The Sovereign Exception of Guantánamo
A few weeks ago, just before leaving Providence, I read a new pamphlet from Prickly Paradigm Press, Magnus Fiskesjö's The Thanksgiving Turkey Pardon, the Death of Teddy's Bear, and the Sovereign Exception of Guantánamo . It's an anthropology of the U.S. President, along the lines of Carl Schmitt's theses about power and sovereignty. The sovereign, in Schmitt, is the one who has the power to decide what is the exception (the state of emergency, martial law, response to the threat of civil war, etc.) In the U.S., the sovereign decides the happy exception of a pardoned Thanksgiving turkey or (unlikely, for this president) a pardoned prisoner, as well as the dire exceptions: the establishment of a camp in which U.S. laws do not apply.
OK, it's canny of Fiskesjö to have focused on the persistence of this ceremony, the pardoning of the turkey. And it's a delightful bit of reporting, too, to have discovered that these same turkeys, supposedly sent to a farm to "live out their days," are generally dispatched without ceremony not so long after their arrival at the farm--they are genetic freaks, after all, bred for early slaughter, not really capable of a good long life.
And it's quite apt of Fiskesjö to bring up Giorgio Agamben and Carl Schmitt, with regard to Guantanamo. There could not be a better or more gruesome example of Agamben's concept of "bare life" than in this month's Vanity Fair, which reports on the rise of suicide attempts at Guantanomo, or, as these acts are called by the camp administrators, "manipulative self-injurious behavior," m.s.i b, an invented syndrome. --One s.i.b.'er was so self-injurious that he is now in a permanent vegetative state. How manipulative of him! But that's what the camp commandant actually says of this wretched being: he says he's "childish." !!!
The pamphlet is onto something, but I wonder about the usefulness of a "weak Agambenianism," as I would call it, or a weak "Schmitt-ism." I mean, the more I read this word, "the sovereign," without context, without history, the less satisfied I am. It's not an eternal condition, is it? I guess it is, according to Schmitt. I think there's something about deploying the concept of sovereignty anthropologically that I don't like.
"...letters from students, or maniacs..." --Henry Green, Concluding.
"...vast frescoes, dashed off with loathing..." -- Beckett, Molloy.
Wednesday, December 31, 2003
Saturday, December 27, 2003
Denys Arcand, The Barbarian Invasions
Arcand is an argumentative filmmaker, or a maker of filmed arguments. This film has stagy monologues, and monologues partitioned out amongst a number of characters in imitation of conversation. (And, most gratingly, as in The Decline of the American Empire, characters make sexual puns while whooping and hooting in imitation of a rollicking good time, or the kind of rollicking good time waggish intellectuals can have.)
Also grating are the Houellebecq touches: the frank chauvinism, the references to Mohammedans and Albanians and Chinoises.
Still. I loved it. Anything that addresses the odd invisibility of death interests me--not violent death, but the way most of us will die, in walled institutions. I recently read Foucault's essay on "heterotopias," the places of exclusion to which we consign the unacceptable. The sick and the old are put in prisons: their uselessness, and worse, their incapacity for enjoyment, are a scandal.
I read somewhere that this film was a denunciation of the Canadian healthcare system, but it doesn't seem so different from hospitals in the U.S: beds in the corridors, people in misery, thoroughly exposed and yet invisible, alone and yet without privacy.
The film is a fantasia of the good death: friends and family around, sympathetic health workers, limitless money, the final narcotic injection from a kind friend. I would like such a death (eventually, I mean; not soon). Mais ca coute.
It used to be that the good death was like the one pictured in this film: time to prepare, to say farewell. According to Phillipe Aries. At the time Aries was writing, the sudden death had become the good death--I mean, people had started to say it was best to be hit by a bus, to drop dead of a heart attack, to be taken unawares, even if this was not how people actually died. And now, now that we all linger so long, one dreams again of the older kind of good death.
The bourgeois will start to buy these good deaths for themselves. The rest will do without. Whenever you talk about palliative care or the right to die or assisted suicide, people bring up the fear that the poor will be subtly or brutally encouraged to die. But what if it's the opposite? What if it's the poor and ill who linger and vegetate, kept alive by all the forces of medicine, warehoused in prisons for the aged, while the rich die good deaths at the seashore?
Arcand is an argumentative filmmaker, or a maker of filmed arguments. This film has stagy monologues, and monologues partitioned out amongst a number of characters in imitation of conversation. (And, most gratingly, as in The Decline of the American Empire, characters make sexual puns while whooping and hooting in imitation of a rollicking good time, or the kind of rollicking good time waggish intellectuals can have.)
Also grating are the Houellebecq touches: the frank chauvinism, the references to Mohammedans and Albanians and Chinoises.
Still. I loved it. Anything that addresses the odd invisibility of death interests me--not violent death, but the way most of us will die, in walled institutions. I recently read Foucault's essay on "heterotopias," the places of exclusion to which we consign the unacceptable. The sick and the old are put in prisons: their uselessness, and worse, their incapacity for enjoyment, are a scandal.
I read somewhere that this film was a denunciation of the Canadian healthcare system, but it doesn't seem so different from hospitals in the U.S: beds in the corridors, people in misery, thoroughly exposed and yet invisible, alone and yet without privacy.
The film is a fantasia of the good death: friends and family around, sympathetic health workers, limitless money, the final narcotic injection from a kind friend. I would like such a death (eventually, I mean; not soon). Mais ca coute.
It used to be that the good death was like the one pictured in this film: time to prepare, to say farewell. According to Phillipe Aries. At the time Aries was writing, the sudden death had become the good death--I mean, people had started to say it was best to be hit by a bus, to drop dead of a heart attack, to be taken unawares, even if this was not how people actually died. And now, now that we all linger so long, one dreams again of the older kind of good death.
The bourgeois will start to buy these good deaths for themselves. The rest will do without. Whenever you talk about palliative care or the right to die or assisted suicide, people bring up the fear that the poor will be subtly or brutally encouraged to die. But what if it's the opposite? What if it's the poor and ill who linger and vegetate, kept alive by all the forces of medicine, warehoused in prisons for the aged, while the rich die good deaths at the seashore?
Sunday, December 07, 2003
Vladivostock, Rhode Island
There's about a foot and a half of snow on my fire escape. It has been snowing since Friday afternoon, and it's still snowing.
Films I've been watching in the last few weeks, but can't remember well enough to review in full:
Comedy of Innocence, Raul Ruiz. A son and two women, each his putative mother. The three of them trade the roles of seducer/outsider and contented dyad. The mobile-faced Jeanne Balibar (who reminds me of Holly Woodlawn) plays the crazy, false mother. I love to watch her, though she's made to look a little too elfin for my liking here. I like the film's tense spookiness, the slight suggestions of the supernatural, though it's dismaying to watch two women battling over a tiny little male.
Sister My Sister. Opens on the bloodied walls, staircase, and floor after the maids have murdered their employer, and so the rest of the film is a flashback whose whole promise is that we will return to the appalling carnage. On that level, it's very manipulative, and there the (somewhat) recent French version, The Maids, is probably better: more diffuse, more about the coda of their life in the prison. Still, what I love about this film is the physical portrayal of the employer and her daughter. Both of them are tiny. The stiff, self-satisfied mother, a tiny manic doll, and her oddly ageless daughter, who looks like both a giant five-year old and a pudgy, infantile thirty-year-old. No doubt, this, too, is manipulative: The maids are willowy, long-haired, lithe; the bourgeoises miniature/grotesque. Still, the mother dancing alone, unaware that her daughter is watching, is genius: she traipses around in her stubby way, her arms waving about in an approximation of conductor/ballerina/sylph; her face folds in on itself with rage when she sees the daughter seeing her.
Queer as Folk. (Seasons 1 & 2, on tape.) I like the fantasy that every night in downtown Pittsburgh is a saturnalia a la Querrelle. I also like the crudely Gothic Lite hero: outwardly heartless, secretly sentimental.
Frenzy, Alfred Hitchcock. After listening to Martin Lefebvre's paper on cannibalism, I had to see this. There's a scale here that's sometimes missing from Hitchcock's American movies, a sense of crowded city life. People listening to a speech about cleaning up the Thames's industrial effluent rush to look at a woman's body washing up on the bank. The Covent Garden food market, its crowds and motion. There are frequent juxtapositions of food and bodies: as Lefebvre points out, the corpse in the potato sack is the "meat and potatoes meal" that the inspector, restricted to his wife's disastrous experiments in French cuisine, longs for.
Friday Night, Claire Denis. A transit strike, a chance sexual encounter. I like the traffic jam better than the sex-idyll. The boredom, the fumes, the drivers wavering between impatience and drowsiness. The difficulties of city life: missed dinners, friends who implore you to get a cell phone, the fact that wherever you are in the city, you're supposed to be somewhere else. Claire Denis toyed with me: just after the woman hears a radio announcement asking drivers to do their civic duty and offer someone a ride, the lovely Colin Gregoire (Beau Travail, Nenette et Boni) happens by, but he refuses a ride. This is a departure for Denis: not about beautiful men. (I didn't see Trouble Every Day, though.) There's a nicely handled prolepsis: the woman imagines what would happen if she brought her hitchhiker to dinner at her friends' house, and she rejects that alternative. But there is very little or no hint that this is happening on another level, a mental level, except for the speed at which this part of the story unfolds: the arrival, the awkwardness, the crying baby. We return to the glacial creep of the traffic, and the entire thing has been accomplished without dialogue or any visual marker that this narrative thread is unreal.
There's about a foot and a half of snow on my fire escape. It has been snowing since Friday afternoon, and it's still snowing.
Films I've been watching in the last few weeks, but can't remember well enough to review in full:
Comedy of Innocence, Raul Ruiz. A son and two women, each his putative mother. The three of them trade the roles of seducer/outsider and contented dyad. The mobile-faced Jeanne Balibar (who reminds me of Holly Woodlawn) plays the crazy, false mother. I love to watch her, though she's made to look a little too elfin for my liking here. I like the film's tense spookiness, the slight suggestions of the supernatural, though it's dismaying to watch two women battling over a tiny little male.
Sister My Sister. Opens on the bloodied walls, staircase, and floor after the maids have murdered their employer, and so the rest of the film is a flashback whose whole promise is that we will return to the appalling carnage. On that level, it's very manipulative, and there the (somewhat) recent French version, The Maids, is probably better: more diffuse, more about the coda of their life in the prison. Still, what I love about this film is the physical portrayal of the employer and her daughter. Both of them are tiny. The stiff, self-satisfied mother, a tiny manic doll, and her oddly ageless daughter, who looks like both a giant five-year old and a pudgy, infantile thirty-year-old. No doubt, this, too, is manipulative: The maids are willowy, long-haired, lithe; the bourgeoises miniature/grotesque. Still, the mother dancing alone, unaware that her daughter is watching, is genius: she traipses around in her stubby way, her arms waving about in an approximation of conductor/ballerina/sylph; her face folds in on itself with rage when she sees the daughter seeing her.
Queer as Folk. (Seasons 1 & 2, on tape.) I like the fantasy that every night in downtown Pittsburgh is a saturnalia a la Querrelle. I also like the crudely Gothic Lite hero: outwardly heartless, secretly sentimental.
Frenzy, Alfred Hitchcock. After listening to Martin Lefebvre's paper on cannibalism, I had to see this. There's a scale here that's sometimes missing from Hitchcock's American movies, a sense of crowded city life. People listening to a speech about cleaning up the Thames's industrial effluent rush to look at a woman's body washing up on the bank. The Covent Garden food market, its crowds and motion. There are frequent juxtapositions of food and bodies: as Lefebvre points out, the corpse in the potato sack is the "meat and potatoes meal" that the inspector, restricted to his wife's disastrous experiments in French cuisine, longs for.
Friday Night, Claire Denis. A transit strike, a chance sexual encounter. I like the traffic jam better than the sex-idyll. The boredom, the fumes, the drivers wavering between impatience and drowsiness. The difficulties of city life: missed dinners, friends who implore you to get a cell phone, the fact that wherever you are in the city, you're supposed to be somewhere else. Claire Denis toyed with me: just after the woman hears a radio announcement asking drivers to do their civic duty and offer someone a ride, the lovely Colin Gregoire (Beau Travail, Nenette et Boni) happens by, but he refuses a ride. This is a departure for Denis: not about beautiful men. (I didn't see Trouble Every Day, though.) There's a nicely handled prolepsis: the woman imagines what would happen if she brought her hitchhiker to dinner at her friends' house, and she rejects that alternative. But there is very little or no hint that this is happening on another level, a mental level, except for the speed at which this part of the story unfolds: the arrival, the awkwardness, the crying baby. We return to the glacial creep of the traffic, and the entire thing has been accomplished without dialogue or any visual marker that this narrative thread is unreal.
Sunday, November 16, 2003
Ubu fils
"The grotesque or, if you prefer, the 'Ubu-esque,' is not just a term of abuse or an insulting epithet, and I would not like to use it in that sense. I think that there is a precise category, or, in any case, that we should define a precise category of historico-political analysis that would be the category of the grotesque or Ubu-esque. Ubu-esque terror, grotesque sovereignty, or, in starker terms, the maximization of effects of power on the basis of the disqualification of the one who produces them. I do not think this is an accident or mechanical failure in the history of power. It seems to me that it is one of the cogs that are an inherent part of the mechanisms of power. Political power, at least in some societies, and anyway in our society, can give itself, has actually given itself, the possibility of conveying its effects and even more, of finding their source, in a place that is manifestly, explicitly, and readily discredited as odious, despicable, or ridiculous." --Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the College de France, 1974-1975
"The grotesque or, if you prefer, the 'Ubu-esque,' is not just a term of abuse or an insulting epithet, and I would not like to use it in that sense. I think that there is a precise category, or, in any case, that we should define a precise category of historico-political analysis that would be the category of the grotesque or Ubu-esque. Ubu-esque terror, grotesque sovereignty, or, in starker terms, the maximization of effects of power on the basis of the disqualification of the one who produces them. I do not think this is an accident or mechanical failure in the history of power. It seems to me that it is one of the cogs that are an inherent part of the mechanisms of power. Political power, at least in some societies, and anyway in our society, can give itself, has actually given itself, the possibility of conveying its effects and even more, of finding their source, in a place that is manifestly, explicitly, and readily discredited as odious, despicable, or ridiculous." --Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the College de France, 1974-1975
Friday, November 14, 2003
A meandering post
I've been reading Nevermore, by Marie Redonnet. Beautiful, telegraphic sentences; a blow job every 5 pages or so; and a lot of the tropes that are so tired in American cinema but are remarkably new here: a small-town sheriff, a circus, a mystery, a Southern California border town.
The interiorty of the main character, Willy Bost, is mostly presented through the wierd, admonitory notes he writes in his notebook: "Do not think about the past."
Redonnet apparently had herself committed to an insane asylum so that she'd have time to write. I admire that. I generally mourn the passing of the clinic: a certain genteel crack-up is no longer an option, it seems to me.
In Montreal, I went to dinner with three people I'd just met: Henk, his girlfriend (?), and Jane. I mentioned a book by Teresa Brennan. Jane told me Teresa had been killed last year, in a hit and run accident; the driver was never found. --These three people I was with that night had met each other through Teresa.
The book had been about "exhausting modernity." A book of feminist Freudo-Marxism. I didn't say this, but I had eventually grown dissatisfied with the book's insistence on the infant's illusion of omnipotence, I mean with its insistence on the explanatory value of this thesis, that the illusion of omnipotence, and subsequent disillusionment and rage, are universal, and are central to the ills of the world. Like a psychological theodicy.
But at dinner I was told that Theresa had been planning a place, a sort of think tank, in the Bahamas. For herself and her friends to come to. And this made me reconsider my opinion of the book, or of Teresa Brennan. I had an illusion of potency just then, myself, of collective potency, at that moment, in that company.
Because we talked a great deal about how awful the world was lately; about "energetics," which had been Theresa's object of study toward the end of her life, and which had played a part in a memoir Jane had read, in which a raped woman fighting for her life suddenly stopped being frightened, and at that moment her assailant became frightened, and ran away; prophetic dreams; the dismantling of social welfare state in Holland and the Americanization of the world; the fact that Theresa's death was a murder, even if not an intentional one; the need for an alternative to marriage and nuclear family.
(I'm a little naive, reveling in the company of "free thinkers," as though this were 1910. My interest in "alternatives to marriage," is never, by the way, founded on a wish for variety, for supply, for multiple partners. I've often thought a disjunctive synthesis would be best: rather than an ideal fusion, or even a sober partnership of complementary equals, rather something appallingly or impossibly ill-fitting, right at the heart of the union: marriage to a gay man, for example. My twin utopic visions are: 1, the disjunctive synthesis of Millicent, Elijah, and the narrator in James Purdy's novel I Am Elijah Thrush, and 2, the community on a terrible, short-lived TV show about a priest, 'Nothing Sacred.' Everyone there was sexually incompossible, if I may say so: a celibate priest, a pregnant teenage girl, a Jewish accountant separated from his wife, a nun. If I can't live in an insane asylum with lap robes and cups of tisane and a nice view of the greensward, then let it be in some hopeless disunion such as this.
(The accountant of course was a free agent. He could have hooked up with anyone, so could the girl, so could they all. The important thing is that he was non-married, ex-married. His Jewishness--maybe the show was trying to be "inclusive," maybe it was a repetition of a loathsome stereotype--to me, for my utopic ideal of disunion, what mattered was that he was not entirely part of the church, never fused in the community.)
I've been reading Nevermore, by Marie Redonnet. Beautiful, telegraphic sentences; a blow job every 5 pages or so; and a lot of the tropes that are so tired in American cinema but are remarkably new here: a small-town sheriff, a circus, a mystery, a Southern California border town.
The interiorty of the main character, Willy Bost, is mostly presented through the wierd, admonitory notes he writes in his notebook: "Do not think about the past."
Redonnet apparently had herself committed to an insane asylum so that she'd have time to write. I admire that. I generally mourn the passing of the clinic: a certain genteel crack-up is no longer an option, it seems to me.
In Montreal, I went to dinner with three people I'd just met: Henk, his girlfriend (?), and Jane. I mentioned a book by Teresa Brennan. Jane told me Teresa had been killed last year, in a hit and run accident; the driver was never found. --These three people I was with that night had met each other through Teresa.
The book had been about "exhausting modernity." A book of feminist Freudo-Marxism. I didn't say this, but I had eventually grown dissatisfied with the book's insistence on the infant's illusion of omnipotence, I mean with its insistence on the explanatory value of this thesis, that the illusion of omnipotence, and subsequent disillusionment and rage, are universal, and are central to the ills of the world. Like a psychological theodicy.
But at dinner I was told that Theresa had been planning a place, a sort of think tank, in the Bahamas. For herself and her friends to come to. And this made me reconsider my opinion of the book, or of Teresa Brennan. I had an illusion of potency just then, myself, of collective potency, at that moment, in that company.
Because we talked a great deal about how awful the world was lately; about "energetics," which had been Theresa's object of study toward the end of her life, and which had played a part in a memoir Jane had read, in which a raped woman fighting for her life suddenly stopped being frightened, and at that moment her assailant became frightened, and ran away; prophetic dreams; the dismantling of social welfare state in Holland and the Americanization of the world; the fact that Theresa's death was a murder, even if not an intentional one; the need for an alternative to marriage and nuclear family.
(I'm a little naive, reveling in the company of "free thinkers," as though this were 1910. My interest in "alternatives to marriage," is never, by the way, founded on a wish for variety, for supply, for multiple partners. I've often thought a disjunctive synthesis would be best: rather than an ideal fusion, or even a sober partnership of complementary equals, rather something appallingly or impossibly ill-fitting, right at the heart of the union: marriage to a gay man, for example. My twin utopic visions are: 1, the disjunctive synthesis of Millicent, Elijah, and the narrator in James Purdy's novel I Am Elijah Thrush, and 2, the community on a terrible, short-lived TV show about a priest, 'Nothing Sacred.' Everyone there was sexually incompossible, if I may say so: a celibate priest, a pregnant teenage girl, a Jewish accountant separated from his wife, a nun. If I can't live in an insane asylum with lap robes and cups of tisane and a nice view of the greensward, then let it be in some hopeless disunion such as this.
(The accountant of course was a free agent. He could have hooked up with anyone, so could the girl, so could they all. The important thing is that he was non-married, ex-married. His Jewishness--maybe the show was trying to be "inclusive," maybe it was a repetition of a loathsome stereotype--to me, for my utopic ideal of disunion, what mattered was that he was not entirely part of the church, never fused in the community.)
Sunday, November 02, 2003
Anomalia
Why is this my dullest post yet? Is it a foretaste of how dull I'd be if I became an academic? Now I'm editing.
I just got back from a conference in Montreal called "Anomalia."
I gave a paper drawn from Charles Mudede’s and my work on landscape and crime. It was about Tarde and imitation.
There were some very good papers: Henk Oosterling on what he called "radical medi(a)(o)crity," Martin Lefebvre on cannibalism, and Peter Paik, of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Paik gave a paper titled "Saturnalia of the Automatons or, the killer stripped bare by his guru, even." About Kiyoshi Kurosawa's "Cure," post-9/11 films, and "omnicide," or cult homocide. This film the Cure, I'd love to see it. He showed a clip where the affectless cult leader, in police custody, sort of hypnotizes a policeman by repeatedly asking "who are you?" The film, Paik claims, is an advance over the abject-hero film, where a killer is dashing and bad and sexy, like Hannibal. In the Cure, the killer is, Brechtianly, "just annoying."
--So but then the people he hypnotizes are not aware of being in a cult, they just carry out brutal murders and then are found near the scene, amnesiac, dazed. Paik: "The marvelous irony of the film consists of its insight that when people act on their most repressed desires and fulfill their most disavowed fantasies, they do so mechanically, even mindlessly, with all the gusto of robots or zombies. "
And Montreal! Ah, Canada. How I long to live in Canada. Like here, but so much better. I've lived in so many places that were shadowed by Canada: Buffalo had Fort Erie and Toronto; in Seattle, it's Vancouver. Some day, Canada.
Why is this my dullest post yet? Is it a foretaste of how dull I'd be if I became an academic? Now I'm editing.
I just got back from a conference in Montreal called "Anomalia."
I gave a paper drawn from Charles Mudede’s and my work on landscape and crime. It was about Tarde and imitation.
There were some very good papers: Henk Oosterling on what he called "radical medi(a)(o)crity," Martin Lefebvre on cannibalism, and Peter Paik, of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Paik gave a paper titled "Saturnalia of the Automatons or, the killer stripped bare by his guru, even." About Kiyoshi Kurosawa's "Cure," post-9/11 films, and "omnicide," or cult homocide. This film the Cure, I'd love to see it. He showed a clip where the affectless cult leader, in police custody, sort of hypnotizes a policeman by repeatedly asking "who are you?" The film, Paik claims, is an advance over the abject-hero film, where a killer is dashing and bad and sexy, like Hannibal. In the Cure, the killer is, Brechtianly, "just annoying."
--So but then the people he hypnotizes are not aware of being in a cult, they just carry out brutal murders and then are found near the scene, amnesiac, dazed. Paik: "The marvelous irony of the film consists of its insight that when people act on their most repressed desires and fulfill their most disavowed fantasies, they do so mechanically, even mindlessly, with all the gusto of robots or zombies. "
And Montreal! Ah, Canada. How I long to live in Canada. Like here, but so much better. I've lived in so many places that were shadowed by Canada: Buffalo had Fort Erie and Toronto; in Seattle, it's Vancouver. Some day, Canada.
Sunday, October 12, 2003
My Own Private Lavant
Too much of a good thing. I thought I'd round out my Denis Lavant festival (see previous post) with a viewing of Carax's The Lovers on the Bridge. I want to like it. I admire the excess. If you're going to reinvent melodrama, I'd rather it be this than Todd Haynes: not Haynes' careful, pained dialog ("it must be terrible to be a black man"--that's Tisa's friend Naima's summary of the dialog in Far From Heaven), not the exacting 1950s palette; not the ironic re-stagings. Carax is blood and fire and gratuitous narrative acts. --And I like the ending, which rewrites L'Atalante. (Or, I like that I'm able to congratulate myself for noticing its relation to L'Atalante. Cineaste that I am. The ending itself is actually another gratuitous narrative act.)
Lavant's kineticism is put through its paces in Lovers on the Bridge: he's given a cast and a crutch; he hobbles and clambers and runs peg-leggedly; he drinks and shivers and passes out; he breathes fire, he does handstands; but the film is oddly inert for all Lavant's motion.
(Speaking of melodrama: I'm also watching Fassbinder lately. Fassbinder's melodrama is much better than Haynes's. Especially if you count the marriage films, The Marriage of Maria Braun, Effi Briest, the Station Master's Wife.--My other favorite actor of late is Fassbinder himself, in his segment of the omnibus film Germany in Autumn.)
Too much of a good thing. I thought I'd round out my Denis Lavant festival (see previous post) with a viewing of Carax's The Lovers on the Bridge. I want to like it. I admire the excess. If you're going to reinvent melodrama, I'd rather it be this than Todd Haynes: not Haynes' careful, pained dialog ("it must be terrible to be a black man"--that's Tisa's friend Naima's summary of the dialog in Far From Heaven), not the exacting 1950s palette; not the ironic re-stagings. Carax is blood and fire and gratuitous narrative acts. --And I like the ending, which rewrites L'Atalante. (Or, I like that I'm able to congratulate myself for noticing its relation to L'Atalante. Cineaste that I am. The ending itself is actually another gratuitous narrative act.)
Lavant's kineticism is put through its paces in Lovers on the Bridge: he's given a cast and a crutch; he hobbles and clambers and runs peg-leggedly; he drinks and shivers and passes out; he breathes fire, he does handstands; but the film is oddly inert for all Lavant's motion.
(Speaking of melodrama: I'm also watching Fassbinder lately. Fassbinder's melodrama is much better than Haynes's. Especially if you count the marriage films, The Marriage of Maria Braun, Effi Briest, the Station Master's Wife.--My other favorite actor of late is Fassbinder himself, in his segment of the omnibus film Germany in Autumn.)
Saturday, October 11, 2003
I have seen the World Spirit on steroids, with totally ripped delts
Last night my friend Tisa and I watched Leos Carax's Mauvais Sang. Its star, the beautiful-ugly Denis Lavant, is a kinetic genius. About half an hour into the film, he runs/dances down a dark street to David Bowie's "Modern Love," going from a hunched-over lurching to an off-kilter boxing to running to handspringing. At one point, he grasps his trousers near the front pockets and yanks them up so that his socks show, all the while bizarrely skip-running with ever increasing speed. Part of the thrill comes from the stasis of the preceding scene, part from its irruptive unreality. Mainly it's the way Lavant moves, his odd "phrasing" of the strides: there's a hesitation, a taut point, a second of hang time where you wouldn't expect it.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=8e5g_wXJf1I
(I know, this is getting to be a habit of mine, the largely uncritical post about a male actor. I suppose I should be commenting on something of great import, or at least writing criticism of Carax. The actual news--Schwarzenegger, Iraq, Syria, the suicide of Carolyn Heilbrun--none of that do I care to comment about. Except to say this about Schwarzenegger, after Hegel's comment on Napoleon: "I have seen the World Spirit on steroids, with totally ripped delts.")
Continuing the Denis Lavant festival, today I rented Claire Denis's "Beau Travail" again, for what must be the fourth time. At the end, in an epilogue, Denis Lavant stands still in a dark disco, alone, and then bursts into moments of speed to the sound of Corona's "Rhythm of the Night." His dancing is jolie-laide; it's not the beauty or precision of execution that matter. It's the abruptness of his shifts from stillness to motion, and his careless, flailing grace.
Last night my friend Tisa and I watched Leos Carax's Mauvais Sang. Its star, the beautiful-ugly Denis Lavant, is a kinetic genius. About half an hour into the film, he runs/dances down a dark street to David Bowie's "Modern Love," going from a hunched-over lurching to an off-kilter boxing to running to handspringing. At one point, he grasps his trousers near the front pockets and yanks them up so that his socks show, all the while bizarrely skip-running with ever increasing speed. Part of the thrill comes from the stasis of the preceding scene, part from its irruptive unreality. Mainly it's the way Lavant moves, his odd "phrasing" of the strides: there's a hesitation, a taut point, a second of hang time where you wouldn't expect it.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=8e5g_wXJf1I
(I know, this is getting to be a habit of mine, the largely uncritical post about a male actor. I suppose I should be commenting on something of great import, or at least writing criticism of Carax. The actual news--Schwarzenegger, Iraq, Syria, the suicide of Carolyn Heilbrun--none of that do I care to comment about. Except to say this about Schwarzenegger, after Hegel's comment on Napoleon: "I have seen the World Spirit on steroids, with totally ripped delts.")
Continuing the Denis Lavant festival, today I rented Claire Denis's "Beau Travail" again, for what must be the fourth time. At the end, in an epilogue, Denis Lavant stands still in a dark disco, alone, and then bursts into moments of speed to the sound of Corona's "Rhythm of the Night." His dancing is jolie-laide; it's not the beauty or precision of execution that matter. It's the abruptness of his shifts from stillness to motion, and his careless, flailing grace.
Thursday, September 11, 2003
Dawn Raffel, Carrying the Body
The territory this book stakes out is the abject; the female body as the site of horror, of fluids, leaks, blood, birth: "Unsoppable," in the narrator's phrase. But it's this horror from the perspective of the women themselves, who are not exactly horrified. "Oh, drink! See such a trough as this! Unsoppable. The blood was on the bedding, and afterward the afterbirth."
Though the "Aunt" of the story is dry: her lips are cracked, she cannot get enough to drink (gin). There is no juice or milk for the child, only tonic. At some point, someone says, "there is no balm in the house."
Eve K. Sedgwick suggests to her students of 19th-century fiction that they keep a tally of the "Gross Novelistic Product," how much money is made and exchanged in the novel. You could try figuring out the gross fluid product of Carrying the Body, or maybe not the gross, but how it's distributed, floods here, droughts there. There is gin, there is tonic (though never together, in the same glass), there is gray bathwater. No juice, no milk, no drinking water.
Raffel makes a weird and arresting use of the partitive: " 'Here,' said Mother, 'have some, have less.' " A tendency to vanish, dry up, dwindle. A mother as an offering that retracts. There's an Alice-in-Wonderland illogic to the invitation to have some, have less, though in Alice it's illogic of plenitude (something like, "how can I have more cake when I haven't had any yet?").
There is also a great deal of "whatever." Though not as a dialect marker, it's not the whatever of teen culture. It's also not the general; it's the name of the singular. --well, I can't exactly prove that. Anyway, there's a particular construction, "what with whatever," that the Aunt often uses: "The house collects dirt, what with the child and also what with the mice, of course, and what with whatever it is that is living in the pantry." (The child is only another species of vermin, like mice and "whatever.")
The territory this book stakes out is the abject; the female body as the site of horror, of fluids, leaks, blood, birth: "Unsoppable," in the narrator's phrase. But it's this horror from the perspective of the women themselves, who are not exactly horrified. "Oh, drink! See such a trough as this! Unsoppable. The blood was on the bedding, and afterward the afterbirth."
Though the "Aunt" of the story is dry: her lips are cracked, she cannot get enough to drink (gin). There is no juice or milk for the child, only tonic. At some point, someone says, "there is no balm in the house."
Eve K. Sedgwick suggests to her students of 19th-century fiction that they keep a tally of the "Gross Novelistic Product," how much money is made and exchanged in the novel. You could try figuring out the gross fluid product of Carrying the Body, or maybe not the gross, but how it's distributed, floods here, droughts there. There is gin, there is tonic (though never together, in the same glass), there is gray bathwater. No juice, no milk, no drinking water.
Raffel makes a weird and arresting use of the partitive: " 'Here,' said Mother, 'have some, have less.' " A tendency to vanish, dry up, dwindle. A mother as an offering that retracts. There's an Alice-in-Wonderland illogic to the invitation to have some, have less, though in Alice it's illogic of plenitude (something like, "how can I have more cake when I haven't had any yet?").
There is also a great deal of "whatever." Though not as a dialect marker, it's not the whatever of teen culture. It's also not the general; it's the name of the singular. --well, I can't exactly prove that. Anyway, there's a particular construction, "what with whatever," that the Aunt often uses: "The house collects dirt, what with the child and also what with the mice, of course, and what with whatever it is that is living in the pantry." (The child is only another species of vermin, like mice and "whatever.")
Monday, August 25, 2003
Last week I finally saw Pirates of the Caribbean, so now I'm working my way backward through the Johnny Depp oeuvre, though not very systematically. I watched Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man last night.
Depp's William Blake is only fully conscious for about twenty minutes of the film. The rest of the time, he's falling asleep to the rhythm of the train, suffering from his gunshot wounds, blacking out from hunger on a vision quest, or dying. It's a beautiful performance. The camera, too, closes like an eyelid at the end of each scene.
Apart from the gunshots, it doesn't really take anything much to put Blake under. Everything makes him reel. His swooning reaches its loveliest pitch when he blacks out in a village of Northwest Indians, his lids fluttering over the whites of his rolled-back eyes. And again when, for no obvious reason, he curls up to sleep beside a slaughtered fawn in the woods.
Although the film toys with providing viewers with the traditional satisfactions of righteous film violence--Blake becomes a "killer of white men," a killer of killers--its rhythms are off-kilter in comparison to the poetic slo-mo gun battles of Peckinpah or Woo or Tarantino (this comparison is from Jonathan Rosenbaum at Chicago Reader). Everything goes on too long--Blake never stops bleeding, there's always an extra beat or three while Blake lingers at the scenes of his killings.
It's not the first demystified Western, or even the first demystified Western to feature a passive hero--Warren Beatty in McCabe and Mrs. Miller was also fairly hapless. It's Depp's physical passivity that's so entrancing, all manner of dozing, fainting, staggering, bleeding, falling...
I meant to write something, months ago, about the hypnosign, in the manner of Deleuze's terminology in the Cinema books. But, whatever.
Depp's William Blake is only fully conscious for about twenty minutes of the film. The rest of the time, he's falling asleep to the rhythm of the train, suffering from his gunshot wounds, blacking out from hunger on a vision quest, or dying. It's a beautiful performance. The camera, too, closes like an eyelid at the end of each scene.
Apart from the gunshots, it doesn't really take anything much to put Blake under. Everything makes him reel. His swooning reaches its loveliest pitch when he blacks out in a village of Northwest Indians, his lids fluttering over the whites of his rolled-back eyes. And again when, for no obvious reason, he curls up to sleep beside a slaughtered fawn in the woods.
Although the film toys with providing viewers with the traditional satisfactions of righteous film violence--Blake becomes a "killer of white men," a killer of killers--its rhythms are off-kilter in comparison to the poetic slo-mo gun battles of Peckinpah or Woo or Tarantino (this comparison is from Jonathan Rosenbaum at Chicago Reader). Everything goes on too long--Blake never stops bleeding, there's always an extra beat or three while Blake lingers at the scenes of his killings.
It's not the first demystified Western, or even the first demystified Western to feature a passive hero--Warren Beatty in McCabe and Mrs. Miller was also fairly hapless. It's Depp's physical passivity that's so entrancing, all manner of dozing, fainting, staggering, bleeding, falling...
I meant to write something, months ago, about the hypnosign, in the manner of Deleuze's terminology in the Cinema books. But, whatever.
Tuesday, July 22, 2003
Q&A with Gary Lutz
About a year ago, I interviewed Gary Lutz for The Stranger. Here's what got left out.
Q. Many of your characters seem to be in a sort of bafflement about "sexual relationships." Though some of your narrators become serially involved with (or successively detached from) men and women, the word "bisexual" has a connotation of equipoise that just doesn't apply here. And the more or less heterosexual narrators also move through a succession of ties that tend toward obsolescence. Even at the level of the sentence, there is a tendency for your series to leap from the singular into a sort of "whatever." As in this from “The Pavilion”: "cinquefoils, observatories, anything."
A. Yes, I doubt that any of my characters would even for an instant consider themselves bisexual, and for many of them, the words "heterosexual" or "homosexual" would probably be little more than confoundingly inapplicable nomenclature. Some of my narrators find the differences between the genders negligible and not worth even acknowledging or honoring or troubling over. For them, I guess, every encountered person, every arrival, is a novel, consuming totality of life and limb--a stupefying array of skin, hair, teeth, arms, busying emotions: a useful human integer, in short, for the narrator to blunder against, mount, disappear into, rhapsodize about, ride out some sadness on, suspect of almost anything. And you're right to observe that after a point, the fussed precision with which the narrator carries on about the regarded person and their conjoint fumbles reaches a crisis of depletion, and the regarded person vagues out, and the relationship gets pretty vaporous pretty quick. At that moment, another person is no doubt motioning into the narrator's cleared gaze.
And also this, regarding writers:
A. Elizabeth Smart is a favorite of mine, solely on the basis of a tiny, thrilling, thunderous collection of stories called THE ASSUMPTION OF THE ROGUES & RASCALS. Among living writers of prose I admire Gordon Lish, Ben Marcus, Diane Williams, Christine Schutt, Sam Lipsyte, Dawn Raffel, Amy Hempel, Pamela Ryder, and Brian Evenson, each of whom is a supreme virtuoso of the sentence.
About a year ago, I interviewed Gary Lutz for The Stranger. Here's what got left out.
Q. Many of your characters seem to be in a sort of bafflement about "sexual relationships." Though some of your narrators become serially involved with (or successively detached from) men and women, the word "bisexual" has a connotation of equipoise that just doesn't apply here. And the more or less heterosexual narrators also move through a succession of ties that tend toward obsolescence. Even at the level of the sentence, there is a tendency for your series to leap from the singular into a sort of "whatever." As in this from “The Pavilion”: "cinquefoils, observatories, anything."
A. Yes, I doubt that any of my characters would even for an instant consider themselves bisexual, and for many of them, the words "heterosexual" or "homosexual" would probably be little more than confoundingly inapplicable nomenclature. Some of my narrators find the differences between the genders negligible and not worth even acknowledging or honoring or troubling over. For them, I guess, every encountered person, every arrival, is a novel, consuming totality of life and limb--a stupefying array of skin, hair, teeth, arms, busying emotions: a useful human integer, in short, for the narrator to blunder against, mount, disappear into, rhapsodize about, ride out some sadness on, suspect of almost anything. And you're right to observe that after a point, the fussed precision with which the narrator carries on about the regarded person and their conjoint fumbles reaches a crisis of depletion, and the regarded person vagues out, and the relationship gets pretty vaporous pretty quick. At that moment, another person is no doubt motioning into the narrator's cleared gaze.
And also this, regarding writers:
A. Elizabeth Smart is a favorite of mine, solely on the basis of a tiny, thrilling, thunderous collection of stories called THE ASSUMPTION OF THE ROGUES & RASCALS. Among living writers of prose I admire Gordon Lish, Ben Marcus, Diane Williams, Christine Schutt, Sam Lipsyte, Dawn Raffel, Amy Hempel, Pamela Ryder, and Brian Evenson, each of whom is a supreme virtuoso of the sentence.
Wednesday, July 09, 2003
The Empty Secret
Steven Shaviro’s recent entry on the film Time Out reminded me of The Adversary, the non-fiction book about the case from which Time Out takes some of its plot. As in the film, Jean-Claude Romand drove over the border to Switzerland every day. He pretended to have a job at the WHO in Geneva; he sometimes hung around WHO headquarters, pilfering stationery and brochures. More purely than in the film, though, he did nothing, day after day. He made absolutely no money; there were no smuggling schemes, as in the film; he borrowed money from his family and his in-laws. On the point of being discovered, he murdered his wife and children and burned their house down.
It’s the doing nothing that fascinates me.
Romand started doing nothing in med school. He failed the exam that would have let him advance into his third-year training; moreover, he did not tell anyone he had failed. He stayed registered at school. He studied. He would be allowed to take the exam again (in secret, though, from his friends and family.) At this point, his secret life was merely on loan from his public life; once he passed the exam, he would again be what he seemed.
On the day of the make-up exam, though, he never left his room. He slept through the time appointed for the exam. This is delightful to me: he’s not diabolical, he’s Oblomovian. He exploited a curious lapse in the school regulations: there was no positive provision for throwing out someone who failed this exam twice. Nor did this mean they expected people to do an American-style perpetual schooling. A good Frenchman would’ve thrown himself out, would’ve declared his failure to everyone and lived with the shame, or even killed himself. Romand just quietly kept registering, pretending to always be in different courses than his friends. When everyone else graduated, he stopped going to med school, too.
He kept it up for eighteen years, from the failed exam to the murder of his children. All this time, he had secrets but no interiority. That his secret life was so dull fascinates me. Sleeping in his room, sleeping in his car at a Swiss rest stop, waiting for the hours to pass until it was time to go home again.
Steven Shaviro’s recent entry on the film Time Out reminded me of The Adversary, the non-fiction book about the case from which Time Out takes some of its plot. As in the film, Jean-Claude Romand drove over the border to Switzerland every day. He pretended to have a job at the WHO in Geneva; he sometimes hung around WHO headquarters, pilfering stationery and brochures. More purely than in the film, though, he did nothing, day after day. He made absolutely no money; there were no smuggling schemes, as in the film; he borrowed money from his family and his in-laws. On the point of being discovered, he murdered his wife and children and burned their house down.
It’s the doing nothing that fascinates me.
Romand started doing nothing in med school. He failed the exam that would have let him advance into his third-year training; moreover, he did not tell anyone he had failed. He stayed registered at school. He studied. He would be allowed to take the exam again (in secret, though, from his friends and family.) At this point, his secret life was merely on loan from his public life; once he passed the exam, he would again be what he seemed.
On the day of the make-up exam, though, he never left his room. He slept through the time appointed for the exam. This is delightful to me: he’s not diabolical, he’s Oblomovian. He exploited a curious lapse in the school regulations: there was no positive provision for throwing out someone who failed this exam twice. Nor did this mean they expected people to do an American-style perpetual schooling. A good Frenchman would’ve thrown himself out, would’ve declared his failure to everyone and lived with the shame, or even killed himself. Romand just quietly kept registering, pretending to always be in different courses than his friends. When everyone else graduated, he stopped going to med school, too.
He kept it up for eighteen years, from the failed exam to the murder of his children. All this time, he had secrets but no interiority. That his secret life was so dull fascinates me. Sleeping in his room, sleeping in his car at a Swiss rest stop, waiting for the hours to pass until it was time to go home again.
Sunday, July 06, 2003
Tony Leung Chiu-Wai's Face
Usually, there is something faintly ridiculous about an actor "doing" particular emotions with his face. An actor serially portraying now rage, now happiness, now anticipation strikes us as amateur, the more so if his or her discrete emotions are legible as separate states.
In Wayne Koestenbaum's book The Queen's Throat, which I don't have at hand, there's a series of photographs from a century-old instruction book called How to Sing; a woman who looks something like Margaret Dumont mugs for the camera to demonstrate a series of emotions every singer must know how to portray with her face. Her facial expressions are both hilariously overstated and hilariously under-differentiated: what really separates her portrayal of ecstasy from her pity from her scorn from her yearning? You get a giddy sense that the captions could be switched around with no effect on the senselessness of the illustrations.
The unwittingly comic series the Dumont-ish singer portrays--it's full of disjunctive inclusions, most of which my memory can't do justice to--culminates in an expression I would describe as a an edgy, almost hysterical half-smile, but which bears the caption "Neutral Indifference: Nothing in the Eyes, Nothing in the Mouth." This degree-zero of facial expression is, as I said, somewhat un-neutral, perhaps because the singer is a woman and ideals of femininity demanded (or still demand) that a woman's neutrality evince sympathy toward any onlooker.
(That the photographs are next to each other is also part of their comic effect: they appear to be a Muybridge series that uses a fast shutter speed to capture the rapid passage from pity to scorn to yearning to indifference.)
In films today, a more truly neutral version of "neutral indifference" seems to be the standard. Er, okay, that's a weak generalization, "seems to be the standard." My only evidence is the prevalence of this scene in recent comedies: a tyro actor offers to demonstrate his skill: "this is my angry face," he'll say, and then he'll do the Dumont-singer thing: an expression at once grotesquely overdone and poorly realized. We, the audience, know better: a real actor works by the dictum "nothing in the eyes, nothing in the mouth."
And there is a sense in which this is true: everyone who knows anything knows that the film actor has always been a prop (a "Requisit," Benjamin writes somewhere). Any theory that fails to recognize this threatens to perpetuate some naïve ideas about expression and emoting. Self-expression is the theory, melodrama is the practice.
Thus a good theorist will write about the face's thingliness: Barthes on the whiteness of Dietrich's face, Delueze on the way that Dreyer's close ups disorient space.
(Even Dreyer's Joan of Arc, the film that's all about the face, might be said to be structured around a series of oppositions in which the male face preserves something of its neutrality; the judges scowl, Falconetti weeps with wide-open eyes: scowling/weeping, closed/open, male/female.)
Tony Leung is, by these lights, a "bad" actor. He's extremely expressive; he also makes use of a seriality of expression that comes dangerously close to that weird Muybridge/Dumont series of photographs. And yet he's the greatest actor working today.
There are a few scenes in Tony Leung's films that are exemplary of his radical departure from neutral indifference. In Happy Together, a friend has told Leung that on a mountain at the tip of the South American continent, where he's going to travel, you can release your cares. He then urges Leung to speak into his cassette tape recorder, to leave him a souvenir on tape. He, the friend, offers to leave Leung alone with the tape recorder. Alone, Leung picks up the recorder, holds it to his mouth--it's not a mike, he's holding the whole paperback-sized thing pressed to his face--and his face crumples in sorrow. He's weeping.
Earlier in the same film, Leung is sitting on a curb outside the tango bar where he works. His ex-lover, who's now hustling, has just given him a watch, obviously given him by (or stolen from) a john. The ex-lover is gone and Leung is alone on the curb. In contempt, he tosses the watch onto the street. He makes a sort of moue, as if reconsidering his contempt. He looks around sheepishly, picks up the watch, listens to it, and, again contemptuous, puts it in his pocket. He looks, in the end, like he is thinking for the benefit of anyone watching "I've seen better watches than this; I'm not impressed."
Finally, in Hard Boiled, there is a scene in which the undercover Leung has to abjure his criminal mentor, tell him to go to hell. And somehow his renunciation means that the mentor will die. (I'm getting the plot somewhat wrong, but the basic situation is right: he has to act an indifference while feeling pain about the mentor's certain death.) He coldly tells him off, then he turns around. Now the mentor cannot see him, but we can; it's as if he's alone. There are tears welling up in his eyes; then an intense effort passes over his face, like the effort of using rage to suppress tears. The expressions follow very closely, but they are nonetheless serial: sorrow, then suppression, rage.
There is a term for exactly matching the musical score to the action: it's called Mickey-Mousing. Likewise, the expression-series is a kind of Mickey-Mousing; now I throw the watch down, see my contempt; now I reconsider, see my sheepishness; now I pick it up, see my curiosity. Now I condemn my friend to death, see my sorrow; now I master myself, see my rage.
How does he get away with this? I could watch him every day, adding the seriality of repeat viewings to his serial displays. Though perhaps I damn him all the more with my enthusiasm; what demands repeat viewings more than a serial actor, a matinee idol? But that's not my intent. I really meant for these musings to be adjacent to, but more interesting than, recent think-pieces about "the new melodrama," which pieces are invariably hampered by a naïve the-artifact-reflects-the-zeitgeist thinking.
Is the risible seriality of Leung's emoting only in my description of it? Perhaps he never displays discrete states, perhaps it's the modulation, the continual change, that fascinates me in Leung's performances. I don't think so. He really does perform serially, even if there are fine modulations.
This is too long already, so no conclusions yet, only a few more remarks toward the typology: he is alone in all these scenes, or effectively alone. The scenes are all silent, in the sense that there is no dialogue. They are not close-ups, at least not of the extreme type of Dreyer's close-ups.
Usually, there is something faintly ridiculous about an actor "doing" particular emotions with his face. An actor serially portraying now rage, now happiness, now anticipation strikes us as amateur, the more so if his or her discrete emotions are legible as separate states.
In Wayne Koestenbaum's book The Queen's Throat, which I don't have at hand, there's a series of photographs from a century-old instruction book called How to Sing; a woman who looks something like Margaret Dumont mugs for the camera to demonstrate a series of emotions every singer must know how to portray with her face. Her facial expressions are both hilariously overstated and hilariously under-differentiated: what really separates her portrayal of ecstasy from her pity from her scorn from her yearning? You get a giddy sense that the captions could be switched around with no effect on the senselessness of the illustrations.
The unwittingly comic series the Dumont-ish singer portrays--it's full of disjunctive inclusions, most of which my memory can't do justice to--culminates in an expression I would describe as a an edgy, almost hysterical half-smile, but which bears the caption "Neutral Indifference: Nothing in the Eyes, Nothing in the Mouth." This degree-zero of facial expression is, as I said, somewhat un-neutral, perhaps because the singer is a woman and ideals of femininity demanded (or still demand) that a woman's neutrality evince sympathy toward any onlooker.
(That the photographs are next to each other is also part of their comic effect: they appear to be a Muybridge series that uses a fast shutter speed to capture the rapid passage from pity to scorn to yearning to indifference.)
In films today, a more truly neutral version of "neutral indifference" seems to be the standard. Er, okay, that's a weak generalization, "seems to be the standard." My only evidence is the prevalence of this scene in recent comedies: a tyro actor offers to demonstrate his skill: "this is my angry face," he'll say, and then he'll do the Dumont-singer thing: an expression at once grotesquely overdone and poorly realized. We, the audience, know better: a real actor works by the dictum "nothing in the eyes, nothing in the mouth."
And there is a sense in which this is true: everyone who knows anything knows that the film actor has always been a prop (a "Requisit," Benjamin writes somewhere). Any theory that fails to recognize this threatens to perpetuate some naïve ideas about expression and emoting. Self-expression is the theory, melodrama is the practice.
Thus a good theorist will write about the face's thingliness: Barthes on the whiteness of Dietrich's face, Delueze on the way that Dreyer's close ups disorient space.
(Even Dreyer's Joan of Arc, the film that's all about the face, might be said to be structured around a series of oppositions in which the male face preserves something of its neutrality; the judges scowl, Falconetti weeps with wide-open eyes: scowling/weeping, closed/open, male/female.)
Tony Leung is, by these lights, a "bad" actor. He's extremely expressive; he also makes use of a seriality of expression that comes dangerously close to that weird Muybridge/Dumont series of photographs. And yet he's the greatest actor working today.
There are a few scenes in Tony Leung's films that are exemplary of his radical departure from neutral indifference. In Happy Together, a friend has told Leung that on a mountain at the tip of the South American continent, where he's going to travel, you can release your cares. He then urges Leung to speak into his cassette tape recorder, to leave him a souvenir on tape. He, the friend, offers to leave Leung alone with the tape recorder. Alone, Leung picks up the recorder, holds it to his mouth--it's not a mike, he's holding the whole paperback-sized thing pressed to his face--and his face crumples in sorrow. He's weeping.
Earlier in the same film, Leung is sitting on a curb outside the tango bar where he works. His ex-lover, who's now hustling, has just given him a watch, obviously given him by (or stolen from) a john. The ex-lover is gone and Leung is alone on the curb. In contempt, he tosses the watch onto the street. He makes a sort of moue, as if reconsidering his contempt. He looks around sheepishly, picks up the watch, listens to it, and, again contemptuous, puts it in his pocket. He looks, in the end, like he is thinking for the benefit of anyone watching "I've seen better watches than this; I'm not impressed."
Finally, in Hard Boiled, there is a scene in which the undercover Leung has to abjure his criminal mentor, tell him to go to hell. And somehow his renunciation means that the mentor will die. (I'm getting the plot somewhat wrong, but the basic situation is right: he has to act an indifference while feeling pain about the mentor's certain death.) He coldly tells him off, then he turns around. Now the mentor cannot see him, but we can; it's as if he's alone. There are tears welling up in his eyes; then an intense effort passes over his face, like the effort of using rage to suppress tears. The expressions follow very closely, but they are nonetheless serial: sorrow, then suppression, rage.
There is a term for exactly matching the musical score to the action: it's called Mickey-Mousing. Likewise, the expression-series is a kind of Mickey-Mousing; now I throw the watch down, see my contempt; now I reconsider, see my sheepishness; now I pick it up, see my curiosity. Now I condemn my friend to death, see my sorrow; now I master myself, see my rage.
How does he get away with this? I could watch him every day, adding the seriality of repeat viewings to his serial displays. Though perhaps I damn him all the more with my enthusiasm; what demands repeat viewings more than a serial actor, a matinee idol? But that's not my intent. I really meant for these musings to be adjacent to, but more interesting than, recent think-pieces about "the new melodrama," which pieces are invariably hampered by a naïve the-artifact-reflects-the-zeitgeist thinking.
Is the risible seriality of Leung's emoting only in my description of it? Perhaps he never displays discrete states, perhaps it's the modulation, the continual change, that fascinates me in Leung's performances. I don't think so. He really does perform serially, even if there are fine modulations.
This is too long already, so no conclusions yet, only a few more remarks toward the typology: he is alone in all these scenes, or effectively alone. The scenes are all silent, in the sense that there is no dialogue. They are not close-ups, at least not of the extreme type of Dreyer's close-ups.
Monday, May 19, 2003
Yeah, well. Big deal. Last post, I was all excited about Negri's release from prison. Yes, Negri's the ultimate bad boyfriend: in prison, well read, Spinozistic Marxist, totally unavailable, remote, ungiving. (Bad, as in unsatisfactory, unhelpful, not "bad boys.") But, jeez, his books. If he didn't write with Michael Hardt once in a while, would I ever understand him? Would I ever read him? "Kairos, Alma Venus, Multitudes:" about the only part I can follow is the "Multitudes" section, and even there, I wonder, about the apotheosis of the poor.
Even now, a certain piety, hangover from my deconstruction days, dogs me. "they do not read." It was the worst thing you could say about anybody, back then.
Lately, I do read. These are the books on my bed, starting at the head end on the left side, trailing down toward the lower third of the bed:
Even now, a certain piety, hangover from my deconstruction days, dogs me. "they do not read." It was the worst thing you could say about anybody, back then.
Lately, I do read. These are the books on my bed, starting at the head end on the left side, trailing down toward the lower third of the bed:
- Barbara Einzig, Distance Without Distance.
- Alexander Kluge, Case Histories (which I read in Germany as Lebenslaeufe/Anwesenhetsliste fuer eine Beerdigung. There always seems to be some story missing in English, though I could be wrong.)
- Kluge, again, Learning Processes with a Deadly Outcome (I can't believe I waited until now to read this.)
- Samuel Delaney, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue
- Lynn Crawford, Solow
- Lynn Crawford, Simply Separate People (this book frightens me. The artlessness of it, the apparent artlessness. Am I John Updike, in comparison to what is really happening now in writing?)
- Camille Roy, The Swarm (see above)
- Charles Wright, The Wig (I think at one time this was a necessary maybe scandalous book. But now, after Ishmael Reed, after Danny Laferriere, ...? I stopped 2/3 of the way through.)
- Matthew Derby, Super Flat Times (he takes Ben Marcus' Kluge-ean futurism and restores some of its mournful political fantasy. Whereas as in Marcus that's all shunted into the sorrows of the family.)
- Victor Shklovsky, The Third Factory
Friday, April 25, 2003
I am a bad blogger.
I never actually see any movies or books, and I mostly visit the same web sites over and over. I wish I could go see this video, Disobbedienti, at Hallwalls in Buffalo. Or this book, about the workerist movemest in Italy, Storming Heaven.
I wish I could read this book, Time for Revolution, which I actually own. I was in the hospital when it came, being observed and tested for (further) signs of appendicitis. Kind of a non-story, as I don't have it, didn't have it. The other woman in the next bed was old and wailing all the time, "Nurse? nurse? Oh God. Oh God. What did I do to deserve this? Nurse? nurse? nurse?" At first I would page the nurse every time she started wailing. Soon I grew to hate her; I hissed at her, "use the call button!" Another old woman, across the hall, kept saying "hello? [twenty-second pause] hello? [pause, and repeat]." She pronounced it "he-lou" or "he-low," (like ow!)
After the hospital I stayed one night in the university infirmary. Now there's an institution! Quaint, collegiate, paternalist (or maternalist, really), beds in rows. It was like the Madeleine books. (which reminds me of the other madeleine, I tried to read Proust in the hospital, only got through the overture. Not really a conducive place for it, nurse hello nurse hello.)
Institutions I would like to be confined in:
Rebibbia prison, on the Negri plan: it's terrible to make light of. Italy brutally crushed its radical movement, that's no joke. But still. Think of it: in the daytime, you amble through the streets of Rome; at nightfall, you come back to the prison, read your Spinoza, have a little of the house wine with Toni (Negri). It's not good wine--it's only prison--but still. (this is mostly a bad joke; he served a lot of time before his conditions changed to house arrest.)
La Borde clinic, founded by Jean Oury as part of the anti-psychiatry movement. It's democratic, not very sharp borders between staff and patients, it's in the Loire valley. In the summer they put on a play. I saw the documentary, of their production of Gobrowicz.
The hospital though, no fun at all. No wine, no Toni, no Gombrowicz.
The Negri book was here when I got back from the hospital, but I haven't gotten to it. I don't have the strength for it, Nietzsche would say. Or he would say, I was too strong to read that book, I had to wait until weakness, sickness...
The books I really ought to have are always other books. Like this, Invoking Humanity, or this, A Grammar of the Multitude. Maybe I'm mistaken about the invoking humanity book, it appealed because it has this epigraph from Carl Schmitt, "Whoever invokes humanity wants to cheat."
I never actually see any movies or books, and I mostly visit the same web sites over and over. I wish I could go see this video, Disobbedienti, at Hallwalls in Buffalo. Or this book, about the workerist movemest in Italy, Storming Heaven.
I wish I could read this book, Time for Revolution, which I actually own. I was in the hospital when it came, being observed and tested for (further) signs of appendicitis. Kind of a non-story, as I don't have it, didn't have it. The other woman in the next bed was old and wailing all the time, "Nurse? nurse? Oh God. Oh God. What did I do to deserve this? Nurse? nurse? nurse?" At first I would page the nurse every time she started wailing. Soon I grew to hate her; I hissed at her, "use the call button!" Another old woman, across the hall, kept saying "hello? [twenty-second pause] hello? [pause, and repeat]." She pronounced it "he-lou" or "he-low," (like ow!)
After the hospital I stayed one night in the university infirmary. Now there's an institution! Quaint, collegiate, paternalist (or maternalist, really), beds in rows. It was like the Madeleine books. (which reminds me of the other madeleine, I tried to read Proust in the hospital, only got through the overture. Not really a conducive place for it, nurse hello nurse hello.)
Institutions I would like to be confined in:
Rebibbia prison, on the Negri plan: it's terrible to make light of. Italy brutally crushed its radical movement, that's no joke. But still. Think of it: in the daytime, you amble through the streets of Rome; at nightfall, you come back to the prison, read your Spinoza, have a little of the house wine with Toni (Negri). It's not good wine--it's only prison--but still. (this is mostly a bad joke; he served a lot of time before his conditions changed to house arrest.)
La Borde clinic, founded by Jean Oury as part of the anti-psychiatry movement. It's democratic, not very sharp borders between staff and patients, it's in the Loire valley. In the summer they put on a play. I saw the documentary, of their production of Gobrowicz.
The hospital though, no fun at all. No wine, no Toni, no Gombrowicz.
The Negri book was here when I got back from the hospital, but I haven't gotten to it. I don't have the strength for it, Nietzsche would say. Or he would say, I was too strong to read that book, I had to wait until weakness, sickness...
The books I really ought to have are always other books. Like this, Invoking Humanity, or this, A Grammar of the Multitude. Maybe I'm mistaken about the invoking humanity book, it appealed because it has this epigraph from Carl Schmitt, "Whoever invokes humanity wants to cheat."
Tuesday, March 25, 2003
WTC Snuff
Some other blog made me aware of the existence of this 8-minute film at Atomfilms.com, called "The Voice of the Prophet," in which a head of security at Morgan Stanley reminisces about war, and remarks that the coming wars will be fought on the streets, "of Los Angeles," for example, against terrorists, and that the WTC bombing (the first one) was an example of things to come. It's shot in his WTC office, in 1998. The Atomfilms Web site enthuses about how this "prophet" foresaw all, in 1998, "long before Osama bin Laden was public enemy number 1."
How long before? Days before? I remember hearing Osama jokes in the office, and I only worked in an office from 1996 to 1998. (and here's an MSNBC story from April 1998, called Bin Laden Comes Home to Roost.) In addition, this prophet in the film, the security chief, was speaking five years after the first bombing.
The sound is bad on this film, and my speakers are bad. But, he starts out talking about Viet Nam and Rhodesia. There's a long rambling anecdote about charred bodies in Viet Nam. I couldn't hear that much of the first part, but apparently he volunteered in Rhodesia, or he was a mercenary in Rhodesia. I -- again, just don't know what to say there. From mercenary in Rhodesia to lackey for Morgan Stanley. What was his prophetic gift but guilt: "I am not going to get away with this shit forever." I'd have called the film "Man Sells Soul, Brings Doom on Us All."
Some other blog made me aware of the existence of this 8-minute film at Atomfilms.com, called "The Voice of the Prophet," in which a head of security at Morgan Stanley reminisces about war, and remarks that the coming wars will be fought on the streets, "of Los Angeles," for example, against terrorists, and that the WTC bombing (the first one) was an example of things to come. It's shot in his WTC office, in 1998. The Atomfilms Web site enthuses about how this "prophet" foresaw all, in 1998, "long before Osama bin Laden was public enemy number 1."
How long before? Days before? I remember hearing Osama jokes in the office, and I only worked in an office from 1996 to 1998. (and here's an MSNBC story from April 1998, called Bin Laden Comes Home to Roost.) In addition, this prophet in the film, the security chief, was speaking five years after the first bombing.
The sound is bad on this film, and my speakers are bad. But, he starts out talking about Viet Nam and Rhodesia. There's a long rambling anecdote about charred bodies in Viet Nam. I couldn't hear that much of the first part, but apparently he volunteered in Rhodesia, or he was a mercenary in Rhodesia. I -- again, just don't know what to say there. From mercenary in Rhodesia to lackey for Morgan Stanley. What was his prophetic gift but guilt: "I am not going to get away with this shit forever." I'd have called the film "Man Sells Soul, Brings Doom on Us All."
No Fair
I have nothing arch, scathing, or funny to write about the war, the war coverage, or the protests. But, I did read this heartening editorial by Jeffrey St. Clair at CounterPunch. In which he asks, apropos all the recent brandishing of the Geneva Convention, "What does the professor of torture Alan Dershowitz have to say now?" Now that it's the US soldiers who are POWs.
The heartening part, besides the pleasure of seeing Dershowitz scorned for his defense of torture, is the part about the real resistance to the war taking place on the streets of "Cairo, Paris, New York, Madrid, London, Nablus, San Francisco..."
I have nothing arch, scathing, or funny to write about the war, the war coverage, or the protests. But, I did read this heartening editorial by Jeffrey St. Clair at CounterPunch. In which he asks, apropos all the recent brandishing of the Geneva Convention, "What does the professor of torture Alan Dershowitz have to say now?" Now that it's the US soldiers who are POWs.
The heartening part, besides the pleasure of seeing Dershowitz scorned for his defense of torture, is the part about the real resistance to the war taking place on the streets of "Cairo, Paris, New York, Madrid, London, Nablus, San Francisco..."
Sunday, March 23, 2003
Color Commentary: Beyond Comment
This was in the New York Times on Saturday:
"This is the biggest, ugliest desert I've seen in my life," Ted Koppel told Peter Jennings on a special extended ABC newscast on Friday night. He said his convoy had made no contact with the enemy, "only a few Bedouins and their sheep."
--I, I just can't think of what to say. No wonder all my friends with TVs are so depressed. It's not so much the "incorrectness" of the Bedouin & sheep comment, though that's bad enough. Just the unashamed Ugly-Americanism of it.
(I have to acknowledge again The Pinocchio Theory of March 21 for the spot-on sportscaster/warcaster analogy.)
Off to protest, again. Yes, I know, the whole world protested yesterday, as did the whole nation, but here in Rhode Island, we're picking pious, church-y Sunday on which to stand around looking sad and morally superior. What can I say? My taste in protest runs to chanting ("Osama, Saddam, Pinochet/ All creations of the CIA!"), absurdity ("chair not war" [see entry for March 21], "drop pants not bombs"]), music/noise (Infernal Noise Brigade, the Anti-Fascist Marching Band), and Foucault ("no more sad militants"). And, um, also mobile shifting groups of anarcho-vomiters who go around the city not getting arrested.
This last, not getting arrested, may become more and more important as fresh hells like the Domestic Security Enhancement Act (DSEA) get under way, I mean if they do. Everybody's all up in arms, so to speak, about Patriot II's assault on privacy; it's the extension of secrecy that worries me. According to warblogging "The legislation would allow the Justice Department to 'detain' anyone secretly indefinitely, at least until an indictment is secured against the person. It would make it a crime to reveal the identity — or even existance — of such a detainee."
As my friends and I wrote last fall in 23 Theses on the History of the Secret: "But nowdays the locus of secrecy has been radically reversed: it is no longer the individual that has a 'right to privacy' but the state that has the power of secrecy. It’s not only the kind of power you think it is: taking prisoners of war, locking them up at Guantanamo Bay and torturing them for six months, or imprisoning thousands of immigrants but keeping their identity secret. It is also waging publicly secret wars: wars whose bare factuality is common knowledge but whose events are invisible, even to the most vigilant 'public.' We live in the age of the public secret."
(though I admit there's some collusion in the secrecy of the publicly secret war: I could post links to the Al-Jazeera photos of Iraqi corpses, but... you can find them if you want to.)
This was in the New York Times on Saturday:
"This is the biggest, ugliest desert I've seen in my life," Ted Koppel told Peter Jennings on a special extended ABC newscast on Friday night. He said his convoy had made no contact with the enemy, "only a few Bedouins and their sheep."
--I, I just can't think of what to say. No wonder all my friends with TVs are so depressed. It's not so much the "incorrectness" of the Bedouin & sheep comment, though that's bad enough. Just the unashamed Ugly-Americanism of it.
(I have to acknowledge again The Pinocchio Theory of March 21 for the spot-on sportscaster/warcaster analogy.)
Off to protest, again. Yes, I know, the whole world protested yesterday, as did the whole nation, but here in Rhode Island, we're picking pious, church-y Sunday on which to stand around looking sad and morally superior. What can I say? My taste in protest runs to chanting ("Osama, Saddam, Pinochet/ All creations of the CIA!"), absurdity ("chair not war" [see entry for March 21], "drop pants not bombs"]), music/noise (Infernal Noise Brigade, the Anti-Fascist Marching Band), and Foucault ("no more sad militants"). And, um, also mobile shifting groups of anarcho-vomiters who go around the city not getting arrested.
This last, not getting arrested, may become more and more important as fresh hells like the Domestic Security Enhancement Act (DSEA) get under way, I mean if they do. Everybody's all up in arms, so to speak, about Patriot II's assault on privacy; it's the extension of secrecy that worries me. According to warblogging "The legislation would allow the Justice Department to 'detain' anyone secretly indefinitely, at least until an indictment is secured against the person. It would make it a crime to reveal the identity — or even existance — of such a detainee."
As my friends and I wrote last fall in 23 Theses on the History of the Secret: "But nowdays the locus of secrecy has been radically reversed: it is no longer the individual that has a 'right to privacy' but the state that has the power of secrecy. It’s not only the kind of power you think it is: taking prisoners of war, locking them up at Guantanamo Bay and torturing them for six months, or imprisoning thousands of immigrants but keeping their identity secret. It is also waging publicly secret wars: wars whose bare factuality is common knowledge but whose events are invisible, even to the most vigilant 'public.' We live in the age of the public secret."
(though I admit there's some collusion in the secrecy of the publicly secret war: I could post links to the Al-Jazeera photos of Iraqi corpses, but... you can find them if you want to.)
Saturday, March 22, 2003
Get Your War on TV
Steve Shaviro's blog of March 21 anatomizes the boredom factor of Gulf War II on TV: not that you know what's going to happen before it does, or that the actual war itself is unimportant, but that nothing happens, on camera, right in front of you, in real time, lots of nothing. Tanks rolling endlessly across the sand.
I don't have a TV now, so I've only seen Gulf War II TV silently, in restaurants. I haven't seen the tank footage. I have seen some four-screens-at-once footage. Like the latest in video porn: no narrative, no context, just four screens of simultaneous "action." Or, in this case, inaction: green-lit cities; carrier decks; computer graphics of military helicopters; some Al-Jazeera footage with Arabic uselessly (to me) scrolling by. My experience supports Shaviro's boredom observation; porn is the boredom genre. CNN.com, too, has free news, but entices you to buy the special footage you can only see "by subscription," again like porn, in this case, web porn.
As to Shaviro's question, whether they'll show the carnage on this reality show, he probably knows the answer is no. Wrecked and charred buildings will have to stand in for that, if what I saw today is any indication. The only Iraqis on this show will be live, cheering ones.
On the scrolling stories at the bottom of the screen, it said, just once: "Protestors in NM vow to take the protest to one of Rumsfeld's four residences." Right the f---* on. I hope it's true.
*can I use the seven dirty words on this blog? I mean "f---", not "Rumsfeld." I don't know, I just agreed to the terms of service without reading them.
Steve Shaviro's blog of March 21 anatomizes the boredom factor of Gulf War II on TV: not that you know what's going to happen before it does, or that the actual war itself is unimportant, but that nothing happens, on camera, right in front of you, in real time, lots of nothing. Tanks rolling endlessly across the sand.
I don't have a TV now, so I've only seen Gulf War II TV silently, in restaurants. I haven't seen the tank footage. I have seen some four-screens-at-once footage. Like the latest in video porn: no narrative, no context, just four screens of simultaneous "action." Or, in this case, inaction: green-lit cities; carrier decks; computer graphics of military helicopters; some Al-Jazeera footage with Arabic uselessly (to me) scrolling by. My experience supports Shaviro's boredom observation; porn is the boredom genre. CNN.com, too, has free news, but entices you to buy the special footage you can only see "by subscription," again like porn, in this case, web porn.
As to Shaviro's question, whether they'll show the carnage on this reality show, he probably knows the answer is no. Wrecked and charred buildings will have to stand in for that, if what I saw today is any indication. The only Iraqis on this show will be live, cheering ones.
On the scrolling stories at the bottom of the screen, it said, just once: "Protestors in NM vow to take the protest to one of Rumsfeld's four residences." Right the f---* on. I hope it's true.
*can I use the seven dirty words on this blog? I mean "f---", not "Rumsfeld." I don't know, I just agreed to the terms of service without reading them.
MOAB of the Signifiers
This is from a few days before the war "started," so to speak (considering it never really ended). The New York Times ran this story: "Realizing Dreams of Flight, Inspired by Historic Crew".
If the New York Times has already archived the story by the time you read this, let me give you the highlights:
Photo: an African-American pilot gazes off into Destiny. It's straight out of Barthes' essay "Myth Today."
The story is a profile of a Lt Barnes, a young African-American, who serves on the USS Abraham Lincoln, and went to school at the Tuskegee Institute. Are they serious??? If this "Barnes" didn't exist, Operation _____'s office of public relations/ office of securing African-American consensus would have to invent him.
Another oddity to this story:
"Lieutenant Barnes... became animated..."
"Animated again, Lieutenant Barnes said ...."
" 'I'd like to go,' Lieutenant Barnes said, animated once again..."
Apparently, he either lapses into a stupor when he's not raring to go kill, or the reporter's slip betrays the fact that "Lt Barnes" is animated only in the space of nytimes.com.
It's eerily close to what Charles Mudede noticed about the use of African-American faces in coverage of 9/11:
The NY Times promises we can follow its "Tours of Duty" profiles throughout the war.
This is from a few days before the war "started," so to speak (considering it never really ended). The New York Times ran this story: "Realizing Dreams of Flight, Inspired by Historic Crew".
If the New York Times has already archived the story by the time you read this, let me give you the highlights:
Photo: an African-American pilot gazes off into Destiny. It's straight out of Barthes' essay "Myth Today."
The story is a profile of a Lt Barnes, a young African-American, who serves on the USS Abraham Lincoln, and went to school at the Tuskegee Institute. Are they serious??? If this "Barnes" didn't exist, Operation _____'s office of public relations/ office of securing African-American consensus would have to invent him.
Another oddity to this story:
"Lieutenant Barnes... became animated..."
"Animated again, Lieutenant Barnes said ...."
" 'I'd like to go,' Lieutenant Barnes said, animated once again..."
Apparently, he either lapses into a stupor when he's not raring to go kill, or the reporter's slip betrays the fact that "Lt Barnes" is animated only in the space of nytimes.com.
It's eerily close to what Charles Mudede noticed about the use of African-American faces in coverage of 9/11:
"Then there were the images of weeping and praying blacks on the covers of USA Today, The New York Times, and The Seattle Times. These images of suffering were not false; many black people were deeply affected by the monstrous magnitude of the September 11 attacks. But these newspaper photos served another purpose. Beyond showing that the tragedy was an American tragedy, the photos also said, 'Look, even black people are upset about this attack. They have been humiliated and oppressed by America from day one, and yet here they are crying.'
"Now, dear reader, if blacks are crying, can you imagine what white America is feeling at this moment? Yes, that is how bad things are."
The NY Times promises we can follow its "Tours of Duty" profiles throughout the war.
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