Happy Stories In Films And Newspapers ...11/29/2021 Happy Stories In Films And Newspapers – Are Really So Boring That Nobody Wants To Watch And Read Them? Yet again I was told that my happy lesbian film love story is not interesting enough to get money. I was told it is cliche. Everybody wants to watch drama, conflict, pain, and argument. I am so shocked that our civilization still holds to 2000 years old Aristotelian concept of tragedy as the motto of nowadays art (film, theatre, multimedia). For this reason, I share an attitude of Argentian philosophers Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Déborah Danowski who claim in their chapter the »Past is Yet to Come« (2017) that we still live in the so-called 'axial period' or as they write: »The Origin and Goal of History is the title of the famous book in which Karl Jaspers advances the concept of an 'Axial Age,' the period after which the human species would begin to have not only a common history but also a single destiny. With this term, Jaspers referred to the period between 800 and 200 BCE, during which Eurasia saw the rise of Confucius, Lao-Tse, Buddha, and Zoroaster, the great Hebrew prophets, and the Greek poets, historians, and philosophers …« and continue »there is no greater intellectual crime than to address with the equipment of an older period the challenges of the present one … concept of the Anthropocene reveals the terminal obsolescence of the theological-philosophical equipment bequeathed by the Axial Age«. Isn't time we move forward to a different epoche, more positively oriented? Epoche where we are eager to watch and read good and happy news, where love is about good communication, tender kissing, and passionate sex, where two great minds meet and exchange their world-views or where two great artists or makers meet and create something together, where they wish to be together and they learn and grow together not because they suffer but because they enjoy and have a good time together. Of course, not everything is great and harmonical all the time but in general, their relationship does not go through pain and turmoil to get better, to communicate better, to change for the better. Why would they if the relationship is okay? Ergo, their relationship communicates what is it about: happiness! My love story does not wish to interpret human behavior nor change it. Their relationship is about a working everyday relationship, it is not about a relationship that is not going to result in break up, cheating, accident, or death. But that is exactly what Slovenian film directors and producers want. Let me demonstrate by example what I was told by Slovenian female directors Polona Sepe, Barbara Zemljič, Katarina Murano – we are not interested in happy love stories but stories with conflicts, arguments, and tragedy. I was told the same by two Slovenian producers, Boštjan Virc and Luka Dragičević. Well, Slovenian films directors and producers why not do your wishes come through in your real life and when you experience what you wish to show, let us meet again and share what you learned, how you changed and grew up, and if your wishes were correct, was it worth? I bet not because I am speaking from my own numerous experiences. I especially ask this for director Barbara Zemljič who told me that there are already numerous happy love stories in reality or at least that is how her relationship is and there she doesn't want to direct another one. I replied, is that really so? Mine was not and when I told her my love story she told me why not write about that and that she would rather direct my real-life experience. My second reply, what I learned from my experience is that I would rather have a happy love story and not a tragedy that I experienced. Here is the answer to why I wrote a happy love story. Another one is that lesbian films usually have tragic love stories and happy love stories are rare to find. Their second claim is that they judge the screenplay according to its quality and mine is supposedly full of cliches and doesn't appear to be good enough. Well, my reply to this is: are their films really so excellent that they can tell me that? Have their films become world film classics, even Slovenian film classics? NO. Nobody knows about their films, even Slovenians don't know what films they did and what they are about. At least my film shares a positive and optimistic message while their films are just a mess. What are in my opinion the real motives behind tragic love stories? Judging from the axial period it is all about the concept of immanence and transcendence. Castro and Danowski cite from the book Unearthly Powers which takes as its starting point the dichotomy between two forms of religiosity, »immanentism« and »transcendentalism« that directly derive from the axial period. Authors don't dwell on the specific problem of the monograph namely, »the interaction between political and religious factors that led to the worldwide expansion of some major transcendentalist religions (Christianity, Islam, Buddhism). For Jaspers and most axialists the invention of transcendence and everything that followed is part of the necessary progress of humanity, the unfolding of the potentials that distinguish it within nature as a whole. All converge, however, in the realization ... that there is no continuous linear advance from original immanence to final (or terminal) transcendence, but that post-axial history shows a certain alternating rhythm, as the innovative impulses of transcendentalism are gradually neutralized by immanentist inertia … which require periodic efforts in reform, asceticism, and purification, the old idea of starting anew«. Castro and Danowski continue to show that dialectics between transcendence and immanence revealed by the axial epoch took the canonical form, in modernity, of the distinction between Nature and Culture (Society). »Now Culture was the new name for human transcendence (the soul of divine origin modernized and internalized as the practical reason or as the order of the Symbolic) and Nature that of its immanence (the congenital animality of the species, from the instinctive to the cognitive plane). Now Culture was the domain of immanence (openness to the world, history as the history of freedom, the heroism of the denial of the Given) and Nature that of transcendence (the exteriority and intangibility of physical and biological legality, history as the mechanical evolution of the cosmos) … The hierarchy between temporality and spatiality established by the Axial Age and hyper-transcendentalized by the Christian eschatology infused in Western philosophies of history ... is being empirically challenged by the extensive (imperial) and intensive (extractivist) closure of the earth’s frontier«. Let us conclude this short philosophical discourse and say in plain words: what films directors and producers want is that their characters suffer in order their suffering will glorify and reward them in a transcendent or non-terrestrial world. I wonder how does this makes any sense since we can never really know that their suffering paid them to be better off in another world? As far as the second motive, that suffering will change the main character (for better or worse) I can say only that - does someone really believe that people change? As far as I can remember people keep telling me that nobody changes and that is why the human species hasn't progressed for the past two-three thousand years (speaking in terms of ethics and human psychology). Why than not use the patterns of human relationships that work and make people happy and satisfied?
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Katarina Majerholdphilsopher, lesbian, editor Archives
May 2023
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