aristide1 wrote:I never got the impression that Darko really understood his role in time travel until the very end, to the extent that when everything "rewound" he didn't place himself back in his bed as much as he was placed there by the rewinding though he was aware of the impending disaster and the end result. But it wasn't like he fell into a worm hole from his last position similar to the jet engine.
I think that we think the same thing about this, but I wanted to say something about it. Yes, when Darko 'goes back' and rejoins the 'real universe' just before the tangent universe's creation, it is not of his own power, and he is merely experiencing his jumping around. But what he does do is choose to stay in his bed, rather than go outside. By choosing to stay inside, he chooses to stop the tangent universe from being created. So in a sense, he still had power over the saving of the universe, but it's not like he clapped his hands to do so. He just chose to stay in his bed.
aristide1 wrote:Well one wonders just how much connection will be made with something as convoluted as Donnie Darko. In today's society eyewitness testimony is becoming useless because one thing happens and witness recounts are all over the place.
I would like to make what I feel is a very important distinction between art and what I will call fidelity. I will try to make the distinction clear with respect to photography. When I take pictures, I have, as the shooter, incredible power over what the end result of my picture is. Merely by the act of deciding what is framed in my shot and what is not, I am fundamentally changing the reality of that picture. Imagine that I am taking a picture of a balloon floating in a room. If someone were in the room with me, they would see what is holding the balloon, the lighting in the room, what is in front of the balloon, what is behind it, etc. But when I take that picture, I am completely limiting what the observer sees to exactly what I want them to see. No longer am I capturing reality in its purest sense -- what I have done is taken a snippet of reality and filtered it to suit my needs.
I contrast this with what I'm calling fidelity. Sometimes when taking pictures, I try to take a picture 'as it is'. Of course, a picture really can't be exactly like the subject you're taking, since one is paper and ink, and the other is...whatever. But when I do things in this 'mode', I'm trying to capture it as I saw it. For example, I may take a picture of a cityscape, trying to match the picture with what it was like to see that city. I won't give undue attention to any single object in the picture, since that was not as I saw it.
All this was just to say that I think the distinction between describing art and describing a real-life event follows this same cleavage. Since, in art, one understands that what is being recorded is not an attempt at retelling things 'as they happened', but adding wrinkles and filters to what happened, that is why interpretations are so open. So when one person has one explanation for a part in a movie and I have a different one, then I to some extent 'agree to disagree'. This is different in real-life scenarios when witness testimony differs, however, because in this situation there was something that 'actually happened', and this is what we're trying to see, not 'how the event made me feel' or anything like that. Finding out what the actual event is a monumental challenge for sure, but it is quite different than finding meaning in a work of art.
Lastly, I would like to comment about the whole 'audiophile' debate. Granted, not all audiophiles are out of touch and don't care about actual music. If you got that impression from my last post, that was my fault; I was being imprecise with language. So yes, being an audiophile doesn't make a person one who knows nothing about music. And yes, listening to a more accurate reproduction of a piece of work can bring out new threads in music that weren't appreciated on lesser equipment. But I would also say that listening on 'lesser equipment' can have its own merits.
Listening to a recording trying to have every sound come through is one way of listening to music. But at a concert or some live event, one doesn't hear every nuance of a song. And it could be argued that this would be the purest form of auditory experience. To jump examples, do not Monet's fuzzy impressionist pictures not have a life of their own
because they aren't as accurate as they could've been? What about Seurat's pointillism pictures? What about (I'm sorry, I grew up in the '90s) post-grunge bands that purposefully add distortion in their guitar performances for effect? I am in awe at pictures taken a hundred years ago that have more character and presense than I could ever hope to capture with modern photographic equipment. It's almost as if the imperfections in reproduction by themselves add a new element to these pictures.
Again, I totally agree that accurate reproduction of music is a wonderful thing and can add a lot to the experience of music. But listening to music on a beat-up device in a loud environment can have value in itself.