(no subject)

[pantryslut]

"If I am to write about a show-business product that even halfway evokes the globe's current meltdowns, then the only real choice lies in [...] Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. From this entertainment, I learn that we are stuck, all of us, inside an injurious debacle that no one will shut down; a debacle that has gained an awful fascination, and assumed power to drag on indefinitely, precisely because of being injurious. We see in Spider-Man the blind overreliance of the world's elites on dubious technologies; the determination of the investing class to press on, no matter how many people get hurt; the profound complicity in the disaster of the Commentariat (always so censorious, yet always quick to remind us that profit justifies all); and from the suckers in the seats, a self-confounding horrors over the destruction they're buying, combined with a readiness to pay for more. We even see the psychological dodge, standard in politics and entertainment alike, that permits us to endure, and endure, and endure. Consensus settles on Julie Taymor as the bearer of evil, Taymor as the figure who must be sent to Azazel. A supposed genius-leader who previously was heroized all out of proportion, she is now made an object of derision by people who (for all her shortcomings) can't claim a tenth of her achievements."

-- Stuart Klawans