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Why Do Girls Love Trolls and Vice Versa? Poetry, Dreams and the Film "Troll 1"

I'm a believer in something I first heard in a lecture on SF writer Philip K. Dick, by techno-mystic Erik Davies.  The "logos" I remember Davies saying, is often found in the discarded elements of culture -- those artifacts tossed aside and ignored, like the ads on the backs of matchbook covers.

That's why, when I saw this scene from a somewhat forgotten grade B movie, Troll 1, I felt I was in the presence of revelation.  In it, a character who is later transformed into an elf, recites from Spenser's Faerie Queene:

For those unfamiliar with this flick (now in my top 10 all-time faves), this moment may appear a bit opaque -- like a dream, or an avant-garde poem.  Here's the context:

The girl who requests this recitation is actually possessed by a murderous, scary looking (male) troll. This denizen of the mythic underworld is slowly overtaking all the inhabitants of an apartment building in San Francisco, and converting each of their pads into a different faerie world (you get a preview of these environs in this scene).

Once this devilish transformation is completed, the possessed girl will be crowned the troll's Faerie Princess.  And when this happens, the troll's maleficent kingdom will be reborn as a 4th dimension existing along side -- and in dark competition with -- ours.

The Secret of the Troll Doll Craze

As I was wondering why the troll felt so at home in the girl's body, Elaine Equi (my better half) reminded me that little girls and trolls have always had a thing for each other.  It's a fact of psychological life that no doubt fueled the Troll Doll craze.

Why?  Elaine's theory is that young girls cling to trolls as symbols of power -- exactly what they lose after a fully feminized socialization.  In addition to being a rebellious, anti-social figure, the troll possesses awesome magical capabilities. 

In this sense, trolls are necessary for girls, as symbols of autonomy. For that matter, trolls need little girls, too.  For (as the movie shows) without them, their desires can never surface in the waking world.

Coincidentally, Equi wrote a poem about all this -- long before we saw the movie:

The Necessary Troll

Once I thought I saw a lecherous troll gesture loudly
beneath a bridge on a box of jasmine tea imported
from some imaginary country in an undisclosed century.
He was trolling patiently for after-school girls
to give him the pearl of their girlish essence.
The tea was so delicate and feminine -- really more
like perfume in a cup than something to drink.
I hated the taste, but enjoyed playing chicken with the troll,
letting my eye sweep his dirty corner without grazing him.
No one knows what happened to those who actually did look.
Some say they turned into spiders and crawled -- others that they
aged hundreds of years in a blink.  I never crossed that bridge,
preferring to believe that as long as I didn't, everything
would remain as it was on the cardboard box.  And regrettably
it has.  You see, I didn't realize the value of the troll's slurpy
slobber and its power to transform a common commodity
such as tea into a rare and precious thing.

Giving up the Troll here results in a gentle sense of loss.  I wondered, though, if "the troll's slurpy slobber" had totally evaporated.  It was preserved, at least, in the poem, was it not?  This brought to mind something I read by the philosopher Lyotard on Freud's theory of dreams.

Freud termed the way dreams mash up images, sounds and meanings condensation.  Lyotard tells us that this aspect of the dreamwork "crumples" the text of a dream.  This process hides/censors anti-social desires from waking consciousness while, at the same time, preserving them -- for it offers them a masked, indirect way to see the light of day.  If you crumple a piece of paper with a message on it, some of its words are still legible. (p. 28)

The comparison of poems and dreams, of course, has a long, rich history.  Both are modes of figurative language, as are tales about trolls (perhaps the most "crumpled" of all mythological figures).  And all three "genres" often depend on condensation for their power.

The poet Lorine Niedecker wrote the classic statement on the advantages of the condensed work of poetry: 

Poet's Work

Grandfather 
    advised me:
            Learn a trade

I learned
    to sit at desk
             and condense

No layoff
    from this
           condersery

Some have read Niedecker's line about "no layoffs" as proof that being a poet is a 24/7 gig.  True enough. But I see it also meaning that she can't get fired.  As such, poetry offers a bit of autonomy no one can take away.

Perhaps like a dream, the work of poetry keeps a bit of the old slobber around.                      

If You Create a New Species, Is It OK to Have Sex With It? Thoughts About the Movie "Splice"

(Spoiler Alert: Contains details about the movie plot.)

I recently saw Splice, the latest film inspired by the ethical questions raised by genetic research.  In it, a married pair of scientists, played by the always cool Sarah Polley and Oscar winner Adrian Brody, through gene splicing experiments, create a new life form.

As in earlier films, like The Island of Dr. Moreau, the being is an amalgam of creatures.  It's got some of Polley's genes, so it looks partly human.  But it has legs like a bald kangaroo's, and a tail with a stinger (like a scorpion or stingray).  It chirps like a menacing bird -- and it unfurls majestic wings when excited, taking on the look of something above-human: an angel.

The being can look sexy, too.  Played by Delphine Chaneac, the creature sometimes resembles a runway model. The following scene captures a bit of the sexy/scary quality of this "new species":

What I like about this clip is that it suggests the mix of fascination/horror public discourse about new science and technology often carries with it.  We love this stuff, yet we're afraid it will kill us if we get too close.

In fact, what's new about the film is that it pushes that "love" all the way into Eros.  There's even a sex scene between Brody's character and Dren (the name given the creature), where her angel wings flutter in ecstasy.

But, as the stinger at Polley's throat reminds us, Dren is "not of our kind."  (That stinger will pierce the heart of one of the characters later, administering a death blow not unlike what killed Steve Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter.)

One of the things that keeps the film from resolving into cliche is that it maintains this ambivalence through to the very end.  Of course, Polley and Brody are punished in various ways for their Promethean hubris.  Like Adam and Eve, they've accessed knowledge it seems they should have left alone.

But in the last scene, this idea is thrown into doubt.  We find out Polley's character is pregnant. The baby could be the progeny of her (now dead) husband or of the creature itself -- who at one point transformed itself into a man and raped her.  In a rather futuristic take on the Pro-Choice position, she decides to keep the baby.

And her boss at the genetics firm has gone from condemnation of her creation to approval.  It turns out her research produced profitable new patents for the company.  Polley's character is lauded for her courage.

Tradition and the Posthuman Individual

As I was wondering about the film's vacillations, I came across some interesting observations by the philosopher Slavoj Zizek on the public rhetoric surrounding genetic research.

 Zizek, thinking about the way the news of genetics breakthroughs has been received in Europe, notes a tendency which "on the one hand, tacitly tolerates scientific and technical progress, while on the other...tries to control its effects on our socio-symbolic order, that is, to prevent the existing theological-ethical world picture from changing." (p. 62)

I think Zizek's comments explain the caution around such discoveries when it comes to public policy rhetoric.  In the U.S. at least, such "official statements" are influenced by a politics that speaks the language of (if not rules according to) Judeo-Christian ethics.  And the film certainly reflects this influence. But what of its simultaneous delight and endorsement with such dabbling? 

There's one U.S. institution stronger than Church and State combined: Business.  And this force is governed more by cost/value equations than ethics.  As such, it tends to be morally agnostic.

The movie can be read as a parable about the difficulty of splicing all these forces together -- into anything resembling an integrated social whole.  And though this integration never happens, along the way the film offers up some fascinating and hilarious conundrums.  Here's my favorite:

After walking in on Brody and Dren, Polley's character mutters a standard movie expression, along the lines of: "There are some things you just don't do."  This draws a big laugh from the audience.

Maybe that's partly because it's hard to define Brody's transgression: has he committed adultery?  Incest? Or something new -- human/alien sex -- that we don't have a sin for yet?  In which case, you find yourself asking: is it really bad?               

Is Nature Superstitious? Science, Religion and Science Fiction

Recently I bought an anthology of science fiction stories titled The New Space Opera 2.  The beginning of one tale in particular, "The Island" by Peter Watts, compelled me to read on:

"You sent us here.  We do this for you: spin your webs and build your magic gateways, thread the needle's eye at sixty thousand kilometers a second.  We never stop, never even dare to slow down, lest the light of your coming turn us to plasma.  All so you can step from star to star without dirtying your feet in these endless, empty wastes between. 

Is it really too much to ask that you might talk to us now and then?" And then, a little later on the page: "Why have you forsaken us?" (p. 31)

The addressee here is not God but, as far as I could tell on first reading, a post-human intelligence, perhaps some combination of man/machine.  And this prayer is uttered not in a Church, but in one of those Cathedrals of the far future: a rocket ship.

The character thinking these words is tens of thousands of years old.  But she's not supernatural either. She's simply one of a small crew of workers whose Sisyphean task is to travel thousands of light years across the cosmos, as she helps build things for a kind of intergalactic Robert Moses (the "person" addressed earlier).  To make this task possible, she and her crew only get to stay awake for a few weeks every thousand years or so (the rest of the time they're kept in an "undead" state by intelligent robots).

Talk about work alienation: "...there is no finish line," she mutters.  "We go on forever, crawling across the universe like ants, dragging your goddamed superhighway behind us." (p. 69)

Natural Supernaturalism

Why was I compelled to read on?  The pleasure of this text for me was in watching how it elegantly translated the motifs of older, biblical, devotional and mystical literature (and the feelings these stirred) into a secular tale.  In this, the SF genre shares something with Romanticism.  It too derives some of its appeal from what the great literary scholar M.H. Abrams termed (in a book of the same name) Natural Supernaturalism.

According to Abrams, the Romantics (and their progeny) -- reacting against the more mechanistic side of the Enlightenment -- found ways to reinvent older spiritual (and biblical) literatures by "reconstituting them in a way that would make them intellectually acceptable, as well as emotionally pertinent." (p. 66)

So, for example, the figure of "Prophet" becomes the "visionary poet" in Wordsworth.  "Providence" is transformed into the march of the Idea through history by Hegel.  The Millennial Kingdom is reborn as the post-historical age of Communism in Marx.

Pulp Vs. Hard SF

From what I know of the history of SF, the term "Space Opera" (derived from "horse opera") was originally derogatory.  It described a strain of the form full of fanciful science, with a premium placed on adventure. It was also known as "Space Romance."

"The New Space Opera" appears (at least on the basis of this tale) to be an attempt to renew the "wow" factor of its pulp ancestor (its sense of the cosmic infinite or sublime) by offering greater attention to hard science fact and theory, in order to enhance speculative plausibility.

 What's touching in this tale, though, is a sense of mourning for the lost innocence of older SF.  At one point, for example, there is a vision of nature reminiscent of a more Romantic heritage: a living star that signals "Stop, stop, stop" to the rocket as it nears.

The narrator tells us that no human crew has been able to communicate with an alien life form, and the very possibility sets off her utopian imagination.  She becomes convinced this being (called "The Island" or DHF 428) is evidence of a kinder, gentler, version of evolution: 

"The Island puts the lie to everything we were ever told about the machinery of life.  Sun-powered, perfectly adapted, immortal, it won no struggle for survival: where are the predators, the competitors, the parasites?  All life around 428 is one vast continuum, one grand act of symbiosis.  Nature here is not red in tooth and claw.  Nature, out here, is the helping hand." (p. 54)

But, as one might expect from a post-Romantic Space Romance, this proves untrue.  Through great effort, the ship, heeding the pleas of 428, adjusts its course, so as not to collide with it.  Later, though, we discover this being "conned" them" -- into killing another life form in its vicinity.  "I let myself believe in life without conflict," the narrator mourns, "in sentience without sin." (p. 69)

Science Vs. Ideology

Have we then, through this disillusion, escaped the Natural Supernaturalism of the Space Romance? Perhaps.  But doesn't it sound like the narrator, presenting a more "realistic" version of evolution is getting it mixed up with older doctrines like "Original Sin"?

Some cultural critics consider this "dog-eat-dog" version of "hard science" to be suspiciously close to competitive market rhetoric.  Evolution, so I've read, can be influenced by cooperative ventures like culture, as well as "selfish genes."

So you might read this tale as a cautionary one.  Perhaps it warns that sometimes you give up religion, only to replace it with ideology.         

   

         

Is All Good Art About Nothing? Seinfeld as an Allegory About Aesthetics

Reading a book that came my way as gift, Jacques Ranciere's Aesthetics and Its Discontents, I discovered this provocative passage:

"'The social function of Art', as Adorno will echo, 'is to not have one.'  Egalitarian promise is enclosed in the work's self-sufficiency, in its indifference to every particular political project and in its refusal to get involved in decorating the mundane world.  It is owing to this indifference that, in the middle of the nineteenth century, that work about nothing, that 'work supported on itself' written by the aesthete Flaubert, was straightaway perceived by the contemporary advocates of the hierarchical order as a manifestation of 'democracy'. The work that desires nothing, the work without any point of view, which conveys no message and has no care either for democracy or for anti-democracy, this work is 'egalitarian' by dint of its very indifference, by which it suspends all preference, all hierarchy." (p. 40)

A few days later, while indulging in a nightly habit of watching Seinfeld reruns on TV before bed, I saw the episode that encapsulates the entire concept of the show.  Any fan of the series will remember this scene:

A lot has been made about Seinfeld as "the show about nothing."  In books like Seinfeld and Philosophy, for example, "nothingness" is connected to vast questions about existence itself.  After the reading the passage I mentioned, though, I started to wonder if the "nothingness" of the show had more to do with creativity and aesthetics than "the philosophy of Being."

If you think that's a reach, check out this scene, which appears after George and Jerry have made their pitch to studio executives about a "show on nothing."  Jerry is scolding George for his refusal to compromise:

Art-for-Trivia's-Sake

There's no mention of philosophy in this clip, but there's lots about George's "artistic integrity."  Jerry, who is this case serves as the voice of the commercial world, even offers the stereotypical mainstream media response to artistic ambition: "you must be crazy."

As the show develops over its seasons, this "art about nothing" shares something else with other types of "crazy" art: it begins to seem almost anti-social.  Much of the humor in Seinfeld derives from the apparent indifference the characters exhibit to social proprieties.  As a running gag, George and Jerry in particular stumble over ethnic, sexual and religious slurs of all varieties.

In fact, almost any "serious" matter is refused attention in favor of what the show celebrates: the minutiae (or nothingness) of everyday life.  Jobs, politics, even death -- all become victims of the show's endless distractions.  And this is democratic.  Who, after all, can't relate to trivia?

But, does refusing to deal with "the big questions" enable the show to become entirely devoted to its own "free play" and wit?  Not exactly.

Why Does the Seinfeld Crew End Up in Jail? 

Watching Seinfeld reruns this time around, I was struck by how the characters get progressively nastier. Rather than just clueless, they almost begin to seem, well, bad.  Think of the way Susan's death (George's fiance) is greeted with glee by George himself, and a characteristic ho-hum by the Seinfeld posse. Then, of course, in the last episode the gang ends up in the clink for laughing at someone who's getting mugged.

Does their incarceration mean that the show developed a guilty conscience?  Perhaps.  But, returning to Seinfeld as an allegory about aesthetics enables another reading.

Ranciere tells us that, in addition to the "art-for-art's-sake" impulse, the other pole of aesthetics is what he calls "engaged art".  This is art that confronts social reality (rather than turning its back on it), and seeks to intervene directly (often by "bearing witness" to injustice).  Ranciere theorizes that the battle of these two impulses is what gives modern aesthetics its dynamism.

You can read the last few episodes of Seinfeld as re-enacting this battle.  One side insists that art, even TV comedy, must exhibit a social conscience.  The other side resists, knowing that adopting an engaged stance will kill the show's humor.  The mock judgement against the show at the end is as much aesthetic as it is moral.  It says: art like this is flawed: reform.

Characteristically, even in jail Jerry and crew are unable to take this verdict at all seriously.               

Is It Ethical to Appropriate? Ideas from a Performance by Rob Fitterman

Even to a relatively uninitiated observer such as myself, newer literary practices that fit under the umbrella of "Conceptualism" are at times reminiscent (as Kenneth Goldsmith has mentioned) of older movements, such as Realism.

As in these earlier (predecessor?) styles, there is sometimes an effort to present/document very ordinary ways of communication from everyday life.  In the case of Conceptualism, this can involve snippets of conversation, internet chatter, advertising and journalistic lingo, institutional cliches and more. 

This "Realist impulse" can produce (in the words of Ranciere) a "scandal" -- arising from an "anything goes" attitude, in which what is customarily relegated to "profane" realms is welcomed into the halls of art. (pp. 5, 14)

You can see how it could also give rise to ethical questions.  As critical as Realism was of its subjects, it was considered democratic, if for no other reason than that it offered voice to people who previously had none (at least in high culture).  When Conceptualism appropriates unsophisticated chatter, it's often very funny. But then the question arises, is this "just making fun of the boobs"?  (In which case, it risks sacrificing the power of an egalitarian ethos.)

In a witty performance at St. Mark's Poetry Project last Wednesday, Rob Fitterman addressed this question head on.  Fitterman's new book, Sprawl, often uses online consumer commentary about stores and restaurants.  In a part serious/part satirical piece he read at the end of his performance, he described his sense of "failure" in his handling of such material :

"I still have the messy job of returning to the ethical question, which I failed to respond to in any satisfactory way.  I've tried to consider how I might borrow consumer language without having a superior relationship to it. The dilemma comes to a head in the conflicted decision of whether or not to correct the grammar and spelling of online found text.  If I Ieave in the original errors, I take the risk of poking fun of the online authors who might be less privileged in education, and if I do correct the errors, then I run the risk of controlling and purifying the found text.  Either way points to failure, major failure, capital F." 

Fitterman's performance did, though, offer some intriguing ways out of this quandary.  One solution to the "artist-over-subject" dilemma was to appropriate, and sometimes transform (with consumer language) elements from the texts of Matvei Yankelevich, with whom he read that night (and who gave a fascinating performance in his own right).  I took this as a way of leveling the playing field; i.e., reminding us that it's not only unsuspecting consumers who get their texts borrowed.

Even more provocative for me, though, was the fact that who the producer/author was and who the "mere" consumer shifted at points during the reading.

Who is "The Consumer"?

Working in Advertising/Marketing over the years, I've seen many presentations by prestigious research organizations on "The State of the Consumer" (who is sometimes "disillusioned", often "in revolt", "demanding more choice", and generally behaving irascibly).  In Cultural Studies literature, I've read about the "Consumer" being "the new proletariat".  It's always struck me, though, when describing this mysterious Other, that these intellectuals never seem to acknowledge that they are also describing themselves.  Don't they like to shop?

A particularly egalitarian moment erupted during Fitterman's performance when he presented a work that dissolved the subject positions of author/producer (and "person in the know" in general) and consumer.  It happened like this... 

The Poetry of Pills

As in the world of TV, FItterman's performance was interrupted with ads.  Throughout the night, he periodically re-presented drug ad copy (sometimes straight, sometimes modified) as poems.  Usually   these pieces got laughs -- especially to a younger crowd, where the imagined consumer was an "Other".  Picture a dramatic, deadpan, pause-filled reading of this text, about Levitra: "Sometimes you need a little/help staying/in the game.../but once you're in/the zone,/it's good."

It's not just, of course, schadenfreude that makes such copy funny.  After being bombarded with messages as consumers all day, ironic distance offers one the pleasures of taking an objective rather than subjective position to such texts.  However, something else occurred when Fitterman read this (in what I remember as a slow, slightly mournful voice):

Paxil

I don't enjoy
things like

I used to
I can't

sit still
I wasn't

always like
this I

used to
be happy

I remember
being happy.

When I spoke to people afterwards about the hear-a-pin-drop-silence that followed this poem, someone said "maybe that one was too close to home."  I think that's why, for me, this momentary erasure of the self/other divide answered the ethical question posed that night.

For, like a sign carried across a Brechtian stage, it interrupted the plane of the performance with a caption -- one that said: "Oh, by the way, this is about you, too."