Posted on 02/25/2012 10:31:50 AM PST by rhema
He’s ambivalent about it but the poetic details are on the money.
Claude Lanzman was upset that Shoah was no longer the primary film referent for the subject. It was more jealousy than anything else.
He’s not ambivalent about it, he HATES the suburbs:
It begins on Sunday; you take your car to be washed. You have to drive it but it’s only a block away. And, as the car’s being washed, you go next door with the kids and buy them ice cream at the Dairy Queen and then you have lunch at the plastic McDonald’s with seven zillion hamburgers sold. And then you go off to the games room and you play the quarter games: Tank and the Pong and Flim-Flam. And by that time you go back and your car’s all dry and ready to go and you get into the car and drive to the Magic Mountain plastic amusement park and you spend the day there eating junk food.
Afterwards you drive home, stopping at all the red lights, and the wife is waiting with dinner on. And you have instant potatoes and eggs without cholesterol – because they’re artificial – and you sit down and turn on the television set, which has become the reality as opposed to the fantasy this man has lived with that entire day. And you watch the prime time, which is pabulum and nothing more than watching a night light. And you see the news at the end of that, which you don’t want to listen to because it doesn’t conform to the reality you’ve just been through prime time with. And at the end of all that you go to sleep and you dream about making enough money to support weekend America.”
That’s not ambivalence, that’s loathing.
Or maybe Claude Lanzman, who isn’t at all alone in his criticism, has a point.
That sums up the suburban experience for many.
It only sums it up for people outside it that hate it and the people in it.
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