Notes on Mumblecore for Jupiter Square Saturn

Or, "My Much More Interesting Real Life"

This is the second time I’ve tried to write a piece for the Jupiter in Gemini square Saturn in Pisces transit. The first time was about Alexander Payne’s Election, something meta about how Saturn square Jupiter was the astrological signature of politics and the inadequacy of ‘choosing sides’. There was also a weird (and again, meta) argument in there that only bitter perverts have a problem with the polarizing character of Tracy Flick and only die-hard Hillary ‘16ers actually like her. I may still post it, I may not.

I run into issues writing under and about Jupiter square Saturn especially as the planets face off in Mercury-ruled Gemini and Jupiter-ruled Pisces. This is big planets being expressed with vague and granular means, broad strokes in scattershot detail. When I try to address this transit I’ve found myself layering meaning on top of meaning more than usual and more than feels productive or necessary until I end up with a lot of nothing. Which is exactly how I would describe the physiological and intellectual experience of a Jupiter-square-Saturn transit. Largesse dampened by reality, reality confused by potential. Big is small, small is big, hard to tell if everything is meaningful or if nothing is. If you’ve been feeling more anxious than usual this week, this is probably why.

So, instead of trying to really lock down what a Jupiter/Saturn square means (of which we have one more in 2025, this time with Jupiter in Cancer and Saturn in Aries, a very different vibe), I am providing an informal and unstructured list of mostly half-baked ideas on this transit’s connection to 1) the handheld camera 2) the unsteady moments in between film movements, and 3) generational ennui. This form and content is in informed by my suspicion that a Gemini Jupiter square to a Pisces Saturn is best imagined within the terms of the infamous early-2000s film genre, Mumblecore.

1. Connection between William Eggleston’s 1973 Stranded in Canton and the Hollywood New Wave cinema of the 1970s. Something to do with Eggleston’s use of the Sony Portapak, the first portable video camera and the change in film that comes when cameras get closer to the body. More likely is a connection between Hollywood New Wave and the French New Wave and maybe cinéma verité, but the idea holds.

   1. The handheld camera is oppositional and therefore more trustworthy.

   2. The handheld camera is more subjective and trust is not important.

   3. The handheld camera is easier and less expensive, it is populist.

      1. The handheld camera is easier and less expensive, it is lazy.

2. There are cases for each and Mumblecore defies all of them. In Mumblecore the cameraman is obviously there and he is making concessions and mistakes while he sets up shots and angles and diligently records. He would be a documentarian, but there is no spontaneity. Choosing an ideology feels beside the point. This is a lower-case f filmmaker, incidental, slice of life.

   1. Bujalski’s Funny Ha Ha, Joe Swanberg’s Hannah Takes the Stairs. From what I can tell the hallmarks of an early mumblecore movie are narrative flatness / episodic wandering structure, largely improvised dialogue, handheld camera, minimal equipment, mostly uses friends from college. Love triangles.

      1. The subject of white people leaving college and becoming aimless was a thread picked up and honed to more cultural success in the 2010s by Lena Dunham and Noah Baumbach (the Bujalski homage of the title Frances Ha, the inclusion of mumblecore queen Greta Gerwig). The initial Mumblecore ventures makes for nearly unwatchable cinema. So boring it is brave.

      2. The mumblecore to twee pipeline — from the unwritten and laboriously spoken to the hyper verbal. From Funny Ha Ha to Juno. They feel like connected trends borne from similar instincts that took starkly different paths.

         1. Has anyone out there classified the signatures of ‘Obama-era filmmaking’?

   2. Eggleston was attuned to image in a way Mumblecore is not.

      1. If anything, I would associate Mumblecore more with my grandparents’ filmmaking (home movie making) philosophy: “for posterity”.

3. The crushing of the hippie movement in the late 60s, the assassination of MLK Jr, Manson, Vietnam, both Kennedy assassinations. Disillusioned youth of 60s into 70s. Millennials look to be similarly fortuned to Gen-X and then 9/11 and the Iraq War happen. Funny Ha Ha comes out in 2002, full release in 2005.¹

   1. Is this like the film version of Abstract Expressionism? I’ve never been sure about the idea that experiences of war and violence will inspire movements of anti-narrative, anti-representation in the upcoming generation, because it gets complicated by the fact that the anti-narrative art is co-opted again to feed the interests of war.

      1. Lena Dunham’s Hannah Horvath getting into and then leaving the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, canonically, in Girls.

      2. What I’m wondering is whether or not Mumblecore was a psyop designed to inspire an entire generation of navel-gazing filmmakers.

4. More broadly: has interiority ever been radical?

5. More urgently: is it good to be bored by a movie?

   1. I think everyone should have to sit through Dog Star Man, sober, fully awake, as I did in my third year of college. It was very boring and I felt very strong afterward.

6. Drinking Buddies is a less typical (less pure for it, I think) Mumblecore because it stars familiar faces. Namely Olivia Wilde, Jason Sudeikis, Jake Johnson, Anna Kendrick, and Burger from Sex and the City.

   1. Same themes of romantic and financial disappointment, everything comes to nothing and arrives nowhere, or at least nowhere very different.

      1. I’m not saying that perspective isn’t valuable, but I might be.

         1. The value of boredom and the incidental.

      2. American experimental filmmakers of the 60s & 70s were doing cool structural stuff with the material of film itself. Mumblecore feels like an extension of the eye or the memory.

         1. Blow-Up and the genre of thriller that locates both evil and salvation within the recording device itself (The Conversation, Klute, Blow Out).

      3. Mumblecore interiority is one that denies its characters and audience the catharsis and connection of expression. It is expressionless.

   2. From Wikipedia on 70s New Wave: “Seventies narratives place an uncommon emphasis on irresolution, particularly at the moment of climax or in epilogues, when more conventional Hollywood movies busy themselves tying up loose ends.”

7. Jupiter expands and Saturn contracts. In a square, they are a neverending push pull of excitement tempered by disappointment. Mumblecore is a genre about the deadening reality of the day-to-day of white people living in moderately well in Chicago or Boston. Life marches on, fleeting instances of meaning occur, events and moments stand for nothing save for their own recreation within the Mumblecore movie itself. Despite the promise of whiteness, a Harvard education, a group of friends, everyone is sad. But is anyone in a Mumblecore movie really unhappy? Or are they just slightly dissatisfied and just for now?

   1. Saw a comment on trailer for Hannah Takes the Stairs that said “I think the reason I never got into mumblecore is because it seemed like a pretentious take on what was my much more interesting real life”

1. I might be parroting Adam Curtis.