Singular (Blazing) moments

[Paul Nightingale]

Thanks, Dave, for the extracts from the Grazer article. I've always resisted
Mel Brooks' films, I have to admit, but Blazing Saddles was maybe different.
It's that western again: a film like Chinatown could play with the
private-eye thriller, but the western has always been a vehicle for debates
about national identity. (Ref the anachronistic, and implicitly racist, use
of the term 'outlaw' to describe a certain refugee from infinite justice.)
I'm trying to think of something comparable in Britain: maybe Shakespeare,
maybe novels that claim to be 'about' the colonial past, eg Forster. British
cinema, such as it is, has repeatedly plundered both in the recent past: we
sometimes call it heritage cinema and it really is as deadly as the phrase
suggests.

Perhaps, if the 1970s was a time of singular moments with regard to cultural
production, this is because it was a time of transition. The rules were
being broken; the point of the exercise was to break as many rules as you
could.The cultural masterpieces of the time were iconoclastic. A masterpiece
at any time has to be iconoclastic, but these singular moments challenged
the very idea that icons were possible, or necessary or, indeed, desirable.
Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, Taxi-Driver. GR is the novel it is because
Pynchon's timing was right. Something of a heresy to say that, of course -
don't I have any respect for the Great Man! I've said before that he wanted
to produce a novel that made novel-writing impossible, just as Godard's
films made (radical) cinema impossible: one of the ironies is that p-list
discussion of the P-Man's work has often leaned towards deification. One of
the reasons I think M&D is a better novel is that breaking the rules is no
longer enough; you now have to consider what you're left with when the rules
have disappeared.

Which of course is where Foucault comes into it but ...