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February 11, 2007
The So Beautiful Season
Adam Gopnik wrote a piece in January 8, 2007 edition of The New Yorker titled, The Unbeautiful Game. It was about the issue of football stats and why they haven’t really become as important to fans as baseball stats and why they are starting to do so now.
In the process, he pulls in theory and quotations from a book called In The Praise of Athletic Beauty by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht. And it struck me as I read it, that these ideas relate powerfully to the ongoing discussion of why people, professional and civilian, become so obsessed by the Oscar season.
“We watch sports not out of identification with the players but out of a kind of happy absorption in someone else’s ability: ‘The euphoria of focused intensity seems to go hand in hand with a peculiar quietness. I am at peace with the impression that I cannot control and manipulate the world around me. So intensely quiet do I become and so quietly confident, at least during the second when my favorite football team is talking through its next play in the huddle, that I feel I can let go and let come (or not) the things I desire to come.’
In other words, when we watch… what we feel isn’t pathetic and vicarious but generous and authentic: we give up a bit of ourselves in order to admire another. We’re broadened, not narrowed, by our fandom. Our connection with our heroes is through an act of imagination, and the act of imagination, not the connection, is worth savoring and saving.”
The argument that The Oscars are a mostly meaningless and self-indulgent orgy can not be fought. And really, how can we argue otherwise about 22 men or 10/11/12/13 on a field of play? But the passion of how we watch and engage and absorb and imagine is not meaningless.
How those of us who earn a living off of the season behave is a different argument altogether, though there is a fan element there as well. And some day, with some perspective, a sane analysis of how those of us in this game have chosen to position and promote ourselves, sometimes honestly, sometimes otherwise, might be fascinating as well.
Thoughts?
Imagination?
Posted by poland at February 11, 2007 03:23 PM
Comments
Dave are you high?
Posted by: martin ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.mcnblogs.com/thehotblog/nav-commenters.gif)
at February 11, 2007 05:22 PM
^^^ Uh-oh.
Posted by: Kristopher Tapley at February 11, 2007 05:34 PM
Never in a million years would I have expected to see Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht mentioned on this blog.
Posted by: Blackcloud at February 11, 2007 05:50 PM
"self-indulgent orgy can not be fought"
ick. not a nice image Dave.
well I watch them to see the clothes, especially the men's suits for sinister reasons of my own, swig out of a hip flask, then wait for the vicious partygoers around me rip on the pageantry.
I actually rather see Prince's halftime show again. At least there was some element of surprise in that!
Posted by: Lota at February 11, 2007 06:11 PM
Why high?
Please grace us with an idea, Martin.
Posted by: David Poland at February 11, 2007 08:37 PM
Wouldn't this work better as an argument for why we watch movies? I'm not sure how it fits with the Oscars, which don't seem to fit the criteria that Gumbrecht is applying. Those criteria being, as far as I can gather, the categories of aesthetic experience established by Kant in the Kritik der Urteilskraft.
I never thought I'd see Kant discussed on this blog, either.
Posted by: Blackcloud at February 11, 2007 09:01 PM
Movies don't really have winners and losers. The Oscars, like sports, do. No?
Posted by: David Poland at February 11, 2007 09:16 PM
That is so, but I don't think the "happy absorption in someone else’s ability" applies to the winning and losing, since that is posterior to the application of the ability, which is what it appears Umbrecht is concerned with. You can argue that the absorption is contingent on our anticipation of the result, but again, it's not identical to it. The Oscar season doesn't elicit the same kind of "act of imagination" that Umbrecht seems to have in mind with sports. They aren't, in other words, commensurate aesthetic experiences, if in fact the Oscars are an aesthetic experience in the first place. That's why I suggested on this basis the comparison works better with movies. Now, if you're comparing the Oscars and sports because they both have losers and winners, that's a valid comparison, but I would claim that's a different argument than the one Gumbrecht is making.
I must qualify these remarks by stating that I make them having read neither Gopnik's article nor Gumbrecht's book. I am going on only what is quoted here.
Posted by: Blackcloud at February 11, 2007 09:53 PM
While the idea that fandom is an extension of connecting to the art/artist sounds understandable and very human, there comes a point where it's not really productive anymore. You wouldn't treat Beethoven or Mozart as racehorses and we shouldn't be casting great directors like Scorsese and Eastwood into this kind of competitive drama either. Of course, we all do it anyway, but...it strikes me as problematic.
Martin, every few months DP gets all contemplative-like.
Posted by: jeffmcm at February 11, 2007 09:56 PM
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