Interesting thoughts about gangster movies, from Alice Bachini.

It's obvious from everything she writes that Alice is more interested in morals than she is in money (this being her basic complaint about the gangsters), which would explain her relative lack of money and superabundance of morals. She wants more money. Don't we all? But only so that she can stop having to worry about it. Morals she thinks about anyway, whether she has to or not, and if someone gave her a billion pounds, she'd think about morals all the time. She'd only think about money insofar as money can also be a moral issue. Is it fair that I have so much? – What is the morally correct way to spend it? – etc.

I had an interesting discussion the other day with Perry de Havilland, also about movies and preoccupations, which he said he would write about on Samizdata. But he is either busy or not in a Samizdating mood now, so I'll write up the conversation instead.

I asked him what he thought of the latest LOR movie. (I won't be seeing this, but I have no problem listening to people talk about such things.) He said it was very good and admirable, and he really liked it and everything, but that it didn't stir his soul.

His actual expression may have been the much overused "rocks my world", I fear. People really should stop saying that. It was too vivid and individual an expression when first used to work as a regular unoriginal expression for regular unoriginal people to be using every twenty minutes. It grabs my attention in a way that I really resent and feel is deeply undeserved.

Anyway, he didn't absolutely adore LOR3. Then we got talking about other movies that he does like. Memento in particular. And LA Confidential. And then we changed the subject completely and talked about philosophy, and words like "truth" and "epistemology" got used a lot.

At which point I speculated that maybe the reason he adores Memento and LA Confidential but did not adore LOR3 is that Memento and LA Confidential are both about mysterious situations in which the truth – who the bad guys are and what they are up to – is absolutely not obvious, while in LOR3 the situation is clear and the only question at issue is whether the heroes can deal with it. Bingo. In LOR3 the problem is not who the bad guys are and what they are up to. That's all clear, apparently. The problem in LOR3 is whether the good guys, who know exactly who they are, are up to the task they face, morally speaking. Do they have the endurance and fortitude and ability to stick it out and see their way to victory?

Now Perry has done all that, in his Balkan past. "Knowing who the bad guys were there was a no brainer!" Now he is on a quest for truth, and for an understanding of all the various means of arriving at it and identifying it. He is interested in any movie where the agenda is: What the hell is going on here? The mere character, or lack of it, or growth of it, of the people seeking to answer this question is of secondary importance.

Perry himself is satisfied that he is a good guy. The foundations of his character are secure in his own eyes. (For whatever it may be worth, I agree with him.) The agenda, for him, is to make better sense of the infinitely mysterious world out there. In the words of Michael Caine's Alfie: What's it all about?

Part of Perry's present blogging problem, if he has one at all, may be that whereas the agenda for Perry is: Perry making sense of the world; the agenda for Perry is not: Perry immediately telling the world as and when he finds it. First things first. First get to the complete and final Truth. Then announce it. Do not announce confused and even dead wrong versions of the Truth in the meantime, the latter process being a downright interruption of and corruption of and distraction from the former. Which is a great pity because Samizdata is definitely better when he joins in.

I will also deal at a future date with the expression "no brainer", which I also hate.

My own preoccupation, just now and for as long as I can remember and from the moment I learned to talk, is and has always been finding the exact right words to nail things down, so that I can impress the hell out of and energise (and impress the hell out of) other people. Sometimes I wish devoutly that it were otherwise. How convenient it would be to be obsessed with money, how comfortable to be obsessed with domestic comfort.

My preferred method for saying clever things is not to think in silence for days until the perfect phrase comes along. It is to fling masses of phrases every day at the verbal dart boards I have surrounded myself with, and to hope to get a regular stream of quotable and permanently useful bull's eyes. This, I think, accounts for my intense dislike of wallpaper wrecking darts throws like "rocks my world" and "no brainer".

By the way, Stephen Pollard has a list of his favourite movies up at his blog, and the overlap with my list is very high, in the sense that I like a lot well over half the ones on his list. I suspect that he's in a similar phase in his life to me, i.e. searching for the perfect phrases for things by trying out lots. Both his list and mine have characters who are trying to say what is going on around them with the perfect phrase, by saying a lot and hoping that the best of it is clever. I was particularly chuffed to see Metropolitan on his list. If your preoccupation is with, e.g., doing the right thing rather than saying it, you would find Pollard's list, and mine, insufferable.