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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Jim Rockford
Published Letters: 12 Editor's Choice: 6
Dear LW,
Let me first acknowledge the difficulty, the emotional crush, of your situation. I hope you've read through the many thoughtful responses readers have posted here, and ignored Cary's misguided if gentle ramblings about men needing time, etc. before making these sorts of fundamental decisions that govern the course of a relationship. Yes, thinking and evaluating is wise. But your significant other is displaying a distinct indifference, and coldness, in response to what is a perfectly reasonable request two years into an adult relationship. You have asked to meet his daughters, to be more fully in his life. He simply does not want this.
I have quoted Will Shakespeare above on the nature of love -- love shows itself, love acts, love moves, love listens. Your significant other has a dubious record and may indeed have pain and shame related to the broken engagement as Cary suggests, but more likely, and especially at his age, he has a long-standing, deep streak of self-centeredness that poisons his relationships.
As you indicate, you are over 50. Frankly you deserve far more and far better. It is time to move on, firmly, absolutely.
Sometimes a cut to black is just a clumsy cut to black. Rather than a sublime meditation on nihilism, the blank screen that stunned viewers last Sunday indicated a failure of nerve on the part of David Chase. David Chase is not Goddard, not Truffaut, nor even David Lynch. One should be cautious about trundling out the long-outdated aesthetic theories of dead white European males -- Brecht, Derrida, Baudrillard, et. al. -- from the 1940s-1960s to somehow authorize the impoverished narrative chess move Chase executed. He left us in check -- not checkmated. We were not left with an ending, a meditation on endings, or an illuminating gesture in some metanarratological direction, just an obnoxious, splattered rorschach. In order to demonstrate the ultimate alienation of the bourgeois viewer from the filmic text, Chase should have presented us with two hours of black screen. That would have accomplished far more methodologically than a two-bit soap opera designed to titillate a masochistic audience awaiting it's final punishment.
In truth, the Brechtian "fourth wall" was firmly in place throughout the series. The Sopranos was a soapy mobster genre piece that "aspired." Unfortunately, in the process of pretending to be something it wasn't it recklessly muddled complicated meta-issues dealing with the nature of psychotherapy, existential crises, and the social location of violence in our society. These potentially meaty issues, barely explored, were merely flickering red herrings distracting from the fundamental thrust of the narrative throughout, which in truth was just a retelling of older stories -- Wiseguy, the Godfather, Goodfellas, etc. The heavy ironizing of the scriptwriting and painful self-consciousness of the actors, revelling in their imagined cleverness, distracted from the intellectual appeal of the series from the very first episode. The final episode ran true to form, like a soap opera, with no profundity inherent in the text itself but rather leaving the overimaginative viewer to interpret the wads of symbolic feces which had been thrown against the semiotic wall for Chase's gorilla-like enjoyment. In the end, the show just sputtered -- not as an acknowledgement of some epistemological event horizon beyond which the viewer cannot peer, but rather as if HBO productions had forgotten to pay the lighting bill on the final day of shooting.
"The finest plans have always been spoiled by the littleness of them that should carry them out." (Brecht)
"Lights out, ah hah, blas blast blast." (Peter Wolf)
"And kind old King George sent Mother a note when he heard that Father was gone.
It was, as I recall, in a form of a scroll, with gold leaf and all.
And I found it one day in a drawer of old photographs, hidden away.
And my eyes still grow damp to remember, His Majesty signed with his own rubber stamp."
Reading Rose's piece on fatherhood proved to be both profoundly disturbing and depressing. My heart aches for his unfortunate sons, who will sense their father's overwhelmingly condescending and detached assessment of their young lives, wishes, hopes, and thoughts. I sympathize with the "10 or 20" years younger wife who is coldly described in this scenario as a hysterical caricature. Rose, in his raging arrogance, writes as though he alone has an inner life. Must this letter have been inflicted upon us, especially on this holiday? If it missed the attention of the editors of Salon, Rose's disaffected stance is entirely cliched. There are millions of patronizing, emotionally absent fathers. The world is brimming with them.
I quote the lyrics of Roger Waters (above) as a counterpoint to the most tragic aspect of this letter: a father's callous indifference to the most profound needs of his sons. Rose is an absent father, not physically, but he is removed by both his age and by his conceit. And his sons will feel this. Children ache for the approval of their fathers and they feel the sharp pain of a father's absence or indifference for their entire lives. Waters's great opus The Wall was inspired by the pain Waters felt at growing up without a father (his father was killed in World War II). The theme is well-represented in literature: Shakespeare's great, late play King Lear shows what violence a father's arrogance can wreak on his own life as well as the lives of his children. I am deeply saddened by Rose's alarmingly complacent disregard for the emotional needs of the young human beings he helped bring into the world.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Once seen as a lunatic fringe, reactionary anti-women groups are courting respectability
Salon headlines in your mailbox
