The New Disorder (by David Denby)

In the campus where I am staying, there are buttes above like something out of an old western. I run these dusty trails around the campus, dodging cactus and startling bunnies. These rabbits appear to have no predators, and hop boldly across campus and the surrounding hills, only to turn their white tails like a snow flurry when approached. While running the dry hills, I look out over the irrigated track suburbs of Thousand Oaks below, complete with identical houses, emerald lawns and palm trees. Two things ring for me in this place, astonishment and irritation at this oasis imposed upon a dessert and confusion about what I’m doing here in Southern California, running the dusty trails again as if I had never left at 18. It seems like there is rationality to it, some sort of cyclical pattern that I should be able to discern. Is there a code to break that would unravel what I’m looking for, why I remain so independent and rootless? How did I end up here anyway?

In my beach reading this afternoon, a happened upon an essay on film that seemed to explain some of this. The author identifies a common stylistic trend in many recent films (Pulp Fiction, Momento, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Syriana, Amores Perros, 21 Grams, Babel). Each shares a manipulation of chronology. In my relative ignorance of film history, I didn’t know that playing with the film timing is a recent trend, notable for taking non-linear storytelling techniques or narrative manipulation typically most evident in the van guard, and making them common in popular works. Of more traditional chronology, David Denby states that:

“ Storytellers, relying on sequence and causality, make sense out of non-sense; they impose order, economy and moral consequence on the helter-skelter wash of experience. The notion that one event causes another, and that the entire chain is a unified whole, with complex, maybe ambivalent, but, in any case, coherent meaning, not only brings us to a point of resolution; it allows us to navigate through our lives.”

This is exactly the sense that I’m having, that my life is somehow lacking a plot line, that is should line up more neatly and march like a Hollywood movie from difficult trials to euphoric conclusion. Yes, I know it is senseless to take life cues from a Hollywood film, but shouldn't this all make more sense? Perhaps this is why, when I can’t face myself and the world, I go to the movies. I need the reassurance that there is a narrative in the non-sense of experience.

As my friends drift closer to being contemporary artists, and drag me to gallery upon gallery of art that seeks to provoke rather than please (or at least only please those elite few with a knowledge base to understand the hidden jokes and ironies), I’m sometimes repelled. This is explained by Denby “for more than eighty years, frustrating our pleasure in the orderly unfolding of a story has been a familiar strategy of the political and artistic avante-guard.” While I suppose that there are many works of contemporary art (including film) that do delight, for the most part I find an obtuse resistance to easy pleasure in the work that I saw in Los Angeles these past few months.

Contemporary art is not only often intended for the elite (which both repels and attracts me), requiring of a knowledge base that I don’t necessarily possess, and lacking in that simple narrative or causality that I take pleasure in. Obviously there is a place for both popular entertainment and challenging avante-guard work, but I can’t help but feel that both fields would benefit from borrowing a bit more from each other. Maybe they are in these films. Meanwhile, I drive the Santa Monica mountains to Malibu, slip onto the PCH, and feel like I'm in another film about a disillusioned girl driving along the California coastline (or is it the Mediterranean?). I'll continue to strive to find reason and logic in my cyclical return to my roots, in my attraction and chance encounters with film-makers and artists, in my sense of dissatisfaction.