Word: inwards
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...immigrant marriage-and-murder plot in The Silence of Lorna, a wife falling for the man who sent her husband to jail in Three Monkeys, a woman who's afraid she ran over someone in Lucrecia Martel's widely praised Argentine film, The Headless Woman - before turning sullenly, claustrophobically inward. For many vaunted directors at Cannes, this was a year of treading water...
...Start with a big bang, end with terrifying mysticism. The creation of these movies always has this method: start with the opening and climactic sequences - in Raiders' case, the South American cave with the rolling rock and the opening of the Ark with the melting skulls - and work inward. (Or as Spielberg says on the new Last Crusade DVD: "How do we fill in the middle?") Here, the bang couldn't be bigger. The 12 min. opener takes Indy into Area 51, where he escapes into what seems to be an ideal Levittown ... except that the people are mannequins...
...part this is because, over the past couple of decades, Americans have turned inward as film-culture consumers. For fun they watch the big Hollywood movies; for edification they go, in much smaller numbers, to the American indies, which have replaced foreign films as the higher-IQ supplement. Another reason is, frankly, that the foreign stuff isn't as exciting as it once was. The preferred art-film mode is dour minimalism, in which glum folks surrender to cosmic torpor in front of a static camera. Even as the pulse of world entertainment, from pop movies to video games...
...world multiculturalism. Everyone in Lahiri's fiction is pulled in at least six directions at once. Parents pull characters backward in time; children pull them forward. America pulls them west; India pulls them east. The need to marry pulls them outward; the need for solitude pulls them inward. Lahiri's stories are static, but what looks like stasis is really the stillness of enormous forces pushing in opposite directions, barely keeping one another in check. "Just being brought up by people who didn't and still don't feel fully here, fully present--that's very intense," she says...
...Tough going, but it seems of interest that this inward turn proves so pervasive, even inevitable, in every form of online expression. If the furious e-mail is the product of being concealed from other tangible humans, being nevertheless laid bare to them may induce this pathological self-consciousness. Consider Internet journals, a total inversion the dynamic of the private diary. The same goes for (another contributor) YellowBanana’s penchant for sprinkling the novel’s text with the word ‘banana’ (either vandalizing or improving...