Looney toons always has a pair. One who “gets it” and one who fails.
Pairs, like Tweety and Sylvester. Or Wile E Coyote. Maybe in some complexity of three with Tom and Jerry (and that bulldog), but mostly in regards to two, such as Bugs and Daffy or Bugs and Elmer Fudd.
These scenes resemble little more than snapshots of complex schemes often with little change between how one scene connects with next; they all occupy the same region; they are interchangable; syntagmatic.
Contrary with more contemporary cartoons, these looney tunes begs the question; who are we to identify with? How do we enter into the narrative? We relate with one or the other: The one who struggles with desire or the one who achieves mastery?
“meep meep.”
Neither position really presents much in the way of identification — at least for modern audiences. In such vignettes, at least for me, my interest is in the interplay between the one who “gets it” and the attempts of one who does not.
I guess in that sense, Venture Brothers is the same way. Only they all pretty much fail.
No one gets anything. Not the Guild and not O.C.I..
Even the super secret agents get confused about the counter plot. Don’t you see? It’s all just a test to prove your mettle, to see if you ‘get it’ or not!
Even the super powerful agent Brock Samson is at times reduced to an angry gorilla. ‘Getting it’ depends largely on understanding your role at all times, and no one can do that. Everyone fails at some point, with the twists and turns in the plots and complex schemes. We can’t always see how we stand with or among others.
What’s intriguing in Venture Brothers is that despite super science and heros and villains a reoccurring theme appears with older characters who have given it up.
So then theres “life outside discourse” where you “settle down”… (Venture Brothers episode 406)
This is very insulating, in the sense that we are walking into a dichotomy. Whether it is “settling down” or ruling the world, Everyone wants the dream-life. In the larger picture, we just don’t know what the idea ‘it is’ or ‘how it could be’. Again, those who ‘get it’… are who we want to be, if its the start of a career as a super scientist or one who is washed up at the end of it and ‘knows better’.
I think that kind of story (finding your way in or out of a discourse) is more interesting than ones where “the course of discourse must be decided” on “the battlefield”
Examples of the latter? Like Bravehart or Twilight or Star Wars… (we won’t talk about these because they are really boring as the ‘answer’ is obvious from the start, the journey is supposedly in the resolution of the conflict, but it is ‘safe’ conflict as the ending is pretty much guaranteed.)
An example of the former?
Married with Children is one example of the former. So life is gappier. You talk the big talk, Al Bundy (or Marcy Darcy or whoever) but then through the twists and turns you are revealed to be empty. To be a fraud, to only have your dreams. Dreams no one else really cares about.
Do you get it?
In Venture Brothers, the character we follow, for whom things are revealed, must always ‘figure it out’. The colorful side characters always ‘know more’ or ‘know nothing’ but become part of the tapestry as mastermind or victim/bystander.
There is a third kind of discursive position though, one in which things are arrows, in terms of maintaining the discourse.
Sitcoms repeat drive states until one character “gets how to deal with that imbalance” before life can return to its normal repetition.
IRL is probably more like sitcoms, although sometimes we think it’s about “getting it” in which case we think others “get it” and we try to “get it” too, or at least fool others into think we “get it” until we actually become one of those who “get it”. This is best seen in business where new businesses spend an inordinate amount of time convincing others they are legitimate….
The problem with imbalance and return is that IRL there’s really nothing to return to.
Just like there ain’t a discourse that’s inscibed in the cosmos, only ones inscribed in us. And we select from those partial lines.
IRL is like a bad play that just won’t end.
If, like the current movie, j Edgar, maybe we can improve the narrative if we tell it out if order so it’s not a flat narrative in which we repeat cycles. But why not sacrifice ‘realism’ if you are going to step Outside the chronological line and stage a trial by gods where j Edgar must recall his life in purgatory and judge himself…
So the conflict is drawn out — already j Edgar relies on voice overs and incidential parallels in time to explain the character reasoning which we wouldn’t otherwise get without it. In fact, the movie starts off with j Edgar relating to an agent to write a book; he supplies a narrative in order to reconstruct his own life, suggesting for us that he is the mastermind of his own plot — (calling into question what for us, might be the actual meaning).
This is very IRL — when here on the blogosphere, or with friends, we explain how we were in the recent past — to give continuity and identity to our current actions. We explain ourselves into a discourse, bring others into the fold so as to legitimize what we are doing right now.
For j Edgar, the voice belongs to a disembodied super ego which lasts beyond the narrator’s own death. But wouldn’t it be more interesting if the voice overs was the disembodied id and the determination in the scenes was due to the superego attempting to weave a dignified plot line?
As it is, the movie starts out it was the ego but it shifted when you caught up to the ‘narrative present’…
And then confusingly surpassed it.
Over all, with j edgar, it’s too easy to understated. The movie asks the wrong questions. We want to make a tragic figure? But it was too much a victimization…
Aristolean conflicts with the cobbled story line not withstanding.
If we could be explorers. Would it be best told as Marlowe or as Kurtz?
Between Naruto and Sasuske the story is told by the witness, Sakura. Not by Sherlock Holmes, but by Watson, a bystander.
Cuz, you know, Sakura is otherwise worthless. And that is the role others play for us, to witness it, and share it, to legitimize it. The crow lets the pawnshop owner to live and run back and ‘tell the tale’ so that others may know his story. Others can ‘get it’ too.
so, back to that shared discourse, it is the effort to legitimize our behavior within a symbolic (larger social reality) which Lacan was able to extract from Freud and speak of it directly without Freud’s troublesome metaphor.
I think that is pretty much Lacan right there; we get a calculas of who ‘gets it’ and ‘who does not’ and how we are each frauds — without substance and with substance– but in different ways. I think if there is a lesson to be learned is that we must not believe in the ‘getting it’ that ought to be gotten. That even adults are frauds, and that everyone is nothing in the face of the awesome sublime. Nonetheless, some ppl can be okay with nothing, and the job of an analyst is to help you become okay with nothing. And that ppl who are okay with nothing have nothing over those who are not okay with nothing. That there is no difference, and it is this nothing that makes no difference difference with everything.
I mean, yeah, zizek says that too. But he says more than that, although its not much more… its this nothing that really helps you see where Zizek and Buddhism collide. Actually it’s fuzzy in my head, but I think Zizek did mention it, in some book, I forget where, at the end of Parallax Gap, maybe. I saw it years before he wrote that book, but someone was bound to eventually point it out in print.
Zizek himself said it. Because then at that point, he ‘got it’ too.
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