SOME THOUGHTS FROM LAST YEAR, 2 (toward a start)

3/12/19

So, if I turn my attention to the major myths as foundations to my readings in a variety of media, the failing to guard against is that every instance simply becomes another example of the same concept. The specificity of the relationship between myth/instance/receiver has to be analyzed. If I play off of Barthes’s tripartite breakdowns where the signified finds a signifier that gets encoded in a sign and the sign (word/work/object) becomes a signifier for the signified (myth) which is decoded in the sign of the mythologist’s analysis, then there’s also a further trio (of allegory) that takes the mythologist’s reading as “signifier” matched to a signified (the cultural work of the sign) that finds its sign in the lyrical history of reception, which is to say that the sign is the coming to consciousness of the formation fantasies and that realizing them, in writing, is the entire goal.

With this approach in mind I have to begin with the mythic sign and move toward the allegory of becoming. This process is personal and individual (hence, the idiosyncrasy) but it is also social/collective because it assumes the general presence and reception of the myth; as critique of the myth the analysis serves a proleptic purpose—a conduit between the past, where the myth was received, the present, where its effects are analyzed, and the future where a possible benefit accrues, not as revolutionary gesture but more as an existential truth, a Sisyphean perpetuation of the burden of knowledge, of the framing of the idea of an emancipatory act. “No exit,” indeed, but that is not a cause for despair if, a good jester, one accepts the joke is on oneself.

Playing with these ideas in my mind at the moment, I see that—to recall my four-part fantasia—ethos would be the comic, the jester’s wit, the ability to laugh at absurdity and to see the cosmic joke in human affairs (how to take people seriously?); pathos would be the heroic, which moves from superheroes to tragic heroes—Christ, Faust, Shakespearean—to antiheroes, Dostoevskyian, in film and fiction; eros would be the poetic—the lyrical—finding its image in woman/the feminine, and having to recognize its presence in oneself: a self involved in rendering the sensual mental sphere which is what I basically find in poetry or at least my poetic heroes; finally, logos would be the narrative principle—uniting novelist and certain film-makers as controllers of the narration/diegesis. It will be seen at once that this change in emphasis, to the theoretical or categorical, lessens the attention to the diachronic, historical approach—the point of autobiographical criticism—but not if I can help it.

My sense of art history, as a sequence of styles and their attendant myths, should keep me focused on the passage of time as an element in reception/conception. (Note: I’m sitting here, now, in the Blue State Coffee Shop on York Street in New Haven, which used to be, when I first moved here, in 1994, a Willoughby’s Coffee Shop—the view out the window on York Street on the rear of Yale’s Sterling Library hasn’t changed much (though there was construction on the outside of the library for many years). I can’t sit here and not remember writing one of the poems I worked on for “At Large,” the poem called “Backseat Driver.”) My point—in that parenthesis—being that the time that has passed from the day of that poem to this—which is to say from the doctorate to now—is not lost but part of the perspective. Time must be contained in the views of the myths, in the allegory of their reception, or I have learned nothing. These thoughts, about the years at Princeton, come from re-reading that Barthes essay, which takes me back to starting at Princeton and the idea that exercised my mind at the time, to unpack the transition from the realist novel to something more subjective, based on an aesthetic response, to see how—again—the impact of history plays into aesthetic experience (a concept I might now see as ‘myth’) as a thematic element of every narrative—which is to say an indication of the author’s choices/assumptions about the “state of the art” and the position of the probable reader/receiver. What kept me from fully embracing Barthes et al. at the time was the sense that semiology was ultimately not concerned with art qua art. In other words, it did not consider the ‘usage’ of the strategies of art—in poetry, in literature—as substantially different from any other form of discourse or media. My “aesthetic experience” claim sought to foreground that particular use value which can only be found in art. With the eclipse of most of my artistic assumptions in the name of ubiquitous media, it’s no surprise that those ideas didn’t garner much support.

The concession, at this remove, occurs on several fronts. First, the situatedness of the critic. The objectivity of theory and history has always bothered me. The claims I make, as a critic, are to some degree performative—which is where both autobiography and lyrical self come into play, as they must, or there is no point in me writing this. My failings in the profession come primarily from trying to write as others do, to appropriate an appropriate voice/stance. If I am to “free my hand” then I’ve got to own the stance entirely, which means “owning up” to the particular idiosyncrasies of the critical gesture. Second: that situatedness has a political dimension because of our surrounding context which interrogates privilege, racial placement, gendered identity and all aspects of the social mimesis. That critical tendency became prevalent as I was finishing at Princeton and was the marked position of the academy at the time—the university as a white male dominated space of intellectual colonialism, an oppression by other means. Because of the steady chipping away at that monolith, any work that arrives as the intervention of a hetero white male with Ivy League antecedents is going to be suspect if not irrelevant. That I can’t help, but I can accept, jester-like, the use of irony. “Hide, fox, and all after” has long been my motto, with all due acknowledgment of its source. The placement of critical pressure on historical accident, the stress on trivial identification factors (whom one’s ancestors were and whom one has sex with and how) as determinant of “position,” is a way of recognizing that the social uses of art, more—its value for social recognition and identification—is all that matters in this period.

The “driven to abstraction” nature of my earliest incarnations take root there as there is no access to that mode of thought by means of those trivial factors. So this—belated—recognition of the social importance—for critical purposes—of that ground is something that the criticism must register. The work on “Between Days” has made that aspect of my past—now told by a self-styled narrator—more accessible and even relevant, particularly where the “myth” of the author/artist is concerned. No doubt a part of that analysis will be of the trajectory of that concept as it plays through my earliest identifications and into the state it now occupies in all its situated banality. What kept me away from biographical/historical analysis of the artist/author before was my sense that such work was essentially gossip writ large. I still believe that, but there is some merit in meeting that view with a grasp of the self-deprecating humor necessary to the form (“who’s he when he’s at home?”). If one can’t countenance the continuity between text and being, between the authority of the author and the triviality of the person, then one becomes a worshipper, an idolater. That I am not.

Third: aesthetic experience as but one factor (even if a “supreme fiction”) in the reception of the everyday fiction of mediated existence. Some version of that argument was contained—at what lengths!—in the transition from modernism to postmodernism and it could be said that my perspective is still a postmodern, “Baby Boom” perspective on the era that I lived through, but, if so, it’s one that has been shaped both by my elders (those born in the ‘30s and ’40s), my contemporaries (born in the ‘50s and ‘60s), and my juniors (born in the ‘70s and ‘80s). The elders come to me through literature, film and rock; the contemporaries share those fields. The juniors—as my stepson’s and my daughter’s generation—inherit them and have their own emphases. The subsequent generation (‘90s and ‘00s) is the student population that may or may not receive the lesson. My locus in that tripartite division is key to my outlook, and it will be key to the historical situatedness of the account. Which is a way of saying that the context—supplied by those who lived through World War 2—is distorted by the elders, moving into the counter-cultural emphases of those born in the ‘40s (who are now our elder statespersons), received—with all due irony and apathy—by those born in the ‘50s and ‘60s (a kind of “lost generation” of its own, but finding—for me—some ready heroes, particularly in rock, less so in the fine arts), moving on to the generation now approaching its fulcrum of middle-age (forty, fifty years old). The true juniors—in their twenties and thirties—are so readily identified with the twenty-first century and its technologies of (so far) benign surveillance and its failing environments and embattled borders as to be largely indifferent to these arguments. So, granted, the target audience is still “my students”—those who were grad students and undergrads in the 2000s. As we move into the 2020s I can only gesture toward what deluge awaits, seeing 2022—100 years after Ulysses—as the place where the record of modernist myth must reach a kind of end-stop. So, then, the myths . . . [Note: I’ve projected spring of 2022 as the completion of the Tarot panels, 12/2/20]

A simple schema would yield ethos as comedy, pathos as tragedy, eros as lyric (whether poetry or song), logos as narrative (in film and fiction). But, while that might work at the schematic level, I don’t think it works in practice. The “comic” as an ethos could be a factor in any genre, as such it’s part of the perspective. Yet I see this as significant, an aspect of my outlook that I may have neglected. The point, then, is to establish the originary myths. The pathos of the hero and the antic comic hero—the value of irony. One would be the hero as redeemed by suffering, another would be the hero whose insouciance carries the day. Another would be the femme fatale of drama and of song; the muse; the model; the artist-hero; the creative ego; the demiurge; the daemon; the various myths of the rock-bard, like the movie star, are deeply invested with a specular identity, but that also serves the scholar-star, the creative genius, the unprecedented talent, the romantic hero; then there’s the trickster, the jester, the fool. The narrator-hero, the observer, the chronicler, the historian, the critic—these are all positions, entities, but the task is to extract the ideology and poetics of these subject positions. And since most of them mark the reception of and identification with the works of lit, music, film, the analysis should take us into the basis of intrinsic conceptions. What I’ve mainly been thinking of, in terms of explication, is my own formation as a critic-subject, a developmental account, but this newer conception puts the critique at the forefront.

Thus, the development is of a series of myths that prolong the ideology of art (as alternative to culture) and invite the poetics of the self-formation that leads to the critique. The end result is not an artwork, nor an artist’s creative ego, but a critical engagement with the perspective made possible by certain interactions and experiences—aesthetic, yes, but requiring an account of what that entails. It’s likely that at any given stage in this diachronic account there will be dominant figures, the unavoidable “new figure” that encapsulates and challenges, that creates the expectation of a further satisfaction. Of course, the line I was considering previously—derived from Stevens’ “Supreme Fiction”—was the abstraction (ethos), change (pathos), pleasure (eros) trio, which still pertains, but at a more meta level. And that level (allegory or supreme fiction) is the vantage point that may be “beyond critique” or “beyond interpretation” as some would have it. It’s the passion for the task that undoes the performance of it. The untamed, untutored essence of need. Abstraction, as I said earlier today, was the necessary lie against bleak reality, recognizing the lack within the particular—so a supplement for the sake of a “higher calling” (a myth in itself); change (pathos) has always been intimate to my vision—what found such fascination in Proust, the realization of time as the tension between “the eternal” (the analogue to an ethos of “the universal”) and the time-bound loss, the impossibility of a fixed value. And that leaves eros/pleasure as the temptation to linger in good feelings, the sustaining attention to sensual satisfactions—seeing, hearing, touching, consuming—where “the work” is a feast, a dance, a spectacle, a trance, a poem. Breaking the trance is the work of criticism, an inscription on a tomb.

I wait in anger and amusement
In my rehearsals for retirement

If I'd have known the end would end in laughter
Still I'd tell my daughter that it doesn't matter

Farewell, my own true love, farewell, my fancy
Are you still ownin' me, love, though you failed me?
But one last gesture for your pleasure
I'll paint your memory on the monument
In my rehearsals for retirement

--Phil Ochs, “Rehearsals for Retirement” (1969)

SOME THOUGHTS (BARTHES) FROM LAST YEAR

3/11/19

I was thinking this morning of how the type of account I want to write should begin with a statement of main themes, that it’s not enough—as I tend to do in lists—to enumerate proper names with maybe a tagline to indicate critical orientation. Then, having had a look-in yesterday at Baudrillard’s Conspiracy of Art, I picked up this morning Barthes’ “Myth Today,” which includes, as perhaps ultimate inspiration or challenge, the lines: “In a word, I do not yet see a synthesis between ideology and poetry.”—with the two seen as “two equally extreme methods”: “either to posit a reality which is entirely permeable to history, and ideologize; or, conversely, to posit a reality which is ultimately impenetrable, irreducible, and, in this case, poeticize.”

For me, the true poeticization is something like “Metro Lace” where language serves the purpose of asserting arbitrary relations to the subject and object—it is a bridge between two things, each with its own status, and the poem approximates moods only, making the capacities of language register presence—thus a sensual act because the writer is a locus of senses and sensory impressions in the act of operating language.

But a critical language needs history—which is biographical first because the utterance has to be placed in time and because the evaluation is retrospective. “Entirely permeable to history”—though—is more extreme than what I had been considering. And that’s where reading Barthes’s very lucid discussion may be crucial at this time. For I begin to see that what has hung me up all along is what I might call the particular vantage of my intervention. I’ve wanted it to be “autobiographical” or “lyrical” criticism, a story of becoming, à la Nietzsche’s “How One Becomes Who One Is,” but that is fraught with the difficulty of articulating who and where and what one is. The account creates its author, I don’t doubt, but that’s an intimidating prospect. As “lyrical,” the account allows for a love story, of sorts, and that might too easily become fan notes or the glib appreciations the internet is rife with. But Barthes’s concept of myth brings me to something I’ve been trying to suggest with such formulations as “exile,” “pursuit,” and “flight.” The point is that the perspective has to be one willing to excavate the myths built into the objects by their context (the historical imperative) and to witness the myths of becoming that each object bequeaths.

Here, then, we’re engaged in true critique, the type that would extract principles of becoming, not so absolute as an interrogation of essence by means of substance, or of form by accident—since I don’t think I will uncover Platonism at the heart of the endeavor, nor phenomenology, but rather a Nietzschean or possibly romantic irony, a gesture, in other words, toward art/poetry by other means. But if I am attentive to the myths built into, or incorporated by, the reception of the object, and how that reception creates or stimulates a certain subject—the subject as receptor/receiver/reader/viewer—then the point of the writer in the equation (what Barthes calls the mythologist) is to delineate the ideology at work each step of the way because, in Barthes’s terms, revolution does not occur. The failure of revolution is the real failure, or the failure of the Real. The arts are, at best, a gesture toward emancipation, but that impetus only exists to end up in art. So that even a “revolution of the word” or a revolution of ways and means within the artform still stops short of eradicating the art world and the history of art. This particular confrontation, compromise and concession has to be acknowledged within the objects, but also within the spectator—as observer, not actant. We are always watching a pageant go by, that’s the nature of the condition. What Barthes points us to is acknowledgment of the degree to which we take the “nature” or naturalness of our condition from the bourgeois world that dominates all critique and tables each intervention. As such, protest is always theater and acting out, unless one sets aside representation and manifests overthrow; that, at times, is the context by which the object is informed, but that gesture becomes encoded into its subsequent reception, into its status as a historic break or defeat.

See Barthes: “Bourgeois ideology continuously transforms the products of history into essential types . . . . So it cannot rest until it has obscured the ceaseless making of the world, fixed this world into an object which can be forever possessed, catalogued its riches, embalmed it, and injected into reality some purifying essence which will stop its transformation, its flight toward other forms of existence. And these riches, thus fixated and frozen, will at least become computable: bourgeois morality will essentially be a weighing operation, the essences will be placed in scales of which bourgeois man will remain the motionless beam. For the very end of myths is to immobilize the world: they must suggest and mimic a universal order which has fixated once and for all the hierarchy of possessions. Thus, every day and everywhere, man is stopped by myths, referred by them to this motionless prototype which lives in his place, stifles him in the manner of a huge internal parasite, and assigns to his activity the narrow limits within which he is allowed to suffer without upsetting the world: bourgeois pseudophysis is in the fullest sense a prohibition for man against inventing himself. Myths are nothing but this ceaseless, untiring solicitation, this insidious and inflexible demand that all men recognize themselves in this image, eternal yet bearing a date, which was built of them one day as if for all time. For Nature, in which they are locked up under the pretext of being eternalized, is nothing but a Usage. And it is this Usage, however lofty, that they must take in hand and transform.”

It’s clear to me, from the above, that for too long I’ve entertained the idea of enumeration, the weighing in the scales—this is more significant than that—for the purpose of creating “the universal order of the hierarchy of possessions”—to create that eternal analogue of my former life, the life I lived within the objects as “worlds” to explore. But I see in Barthes the challenge to objectify the myths of the things themselves, to write as a means to “take in hand and transform the Usage”—where the “usage” is the values gained from the museum, the library, the archive, the collection, the syllabus, the news bulletin, the ad, the prospectus, and the transformation has to come from the twin actions of ideologizing and poeticizing—where history is the autobiography (a life in time) and lyric is the acquired language/taste of a life lived in art.

WHATCHA READIN'? Americanah (2013); Winter Journal (2012)

Recent reading has included two books read in digital format on my new, as of this year, Kindle Fire from amazon. The reason for this acquisition is that this summer, even more than last summer, I’m going to be in transit quite a bit. For over a week I’m going to be on a cruise ship and I do not want to lug printed matter with me. Already the ease of carting around all my students' papers on this little device makes it worthwhile, but I wanted to see if I could actually get into reading full-length books on it. Seems I can and that it may even be preferable for certain kinds of works.

What kind? Easy to read books. So far I’ve read only recent, 21st-century, publications, though I do have quite a few “public domain” classics loaded on for ease of reference, particularly a lot of Henry James. And a few others that I paid a nominal price to have permanently loaded on the device—the complete plays of Shakespeare, Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The problem with “kindle editions” is that the translation one might prefer may not be available, and even English language classics may be available in lesser editions. Clearly, amazon wants you to buy new releases and the digital version of those are as good—or what term one likes—as the printed versions. So, the two I read.

The first was Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a book that was “in the cloud” because I got it for my wife, who had a Kindle earlier than I. I thought it might interest her because it’s written by a Nigerian and one of my wife’s friends/colleagues is Nigerian, and it makes mention, in passing, of places we’ve lived in: Princeton, Philadelphia, New Haven. What I didn’t know (or if I did, I forgot) is that the main character in the book, Ifemelu, begins her career as a writer by writing a blog about race, recording, particularly, her observations of U.S. racism from an expatriate African’s perspective. Indeed, the portions included as blog entries are some of the best parts of the book since it’s there that some telling observations are made, and—isn’t that always true of blogs?—it’s there that the honesty or directness of life as lived becomes most evident. I say that as a criticism of some of the rest of the book—its fictive events—which eventually come to seem like plot-stretchers or helpers, the narrative equivalent of stuff you add to hamburger to make it feed more with less cost. Some of what does happen comes off as deliberately courting the “chic-lit” genre, so that Ifemelu’s trials and errors on the way to true romance, and success, and self-acceptance are what keeps the pages turning. Along the way, there’s maybe one character—an aunt who was for a time a mistress of a big political figure in Nigeria—who stands out as memorable.

And yet I kept reading. In part because it’s all very readable and kindle-able. The best parts are what you might expect: seeing our times and culture (including life, for her sometime boyfriend, as an undocumented worker in London) from the view of an opinionated someone from somewhere else, and, even better, seeing how she renders her native land. The fact that much of what is happening wherever she is doesn’t please Adichie very much becomes part of the point, which is to say, that she casts a cold eye, for the most part, on the way things are. And that I enjoyed. The fact that, as a woman, the central character was quite willing to show herself as flawed and, sometimes, frustrated with herself, went a long way to make the character “sympathetic” even if annoying at times.

“Plot,” Henry James says, “is for the revelation of character,” and there are some “character-building” plot turns, particularly as Ifemelu has to bottom-out in America before she can ride to success—with a Princeton fellowship, though we don’t necessarily grasp what makes her so worthy of her eventual good fortune. She snipes at the kind of rhetoric one finds in the semiotics-inspired classroom of the time and, from the point of view of such study, her writing seems rather lightweight, populist even. In terms of the challenges of contemporary writing, it’s poised to be easily digested, Oprah-style. Still, the point of view of the novel is very smart, and seemingly candid. I say “seemingly” because elements of the story are wholly contrived and that makes me question the validity of the whole.

My other Kindle reading, to date, was Paul Auster’s Winter Journal because it’s an assigned text for Daily Themes this semester (Auster will be addressing the class in the spring), the first time there’s ever been such a thing. As a choice it’s OK, though I’d hoped for more reflection about writing, about how one goes about inhabiting the page or thinking in prose or turning oneself into writing, or even the kind of breaks that make for a successful career. Auster, clearly, is someone who mastered all that long ago: Invention of Solitude (1982), a memoir provoked by the death of Auster’s father, was the start of it all. Well, sort of. Auster began as a poet but his breakthrough, so far as literature is concerned, came when he started writing prose. I’ve only read his fiction, till now.

There’s always a slightly disembodied aspect to Auster’s narrators and that’s true here too, even when describing his own life and things like panic attacks and health crises, or the loss of his mother, in 2002. Auster employs the second person so that even his own experiences seem to be taking place in a kind of dream state (“you” is always effective for describing the actor in a dream), especially a description of an automobile accident that occurs with Auster at the wheel. It feels a bit like watching a car go out of control—as they sometimes do—in a dream.

The best stuff is the reminiscences of things like the different neighborhoods he’s lived in, or his mother, as a Scout master when Auster was a boy, playing ball with the boys, or the way in which he is able to delineate a lot of family history in a short space. One feels that Auster, in his sixties now, sees how much of his life has been lucky. Avoiding things that could have been fatal—like a fishbone that was able to be dislodged from his throat in Paris—and experiences—like his wife—that have added immeasurably to his life. But as a “journal,” the book doesn’t really work. Though there is a certain feel of the quotidian to it, of the kind of glimpsing of life as its lived that we find in real journals, Auster is not interested in revealing anything. He seems to think that being candid about a masturbatory youth or the fact that his right hand does many things he’d not want to be caught doing amounts to “telling it like it is.” I don’t doubt that Auster is happily married. But I know something about married life, and I don’t believe in his description of it. It sounds very much like the sort of thing you write and publish when you know your wife and her friends and relations, and your children, may read it. So, not a “journal” in that sense at all. Rather a reserved and retiring performance. Not Auster’s final bow, I’m sure, but perhaps his final bow in memoir mode.

But even with my cavils, I enjoyed reading it, if only because it’s interesting to “hear” someone who is able to reflect in such measured tones about his life. Who can describe great pleasures and howls of distress with the same level of diction and inflection. It’s also a book that—and for this it may be good for students, even those not very interested in what someone their grandparents’ age has to say about life—shows how precarious is the writer’s life, and how much it is, primarily, a matter of writing, whatever else it is. This isn’t a book about how one builds a career; it’s a book about some of what goes on behind the scenes during the writing of books. The odd state of even a successful writer’s life is probably best captured in a moment when Auster, in a fit of anger and frustration, flings his bag, containing 70 pages of his new novel and a copy of Le Monde that includes a feature about him, at a cab the driver of which has refused to convey Auster, his wife, their infant daughter, and their many bags, to their destination: things can be going well, and you may be finally getting your due, but you still can’t get a Parisian cabbie to treat you with respect.

WHATCHA WATCHIN'? Boyhood (2014)

People told me I would like it. I don’t really remember who. “The part when the dad is commenting on Wilco to his son” or maybe it’s the scene when the dad gives his son, on his fifteenth birthday, “the black album,” a carefully arranged and burned double disc set comprised of the best of the ex-Beatles. Sure, we all have contemplated such an album. I know how I’d lay it out . . . and not like the dad in the film did.

But then the dad in the film really isn’t very swift. And, as one who has never been intrigued or entertained by Ethan Hawke, I’m surprised to say I found him the best thing in the film. He at least is never bowed down, always puts a good face on things for his kids. Granted, he’s only a partial care-giver, the weekend dad, but we never see him being a total asshole like every other guy his ex-wife falls for. Eventually he ends up with a new wife, a new kid, in-laws who are Christers, and he had to sell off his classic black GTO for a mini-van. And yet he faces it all with sly self-deprecation. At the start, he’s already separated from Olivia (Patricia Arquette), who mainly just looks dazed and needy—except when in front of the college class she teaches when her son is in middle school.

The film has been hailed and acclaimed—mainly, it seems, for the gimmick of filming at intervals over a twelve-year period, 2002-2013, so that the child Mason (Ellar Coltrane) and his sister Sam (Lorelei Linklater, the director’s child) age from grade school to college. Wow. But if you’ve watched an ongoing series like The Sopranos, you saw AJ undergo a similar transformation in almost ten years on the air. And that family, unlike the family in Boyhood, is at times exciting, at times entertaining. The height of entertainment here is when little Sam mimics Britney Spears to annoy her brother. And that’s in the first half hour.

It’s a slice-of-life film, alright. It starts to feel like that holiday visit you sometimes find yourself undergoing with some relations you barely keep up with because they’re so damn boring. Oh, did you ever get that masters? Oh, you’re dating your professor? Oh you married him and made a family of your two kids and his two? Real Brady Bunch stuff, huh? Oh, he drinks. Oh, he smacks you? So, you moved out on him, wow, good for you. Oh, so now you’re a professor and dating a student? Oh and he was in the military and works in a correction facility. In Texas? Uh huh. Listen, I gotta go.

And that’s just mom, who at least keeps managing one train wreck after another. We never quite learn why she dumped good ol’ Mason Senior (Hawke) except he was probably real self-centered or something. But the main story here—hence the film’s title—is supposed to be, I suppose, the journey of a child into a man. The problem is Linklater forgot to write a character for his main character. The kid is pretty minimal. Even when he has to go to school with a buzz-cut enforced by his mom’s second husband, he doesn’t get any shit. Even when they run out on the abusive psych-prof dad and Mason has to be the new kid in school, it’s all OK. Because the film is more or less PG (except for underage drinking and smoking), we’re spared anything like masturbation or awkward first times with girls. As a senior in high school, Mason kinda gets dumped when his heart-throb, Sheena, winds up in bed with a lacrosse player. Not even a football player. In Texas.

The entire film is so anodyne you find yourself waiting for something dramatic to happen—as it sometimes does to people in real life. A bout of serious illness. An injury. Hey, maybe he’s looking at the phone photo of a pig a little too long while driving, he could have an accident. Firearms! You could shoot someone’s eye out, kid! Nada. Even his boss at the restaurant he works at as a busboy isn’t really an asshole. Folks are mostly decent if you only see ‘em in little clips.

Acting isn’t really something you can talk about here because mainly the actors just get older. As a kid, Coltrane has good screen presence and as a teen who wants to be serious about photography he’s able to field with nice understated aplomb some bully-ish advice from a teacher. As a kid going to college with a scholarship he’s so low key you’d welcome a visit from any of the stoners or jocks or nerds in Linklater’s Dazed and Confused. Those kids were amusing, but then, they were portraying Linklater’s generation. Linklater knew them intimately. He knew how to find them amusing, looking back. Portraying his children’s generation, he suffers from “nice dad” complex. It’s all good! And it wouldn’t be very sporting to mock his progeny and their peers, would it? (Admittedly, there is a scene with kids hanging out with slightly older kids as in Dazed, and Mason Jr. comes home a bit stoned to encounter Mom much as Mitch does in Dazed, so, yeah. But the charm of the replay is a bit offset by the bland fact that, from Linklater's point of view, nothing has changed. The kids are alright, always.)

The most you can say is that the film is a little mean to the Mrs. among us. Like maybe Linklater has had his fill of the serial wife trying to avoid being a single mom, creating ad hoc “families” while trying to get her act together. She does, or seems to, but to her falls a badly written late scene where she basically dumps on her off-to-college son for leaving the latest nest she provided. Hers is the distress of the woman who had kids before she grew up (had the first at 23 apparently, and then another a few years later) and now feels pointless because her kids are grown up. But her cry “I just thought there’d be more to it” extends to the entire film; we hear her. She’s had a pretty basic life and has been stuck for over a decade in a dull part. And we’ve been watching 12 years go by for almost three hours.

Linklater began his career with Slacker, an exploration of a “day in the life” of Austin, TX, that kept its feet moving. It never stayed too long with any of its oddball bohemians and so they all remained more or less likeable, people you met at a party who said something amusing you might still remember. Somewhere along the way he made a career of filming Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy at intervals to keep adding chapters to what began as a “cute meet/cute date” movie Before Sunrise (1995) and then tried to be something more. As if life could really be revealed on a date. It worked the first time because everyone has that fantasy of a fulfilling “one nighter” with a stranger where it’s all about potential and promise. But “catching up” is not like that. It’s pretty much a bummer for the listener, and probably even for the participants (if they were real).

If the characters in Boyhood were real, not scripted—like the kids in Seven Up! and its sequels—then it might be interesting to see what becomes of this family, as examples of the era. Then, if it’s dull, we can blame real life, and we could even have the kids talk to the camera, confiding to us what it’s like, from their perspective in the moment. Instead, we get Mason driving a car, inveighing about online life and the robotic nature of the gadget generation to his blandly smiling girlfriend. Linklater’s daughter, Lorelei, besides doing the funny Spears imitation (maybe he should’ve just made a film about her as a kid), gets a good scene where Mason Snr embarrasses her, in adolescence, by suggesting her boyfriend wear a rubber, and another good scene when mom tells the kids they have to cull whatever they want from the house she’s selling out from under them after they go off to college. The look on the girl’s face, listening to yet more obtuse justification from this woman who seems utterly lacking in interiority, is full of internal remorse and a stoic sense of how not to give into the pain.

Linklater likes to end films with sunrise, the morning after, a trip to the outdoors. We get both in this one, when, first, Mason stays up all night, rite de passage-style, with Sheena and they sleep together in his sister’s dorm room while she’s away. Later, he and his first college roommate and two nice girls hike into the wilderness and stare off into the distance, but even when supposedly on mushrooms these kids are polite, bland, matter-of-fact. No wise asses, no aggression, no depression. I guess angst is so 20th Century.

Makes you wonder whatever happened to the kids left with belligerent, drinking dad, the psych prof. What was he so angry about? That he was trapped in a dumb role? I wonder if he and Olivia ever had a single conversation. I wonder if the kids of the father and the kids of the mother ever felt awkward living together. I wonder if Mason or the other kid had any fantasies they’d be ashamed of us learning about. I wonder if they ever listened to any music on their own and felt it defined their generation.

In a sense the film is a major statement: Living through childhood is simply biological. It doesn’t mean a thing. You just got to get through it. Kinda like watching this film.

You can buy a home of your own / Learn to drive and everything / You'll get your share / When you're a boy--David Bowie, "Boys Keep Swinging" (1979)

[Feb. 10: This just in: Kajsa directed me to this clip of online dudes discussing the extraordinary cinematic feat that is Boyhood. Yup. 12 years.]