if recovering intimate writing from one’s past - say, a private journal entry or a love letter - is particularly cringeworthy in its revelation of secret pretensions and flagrant posturing, it is always comforting to realize that the level of self-loathing induced by such a moment is unmatched precisely because we had the good sense not to betray ourselves (and our genuine pretensions) to anyone but ourselves and to those with whom we were seeking to be truly vulnerable.
something i wrote a long time ago to someone i love very much:
“I watched 2046. In fact, it was pretty awful–each affair felt entirely arbitrary and purposeless, a clumsily linked strain of surface anecdotes narrated in an aesthetic vocabulary which was tired and gimmicky and capricious (a bit like the martial arts novels at which Chow scribbles away)–the opposite of the marriage of pitch-perfect tragedy and restraint accomplished in In the Mood. I suppose that the final message of the movie was that, for a man who will never again lend his heart, love affairs will by definition be short and shallow and meaningless, a point which we have just been laboriously illustrated for 2 hours. The poetry of that message, however, pales as the film’s redeemer–no doubt many have said it better.
HOWEVER. If the film is weak on its own, it actually serves In the Mood brilliantly. If we can imagine that WKW has spent all of that energy and money to make a glorified postlude which buttresses the genius not only of the cinematography but the sincerity of the romance in ITMFL, it bears renewed merit. Although I’m not sure it’s ever a great compliment to a film maker that his movie is very good for making his other movie look good in comparison.”
talk about missing the point.
also, the same cannot be said about blog posts. baked goods are more often sincere.
