A while back, Bruce Sterling (who is a star) was going on about “Our New Frontier Is The Ruins Of The Unsustainable”, and talking about atemporality and lamenting the lack of high-art therefrom, or he might have been talking about steampunk… or the impossibility of making high-art from collage, but like… whatever.
I think this might be high-art. Maybe.
The imperfections are perfect, connecting so seamlessly to David Lynch’s stuff that it seems kindof wrong to see it as separate. Straight out of the Lynchosphere… and what is that? 50s? 70s? 90s? It’s all of it. All of you and all of me. She’s got that whole bored, doomed, laconic thing… there’s an archetype there that she’s hitting dead on the nail, and little (over-committed) touches like less than perfect plastic-surgery are… perfect. The lack of fidelity is part of the scene… because there comes a point with nostalgia, where what you are remembering isn’t what actually happened, but the photographs of it that you still have… and those fade… well, they did in the 20thC.
Everything is borrowed – as it should be, because (is this part of a gen-x revival?) the culture is the entire context. There’s nothing outside of it that we know. Everything comes from somewhere else… probably copyrighted, but it’s ours, and corporations have absolutely zero business claiming any of it.
So from a filmic point of view… that whole Paris-Texas-holiday-scene halcyon-super-8 thing going, distilling this nostalgia-for-a-time-that-never-existed out of deleted-scenes… and adding sex. Like girls from the last year at school who were beautiful but going nowhere… and who I thought were out of my league… who would never let me near them, but really it was the other way round, because I WAS going somewhere… I was headed out of here, out of the small town, away.
And now? You can’t go back. They grow old fast… faster than I did, and they have daughters of their own now, who aren’t going anywhere either… but there’s this parallel universe, like a loop, or a bubble… where things might have been different, not for them, but for me. If I’d decided to go nowhere too… to just fall in love, and make that the point of existence. To fall for the honey-trap that’s too dumb to even know what it is, but is at least sincere. I sure as shit would be happier than I am now. Or would be, for a while.
With drugs you get 5 good years… with life… maybe 15. Before the windows of possibility start closing… or before you stop seeing them.
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