Stories Abound Of The Animatronic Shark Stalling The Moment It Hit Water And Sinking

To mark the thirty-fifth anniversary of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, NPR’s Cory Turner set out on a journey to find Bruce, the fabled mechanical shark star of the film, and ended up at a junkyard in Sun Valley, California.

The Great Dramas Of The Last Decade Are Great Precisely Because They Found Certain Limits Of The Form

With both Lost and 24 wrapping up this week, Richard Beck looks at our fascination with serial television dramas for n+1. With Joyce Carol Oates’s famous 1985 TV Guide gush over Hill Street Blues as a starting point, Beck traces the evolution of serial narrative from its beginnings as what came to be the nineteenth century novel:

The Glimmer Twins Now Seem To Preside Over A Mild Outbreak Of Tickle Fighting

Much has been written this last week of the Rolling Stones remastered release of their 1972′s masterpiece, Exile on Main St. Vanity Fair provides a rundown of the many (and many absurd) tie-in merchandise offerings related to the re-release, along with a slide show of unreleased photographs that French photographer Dominique Tarlé took while living with the band at Villa Nellcôte in the summer of 1971. At the New York Times, Ben Ratliff wonders why the alternate take of “Loving Cup” on the newly released outtakes disc never made it on the album proper.

They’re Hardly the Only Ones on the Block Playing Charades With Their Lives

Emily Colette Wilkinson considers the new film The Joneses (2010, Derrick Borte) for In Character as the latest in a long line of American imposters, including American Psycho, American Beauty, Weeds, and Mad Men, in which “the authentic life looks a lot like the fake life, or the two are so interdependent that it’s hard to tell where the lie ends and the truth begins.”

If the symbolism is a little heavy-handed in retrospect, the image is still a chilling icon of the real emotional and spiritual devastation that decisions and failures in our material lives can have-the kind of devastations that many Americans are still wrestling with right now.

Click here to read the essay.

The Birth of the Wurlitzer From the Spirit of Faust

Mute’s Nina Power examines the evolution of film soundtracks — from an organ designed to drown out the sound of the projector in the silent era to today’s pop playlists and brass crescendos.

Commercial cinema’s desire to block out the machine, to smother the jolts and gaps between movement means that music is often seen as a kind of empathetic patch, a device to pretend that the frames and hyper-technicality are always put in the service of larger, smoother, humanitarian wholes. ‘Mickey-Mousing’, the practice of exactly matching music to image, may be something we associate with animation from half a century ago, but this often comic self-consciousness of the relation between the sound and image is far more radical than the surreptitious manipulation of familiar emotions that much of today’s cinematic music pursues. But mainstream cinema remains one of the few places where sounds and music could potentially afford to be brave.

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Basted in the Suspended-Animation Subjectivity of 1980s Hiccuped Grandiosity

Through an intertextual analysis of films such as Greenberg and Hot Tub Time Machine, and novels such as Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask, A.O. Scott examines the apparent midlife crisis facing the generation christened by Douglas Coupland as “Generation X” in his 1991 novel.

Note the sudden swerve from world-historical grandiosity to consumerist banality; the attempt to camouflage sincere confusion with winking insouciance; the obsession with generalizing a personal experience.

Click here to read the essay over at The New York Times.

For America, Tom Beaudoin, author of Virtual Faith: The Irreverent Spiritual Quest of Generation X, reflects on Scott’s conclusions as reinforcing some of his own observations:

For what it’s worth, what strikes me as most “true” about Scott’s analysis is the surprising permanence of the deep sense of the absurdities of adult livelihood; I think that I mean the sense of objective craziness about the system registered in shows like “The Office,” except that “The Office” becomes the type for mainstream adult work, including in church and academy, of almost all shades.

Click here to read Beaudoin’s essay.

All These Zombies Represent a Plague of Suspended Agency

From Shaun of the Dead to Zombieland to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, the walking dead are the monster du jour. At n+1, Mark McGurl analyzes our ongoing fascination with the undead and wonders, among other things, if our culture is looking in a mirror.

But what if we were to venture a different, more literal interpretation of this cultural symptom, which is after all only one of many signs that we are currently witnessing a zombie renaissance? Perhaps the zombie attack on Austen’s novel is telling us that the novel is neither alive nor dead but undead. We are living in a time when what counts as “life” is in significant scientific dispute, and in the heyday of zombie computers and zombie banks, zombie this and zombie that. Why wouldn’t we also be living in a time of zombie literary forms? Whatever their specific emphases and intricacies, all these zombies represent a plague of suspended agency, a sense that the human world is no longer (if it ever was) commanded by individuals making rational decisions. Instead we are witnessing a slow, compulsive, collective movement toward Malthusian self-destruction. Of course all monsters are projections of human fears, but only zombies make this fundamentally social and self-accusatory charge: we the people are the problem we cannot solve. We outnumber ourselves.

Click here to read the essay.

Their Lurid Covers Keys to the Secrets of the Universe

From The Believer archives, Andy Selsberg looks back at the abundance of teen sex comedies that were so abundant in the early 1980s.

While a few of these pictures, most famously and especially Porky’s, did big business in theaters, their true home is on VHS and the dark corners of cable, the two types of media that helped pave the culture for such wet dreams. In the ’80s, parents of adolescent boys weren’t quite sure how to operate VCRs or cable, so sex comedies that failed in theaters could still be made and routed to their proper audience.

Click here to read the essay.

They Drop Us in A Murky Vortex of Authorial Intent

To say that James Nguyen’s Birdemic: Shock and Awe is a bad movie sort of misses the point. (If you’ve not yet had the pleasure, check out the trailer.) Jonah Weiner takes a look at the recent cult phenomenon, and examines how even a movie built around animated gifs of attacking birds can remind us of film’s power.

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The Desire of Tormented Neurotics to Obliterate Themselves

As Jonathan Rosenbaum continues to add his older film writings to his blog, he continues to unearth forgotten gems — even recent films like the Charlie Kaufman-scripted Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004, Michel Gondry).

All of these movies are founded on goofy, surrealist fantasies concerning the thwarted desires of neurotic and ineffectual characters, and all have scrambled methods of telling a story, including juggled chronologies and viewpoints. It’s refreshing that Kaufman is using his growing fame to make his experimentation even more audacious and complex, trusting his coworkers and audiences to be equally adventurous.

Click here to read the essay.