When did I walk away from away from that doctoral program? 1981? I was three courses and a dissertation away from a UCLA PhD in Theory, History and Criticism of film and TV. A doctoral dissertation away, however, can not be considered close. A friend likened writing a dissertation to having a low grade fever for several years. You’re never really sick enough to just lie in bed but you don’t feel very good, either.
Looking back through an integral lens, it is precisely the “flatlandedness” of my classically postmodern education that did me in. If I had to write one more paper about a film or TV show that may have looked fun/happy/liberating/progressive on the surface but was really repressive de-sublimation that erased capitalist and patriarchal hegemony, I was going to puke. Buddhists are accused of not being much of a party crowd, but try postmodernists.
Postmodernist film criticism includes some real grostequeries: those French could write without irony about Jerry Lewis as a transgressive and liberating figure. And one school of “feminist” analysis was organized around Jacques Lacan’s Freudian work on “presence and absence” or penis vs. not-penis. I would come to my graduate seminars and whine, “are we going to do weenie-ology again today? Apologies to all the Freudians out there and shout-outs and props to our dawg Sig for his groundbreaking genius, but Freudian feminism still seems to me a little like a civil rights march led by Strom Thurmond.
What postmodernism did give us, of course, was an appreciation of the power and subtleties of the Lower Left; that culture and language and signs and meanings – our intersubjectivity – pervades our consciousness. We learned that we must consciously intend to make this pervasive ideology (and this was my favorite concept from postmodernism) “opaque.” Social meaning making is so complete that it is transparent – we don’t even perceive it unless we make an effort to make it opaque. Our Lower Left frames the questions we ask and thus shapes the answers that seem possible.
As KenWilber has so brilliantly elucidated, postmodernism eschews hierarchy. Nothing can be better, stronger, higher, more good, true or beautiful than anything else because all those evaluations are hopelessly just perceptions and “all perceptions are perspectives, and all perspectives are embedded in bodies and in cultures” (Integral Spirituality, p. 43.)
In postmodernist literary criticism (including film and TV), it was our job to uncover the ideological underpinnings of these perspectives; thus every paper was about capitalist and patriarchal hegemony, blah, blah, blah. When we saw the slightest ray of light, we’d put on our Herbert Marcuse glasses and see a bait and switch; a phony “freedom” ultimately in service of repression.
Which, thinking back on it, is actually kind of weird since postmodernism is so Marxist and Marxism is, when you get right down to it, about liberation. But what models of liberation did we have in pomo-dom? The Soviet Union? That illusion may have gotten my parents through the 30’s but didn’t do much for the 60’s. Sexual de-repression seemed like a possibility but after a lot of fun (but, sorry folks) kinda empty fucking around, 70’s feminism started to ask whether that was really freedom. Maybe necessary but insufficient for freedom?
I always perceived finding a spiritual path as my camera zooming out; a model of liberation that could transcend and include (to coin a phrase) and could situate politics and art and my deep, deep yearning in context. Integral Theory zooms us even further out, widening our perspectives to make it all opaque situating it all – even spirituality – in a grand theoretical framework.
So it is with a huge relieved sigh that I’m circling back to film and TV criticism with a big update! We get to talk about truth and beauty and freedom and what’s good and right! Whoo hoo!
And I have to admit I’m still way, way, way more interested in the Lower Left intersubjective space than I am in naming something “art” (or not). I’m interested in the meaning we’re making in our we-space and especially in making opaque that which is transparent.
But now I have a different way to evaluate the “good”. Given the progression of states and stages, given our multiple lines of development, what do films and TV shows support? What skills do they (per one of my favorite concepts from developmental psychology) “scaffold?” Does a piece help us see more perspectives? Does it help move us from ethnocentrism toward world-care? Does it inspire us to greater physical skill? And on the states scale, do films and TV shows help shift us to non-ordinary consciousness? Inspired, engaged and progressive non-ordinary consciousness or dark and defeated non-ordinary consciousness? The horror biz certainly explores shadow pretty thoroughly; does it do so in a way that is present to horror but unattached? Does it use horror for transcendence or does it wallow in horror, celebrating that which is darkest and regressive in humanity?
What I learned at film school was how to look not just at the ostensible story but also at the way the piece invests and directs attention and energy. The Freudians popularized the term “cathexis” – Wikipedia defines it as “the process of investment of mental or emotional energy in a person, object, or idea.” One of my mottos, “follow the cathexis.”
So with that promo, stay tuned. You may have seen my blog in this space about American Idol runner-up Adam Lambert. Some of the things I’m thinking about: the HBO series Trueblood written and directed by American Beauty writer and Six Feet Under writer/producer Alan Ball. The show is compelling but I keep feeling like openly gay Ball has his wires a little crossed here in positing a civil rights struggle for vampires. Are vampires deserving of civil rights? Since the show analogizes the gay civil rights movement (vampires are “out of the closet”) does our questioning of whether vampires are deserving make us question whether gays are deserving? And on a states level, what is going on with this vampire stuff anyway? What does it mean to think of the undead as sexy as hell? (haha.)
I may even take on comedy which is notoriously the hardest (and least funny) material to analyze. Full advanced disclosure: I worship Jon Stewart. Comedy is hugely complex in its play with subject/object identification. It has always seemed to me that there’s a big moral difference between laughing with and laughing at. I saw The Hangover last week and I wonder if someone being so drugged out as to extract his own tooth with a pair of pliers is funny. Is it funny if we identify with the character or is it just funny if we see him as an object? Is what you find funny a good way to get at your shadow?
More to come.
