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It would be hard not to notice the numerous rapid descents in the Dark Knight which, while uncommon for filmic representations of superheroes, seem particularly frantic and well done. I would argue that this is indicative of the film’s content as well as its form: the Dark Knight is not so much the recognizable ‘descent into madness’ but more the repetitive chaos that threatens the apathetically sane post-capitalist world. [Spoilers Follow.]
The rift between narrative and non-narrative has been crystallized in the recent writers strike - as it becomes as visible as possible, what exactly it is the writers do for the television industry. Executives have predictably turned to reality television in its various forms to wait out the storm. Reality television is, in fact, almost as old as TV itself, if one counts candid camera and related shows as reality tv.
However, the game shows and hidden camera shows which are only considered reality television in the broad sense - in that it is a program which is generally unscripted. The first truly ‘real’ reality show would be An American Family, where a nuclear family going through a divorce was caught on film. An American Family was shot documentary style and falls in the same category of ‘real’ reality such as Cops and American High. And, interestingly enough, Cops came about because of a crippling writer’s strike in the 1980s.
The question becomes - are reality shows more about constructing an artifice which will generate a particular kind of reality (ie a set of contests and competitions is set up to show us the true competitive/angry/sleazy etc nature of people) or does it actually try to represent something natural or purportedly unconstructed, at least in a narrative sense?
Rob and Big was was funny as it was because it consciously played with the aforementioned tension. From the distance the show appeared rather unremarkable - it was about a semi-professional skate boarder and his body guard. While the two ostensibly make an odd couple - the appeal of the show was in fact not various entertaining moments of strife between them but the remarkable ease of their friendship (the show’s theme song is “Bestfriends”). What also makes the show interesting is that its scripted nature is semi-transparent. In each episode the duo sets about attempting some ridiculous task which they have both suddenly assigned the utmost importance. That is, Rob always acts as if he has just come up with a really silly idea out of nowhere (like putting sacred geometry on his skateboard or deciding to break as many Guinness Book of Word Records as Possible).
Unlike the vast majority of reality shows, there is no face to face confession in Rob and Big, the camera appears far less intrusive. Instead of embodying a real persona, Rob and Big play the roles of reality television personalities. The show purposefully constructs the object of reality television which is supposed to be spontaneous when it is in fact not. The duo’s interesting motto ‘Do work son,’ is partially the generic justification beyond their numerous shenanigans as well as an interesting call to do, to not just sit around doing nothing. Overall the show offered a kind of willing accidental entertainment is coupled with a generic heterogeneous encouragement. Together these themes question the knot, one which I have addressed before, of seriousness and intent. There is a well known quote that it is imperative to take what you do seriously and never take yourself seriously. Here Rob and Big’s take on the narrative plays ruthelssly with the boundaries of seriousness and intent.
Rob and Big, as a self aware reality show, or at least self aware in terms of form (not content), is part of a growing sense that the illusion is to be dropped when it comes to so called reality and, taking Lesie and the Lys as a model, critical ironic distance as well. Leslie Hall seems to be making fun of those who do ridiculous things self critically by doing what seems ridiculous seriously while aware that she’s doing is for an audience. In a sense then, Hall is reflecting on her performance (making sure that it is ironic) which makes it less seriously ridiculous - meaning that it comes off as more earnest (in its attempt to be ridiculous) and therefore seems less like an attempt at being ridiculous and more simply ridiculous thing.
To be clear: what we have here is a kind of non-relfexive Cartesian subjectivity (as Lacan articulates it) run amok that is “I think where I am not” and “I am therefore it thinks” is embodied as “When I think I should act as if I am not thinking and also my social being must have the halo of thought to show that I am aware of my being but not trying to form my being.” This is Zizek’s simultaneous postmodern decline and return of the big Other - the internalization of authority not in a traditionally disciplinary way but in a panoptic function.
A fairly recent study to verify the existence of non-conscious effects in the brain entailed a subject being flashed with a fearful face so quickly (33 milliseconds) that it could not be consciously registered. Yet, as caught on a high res MRI, the face had an observable effect - causing anxiety in the test subject. Similar to Benjamin Libet’s studies and others which have verified his findings, it appears that the unconscious or subconscious or non-conscious, registers and causes effects prior to conscious thought.
In their text Biology of Freedom: Neural Plasticity and the Unconscious, Francois Ansermet and Pierre Magistretti differentiate between the unconscious and the non-conscious. For Ansermet, the non-conscious is procedural whereas the unconscious is the fantasy trace of experience which, like the coincidence of simultaneously fired post-synapses, glaciates multiple signifiers in ways that are further and further from the signified.
Shifting to the latest volume of Collapse the question arises: are the un-seemingly un-formed oozes and horrors of the universe simply the formed horrors but at a faster pace? Is this the divide between Terror of horror versus the lurk of horror? Could the horrifying event, slowed down, been taken from the unconscious and put into the conscious - would this be the forbidden knowledge of Lovecraft’s Cthulu mythos?
At the beginning of Lovecraft’s Call of the Cthulu he writes:
“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”
Yet the reactions to ‘godless’ science seems to be more of a mixed bag of reactionary strategies: new age obscurantism, the theological term in philosophy, and, of course, the rampancy of the correlationist impulse. Houllebecq quotes Lovecraft on his cosmicism:
“The sky will become icy and void, pierced by the feeble light of half-dead stars. Which will also disappear. Everything will disappear. And what human beings do is just as free of sense as the free motion of elementary particles. Good, evil, morality, feelings? Pure ‘Victorian fictions’. Only egotism exists.”
While Meillassoux does not engage Lovecraft directly in Collapse IV, it seems that After Finitude has much in common with the foremer’s cosmicism - that humans are simply insects that supplant their idealism on the cosmos. Lovecraft’s cosmicism, as different from nihilism, is, instead of a complete meaninglessness, a great leveling of meaning and the aforementioned egotism, no doubt, finds a comfortable home in correlationism. Horror then, is beyond our individual fragility and is about a trace in humanity’s fragility itself where terror is immediately effecting our egotism. It is obvious then that, for terror, it is more than often death whereas for horror it is insanity.
The tipping point here is that of the figure of the last girl or the sole survivor, which I’ve previously discussed. That is, once the terror is over, the last girl lives to carry on the trauma of what happened. While this seems out of the realm of the terrible it does not qualify for the realm of the horrible.
Put most directly: terror is not knowing, horror is knowing too much. However, there is a level of cross over. The horror, in the realm of terror, is the discovery of the body, it is the knowing too much which leads back to not knowing (in relation to the self) hence ‘am I next?’ The terror of horror, is the sight of the thing which cannot be definately described. As I discussed previously in terms of trauma, the figure of the serial killer moves from the full trauma (the human caused creation of the killer) to the result of the empty trauma, the lone survivor who was chosen, at least in the best slashers, arbitrarily.
In terms of trauma, horror moves in the opposite direction, the pointless existence of horrible things, not caused by humans, generate full traumas - causing complex networks of insanity in the victims - a mythos. In the case of terror - the person survives to tell the story for the benefit of others and themselves - in horror the story is hidden and buried, no one benefits from it.
The question then is what of films which display the genesis of what could become the horrible? That is monster movies in which the birth of the monster, or monsters, is obfuscated by the film’s end - that there may or may not be anyone left to tell the unbelievable tale. We are more used to monster tales being public whether massively (Cloverfield, Godzilla films, King Kong films, War of the Worlds and its imitators, Romero’s zombie films and the like) or more locally (vampires, werewolves, witches et cetera). Two of the examples that stick out here are Neil Marshall’s The Descent, which I discussed at length here and John Carpenter’s The Thing. These films reject the participation in legend and remain self contained horrors which are terrifying (Thacker in Collapse IV makes a similar point - p. 89).
Carpenter’s The Thing is particularly interesting because the thing itself is between formed and formless it is a creature which, if it has an orginary form, we never see it - throughout the film it, in various states of accuracy, copies the creatures around it. The thing is the embodiment of the organic excess of the organic, the drive’s axis of iteration. While this is the drive axis that is fitting to horror, and that which is key to speculative materialism as articulated by Brassier, terror’s axis of alteration, the transcription of trauma, is neglected. This is clear when, at the end of Nihil Unbound, Brassier equates Trieb with only repetition towards death.
Thus we end up somewhere between Benjamin Noy’s positing of the horror of time, the experience of time as a kind of horrendous all at once, and a potential buggering of Virlio’s notion of dromology. That is, where Brassier points to the correlationist separation of time and space, we might point out his removal of the experiential of effects of time - as a sharp terror and a creeping horror.
The following is a nervously humorous exchange from No Country for Old Men:
“Chigurh: What’s the most you’ve ever lost on a coin toss?
Proprietor: Sir?
Chigurh: The most. You ever lost. On a coin toss.
Proprietor: I don’t know. I couldn’t say.
Chigurh: Call it.
Proprietor: Call it?
Chigurh: Yes.
Proprietor: Well - we need to know what it is we’re callin for here.
Chigurh: You need to call it. I can’t call it for you. It wouldn’t be fair. It wouldn’t even be right
Proprietor: I didn’t put nothin up.
Chigurh: Yes you did. You been putting it up your whole life. You just didn’t know it. You know what date is on this coin?
Proprietor: No.
Chigurh: Nineteen fifty-eight. It’s been traveling twenty-two years to get here. And now it’s here. And it’s either heads or tails, and you have to say. Call it.
Proprietor: Look… I got to know what I stand to win.
Chigurh: Everything.
Proprietor: How’s that?
Chigurh: You stand to win everything. Call it.
Proprietor: All right. Heads then.
Chigurh: Well done. Don’t put it in your pocket.
Proprietor: Sir?
Chigurh: Don’t put it in your pocket. It’s your lucky quarter.
Proprietor: Where you want me to put it?
Chigurh: Anywhere not in your pocket. Or it’ll get mixed in with the others and become just a coin. Which it is.”
The sometimes remembered French Marxist Jean Joseph Goux remarked on the homology of money and the psychoanalytic phallus - that both are essentially nothing special in and of themselves, but simply point to a kind of presence as presence. In addition and in relation to this, the coin/phallus (and we could also add Levinas’ face of the Other here) circles around a certain conglomerated social (as discussed in my last post) which serves as access to and a bar from the social as such.
In a related way - No Country for Old Men is just as much about debt and payment as it relates to a kind of social momentum. There is essentially no fair trade in the film - there is always a loss, always to much to gain and too much to loose. Several critics of the film have pointed out that we are ripped off cinematically - we don’t receive the death scene of Llewelyn or his wife and we are given the continuing life of Chigurh. We feel ripped off because we don’t receive the payoff from our (emotional and temporal) investment - as is the case with the drug deal gone bad. Even Chigurh’s potential clean up goes beyond its bounds - he kills everyone who gets in his way or even annoys him. Chigurgh attempts to remain outside of the economic, out of the buisness of everything, and acts as a kind of angel of potentiality, going to the very end what he has set out to do, regardless of whether the terms have changed or not. This is summarized best by Chigurh himself when he asks: “if the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?”
In the final scene of action, however, Chigurgh is lowered to the same economic plane as everyone else - he escapes and survives through the use of money.
The endlessness of debt and the impossibility of paying it off, of owning up to the very cost of living (to take it in a literal sense). We might borrow from Adrian Johnston’s Zizek’s Ontology in regards to what he posits as the antimony of the psyche: that on the one hand I know I will die, I am finite in that my life had a definite beginning and it will have a end and yet, at the same time I am infinite because I neither experienced that birth nor will I experience any death, there is a gap in between where my subjectivity, my sensible existence slips through the fingers of god and reason and everything. The infinite in between the frame of reason and the failure of the sensible bears a plasticity which, for our purposes here, can be defined as monetary.
Sheriff Bell tells his wife about a dream at the end of the film:
“The second one, it was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin through the mountains of a night, goin through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and snowin, hard ridin. Hard country. He rode past me and kept on goin. Never said nothin goin by. He just rode on past and he had his blanket wrapped around him and his head down, and when he rode past I seen he was carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold, and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. Out there up ahead. Then I woke up.”
The Sheriff’s dream tarries with the same plasticity of our leaky economy of being but instead of the movement towards death or life, the constant motion of flipping the coin a la Chigurgh, the Sheriff sits comfortably or uncomfortably in the middle. It’s important to remember that Sheriff Bell’s dream, which he didn’t remember, was about money. His father carrying the fire, carries civilization with him (and tending to the fire is a very Freudian image of civilization) and the Sheriff is not privy to where it came from (birth) or where the path will lead him (death), only that he has to follow.
Regardless of our knowledge we always have to, in no certain terms, discern our place between the two uncertainties - we must grip the fact that value is painfully elastic between these two poles. We are always forced, with or without a Chigurgh before us, to call it.
/1/ - Critical Separation
What is it that separates human beings from animals? It is a simple question in the most broad sense and one that is constantly answered and simultaneously unanswerable. The connective tissue is one immersed in violence - when humans are treated ‘like animals’ do both the torturers and the subjects of torture become less than human or do both become more human? Is the infliction of pain on another person a human act assuming its outside of survival, clearly human and is what makes us human in our suffering the fact that, a la V for Vendetta, there is that which can never be destroyed by violence, the inch of our unknowable subjectivity which grants us the possibility of immortality.
Such capacity for immortality is the only purely human trait according to Badiou’s Ethics. In an interview appendix of the text, Badiou is jokingly attacked by Peter Hallward for being too hard on animals. Badiou states that, in a sort of material sense, we are animals, we belong in the category of animals. What sets is apart on a base level is our use of mathematics and, as Badiou sees it, it is mathematics which is the language which allows us to understand ontology, to access the possibility of subjective fidelity to an event, to become a subject in the wake of an event. Badiou argues that the animality of humans is exceeded by a kind of grace of thought - though the event is itself only materiality, it is a materiality grasped in a way that cannot be reduced to the interactions of the material pieces of our animal brains.
In terms of history of course, the line is blurred through long years of horrific treatment. The institution of slavery, the popularity of humans-as-spectacle in various world’s fairs - the human zoo of the Paris exposition, the odd fame of the Hottentot Venus and so forth. Given that so much animal treatment has primarily to do with enclosure, it should be no surprise that Agamben constructs the difference between animal and human with spatial perception as the material. Following Heidegger, Agamben argues that the animal perceives a mess of small worlds whereas only the human being sees the open as such, the broad system. The chapter entitled ‘Tick’ is an excellent example - the creature is blind and only sniffs out blood to feed on. Nietzsche’s comments about animal memory in The Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, seem to come to a similar conclusion - the absence of history in animals leaves them in ignorant bliss.
/2/ - Contractual Interrelations
Waltzing through Manhattan instantly gives one an idea of how people will go for their pets emotionally, conceptually and financially. The anthropomorphization of dogs and cats in particular is evidence of the weight of anthrozoological relations. The domestication of the dog and the horse goes back tens of thousands of years and the use of live stock just as far if not further. Despite technological advance, services animals are still widely used to aid the blind and the deaf, and the benefits of human-animal contact for the sick and disabled is still popular.
A brief tour of reality television illustrates human investment in the pet - The Dog Whisperer, documents the inability of humans to control their pets as well as the relative ease of doing so. Interestingly enough, Cesar Milan’s approach is to instruct the owner to become a pack leader, an odd sort of Deleuzian becoming-animal if there ever was one. To become a pack is, in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, to shift from the molar to the molecular, the embrace a sort of errant multiplicity. Dog Town, which tells various stories surrounding the animals and people of a giant rescue in northern Arizona, is evidence of the cost and effort that many are willing to put in to care for sick and homeless animals.
The notorious PETA is, of course, diametrically opposed to such relations. To say nothing of their activism, their media tactics have become increasingly ridiculously. Not too long ago they began a media campaign called the holocaust on your plate. The campaign juxtaposed large pictures of holocaust victims within camp walls with shots of animals in farm cages. The creator of the media argued that the same mindset allowed both to happen. The animalization of the Jews is, of course nothing new. Several of the Nazi texts, particular those that focused on the so called original races from mythological times.
In Mladen Dolar’s A Voice and Nothing More, there is an interesting anecdote about the relation of mice to Jews. He writes: “With mice we should also keep in mind the connection in German (a verb derived from Yiddish for Moses, Mausche, and meaning to speak Yiddish or Yiddishized German, and by extension to speak in an incomprehensible way, and by further extension secret dealings, hidden afairs, decit).” (p. 208)
Art Spiegelman’s well known Maus, tells one man’s experience of the holocaust by using anthropomorphic animals: the Jews are mice, the Polish pigs, the Nazis are cats, the Americans dogs and so forth. While there are several critical essays on Maus, they have become hard to find and many focus more of their attention on memory then the animalization of the holocaust. The effect, instead of trivializing history, brings a tenderness through sheer difference that is increasingly hard to find in the plethora of holocaust tales. The likely explanation here would be that of the uncanny valley - that non-humans with human characteristics create a strong emotional response. A somewhat similar attempt is made, in regards to the Iraq War, in Brian Vaughn’s Pride of Baghdad.
/3/ - Deep relations
While several texts have emerged regarding human animal relations, Midas Dekkers’ text Dearest Pet: On Bestiality remains one of the few that critical deals with zoophilia. Dekkers makes a fuss over how despite the intent of affection we have for our pets we can carefully mentally eliminate the possibility of cross species contact. This fear, as Deleuze and Guattari make clear, has quite a bit to do with theology - the witch, the devil et cetera, are always bestial, unnatural. D and G, in A Thousand Plateaus, confront psychoanalysis as unduly erasing the category becoming-animal, that it reduces the animal to the drives, to the bare biology, even pre-biological (p. 258-259).
Peter Greenaway’s A Zed & Two Naughts (aka Zoo) follows two previously conjoined twins, Oliver and Oswald, whose wives die in a strange car accident. The two of them become obsessed with death, decay and the beginnings of life as well as strange coincidences surrounding the crash - the woman driving, who survived, was named Buick, and lost her baby after taken mercury in the past. She lost another pregnancy in the car crash - the car was a ford mercury. The accident was caused when Buick was distracted by a series of swans - the street she was on was swan lane.
The brothers soon produce time lapse movies of animals decaying, in an attempt to understand what happened to their wives as well as their own grief. Coupled with this is a fascination with amputation - Buick’s leg is amputated because of the crash and she later asks for the second to be done. This amputation, as well as Oswald’s and Oliver’s relationship, is mended through a strange appreciation of symmetry. The twins, both zoologists, relate their own state of being to the zoo in that, in previous times, conjoined twins would be deemed an oddity and locked up in cages, as was the aforementioned venus.
The films most interesting side character is, incidentally, Venus, a seamstress who sells her body and tells extravagant tales of bestiality on the side in hopes of one day being published. The large ominous blue sign of the Zoo, which simply says ZOO in giant blue letters, is seen backwards, as ooz or ooze, as that which all life returns to, as Venus goes of to either have sex with a zebra or die by it, it is not clear. By way of her unseen death, Venus provides a common connection of love and death as well as the knot of not being ever able to know how things end, the specifics of death (what the brothers are trying to understand) nor the beginning, the rising from the ooze.
If, following Badiou, we are capable of escaping the gravity of our bestial nature through a kind of errant immortality, then in what ways do we turn back to the animal?
/4/ - Battles or separation unraveled
The history channel’s recent special Life After Humans, wonders what would happen if every human on the planet was to up and leave. The show devotes most of its time to structural decay and the inevitable rampancy of animals after our sudden departure but also shows the severity of our current impact on them in myriad ways. For one, the special talked of how roads violently carve up the migration paths of many animals, most notably bears.
Warner Hertzog’s Grizzly Man is, at least partially, about a failed attempt to return to nature. The film follows Timothy Treadwell, an animal enthusiast who, along with his girlfriend, was found eaten alive by bears - his watch ticking on a disembodied hand. Treadwell, as well as various other animal hunters, many of which seem to care far less about conservation than he did, are written off, particularly when they die, as fools who tested the mettle of Mother Nature and hence none of us should be surprised.
Returning to Life After Humans, there is an ever present motif in disaster and apocalyptic/post apocalyptic films - that of the animals once enslaved, turning back to nature or perhaps, more accurately, reasserting their nature despite their bonds. The deer wondering through the abandoned school, the horse and carriage wondering without driver or passenger. Is this suggestive of a naive return to nature, to some harmony?
The very concept of nature itself, seen through the eyes of humans, is unnatural, such as when Lacan articulates the concept of antiphusis or anti-nature. As Lacanians such as Adrian Johnston and Lorenzo Chisea have discussed, human existence is shot through with the symbolic from the moment of our birth. Just as there is something always already ruined about humans (as animals at least) there is always the bit of the beast that cannot be erased from the animal - that glimmer of hunger or chance at escape which remains. The weighing question is the same that is at the end of the film Equus: who is it that really has the bit in the mouth?
/1/ - The Uncanny road to trauma…
The translation of the word unheimlich, literally ‘unhomeness’, is uncanny - a philosophical and psychological category all too familiar thanks to the work of Sigmund Freud. Yet, the original German term has a primarily spatial orientation - it is a feeling of not being where one feels like they are. The English definition takes the word in a very different direction, or maybe we should say to a very different place. Canny means knowing and therefore uncanniness becomes a state of unknowing - of not knowing what one knows.
It is important to establish here the difference between not knowing and not knowing what one knows, the latter being the state of the uncanny whereas the former simply has to do with negativity. Where not knowing would be negative, the un at the start of the uncanny signals indefinite judgment. The most well known example of this would be undead - anyone who frequents the cinema knows that being undead does not mean alive but it certainly does not mean dead either - it is somewhere in between.
Having established the uncanny as indefinite judgement, what exactly does it mean to not know what one knows? In his text Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, Zizek quotes a wonderfully obscene statement from the former head of the Department of Defense:
“In March 2003, Rumsfeld engaged in a little bit of amateur philosophizing about the relationship between the known and the unknown: “There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.” What he forgot to add was the crucial fourth term: the “unknown knowns,” the things we don’t know that we know-which is precisely, the Freudian unconscious, the “knowledge which doesn’t know itself,” as Lacan used to say.”
The nature of the unknown knowns brings us to the strangeness of cognitive dissonance.
/2/ - Cognitive dissonance
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On every season of American Idol the same painful yet funny process of weeding out the awful singers invariably causes two events: either the amateur singer breaks down in tears thereby realizing the comments of the judges, or they complete reject the judgment and storm off in indignation. The two roads represent exactly the split of cognitive dissonance: where the mind, faced with an uncomfortable situation, must either confirm, and therefore change, or deny and remain psychically intact.
In both cases the audience experiences schadenfreude - a pleasure in the the displeasure of others, as they fail before ever being lifted off the ground. Therein lies the difference between human mortality and immortality, between tragedy and comedy proper. It has been stated that the tragic occurs when someone of great stature falls into the mud - this is true if they stay in the mud - comedy occurs when they keep going.
There is an odd reverse version of the experience of watching this split occurring in NBC’s popular To Catch a Predator. When a bewildered man is caught with materials that could suggest nothing other than an intended sexual encounter with an under-aged girl, the suspects follow two routes - they either play stupid or apologize profusely, eventually ending up in tears. Essentially they admit their mistake and throw themselves at the mercy of the television/law, which is fairly rare, or they attempt to somehow undo their situation - they attempt to prove that they were just there to warn the girl, to have a talk with her et cetera.
In the first example the subject seeks validation for their belief; in the second their behavior is attributed to a kind of unacceptable subjectivity (pedophile). In both cases there is a disconnect between being as a subject and being as a set of actions. Or, put another way, it points out the difference between the classical transcendental subject and the more Althusserian subject in process.
/3/ - Losses and Controls
While sticking our noses in the realm of pop singing sensations, it would be incredibly impossible not to discuss a certain Miss Spears. It would be interesting, albeit no doubt impossible, to pinpoint the moment where she passed from a signifier of sexed-up deceptively sweet stardom to transmogrifying into a master signifier for the traumatized citizen par excellence. If there is something more desirable to the general public then a small crystallized moment of the American dream (take any rags to riches story) it is the complete shattering of that graven image.
The most sensational reports of Spears’ recent demise, regardless of their factual content, say more about our vested interests in celebrity collapse then the suffering of a less than functional adult. The details of ‘crazed Britney’s drug cocktail’ were particularly appalling:
“TWO bottles of Nyquil
TWENTY diet pills, including her favourite brand Clenbuterol.
EIGHTEEN herbal uppers specially ordered over the internet.
EIGHTEEN Piriton antihistamine tablets
TWELVE Vicodin painkillers
TEN sleeping pills
UP TO eight antacid reflux tabs
ONE bottle of stomach upset mixture Pepto Bismol
TEN Zantac tablets, an anti-hangover and indigestion drug.
SIX Ritalin, for her attention deficit disorder issues.
TWO empty bottles of painkiller Oxycontin, known as hillbilly heroin, were also found at her home.”
In picturing bald Britney one can peer into the texts of Lauren Berlant, which I discussed here paying particular attention to her notion of fetal citizenship. Spears as the shaved headed threat to her own children, doubly invokes Berlant’s fetal citizenship as well as Lee Edelman’s heteronormative reproductive futurity. Simultaneously Spears embodies a fetal-like victim of the paparazzi-toothed pop culture machine and the threat to helpless creatures (children) as the drug abusing, irresponsible threat which puts a certain politicized reproductivity into jeopardy, it threatens the symbolic American child as such.
This knot is more than likely responsible for the kinds of questions that Jodi Dean, for example, asks at the end of her post here. Dean takes issue with ‘care’: what does it mean to care about something. More specifically this can be thought of in terms of attention - when we pay attention to Britney or Paris Hilton it doesn’t seem that attention means care. At what point is investment empathetic - can the two necessarily be divided?
/4/ - Mimetic Grief
Every few years it seems that some national event grabs the whole of the heart strings and tugs just strong enough to demand a feeling of vapid connectivity. The shootings at Virginia Tech seem to be the most recent example of this, though smaller events are happening all the time that demand a strange kind of empathy; but beyond empathy there is a kind of trauma porn. As I discussed in an earlier entry, the full kind of trauma, often in the form of a national trauma, is taken and spread as far as possible so that its boundlessness is preserved.
Much was made of the involvement of Facebook in the after math of the massacre; the involvement of students in the groups was actually a talking point during my undergraduate graduation. The strange attempt to ‘be a Hokie’ in the wake of the shooting seems to fuel the theories of Berlant, Cvetkovich and Wendy Brown. In the first case, Berlant’s theories of the fetal citizen (as discussed above in relation to Spears) fall nicely in line with experiencing the pain of disasters. Or put in another way, the concept of a privatized public, where issues such as abortion and gay marriage become significantly political, is a reversal of Ranciere’s progression of politics in his text Disagreement. In the text, Ranciere shows how common people were rejected from political discourse because they were marked as being incapable of communication beyond an animalistic way - now we have the so called personal or animalistic cries of being transformed into political impetuses.
/5/ - ‘I’m just documenting’
The feverishly angry responses to Matt Reeves’ Cloverfield are somewhat surprising and yet also somewhat expected. Several reviewers have cried that the film too heavily invokes 9/11 and that it is tasteless and exploitative. While there is one shot of smoke billowing down the street that is very reminiscent of the attack, the direct comparison stops there. The word terrorism is muttered once by a bystander and no antagonistic turns of phrase by the military or anyone else lean towards such a comparison. The reviewers who claim such comparisons seem to think that any devastation in midtown Manhattan is automatically a reference to 9/11, that any destruction in the contemporary era is instantly a reference or a slap in the face. The New York Times‘ Manohla Dargis’ review is particularly weak in that she makes where the director and producer are from a stinging point - only people from Los Angles could so callously exploit our city.
Several reviewers also dub it a cross between Godzilla and The Blair Witch, though, while the Blair Witch comparison describes the look of the film, it does not quite grasp the movie’s comments on the archive, on documentation. The characters, as Lisa Schwarzbaum puts it are appropriately unmemorable; they are average 20 something New Yorkers caught in a disaster. This is done most likely to highlight the monster, as well as the very act of documenting. It cannot be a coincidence that the character who controls the camera is called by his last name Hud (which the video game players out there know as an acronym for heads up display - something that shows information without obstructing the users view).
The entire film is set up as a found document, as something that has come into possession of the Department of Defense. The fact that the movie is encapsulated as a found object, a tape buried in rubble, seems to invite comparisons as it appears as a archived object bearing trauma. At the same time the film seems to suggest the threat of documentation superseding the event itself and, furthermore, what the tape struggles to capture is affect. As Cvetkovich notes in An Archive of Feelings, affect, particularly as it relates to living individuals, tends to get lost in the discussion of national trauma. Beyond the films love story functioning to appease certain demographics (and to get the protagonists moving towards instead of away from the monster) it tries to insert some amount of smallness in the immensity of national trauma.
Here we can return to the linguistic confusions surrounding the uncanny - trauma is both an ‘unhomeness’ as well as an unknowing. The found document illustrates the literal (read spatial) divide between us and the subjects of trauma, as well as presenting itself as a document where we can safely search for the unknown known, the deeper meaning behind the event.
/1/ - Sounds across the stage
Over time the sound track has wormed its way deeper into the medium of cinema. Is it possible that this kind of narratological infection is parallel to the increasing reflexivity of music itself? Sound was first introduced to film at the turn of the century but was not a common occurrence until the 1920s. While the technique was quick to catch on in America it was still met with skepticism elsewhere - there was belief that it would undermine the uniqueness of cinema as a form of entertainment and as a form of art. The worry is not completely unfounded since, as Zizek points out, that while music covers over the threatening silence of the universe, it is also a danger - in that it sentimentalizes and electrifies.
The primary concern was not music into film but that of speech, of the concept of the talking actor. The threat manifested itself in practical terms such as in the first British talkie Blackmail, directed by a young Hitchcock, where the star Anny Ondra had too thick of an accent to be understood when the film, originally shot silently, was redone with sound.
So it is important to remember that we are dealing with two separate yet densely blended entities - the function of the voice in cinema and the function of music. Music was placed over film, sometimes even from a live source, from the orchestra pit for instance, and now has become included to the point of narrative infection.
There is a fairly recent event in film, where movies have become highly musical - seemingly when young directors are behind the camera. Examples of this are Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, Marie Antionette, Wes Anderson’s numerous films, the recent film Juno directed by Jason Reitman (Thank You For Smoking) and written by professional blogger Diablo Cody. What is the connection between the birth of the cinematic voice and musics impregnation of cinema?
/2/ - Move, move move
The birth of the sound film, the talkie, had its ceremonious unveiling at the 1900 Paris Exposition. The tension of film itself is magnified in the architecture of the fair’s layout - the contrast between the Eiffel tower and the human zoos surrounding it. Art nouveau, the arrest of organic growth in the deadness of architecture, also was abound at the fair - the first metros with their elegant gates opened for the first time. Other inventions debuting at the fair speak to a kind of ‘movement to nowhere’ - the escalator and the panoramic theater - both mock the idea of transit purposefully or not.
Furthermore Art Noveau’s focus on style (as an incredibly stylistic style, if such a thing can be said) fertilizes the ever more popular idea that style has become the new content. In Paul Virilio’s Open Sky, he speaks of the horizontal over the vertical, and the valorization of time over space. At the turn of the century the world was spatially compacted view invention whereas in the current epoch the compacting of space is the limit of invention.
The digital age is one of translation and combination and not one of true technological novelty - note that novelty here is not about the quaint fascination regarding certain objects but an absolute newness, a radical moment of newness. Here it might be useful to see newness in terms of Badiou and Zizek. For Zizek novelty is birthed from the void - in step with the strangeness of quantum physics he argues that reality is a kind of unstable nothingness from which reality emerges.
Looking at Badiou, novelty is more about a kind of universalism, it is about creating a space for a new name to emerge, a new unity. Both of these aspects are simulated in the music video cinematic movement - it is a celebration of the nothingness of existence, the pre-real deadness and the lack of a new universality which is, essentially, a universality of denying the possibility of new realities, new universalities.
/3/ - Stations of media
To be almost vulgar in our abuse of diction - what of the track, that is the sound track and also, at the same time, the station of radio station. Early film was obsessed with capturing movement and to anyone who understands the basic function of film - we know that the movement isn’t actually portrayed but what is shows is a series of frozen images that when placed alongside each other effectively mimic movement.
Stations of life, is the kind of lurching movement of development and indeed, the youth of such directors, is apparent in their subjects battles with adulthood. Why is it that the heavily musical film is one of coming to age - take for instance Garden State or its predecessor The Graduate. Music becomes the easiest way of marking movement was has become too quick and easy, at least technologically, but perhaps less so psychologically. Music allows for the narration of the most banal.
Here one should be careful to contrast the heavy use of music versus the musical. The strange bridge between the MTV style film and the classic musical could be The Umbrellas of Cherbourg which I have written on before. The film is throughly musical - there are no musical numbers- instead the film is throughly musical - every line of dialog is sung. But why this differs is that the film does not aggrandize - it highlights the inability of romance or the valorized view musicals tend to have.
Here the subway or train station and the radio station (internet radio now I suppose) come together. The pause of travel and the pause in listening become the same - the choice becomes what and not how, the how has been answered for us via the ease of technology, of the depth of our mechanical and electronic infrastructures.
One scene of Umbrellas which speaks to its refusal of transit as ‘howness.’ When the male lead leaves for Algeria, he walks alongside his love wearing a blue shirt hidden under his coat while she clutches a blue handkerchief to her chest. The visual balance of their emotional pain cuts through the maudlin music which fills the scene. The very lack of words is what drives the scene - no attempt is made to narratize the departure of [name].
The concern of music becoming noise should not be a stylistic concern but one of integration - of quotidian music. The over-integration of music lends itself to the contemporary obsession with a futurism.
/4/ - No Future(ism)
Juno is a film that tarries oddly with what could be discussed as teenage heternormativity or as reproductive futurism a la Lee Edelman’s text No Future. Futurism, as the name suggests, has to do with concern with less with the future as an aesthetic and more as a worry of the continuance of heteronormative child bearing. Via Lacan, Edelman argues that queers enact a sinthomsexuality, that instead of placating to the demands of heternormativity (by way of gay marriage, adoption et cetera) queers should embody the radicalness of being ‘against the children’ of giving life to the death drive. While not simply embodying a vaguely punk rock cry of ‘no future,’ queer folk suggest a possibly different present instead of fighting for a rosy future of abstract tolerance, of an impossible ‘love thy neighbor’ sort of reality.
Juno is about a teen pregnancy which progresses half predictably - Juno becomes pregnant having had sex with a boy she eventually realizes she is in love with. Juno decides to give the baby up for adoption, having ran in a panic from a less than stellar abortion clinic, to a ‘nice young couple.’ What sets the film apartment apart from similar cinematic paths is that the comedy comes from Juno not taking her ‘condition’ seriously and the drama comes from her disruption of the adoptive parents lives. The absence, or least deferral of seriousness is interrupted when the adoptive father sees Juno as the way out of a loveless marriage, as a possible way for him to be young again, to try and be a musician.
Mark, who once had aspirations of being a rock musician, has had to settle for writing jingles to support his eventual family. While the jingle represents an even ‘more quotidian’ use of music, due to complete commodification, Mark’s character has to be taken out of the movie because, through indirect reflection, points out the own loss of meaning central to the film which is the impetus for its comedy. In other words, Mark’s clumsily attempt at courting Juno embodies Juno’s attitude towards the entire universe - one not of reckless abandon but cool headed abandon.
/5/ - The meta musical?
Disney’s Enchanted aims to parody the magical/romantic artifice on which it sits in the animated world and by clumsily transmuting it to the real world. While the film is critical of the various disney tropes, it is more harsh on the kind of every day cynicism of the ‘real world’ found in the offices of the male love interest of the story. In criticizing this negativity of the real world the film therefore reasserts its ‘Disneyness’ by clinging desperately to the fantasy of it all. Dejan, and others have already pointed this out in various ways. What in terms of music then, does the film do that is narratologically sinister, how is it a sort of inverse of Umbrellas?
While Umbrellas is a musical that is a sort of tragedy (because it fails to ascertain the place of proper tragedy that musicals often portray), Enchanted attempts to sabotage the cheesy posturing of the musical by over eagerly embracing it. Here the loss of serious, discussed above regarding Juno, comes back to the spotlight. The message becomes that magic exists but we can only arrive at such a conclusion by passing through the fire of cynicism and ending up in a virtually fetishistic relationship with romance - romance becomes placed in a magical realm (Disney) yet it’s fantastical existence is more real then the reality that cynicists would claim.
I am not hereby agreeing with the cynical position, especially in relation to love, that true love or, to put it into more pragmatic terms, that long term relationships are impossible, I am stating that Enchanted maintains that an intense fantasy construction is the only possible way of maintaining belief in true love. The alternative to both this and the cynical point of view, is that true love does exist but it is not a sort of inhabited vision, etheral and magical, but that it is on the verge of the political, that it is, as Badiou says, a long march.
The over integration of music aims to prop up not reality with fantasy but fantasy with reality - by galvanizing the most banal events in ‘mtvesque’ montages in order to perpetuate the imaginary atmosphere of every day life.
/1/ - At Century’s turn
The very concept of the turn of the century, whether rendered in English or the French fin de siècle, is tethered to one particular time: the shift from the 19th to the 20th century. This temporal lurch appears more drastic then any other because of the technological advances of the time, advents that seem impossible to imagine being without in the current epoch - the radio, telephone, airplane, and the harnessing of electricity.
In contrast to this tectonic of clockwork, it is odd to consider how the passage from the 20th to the 21th century was barely felt. If anything, the eve of the century bottled all its excitement in the knot of anxiety surrounding Y2K. The possibility of the failure of technology seemed, while utterly ridiculous, also banal and quotidian.
Perhaps there is a kind of wide scale technological death-wish here. In the opening pages of The Telephone Book, Avital Ronell tells us that “there is no off switch to the technological.” The telephone expertly embodies this anxiety - it is the constant demand, as Ronell argues, that never leaves us; we are always ready to answer the call, to accept some form of debt.
But before engaging telecommunications too quickly, there is a concern to be raised: how has science, through its deterritorialization lost its very sense of invention, of novelty, of an irruption in knowledge itself?
/2/ - Materialization of movement
It would be difficult not to characterize the contemporary era in terms of a simultaneous fullness and emptiness, of pure excess but an excess of empty shells. What is the interplay between these elements? Let us make the wager that it can be found in the notion of process, or, technological transparency.
Why should we discuss a certain fascination with the sphere? The creation of massive globes (Richardson’s Weather Factory, Reclus’ inside out sphere, Mappariums et cetera) in conjunction with certain geological theories in the realm of pseudo-science (such as hollow earth) suggests a fascination with the materiality of the immaterial. One example is the temporalization of space such as “the great map of mankind”. Fashioned during Victorian times, this world map depicted non-Western countries not in spatial terms but more fundamentally in terms of time. This meant that the ‘less devolved countries’ were seen less as different cultures and more as located in various pasts of western culture.
In addition, theories such as phrenology, physiogomy, and craniometry attempted to materialize differences and, in particular, racial differences. What links these attempts at objective science to the shift from the 19th to the 20th century is their role in the search, as Alain Badiou puts it in his text The Century, for the new man. The errancy of the Fascist, the Nazi, and of all eugenicists was the possibility of a Promethean/utopian project. While Badiou points out how this was the wrong project, it was more noble than today’s science where there are no projects to be pursued but only problems to be solved.
While so many technologies birthed at the turn of the century seemed to eliminate space, they were, in fact, a greater affront to time. Despite the radicalness of such inventions, a certain amount of spatiality was respected. The phone was trapped in place at its desk or booth, small towns grew to service the needs of endless veins of locomotives, and the television and radio gave full rooms of families the injunction to ‘gather ’round.’ Again we have the sphere - the place which moves yet remains.
Perhaps that was the frightening aspect of Tesla’s experiments in Colorado Springs,the lack of wires, the moveability of science which surpassed magic. And to return to the aforementioned Promethean nature, doesn’t the very holding onto there being a place of the gods, keep technology bound to space?
/3/ - The Fifth element or Invention’s plane
While there are countless theories which have been superseded by scientific evidence, several hang about our imaginations. Here I am thinking of aether, and in particular the luminiferous one. The luminiferous aether was the posited medium which, in theory, allowed for the transmission of light. The concept that light could pass through the nothingness of space did not seem to be a possibility at the time. Aether, in a more general sense, was also the fifth element, the air of the god’s ‘clear sky,’ or as the embodiment of quintessence, the non-material material, life itself.
Here Paul Virilio’s almost poetic text Open Sky is of the utmost relevance. The book begins: “The blue sky above us is the optical layer of the atmosphere, the great lens of the terrestrial globe, its brilliant retina. From ultra-marine, beyond the sea, to ultra-sky, the horizon divides opacity from transparency” (p.1). In a kind of reversal, Virilio goes on to argue that in the current time, contrary to the previous century, we have given time its own sense of matter; time has become the only sense of space.
Another venue to examine the relation of the material and the immaterial during the turn of the century is the awkward co- inhabitation of science and mysticism. Would it be completely ridiculous to find a connection between the rise of spiritualism, the belief that god and spirits can be directly communicated with, and the birth of the telephone?
To bring up an example I have used before - Hegel, discussing physiogomy in The Phenomenology of the Spirit, makes the odd statement that ‘the spirit is a bone,’ suggesting the coincidence of opposites in materiality and immateriality. As Zizek argues in The Sublime Object of Ideology, this coincidence has to do with the bone, and in particular the skull, embodying the very failure of being a subject, the subject’s deadness (p. 208). Spirit and materiality are seen through the act of ‘looking awry’ or through Zizek’s amended definition of parallax.
At the same time, the century seemed bent on the concept of the performance as sham, the grift, as well as the belief in magic as magic. This brings us to the film The Prestige.
/4/- The Secret or the Pledge, the Turn and the Prestige
While k-Punk has, some time ago, discussed The Prestige in terms of the secret, the most important aspect is of course found in the film’s end. The final lesson of the film is that we, in our current epoch, wish to believe the infallibility of science which, in a sense, divides science from the notion of invention itself. Without giving too much away, the film’s final point concerns our willingness to completely disregard magic and accept the logical explanation. But the important caveat here is that our viewing the film with a certain amount of dismissal of magic brings with it a view of technology - that it can no longer accomplish novelty - that it is only, in the current era, capable of slow, incremental changes, or as Badiou put it, fixes to a problem and not projects. How can we better explain how the appearance of novelty, of the Event, functions in the field of science?
For Badiou, science is one of four fields in which new truths emerge. The following is an extended passage from Being and Event:
“When Galileo announced the principle of inertia, he was still separated from the truth of the new physics by all the chance encounters that are named in subjects such as Descartes or Newton. How could he, with the names he fabricated and displaced (because they were at hand — ‘movement’, ‘equal proportion’, etc.), have supposed the veracity of his principle for the situation to-come that was the establishment of modern science; that is, the supplementation of his situation with the indiscernible and unfinishable part that one has to name ‘rational physics’?” (p. 401).
The question that Badiou is asking, in his own terms, is how does one move from the indiscernible, from the obscure object of invention, to the undecidable, to the point where one must decide to act in regards to the truth of one’s discovery. Something is knowable in the situation, through some procedure (in the case of the above story calculation based on gravitational discrepancies) that connects what is known to the truth of the situation which is must be forced (Badiou borrows the term of forcing from the Mathematician Paul Cohen) into the situation.
To bring this to the category of invention, one need only take a brief look at the writings of Brian Massumi. In Parables for the Virtual, he writes: “a true invention is an object that precedes its utility [...] with invention, the perceptual direction of travel between the poles of necessity and utility, between the intelligence and instrumentality, possibility and reason, is reversed” (p. 96). An invention “precedes and produces its own possibility” (p. 96).
/5/ - The call, the ring of the phone
Taking another note of Massumi’s - invention- and, in particular, the process, is always analog (p. 147). Wasn’t the turn of the century about the revolt of process, of our rejection of process? The intimacies of process seem to fall close to the dreams of the project- the details of process instill in us the very impossibility of the project.
So where does this leave us: what is the state of invention? Near the end of his well known text Simulacra and Simulation, in the chapter Value’s Last Tango, Baudrillard suggests that all that we have is the foolish hope that the very territory where the transreal and the transfinite exist disappears. This is all we have if we wish for a kind of return to meaning, a return to value in a time of an excess of information.
Returning to Ronell’s Telephone Book, the notion of the call, and in particular the call to act, is paramount. Ronell works through Heidegger’s embarrassing Spiegel interview, relating it to his philosophical works. In particular Ronell discusses Being-guilty in relation to being-there. She argues that the call, which is both beyond and over one (p. 33) when answered makes one guilty (p. 37). To want to answer the call, one must already be in the state of being-guilty, one must be willing to, in a more literal sense, accept the charges.
Ronell makes clear that this being guilty has to do with a simultaneous over-proximity and great distance from the Other as such. Bashing ‘paranoid’ theorists of technology such as Virilio, De Landa, Zizek and Ronell, Jerry Flieger asserts that hypervisibility and technology are not capable of erasing human existence as it has been. Flieger states that the anxiety over technology is simply another example of ‘paranoid knowledge,’ of looking too awry at reality (Is Oedipus Online?, p. 88).
The greater threat, it seems, is not the human mind and body at the altar of cybernetics, but the very concept of technology as a threat to itself. It is not frightening how humanity and technology, how flesh and circuitry, will be melded, but how such a thought displaces the place of invention itself. The risk is science becoming primarily a technique of extension, instead of one of knowledge’s explosion.
/1/ - The commons of trauma
The panoply of images after shocking events, whether wildly national/global, such as September 11th, Hurricane Katrina, or somewhat more localized, as in the case of school shootings and abuse scandals, invariably contains the image of the traumatized victim par excellance, the woman with her reddened face buried in her hands, tears streaming, supported by another.
Opposed to this full trauma, or the trauma of ‘too much,’ there is also the trauma of the ‘too little.’ This is a trauma that is a kind of destitute trauma, the lone person on the roof of the flooded house holding a white board with ‘help’ spray painted on in black. Or ‘Alive Inside!’ to borrow from Dawn of the Dead.
In both senses these traumas are public but seem to function differently. The trauma of fullness, or what could be called a sublime trauma, is effective because it focuses on the boundless of the traumatic event itself, and the victims are merely a kind of bodily extension of the event, the trauma personified, the results of the disaster solidified in flesh.
In the trauma of emptiness the uncertain endings of events are in focus. In the case of hurricane Katrina or other massive natural disasters, the life span of what has already happened is what is at stake: the gap between the damage and when things ‘return to normal.’ The full trauma is about diagnosing the pain in all its forms and effects while the empty or lonely trauma is about understanding the entire traumatic event as a bounded object.
It may be that, whether local or global, that the full trauma is human-caused (genocides, serial killings, et cetera) and that the empty trauma is caused by nature. The obvious explanation here is blame - one cannot blame a hurricane like one can a terroristic organization, lone gunman or what have you. Blame allows the trauma to live on in a way that environmental trauma cannot. (One can of course blame the human response or lack there of to natural disasters thereby transforming empty trauma into a full one.)
/2/ - Children’s private nationalities
A fistful of Queer theory texts including, but not limited to, Lauren Berlant’s The Queen of American Goes to Washington City, Ann Cvetkovich’s An Archive of Feelings and Lee Edelman’s No Future, all deal with the interplay of children, trauma and or nationality. All three texts involve a kind of quotidian trauma, a ‘commonizing’ of traumatic feelings and subsequently of politics.
Berlant argues that an ‘intimate public sphere’ has become the center of American politics, and that the fetus, in particular, has become the signifier around which much of contemporary political concern encircles. Berlant goes on to state that the figure of the fetus in particular has become the most used loci of public intimacy. Berlant further argues that the pregnant woman becomes reduced to an almost formless “vehicle for the production of national culture” (p. 87). This line of thinking seems best supported by the bumper sticker that claims that abortion is killing future American soldiers, or that America’s future as an anglo dominated country is threatened by abortion (here it seems archaic fears of miscegenation are being drug up from the tomb.)
One has to wonder how exactly such an intimate sphere came about when, as aptly analyzed in Jacques Ranciere’s text Disagreement, the first democratic publics in Greece rejected the plebians in the discussion of governmental issues - it was believed that they could not engage in enlightened discourse, that all they had to offer was animalistic cries of pain. It seems someone learned, along the long way of democracy’s history, that it is best to utilize such cries of pain, displays of affect, and the like, as an undeniably valuable form of political currency.
The fetus and the child are the ‘most silent’ and therefore necessitate the most political attention, according to our contemporary intimate public. Yet silence is not the determining factor since many injured groups are only ‘heard’ politically when someone dies, as Cvetkovich suggests in Archive (p. 278). Edelman goes even further suggesting that queer folk are diametrically opposed to the view that a viable future is possible only through a politics of ‘think of the children!’ or what he dubs ‘reproductive futurism.’
Let us take a somewhat sharp turn into the more common field for visual depictions of trauma.
/3/ - Horrific productions
Filmic representations of horror seem to oscillate between the two aforementioned poles of traumatic experience (that of full and empty) but, at the same time, horror inverts the form of their progression.
In the classic horror slasher film we have the tension building up to the murder, the murder itself, and then the eventual discovery of the body. For our purposes here we are focusing on the first and third terms. The first term appears to be the reversal of the empty trauma: the lone survivor. The slow approach of the killer is about the work of getting to the empty trauma - that small increments of killing are oddly designed to lead us to the empty surviver, to the last victim. (This process is oddly formalized in the film Unbreakable when Samuel L Jackson’s character admits that he has caused a series of attacks in order to find someone like him, to find another person that shares his gift.)
In relation to the full trauma, we have the acts of killing continued to the eventual discovery of the body/bodies and then the ultimate effect it has on the lone survivor. This trope of the final girl, dubbed by Carol Clover in Men, Women and Chainsaws, states that the woman surviving in a male dominated genre (horror) is only possible through phallic appropriation by the woman such as her taking of the villain’s weapon. On the website Cinema de Merde, the author suggests a compelling alternative: What if the final girl is just the excuse which allows the viewers to enjoy the sadism that has been happening for the past few hours?
Circling back to Berlant’s argument and the first photo above, it seems that women are codified as the bearers of trauma. How many countless war movies spend an exorbitant amount of time on the telegram of death, the notifying man at the door? Regardless of whether the scale of the trauma is national, as part of a larger conflict/disaster, or more localized, women seem to be required to carry the weight.
/4/ - Trauma’s short circuit
If it is true that men die and that women endure in the national and horrific imaginary, then is this why children must remain unsexed and, more forcefully, the only figurative hope for the future in both body and concept? Children are reduced to pure victim; they only obtain adult characteristics when it expands their victimhood. Furthermore, and to return to the previous few passages, the absence of child and the fragility of the child as child is anchored to that of the vague codification of the fertile or pregnant female body.
Here again we have the interplay of the full and empty trauma - the dead child, full of now impossible potentiality, and the empty arms of the mother-not-to-be. The short circuit here would explain the figure of Medea, of the mother who kills her own child.
“I got a tree on my back and a haint in my house, and nothing in between but the daughter I am holding in my arms” (p. 18). Sethe is worn to the bone by the eventual materialization of her dead daughter, whom she beheaded to spare from slavery. Beloved’s somewhat ghostly but somewhat physical body displays the confusion between the physical and emotional history of slavery’s victims. As the end of the text suggests, in a somewhat maudlin fashion, only community is capable of making trauma livable even when one’s particular experience of a larger trauma (such as slavery) is always different from another’s. And while Sethe’s experience is ‘not one to pass on’ it is passed on, it needs to exist as a kind of splotch on history itself that cannot be ignored but can only be partially discussed.
/5/ - Frayed ends
The horror film seems to the the transformation of anxiety into possible trauma, whereas the quotidian futurism of childhood is the overly active or disregard for trauma’s creation. The sphere of childhood is continually armored against possible invasion, and the life and times of children are becoming ever more sheltered in ways which grace many young people with social and psychological fragility.
In a sense we can grasp the internal limit of children’s futurity in the concept of ‘growing up too fast’ intertwined with never leaving the mother’s side. While we cannot predict the dangers of the external world, we cannot avoid having anxiety about them, but to let that anxiety become trauma in our fantasies freezes certain possibilities. Given too much freedom, trauma becomes constant and unrelenting.
Showtime’s program Dexter is an interesting twist to this logic. The main character, Dexter Morgan, was left in a tank full of dead bodies along with his brother at the age of three. He’s later adopted by a policeman named Harry who recognizes that the boy has sociopathic tendencies. Harry decides to make Dexter into a socially responsible serial killer by training him in his talent while making sure he only targets the guilty - criminals who have slipped through the cracks of the justice system.
Dexter is about the endlessness of trauma as Dexter’s brother becomes a killer as well, suggesting that the ongoing potency of the traumatic event. One has to wonder about Dexter’s upbringing - if he could be taught to be socially responsible in his murder, couldn’t he be stopped as a murderer all together? Dexter’s ‘dark passenger,’ the entity which takes control of Dexter and forces him to kill, has all the markings of the Freudian drive - while it can be somewhat directed and reformed by the subject’s environment, its fundamental nature cannot be changed.
This brings us back to the split of the full and empty trauma and, in particular, the function of origin and blame. The two traumas meet each other in the figure of the serial killer - if one cannot change who one is, if one is either born a serial killer or becomes one very early on in their ontogentic development, then where is the final origin of the trauma, where does its weight fall? If we take into account our earlier discussion of a gendered split in trauma, or at least a division of perception, it seems that the full trauma is gendered feminine, that women carry the weight of the large, disastrous trauma whereas men epitomize the lonely trauma. In the case of the final girl, this lonely trauma turns into anxiety and culminates in a kind of hysteria whereas for men, the full trauma is converted into a violence that produces trauma in others, that works towards an impossible collusion between fullness and emptiness.
/1/ - War wind weathered bones
Let’s risk a fairly ridiculous argument - the western, as a film has exploded in popularity during times of a kind of colonial fear - world war II, 1957 (the height of the cold war due to the launch of Sputnik) and most recently during the first and second Gulf Wars. Previously I’ve suggested how Westerns embody a kind of ‘Enlightenment obscenity’ - it encapsulates the very violent core of the enlightenment project - illustrating the excess that serves as the foundation and disruption of (ie the symptom of in Lacan’s terms) the notion of progress.
The question becomes - do westerns, at their fundamental core, simply reaffirm the barbarity of humanity (the reckless id, the undeniable unconscious) or do they, perhaps more radically, display the very violence of the notion of reason itself?
Nick Cave’s The Proposition is brutal in a variety of aspects - it is episode after episode of extreme violence painted over a landscape of unbearable whiteness. The film seems to weave two large themes together - the fragility of the word (the symbolic) and the animality of humanity. One of the more heavy handed scenes of dialog in the film is when Guy Pierce’s character comes across a drunken bounty hunter. The bounty hunter rants about Darwin’s theory of evolution - laughing manically at the idea that ‘white men’ could be on the same level as natives. The entire film stages a battle between (or maybe just institutes a confusion of) civilization and barbarity. If there is one scene that crystallizes this antimony, it is a shot that only lasts a few seconds but is deeply disturbing. After the youngest of the criminal brothers has been flogged 38 times, the whipper rings out all the blood in the flayed-end whip and it pools sickly in the dirt.
The film seems at once condemn and find sympathy for those who seek to ‘bring civilization to Australia’ One of the main character’s of the film (who seems to shift from villain to anti-hero) is that of Captain Stanley who has convinced himself he must civilize the land in order to keep his delicate wife safe. Stanley tries to stop the flogging of the criminal (especially since he is to die by hanging 5 days or so later) arguing that that would kill him.
Despite the horrid dying landscape what is important to notice is that there are no skeletons only skeletal structures (the captain’s fence, the house where the rape occurred has a bare roof, the bullet riddled hide out of Pierce’s character, the strangely empty wire crib, the porous cave hideout etc). Humans are constantly grimy, bloodied, yellowed like wet paper - what’s important is that we’re never giving direct access to the base of the primal - we never get to see the most basic framework - the always already lost origin. It is namely homes that appear barren and skeletal - representing the uncanny unnaturalness of creation itself. The stark, at times almost blinding, landscape of the film seems to suggest a sort of pre-natal haunting, a haunting that is tumbling over itself trying not to remind us of a sunken weight but the sharp pang of a memory constantly trying to be formed.
To draw a connection to my entry on porosity - the genetic, the forming of experiences as well as the actual genetic, is easily evident in the case of family. At one point in the film two of the characters are discussing what a misanthrope is and another asks, based on their violent past, ‘aren’t we misanthropes’ and the film’s true villain answers ‘no we’re a family.’ The concept of family (fused with that of loyalty) is the how the genetic is construed in order for the ‘civilized characters’ of their film to enjoy their horrific acts. During the flogging scene there is a series of shots where the backs of the onlookers are focused upon. On their yellow and white vests dozens and dozens of flies gather and buzz ominously. The flies are indirectly linked to the natives in the film when the drunken bounty hunter rambles about how when you kill a fly more just appear. Later on the pretentious gentleman tells Captain Stanley that ‘if you’re going to kill one native make sure to kill all of them.’ His tone when he talks about the native in an earlier statement suggests that they are driven by revenge, even though, the most brutal acts of vengeance in the film are carried out by whites.
/2/ - Kant’s Civilization or Freud’s Fons et Origo
Kant’s short introduction to his Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View gives off a very proto-Hegelian vibe and also reverberates well with Laclau as well as Lacan. Kant’s argument perfectly highlights why Hegel’s later argument about teleological history - is not ‘eventual’ or to be actualized in praxis, but as a necessary fiction. While Kant proposes a definite end for history, his apparent idealism is more tempered than a naive reading of Hegel’s notion of absolute spirit. Besides the capacity for reason Kant prefigures another Hegelian text when he states that ‘man is the only animal who requires a master.’ Kojeve’s lectures on Hegel, attended by Lacan, provide the perfect intersection of these ideas. Kant argues that humans require a master because of the social nature and because reasons drives them to dominate others (following a vaguely Nietzschean argument). The fact that this drive towards domination exists is what results in the aforementioned fundamental tension - the split being of ontology that Kant, according to commentators such as Žižek, could never come to terms with.
In many ways Freud seems to complicate Kant’s discussion of reason, society and reason by interjecting enjoyment. This move can be seen in terms of a more direct affront to Kant when Lacan, taking up Freud, points out that Kant’s vaunted reason fails in the face of excessive enjoyment (jouissance). In The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant states that sexually crazed libertine faced with the choice between survival or a night with whom desired and then the gallows, would clearly pick survival. Lacan argues against Kant stating that a true libertine would find the threat of the gallows as simply adding to the excitement. The connection of enjoyment to a sort of pure (or impure?) antagonism in society is taken up by the notorious Dr Freud.
Early on in Civilization and Its Discontents Freud suggests a model of the psyche which, in some ways, seems a rough precursor to Paul MacLean’s model of the Triune brain (this is the idea that there is a mammal brain laid over a reptile brain etc.). Freud likens the psyche to the archaeological history of a city where the remnants of past infatuations remain in one form or another as a kind of mental ruin. Freud makes the clever move of seemingly dismissing this argument - that the ruins of a city cannot be easily compared to the psyche. In effect, Freud makes the argument in regards to the usefulness of the ruin argument by making the argument itself into a ruin, a ghost existing in the body of the text.
There is another crossover between Freud and Kant which seems to support ruins/fallen bits of society as haunting human life itself. Reason, for both Kant and Freud, seems to be the retroactively created cause which is beyond the material yet, at the same time, only ever arising from the material, from the actual world. In Civilization and its Discontents Freud lampoons humanity for endlessly trying to find purpose in reality. Here Freud’s concept of will should be seen as a more ‘honest’ view of Kant’s reason - both force humanity onward illogically, or at least in a way that runs against ‘nature.’ The ultimate tension for humans, according to Freud, is the desire to change the world to fit our particular form of happiness and trying to be happy without unnecessary struggle - being happy in avoiding unhappiness, in not doing more than one should.
Let us focus on the struggle to change, on the old ‘westward ho’ kind of mentality.
/3/ - The Science of Expansion
It has no doubt be mentioned in passing, in several texts, that the collusion of science fiction and the western has mostly to do with their shared use of the ideal of the frontier, the view of virginal territory. The very promise of space, however, is shaded by the extreme violence of the frontier - due to the lack of law, of any set coherent rules, and by the sense that once the promise has been fulfilled (once the treasure has been acquired) it is one’s right to obliterate any thing or anyone who would attempt to take it from you. In the Dominion War Arc seasons of Star Trek DS9, there was a simple but startling comment from Sisko’s father in regards to war in space: ‘You’d think with all the room in space people wouldn’t have to fight wars.’ Sci-fi and the western are brought together particularly well in the Firefly series and the anime Cowboy Bebop.
Both of these universes are in the wake of civil war and both fuse the western aesthetic with a non-western aesthetic (Chinese culture in Firefly and Japanese culture in Cowboy Bebop). The unreliable presence of the Law is both creations, is what crystallizes the ‘western feeling’ best. Cowboy Bebop seems to directly connect the destitute state of existence to the failure of rapid expansion in that the construction a gate on the moon (a device allowing for rapid interplanetary flight) resulted in the near destruction of earth. Cowboy Bebop is, at its best, about the irreconcilable tension between past lives/pains and the senseless march towards the future, which, often feels little more than biological survival. Just looking at the three main characters Spike has a past he can’t forget, Faye has a past she can’t remember and Jet lies somewhere in between.
The cross over between the excess of reason/reason’s limit remains murky and, in many ways calls to task the relationship of cognition to the sublime in Kant’s Critique of Judgment. For Kant the beautiful belongs to the faculty of understanding whereas the sublime belongs to reason. For Kant reason exhibits a kind of purpose (which going back to his writing on history mentioned above) can be misconstrued as supporting a notion of god. To return to Freud and more importantly to Darwin, one could assume, in a similarly naive way, that Darwin supported a divine force simple because evolution has a ‘purpose.’ The need to assume a consciousness is why Freud’s ‘final insult to humanity’ is the penultimate one - because it points out the irrationality that highlights how we want to explain away the mysteries, the gaps in our existence.
The truly devastating nature of humans expanding their terrority may lie in Agamben’s discussion of the work of Heidegger. In The Open, Agamben discusses how animals are in a truly free state of being because they see the open, the very blankness of space, with ‘all of their eyes’ whereas humans are always looking back upon themselves, always confronted with ‘a sense of no’ (p. 57). Agamben goes on to discuss Heidegger’s complication of this relationship and argues that while animals seem to have a more direct access to the open, it is an open where nothing is concealed or unconcealed. Heidegger’s most well known piece of evidence for this is that of the moth endlessly circling the flame.
Let’s discuss the flame before we discuss the endless circling…
/4/ - Burning the flesh off the bones
Danny Boyle’s Sunshine embodies the enlightenment tension in science fiction well. The film centers around a group of scientists who must ‘reignite the dying sun.’ The whole point of the movie seems to be about confronting the irrational kernel of the enlightenment through the vague ‘tarrying with the sun as a platonic object.’ Three aproaches seem to emerge in regards to dealing with the sun - as scientific object, as sublime object, as communicative object. For most of the crew, the sun moves slowly from scientific to sublime object - the most violent/courageous characters in the film are those who are more ready to accept the sublimity of the sun.
When the captain Kaneda must go on space walk, just before he is incinerated, several of his crew are screaming for him to move to safety. Searle, who spends an inordinate amount of time in the observation room, simply staring at the sun (almost to the point of blindness), asks Kaneda just prior to his death ‘What do you see?’ Searle is also the character who sacrifices himself, almost without even a painful expression, in order to save the rest of the crew. What’s particularly startling about the scene where Searle agrees to doom himself is that instead of the standard unspoken nobility, Searle engages instead in a kind of eager child like excitement at the prospect of being obliterated by the sun.
The villain of the film’s second half, Pinbacker, makes the common mistake of those reading both Kant and Hegel, of attributing the jump of the enlightenment to romanticism requiring a divine consciousness. Pinbacker believes that trying to save the sun is an insult to god and that man has no right. Again we see how see the split between the ‘purpose’ of humanity and a divine intelligence - Capa, the ship’s physicist, is the rightful hero of the story because he asserts that the technological capability of humanity is more of a purpose, in and of itself, than any attempt at arguing for a divine consciousness.
To return to the aforementioned circling of the moth, one should take care to mention the notion of repetition. Repetition itself seems to stand as a kind of tipping point between rational and irrational behavior. While repetition is the essence of practice, laboratory verification, etc. it is also one of the most well recognized symptoms of mental imbalance - the old saying about insanity being when one does the say thing expecting a different result.
Deleuze brings the sameness between repetitions into question in that he argues that difference is primary, and that every iteration creates a difference, that nothing is self identical. (Here one can easily see how Judith Butler is often described as a Deleuzian despite her clumsy attempts to deny it.)
/5/ - Again and again
To bring things to a close then - if progress itself is as irrational as our animalistic desires are the two simply ‘two sides of the same coin (to play Žižekian games) - is progress an animalistic need or desire? One might also argue, via Lacanian psychoanalysis, that because subjectivity is fundamentally intersubjective (our very being is social - composed of our relations to other subjects) society is the complication that arises between the will (or Kant’s reason) and society. As Freud puts it in Civilization and its Discontents society is that which allows an attack on nature via the will (p. 27).
What the western seems to be about then, in regards to all the strands I have tried to pull together in one bloody palm, is the uneasy tension between the most base sense of our being (the skeleton, the bone of our existence) and how that base continues to endlessly betray us and propel us. The western highlights the very violence of the Lacanian symptom, or in the terms of Adrian Johnston’s Time Driven, the tension between biological time (the time of repetition) and historical time (time that can be represented). The western plays out the impossibility of experiencing ‘first causes’ in Kant’s terminology - while first causes are required by reason to make experience intelligible - this starting ground can never be fully experienced (Time Driven, p. 40).
In terms of the subject there is always a noumenal kernel - the structure which we always miss with the eye - we always see through it - it is porous, skeletal. The only experience of this kernel is the slips of the tongue, the mistakes, the meaningless and enigmatic symbols that we encounter over and over again. What makes this argument non-transcendental however, is that such a structure doesn’t actually exist, it is simply a prerequisite for the very possibility of our thinking. The horrible violence of The Proposition, is the attempt to repeat differently - to tweak our animalistic, non-historical behaviors, in a way that benefits us in the long term, that benefits us in a historical fashion.
It is no wonder that the western is so much a genre of revenge - the strange sense that the circle of violence will some day come to an end. To end on a strange pop culture note - the Gnarls Barkley song Crazy contains a sample from the spaghetti western Django, Prepare a Coffin in which the title character drags a coffin behind him that contains a machine gun (and as luck would have it, this element was paid respects to in an episode of Cowboy Bebop). One would be hard pressed to find an image of the violence and ressentiment more fitting than that of Django. Cee-Lo’s lyrics which simply discuss the madness of being an artist/entertainer emphasize the openness of that kind of creative insanity ‘even your emotions have an echo.’
Reason is a kind of horribly violent progress because it sees itself as without ‘experienceable’ ground and therefor the only ‘reasonable’ thing to do is an irrational jump of faith which is accomplished through a series of odd repetitions.
/1/ - The Surreal and the Pornographic
At the risk of crassness, couldn’t we say that the link between Clowes, Lynch and the pornographic is that of the hole? Isn’t the very dynamic of pornography the interplay between penetration and its limit? Isn’t the pornographic image par excellence that of the completely penetrated woman who, some how, in a kind of defiance of physics and sheer materiality, manages to maintain some sort of consistency? While this raises interesting connections to Lacan’s discussion of jouissance feminine (which I’ll discuss below) it also lends weight to Žižek’s assertion of how men are desubjectified in the pornographic encounter. The male body is taken to be a completely flat entity, taken apart and cut up more into chunks than the female body. The argument here is that really the masculine force need only be a set of stupid signifiers whereas the woman must be felt as the Freudian Thing, the endlessly plastic entity that survives every alteration.
This survival is based not on the fact that the female body escapes the phallic (read symbolic) economy, but that it is so completely subject to it that it escapes its very logic. In Suzanne Barnard’s discussion in Reading Seminar XX there is a point where she discusses the Real in relation to language in which all jouissance is codified phallic - so how is it that there can be such a thing as jouissance feminine? Furthermore this is complicated by the fact that Lacan states that jouissance feminine is spoken. The collusion of the surreal and the erotic proves itself an excellent example of how the Real is the symbolic in the mode of the not-all. The not-all or pas-tout can be seen in the porosity of fiction.
This is particularly evident in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. As Žižek discusses in The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, the opening scene is particularly expressive of this aspect when after showing an average scene of idyllic white picket fence America, the old man watering the garden has a heart attack. The interesting touch is not that the camera focuses on the face of the man as it moves close to him, but instead it goes past his face and enters the pristine green grass to show the seething layer of dirt and instincts. While there is the one obvious message of the falseness of the small town America veneer, there is also a larger issue of the very porosity of reality or, more importantly, what we take to be reality, that of the signifier.
Another discussion of how jouissance feminine is symbolic also in the mode of its delivery - it is spoken (and this is where Barnard had an issue with how spoken jouissance can function in a phallic economy). In the Pervert’s Guide as well as in the The Puppet and the Dwarf, Žižek uses the example of Ingmar Bergman’s film Persona in which one of the character’s enacts one of the most erotic scenes in cinema simply by the way she recounts a scene of sex, a beach orgy.
He sums it up in the following way: “the Real is the Symbolic itself in the modality of the non-All” and also that “to step into the Real does not entail abandoning language, throwing oneself into the abyss of the chaotic Real, but, on the contrary, dropping the very allusion to some external point of reference which eludes the Symbolic” (The Puppet and the Dwarf, p. 69-70). It’s in this way that the symbolic, and in particular the feminine approach to the symbolic, is one that is porous. The idea of feminine jouissance is one that essentially ‘floats’ through the symbolic - not in an ideal way in which it simply bypasses it outside, but by passing through the cracks that can only be seen by submitting to it completely.
/2/ - Switching frames
Here I am tempted to continue a theme that has cropped up in several of my recent posts and relates, in particular to both film and graphic novels. But instead of discussing the idea of narrative gaps in terms of the gaps between scenes/frames, we can discuss the concept of the gap that is invited when there is a switch of sorts.
In David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive the concept of switching is pivotal the entire text and, in particular, the shifting places of reality and unreality. While there is one large switch in the film (involving the blue box and, incidentally, a scene of masturbation) but beyond this there are several odd moments that involve smaller and smaller levels of shifts. For instance when Naomi Watts’ naive young character goes to try out for a role - her acting in the scene (essentially her acting as she is trying to act) is far superior to her acting in the film (Muholland Drive) which is purposefully cheesy. Referring again to The Pervert’s Guide, Žižek discusses how Mulholland Drive is all about over proximity - everything is too much - too bright, too hot, too cold, the music in the theater is simply too emotional for any one to take. So how does the switching play into this?
If Lynch’s films, and in particular Mulholland, is about about over proximity then it seems that such proximity enhances the notions of gaps, or put more directly, when the frame becomes a thing in and of itself that to move from frame to frame, to try and experience things differently becomes the most unbearable gap. What makes the switch so painful is not much the feeling of the unknown other qua other - but the fact that there are different experience period. When Naomi Watts’ character writhes from the music (which is not coming from the singer but beyond the singer) it’s not so much the sound itself but the fact that the experience of the singer is so clearly and painfully expressible to her. In a sense, Mulholland Drive is painful exactly because it is not a comic book, because there is no comfortable whiteness between the frames but only rough cuts and that which seems like nonsense. It’s worth noting that the last word of the film is silencio (silence) uttered by the singer who previously collapsed during the song that wasn’t actually hers.
Daniel Clowes could easily be called the David Lynch of the comic book/graphic novel world - particularly when one looks at Eightball, David Boring and Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron in particular. If we wish to attempt a kind of porosity of the signifier in the comic book/graphic world than Clowes is the best candidate.
/3/ - Sex or story?
Velvet glove falls somewhere between the realm of the Twin Peaks and the exploitation films of Russ Meyer. Much of Clowes works plays with the boundary between pornography and fiction as well. The stupid flatness of the signifier (as I suggested in the first section regarding pornography) is all over Velvet Glove. After being beaten by two bored police officers, they carve a stupid face (Mr Jones) into his foot to mark him. That face starts appearing everywhere, and drives Clay crazy. He starts running into other characters who have dedicated their lives to trying to understand the figure of Mr Jones - there was a small tattoo on Hitler’s neck etc, the person who knows the ‘truth’ about the figure says it is only a joke. Ultimately Clay attempts to find some sort of meaning in something meaningless, in a snuff film that was based on the strange rantings of a little girl. In addition to the sort of meaningless chase for meaning, the text is obsessed with mutations and non-sexual relationships or overly casual encounters.
So why is it that so many surreal texts are inherently sexual or is it that sexuality itself is surreal, essentially nonsensical? To return to the aforementioned point about the symbolic and sex, and, again returning to The Pervert’s Guide, Žižek makes the obvious but at times forgotten point that ’sexuality is never about bodies, it is about words.’ Following this point Žižek discusses the fundamental prohibition of pornography. Everything can be seen, but almost nothing can be told, no true narrative can come to pass in that there can be no emotion. (A film like John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus may try and challenge such a deadlock but since I have not seen it I cannot comment on its effectiveness.)
Using the example of Eyes Wide Shut, Žižek points out how the entire film (especially seen in the awkwardly cold orgy scenes) is about how male fantasy can never catch up to the feminine fantasy. And what is interesting of course is that Kidman’s character never actually commits any acts of betrayal, it is her imagined affair with the officer that her husband cannot stand. So here we have the standard difference of men and women’s different approaches to the erotic - that one is visua