Batman, bringing me down.
When Priscillia Bratcher, Director of Development for UNC-Chapel Hill’s Carolina Performing Arts Society, walked to the lip of Memorial Hall’s stage last night following the first of two nights of Mikel Rouse’s The End of Cinematics, ripples of disbelief and humor passed through the audience: “Experimental work like this is very important for this program … If you would like to give a ticket stub to someone, they can come for free tomorrow night.”
The ripple of laughter was for the idea that you didn’t want to give your ticket stub to a friend. The wave of disbelief was for the notion that Rouse’s Cinematics, the third and final installment of his opera verite that began with Dennis Cleveland and Failing Kansas, was an important piece of experimental work. See, it wasn’t. A clever failure misguided by technology supplied by funds both public and private and an overdone sense of cynicism suggesting—or rather, proclaiming—that cinema (and all popular art, really) is void of any intelligence and even an ounce of audience interpretive space, End of Cinematics had little lessons for anyone. It felt like what it set out to denounce, just in reverse.
After all, it looked, sounded and felt like one of the most dated new works in memory. If one wants to speak to the kids and tell them that they need new art, don’t hit them over the head with Depeche Mode drums, Stone Roses guitars and Savage Garden pop (even if they insist on heterophonic polyrhythm) without a trace of irony or self-deprecation. Instead, an alternately bored and irked crowd was lambasted with smug didactism that barely deserved the meek applause it received at curtain call. Skip The End of Cinematics, unless you like veiled redundance and lyrics about Batman’s struggle versus the white, black and yellow races.
