| Sure, Dali and Lynch are definitely film school's textbook answer. > I get that the complaint is that at some point people start replicating the form Not really, the complaint is genuinely with the originals. Even at their best, we get what from surrealism, maybe one message? ie, the norms of artistic expression are fundamentally arbitrary? That's just... the sort of thing I expect any 16-year old to find obvious. So I can entertain a few possibilities: 1) Everyone finds this message, which I find obvious, to be deeply profound, to the point where they want to be bludgeoned with it over and over. 2) No one actually understands why these films are good, they're just endorsing the bizarre to look intelligent. Or parroting what film professors or critics said about them, who in turn made careers off of taking iconoclastic positions. 3) There's something deeper in these forms of art that I haven't directly experienced and no one is quite able to articulate. 4) People like what they like. (Hat tip to John Hodgman.) I've never really found overwhelming evidence to support or disconfirm any of the alternatives, and not holding out hope I ever will, but would love to see it someday. I genuinely would like nothing more than to hear that (3) is the right answer. I've had multiple hours-long conversations looking for support of that one. In the absence of persuasive evidence in any direction, I should probably favor (4). It has no predictive power as a model, which sucks, but of the available options, it's the most charitable to all concerned. |