A tribute to Kafkaesque cinema

Just how often in life do you get the chance to discuss phenomenology?

So... I guess that means I've been reading Heidegger right... ?

Exactly. People should jump at such a rare treat.

So, what are THOSE books today?

Still good ones.

Zizek? Gladwell? Kendi? Butler?

Wait, were you asking for the trendy equivalents of Kafka/Heidegger in today's world?

Still have them on the basement bookshelf. Those and Sartre and Nietzsche. I don't philosophize much anymore, but it impresses visitors and raises my IQ by about 20 points.

I read Heidegger's Being and Time many years ago and I still enjoy reading it again.

I always thought 12 Monkeys was pretty Kafkaesque

Scorsese's After Hours will always be among my all-time favorite films. And even though I am a huge Soderbergh fan, I somehow missed he did a re-edit of Kafka! Will definitely check that out.

Other Kafkaesque cinema not yet mentioned...

• Brazil (Terrry Gilliam)
• Being John Malkovich (Spike Jonze)
• Synecdoche, New York (Charlie Kaufman)
• Barton Fink (Joel & Ethan Coen)
• The Lobster (Yorgos Lanthimos)
• Poor Things (Yorgos Lanthimos)
• Alphaville (Jean-Luc Godard)
• Dark City (Alex Proyas)
• The Bothersome Man (Jens Lien)
• Sorry to Bother You (Boots Riley)
• Under the Silver Lake (David Robert Mitchell)
• "World on a Wire" (Rainer Werner Fassbinder)
• "Severance" (Dan Erickson)

__________________
"Film is a disease. When it infects your bloodstream it takes over as the number one hormone. It bosses the enzymes, directs the pineal gland, plays Iago to your psyche. As with heroin, the antidote to Film is more Film." - Frank Capra

Don't forget that phenomenology is as much a method as its an object of study. Hence phenomenology can be applied to any film as a means of analysis. What we call "kafkaesque" is a particular form of existentialism, which I argue uses phenomenology to reach a particular conclusion about the nature of the world (ontology) that supposedly disavows metaphysics but as Heidegger would critique in a scathing letter to Sartre, is actually based on metaphysics.

Curiously, I completely changed my feeling about Kafka and his view of the world later, when I was in grad school for clinical psychology. I checked out Kafka again and realized that a lot of his "existential gloom" and emotional flatness were mainly signs of someone with a high level of depression. Kafka was living with an increasing level of anti-semitism in Europe, was considered unattractive, was a fairly compulsive womanizer, dabbled in zionism, showed a lot of signs of anorexia, and, if all that were not enough, may have been suppressing homoerotic impulses.

I'd guess that "Kafkaesque" is a simple way of grabbing at all of that. The poor guy was a psychological mess. Having spent some college years in the philosophy world, one of the things I recall was how they didn't like to be "psychologized". On the other hand, one's basic temperament and emotional style HAVE to show up in something like philosophy unless one thinks that they are nothing but a thinking brain with no body or emotion.

Kafka seems like the demonstration case for all of that.