{"id":38127,"date":"2011-06-22T13:09:41","date_gmt":"2011-06-22T13:09:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/a-wilderness-of-contradictions\/"},"modified":"2011-06-22T13:09:41","modified_gmt":"2011-06-22T13:09:41","slug":"a-wilderness-of-contradictions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/a-wilderness-of-contradictions\/","title":{"rendered":"A Wilderness of Contradictions"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/lareviewofbooks.org\/post\/6784958198\" class=\"tumblr_blog\">lareviewofbooks<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><b>F.X. Feeney<\/b><br \/>\n<br \/><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/66.media.tumblr.com\/tumblr_ln645kbQWi1qhwx0o.jpg\" \/><b>Christopher Sorrentino<br \/><i>Death Wish<\/i><\/b><br \/>\nDeep Focus\/Soft Skull Press, November 2010<\/p>\n<p><b>Jonathan Lethem<br \/><i>They Live <\/i><\/b><br \/>\nDeep Focus\/Soft Skull Press, November 2010<\/p>\n<p> \u201cIs <i>Death Wish<\/i> a good movie that ultimately fails, or is it a bad movie that succeeds brilliantly from time to time?\u201d Christopher Sorrentino asks this at the outset of his brief study of the 1974 film, before turning to wrestle with a more lawless possibility: \u201cCould it be both?\u201d  Such questions may prove over time to be the running theme of Deep Focus \u2014 a paperback series launched in late 2010 by Soft Skull Press, of which Sorrentino\u2019s <i>Death Wish<\/i> is the second, following Jonathan Lethem\u2019s provocative look at John Carpenter\u2019s <i>They Live<\/i> (1988).* The approach in both is lively and heretical. \u201cI\u2019ve never seen a Carpenter film in a theater except <i>Memoirs of an Invisible Man<\/i>,\u201d Lethem tells us by way of introducing himself. We are in the newfangled realm of criticism post-cinema:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>A Netflix copy of <i>They Live<\/i> plays behind these words as I type. Not a television screen in the same room, but the computer\u2019s, on which my document also appears. Thanks to contemporary technology \u2014 not just DVDs, but YouTube excerpts, available via wireless signal in the caf\u00e9 where I write sometimes, if I\u2019ve forgotten to bring the disk \u2014 I\u2019m Pauline Kael\u2019s ultimate opposite here: I\u2019ve watched the entirety of my subject film a dozen times at least, and many individual scenes countless times more (Kael used to brag of seeing each film only once).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Improbably close readings of questionably canonical texts are the order of the day in these books, and the authors \u2014 both of them novelists \u2014 are clearly aware of the willed incongruity of what they\u2019re doing. Sorrentino quotes Herman Melville\u2019s description of the \u201cIndian Hater\u201d from <i>The Confidence Man<\/i> \u2014 \u201cHe commits himself to the forest primeval; there, so long as life shall be his, to act upon a calm, cloistered scheme of strategical, implacable, and lonesome vengeance\u201d \u2014 in order to illuminate the peculiar magnetism of Bronson\u2019s death-dealing vigilante. <\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/lareviewofbooks.org\/post\/6784958198\">Read More<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>lareviewofbooks: F.X. Feeney Christopher SorrentinoDeath Wish Deep Focus\/Soft Skull Press, November 2010 Jonathan LethemThey Live Deep Focus\/Soft Skull Press, November 2010 \u201cIs Death Wish a good movie that ultimately fails, or is it a bad movie that succeeds brilliantly from time to time?\u201d Christopher Sorrentino asks this at the outset of his brief study of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[],"tags":[780,1539,781],"class_list":["post-38127","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-edp","tag-emergent-digital-practices"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6PWot-9UX","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38127","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38127"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38127\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38127"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38127"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38127"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}