But in an age of digital wizardry and ironic cool, such products—with their earnest storytelling and their utter lack of artistic pretension, to say nothing of skill––such products come as a breath of clean desert air. Here we see actual people working, struggling to create something they hope will be beautiful, struggling against the limitations of technology, of time and money, of personal disaster, professional incompetence, and random, catastrophic accident. In short, we see something approaching a human reality. And as the medium of film advanced over the next century, that reality is increasingly what gets left on the cutting floor––or in the “Delete”-cache. Films and television these days, and not only those with computer-generated images, are industrial products that by the time they reach consumers have been through rigorous quality control. What we have in The Lone Ranger is something closer to folk art. Commercial, to be sure, but more modest in its claims on the viewer; less tidy, and in the end, less totalizing.
Now. There are those who will laugh at the original Lone Ranger, as they laugh at The Great Train Robbery and at Ed Wood; i.e. with a smug sense of their own cultural superiority, an ironic sneer and a chortle of schadenfreude. To these debauched souls I have nothing further to say. For it is only the generous of heart to whom these folksy, obsolete entertainments will reveal their secrets. To understand them, one must be susceptible to that “double-vision” which allows at once a childlike pleasure in the story itself and a grownup interest in (and compassion for) the storyteller, hapless as he may be.
-Published in berfrois, John Crutchfield’s “Toward an Aesthetics of Failure” explains why he still loves the out-of-fashion western despite repetitive plots, one-dimensional characters, and shoddy filmmaking — and why you should, too.
from Longreads Blog » Longreads Blog http://blog.longreads.com/2015/07/22/go-west-young-man/
No comments:
Post a Comment