Trailer for Examined Life
Astra Taylor's peripatetic gabfest doesn't examine "life" so much as it trolls the gray area between genuine philosophy and pop-cultural pap. She gives eight thinkers 10 minutes each to unload on tough topics like the meaning of life and right and wrong and comes up mostly with a lot of platitudes about treating other people nice.
To add visual interest to the verbosity, Taylor has some of her subjects stroll through locations in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco (walking heads?). This makes for some apt counterpoints to the verbosity, as when Marxist apologist Michael Hardt equivocates about the meaning of revolution while rowing a dinghy in a Central Park pond, only to run aground on a boulder. Or when Slovenian loose cannon Slavoj Zizek, who was more coherent and amusing in Taylor's Zizek!, argues in a garbage dump that ecology is the opium of the masses. Huh?
Sometimes the unlived life is not worth examining.
