Friedrich Schiller on tigers, etc.

"In a truly beautiful work of art the content should do nothing, the form everything; for the wholeness of Man is affected by the form alone, and only individual powers by the content. However sublime and comprehensive it may be, the content always has a restrictive action upon the spirit, and only from the form is true aesthetic freedom to be expected. Therefore, the real artistic secret of the master consists in his annihilating the material by means of the form, and the more imposing, arrogant, and alluring the material is in itself, the more autocratically it obtrudes itself in its operation, and the more inclined the beholder is to engage immediately with the material, the more triumphant is the art that forces back material and asserts its mastery over form. The nature of the man who sees or hears the work must remain completely free and inviolate; it must go forth from the magic circle pure and perfect as from the Creator's hands . . .

Nevertheless it does not always argue formlessness in a work, if it makes its effect solely through its content; it can just as often be evidence of a lack of form in the observer. If he is either too tense or too languid, if he is accustomed to read with his intellect alone or with his senses alone, he will get no further than the parts even with the most felicitous whole, and no further than the matter even with the most beautiful form. Being responsive only to the crude element, he must first shatter the aesthetic organization of a work before he finds enjoyment in it, and carefully disinter the particular qualities which the master with infinite art has caused to vanish in the harmony of the whole. His interest in it is either solely moral or solely physical; only precisely what it ought to be--aesthetic--it is not."

And a thousand bad karma points for comparing Alain Delon to Audrey Hepburn. William Blake is not amused.

Ass-Headed Bottom: Koko, I have no chance doing battle with you on unstable Romantic ground, but I will try to fling a handful of sandy notions in your Tyger-eyes to at least distract you.

1. None of Schiller's diatribe means that any old orange shmata with black stripes is a real tiger. It's possible to take this shiot endlessly seriously and still come away from Le Samourai feeling like the coolest things about it were the hilarious automobiles.

2. Hmmm... Call me anti-Teutonic, but I have trouble agreeing with any German aesthetic calling for "the wholeness of man," "mastery," "triumph," and, good Lord, the "annihilation of the material." Triumph over what, exactly? The only triumphs that interest me are instructive and worthwhile failures.

3. Whatever happened to aesthetic balance? Look at all the "onlys" all the "alwayses" in this passage? Why indeed should the appreciation of art be either wholly formalistic or wholly moralistic? Even Aesop managed to dress his living jackass up in a dead lion's skin. Even Aesop knew enough to put a jackass inside his lion-skin. Form and content, even now and always.

4. Although Fred's language is compelling enough, his logic is surely gobbledygook. You know this better than I do; take the passage apart: does the first "Therefore" actually mean what it says? Are the initial, intermediate, or closing truth-claims even remotely legitimate? Or psychoanalyze the bastard: does the second paragraph follow from the first, or is it trying to make up for the insufficiencies of the first by blaming the reader? Isn't it possible that this very passage is all style? If so, doesn't that kind of fuck us?

5. As for Mr. Blake, well, the answer to his question, "Did he who made the Lamb make thee?" is a resounding "Yup," which makes me feel like there is something wrong, even for that insane illustrator, with the escape-route of just marveling at the tiger and not dissecting it. Or at least with not lining the tiger up next to the lamb? What am I trying to say? I dunno. Maybe that Le Samourai can't stand alone, without comparison to rival movies, to films that already sacrificed style for content. But how many books do you esteem solely for the nasty things they did to their sources? Probably the same number of books you esteem for being pure style and nothing more.

6. Uh-oh. I've stopped being clever, and all for a movie I didn't like... Forgive me. I will endeavor to be more accepting of the medium.

7. Tigers are cool, but I kind of prefer ocelots. Or cod-cods, or housecats. Those, you can talk to.