Deep Focus Series

Soft Skull Press is putting together a series called Deep Focus, which pairs “the smartest, liveliest writers in contemporary letters” with whatever films they want to write about. So far I can see Lethem on They Live (hope he talks at length about the fight scene), Christopher Ryan on Lethal Weapon, Matthew Spektor on The Sting, and Chris Sorrentino on Death Wish (though I think either Mr. Majestyk or Prime Cut would have been the more intriguing choice here.)

And apparently Douglas Rushkoff, posting over at BoingBoing, has seen some galleys. A snippet:

I read Lethem’s time-coded analysis of They Live on an airplane while I watched the film on my phone, for the perfect DIY mini-Criterion experience. Lethem is one of my favorite writers anyway, but experiencing him wax on about Nada and the ghouls was perhaps the highlight of my summer reading. Here he is on Shephard Fairey’s original OBEY campaign, which began as a reaction to the “obey” signs revealed beneath ordinary advertisements when characters in the film wore “Hoffman glasses”:

Fairey’s interventions occupy the same uneasy middle ground as They Live itself: on the one hand, the termite arts of graffiti or of the deliberate B-Movie, marginal activities carrying a subversive potential past the sentries of high art. On the other, the gallery-ready postures of text-artists like Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer, or of the Cahiers table of “conscious” auteurs – Hitchcock being the supreme example – at which Carpenter may occasionally be granted a shakey seat. Too poisted and context-aware to be claimed as primitives, too crass and populist to be comfortably claimed for the high-art pantheon, Fairey and Carpenter both oscillate dismayingly in the void between.”

Or, a bit later…

“Kruger and Holzer’s non-sequitor interventions briefly attained a gallant purity, but they’d always needed the gallery or museum context as a quarantine against recontamination. Their work degenerated anyway, refamiliarizing into po-mo moral rhetoric or reappropriated for fashion layouts. What makes Shepard Fairey’s populist gesture insipid is is how self-evidently it awaited a product retrofit, a proceed-to-checkout button. When the OBEY t-shirt or CHANGE political campaign rolled out, no one, least of all the ‘artworks’ themselves, even hiccuped.”