Long Links #3

On my subreddit I put up links to individual videos, websites, or blog posts, etc. Any of these things can be "consumed" (paid attention to) in one sitting (generally speaking). Those are "short links". But "long links" take (or take me) more than one sitting and to me seem to not belong in the same context as short links.

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Recently (in the last 6 months) I watched the following movies (among others):

My Name is Sarah (a woman finds community and romantic love in an Alcoholics Anonymous group even though she doesn't drink)

The Book Shop (a woman opens a book store in small-town coastal England, has to deal with enemies)

Detroit Unleaded (Two Arab-Americans in the Detroit area -- a young man, who works in a gas station convenience store, and a young woman, who comes from a rich family -- meet and fall in love)

Nowadays, I watch movies to pass the time, not to explore the world of human experience or rewire my brain (more what I was going for when I was in my 20s). I think these movies are not great movies in the way that Citizen Kane, Last Year at Marienbad, Stalker, or Testament are great. But if I wanted to rewatch those great movies, I could, and I could probably find more like them. Nothing really prevents me. But I actually prefer to watch these unassuming movies.

Actually, I think that there is more going on under the surface in these movies that I don't catch because I don't process audiovisual information quickly enough. Films do a lot of hinting because they don't have time to flesh out everything they're trying to portray, and subtle things like that go over my head, although I can see the hints happening and say to myself "they're trying to say something". The films, being unassuming, don't strike my brain hard to make it notice. Perhaps I would understand their ideas better if I rewatched them. I'm not sure I would want to rewatch them, but I could imagine myself doing so if I owned them on DVD and had a hard time getting new media. (Like kids back in the day watching the same VHSes.)

I think it's exactly the fact that these movies don't strike my brain that hard, or engage in too-strong of visceral engagement, that makes me open to them and like watching them enough to finish them.

I do think that despite that I find them "just to be a way to pass the time", on one level I think even then they do important cultural work by expressing an aesthetic. People can find each other through aesthetics and are encouraged to continue in their personal vibes/aesthetics/sarkars by the bits of time they can spend watching films congenial to them.

These movies are small, quiet, and unassuming. (Not necessarily that the characters or their experiences are, but more that the films themselves don't assert themselves the way that "hard-hitting", "exciting", "sexy", "weighty", "important" movies do.) Although it would not be small, quiet, and unassuming of them, what if those three vibes became greater, or dared to try harder and do bigger things, without losing their roots? I think people carried along by those vibes might be good at doing things that other people are not.

(I think that that last paragraph connects to my own writing a lot. To take one example, I think my book Letters to People who Care would fit in to that same set of vibes.)

(Maybe someone who knows more about movies could list some unassuming movies that do something great.)

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I watched two video essays by biz barclay.. One of them on the binding of Isaac, God is Not Dead, and Midnight Mass, the other on the phenomenon of Snapewives.

The Snapewives one presents the question "what is religion?" and shows a particular new religion. I think its value for me was in showing my own relationship with God in an alien light. The Snapewives' relationships with Snape (their god) sound similar but different from my relationship with God, at least insofar as they hear from Snape and have some degree of devotion to him. The "varieties of religious experience" are profuse and it can seem as though we should give up the search for the real God, since it looks like there's a separate version for each group of people, made in the image of what would serve them. Can I really believe that I am in touch with a person, who is God, rather than am under some kind of force that produces religious experiences of whatever form suit my mind?

I can recommend the other video more highly, especially if, like me, you are someone who is modernist-leaning (i.e. not postmodernist), in favor of being active, in favor of listening to God's voice (an evangelical in some sense of the word?), because it presents the binding of Isaac, a story which in itself shows those pursuits to be dangerous. (The Bible sets dangerous precedents. Also (a la Kierkegaard?) the Bible at least in this story frustrates logical ethical thought processing (even though overall it supports it). "Formulalessness", perhaps.)

Modernism/activist religion is dangerous. Postmodernism is also dangerous (the inability to be excellent, the inability to do what needs to be done, to coordinate cultural activity, the danger of settling for socially-convenient shared values rather than asking about the possibility of causing harm not currently part of consensus reality, such as harming God, or harming humans in ways the social consensus doesn't recognize.) Is there a counterpoint to the binding of Isaac that shows the dangers of postmodernism or other anti-activity philosophies/cultural drifts? Perhaps the rest of the Old Testament, as a whole, is about that. A counterpart to this video could be one about the call of Abraham (in Genesis 12 and renewed later in Genesis), and the need for society to have crazy (literally mentally ill like we might diagnose Abraham), outsider antagonists to the social order to drive moral progress forward.

Both videos are 3 hours long. I think the video essay format, especially the longer the essays get, lends itself to imparting energy to the viewer and giving them time to think about things. As mentioned above, I don't process audiovisual things the best, so I would latch on to some ideas as they were repeated throughout the video, and then think about them for myself. Maybe part of the comparative advantage of video essays is in this energetic transfer and stewing tendency.

(If you combine the two videos, you get the question "how can you know that God (a specific God) is talking such that you should trust and/or obey the voice you hear?")