Summer Reading. 5.

What, then, comprises this "resistance" I have noted in "those who hate Magnolia" to acknowledging the lesson about action and passivity? The answer: Freedom. Freedom thought as an absolute value, that is, as the priority, the very foremost, top shelf, upper deck, blue ribbon, gold medal of human values, is what forms the stuff of this resistance. To get the point of Magnolia is to admit that freedom is not our highest value (and this is not the same as saying that freedom is not important)--and this is precisely what we've always been taught (especially as red-blooded Americans) we must resist admitting.

-- From "Act Passively, Pass Actively," by Jill Stauffer. The h2so4 piece is subtitled: "Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia: Unsuspecting Nietzschean Case Study in How to Reconcile Will to Power with Eternal Return of the Same, or, Love, Soft as an Easy Chair in which it is exceedingly difficult to sit."



Posted by dwhudson at July 23, 2003 10:36 AM