fake empire

saw a documentary last night about a german model. paul boche. it starts with 9 year old paul rowing a boat. he says that when he is older he wants to live in the woods with his dogs. he says he doesn't want to live with people because people hate each other and destroy everything. the rest of the movie follows paul, now eighteen years old, through his fledgling career as a model. we see paul at show castings in milan, at job castings in paris, in model apartments in milan and new york, in every situation that is imperfect, lacking and wrong-footed. other characters that he encounters are somehow bungling- the other german model, drunk, oafish and hard to watch. in the casting settings we see anonymous young men standing in their underwear while the clients survey them. and backstage, models that have passed this kind of test are now costumed, coifed and masked with asymmetrical makeup. we even see the show, a catwalk actually bordered with electrical power-lines that throw off sparks; a spectacle that is as ridiculous and over-the-top as the clothes that are paraded by the models. 

it is hard not to feel saddened by these strange habitats of the fashion industry, a world that is revealed as tragi-comic, falling short of something and pointless.

for a minute during the movie i felt like i understood it. here is a beautiful creature like paul that is hard not to watch. he is beautiful. with big light eyes quietly pouring out at you, like a baby deer, like a waterfall. and here is the modern world looking at this beauty and wanting to experience it, its purity. the problem with the modern world is that there isn't an appropriate avenue to do this on any large scale. the only institution that we have that could honour beauty like this is the family. outside of this are the more dangerous works of capitalism:- private consumerism, advertising, the fashion industry. here beauty is broken down into a commodity, into tiny bits, dollars and cents, into money. everyone is looking at paul but seeing nothing. 

i guess that once upon a time everyone dreamed of a world that wasn't built like this, but somehow, in spite of ourselves, this is the world that just sort of happened.