January 20, 2008

The Long Goodbye

Film criticism has long been criticized for being the province of wannabes who couldn’t hack doing it. Generally speaking, this is a myth. Having had the pleasure working alongside Toronto’s crack team of film scribblers, I can say with some authority that the vast majority of them had no interest in making movies, and devote themselves with missionary zeal to the role of critic which the chose and now cherish. There are always exceptions, of course: it’s easy to see how someone could use the craft as a surrogate, as a way of doing movies without actually doing them. It’s especially easy for me to see that, actually. Because I’m one of them.

This has not been for lack of dreaming, wishing and vague attempting. I did, of course, get into film school, in the hopes of becoming the junior Martin Scorsese that my high-school mind saw as the end-all/be-all for film geekery. That somehow didn’t work out. At the time, I blamed it on my classmates, whom I heartily despised for what I saw as their epic ignorance and casual anti-intellectualism. But as my general alienation extended to most sectors of society (minus the lusty hatred), it was obvious that that couldn’t be it. My inability to compromise, my paranoid fear of everything that I couldn’t master immediately (like those machines we were supposed to be learning how to use) and my complete inability to talk about anything BEYOND movies was a big problem. Something else was wrong, the thing that had been wrong my whole life and which I couldn’t explain.

Eventually, it all fell apart. I dropped out of the production stream and went into theory, and almost didn’t graduate after failing to turn in one essay that I somehow couldn’t bring myself to write. After that, I drifted, gripped by a vast, sweeping depression that knocked me flat and filled me with fear and passivity. I got myself a shrink- a quack who never treated me beyond filling me up with drugs- and I got myself on disability, which solved the problem of dealing with getting a job. In my immediate vicinity, I had one friend whom I trusted enough to let into my life, and almost everyone else I experienced with either surface courtesy or simply shunned. I was an empty shell, and without a shred of insight into where it all went wrong or why I was the way I was.

One of the exceptions to this rule of alienation was our fearless leader, Bill Chambers. He matched me geek-for-geek in passion, commitment and disdain for the rabble who went to school with us; we had many a pub-set discussion about movies that gave me the shreds of respect I needed to get by. When we graduated, and he set up in elsewhere (He was in Oshawa, I was in the Big Smoke), he encouraged me to set up my own website just as he was setting up his. I limped along with mine, unwilling to put myself out there to the degree that it would take to grab some attention. Bill, as you know, was not like that at all. He hammered away at getting exposure for Film Freak Central, and built it into the internet empire that it is today; and he absorbed me into the fold, so that I might have a broad venue for my writing instead of the apologetic shrug with which I had put into mine.

Without FFC, I wouldn’t have had the opportunities that I had or the confidence to grab them: my work for Exclaim would be unthinkable, as would my forays into Reverse Shot and The House Next Door and wherever else I might have found my words. Bill single-handedly held me by the scruff of the neck as I hung over the abyss, and wasn’t letting go. I would like to say that I was always grateful for the help, but I wasn’t. The thing about powerlessness is that it tends to make you an asshole. A life of total denial makes every disagreement into a vicious affront, and every disappointment into a crushing blow; it also engenders a wicked sense of entitlement that only someone held back from participating in life can justify to oneself. Plus, film criticism was a substitute that could never give me the full gratification of saying that I was doing what I wanted to do on my own terms; and my dependency on help from the government didn’t exactly improve my outlook. Very often, I took people for what I could get, unwilling to believe I could get anything more fleeting immediate satisfactions, and this happened with Bill as it did with anyone else. I don’t know if that was self-criticism or self-exoneration, but whatever: I could be a prick.

Ten years of unsalaried work pass. My uber-quack finally does me the honour of retiring, where it’s revealed that he had diagnosed me with schizoaffective disorder without telling me. This meant that I was referred to a clinic that specialized in schizophrenia- a place of dedicated, caring professionals who were uniformly puzzled by my diagnosis. Half a year goes by with the doctors trying to figure out why the hell I had been sent there, with me half-wishing I was schizophrenic just so I’d have a name for the unnamable thing that had gripped me. And after ten years on the dole, and thirty-four years of stunned incomprehension at the world around me, It was finally decreed: Travis Mackenzie Hoover has Asperger’s syndrome.

Plunk. The pieces finally fall into place. My narrow obsession with one subject, my series of fidgety mannerisms and “stims”, my inability to decipher social situations, my tendency to blurt things out without considering the consequences, my problems with empathy in situations that really demand it, my difficulty, my alienation: there was name, a face, and an assurance that none of this was my motherfucking fault. The syndrome wasn’t bad news, it was the key to understanding my behaviour and the behaviour of everyone around me, which before had been humiliating mysteries and which now revealed themselves to be the neurochemical luck of the draw. I wasn’t a victim of Asperger’s syndrome, I was a victim of not being told I had Asperger’s syndrome, and the information lifted my depression and shredded my fear and gave me the first proof that maybe this once-nightmarish world might not be such a bad place after all.

But recovering from 34 years of dazed uncomprehension doesn’t happen overnight. For about six months, I just sort of thought: Well. This is GREAT. Everything’s gonna be JUST FINE and I’m gonna just SIT BACK and LET IT HAPPEN without doing ANY DAMN THING at all. It was sufficient, for that first little while, just to have the burden of self-hatred lifted from me, to enjoy the idea of not judging yourself for playing with your hair until you have an embarrassing horn on your head and not doing the things everybody else does. But then I sat down with that other friend I mentioned earlier, and we talked about our relationship- part of which was the terrible burden I had placed on him as my only very close friend, using him as a conduit in social sitiations and needing his help more than could be reasonably expect. There was more to it than that, things on his side of the relationship, but it was clear that this couldn’t go on- and it was clear that I had to take the same attitude to the rest of my life. I had to expect more of myself, I had to expect more of others, and I had to be pro-active about what I wanted.

By some strange serendipity, I inherited a small amount of money recently. Not enough to change my life, but enough to get me a DV camera and a computer powerful enough to edit the footage, and it’s here that the next chapter of my life begins. I’m going to try and make something about my experience, and maybe some stuff totally unrelated- in any event, the diagnosis has finally given me the sense of emotional cause-and-effect I need to write convincingly. (As a side issue, my passionate vendetta against Canadian cinema now seems to me a resentful reaction to a film culture that took my self-hatred and powerlessness and held them up as a shining example for everyone to emulate). I’m going to put my theories into practice, and I’m going to see if I can claw my way out of the ghetto and put Aspie culture on the map. And that means I have to clear out certain distractions.

By the end of ten years criticism had sort of become a soporific drug to numb the pain. My absurd output for Exclaim- in which I signed up for some of the very worst movies ever made for lack of any better way of occupying my time- had become a convenient way of avoiding doing something substantial with my time, to give myself the illusion of activity while furiously avoiding my life. That was fine pre-diagnosis, but now it’s just getting in the way. Criticism isn’t going to stop with me- not at first, anyway- but it’s got to be curtailed. I can now only do the stuff I want to see and write about, to make room for the other things I need to do; and it has to be more occasional, meaning I have to stop anything that keeps me on a grind, that has me doing soul-deadening things I don’t want to see on a treadmill. And that means, after ten years running down that road, I am hanging up my typewriter at Film Freak Central.

There are things I’ve done here of which I’m immensely proud; there is also hackwork I’ve done half-asleep while stunned by depression. Thank you for reading and considering it all. May all of us who drink from the chalice of cinema have a long and happy life in this stupid, beautiful world, and I hope you will wish me the best. As I wish it for you. Good night, film freaks.

37 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thank you too Travis.

Jefferson Robbins said...

Travis, your work for this site has been exceptional. Its infrequency is the only point at which it suffers by comparison with Walter's. I wish you best of luck in your new venture, and in your progression toward health.

Alex Jackson said...

Well, wow.

I expected to see a letter of resignation on the blog when I heard you were quitting, but I didn't expect to see this.

Early this summer I happened to take a quiz on the Internet that suggested I too might have Asperger's Syndrome. I've never been formally diagnosed (I'm not sure how I could justify doing so, unless I seek treatment for my internet addiction (superior to casual in-person contact in every way) and I'm not sure I want to do that).

But yeah, the fidgy, the stimming, the narrow focus on one thing (God, I still can't believe I brought List of Bests down to something managable), the lack of empathy in social situations (the really major one is my overly concrete understanding of death); all things I'm grateful to have a name to.

I love the statement:

I wasn’t a victim of Asperger’s syndrome, I was a victim of not being told I had Asperger’s syndrome, and the information lifted my depression and shredded my fear and gave me the first proof that maybe this once-nightmarish world might not be such a bad place after all.

It works both ways, Asperger's syndrome takes some of the blame off me but it takes some of the blame off the rest of the world too. So you can kind of begin to forgive people for not being as "serious" as you.

I believe that this syndrome contributed a lot to my strained relationship with my parents, not the least because I think my father might have it too (not unthinkable, genetic contribution is thought to be one of the sources) and a lot of the aggression he has toward me might be borne from self-hatred. This still hurts, but yeah just having some kind of name to put to it relieves me of a great deal of the culpability for it. Indeed, I wonder (though not too much) what things might have been like if I was diagnosed as a child.

Not meaning to steal your thunder, trying to offer my support. Given that there seem to be TWO aspies that just happened to write for the same site, I suspect that the film buff community is ripe with them. Meaning that if you make a film about the syndrome, you better make it REAL good or else you're setting yourself up for heartbreak. Ha ha!

Also meant to say that your review of The Jazz Singer, is in fact some kind of masterpiece, and would be a great one to go out in the sunset on. Not the least because it's quintessential Travis Hoover, infused with an intimidating grasp on film history and a refined moral consciousness.

Anonymous said...

I'm happy that you're happier, Travis Mackenzie Hoover. I still think your brief The Fountainhead review is a masterpeice. Drop by occassionally. Goodbye and Goodluck.

Anonymous said...

Your post has genuinely moved me, Travis. I suffer from most of those symptoms as well, so that combined with my own obsessive cinephilia made this read almost like biography, excepting that I never attended film school. I hope you successfully enter a new stage in your life, for your sake and as inspiration for others like myself.

BTW, I recently happened across your Conan the Barbarian review at the old Days of Thunder site. You were right on, man. =)

Unknown said...

I wish you all the best, Travis.

Anonymous said...

You will be sorely missed, man. But at least we have your old reviews to read again and again. I don't know what else to write except that you'll be missed.

Anonymous said...

Excuse my indulgence, Travis. Perhaps your goodbye will result in an epic aspie decloseting session.

I was diagnosed when I was a kid and for a very long time I denied it, likely to preserve my ego. I was sent through the special education system, forced to deal with condescension (some of which I probably earned) and dumbed down curriculums, and one year into high school I found myself in a regular high school but was still trapped within a program that I didn't really need that crippled my social possibilities while there, surrounded a couple periods a day with fellow aspies, and enduring group therapy that continually devolved into arguments where my compatriots and probably myself a few times attempted to prove their superiority to the material. I developed a true filmic hardon when I was 13, which I blame on George Romero and Evil Dead and Dead Alive (which led me via horror critic Mike Bracken to Asian horror, which led me to foreign cinema in general, and so on), and I would entertain my rather impish and demented special education teacher (though he liked Patch Adams, giving me pause) and peers on a daily basis with exuberant descriptions of my favorite gore films. Outside of that bubble, I only slowly emerged as an individual. I dealt with a crush that didn't lead anywhere and my attempts at realizing my ambition of making a feature film were non-starters and one of the few outside circles in which I found myself comfortable was the improv troupe, where my absurdist, twisted sense of humor was welcomed. High school was stifling and miserable, if only in retrospect.

I'm 19 and I'm a sophomore at Anne Arundel Community College and I've spent the last year going through the motions of the increasingly redundant film study program, while coping with the fact that I've missed out on an adolescence. I know 3 other people with Aspergers, one of whom is also film-obsessed and I can regularly be found yelling obscenities at him about his respect for Richard Roeper in the cafeteria. I nearly found myself in a wonderful relationship with a beautiful, wildly intelligent girl (perhaps one of the reasons I was softer on Juno than I wanted to be was because it is possible for a teenage girl to be somewhat like that, albeit with the mouth of a sailor) that loves everything that got me into movies (she being the first person in line for Romero's last zombie flick), but she, herself dealing with a mental disorder and with a very traumatic life that likely resulted in said disorder, dropped that thread abruptly, and has kept me around (or I've kept myself around is more accurate) as a valuable friend who helped her get through a difficult and unhealthy relationship, all which has caused me much pain and self-loathing for a while and pretty much cemented my resigned acceptance of my "difference." And in that acceptance, somehow I find myself interested in more things. I've been reading a lot more than I was and I am generally more open to a wider variety of topics though I still don't think I can. I'm not sure if there's a connection or if I've just become obsessed with the idea of well-roundedness, but I may be making slow progress.

Actually today I had the idea of making a movie from the aspie perspective, but I'd rather leave that up to you, Travis, since you're a much better critic than I currently am. Good luck, brother.

And Alex, I'm also Internet-addled, so we apparently have both these things in common. (And I'm dealing similarly with a strained parental situation, which I think derives out of my being so familiar and comfortable with their presence that they've basically become part of my environment and thus much harder to relate to.)

I feel better just getting this off my chest and into a part of the world that I feel comfortable with.

Anonymous said...

Shit, I forgot to complete a sentence:

...a wider variety of topics though I still don't think I can engage with those topics in an unstilted way.

Matt Zoller Seitz said...

It's hard for me to decide which I admire more: the unsentimental frankness with which you disclosed this to your readers, or the typically precise, expressive language you employed. Let's call it a draw. You're a treasure, man, and I'll concur that pretty much the only complaint I've had about your work is that there isn't more of it.

Write again when you feel like it, but by all means, concentrate on what you know is most important: living your life.

Ryan said...

All the best, thanks for the excellent reviews, and looking forward to seeing what you come up with - don't be a stranger!

Anonymous said...

Travis, that was beautiful and brave. As a fellow Hamilton native obsessed with movies; I'm sure that you and I share many fond memories of the Tivoli, The Century, The Broadway and the Hyland--after recently moving back to the city, and talking daily walks among the shuttered temples of my youth, I finally find myself comforted by the ghosts of my childhood. Long way of saying that I know how liberating it is to find a context for your life, especially wben self-awareness can be as much a curse as a blessing. Good on ya. I hope you will occasionally tread these boards again to initiate more discussions of Canadian film, which were among my favourite FFC pieces.Cheers.

D

Anonymous said...

I agree with everything that everyone else has said. Great job to date, and the best of luck to come.

girish said...

My most sincere wishes to you, Travis!

Anonymous said...

As always, excellent writing Travis. Break a leg with your upcoming projects.

Anonymous said...

Heath Ledger is dead. What a month.

Anonymous said...

I don't have Aspergers (I somehow feel I need to state that). All I can say is good luck for the next (first?) part of your life. I expect some follow-ups here, maybe with a teaser attached. And of course a dedication to FFC in your Oscar speech...

on the other topic: is it bad that my first thought after hearing Heath Ledger died was, »Did they finish the Dark Knight yet?«?

Ryan said...

The Heath Ledger thing really sucks - he hails from my hometown here in Australia, Perth, and we saw him just a couple of weeks back at the arthouse cinemas here. He was trying not to be recognised, and I was impressed that most of the people who did see him didn't make any deal out of a star being here in public, which really never happens. Perth doesn't really have many great exports, but besides that, worse is that he's so young, and he has a daughter, and no matter how bad it was for him, he had everything in the world going for him, he could have been helped. Terrible loss.

Anonymous said...

well i can think of a few worse ways to go than in your prime, making a living as a successful actor, lying in your soho loft waiting for your masseuse to arrive.

like, every other way.

--b.e.

James Allen said...

Travis,

I really enjoyed reading your pieces over the years, and I wish you the best of luck. One of my favorites was (of all things) your review of Smokey and the Bandit. The money quote:

"The lines are rotten plums in a thin pudding of natural-light shooting and lackadaisical mise-en-scène, leading to a total lack of care that adds up to a cineaste's nightmare."

Zing!

All the best, Travis.

Jim

Rick said...

I have all the respect in the world for the FFC critics, and Travis was no exception. I tried getting a hold of Monkey Warfare and Six Figures solely based on his brief recommendation in the Top 10 lists. ( I placed the order for Six Figures online but the 2 copies listed as in inventory were already sold)

Good luck, everyone here will miss your reviews.

Anonymous said...

Best of luck to you, Travis. I will miss reading your criticism

- KK

Anonymous said...

I was looking through Travis's reviews, and came across the opening two paragraphs of his review of Get On The Bus, that pretty much are the definitive word on message movies and should probably be shown to anyone thinking of taking a didactic approach to filmmaking but unfortunately was not shown on time to Paul Haggis.

Anonymous said...

Anybody around here see Joshua? I was pleasantly surprised by subtly creepy, blackly funny, and ultimately outright wicked it was. The ending has lingered in my mind for days.

Vikram said...

Travis, you are fearless and I wish you the best in whatever you do next.

I've always loved the fierce work that you and the others at FFC produce and I hope that we get the occasional cameo column from you when the mood strikes.

Again, all the best,

Vikram

jer fairall said...

Lovely post, Travis. I wish you all the best in your work. Always enjoyed your stuff here (I already evangelized your brilliant Jazz Singer piece, and I thought you absolutely nailed Shortbus in a similarly hipster-deflating fashion), not to mention over at Exclaim!. Keep us posted, please.

Alex Jackson said...

Anybody around here see Joshua? I was pleasantly surprised by subtly creepy, blackly funny, and ultimately outright wicked it was. The ending has lingered in my mind for days.

I liked it too, though that scene with the child psychologist really pushed credibility. I seem to remember having other problems along those lines, but I really hated that one scene in particular.

The ending was great though, as was that scene in the park. Sent in my Sundance capsule of Choke this morning and I think I'm getting to be a fan of Sam Rockwell.

Anonymous said...

Am I the only one who considers Cloverfield an act of rape?

Rick said...

A bad review for Choke? Alex, aren't you worried you may infuriate the hipsters? I bet they are already being defensive, even though they haven't seen the movie yet.

Rick said...

The only positive about Cloverfield is that they unintentionally create characters whom you want to see die. I don't really understand the use of 9/11 imagery, that seemed to be without a point.

Alex Jackson said...

A bad review for Choke? Alex, aren't you worried you may infuriate the hipsters? I bet they are already being defensive, even though they haven't seen the movie yet.

Your comment inspired me to troll for abuse and I posted a link to the review on the Choke message board. Here's the first response:

"And then there's the cheerleader who needed a stomach pump after swallowing too much semen. I want to talk about the cheerleader. I think Victor said that doctors pumped two quarts out of her stomach. Considering the amount of semen in a typical human ejaculation is about 1.5 to 5 millilitres, that's a lot of blowjobs! Two quarts is around two litres, right? So she would've had to service at least 400 men. Assuming this would take about three minutes apiece, she'd have to have been at it for twenty hours straight, without vomiting up or digesting any of the semen--which, by the way, is completely non-toxic and would not require the use of a stomach pump--in the meantime. What kind of *beep* expects me to buy this?"

This takes up a third of the review. Way to go. He later goes on to say that he has never read the book, and then blames problems with the film on the author.

Amazing journalism. << (my "self congratulatory sarcasm")

Alex Jackson said...

Ooh, got a good one.

I wanted to see what anyone else thought of the movie and came across this ridiculous review. Did Clark Gregg dump you or do you just not have a sense of humor.I never would have read your review if you had not posted it here.Your site is terrible.
Sundance is Freakin' Cold.

Children should be seen and not post.

Anonymous said...

Quiet ‘round here. Everyone must be drinking milkshakes. Recent views:

With more than a little trepidation, I finally saw Juno and was quite surprised at how much I liked it, stoked as I was by the virulent assessments from some of my favourite critics. Yeah, calling it the best film of the year is ludicrous. I’m trying to picture Ebert picking the superior but similarly overwritten high-school fantasia The Breakfast Club as the best film of 1985 and wondering just how hard Siskel would have slapped him. I will just chalk up his latest head-scratcher to Ebe’s most chronic malaise: Acute Sentimentalitis (Almost Famous? Best of 2000? Suuuuuurrreee it was.) The writing is consistently grandiose and needlessly precious in patches (the opening scene in the convenience store is also the worst) but, I found it mostly a welcome respite from the meandering Weiner-Centric riffing which currently passes for Klassic Komedy (i.e. Superbad, Knocked Up, Beowulf) Jennifer Garner (along with Mark Ruffalo in Zodiac) provides one of the most underrated performances of the year; those who dismiss that role as just another rote suburban harridan are not paying attention. Cody’s script is smart enough to trick you into that assumption, with the white suburban manse and creepy family portraits; cheap shits and giggles upended later with the look Garner gives Juno when she feels her baby kick and she transforms into a mother. It is a moment of un-ironic frisson that never comes in the similarly precocious but infinitely dumber Napoleon Dynamite. Hamburger phones and tic-tacs aside, there are small flourishes amidst the quirk which easily assert the talents of Cody and/or Reitman. I’m thinking of the last scene with Garner holding her child, a beatific still life slyly transcended by the amount of new-mom paraphernalia overflowing on Garners' night table. Wishful thinking punctuated by a little truth. Cody’s smart enough to use the familiar tropes to her advantage, and even smarter to know where to poke the holes. I think there is some merit in the Tarantino comparisons (I have not heard them here at FFC btw) when decrying Juno primarily its arch dialogue and self-consciousness. Indeed, the ostentatious, overlong and wholly unbelievable back and forth between the young women (Vanishing Point? Yuh-huh) in Tarantinos terrible Death Proof was given many a pass by volumes of crits now heaping similar scorn on Juno. Best of the year? Not even close. But nonetheless—this baby kicks. As a personal aside, given that my high school chum and I maintained a “Jeff Doucette Fan Club”, quoted liberally from Microwave Massacre while claiming membership in a fictional Quebecois street gang named “The Tremblays”—I found Juno’s precociousness strangely credible. Wish she went to my high school.

Under whelmed by Breach. Cooper is good, of course. Did not buy the Laura Linney character (i.e. Hollywood Professional Woman T1000) for a nanosecond; but charitably Linnet did her best. Streep could not have sold that crap, especially the preposterously expositional scene where she reveals the true nature of the investigation to Phillipe (Naïve Young Recruit XP1000). The less said about Caroline Dhavernas as Wife Shaped Plot Device V.6578) the better.

G’night.

Anonymous said...

Dave G, you just described exactly why the Garner character doesn't work. We are given every reason to mock her for the first half of the movie, and then out of the blue all she has to do is feel Juno's belly and suddenly her character shifts to the positive end of the spectrum, and that's basically that. It reeks of lazy writing, and the entire screenplay is glued together with shortcuts like this.

Anonymous said...

The Garner character annoyed me too (I'm honestly really tired of women being redeemed through motherhood), but I really enjoyed what they did with Jason Bateman's character. That he turns out sleazy went a long way towards endearing the movie for me, especially after they set up his extended adolescence as such an unmitigated positive early on.

I like the comparison of Breach to Juno; both rely fairly heavily on their script & actors for their appeal (i.e. neither is a visually flashy movie). Both feature more or less equally unbelievable dialogue; I think people get on Juno's case more because the way people talk is less conventional in a Hollywood sense.

I think debating about whether or not "high school students really talk that way" is missing the point when it comes to Juno. Yeah, it's self-consciously clever, but many of my favorite movies (such as the Wes Anderson films) draw attention to their own artificiality visually. I don't see how drawing attention to the artificiality of the dialogue is significantly different, or at least especially deserving of disdain. Besides, one of my favorite movies from a couple years back (Brick) had teenagers spouting hard-boiled detective one-liners circa 40s noir, and it worked fine.

Unknown said...

Hey i was recently afforded the realisation that my aspergers diagnosis many years back is infact nnow absolute bullshit, but something very low level autistic is definitely up with me as well. I experienced very recently the exact same thing you did regards to a doctor retiring while diagnosing me with a bullshit schizoaffective disorder and not telling me: Its what these guys do best, meaning get their qualifications, work the basic reading and angles, toatally hack it, and form an arrogant condescending misinformed opinion of someone...kind of like freshly film graduated coke heads that had the pyscho/sociopath trait in their genes from birth. No Doctor in my life up until now managed to identify a serious number of allergies as well...welcome to the epidemic of dumb.

"there is also hackwork I’ve done half-asleep while stunned by depression."

Damn straight. Your review of Stella is woefully inept in analysis and misplaced; or rather, totally backwards in the assesment that these people believe themselves to be superior to the world and people around them, and it is the impetus to lay this out first and provide comedy second: thats complete horseshit. The point is that the world and people at large outside this small group view themselves as morally, ethically, financially & socially superior and more stable in the grand sceme of reason, and that the group simply must work with this according to their own world view and relatively less stable/successful characters & drives as a love/hate/parody/satire to the 80s and its culture filtered through television and advertising media. The idea of needing to present acumin to obtain such a standard of living, is proven when they dance their red shoes of for the estate agents in the first ep yes...but this is clearly a riff on the pretence/absurdism of american 80s culture filtered through such crap as Melrose place or Beverly Hills 90210 post grafuation for example...and the logic of your point/analysis is completely undone by the fact that after seemingly accepting the trio for presenting the required accumine, they are then reminded or hit with the truth: All they need now is a fucking ridiculous load of money, and if they don't have that, the acumine means nothing in the context of this 80s to 90s fantasy.

Anyway i hope its working out for you fella, i know now i suffer from manic depression, and yet i understand clearly how to work with this now, by paying close attention to the misery and 'delusion' of this brought on by myself, against those of others, actual hacks...arrogant misjudging perceiving cokeheads, son of priest arrogant misjudging coke heads, steiner school mummys boy misplacing ego maniacal jerk-off coke head film students and critics of both film and peoples lives in general of which they genuinely understand nothing off and really care for past selfish/inner projewctive reasons, doctors who just want you to shut up, get a real job like everyone else and wonder when that next exotic vacation is coming up so he doesnt have to stare at any of these saps and try and figure out their problems with anything other than wank-brained wit... if this sounds a bit lairy its because your post has made me realise this dumb epidemic is stalking its way across the world and people where it has no business, and is probably doing a good job of convincing people of this pathetic spun bullshit...my plan is stay in the light and cultivate things away from these absolute empty taint-motherfuckers...

Unknown said...

apologies for poor spg, this was written very quickly and without a large supply of caffiene & the white stuff