Against "Cinemania": On the culture of seeing films as art and obsession. (Interview with Bill Heidbreder of the film “Cinemania”).

AGAINST "CINEMANIA"

ON THE CULTURE OF SEEING FILMS AS ART AND OBSESSION AND RELATED MATTERS:
Interview with Bill Heidbreder of the film “Cinemania.”

Interview with Willliam Heidbreder, by Mark Petty for Questionsducinema.com, in New York, October 30, 2019.  Copyright 2019 Questionsducinema.com and William Heidbreder.  All rights reserved, except to quote with permission.  No claim of accuracy or authenticity is made for references to the film "Cinemania," or its documentary subjects, producers, or filmmakers.  

MP:  William Heidbreder, or Bill Heidbreder as you are credited, a longtime frequenter of New York’s art cinemas, you are one of the 5 documentary subjects in the 2002 film “Cinemania,” by Steven Kajak and Angela Christlieb, which ponders and celebrates your lives as curious persons who are cinephiles, and the travails of being one today.  You now write about film among other things, in part on your blog, www.questionsducinema.com, where I see you have essays on Godard, Kubrick, Pasolini, Jancso, and Von Trier, Vera Chitylova’s Czech New Wave classic “Daisies,” and more recent films like “Moonlight,” "Personal Shopper," and "The Square." More than 15 years later, I want to ask you about your role in this film, and how you see it, and yourself, today. First, what has been your experience of the film’s after-life, so to speak?

WH: About 30 people in the last 15 years, interestingly all men, have approached me in some way to tell me that they saw me in the film, they found the film enjoyable, and they want me to know that.  Each one of them was very friendly and cordial.  It was like they wanted to be friends for two minutes by clicking a shared like button.  None of these people seemed to think the film interesting for what it discusses; as if it had a remarkable “that” but not an interesting “what.”

MP: And that’s all anyone has ever said to you about it, that they liked it and wanted to ring your bell and say hello?

WH: Yes.

MP: As if in our celebrity media culture fame eclipses meaning and virtue as what people really value and want.

WH: Yes, because meaning and value seem to lie in the fact of appearance, being noticed.  This is a point that Warhol’s art and film, which I have a short essay on on my site, in a way argued for while regarding it with camp’s ambiguously critical gaze and voice: Images of persons we can identify with give us, instantly, something to be by being like.  It must be that we all have some kind of mimetic desire, an anxiety about success that in conditions of precarity or simply modernity can be figured as about existence at all, if not in the literal sense of immigrants and poor people made liminal subjects who, as the philosopher Giorgio Agamben put it, “must not be sacrificed but may be killed with impunity” (or locked up, deservedly or not) by either anonymous hoodlums or the state, but also being or existence in the sense of something remarkable because remarked.  Or, perhaps, represented. Being is something that has appearance.  As we have known since Kant, Being, the true character of what is (or of who anyone of us are), must either just be how it appears, or can appear, or if it is something that does not appear, this is both an idea and a function of what does appear, since that is all we can know. In fact, the Being/Appearance dichotomy is a feature of a paradigm of knowledge as representation, and this is theatrical. Pure being is the actor behind the mask or role or character). Wannabe people not only want to be something in particular, they want to be something, so as to be at all.  If the ultimate thing we fear is death, the search for meaning that is supposed to compensate for it must also be a want-to-be, to be not by way of meaning something (such notions have been ridiculous since Beckett) but to be something in order to answer for ourselves the question, Leibniz’s as well as Hamlet’s, of to be and not be, the original vanity in the face of the ultimate terror and mystery, that we are, that there is a world, that an I stands here talking to a you, or that anything is.  If nothing were and all were illusion, it might not matter, but most of us live as if it does, and we’re surely right.  Further, to live in a society with the political character of being able to contest most things in at least some contexts, is, as the German Jewish philosopher and Holocaust survivor Hannah Arendt pointed out, to appear and be capable of appearing.  The French, who have an official culture of greatness centered around the arts and world of ideas, where ours is centered around mere personality and militarism (perhaps because the educational system drives their country’s economy as the military and research for it does ours), say of those who have died that they have “disappeared.” They have left the public world of appearance. Indeed, the polemical, iconoclastic, theater-phobic, idea, in the radical French theorist Guy Debord but actually many others, of a “society of the spectacle” given over wholly to representation, is one in which Being has been replaced by Appearing.  Which to puritans like Debord means nothing is real, and instead of some New Age celebration of that condition (which would amount to a superficial appropriation of ancient Indian thought by the suburban fad of the new orientalism, optimistic, admiring, and ignorant like so many popular ideologies), it is mournful and maybe revolt-inspiring, as it was, in part accidentally, in France a year after the book “Society of the Spectacle” was published in 1967, the year of Godard’s “La Chinoise,” which brilliantly reduces radical politics to gestures and flat tricolor minimalism as part of Godard’s project of being revolutionary by criticizing everything that appears.  Although actually cinema is really closer to the novel than theater, and for formal reasons, because it presents worlds as textures of what can be experienced. The key is the forms of the sensible, as Jacques Rancière puts it, not the representation of personalities and their dramatic conflicts, which also means that the nature of the political shifts: no longer representational, it should not be ad hominem and based on identities. It should want to change the form of life including economically, more than redress oppression by countering insult with the pride and respect proper to opportunity, which is a worry of ambitious professionals, and students preparing to be ones, who have no wish to change their form of life but only their relative position, more than poor people, who usually do not want to change things but may do so more momentously in response to crises that affect them more concretely.

Partly for these reasons, one of my interests lately is in theater as an idea and the way some films that are key in the canon, like “Persona,” “Vertigo,” “Last Tango in Paris,” some of the early Scorsese films, and many others, including the current film “Joker,” have treated it, because the theatrical situation of the person who is also representing a person, that is, the actor, is, I think, a set of many interesting anxieties and problems that trouble people today.  I think Shakespeare thought about this as much as anything, and today’s toxic masculinities are partly based on theatrical, and Shakespearean, versions of Stoical notions, which are also present in the Buddhism that has become so popular in America today in both the business and medical/therapeutic worlds. There is a common concern that may reflect a prevalent solitude today that takes to a further limit the Cartesian idea that everything, including self, world, and others, can somehow be doubted. The problem of performance and the actor that we have lived with since Shakespeare is one of representing who you are, to yourself as well as others, overtly in order to grasp the truth of your manner of being. While at the same dialogue is never just a statement of what someone thinks and maybe believes, but also a rhetorical move in a game of language as ‘speaking-with’ that is always provocation, entreaty, seduction, tactic, a way of doing something with words other than just using them to say or mean something. And cinema takes all this and adds its own proper dimension of temporal unfolding of the visible and audible per se, which partly removes experience from action, a fact that is also built in to the cinematic apparatus of dark theater, projector and screen. I suppose I think most of our notions of the political are bound up with theatrical notions like speaking truth to power or arguing about something important, and my ambivalence towards this visual culture which most people are absorbed in without thinking about is that I think our society is anti-political and is destroying social life by reducing the social deviance that art depends on to psychology.

I don’t think art should be a new religion, as was suggested by German romantics in a way that may well have contributed to fascism, as Walter Benjamin, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and others have suggested. If we expected art to save us, it would be a secular religion of salvation, and that is well-realized now in banal and dull forms, and very profitably, as a necessity and duty binding on everyone who is not entirely health and normal, which is everyone. Human beings are the misfit, maladjusted, abnormal, unhealthy animal, we are born that way, as we are born helpless, and this is the source of our capacities for greatness and meaning and joy, since everything we do in applying to the world of our environment the powers of our enormous brains is essentially artificial and contingent. There is for that reason no human nature, no way people and societies have to be, exactly, and we have art because we want to make sense of our experience and maybe change some things as we do. Especially in America, most people think there is an order of things or a truth of things; and when they find it, they represent it, and pretend it is a name or description of God. For these reasons, I am against the mental health system and think it should be dismantled along with prisons. What I do think, though, is that the fact that today so much of art including that of film are somehow political, and this is almost a banal truth or becoming one (consider the 2018 Whitney Biennial: Yes, it was mostly politically correct, but more importantly, its ambition was to show art that is political), this is true and should be recognized, as art in both its critical and visionary capacities can do a lot to help us really grasp the most difficult truths about our social world and the fragmentary hopeful tendencies that may help us move beyond it.

That is why is why I like writing about film, and also engaging with political and aesthetic philosophy and theory, and I want to do my part to help promote the idea that just as experiences are not only to be enjoyed but also thought about, people should go to the movie theater not to be comforted but to be troubled. And in a way that is not just a moralism, which is usually pretty nasty and intolerant, and America more than anywhere is full of it to the point of the gratuitous. Maybe in film that is part of the lesson of Hitchcock. In fact, the viewer that films like his demand and create is of course one who delights in the way he is troubled. We don’t need everyone to observe better a set of divine and moral commandments, as much as that actually does matter, at least if they are the right ones; if that were the only point, we could endlessly be reminded to just stop thinking and go back to work. Instead, and especially now that precarity and trauma are a new normal, we need people to think, openly suffer, and experiment in trying to change the world, and in ways that of course cannot be predicted. For my purposes, film is an art form that precisely because it is so experiential, calls for discussion, commentary, and thought, in language, and so criticism. I situate my own filmgoing practice in a space that is between experience and critical thought about it. My ultimate objection to “Cinemania” is that it is so comfortable with with the presumed triviality of film viewers and viewing. Of course, in a way, a Nature God who may be cruel or benevolent destines us all as individual persons to be expendable, but we would like to nonetheless believe that a specialness that is not arbitrary appertains to some of the things we care about and our engagement with them.  

I think relate some of these problems as they affect how we think about the art of cinema to other things, like our toxic masculinity. This is in part just the idea that guys, and maybe also girls when they become strong and heroic and typically show that in a way they are the most perfect men who are almost impossibly so, that is, without recognition of lack, deal with it.  Heroes do and that and the role of this in a militaristic authoritarian culture of reactivity and reaction is partly why we have the superhero film phenomenon.  The common idea is: Shit happens; stop complaining; get back to work; and whatever it is, whatever is your problem, deal with it.  This idea weighs on many people, of both genders, all sexualities, and all types, and the result has partly been various manifestations of despair from the opoid and methamphetamine crises to the wave of mass crimes committed by frustrated and typically right-wing white men.  Our society is going to have to do something other than either abandon gender norms completely, which is impossible, or adopt a normative femininity, which to some extent it has done without fully realizing it, on the grounds that men and masculinity are bad, or just refuse this by insisting on making a morally insouciant military manhood stand or get it up and be great again.  

A lot of this is theater performed for audiovisual mass media, and that includes much of what passes for political speech and position-taking in the media and public discourse. Who is more of a ham actor than Trump?  Trump’s use of speech is unusually weighted away from the “constative” use of statements, as it is called in philosophy of language, that is meant to say something about some reality that is actually supposed to be true.  And of course, we are beyond this now, but you don’t have to read Derrida to know that when someone authoritatively tells you “how it is,” maybe after looking it up in their dictionary of received ideas of what may be said, what you must of course say, and with a straight face, is, “I don’t believe in ‘It’.” Ideology calls for the atheism proper to it: positively, there is no “It,” nothing we can refer to, not image, concept, or person, that has a mute authority. The “names of God” that are bandied about, especially in America, are all forms of advertising that in the end are just a focus for the enforcement of stupidity. But what they always mean is “Just do it,” do your job, do what we tell you, stop thinking, and go back to work. Lacan says that in the end the Master is always saying just that. Trump’s speech effects a move away from the constative towards the purely performative use of speech, where the only thing that actually counts is what people do.  Trump can utter falsehoods and say that those who state what is carefully thought and likely true are presenting “false news,” because what he at least partly means is just, “This is what I, the Boss of It All, say now is ‘true’, meaning what we are to believe.  I’m giving you a heads up: look here, this is it.  This is what Team America is supposed to think now.” Trump must actually believe some of what he says, which is why he reads the New York Post, though he cancelled the White House’s subscriptions to the New York Times and Washington Post.  He is the kind of ideologue who is committed much less than to what he knows is true than to getting what he wants.  He’s a deal-maker with a lot of bluster, a poker player who is just as right to bluff or threaten as to tell you what cards he’s got, and, more the idiot than a good Machiavellian, he doesn’t change his face but wears the same mask. It works because he holds a lot of chips. Politics for him is a game that government may wear as its face; it is entertainment with high stakes. That’s one-half of what he is as public speaker, and of course, using social media as he does, he is the most media-oriented president we have had, much more so than Reagan, who seemed eloquently sincere in saying credible things and motivating even thoughtful people thereby.  The other half is that he presents himself as a boor, a schmuck or prick, an asshole, and one who doesn’t care that he is.  Grab a pussy, brag that he can shoot citizens on the street (though there is so much of this already, he surely is not needed for that, except maybe to remind us that it is normal), bomb a country, use insults instead of arguments just as liberals complain that arguments insult them personally, call the most respected newspaper in the country false, and say in front of cameras, in effect, “Since I know what is right, or what is to be done, I’ll do what I want, I am head of the nation most known for doing what it wants, the lone ranger president whose public persona does not even need to not be out of control, and what do you care?” Perhaps there is only to add something like the Danny de Vito monologue in “Goodfellas”: “You think I’m a funny guy?”  People like French theorist Jean Baudrillard were saying back in the Reagan era that our media society was now one in which in a way nothing is real; but now it’s not that the emperor is naked behind the clothes he pretends to wear: he says I’m a naked schmuck and nothing is true, so we’re at a further remove from the intelligibility of the critical unmasking of ideological discourse. From a false world pretending to be real, we have schmucks pretending to be who they really are. As if, anyone can be who they are, or pretend to be someone else, but who can pretend to be who they are in fact? Certain good actors, no doubt. Authenticity is representational artificiality as ethical mandate. Agamben says government in our time has shifted from “Let live and make die” to “Let die and make live.” (Let die as in the AIDS victims of my generation, or people sent to live in prisons or hospitals, or immigrants in cages, or poor people suffering from massacres in unimportant countries like Rwanda rather than important ones like Bosnia, or the Kurds when they are no longer useful, or the Palestinians outside the city gates treated like Blacks in our ghettoes, unfortunate in being identified with bad politics and recognizable to the proper citizens only as danger and threat, or rain forests and a global ecosystem that can be allowed to die, for do most of us most of the time believe that anything anywhere concerns us? It is difficult to destroy not just “a world” but the world, though that may be happening; but it is easier to let it die but not noticing or caring). Along with let die and make live, we’re in the age of powers that let be and make appear. It’s like the shift in Communist societies from the repressive model of a state apparatus that is sustained by an ideology many believe, to one that no one believes, as the idealism of bureaucracies shifts to the cynicism that goes with it as its disavowed truth. Trump is historically novel as far as I can see in being the leader of a powerful nation, which economically, culturally, and militarily, though not through outright ownership, is an empire, who makes a spectacle of making no pretense to truth, honesty, or decency. Simply, Trump is the leader as obscene, and moreover, this is intended. In Italy, Berlusconi was crass and Mussolini was a ridiculous figure of posturing braggadocio. Trump is both those things, but more. He is beyond shaming because he does not care if anyone views his image but says they don’t like it. People like Brené Brown don’t get that teaching people to be unafraid of being shamed so as to maximally leverage their vulnerability as a source of courage is not the maternal component of an ethics that we need; such ethical maxims have a tendency to be part of the problem. Shame is a useful and very important thing in republican societies, like France and most of Europe. It links normality to virtue, not just success. And it links judgment and claims to truth not to opinion and assertion of will and force, but to reason and thought. What Trump needs is neither comfort nor greater courage or even common sense, but for Congress or voters to say, “You’re fired!” We should help him do what Beckett enigmatically suggests in “Worstward Ho,” something that goes beyond the business culture of success that results from a courageous resoluteness and confident faith that learns from failure so as to succeed better. Rather, “Fail better.” Our country is failing badly.

Of course, the nation’s government is run by people who have sane and comprehensible motives and goals, even if they are not mine or yours. Our government has always basically represented corporate America, which is not stupid even if there are thoughts it cannot think. The innovation is one of style, and that style has a meaning. I think it is a symptom of a much larger problem than the man himself—and of course, his moral psychology, the criticism of which is such an easy way out of any real consideration of our nation’s problems—and I think this symptom and whatever else it involves in style and tendency of thought and feeling and expression, this, which is the kind of thing that narrative art can deal well with (we can leave economic policy to politicians and those advise them) and should. Trump is style as ideology, to use the old Marxist term, and art of course can critique how we think, feel, act, behave, desire, live.

Unfortunately, this does not make our presiding schmuck pathetically funny despite himself like Arthur in “Joker”; it makes him ugly, except to his supporters, who share the sensibility he does much to model, taking further the American right’s typical refusal of thought and argument in favor of scorn. What is disturbing about this and somewhat novel is that we not only have propaganda attempting to rule the people (fortunately, there is an opposing party), but the mask says it cares about nothing but getting what it says it wants.  As the Sex Pistols put it, “I don’t know what I want but I know how to get it.” The president of the world’s most powerful and sometimes admired country now is a spoiled brat who doesn’t even care that he is.  He doesn’t mind appearing to be a fool.  He’s not stupid, he just uses language with little thought except to making deals, being provocative, and getting what he wants and thinks the nation should want. Now, it has long been said that in late capitalist society there is often a cynical and ironic voice in advertising, some art and entertainment, and elsewhere, that says, as cynicism always does, “It sucks, but so what?  That’s life.”  In “Joker,” Sinatra’s optimistic song of that title plays more than once, including over the final credits.  The cynic says: The world is evil and I don’t care.  Ironically cynical art and advertising invites the viewer to share the inside joke that the piece itself “knows”: This is evil; so you thought ideology critique would help you by negating it from the standpoint of an outsider or a going-beyond; but there is no such “utopia” (Margaret Thatcher said, “There is no alternative”), and so critical insight into the system’s evil won’t help you; it’s part of the show.  The scene near the end of “Joker” when Arthur is onstage with the de Niro character, who says to him, completely on the level and not as part of the comedic game we half expect, that Arthur’s saying he has killed people is actually serious (it’s not a joke), suggests that the limits of cynicism lie partly in what is actually its solipsistic character, for solipsism is an experiential and ethical closure of self and world onto the actual and the merely appearing.  There is therefore no absolute work of art.  (An idea that some people think led to fascism). For the same reason there is no discourse of absolute mastery.  If there were, a Joker could bracket the world and others out of his clrcle of concern, and hope we laugh, for, as in John Lennon’s ironic and very sad song, “Strawberry Fields,” “Nothing is real, and nothing to get hung about.”  

I think actually that film could take this on.  And maybe it is starting to.  The difficulty is largely that of thinking in the most complete and useful way about any social reality, especially if it is happening now.   

Our capitalist culture, which is individualist in what are surely not the only or best ways, says, “Got precarity?  Your problem, not mine.  Work harder, deal with it, be heroic, and if the effort fails, the breakdown is yours, you must be “sick” instead of normal.”  Traditionally, women might suffer from the oppression of being dominated, while men could suffer from the stress of being expected to dominate.  I once spent an hour in a jail, and I am alive today because there was one righteous person in the place, someone who knew that being a man is being an adult and also having a conscience and using it, not just proving that you are strong and not weak. I will spare you the unpleasant details, as I’m sure you can imagine.  But as for the culture of film spectatorship —

Perhaps writing and meaningful conversation have largely been replaced by seeing and being seen.  In Walker Percy’s novel, “The Moviegoer,” a man feels as if his experiences in life are only real when confirmed on the screen.  But film does not reproduce experience, it refashions it and gives us allegories and analogues.  That is the power of imagination; it’s what fiction can do that journalism cannot. Our culture surely needs more of the reflection on films and their meaning that our now many excellent critics help provide, my own ambitions obviously including being among them.  But not to just be something.  Being is outside and elsewhere for those who love art; it is the world of what art critic and philosopher of art Arthur Danto called “the ‘is’ of artistic identification.”  That means that in a sense, a sense peculiar to art, not only “is” Flaubert Emma Bovary, as he claimed to be, but you and I everyone either is or, if we are not, should be, a bit like all these losers.  We are like them because we feel things in ways that art can manipulate, but we are more than them when the film’s 2 hours are over and we start to think about it. The represented visible always exists in a relationship of both identity and difference to the spectator.   

Relevantly, “Joker,” is about a narcissist working in the entertainment industry who is stuck in adolescence, and his problem has everything to do with identity.  That this is a big problem in our society today is evidenced partly by some of the popular titles in the self-help book industry, which tell you how to be a real man by standing up and being responsible (Jordan Peterson) or feel like a natural woman (Brené Brown with her cult of the cultivation of vulernability). “Joker,” a film I do have some problems with and have a review of that should soon be published either in a journal or on my site, explicitly references some of the films that did most, in the early years of post-60s neoliberalism, to market disturbingly off male loser schmuck characters who are, like de Niro in some of these films, funny to us while being sometimes horribly sincere to themselves.  The identification that this facilitated in the popular culture, which is largely a young guy thing and particularly in some of the arts, especially filmmaking, which is still far too much a guy’s club, based on young men bonding and sharing their things, this identification precisely is unrealizedly constructed on the narcissist’s false identification of fame or attention with virtue or merit, and when pushed to the limit this can indeed become criminal.  It should be more disturbing to more people than it is, because especially when these jerks are men as they most often are, the narcissist’s confusion of the need to be loved with the ability to be admired or just gazed at (which at root is what ‘admiration’ is and means), and then the usual identification of being loved with loving drops out along with virtue, which may depend on having that kind of private self that can appreciate a solitude that is distinct from loneliness, and that I think was once widely cultivated by a culture of reading novels and listening to classical music, a culture of reflection that thinks and draws the consequences of what it thinks, and not of a failed and merely specular visual reflection that wants to be seen without seeing the one who sees and knowing what they think.  It is the violence of fucking without being fucked, even if in a different way.

One form of this, actually, is the huge #MeToo phenomenon, which has finally brought attention to things feminists had been talking about for decades, though mainly, as is also the case with our loser angry white male right-wing self-made terrorists, the problem has been getting attention and is framed in terms of thinking about crime and/or mental illness.  This is nothing new, considering both that patriarchy itself was in part a protection racket, and that in modern capitalist societies like ours the more popular media tend to thrive on crime stories that function to name and reassuringly offer as solution the knowledge that the authorities are solving the most fearful social problems as crimes, considered as disruptions of order that must be set right, and this makes for simple stories that legitimate the idea of the social order as good and just in this way. Crime and madness are two very different problems except that they are handled in what are similar ways, identifying the person, or his identifying himself, as outside the imaginary totality called society, which of course facilitates incarceration, which always means somehow that a sense of one’s living in a coherent world partly of their fashioning is withdrawn and withheld, or (as in torture according to one of its scholars, Elaine Scarry, in her book “The Body in Pain”) destroyed, while one is subjected bodily to confined spaces, for a duration of time that enforces a bureaucratic judgement that in a way is withdrawn from discourse, just as the individual is excluded from the society of citizens entitled to speak and participate in deciding on what is and shall be. To be expected to have your thinking formed in accordance with statements that are necessarily true, because uttered by people with professional expert authority, and so cannot be challenged, is to refuse you the opportunity to think at all, since thinking is always a use of language and form that is essentially public by nature. The closure of a sense of world and the fear of the annihilation of the self, which can be involved in suicidal, mass killing, and apocalyptic fantasies, is in a way a collapse of a kind that far too much haunts our society, which of course is not only more violent and aggressive and crueler than most, and almost singular in the First World in this regard,
but also has by far the largest prison archipelago. This is partly a holdover to a certain modern paradigm that dates from the 17th century of an individual subjectivity confronting through vision and projects of knowledge and mastery an outer world of objectivity. And this is painful because the United States is in many ways a punishment society sustained by a lot of punitive moralities. Fassbinder, that great analyst of and sympathizer with victims, got this when, in “Berlin Alexanderplatz,” he has his antihero Franz Biberkopf leave prison and shows us the ironic title “The Punishment Begins.” The angry white male loner/loser right-wing is exemplified in figures of solitary victim rage who offer us and themselves spectacular destructive expressions of their situation as they grasp it, they are symptoms of a social malaise that discourses of morality and illness are inadequate to grasping. These aggressive losers are more involved in an identity politics, or identity problematic, even than the liberals. That’s largely why they tend to have gender and sexuality anxieties as much as identity pseudo-nationalist and so race ones.  It is also worth noting that when anxieties about how we live our lives in the world we are part of, when these anxieties become apocalyptic, the paranoiac’s and the narcissist’s great fear of destruction that simply unfolds the logic of this position. One interesting thing this fails to grasp is that our mortality is not the true horror, although most of us rightly fear great pain, which by definition no one likes, unless they have chosen to like it because they don’t; the greatest horror is surely not having a world deprived of oneself, for everyone approaches that at death; the reason people say the Kaddish, which does not mention, let alone justify, death, but only affirms the continuation of the world, is that that is the reality; a truer horror would be the opposite: a God or conscious master for whom the world ends, and can love nothing and no one because there is nothing there (or it is impossibly out of reach). To love is partly to value someone or something more than yourself, and want to give. The failure to love, like Being for Duns Scotus, may be one simple thing but it is said in many ways, giving us many interesting literary and dramatic characters. Maybe some of the apocalyptic suicides who now make up our terrorist white male rage killers, maybe they mistake the crisis or feared destruction of their personal world with the world as such. In any case, though, no one can truly say that our society suffers mainly from the social problem of many sick people who need help, as the “Joker” film suggests by making the Arthur character a victim of the closure of psychiatric social services. From there to the penultimate scene of a meaningless riot inspired by people whose politics must be called fascist—getting off on pointless and nihilistic acts of rage that involve hating and killing rich people—is perhaps no surprise. That’s why films like this are needed to do what the film really fails at, which is to explain this not as a medical and bureaucratic problem but a social one. The best films have a sociological imagination, not just a psychological one. Otherwise, why do we see them? If all problems manifested by individual persons were explained by calling them cases of mental illness, which is actually tautological because it amounts to saying that people with problems have problems because they have problems, — then narrative art would really be dead, as we would not need to be affected by and think about how we could be like them, because a priori any way of being of any person is in some sense a possibility of ourselves, if only because we can understand it. In Kantian terms, anything that can be represented “to” my consciousness, so that I see it and am aware of it, is in a way a property of myself as a conscious subjectivity who can say “I.” What I see is not a reflection of me, but a presentation of what must be acknowledged a possibility of myself; what appears, is done, and is said is not all an expression of me, but it is necessarily all things which I can recognize, and that means they are possibilities of one who can attach them to his own “I” as part of an “I think,” “I perceive,” “I feel,” “I want,” etc., since what is said, seen, or done, is said, seen, or done in a way that formally is impersonal; in one sense, the only real difference between the man or woman on stage and me is that they are there and I am here. Theater is based on the fact that perception is never innocent. I may not bleed if you are pricked on stage, or seem to tear your eyes out, but my empathetic feeling is a sign that my conscience is pricked; theater depends on that and in some sense, however distant from our active possibilities, what is actual to the men and women on stage is a true possibility of ourselves, or we wouldn’t see or feel it. As many of us do when bored, we’d be distracted, and might soon be in search of a meditation practice instead of more difficult art that makes us think instead of helping us manage or get out of boring thoughts. Then we would not need films and they would not need audiences. Imaginative people could be employed instead in the service of hospitals and case workers and the tabloid publications that serve them. And doubtless sophisticated and agreeable ways of doing this can be found.

There is here of course some coherent notion that needs to be constructed and represented of a social problem that we can wish Hollywood would really give us a good film about, though in this regard “Taxi Driver” did not badly, just as we also await a good fictional film that deals with Trumpism.  With #MeToo, the male sex abusers I think mostly have in common that they don’t get that there is a difference between liking and being liked.  Many guys have a hard time with that.  If you go out with a girl and like her and she smiles and seems to like you, does she want what you want, and can you assume that? The best films that deal with these kinds of problems are sharply and rather clearly critical, as the great early films of Scorsese and Coppolla were.  The trouble with mainstream Hollywood narrative cinema was that the classical ways of constructing an entertaining film always make it possible for viewers with bad film educations to enjoy identification so much that if the hero is an asshole or a killer, so what, it’s still fun.  But these people fail to get what the Joaquim Phoenix character in “Joker” certainly does not get either (and which the comedian talk show host de Niro as character as father figure fails to impress on him, which has something to do with reality, the existence of others, and their non-spectacular suffering): the whole complex of identification and attention and being something by or as a role, that you do not have to reflect on, and which for many people is what “cool” is, the films that seem to have most drawn appreciation through this, of course they comment sharply on it.  “Taxi Driver” unfortunately both commented on a social problem and was used by a real-life asshole as a pretext to model his own crime on, and now people like that are copying each other; they don’t need good movie art, just any image they can copy; and then they can move from lonely rage to the appropriation of “Being” through “Being-like.” I am one of those who thinks it more important to take the risks to understand this better and change our culture, than suppress representations that try to do that, on the grounds that movies can provoke not only useful thinking but also the stupidest actions. “Taxi Driver” comments on Hinckley’s crime in advance by commenting on a social problem. The problem is not that there might be one or a few people like who could be dangerously inspired by some story or image, though this does suggest a failure of imagination that does not so much remove it from a grasp of reality as push it all too close to a reality that is then enacted to prove this. When art is treated as representation and model, as in Plato, it can seem intelligible to either choose which model people may see, as fascism and Stalinism did, or to believe that Ideal should be made Real but passing to the act. The problem is that in a less horrible and spectacular sense, films like that are not exhibitions of “mental illness” and how it explains some crimes; they are searing commentaries on our culture. We can shut some people up and put others in jails or subject them to other forms of social control, or we can take some steps back before moving forward and try to make better sense of where we are. There are too many activists in America and not enough artists and critics. So Marx had it backwards: Everyone is trying to change the world, the most important task is to understand it. Certainly, if your date laughs at the Danny de Vito character in “Goodfellas” or only feels sorry for the Ray Liotta character, without seeing that the film is a critique of this kind of “cool,” that of people who only want to feel cool by belonging to something important, you might want to exit during the credits and skip the after-movie drink.  The problem with evil in Hollywood films generally has turned on a kind of theatrical reflection, like what some of Shakespeare’s characters perform on the stage in the revealing monologues.  A film can present a world in which something is rotten; it and its viewers should know this but artistically and not as a sermon, and it is most biting when subtle.  This maybe is hardest to get right in the American model, which soaks the viewer in experience, oppositely of Godard, for example, where everything shown is a critical comment on itself. Aristotle helped set up the problem not only in his Poetics, which still lies behind most contemporary story and drama aesthetics, but in the Metaphysics, which begins with the observation that “All persons by nature desire to understand [or make sense of their experience]; evidence of this is the delight we take in our senses.”

MP: What you say about a kind of disconnect, though with very different consequences, is of course true ex hypothesi of some of the people in “Cinemania,” you not least among them. And of course you are strongly suggesting that we have to recognize these people as not people we can merely condemn, any more than admire, like in Hitchcock where the film often turns partly on our seeing that the character’s anxieties are to some extent our own, when we have lived through them on the screen.

WH: Yes, but no one in the film says much about art, but rather a lot about lifestyle quirks from subways to quick-fix sandwiches.  Is this what cinephilia today is, is like, is about, means, offers?  The failure as a documentary film of “Cinemania” is related to the limitations of “Joker,” which I think is an excellent film in terms of character and a certain idea of how the edge of stand-up comedy can fail, the edge, which can ultimately between life and death, as well as between reality and fiction, but also between something like the beautiful and the sublime, or between what we enjoy and what bites at us.  

MP: I will get to the film, but first I want to ask you about you. In the film, you’re quite the funny boy.  In fact, you seem both detached and like a perfect wimp. And you even seem whimsically self-satisfied with that.  You talk a bit about film but only as an obsession, not an interest, though of course the film posits no such distinction. You talk about lists, a dating ad, and food, clothing, and the logistical difficulties of scheduling screenings and travelling to local venues.  As if your interest, or whatever it is, in film is a given, and the task is organizing a life of any kind merely to sustain this.  And massive amounts of peanut butter, sort of the opposite concept of the Daniel Day-Lewis character in “Phantom Thread,” whose lifestyle obsessions are organized pleasure and seamlessly interwoven with his art, however much they make it difficult to love or be loved by a person.

Indeed, the film kind of presents all of you as lost losers. 

WH: This had an afterlife when I was the object of petty police harassment a few years ago, and they told me that they knew that I like film, want to be a writer, and may have some mental illness. 

Now, being lost and being a loser.  The truth is this is not as damned as you might think.  I will come back to this, because I want to talk about love of film and what it really means. 

Personally, I had come to New York not long before the film was shot.  I had recently graduated.   And by the way, I went to Berkeley, which is not just in California, but the Bay Area.  Where everyone eats quiche, frets about recycling soda cans, and rides a Volvo in a bicycle lane. Whereas, in LA we have Jews, artists, and film noir.  Angelenos are like New Yorkers who drive and pretend they are easy going; but of course are nothing of the kind, and they live in separated houses with yards, since the city is a giant suburb of itself, and move about in steel cases because that's how they see themselves in relation to the world.  So they are like well-protected narcissists, while New Yorkers are the paradigmatic urbanites who are knowing narcissists who can't shake shock or cool to confrontation and don't try.   We know the trauma that imagination is never equal to its reality, and we eat this knowledge for breakfast.  In fact, Angelos are so sure they are hard core that they can pretend not to be, while we are happy to appear to be even if we're not.  The other of New York is not LA but the area by the Bay, with its haute burboisie.  I live in—you’ve seen the t-shirt, right?—New York Fucking City.  Maybe that’s my alibi for supposedly not being normal.

So, now, it’s 1998, and I’m in New York.  I’ve been here a short while. Yes, I came here because it’s the capital of film exhibition, and other things.  I mean, it’s the real capital of American culture, and it is a city apart, in a way both the least and the most American city.  The least because there is a kind of middle-class and effectively mostly suburban culture that dominates much of this country and how people think; the most because of the world of the arts, and because people walk instead of drive, making you much less shielded, and they are less glued to televised news and sports; and instead we go out more, do stuff; here it is not unusual to go out on a Monday night, and there are always lots of choices, which of course is a reality that happily plagues us cinephiles. It is also the city most defined historically and actually by immigrants, less by the WASPs who have always been prominent in our business culture, and its high culture has always been close to that of Europe. It still has an intellectual culture that is not entirely defined by universities. And because it is the center of the arts, it is indeed the national and global center of international film exhibition, without parallel and today increasingly. A now more solidly middle-class New York now has less room for starving artists but even more space for the many well-tailored arts venues that at least cater to those of us cultural tourists who take this seriously as a project.  And this cultural tourism is not to be mocked because you can learn a lot about the world, going places without leaving town or your job or theater seat.  So now, this is 1998, I’m working downtown for an international investment bank as a Word Processor; my job title is the name of a machine. I’m bored, I’m tired; at the end of the day I want to zone out or if anything see a movie. Now I’m also in the all-time Mecca of the art of the silver screen, and this is great because I love film.  Let’s say that evenings are for films, and among the screenings on Mondays I get enlightenment, Tuesdays are a party, the other days both. Now I know I’m into certain things, like French philosophy, or theory as we call it here, I want to write but without any clear idea of projects at the moment, and a total sense of enervation that makes much creative activity in the margins of the alienated labor experience difficult to get it up for.  But there is art, which I also love, and one art form is plentiful, cheap, and fun.  It’s cheap, easy and it’s art.  And art is interesting, wouldn’t you know it?

MP: To continue with the “Joker” theme, what do you think of Benigno, the nerdy man in Almodovar's "Talk to Her" whose seeming gayness is his dissociated feyness (a quality “Joker” obviously has, sometimes) and who commits the celebratedly troubling transgressive sexual act that is at the film's center?

WH: He’s an interesting character, and I think I understand him.  Among the films that inscribe in their fabric a critique of deadly follies that have been facilitated by cinema spectatorship, there is this anxious, Hitchcockian strain that is in this film and many others, including as seminal a film as Michael Powell’s “Peeing Tom,” as well as the Godardian one that is more of a comical satire, in “Breathless” and all the films influenced by it, including Bonny and Clyde, some of Scorsese up through at least “Goodfellas,” etc. By the way, the film's inclusion of a mock silent film about, let's say a total sexual penetration with a real petite mort of self-loss or disappearance, to cover the transgressive act that is unpresented out of a pudeur that is Benigno's own, this is important in the film partly because Benigno and Marco both live in an extreme condition resembling the cinephile's, which can be called that of Noli Me Tangere, Don't touch me, talk to me; but who is the other who is not there?  What if we could only relate to other people like those people we see on a screen, from whose ageless presence we are inevitably and eternally separated, so that relationships with other people or the external world itself is a mere possibility, a question and potentially a problem, which in philosophy was true from Descartes to at least the middle of the last century?  For there is something in this of the still Cartesian but deeply problematized separation of subject from world and object that vision cannot cross, as of course only the impossible or interdicted touch could.  Now, this cinema-goer who, having been brought up by his mother to care, as nurse and hairdresser, for her chaste but doubtless incessant bodily needs, a condition that invokes a disavowed aggression beneath an impossibly mild exterior, and that he repeats in the hospital with Alicia, he knows he is essentially on the outside looking in, an outside-ness that he will attempt to transgress by getting inside her. The film at the end will raise the question with the travel writer Marco, Benigno's circumspect and melancholy survivor who could not protect and save his own beloved who herself is also silenced into a mindless bodily persistence in an accident, whether he can penetrate this world normally accessed through visibility as well as language.  Can he touch or be touched, for instance by Alicia?  For of course that is the real question, and it is the question of love, which must touch you in some sense because it must happen to and affect you.  Benigno wants this desperately and his perversion simply expresses his anxious desperation.  The key to his character may be when he meets Alicia on the street before the car accident that of course seems fated as if the director's point of view were that of the character who unconsciously wants this, and he says, "I am harmless," which is a translation or commentary on his name, Benign.  But it's the wrong answer because it can only be a lie.  The benign man is mild because he transforms his fear of his own desire to penetrate the other even at the risk of hurting her or causing her death, or as in the silent film dream his own, which he also does or almost does twice.  The moral lesson here is of course that the good man is not harmless, because a harmless person is just one who could hurt you but tries to not want to.  Benigno does not love Alicia but only desires her.  But of course desire's enigma is that its truth is love, which is the care for the beloved object of desire.  The film posits the possibility of loving as a question, and in this respect it is interesting that a story based on the problems of separation in vision not only has a kind of touch as its central event but the two bookending dance pieces by the Pina Bausch company are of the fraught encounters of the inept and falling bodies of the blind and their companions at the outset, and the careful passing of a single female body raised above the troupe of dancers at the end.  And now we see that while the hesitant Marco can only hope to touch and be touched by Alicia, it is at least now possible that he might.      

Benigno is a cinephile, he is Hitchockian, but ultimately his madness proves to be that of an ordinary macho asshole whose defining quality in both “acts” of his character is that he wants to get what he wants.  This is wrong.  Being true to yourself is not want to get what you want; one must have the good sense to be able to criticize what one wants and then want to; but there is also another sense in which you should want the wanting, or desire, in what you want (many people do not; Lacan made this point: he calls it “giving up on your desire,” and it is not the worst act morally of course, but it is the one truly unethical position, and it underlies all cynicism, and the Hegelian “beautiful soul” posture that develops it—the position that in a Cartesian and empiricist way stands outside the world, which it totalizes, looking at it, as if sovereignly able to judge it because uninvolved epistemically—and this is also your involuntary celibate who presents himself as being as “harmless” as if his fantasies will not be played out (the car crash that renders Alicia unconscious disproving this) or will be played out but only in fantasy, so that the film’s rape scene, if that is what we should call it (she did not say yes but also did not and could not say no), is Benigno’s way of posing the question, can you fuck someone (or make love to them—and what is the difference, the question that many men do not ask themselves and should) purely in and as a fantasy, and a cinematic one at that.  (It is a silent film in which the man “shrinks” in the presence of an attractive assertive woman, and then enters her, to disappear in a praying mantis-like orgasm as being pleasantly annihilated.  Indeed, if the term “Holocaust” originally meant sacrifice by annihilation of the other (the term has rightly been widely banned in the Jewish world and in France for this reason, replaced by the word “Shoah,” which means catastrophe, with no suggestion of Christianity’s sacrificial redemption of the loss), and obviously some people get off on such ideas, then he is doing that.  By which I do not mean to raise the question of acts of evil involving horribly crimes, but of how a film that wants to present a kind of transgression related to sex and gender, a major concern of Almodovar’s, can raise and have that character raise without recognizing, the question of “evil” on an intimate scale where the penetrating perpetrator thinks it is “love”.)  When Benigno’s strategy in the more interesting first act fails, and he moves from hospital to prison, false intimacy to isolation, fey to macho asshole (and proud of this of course), then we see that what unites the two acts is that he is a man in the end cannot love (his contrasting double Marco, another and certainly more traditional and common type of modern (and post-Franco Spanish) male (played by Argentine, Dario Grandinetti, whose country has its own peculiar, and interesting, history of macho culture) would like to know how to, and the film’s final note suggests he will or might, and with none other than the resurrected young dancer Alicia.  The French philosopher Louis Althusser once famously said that people today need to re-learn the meaning of certain basic practices and gestures.  This should be obvious, but if there is hope for societies like ours it surely will involve rethinking certain things.  You can see similar things in the way certain European philosophers who are political, on the left, and atheist have been rethinking things like Christianity, not to be it but to think and make sense of it, like one can with paintings at a museum.  One of our national problems is identity, oppression, and being-minority or minoritarian, and obviously this includes lots of questioning about gender and sexuality.  Another is the authority/liberty complex.  Another is how people do and can cope with precarity, loneliness, alienation, and all these that reductively get called “mental illness.” Films must treat this; it’s not easy, and I don’t have any great script ideas for the moment, though one or two have in vague shape crossed my mind; we’ll see, I’m mainly an essayist critic.  What I would really take on is in part the therapy and spirituality industry.  Adult citizens should be in lifelong learning but not lifelong therapeutic support groups. 

MP: Is there any political tendency you favor?  And do you ever write anything that is “directly” politically?  

WH: Official political politics, which is about government and policy, only weakly.  I believe in art.  I sometimes write, almost on a whim, comments that usually get published on the blog of the New York Times in response to opinion pieces.  As someone at a leftist journal I respect has said, such commentary tends to shift one’s voice to the center.  In any case, I’ve written about 150 of these, they are all very short, they are on my blog, and my point of view is that of a certain left position that is moderate and critical of identity politics.  

What Foucault says in his essay on enlightenment seems right to me: We need to engage in ways of both criticizing and experimenting with who and what we are and our like.  And art can do much to help us do that; indeed, may be this definition of the function of art, related to Rancière’s of a distribution of the sensible, is what needs to replace the static model of representation whose essential terms are Being and Appearance, and which is linked to antiquated and policing-tainted notions of truth as representation.  Heidegger that the alternative was revelation, reflecting his pious receptivity to Being.  Maybe the alternative is something like to “fuck plenty with the future,” as Patti Smith once put it, by fucking around with the forms of Being, including every damned identity.  Transgression, but even more, transformation.  

And by the way, the extreme critical theoretical tendencies in film theory and elsewhere in the 70s were in a Cartesian representationalist paradigm because their theoretical prejudice constructs, inhabits, and presumes an outside.  It’s too cold, and would destroy art.  Debord has a film that is completely silent and has no images, just a blackness.  I don’t find that interesting.  As soon as any work of art is only interesting to talk about but not sit through, it’s probably worth just talking about something instead.  We’ll always be in our experience; we certainly need criticism of our world as mediated by it.  An after-life outside the world of forms and experience as model of critical standpoint is bankrupt.  Even people who write books in monasteries spend most of their time in immanence, not transcendence, though they might talk about it or experience it on occasion.  If you did nothing but which films and maybe sleep, you would be a audiovisual glutton but that not make it false, only excessive.  But no one is really balanced today, though if they are into some traditional idea of wisdom, Eastern or ‘Western, they will say they mean to be.  What does a person do in a world of bores?  If you are a kid, you escape it, first in fantasy through art, and maybe you move to a city like New York where there are so many artists and people who love art.  

Identity is a trap.  Therapies, religion, spirituality, health and self-help, these things all cannot go where art alone does.  That’s not to blame any of them, because they can be good at doing what they do.  But people should focus much of their unbound and available energy on art and thought.  A society in which everyone is (thought to be) dangerous or sick, or needs help, or in which our worst social problems, including those that rightly make us afraid, unlike the many things that do but shouldn’t, are attributed to individual “mental illness” (a term that explains nothing and is only used to avoid thinking, and enable certain acts of governing authorities), -- that society is the “totally administered society” the Marxist German-Jewish Frankfurt School philosophers spoke of.  Liberals, who are always right about the right, mostly are blind to this utterly.  For me, that has always been a big problem.  We on the left left, or something like that (perhaps), share something of this critique with many conservatives, who handle the problem differently because they don’t desire anything better than the forms of the past, and so don’t need much theory.  I don’t like authoritarianism.  If someone thinks I have a problem that makes me behave badly and for which I alone am responsible, they are saying I can be excluded, and they are depriving me of my right to free speech.  Even if that only exists anymore, and for a long time now, in art, and writing about it. 

MP: On a more personal and lower note, do you want to make love, as your fellow cinephile Jack alludes to comically in the film, to any great screen beauties?

WH: Ha ha.  Much in film history poses that question.  If we think it through well enough, we may find that aesthetic conditions of life today call for and make possible a rethinking of how we relate both to the world and other people, and so among other things of the Pauline triad of faith, hope, and love, at least when these are all possible modes of being as relation, as radical a re-imagining of much of this as the courtly poets who invented love as we know it in twelfth century France, whose genius was to identify the conditions and tasks of poetic thought with those of love.  Ancient love poetry, as in the "Song of Songs," did not do that, because that world did not ask what things really are or mean against the background of their possible negation or non-being.  Romantic love does, and art and literature were so preoccupied with it at least until recently because love seemed negating of self and existence in ways that held some compelling promise.  (Denis de Rougemont's famous theory that is essentially Oedipal of the confrontation with an obstacle to be overcome in a heroic adventure, and that renounces the romantic project on the grounds that its implicit theology is desperately morbid, is mistaken, and it leads him to renouncing the very idea of desire).  But today, since love like politics and even art seem now to be so often doubted or placed into question, I would say that this task takes on an importance and urgency.  

MP: Any notable attempts at this?  

WH: Sure.  Among them: Minelli's "Some Came Running."  Frank Borzage.  Some of the close-ups of Lilian Gish in Griffith's films.  Murnau's "Sunrise."   Dreyer, especially "The Passion of Joan of Arc" and "Day of Wrath."  The great Italians, like Rossellini, Antonioni, Pasolini, Fellini, Olmi, Bertolucci, Visconti.   Early Godard, in a way much of Godard.  Eric Rohmer, certainly and almost always.  Von Trier's masterpiece, which is a dissertation on love as excess and transgression, "Breaking the Waves."  Agnes Varda's brilliant diptych made at the outset of what would be called the French New Wave, "La Pointe Courte."  Wender's "Wings of Desire."  And of course quite a few Hollywood films, including many classics and some recent endeavors like Richard Linklater's wonderful love trilogy. 

Most things that may seem to be disappearing are being transformed in what are of course not yet fully graspable ways through re-evalution of them.  Love and politics are among these things, two ideas that were central to our civilization for centuries and that have recently come to seem much less important than they once were, their very possibility now being doubted.   Another of these things is cinema, and its fate is surely entwined with that of the others.  But art is a thoughtful practice in a way that most other things are not, so art will only be saved by politics and love if it itself saves them, and in times of crisis cultural forms are not recovered to institute their conservation, though this may be useful as means.  We revisit the past for the help it can offer us in changing the present, and in ways that could only be found in this past and its traces now, in the present, with worries proper to its conditions.        

MP: The film was made in 2002, and shot early that year.  Do you think it was in some way a response to 9/11?    

WH: I find that a very interesting question.  When the police stopped me twice in 2015, it was shortly after the stadium bombing in France by Islamist terrorists that November, which the officers dutifully and unaccountably complained to me about, using the excuse that three years earlier I had lived in France, they also mentioned the film and seemed to think it showed me as a fool.  Though 9/11 was still on everyone's mind, along with the willed stupidity of President Bush's response to it of killing a lot of people in a foreign country that was scapegoated to give us something to want and do, the filmmakers did not seem to be thinking of it, nor were any of us.  Are cinephiles oblivious to history and politics?  That would suggest that they don't care about the world and have traded film's, and art's, logic of meaningful displacement for the stupidity of a disavowing substitution, which practically would just mean that dedicated filmgoers are autistic or schizoid types avoiding a reality they cannot deal with in favor of childish games rather than the artistic kind.  Of course, if there is or was a relationship to 9/11 the film's aesthetic strategy does destine that relationship to be one of such a disavowal, based upon the displacement that becomes mere replacement, with the links broken so that time becomes reduced to the formal properties of continuity and event without the elsewhere and later having a problematic but very visible relationship to the here and earlier, so that experience itself is work because it is necessarily troubled.  Heidegger showed that we are the anxious animals because be are born and die prematurely.  We live under the sign of an impropriety we can at best seize upon responsibly, and the paranoid and security state anxious projections that almost everyone is or might be, A criminal, or B crazy, is just a way of failing to recognize that as we mistake lack and strangeness for taint, with the consequence that the psychological replaces the political just as moral law has always threatened to squeeze out the ethical inquiry that is alone at the heart of art since it cannot do without experience, of which even abstract painting is a form since it is the experience of color, or Duchamp's readymades since they are useless objects of use and make us wonder what they mean and whether art can be the assertion of a radical negation of meaning in favor of the banality of everydayness.  The relationship to the decisive event here would be essentially one of pure and dull forgetting, which is indeed the motivated forgetting of disavowal and willed ignorance, seeing no evil, or living in a heaven that is not the perspective on hell that all true heavens are, since thought redeems experience whenever it matters.  So the significant event politically that the film's appearance at that moment would indeed represent is the denial of the event, the refusal to believe or see that anything had changed or happened.  Then 9/11 becomes a minor variant of what the Holocaust is for the Godard of "Histoire(s) du Cinema": it is an event that at the crucial  level of experience, which is what conditions and calls for thought, was not fully present, not fully registered, even and especially by the very medium, cinema, which could do so, which means that cinema in the last century missed the most important part of its vocation.  Which by the way does not divide documentary and fiction, since in both cases film has the inevitable realism of the photographic that André Bazin so stressed.  That is, if 9/11 was an event, and the art of the presentation and representation of what happens and has happened, had the duty to think it, and this obligation  was not honored.  The question of historical events is of course what they mean to us and what they should mean, which needs to be the same thing.  It insults not me and my four colleagues but the art of cinema to refuse thies relfection.  Has the film of 9/11 been made?  I don't think so.  Not an easy task if done well.

MP:  It sounds like the police wanted to harass you.  If they did this in a way meant to be both stupid and effective,  might they try to establish some possible connection between your intellectual and artistic interests, your seeming detachment and so craziness or idiocy, and perhaps even some absurd and circumstantial association of the slight political bent you share with so many people if more uselessly and articulately, with some notion of terrorism, their own or some with official currency, either because you could be associated with a radical politics or some idea thereof, or by reason of any other association of ideas that would not need to withstand any serious reflection any more than media discourse about political matters generally does.  Then they basically threaten both to discredit you publicly, which is hard to do today since the Internet is not controlled by the oligarchy the way television and print journalism are, or to lock you up as a crazy man and in that way prevent you from writing.  

WH: This latter is a real fear.  This is something I want to work on politically, if only by writing about it.  Look, in most states now it used to be but no longer is the case that to commit you involuntarily they had to declare that you are dangerous in the sense of possessed of will and inclination to commit some violent crime, which could include suicide.  Now they only need to say that you are mentally ill and "need" the incarceration.  Of course, half the population is now mentally ill by their consensually-reached definitions, so the operative category is that of emergency.  They declare a personal state of emergency.  This always means that laws and rights are suspended, and the citizen, who is really now just a subject, has only the duty to obey, and obey not a law, which exists as a legislated statement, but an order.  Being law-abiding does not mean, or reduce to, obedience.  I was in fact incarcerated briefly and there at least two interesting things happened: First, a nurse who presented himself as an avuncular advisor told me that in his theory of history, mentioning that he was Jewish, the German Communists were to blame for the triumph of Nazism.  He seemed to be saying that we dissidents and deviants, since European Jews at least were always pariahs, have only ourselves to blame if we rebel against the powerful men who rule, and whose domination over us is eternal reality.  Then he segued somehow into mentioning the bad example of Julius Rosenberg, the man who with his wife Ethel gave the American nuclear bomb secret to the Soviets.  I saw that I was being baited, and said nothing because there was no occasion for me to relevantly comment on the vices or virtues of treason.  You certainly would be a fool if you exposited to a public employee during the reign of the War on Terror that you regard as a philosophical question whether or not some act of treason was justified.  You would of course probably also be a fool if you wondered about this privately, but that is another matter.  The second interesting event was that once when I was asking a nurse for writing paper, which they ration so as to control you and make you know that they do, she for a split second seemed to demur and I then to want to ask a follow-up question, as I do often in business discussions, and thus in her mind to rebelliously insists.  Instantly I was surrounded by six nurses demanding that I take additional medication.  This was punishment, rationalized to them as a necessary act of control.  I said, "I believe I have the right to refuse any treatment."  "Yes you do," one of them replied, "but you have to take this now."  In other words: the law does apply, and it protects you, and it is real on its paper and for those, like lawyers, whose job it is to occupy themselves with it.  But administration is driven by the necessity of situations.  The avuncular counselor nurse was implementing a state of emergency; these nurses now were all declaring a new one.  This also meant that any further refusal on my part could well be coded as violence, which would immediately trigger their own real violence in response to this imaginary one, and which real violence would of course be called something else.  Probably just a necessary measure.  When an administration goes into action to perform a necessary act in response to a necessary condition, you can expect an act of violence performed with efficiency and skill.       
                           .     
These people can be menacing, and sometimes it is darkly funny. Just before they let me go home, the social worker assigned to me on the hospital ward, gave me, in response to my request, 10 sheets of blank paper to write on. The quantity was chosen to perform the austerity ideology. They are charging you $2000 a day to do basically nothing with or for you, except punctuate your boredom with harassments. The previous day I got 100 pages on the front of which was the French text of a Racine play from the website of the Bibliothèque National de France, which she gave me at my request. This time, it was just 10 blank pages. Until I got back to my room. The I saw that the other side was a set of procedural instructions for involuntary admission to a long-term psychiatric care facility in my father’s county in Virginia. This cannot have been a mistake. Americans can be very good at the tactical theatricality of showing you something they will never say. Further, they alone are subjects of a gaze of mastering knowledge of which you alone are object. So you cannot explicitly remark on what they are saying or doing. Therefore, whatever you say can only be used against you. The managing subject is in a way not the responsible subject. And this is why in context of rule or administration, the victim is always to be blame; you are responsible for what happens to you and what you do and say. Just like if you are being bullied and you say, “You are bullying me!” the bullies will say, “Hey, look at this joker. He thinks we’re bullying him! Are we bullying you, asshole? Do you think I’m a funny guy? What’s so funny?…” That social worker was doing nothing more than threatening me. Which is why I was released the next day. She was threatening to send me to what would amount to a hospice, I place where I can live and die, as my bodily and physical health needs would be as meticulously cared for as in the psych ward where the nurses leave their paperwork to take everyone’s blood pressure 4 times a day, and once a day to lead a group where patients are asked to discuss only things that have no bearing on their present situation, like what they think about politicians or what is their spirituality (that is a favorite one, though it also has a contentful purpose, which is to promote the new ideology or religion of therapeutic spirituality.) They also intervene to restrain, super-medicate, and punish any patient who annoys them in any slight way, and then they will believe like the police do that powerless individuals subject to their immanent violence are endangering them. There was also a man brought in, nurse or psychologist or something, as a provacateur. The first time he said, during a group, and looking at directly at me, “I finally learned that everything is about me.” I said, “That’s too bad, because it means you cannot love anyone or anything. Then again, it would be hard to here, because they take everything you are involved in or attached to away from you.” This shut him up. The second time was a group that turned out to have four staff members and only me as a patient. Realizing that, I said nothing. The theme of this group was “communication skills.” This same man again turned to me and said, “I was 40 years old before I learned how to Communicate.” That was a theme of theirs with me, which came up in other communications for which I think I know or can reasonable infer were directed at me deliberately by some concerned authorities, as if to send me some message. I know that there are psychotic versions of that idea, but they are always stupid. I don’t believe in magic. Why is it so important that someone wants me to know that I had better “communicate”? Maybe because I am a writer and that is supposed dangerous because it could be linked to political crimes or criminal politics (obviously, there is such a thing, and just as obvious to everyone who knows me or reads my writings, I have nothing to do with it except not like it and, as with everything, wonder what it means. Susan Sontag, by the way, was wrong, along with Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and others, to suggest that we should approach art through an erotics of enjoyment and not a thinking that interprets. There is good and bad interpretation. I think we should all want to know what our experience of the world means. That is of course not a given but is constructed. It is the product of a labor of interpretation, which is a living with an artwork and thinking about it, sometimes with other uses of form, call them responses or riffs, and most often with thinking in words.

Systems of control rely often on provocational theatrics that is Machiavellian in the sense that it is manipulation using speech only as a tool or weapon. They also rely on ideologies, and one of them that is significant to use in our time, because this is not 1953, though the avuncular hospital nurse pretending to offer me wise counsel about obeying authorities, he referenced, if absurdly, the Rosenbergs and so the whole anti-Communist thing of my father’s generation. What I mean to get at is patriotism and its links to official paranoia. (For of course so many things are projections, and just as haters often legitimate their hate of another group by believing that they are hated by them, and just as powerless people subject to police violence or that of semi-police officers like security guards and hospital nurses, just as these powerless people about to violated or placed outside society are always first declared violent (anything will do, like spilling water on a female nurse’s trousers while demonstratively expressing a will disobedience), or first declared to already be outside society as criminals or sick people similarly, it is important to understand that when authorities talk about paranoia, they attribute to individuals “inside” of whom may lie the origin of this bad way of thinking, and yet always this discourse is itself paranoid, as McCarthy himself, or Roy Cohn, and Nixon, Stalin and many others. The Cold War was paranoiac; are we still in that time? Is patriotism now an issue again and something demanded of citizens as a morality? And at the threat that dissenting from it is treason? On the ward, the head doctor appears, as they very rarely do, as they are like prosecutors and judges in understanding that prison sentences and other punishments are indeed as horribly painful as they are described as being, but in a pain they do not feel and in places they almost never have visited, and certainly not for long. The doctor approaches me and says, point blank, “This is a good country. (pause). And if you don’t like it, you can sue me.” But the funniest use of patriotism was an admitting psychiatrist who obviously thought I had what British psychoanalysis Donald Winicott called a “false-self syndrome.” There is a psychological category as worthy of being considered a simplified theoretical adaptation of aspects of thaumaturgy or theatricality. It means, to use a philosophically well-worn concept from Montesquieu and Rousseau to Heidegger, being authentic. But authenticity, and I am writing about this in connection with certain films and filmmakers, is merely an ideal, and an impossible one, whose complementary term and opposite pole is performativity or artificiality. Neither is ethically wrong. It is unethical to use such tactics for the wrong end and perhaps if used in the wrong way. It is normally unethical to allow. It is not unethical to have a false accent, which appears to be what he attributed to me. I had just come from living in France. I was not trying to be or sound English or to be sound or anything. When you are taking some real care with what you say to the extent that you think about it first and then say it carefully, hoping to be understood as you want to be, this can lead you slightly towards sounding artificial. He seized on the propriety of nationality. On finding out that I was born in this country and have lived here most though not all of my life, he leaned forward, extended his arms wide, in the kind of very over-wrought rhetorical and dramatic performance, and said, “I welcome you to be American with me.” I was speechless. First, suffer the little children to come unto me, says this rent-a-Christ. It was as if he were saying, open your legs wide, so I can come in and love you like you need.
His next statement was the question, “You are feeling anxiety.” But it wasn't a question but a statement; he wanted a performance. This would have been a trap whatever I had said. I later learned that he had already decided to have me locked up before I even walked into his office. He was just looking for an excuse that he could write to protect himself and the hospital against lawsuits. The last thing he said was that he was locking up to “protect” me. From what, he did not say. Maybe he had concluded from the fact that I had just been thrown to the ground and poked all over, more or less beaten up, or less violently arrested, by a group of nurses and hospital personnel for not relinquishing my computer when demanded. Though there was no reason for them to take it without at least informing me first that I was be incarcerated, which was in fact the case. When I first wrote about this experience, I wrote, that I came to the conclusion (momentarily) that “I hate America.” That literary and rhetorical moment must have been used against me the second time. They set up a scenario that I was invited to interpret as “Are you patriotic?” yes or no, when of course both answers are equally wrong. It is good keep in mind not only that our ideas of politics owe much to theater since Aeschylus and Sophocles, but also that tragedy was separated out not just from sacrifice but later both medical and legal thinking. That is why most interesting questions are not ones of innocence and guilt. Further evidence may be that the 19th century saw not only the triumph of the novel and the birth of photography and cinema, but also social theory and sociology; philosophy in Europe has been part social theory since Hegel. Because film like the novel goes beyond character and dialogue and can easily dispense with or go beyond plot, and the destinies of heroes and villains, or hopeful subjects awaiting disenchantment and experiencing failure, or social order disturbed by bad people and restored by the police (or the doctors: law and medicine are both normative and so conservative, and they go together. Cinema is about a visual and aural experience as the novel is about a verbal one. Theater is about characters who speak and act, and their conflicts. In film they are always more or less part of the scene.

I suspect that one saving grace is that the police are not that smart usually and don't need to be, though that is also tied to the depressing fact about the media that you mention, which is certainly a big problem with our culture that points not so much to ideological delusions and the need for criticism of them, as for better education, since without it even those who could want to play the role of engaged citizen proper to old-fashioned republics with functioning constitutions and real public discussions, even they or we could do very little and would probably wind up occupying our attention with things that seem to be important but aren't.  Constructions of meaning are mostly retrospective, which is why paranoia is generally so false, because it refuses history in denying our usual way of being in time, which entails that there is always something happening and we don't know why it is, like Dylan's Mr. Jones, except that, as Hegel noted, this is an ontological condition, the reality of time that underlies history, and it is why we cannot really have rule by experts who discover truths to be applied by wise managers.  Experience is unmanageable and can only be understood.  We have film and it matters for that reason.  

Though there is the curious fact that one of my fellow cinephiles in the film has said he is interested in the philosophical notion that it is better not to be than to be, and so that, hypothetically, some madman's project of annihilation of the world might theoretically be justified.  Of course there is exactly one man in the world who is a madman and could do this, and in one other country a sane tyrant could who never would but only with the agreement of a couple of subordinates in his army.  And this real possibility is what makes this man's musings rather darkly funny.  This laughable musing of an absolute nerd is of course the wrong answer, since if we can and must affirm anything it is first of all that it better to live than die, which in a way is the personal meaning of affirmation. And it is also an answer to the wrong question, which is Hamlet's, which at root supposes that to be is to not not be, which is the only condition under which you could choose to be.  I don't normally take arguments for plainly absurd conclusions too seriously, even if my profession (I am in business as an editor of scholarly papers) involves helping people make effective arguments in their writings and officially caring only, like all of the business world, for a generic excellence in what we might call an athletic theory of the mind and its works.  In fact, Jack is fond of arguing for several philosophical positions that I regard as of no real relevance despite appearing to give epistemic and ethical support to what are in fact forms and clothing of neoliberalism, like arguments that there is no free will or no true values, all of these positions having in common a schizoid Cartesianism that is all too common among American amateurs of philosophy who are usually men with nothing better to do but challenge and insult each other.  But, the insignificance that they could well be all too happy to exploit notwithstanding, a police agency could have a fun field day with the silly notion that someone like him thinks, or someone like me is even acquainted with someone who thinks about, and finds interesting, as I actually do not except in some perfectly comic register since it is the notion of a buffoon worthy ideally of a Dostoevsky, notions of world destruction linked, if only in a purely theoretical way, to political radicalism, even though we know that if anyone destroys the world it will not be a poor protestor in Pittsburgh; it will be either the will of some leader acting in a crisis or just the unwitting consequences of a lot of business activities. To maximize the credibility of some plainly stupid allegation, they would also link all this to love of the art of film, and link that to the decisive threat posed by the idiocy and madness of those kinds of people who are as an incidental matter willing to entertain as if serious such curious notions.  Now, what would the police do then?  Note that most paranoid interpretations fail because they point to connections that are haphazard, but the police often seem to think that way.  Perhaps they would obnoxiously advertise to some willing audience, maybe just a doctor, the idea that I am crazy, dangerously so because I appear at least to myself to have any politics at all, and have a superficial but real connection to one or more persons with bizarre but also crazily dangerous, at least in some absurd but minimally and entertainingly credible theory, to so-called terrorism.  Which after all really is nihilistic; I mean, that is the meaning of ISIS: the theatrically staged media event of the murder of representative persons and artworks, if possible of a putative civilizational value that will irritate every unwitting colonialist who styles himself a lover of museum exhibits, in the explicit name of a military empire that spreads as much by advertising and contagion and entertaining emulation as conquest, that is itself utter madness, but whose implicit logic is the nihilism of destruction for its own sake.  Or, but this is the same thing, for the sake of a war to defeat evil by a good that has become reduced to this opposition, as in some three-minute parody of a bad Hollywood Western where the good guy is a kind of ontological warrior cop whose sole raison d'être is to defeat the bad guys, perhaps in front of a mirror where he imagines some silly young girl admiring the facile comic-book heroism of his phallic narcissism.  The important thing here is that perhaps a morality without virtue and so that is a form of activity but not of life is the form of nihilism that simply defines good as the war against evil and the good person as the social justice warrior who goes out into the world he doesn't know he was born into in order to set upright all that is upside down.  This is Americanism as its own bad comic, and in fact I tip my hat to comic book and superhero artists who like filmmakers want to explore unrealized useful possibilities within a wasteland that they have the courage to inhabit without regrets.   Much of the significance ISIS is that it is so theatrical and so spectacular, and in fact we might even say after Nietzsche expresses that it expresses the will to power as art, but meaningless art, an art of pure spectacle, empty experience.  Of course ISIS presents itself to the West as a mirror of its own most nihilistic metaphysically technological possibilities, and therein lies its real horror.  Technology is nihilistic because it only needs to want to get things done well, effectively and efficiently, which is why profit is not the essence of business and socialism is a more democratic form of capitalist enterprise.  Love and trust it and the force may be with you, but look out, for despite its better intentions, this force may express not the good but simply force itself.  This is the worst nightmare of a police state: its project transforms through corruption law enforcement into force enforcement.  

The theatrical metaphysics of Western theology with its Manichaean temptations and its paradoxical identification and difference between State and God, so that what is must answer to a higher power that is moral if not ethical, while cynics are equally empowered to claim God on the side of government, as in those Protestantisms where sin is not injustice or failure of love but disobedience, all of this stems from the fundamental motifs of technique and force and their dependence on the possibility that Being depends on not-Being.  The Islamists who have been allowed to appropriate the hoary notions of politics as struggle and militancy and the radicalism of going to the root of problems, so that in the New York Times for years now a radical or a militant is someone is or wants to be a criminal with a great imagination like the men Dostoevsky's ridicules in "The Demons," and I see gestures like this as consecrating a refusal of any oppositional politics whatever.  As Giorgio Agamben has said, the citizen, as the one who is involved in the affairs of his society and time because he is affected and cares, this figure itself is ultimately now what the figure of the terrorist is really understood to be.  The police state is not very adept in countering any real politics for reasons surely related to the difficult of even formulating any, which is a real problem for thought; so they act blindly against putative threats with thin and imaginary connections to any real ones.  But maybe the real worry of our rulers is not that someone will say that they have no clothes, but that we ourselves do not, and for that reason we are designing new ones.   If you pay attention to the  self-representations of some of the Islamists, who, let it just be said, are not the real threat to the American and European establishments, how they present themselves is honest and close enough to the truth of what these crazy murderous people with a parodically Manichaean theological metaphysics really are, and want and know themselves to be.  Now of course if the FBI or the police wanted to use such associations to take out people like me, they would make and argue for some such superficial connections as a displacement from their real desire to target people like me for some other reason.  In fact, this would be incredibly stupid except maybe just as a fairly blind prophylactic measure.  What did they fear?  

In 2002 I had done nothing, though they knew I had vague left-wing sympathies and equally vague if writerly and perhaps scholarly ambitions, destining me to the acquaintance of audiences small and few.  Of course they had me under surveillance, and so by 2015 had I made some mistaken or stupid statements?  Perhaps, that of most consequence being surely that I translated, and for the website of a serious scholar who in a perhaps troubling comedy has the name of Lenin himself in the web address, an unfortunately rather personal critique of France's self-avowedly leading Jewish intellectual Mr. Bernard Henri-Levy, who is sort of like France's Alan Dershovitz, a media "intellectual" whose opinions, befitting his position and posture, need to be morally correct but not correct in the sense dependent normally on argument, and of course the shallowness of our media culture is much the source of our mostly faux left-liberal PC culture, such that this problem really is shared by much of left and right.   I now regard this as a mistake because I think people who are wrong in what they say should be criticized for mistaken reasoning and not as liars and so bad men with bad morals.   I had also made in certain contexts 2 or 3 surely innocuous statements about Israel and the Palestinians, and they may have decided to worry about me for that reason, though I don't actually think that should be treated as the most important political issue of our time, since in fact it isn't, and Jews are singled out, perhaps rightly, and often by themselves, as the ones whose injustices can never be tolerated since they are supposed to represent God himself with his troublingly high moral standards.  But the conservative character of the Jewish world, which to me is what most interestingly underlies the hyper- or pseudo-Zionism that is the moral defense of a fortress state exercising what is effectively an internal military occupation justified as policing in a way that anxiously troubles so many opponents and proponents here precisely because this is a darker but clearer mirror of what American society often seems to have become or be becoming.   The conservativism that sustains this and whose other motives which surely involve less any moral corruption than certain theoretical mistakes, is another topic entirely; I think what happened is conservative social and institutional forces triumphed and they could live with and need nothing more than old ideas whose possible relationship to broad cultural and intellectual movements in the wider culture that European Jews had long been so centrally a part of was a question never asked.  So, for instance, what is called "Jewish philosophy" today in a religious sense is generally not very sophisticated and with little apparent relationship to the larger philosophical discourses that it of course really is part of much more than any practice of textual commentary, whether hortatorily homiletical or otherwise. And yet, particularly in Germany and since the war in France and Italy, the philosophical culture is so deep and vital, and always political, and it not only gives us all the vocabulary we might have or want, minus only that of textual commentary, which is necessary secondary on the plane not of moral exhortation but of thought, it also is the tradition that includes and poses more or less all of the important questions, which is another reason why whatever it offers you in poetry, ritual, or community, religion is secondary.  Unless we return to a medieval situation where elites and masses live in separate worlds, which I think is impossible, and certainly not the case today at all, it will only survive by relating itself to and largely situating itself within the larger discourses of philosophy.  That tradition is culturally specific, and it is specific now to the culture of the European languages, and in the modern world four of them almost exclusively: English, French, Italian, and German.  Religion like government and every profession, if it wants to survive, must take second seat behind philosophy and the arts.  Philosophy in what is today the mainly French and Italian tradition is our lingua franca, it is the language shared by all thoughtful political activists, and by everyone in each of the arts who is heavily engaged in thinking about them.  The principle language of the arts today is a metalanguage that in America is called theory and that has its principal roots in that European tradition, rooted in turn in the Latin half of medieval Christian Europe.  Of course, the West does not need to be defended, only some of its ideas do, and you are of course a fool if you think they are all corrupt since that position is not just mistaken but impossible. And ideas are never threatened from without but only from within.  The great threat to our civilization is not military nor could it be one of medicine or policing, neither of which the Third Reich was at a all lacking in sophistication and effectiveness with; it is a threat that really exists at the level of thought.  It is a threat that would be realized if we are so concerned to defend what we are committed to that we forget what it is.  The great ethical tasks behind any possible politics remains what it always was: to think, and think well enough.  Today much of the visual art world is explicitly political, and that is a symptom of the fact that artists know their tasks are not to give us pleasure but to help us deal with the world we live in, rightful source of most nauseas and headaches.  The essentially internal character of any deep social problem is also the reason why considerations of self versus other in the context of discourses about post-colonialism or whatever are so mistaken.  The question of the identity and future of European civilization or the West is not that of its relationship to an excluded or excludable outside.  Its question is the old one of "Who am I?" not "I know I am and who the fuck are you?"  But there was a bounded and self-enclosed character of identities traditionally that made the self/other, inside/outsider, inclusion/exclusion distinctions vital, when now we can see they are just realized in a logic of a pointless war that is largely a displacement.  The state really fears not the radical warrior but the insignificant jester.  Places of habitation today are all places of crossings, and so many of the achievements of our or any civilization come from encounters and hybridisms.  The "I" and "we" need the "you" not to have clean hands, stay honest, or pay our obligations, but we need the others in order to be ourselves.   Love begins with the recognition of the self's dependence on the other, which is why it always retains strong traces of its roots in infancy.   And since politics cannot be war by other means, it must be thought by its most proper means, which are those of art and thought about it.                   

To return, what I want to note here is something about drawing connections.   Like links and hyperlinks online.  Meaning does not lie in the fact that two things are connected, and I'm not even sure it lies in how they are, though both of these things figure centrally in any logic.  Meaning lies in interpretation, which is making sense of experience.  And by the way, it's funny that I had forgotten about it by February and perhaps wanted to, as no doubt many of us New Yorkers did and have done, but for the record, on 9/11 I was no longer working on the 101st floor of one of those buildings, but I was a mile away in the West Village watching from a video screen as part of my city and several thousand of its people were, we later were told and certainly could infer, burned alive as well as reduced to rubble.  And by the way, the Nazis asphyxiated people alive with chemicals but burned their bodies afterwards, so though the scale is smaller the Islamists in a way "improved" on the Nazis in their horror and cruelty.  I am no fan of terrorism, I narrowly escaped being one of its victims, and the police are alright with me when they behave as they do surprisingly often.  He who says radicals sympathize with murderers, he lies.  

But then politics like art is a thinking and not a mere choosing, identifying, or representing; its roots are more affective than mathematical, and its task is not in the first place to take sides but to simply try to make sense and understand.  Of course the entirety of a police thinking about any dissident politics just reduces it to crime.  Crime stories are about who did what and because they wanted what for some personal and venal reason, which is what all psychology ultimately reduces to.  Representatives and governments can do things that are criminal and this has been shown to be a major liability for anyone in any position of power.  But since thinking is theatrical when not also melodramatic ,and since the victim is the correlate of the criminal, where violence is simply the wrong some do to others, attempts to think politically too often are too simplistically personal in this way.       

MP: Whatever we make of these reflections, which may well be the salutary disease of the critic who studies philosophy, you do here tell a story!  But of course any connection of the film to your misfortunes at the hands of our surveillance state could only be circumstantial and speculative, and surely is nonexistent.  Everything of the political, however it is thought of, is present in the world of this film only as an absence.

WH: This question of the reality and importance of absences and their artistic recuperation is something I will have to discuss.  

MP: I hope you will.  But to return to the film, it does show you as a fool or an idiot.  

WH:  Indeed, it does.  And it is a comment perhaps on our time that those 30 guys all approached me to gush enthusiastic about being a fool or idiot.  Which I think was also the filmmaker's intent, though it certainly was not meant to denounce this even if it is clearly comic.  It's a function of something like the unconscious that sometimes people need to be asked, do you even know what you are saying?  Like when Francois Truffaut turns in the street to face the madwoman Adèle Hugo in "The Story of Adèle H," and his silent gaze seems to say, "What are you doing?"  This is the question of recognition, which is characterological and theatrical, not so much cinematic, though film allows for such confrontations and self-confrontations at moments just like comedy and tragedy.   

In fact, I was not a pure idiot but if folly is lack of wisdom, then folly I lacked not. America is a funny place whose anti-intellectual character is so strong people have the funny notion that you can be mature by being responsible but without having learned anything.  But I am the product of American public schools as well as a couple of great universities.  You know, and this is a good reason for alienated oddballs to escape to New York and get not religion but art,  in American public schools you don’t learn anything substantively, you learn habits of intellectual obedience and conformity.  A measure of how profoundly conformist our culture is is that young people think they can make friends by discovering a shared like for an artist or art object; what is interdicted is talking about it; I don't know what it means, goes the cliché, I just like it.  It's like you get points for liking things that others like and so that are cool, and in this land of salesmen to the world that happily speaks our language so we don't need to learn theirs, people wonder that our friendships are so shallow.  French philosopher Alain Badiou thinks ethics is the discovery of shared sameness, and thinking is drawing consequences of things that have already appeared and are known, yet both these things are banal, sameness is as banal as difference and equally digitized and countable.  What a world of commodities lacks is qualities that are not just grasped but felt, experience that has substance or depth, and the time of leisurely lingering.  For me, everything of significance that I have learned I learned as an adult.  I know a lot less than I should, and that was all the more true of my relatively greenhorn self 15 years ago.  I think in our age of the universal entrepreneur, the erstwhile citizen has the task of learning about things, including literature and the arts.  Film as a major art form is one of these things, and it has the advantage on novel reading that it is more efficient and you can easily see more than anyone can read. 

I want to borrow a thought from Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot,” which I have written on in an essay on my blog. The play is from 1953, which is a moment in which the French New Wave and European art cinemas were in a period of gestation, and by the way it is certainly under-appreciated how much developments in film mirror and belong to those in the other arts and in philosophy and social and cultural theory.  Here Beckett thematizes the lack of a desired meaning, story, and experience as these prove impossible on their own terms, so that the impossibility of narration is what is narrated. This semantic castration is a very important condition of life today.  Art today redeems not sin and tragedy so much as boredom and meaninglessness.  And so too maybe ignorance.  Ignorance is not just the condition of those who want to know, it names the very passion for learning. Today we are plagued by the danger not so much of doing things that count as sins but doing things that don’t count, counting things with no meaning, or thinking things mean much when they mean little.  It's what Marx called alienation and Baudelaire and Flaubert called ennui or boredom.  This is a condition we have to think ethically, and as condition of possibility of any ethics or way of understanding and having our form of life, rather than morally, which of course leads only to hypocritical postures of denunciation of poisons we want some police officers of medicine to keep us clean from or finance and market our just voting no to.    

Cinephilia can be a response to this because it offers an idea of experience as such, whose argument is its rhetorical force or intensity.  And with all the paradox this involves, of bringing something close by keeping it at a distance, the idea that is at the heart of Aristotle's originating construction of aesthetic experience through the paradigm of a spectatorial relationship to the experience of tragedy, it’s a safe way of being affected; a theater seat is located in a true safe space, where even a meteor will not hit you, though you might see and hear it do so. We often suffer today less from painful experiences than from the specter of none at all. The condition of enjoying a presence is suffering an absence.  There are things every reasonably smart and educated person should be educated in, and almost no one anymore meets this criteria. 

MP: This sounds like an apology, albeit perhaps a self-consciously ambiguous one.  Did anything ever change?  

WH: Yeah. 20 years in New York and I’m a pugnacious prick, who if you fuck with me you get an argument.  A bit like the type of the artist or aesthete who is aggressive, like Thomas in Antonioni's "Blow-up," and note that only such a character could discover the vanishing aesthetic transcendence at the film's end.    But I underwent luck and changes.  Like: Boring job gets dumped for pretentious self-employment editing papers for people who think they want to spend time at a university.  Which is interesting work sometimes, and I’m self-employed so I own my time.  Then I start reading, I start writing, I go to Paris to get a philosophy degree, I start a film blog, questionsducinema.com. I am, if not a made man, a minor maker.

MP: And you still see films?

WH: And I still see films.  It's not an obsession, but a passion.  Obsessions collect and count their objects; passions explore them.  That's why the medieval poets who invented romantic love linked love to thought through a creation that was thought of as discovery or invention.  Engagement with a real object of passion, that is, a love, and love, not just use and enjoyment, of things, images, and forms is an idea worthy of rediscovery, this engagement aims to make sense of an experience that is bouleversant or upsetting whether it is painful, pleasurable, or as is usual, both, and this making of sense proceeds through the via negativa of a radically placing into question of subject and object of the  experience.  So that the experience of love itself, the macro-idea that groups together all particular passions and their objects, places in question at once lover, beloved, and the what, how, and that of the activity of loving in this instance.  If something like cinephilia courts debasement, it is for the same reason that love always risks reduction to lust and art to commodity.    The modern world differs from the ancient and medieval worlds in its willingness to tarry near or with the indistinction that makes these things so worth distinguishing. Enlightenment for us is not an alternative to inhabiting the Cave but a crafty and artful way of doing so.   

MP: Do you see films now the same way you always did?  

WH: What kind of question is that?  If you are alive, what activity is continued that is not done both the same way and differently?   And if you need the why and how of this, have you ever heard of maturity?

MP: So?  Know your place, man: You're the idly chatting idiot savant, I'm asking the questions.

WH: The "so" is that I think more and better.  Sometimes I see less.  I read more.  I write.  The better to think, the better to enjoy.  I have 3 friends instead of 2, or on a sunny day 30 instead of 20, whatever, they count for much though I don't count them.

MP: Ha ha.  You said maturity.

WH: Thinking at all well has a marvelous tendency to mature a person, and if you think about it, so do experiences.  

MP: Are you going to try to defend the idea that film is an art form?  I mean, come on!  

WH: Well, the “Cinemania” filmmakers don’t know it, do they?  Or they do but their viewers are not told the secret. 

MP: That film is an art form, did that ever need to be established, was it ever a new idea, is it an idea that is or can be doubted or contested?

WH: Film was born as a popular art form, and the claims for its artistic character were long made on the assumption that the former was given and the latter a question.  And it was an idea that people found interesting and had to argue for as late as the 1950s. The art film culture that developed around that time, particularly in Europe, and in New York with its still mostly literary high culture’s typical Eurocentrism, abetted by the fact that much of that culture was Jewish and some of it a culture of immigrant refugees, helped to establish this as fact, since the idea seemed explicitly linked in particular to certain popular European directors.  For people seemed to understand that whatever anyone in Hollywood was really doing, all appearances to the contrary, filmmakers like Bergman, Antonioni, Resnais, and Godard were making films that aspired to be great art, and maybe even that first and foremost. By 2002, when “Cinemania” was made, this had long ceased to be a new or interesting idea, and the filmmakers seemed to take their cue not from the objects of the passion for film but the curious lives of some of those taken with it. They then treated this cinephilia like any obsessional hobby that is essentially without meaning, like a film I saw a trailer for about pinball fanatics, making the film an opportunity to explore what makes certain people such curious types. The film does not argue that film is not the great art form we think it is, but merely ignores that and all such questions.  Its premise is, hey, let’s make a film about these oddball types and show their amusing and in fact charming oddness. 

MP:  What changed in the world in the meantime as far as cinephilia is concerned?  Are we now fallen angels tarrying in what were once palaces of kings, as the idiotic pompous producer complains in Godard's "Contempt"? 

WH:  At least we can tell the story.  Shall I----?    

MP: We have ordinary people on the payroll, don’t we, Tom? Anyway, you write on film and you studied philosophy, so maybe you can enlighten us more about what this all is about.

WH: Film was never sure of itself, as to whether it was high art or mere entertainment.  Lovers of popular art have art-envy and are self-consciously sine nobilitas, un peu snob, though in a curious way since unlike most snobbery it is not disavowal.  With postmodernism art learned to embrace what is low, to value what has none.   

The film critics in the 1950s who became the French New Wave and contributed much to this mélange of high and low, or trivial and important, were not the first, but they were the most famous, to argue that film is truly an art form.  Indeed, the term “Cinemaniacs” was applied in France by some observers to these very critics when they were slumming it at the Cinemathèque Francaise, patron hall of most archival and repertory cinemas today. These people were actually asking: Could it possibly be that the popular art of cinema is as much an art form as literature, as theater, as classical music, as dance, as painting?  We know their answer.  In New York, it was the nascent European art cinema that began to emerge in the 1950s that changed things, though interestingly for the French it was above all their rediscovery of classical American cinema, and the argument was that very popular forms of the art of cinema could be classics as great as Flaubert, Joyce, Picasso, or Schoenberg.  Cinema mattered. The happy truth is it still does, as much as ever.

In time cinephilia morphed.  It got big, had its groupies, and by 2002 when this film was made, perhaps it was time for a revisionist view.  The trouble is just that the film poses no interpretive question and offers the viewer nothing desirable.  It is interesting to ask how that was possible.  And, inevitably, what it means. 

What they found was a not very magnificent obsession.  They identified the froth of a demi-culture that is base, that is, at the theoretical lowest point of low, and nihilistic, because it seems to really want nothing, say nothing, give nothing. Cinephilia means love of cinema.  The transformation of the suffix for love, or rather friendship, philia, as if film can be an object of taste but not something truly and scandalously erotic or passionate, into the name of a mental disorder indicating excess excitement leaves the viewer with the unanswered question, where’s the love?  Or better, perhaps, what is the love?

Or even, do we need love? Need the concern or obsession with cinema be a love?  My answer is yes, and this is vital.  Further, like all love this one begins with passion, that is, an experience in passivity.  In art, there is no thought without experience, no truth without love. 

For instance, no one worth his salt sees artworks just in order to talk about them.  Yes, one writes to think, but thinking about art is transitive. To understand an artwork, you must experience it.  Moreover, the essential activity, which the Gods will for every woman and man, is the love experience with artworks, beside which all productive, creative activity however meaningful is secondary. Most amateurs are not professionals, but a professional who is not an amateur tells a vain tale of sound and fury, and is a hypocrite reader of what he studies.  He will be destined to become a pedantic bore. The experience of art resembles both romantic love and religious experience.  It is broader and less contingently aleatory than love of actual persons, and Hegel rightly saw that in the modern world art along with theory, or philosophy, has subsumed and surpassed religion.  What were once called the truths of religious experience now need art; it treats them on its own plane. 

If you take all this for granted, then maybe nothing remains but peanut butter.  But that is impossible. 

The film "Cinemania" is really about something that is interesting in the way that trash might be. Or that is a pleasure to consume or engage in in the way that really good food or love-making is.  No distinction is made between enjoyment and interest, or involvement and enjoyment. The film is nihilistic in the sense that the object of the film lovers’ love is one with no meaning, apart from their own subjective preference.  This is Sophism: everything is true because nothing is. Film is interesting because some people like it; it is interesting to them.  Its meaning is its likeability, it’s being chosen by a consumer.  The consumers are willing to pay for it, or go out of their way to get to it, or give up a decent lunch for rapidly smearing a pile of peanut butter on a slice of bread so as to not to have to bother with anything outside the autist’s “special interest.” You might well wonder if these people even bathe.

But the film’s position of having none has a defense.  It is the Christian and radically egalitarian one that what is seemingly without value and unredeemable is precisely what is most to be redeemed.  Losers, rejoice; we are all losers.  It is a truism that only the lost ones can be saved.

This is a truth depending on a hierarchy between affect, being affected, and thought, which is making sense of experience, that can be read either or both of two ways. We are truly lost; yet we alone can be saved. And by a kind of grace facilitated less by work in making meaning than a faith in the experience that meaning-making desires and loves.  Its idolatry is of course that it loves precisely and only that experience, and whatever is revealed in the cinematic communion with the artifact as lying within it. 

MP: Of course I get that you mean to declare, and in some interesting way, that film for you is an art form, perhaps hoping however vainly in what is really an elaborate public confession to habilitate your own reputation thereby.  

WH: Sure, but also to try to better understand things whose meaning seems obvious but isn't.   

MP: Since you have not resisted reference to cautionary tales of losers, on the ground or pretense that these are interesting documents about our time, and perhaps with signs of hope amid the sadness, I cannot help noting, that cynics may see you as a bit like Dirk Diggler in P. T. Anderson's "Boogie Nights," who is really just a fool and a jerk-off, but since this is his job, like everyone around him he wants to believe that pornography is high art and his way of being a colorful schmuck is somehow important because linked to it; call it snobbery as a strategy of faux redemption for the at best comically ridiculous.  And of course this is all an acerbic social criticism that none of the film's characters are able to see for the laughing matter it is.  

WH: You mention one of the great films about the 1970s, a time I remember very well.  It belongs in the company of "Last Tango in Paris," Salò," "WR: Mysteries of the Organism," "Taxi Driver," "Saturday Night Fever," and others.  The film that best nails that decade and what was wrong with much of the culture is "Last Tango in Paris," which I am writing about.  

MP: But, in your own terms, did you in fact become a cinephile out of love of film as an art form? What was your introduction, the beginning of it all, and what for you was or is its meaning? And how do you now see the film culture of then and now?

WH: The first film that profoundly moved me was Truffaut’s “400 Blows," which I read as the testament of an angry young man that it is.  I thought: that’s me, my family, my exploration of the city, my escape to the sea, the recognition that escape ends in a dead-end that makes you turn back and anxiously wonder, posing the always central question of what is the question to pose. 

A cinephile is not someone who loves cinema but someone obsessed with looking at it.  It really started for me at Berkeley in the 1980s, where I had transferred to be a lit student, having abandoned political sociology out of the vague intuition that politically as well as spiritually it was art that mattered.  Man cannot live in the real world alone. I stopped caring to go to political demonstrations or meetings, and began to see that what I loved was that part of the world of ideas whose alibi was its being a world of beauty.  It was something to love. 

Antonioni’s film “Red Desert” grasps this in its poetic and ethical surpassing of the mere psychological character of Monica Vitti’s personal crisis; she says that what she is searching for in life is to know what to look at, or how to see, which of course is the film’s own problem, which Richard Harris, an incuriously restless traveler who is at home nowhere and whose basic desire is for displacement, trivializes by equating her project with his own more common question of how to live.  She also speaks of being told by a doctor that it is important to love, and the love could be of a person or anything, just not a series of all possible things which would then seem to surround her in a way that is at once comforting and disconcerting.  In other words, spatial location of self and objects, or the place of self in the world, is not the question; what matters is how things are experienced visually.  She is literally seeking a way of being in the world, and she finds, if not the answer, at least the way of answering it, in the film’s own vision and its very idiosyncratic construction of stunning visual beauty in industrial objects and settings, which transforms use into appearance. Cinema at least knows perhaps no great argument for the importance of art to life of this.     

I cannot say that art in general is a better or greater love object than persons or mere sunsets, but it has a vitality that derives from both the concentrated intensity it takes on within its frame or on its stage, and the way it represents or in some analogical way figures some part or aspect of our experience of the world we must live in. Art is likeness, which like Being for Duns Scotus is said in many ways. As love objects go, art can claim its own priority, and one of the distinctive features of the art of cinema is its intense quality precisely as an experience, as moving potentially as the best music but totalizing in involving the several senses and forms. It would be unfair to call the experience it facilitates merely vicarious, since it is one of those substitutional displacements that exceeds any more original or proper object, a quality that human desire itself has.  Also, the experience of art has much in common with that of love.  It is intense, and transformative, and like love it unites desire and some kind of care based on some sense of importance or mattering that I think is implicit in its claim to in some way mediate for us a more rarified, particular, and reflected encounter with something worldly and real that it helps us appreciate and care about.  

As a student, I found Berkeley had for me two or three principal attractions: Great professors teaching interesting classes, the pleasure of writing more or less inspired papers in some of these classes, and a too-little known place called the Pacific Film Archive.  Also, my social life was poor, and the great art of total experience that cinema is was a substitute.  Like all such substitutes, a symptom that replaces the syndrome with something far better to live with.  Like Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art, or the Cinemathèque Francaise in Paris, the PFA is a theater with nightly screenings of mostly foreign and classic films.

The 80s, which was also the heyday of postmodernism, was a great time in film history internationally, better than the 70s if not the 50s and 60s.  It was the tail end of the period of European art cinema that began in the mid-1950s with Antonioni, Bergmann, and the early films of Alain Resnais and Agnes Varda that I think really began the French New Wave in 1955.  In the 80s I could discover contemporary films by people like Fassbinder and Wenders in Germany, Pedro Almodovar, then making his early wild comedies, Angelopolous, Tarkovsky, Kieslowski, whose “Blind Chance” and “Decalogue” were such revelations, Cassavetes, some of the many great Italian films, the still exciting and puzzlingly thoughtful films of Godard, and others.  The reigning aesthetic was a postmodernism that could be playful as in early Almodovar or Kaurismaki, or melancholy as in Wenders, Tarkovsky, and other heirs of Antonioni, such as in Angelopoulos’s “The Beekeeper,” where an uncommunicative middle-aged man wanders Greece in search of an absent life, meets an insouciant, sexy 20-year-old who listens to juke box music, and they of course meet without connecting. 

For me personally, film was, as it is for so many cinephiles, both delight and instruction, escapism and wandering daily in the labyrinth of a wonderful museum of moving pictures of lives both like and usually unlike those of myself and the people I knew. 

MP: Do such resemblances matter at all? 

WH: In viewing, almost never, in reflecting and writing possibly, but it's best with aesthetic likenesses to just take for granted the likely likeness but not identify what is mirrored.  That's because art works in principle always have the quality that raw experience lacks of being well-formed, and for that reason a character or story that is recognizably like me or you or us is almost always most interestingly discussed with specifying any references.  There is a primacy of the art object.  It gives us to understand much more and better because it is throughly well-made or perfected, which means just that.  There is no perfection outside art.  Human beings are destined to be able to know it but not live in it.     

In part precisely because I was a literature major, entertainment could less easily lie in reading Keats or Eliot than in seeing some great film.  But, yes, it was art, the curators of the PFA including the wonderful chief curator Edith Kramer, were certainly keen on that, and they had great programming.  And for me like so many cinephiles it was both a life that did not even need to be tangibly real because as every cinephile will tell you film has a reality effect that is a more-than-real, and of course art always had that character, and it has it today more than ever even when the conditions of artificial experience are so changed and omnipresent that the very distinction between real and artificial on which art itself is based is in some ways effaced.  Sometimes it is even sought in this very place of its absence. 

Film for me was also a sentimental education in documents of the life and experience of the world of my time.  It was an education.  What, I wonder, would a great university be without something like this, because the premise of college education in America is you get to have interesting experiences for a few years while you pretend to be learning about the world.  I have found myself returning to much of the great music of that era; in New York and elsewhere the visual art world was also vital; cinema for me was international, and the art films we denizens of that little theater saw were mostly European. Indeed, I think 1989 was something of a watershed when the cinemas of some of these countries somehow became exhausted and there was the beginning of a turn to something else, an aesthetic of true visual and experiential impoverishment and sometimes the traumatic that one can see in the first case in Bela Tarr, and in Phillipe Garrel and other reflections of the post-ironic hyperrealism of Warhol, and in the second in people like Michael Haneke and much more deeply David Lynch, for whom trauma warps experience and sense-making themselves, calling the film itself and the possibility of reading it into question, much more than serving as the central and defining and wholly visible and presented object of melancholic and anguished contemplation. 

The cinematic sensibility of the time was still a variant of the low meets high quality of so much of postwar film, and the films I mostly saw were quite entertaining. But of course art in the modern world is disenchantment, and what I found in cinema was a set of poetic ways to be alienated, which was also of course a pretty big theme in the music of the time.  Maybe that’s what cool or hip is ideally, though I never wanted to “be” a part of any counterculture, perhaps because the draw of film is to replace being with appearing, and the cinema-goer is not a character on a universal stage but an enchanted witness, something closer to a casual scholar or archivist who is also like the flâneur or aimless and lingering urban stroller celebrated by Baudelaire. His involvement, which is all the more intense for its paradoxical disengagement and the seemingly insouciant and aleatory quality of not selecting, is such that his enchantment can extend to most forms of disenchantment.  He wants to experience and understand, but demands only the interesting, as if enjoyment only required a certain faith.  Finding enchantment in objects of disenchantment is much of the promise of art in our time.  That is how it delights and instructs, as the Latin theorist Horace said art does. Modern art is the poetry of every kind of malaise, and the universality in it of suffering is one reason its theatrical character can leave us choosing only between sadism and masochism as opposite ways of mastering the scandalously unmasterable and painful character of our being in the world.   

1989 also marked the end of a time of hope linked to ideas of revolution, however much by the late 70s this had been replaced in the West with irony.  Punk and some of the lighter music of the time was militant in its irony.  Also often in   oyhter
1989 was the end of the sequence whose high point was 1968, and in cinematic history globally, and certainly in the West and Japan, the end of the 80s were the end of a sequence that began in 1945 with the spectacular birth of Italian neorealism.

Some will say film considered as a high art form ended then also, but I think the opposite is the case; it’s more important than ever, even if the number of people involved internationally is actually very small, consisting of a circuit of serious critics, scholars, curators, festival goers, artists themselves, and a culture of avid fans who make up a very distinct world from the commercial one of marketing and ticket sales.  The latter is still centered in Hollywood but arguably it is in decline.  To give an idea of the small size of the film as art world, I have frequently been to theaters showing a film that is critically of some importance to an audience of a few people. 

I guess the limit will be when they screen a film and no one is there to watch it; this must happen. It sounds like Bishop Berkeley's question, "If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?" But this is like asking if cameras actually see, and we know they do, and our ways of seeing today owe more to them than theirs just imitate us, and this is perhaps also the question of AI.  We want to say cameras see without thinking, but films think, and yet why is that, because of editing, or camera movement, both of which are technical operations?  Maybe the difference is the addition of choice, which turns not on will or cause, reason or responsibility, but on contingency, which is the fact that what is could be otherwise.  For a work to say something and not only register and represent information, for the epistemic and aesthetic paradigms of representation are purely mechanical, the work's making must involve things being done that could be done otherwise, and if they seem to need justifying reasons, that is why they can.  The question is not why something rather than nothing but why this rather than that.  This image, this cut, juxtaposition, movement, angle, or interpretive commentary.  The contingent possibility is not the one that must be justified but the one that can be elaborated; it has the density of detail.  This means we can find it interesting and it can seem to say something.  A collection of data from all the recording devices in the world would be empoweringly informative but have no meaning and could interest no one whose project is to understand a world or life in order to live well rather than to control and use in order to maximize gain and minimize risk and loss of invested time.      

Anyway, this film world is partly sustained by rich donors, and those of us lucky enough to live in places like New York owe them a debt, because they mostly choose to donate to arts institutions they can understand rather than charities catering to less poetic losers.  Indeed, there are really two film worlds in the world today, one centered around ticket sales and entertainment and the other around institutions that regard film essentially as high art.  The truth is the efforts to arrange screenings and retrospectives are rewarded not when several hundred people go to see them, but when someone who is a critic writes something good about it.  If you live in a place like New York it’s easy to get the idea that the film world properly speaking is this world driven by curators and critics, but of course the two are related, with the difference that commercial production and distribution companies are democratic institutions that capitalize on pleasing as many people as possible, while the arts institutions rely ultimately on critical judgment, and criticism makes an argument, so it is also at a remove from the experience, simply because it is talk about something experienced rather than being in it directly.  Film criticism also divides in this way between an evaluative criticism that tells you how much the film is well-made and well-performed and should be seen because you will like it, versus an interpretive criticism that asks what is the film saying and doing, and makes satisfaction contingent on thought rather than pleasure.  And film is both high and low because it requires both markets and consumers on the one hand and museums, writings, and discussions on the other.   What our civilization is now most threatened by is the stupidity of thoughtless consumption, and the solution is perhaps not to abandon markets for entertainment but just better market their dependence on museums and written commentaries.  

Which would be possible if we had an economy like that of France that is highly dependent on institutions of intellectual culture in a way that ours is not, as our professional culture does not seem to need the world of ideas but just uses university training for socialization and credentials, just as public schools only train you for work and not any idea of citizenship.  Understanding better the role of practices of thought in a narrow sense, that is the written essay, in relationship to art also means abandoning the idea that thought seeks information to be instructed, when it fact its desire is not to accumulate, which is a desire that is not one,  but to make sense of experience and to do this by calling what is, including ourselves, into question.  And we need, as Godard says, not just thought that forms but forms that think.  We live in dark and shitty times, and this has become increasingly obvious and the recognition of this unites left and right.  Crisis in Western thought calls for thought.  Film is an art form because it gives itself to thinking, and art matters because there is so much we do not understand and desperately need to, and most of this understanding is not finding out what is there but asking what the given things are or mean, and approaching our experiences as demands to pose questions.  Which is what I think is the task of criticism and the reason I try to practice it.  

The market itself is nihilistic but the filmgoer’s pursuit of satisfaction implies that he knows what he wants, and yet none of us really do.  If you know what you want, you want a commodity that you can use, not an artwork you can experience.  People who know what they want from people they find attractive have sex and maybe marriage but not love affairs.  Technique and consumption use and change the object; art changes us. 

It is not with, in, and for us, but in a real sense we belong to it, which is why it is easy to show as Raul Ruiz does in his wonderful short book “Poetics of Cinema,” that we are actually captives of the stories we hear tell, and much of our lives is unwitting clichéd repetition of images, characters, stories, and forms and styles of presentation.  Art is the place of forms, and at this point in our history we are so attached to the life of forms that we could only think of a life without them as one of animal barbarism, which is a capitalist and colonialist anxiety, though the truth is we live our lives in intervals between formless chaos and a formed worldliness that is wholly dependent on the artificial manipulations of language and sensuous plastic forms.  Artistic experience and creation work within and on that interval, between absence and plenitude of meaning.  Chaos is creation’s condition, creation chaos’s destiny and nobility. People live for this more than they know. Artworks are the true subjects of the experiences we have with or in them, and we their tools and artifacts of the processes that make us, and provide whatever tenuous and imperfect grasp we have on the reality of what is beneath or beyond form that since Kant has been treated as an idealization whose existence is problematic.  Since the whole modern world has this character, we may as well recognize that art-inspired doubts about our hold on reality or the need to be related to it as something other, that this question can be posed of something like cinephilia only because it is a real puzzle for all of us.  Do not under-estimate the power and reality of artifice. Art as creation is the sole technique that subordinates use to meaning and thought.  We have no other way to think without it, and the specter of doing so can only indicate the abyss of a consumerist world of mere technique and use.  Though this is another form of the nihilistic anxiety I associated a moment ago with colonialism's construction of civilization against barbarism.  Like many anxieties, this is better countered through forgetting than oppositional struggle.  Art is the one technique whose effects are its affects. Since Aristotle, it has been how we cope with life by making sense of experience.  Experience can be the mere enjoyment of a something that happens, or a happening that changes you by making you and your world strange and so something you must deal with because you cannot.  Art works when it changes you. Artworks are like people we fall in love with not because they meet our expectations but because of the way they create new ones. 

Art also, and especially today, links crisis and beauty, or terror and love.  I find this to be one of the striking features of Godard’s 2007 masterpiece “Histoire(s) du Cinéma,” whose title can mean the story of film and its stories.  Godard here shifts constantly between a sense of recent history as one of crisis and horror, and a profound interrogation of beauty and cinema’s way of constituting it in response to time, time which hurts and promises, certainly wounds and maybe cures.  Godard’s ultimate project here may be to articulate a sense of cinema’s power of creating transcendent beauty with the profound shock and shudder that the traumatic events of the last century caused to be both registered and ignored, perhaps because trauma is the experience that evades recognition because it is the past that is not even past because it has not fully happened, in what may be life’s constitutive failure to be fully lived. 

What has happened since the 80s is a changing landscape and temporality of crisis.  There was a series of geographical mutations and a shift in the dominant sensibility in the world that since 1989 has been more desperate, and with a sense of crisis that is less tangibly poetical. It is much less optimistic about art or life, that optimism being still embraced in often ironical ways in many of the films of the 80s.  Compare “The Beekeeper” with a film like Zvyaginstev’s 2014 “Leviathan”; it’s the difference between melancholy and despair.  

I recall 1989 as a moment of great hope when I could think, half of Europe will turn to a democratic and liberal form of socialism with its promise at last of a life damaged by neither squalor nor tyranny.  Those hopes were of course rapidly dashed as the East simply joined the West.  And when that happened something ended, and this was as true in Italy as it was in Hungary and Poland.  Yet the art world today and the film world only somewhat less so is normally political.  We live in troubled and unhappy times, everyone knows it, and knows that no one quite or exactly has the answer.  There is no equivalent of Lenin’s “What Is To Be Done?” and Marx’s famous statement that the philosophers have only interpreted the world when the point is to change it, is now generally inverted, such that we know that men of action have been busy trying to change the world, but, if only because their efforts usually seem too limited and superficial, the real problem now is to interpret and understand it.   

Geographically the shift that took place has involved the growth of various cinemas from the developing world, with Japan and much of Europe becoming less central, and artistically if not commercially, the United States perhaps falling even further in relative terms if not absolutely, though I find that a quite substantial number of truly excellent films are being made today in the US every year, and we probably do still have the world’s most vital film culture, rivalled today only by France, which is the only European country besides Poland, and in fact these are besides the US arguably the only two countries anywhere that had a very vital national film culture before 89 that they retained afterwards.  In France I think the events of 68 so overshadowed the disillusion with Communism that followed in the 1970s that 89 marks less of a break. The periodization of from 68, or rather 56 and in some ways 45, to 89, which is so sharp in Eastern Europe, applies to the West as well as the East, a distinction that film history suggests is mistaken, because the mostly dissident Czech, Hungarian, and especially Polish film of the Communist era belong absolutely to the aesthetic and political possibilities these countries shared with Italy, France, Germany, Japan, Russia, and even England and America, so that for instance Italian and German cinema of the 80s have more in common with that of Poland and Czechoslovakia a the time than films from these places then have in common with those being made there or anywhere in the 2000s or today.

MP: You have published a short but interesting piece on Vera Chitylova's "Daisies," a key film from 1966 of the Czech New Wave.  Do you have a particular interest in Eastern European cinema of the Communist period, so much of which is so powerfully dissident?

WH: Yes, and partly for just that reason.  And because of where we are today, this project would be much better undertaken now than it could have been in the 90s.  Indeed, I would like to write a book on this, or maybe just on Polish cinema, which was postwar Europe's strongest national cinema after Italy and France or maybe just after Italy.  The case can certainly be made that we now have, and not just in America but increasingly in many places if not everywhere, authoritarian police states serving not ideological socialist bureaucratic governments but capitalism with all its oppression and squalor.  The whole argument of the Cold War which was basically the intellectual blackmail of us vs. them now seems false, for several reasons.  Dissidents opposing both regimes were both right and nothing about the way they were truly justifies much about the other side.  Why were so few people able to see that clearly then?  Now it seems the world was divided by a dispute between two straw men.  Of course, an interesting set of problems in political philosophy and social theory are posed by this situation, though the disappearance of a socialist faux alternative does also tend now to suggest that we are somehow basically just reliving the Victorian era with all the ugliness of a rapacious capitalism.  That position has its defenders, particularly Marxists, but I find Marxism too simple, and I certainly think it's a happier condition of engagement with both aesthetic and theoretical problems to recognize that there are many questions and fewer answers.  

It is true that to some extent some of this was part of the lesson of 1968, particularly in France, which was in many ways that the two systems divided by the phony war known as the Cold one, that they were much more similar than different, and even that they were forms of the same thing, which was one of the basic claims of Guy Debord's 1966 manifesto, "Society of the Spectacle," probably the most important intellectual influence on the events that in France culminated two years later.  Debord sought the essence the two systems shared and his notions of representation and spectacle are in part a consequence of that.  I also find interesting some of the writings of dissident philosophers and writers from these countries, and if it's a funny thing to like both left-wing French and Italian philosophers and theorists and liberal anti-Communist ones like Kolakowski or Havel, for some reason this does not seem to me any obvious contradiction.  Though certainly in film history it has its analogue in the mere ability to appreciate the more critical films from that time from East and West.  The mere fact that anyone can love, for example, both Pasolini and Wajda as I do, surely is an indicator that we inhabit a world not so flat that you fall off it when you cross some kind of border.  The unity of plague theories about the two houses in the Europe and world of my youth may be partly due to the unifying influence of Heidegger, most of whose followers are liberals or on the left, than the divisive one of Marx, but I think Marxism is a social theory that fails as philosophy, and so also will be inadequate for art.  While it tells us how the economy is organized, and rightly sees that economics is central, it leaves so many questions unanswered or unposed.  It's not a philosophy but a science.  

But now, today, in a way it's like the US increasingly has a social structure like Brazil's and a government like East Germany's.  That of course is an extreme that is still far from being realized to that degree and surely will not be; Orwell's "1984" requires the setting of wartime. We lack the sense of explicit oppressiveness that is only possible in a society that, with or without a totalitarian ideology, our form of which is simply marketing, is essentially bureaucratic.  We have liberty for the rich and explicit social control for the poor.  When this control is happier as it is for what remains of the middle class, it is only because a cell phone can track your movements while selling you enjoyments more effectively than an ankle bracelet which feels directly oppressive in the same way that imprisonment does, and seeing what amounts to a medical probation officer monthly for medication to control your feelings and thoughts does not.   Maybe our society wants to move towards the model of China, which recently announced that all citizens will have personal profiles of every significant thing they have ever done or failed to do, and all employers and social agencies of whatever kind can pull up and read them, and this is of course a fantasy that could be implemented here tomorrow.  

If this project fails it will only be not for lack of political will and force but because other technologies facilitate other ways of using language, let alone sensuous form, that in fact it cannot control.  Social control is a project of capital meant to channel and limit the productive and creative forces of labor of whatever kind, but it does not actually create meaning or value.  The refutation of Manichaenism as a metaphysics, which says either that Being or Matter is evil or, which amounts to the same thing, the Good is the war against it, turns upon the fact that a will to destroy that encompassed everything not only would destroy Being as such, but that the very fact that it could do this would surely mean that it already would have.  Since it would be indistinguishable from it being mere negation and destruction for Being to be divided between forces of creation and destruction, it must be that Being is essentially good, and evil is accident, failure, or privation.  The political consequence of this is that an absolute tyranny is impossible.  And that is why the logic of every tyranny must be war, and of course directly or indirectly all war ultimately is partly conducted against the native populace, typically for its protection against some part of itself.  In a state that claims to protect when it punishes, the separation of internal and external disappears along with the relevance of notions of agency and will.  Any political morality is refused as irrelevant, and no one can have any legal, political, or moral defense because you are not being accused, just helped.  There is no responsibility in this world except to use one's professional expertise and to obey those who do.  It's all the same if you get sick, commit a crime, are victim of a crime, or unlucky.  In all these cases your person is the site of a problem that needs to be solved, the necessary and appropriate measures must be taken, and all that this problem like every other calls for is the most effective technique.  Since this is nonetheless done to and with and therefore for you, on your behalf, what they do with you also places you in their debt and you must pay.  You have no political or ethical responsibilities beyond obeying and paying.  Of course this will all be done in the interest of your happiness, and happiness is just well-being, which is not your affair but that of experts assigned to care for it.  So the ultimate police state will be medical and immunological (protecting against risks and dangers, perhaps imagined as contagions as in the Third Reich), and psychological and therapeutic discourses will proliferate and be embraced by all with the petty bourgeois mentality of the self-employed as works of Good News about how to live a good life, given the way things are.  The psychological replaces the political, and in this way our society's supreme individualism, for the US really is so far the most purely bourgeois and capitalist society ever, dovetails with its bureaucratic and marketing forms of administration.              

Our rulers may want us to be more like China, yet in fact we are becoming like Russia, just as more optimistically America historically wanted to be like France but always was fated to discover in the morning after that we are an England that is less parliamentary and wittily and skeptically smart, and instead of the monarchy and aristocracy just has celebrities and a pseudo-revolutionary immediacy.   Here the revolution is always being televised live.  Its meaning is of course more in its form than the content it little needs.  Trump is an extreme and highly self-conscious manifestation of the transformation of the face of governance into authoritarianism via pure performativity.  Who cares if what I say is true?  I am just telling you what to want and do, and that is still the leader's job.  The question about Trump is the one France's radical political philosopher Alain Badiou posed about then-President Nicholas Sarkozy: Of what is he the name?  Trump is the name of something that is larger than and preceded him, and I began to see this in 2013 when I returned to this country from living in France, when I began to think I had some troublingly credible reasons to believe that for whatever curious reason I had been identified by some police agency for highly tangible surveillance and the inevitable accompanying harassment.  When Trump was elected and replaced the typically Democratic wonkish and preacherly eloquent Obama, little really changed in this country except at the level of talk.  In fact, our most effective political movement so far has largely taken place outside government at all. The #MeToo movement has not advocated changes of policy, but targets mostly powerful men in private industry whose behavior suggest that much of our society still lives by values that are so obviously wrong by its own lights that the people performing this pervasive moral depravity are themselves so ashamed they are reluctant to admit to it.  It's a conflict that is not even an argument.  That's probably an interesting fact in several ways.  It is a political social movement that is not governmental or factional.  Trump's election was a response to anxieties and was greeted by more of them in turn.   Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump are the names of different styles of authoritarian governance and its legitimation, one of which is discursive and bureaucratic, and one performative and linked only to business with its supreme demand just to get things done.  The most interesting and useful responses to Trumpjsm may not yet have been formulated in the most precise way, and if so, I think we could best expect it from cinema.   It is our most important art form, not just for the reason Lenin famously gave that it reaches mass audiences who need not be highly literate, but also and equally because of the resources it uniquely gives us for understanding and thinking. 
     

Art tells us what matters, or what should, and that is its constitutive link to the polis, which remains even when the world is staged and reading and viewing are private. Heidegger put this by saying it reveals a world and as such reveals to us aspects of the world.  So, which Heidegger also argues, distinctions we think important can be shown by some artworks to be not the ones that really matter, and of those that did not that they really do, and I think the politics of cinema lie in part precisely there.  Art that matters changes us, and changes how we think.  This is why it gives us something to think, which is why I myself had to become a critic.  A political film of our time paradigmatically asks not necessarily what is a film and what a political film, but it does pose the question what is a politics, just as it poses the ethical question, what is our form of life really like today, and what is the good life we should want. 

MP: With respect to the question of “lost losers,” which you said you would return to, will you admit that there is a potential for, and therefore a reality of, some people becoming lost in an abandon that is vain and fruitless, in short, a waste of time?  And if so, where do you think the seduction of cinema lies?

WH: Cinema has one fundamental appeal: intense, immediate, sensuous experience.  And it offers experience to people persuaded, perhaps in part rightly, that they have none.  

MP: Is that dangerous?  

WH: Identification, will, experience, and enjoyment can take you anywhere.  What is dangerous is only if you don’t think about it enough and in the right way.   

There is a desire for experience no less than identity; these are forms of what we might call a desire for Being.  One of handling the modern problem of alienation as boredom and loneliness is to go in search of experience.  

People who are aesthetes are selective about these vicarious experiences and may enjoy sharing or discussing them with others, sharing at least being another kind of experience.  As the critic Walter Benjamin argued, there is a way in which many people in the modern world find their lives to be improverished somehow, and it is symptomatic that things like “meaning” or experience can be invoked along with various other broad categories, like business self-help guru Brené Brown with her promotion of “vulnerability” as the key to happiness and virtue.  There are few such books in France; a book arguing for courage would meet readers and critics saying, “We know that,” from the war, Sartre, lots of things.  When I was in high school, kids would talk about different drugs or even music in terms of the tonality of experience that they made possible: one pill makes you “intense,” one “mellow.”  In film the idea of experience is what we may called enjoyment-value.  Perhaps it means people don’t want to be bored: as someone has said, they cannot sit alone in a room.  

Tim Burton sums up the experience thing in “Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure” when the title character says of the fact that the Alamo doesn’t have a basement, that this is something you just gotta experience.  

Cinephile culture adds to this what I would call a principle of rarity, which has to do with the necessary conditions of cinematic exhibition and the existence of a museum-like archive of film works considered art, and curatorial selections from among them. 

Cinephile culture is less the creation of a world of marketable entertainment than of museums of cinematic works, even if the experience of seeking pure enjoyment and that of going to a museum-like space to learn something are for the cinephile in particular, their art being such a popular one, rather identified.  Which is how he is unlike the popcorn-eating Cineplex customer, even if this film “Cinemania” operates on the assumption that that distinction has been effaced and replaced by one between causal pleasure and obsession, with the obsessional’s counting of essentially meaningless objects or tokens, which by the way is why most serious cinephiles are men.  They collect tokens of objects of experience that count because they can be counted, like Don Giovanni numbering his erotic conquests.

I will take the second of these conditions first.  Cinephiles largely frequent repertory and archival cinema houses, as well as commercial art house cinemas that mostly show foreign and sometimes independent films.  These archival and repertory houses tend to show a particular film one or two times. (As for the count, if you take just those with multiple screenings daily, there being others with screenings on weekends or certain evenings, there are now about eight in New York, most of which have recently expanded their number of screens or shortly plan to; I count about 20 screens with different shows daily or nightly.  When I came to New York in 1997 it was a bit more than half that. The old family-owned arthouses with seedy seating, mediocre screening conditions, screening prints still in circulation of old films by publicly recognized classics is something you still find in Paris, but here they had all gone out of business, and were being replaced by more professionalized institutions, and that  development has simply continued).  If you want to see it, you have to be at this place at this time, and moreover, every screening conflicts with several others you would like to see.  The rarity, or definiteness, condition creates a sense of urgency about anything a cinephile wants to see, today or in his lifetime, if it is playing now.  Whereas a novel you want to read can stay on the shelf and be read when you like.  The condition of multiplicity and conflicts among objects is a condition we might also call density, and its effect is basically that not only are the commodities of limited availability and so high in the aesthetic opportunity cost of not choosing the thing, but also the shelves are flooded with things to buy even if each precludes buying any of the others.  This all makes it harder to stay home. Susan Sontag, who certainly loved film and moved to New York to be part of a scene that included both seeing art and contributing to the art world, said that the decision to go see a film or not to was always a dilemma because the opportunity cost for her was not staying home and writing. 

With film, the experience thing is the effect of several conjoined conditions.  And by the way, none of this has anything to do with the question of digital and analog film formats, as the viewer experience is fundamentally the same, and these are really no different in kind from paintings using two different kinds of oil paints. First, to see a film you must go to a theater.  Secondly, there you sit in the dark and you look up at a very large screen.  It’s like you are in it.  You are immersed and overwhelmed just by the physical conditions of viewing. And you are in it secretly, your body not being visible to others in the dark or even really to you.  Thirdly, the sensory quality and the sense of immediacy and intensity, film shares these qualities with video, but it has them in much greater intensity.  It is bigger, more vivid, louder.  It is a realization in secular terms, linked to no necessary meaning or thought, of Jewish philosopher Abraham Joshua Heschel’s concept of “radical amazement,” which always makes me think of West Coast types who would say “Wow!” or “Amazing!” (in a tone that is identically expressive of enthusiasm whether the thing is liked or disliked: at least it is noticed, and big enough to be).  Since the birth of the mass culture and the entertainment industry at least, our capacity to combine enjoyment with admiration has tended to both make Being appearance merely and appearance secular.  For instance, the art world swallowed whole that part of itself which was once located in places of worship and ritual.  Now it is what some people pay for and enjoy, and others experience and think about.   

Whereas video and television are objects, which means thrown before you, and are at your disposal.  The screen is smaller.  You can watch any of your videos anytime just like with books.  You can pause and rewind.  You can do something else at the same time just as with recorded music.  As something thrown before you and at your disposal it is a technological object for you, a consumer technology, where you control your experience.  This makes you less passive.  And that makes it less of an experience.  The film seen in a theater is also programmed by someone else. It’s not a question of French theorist Guy Debord’s idea of the spectacle because that concept ignores this distinction between an experience of pleasurable subjection and one of competent mastery.  Cinema is closer to masochism and video to sadism, and of course masochism has in it a courage since it risks the self even if it masters that risk, that sadism lacks. Film watching is truly sadistic only if you enjoy a spectacle of suffering that does not affect you, and strictly speaking this is possible only at an impossible limit. It also is not only a repeatable experience but one which demands to be repeated. Film going is a ritual in which the cinemagoer returns again and again to the scene of the scene, each time seeing a different film but having the same kind of experience, formatted the same way, and satisfying as such.  And this can also make of certain films fetishes for the snobbish collector of experiences.  Perhaps what serious filmgoers need to do is doubt the expected satisfaction, which can only be done at the price of removing it from the demands placed on the experience’s content, so that the object of an artistic experience, and this is precisely what the uninvolved character of snobbery denies, is the anything or whatever of what is simply there. 

As an aside, in Bertolucci’s landmark critique of the sexual revolution and feminism in the context of the theatrical quest for authenticity and a manic aestheticist cinephilia, “Last Tango in Paris,” which I am presently writing on, theatrically and cinematically structured forms of subjectivity are presented as possibilities which all fail, as the film’s question partly is how to live a life when what is offered is these forms of aesthetic structuring of a life, and the violent negation of them practiced by Paul and later Jeanne is also just another possibility within them. The Oedipal structuring of a subjectivity formed through rebellion is revealed to also be a form of this, and perhaps the psychical meta-form of its impossiblity. 

Maybe the singularity of Italian neorealism was partly that art’s questioning of how it could be political did not pass through this question of art or form at all, which life seemed not to need.  In Rossellini’s “Rome, Open City,” when Pina is shot down, or when the priest says it is not difficult to die but only to a live a good life, lived experience in the midst of active history has urgency, and makes the film in part a stirring set of enacted sermons as well as a construction of postwar Italy’s defining myth of a popular antifascism.  When the political scenes and stagings that render the Rossellini film melodramatic in its very realism, when these conditions disappear from everyday life, art may take the risk of feeding us back a reflection on art’s own reflections of life.  Then poetry becomes not politics with its urgency but problematization with its mere importance, ironically inverting the priority of what must be experienced now yet need not be at all. 

Cinephiles always face twin dangers that can lead one’s life to dissolute disarray, and the life of the most respectable aesthete is nothing apart from this risk. The first danger is becoming too addicted to the audiovisual cinematic experience simply because it is an experience with its intensity. Secondly, there is the organizational or prioritizing problem that results from the fact that among the things we want to experience that necessarily come in the form of discrete countable objects and thus in sets and series, some of them are indefinitely programmable and others necessarily tied, as film is, to fixed programming.  As in the novels you want to read versus the films you want to see.  In a sense, the novels occupy an infinite and unstructured time; nothing about any of them intrinsically condemns you to only being able to read it in this space and time.  Writing intrinsically has greater availability than performances.  The list of novels may also very well be in aggregate and on average more important than the films, but they are less urgent. You may want to read sometime soon Joyce’s Ulysses but the series of films by Nicholas Ray, though all less important than Ulysses, are being shown this month.  The films then become less important yet more urgent.  How to decide?  It’s very likely a trade-off, but here if you trade at all you condemn your life to doing fewer more important things, though you get do get the ability to see the Ray films without waiting ten years for the next retrospective.  True, you could see them anytime on video, but note here that literature is a more mechanically reproduced art than film is because the sensuous quality of the written signifier is minimal, so one copy of a text is as richly representative of whatever we might call its contents as any other, while two copies of a film print let alone a film print and a video copy can differ quite dramatically.  You could know what the Ray film is about by seeing it on You Tube, but because visual art is sensual, knowledge falls short of experience.  Purists say it tells us less in fact, while the average Joe knows only that it is less fun.  Maybe in the end the rarity of artistic artifacts derives from their being objects and sites of experience, for it is experience that is rare because it takes time, and in some space we can have or know many things at the same time, but you can only have two experiences by having them at separate times.  You can also love two women, but it's a logistic nightmare for most people to schedule simultaneously love-makings.  And that is not because of the inability of two bodies to exist simultaneously but the impossibility of two experiences to do so.  As Kant saw, the self is a temporal problem.  

The price of all this is the malediction or danger of being condemned to an eternal rather than a mortal life, because eternity, the opposite of hubris, is the All that is revealed as a Nothing. Art extends a promise of eternity perhaps even more than that of happiness, or simply experience, an implicitly nihilistic concept that reduces to the there is, or the something that is happening but you don’t what it is.  This happiness is not the satisfaction of a desire other than the desire for a something that is anything, a commodity that is presumed to have some meaning, and that is all that matters.  The pleasure is both hypertrophied and eviscerated, as everything becomes mediated, a condition that may not be so bad, and in any case is now increasingly what we live with.  As long as anything at all appears, it can be given a meaning.  Our destitution today is companion to our opportunity and freedom, and it lies in the paradoxical conjunction of the meaningful and the anything at all.  This problem, which had emerged by the early nineteenth century, is radicalized by the technological conditions of life today, which makes us all masters of a world we did not and could not choose but can try to. The ethical question is that of how to live a good life in these conditions. 

The two very real realities I spoke of, addiction to presence and the displacement of importance and choice by urgency, are the sources of the practical problems intrinsic to cinephilia. One is too hedonistic, the other under-prioritizes.  One is a problem of presence, the other of counting and ordering; both turn on the failure to choose wisely, and so on subjectivity as activity, commitment, and choice.  Both are problems about being selective in order to avoid a “too much.” This is a problem that the nihilistic perspective simply dismisses, since nihilism refuses to value things, and so there is no lack or excess.

But aesthetes are among the least calculating and so least prudent of people.  We concern ourselves less with business, that is, with getting things done in order to accumulate goods or efficiently improve some worldly state of things, and more with experience, or passion, or simply love.  And if there is a price to be paid for loving too much and unwisely, there is also a cost in loving too wisely and knowing too much.  Here is my advice to young artists and critics: Risk yourself.  Not your money, your identity.  Of which there is no politics that is not first an ethics and therefore an aesthetics.  Give yourself to art. Master it sometimes and in a bit of a way, but let it master you always and in a much of a way. 

MP: This sounds like abandonment to what you criticize.  Is cinema then, and art generally, pure pleasure? 

WH: To posture as being free of what you criticize is ultimately fascist, and leads away from joy by way of paranoia, which is in a way a result of interpretation without experience, the paranoiac wanting desperately to understand what people intend and things mean.  It is a product of the modern Cartesian understanding of a knowing self as separate from and uninvolved with the world of lived experience.  True critique, as Foucault argued, is experimentation; it is always a critique of where we are and how and who we are.  This gives it an excitement and vitality, all the more so as in this perspective we do not have time that we can use to invest or accumulate, but are in it and it has us.  No other mode of engagement in the world is honest or indeed truly engaged.  We are thrown into the world, and can choose ourselves only on the basis of how we have been chosen.  The basis of the activity of art and mind is the radical passivity of experience; even more than knowing we have to die and so our projects have frames, we are those who know that we were and are born, and so they have conditions. 

Art is the transformation of what is without value, including pure suffering, into what appears to be of supreme value.  This normally takes the form of artefacts that are a focus of experience and thought.  The artefact is an object but the object is not one of use but the microcosm of an imaginary world, which is a perspective on a world we theoretically share.  This is why understanding art is critique and critique is fundamentally aesthetic. Its object is, as French philosopher Jacques Rancière argues, the very way in which experience is organized and happens.  Every politics of art today lies within this. 

Aesthetic pleasures in the sense of experiences of art typically can include what is disconcerting, troubling, anguishing, or simply painful by placing it within a larger framework that is actually agreeable, either intellectually or by virtue of some sensory qualities. This is part of what is achieved by Aristotle’s theory of tragic theater: The character played by the actor experiences crisis, trauma, and suffering, but from our distanced point of view, since we are related visually and aurally and not corporeally to the drama, which touches in the absence of physical touch, we find it enjoyable.  And we learn what the hero does without dying (yet, or because the story kills) as he must.

Cinema of course has its roots in theater, which is something I am working on. I’m going to discuss how certain major films have taken up and incorporated reflections on theater as what they both are and are not, and which problematize and politicize in what are in fact very different ways, cinema actually being at the level of thought closer to the novel. 

MP: The "ontological" question that appeals to some theorists.  What is cinema, how is it like and unlike the other forms it appears to include, and what will answering this question tell us about why it should matter to us and maybe does?  

WH: This is a very interesting question because it is vital both in understanding what we have gotten ourselves into and what are the features of the medium that are so inescapable and defining of its relevance that grasping them may help to tell us what a film or filmmaker can do.  

One difference between film and theater is that the viewer is identified with the filmmaker in a setting where the act or fact of seeing and things seen take over from an experience of presence and the foregrounding of action, declaration, and reflection in theater and the continuity of theatrical space with that of life that it also represents.  The film viewer’s immersion normally deprives him of critical distance, which also makes reflecting on the experience a more problematic possibility.  And at the same time, a space and time of persons revealing what persons can say, do, and know becomes an essentially visual space so that what is constructed is not situations and actions but the spatiality and temporality of the visible itself.  Cinema has a greater apartness or artificiality that only adds to its far greater reality effect, and it also shares with the novel the much more fully aesthetic quality of being fundamentally concerned with forms: of the sayable or rather writeable and readable in the one case, and the visible and perhaps also audible in the other.  If an artist wants to innovate in presentation not of action, dialogue, and recognition, where what matters is persons and what they do and say, but in the configuration of experience at the level first of all of sensation and only derivatively of sense-making or meaning, then he or she should make a film. 

As the philospher and great writer on film Jacques Rancière has argued, this changes politics from being centered around persons and perhaps, like religion for most American Protestants, beliefs, with the question of the reality of the world and other actors becoming central to modern thought from the early 17th century to the early 20th, to being about the forms of sensible experience, which means that now what is most political is our form or forms of life.  If anything can free us from the anti-political, representational paradigm of politics where celebrities are delegated to have both authentically expressed experiences and presumptively valid opinions, precisely because they belong to a world substituting for the active life we know we are capable of yet also are denied, it is that the artwork that opens onto a world whose exploration is not information, a notion that is still representational, but inquiry in all its constitutive openness, so that answers should be disallowed when they are not themselves also questions, as dying finite beings reveal something of Being because they are also natal, being born, which means that worlds themselves as sites of experience and are constructed as infinite series that are both closing and opening.  

Learning the truth is always closing a series by drawing the consequences of what has been, and so is strictly morbid and thanatological and discovers or discloses nothing, since discovery is of the new and so carries with it, like a kangaroo its child, its productive unformed or chaotic underbelly.   The inner secret of the commodity is that we desire it because it is not final but initial, it does not just satisfy desires for specific ends or things, but gives us to desire because the interior structure of the artifact consists of the relationship of its contingent forms to the thinkable aspects of our form of life.  Which is how all art is like theater, or a framed visible field, or a Schillerian or Winicottian space of serious play.  Modernity does not abandon but only widens the constitutive gap between, and makes difficult, the ancient unity of the pleasurable and the interesting, of objects of value and those of desire. 

More than any other art form, that of cinema inhabits and works upon the intervals that necessarily exist between chaos and form or world, between absence and plenitude of meaning.  Angels would possess perfect maps of the world, animals do not need them; we fret about them, and that does much to make us what we are.

And as Antonioni’s “Red Desert” makes clear, art's fundamental question is not what to do or even what to think but what to experience.  Maybe film restores the Aristotelian priority of experience and pleasure to thought, with action conceived as originally the property of a sovereign willing subject as the at best poor third cousin of these two.  Action is rare as Rancière says a true politics must be, and as heroism must be, however much we rightly celebrate it precisely because it is compelling yet rare.  Already at the birth of theater a little before Aristotle, the heroes did not occupy the seats but merely the lines of sight.  As our civilization becomes more spectacular, it may be becoming more thoughtless, but this question must be posed at the level of the spectacle itself.  Of course the greatest artworks question their own existence, as Clement Greenberg argued about modern art and Shakespeare showed with theater. So the greatest films pose the question, what is experience, how do we have or do it, and what does it mean, or what do we do with or about it?   What is enjoyment, what is love, what is it to live a life, or a good life, how to understand and think, and to begin with, as now key to all these questions, how to experience, meaning perhaps above all how to look, how to see?

Film is an art form is absolutely singular in this respect, and in its first century in discovering many of its possibilities, gave us the beginnings of a wholly new and far more subtle and far-reaching mode, and this partly for the sake of thinking and not merely some kind of manipulated good feeling, of configuring experience, a set of ways of being in the world and understanding the forms and possibilities for doing so.  If something has fundamentally begun to change in recent thought and experience that had been until now set in stone by the effects of Aeschylus, Parmenides, Euclid, and Plato, it is the effect of the art of cinema of which television and the online world are of course its poor cousins, more than the invasion of the transistor and the computer chip or the apocalyptic reflections we associate with Heidegger and Derrida.  Since there is no reason to think that anything to do with the film world is slowing down or ending, the truth of this aesthetic technology needs to be better grasped to take full measure of where we are now historically and what we can do about it.  

Part of what I mean is this.  Cinematic experience is partly an evocation of affect through the viewer’s investment secondarily in character and story and fundamentally in image and sound, and partly a structuring of the visible through manipulations of space and time, which as Deleuze shows in his two-volume Cinema, have ceased to be unitary.  We no longer inhabit spaces and times in which our bodies are active centers, which is how theater and its fictioning of the political are in a way obsolete.  Instead, the film’s moving space which we are curiously placed within as we are radically excluded from it, since we not only do not touch the characters by virtue of mere interdiction, but unlike theater audiences could not touch or be touched by them, for they are now wholly virtual, which is why actresses on screen are, though animated, ageless and immortal.  Theater space is one of bodies in motion because it is unitary and the thought and time of the characters is a doubling of that intended at the same moment by the actors playing them.  Film in its form multiplies forms or types of space and time, which makes the experienceable world far more plastic, giving artifice greater powers, and the  powers are powers of the real, to figure, configure, disclose, or represent it.  Film in this sense differs from theater in the far greater scope and power of its forms, in its having an even greater reality effect, evidenced regularly in its seductively intense quality of its experiences, while being much more purely a matter of forms, and rendering the whole reality of form far more fully plastic, and so forming and transforming our experience in a way that goes beyond the mere saying and showing of theatrical representation.  Cinema’s elements are not like nouns whose referents are things, dooming semantic and interpretive interrogation to questions of epistemology, but are like adjectives and adverbs, as if Being consisted less of objects than qualities, as if art were means without end, as if the question to ask people is not what do you want to have, but how do you want yourself and things to be. 

Art moves within likeness; the question of meaning reveals not the identity of the thing but the how of its manifestation.   The ethical question of course was never whether to be or not to be, but how to be, how to live. In a way the great question is not Camus's question of suicide but the banal one of what to have for dinner, not why is there something rather than nothing but why this thing rather than that one.  Or rather, not why there is something and not nothing, but what is it that is there now, and what are the actual qualities of the appearances; not is it happening, or yet or still, but what is happening, che cosa, qu'est-ce que c'est?  

And note that only the former kind of question, which is one of being and not-being and of choice, lends itself not just to identitarian if doubtful reflective mappings of a thing onto itself, but to consumerist delusions.  What mere tools and objects or commodities lack is given by the essential transparency of instrumental, means-ends thinking.  The question of the how of a form of life, a style or manner of living, is possible in art because of something like a depth or density of the art object, whether this be artifact, experience, or both; they have quality, and quality is not a matter of binary logic but something with a substance and depth that can only exist in a space and where they are given to be explored.   Which is why understanding art is generally a question of detail; this is because experience has a dense continuity.  Artworks are commodities only as a matter of course.   They are autotelic, that is, means without ends or ends in themselves.  Instead of an in-order-to that turns upon a desired future state in which an investment of time is realized, they are things with a feel, a taste, a sound, or a look, and if you look at something in order to know or understand or use it somehow, you are not really looking.  In other words, the ultimately popular art form that cinema was and is poses for us all the question, What is experience?  And so too something like virtue, which as we all know was classically the underside and support of beauty: not what do we want, a question whose answers can only dissatisfy and bore us, but how do we want to live, and dependent as we are on a perception whose exact modes are never given, because not essentially instrumental at all, how to see?  If thinking is understood to be done in a world, than novels like poetry and philosophy, teach us how to think. 

There is no seeing without thinking, even if we have to remind ourselves to think, and ask questions, usually in language, but in our time the question of the best government became less important and that of how to see much more so, and the political consequences of this are perhaps more hopeful than you might think.  Notwithstanding or the real problems of his time,  the urgency Lenin’s question, “What is to be done?” which of course forms the political question as identical in form to a moral one,  now seems too simple for us. 

Revolution welcomed ordinary people onto the stage of history, but history today may be unstageable, just as the long history of nostalgia for a real community and a participatory democracy fit to its measure may now be over.  Participatory democracy as socialist self-management has perhaps become impossible in a way related to a general untotalizability and unmanageability, and unsavability, a loss redeemable perhaps only through enjoyment and thought, that portends a life whose happiness depends on being well-managed but on a true freedom that depends more on contingency and chance than the powers given by knowledge.   But in any case, if we wind up re-envisioning social and political life, we will surely be as captive of given forms of artistic experience as the Greeks who invented politics as we know it were influenced by the new art of theater.  Since everyone today agrees that all art is political somehow, should there not be a bit less obsessional discourse about the affairs of the hooligans who run our government and a lot more about the forms and ways of our experience and how we think about it?  Lenin's question need not be avoided to be productively deferred most of the time.  If you don't see that De Gaulle and even Gramsci are less vital today than Picasso and Francis Bacon, then please go back to school, somehow.    

More than anything else, more even perhaps than speech and action, which in Arendt's still theatrical framework grounded the political, art is what makes us human.  We use it to think, and want to because we like how it feels, which means that art must embrace, as in some forms of postmodern thought with its refusal of all cultural elitism, the risks of being affective pornography, which is to say a tool and its correlate the mere thing that is possessed or used for the sake of something else.  The problem with technology is its ends.  Simone de Beauvoir once commented wryly that America had the capacity to become a great civilization, if only its leaders could formulate some more interesting project than offering people buildings and food.  There are technologies that only give you what are essentially and quite literally transient and empty experiences of objects to fulfill needs and desires. Such purposed objects is Marx's definition of the commodity.  But there are also tools and techniques of thought and understanding, of inquiry, and the best of these are also tools of experience.  And experience can be an ending or a beginning.  A teleology that directs itself at ends that lie outside its grasp is a paradoxical kind of which artworks are forms.    

The problem is not to create tools that reflect ironically on their being tools, which is Shakespeare’s idea of what theater is, suggesting that the human being is a tool that is more than one because it knows itself, recognizing its mirror reflection, but to exploit the capabilities of artistic tools for revealing aspects of our world to us, just as medical technologies aid in diagnosis and surgery.  Technology is not the problem if that means its things and devices.  The problem is thinking in the broad sense as learning how to live, and that is what art is ultimately for.  

Mikhail Bakhtin, the Russian theorist of the novel, showed that the novel is able to stage and problematize forms of life through discourses and uses of language, and though it is still about people and situations in social life, it is so largely more indirectly in a way that actually gives the literary artwork far more power.  Film does this through manipulations of the visible that as Deleuze has argued are essentially of space and time.  And these are not singular but multiple; there is no lived experience prior to the construction of its forms through artifice, or if there is it is now so dependent on plastic form that it is of secondary interest, space and time being more mathematical forms than natural things.  

It thinks these things more plastically and relevantly than the science of physics, which basically uses mathematics to develop the possibilities of certain metaphors, most of which are ancient and not contemporary.  And it clings to the unitary and singular as much as theater, asking not so much about spaces, times, and forces as space, time, and force as such, and therefore allowing the obsessional quest for a unified theory of everything, just as it incorporates the quest for origin, and, if you like, the divine or God as the power of this origin, in its puzzling speculations about the origin of time, space, and world in the big explosion that turn on Kantian paradoxes about the origin behind the origin, which are paradoxes about totalities constituted by limits they must also refuse, and so both closed and open in a circle that scandalously demands to be squared, a problem Russell finally solved logically by showing that there cannot be a set of all sets; there is no everything to be grasped as such, which may ultimately mean that what we should care about has all and only the necessity of the contingent.  

And this makes cinema wholly modern in its implied sensibility.  While physics remains obsessional and linked to projects of conquest or mastery in a way that cinema, which knows only mises-en-scène, need not be.   Far rather than science being the true philosophy, as Stephen Hawking has claimed, art takes the place in our culture that could occupy if it were recognized as a way thinking and not of feeding information to rulers and their buyers. And film constructs space and time much more radically and credibly than physics.  It remains to be seen whether the new sciences of the brain which so far have mainly served the social technology of medicating social deviance for its disaffection, will realize science’s promise better than physics did, because the brain is just the internal architecture of that greatest of systems and machines that is the mind, whose dependence on language and perception are such that what it can tell, show, or otherwise give us is still a world of qualitative forms, not operations and techniques. 

Art is a condition of discursive thought since it alone gives us our access to the ultimate real whose singular science if it existed would surely be a sociology.  The natural sciences are, like philosophy in America, all too easily appropriated by government and business, with their experts giving advice to princes, and posing as the ones who know to adulatory audiences who believe knowledge is power and thus the true object of both desire and inquiry.  Film is the true physics, and the most republican because public art form, and evidence of this is the related conditions that it is given to an experience that exists publicly but is had privately, and it is food for thought more than anything.  You only love an art form if you can get hot and bothered arguing about what it means.  And arguably, it only means anything if you can and must.   In this schema, truth is also multiplied without, as in Sophism, being negated; it is multiple, fragmentary, and particular, without losing its objectivity.  What is on the screen is contingent because the filmmaker could have done it differently, but fully objective because it is what is there.  Kant showed that critical judgment or interpretation depends on the thoughtful viewer’s necessary belief that his subjective valuation is a universal truth, wanting only the good enough argument.  But this objectivity of what is subjectively grasped also characterizes the art of cinema and the experience of its enjoyment.   We are not in the Cartesian world where subjective and objective are problematically distinct, with the anxieties about presence, or reality, that of world, others, or self, that this facilitates.  And this is why Shakespearean notions of self-reflection trouble and enchant us less than they once did.  Interestingly, as this passed, theatrical discourse became prosaic, and at the same the prosaic quality of everyday life began to seem trouble or opportunity to so many people, which is a fact about the nineteenth century as a whole and not just artists like Flaubert and Manet.  The cinema, whose invention is an affair of the nineteenth century like psychoanalysis its almost simultaneous twin, which likewise shifted the configurations of subjectivity, discourse, and the thinkable, is very much captive and heir to this shift, among others.  The history of the art of cinema in the twentieth century was partly one of drawing the various consequences of this and playing out the resulting set of possibilities.  

MP: So then what, finally, is your judgment of "Cinemania"?  It seems you can only be very critical of it except perhaps as suggesting some road not taken.

WH: I think the film “Cinemania” is too comfortable with the common contemporary poverty of experience.  It aims to celebrate, in a way that is at once ironical and exemplifying of a blindly insouciant postmodernism, a contemporary lifestyle of aesthetic ubiquity, and probably fails because it does. It refuses to condemn yet probably does so by implication, its curiously non-mean-spirited appeal depending on tolerance and indulgence of the whimsicality of the love of cinema that it presupposes without interrogating.  The film appeals to all those for whom art and entertainment, which of course are at a necessarily lower limit indistinguishable, are worth affirming thoughtlessly.  It appeals to a viewer who does not choose and so think, who does not make, is purely passive, and indistinctly indulges this condition and celebrates it, for why not. 

If the film were structured by a true inquiry as I think a documentary film should be, it would pose that question and suggest that it must be posed, or that it implicitly is.  A film like this must aspire to something like an ethics, which is the inquiry into a form of life, without being a moralism that judges and refuses.  It would pose cinephilia as both opportunity and risk, and as symptom with regard to which it would ask, what is it a symptom of?  It would ask about the place of making sense of experience in a world with a nihilistic and Sophistical surfeit of experience over sense or meaning, a world in which artworks are come upon or into, are found, like thought and love for the medieval love poets, not after but before being chosen, which is a quality of a world where experience is both placed in question and marketed as omnipresent.  Such a film would knowingly court the despair of this, but would also note, with whatever comic irony, its hopeful side, thus engaging in the redemptive project of seeking hope precisely where it seems absent.  Perhaps the film’s defenders will say that in sharing images of the dissipated and difficult life of some committed cinema aesthetes (of course, some others are wealthy retirees and others), and merely taking for granting the manner of their love for their love object, that is what the filmmakers did.  The film’s passive documentary style, which aims to show without interpreting or inquiring, is a mirror of its idea of what cinephilia has become.  In this the film answers a set of questions it has chosen not to pose. 

Today, as Walter Benjamin famously said of civilization and barbarism, every document of experience is a document of its poverty or impossibility.  Of course, the redemptive dialectical truth of this could only be something about the experience of what somehow cannot be experienced. Art, which is the alchemy of finding gold in dross, is today sometimes richest when self-aware of its poverty, and happiest when actively doubting its own conditions of possibility.