Jimmy Finlayson
By:
August 27, 2009
All hail the Mighty Fin! For was it not JIMMY FINLAYSON (1887-1953), third banana in 33 Laurel and Hardy films, who offered us emancipation through his unique enactment of The Double Take & Fade Away? Let us explore the three stages of political consciousness that The Fin elucidates.
The First Take: The conventional bourgeois response to social relations and capital, wherein all is normalized and therefore no significant surprise is registered, no mater how bizarre the circumstances.
The Double Take: The moment of revolutionary epistemological rupture wherein, for the briefest of moments, a new reality thunders through the consciousness, accompanied by an exclamation like “D’Oh!” — i.e., the anguished cry of a drowning man who briefly inhales the oxygen of truth.
The Fade Away: Unable to sustain the unthinkable fury of heightened consciousness without a concomitant change in base-superstructure systems, The Fin invites us to squint suspiciously at a partially restored reality: i.e., to treat the world of First-Take Bourgeois Normativitism with swivel-headed paranoia.
In conclusion, let us therefore denounce Homer Simpson for his counter-revolutionary usurping of Finlayson’s “D’Oh!” — and let us strive to retrieve The Fin from the dustbin of two-reeler history.
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On his or her birthday, HiLobrow irregularly pays tribute to one of our high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes. Also born this date: | Jeanette Winterson | Paul Reubens
READ MORE about members of the Modernist Generation (1884–93).