A Start

I was talking to my wife yesterday about the best openings to films, ever. Or more specifically I was positing unscientifically that Manhattan has the best opening to a film, ever (even though I wrote differently here. I changed my mind, alright?). Anyway:



See?

The point is that this here, that I'm building with typing and linking and self-aggrandising, isn't a great beginning. This blog was created, ooh, ages ago, when I still lived in Sheffield, and was intended for writings about film which didn't fit into either the (fairly limited) magazine stuff I was doing, or my ongoing PhD, which is about changing models of authorship in contemporary Hollywood. Of course, freelancing, writing a PhD and having two children means I never had the time to write a single entry - no disaster, since I barely had the time to have any thoughts which could be wasted by not being written about.

So, to now. The blog is resurrected primarily as a public shaming tool for myself. I'll make friends aware of it (hello, friends!) so that the weight of humiliation is awkward and pressing. See - this is the crux of it - I have been writing my PhD for four and half years. I've been doing it slowly, when I can and, lately, hardly at all. I have until the end of August to submit a full draft of 70,000 words. I currently have around 35,000 words written, and so am undertaking to write 2000 words a week from now on.

I'll post here mostly to keep a record for myself. There will be at least one post weekly. Each post will end with a running total, counting down from 35,000, of how many words are left to write, and how many have been completed that week. Mostly the posts will be involved and dry, and uninteresting for casual readers (sorry, theoretical casual readers!). They will say things like:

Last night I rewatched Manhunter to prepare for writing the second part of the Lynch/Mann chapter. I enjoyed it more than ever - title credits and climactic soundtrack choice aside, it's brimming with edge and intelligence, and it's hard to see how it wasn't recognised at the time. I'll be focusing on the film's emphasis on voyeurism and modes of looking (back to not understanding Lacan properly - hooray!), and the specific use of videotapes - the capture and exploitation of experience - in the detective narrative. The most striking thing is still how closely the character of Dolarhyde and his killer's MO fits Lacan's model of langauge/symbolic order/mirror stage, with the use of actual mirrors and his speech impediment. I'll be using the film mostly as a comparison to Blue Velvet - both films released by DEG within a month of each other in 1986 - and Lynch's fetishised conception of performance, but I'm also wrestling with the significance of Blue Velvet's similar correspondence to Freud's Wolfman case. It the connection mostly due to the inherent voyeurism both films depict? Or is it a reflection of the engagement of independent studios in intellectualised sex? And, relatedly, was Ziggy in Quantum Leap named after Sigmund Freud? It's just been brought to my attention that he might.

I'm cheating, because I haven't written any of this yet. Next week will be more honest. Like I said, I know what I'm writing here is out of context and, well, I don't want to say boring, so I won't. But niche. Specialised. All the euphemistic words the marketers of the films I'm studying use to describe their tough sell Euro titflicks and auteurist impenetrables.

The count:

Words remaining: 35,000

Oh, and here's a picture reward, for getting to the end - Manhunter's two promo posters, showing typical alternative strategies. Top - classy intellectual thriller, bottom - kick-ass exploitation cop flick. I love them both.