Scanners. Recently.

What a parenthetical tucked into George Packer's piece in last week's New Yorker: "(In a lecture that Kilcullen teaches on counterterrorism at Johns Hopkins, his students watch Fight Club, the 1999 satire about anti-capitalist terrorists, to see a radical ideology without an Islamic face.)" Jim Emerson spotted it and he not only insists that you read the full article but also adds at scanners:

That, I submit, is revelatory. I wonder if those who can't see what's going on in Fight Club - the feelings of impotence and alienation and personal violation that fuel the rage and the desire to belong to a force larger than the individual, even if it's just a form of nihilistic fascism that lacks the religious, racial or nationalistic aspirations of Naziism, Soviet Communism or "Bin Laden-ism" (for lack of a better term) - can even begin to comprehend contemporary jihadism and what we now call "the insurgency" (as if there were just one).

Now then. You've gone and read the Packer; here's your dessert:

"I don't disagree at all with Andy Horbal's list of reservations about annual critics' 'Ten Best Lists,'" admits Jim Emerson, but adds, "To me, a ten best list is like a personality inventory - a rough sketch of who I was (and what mattered to me most) during a particular year." And he's got, yes, a list, "What Can Be Good About Ten Best Lists," before presenting two of his own and pointing to another cluster of lists he's contributed to.

The first is a series of annotations to the Guardian's "50 Lost Movie Classics," of which there's already been a lot of discussion out there, and the second is his top ten, with Pan's Labyrinth in the #1 spot.

He wrote it up for MSN Movies, where Dave McCoy presents his own list and introduces the package of seven more: frequent GC-contributor Sean Axmaker, whose list, like McCoy's, is unranked; Gregory Ellwood (#1: Dreamgirls); again, Jim Emerson, though you'll want to read his revving up for it here; David Fear (#1: Half Nelson); Richard T Jameson (#1: Flags of Our Fathers / Letters from Iwo Jima); Kim Morgan (#1: The Departed); and Kathleen Murphy, who also goes for Clint Eastwood's pair of WWII films.

Posted by dwhudson at December 20, 2006 6:14 AM