handful_ofdust: (eccentricities)
[personal profile] handful_ofdust
Re yuki-onna, talking about how the ending of Watchmen doesn't work for her because she's been "Neuromancered"...WTF does that even mean, exactly? I read Neuromancer, but about a million years ago, and it occurs to me that perhaps it was exactly as not-so-impressive to me, in the end, as Watchmen was to her. But seriously: There's something "innate" in a received-wisdom sense that I'm supposed to be getting from the reference about how best to end a book, right? And...I'm just not gettin' it, sorry.

I should probably be asking her, I suppose, rather than the universe at large. But I get the feeling I'd just get slapped for being dumb, and I'm not all too into that right now.

Date: 2009-02-17 02:10 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] handful-ofdust.livejournal.com
No, definitely; I get that. Used to teach film history, so I've seen it a hundred times before--the syndrome where you show them something like The Godfather and they go: Man, what a rip-off. But...what do the ending of Neuromancer and the ending of Watchmen have to do with each other at all, aside from maybe Manhattan going off saying "I think I'll create some [life]" being a bit like Wintermute going off to chase alien AI tail? Or is it that Pauley possibly being still "alive" in the ultraweb is better than Rorschach being "kept alive" by his own writings? Or...what?

Date: 2009-02-17 02:25 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] readingthedark.livejournal.com
To me, that's all she was saying, that her subjective and personal reading experience of the two may have been hampered by the rip-offs. (I almost mentioned The Godfather in my original comment.)

The fact that she mentioned Neuromancer going into the riff on The Watchman, just to me, wasn't actually an attempt to connect the endings of the two.

Date: 2009-02-17 02:37 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] handful-ofdust.livejournal.com
Ah. Okay. Thanks.;)

Date: 2009-02-17 03:05 am (UTC)
sovay: (Lord Peter Wimsey)
From: [personal profile] sovay
Used to teach film history, so I've seen it a hundred times before--the syndrome where you show them something like The Godfather and they go: Man, what a rip-off.

It's still not a reaction that makes sense to me; I find that really amazing art, whether visual or cinematic or literary, does not lose its effectiveness even after it's become a cultural cornerstore and been imitated, quoted, homaged into infinity: otherwise no one would ever bother to watch Casablanca anymore.

Date: 2009-02-17 04:23 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] handful-ofdust.livejournal.com
Well, yes, this. And Shakespeare, what-have-you. Mythology's mythology--the only thing which differs is execution, and when both coincide, that simply does not go out of style.

Then again, we're also talking about people who didn't want to watch Koyaanisqatsi because of "all the '80s hair", and people who said, when I said: "But of course, you've all seen Silence of the Lambs, replied: "But that's really OLD!"

Date: 2009-02-17 05:15 am (UTC)
sovay: (Psholtii: in a bad mood)
From: [personal profile] sovay
and people who said, when I said: "But of course, you've all seen Silence of the Lambs, replied: "But that's really OLD!"

*headdesk*

Man. Learn cuneiform. Complain to me then.

Date: 2009-02-17 05:39 am (UTC)

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