{"id":1872,"date":"2009-01-09T11:24:33","date_gmt":"2009-01-09T16:24:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/2parse.com\/?p=1872"},"modified":"2009-01-09T10:58:24","modified_gmt":"2009-01-09T15:58:24","slug":"the-existential-clown","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/?p=1872","title":{"rendered":"The Existential Clown"},"content":{"rendered":"

I haven’t yet decided whether James Parker’s piece in The Atlantic<\/em> on Jim Carrey, “The Existential Clown<\/a>,” is profound or pretentious. Sometimes the line can be awfully thin. And at times – James Parker seems to be stretching his points a bit too much:<\/p>\n

Who knows how the self became such a problem, or when we began to feel the falseness in our nature? \u201cThere\u2019s another man within me, that\u2019s angry with me,\u201d wrote Sir Thomas Browne in Religio Medici<\/em>, three and a half centuries before the scene in Liar Liar<\/em> where the hero stuffs his own head into the toilet bowl.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yet, for all of that, I have the feeling Parker is onto something profound – and I am always interested in the profundities that can be understood in a deep reading of our pop culture.\u00a0 Here’s a taste of his thesis:<\/p>\n

Jim Carrey will loom large in our shattered posterity, I believe, because his filmography amounts to a uniquely sustained engagement with the problem of the self…<\/p>\n

Movie after movie finds Carrey either confronting God (\u201cSmite me, O mighty Smiter!\u201d he roars in Bruce Almighty<\/em>) or enacting, violently and outrageously, some version of the dilemma identified by the Spanish existentialist Jos\u00e9 Ortega y Gasset\u2014that man, as he exists in the world, is \u201cequivalent to an actor bidden to represent the personage which is his real I.\u201d One wonders what the French make of him. Here in America, we\u2019ve been content to regard him as a blockbustering goofball, but in France, beautiful France, where philosophy is king and Jerry Lewis is awarded the L\u00e9gion d\u2019Honneur, might not they be readying garlands for Jim Carrey?<\/p>\n

Yes Man<\/em>, out this month, is Carrey\u2019s latest existential parable. If, as has been speculated, Hans Christian Andersen and S\u00f8ren Kierkegaard shared a libertine moment in the salons and cellars of 19th-century Copenhagen, they could have brainstormed this movie over drinks.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I forward it on to Andrew Sullivan, who despite his place at The Atlantic<\/em>, might be able to judge whether this piece merits a Poseur Award<\/a> or not.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I haven’t yet decided whether James Parker’s piece in The Atlantic on Jim Carrey, “The Existential Clown,” is profound or pretentious. Sometimes the line can be awfully thin. And at times – James Parker seems to be stretching his points a bit too much: Who knows how the self became such a problem, or when […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[47,50],"tags":[1246,1244,226,1245],"class_list":["post-1872","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-criticism","category-reflections","tag-james-parker","tag-jim-carrey","tag-the-atlantic","tag-the-existential-clown"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8qcx-uc","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1872","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1872"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1872\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1878,"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1872\/revisions\/1878"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1872"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1872"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1872"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}