Plundering Cultures, or, the Things I Hate About France

I was on Facebook just now, and having read everyone’s status updates and creepily made my way through walls of people I haven’t seen in years (Facebook makes everyone creepy. It’s a fact we must accept. I love you, Bobby, and your wonderful business, so don’t think I’m knocking it.), I found myself staring at my own profile page and wondering what people think of me when they read it. (You do it too. Just like you google yourself. Facebook also makes us narcissistic.)

Anyway, I happened to glance at my children’s names and it struck me, all at once, that my husband and I plundered three different cultures to which we have absolutely no genetic connection in the search for the perfect name. Sienna=Italian, Charlotte=French, Liam=Irish. Furthermore, it occurred to me that the name I like the most comes from the culture I like the least.

Seriously, what’s up with the French?

I’ll admit that their cuisine is fantastic and their wine-making skills unparalleled (although personally I prefer Italian food and California wines), but the rest of their culture is…weird. And not weird in a good way, like those freaky Icelanders or the cylon Danes. No, France takes humanity in a direction it was probably never meant to go. Which, I think, is why they’re so cranky all the time.

For example, French cinema. I’ll admit that I liked Amelie as much as the rest of the wannabe-eclectic set, but the rest of French cinema seems to be nothing more than a collection of random, meandering storylines built on a subtext of homoeroticism and featuring at least one naked, unshaven woman. Or, alternately, the movies are a series of compressed action shots with little dialogue, lots of disgusting violence and acts of depravity, and zero coherency. And in the world of independent art houses, this is heralded as art. Not just art, but deep, meaningful art.

Do you think people say that something is deep when they can’t understand it? Or when, like many French films, it has no meaning at all? Sometimes I think so. I used to be one of those people, actually, when I was younger and thought I was cool. I always wondered if everyone else was terribly impressed and cast into awestruck silence after such a film because, like me, they had no idea what the hell they had just witnessed. Or why. You want a concrete example of such a film? La vie revee des anges (sorry, not going to go to the effort to get the accents right), or, The Dreamlife of Angels. After I watched this movie, I was depressed for a month. I think that’s the diabolical purpose of French cinema, actually. To make everyone depressed. So that they go to the Champs-Elysees and spend a thousand dollars on a scarf.