My husband has a rule: with rare exceptions, he does not willingly see any movie that is in color. When we first married, I mocked him: "Honey, you're so conservative, you literally only see things in black and white." His real reason is he is tired of the attitude of modernist detachment from everything that all contemporary movies --even the "wholesome" ones have ("Finding Nemo" is my poster child for a technically accomplished, "clean" movie that is utterly arch and dispiriting in tone). A contemporary movie is just not a good bet is his feeling. Over a dozen years of marriage, I've come to see his point. Although my interest in acting & directing keeps me seeing new things, there is a freshness to old movies that modern film-makers basically can't achieve because they're too cynically detached from anything to make their stories matter.
It's journalism, however, that I see utterly crippled by modernist detachment. Take this story in the Post: In the Floods, Parties' Agendas Surface. The whole attitude is just so gross, not to mention bor-ing. It may seem that people are trying to help their constituents in the wake of a disater, but we're not fooled, we know they're just pushing their private agendas. Which of course begs the question whether someone --R or D-- might possibly be attached to an agenda because he really believes it would help. What gives the Post the right to adopt the attitude of above-it-all judge-of-the-world? Just tell us what our reps are doing and let us make the judgments about their wisdom and motives, thank you very much.
And PS to the Post. Not only is your above-it-all detachment tedious, since you felt the need to do a story on some out of tone GOP comments on Katrina that few people would have heard about otherwise, I'm sure your feature on outrageously over-the-top Dem rhetoric will run tomorrow, right?
