Shocking Blocking (47)
By:
May 26, 2013
Wrestling “is not a sport,” noted Roland Barthes, in “The World of Wrestling,” a trailblazing 1952 example of semiotic cultural analysis. It is instead a “spectacle,” one whose “primary virtue [is] to abolish all motives and all consequences.” In the lowbrow, amateur (“true”) wrestling “performed in second-rate halls,” Barthes elaborates, there is no story; there is only a kaleidoscopic assemblage of “moments” over which — like a jigsaw puzzle — viewers are invited to brood. For precisely this reason, although it has been savaged by middlebrow critics in search of a plot, I can’t get enough of Jared Hess’s amateur-wrestling movie Nacho Libre, a sum of spectacles (to quote Barthes) of which no single one is a function. At the level of form Nacho Libre is a “writerly” text, one whose unity is forever being re-established (Barthes, again) by its composition; as such it bears comparison to Scorsese’s Goodfellas. Extract the perfunctory story-advancing scenes set at the monastery where Ignacio (Jack Black) works, ignore even the movie’s actual wrestling scenes, and you’ve still got brilliant moments like the one shown here — in which religious codes and wrestling codes intermingle, in a way that is somehow at once both funny and moving.
An occasional series analyzing some of the author’s favorite moments in the positioning or movement of actors in a movie.
THIRTIES (1934–1943): It Happened One Night (1934) | The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) | The Guv’nor (1935) | The 39 Steps (1935) | Young and Innocent (1937) | The Lady Vanishes (1938) | Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) | The Big Sleep (1939) | The Little Princess (1939) | Gone With the Wind (1939) | His Girl Friday (1940)
FORTIES (1944–1953): The Diary of a Chambermaid (1946) | The Asphalt Jungle (1950) | The African Queen (1951)
FIFTIES (1954–1963): A Bucket of Blood (1959) | Beach Party (1963)
SIXTIES (1964–1973): For Those Who Think Young (1964) | Thunderball (1965) | Clambake (1967) | Bonnie and Clyde (1967) | Madigan (1968) | Wild in the Streets (1968) | Barbarella (1968) | Harold and Maude (1971) | The Mack (1973) | The Long Goodbye (1973)
SEVENTIES (1974–1983): Les Valseuses (1974) | Eraserhead (1976) | The Bad News Bears (1976) | Breaking Away (1979) | Rock’n’Roll High School (1979) | Escape from Alcatraz (1979) | Apocalypse Now (1979) | Caddyshack (1980) | Stripes (1981) | Blade Runner (1982) | Tender Mercies (1983) | Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life (1983)
EIGHTIES (1984–1993): Repo Man (1984) | Buckaroo Banzai (1984) | Raising Arizona (1987) | RoboCop (1987) | Goodfellas (1990) | Candyman (1992) | Dazed and Confused (1993) |
NINETIES (1994–2003): Pulp Fiction (1994) | The Fifth Element (1997)
OUGHTS (2004–13): Nacho Libre (2006) | District 9 (2009)
Joshua Glenn’s books include UNBORED: THE ESSENTIAL FIELD GUIDE TO SERIOUS FUN (with Elizabeth Foy Larsen); and SIGNIFICANT OBJECTS: 100 EXTRAORDINARY STORIES ABOUT ORDINARY THINGS (with Rob Walker).
It would not surprise me at all to find out that Jack Black had read ‘Mythologies.’
Sam Pratt liked this on Facebook.
RT @HILOBROW: NACHO LIBRE is exactly what Roland Barthes was talking about in his semiotic analysis of wrestling: http://t.co/JBfCShD6mq
Devin McKinney liked this on Facebook.
An overpowering obsession with narrative, story, and plot (whatever you must call it) will be the death of the written and filmed arts. When each scene is seen as merely a step in a path to a resolution, a variable in a sad man’s algorithm (a pre-approved Campbell-McKee-Lucas formula), people become incapable of apprehending them for what they are and they may as well be anything. This is obviously already the case in Michael Bay movies, where attempted spectacles die hard because of attempted plots, but it’s also the case in the popular entertainment which most should be pure spectacle: the TV talent show. What should be a succession of human refuse somersaulting across the stage for cheap laughs is instead edited into endless repeated and identical “stories” that, we are told, we “care about.” It’s time, I think, to send in the lions. Or at least to ring the gong.
Tom Gibbon liked this on Facebook.
Richard Grijalva liked this on Facebook.
RT @HILOBROW: NACHO LIBRE is exactly what Roland Barthes was talking about in his semiotic analysis of wrestling: http://t.co/JBfCShD6mq
Richard Grijalva liked this on Facebook.
Tom Gibbon liked this on Facebook.
Devin McKinney liked this on Facebook.
Sam Pratt liked this on Facebook.