David Richter

Afterthought on “The Empty Subject and the Art of Ethics”

Bouncing into Graceland: The Coordinates of Musical Expression

the authentication of musical experience - middle-class discontent and self-loathing - a Jungian mystical approach mediated by futuristic video-game imagery - eucharist for the society of the spectacle - an American essence eminently ethnic in nature - « the days of miracles and wonder »

Notes on the Period Film

« you could not have new objects! » - the aftermath of a war - candy-colored and gynocentric melodrama - testimony of unreliable witnesses - purging past sins and corruptions - a relation, however dialectical, to the « real world. » - rhythm, after all, is a synchronic phenomenon - a kind of innate and habitual conservatism

Exiting Somewhere: Sofia Coppola and the Excess of Bourgeois Asceticism

It is the stillness that the rich attempt to escape - metabolism - Nietzschean master morality—when attempted - neurotic anxieties and violent outbursts - a gap that takes the outward appearance of waste - « deep » Oedipal dramas - upper-class Bartlebies - bourgeois ascetic values - the ascesis of celebrity

Lars and the Real World: Dogville as a Political Film

the fullest possible representation of this world - Lars von Trier, a genius both maligned and misread - « the only reward a film-maker gets, the only thing he hopes and longs for » - both pornography and movie-watching in general - the sins of history - moral rearmament - « cognitive mapping » - the secret affinity between suffering and media culture - partially successful ways of dealing with reality