The descriptive arts

A few weeks ago I gave a fairly measured review of M. Night's The Village. It wasn't what it could have been, but it wasn't what most movies are. It was somewhere in between, in the lower half of the Shyamalan Canon, in the upper, say, 25% of the rest of mainstream Hollywood.

Sorry I couldn't be more forceful, but he gave me nothing to love or hate with anything approaching zealotry.

That's why I'll never make it as an upstart Indie journalist. I can't fake zealotry, I can't mock worship or loathe something for the sake of readership.

Case in point:

"Is it me, or is this something an aged Rod Serling might have dreamed up while masturbating on crystal meth?" Village Idiot, Small World, by Steve Wiecking

The article is funny, self-consciously so. It's crammed with as many obscure pop-culture references as one man could possibly fit into a column, and most of the analogies don't hold up

"William Hurt, who’s apparently chosen to ape William Shatner’s distinguished acting technique (Mr. Hurt, we . . . want your . . . Oscar . . . back)"

Hurt sounds nothing like Shatner, he sounds nothing like anyone, neither does anyone else in town. That's the point. In hindsight, what most people complain about as clunky dialogue, I now consider a quiet statement about the nature of the community M. Night has created.

This utopia, like the language the people use, is heavy-handed, artificial and altogether vulnerable, not due to encroachment from without, but from internal collapse.

But I don't want to rehash my review. The point of this is that I'm probably not good enough at the Keith Olbermann school of pop culture journalism to pull off any kind of indie rag writing. Olbermann is a genius, no one tops him--but that doesn't stop every twenty-something in America from trying.

The problem I think is that this new wave have made Trivial Pursuit knowledge a sign of status--an end in itself rather than an added dose of color to the issue of central importance. With this shift of focus, they've also brought a liberal dose of haughtiness. It makes me laugh, probably because I'm also a twenty-something with an intellectual axe to grind. But what does it accomplish aside from establishing a loose pecking order of minutiae-obsessed vainglorious sarcasmbots?

It's also just not that hard. Ahem . . . quiet, I'm creating.

"the whole movie I felt like I was watching something dreamed up by Oscar Wilde on one of his eponymous Opium binges. He could have shat this out, typing with his tongue whilst shooting smack into his eyeball in a carriage on his way to clusterfuck Gilbert and Sullivan and still leave time to recieve the stigmata from Pope Gregory before afternoon tea."

God that's edgy. The best thing about this freeform criticism is that you get to ignore grammar, chronology, veracity and tact. Tact is the last thing you want. Tact doesn't sell free papers.

The worst part is that this is encroaching on the mainstream. Some guy on Dennis Miller (who is the smoldering wreckage of his former self) last night gave a stupid free-form rant about something or other--which amounted to nothing really.

So I've realized that not only is the political discourse being systematically stupidified, all discourse everywhere is meeting that fate.

I know this isn't the blog I promised Omni, I got worked up. I'm drafting.