River of Grass (Kelly Reichardt, 1994)
"I guess it wasn't any one big thing, but a lot of little things that just grew deeper and deeper under her skin."
The video I'm watching is one of those videos where a group of people all try one type of food stuff and give their opinions and then in the end a winner is crowned. You know the thing.
I've seen these kind of videos done a number of times, for doughnuts, coffee, chocolate, biscuits, cake, and so on and so forth. Often sweet, rarely savoury.
And this one is no different, except that the food stuff these people are all trying is a chocolate chip cookie.
But then I notice something interesting.
The video becomes a conflict between the idea of a chocolate chip cookie, and the physicality of one. What I mean is that the participants all start this process by outlining their mental image of what a chocolate chip cookie is, and then criticising the subsequent (free) cookies they're given to eat because of how the real object fails to match up to the one in their head. How is reality ever supposed to better an idea, a dream?
But it doesn't stop there.
The participants in this video are all quite young (although I think pretty much everyone is young now) and reflect the broad range of lifestyles that young people follow now. We have reached a point where we no longer believe in binary genders, but rather that gender is a spectrum. We know better than this now.
So why are they getting so angry when a chocolate chip cookie deviates from their idea of a cookie?
Why can chocolate chip cookies not also be on a spectrum?
Why do we have to follow rigid rules of what is and isn't a chocolate chip cookie?
One participant is handed a cookie about mid-way through the video, takes a bite, and then puts it down, shaking his head, muttering 'That's not a cookie, I'm not eating that' when the truth of that first clause couldn't be further from the truth. That very much *is* a chocolate chip cookie. This dude ain't Baudrillard.
When we start going down the road that this participant has taken his first step onto we don't end up anywhere good.
We end up in a world of homogeneity, where everything is the same. Or, alternatively, we end up in a world of control, where certain things are not allowed.
Neither of these are the ending point that any of us want to arrive at.
Try to avoid being the unconscious agent of a philosophy that you're probably consciously strongly against. The chocolate chip cookie paradox.
The video I'm watching is one of those videos where a group of people all try one type of food stuff and give their opinions and then in the end a winner is crowned. You know the thing.
I've seen these kind of videos done a number of times, for doughnuts, coffee, chocolate, biscuits, cake, and so on and so forth. Often sweet, rarely savoury.
And this one is no different, except that the food stuff these people are all trying is a chocolate chip cookie.
But then I notice something interesting.
The video becomes a conflict between the idea of a chocolate chip cookie, and the physicality of one. What I mean is that the participants all start this process by outlining their mental image of what a chocolate chip cookie is, and then criticising the subsequent (free) cookies they're given to eat because of how the real object fails to match up to the one in their head. How is reality ever supposed to better an idea, a dream?
But it doesn't stop there.
The participants in this video are all quite young (although I think pretty much everyone is young now) and reflect the broad range of lifestyles that young people follow now. We have reached a point where we no longer believe in binary genders, but rather that gender is a spectrum. We know better than this now.
So why are they getting so angry when a chocolate chip cookie deviates from their idea of a cookie?
Why can chocolate chip cookies not also be on a spectrum?
Why do we have to follow rigid rules of what is and isn't a chocolate chip cookie?
One participant is handed a cookie about mid-way through the video, takes a bite, and then puts it down, shaking his head, muttering 'That's not a cookie, I'm not eating that' when the truth of that first clause couldn't be further from the truth. That very much *is* a chocolate chip cookie. This dude ain't Baudrillard.
When we start going down the road that this participant has taken his first step onto we don't end up anywhere good.
We end up in a world of homogeneity, where everything is the same. Or, alternatively, we end up in a world of control, where certain things are not allowed.
Neither of these are the ending point that any of us want to arrive at.
Try to avoid being the unconscious agent of a philosophy that you're probably consciously strongly against. The chocolate chip cookie paradox.