Skip to main content

Elaborated re-post: Not watching your own movies

Any good interview, even one that’s entirely friendly on the surface, should have a slight adversarial quality, since the reporter and the subject have inherently different goals. The Coens don’t always suffer fools gladly, but they give good copy, even in one-word answers to questions that don’t interest them. (“Do you get excited about the Cannes competition?” one reporter asked them. “Does that get your heart pumping?” Ethan Coen: “No.”) Over the years the Coens have developed a routine that lies somewhere between practiced shtick and a psychological coping mechanism. Ethan, the younger, shorter, lighter-haired brother, delivers brief responses, often glib or acrid in tone, and then the taller, older and more loquacious Joel bails him out, expounding generously on the original question or diverting it into friendlier terrain.
[. . .]
Well, I feel like one aspect of that is that your movies almost always reward a second viewing. There’s always stuff I didn’t see or didn’t understand at first. Which definitely isn’t true of most movies!
J.C.: That’s a marketing trick!
E.C.: We endorse it! [Laughter.] But, my God, we don’t watch our own movies. No. You work on it for a year, a year and a half, and especially by the final stage when you’re fussing over every little thing — and we cut them ourselves — and everything is problem-solving, fixing stuff up. There’s a job involved, and beyond that when there’s nothing to be done, why would you look at it again? I mean, you know how it comes out. ("Joen and Ethan Coen: 'My God, we don't watch our own movies!'" interview with Andrew O'hehir, Salon.com)
- - - - -
Emporium

"Don't watch our own movies"

I hate that answer; it's designed to make them seem remote from us, as if we're rabidly chasing down appetites they're removed from. There's no way they haven't replayed the experience of making the movies—key scenes, reverberating portrayals—many times, even as they go about their next projects. Piecemeal, over time, they've seen them as much as any of us ... I, personally, would have made this clear. Join the rest of us, Coens, and particular yourself from there. It'd be more interesting. 

        

Graham Clark

I hate that answer; it's designed to make them seem remote from us

Or it's just the honest truth.

And they don't need to make themselves seem remote from you; they are remote from you.

        

Emporium

@Graham Clark They don't watch their own movies, but they know that by saying that that they're going to seem as if they dump everything they've done without a need to look back ... this draws us to envy and be in awe of them (they're very psychologically sophisticated people). I think part of them likes to pretend they've garnered some kind of enlightenment, but won't from within their cloaks, show it to us. Someone ought to chastise them for their limiting tendency to withhold, and me, Emporium, just did my limited bit. 

Also, I enjoy their movies. They're different from me, can show me things about people that'd learn and excite me a lot; but they're not all that remote from me, good sir. 
        

Graham Clark

but they're not all that remote from me, good sir.

They are indeed all that remote from you, and you know it. Hence the resentment:

this draws us to envy and awe them (they're very psychologically sophisticated people). I think part of them likes to pretend they've garnered paradise (or at least, enlightenment), but won't from within their cloaks, show it to us. Someone ought to chastise them for their limiting tendency to withhold

        

Emporium

@Graham Clark Graham, do you cling to the authorized, so to make fun of those below? I'm always willing to re-fresh my take, but I seem to remember that was the fit you unfortunately found you belonged to. 

        

Graham Clark

Graham, do you cling to the authorized, so to make fun of those below?

No, but I do have an unfortunate compulsion to make probably futile attempts at encouraging those below to do something more productive with their time than nip at the heels of the angels.

but I seem to remember that was the fit you unfortunately found you belonged to.

What?

        

Emporium

@Graham Clark My art is different from theirs, but they are amazing. Still, they withhold, and it's meant to draw ... but frustrate. And just as your everyday average Magna Carta human being — with a nifty, remote, admittedly "you-denying" pseudonym — who'd prefer none of us had too much a taste for heights and angels (that was the real 60s, after all), I'm for sure going to point that out. 

Andrew's piece had it that if we were left with only the younger, we'd be warranted to mob at and burn them — did you catch that?

* * *

rdnaso

@Emporium Nothing ruins the fun of watching a movie more than working on it. At the end, just like they say, everyone's just trying to get it out the door on time and all too aware of everything that could have been done differently and better. I doubt that novelists spend much time reading their own novels either: too busy working on the next one. Mailer claimed to not read at all: "I'm more a writer than a reader." Poets though - they read their own stuff compulsively... 
        

Emporium

@rdnaso @Emporium If that were generally true, by now it wouldn't be a surprise to learn they don't watch their own — in fact we'd be surprised if they did. I think many creators know that it sounds sort of masculine to always be onto the next work, and feminine, to admit watching the whole film with an audience is a rewarding good time. They toss things off as soon as possible and don't look back, while we, their dependents, indulge. Masculine to our feminine. 

Emporium / Patrick McEvoy-Halston



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Discussion over the fate of Jolenta, at the Gene Wolfe facebook appreciation site

Patrick McEvoy-Halston November 28 at 10:36 AM Why does Severian make almost no effort to develop sustained empathy for Jolenta -- no interest in her roots, what made her who she was -- even as she features so much in the first part of the narrative? Her fate at the end is one sustained gross happenstance after another... Severian has repeated sex with her while she lay half drugged, an act he argues later he imagines she wanted -- even as he admits it could appear to some, bald "rape" -- but which certainly followed his  discussion of her as someone whom he could hate so much it invited his desire to destroy her; Severian abandons her to Dr. Talus, who had threatened to kill her if she insisted on clinging to him; Baldanders robs her of her money; she's sucked at by blood bats, and, finally, left at death revealed discombobulated of all beauty... a hunk of junk, like that the Saltus citizens keep heaped away from their village for it ruining their preferred sense

Salon discussion of "Almost Famous" gang-rape scene

Patrick McEvoy-Halston: The "Almost Famous'" gang-rape scene? Isn't this the film that features the deflowering of a virgin -- out of boredom -- by a pack of predator-vixons, who otherwise thought so little of him they were quite willing to pee in his near vicinity? Maybe we'll come to conclude that "[t]he scene only works because people were stupid about [boy by girl] [. . .] rape at the time" (Amy Benfer). Sawmonkey: Lucky boy Pull that stick a few more inches out of your chute, Patrick. This was one of the best flicks of the decade. (sawmonkey, response to post, “Films of the decade: ‘Amost Famous’, R.J. Culter, Salon, 13 Dec. 2009) Patrick McEvoy-Halston: @sawmonkey It made an impression on me too. Great charm. Great friends. But it is one of the things you (or at least I) notice on the review, there is the SUGGESTION, with him being so (rightly) upset with the girls feeling so free to pee right before him, that sex with him is just further presump

When Rose McGowan appears in Asgard: a review of "Thor: Ragnarok"

The best part of this film was when Rose McGowan appeared in Asgard and accosted Odin and his sons for covering up, with a prettified, corporate, outward appearance that's all gay-friendly, feminist, multicultural, absolutely for the rights of the indigenous, etc., centuries of past abuse, where they predated mercilessly upon countless unsuspecting peoples. And the PR department came in and said, okay Weinstein... I mean Odin and Odin' sons, here's what we suggest you do. First, you, Odin, are going to have to die. No extensive therapy; when it comes to predators who are male, especially white and male, this age doesn't believe in therapy. You did what you did because you are, or at least strongly WERE, evil, so that's what we have to work with. Now death doesn't seem like "working with it," I know, but the genius is that we'll do the rehab with your sons, and when they're resurrected as somehow more apart from your regime,