may I refer you to the video in question:
While I think "explaining the joke" would remove this video's comedic value, and to those really value that I suggest you dont read this and go on with your life, I just want to talk about this in depth because it is very conceptually interesting to me. To those of you who have not seen the video(and I don't blame you, I too would rather be on that app for far less of my life), our narrator, @declanmcollins, shows us a compass of two axes; the oh!/ah axis and the ooo/hmm axis. The oh!/ah axis is one of comfort, oh! here refers to a sort of surprise or beaing caught of guard and ah as a being in a relaxed state. The ooo/hmm axis is presented as a sort of mark of intellectualism, the ooo here being pure beastial attraction and the hmm being something that provides a more intellectual challenge, we could imagine this as a measure of (dis)embodiment. We will explore these quadrants in the same order declan does.
1. "frankenstein", surprisingly embodied:
I would really like to see a rothko, and I think this is the perfect way to explain this category. Modern art is often understood as conceptual, beyond the general publics comprehension, but Rothko's work is entirely experiential. The sheer size of the painting is supposed to cover your entire field of vision, theres nothing abstract about it, the entire fucking thing is in front of you. Its a bit confrontational but its there, there's no trick.
2. "cup of tea", relaxedly embodied:
This is where we will find what most people find to be "good art", still life, portraiture. Theres absolutely nothing wrong with it, I personally find it aesthetically pleasing as well. We often have alot of appreciation for the craft of these works, but they are decidedly not confrontational. These works make up the cannon, the commonly accepted "art".
3. "water cycle", relaxedly cerebral:
This is the only quadrant in which there is no art, but rather "art theory", this is the inner workings of the art, the reason the art work, the grammar and spelling rules of various art styles. This makes the art tick, this creates the meaning, if we dont associate the colour blue with sadness then the curtains are just blue and whats so interesting about that?
4. "mad scientist", surprisingly cerebral:
Margritte's "ceci n'est une pipe" is the quintessencial "concept art", along with Yoko Ono's grapefruit or, most memes. This is the space of conceptual art, usually made by people who understand the rules of conventional art and are the exact kind of contrarian asshole who goes out of their way to break those rules. To be clear, we do need contrarian assholes to an extent, I really don't know where we would be without them culturally and societally.
5. "frankenstein" surprisingly embodied:
It may make sense to understand the frankenstein as a return to the body through a sort of ceberim. What makes the frankensteins embodiment so surprising is that it was made by the mad scientist(eeerrrmmm actually etc. etc.). The reason I present this to you as a cycle is that it kind of operates in such a way, this could be seen as a cycle of disruption at the top of the graph(the mad scientist and frankestein) and settlement at the bottom. We could visualise it as starting at the bottom of the diagram to begin with, 2. cup of tea, the material world is settled, then we move to 3. water cycle, the settled world becomes abstracted and mapped, we progress to 4. mad scientist, we stretch these maps in different directions and break them, making the opportunity to create more world giving us 1. frankenstein. Creation, this is the domain of god and us, we make art and infrastructure and while it often seems new fangled at first*, even uncomfortably so, it integrates into the world and the cycle continues.
I really dk exactly what I'm talking about, like I think this is hegelian but I haven't read enough hegel, only zizek. but I made a graph if that helps:
Ok, while we are on this topic: Nolan is the anti-Lynch; let me explain. Both filmmakers seem to have similar extratextual interests, they both champion the cinema and have an attitude of allowing the audience to experience the film for themselves rather than explaining it for them. On the surface the divergence occurs where Nolan creates puzzle box films that you have to figure out, sometimes with a Nolan film it feels like the film is getting in the way of the idea, this is perfectly exemplified by his work being rooted mostly in science fiction, a genre often labelled the "genre of ideas". Lynch's work on the other hand, initially appears more viscerally motivated, his movie drawing from genres like thriller and horror which intend to create a reaction in thair audiences, to be experienced, this is solidified with his poetic filmmaking style, Lynch's surrealities create an atmosphere where we as veiwers feel compelled to stop making sense of the images.
But all is not as it seems! On further inspection it may appear that in both cases the opposite is the case. In Nolan's case we can turn to a line from Tenet(which I haven't seen in full, I must admit), when the main character is learning about the time scifi tech, he is told something along the lines of "don't try and understand it, feel it", which I've heard countless times used as a mantra for approaching his films in general. Lynch on the other hand is far more intentional than he lets on, we can look at his art practise as an example, there is text strewn around everywhere, as with my examples of what I described in the main body as "concept art". Lynch is poetic but not meaningless, and while he obfuscates the meaning he does want you to look for it. That is not so say that Nolan is meaningless, the meaning for Nolan is the experience of the art, and Lynch's work is not entirely conceptual, his work is some of the most affecting I've ever seen on a visceral level.
Lynch and Nolan here make two sides of the same coin, where Nolan moves from the idea to the embodied Lynch moves in an opposite direction, but they both contain fragments of both.
Idk i could just be saying some bullshit.