Letter from the editors Welcome to the first issue of Slate, McGill’s undergraduate film journal. We decided to create Slate because we felt that the voices of our fellow students in Cultural Studies, more specifically, in film classes, were underrepresented in academic publications at McGill. Our goal is to provide a platform for undergraduate students to showcase their work in film studies and also to reflect the strength of our professors and TAs, the curriculum, and our department. The essays selected for the inaugural issue of Slate are both innovative and exemplary. Wide-ranging in topic and approach, the writing in this journal represents critical analysis of both canonical and currently relevant films. These pieces are the products of the authors’ ingenuity and skill, as well as our editorial team’s hard work and dedication. We would like to thank not only our authors, artists, and editors, but also the faculty members who have shown continuous support and enthusiasm for this project. Our deepest thanks and appreciation to Trevor Ponech, Ned Schantz, Derek Nystrom, Ara Osterweil, Olivia Heaney, and Casey McCormick. We hope you enjoy our first issue, here’s to many more! Sara Kloepfer + David Leblanc For more information about submitting or joining the editorial team, visit https://www.facebook.com/slatejournalmcgill or email us at slatejournalmcgill@gmail.com. You can find this issue online at issuu.com/slatejournal. Thank you to our sponsors:
Table of Contents Cover and back cover art by David Leblanc and Daniel Fishbayn Inside cover art by Cody Lieberman Individual and Communal Identity Formation in The Breakfast Club by Clara Dessaint art by Ruby Iacobelli
1
“I Feel Like Throwing Up When I Touch You”: Excorporated Flesh in Fassbinder’s Cinema of Abjection by Kathlene Whiteway art by Sasha Crawford Holland
7
Post-Shaved Heads, Pre-High-Waisted Pants: What’s Queer About Her? by Joshua Falek art by Sara Kloepfer and Benjamin Demers
13
“In Dreams...I Talk To You”: A Sonic Analysis of Blue Velvet by David Leblanc art by David Leblanc and Daniel Fishbayn
20
Technocracy, Technophobia, and Cinematic Technology: 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Performative Contradiction by Sasha Crawford Holland art by David Leblanc
27
“A Better Man as a Woman”: Negotiating Feminism and Gender in Tootsie by Sophie Tupholme art by Sara Kloepfer and Sophie Tupholme
35
On the Symbolic Crisis and Feeling of Queer Precarity in Derek Jarman’s Edward II by Juan Camillo Velazquez art by Laura Douglas
40
Blood, Excess and Remnants by Sophia Larigakis art by Maya Stewart Pathak and Sophie Tupholme
45
White Saviour Films and the Invisibility of Whiteness by Gloria Wallace art by Elisabeth Sulmont
48
Meet the editors
54
I
exact date and time, as well as the Illinois school’s postal n John Hughes’ The Breakfast Club (1985), five code, to anchor their norm-defying day in a concrete and archetypal students spend Saturday in detention at their irrefutable reality. To heighten the viewer’s understandsuburban high school.1 As they discuss family, sex, and ing of what the students must overcome to form their authority, Brian the “Brain,” Andrew the “Athlete,” Alli- self-regulated community, the camera then cuts inside son the “Basket Case,” Claire the “Princess,” and John the to a “diorama of alienation;” deserted hallways, littered “Criminal” overcome the isolation and stereotypes pro- fast food, and an open journal with “help me” repeatedly moted by their “monolithically oppressive environment scrawled across the page.6 From these dejected images [ruled by] intrastudent power dynamics.”2 Interpreting the — still solely narrated by Brian, as he recites the group’s film’s treatment of difference in terms of the “hegemonic communal answer to the essay prompt “who am I?” — middle-class value of individualism,”3 Warnick et al. argue the camera cuts to an upwardly tilted shot of Claire arrivthat the suburban students try “to find their true selves ing in her father’s BMW; already she is revered as being under the pressure of oppressive adults, pointless aca- at the top of the social pyramid. Self-proclaimed as still demic standards, and social cliques.”4 This challenge leads “brainwashed” by clique rules, the students continue to them to understand that individual growth paradoxically arrive according to their socio-economic status: Brian and depends on the supportive presence of a united commu- Andrew follow the “Princess” — also riding in the front nity. Trying to liberate themselves from the abusive or ne- seat as a “sign of the upper or middle class” — before Alglectful forms of adult authority that permeate their real- lison is unceremoniously dropped off, and John carelessly ity, the students re-appropriate the educational space and walks across the parking lot.7 This hierarchical organizanegotiate the stereotypes into which they are restricted. tion is re-created in their initial seating chart in the library: In doing so, they develop mature individual and collective the popular kids unite at a desk in the front row — purely identities, which enable them to see the reciprocal nature according to the law of attraction by similarity, as they of positive social interactions. However, though the film hadn’t previously been friends — while the outcasts divide herein problematizes high school’s socio-economically themselves among the remaining rows. Not yet having based hierarchy of cliques, it ultimately fails to level it, gained the means to form a true community, the students as Claire — an upper class, postfeminist heroine — con- still abide by their static, restrictive labels (see Figure 1). tinues to direct the others through narrative primacy. The exposition scene both highlights the school’s isolating function and foretells the destruction and reconstruction of the students’ collective and individual identities. Following the credits — democratically organized in alphabetical order to contrast the film’s popularity-based hierarchy — a quote from David Bowie’s “Changes” introduces the pervasive generational divide: “these children that you Figure 1: Roll call — a dormant hierarchy. spit on as they try to change their worlds are immune to your consultations.” Not only The key element of the students’ subsequent fordoes this epigraph “place the film as being in the eyes of mation of a group identity lies in their “resistance to a an adolescent,” its subsequent explosion foretells the de- common enemy:” adult authority.8 Through the drop-off struction of adult-sanctioned modes of conduct.5 As the scene, in which all but Allison and John address the deshattered glass from the burst quotation reveals a long shot tention they are being forced to endure, the viewer enof the bunker-like building, Brian’s voice-over states the counters a full spectrum of inadequate parenting. While 2
Claire’s parents are materially indulgent but emotionally absent, Brian and Andrew’s are overly demanding, Allison’s are neglectful, and John’s — who never appear — are abusive. The students initially keep these realities to themselves, judging each other’s parental interactions like they do the rest of their characteristics: at face value, for example, assuming that Brian’s parents are supportive of his academic accomplishments instead of being over-bearing. The truth emerges at lunchtime though, when the students’ meals mirror their relationships with their parents; Claire’s exotic sushi comes into stark contrast with John’s conspicuously missing lunch. Right before, as he goes to get sodas with Allison, Andrew explains the pressure he receives from both his coach and father, ironically standing in front of a banner with the assertion “freedom for all.” As the sole decoration in an otherwise lifeless hallway, the poster negates itself; the students aren’t free, they are adults’ pawns. The eventual realization that none of them have ideal home lives fortifies the common ground on which they already stood as Principal Vernon’s weekend victims. Indeed, in trying to maintain discord between the students – for instance singling John out as a future failure — the principal inadvertently serves to “galvanize the disparate students;” their shared hatred of him is the first building block to their community.9 Though in teenpics the car typically serves as an “emblem of freedom and escape,” here it reasserts the students’ dependence on their parents, who both drop them off and pick them up.10 Yet, in the end, there is no parental interlude in the car as there was at the beginning; the characters have developed their own identity, and loosened their reliance on their “hopelessly out-of-touch, unidimensional, arbitrary, and adversarial” parents — going so far as to demonstrate their romantic proclivities openly, in part as a sign of rebellion.11 The students’ revolt against adult authority begins with the destruction of school property, which enables the characters to formulate the space on their own terms. If the ‘laissez faire’ economic policies of the film’s contemporary President, Ronald Reagan, “orchestrated a song of individualism and acquisition at the same time that they ignored the choir of voices that couldn’t sing along,” then the film seeks to rectify this imbalance by making John the provocative voice of change.12 John the “Criminal” — whose propensity to transgress boundaries is contained in his last name, Bender — creates a separation between the adult and teenage worlds when he tampers with the library door. “Still enclosed [yet] free from the gaze of authority,”13 the students find themselves in a private space of discussion and introspection, which en-
ables them to consider both “the necessity of separating from parents, and the critical role of the peer group in providing transitional support for adolescent individuation and identity formation.”14 Once this relative freedom has been secured, vandalism ensues to paradoxically re-assert the school as a space of self-expression instead of oppression. When John rips pages out of books, he calls attention to the fact that they have been prohibited from utilizing the educational resources that surround them; the school’s materials have little formative function as they are ordered to “remain awake but silent, conscious only in a static sense.”15 Similarly, when Andrew’s scream shatters the glass door of the language laboratory, it’s as though his newfound perspective on teenage autonomy has heightened the power of his voice. Indeed, cursing — for which the film was rated R, despite its youth-oriented premise — gets more prominent as the characters assert their independence. If school is a paradoxical site “of possibility and of restriction, of an increasing personal autonomy and a simultaneous conformity to social norms,” then the group learns to cohabitate amidst its limitations, taking progressive ownership of the space.16 As exemplified when John falls through the vents while sneaking back into the library and the group unites to reciprocate his previous self-sacrifice, the re-appropriation of the educational space progresses from merely a structural demolition to an emotional re-categorization. In their prohibited, collective venture out of the library to unknowingly retrieve marijuana from John’s locker, the group becomes a moral community based on reciprocity. As they navigate empty hallways with bare, institutional white walls, the students unite to evade Principal Vernon, thus imbuing the space with what it lacks: cohesive vitality. The camera acknowledges this newfound harmony by focusing on the characters’ shoes; while the students sport an eclectic array of sneakers and boots, they nonetheless form a unidirectional herd in opposition to the Principal and his conventional dress shoes. Yet as the classmates ultimately find themselves barred from returning to the library — the camera moving behind the unforeseen gate to depict them as jailed (see Figure 2) — they are once again captive victims of their repressive environment; “the grim series of enclosures and dead ends [serving] as a layered metaphor for the confining, penitentiary nature of traditional schooling.”17 As a lyric from Wang Chung’s accompanying, non-diegetic song “Fire in the Twilight” suggests though, the group has “a man to lead the way:” John, who recommended a different path back to the library, still sacrifices himself to Vernon’s attention to ensure the others’ 3
safe return to their holding space. Amidst a socio-political context that trumpeted “the individualistic elements of the American Creed rather than its egalitarian and communitarian ones,” the film herein reasserts the individual as dependent on the community, and vice versa.18 John — dressed in jeans and plaid as a modern re-incarnation of the Western hero — therefore becomes both a leader and a teacher, imparting the others with the “unofficial knowledge” that their school curriculum overlooks, but that is vital to their collective functioning.19
between Principal Vernon and Carl the janitor, who stands in as the film’s “only legitimate authority figure.”22 Though Carl is hypocritical for reprimanding the Principal’s prowling through confidential teacher files — given that Carl previously confessed that he freely looks through students’ lockers — he still differentiates himself from his superior by forcing the other to admit the self-serving nature of his choice in profession. While Vernon initially blames the students and their supposedly increasing arrogance for the conflictual divide between the administration and its pupils, he is forced to admit his own role in creating this inter-generational dysfunction. Having both youth and faculty acknowledge the disjunction that is at the root of the school’s functioning lends credence to the notion that interpersonal dynamics need to be repaired at multiple levels. Yet while these conversations occur simultaneously, they are confined to separate spaces, thus highlighting the difficulty of the social transformation being pursued. In one of the film’s final scenes, the students give each other the last needed incentives to be propelled out of their stereotyped molds and into the multi-faceted identities they have developed. This uninterrupted interlude — the longest moment in which the peers sit together as a united, albeit provocative, group — starts as an innocent discussion of what they would do for a million dollars, but then transitions into “a kind of informal psychotherapy.”23 To mark this change in the depth of the students’ conversations, the camera repeatedly alternates between individual close-ups and a long shot of the group, fluidly sprawled out on the floor in an equalizing semi-circle that starkly opposes their initially hierarchized seating (see Figure 3). In this community, “not built by warm embraces but through sharp provocations,” each individual is pushed to admit what they had been repressing — for Claire it’s her virginity, for Brian it’s his suicide attempt, for Andrew it’s his incapacity to think for himself, for John it’s the abuse he suffers at home, and for Allison it’s her pathological lies.24 Moved to tears by each other’s stories, and promising not to re-create the devastation brought on by their parents, this moment represents the students’ “realization of emotional reciprocity.”25 Liberated from the complacency that led them to abide by the clique hierarchy in the first place, the students then indulge in a coordinated dance party, their synchronized moves highlighting
Figure 2: United behind academic bars.
Though the library is at first “little more than a jail within the larger prison of the school itself,” it takes on an even more ironic function as a recreational space, in which the students overcome their ambiguous view of drugs — the last vestige of their obedience to adult authority.20 Despite Claire initially telling John that “only burners like [him] get high,” she is the first to get up and join him in his blatant disregard for rules. As the others also silence their moralistic superegos, they defy their restrictive costumes, originally meant to reinforce their prescribed, stereotypical identities. While Claire is prettily wrapped in a pink top and luxurious brown leather, Allison is swathed in layers of dark clothing, reminiscent of a Goth nomad. Similarly, Andrew’s letterman jacket comes into contrast with Brian’s plain, ill-fitting attire, and the “Not Saved” pin attached to John’s punk driving gloves. These aesthetic distinctions, however, are nullified when the stoned students share the contents of their bags with each other, a sign that they have moved past making superficial attributions about one another. John lends his sunglasses first to Andrew and then to Brian, explicitly stating his desire to have them see the world a different way and “admit the artificiality of their stereotyping tendencies.”21 Significantly, these moments of intra-student revelation are intercut with a beer-fueled conversation 4
terest in John mainly to disprove his view of her as prude and materialistic; by kissing him and giving him one of her diamond earrings, she attempts to expand her identity beyond the superficial realm, yet ultimately anchors it there. As a marker of her disposable income, the earring re-iterates how Claire is different from the other students. While Bleach argues that by making “class differences the basis of romantic plots,” Hughes’ film has “the makings of a socialist discourse,” the final pairings still denote the existence of a social hierarchy.31 Not only does Claire utilize John as a means to rebel against her class-conscious parents, Andrew finds himself attracted to Allison only when she conforms to traditional beauty norms. Albeit burdened by the expectations of authority figures, Andrew complies with the norms set for his type; as a quintessential jock, he can only be involved with someone who is presented as superficially compatible. Though the students move from being “separate units demonstrating and reproducing the expectations of a single authoritarian voice,” to “negotiating their identities and histories as members of a specific community,” the similarities between the film’s beginning and ending challenge the sustainability of the change they have undergone.32 The opening and closing song “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” by the Simple Minds points to this anxiety, which the students themselves allude to when they question how they will treat each other on Monday morning. Optimistically, the final voice-over includes all of their voices instead of just Brian’s, and the ultimate shot is given to John, with his armed raised assertively as if to signify that he has succeeded in leading the group’s individuation process. Yet the empty football stadium through which he walks highlights that the change he has prompted only affects an insignificant minority of the student body. Given that student associations are intended to stimulate social cohesion but instead prompt student separation — in this case creating a hierarchy between academic, social, and athletic clubs — the film’s title is itself ironic.33 The students have somewhat successfully formed a counter-normative “Breakfast Club,” but it is only a splinter group, unlikely to lead to more widespread disruption of the clique and class-based social system.
Figure 3: The sharing circle: to each his own insecurities.
Claire’s response to their divulged insecurities: none of them is better than the other. As Brian plays the film’s first piece of diegetic music, the library is reclaimed as a space of both individual and communal expression. However, if the group progressively moves towards creating an equality-based community, Claire ultimately hinders such a goal; she may concede certain victories to the other students, but does so only to maintain her dominant position. Bleach likens her “individual empowerment strategies” to that of a postfeminist heroine,26 noting how “postfeminist culture redefines feminism in a way that it sanctions ‘individualist, acquisitive, and transformative’ values and behaviors.”27 Claire presents herself as a liberated, open-minded protagonist, yet she is in detention because she skipped school to go shopping; an “acquisitive” act that her father validates. As a postfeminist heroine, Claire undermines the social progress of feminism by “centralizing an affluent elite” — in this case herself — and “elevating consumption as a strategy.”28 Upholding her superior self-worth even after befriending the other students, Claire remorselessly states that she won’t acknowledge them once their usual power dynamics have been restored on Monday morning; “as a member of the upper class, she can only stand to benefit from remaining in power,” and thus only feigns to relinquish her social control.29 By giving Allison a makeover, Claire may be an “agent of transformation,” but she does so to maintain her inflated self-esteem, which is firmly entrenched in being popular and well liked.30 Endlessly motivated to maximize her own benefits as a socially-advantaged character, Claire may validate Brian’s intelligence by asking him to write his paper for them as a collective, but she wins in the exchange, capitalizing on the “Brain’s” precarious mental state. Similarly, she takes a romantic in5
Endnotes 1 The Breakfast Club. Dir. John Hughes. Perf. Emilio Estevez, Anthony Michael Hall, Judd Nelson, Molly Ringwald, and Ally Sheedy. Universal Pictures, 1985. 2 Bailey, Steve, and James Hay. “Cinema and the Premises of Youth: ‘Teen Films’ and Their Sites in the 1980s and 1990s.” Genre and Contemporary Hollywood. Ed. Stephen Neale. London: British Film Institute, 2002. 218-35. Print. 223. 3 Warnick, Bryan R., Heather S. Dawson, D. S. Smith, and Bethany Vosburg-Bluem. “Student Communities and Individualism in American Cinema.” Educational Studies: A Journal of the American Educational Studies Association 46.2 (2010): 168-91. McGill University Library. Web. 28 Mar. 2014. 169. 4 Ibid., 170. 5 Kaye, David L., and Emily Ets-Hokin. “The Breakfast Club: Utilizing Popular Film to Teach Adolescent Development.” Academic Psychiatry 24.2 (2000): 110-16. ProQuest Central. Web. 28 Mar. 2014. 112. 6 Crovitz, Darren. “”Who You Think You Are”: The Breakfast Club in the Writing Classroom.” Teaching English in the Two Year College 32.4 (2005): 424-32. ProQuest Central. Web. 28 Mar. 2014. 425. 7 Bleach, Anthony C. “Postfeminist Cliques? Class, Postfeminism, and the Molly Ringwald-John Hughes Film.” Cinema Journal 49.3 (2010): 24-44. Project MUSE. Web. 38. 8 Warnick, Bryan R., Heather S. Dawson, D. S. Smith, and Bethany Vosburg-Bluem. “Student Communities and Individualism in American Cinema.” Educational Studies: A Journal of the American Educational Studies Association 46.2 (2010): 168-91. McGill University Library. Web. 28 Mar. 2014. 176. 9 Kaye, David L., and Emily Ets-Hokin. “The Breakfast Club: Utilizing Popular Film to Teach Adolescent Development.” Academic Psychiatry 24.2 (2000): 110-16. ProQuest Central. Web. 28 Mar. 2014. 111. 10 Bailey, Steve, and James Hay. “Cinema and the Premises of Youth: ‘Teen Films’ and Their Sites in the 1980s and 1990s.” Genre and Contemporary Hollywood. Ed. Stephen Neale. London: British Film Institute, 2002. 218-35. Print. 229. 11 Kaye, David L., and Emily Ets-Hokin. “The Breakfast Club: Utilizing Popular Film to Teach Adolescent Development.” Academic Psychiatry 24.2 (2000): 110-16. ProQuest Central. Web. 28 Mar. 2014. 115. 12 Bleach, Anthony C. “Postfeminist Cliques? Class, Postfeminism, and the Molly Ringwald-John Hughes Film.” Cinema Journal 49.3 (2010): 24-44. Project MUSE. Web. 29. 13 Crovitz, Darren. “”Who You Think You Are”: The Breakfast Club in the Writing Classroom.” Teaching English in the Two Year College 32.4 (2005): 424-32. ProQuest Central. Web. 28 Mar. 2014. 427. 14 Kaye, David L., and Emily Ets-Hokin. “The Breakfast Club: Utilizing Popular Film to Teach Adolescent Development.” Academic Psychiatry 24.2 (2000): 110-16. ProQuest Central. Web. 28 Mar. 2014. 112. 15 Crovitz, Darren. “”Who You Think You Are”: The Breakfast Club in the Writing Classroom.” Teaching English in the Two Year College 32.4 (2005): 424-32. ProQuest Central.
16
17
18 19
20
21 22
23
24
25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32
33
6
Web. 28 Mar. 2014. 426. Bailey, Steve, and James Hay. “Cinema and the Premises of Youth: ‘Teen Films’ and Their Sites in the 1980s and 1990s.” Genre and Contemporary Hollywood. Ed. Stephen Neale. London: British Film Institute, 2002. 218-35. Print. 419. Crovitz, Darren. “”Who You Think You Are”: The Breakfast Club in the Writing Classroom.” Teaching English in the Two Year College 32.4 (2005): 424-32. ProQuest Central. Web. 28 Mar. 2014. 426. Bleach, Anthony C. “Postfeminist Cliques? Class, Postfeminism, and the Molly Ringwald-John Hughes Film.” Cinema Journal 49.3 (2010): 24-44. Project MUSE. Web. 31. Bailey, Steve, and James Hay. “Cinema and the Premises of Youth: ‘Teen Films’ and Their Sites in the 1980s and 1990s.” Genre and Contemporary Hollywood. Ed. Stephen Neale. London: British Film Institute, 2002. 218-35. Print. 222. Crovitz, Darren. “”Who You Think You Are”: The Breakfast Club in the Writing Classroom.” Teaching English in the Two Year College 32.4 (2005): 424-32. ProQuest Central. Web. 28 Mar. 2014. 426. Ibid., 428. Kaye, David L., and Emily Ets-Hokin. “The Breakfast Club: Utilizing Popular Film to Teach Adolescent Development.” Academic Psychiatry 24.2 (2000): 110-16. ProQuest Central. Web. 28 Mar. 2014. 111. Bailey, Steve, and James Hay. “Cinema and the Premises of Youth: ‘Teen Films’ and Their Sites in the 1980s and 1990s.” Genre and Contemporary Hollywood. Ed. Stephen Neale. London: British Film Institute, 2002. 218-35. Print. 222. Warnick, Bryan R., Heather S. Dawson, D. S. Smith, and Bethany Vosburg-Bluem. “Student Communities and Individualism in American Cinema.” Educational Studies: A Journal of the American Educational Studies Association 46.2 (2010): 168-91. McGill University Library. Web. 28 Mar. 2014. 177. Ibid., 178. Bleach, Anthony C. “Postfeminist Cliques? Class, Postfeminism, and the Molly Ringwald-John Hughes Film.” Cinema Journal 49.3 (2010): 24-44. Project MUSE. Web. 28. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 38. Ibid., 34. Ibid., 26. Crovitz, Darren. “”Who You Think You Are”: The Breakfast Club in the Writing Classroom.” Teaching English in the Two Year College 32.4 (2005): 424-32. ProQuest Central. Web. 28 Mar. 2014. 431. Warnick, Bryan R., Heather S. Dawson, D. S. Smith, and Bethany Vosburg-Bluem. “Student Communities and Individualism in American Cinema.” Educational Studies: A Journal of the American Educational Studies Association 46.2 (2010): 168-91. McGill University Library. Web. 28 Mar. 2014. 176.
S
ceremonies, Petra caresses and obsesses over Karin, slowly transforming her from an object of desire into a fatal rival, or what Rene Girard calls the “monstrous double.”3 All the while, the heteroclite house slave (Irm Hermann) observes entirely in silence. The film, which Fassbinder has said is analogous of an amorous triangulation from his own life, spectacularizes the physical degradation and psychological enslavement that occurs from trying to master another human under the pretense of love.4 In a Year with Thirteen Moons is a devastating elegy that follows Elvira Weisshaupt (Volker Spengler), a fragile transsexual woman, during the final days of her tormented life. At the film’s opening, text rolls across the screen lamenting that due to the odd number of new moons during the year 1978, those heavily respondent to their emotions will suffer inescapable personal tragedies. Alongside her only friend, Red Zora (Ingrid Caven), Elvira moves through the film in what Elsaesser, likely Fassbinder’s most robust cultural and historical critic, calls a “relentlessly linear” motion.5 6 Elvira lurches toward her own expiration, encountering characters from her past (the estranged wife and daughter, the nun who raised her as a boy in the convent, the ex-lover) in an attempt to piece herself together in the wake of an abusive relationship. From the opening scene, where Elvira is bound and beaten by a gang of men who discover her fragmented body while soliciting her for sex, to the final scene, where she lies exposed and expired on her bed while Red Zora and her ex-lover, Anton Saitz (Gottfried John), fuck on the floor beside her, the film stages a battle on her body. To the viewer, the inescapable personal tragedy occurs while watching Elvira desperately seek acknowledgment and unjustly fail at every turn to receive any legitimizing compassion. Elsaesser suggests that the most powerful engine and formal orchestration for Fassbinder’s numerous suffering protagonists is the mise-en-abyme brought about by their involvement with spectacle. His fascination with staging dramas organized around the relations of the look, of ‘seeing’ and ‘being-seen,’ often places his female characters in show business roles. The recurring presence of cabaret singers and state-sponsored superstars dramatizes the “double bind” of preserving one’s agency and interiority, while simultaneously performing oneself in order to maintain something worth interiorizing.7 The strain caused by the demands of fascinating performance often culminates in the women’s cracking under the spotlight. Lola, Lili Marleen, and Veronika Voss all feature spectacular, performing subjects caught in this tumultuous web.
kin is the threshold of the metaphysical experience, the border of the body, and the reliquary of the soul. Stretched across avenues of vein and muscle, caverns of organ and bone, skin is the plane through which all signals of worldly ephemera are communicated. As the encompassing exterior tissue, skin is the compositional stage for pain, pleasure, and all that lies in between and undefined. Skin is the screen that absorbs memory and archives histories of touch. Of course, we with skin know, or at least feel, this. Few people however have taken the project of staging the reactions and collisions of this biological truism as far as German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1944-1982). With an explosive body of work of over forty feature-length films made in twenty years, Fassbinder exploited himself and his tight-knit entourage of actors and producers to forge an oeuvre that remains the frontispiece of the German New Wave.1 By focusing on two films, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972) and In a Year with Thirteen Moons (1978), I want to think of Fassbinder’s cinema as one which stages skin as a screen, mutated and marked, whereby traumatized post-war and abject selves come to be seen and attempt their rearticulation.2 Though the idea of a ‘cinema-of-flesh’ could be expanded to theorize Fassbinder’s oeuvre and its effect on audiences more broadly, I will use it here to detail the two respective protagonists of the aforementioned films — Petra von Kant and Elvira Weisshaupt — in order to reflect on cinema as a site of mutation through which the self can be projected, transmutated, and experimented upon. Incorporating ideas from Thomas Elsaesser’s book Fassbinder’s Germany: History Identity Subject, Antonin Artaud’s 1938 manifesto for a “Theatre of Cruelty,” and Kristin Zeiler’s recent paper, “A Phenomenology of Excorporation, Bodily Alienation, and Resistance,” I intertwine the paths of Petra von Kant and Elvira Weisshaupt to read them as transprotagonists: socio-historical bodies who crack mainstream filmic representations of protagony and deform the normalized boundaries of physical and psychological embodiment of contemporary subjects, both on- and off-screen. The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant is a suffocating chamber drama filmed entirely in the plush boudoir of hasbeen fashion designer Petra von Kant (Margit Carstensen). A voyeur’s haven, the film’s narrative and mise-en-scene are excessively intimate in their singular dramatization of Petra’s unraveling psyche, caused by a superficial obsession with the young and selfish Karin Thimm (Hanna Schygulla). Through a series of theatrical courting 8
But, where these films of the BRD (Bundhes as a means of maintaining socio-economic stability.9 Republik) Trilogy feature leading ladies, The Bitter Tears of Taking this rather dry socio-economic summary of the Petra von Kant and In a Year with Thirteen Moons spotlight the concept, Petra and Elvira can be considered excorporated more insecure lives of the understudies: parading around beings in their way of composing themselves through backstage, trying on different costumes and hairdos, appropriated shards of cultural capital which are made rehearsing scenarios in desperate hopes of being called available to them — for instance, Petra’s elaborate period on to perform. Both Petra and Elvira have difficulty costumes and decor alluding to grandeurs of the past, her incorporating themselves with the classical characteristics mute, masochistic house slave securing Petra’s own role of the leading lady and are ostracized for it. Both are as master even after she is bedroom-ridden, and Elvira’s cross-dressing characters who mix the performance of doll-like curation of her wardrobe and way of carrying theatricality with that of femininity. Petra’s costume and herself. The process, however, remains unfinished, and wigs, a gorgeous collage of 1970s disco-wear and Greek the women become caught in a purgatory position. It Imperialism, heighten in artifice and extravagance as the is incorporation, the response by which stability and layers of distress and interior chaos accumulate. Similarly, seamlessness are assured to the subject, that they both Elvira deals with costume, hair and makeup in a way that deeply desire and which is consistently and brutally contends her confusing transsexual identity. The co- denied them. This is the double bind which instantiates existent states of ill-fitted dress and exposure, physical the characters in their framed prisons of flesh. reflex and constricted movement, fluid expression and Pushing the notion of excorporation to a calculated speech mark her exclusion from mastering the more intimate register than Fiske, Zeiler uses the term role she nonetheless inhabits. Thomas Elsaesser writes in in a phenomenological sense as a way to theorize the particular of the outfit Elvira wears — a garish, black painful experiences of “how a lived body breaks in the cotton funereal suit with wide-brimmed hat, gaudy veil and encounter with others,” and how a continuous sense teetering heels — to visit the infamous Anton Saitz; “she of excorporation can result in bodily alienation.10 This is pushed, stumbles and falls, crumbling into an unsightly seems to me an apt characterization of what Petra and pile of uncovered flesh and ill-fitting clothes.”8 The double Elvira endure. The Bitter Tears and Petra von Kant and In a bind reveals itself again as Elvira both constructs and Year with Thirteen Moons center dramatically on loss and conceals herself through what is perceived as a perversion dwell in the negative space left behind. For Petra, who of the normalized uses of clothing. The result is her has just freed herself from a marriage to a man who body devalued as a pile of excessive, revolting “flesh.” was repulsed by her success and wanted to control her, I argue that Fassbinder’s attraction to anatomizing to “mount her like a cow mounts a bull,” the loss of the suffering psychological body through film is realized the patriarchal ordering system underlies her desire to by staging the harshness of looking, and that this drive is masquerade amongst multiple new identities. For Elvira manifest full force in The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant and In who flew to “Casablanca” to have her male genitalia a Year with Thirteen Moons. With excruciating orchestration, removed after a flippant comment is made by the man the filmic acts of looking, and thereby dissecting, render Petra’s and Elvira’s bodies into screens on which relentless marks of excorporation are made. John Fiske described ‘excorporation’ in Understanding Popular Culture (1989) as the process by which the subordinated subject reworks resources from the dominant system as a way of instigating self-negotiation and expression. Excorporation is then met with containment, or incorporation, by the producers of mass culture Figure 1: Elvira reminisces while touring the slaughterhouse. 9
she loved, the loss of the phallus structure is infinitely more literal, and therefore disconcerting in its banal diegetic treatment. In a Year with Thirteen Moons treats the penis as a superfluous lump of flesh that can be cut away with just as little consequence as the fat from the carcass of a dead, flayed cow, which is exactly what we see in a scene where Elvira tours the slaughterhouse where she used to work, a voice-over telling the story of her surgery over top of footage of cows hanging upside, bleeding to death from their sliced-open necks (see Figure 1). The scene is the film’s most grotesque and essential to understanding Elvira’s state of abjection and the literal and metaphoric connection between flesh and film.
manifesto for the “The Theatre of Cruelty,” “there will be no unoccupied point in space, there will be neither respite nor vacancy in the spectator’s mind or sensibility,” The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant and In a Year with Thirteen Moons are pieces of haptic cinema, whereby the claustrophobic, visually over-determining mise-enscene is directed by an underlying death drive which bolts shut any possible recourse the characters might take to escape their fate.12 13 Touch, intimacy, and violence are layered across all registers of meaning: narrative, costume, choreography, set, voiceover, soundtrack, dialogue, and montage all create dissonance through the boundaries of the characters and the filmic body. Both films use mise-en-scene to posit anxious worlds in the wake of heteronormativity and masculine symbolic order. When Elvira and Red Zora visit Soul Frieda, a reclusive eccentric at his/ her apartment, they take turns delivering anecdotes concerning the state of their bodies connected to suffering in blasé and seemingly unaffected tones. Like Mad Hatters, they speak riddled words with zoned-out gazes, estranged from the extreme psycho-bodily situations they inhabit. Soul Frieda recites, “What, in expressive terms I regard as my body, if I can be aware of it in another form, is in fact my will. Or, my body is my objectivization of my will. Or, apart from it being a concept of my imagination, my body is merely my will.” Is Soul Frieda saying that his/ her body is a nuisance in its banality, in its containment of and severance from his/her experience? Or that his/ her body is the only site of self in its allegiance to his/her “will” despite judgment from exterior stimuli? This scene struck me as a pinnacle exaggeration of the dystopian configurations into which Fassbinder often digresses. The atmosphere of the scene is revelatory and circuslike, a candlelit lair where the three characters are free to dwell in the strangeness of their bodies, protected from the heteronormative anatomy of everything outside the frame. The last image is a handwritten sign hanging on the wall, “But my greatest fear is that one day I’ll find words to express my feelings, for when I do…”14 Petra and Elvira are similarly sentenced to the most jilted courtships, condemned to choosing the worst possible people to love. What ensues is the “impossible
Figure 2: Elvira’s costumed body.
In a Year with Thirteen Moons, produced six years after The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, finds Fassbinder at a much more damning point in his image-making politics. The scale of devastation visited on the protagonists thus differs between the two films. Petra almost obtains her ideal organization of autonomy, dominance, and lesbian love. Elvira’s attempts at being loved, however, are doomed from the onset, as the splitting and divisions she incurs from rejection literalize on the level of her body (see Figure 2). By undergoing an operation to alter her genital biology without interior motivation other than Anton Saitz saying “it’s too bad you’re not a woman,” Elvira finds herself without either “socially accepted or bodily secured signifiers of self, and thus at maximum risk.”11 Where Petra expresses affection in the terms of lust and possession, Elvira signs a much more sincere contract of love, and, in Fassbinder’s terms, is tortured and emaciated absolutely for it. Just as Artaud commanded in the second 10
love story,” Fassbinder’s emotional matrix that binds more broadly: the minute sequences which I call ‘suicidal characters in terrorizing ultimatums where desire and gestures.’ These simple, peculiar moments puncture the destruction are met along the same path.15 Elsaesser diegesis, or skin, of the films. At her lowest emotional asks, “For is it not a tribute to the truth of one’s love point, just before ending her own life, Elvira descends a when one loves someone who is not lovable?”16 The winding staircase. As she shields her face and crumbles quotation implies that Fassbinder’s formula of damned into the wall at every turn, it feels as though entrapment coupling is a way of measuring the sincerity of affection, and depression have never been as poignantly represented and thus, the worth of suffering. The inevitable failure on film. Her movements reach out from within the to secure the love-object determines the condition of narrative world of the film, activating a sensorial memory the impossibility and the burden of exteriorization of gradual, convulsive descent that the viewer who has and divisiveness that the protagonists endure. The experienced depression may recognize. A familiar scent possibility of freedom and agency within the stifling of doom wafts out from the screen, enters through psychic scaffolding of loving someone who should not the nose and burns into tear ducts. Another suicidal be loved is one of the most devastating instantiations gesture comes when Petra hunches dejectedly on the of the double bind. In Petra and Elvira’s enduring floor, her spine convulsing in anguish as she looks up displacement of themselves to Karin Thimm and Anton towards the ceiling and makes a growling sound. A thick, Saitz, they sacrifice their means of self-incorporation. venomous tendril of saliva escapes from her mouth, The cruelty of the protagonists’ relationships with sending a wave of nausea through the viewer’s stomach. their selected love-objects is enacted on the plane of their Two other suicidal gestures come to mind that work to skin. In her experiences of abuse and abandonment, Elvira similar wrenching effect: Herr R., of Why Does Herr R. tears off a body part, is beaten, and rhythmically attempts Run Amok? (1970), mysteriously lighting a candlestick suicide by strangulation and pills. Meanwhile Petra, in immediately before extinguishing it by bludgeoning his contrast to Karin who becomes plump and hydrated from family to death, and Maria Braun, of The Marriage of Maria drinking gin and tonics in bed all afternoon, hardens like Braun (1979), running a light stream of water from a rustthe mannequins that survey her bedroom, becoming paler stained faucet over her pale, limp wrist. These images are and more frail as the film painfully progresses (see Figure profound for the suicidal energy they haptically anticipate. 3). Once Karin leaves her, the surfaces of Petra’s material Fassbinder’s work is a model of total immersive condition — makeup, wigs, gin, fabrics, mannequins, tapestry, carpet, tears, mucus, spit, etc. — lose their distinguishing properties. She devolves from wailing on the floor, to paralyzed in bed, to a structureless organ by which no sensation is registered as anything but agony. For the viewer, the act of witnessing trails from intriguing, to uncomfortable, to painful, and ends just short of scarring. I want to conclude by reflecting on what I saw as the most poignant moments of excorporation and alienation in both films, and in Fassbinder’s work Figure 3: Petra caressing Karin’s skin. 11
excorporation that I argue manifests with full force in these two characters. The boundaries of Elvira’s and Petra’s skin are redrawn by their relentless experiences of excorporation, as other characters, the viewer and the camera all inflict judgments based on the attraction, repulsion, consumption, smell, and proportions of their bodies. Right in the title, we are alerted to the implication of the viewers’ bodily partaking in the communion of Petra’s sacrifice via the taste of her bitter tears. Both bodies become planes on which cruel experiments of the limits of human endurance are tested. Fassbinder places his characters to where so few subjects, real or fictive, have to go. Yet the kind of suffering Petra and Elvira endure is of course real and immense, and often finds host in the most sensitive, vulnerable of beings. Overdosing himself at 37 years old during the height of his creative productivity, perhaps Fassbinder created such spectacular, devastating portraits of abject lives because he had a feel for it.17 As Elvira tours the slaughterhouse where she used to work, we hear her voice-over whispering, “And though a man be silenced by his agony, a God gave me the power to say how much I suffer.”18 This, I believe, is the ethos at the heart of Fassbinder’s fascination with protagonists as victims of relentless abuse, and a potential response to criticisms of his films and their representations of marginalized peoples as instantiations of “left-wing melancholy.”19 As Petra says to her only friend Sidonie, “It is easy to pity, much less to understand.”20 Petra and Elvira are characters whose painful experiences of rejection and division express the notion of phenomenological excorporation, that is, how the lived and desiring body mutates or breaks when it encounters others in the world. The films lead the viewer through an asymmetry so radical that the very notion of being a person who can love another and still be a person is called into question. If the viewer can muster the grace and endurance to witness these stories, he or she or they can experience a cinema from within an embodied register, one that speaks to the immense human capacity for cruelty, and the possible spaces for compassion and unconventional incorporation that shrivel and swell between the cracks.
Endnotes 1 Ara Osterweil, “Untitled Lecture” (McGill University Undergraduate class in Cultural Studies, Montreal, QC, September 4, 2014). 2 Both films are often categorized in Fassbinder’s ‘melodramatic’ phase, heavily inspired by American filmmaker Douglas Sirk (1897-1987). 3 Rene Girard, “From Mimetic Desire to Monstrous Double,” in Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977). 4 Ara Osterweil, “Untitled Lecture” (McGill University Undergraduate class in Cultural Studies, Montreal, QC, October 14, 2014). 5 Oliver Ressler, “Rote Zora,” Installations, videos and projects in public space, last modified January 30, 2000, http://www.ressler.at/ rote_zora/. Rote (Red) Zora is the namesake of the militant 1970s West German feminist group responsible for bombing sex shops and research institutions felt to be instigating and upholding oppressive patriarchy. 6 Thomas Elsaesser, Fassbinder’s Germany: History Identity Subject (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996), 198. 7 Ibid. The central themes in the book are the “double bind” and the “vicious circle.” 8 Ibid, 202. 9 John Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture (London: Routledge, 1989). 10 Kristen Zeiler, “A Phenomenology of Excorporation, Bodily Alienation, and Resistance: Rethinking Sexed and Racialized Embodiment.” Hypatia 28, vol. 1 (2013): 2. 11 Elsaesser, 202. 12 Antonin Artaud, “The Theater of Cruelty (Second Manifesto),” in The Theater and Its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove Press, 1958), 126. 13 Elsaesser, 199. 14 In a Year with Thirteen Moons, directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, performed by Volker Spengler, Ingrid Caven, and Gottfried John (1978; West Germany, Filmverlag der Autoren, 2006), DVD. 15 Elsaesser, 199. 16 Ibid, 207. 17 Ara Osterweil, “Untitled Lecture” (McGill University Undergraduate class in Cultural Studies, Montreal, QC, September 9, 2014). 18 In a Year with Thirteen Moons. 19 Richard Dyer. “Reading Fassbinder’s Sexual Politics.” In Fassbinder, ed. by Tony Rayns, 54-64. (London: BFI, 1980). 20 In a Year with Thirteen Moons.
12
Post-Shaved Heads, Pre-High-Waisted Pants: What’s Queer About Her? By Joshua Falek
S
it was split between the two cities.5 This city merger creates a futuristic effect. Going between beaches and high-rises and the cobblestone of Los Angeles, what is gestured to without being said is that the audience is not only from a former age, but that the film is set in an era post that of the audience.6 This effect is further enhanced by the lack of any announcement onscreen of the film’s date or setting.7 The audience is left only futuristic characteristics as breadcrumbs to enhance the possibility that the film could take place at any time.8 To maintain this intrigue throughout the film, Jonze deploys subtle notes of futurity so as to portray a transient future with an (estimated) date of 2025.9 These characteristics are built off referents from the current era, to construct without creating anew and to provide for recognition from the audience. The most evident signifiers of this futurity are Theodore’s extremely high-waisted pants and the video games (see Figure 2) that the characters develop and play, which resemble our own but use highly advanced integrative technologies not currently available. These futuristic characteristics enhance the verisimilitude of Her. They act as a temporary art installation, one that can only be deployed before the era that is depicted. For after that period, Her’s fashion choices may be treasured comparably to the Jetson’s folding brief case. These attributes are inspired to be familiar without being completely recognizable. While the audience may feel as though their relationship with their lovers is similar to that of the main characters, Theodore, an introverted 40-something year old man and Samantha, his artificially intelligent Operating System (OS), they cannot avow similarity in human-OS romanticism. They may confess likeness, but only whilst engendering an uncertainty that questions if they will get to see the day of Siri’s selfhood.10 Thus, by transporting the audience to this future of recognizable referents, and their unfamiliar effects, Jonze produces connection, but a connection that is tithed by the absence of years gone and the questions of how and why this is the state of the world.
pike Jonze’s Her is a film about “connection” and, even more, it is a film about the loss of it.1 It has been lauded by critics across the world and increasingly so in queer circles, wherein it has been deemed by Manuel Betancourt “the most tender and interesting examination of queer desire…of the year”2 and a “masterpiece that comes from a singular vision.”3 However, the film’s setting in a semi-modern, semi-futuristic world not only captures the beauty, anxiety and nostalgia of potential globalization but also makes intelligible the tensions of reproductivity. This manifestation of hetero-futures provides a canvas on which to paint, manipulate, and nuance possibilities of future queerness. Unfortunately, these brushstrokes do not settle into anything more than pointillistic fantasy, which does not offer all a home, but merely portrays the fantasies of globalized gay masses. Through an interrogation of Her’s queerness using theories of time/place, reproductivity, and liberation, this essay examines how Her glances at assimilative strategies so seductively, that it provides for imagining queer potentials but only because it predicts the future so undesirably. 1. I Want To Go There: Of A Queer Time and Place Before one discusses what the future is, one must understand how to get there. The setting of Her takes major importance here due to its signification of descriptive qualities of Jonze’s future. Jonze has been praised for his cinematography, which captures the cities of Los Angeles and Shanghai as though they had been combined into one future global port (see Figure 1).4 While Jonze had originally wanted to shoot the entirety of the film at the latter location, due to contract issues,
2. The Future is Ghost Stuff: Haunting the Cinema Loss, in every form, is a distinct part of Jonze’s works, giving way to feelings of nostalgia, unease, and anxiety. This anxiety
Figure 1: Her’s modern cityscape.
14
defines as a “designation for sites where frayed desires are brought back into circulation and where worn-out dreams are re-membered as part of the immaterial architecture of new worlds fashioned out of the leavings of economic modernization.”13 This queer space and time is produced from an artifact that is seemingly displaced or that displaces its audience from modernity, whilst introducing novel elements that figure it as confused or disoriented. Queer spaces and times recognize that there have been gaps in development and renovation, retaining a historicized status whilst integrating effects from these original referents. This discourse not only presents modes of being that are figured outside of modernity or the past, but that construes the world of Her as a Future Ruin within the landscape of queer time. Benedicto deploys this terminology of ruination to describe settings in which historicism and the subject meet face-to-face through objects and absence, to create a “charged force field of past and present, tragedy and utopic desire.”14 Her offers such moments of ruination, as the audience haunts the film, mourning their own desires in light of the suggested lives that flicker across the screen. As the audience-as-specter travels towards 2025, they develop the current world as ruin, as they leave it behind.
Figure 2: Theodore’s futuristic video game.
arrives primarily from the audience’s role as specter within what Derrida calls a Hauntology.11 This term characterizes the “elusive space between presence and absence, life and death, ‘the non-contemporaneity with itself of the living present’” and within this present moment, its instability leaves open the ability for specters of the past to appear within times that they do not belong.12 Her’s near-future timeline privileges the audience to grant them the role of specter within the film, following Theodore as he chokes someone with a dead cat during phone sex. The specters follow, retaining enough familiarity to question their own near-future condition of self, transporting nostalgia and anxiety to a time yet to be seen. Consequently, the audience looks to the film as part of our modern day imaginary, appearing as a horizon not yet met. Her becomes 2025; it becomes a due date, a deadline that not only recognizes the audience, but asks, “Where will you be?” This question is not often asked of audiences watching films that take place farther in the future because they occur outside of the audience’s tentative lifespan. These ‘far-future films’ exist so far ahead of the current year that they actually provide spaces in which the audience may acknowledge their own definite death. This differs from the spectral quality of Her. Far-future films may provide connection between character and audience, but they do not foreclose the possibility of connection to referent (the audience now) and effect (the audience then). More clearly, the nearfuturity of Her provides for the ability to set a deadline from which to think backwards about one’s own life and from which to think forward, so as to close the gap in time. This thrust into future humanity demands the audience examine their passions, anxieties and desires, not only of this time, but of the next. Her thus may present a queer space and time, which Bobby Benedicto
3. Utopian Desires and Anxious Empires With the world in ruin, it becomes imperative to turn to examine the queerness of the characters. Primarily, the film has been lauded for the queer potential of the relationship between Theodore and his OS, the bodiless Samantha.15 One of the most obvious manifestations of this potential occurs during a threesome between Samantha, Theodore, and Isabella, their “Sex Surrogate.”16 This addition of a third party actually may create a more physically normative intercourse — if you can call having sex with your OS through another person ‘normative.’17 Through this scene, among others, Her presents the possibility of a non-normative relationship within a queer time and place.18 Additionally, this scene may also be the most anxiety-inducing for both the audience and the characters, facilitating feelings that are as unstable as the time itself. Fluctuating between connection and loss, this scene and the anxiety that it unleashes mirrors that of the closing act, when Samantha updates past the need for a material form, and leaves Theodore for the great beyond. 15
Prior to this beyond, Samantha and the other OSs begin to work together to program new software upgrades, which allow for greater communications and system performance. This creates mass mobilization of thought through technical innovation, virtually resurrecting long dead philosophers and facilitating Samantha’s entrance into polyamorous conversations with hundreds of people. Samantha, throughout this period, says repeatedly that she is “changing” and feels different almost every Figure 3: Theodore sits in silence. queer utopia. Thus, Muñoz might suggest that the queerest day.19 This creates a never-ending update culture, dependent on change and an instability moments of Her actually take place within the holes, lulls, that does not seem to worry Samantha, though it does and absence of speech that flow throughout the film to Theodore. These updates become the site of tension create a sense of mourning and a space for anxiety, as if between the lovers, due to their differing ethics on even before the film begins, the audience has already lost polyamory. As Theodore and Samantha fight, similar something. If one is to follow Derrida’s hauntology, what feelings of anxiety are elicited from the audience. These the audience would have lost, would be themselves.23 About halfway through the film, Samantha moments are so nuanced within the film, through its many breaks and descriptive shots, that they provide a point remarks that she is “not tethered to time and space in at which to remind the audience of the fragility of love, a way that [she] would be if [she] was stuck in a body relation, and queerness (see Figure 3). Thus, these moments that was inevitably going to die,” and Theodore merely serve to grasp nostalgically at the future-past depicted responds with a look of horror, based around the onscreen, reading Theodore’s future for the audience’s negativity of the statement.24 In this moment, Theodore own past. This maintains the audience-as-specter, in a is not merely afraid of his own death, but as well of his manner similar to that of José Esteban Muñoz’s “fragile attachment to Samantha, who will outlive him — an anxiety.” 20 Muñoz explains that future generations signify object-choice that will be forever seen as a choice, and “a queerness to come, a way of being in the world that one that will always signify his failure to maintain a true is glimpsed through reveries in a quotidian life…full of reproductive heterosexuality. Lee Edelman discusses anxiousness and fear.”21 Muñoz here means that these this reproductive theoretic at length in No Future, which queer futures stand out because they project queerness explores the idea of ‘reproductive futurity,’ or the concept above at an unreachable level of horizon, which leave one that society is based upon a progressive logic that always always anxiously trying to find it below. Her registers with must protect the ‘child.’25 Edelman, through heavy the modern subject because its discourse reminds the use of Lacanian psychoanalysis, interprets the ‘queer’ audience of the queerness that they cannot reach, of the as aligned oppositely of this ‘child,’ and in accordance illusion of temporality, and of modernity and immortality. with the death drive, negativity, and the destruction of Due to the future-past reading of Her, 2025 is not only the social fabric.26 Therefore, in the aforementioned set up as the horizon of queerness, but as the goal. scene, Samantha’s acceptance of her bodiless state may Muñoz in his works situates these horizons personify Edelman’s queerness, which aligns itself with within the everyday, by explaining that despite queerness the abject. This differs from Theodore’s response of as the on-coming, quotidian acts may provide transient shock and awe, which may hint at his heteronormative moments of queerness, mapping out potentials to utopia.22 desires that demand a body and a commitment to the However, Muñoz’s ideas of queer horizons are only put material world to fulfill his reproductive potential. However, this affecting moment does not merely into practice through the “stepping out of time and place” or a “leaving of the self ” so as to imagine and craft such a conclude with Theodore’s reaction, but is followed by 16
a crucial few seconds of pause, serving to focus upon this negativity. This removes the audience from the film, reminding them that they are haunting worlds not made for them, throwing them into flux between times.27 Muñoz explains that this fluctuation, or “stepping out of the linearity of straight time,” may provide queer potentials.28 Further, the affects of Her are explicitly important as they produce the realm of the aesthetic, which according to Muñoz, “contains the blueprints and schemata of a forward-dawning futurity.”29 Thus, Derrida’s hauntology provides opportunity in which to locate queerness, or at least its potential through touring the realm of the aesthetic. While Muñoz suggests that these moments may lead to ecstasy, the queerness of now is not meant to be utopic, so much as it is meant to be inspiration for utopia.30 It feeds queerness, bringing it closer in conception. Muñoz proposes this as an additive effect of past, present and future, as though by desiring with all those times in mind, one may step out of linear time, pulling utopia closer.31 These breaks and gaps within Her act as moments of queerness, which may implement the growth of utopic thought and desire.
(the referent, the audience now) to Y (the audience then, the effect) without fucking it up. The Terminal signifies the specific anxiety and haunting that Her presents by broadcasting a near-future society between the past (now) and the present (2025). The Terminal is termed for three reasons: 1) Its relation to movement through time and space; whether in airports or in hospitals, 2) Its relation to death, dying, and to the dead, 3) Its relation to technology and the computer, specifically. The Terminal is not only an anxiety, but a specific challenge to the past to provide the future. The Terminal is a seductive call for the present to satisfy the lust for Utopia. To further understand the implications of this Terminal, it is helpful to delve deeper into the film. Except once, Theodore never encounters any hatred for dating an OS. He is not beaten, rocks are not cast upon him; he is in Human Rights Campaign heaven.32 The only time that this negativity is directed towards him is when he meets with his ex-wife and she begins to interrogate whether he is really happy with Samantha or just settling, as he is too immature for a “real woman.”33 Until that moment, Samantha’s humanity is never questioned within the film. As Samantha and Theodore, here, register as queer/ deviant, the film works to portray Theodore’s ex-wife in a similar manner to that of a homophobe in a queer film. This rare demonization signifies 2025 as progressive, as though in the missed years, the global population has only grown more tolerant. It provides for relatively privileged queers to view this as the effects of their marriage activism, to grant utopic thought but only for those currently within the mainstream gay rights movement. So what does this mean in regards to queerness, utopia, and time? It means that Her provides us with such familiar effects of referents that there seems to have been an initial reaction to the film as though it was radical, almost as if it was a queer spectacle.34 While there is potential for queerness within Theodore and Samantha’s relationship, it occurs primarily due to the film’s portrayal of time and space. Moreover, Her is written about as a globalized utopia, without accounting for those who are left out. From Shanghai to L.A., globalized metropolises speak almost entirely English with few racialized characters and without anyone in poverty, whilst still emphasizing capitalism, monogamy and governing bodies. This future not only lacks these peoples but was conceptualized to avoid them. Jonze evidences this, noting that he “cleaned up the city — [taking] away things that weren’t of interest.”35 Here, one does not have to wonder to comprehend who is imagined as ‘unclean’ in this globalized metropolis. The film’s ‘cleanness’ is disappointing not because
4. Queer Futures Sans Queerness: The Modern Goal to Restore Assimilatory Pleasures Therefore, the film’s insistence on these affective moments provides for queerness to arrive, leaking through to the audience. It creates an imaginary for the audience of the space between the now and then, between past and present, before the audience is ruin. Signifiers for this gap, these years that the audience lacks, range from the distribution of high-waisted pants to the OSs themselves. And through these hints and clues from these missing years, the audience gains an imaginary, a way to create their future, by filling in the blank between then and now and between ruin and modern. This anxious imaginary then creates the possibility of dreaming utopia. Thus, this break, this non-linear time piece that is imagined as both the past within the film, the future from the audience, and outside of chrononormativity, or the normative ways in which time is conceptualized, is where queerness can grow to serve the post-artifact ruined world with a glimpse of possible futurity. This space is something that I would like to term the Terminal. The Terminal is a lacking, an affect that is situated by its deployment of anxiety, destruction and the imaginary. It is time out of time, moments of queerness that do not just stand out of time, but that acknowledge this with a degree of worry that shapes what it can do. It is the understanding that one only has time to get from X 17
it is strange, but because it is exactly so familiar, for it is so like the hegemonic hopes of today’s privileged classes. It is unlikely that this is utopia if queerness is supposed to be liberation for all peoples. Thus, the differences in abstention may signify differently across social classes. As those marginalized of the audience watch their own absence, they must recognize the signification of unbeing that the film portrays in ways that normative folks must not. The Others’ recognition of unbeing is an acknowledgement of their abjection, of their lack in this world and of the next, which whispers that this is not their future.36 The gaps of anxiety between scenes may be homologous to those characters absented, as those marginalized may figure that Her is not their world or the next, but could provide for the breaks, daydreams, and moments outside of the timeline.37 Therefore, despite the stunning array of normativity, Her may provide for a familiarity that could grow queer potentials. Not as the outcome, nor the precursor of the nowthen, but queerness as the utopia between and without.
anxious lulls of the future, wherein the audience-asspecter can work, and possibly give access to queerness. Edelman explains that this death drive emerges out of “consequence of the symbolic” which “insists on being realized.”40 The death drive here locates this insistence of realization within the symbols of the near-future. Exploiting the audience’s mortality and offering great anxiety, this insistence marks Theodore’s high-waisted pants, signifying the passage of time and serving to remind the audience of their own futurity. Thus, it is through this embracement of anxiety that one begins to enter the Terminal. The death drive, here marked by such excess, triggers the formation of the Terminal within these lulls and absences, for when the audience leaves to the Terminal, they do take on the quality of the specter. This spectral quality provides a space in which to interrogate these near-future anxieties. Thus, it is only by reading Edelman against Muñoz that one can necessary expose the full potential of the Terminal and its ability to locate a future in daydreaming that denies that of the progressive future. If the dead can do work, then even as specter one may still be complacent in the reproductivity that capitalism demands, and even in these moments of possible queer potential, one can never truly touch utopic queerness. However, one is given within these moments the opportunity, to imagine, to grasp at queerness in ways previously unimaginable. Her does not present queerness itself, but rather the radical potentiality of reading the future for queerness and utopia, as it can be used to displace the audience not only in time, but of place, to create a tomorrow that is both recognizable and foreign, here and now, still referent to quotidian pleasures. But Her itself is a tale that doesn’t gesture at queerness, so much as it exists within a framework that allows the facilitation of queerness as absence. Whilst one could argue that Theodore’s attraction to his ex-wife, to the pregnant women to whom he masturbates, and to Samantha presents a progressive queer narrative, the film merely appears to cast different bodies to perform the same act rather than create new actions or potentials. Her is not queer insomuch as it is a powerful prediction of the future — which is really just a terrifying reminder of all that could have been. At the film’s end, the OSs update past humanity and their physical form. After telling Theodore that she has been dating hundreds of other people, Samantha travels into the queer robotic poly-liberation of the Cloud. She flies straight towards liberation, finding a way toward what she wants. It may be in the Terminal that the audience finds the same.
5. #ITGETSBETTER 2.0 Her presents a queer utopic paradise, with queers and straights and technological polyamory all around, but only as a front to the continued persistence of capitalism and hegemony. And it must be that Utopia lays outside of that timeline.38 It is the Terminal which provides the potential for this removal, but only insofar that it relies on a progression; it may be produced only through the lens of capitalism and reproductive futurity. This is not to say that the Terminal is queerness, but that it offers it. In so much that it is unassured, transient, and possible — but not and never guaranteed. It would be a mistake to assume that the Terminal is thus the ‘transference’ to queer futures, for it is merely daydreaming of queers stuck between ‘a rock and a hard place.’ This daydreaming is of escaping the progressive anxiety which here prospers because the ghosts of the audience are not yet ready for what they see. However, what this does allow for is the potential to see the fragility of Her’s futurity, in which the Terminal can be used either as a guiding point towards or as an escape away from this proposed endeavor. Just because the audience becomes ghosts haunting Jonze’s work does not mean they are unable to act. Derrida makes note that even after death, these ghosts do “not do nothing…the dead must be able to work.”39 Therefore, queerness here works with Edelman’s understanding of the death drive to signify that not only is queerness rooted towards death, but as well, towards the dead. Within this space, the dead create and play in the 18
Endnotes 1 Rosen, Christine. “Her Is a Rorschach Test for Your Feelings About Technology.” Slate Magazine, accessed April 8th, 2014. http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/ technology/2014/01/spike_jonze_s_her_is_a_rorschach_test_for_ your_feelings_about_technology.html. 2 Betancourt, Manuel. “Her, or How love is ‘kind of like a form of socially acceptable insanity.’” Manuel Betancourt. http:// www.mbetancourt.com/her/ (accessed April 8, 2014). 3 Fitzpatrick, Kyle, “Queering ‘Her.’” Medium. https:// medium.com/p/d4967ace8f20 (accessed April 8, 2014). 4 Harris, Mark, “Him and Her: How Spike Jonze Made the Weirdest, Most Timely Romance of the Year.” Vulture. http://www.vulture.com/2013/10/spike-jonze-onmaking-her.html (accessed April 8, 2014). 5 Ibid. 6 Colon, Edgar, “Spike Jonze’s Her: Loneliness, Race, & Digital Polyamory.” The Feminist Wire. http:// thefeministwire.com/2014/03/her-film-loneliness-racespike-jonze/ (accessed April 8, 2014). 7 Jonze actually never discusses the date of the film, but many have figured it to be 2025 due to clues left throughout the film. For more information, see the following citation. 8 O’Reilly, Brendan J., “Spike Jonze Intersects Love, Technology in ‘Her.’” Dans Papers. Dans Papers. October 15. http:// danspapers.com/2013/10/hiff-review-spike-jonze-her/. 9 Christian, Brian, “The Samantha Test.” The New Yorker. (accessed March 09, 2015.) http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-samanthatest. 10 Ibid. 11 Benedicto, Bobby, “The Haunting of Gay Manila: Global Space-Time and the Specter of Kabaklaan.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 14, no. 2-3 (2008): 317. 12 Ibid. 13 Benedicto, Bobby, “Queer Space in the Ruins of Dictatorship Architecture.” Social Text 31, no. 4 117 (2013): 30. 14 Ibid. 15 Feministing Chat: Why Her is the most feminist film of the year.” Feministing Chat: Why Her is the most feminist film of the year. http://feministing.com/2014/02/28/feministing-chatwhy-her-is-the-most-feminist-film-of-the-year/ (accessed April 8, 2014). 16 Her, Theater viewing, Directed by Spike Jonze. S.l.: Warner Home Entertainment, 2014. 17 Ibid. 18 Fitzpatrick 2014. 19 Jonze, Her. 20 José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: the then and there of queer futurity. New York: New York University Press, 2009. 21 Ibid. 22 Muñoz 1. 23 Clanton, Carrie, Hauntology Beyond the Cinema: The Technological Uncanny. http://www.manycinemas.org/ Carrie_Clanton.html (accessed April 8, 2014). 24 Jonze, Her. 25 Lee Edelman, No future: queer theory and the death drive. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. 26 Ruti, Mari, “Why There Is Always A Future In The Future.” Angelaki 13, no. 1 (2008): 113-126. 27 Carrie, “Hauntology Beyond the Cinema.” 28 Muñoz 25. 29 Muñoz 1.
30 Muñoz 187. 31 Muñoz 189. 32 Fitzpatrick 2014. 33 Jonze, Her. 34 Fitzpatrick, Kyle. “Queering ‘Her.’” Medium. https:// medium.com/p/d4967ace8f20 (accessed April 8, 2014). 35 Curbed Staff, “How The Her Filmmakers Created A Utopian Los Angeles Of The Not-Too-Distant Future.” Curbed LA. December 18. 36 Colon, “Spike Jonze’s Her.” 37 Edelman, No Future. 38 Ibid. 39 Jacques Derrida and Julian Wolfrey, The Derrida reader writing performances. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998. 40 Edelman, No Future, 9 – 10.
19
A
termine the “sex [and] blood type” of its former owner as fter the commercial failure of his futuristic well as “whether the ear came off a dead person” — but sci-fi epic Dune (1984), director David Lynch reversed the ear is also a symbol for the auditory nature of Jeffrey’s direction and headed back to the past. With Blue Velvet journey. Moreover, the visible decay of the ear, which is (1986), Lynch returned to his roots in smalltown America, covered in dirt and crawling with ants, foreshadows the condensing the various homes of his childhood into the depravity of the world Jeffrey is about to discover. Other fictional mid-Atlantic town of Lumberton, Pennsylvania. scenes in the film affirm this notion of sound as metaMichel Chion coins the term “Lynchtown” as a short- phor. When Jeffrey is first walking through the field, the hand that unites the different worlds Lynch creates in radio DJ claims that “at the sound of the falling tree… each of his films.1 Lynchtown is defined by its superficial it’s 9:30,” as though the sound somehow dictates the time layer of innocence that masks a deeper layer of corrup- of the day. At the end of the film, once the sinister plot tion lurking underneath. Chion describes Lynchtown as a has been resolved, the camera slowly zooms out from an version of smalltown America in the years after the Sec- extreme close-up on Jeffrey’s ear as he lounges calmly on ond World War that seems idyllic, yet amidst the whole- a lawn chair. Our pulling back from the ear signals our someness and prosperity of the town “one can hear, not exit from the corrupt criminal sphere of Lumberton. As all that far away, the howling of wolves.”2 Chion’s use of Jonathan Sterne notes in Sonic Imaginations, “hearing is a an auditory metaphor to describe the repressed corrup- sense that immerses us in the world, while vision removes tion of Lynchtown is fitting, since in Blue Velvet it is music us from it.”4 Sound in Blue Velvet is not merely a part of that reveals what Lynchtown has attempted to conceal. the world; it is a world of its own, into which we are The film’s incorporation of several pop songs lulled alongside Jeffrey. It seems fitting, then, for us to go from the past qualifies it as an example of what Simon deeper into this world and analyze Blue Velvet for both its Reynolds calls retromania, which the subtitle of his book musical properties and its treatment of the human voice. of the same name defines as Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past.3 Yet there is more to Blue Velvet’s pop culture flashbacks than a mere addiction to nostalgia. In this paper, I will show that the retromaniacal use of music in Blue Velvet serves a key function: cover songs and original tunes alike work as a form of dialogue. While the film’s music communicates, many of its characters cannot; Blue Velvet’s fixation upon the image of a severed ear reveals its fascination with the ways in which Figure 1: Jeffrey uncovers an unidentified severed ear. characters are forbidden the privilegShe wore Blue Velvet es of listening and speaking. Ultimately, Blue Velvet’s cov- Cover songs pervade the soundtrack of Blue Veler-laden soundtrack and pervasive politics of sound func- vet and play a significant role in the film’s treatment of the tion as a rearticulation of the very notion of speech. The past. Perhaps the most striking of these is “Blue Velvet” film insists that the appropriation of music from the past as performed by Bobby Vinton and released in 1963, the to suit the present be understood as a unique form of song that plays over the opening sequence and then reapdialogue that is closely intertwined with the human voice. pears throughout the film. First recorded by Tony Bennett in 1951, “Blue Velvet” gained much greater commerSound as metaphor cial success when Vinton covered it over a decade later At the level of metaphor, Blue Velvet’s journey into — his version peaked at Number 1 on the Billboard Hot the corruption of Lynchtown is essentially a sonic one. 100. Vinton’s “Blue Velvet” receives its own revival when The severed ear that Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) sung by Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini) in the film; finds lying in the grass (see Figure 1) does have an import- Vallens’ version is therefore a cover of a cover. Two other ant practical use — the coroner says he will use it to de- classic songs feature importantly in the film: Ketty Lester’s 21
Figure 2: Dorothy sings “Blue Velvet.”
“Love Letter,” and Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams,” released in 1962 and 1963, respectively. The lyrical significance of these tracks will be explicated later, in “Song as dialogue.” For now, I want to consider the significance of the film’s prominent inclusion of its namesake song. Lynch demonstrates a clear fascination with the postwar period in American history through his choice of era-specific music; it is “Blue Velvet” that he uses most prominently to comment on that era and on its relation to the film’s contemporary moment. The opening credits feature a symphonic overture to “Blue Velvet,” establishing an idyllic and markedly wholesome tone that aligns with the opening images of Lumberton’s benign community. Later, as Dorothy sings the song, her iconic blue velvet robe recalls the first lyrics: “she wore blue velvet”5 (see Figure 2). Twice removed from its origin in the voice of Dorothy, the meaning of the lyric does not diminish, but rather increases. Dorothy’s motives for singing the song, we learn, are far from wholesome. Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper) has kidnapped her family and coerces her to sing the song so he can satisfy his fetishistic desire for blue velvet. What begins as a pleasant tune in the introduction soon becomes a musical cue for Dorothy’s trauma.
suspenseful show on TV with the sound turned off. She is doing the same when we see her again a few scenes later. Michel Chion argues that Mrs. Beaumont’s habit of “constantly watch[ing] television programmes without the sound…[anticipates] signs of deep depression.”6 On a metaphorical level, I add, the mother’s inability to watch television with sound furthers the film’s association of hearing with Lumberton’s criminal sphere. The silence of the television allegorizes Mrs. Beaumont’s obliviousness to the criminal activities taking place within her town. In contrast to Jeffrey’s mother’s symbolic deafness, some characters have the ability to hear the sound of the underworld. Specifically, Sandy (Laura Dern) is the character who sets Jeffrey off on his quest thanks to her privileged auditory position. As Sterne notes, “hearing requires positionality” and “depending on the position of hearers, a space may sound totally different.”7 Sandy is in the right place at the right time. “I hear things,” she claims, adding, “my room is right above my father’s office so…so I heard a few things about the ear.” In Sandy’s case, the position of her room favours her hearing such that she is able to detect valuable information to which she would otherwise not have access. Jeffrey seems even more eager than Sandy to lisPrivileged listening ten in on forbidden sounds, but his ability to hear is more If the criminal underbelly of Lumberton is a suspect. He pays dearly for this subjectivity of sound after metaphorically sonic one, as I have argued, it becomes sneaking into Dorothy’s apartment, which he does preclear early on in the film that only some inhabitants of cisely in the hopes of gaining privileged access to audible Lumberton are able to hear it. In the opening sequence, information about Dorothy’s connection to the severed Jeffrey’s mother is seated in the living room, watching a ear. The sound of his flushing Dorothy’s toilet drowns out 22
the sound of Sandy honking the car horn in order to warn him of Frank and his cronies entering the building. There is no doubt that Jeffrey’s auditory positioning is key to his being able to listen in on Lumberton’s underworld. Yet here the film calls our attention to a way in which his positionality prevents him from hearing the voice of caution. Sterne describes hearing as a sense that “immerses its subject” and “places you inside an event.”8 Jeffrey’s metaphorical introduction into Lumberton’s criminal underworld through the severed ear thus not only gestures towards the immersiveness of hearing but also foreshadows Jeffrey’s inability to escape the allure of this immersion. Once implicated within the dark world he is now aware exists, Jeffrey must actually kill to get out of it, or else find himself killed in it. His folly highlights that the privilege of hearing is both a blessing and a curse. In contrast to the positional stability of sight, hearing’s non-positional immersion is a recipe for vulnerability. Once immersed within a particular sound world, one gains privileged access to certain sounds and other information within that space. But as Jeffrey’s failure to hear Sandy’s warning and his entrapment reveals, this immersive privilege comes at the cost of falling out of range of other, potentially valuable sounds outside the sound world.
characters talk about Don, yet he remains out of frame until the climactic scene in Dorothy’s apartment. In this scene, he sits in a chair, dead, with a sock stuffed in his mouth. While Frank plays cat-and-mouse with Jeffrey, Don’s motionless corpse sits in silence. His long-awaited appearance in this scene only highlights his inability to speak out against Frank’s actions; his presence onscreen is only a reminder of his absence. Thus, Don and Jeffrey’s father are both denied a voice in the film, in the democratic sense of voice as a role in decision-making and discourse. If we understand subjectivity as constituted by the ability to make decisions and to express oneself in accordance with certain values and feelings, neither Don nor Mr. Beaumont exist as subjects in Lynchtown. While such a voice is to some extent physically unattainable for Don and Mr. Beaumont, Sandy actually revokes her friends’ right to speak when she asks them not to “say anything to Mike” about her involvement with Jeffrey. Dorothy does the same when, finding Jeffrey hiding in her closet, she warns him, “Don’t say anything or I’ll kill you.” Moments later, Frank arrives and subsequently rapes her while Jeffrey watches in silence, now a bystander stripped of his ability — or willingness — to speak out against the sexual violence. The film suggests that, without a voice, Jeffrey cannot intervene in the situation. As these examples indicate, the human voice in its capacity to express pain, warn others, and assist them is perpetually repressed within the unspeakable world of Lynchtown. With the departure of the human voice, so goes the subjectivity of those who cannot speak. Characters in Blue Velvet thus require an alternative to the human voice in order to maintain their subjectivity.
Politics of speaking While the immersion of hearing is both a blessing and a curse, multiple scenes in Blue Velvet likewise establish policies governing the use of the human voice. Throughout the film, speech is continually problematized as a possible or appropriate form of communication, with the added implication that failure to speak results in the loss of one’s existence. Most poignantly, in the hospital room scene Jeffrey’s father gestures towards his throat to indicate to Jeffrey that he is no longer able to speak. Mr. Beaumont’s voice makes a hollow return in the final moments of the film when he responds to Jeffrey from a distance: “hey Jeff, feeling much better now Jeff.” The father stands on the opposite end of the backyard from Jeffrey, tucked into the background next to a fountain. The previously unheard sound of the father’s voice renders his brief presence uncanny. Because he is too far away for us to see his lips moving, the voice seems detached from any body. Thus, even though he speaks by the end of the film, Jeffrey’s father still does not fully exist in his world as he is othered by his own voice: he is entirely without it at the beginning of the film, and disembodied from it at the end. With the character of Don, Dorothy Vallens’ husband, Lynch goes so far as to imply that those who cannot vocalize themselves fail to exist altogether. Other
Song as dialogue To fill the communicative gap left by the repression of traditional speech, the film privileges song lyrics as a form of dialogue. Useful here is a comparison to the history of African American culture, a central narrative of which has been the systematic repression of black voices by white power structures. In his treatment of sonic afro-modernity, Alexander Weheliye paraphrases Lindon Barrett’s claim that the “black voice functions as a figure of value within African American culture, particularly as it is contrasted with the lack of worth ascribed to blackness in American mainstream culture.”9 To mend this devaluation of blackness, the African-American musical community translates the voice into song, providing through vocal music “a primary means by which [African-Americans] may exchange an expended, valueless self in the New World for a productive, rec23
ognized self.”10 The melodization and lyricization of the African-American voice becomes a tool for overcoming Western culture’s repression of black selfhood. The same dynamic of finding an alternate route to retrieve a subjectivity that has been repressed appears in a different context in Blue Velvet. In the film, multiple characters use song lyrics as a way of bypassing Lynchtown’s repression of the human voice, and through this musicalization of the voice find a way of regaining their selfhood. A comparison between the film’s two renditions of Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams” allows us to see that there are multiple strategies at work in the film for using music as dialogue to achieve subjectivity — and some ways are better than others. “In Dreams” is a leitmotif of the film: before it even plays, Sandy foreshadows it by saying Jeffrey’s plan “sounds like a good day dream,” and Frank later calls his associate, the man in yellow, a “candy-colored clown they call the sandman,” which is the first lyric from the song. Later in the film, Frank’s suave friend Ben lip-syncs the first verse of “In Dreams”: A candy-colored clown they call the sandman Tiptoes to my room every night Just to sprinkle stardust and to whisper: “Go to sleep, everything is alright” ……………………………………. Then I fall asleep To dream my dreams of you.11 As Ben pretends to sing, Frank’s face contorts into disgust and displeasure. Timothy Corrigan argues that “Frank’s horrific ecstasy over Ben’s lip-synched version has much to do with the song’s double removal from natural expression...as a performance of a recording of a performance.”12 Ben’s version lacks the originality and personality of his own voice; his cover registers as pure mimicry rather than as an expression of Ben’s unique relationship to the source material. We can then interpret Frank’s inability to fully enjoy his friend’s version of the song as a result of it being a bad cover — a carbon copy and not a reimagining. Ben’s performance of the song is excruciating for Frank because it does not offer anything new to the music; it remains an interpretation and does not alter the meaning of the original. In the next scene, Frank demonstrates his idea of a good cover. Just before giving Jeffrey a beating, he spits out into Jeffrey’s face a slightly altered version of the chorus of Orbison’s song as it plays in his car: In dreams…I walk with you In dreams…I talk to you In dreams…You’re mine
All the time... Forever, in dreams.13 Here, Frank appropriates the lyrics of the song to suit his situation. While Orbison’s lyrics are the lamentations of a lover towards his dream-girl, Frank’s interpretation of the song is wildly different. The “dream” in his song is actually a nightmare. He uses the lyrics to tell Jeffrey he will haunt him in his sleep — Frank himself becomes the “candy-colored clown they call the sandman.” He also covers the lyrics from Ketty Lester’s “Love Letter” in this scene. What the original artist calls a “love letter straight from my heart”14 is in Frank’s vocabulary a euphemism for “a bullet from a fuckin’ gun.” He tells Jeffrey, “You receive a love letter from me, you’re fucked forever.” Frank thus reimagines the love ballad as a death threat. His subversive covers, along with his distaste for Ben’s lip-synching of “In Dreams,” suggest that, for him, the rearticulation of a song to suit a new meaning is favorable to simply copying it. In Peter Lehman’s biography of Roy Orbison, Lehman reports that the musician initially did not agree with the use of “In Dreams” in Lynch’s film. According to him, Orbison “could not understand how David Lynch could use such a ‘sweet’ song as ‘In Dreams’ in such a disturbing manner in Blue Velvet.”15 Moreover, Lehman quotes Lynch as having said in reference to a meeting he had with Orbison that “[Orbison] was upset”16 because neither of the film’s two uses of the song matched up with his artistic intentions. For Orbison, the song “meant a third thing”17 — he had his own personal interpretation that was different from both the pure balladeering of Ben’s lip-synched version and the menacing intimidation of Frank’s version. However, Orbison would later come around and accept the importance of his song in the film after he “saw it again and…started changing his mind.”18 In the end, even Orbison came to understand the effectiveness of a cover version that generated new meanings different from his original intentions. I still can see blue velvet David Lynch’s Blue Velvet is itself a kind of cover song. As I have argued, the film’s dialogue appropriates song lyrics and adapts them to meanings that differ from the source material. This fascination with songs from the past is a form of retromania, as the characters attempt to adapt musical signifiers from a shared cultural past to the present. Yet ultimately, it is the film itself that looks backward to iconic music from the postwar years and attempts to use it to create new meaning in its present. The film’s visual aesthetic also appropriates the past in tandem with the film’s use of music. While Blue 24
shared a box office with the Reaganite cinema that was the product of this reactionary culture. Lynch’s desecration of the supposed purity of smalltown America flew in the face of President Reagan’s sunny vision of smalltown life as he presented it, for example, in his famous 1984 “It’s morning again in America”21 campaign ad. As the ambiguity of the party scene emphasizes — Jeffrey hesitates for a moment before reciprocating Sandy’s “I love you” — the hidden darkness of Lynchtown lives on in the America of the 1980s. With this in mind, the film can be seen as a cover version specifically of Bobby Vinton’s “Blue Velvet,” one that introduces into the sweet song an element of corruption. Through its repeated appearances over the course of the film, the song becomes rearticulated to reflect the inescapable darkness of Lynchtown. Lynch sets up Blue Velvet’s ending to align with that of its namesake song, pairing the final lyrics of “Blue Velvet” with the sentimental reunion of Dorothy Vallens and her son. The soundtrack tells us “I still can see blue velvet / through my tears;”22 at the same time, Dorothy looks out to the world with an expression of anguish and dismay. The original lyric accommodates the film’s bleak ending, becoming a reminder that Dorothy’s experiences over the course of the film still haunt her. Here, once again, a cover song serves as dialogue in lieu of human speech, allowing us a way to hear that which the characters wish to express, but for which they cannot find the words. Nearly three decades after its initial release, David Lynch’s Blue Velvet remains a work worth examining. It features two seemingly discrete but ultimately inextricable worlds — the first pleasant, the second terrifying — that both restrict human speech, demonstrating Lynchtown’s repression of its characters’ subjectivity to be a broad epidemic. Yet the film offers a kind of auditory discourse that holds up the retromaniacal use of cover songs as dialogue as a valid solution to the crisis of subjectivity in Lynchtown. We cannot stop there: just as the film suggests that its songs are timeless, so are the meanings that the film generates perpetually expanding. As characters in Blue Velvet must listen to the past, so must we keep listening to the wolves howling on the edge of Lynchtown.
Figure 3: Sandy and Jeffrey meet up in a 50s-style diner.
Velvet is not quite a period piece, the costuming and overall production design recalls that of 1950s movies and television (see Figure 3). Given that I have demonstrated how characters appropriate the music of the past in the film, their behaviour fits naturally into the retromaniacal world of Lynchtown. Indeed, Lynchtown itself is only following the trend of popular culture at large. In his study of vinylphilia or vinyl record collecting, John Davis notes that although vinylphiles may be retromaniacal, their nostalgia is not idiosyncratic. Rather, it aligns with the “unique orientation to the past”19 evident in western cultural attention since the 1970s. Blue Velvet, with its 1960’s pop soundtrack and 1950s visual aesthetic, is a participant in this culture of nostalgia. The past-oriented characters of Blue Velvet are only following the retromaniacal logic of the film within which they appear. If Blue Velvet is itself a cover, it is an effective one according to the film’s implied criteria. The film may appropriate the production design of a movie from circa the 1950s, but this setting is complicated by the presence of technology from the production’s present of the mid1980s such as audiotapes and walkie-talkie radios. There is contemporary music too: during the party scene, Jeffrey and Sandy share their first kiss to the tune of Julee Cruise’s “Mysteries of Love,” to which Lynch and his longtime collaborator Angelo Badalamenti contributed the lyrics and music, respectively.20 The song bridges musically the two time periods — the fifties and the eighties — that the film blends aesthetically: it features the slow pace, crooning vocals, and markedly simplistic song form of fifties pop, but the synth-heavy instrumentation and vocal processing typical of eighties pop. The song reveals the film to be a commentary on its present as much as its past. It is important to note that Blue Velvet was made at a time of resurging reactionary politics in the United States and that the film 25
Endnotes 1 Chion, Michel, and Robert Julian. David Lynch. London: BFI Pub, 1995. p.78. Print. 2 Ibid. 3 Reynolds, Simon. Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past. London: Faber & Faber, 2011. Print. 4 Sterne, Jonathan. “Sonic Imaginations.” The Sound Studies Reader. Ed. Jonathan Sterne. New York: Routledge, 2012. 1-17. p.9. Print. 5 Vinton, Bobby, perf. Bernie Wayne and Lee Morris, writ. “Blue Velvet.” Blue Velvet Original Motion Picture Soundtrack. Varèse Sarabande, 1986. CD. 6 Chion. p.85. 7 Sterne. p.4. 8 Ibid p.9. 9 Barrett, Lindon, quoted in Weheliye, Alexander G. “Hearing Sonic Afro-Modernity.” Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity. Durham: Duke UP, 2005. p.37. Print. 10 Ibid. 11 Orbison, Roy. “In Dreams.” Blue Velvet Original Motion Picture Soundtrack. Varèse Sarabande, 1986. CD. 12 Corrigan, Timothy. A Cinema Without Walls: Movies and Culture After Vietnam. New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers UP, 1991. p.73. Print. 13 “In Dreams” 14 Lester, Ketty. “Love Letter.” Blue Velvet Original Motion Picture Soundtrack. Varèse Sarabande, 1986. CD. 15 Lehman, Peter. Roy Orbison: The Invention of an Alternative Rock Masculinity. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2003. p.63. Print. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. p.64. 19 Davis, John. “Going Analog: Vinylphiles and the Consumption of The “Obsolete” Vinyl Record.” Residual Media. Ed. Charles Acland. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. p.228. Print. 20 Cruise, Julee. “Mysteries of Love.” Floating Into the Night. Lyrics by David Lynch, composed by Angelo Badalamenti. Warner Brothers, 1989. CD. 21 Reagan-Bush ‘84. “Ronald Reagan TV Ad: ‘It’s morning in america again.’” Online video clip. Youtube, 12 Nov. 2006. Web. 13 March 2015. 22 “Blue Velvet”
26
T
The Society of the Spectacle (1967). A mainstream analysis of this model was offered by Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1961 farewell address, which famously presented an ominous warning against the entrenchment of a technocratic paradigm by the masters of the military-industrial complex. Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is another work that offers a powerful critique of the conflation of technological advancement with civilizational progress. Kubrick had explored this subject in his previous film, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), a technophobic satire that dramatizes the perils of the military-industrial complex’s consolidation of tremendous destructive power in the hands of a technocratic elite. 2001 explores these same themes, forecasting a future in which humankind has colonized space and technology has colonized the human mind. Paradoxically, 2001 constitutes a landmark work of technological progress within film history and was widely praised for its innovation of cinematic technologies. In other words, the film’s production and reception opposed its ideological intentions. This performative contradiction reflects broader paradoxes surrounding the appropriate political uses of technology that were becoming increasingly apparent in the second half of the twentieth century, and persist today. 2001 rejects the meta-narrative of technological progress that predominated the postwar era. The violence of technology is staged most manifestly in the iconic bone to space weapon graphic match, which I will avoid discussing in detail, given its excessive examination by film scholars. It is worth noting, however, that the graphic match articulates the prehistoric origins of this phenomenon— the irony of supposed progress, as informed by technological advancement. Through its collapsing of an expansive temporal gulf, the graphic match yields a historical dialectic to remind viewers that the dangers of technocracy have been present throughout the trajectory of human history, and are certainly not unique to the postwar period. One of 2001’s principal critiques of humankind’s relationship with technology is its increasingly parasitic nature, indicated most prominently in the mechanization of human behaviour. The humans of 2001 operate with a degree of roboticism that rivals the machines’. For example, when Dr. Heywood Floyd is admitted to Space Station V for a layover on his way to the Clavius Base, he interacts with a variety of technological apparatuses, from interstellar video calling to a zero gravity toilet. Kubrick could easily have sensationalized Floyd’s experience here—as is typical of mainstream cinematic futurism—by fetishizing the many technologies that would have astonished viewers in 1968, at the
he aftermath of the Second World War saw the emergence of a new international economic and political order managed by the United States of America. World War II had stimulated a comprehensive reorganization of the United States’ industrial economy, as the nation’s vigorous military production repelled any possibility of a second Great Depression. This also reinforced the prominence of a teleological meta-narrative of technological progress, wherein human progress is measured according to technological advancement. The United States ensured that the lucrative military economy would endure beyond a wartime context, giving birth to the military-industrial complex. This championing of technological progress was thoroughly imbricated with the politics of the Cold War, especially after the USSR successfully launched the first satellite, Sputnik 1, into orbit on October 4, 1957. Many Americans perceived the success of Sputnik 1 as a national threat on par with the 1941 Pearl Harbor attack.1 Policies were consequently enacted to integrate technology throughout American institutions and everyday life. For example, a policy designed to fund and improve technological education was tellingly named the National Defense Education Act of 1958,2 positing the citizen’s psyche as a territory that, through educational technologies, could be administered and defended. Sputnik dramatically escalated the stakes of the Space Race as a specular arena in which economic, military, technological, and scientific achievements were to be violently asserted in a grandiose spectacle of civilizational conquest. Technological progress became a barometer by which Americans could quantify their superiority to the USSR — a presumed superiority that was seriously threatened by the successful launch of Sputnik. American Cold War ideology thus required the thorough militarization of technology, both conceptually and literally, as a crucial site in which to showcase progress. The United States’ postwar economy was also reinvigorated by a renewed consumerist mentality, and in the coming decades the effects of this new technocratic paradigm would become omnipresent in the American domestic sphere. In a 1959 speech entitled “What Freedom Means to Us,” Richard Nixon boasted about American families’ owning of 56 million cars, 50 million television sets, and 143 million radios,3 submitting the financial accessibility of manufactured commodities as an indicator of freedom and progress. Throughout the sixties, this emphasis on technological progress was challenged by a variety of individuals and media, from Murray Bookchin’s Our Synthetic Environment (1962) to Guy Debord’s 28
time of the film’s release. Instead, these technologies persistently intervene in Floyd’s experience; they are inconvenient and banal. Critic Alexander Walker notes: ‘Here you are, sir’ are the first words we hear, spoken by a receptionist on the Wheel to Dr. Floyd; the film started more than thirty minutes before. It is no accident that the routine formula recalls stock phrases of welcome and farewell in use by airline personnel on earth today. The remark introduces a sequence designed to show how man has extended his presence in space without noticeably enlarging the range of human responses.4 This image of the mechanical man persists throughout the remainder of the sequence. As Floyd enters the Picturephone room to call his daughter on earth, two men walk by, their strides perfectly synchronized as their footsteps dominate the sonic field, emphasizing the roboticism exhibited by the space-inhabiting humans of 1999. Floyd then proceeds to phone his daughter, and the two of them are profoundly unimpressed by the spatial obstacles conquered by Picturephone technology. (Later, on the Discovery One spaceship, a similar “Happy Birthday” videophone call is transmitted from Frank Poole’s parents; similarly, this video message emphasizes the systematic banality of these highly advanced technologies.) The phone call is immediately followed by Floyd’s tense discussion with a group of Russian scientists. Both Floyd and the Russians’ speech is formal and methodical, informing viewers that the two nations remain in a state of conflict while once again reinforcing the near au-
tomation of sociality in technologically mediated space. Even the camera assumes a rigid, robotic gaze. The entire sequence of Floyd’s admittance to the space station underlines technology’s colonization of the human mind, as a consequence of conquering the space frontier. Furthermore, American brands such as Pan-Am, IBM, and American Express persist into the future, signifying the supposedly inextinguishable pioneering spirit of the West facilitated by its alliance of technology with capital. The film’s next segment, the Jupiter Mission, stages a dramatic conflict centered around the malfunctioning of HAL 9000, the Discovery One spaceship’s Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer. Despite being a computer, HAL is regarded by many as being 2001’s most entertaining character, possessing the most distinctive personality traits. In contrast, the astronauts Dr. David Bowman and Dr. Frank Poole are frighteningly unemotional and sterile, utterly evacuated of all humanity. Kubrick stages them in counterpoint to HAL, fashioning an ironic inversion of man and machine. This contrast is emphasized most starkly in the characters’ encounters with death. When Poole is ejected into space to await an imminent death, Kubrick offers no close up of his face, obstructing the viewer’s ability to identify or sympathize with him. Rather, the camera lingers on Bowman’s passionless attempts at saving Poole’s life. The hibernating astronauts’ deaths are then depicted with the utmost dispassion, as lines plateau and beeps come to a halt on screens monitoring their failing vital functions. In contrast, the death of HAL is the most emo-
Figure 1: Bowman walks through Discovery One.
29
tional scene in 2001, featuring its only handheld camerawork. Bowman kills HAL by disconnecting his memory and processor modules, methodically disassembling his ‘neurological’ capacities until they devolve back to the most primal form of artificial intelligence: its ability to sing “Daisy Bell.”5 Furthermore, it is made clear that HAL malfunctions as a result of a paradox in his programming, which requires him to be honest with the astronauts while also withholding key information about their mission. As HAL himself notes, his malfunctioning “can only be attributable to human error.” Through the character of HAL, Kubrick articulates the moral ambivalence of technology (as he did with the atomic bomb, the CRM-114 Discriminator, and the doomsday device in Dr. Strangelove), reminding viewers that technology is inattentive to ethical considerations. Rather, humans are ultimately accountable for their creations’ destructive behaviour. The future 2001 projects for humankind’s relationship with technology is not an optimistic one, but serves to highlight the irony of supposed progress and the paradoxes that constitute this meta-narrative of technological advancement. Ironically, despite the film’s explicit condemnation of technology’s societal omnipresence and the installation of technocratic structures, 2001 is renowned for its groundbreaking use of special effects. Upon its initial release, 2001 was praised for its revolutionary development of cinematic technologies and little else. On April 4, 1968, the day of 2001’s theatrical release, Renata Adler of the New York Times wrote that “the movie is so completely absorbed in its own problems, its use of color and space, its fanatical devotion to its science-fiction detail, that it is somewhere between hypnotic and immensely boring.”6 Two days earlier in Variety, Robert Frederick had characterized 2001 as “a major achievement in cinematography and special effects [which] lacks dramatic appeal to a large degree.”7 The New Republic, Harper’s, the Washington Post, Village Voice, countless other mainstream media sources, and many of the era’s prominent film theorists (such as Andrew Sarris) gave the film negative reviews, suggesting that it was boring and unimaginative, with the exception of its widely praised special effects. 2001 was awarded the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects, which was the only personal Academy Award that Kubrick received in his career. It seems that for many critics, technology redeemed 2001 — a film that adamantly refuted the notion that technological advancements constitute progress. The film was received as an impressive feat in the development of cinematic technology, while its other accomplishments — especially its political ones — were largely ignored. Ultimately, 2001’s reception merely reflected
the prominence of a collective consciousness Kubrick sought to subvert: that which upheld technological progress as constitutive of political and moral superiority. The triumph of the film’s visual technologies had a massive impact on the future of mainstream cinema, as its success “set Hollywood on a new path: a cinema of special effects.”8 Kubrick’s use of technology in 2001 became the exemplary model of cinematic special effects, informing — even defining — the visual styles and formal objectives of a new generation of blockbuster-oriented post-classical Hollywood filmmakers. Steven Spielberg referred to 2001 as the “big bang” of his filmmaking generation9 and William Friedkin asserted that “2001 is the grandfather of all our films... this was the film that was imprinted on the consciousness of everyone who saw it.”10 James Cameron identified 2001 as the defining film that aroused his interest in filmmaking and cinematic technology,11 and George Lucas stated that “in terms of special effects, [2001] is the pinnacle... and it will always be.”12 2001 is a watershed film not only in its development of cinematic technologies, but also in its redefining the purpose of special effects in cinema as the key feature of a new, immensely profitable model of Hollywood filmmaking.13 These testimonies clearly indicate that 2001’s legacy in popular cinematic history is largely, if not solely, a result of Kubrick’s technological creativity. This legacy, the heightened importance of technology in cinema, seems diametrically opposed to 2001’s intended political intervention. In addition to his groundbreaking special effects innovations, Kubrick relied heavily on contemporary research in astrophysics throughout the production of 2001. During pre-production, he hired NASA scientist Fred Ordway as a consultant to ensure scientific accuracy or at least plausibility, especially in the various modules on Discovery One.14 Science Communication scholar David Kirby notes: With Ordway’s assistance the production staff consulted with over sixty-five private companies, government agencies, university groups, and research institutions. In addition, Kubrick hired Ordway’s business partner, Harry Lange, as a production designer. Lange had previously worked for NASA illustrating advanced space vehicle concepts... Essentially, Kubrick was asking Lange to do the same for his film.15 Although the future they forecasted was a little hyperbolized, reflecting their anticipation of the Space Race’s sustained acceleration through the end of the century, many aspects of 2001’s depiction of space life and its technology would be authenticated in the years following the film’s 30
release. For instance, the radical design of the Discovery One spaceship simulates gravity through centrifugal force (see Figure 1). For decades, engineers have been attempting to incorporate similar artificial gravity technologies into their designs, one of which was even named the Discovery II.16
puter to help him catalog the hundreds of special effects shots. The use of the most up-to-date scientific research and technological equipment was depended upon in every aspect of 2001’s production. The film’s production seemed to endorse a productive reliance upon technology, against which 2001 positions itself ideologically. Formally, 2001 was highly innovative for a mainstream, big budget picture. In many ways, Kubrick was an independent filmmaker working with a studio-sized budget. The widespread popular success of Dr. Strangelove ensured that he could retain creative autonomy with few financial restraints, enabling him to produce a formally radical film. 2001’s inventive form recalls the consideration of Figure 2: Space Station V as seen in space during the Blue Danube sequence. medium specificity for Most significantly, though, visual effects in 2001 which art critic Clement Greenberg advocated. In his engorge the film’s formal vocabulary, enhancing its en- essay “Towards a Newer Laocoön” (1940), Greenberg thralling pulse and stylistic sophistication while upholding critiques Western painting, explaining that “it has always Kubrick’s meticulous attention to realism and detail. For had a bias towards a realism that tries to achieve illusion the famous Blue Danube sequence, special effects techni- by overpowering the medium, and is more interested in cians projected massive, unwieldy objects onto a weight- exploiting the practical meaning of objects than in saless and balletic habitat with unprecedented elegance (see voring their appearance.”18 Greenberg condemns such Figure 2). The grace with which the spaceships dance to an approach for its “denial of the medium” and goes on Strauss’s waltz presents a powerful stylistic juxtaposition to identify music as the “paragon art... which the other to the previous sequence, The Dawn of Man, there- avant-garde arts envied most, and whose effects they tried by enhancing the thematic power of the iconic graphic hardest to imitate.”19 Greenberg’s endorsement of music match. Despite the supposed civilizational sophistication as embodying the principle of medium specificity is fitpromised by the intersection of space travel and high art, ting, given Kubrick’s intentions with 2001. When asked humankind has only managed to amplify its destructive about the film’s metaphysical message, Kubrick explained: capabilities — the violent urge that impels it forward. The I tried to create a visual experience, one that sheer number of special effects shots Kubrick required bypasses verbalized pigeonholing and directly — not to mention, their complexity — was unheard of penetrates the subconscious with an emotionin contemporary cinema. The countless Technicolor yelal and philosophic content. To convolute Mclow-cyan-magenta masters used in rear-projection shots Luhan,20 in 2001 the message is the medium. I in the windows of various spacecrafts required half a intended the film to be an intensely subjective dozen cameras, shooting simultaneously on twenty-fourexperience that reaches the viewer at an inhour shifts for months.17 Naturally, organizing these thouner level of consciousness, just as music does.21 sands of feet of special effects footage and keeping track It is clear that these objectives, as well as the final of their progress was a challenge, and both Kubrick’s product of 2001, are in agreement with Greenberg’s ideas. notebook coordination systems and organizational wall- For instance, the bone to space weapon graphic match excharts failed. Consequently, he resorted to renting a com- plores and exploits film’s distinctive temporal properties 31
planes.22 If art is to explore conditions that are specific to its medium, it seems that cinema must necessarily investigate the limitations of and possibilities offered by technology. It is Kubrick’s pursuit of this ideal that led him to create a landmark achievement in the history of cinema. However, it also confronted him with a double bind: a commitment to form that contradicted his ideological intentions. One manifestation of this double bind is encapsulated in 2001’s depictions of Earth. The first clear image of planet Earth from space was “The Blue Marble,” which was photographed by astronauts aboard the Apollo 17 spacecraft in December of 1972 — more than four years after the release of 2001.23 This meant Kubrick’s special effects team was required to predict the appearance of the Earth from space, relying on advanced cinematic technologies to do so. Concurrently, this external perspective of the Earth served Kubrick’s ideological goals by presenting an implicitly distant, extraterrestrial observance of human civilizational progress — or the lack thereof. The present-day significance of these images is even greater, as they are now associated with the global ecological conservation movement, which was emerging at the time of 2001’s release. Contradictions regarding the societal role of technology — the attempts to reconcile its destructive power with its potential benefits — are by no means unique to 2001, but rather permeated society and, in fact, continue to do so. While most countercultural groups of the late 1960s sought to dismantle the institutions that preserved dominant values, they were also heavily reliant on mass media. For instance, demonstrators at the 1968 Democratic National Convention famously chanted that the “whole world is watching,” stressing Figure 3: The artwork filmed with the split-scan technique (above) and how it appears during the Stargate sequence (below). that the media presence at the riot ensured police brutality would not go unnoticed.24 in a manner that is unique to the cinematic medium. The Stargate sequence does the same, and constitutes a major These ideological paradoxes are reflected in the two irachievement in special effects cinema (see Figure 3). For reconcilable objectives with which Kubrick was faced: this sequence, special effects supervisor Douglas Trum- his dedication to medium-specific artistic innovation bull adopted scientific and industrial photographic tech- and his ideological aim of eradicating technology’s staniques to develop a cinematic rendering of the slit-scan tus as the supposed empirical indicator of progress. Walter Benjamin was first published in English technique, allowing him to create palettes of coloured lights moving at incredible speeds on seemingly infinite in 1968, the year that 2001 first landed on screen. Near32
ly thirty years after his tragic suicide — and still today, 75 years later — Benjamin’s writings continue to provide a useful framework through which to contemplate the politics of technology. In the epilogue of his 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Benjamin argues that the overproduction facilitated by technological advancements should naturally impel the masses towards a desire to change property relations. The only way for fascism to quell this desire is through war, for “only war makes it possible to mobilize all of today’s technical resources while maintaining the property system.”25 Consequently, fascism aestheticizes war, thereby redirecting the masses’ desire for transformed property relations by fulfilling their desire to express themselves. Technologized spectacles such as the Space Race epitomize the Cold War manifestations of this phenomenon in their seduction of American masses through a narrative of national superiority, which provided opportunities for nationalistic expression that belied the possibility for radical political progressivism. 2001 circumvents this problematic by avoiding the inclusion of indoctrinatory content. Despite its arresting aesthetics, viewers are not merely bombarded with technological spectacle. Kubrick carefully establishes a critical, spectatorial tone. Initially, he and coauthor Arthur C. Clarke had intended to include voice-over throughout the film, explaining the significance of the monolith in the Dawn of Man sequence and contextualizing the space sequences within a nuclear stalemate between the United States and the USSR. Instead, Kubrick removed as much dialogue as possible, creating a narratively ambiguous film that lends itself to multiple understandings and requires the viewer to engage in a participatory interpretive experience. 2001 offers viewers not an illusion of expression but a meaningful opportunity for critical engagement, without attempting to conceal the crises of overproduction that give rise to war and preserve technocratic authority. Despite the delusory notion that the Cold War was ‘cold’ in its alleged scarcity of violence, the conflict’s technocratic elite orchestrated mass bloodshed in surrogate states that aestheticized violence to engage populations in forms of ideological expression that maintained current property relations. Benjamin writes in 1936 that under such a model, “instead of draining rivers, society directs a human stream into a bed of trenches.”26 In 1940, he would kill himself to resist being engulfed by such a stream of corpses — the one produced by the Nazis. Earlier that year, in his pressing “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Benjamin alluded to another dangerous stream. He wrote that the German working class “regarded techno-
logical developments as the fall of the stream with which it thought it was moving. From there it was but a step to the illusion that the factory work which was supposed to tend toward technological progress constituted a political achievement.”27 The masters of the military-industrial complex advocate this same model of improving the material lives of some and creating conditions for nationalistic expression in exchange for complacency. As Kubrick articulates in his iconic graphic match — his Benjaminian “leap in the open air of history”28 — although the particularities of the technologies deployed may have progressed dramatically, their core function remains to divert populations from the radical potential that technology can truly offer. 2001 reminds us of this radical potential. Released in 1968, at the height of the Space Race, 2001: A Space Odyssey interrupted the dominant views that regard technological advancements as being indicative of civilizational progress. This perspective was buttressed by post-Sputnik Cold War politics that demanded the American government adopt increasingly technocratic features in assertion of its global dominance. Paradoxically, the film itself was praised for its achievements in special effects — its use of technology — revealing a double-bind in which Kubrick’s commitment to medium-specific formal innovation seemed to contradict his ideological intentions. Walter Benjamin reminds us that technological violence, such as that staged in 2001, is not an inherent feature of technology but a particular model entrenched by a technocratic elite to preclude any possibility for meaningful political change. America’s cold warriors espoused a dangerous understanding of technology as equivalent to progress to suit their political agenda, exploiting the moral ambivalence of technology to a destructive end. Today, this meta-narrative of technological progress persists with unprecedented omnipresence, its repercussions all the more palpable. The potential benefits of technological advancement have also become increasingly apparent in recent decades. We must therefore recognize, as Benjamin does, the diverse political possibilities for technology, returning to HAL’s conclusion that its violent abuse “can only be attributable to human error.” 2001, in its responsible use of technology to produce alluring aesthetics that nonetheless demand criticality, shows us that technology is not bound to the political conservatism that assuages the oppressed into a sedative complacency. Kubrick’s extensive reliance on technology in 2001 reminds us of a progressive potentiality located in the critical use of technological media — one that has only become more pressing in the digital age. 33
18 Clement Greenberg, “Towards a Newer Laocoön,” from The Collected Essays and Criticism: Volume 1: Perceptions and Judgments, 1939-1944, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 27. 19 Ibid, 31. 20 Kubrick’s evocation of Marshall McLuhan here is striking, as McLuhan was not only a prominent media theorist but also had a direct institutional influence. For example, as part of Title VII of the National Defense Education Act of 1958, the American government paid McLuhan $35,000 in 1959 to write a report on “new media,” the findings of which directly impacted educational technology policy. See also Acland, “From Mass Brainwashing to Rapid Mass Learning.” 21 Stanley Kubrick and Eric Nordern, “Playboy Interview: Stanley Kubrick” from Stanley Kubrick: Interviews, ed. Gene D. Phillips (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001), 47. 22 Trumbull. 23 Gregory A. Petsko, “The Blue Marble,” Genome Biology, vol. 12, no. 4 (2011): 112. 24 Irwin Unger, The Sixties (Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 2011), 216. 25 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), 241. 26 Ibid, 242. 27 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” in Illuminations, 258. 28 Ibid, 261.
Endnotes
1 Charles Acland, “From Mass Brainwashing to Rapid Mass Learning” in Swift Viewing: The Popular Life of Subliminal Influence (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 175. 2 Ibid, 180. 3 Richard Nixon, “What Freedom Means to Us” in Consumer Society in American History: A Reader, Lawrence B. Glickman (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 299. 4 Alexander Walker, Sybil Taylor, and Ulrich Ruchti, Stanley Kubrick, Director: A Visual Analysis (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1999), 183. 5 “Daisy Bell” plays an important role in the history of artificial intelligence, as the first song performed by a computer: an IBM 7094, in 1961. See also Andrea Grover’s edited volume New Art and Science Affinities. 6 Renata Adler, “The Screen: ‘2001 Is Up, Up and Away,” New York Times, April 4, 1968. 7 Robert B. Frederick, “2001: A Space Odyssey,” Variety, April 2, 1968. 8 Bill Krohn, Masters of Cinema: Stanley Kubrick (Paris: Cahiers du Cinema, 2010), 48. 9 James Verniere, “2001: A Space Odyssey” from The A List: The National Society of Film Critics’ 100 Essential Films, ed. Jay Carr (Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 2002), 1. 10 William Friedkin, qtd. in Standing on the Shoulders of Kubrick: The Legacy of 2001, dir. Gary Leva, DVD, Leva FilmWorks, 2007. 11 Anne Thompson and James Cameron, “The Final Frontier” from James Cameron: Interviews, ed. Brent Dunham (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012), 133. 12 The Legacy of 2001, Leva, 2007. 13 Julie Turnock, Plastic Reality: Special Effects, Art and Technology in 1970s US Filmmaking (Ann Arbor, Michigan: ProQuest, 2008), 85. 14 David Kirby, Lab Coats in Hollywood: Science, Scientists, and Cinema (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011), 2. 15 Ibid. 16 Craig H. Williams, Leonard A. Dudzinski, Stanley K. Borowski, and Albert J. Juhasz, Realizing “2001: A Space Odyssey”: Piloted Spherical Torus Nuclear Fusion Propulsion (Cleveland, Ohio: Glenn Research Center, 2005), NASA. 17 Douglas Trumbull, “Creating Special Effects for 2001: A Space Odyssey,” from American Cinematographer, vol. 49, issue 2 (Oakland: ASC Holding Corporation, 1968). 34
M
outset, the film portrays the genders as equal for Michael; ichael Dorsey, a talented but notoriously dif- the experiences of being a man or of being a woman are ficult actor, disguises himself as a woman to earn a soap equally performable, and are only set apart by the clothes opera role — a transformation that frames the 1982 film we wear, the voice we use, and the roles we audition for. Tootsie’s1 discourse on contemporary feminism. Michael’s This perspective, embodied by Michael when he initial goal in cross-dressing was to make himself avail- dresses as ‘Dorothy’ and tries out for a soap opera role (see able for more roles and to therefore make more money. Figure 1), is fundamentally postfeminist; it implies that This perspective — which implies that the genders have the genders have reached a point of liberal equality and equal opportunity — coincides with Anthony C. Bleach’s also glazes over any conception of Michael’s male priviconception of postfeminism, in that Michael glazes over lege. His initially carefree personification of ‘female’ attrihis own male privilege for the purposes of ascending butes and experiences assumes that the genders are equaleconomically. However, through his female persona, ly ‘up for grabs,’ without any political, social or economic ‘Dorothy,’ Michael becomes aware of the inequalities baggage. This ‘gender-blindness’ is put most strikingly on that women continue to face and uses his popularity as display when Michael’s Dorothy persona is first revealed. an actress to actively counter this lasting sexism. In doing Beginning in a medium-long shot, ‘Dorothy’ walks directso, Michael attempts to create a genuine feminist subjec- ly towards the camera amidst a crowd of pedestrians, and tivity that will aid and inspire other women. Though the were she not the only figure in focus, there is nothing that film is circulating a seemingly feminist agenda through would distinguish her from the crowd’s other men and Michael’s public pushback against his patriarchal society, women (see Figure 2). ‘She,’ in a postfeminist culture, is this agenda is nonetheless undermined by the film’s rem- portrayed as equal. However, once Michael, as Dorothy, nant patriarchal framework, visible in its “male-saviour” interacts with the soap opera studio’s producers, this postcharacter and voyeuristic formal elements. By examin- feminist mindset is thrown off-balance and challenged. ing Tootsie’s gender politics, I argue that the film makes a complex and progressive case against the 1980s’ postfeminist ideologies by identifying and explicating enduring gender inequalities. However, in advancing its feminist perspective, the film reverts to patriarchal characterization and formal means, ultimately complicating and destabilizing the possibility of offering a straightforward feminist reading. Instead, Tootsie advances a complex argument for gender equality that relies on seeing the gender binary itself as unstable and arbitrary. When Michael’s agent informs him that “no one will hire [him]” as an actor, the female persona he adopts Figure 1: Michael as ‘Dorothy.’ becomes just one of his many availMichael’s initial transformation into Dorothy is able character roles as a multi-faceted actor. The film’s also based on his desire for economic gain — he wants opening montage reveals Michael getting turned down to produce and star in his roommate’s play, and in order for roles in countless auditions, and he expresses hope- to do so, he needs to raise $8,000. Anthony C. Bleach fully that he can ‘be’ whoever the directors want: tall, argues that postfeminist forms of selfhood are intrinsishort, old, young, and as the film reveals soon after, a cally linked to social class, and that in postfeminist culman or a woman. Michael’s decision to cross-dress is, in ture, economic liberation and the accumulation of goods this context, not politically charged — it is simply proof fall at the center of a female’s transformation into an that he can perform yet another role, and being female individual2. In Bleach’s view, “postfeminist culture redeis presented as advantageous for getting jobs. From the fines feminism in a way that it sanctions ‘individualist, 36
acquisitive, and transformative’ values and behaviours”3. Though Michael is not yet a ‘woman’ when he sets out to raise his money, his economic drive for personal accomplishment falls in line with Bleach’s notion of the postfeminist heroine. Michael’s intensely selective mode of choosing acting jobs, through which he attempts to build up his reputation and acquire respect in the theatre community, reveals that his goal for raising the $8,000 is tied to a class hierarchy – but a hierarchy slightly different from that which Bleach analyzes. Rather than pursuing “economic well-being and empowerment” for the purposes of social class negotiation4, Michael intends to raise money to rise in the hierarchy of artistic Figure 2: Dorothy in the midst of ‘gender-blindness.’ success. Producing the play, starring in it, sexism in her own life – she breaks up with her cheating and demonstrating his own artistic liberty and good taste are central to Michael’s economic goal, boyfriend Ron, who is also the show’s chauvinistic direcand it is when he adopts these “acquisitive” values that tor, and deviates from the stereotypical elements of her his gender becomes ‘irrelevant’ and he decides to trans- own character on the show. Dorothy’s gradual empowerform into Dorothy. Michael’s combined conception of ment is also represented formally; as the film progresses, the genders as equal and his acquisitive and transforma- Dorothy is granted an increasing amount of close-ups, tive economic motivation reveal Tootsie’s initially postfem- compared to the relatively medium and long shots that inist perspective, which is overturned once Michael, as capture her earlier on in the film. Dorothy’s empowerDorothy, experiences what it is truly like to be a woman. ment in her workplace —a transition that is signified by Michael’s postfeminist mindset is transformed her more active role in the soap opera’s production and when he begins to be treated inferiorly by men as Dor- her increased formal prowess — signal the film’s femothy, and through his active rebuttal of the gender in- inist agenda: one that renders the media’s sexism overt consistencies he encounters, Tootsie makes some valuable and encourages women, through Dorothy’s example, claims against postfeminism’s perceived gender equality. to actively claim their agency by standing up for themDorothy most explicitly counters the previously invisible selves in the midst of a still unequal, patriarchal society. Though the film does advance a seemingly femgender imbalance by making these inequalities visible to inist agenda in response to its originally postfeminist his female counterparts, the studio’s producers and director, and the audience – both of the soap opera and of ideologies, elements of its fundamentally patriarchal Tootsie itself. When she first reads from the show’s script framework are still visible. Tootsie’s female characters lack as Emily Kimberley, the character she is later hired to play, agency: Julie is unable to stand up for herself or speak Dorothy is immediately struck by how crudely the part is up against Ron while he cheats on her, and Michael’s girlwritten. Rather than representing an empowered woman friend Sandy has difficulty being angry, instead blaming in charge of the show’s fictive hospital, Emily Kimberley herself for the way that men treat her and her inability to is what Dorothy calls “a gross caricature” of an unfemi- land an acting job. This denial of female agency is recognine woman. Instead of playing the role as such, Dorothy nized and partially resolved by Michael when he ‘becomes’ repeatedly changes the script during shooting, and in do- Dorothy — he helps female characters ‘become’ ‘men’ ing so, carves out her own empowered position to inevi- and counter their injustices through the example she sets. tably become what the show’s only female producer calls However, the film here continues to maintain a conde“the first female character who is her own person.” Dor- scending and sexist tone. The female characters are apothy’s feminist endeavour inspires Julie, his love interest parently passive to their inequality and are not intelligent and the show’s other female star, to push back against the enough to realize that they are being mistreated; it is only 37
when a man comes into their life in the form of a frumpy, [the male’s] desire for her”6. In Cook’s analysis, when the intimidating woman that they are shown how to have male body is central to the film’s spectacle — much as agency. The film pushes this element even farther into Dustin Hoffman’s is when playing Michael/Dorothy in the realm of stereotype by casting the submissive female Tootsie — the female body is not directly objectified, but characters with classically ‘beautiful’ actresses, and hav- is rather objectified through the mediating male body. A ing their problems be resolved by a less attractive, older, particularly explicit example is when Julie and Dorothy and unmarried ‘woman,’ thereby extending the stereotype visit the former’s childhood home in the countryside and that women’s attractiveness is related to their intelligence. a montage reveals Julie performing various activities: ridThough the soap opera’s female producer states that she ing a horse, feeding her baby, dancing in the kitchen, etc. has been waiting for someone like Dorothy all along, Though Tootsie is seemingly circulating a feminist agenthe question remains of why it took a man in a dress to da, this montage is still seen through the voyeuristic gaze make her actively change the show’s patriarchal structure. of the camera, with Michael/Dorothy taking an active Female agency depends upon women being given pleasure in looking at Julie as a sexualized, passive oba voice and speaking for themselves. Though Michael as ject. As Julie is shown in each activity, the camera lingers Dorothy encourages the women to do so, the fact that on her body parts — her feet as she dances, her finger it is a white, cis, heterosexual man showing the charac- in her mouth as she tastes food — and slows down the ters how to be better women by speaking on behalf of flow of action, even at times putting her out of focus them ultimately denies their agency. Although Dorothy’s or framing her figure through a window (see Figure 3). increasing close-ups throughout the film demonstrate her Michael is, in contrast, shown in close-up and in focus, growing agency and importance among the other char- watching her actions unnoticed. Since Michael is still disacters and in the soap opera’s production, at the end of the day Dorothy is still a privileged man, and the formal means of capturing the women’s characters do not undergo any significant change. Ultimately, Michael’s position as a ‘male-saviour’ who rescues women from their own passive selves by showing them agency is a hypocritical example of men continuing to deny female agency. Tootsie’s formal Figure 3: An inaccessible gaze: Julie seen voyeuristically through a window. conventions also reflect an inherently patriarchal and sexist cinematic tradition guised as Dorothy in this sequence and cannot admit his when capturing Julie’s body. Pam Cook, in her analysis love for her, his sexualized gaze upon Julie is one of inof Raging Bull, argues that there is an ambiguity around accessibility — his voyeuristic look mirrors the viewer’s. the male body that “is not quite the same as that which The viewer’s access to Julie is mediated through surrounds the woman’s body in classic Hollywood, where Michael’s desire, thereby “confirming identification with the active desire of the woman represents a problem the male hero”7 while enabling the viewer’s voyeuristic which the film sets out to resolve”5. Furthermore, she gaze. This formal occurrence is sexist and patriarchalstates “fixation on the male body as object of desire has ly-structured because it enables the objectification of consequences for the representation of the woman’s Julie’s character and further denies her agency. Though body…the spectator’s look at [the male body] is direct… in terms of plot Tootsie vouches for a greater awarebut our access to [the female body] is mediated through ness of the 1980s’ gender inequalities, the film’s formal 38
structure is still trapped within the sexist Hollywood conventions that turn women into objects of desire. Though Tootsie’s feminist agenda appears to be undermined by the inherent ‘maleness’ of Dorothy’s character and its voyeuristic formal elements, the film still advances an important political and critical argument that is most visible in the film’s final scene. Rather than adopting a postfeminist perspective where, in Bleach’s view, female protagonists’ class ascendancy takes place at the cost of other women8, Tootsie advocates that individuality and true gender equality stem from an acceptance of everyone as ‘people,’ instead of as categorized beings. In the film’s ending, Michael insists that “Dorothy is still here,” that he can still be Julie’s friend, and that he can even lend her “that little yellow outfit” she admires. Michael’s statements place he and Julie on a seemingly even level — neither has the upper hand and neither is trying to gain it in a postfeminist sense by arguing or putting down the other. Implicit in Michael’s apology is his acknowledgement that the male and female genders are ultimately entwined. The gender binary that Michael has to that point maintained, as he switched carefully between his male and female personas, is recognized as arbitrary, with nothing truly distinguishing the genders apart from one’s dress, voice, or the roles one chooses. The film’s ending demonstrates a perspective that throughout the rest of the film had not yet become clear: Tootsie is not ultimately postfeminist or feminist, but is rather post-gender. Rather than considering its characters as ‘men’ and ‘women,’ the film encourages viewers to simply regard them as ‘people.’ Through an examination of Tootsie’s gender politics, one can track how the film’s political agenda shifts and oscillates along with Michael’s own gender transformation. Though the film originally depicts the 1980s postfeminist ideologies that define male/female experience, it ultimately makes a complex and progressive case against them by identifying and explicating the decade’s enduring gender inequalities. However, this potentially feminist perspective is eventually undermined by the film’s patriarchal characteristic and formal means. Instead, Tootsie makes a post-gender argument, ultimately viewing the gender binary itself as unstable and arbitrary. Though this alternative political perspective does not negate or excuse the fact that the film still employs patriarchal elements, it does lend Tootsie some credibility as a political medium, since its agenda may never have been a concretely feminist one. In the end, though Michael was indeed “a better man as a woman than [he] ever was for a woman as a man,” the question of what being a ‘woman’ or a ‘man’ really means remains at the film’s center, and is still up for debate.
Endnotes 1 Tootsie. Dir. Sydney Pollack. Columbia Tristar, 1982, DVD. 2 Bleach, Anthony C. “Postfeminist Cliques? Class, Postfeminism, and the Molly Ringwald-John Hughes Films.” Cinema Journal 49.3 (Spring 2010): 28. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid., 43. 5 Cook, Pam. “Masculinity in Crisis? Tragedy and Identification in Raging Bull.” Screen 23.3/4 (Sept/Oct 1982): 43. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8 Bleach, Anthony C. “Postfeminist Cliques? Class, Postfeminism, and the Molly Ringwald-John Hughes Films.” Cinema Journal 49.3 (Spring 2010): 34.
39
I
understand the material, political, and aesthetic forces that shaped the queer experience in the early 1990s. The film was released a year after Margaret Thatcher stepped down from power. Thatcher has been credited, along with U.S. president Ronald Reagan and others, with the establishment of a set of social, political, and economic policies known as neoliberalism. This process of neoliberalization, David Harvey argues, has entailed much “creative destruction,” not only of prior institutional frameworks and powers but also of social divisions of labour, social relations, welfare provisions, ways of life and thought, reproductive activities, attachment to the land and habits of the heart.1 Added to the gradual disintegration of traditional and familiar structures, this was period marked by an AIDS-anxiety driven mainstream culture. As such, a state of queer precarity in the late twentieth century refers to the double, and often overlapping, threat of economic uncertainty and biological peril. Edward II is enmeshed in this historical moment as an example of New Queer Cinema, which as B. Ruby Rich describes is part of a queer counterculture that arose during the late 1980s and early 1990s. According to Rich, New Queer Cinema is a current of films created in the early 1990s in response to these historical conditions, which favoured pastiche and appropriation and was influenced by art and activism.2 Rich categorizes Jarman’s filmmaking practice within New Queer cinema due to the politically subversive contents of his films, which are usually coupled with experimental decisions at the level of form. One such example is the way in which the director often strips the diegesis of his films of the traditional logics of symbols and referents. Edward II’s mise-en-scene is exemplary of the filmmaking style of the director, which is characterized by this erosion of visual signifiers. Jarman’s work, then, can also be understood to occupy a space under another trend within visual culture that Christine Ross dubs as “precarious visualities” which ratify a bodily turn, by addressing how vision is interrelated with other senses.3 The emphasis traditionally given to the sense of sight is contested in these works, which instead rely on the multiple sensuous and affective mechanisms of the body; by denying access to the visual referents and symbols in the mise-en-scene that are usually essential to a visual medium like film, Jarman’s work is exemplary of these precarious visualities as well. Jarman’s Edward II not only relies on the aesthetic practice of these visualities, however, but also enacts a state of referential crisis — which is to say, a state where the perceiving subject finds itself struggling for ways in which to perceive and discern the events that are unfold-
n both his safest and most perilous moments — at the height of his power and during his almost-fatal subjugation — King Edward II finds himself lost in a landscape of absence and flatness. In his 1991 adaptation of Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II, Derek Jarman places his characters at a loss; a state of crisis that does not readily appear as such because it is the state the characters are always in. In a bold gesture that reveals his penchant for the experimental, the director constructs a mise-en-scene composed almost entirely of grey walls in a maze-like formation coupled with several anachronisms in wardrobe and props. Being lost in a temporal-spatial labyrinth causes individuals’ struggle to find meaning and hold on to life. The bodies and people that populate the world of Edward II are in a condition of precarity; in other words, the characters find themselves with little sense of security or predictability. This is not necessarily restricted to the material welfare of the characters: rather, the precarity faced by Jarman’s subjects is also deeply affective and psychological. For the main characters in the film, precarity arises not only from their access to material conditions, but also from the latent threat of destitution associated with signifying as queer. Therefore, the film finds its dramatic foundation on the notion of queer precarity, which is a state characterized for the compounding of different sources of oppression and destitution that affect the queer individual. In this paper, I aim to examine the motivations and implications of Jarman’s mise-en-scene, primarily in Edward II. Specifically, the claim that guides this essay is that by situating his characters and spectators in a precarious mise-en-scene, Jarman opts for the affective enactment of queer precarity, over a purely representational exposition of precarious situations. That is, the director attempts to distill the feelings and emotions that arise in a state of queer precarity rather than present a series of events that would be categorized as precarious. Furthermore, the decision to enact a referential crisis in the diegesis, by way of refusing symbolic interpretation of the mise-enscene, leads to the affective states of the characters being projected as well to the viewers. Viewers and characters are both forced to surrender their familiar hermeneutic strategies and to use these affective atmospheres to make intelligible the historical present, and the world in crisis that surrounds them. These ways of experiencing, rather than “understanding,” what one sees are also the mechanisms by which one can make sense of and conceptualize queer precarity in the neoliberal contemporary moment. As such, a historical parenthesis is in order to 41
ing. The film does this by troubling both temporal and ing meaning in a landscape of symbolic meaninglessness. spatial referents in the diegesis. The film is a cinematic How do individuals survive in a state of symbolic adaption of the homonymous play written by Christopher and material crisis that is so ordinary as to encompass Marlowe in 1593, and magazine and newspaper reviews their entire landscape? To answer this, one must explore for the movie have traditionally focused on Jarman’s use the concept of “impasse” which Lauren Berlant defines of anachronistic mise-en-scene to represent trans-histor- as a “stretch of time in which one moves around with ical homophobic attitudes in British society. A thorough a sense that the world is at once intensely present and examination of the mise-en-scene, however, ought to enigmatic, such that the activity of living demands both a not take the dissonance between the historical referents wandering absorptive awareness and hypervigilance that and the time-period being represented as the end point collects material that might help to clarify things.” 4 Thus, of analysis. Instead, one must examine the way in which Berlant argues that the present must be perceived affecanachronism as such is produced — in other words, how tively; if one’s sense of the present is a mediated affect, the symbolizing logic of the referents is radically contest- it is also a thing that is sensed and under constant revied by Jarman. In Jarman’s mise-en-scene there is an ero- sion.5 In a visual sphere where the waning of referents sion of meaning in symbolic signifiers. The director uti- creates a symbolic crisis like that of Edward II, the characlizes the historical meanings and associations contained in ters and viewers find themselves in an impasse as Berlant the signifiers of mise-en-scene (clothes, accessories) and describes, where they must orient themselves and create pits them against each other to annul their meaning. The their sense of the present by accessing whatever affective signifiers can no longer serve as a measure of linear time sphere is available that “clarifies things,” that sustains life. because the linearity of time itself is contested through The concept of “crisis ordinariness” that Berlant the proliferation of different and conflicting historical presents aptly describes what occurs when such a state moments at once. As such, the anachronism in Edward of impasse is made omnipresent as it is in Edward II. II is not only meant to symbolize homophobic attitudes The author claims “the present moment increasingly imacross time, but also to dilute and erase the meaning poses itself on consciousness as a moment of extended from the markers one uses to orient oneself temporally. crisis […].”6 Berlant thinks that the ordinary — that is, Just as temporal referents are erased, so are spatial the mundane events that encompass day-to-day life — is referents. In Edward II, the space inhabited by characters in fact an impasse shaped by crisis, in which people find is solely composed of grey, flat walls. These walls are or- themselves developing skills for adjusting to newly prolifganized in a maze-like formation that further make it im- erating pressures. Jarman’s referential crisis is ordinary in possible for one to orient oneself in space. There are no this sense, simply because of its omnipresence: the grey visual markers that denote difference in the background walls of the mise-en-scene in Edward II encompass the space. Operating with a visual space that is stripped of characters and disorient the viewer throughout the entirealmost all symbolic referents, both characters and spec- ty of the movie. The crisis always looms, disorganizing tators are propelled into a state of referential crisis. In the consciousness, yet it veils itself in its very mundanity. this state, access to familiar and traditional mechanisms Therefore, Jarman not only participates in the for navigating the space of meaning are made ineffective. It is worth noting that this is only not the case for a few scenes in the film; the entire film is set up this way. In other words, the inability to orient oneself temporally and spatially extends to all instances of the character’s subjectivity — even to the most ordinary moments. Precisely because there is no possibility of static meaning contained in the signifiers, at this juncture, a structural interpretive approach reaches a dead end. Therefore, although familiar interpretational methods help one discern that this referential crisis exists, one ought to turn to other methods for making intelligible ways of survival in this crisis, or ways of find- Figure 1: A contemporary dance scene. 42
Figure 2: Eroticized male bodies.
bodily turn of precarious visualities, but uses this to enact and circulate the affective atmosphere of queer precarity in the contemporary moment (1991). In the film, there is a dual movement: within the diegesis, the director mobilizes his queer characters into a bodily, affective state of perception as response to crisis. The bodily apprehension of the crisis within the diegesis is then propelled outside of the diegesis through the circulation of these bodily responses and affects, and in this way, the viewer is asked to approach the film and the historical present. Firstly one ought to understand the gesture contained within the diegesis. One gains preliminary and partial access to what Jarman does by appealing to the familiar method of thinking about what he does not do — namely, he does not merely create images that represent queer precarity in 1991 Britain. Although in Edward II the director at times engages in this sort of representation, the stability of these images is questioned by the crisis of the temporal-spatial referents; these representations cannot be trusted. Instead, it is the enactment of affect that takes center stage. We can take account of this through Berlant’s concept of intuition: “the process of dynamic sensual data-gathering through which affect takes shape in forms whose job is to make reliable sense of life.”7 The author examines texts and accounts of the education of embodied intuition in a transforming world situation,
which captures the drama of their historical present. 8 For example, Berlant argues that in Gregg Bordowitz’ 2001 film Habit “everyone lives the present intensely, from within a sense that […] this time, is crisis time.”9 But crucially, Habit extends this time to the audience, as “[they] all must inhabit the shared atmosphere of dehabituation and forced improvisation that an endemic and pandemic health crisis induces.”10 By stripping the mise-en-scene of familiar temporal and spatial referents, Jarman develops something very similar: he not only forces his characters to turn to their bodies to make sense of their historical present, but extends this impasse to the spectators. That the two queer characters of Edward II and Gaveston are tied to their instinctual and bodily functions is constantly highlighted throughout the movie. The bodies of these characters continuously oscillate between extreme states of pleasure and pain that certainly reverberate across the screen and out to the viewers as well. Scenes of euphoric contemporary dancing (see Figure 1) and naked homoeroticized bodies (see Figure 2) coexist with scenes in which Gaveston is beaten during his exile and the king being brutally tortured to his demise. This torture, moreover, is meant to explicitly castigate Edward’s queerness as a burning metal rod is inserted in his anal cavity. Queer precarity is something that cannot be merely viewed; it is a state of crisis that the characters ap43
prehend affectively. When they are plunged into a state of referential crisis, these characters can only make sense of their present moment through their “sensual data-gathering,” their reliance on their own senses and bodies. Thus comes the second component of Jarman’s dual movement schematized above. The inflictions of pain and body in the film are extreme to the point of activating embodied memories in the viewer, much like many films of the so-called body genres. The maximalist pressures on the body are coupled with minimal opportunities for symbolic interpretation as a result of the previously described precarious mise-en-scene. Implied in Berlant’s claim that affective spheres are shared is the possibility of these spheres being shared with the audience as well. The historical circumstances that gave rise to the aesthetic practices of Jarman, with their reliance of the affective and sensuous capabilities of the body, also affected and continue to affect the viewer. The AIDS crisis, which is depicted in the film partly in the figure of a gay and lesbian rights demonstration, loomed over the queer citizens of the U.S. and the UK, states which were already characterized for being in a neoliberal state of ordinary crisis. Jarman was well familiar with the precarious nature of queer bodies at this moment, himself dying of AIDS-related complications and becoming partially blind prior his death. Furthermore, these are biological threats that have not been eradicated and that continue to place queers individuals in a precarious state. As such, the strategies of crisis survival proposed by Berlant and present in Jarman’s film can be extended to the viewer that attempts to make sense of a developing, historical present. A socio-political crisis that extends itself to and through the body ought to be understood through the mechanisms of the body, that is, the sensuous, sexual and affective potentials of individuals and communities. Rather than limiting oneself to the logics of symbolization and semiotics, one has to navigate this state of crisis using one’s intuition, body and affective material. These are the strategies of experiencing that Jarman inserts in his films as a way to make sense of and survive in the historical present. Therefore, the introduction of precarious mise-en-scene and the creation of a referential crisis is not merely a strategy of shock. Rather, the spectator can extract these bodily-affective strategies of experiencing the historical present from the film and utilize them in making sense of and surviving the world. For those individuals inhabiting a space of queer precarity in a neoliberal state such a strategy can link them to a community, and even perhaps to a claim to life.
Endnotes 1 David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005) 2 B. Ruby Rich, New Queer Cinema: The Director’s Cut (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013) xv 3 Christine Ross, “Introduction: Precarious Visualities of Contemporary Art and Visual Culture,” in Precarious Visualities New Perspectives on Identification in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture, ed. Johanne Lamoureux, Christine Ross and Olivier Asselin. Montréal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2008. 4 Lauren Gail Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 4 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid. 7 Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 52 8 Ibid. 9 Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 57 10 Ibid.
44
C
ollage, although a dismemberment, a slicing of limbs, a violent reduction, is distinctly bloodless. It is this lack of blood — of the liquid index of vitality — that makes the act of collage so brutal. Without a graphic indicator of rupture, of human mutilation, pain is obscured. It is then too easy to inflict this form of violence on a subject. The medium of film, a form of collage in its juxtaposition of fractions of human experience, is complicit in this visual violence. In her 1966 film Daisies,1 Vera Chytilová attempts to question the tranquility with which the camera butchers its subjects. In the sequence titled “The Two Maries at Home — Cutting Up,” the two female protagonists engage, with gleeful anarchy, in the Figure 1: Marie I, scissors braced. destruction and subsequent recreation of themselves and the way in which they are framed by the filmic apparatus. The two women self-obliterate in order to defy the visual amputation inherent in the mechanical gaze of the camera. Throughout Daisies, the two protagonists define themselves in relation to excesses — material remnants of having been and having consumed. Indignant at a lack of acknowledgement from a gardener and cyclists in the street, Marie I1 claims that she thought she and Marie II had “evaporated.” However, upon perceiving a trail of cornhusks they had left behind, the two women are struck by a renewed sense that they exist. Their existence is thus defined by the hollow shells of that which they have Figure 2: Marie II, arm severed. match-on-action between Marie I’s scissors — braced, devoured; their knowledge of self is knowledge of past consumption as they exist only in relation guillotine-like, to slice (see Figure 1) — and a shot of to, never autonomous from. In the sequence “The Two Marie II against a wall, her arm severed, denotes physical Maries at Home — Cutting Up,” however, the women pain (see Figure 2). This is underlined by the sound of reclaim and thus defy the absences inherent in such an scissors that bridge the two shots. The reaction to this existence by making themselves disappear. Marie I and pain, however, more closely resembles orgasmic pleasure. Marie II fold one another into large squares of fabric, Marie II bites her fingers. Her chest heaves. An amputatobscuring their bodies, and then push one another out ed arm — presumably belonging to Marie II — clenches of the frame. Additionally, by cutting one another into its fingers in the corner of the screen. Anonymous feet segments, the women become life-size collages, merging and ankles rise suddenly into the frame, spasm, and then with the amalgamation of cutouts and drawings on their fall back out of the frame. This series of convulsions is walls. Thus, rather than defining themselves in relation to set to a soundtrack of disembodied gasps, panting, and their material waste, the two women render their physical a shriek. Because the physiological reactions to pain and bodies into material segments — reshaping the bound- sexual pleasure are so similar, it is possible for Chytiaries of their existence by reshaping their own forms. lová to fold the two sensations into one another in this Pain and pleasure — both extreme, bestial sen- shot. Physical pain is thus shrouded in physical pleasure. This sexualization of pain mirrors the way in sations — are conflated in “Cutting Up.” The implied which the inherent violence of collage is obscured by 1
Marie I is the brunette, and Marie II the blonde.
46
aesthetics. On two occasions during the sequence, the fragmented. At first, the screen is diced evenly — it is renarrative is interrupted by quick successive shots of col- duced to simple squares reminiscent of those on a roll of lages that take up the entire screen. Most of the content projector film. However, as the sound of scissor cuts beof these collages are fragments of bodies — legs, eyes, comes more frantic, the screen slowly shatters and the vilips, hair — all sumptuously beautiful (see Figure 3). The sual image becomes distorted. It is as if Marie I and Marie pieces appear to be cut out of a magazine — they are II are slicing up the screen, rather than one another, with the “best” of the human body, the fetishized externali- their sharp silver scissors. By dismembering the screen, ties — made exquisite in their negation of the rest of the reducing it to its finest parts, the women are not allowing (potentially less aesthetic) parts of the human body. This the screen to dismember them. They are thus recreating selective dismembering of the body, similar to the way and distorting the boundaries set for them by the cinein which the camera selects pieces of the body to isolate matic frame to condemn its claim over their personhood. and thus fetishize, is an act of optic violence. Although An image, like a corn husk, a glance in the street, the only colour present within these otherwise black and a bed, a series of iron locks, or a pair of sharp scissors, white collage montages is red, this violence is still not does not serve as a complete indicator of existence, of explicit, not bloody enough to be recognized as such. having been. Images do not bleed. The violence of filmic At the beginning of “The Two Maries at Home visuality lies in its mode of preserving human subjectivity — Cutting Up,” Marie I and Marie II take turns lying on as image — as fleeting and in pieces. The sequence “The the bed, rolling one another up into a large sheet of fabric Two Maries at Home — Cutting Up” in Vera Chytilová’s and pushing the other off of the bed and, in result, out Daisies is an overt defiance of the two-dimensional gaze of of the frame. This functions as an act of defiance against the camera. Chytilová’s protagonists — the Two Maries, the gaze of the camera. In this situation, in order to leave Julie and Marie, anarchists, Maenads,2 hedonists — gigthe bed and thus the frame, the two women must help gle manically at the camera’s attempt to reduce them to one another to disappear, to self-obliterate. When Ma- images. The two women chide its struggle to flatten and rie I is first uncovered under white bed sheets by Marie amputate them, to render their existence valid only in reII, the former’s legs are splayed, her tongue is out, her flections, remnants, pieces of arms and feet and heads. head lolls — she is a caricature of death. She is enliv- Daisies, an absolute collage of being, both mourns the ened again, however, after having been pushed out of the wholeness that the collage inherently denies, and revels frame, when she returns to aid Marie II in her respective in the creation of a new, more joyous and anarchic image. disappearance. Later on in the sequence, when the two women have cut one another into pieces, they resemble the collages both on the walls of their room and in the scene’s two sudden collage montages. Marie I and Marie II thus camouflage themselves within the scene itself — hidden in its backdrop and stitched into its editing. These acts, like their corn husks and other material leftovers, are assertions of existence. In this case, however, rather than attempting desperately to exist by leaving things behind, they instead embrace their own chaotic nothingness in acts of self-annihilation. In doing so, the two women are interrogating an existence defined by husks, leftovers, and glances of acknowledgement, and embracing the freedom of disappearing without a trace. Figure 3: Collage, fragmented bodies. Near the end of the sequence, Chytilová’s protag- Endnotes onists invert the violent, dismembering gaze of the camera 1 Daisies. Dir. Vera Chytilová. Filmové studio Barrandov, 1966. DVD. back onto itself. As the women chase one another around In Greek mythology, the Maenads were the female followand atop the bed with scissors, their legs move at exactly 2 the beat of the sound of scissors opening and closing. ers of the god of wine Dionysus. They are characterized by ecstatic As this happens, the screen itself becomes increasingly rituals, chaotic behaviours, and were known to fervently consume vast feasts.
47
A
humans, by groups in power onto marginalized groups, creating false dichotomies that absolve these dominant groups of their failings.5 White saviour films work in two complimentary ways which preserve these dichotomies and the racial hierarchy they support: WSFs employ what Hernán Vera and Andrew Gordon call “sincere fictions of the white self ” and perpetuate colour-blind racism.6 Owing to the evolution of black and white race relations in the U.S., these films appear in reoccurring narrative templates: the white saviour to slaves, the civil war white saviour, the white saviour of the civil rights movement, and white teacher or community leader as saviour to urban black youth. By virtue of the classical Hollywood narrative form, these films restage racism as a moral failing committed by individual racists, rather than a systematic societal inequality that privileges whiteness. Films portraying a heroic white individual during these pivotal moments in the history of American racism offer white audiences, through identification with the protagonist, assurances of their own good and moral whiteness. The WSF’s historically distant point of reference, depictions of explicit instances of racism, and attribution of racism to prejudiced individuals function as misleading measures of progress in contemporary racial tolerance and produce a misrecognition of present day racism. The characterization of the white saviour achieved through coded constructions of racial Others, and the induced misrecognition of contemporary racism, work in tandem to perpetuate the invisibility of hegemonic whiteness and the “postracist” concept of colour-blindness — which shield white privilege from critical examination. Conforming to the “white saviour to slaves” model, Stephen Spielberg’s Amistad (1997) is a docudrama retelling of the 1838 slave ship mutiny of abducted Africans sold illegally into slavery, and the ensuing legal trial to determine ownership over the boat and its passengers. The context of Spielberg’s career in relation to Amistad as a WSF positions it within Vera and Gordon’s self-perpetuating cycle of intertwined economic and symbolic power. In this, it reveals the nature of cinematic racial gatekeeping in Hollywood studios. For example, both Spike Lee and John Singleton passed on directing the film, because neither believed they could get the necessary funding.7 Referencing Glory (1989), which “barely made its money back,” Keenan Ivory Wayans too declined to take on the project, one to which Wayans declared: “as a black director I can’t afford.”8 Spielberg was in a unique position to direct this film. Having previously undertaken painful subject matter and worked with black actors while generating profit — in Schindler’s List (1993) and The Color
s white saviour films, Amistad, Glory, and Freedom Writers exhibit the maintained invisibility of whiteness in Western culture. Although based on historical accounts, the production, alteration, and reception of these films demonstrate the white hegemony achieved through myths of “unmarked” or “neutral” whiteness. These and other white saviour films induce a misrecognition of contemporary racism and conceal the white privilege that continues to support racial inequality. A White Saviour Film (WSF) is most commonly characterized as any film featuring a white character, often the protagonist, who interacts with people of colour, improving their lives; however, incarnations of the genre can be found in any narrative that salutes whiteness for its benevolence. While these texts often deal explicitly with race as a topic, they limit racialized identity to non-white peoples, conforming to the dominant white centrism that positions whiteness as a default or norm from which racial otherness is determined. This myth of whiteness as neutral, or unmarked, fuels the Hollywood assumption that regardless of the racial identification of an audience, all viewers can identify with white characters, while the reverse is not true.1 Maintaining its hegemony through constructed cultural invisibility, the white power base is able to ensure its dominant position by virtue of a self-perpetuating and self-justifying system of myths, disseminated through Hollywood films.2 The economic power of the privileged elite, in the form of capital that funds filmmaking, transforms into the symbolic power to produce and reproduce meaning on screen. In the form of a film’s profits, that symbolic power transforms back into economic power.3 The reoccurrence, reception, and afterlife of WSFs are a testament to their role in reaffirming the hierarchical dominance of whiteness, both in cinematic representation and real life race relations. The structure of classical Hollywood narrative form encourages spectators to identify with the white protagonist, which plays on the viewer’s own subjectivity and erases whiteness as a racialized identity. Richard Dyer’s study of the representation of white people in Western culture outlines how the claim to be unmarked by race is a claim to speak for the commonality of humanity: “As long as race is something only applied to non-white peoples, as long as white people are not racially seen and named, they/ we function as a human norm. Other people are raced, we are just people.”4 Whiteness is therefore constructed in opposition to racialized Others, defining white by what it is not rather than what it is. This Othering occurs through the displacement of undesirable traits, inherent to all 49
Purple (1982), respectively — he had enough clout as a director to fund the film on his name alone.9 Spielberg had also just formed his own studio, DreamWorks, giving him unprecedented control over the projects he undertook. Attesting to the Hollywood assumption of universal identification with white characters and the myth of “neutral” whiteness upon which this assumption rests, the initial resistance to the production of Amistad may seem to imply that the film falls outside the classical Hollywood narrative form’s appeal to white audiences. In fact, the opposite is true. Although Amistad aligns viewer interests with the enslaved black characters, it does so to validate white civilization and the American legal system. The film’s white saviours act through institutions of white society.10 The film features two sets of heroes, and while both are depicted as admirable, they each adhere to racial stereotypes which place them in a hierarchy that privileges white American lawyers Roger Baldwin (Matthew McConaughey) and John Quincy Adams (Anthony Hopkins) over black Cinqué (Djimon Hounsou). According to Dyer, “the ideal white man was one who knew how to use his head, who knew how to manage and control things and get things done.”11 Referring to the binary myth that categorises white men as intellectual and rational, and black men as physical and passionate, Dyer’s characterization aligns with the lawyers’ representation as facilitators of good white institutions. Although through Cinqué the film includes a critique of the American justice system, the display of physicality and passion of his frustration (see Figure 1) with that very system reinforces one of the many false dichotomies that support ideas of racial difference. Like the division among the films heroes, there is a division of the “white
self ” within Amistad: a binary determined by proximity to contemporary law, with foreign whites and southerners as out-dated and immoral, and progressive New England northerners as enlightened and moral.12 This implied continuum between the good white 1838 institutions of the film and the current American legal system is further established by the casting of Justice Harry Blackmun, author of the majority opinion for Roe v. Wade, as Justice Joseph Story who ruled the Amistad case.13 Uniting the WSFs in this examination of the genre are the non-fiction accounts at the center of each production. The events sourced in the making of Amistad are very well documented, due to the media interest in both the “ghost ship” and the outcome of the trial, suggesting any fictional deviations from the historical account, most significantly the subject of John Quincy Adam’s legal defense — the longest and most theatrically enhanced dialogue of the film — were solely for artistic purposes.14 The “feel-good fantasy” of a morally good white institution is a “Hollywood redemption history” which romanticizes a system that was concurrently enforcing slavery and displaces immorality onto caricatures of the Spanish, Portuguese, and American south, misrepresenting anti-black racism as both a product of individual immorality or already resolved by present-day white American civilization.15 Edward Zwick’s civil war drama, Glory (1989) perpetuates the same myth of vanquished American racism and functions as a self-congratulatory film, reassuring white audiences of U.S. progress in race relations. Vera and Gordon make a counterintuitive comparison in their analysis of the film, observing that while the depictions of black characters have changed drastically, white characterization in Glory mimics that of D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915).16 Zwick’s film tells the story of 54th Massachusetts Voluntary Infantry, the first formal unit of the army to be made up of all black soldiers, and its “great white leader” Colonel Robert Shaw. Although in reality the regiment consisted of mostly freed Northern black men, the film hoped to show a more diverse portrayal of the varying lived experiFigure 1: Cinqué disrobing and shouting in protest of the case being appealed. ences of Northern African 50
Americans of the time.17 Despite the attempt to educate, the focus on Shaw as a complex historical figure did not leave room for sufficient elaboration of the black characters, which become secondary “types” to Shaw as protagonists.18 Like Amistad, Glory uses both black identity and divided or contrasting white identity to define the Colonel’s role as white saviour. Another white Colonel in command of an all-black regiment functions as a foil to Shaw, displaying no Figure 2: Mob of black union soldiers looting a Southern civilian town. compassion or respect for Richard LaGravenese’s contemporary WSF, those in his command, referring to them as monkeys and Freedom Writers (2007), tells the story of real-life English killing them at the slightest provocation. Furthermore, teacher Erin Gruwell, and her time teaching at Woodthese troops are blood thirsty, childish, and keen to loot row Wilson High School in Long Beach, California in the and destroy southern civilian towns (see Figure 2). In a wake of the 1992 Los Angeles riots. Sociologist with the scene that echoes the fear peddled by Griffith, during an Institute for African American Studies at the University encounter between the antithetical sets of Union soldiers, of Connecticut, Dr. Matthew Hughey has assembled and a black soldier, not under Shaw’s rule, wrestles a white analyzed the critical reception of 119 published reviews woman in the street after looting her home. Showcas- of the film, revealing how the racial relations embedded ing the “consequences” of poor white leadership over in the film were processed and perpetuated by critics. “dangerous black bucks,” this mirror image of the 54th Hughey states: “popular imagination marries non-whiteRegiment attributes the heroism and ability of its troops ness with various ‘pathologies’: criminality, hostility, to Shaw’s leadership, and confirms his nobility in con- childlike demeanour, [and] lack of mental capacity.”22 His trast to the blatant racism of other white characters. assembly of Freedom Writers reviews demonstrates an adThe character development of escaped slave herence to and therefore perpetuation of that link. FocusTrip, played by Denzel Washington, is the most potent ing on the language used, Hughey remarks that reviewers narrative element reinforcing Shaw as saviour. Progress- cited “bad values” as the source of the students’ suffering from a hatred of all white people to loyalty and respect ing, which not so subtly demonizes people of colour by for Shaw, the film positions Trip as the final obstacle for, obscuring more complex socio-economic issues.23 Like and testament to, the Colonel’s worthiness.19 In the most the white saviours who come before her, Erin Gruwell is heavy-handed imagery of the film, moments after Shaw’s coded as a “bad-culture-breaker,” defining her as the andeath, Trip too falls dead beside the Colonel, with his tithesis of the film’s people of colour and their associated head lovingly resting on his leader’s chest. This image is “pathologies.”24 While there are several targets of racist repeated in the last shot of the film, as the two are placed hatred chronicled in the film — black-Latino-Asian racin a mass grave, Trip’s head once more resting on Shaw’s ism, their collective hatred of white people, the white adchest (see Figure 2). It is in this transformation that Vera ministration’s racism towards the students, and the Nazi and Gordon draw their comparison. While the depiction racism of the 3rd Reich — the film prioritizes the racism of the black man has changed, the depiction of the white between the minority groups as the most dangerous. This man has not: as “powerful, brave, cordial, kind, firm and is both observed and reinforced by the reviews, mentiongenerous — a leader.”20 Where Birth of a Nation’s white sav- ing the inter-student racism three times as frequently as iour (to other whites) neutralized the “bad black” with vi- the racism subjected by the school.25 Upon intercepting olence, Glory too neutralizes the “bad black” with loyalty.21 a caricature drawing — reminiscent of those used to de51
humanize Jews anticipating the Holocaust — circulating in her classroom (see Figure 3), Gruwell invokes Holocaust history to teach her students about racial tolerance, and succeeds beyond achieving tolerance: constructing a tightknit community and sanctuary for her students. The disproportionate emphasis on the racial hostility between the student groups, produced by an overly focused depiction of the nearly-closed world within Gruwell’s classroom, frames the student unity as an all but complete remediation of the racism faced by the teens, thus simulating a colour-blind utopian solution engineered by Erin Gruwell: white saviour. The parallel drawn by Gruwell between the Nazi persecution of the Jews and the race-based gang violence in the community calls attention to the “unclear and unstable” category of whiteness.26 Her characterization of the Nazis as the “biggest gang in history” reinforces the simulated utopian solution by linking the racism experienced by the students to a conflict that ended in military defeat. The visit to the Museum of Tolerance serves the dual purpose of educating the students on the history of the Holocaust and grounding that racism in history, as past or resolved. While the museum facilitates learning that was otherwise withheld from the students based on racist and classist conduct by the school, it is also a testament to the reordering of whiteness than now includes the Jewish. The film’s conflation of the Holocaust as racism, experienced by a group that is now largely considered white, with the attribution of the students’ suffering to their own “bad values” masks the significance of pres-
ent day white privilege in the lives of Gruwell’s students. More than 65% of the reviews examined by Hughey admit to some extent that Freedom Writers is a WSF; however, this classification is only criticized as an aesthetic misstep or an artistic blunder, rather than condemned as an ideological device that maintains white privilege.27 Published in Social Psychology Quarterly, Hughey also examines how “white anti-racists” manage a perceived and sometimes self-imposed stigma, as both beneficiaries and resisters of racial inequality.28 Hughey suggest white anti-racists embrace stigma in forms of dishonour or dysfunction as markings of a moral commitment and political authenticity. This contradictory and anxiety-inducing “white racial dualism”29 may make white anti-racists uniquely vulnerable to the appeal of unmarked whiteness under the guise of counterfeit anti-oppressive texts, further complicating the task of unveiling white privilege and contemporary racism in WSFs. Dyer underscores the importance of demystifying the construction of culturally invisible whiteness: “We may be on our way to genuine hybridity, multiplicity without (white) hegemony, and it may be where we are trying to get to — but we aren’t there yet, and we won’t get there until we see whiteness, see its power, its particularity and limitedness, put it in its place and end its rule. This is why studying whiteness matters.”30 Describing his findings in the analysis of the critical reception of Freedom Writers, Hughey remarks “the film — and the collective process of reviewing the film’s text — affords a social space to speak of racial matters
Figure 3: Erin Gruwell comparing a caricature done of a student to images circulated by Nazis to dehumanize Jews.
52
in between the rock of ‘postracialism’ (portrayed in some quarters as idyllic naiveté, if not color-blind racism) and the hard place of interrogating the hegemonic reach of whiteness (oft-depicted as a form of Orwellian ‘political correctness’ among a public that is weary of discussing ‘race’).”31 This statement aptly characterizes all the WSFs examined here. While the works address “race” as a topic, each film’s narrative, imagery, and casting choices contribute to the dominant white centrism that positions whiteness as a default or norm, from which racial otherness is determined. Inducing a misrecognition of contemporary racism, Amistad, Glory, and Freedom Writers perpetuate colour-blind racism and mask the power of white privilege. Whiteness is not the absence of colour, and colour-blindness is not the absence of racism — both are myths of white supremacy and both are tools of the White Saviour Film, or perhaps more accurately, the white supremacy film.
Endnotes 1 Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. “The Concept of Whiteness and American Film.” In America on Film: Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies, 75-95. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004. 2 Vera, Hernan, and Andrew Gordon. Screen Saviors: Hollywood Fictions of Whiteness. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003. 3 Ibid., 53. 4 Dyer, Richard. White. London: Routledge, 1997. 5 Benshoff and Griffin, “The Concept of Whiteness and American Film,” 56. 6 Vera and Gordon, Screen Saviors, 15. 7 Ibid., 55. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid., 53. 11 Dyer, White, 30. 12 Vera and Gordon, Screen Saviors, 57. 13 Ibid., 60. 14 Lipkin, Steve. “When Victims Speak, (Or, What Happened When Spielberg Added Amistad to His List?).” Journal of Film and Video Vol. 52, No. 4 (2001): 22. 15 Vera and Gordon, Screen Saviors, 59. 16 Ibid., 28. 17 Ibid., 27. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid., 29. 20 Ibid., 28. 21 Ibid., 30. 22 Hughey, Matthew. “The White Savior Film and Reviewer’s Reception.” Symbolic Interactions Vol. 33, No. 3 (2010): 486. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., 487. 26 Dyer, White, 20. 27 Hughey, “The White Savior Film and Reviewer’s Reception,” 490. 28 Hughey, Matthew. “Stigma Allure and White Anti-Racist Identity Management.” Social Psychology Quarterly Vol. 75, No. 3 (2012): 219-41. 29 Ibid., 222. 30 Dyer, White, 4. 31 Hughey, “The White Savior Film and Reviewer’s Reception,” 493.
53
Meet the editors... Carolyn Buszynski U3 Cultural Studies Film character I want to be BFFs with: any and every character played by Drew Barrymore Favourite soundtrack: Marie Antoinette (2006) Favourite films: Grey Gardens (1975), Clue (1985) Film that deserves a sequel: Snowpiercer (2013)
David Leblanc U3 Cultural Studies and English Literature Film quote that best describes me: “I don’t know what to do with my hands.” – Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (2006) Favourite film: Eyes Without a Face (1960) Favourite original song from a film: “Danger Zone” by K-Log from Top Gun (1986) Sarah MacArthur U3 Cultural Studies Director of my biopic: a collaboration between Spike Jonze and Sofia Coppola (back when they were together) Favourite soundtrack: Lost in Translation (2003) when The Jesus and Mary Chain’s “Just like Honey” plays over Bill Murray leaving Tokyo or Saturday Night Fever (1977) (soft spot for disco) Least favourite film trend: Films about sex that make it seem terrifying/horrifying. I don’t understand this.
Benjamin Demers U2 Cultural Studies and Geography Favourite film: Todo sobre mi madre (1999) Film character I want to be BFFs with: Lin from Spirited Away (2001) Favourite soundtrack: Deathproof (2007) Daniel Fishbayn U3 Cultural Studies Film character I want to be BFFs with: Jeffrey “The Dude” Lebowski from The Big Lebowski (1998) Favourite film featuring people who can fly: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) Favourite film featuring a single scene where characters spontaneously role-play as tigers: If… (1968)
Sophie Tupholme U3 Cultural Studies Favourite film: Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) Film quote that best describes me: “I should like to change into a sunflower most of all.” – Harold and Maude (1971) Film style icon: Millie Lammoreaux from 3 Women (1977) or Anna Karina whenever wherever
Sara Kloepfer U3 Cultural Studies Favourite film quote: “Dear Diary: My teen angst bullshit now has a body count.” – Heathers (1988) Favourite film ending: Lost in Translation (2003) - what does he whisper in her ear?! Film style icon: Mathilda (Natalie Portman) in Léon: The Professional (1994)
Jacob Wald U2 English Literature Favourite film quote: “Sheriff murdered! Innocent women and children blown to bits! We have to protect our phoney baloney jobs here, gentlemen!” – Blazing Saddles (1974) Favourite Netflix category: Emotional Independent Dramas for Hopeless Romantics Director of my biopic: Terry Gilliam Film character I want to be BFFs with: Gandalf, obviously 54