Blue Jasmine 1

Blue Jasmine. A completely unique flower, flowoverly decored. A text. A meaning, a reconstruction of Billie Holiday's ultra-famous dither into oblivion. The Blue Moon is a mysterious force. Blue Jasmine is a dither a wither. For Blue Jasmine, a hopeless romantic, mired in difficulties, lost in a song of the past, life is a dream gone bad.

Cate Blanchett's acting has often been rusted by a kind of feigned elegance. Here, we see something of existential pain. We sometimes see her speaking to vacant air, an emptiness, a past, a lost dream tailed to the sprinkles of an evening. She has always wanted to be an anthropologist, but love swept her away. She falls in love with the wrong guy though. She falls in love with the idea of the rich, luxurious life.

It's not hard to be generous when you're making tons of money. Money does make money, but money must come from somewhere. The husband she marries creates a bunch of false corporations to move money from one place to another.  She blithely ignores hard realities. She is wondering if he truly loves her. What matters to her is "love." Again and again, she is treated like a piece of private property, but still, she speaks of love.

Blue Jasmine. I don't know if there is a Jasmine flower that is blue. Jasmine flowers look rather fluffy, overdressed, and overly sensuous. Blue Jasmine is like that, but she is deeply blue as in sad. Some deep existential need is not being met. She suffers because her needs are not being met. But if she fails to reinvent herself for the new age, the Millenial Age, then she fails to live also. Loneliness is her punishment. Here, the actress, Cate Blanchett expresses real grief and pain. The text cannot be reconciled to the subtext. Everything is meaningless because it is continuously repetitive, and people choose easy suffering instead of difficult love. Love is agonizing, difficult, and causes rebirth. She is an abortion.

Julia Kristeva agonizes over the treatment of artists in capitalistic societies. I think she uses the words, "abjection," "suture" and other terms to describe a primary split in capitalistic societies. Joseph Campbell also talked about the dismal treatment of artists in capitalistic societies; however, he also noted that many great artists are American.

Blue Jasmine is an artist stuck in the mechanics of a capitalistic society gone bad.