Los Angeles Review of Books Hosts Girls of Spectacular Culture: Brian Kim Stefans in Conversation with Kate Durbin
Los Angeles Review of Books hosts a dialogue between Brian Kim Stefans and Kate Durbin in its most recent installment. Durbin and Stefans's conversation centers around themes of authenticity and spectacle, and Durbin's skillful ability to skip between film, valley girl, and production languages.
BRIAN KIM STEFANS: You’ve done a lot of writing that’s based on the movies of Catherine Breillat, someone who has a very strong perspective and makes movies that are very realistic but also seem to have some kind of social agenda and a kind of richness of tone, whereas in E! Entertainment you’re not dealing with auteurs at all. How did that kind of movement happen? In the first book you were already beginning to work with just pure objects and with American celebrities, but with Breillat, you wrote original works based on her movies. You weren’t necessarily transcribing her movies. How does that transition work?
KATE DURBIN: The narrative of The Ravenous Audience has a lot to do with coming of age, with myths and archetypes I encountered or absorbed as a child, myths that are also foundational to American pop culture. That shapes the way the reader experiences the book, whereas in E! Entertainment it’s all contemporary pop culture, from beginning to end. One of the things I wanted to do in E! Entertainment was to make sure there was no epigraph, no reference to anything that could be high culture at all. I wouldn’t put a Society of the Spectacle quote in it. I wanted to unsettle people a little bit by not giving them anything that would make them feel intellectually superior or comfortable in the book, so they couldn’t open it and be like, “Good, there’s a quote by …” — I don’t know, whoever at the beginning — “I can read this and feel okay.”
I don’t feel like the way I used the material in Catherine Breillat’s films is radically different from E! Entertainment. In both cases I was watching the screen so closely, taking many, many, copious notes, being faithful to the source and shaping it into something that both captured and transformed that initial experience. It’s very similar, and that respect and care that I had for Breillat’s source material, I carried that over to the Kardashians. If anything, I spent more time with the pop material, three years, as opposed to the Breillat films. Those exercises were much quicker. [...]
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