lend me ur eyes 078
I saw the first The Lord of the Rings film recently in the cinema. It was a fantastic experience. I have no real idea if the film is actually any good, because the experience of watching it is so nostalgic that I’ll never be able to have any aesthetic distance from it. There is no criticality there, just a rush of feelings and memories from childhood rising again and hitting in wave after wave of chemical pleasure. The first time I saw the film was when it came out in December 2001, when I was ten-years-old. I was in New Zealand with my parents visiting my mum’s brother, and we all saw it at a multiplex in Wellington. I just had a flicker-vision of there being a massive cave troll installed on the cinema’s roof, and googling this confirms that this memory was indeed real. It’s hard to overstate quite how big a deal the film series was in New Zealand at the time, and, from what I understand, it remains a significant point of national pride. I had the film tie-in edition of the three books, all packaged together in a single fat paperback with a terrible cover, and also a commemorative set of stamps made to promote the film. I think I saw The Fellowship of the Ring twice more in cinemas in the UK in the month after that first viewing in Wellington, and I’ve loved the trilogy ever since.
What stood out watching the film now—beyond how amazing all the locations are, how good the visual effects still seem, and how beautiful all the miniatures and the matte paintings are—is how sweet that first film is, how full it is of love. Everyone cries during the scene when Boromir calls Aragorn his “brother,” his “captain,” and his “king” (a line which is apparently not even in the book), and then again straight after with the one with Sam and Frodo in the water, but I was also taken by the film’s message about how heroes don’t need to be brave, strong, or even especially capable, just persistent and resilient. In Middle Earth, showing up and keeping going counts for more than anything else. And, back in this world, the film’s arrival felt opportune. I’m not exactly sure why the film was on, but in retrospect something about it seems suspect. There was no particular anniversary, re-release, or marketing event that I am aware of. The whole trilogy was shown, in “HD versions” of the extended editions, and apparently they took much more box office than expected. So much so that they’re on again next weekend. This in itself seems strange, because surely these films will always print money? Everyone loves them. I suppose they are on to generate anticipation for the next series of the television show, or this animated film releasing later this year, but it feels like something else too. Like they were hastily put on as a distraction from something, potentially the forthcoming election. What did we miss while inside the cinema for three-and-a-half hours? What went down while we watched the fellowship slowly wander on, mouths agog, smiling when they said the familiar lines? And does it even matter? Sometimes life starts to feel like too much. When that happens you look at what distraction your local multiplex has to offer. You load the listings and see some truly miraculous text unfurl in front of your eyes. “THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING - EXTENDED EDITION, 7.30PM, £7.50.” You buy a medium mixed popcorn, a 12 ounce cup of pick n’ mix, and you walk in, sit down, and press the button that makes the cheap leather chair noisily recline. “It began with the forging of the great ring.”
WATCHING
It’s received wisdom now that the web is dead, that algos killed what promise there was, and that with everything becoming so insular and on-platform, it’s all gone anti-curatorial and lowest common denominator. I don’t disagree, but what is maybe a more true assessment is that it is just much harder to browse it now. There is still goodness there, but you have to fruitlessly filter through a lot more nothing in order to find something. And yet, among all the void detritus, things do emerge. The other day, GC put me on to Nick Cheong, a bedroom DJ that the algorithm served him on Instagram, and the videos had an immediately click effect on me. I think it is something about his joyful tweaks and twitches and the calculated personality of it all, that delicate midpoint between authenticity and an awareness of audience, of weirdness and palatability, realness and performance. From there, I found his YouTube, which has about 4000 subscribers at the moment, but definitely gives that feeling of being on the ground floor of something about to go interplanetary, of seeing a rough draft of a superstar about to be born. One video I liked a lot was “short movie about love,” partly because it is only two-minutes-long but gives a good, split-second sense of his voice and style. It’s a diary film of sorts, shot scrappily on a handheld miniDV and iPhone, all at night, set to Frank Ocean. It is at once ironic and sincere, which is no easy thing to pull off, and it works because it uses image and sound to transmit emotions without any need for words. The best video of his I’ve seen so far is “i drove to nyc with no plan and slept in my car for 4 days” which is what I imagine a regular vlog is like, but with stupid jokes, chopped-and-screwed hip hop tracks used either as intervals or as momentum building devices, and a style of shooting that reminds me of Semi-Auto Colors, still one of my favourite films of all time. It’s clever and funny, and very well edited, with a beautiful sense of pathos that registers above all. I also very much like this 45 second video where he shaves his head, transforming him from the goofy, lonely midwestern kid he plays in the vlogs to the cool guy post-nerd mashup DJ seen on his Instagram and in the newest frat party videos.
lend me ur eyes is a linkdump of what i'm into month by month: music, books, games, movies, and other internet detritus, with misc editorial misgivings in the intro. lend me ur eyes friends, so that i can see.