Pay TV for me is a bit like smoking dope for those dudes in high school that everyone knew and probably everyone actually was at one stage. Like the way to ascertain if a dope smoking session had been an authentic dope-smoking-session depended on whether or not you solved the problems regarding the Meaning of Life and articulating the MoL proof in the argot of surfie-bogan. Similarly, a few times since being home I have veged out in front of the telly and have found myself thinking very mysterious thoughts… What are mysterious thoughts? Not my regular thoughts… Well regular for someone who reads D&G with his morning cereal as his morning serial. Oh, dear. Speaking about myself. How embarrassment. Yes, I wanna get very self indulgent…
After checking out what was on Cartoon Network, I flicked on through catching a flick that struck me as capturing in a remarkably clear manner one of the problems that has been bugging me for a damn long while. The film is entitled Me Without You and is very, very interesting. Not only because it mentions ‘deconstruction’ in an intelligent way, but it also has some fuckin cool music.
What grabbed my attention where the respective plights of the two main characters. They are friends and it is a ‘toxic relationship’ as the little blue button on my pay TV remote told me in the description of the movie. One, Marina (played by Anna Friel), is scared of being normal, having a family and kid and all that shit. Her mum attempts a suicide via overdose and I got the impression that was how she was going to turn out for most of it. The other, Holly (played by Michelle Williams of “Dawson’s” non-fame), is continually somehow halted from developing a relationship with Marina’s big brother, Nat (Oliver Milburn who looks a lot like this other bloke I know named Myke who now lives in Melbourne!!! WTF! If Mykle ever needed a job he could get one being this guys stunt double or, at least, his stunt cock;). Holly is the “intellectual in the family” as Marina‘s mum describes her and has a big future being a journalist and writing books – she is also the one who delivers the line about ‘deconstruction’ as a critical methodology losing its viscerality or something like that…
The dynamic between Marina’s utter self-loathing (she even wears a t-shirt that says “I Hate Me”) and Holly’s stultified potential are two sides of my very own self. I realised driving home from an indoor soccer match earlier this evening that I really do loathe my own existence. Not in some happy Disneycide way that you find on a brain-numbing evening soap where the pretty young thing hates him or herself compared to some other knob. I don’t hate myself, I quite like who I am and I don’t think I would like to be anyone else. I am not talking about envy masquerading as self-loathing, I mean the real deal. I find my very existence problematic. Here is my list of existential self-loathings:
List deleted. I was scaring myself.
Opposite the self of annihilation, which is really just a tendency and I shall get to that later, is the site of potential, played by Holly in the filmic representation of my self. Yep, Glen doing his PhD, blah blah blah. I just deleted a whole lot of random, boring stuff.
My problem is how to deal with this self-loathing. Should I aspire to have a good job, family and house? Should I aspire to succeed? Should I aspire to fulfill my potential? Which potential? The one where I become the best damn Borg on the planet by efficiently assimilating (at least I’ll have to start going to the gym again), or the one where I am motivated by never ending sense of awe I feel when I witness the utter stupidity of the world.
Surely this is a problem that everyone with a nanogram of critical spirit realises about their own existence living in such a painfully unjust capitalist society where everything is taken for granted. It really does shit me to tears sometimes, but blokey tears so they are silent and I let them run down my face like they aren’t there.
I have been really bugged by this since I got an email through the CSAA list and then read on Melissa Gregg’s blog about a research project for “early career public intellectuals”. I find that term extremely problematic – “career” alongside “public intellectual”? How is this possible in the current era of sportsmen who speak like bankers and once-were-academics who have to whore themselves for an income by fitting into this fuckin system. ‘Career’ is the historical workplace-based process of deterritorialisation by capital. Of course that would never happen, look at all the wonderful examples of ‘public intellectuals’ who are very well placed in their careers we have around us. However, ‘early career’ is problematic as it signals a tendency or aspiration toward an eventual deterritorialisation by capital. It makes my blood turn cold. How can ‘early career’ and ‘public intellectual’ be reconciled so easily without an unacceptable compromise on either side of the divide?
Fuck I dunno…
fuck, took me two hours to write that!!!