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“The Witch” vs “Hellhole”, or from Modernism to Postmodernism

It’s a wonderful feeling when your faith in an idea long dormant is restored. I recently experienced such a restoration after watching the Polish horror film Hellhole on Netflix. There is a segment in this film that shamelessly borrows a visual motif from The Witch, Robert Eggers' arthouse masterpiece of 2015. But the self-conscious way it uses such elements reinforced the usefulness of a concept I had personally consigned to my mental trash bin: postmodernism.

In fact, comparing The Witch and Hellhole is a good way to differentiate modern from postmodern style.  Doing so, you (re)discover what was (is) great about postmodern art in the first place: its ability to accommodate feelings that don’t normally fit together. In the case of Hellhole, the mixing disgust with hilarity.

The borrowing between Hellhole and The Witch doesn’t involve plot or setting. The earlier film is staged in colonial times and involves a family attempting to settle the American wilderness. The forest is full of witches, who the daughter eventually joins to worship of the Devil. Hellhole is set in contemporary Poland. It tells the tale of an undercover detective investigating a monastery in connection with a missing persons case. The detective eventually becomes possessed himself.

Authentic vs. Inauthentic

One of the qualities that makes The Witch so compelling is its authenticity. Director and writer Robert Eggers devoted years to researching his subject matter. He read diaries of the time (circa 1630) to match belief systems and diction. The cabin in the film was built according to architectural notes and other documents from the Smithsonian. This finely detailed realism achieves a historical consistency that makes you feel like you’ve been transported backwards through a cinematic time machine.

Hellhole, by contrast, is historically discordant, and, at times, comically inauthentic. Though set in modern times, the monastery locale is a throwback to medieval Europe, closer to a ruin than a place inhabited by living beings. It’s a mini-universe that reeks of decay.  Such a setting is appropriate for a set of rituals and beliefs that seem absurdly out of step with the times. The monastery is almost like an exorcism factory, churning out one after another. And it’s a profit center—the Vatican pays them by the possession. To add to the weirdness, we eventually discover the monks are worshipping, rather than exorcising, the devil and that cannibalism is a key part of their rituals.

The films, in short, couldn’t be more different—except for one striking scene. Both movies end in a similar way. In The Witch, the lead character, filled with the demon’s powers, joins the band of witches in the woods, in a dance in which they all levitate in a circle together. In Hellhole, the monks of the monastery, now under control of their demon, also levitate and, in their case, are suspended upside down. Like in The Witch, the monks’ levitation is accompanied by spooky voices and music—and there is enough similarity to the scenes that it seems like Hellhole is paying tribute to this earlier possession flick.

The visual imagery, though, is where the similarity ends. In The Witch, the scariness of the scene is mixed with a kind of release, even pleasure: as tragic as the story is (the young protagonist’s family is killed), you feel relieved she is freed from the oppressive puritanism of the film. The monks’ case is different: you feel they get what they deserved for all their ghoulish cannibalism. When they levitate, they are turned upside down along with the crosses in their monastery—an image in keeping with the carnivalesque overturning of belief systems in the film—where good becomes bad and holy profane.

But the most significant difference of all between the two levitations is that The Witch’s version is completely serious, while Hellhole’s is rather funny. This is because, in the case of Hellhole, there is a scene right before this one, that subverts its genre—and ultimately, the religious belief systems it plays with.

A Conjuring Gone Wrong

The premise of Hellhole will be familiar to anyone to anyone who has seen Rosemary's Baby or The Devil's Advocate. A group of devil worshippers, in this case the monks of this weird monastery, wish to assist Satan’s appearance and conquest of the world. In the case of Hellhole, we discover that the detective investigating monastery is destined to be the body/soul the demon will use to facilitate his return. Bringing this about involves a ritual that requires cannibalism, blood drinking and the reciting of blasphemous invocations. Two monks meticulously accomplish all this in front of their order. However, when they do so, nothing happens.

In this scene, the movie abruptly shifts tone, from scary to comic. The monks look puzzled, beginning to seem like a couple of fuckups. The spooky and pompously solemn aura of their ritual becomes undercut by the mundane quality of their self-doubt. “Did we forget something?” one monk asks. “I don’t know,“ the other replies, “there aren’t any instructions [pointing to an ancient book], just some notes.” The monk goes on to suggest that perhaps they interpreted the instructions symbolically when they should have been literal. “It’s not possible,” the other monk counters, adding: “We sacrificed seven innocents, one for every cardinal sin, and the eighth was even a virgin!” “You said this would work,” one monk mutters. “Oh, so you’re blaming me now,” the other shoots back.

Finally exhausted by all the finger pointing, one of the lead monks announces to the perturbed congregation: “This may have been a mistake; let’s act like nothing happened. After all, we meant well.”

This truly funny scene brings the whole film down to earth. It makes the plot and the genre itself seem ridiculous. This is why the levitation scene and the horror tropes that accompany the end of the film seem more a tongue-in-cheek exercise than anything you’d take literally. In this sense, the film is the diametrical opposite of The Witch.

And, rather than merely a kind of nihilistic joking around as some postmodern art is accused of, the absurdity of Hellhole serves as a tool of political critique. Eastern Europeans filmmakers, whose cultures have suffered through Fascism and Stalinism, are probably especially aware of the dangers of powerful “master narratives.” In this context, Hellhole might be read as a questioning of the overweening power of the Catholic Church, whose political influence is significant in Poland (a fact alluded to in the film). The obsession with ritual throughout the film and the decrepit setting suggests the whole edifice is out of date.

More than that, the heretical theology the film invents offers a cutting comment on dangers of any ideology if it gets too influential. If one wonders why Catholic monks would conjure evil personified, the rationale is provided near the end of the film. The head monk states:

 “God and the Devil sit side by side. They have an understanding. Always have. Since the beginning. But the Devil is not evil. People are. They deserve to be punished. And punished they shall be.”

In the context of the film, it’s hard not read this statement as a classic postmodern comment: any ideology, even one that preaches the good (don’t they all?), is liable to turn into its opposite if it becomes too powerful.  The result: rather than helping people, it punishes them—and the pursuit of the good goes hand-in-hand with evil.

The image we’re left with at the end of this film makes this point in a striking way: freed from hell, the first action the demon takes before enacting his mayhem is to pray to a crucifix.

 

Michelle Yeoh, Platonist? Thoughts on "Everything Everywhere All at Once"

How do you find meaning in a life that seems absurd?

This is the question the film Everything Everywhere All at Once keeps asking. Such a query, of course, is one that has haunted modernity since at least the days of existentialism. But the way the film goes about answering it is distinctly contemporary: it presents us with a blizzard of spectacular imagery from which to draw our conclusions.

The film’s basic plot is reminiscent of classic visionary narratives of the past, such as Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass and especially The Wizard of Oz, except that it updates the dreamlike quality of these classics with the popular new trope of the multiverse.

If you haven’t seen it, the narrative works like this: Evelyn, the central character portrayed in a virtuoso performance by Michelle Yeoh, begins the film as a stressed, small business owner. She is trying to run a laundromat without much assistance from her spacey husband, rebellious teenage daughter and demanding father who has come to live with the family. To make matters worse, their enterprise is facing an audit from the IRS, and they are being grilled about receipts and expenses by a stern agent, played tongue-in-cheek by Jamie Lee Curtis.

Amid this turmoil, Evelyn discovers a new ability: she can travel through alternate universes, each of which presents a different version of her life. Such variations, we are led to understand, are the result of small choices she’s made. In one universe she is an opera singer, in another a high-society Brahman, in yet another a kung-fu messiah who is faced with the task of saving a world. The threat, in this case, comes from an alternate version of her daughter who is manipulating a black hole (that takes the hilarious shape of a cosmic “everything bagel”). There is even a universe where everyone’s fingers take the shape of rubbery hot dogs.

Shifting with Evelyn at eye-blink speed from one universe to another, the film calls to mind an experience a lot more banal than a multiverse: you feel like you’re searching for something to watch over our constantly proliferating streaming media choices. But whether scary, goofy, comedic or dramatic, the worlds presented in the film share a common trait: each seems more fun than the one she’s living in. This is why it’s mildly surprising that in the end, the universe where Evelyn finds the most meaning is the one where the film began: the laundromat business.

Plato’s advice on choosing between alternate lives

As I alluded to, such an outcome recalls the end of the Wizard of Oz film, where Dorothy concludes: “there’s no place like home.” But the film brought to my mind a more ancient tale. I am thinking of “The Myth of Er,” the fable that ends Plato’s Republic. In this afterlife parable, souls are asked to choose their next life from an array of possibilities (such reincarnation tales seem a predecessor to today’s more “scientific” myth of alternative universes). The lives offered in Plato’s myth, as in Everything Everywhere…” range from the glorious to the mundane. Souls are counseled to make wise decisions. Here is from Alain Badiou’s hyper contemporary translation of the classic:

“let us learn above all how… to choose an admirable life rather than a degraded one. For then we will have learned that a life, regardless of how lowly it may seem, is admirable when it’s oriented toward justice and that being oriented toward injustice, no matter how brilliant and famous one may be, is tantamount to ensuring one’s own degradation. That’s the only criterion. We must hold this conviction in ourselves, even into the world beyond…"

In Plato’s tale, a great hero of the past has seemingly learned this lesson better than most. Here is how, in Badiou’s translation, Odysseus chooses his next life (he is last in the line of souls making a “next life” selection):

“The memory of his arduous wanderings had cured him of all ambition. He spent ages trying to find the life of some ordinary person who’d been completely uninvolved in public affairs. With difficulty he managed to ferret out, off in a corner, the hard-working, never-changing life of a poor, industrious check-out woman at More Is Better, who, as she was the single mother of four children, got up every day at 5 a.m., did the housework, mended the clothes, washed the sheets, counted her pennies out one by one, and had nothing but the routine of domestic life to fill up her existence. Needless to say, none of the other dead had wanted that life. Odysseus immediately took it and said that even if chance had given him first dibs, he would have made the exact same choice.”

 Where Evelyn, a contemporary Odysseus, concludes her journey is not so different from this ancestor. Like this heroic figure, she ends up at the end of the film as head of a family that struggles like hell. One of the reasons she is dissatisfied with more “glorious” lives is precisely their lack of justice. In the alternate life in which she is the universe’s savior, for example, the way she is to accomplish her mission is by murdering her daughter (which she refuses to do).

Further, in the final few scenes of the film, Evelyn shares with her daughter the discovery she’s made through her “arduous wanderings” across alternative universes. In the film’s most Platonic moment, she states that, despite the absurdity of this excess of lives, one ideal still holds out as truth/meaning: the love she feels for her daughter and family. Thus, it is only her more worrisome and mundane life as laundromat owner that answers the question of “what does it all mean?” In his book on love, Badiou comments:

“Plato is quite precise in what he says about love: a seed of universality resides in the impulse towards love. The experience of love is an impulse towards something that he calls the Idea… In today’s world, it is generally thought that individuals only pursue their own self-interest. Love is an antidote to that.”

The moral of both The Republic and Everything, Everywhere…then, seems to be: to find meaning, one must become immersed in something bigger than one’s own self-interest, something “universal” as Badiou puts it. In this light, compared to the truth of love, the many alternative lives flashing through the film at warp speed seem like so many bullshit media images—or, in more classical terms, illusory shapes projected over the walls of Plato’s Cave.

But certain details in the film cast a shade over such a sunny conclusion. Before Evelyn went on her universe-hopping journey, her family was on the verge of disintegrating because of the financial and emotional stress running a small business created. It would seem that even traditionally unassailable ideals such as love require material support to flourish.

All of which leads one to conclude that leaving the cave of illusion for the land of truth is certainly desirable—if you can afford the admission fee.

Why are we whispering? Thoughts on "Blade Runner 2049."

I finally saw Blade Runner 2049 on cable the other night. Beautiful to look at, sometimes moving, but what really struck me was the degree of low-talking going on.

At times I thought of those comic bits in films where two characters find themselves needlessly speaking in hushed tones. One of them inevitably notices and blurts out, “why are we whispering?”

There are lots of answers you could give to such a question. Perhaps the characters in this dystopia feared surveillance (but would a whisper really mask your speech to the future’s presumably hyper-sensitive bugs?).

Or maybe, since the main characters are androids, they speak in even, quiet tones like AI traditionally does (think of Hal in 2001) in science fiction films. I guess this is to connote emotional control — an inhuman equanimity. But then again, the replicants in this case seem desperate, rather than icy cool.

Or perhaps the voices of these beings are simply muffled by the ambient noise of their chaotic urban landscape, which sometimes seems scored to a track reminiscent of the Beatles’ classic “Revolution number 9.”

None of these answers satisfied me, though. There was something holy about their quiet. Combined with the dark lighting (as I remember it, the movie takes place mostly at night), the whispering made me think I was in a church. I could almost smell the incense.

The religious vibe of the film is inescapable; it’s literally dripping with the biblical. The narrative is centered around a miraculous birth, as a subculture of replicants is excited to discover one of their own was “of woman born.” The mother is Rachel, Sean Young’s character from the first film. At one point, a replicant describing this birth alludes piously to a verse from Genesis: “And God remembered Rachel; he listened to her and allowed her to conceive.”

Religious themes are common to science fiction. Reverential awe often underscores that moment when the wonder of a new technology is revealed: some new device or process cool or horrible enough to promise utopia or threaten apocalypse. The genre never tires of extrapolating on Arthur C. Clarke’s famous maxim: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

But Blade Runner 2049 is not that kind of film. The technology isn’t really new.  These androids have been around since at least 1982, when the original film was released. Add to this the fact that the movie centers on a specific form of technology.  Blade Runner 2049 doesn’t feature alien craft, doomsday weapons or time travel devices. It’s object of meditation is the digital.

This focus is unmistakable, as revealed in a particularly poignant scene. Ryan Gosling’s “Officer K”, a replicant cop, views a comparison of android “genetics” to human: the former binary, the latter triplicate (the nucleotide groups of three that make up the human gene). K says something like, “That’s the difference between us and them…” in a despairing tone.

Alexander Galloway’s Laruelle: Against the Digital

A book I’ve been reading recently, by cultural theorist Alexander Galloway, addresses what might be called the “digital despair” alluded to in the film. In Laruelle: Against the Digital, Galloway argues that the way digital technology shapes our worldview produces a sort of alienation — one of the symptoms of which are weird fantasies of transcendence.

Galloway’s argument is complex, and I can’t do it justice here. But to simplify it greatly, he makes the case that digital technology, based in a binary code, is the latest in a tradition of Western thought, from Plato to Heidegger to Derrida, that attempts to describe the real by dividing it into two. Typically, a thinker decides upon two elements as key (whether these be mind/body, being/nothing, self/other, etc.). We are then shown how the two interact, synthesize or build into bigger structures, and voila, how reality “works” is defined.

The problem is, of course, that the “real” is an unwieldy beast, that refuses to be corralled into such schema. In the case of digital media, Galloway traces two results from such framing. First, it produces a feeling of unreality, for “digital relations are always already fake or simulated, for they arise from radical standardization at the atomic level.” And this leads to a second result: a drive to transcend.

A good example of the way this theory plays out, as Galloway alludes to, might be the widely accepted theory that the brain functions like a digital device — i.e. a computer.  This leads to thoughts of transcendence, i.e., the search for a “ghost in the machine.” Or better yet, the fantasy that immortality will one day be attainable, once we upload our “minds” into heavenly digital clouds.

This dynamic is at the heart of Blade Runner 2049. The replicants, aware they are digital products, feel “less than.” They have been programmed to serve rather than to decide. They are alienated beings seeking, in contemporary pop lingo, to become “authentic.” In other words, like us chromosome-based machines, they struggle to be free. 

And I guess there’s nothing holier than that.

How the Film "Arrival" Predicted the U.S. Election

I’ve heard it said that often that the most interesting thing about a story is the part that’s left out. Lately, though, at least when it comes to movies, I’ve found the most fascinating aspect of the film is in what’s been added to the original.

I’m thinking of here of films based on novels, or some other pre-existing story. The written narrative will present the tale one way. But when it is adapted, it will often be embellished – with the goal of making it more exciting on film. And when you look at the embellishments, what’s added sometimes tells another story altogether.  A story that is often about the political mood of the country.

Arrival – The Story

The recent film, Arrival, is a case in point. As has been covered by reviewers, the movie is an adaptation of a novella (titled “The Story of Your Life”) by the science fiction writer Ted Chiang. Chiang’s version of this tale is an elegant thought experiment, which explores the implications of a linguistic theory, known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. As I remember it, the idea behind this hypothesis is that the way we communicate radically shapes the way we see reality – so much so, that people speaking different languages live, essentially, in separate worlds.

Chiang’s story enacts this concept beautifully. He imagines a first-contact scenario, where, when the aliens arrive (in the form of ships hovering in the atmosphere) no one can figure out why they’re here – or what they’re saying. The military enlists the help of a linguist to decipher their communications. In doing so (by studying the aliens’ circular writing script), she discovers a non-linear, holistic language, where time, as we know it, doesn’t exist. As she learns this language herself, her own sense of time dissolves, and she sees her own past, present and future, her entire biography, at once.

Arrival – The Film

The film version of this story keeps Chiang’s narrative as its center, and does so quite skillfully. As a word-person myself, it’s a thrill to see the great Amy Adams, as hero, lecture the military brass on linguistic theory – and this, in a sci-fi blockbuster! But as I mentioned, what the movie adds is just as intriguing, especially in light of the 2016 election.

To make Chiang’s cerebral tale play more like an action flick, the movie surrounds it with another story, one involving a world crisis. In it, the Russians and Chinese are also trying to decipher the alien script. Unfortunately, they misinterpret what these beings are writing – thinking instead that the aliens are urging the nations of the world to attack each other.

Outraged, they begin to issue ultimatums, ordering the aliens out of their airspace, and they ready their atomic weapons. Luckily, the sane American linguist talks sense (in a rather dramatic way) to the head of the Chinese military, and saves the day. At this point, the aliens split.

The film ends on a utopian note. Collaborating with linguists from all the world’s nations, Adams’ character publishes a guide to learning the aliens’ language. Presumably, once we all learn its script, we will have a universal language to settle our differences in – and a new, more holistic vision of reality to boot.

The Prediction: Global vs. National

Produced well before November 2016, the film’s political subplot predicts, with great accuracy, the forces that would soon divide the U.S. electorate.

In one corner, there are the angry, suspicious nationalists – in this case, the hotheaded Russians, Chinese and more militant members of the U.S. defense forces. In the other, there are the rational cosmopolitans – Adams’ linguist, her partner, a brilliant physicist played by Jeremy Renner, and the other world’s linguists and scientists (some of whom are persecuted). They urge restraint, and a generally a cool, scientific and enlightened attitude.

The event that sets these two camps into opposition is the same one as that which rocked the recent election: the arrival of the alien other. In the movie, these “others” transgress air space; in contemporary politics, they cross borders.

As one might expect, the way the film sketches out these two sides seems hokey and caricaturist (not to mention a bit chauvinistic, in its portrayal of the U.S. as the center of the world's reason!).  But cannot the same be said of our national, political communications?  The Democrats promised repentance for their trade-deal friendly past.  Yet, as Michael Moore predicted, they were nevertheless stereotyped as globalist and “neoliberal”, because of their track record on such issues.

And when it came to the new “America First” party, you had to wonder about the credibility of their patriotic image and rhetoric, when their candidate went around publicly wishing that the election would be hacked by a foreign power.  But, apparently, the nationalistic branding worked well enough.

I wish I could believe that the film, seeing how prescient it was about the this conflict, also offered a way to resolve it. But, here, alas, Arrival seemed to get a bit Pollyanna. For to break such a deadlock, what’s needed is not just a new language – but a new politics altogether.

And that’s not the kind of thing you can get from another world.

 

Play Now (or Never!): Toyota Tacoma Commercial Goes Mad to the Max

Recently, a TV spot for Toyota's Tacoma (a pickup truck) caught my eye. Its combination of music, sound effects and imagery prompted all sorts of warlike and post-apocalyptic associations in my mind. Check it out:

 

You probably recognize the score that these truckers sing along with -- Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries." The same tune was used in an iconic movie scene: the helicopter assault in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now. Film blogger B. Ruby Rich once wrote about the film that, in it, Coppola was "playing at war with all the passion of a schoolboy, relishing its spectacle." With all the explosions and spewing smoke, not to mention the daredevil bikes and racing trucks, you might say the same of this spot.

But what really gives the commercial its post-apocalyptic flair is its similarity to Mad Max films and their imagery. Check out this clip from the latest in the franchise: Mad Max: Fury Road:

 

Comparing the two clips, it's pretty obvious why the Creative Team at Saatchi and Saatchi decided on the commercial's scenario: it's exciting. Both the commercial and the movie are based around the classic film convention of the chase.

Add to this the fact that, as creative director John Payne tells us (in an interview with Mark Gardiner from the Motorcycle USA blog) "motorcycles are kinda universally loved and accepted by people who are into trucks..." -- and you get an idea of the creative genesis of the spot. Also, this whole scenario lends itself to the brand's positioning: the Tacoma is sold more as a recreational than utility vehicle.

But this still begs the question of "what's so exciting about the apocalypse in the first place?" For that, we have to turn to cultural criticism.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Climate Change

Whenever I see scenes of (post) apocalypse, I reach for my Susan Sontag -- specifically her classic essay, "The Imagination of Disaster." In this renowned piece, Sontag wrote that her own era (mid-50s to mid-60s) was marked by both "inconceivable terror" and "unremitting banality." The apocalyptic film, she argued, offered relief from the latter:

"The lure of the generalized disaster as fantasy is that it releases one from normal obligations. The trump card of the end-of-the-world movies...is that great scene with New York or London or Tokyo discovered empty, its entire population annihilated. Or, as in The World, the Flesh, and the Devil (1959), the whole movie can be devoted to the fantasy of occupying the deserted city and starting all over again -- Robinson Crusoe on a world-wide scale."

Of course, contemporary disaster flicks don't offer quite the sort of depopulated annihilation seen in the films Sontag writes about. That's because the nuclear bomb scare of previous decades has been replaced by what worries our times more: ecological catastrophe. The "deserted city" Sontag mentions becomes instead a landscape of desertification.

Playing in the desert in the Tacoma spot is clearly fun. It's a "release", as Sontag would put it, from the "normal obligations" of the city and its work-ruled existence (usually in some bland office building). But doesn't the same sort of wild fun appear in Mad Max too? Despite its "deeper" social messages, isn't the chaotic, heavy-metal drive, along with its crew of sexy characters, first and foremost, just a blast?

Such scenarios bring to mind a term coined by cultural critic Mark Fisher to describe this sort of post-apocalyptic genre: Capitalist Realism. Fisher theorizes that since the mainstream imagination seems incapable of envisioning a way of applying the brakes to the mad drive for maximum, short-term profits, fossil fuels and speed, it's beginning to seem more realistic to simply accept the inevitable side-effects. If you can't beat it, why not join in?

This is why, as Fisher puts it, "climate change and the threat of resource-depletion are not being repressed so much as incorporated into advertising and marketing."

And judging from the popularity of this genre, you could go a step further and hypothesize that our culture is actually starting to love the idea of this sort of catastrophe, much like Doctor Strangelove was enamored of the bomb. At least it's not boring. Beats 9-5, right?

All of which suggests that the Toyota Tacoma tagline that flashes on the screen at the end of the spot is entirely appropriate. In what looks like hastily rendered, white paintbrush letters, we read "PLAY NOW."

Exactly. Tomorrow's looking kind of grim.

Do We Live in an "Atemporal" Time? Thoughts on a Poem by William Bronk

Nowadays, one hears so much about innovation that the very concept has become banal.  It almost seems like there is nothing less innovative than the pursuit of innovation.

This is why I found a poem I came across recently by William Bronk so fascinating.  Instead of offering more of the breathless rhetoric of change, it paints a picture  of a world where everything remains stubbornly the same.  It's titled "We Want the Mark of Time," and it begins like this:

We know what men felt once, as if they feel
forever, as if we feel.  The anguishes
of ancients, their ecstasies, recorded once
and unforgotten, even their trivial times,
are so much ours, it is as if we were
no more than ants, a bird, or any beast
fixed in a closed, instinctive pattern...

I remember reading somewhere that what supposedly distinguished humanity from the rest of the animal kingdom was our ability to create history -- through recording, remembering, and hopefully learning from it.  In Bronk's poem, this capability vanishes; we are just as repetitively instinctual as the rest of living creatures.

It's almost as if we live in the type of universe once proposed by Parmenides, where all is one and static -- the changes we notice merely an illusory play of surfaces.  This sense of stasis seems almost painful to Bronk's speaker.  He states, a little later in the poem:

.....................................We look almost
in puzzlement at someone younger about
to feel or learn what we, as if for him,
as if for everyone, have learned, have felt.
There is no need, we think.  We move as if
to stop him.  Why should he do what we have done?

The poem goes on to ask, "How shall we think of time without a change?" Instead of an answer, it ends with a haunting image and a sense of longing:

Oh, it is with desire we read of suns
that some day burn themselves to darkness.  At night
we search the sky for such a sign: that there
should be time, an ending.  We want the mark of time.

Of course, such lines, which long for evidence of change, run contrary to the common sense of our own times -- marked by, as I mentioned, a breathlessness  regarding everything from the speed of globalization, digitization, and human self-transformation, to troubling realities like the degradation of the environment.  But Bronk's poem (circa 1956) must have seemed at odds with its own time as well.

Sontag and "The Imagination of Disaster"

As Susan Sontag analyzed in "The Imagination of Disaster," popular culture, beginning in 1950 and up until the time time of her essay (1963), was obsessed with images of catastrophic change, not unlike the dying stars Bronk's poem longs for, but does not witness.  Sontag hypothesized that the reality of the bomb inspired this; she proposed that translating the possibility of annihilation into entertaining, fantastic films enabled people to cope with such fears better in daily life.

Reading Bronk's poem brought to my mind, for example, the classic science fiction disaster film When Worlds Collide (1951), where a "rogue star" (or burning sun, as Bronk might put it) is due to crash into the earth.

But there is another element in Sontag's essay that suggests Bronk was also right about the lack of change he registers.  For she writes that her time is not only afflicted with "inconceivable terror," but also "unremitting banality" (a reference, perhaps, to the much written about conformism of the era).  Thus, the other function of the films she covers is to provide a vision of relief from the humdrum:

"The lure of the generalized disaster as a fantasy is that it releases one from normal obligations.  The trump card of the end-of-the-world movies...is that great scene with New York or London or Tokyo discovered empty, its entire population annihilated.  Or, as in The World, the Flesh, and the Devil (1959), the whole movie can be devoted to the fantasy of occupying  the deserted city and starting all over again -- Robinson Crusoe on a world-wide scale."

In light of all this, I think there's a sense in which Bronk's poem is relevant to our own time.  Ever since the dawn of so-called postmodernism, there is a common complaint about the changlessness of our culture -- that we're in a mere recycling mode, with nothing new on the horizon.  Only the other day, for example, I attended a show at MOMA titled: "The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World."

The same dynamic Sontag discusses may be behind the contemporary popularity of the dystopian film.  Such offerings may not only help us cope with our own fears of catastrophe, but also offer a strange sort of hope that the old order will someday be gone, so that we can start anew.

Or, as Bronk would put it, perhaps we too want the mark of time.

Only a God(zilla) Can Save Us: the Symbolism of Summer Blockbusters

In an interview the philosopher Martin Heidegger gave later in life, he spoke about how our technology had uprooted us, not only from tradition, but the very earth itself.  He added that this alienation had reached such an advanced state that "only a god can save us."

I found it amusing, and a bit surprising, that in the recent summer blockbuster Godzilla, when this "god" finally arrives, he takes the the form of a giant, fire-breathing dragon.

If you've seen the film, you know that due to our experiments with dangerous technologies (in this case, nuclear energy), great beasts arise from the depths to torment humanity.  Our main persecutor comes in the form of a giant, moth-like creature.  Godzilla follows this "MUTO" ("Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism") up from wherever such beings live, to hunt down and destroy it.  A battle ensues and God(zilla) is on our side all the way.

When I say Godzilla is a god, I mean that literally.  As Director Gareth Edwards put it in The Daily Beast, the MUTO represents "man's abuse of nature," and Godzilla "is a god, really.  He's at the top of the food chain and probably King of the World."  Godzilla is also called a god by characters in the film.

The mission of this godly being is to restore the balance of nature (that the MUTO throws out of whack), saving humanity in the process, as a sort of fortuitous side-effect.  At the end of the film, as Godzilla leaves the ravaged city where his battle with the evil MUTO took place, the crowd watching breaks out in a cheer.

This means, though, that even with its happy ending, the film has a pessimistic, somber mood -- not unlike Heidegger's later philosophy.  Humanity seems helpless.   Most of the action takes place between the behemoths.  All the military/scientific team that gathers in the crisis can do ultimately, is "let them fight," as one character mutters reverently.

This dark mood certainly reflects the zeitgeist concerning ecological issues.  Washington still debates the reality of global warming, while environmental scientists such as James Lovelock  (who invented the Gaia hypothesis), advise us to "enjoy life while [we] can," as "humans are too stupid to prevent climate change."

And yet, despite the reality of the issues the movie alludes to, I found it hard to take the messenger entirely seriously.  A popcorn movie, where a couple of monsters jam it out, after all, can't help but seem more fun and silly than profound.

As a result, I found myself reading into the movie in more mundane ways.  And I thought about Godzilla being a savior of something less grand than the earth itself.

Recently I've been reading a fascinating book about the entertainment industry by Anita Elberse titled Blockbusters.  In it, she shows that the main vehicle the movie business now favors is the big-budget, special-effects flick.   As a result, it follows a strategy in which it sinks most of its investment dollars into such blockbusters, in search of giant wins.  She also shows that the rest of the entertainment industry is pretty much following suit.

Elberse tells us that this industry increasingly relies on blockbusters, in part, to avoid the need to place its bets on smaller, riskier properties, aimed at niche markets -- an approach often associated with the fragmentation of audiences that came about because of the web and the digital age. Instead, the blockbuster makes old-school mass-marketing to a mass audience still possible.

You could say, then, that Godzilla saves not only the earth, but, on a more trivial level, the movie studio that produced the film he stars in, by offering the promise of the kind of big profits that will keep it afloat.

And blockbusters don't just save the movie industry from being at the mercy of niche tastes.  Elberse doesn't talk about this so directly in her book, but another aspect of entertainment in the digital age is that lots of it is free.  Blockbusters, designed for big, 3-D screens, are one of the entertainment products for which people are still willing to pay.

In this light, Godzilla isn't only saving the earth; he's also helping the paid entertainment economy fight off the increasingly powerful free one -- or what Jeremy Rifkin has recently termed the "collaborative commons."

And in this regard, perhaps this economic message is related to the ecological pessimism you see in the film.  For the same, clumsy, old school, big-time capitalism that survives by producing blockbusters, is, according to Rifkin, incapable of dealing with ecological crises.  What he predicts, instead (in The Zero Marginal Cost Society), is the coming of "Collaboratism," a new economic paradigm that transcends both capitalism and socialism.

Until then, I suppose, one might have to agree with Heidegger, that only a god -- or perhaps a Godzilla -- can save us.

Artifice as a Path to Authenticity: Thoughts on Chuck Close, Charles Bernstein and Video Realism

Continuing to think about our habit of reading into facial expressions (see last post), brought to mind an experience I had once viewing an exhibit of visual art.

I was at MOMA a few years back, checking out the Chuck Close retrospective.  In the room that housed his early works from the 60s, I came across the giant, photorealistic portraits for which he is well known.

I had an odd experience viewing these huge "heads" together in one place.  Close has made it clear that his portraits are paintings of photographs -- not studies from "real life."  Because of this fact, you'd think you were several steps away from attributing psychological presence to these works.  In fact, I'm told that if you view them up close, you can actually see the grid of tiny boxes through which they're created; it's as if you're looking at a mosaic made of hundreds of tiles, each with a miniature abstract painting inside.

Yet, oddly, the paintings also seemed to carry symbolic messages.  In the portrait of Philip Glass, for example, the swirling patterns of Glass's hair and skin rhymed, for me, with the epic, circular movement of his music.  It seemed as if his face were some sort of medieval emblem, in which the spirit of his inner creativity manifested in the flesh.

What I found striking was how this inner spirit fought its way through the artificial quality that Close foregrounds.  It was as if a certain presence would not be denied -- even if the artist telegraphed this was a simulation of a simulation; even if you knew the painting's effect was the result of Close's own "smoke and mirrors."

It was almost as if the artificial aspect of the work was precisely what made it more absorbing.

Charles Bernstein's "Artifice of Absorption"

An especially lucid analysis of the phenomena I've just described is found in a piece I alluded to in the last post: Charles Bernstein's essay-in-verse titled "Artifice of Absorption."  Toward its end, Bernstein describes the experience of watching Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape.

In this play, the character "Krapp" listens to autobiographical diary entries he made via tape recordings during earlier periods of his life.  But just as he, and we, as audience, begin to be absorbed in these accounts, Krapp reminds himself and us of their artifice.  He frequently switches off the tape, interupting the narrative flow, fast forwarding at times, stopping at others to make sarcastic comments on his own youthful naivete.

But our heightened awareness of the mechanical device through which Krapp's "heartfelt" confessions are communicated, rather than make us more distanced, draws us in.  Bernstein comments:

"Indeed, the very jagged moments when the tape is
abruptly turned off -- moments in which the 
listener's absorption may seem to be
ruptured -- only serve to heighten the dramatic power
of the play.  Beckett's incisively spliced
dislocations have a spellbinding
theatrical effect..."

The emotional content of the performance seems more real, then, precisely because the work refuses to become "absorbed" in the "vain hopes" of the stories the character once told himself.  It's as if a higher degree of honesty -- and hence authenticity -- results from the very acknowledgement of the ephemeral quality of the stories Krapp tells himself.

And the presence of a tape machine in the play underlines the fact that even our most basic sense of our lives and identities is unavoidably mediated -- that an immaculate perception of ourselves is impossible.

Video Realism

Both Close and Beckett come from the realm of high art, but I've also seen forms of popular culture that achieve "realism effects" by doing something similar.

Recently I watched an indie horror film titled Alien Abduction (about so-called true events involving disappearances and "strange lights" that occurred in the Brown Mountains of North Carolina).

 

The story, of course, was far-fetched.  But what made it gripping, nonetheless, was the technique through which it was told.  As we watch this tale of alien abduction involving a small family, we are constantly reminded, by its shaky, hand-held quality (and occasional blackouts) that we are watching a homemade video (in this case, one filmed by an autistic boy).  The camera, in fact, is as much a character in the movie as the people.

As such, the movie is the latest in a low-budget genre that began with the Blair Witch Project, in which outlandish tales gain a degree of realism by seeming to be filmed by "real" people on poor quality equipment.

All of which leads me to wonder whether if, today, in order to achieve a "suspension of disbelief," it helps to have a recording device somewhere nearby.  Thoughts?

Also of Interest:
My new book of poems, The Cheapskates, from Lunar Chandelier Press, is now available from Small Press Distribution.  Click here.

Review of The Cheapskates by David Lehman,  click here, and another by Michael Lally (with my poem on Chuck Close),  click here.

Keeping It Weird: Thoughts on the film Dark Skies (with help from the philosopher Graham Harman)

Just saw an alien abduction film via Pay-per-view that received mixed reviews, but that I found a provocative, even philosophical treat.

It's called Dark Skies.  It's produced by the people who developed the Paranormal Activity series, and incorporates some of the "video realism" technique of those films.

 

What I liked about the movie was what some reviewers hated: its vagaries and slow pace.  Rather than following action/horror film conventions, i.e., lots of special effects and overly-long chase sequences, it builds to a slow boil.  When the aliens do appear, they're mostly in shadows, probably due to cost constraints.  But rather than look cheesy, this just adds to their menacing otherness.  And its the chill of this otherness that intrigued me most about the film.

The movie centers on a middle-class suburban family, down on its luck because of the economy.  The father (Josh Hamilton) is looking for a job.  The mother (Keri Russell) sells Real Estate but, since her conscience won't let her hype dingy properties to close a deal, her career is hurting too.  Their adolescent son is becoming alienated from these "losers"; their younger kid is haunted.   He draws pictures of strange beings holding him by the hand.

Disturbing signs build as the movie proceeds.  Flocks of birds dive bomb into their windows.  Some mornings, they find toys, canned food and kitchenware built into bizarre towers in their living room, as if some outsider artist were at work.  Menacing bruises appear on the kids' bodies and behind the ears of the grown-ups.  A web search by Russell reveals that these are all signs of an alien home invasion.

This discovery results in a trip to the city to visit the local ufologist, who, judging from his even dingier apartment, is even more down-on-his-luck than our suburban couple. (Whom the alien gods would destroy, they first make unemployed.)

After reviewing the family's symptoms, he offers a dire prognosis.  They're being readied for the abduction of one of their members.  This can only be prevented if the family sticks together to fight off the alien invaders.

During this scene comes the most crucial conversation of the flick: "why" Russell asks, "did they choose us?  What makes us so special?"  To which the abduction expert tells them that there's actually nothing at all special about them, and that, in fact, mere humans can't understand why they choose who they do.  This would be like being  lab rats trying to understand the mind of the scientist performing the experiments on them.

It's this sentiment, I think, that justifies the murky, vague quality of much of what goes in this this film.  If there are beings we never see clearly, and clues and loose ends that are never tied up neatly, this all goes to support the general incomprehensibility of the characters' experience.

H.P. Lovecraft's "Weird Realism" (According to Graham Harman)

All of which brought to mind a book I've been reading by the philosopher Graham Harman.  Titled Weird Realism, it examines the stories of horror writer H.P. Lovecraft.  Though some consider Lovecraft Poe's true successor, others complain that his "purple prose" is merely sensationalist, kitschy and most of all, vague.

Harman defends Lovecraft on this score, arguing that what his work is actually about is how impossible it is to capture reality through our representational systems.  And in this light, the garish, literal approaches of much conventional pop culture often miss the boat.  As he puts it:

"The meaning of being might even be defined as untranslatability.  Language (and everything else) is obliged to become an art of allusion or indirect speech, a metaphorical bond with a reality that cannot possibly be made present.  Realism does not mean that we are able to state correct propositions about the real world.  Instead, it means that reality is too real to be translated without remainder into any sentence, perception, practical action or anything else."

This explains why, in Dark Skies, though an alien figure is eventually recorded by the elaborate home surveillance cameras the father sets up, he doesn't go to the police -- insisting he won't be believed.  Because he won't be.  What appears on video is too traumatic for a mere camera to represent.  Presumably, the police wouldn't believe their eyes, even if they saw it.

And what makes the film scary is in fact this pervasive "unstranslatability."  This quality even adds a touch of horror to the precariousness of the characters' economic prospects (that seem controlled by incomprehensible forces as well).

In short, what makes the fear in Dark Skies seem real is the fact that the film can't fully articulate what it's scared of.  Thoughts?

Being Joseph Ceravolo: Thoughts about the Poem "Great Plains" (from Collected Poems)

The other morning my wife, the poet Elaine Equi, read me "Great Plains" from the newly published Collected Poems of Joseph Ceravolo:

Great Plains

What, no one here?  No one
around here?  No buffalo?
Like sleeping on the toilet bowl...
Drifting toward love...

The dogs are out this morning
jumping on top of each other
Is there a real release with them?

But, no one here.
There's no buffalo, only dogs,
this morning, where dawn
and a wild wild bird fly away.

She wanted to know my thoughts about this poem, and immediately I offered my surface impressions.

Recalling cold mornings in Chicago where I grew up -- and in fact remembering dogs, if not screwing, at least growling at each other in the icy street -- I placed the poem in winter (although there's nothing in it to indicate a season).  Perhaps the white of the toilet bowl made me think of snow (and the fact that it was cold outside).

I also knew that Ceravolo lived in New Jersey, but was part of the New York poetry scene from the 60s through the 80s.  So I sensed a touch of loneliness in it, as if Ceravolo, comparing NYC to Jersey, felt it to be rather desolate, with a touch a natural wildness to it.

I injected "wildness" into my reading because of the title and the mention of buffalo, but also because of something my Jersey friends have told me about the state: that just 100 miles outside NYC, you can still see bears and coyote (though they may have been pulling my Midwestern leg).

But what interests me, in retrospect, about this unremarkable 30 second interpretation was the paradoxical feeling state that came with it.  Even though my reading of the poem was really about me -- assembled more from my personal memories and associations than anything Ceravolo had in mind -- I identified with him. 

In fact, I felt I was actually inside his mind -- looking out through his eyes, seeing what he saw on that morning.  And therein laid the enjoyment I derived from this poem: the experience of seeing things from the perspective of a poet I admired.  (Perhaps a bit of his magic would rub off on me...)

And as I mentioned, all this happened in less than half a minute; my imagined projection into the poet's mind was automatic, instinctual -- I could not not do this.

This reaction brought to mind two books I've been reading that offer interpretations of literature informed by cognitive psychology.  The first (covered in a previous post) is by Lisa Zunshine, titled Getting Inside Your Head.  Zunshine argues that one of the pleasures literature offers is precisely this feeling that we're really seeing into the minds of others -- observing people's thoughts with a clarity we aren't granted in everyday life.

The second, a book about Shakespeare's Sonnets by Brian Boyd, connects this impulse to what he sees as the raison d'etre of the poetic lyric.  As a form, lyric poetry makes us feel not only that we're reading a mind, but doing so in a particularly intimate way.  It does this in part because, unlike other genres, it is not hampered by the necessity of telling a story.  Stripped of narrative conventions, lyric poems seem to reveal bare thought itself.

Both of these writers argue that our desire to read minds is an evolved trait.  As social and political animals, our survival depends upon accurately guessing the intentions of others.  So when we're offered an insider's view, it delights us.

Being John Malkovich

The drive to dissolve the barrier between our mind and another's can, of course, get rather obsessive, as the many parodies of fan culture suggest.

Coincidentally, as I was thinking about my experience of this poem, the now classic flick Being John Malkovich aired again on cable.

In it, you may recall, a character discovers a secret portal that allows him to get inside the mind of the actor and experience life as he does.  Soon, like a good entrepreneur, he merchandises the portal -- selling tickets to trips inside the Malkovich mindscape.

But even this invasion of privacy isn't enough.  Eventually, like a malevolent spirit, he takes over not only the mind, but the life of Malkovich, making him abandon his acting career and become a puppeteer.  All of which I take as an allegory of how in popular culture, keeping fans happy can pressure a celebrity to begin living out their projections.

Of course, poets today don't get famous enough to have to worry about such problems; we can fall into and out of identification with our favorite writers without harming anyone.

When it comes to mind reading, the contemporary lyric gives all parties a free ride.  No wonder, despite periodic claims of its obsolescence, it persists!  Thoughts?