens himself, and fancies himself a charming romantic hero, passers-by his appreciative audience.
At least the film has the honesty to show (although it needn't, since it structurally exemplifies) the complicity of your high 'art' with your people's quotidian half-hearted semiotic campaigns to valorise their hollow, coddled, greedy misery. Do you really believe that submissive drudgery, consumption, voluntary myopia and cowardly sentimentality are made great and worthy by aestheticising them? That the SUV, the very symbol of your astronomically stupid way of life, can be spiritualised by placing a goldfish in a plastic bag on top of it, and making it into a feeble, bleating fable of mortality? That hymns and kisses and little magic moments can redeem your worthless non-existence? That a pseudo-philosophical greetings-card pleasantry makes it all ok again?
In the circumstances, and despite our cherished personal friendship, I have to state that after having watched this film it is my fondest wish that during the span of my lifetime your civilisation is annihilated from the face of this planet. Given the general cultural conditions – conditions which recall above all the strange attenuated vigour of the chronic invalid, to whose ailing frame relatives choose through some misguided loyalty to tie themselves, breathing deeply the foul fumes of the sickbed – I have to accept this is unlikely, and that it is without doubt I who am due for eradication. In any case, I am lost in a world where this film can be recommended far and wide. But even with my dying breath I will not contribute one word to the campaign to reflexively raise your self-willed ignorance to the status of philosophical thought.
Warm-heartedness. Life-affirmation. Wisdom. How easily, how cheaply, how straightforwardly these people seem to believe such things are won. How repulsive the world would be if it were true. As we have been shown, lyrically, proudly, from all angles, at great length.
In closing, may I recommend to you The Last Mitterand, a film about reality and history in all their inhuman splendour and complexity, beyond the orbits of your self-obsessed mewling idiots. A film which in its astonishing breadth and density, its moral sophistication, its intelligence, and its modest cinematographical brilliance, ought to crush the people who made your horrible, awful film, ought to pulverise them and destroy them.
But (and this may be the origin of this misunderstanding about exactly who is depressed and ailing) strength isn't always like that. Perhaps this is fortunate. Nevertheless, one recognises it, and its opposite, when one sees it. This quietly intense acknowledgement of the passing of things, of the end of an age, of the impossibility of redemption and the inevitability of compromise, is more affirmative, more powerful, than any number of your desperate epiphanies.
yours, in hope of an explanation, etc...
Posted by robin at August 30, 2005 08:56 AM