Bloggrokker (Scott) 10/trikitytreeeet/31

Critical theory has ruined me for the movies.
For every film I go see, there's a theorist skulking in the shadows when the lights go down--or, to parody, er, I mean "pastichize," or maybe intertextually apply Marx's sentiment, "A spectre is haunting the megaplex."
I sat through The Black Dahlia with Fredric Jameson (historiographic metafiction), The Science of Sleep with Roland Barthes (writerly vs. readerly texts), and Henry Jenkins (media convergence) joined me for Clerks II.
Ruined? Truthfully, with the great output of film these days falling somewhere within the ever-widening realm of C. R. A. P. (Cinema Robbed of Artistic Possibility--did anyone else out there suffer through My Super Ex-Girlfriend? Oh, the terrible things one does for an Uma Thurman fix!!), all the critical approaches I'm reading this term are, miraculously, making things a tad tolerable; I can tear 'em apart like a jaded academic and, lo and behold and can it be told, 'tis kinda enjoyable.
And this enjoyment got me through two films I--looming pun intended--saw within the last few days--Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette and, yes, cue laugh track here , the third installment in the cartoonishy gruesome Saw saga.
Marie Antoinette?
Brother, can I coin a term here?
Coppola's film is loaded up with what I'll call historiographic "iPodization."
Anti-thespian Kirsten Dunst--who graced the front of a recent Vogue issue in her ancien regime garb with a tagline reading 'THE QUEEN WHO ROCKED VERSAILLES," a reinvention bringing once again to my mind Madonna's "Vogue" video and the ceaseless Retro-A-Go-Go culturo-commodifying and "gadgetizing" of postmodernism--bounces around the film evidently listening to punk and alt-rock bands only she can hear, bands from a good 175-80 years in the future--BowWowWow, Gang of Four, The Strokes, Siouxsie and the Banshees, etc. Perhaps "THE QUEEN WHO PUNK-ROCKED VERSAILLES?"
Anyway, historiographic "iPodization" is, yes, a riff on Jameson's historiographic metafiction, wherein history is re-read through characters who never existed. In Marie Antoinette, history is re-interpreted with the aid of current cultural soundscapes, i. e. the intensely individualized tracklists compiled by individuals for their mp3 players that only they can hear--this is, y'know, The Era of the Earbud, a logical progression from the Walkmanozoic Era of yore--just as, apparently, only Dunst's character can hear in the film.
And, just as historiographic metafiction proffers characters who never existed before, historiographic "iPodization" sees, er, hears, history through songs that aren't yet written. And if such bands as Gang of Four and The Cure were heard in late 18th century France, wouldn't they be vilified as horrid "noise"--and isn't "noise" what Hebdige terms subcultures? And isn't a subcultural lean what Coppola wants us to see in Dunst's Antoinette, the girl with apparent access to a Robespierre-era Apple iTunes Store with which she employs to "ROCK VERSAILLES?"
Saw III?
I'll just briefly say that this clumsy, gory mess has got Foucault splattered all over it.
Jigsaw, the sado-mastermind behind all the film's spillage--in both grue and plot, harhar--is the embodiment of panopticism. For reasons unexplained, he "sees" the moral trespasses of his future victims; his GAZE is alert seemingly endlessly.
And they're really isn't much more to say regarding this post-millennial gut-turner of a franchise, a franchise gunnin' hard to produce a photo-spread worthy of Fangoria magazine--except perhaps this;
All the Saw films seem to say something along the lines that the sidewalk is a prison, everyone's a prisoner, and there's always someone there to see the screw-up when it happens, to record the screw-up, and to deal out punishments for the screw-up. Yeah, I know, big whoop, what with everyone packing camera-phones and spy-cams shaped like Zippo lighters. Still, for a film like Saw III to make the statement, well, there's sayin' something.
Future tickets?
I can only wonder what theorist I'll go see Borat with.
High hopes.