ellie Voyyd's Website

Buffalo '66, Tropes, Liberal Individualism

i was thinking about how great of a film Buffalo '66 is
yet the director was a Romney Republican
i think this and a lot of other limit cases or instances
where a film or piece of media by a conservative
being good tends to be a mindfuck for liberals and
a lot of the left too is that,
liberalism is inherently against Universality,
the general belief of liberals is that, ultimately,
having good opinions comes from "being" good,
and also that "being" good simply means having good opinions
this virtue ethics pervades liberalism but,
also a lot of the left, and the right too dont get me wrong
i am purely talking about why things like this "dont make sense"
it is because we do not have any faith in a Universal experience,
every individual's experience is a singular ivory tower.
liberals can not comprehend that they have shared experiences with
people that disagree,
because they believe that experience determines consciousness.
what about CLASS consciousness, though?
surely the EXPERIENCE of being a part of the ruling class will
distort someone's consciousness, and THAT is why
individual members of that class have a certain consciousness.

no, experience is universal,
similar to Heidegger's formulation of Being:
we all "partake of being", all "experience" in the same way.
Being is Being.
So what is it that causes change in consciousness?
what could it be other than experience?
the conservative, theological and even liberal response is probably
"soul" or "faith" or some secular equivalent concept,
some sort of mystical, spontaneous, self-moving "will"

for a marxist, consciousness stems from material relations.
those relations can give way to "experience", but that experience
is an effect of those relations.
what, then, are opinions, political stances?
they are opportunistic rationalizations.
What we say about our beliefs does not mean anything, it is babbling.
left or right or anything else, it is all virtue signalling,
hence the constant back and forth of one side "annihilating" the other
yet the back and forth never really stops.
to bring it back to art, since ive gotten too off topic,
when we make art that is to tell a story,
that is guided by our experience, emotions, etc,
and intended to provoke perception in the audience.
the outcome of the work is not determiend by the author's experience.
the author can provoke in the viewer a feeling they don't know,
intentionally or unintentionally,
that is the POINT of fiction, anyway.
the reason an author is capable of this,
is because of the universality of Being, of experience.
now what an author OUGHT to do,
is take that universaltiy and make it an explicit focus,
make it central and intentional,
love stories, tragedies of loss, comedies,
these tropes are powerful for a reason,
as much as i myself, an avant-garde artist dismiss tropes,
they are powerful because they touch on universality,
not that the experiences are universal, but the relations are,
the feelings in response to the relations, etc
and so, tropes are fine, they are good even, really.