Truth is not smog from quick jet planes

[sovay]

I feel it is unfair of me to refer to Richard Brody only on occasions for disagreement, but then he does something like open his review of The Brutalist (2024) with the assertion that "the definition of an epic is a subject that the author doesn't know firsthand: it's, in effect, a fantasy about reality, an inflation of the material world into the stuff of myth," which is so much not the definition of an epic that it short-circuits me on the rest of the critique. It may be true that very few singers of tales nowadays are likely to have personal knowledge of the Late Bronze Age Collapse, but I wouldn't call the most important element of the epic that it didn't happen to the teller, since the same is true of most of human history, not to mention just about every narrative mode beyond the autobiographical, and the assertion that it is a supersizing of myth from reality strikes me as a reductively euhemeristic approach to take to material that has more to do with how a culture tells itself than the necessary veracity of the incidents through which it does the telling. Sure, four thousand years of Troy towns lay under Hisarlık, but if you are disappointed by the lack of a lapis-browed statue of Enkidu among the black-on-buff potsherds of Uruk XVIII, I don't know what to tell you any more than if you expect science fiction to print out the forecasts of the future rather than describe our hopes and anxieties for it. It's a cute sentence, it's nicely balanced, it reads well and it doesn't work even when applied strictly to films of ambitious scope rather than culture heroism. I will grant the notion of a received story, even if Brody makes it sound like the distance is the important thing rather than the tradition: Phoinix in Book IX of the Iliad, remembering the deed of long ago to tell it to those assembled, his near and dear. (μέμνημαι τόδε ἔργον ἐγὼ πάλαι οὔ τι νέον γε / ὡς ἦν· ἐν δʼ ὑμῖν ἐρέω πάντεσσι φίλοισι.) If he meant that the supercharged scale of the epic can be used to examine intimate human truths, it isn't what he said, but it is one of its functions. Fantasies about reality, though, are not epic by definition. Most of the time they are just called art. Or being human, story-making.

Comments

[thisbluespirit]

"the definition of an epic is a subject that the author doesn't know firsthand

Well, that is indeed wrongness incarnate, so I don't blame you! <3

[sovay]

Well, that is indeed wrongness incarnate, so I don't blame you!

Two sentences in! A near record!

[asakiyume]

It's a cute sentence, it's nicely balanced, it reads well and it doesn't work even when applied strictly to films of ambitious scope rather than culture heroism. --There are many such cases: people saying clever things in clever ways, but then you look at what it is they're actually saying, and it's completely wrong or WTF.

...the assertion that it is a supersizing of myth from reality... --is what the witch in The Silver Chair insisted. And she was wrong.

It may be true that very few singers of tales nowadays are likely to have personal knowledge of the Late Bronze Age Collapse, but I wouldn't call the most important element of the epic that it didn't happen to the teller --WORD

[sovay]

--There are many such cases: people saying clever things in clever ways, but then you look at what it is they're actually saying, and it's completely wrong or WTF.

Usually I just disagree with him in the normal way, on the interpretation or quality of films. This was an order of magnitude of disagreement.

--is what the witch in The Silver Chair insisted. And she was wrong.

Hah! I'm not sure I would equate the two exactly, but it's not just not what epics are. I mean, the Kalevala. The Ramayana. Beowulf!

[muccamukk]

Ugh, I'm already tired of critics jerking off while talking about the Brutalist.

[sovay]

Ugh, I'm already tired of critics jerking off while talking about the Brutalist.

The definition doesn't even play into his criticism of the film, which mostly has to do with his feeling that the characters are thin and plot-driven, a problem not solely confined to the three-hour genre.

[sartorias]

Wow, so much assumption of an authority I'm reluctant to grant in that sentence.

[sovay]

Wow, so much assumption of an authority I'm reluctant to grant in that sentence.

I resisted violently.

[marginaliana]

What a baffling sentence indeed.

[sovay]

What a baffling sentence indeed.

I am not sure where it came from. It seems unjust to blame Mars.

[radiantfracture]

It seems unjust to blame Mars.

Maybe the deity and not the planet? He doesn't come off well in epics as I recall

[selkie]

I found this leg and it’s got your teeth marks near where the femoral head would be. I’ma pack it in ice and send it to this guy’s editor. We have talked about how distinctive your dismemberments are. We have gone over the importance of not blood-eagling people in this century.
*sighs*
Still, I can’t deny you’re a true artist.

[sovay]

Still, I can’t deny you’re a true artist.

There's a caesura in the third foot of that bite!

[selkie]

See? The rest of us poor buggers have to get by with haphazard enjambments.

[mrissa]

What the actual fuck, that guy.

[sovay]

What the actual fuck, that guy.

Succinctly put.

[gwynnega]

What a bizarre assertion.

[sovay]

What a bizarre assertion.

I understand it's not his field outside of the epic film, but even for someone who doesn't know much about epic poetry, it is!

That's not even wrong.

[redbird]

So, the box "epic" gets all of fiction, and a lot of everyday conversation, including passing on news, however trivial.

I do wonder what if anything he meant by that clever-sounding phrase, if there even is meaning beyond "I think I'm clever."

Re: That's not even wrong.

[sovay]

So, the box "epic" gets all of fiction, and a lot of everyday conversation, including passing on news, however trivial.

It's not a good definition!

I do wonder what if anything he meant by that clever-sounding phrase, if there even is meaning beyond "I think I'm clever."

It's close to something that's true, but misses by a myth-sized cigar.

[pameladean]

I -- what? When you say, "The definition of X is..." you are supposedly referring to consensus reality. I don't know where this utterance came from -- well, I DO, but what was he ingesting and digesting to produce it? I cannot imagine.

P.

[sovay]

I -- what? When you say, "The definition of X is..." you are supposedly referring to consensus reality.

That was about as far as I got before having to complain to everyone.

[radiantfracture]

"the definition of an epic is a subject that the author doesn't know firsthand: it's, in effect, a fantasy about reality, an inflation of the material world into the stuff of myth,

(Clears throat)

Oh I see you've got this one

if you are disappointed by the lack of a lapis-browed statue of Enkidu among the black-and-buff potsherds of Uruk XVIII

I mean

just a little

[sovay]

Oh I see you've got this one

Don't care, love to hear yours.

I mean

just a little

The crucial difference is that you are not Richard Brody.

[radiantfracture]

Well, I have not your wealth of scholarship. Correct me freely. This:

more to do with how a culture tells itself

does most if not all of the work I could.

"the definition of an epic is a subject that the author doesn't know firsthand: it's, in effect, a fantasy about reality, an inflation of the material world into the stuff of myth

I suppose the pre-colonic sentence here could refer to the displacement of the epic into the distant, quasi-originary past, which -- is a feature, though not a definition.

(Say if Brody read the Wikipedia entry a couple of days before and didn't have time to refresh his memory before hitting send -- he might say a thing like that.)

I can't do much with "a fantasy about reality." What is that? That is all of fantasy and also all of reality.

As for the post-colonic "inflation of the material world into the stuff of myth," okay, sure, but so is, you know, myth. Again, the mere proximity of terms here makes me wonder if he's summoning up some vague reference to a thing I do find interesting, even unsettling, about epic, its overlap of history and what I would less like to call myth and more to name philosophy-through-symbolic-narrative, since my particular analytical tic is to apply what little I understand of Indigenous orature to anything that ever even appears to have wandered by the oral tradition some time or other to swipe the harvest of its garden.

But that literal-symbolic tango seems core to human self-telling too.

I grant you that "a big weird story that holds things together" lacks specificity.

As for the lapis statue, I don't even really want G., let alone E., to have been real. I want them to have been epic. I'm just hungry for material evidence of stories I can recognize myself in.

[sovay]

As for the lapis statue, I don't even really want G., let alone E., to have been real. I want them to have been epic.

I love this distinction and this wish.

[nineweaving]

"the definition of an epic is a subject that the author doesn't know firsthand: it's, in effect, a fantasy about reality, an inflation of the material world into the stuff of myth"

What absolute Mybuggery!

Nine

[sovay]

What absolute Mybuggery!

Yes! Without even the mediating influence of a plaintively insufferable Stephen Fry.

[dramaticirony]

I've had a hard time taking much that Brody says seriously after hurting my soul trying to come up with a charitable reading of his assertion that Perfect Days was made so that Wim Wenders could complain, obliquely, that "You can't get good help in Germany anymore."

Honestly, arbitrary nonsense is deposited on readers with sufficient regularity that I'm drawn to the possible explanation that the column exists not a good faith effort at criticism, but is perhaps instead a covert conceptual art project with the intention of mocking the idea that film is worth serious consideration.

It'd be amusing if someone were to call this silliness out ala Alder's Perils of Pauline, but despite the New Yorker perch Brody is no Kael, and not really worth the effort.

By the by, I love the concision of I don't know what to tell you "if you expect science fiction to print out the forecasts of the future rather than describe our hopes and anxieties for it" and hope you'll allow me to quote it while moderating a panel at Arisa on the topic of "AI" in tech today, and AI in speculative fiction.

[sovay]

I've had a hard time taking much that Brody says seriously after hurting my soul trying to come up with a charitable reading of his assertion that Perfect Days was made so that Wim Wenders could complain, obliquely, that "You can't get good help in Germany anymore."

I can see how you sprained your disbelief with that one.

Honestly, arbitrary nonsense is deposited on readers with sufficient regularity that I'm drawn to the possible explanation that the column exists not a good faith effort at criticism, but is perhaps instead a covert conceptual art project with the intention of mocking the idea that film is worth serious consideration.

He loves Ida Lupino! I give him credit as a booster for her films! And every now then I discover that he championed some movie which I too would love more people to know about, most notably The Well (1951). It's just that the majority of the time he seems not to like anything he writes about, and even when he does I can still find myself disagreeing with him factually. And I am sure that I have said any number of boneheaded things about movies, but I don't get paid by The New Yorker.

It'd be amusing if someone were to call this silliness out ala Alder's Perils of Pauline, but despite the New Yorker perch Brody is no Kael, and not really worth the effort.

I can disagree with Pauline Kael, but I really only ever wanted to fire her out of a cannon once.

By the by, I love the concision of I don't know what to tell you "if you expect science fiction to print out the forecasts of the future rather than describe our hopes and anxieties for it" and hope you'll allow me to quote it while moderating a panel at Arisa on the topic of "AI" in tech today, and AI in speculative fiction.

It would be an honor! Thank you for asking. And good luck with the panel!

[dramaticirony]

Maybe I need to soften my views, for the sake of his admiration of Ida Lupino.

Like you, I'm certain I've the occasional boneheaded things about films--but attributing wildly implausible motives to a director, with calm assurance, as if one had some brain scanning device for establishing this truth, seems like a rather large failure for anyone writing for the New Yorker, or editing it. (And where was the editor regarding epics?) But perhaps the job is mainly about expressing strong opinions, rather than true ones.

Thanks for letting me quote you--if I can't listen to at a panel at Arisa, at least I'll get to bring a small spark of your light to this one.

I'm on five panels this year, which should be pleasantly tiring. Especially glad to be able to burble enthusiastically on "Wicked Good Cinema: Boston's Art House Theaters"