The State of Grace

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Right. Dr. Horrible was creative, experimental, entertaining, and met with overwhelmingly positive reception! (That said, I haven’t seen it in fifteen years, so I can’t offer an assessment of its moral imagination.) If I’m Joss Whedon at the height of my power and influence (before things went to shit for him), I’d much rather work outside the system than be an indentured servant to it! That’s what George Lucas did so enviably in the 1970s: He bought his independence from Hollywood. Also per Wikipedia: But maybe, in retrospect, I was feeling a little elegiac myself at the time. The emotional simplicity of boyhood had given way to the hormonal complexity of adolescence. My parents had just divorced; I barely saw my father after that till his funeral a decade later. (It should say something that I was appalled by the copious alcohol consumption in State of Grace when I recently rewatched it, but thought absolutely nothing of it at fourteen.) As all that was underway, my best friend left the neighborhood, suddenly and painfully, to live with the other of his divorced parents, and for many years thereafter I thought he’d intentionally moved away from me (because, like a true egocentric thirteen-year-old, it never for a moment crossed my mind that what happened to him was in no way about me). Sometimes I end up staying places for hours longer than I want to because I don’t know how to make my excuses and leave.” (167) Jules, I am absolutely delighted you stopped by the blog to share your thoughts on State of Grace; I hope this won’t be your last visit. Most of my posts are about either filmmaking/storytelling or my New York upbringing — my most recent essay, “The Lost Boys of the Bronx: A Tribute to Joel Schumacher,” is about both— and as a fellow New Yorker/filmmaker, I think you’d bring a lot to the conversations around here! It’s admittedly not as good as sharing war stories over a Guinness at the Landmark, but you’re nonetheless welcome to pull up a chair and join me here any time!

But then, Whedon is the father of mainstream geek culture, so perhaps the money and prestige of working within the system — of being the go-to guy whenever a studio had an ambitious superhero project (because the “shared cinematic universe,” as a filmmaking model, was only just coming into being in the wake of the last strike) — was too hard to fully extricate himself from. And hell, it’s also possible Whedon had already had his one good idea— that he was never again going to conceive a project that would match the commercial success and cultural influence of Buffy. I don’t care to psychoanalyze Joss Whedon, but it could very well be that Dr. Horrible served only as a creative pit stop in his career rather than a new direction for it because he was ultimately too institutionalized to seize the We establish who the other two bonds will be and get their POV. That was interesting and I can’t wait for them all to be together.

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Throughout, the focus is kept on Grace’s experience of the world, rather than others’ experience of Grace—as it should be. This is particularly evident in her commentary on how other people treat her, which includes her frustration with not being consulted on important decisions, and not being believed or asked about her experiences:

In the five years since I first published this essay, I’ve only come to see with greater clarity how the kinds of closed-ended, character-driven, street-level films I admired as a young adult — State of Grace foremost among them — simply no longer exist. They’ve been stamped out of existence by the mega-franchise, the branded IP. Such is what happened when Hollywood was subsumed by nerd culture.As I said to Cooper directly above, I’m delighted you discovered this post, read it, and took time from your day to share your insights on and enthusiasm for State of Grace! For years I thought I was the only one who gave a damn about the movie, but this post has connected me to all manner of cinephiles who remember it, appreciate it, and proudly call themselves fans of Joanou’s underrated masterpiece.​ Last month, we talked about the subject of creative inspiration: that an artist’s many influences affect his worldview and sensibilities in ways totally unique to him, and that they, along with his particular life experiences, constitute his voice. In time, those influences become so embedded in his subconscious that he is no longer necessarily aware of the sway they hold over the art he produces, and as his confidence in his craft intensifies, his intellectual capacity to identify them in his work diminishes in kind. Wij hebben mensen en geautomatiseerde systemen die gespecialiseerd zijn in het opsporen van valse beoordelingen die op ons platform worden ingediend. Als we die vinden, verwijderen we ze en ondernemen we zo nodig actie tegen de verantwoordelijke.