Page 315
Shot from final alphabetized story ("Athena/Atalanta/Aphrodite")
of
Sink or Swim
(1990).
eat them. In some ways, I feel critical of the idea of people living a hedonistic life, divorced from serious thought and ignorant of the consequences of history. On the other hand, my experience with my father was that he was absolutely indebted to Western civilization and to the world of books and theory. I wouldn't say that he would defend Western culture against other cultureshe's an anthropologist who's spent a lot of time studying other culturesbut in some more profound way his life is organized around the principles and institutions of Western civilization. If you've lived your life in an ivory tower at a university, if you've lived your life in books, that can exclude you from a lot of experiences.
In some ways I was trying indirectly to critique a certain kind of film practice that's been in vogue for the last ten or fifteen years, and a certain kind of film theory that is often quite divorced from normal experience (although I wonder about the word "normal"). The story later on in the film about the kind of articles my father was writing while my parents were getting divorced was meant to be a dig at a lot of the writing that's done about films that I think strips the life out of them. I'm interested in more direct speech, something more visceral, more emotionally honest. I wanted to touch on that, but not directly.
MacDonald:
I assume this project was similar to
The Ties That Bind
in that you worked at great length on the editing.