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June 4, 2003
I watched a DVD of Scott Hicks' film of David Guterson's novel Snow Falling On Cedars on Sunday Night. Scott had spent some time in Adelaide and went to Flinders University. I had seen the earlier film Shine and thought it a very courageous piece of work.
Though Snow Falling on Cedars is excellent in terms of form, narrative and cinematography, it was the historical consciousness that grabbed my attention:---the heavy hand of history. This was one of the few films I'd seen where everyday life was overlaid with layers and layers of history---the war, Japanese internment, childhood romances, exploitaiton and racial relations. The present was this history. The present social bonds of this seafaring community was shaped by the layers and layers of interpretations of their past. They lived in a circle of interpretations.
My response was very different to this or this or this.
Although the film talked about letting the past go and stepping into the past the present was shaped, informed by history. Our very communal being is historical through and through. So much for the possessive rational economic individual standing alone in their private sphere, responding to price movements and the competitive behaviour of other agents and seeking utility.
The aesthetic highlights what is forgotten by utilitarian economics: the significance of the realm of sentiments, affections, prejudices and bodily habits that cohere to form a social order. Economics, by ignoring the historical affective life of community and culture that we live everyday, constructs its theoretical systems on fictions that it redescribes as mathematical axioms.
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Beatifully put. And a fascinating route by which you travelled there.
The rationalist economics line is largely bunk. How is it that economists fail to recognise that humans make decisions based just as much on emotion as on utility? Yet behaviouralism seems to have no place in their theories.
Isn't is ironic that the subjects of history and philosophy, in our rationalist epoch, have been pretty well sidelined, de-funded and in if the rationalists get their way, de-legitimised in universities. I believe they should be compulsory subjects at the tertiary level in all non-arts courses.
Ah, in a perfect world......
btw, Snow Falling On Cedars is one beautiful piece of cinema, Hick's finest work. Its subtleties seem lost on many in this action-obsessed world where contemplation is seen as a weakness.