READING MATERIALS: Dereliction of Duty

[leondacter]

I am remiss; I have not one copy of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.

This may seem like a non-issue, another risible fact of my bookishness (of my tendency to use obfuscating words like “risible” when I might just as easily write comic, hilarious, laughable, or even goofy), but Invisible Man holds a sacred place in my mind, embodied by strong

Comments

[anonymous]

i'm a big fan of lnklater, however, i agree with your assessment: he dropped the figurative ball. but i think that's less due to either the world of film's pressure to be cute rather than unsettling and complex or inpetitude on linklater's part. linklater, i think, genuinely likes the addled mental obliquity and the inconsequential existentialism of stoner slacker culture (to me, this is demosntrated in how he directed the "impostor" discussion). simply put, what causes dick paranoia and angst is to linklater just the material for great cafe chatter. i don't think linklater is much of a dystopian critic of society. i think he's a nostalgic champion of playfully groundless speculation. in dick, characters are allegories or avatars of painful, enforced psychological conditions. in linklater, they are either people whom he knew or avatars of youthful states/phases of nascent philosophical inquiry. in this sole respect, he's very academic. where dick finds tremendous cause for alarm, linklater finds what he enjoyed most about being in high school. does this mean linklater lacks commitment? not exactly.

for linklater, conspiracy doesn't involve transcendent, malevolent, unnameable entities. conspiracy, for him, i gather, is indistinguishable from high school hierarchy. it's much more pynchonesque than it is dickian. for pynchon, conspiracy is a neat idea about social connection/resonance, the retention of meaning in an increasingly areferential world, and pure speculation as an absurd yet individually fulfilling exercise.

linlater is too sincerely charmed by personalities like barris. also, my guess is, he feels this way: "sure; conspiracy is, in theory, bad, but it stimulates thought (in a world devoid of thought)". where dick sees tragically deformed and disturbed people, linklater sees friendly freaks who represent the last bastion of interesting idiosyncrasy is an increasingly generic culture. linklater would like to institute an idiosynscraCy (of state). the 70's weren't as political as the 50's and 60's.

kauffman, whom i really like too, is, of course, much more of an awkward paranoid. however, his, i think, is a romantic rather than a political paranoia. he's more concerned with panic attacks than with systemic institutionally orchestrated pandemonium (or the eerie placidity that indicates oppression).

reading 676 from 'on certainty', dick would think "who *makes* us confuse these states? who benefits from the confusion and how? who is the cartesian devil responsible, and what does he want from me, his puppet?!". linklater, on the other hand, would think "cool. both, however, would love to discuss descartes and wittgenstein.

- blainerunner/br

Lo! the enigma!

[leondacter]

You wrote this long, thoughtful comment, but you're like a wraith. blainerunner does not exist, so who am I to respond to? I fear I've waited too long, but I wanted to respond in earnest, and I was occupied when I first read the line you dropped.

Do you check back to see if people have responded?

Have I missed the discussion boat?

Re: Lo! the enigma!

[anonymous]

i check, periodically.

you comment on a friend's blog. that's how i found you.

i replied to your post mostly because i think that you and i overlap in certain ways. two years ago, at age 34, i bailed (halway through my diss) on a ph.d in english (with streaks of analytic phil). now, i'm finishing up two screenplays (think linklater, kaufman, w. allen, and hitchcock) and two novels. my dream, however, is to write for 'veronica mars', or whatever joss whedon and the terrific jane espenson happen to be working on.

my vision may bring me to los angeles (a long way from waltham, but not so far from williamsburg). if i do, i'll drop you a note. maybe over some knob creek we can discuss stanley cavell and how one goes about bringing playful intellect to the screen.

- br

Stanley Cavell

[leondacter]

Absolutely, and with him Terrence Malick, and surely Linklater and Kaufman.

What kind of novels are you writing? I don't mean to make you constrict your ideas into a genre definition, but how would you describe your writing? I wonder, especially since you speak of Joss Whedon and "Veronica Mars". I think of those shows (including "Buffy..." and "Angel") as serial fairytales, done with skill but in a manner that is much more playful and cartoonish than anything I would attempt writing. Anyway, I'm fairly young (23) and brand new to Los Angeles, but if you make it out here I'd be glad to meet up with you sometime. As to the Knob Creek, though, (like uberdionysus) I don't drink at all.

I've never considered LiveJournal much of a networking tool, but I'm certainly not against it. I'm reworking an old pilot script that's gotten me some enthusiastic friends and piecing together feature ideas right now. I've been courting novels since the sixth grade, but I tend to cast my net too wide and go off into dialectics and mysticism with my characters, so I'm in the process of distilling my writing process to a proper formula, something I can immerse myself in without losing the narrative thread.

Anyway, when you get a few scripts together, there's no other place to be except Los Angeles: There is so much opportunity here, every day, walking casually through the streets and living next door. Did you say you're in England right now?

dayofthelocust is more of an embedded screenwriter than I, but his journal is friends-only, and since you don't have an identity here now I don't know how you'd read his writings if he friended you. He edits and writes here in L.A., but he's from New York, I believe.

As to P.K. Dick and Linklater, I think you're mostly right. The difference, I think, was in their approaches to entertaining amid their personal philosophies; Dick was, above all, an entertainer, a man who wrote pot-boilers, and underlying all of his futuristic bents was a taste for philosophy that, as an entertaining writer, played itself out as elaborate psychodrama. In the end I think his breakdown was more a result of his intensity and insatiability than a long-standing belief that he fomented into full-blown paranoid mysticism. I think VALIS will always be my favorite book of his, because it represents him, it explores him and his personal demons, reveals all of his sudden revelations and prophecies, and the goal of finding truth in that book is only a device through which he keeps you rapt, always expecting that Dickian screen to be pulled back to show a breathtakingly unexpected thing, to receive the final plot-turn, which never happens. He was a talented and earnest man who was troubled by his philosophical vista to the point of delusion and whose talent and earnestness made his musings into a collection of the most exciting and interesting sci-fi plots ever. I don't think anyone like that exists right now.

And still, to my mind, no one has done his work justice on film. Everyone only goes after the most facile aspects of his drama and misses the poignance altogether. Ridley Scott came the closest, but Blade Runner was really Scott's own creation, his own world-entire inspired by Dick.

I want to direct my own Philip K. Dick movie in the future.