the groundhog day project

I find I can't--or don't want to--write about the third act of Before Midnight . But, who needs to get that far into everything anyway? Instead, I could talk about punctum, or a series of puncta. If you're new, or you've forgotten, a punctum, by way of Barthes, is the piercing, wounding moment that pulls you in, that forces you to identify with a character perhaps, that puts you fully into the story, the small detail that makes it all real for you in the moment. I can avoid the greater wound by dealing with the lesser. (As Jesse is left behind, Hank gone, music starts up and it feels intrusive. I'm sure there was background music in Before Sunrise and Before Sunset but I really don't remember it. If it was there, it wasn't intrusive. Here, and a few instances later in this film, the music is a bit too noticeable, making this film feel more like a movie than whatever the previous two films were.) The first punctum, I suppose, is in the car. The girls are...

It was only this morning, going into the afternoon, but I cannot recall the exact order. Two things that twisted together into an idea to explain something here in this blog. The first (or second) was someone posting some photo on Facebook and referencing Barthes' punctum . The second (or first) was that I was watching last week's episode of Showtime's The Affair and Noah (Dominic West) is drunk and starts to make out with his publicist and... sure he had an affair throughout the first season (that was the setup for the show, of course), and much of this second season has been about how the various characters circling around the central couple(s) are all imperfect, they make mistakes, and sometimes things turn out okay anyway. But, here--and I've written in this blog before about how I can get attached to characters fairly easily sometimes--I was mad at Noah because this seemed like one mistake too many when he is supposed to be... or maybe I just want him to be a bet...