30 ROCK Ends But I'm Reading Michael Chabon's Take on Wes Anderson's Movies' Authenticity So I'm Okay
1. 30 Rock's take on the danger and yet the pleasure and honesty of tyrannical selfishness is too funny to take seriously but at the same time too plausible to put aside. Sketches like Jenna Maroney telling Tracy Jordan something like, "Why do I care? It's not like you're me." and Tracy Jordan telling Liz Lemon, "Which means when the law conflicts with our desires, then we must operate outside the law. You following me?" are ironic and smart as hell, but when you put them in the context of real life where these lines are not made verbal but made manifest in the most familial and painful backstabbing scenes and where the people who made you a zygote show you the most animal form of selfish denial and most minimalist explanation of why they even made you on this earth, it’s kind of a big-time drag.
2. I like and have seen what IMDB has shown as the complete commercial films of Wes Anderson and they’re all great good fun motion works that I immaturely claim as accessible art, but they don’t hit my experience the way Georges Simenon’s 6 Little Crosses in a Notebook or Gus Van Sant’s Good Will Hunting did, so I just take Wes Anderson by the side and arrogantly see him as popcorn moviemaker that I’d still follow but won’t consider as my personal guide and yardstick towards reaching non-life. That, until I read Michael Chabon’s Wes Anderson’s Worlds in the NYR Blog.
3. The article takes me back to the good deception days of college where for every academic paper I make I refer to quotes from imaginary books,magazines, and authors I made up and take this imagination as the authority backing up a statement I also made up (Thank You Albert Einstein’s Imagination Is More Powerful Than Knowledge!). The papers got impressive passing grades and are a parallel to what Mark Zuckerberg did in The Social Network when he claimed that his hacking of the administration’s DDT-I.R. 344- SSL database is something the school should be thankful for because of the sole reason that it had highlighted the glitch in the database that if M.Z. hadn’t caused to botch, would’ve cost the school billions and thousands of future privacy lawsuits. Immoral lesson: make things beautiful and people of supposedly strong influence will dig it. That's what Hitler did.
Anyway, to quote Chabon:
“ All movies, of course, are equally artificial; it’s just that some are more honest about it than others. In this important sense, the hand-built, model-kit artifice on display behind the pane of an Anderson box is a guarantor of authenticity; indeed I would argue that artifice, openly expressed, is the only true “authenticity” an artist can lay claim to.”
3. 30 Rock and pretty much all the good Sarah Silverman and Louis C.K. comedy I’ve seen are extremely bitchy and simply painful and but yet still contain the most personal and temporarily unforgettable answers and coping system templates I keep in dealing with the worst evolving memes of phony adult dealings. So then I learned: to be sensitive, try to be rude and honest about your being crude. Try not to pretend you understand other people’s feelings. Nobody does. Also, your parents will die pretty much basically today.
