Crisis of Unity

Around the time Lehman Brothers fell, and thinking about the topic--Crisis--chosen by graduate students for this year's Comp Lit Graduate Conference at Irvine, I figured I should look up what Marx had to say about crisis. In The Marx-Engels Reader, some pages from Theories of Surplus Value are gathered conveniently under the rubric "Crisis Theory." The occasion for Marx to bring up crisis, here, is his refutation of an assertion by Ricardo that there can be no such thing as "over-production." Very very loosely, their debate concerns whether markets are self-correcting, in this case by being mutually compensating (463). Marx argues that there being too much of something is not an absolute condition (one that we measure in relation to absolute needs) but one relative to ability to pay. And economic crises, crises in the ability to pay, he observes, are crises of syncopation: "if in the interval between [purchase and sale] the value has changed, if the commodity at the moment of its sale is not worth what it was worth at the moment when money was acting as a measure of value . . . the whole series of transactions which retrogressively depend on this one transaction, cannot be settled." Money functions within a given frame of time: "the crisis occurs not only because the commodity is unsaleable, but because it is not saleable within a particular period of time" (456). Last fall, some analysts similarly explained that crashes of the NYSE were occurring not when people were panicking for psychological reasons, but when people were forced to sell to pay bills that could be deferred no longer; they not only had to pay, they had to pay now.

Marx's idea about the temporal form of crisis is the most narratively resonant of his arguments here, but his most fundamental one is that crises are outbreaks of "unity." The passage is a great illustration of a dialecticized idea, of how thoroughly an idea can be dialecticized and self-differential for him:

If, for example, purchase and sale--or the metamorphosis of commodities--represent the unity of two processes, or rather the movement of one process through two opposite phases, and thus essentially the unity of the two phases, the movement is essentially just as much the separation of these two phases and their becoming independent of each other. Since, however, they belong together, the independence of the two correlated aspects can only show itself forcibly, as a destructive process. It is just the crises in which they assert their unity, the unity of the different aspects. The independence which these two linked and complementary phases assume in relation to each other is forcibly destroyed. Thus the crisis manifests the unity of the two phases that have become independent of each other. (444)

Purchase and sale, because they are two angles on the same event, form a unity. Although their coming apart for a while (as in the syncopated story above, when value abruptly changes) is necessary for crisis and is "the elementary form of the crisis" (445), the fact that they come apart is not itself the crisis, and disjuncture is not the meaning of crisis. The message of the crisis is that things that have come apart cannot stay apart; what cannot be deferred is their collapse back into a unity they can't escape.

Meanwhile, back in Irvine, Comp Lit 144, Politics of Crime, watched Ridley Scott's American Gangster. There's quite a bit to say about this not exactly "good" but interesting film, and I hope to come back to it and to many other things that happened in Politics of Crime, a wonderful undergraduate class that kept me going the last several months. For now I'll only recall the scene in which the two protagonists of the film, detective and criminal (Richie and Frank, Russell Crowe and Denzel Washington), set eyes on each other for the first time, just as various factors, including the end of the Vietnam War, have brought about a crisis in Frank's globalized business of cocaine distribution. (The cocaine industry and the war industry are explicitly aligned and, in the plot, materially connected.) Since the occasion of their meeting is Frank's arrest, it marks a break in the film; the logic of the film up to that point culminates in the scene and has to shift afterward. Shots of police raiding the sites of Frank's enterprise are intercut with views of Frank and his family emerging from church, and "Amazing Grace" plays over the sequence. Who was blind and now sees when the antagonists look at each other for the first time and with recognition? They are about to become allies, and in many ways were made to be so. The kind of seeing that is done here occurs when you step outside the church door, outside the fantasy of the enclosed family. Although there are redemptive overtones in the idea that losing everything could be the best thing that ever happened, the gain isn't because the psyches involved will now be different--they will prove to be markedly unchanged--but because of the sudden reconnection of worlds that thought they could live without relation to one another.

Image: Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Fallen Sky (2006)

Style is Cheap, or, George Kuchar

At the L.A. Film Festival there was a large, blissed-out audience at the Billy Wilder Theater for ten short films by George and/or Mike Kuchar. The Kuchars, twin brothers from the Bronx, began making 8 mm films starring their friends and families as children in the fifties; the films shown at the Festival were made from 1958 to 1963. These are mostly silent, except for pirated music, and use intertitles. George Kuchar went on to "experimental" films in the same DIY-smart aleck vein--a little artier, and with a gradually increasing component of explicit homoeroticism, but no different in spirit from the childhood projects--in 16 mm and digital video, and since 1971 has taught at the San Francisco Art Institute. (A selection of George Kuchar's films is available on UBUWEB.) L.A. seems to be afloat on Kucharmania. The festival audience would¹ve been delighted to stay all night--the authorities at the Hammer had to ask the audience and the Kuchars to leave. Cinefamily is screening a series of camp films curated by George Kuchar and two nights of his mid- and later films that more or less take up where the Film Festival left off. The second of these evenings, covering his work in San Francisco, is August 3.

George and Mike Kuchar were present for the Wilder screening, and George commented on each film from his chair in the dark as though we were watching home movies, which we were. On a budget on which you could either make a film or buy a toaster, Kuchar plugs friends and neighbors like "the Leibowitz family" into the rudimentary formulae and--to a startling degree--the elegant shots of the Hollywood genres, especially over-the-top melodrama. While the storylines often head straight for chaos, textbook specimens of minute compositional conventions shape almost every frame: the turning doorknob, the dolly back to reveal you¹ve been looking out a window, the alienation of TV antennae, the shadow of the fistfight on the stairs, the pathos of the windowsill, etc.--each one a compact myth. Almost none of the films is missing its neo-Sirkian mirror shot. In Hold Me While I¹m Naked (1965), a beautiful woman comes through a door three times to answer the same ringing phone, an effect that reminds me of the repeated zoom toward Delphine Seyrig's outstretched arms in Last Year at Marienbad (1961).



In Knockturne (1968), guests at a party, including Edie Sedgwick (!), peel away from the center of the screen finally to reveal Warhol's Jackie on the distant wall.

The narratives run at 78 rpm, the dialogue is pulpy, and the music is usually a painfully crude '50s pop. The acting is "bad" and therefore Brechtian, as in profound schlock like Edward Wood's Plan 9 From Outer Space. Watched on their own time, the films are hilarious. Viewed as a series of stills, the images have lyrical melancholy, even when they're deranged, like outtakes from Godard. The audience does not feel this as a contradiction; one level doesn't seem truer than the other.


(Hold Me While I'm Naked)


(Mike Kuchar in The Corruption of the Damned [1965])


(Mike Kuchar in The Corruption of the Damned)


(Hold Me While I'm Naked)

In a mainstream melodrama like George Stevens's Penny Serenade, pathos comes from the distance between what the film is able to do ideologically and what it seems to yearn to do, as the Time Out Film Guide notes in its summary of the film:

A classic "women's picture" in every sense: an emotional/sentimental switchback, nostalgically framed (Dunne, on the point of leaving Grant, reminisces the family-romance narrative to gramophone accompaniment) and a construction of the "ideal woman" (fulfilled in motherhood, naturally) so upfront as to be almost disarming--though not, as in similar work by Douglas Sirk, pushed quite so far that it might be construed as being critical. Either with it or at it, or more likely both, you'll weep.

With it or at it. Melodrama becomes interestingly difficult when you cry not only with it but at it, since the film¹s limitations then unwittingly reinforce its characteristic theme, the restriction of a character by society. When you cry at a melodrama, it's pointed you mutely to what it can¹t acknowledge--outdone itself. Camp embraces its inabilities, but that may not rule out lament. In Warhol, only approach the paintings traditionally as portraits of the outer and inner states of their subjects and you feel like busting out, because you realize you're in the graveyard of the reified. In Kuchar, the film takes so much pleasure in being a film at all that it's hard to say what limits the film either claims or has.

The meta-film Hold Me While I¹m Naked argues, classically, that cinema is the sublimation of reality, well of course! A director, played by Kuchar, is forced to suspend production when his actress decides (correctly) that he's only a pervert who wants to see her in the nude: he had asked her to remove her bra "because the mysticism of the stained glass window and the profanity of that brassiere do not go well together." Stranded, he applies lipstick to a plastic doll and literally wallows in his own wasted reels among intercut scenes of "real women" having sexual interludes with other guys. In some cases, though, it¹s not clear whether these women (the rebellious actress, for example) are getting it on in the present, in the director's morbid and cinematic imagination, or in scenes of the lost film. An ordinary life appears--the director twirling in the shower alone, sitting in the kitchen with his battleaxe mother and her awful cuisine--that is the very melodramatic image of "unmelodramatic life." The film seems to differ not from a social reality that limits it but just from the unfilmed. The unfilmed is an unknown state altogether, something we can't assume anything about and that the films don't want to know anything about.




(...the beauty of the space between Kuchar and the doll....)



At the end of Hold Me Kuchar looks into the camera and asks, "There's a lot of things in life worth living for. Isn't there?" Things "in life" are unspeakable and feared dead, like the untransmogrified matter on the dinner plate. In Kuchar's virtuostic editing, almost every shot comes as a huge surprise. So much so that an equally huge fear of sameness is implied. In George and Mike Kuchar's Town Called Tempest (1962), an ex-prostitute whose new life of pious service risks being unmasked by the reappearance of the film¹s protagonist, an old acquaintance, comes up with a grenade and lobs it at him in the second she perceives the threat. No hesitation--goodbye, protagonist. This was one of the most uproarious and delightful moments at the Wilder. Who would go so far? (Early Fassbinder? Godard in Every Man for Himself, when the director starts shooting with a pistol as well as with a camera?) We noticed the same narrative originality in the mini-stories Kuchar emitted in the dark. Of the Leibowitzes, for example, he said: "The parents are dead, of course. And the animals. But Larry is still alive. And the house is a complete mess." The little story is edited for unpredictability. Like it, the films realize the resources of disloyalty, distraction, and anticlimax. The cliche, "the house is a complete mess," in the wrong place is euphoric. The films can feed on their own self-destruction, they burden classic shots with material--events, words, clothes, bric-a-bric, settings and human substance--that's dross and needs to be dross so that the films can show their lack of obligation to it. That any thing can be as interesting on film as any other is repeatedly proven by filming crap in a state of flux. (As Kuchar noted in the theater, he's also been "typecast," as he put it, as literally a photographer of turds.) Some of Kuchar's recent projects sound as though they move from playing with rhetorical obstacles, obstacles representing "recalcitrant matter," to a kind of minimalism that plays with lack of resistance--"weather diaries" in which he travels to Oklahoma to observe cyclones but films whatever happens, including nothing. The question that never gets answered is what has worth when not filmed. What's not filmed is dead meat, or so we're afraid. But that doesn't need to concern us as long as we're filming or watching films, and composition costs nothing. Style is cheap; life is cheaper.


Image of Kuchar that appears at the end of Wild Night in El Reno
(1977).

Acknowledgments: Thanks to comrades at the screenings for dialogue: Eyal Amiran, Joe Mahoney, Daniel Tiffany, Toshi Tomori. This post was written for Oh! Industry, and appears in similar form there: thank you to Karen Tongson and Team Oh! Industry.

Hemisphereless James

Years ago I ordered William James’s Principles of Psychology ([1898]; ed. George A. Miller; Harvard University Press,1981) and Niels Bohr’s Philosophical Writings . . . 1933-1957 (Woodbridge, CT: Ox Bow Press, 1978) in the same batch of books, and was very surprised to discover that the former was about 1300 pages and the latter 100. James took twelve years to write the Principles, but Bohr’s interest in writing philosophically at all was apparently not that strong, even over twenty. The essays are really occasional pieces, while James’s work, it's no secret, is intensely personal and reflexively organic. It becomes a moralized cosmology of life, a guide to living in the guise of a description of the properties of being alive. (I’d be interested in knowing about readings that track James’s personal investment in detail rather than just noting that he wrote it after a breakdown and in the mode of self-analysis.)

Like Descartes, James searches for a zero degree from which to start living. It’s notable that he takes the trouble to justify his exclusion of inanimate entities, as though the line between inert and living matter were not obvious enough to assume. That when “we pass from such actions” as are performed by magnetized iron filings “to those of living things, we notice a striking difference” which consists in living things’ caring to move and act (20), does not so much define the biological as raise the possibility—as Descartes does by positing mechanical animals—of the appearance of life without the desire for it. Although the first differences James notes are between iron filings and Romeo and Juliet, between “chopping the foot of a tree” and “the foot of a fellow-man” (20, 25), he proves the difference where it matters by vivisecting a series of conscious beings, ascending from hapless frogs to dogs, monkeys, and lobe-injured people. We know we are conscious through privation (as Freud would agree):

If, then, we reduce the frog’s nervous system to the spinal cord alone, by making a section behind the base of the skull, between the spinal cord and the medulla oblongata, thereby cutting off the brain from all connection with the rest of the body, the frog will still continue to live, but with a very peculiarly modified activity. It ceases to breathe or swallow; it lies flat on its belly, and does not, like a normal frog, sit up on its fore-paws, though its hind-legs are kept, as usual, folded against its body and immediately resume this position if drawn out. If thrown on its back it lies there quietly, without turning over like a normal frog. (28)

While dissatisfaction spurs the action that lets us know we’re alive, the effect of the experiments, and of the diegesis of the early chapters, is to move in the opposite direction, showing how the living thing can suffer the vegetable condition of not caring about itself. “Prey is not pursued nor are enemies shunned by ordinary hemisphereless frogs” (32); they no longer make choices, so that “copulation occurs per fas aut nefas, occasionally between males, often with dead females, in puddles exposed on the highway” (35). The explicit shock is now the one latent in the example of the filings, of how much of the capacity for, and therefore the appearance of, action can be preserved without there being any self or meaning in it: “if . . . we take a pigeon, and cut out his hemispheres as they are ordinarily cut out for a lecture-room demonstration[,] [t]here is not a movement natural to him which this brainless bird cannot perform if expressly excited thereto; only the inner promptings seem deficient, and when left to himself he spends most of his time crouched on the ground with his head sunk between his shoulders as if asleep” (32).

The pathos of the recumbent animals serves the function--cutting across the narrative order of events--of stimulating the vivisector and the reader to care on their behalf, and discover their own aliveness by contrast, at the price that aliveness is relativized and contingent for all. Here the nineteenth-century relative freedom of convention in scientific writing allows James—and not only James, since it’s interestingly pervasive to the time, in the material he cites, for example—to express for the hemisphereless animal what it cannot express for itself, a desire that, further, James expresses on its behalf before he goes on to do so on his own. From the substrate that James keeps calling the “ordinary" brainless organism (and more precisely, his ability to feel something for them), he rebuilds to account for the almost equal disturbance of possible and partial repair. Although strictly speaking it can't restore a loss, the hemisphereless animal can create new actions for old purposes, and force a cognitive path through cortical obstructions: “e.g., the sound of ‘give your paw’ discharges after some weeks into the same canine muscles into which it used to discharge before the operation” (78). The good news is that a lot of capacity, even for consciousness, is built in, and that every action that happens makes it easier to do that action again; the bad news is the same—that “the original organization . . . must always be the ground-work of the psychological scheme” (141), on which “every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar” (131).

Image: Damien Hirst, Mother and Child Divided, 2007

Communicating, Not

It’s July 1 as I write this, the date in the dream in the my last post, but not as hot as the dream July 1.

The Winnicott essay that used to be most important to me is “The Use of an Object,” the one that explains that a relational object is discovered to be independent when it survives its “destruction” (the omnipotent imagination’s assumption that the object will not live alone, and its consignment of it to this expected fate). Lately the one that’s most important is “Communicating and Not Communicating Leading to a Study of Certain Opposites” [1963] (The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development [Madison, CT: International Universities Press, 1965). Here Winnicott "stak[es] a claim, to his surprise, to the right not to communicate" (179). For split egos, he writes, but also in "the healthy individual" in a parallel way, the self comes to gain the "feeling of real" to the very degree that it withdraws from contact. Non-communication becomes a figure of the self's realness because through intrusive parents and other social experiences "communication so easily becomes linked with some degree of false or compliant" behavior (184). In this way, Winnicott understands non-communication in the session as progress toward trust, a variety of the deep aloneness that he argues can be experienced paradoxically only with others in the room ("The Capacity to Be Alone," also in Maturational Processes, 29-36). Winnicott also believes that cultural phenomena mediate between communication and the "subjective objects" which we convene within ourselves only when we are not communicating. He gives the examples of diaries and lyric poems. For Winnicott these instances of language overheard assume a social contract with the audience receiving items placed in the ambiguous transitional space—an understanding that, as in play, there will be no serious demand.

But of course some of us never get the balance, and in addition to just not communicating, with and without others, we use non-communication to negate discourse, and so communicate by means of non-communication, which, if you ask me, is the worst of both worlds—although it may very well be what there is to say (see Ann Smock, What is There to Say? [U of Nebraska P, 1993]). I've thought about starting over anonymously (and a circle of known readers sounds even more inhibiting), but I think this might be naive or circumlocutionary. I might soon find myself back in the same place, not because of things that would or wouldn't feel different but because a complaint about communicating is after all one of the things I most want to utter. The beauty of published writing is its taking care of the delicate social/asocial contract by its very form, as I mention below (January 4, 2008). But real-time writing plays the game for desperate stakes, like Winnicott's nine-year-old patient with her "stolen school book in which she collected poems and sayings . . . . On the front page she wrote: 'What a man thinketh in his heart, so is he'" (186; Winnicott leaves tactfully unresolved the question of whether she invents or finds this citation). What does it mean for the nine-year-old girl to keep this book in her own house, when "rape, and being eaten by cannibals . . . are mere bagatelles as compared with the violation of the self's core, the alteration of the self's central elements by communication seeping through the defences" (187)?

Image: Stephen Cannon, Camouflaged Moth

University of Dream

“I just had the most terrible nightmare,” my friend (white male full professor at another institution) rang up to tell me.
“What’s that?”
“I dreamed I was a female graduate student!” The female graduate students were kept in a sort of razor-wired pen, from which they were drawn periodically to be raped by faculty. Sometimes they walked through a place from which they could see where the tenured faculty lived. There they were drinking and laughing.

Inspired by this, I embarked on some variations on the theme. I dreamed that a white male graduate applicant from anthropology was a black African woman. She and I walked on a beach and I was very sorry that we didn’t have more funding to offer. I dreamed (on another night) that it was July 1, and so hot that our senior French theorist walked by wearing a dress. To be specific, a sleeveless black top with a rounded neck, and a brown tube skirt. (Eyal: “What kind of shoes?” “Flat, black leather slip-ons, gender-noncommital.”) It was understood that this was purely pragmatic, just because it was so hot.

Last night I was going to give a talk to an audience of historians. One of them, a middle-aged woman with glasses, was looking over a copy of the paper in a café beforehand. There were a few references to Aristotle in the opening pages. “Are you an Aristotelian?” she said.
“No!” (Did I have to be?) She continued through the paper and asked another question, something about factual evidence. I realized with despair that she was going to demand empirical historical work to footnote each noncontroversial historical claim, and flung my cup of lukewarm tea at her. She wasn’t nearly as upset as you might expect. She was upset, but I was a lot more upset. It wasn’t clear that I was disinvited from the engagement, although it wasn’t going to go off quite normally either. About 40 minutes after the talk was to begin I saw people still waiting in the library-like room where it was to take place. I told them I’d make some phone calls and find out what was going on (they didn’t realize I was the speaker). I could maybe still give this talk although it would be late at night. In the meantime people were reminiscing about a lavish banquet that the former chair there had staged for an emeritus colleague too ill to appreciate it; there were huge plates of cold poached salmon, berries and fruits of the season, and probably twenty other dishes laid out on a white tablecloth. “That’s the worst thing that Phyllis ever did,” one of them said. Then I was in an apartment in the Midwest with a colleague with whom I did once share an apartment building, though not the unit, in Ann Arbor. I saw various little tchotchkes that belonged to me in the apartment and, feeling an urge to get completely out of there, started putting them in my bag. She said it was convenient to keep an apartment in the Midwest. “Who is on the lease of this apartment?” I asked. “That’s not clear,” she said quickly, as to say, “Good point.” Then my phone rang and I saw on the screen an alarm notice to let me know that it was 9:00 and I had missed my flight. It was news to me that there was a service that notified you if you missed your flight. I’d have to try to make the redeye, but I had a feeling I was going to miss that too.

The great academic dreamwork, though—apart from Adorno’s Dream Notes, which includes many university nightmares—is Fritz Lang’s Woman in the Window (1944), in which Edward G. Robinson plays a New York City professor who falls in with a femme fatale and commits crimes for her. At the end of the film, Robinson wakes up in the faculty club. Throughout the film, the clues that Robinson is dreaming all pertain to his profession. When his car is stopped by the police—a corpse in the trunk, of course—and he hands his i.d. through the window, the cop responds: “Professor, huh?” (It’s printed on his i.d.!) “Assistant!” Robinson squeaks, as though that were ameliorating. Which it is. (Edward G. Robinson is in his 50’s at the time of the film: is he lying to the cop?) At another point, his being named chair of his department—an occurrence in contradiction with the other scene referencing his status--is printed on page two of the New York paper. I’m not sure whose joke this all is: did Lang, or the writers (Nunnally Johnson, based on a novel by J.H. Wallis) know enough about the university system to know that these moments puncture the realism of the film? If so, then these are the moments in which Robinson almost awakes, when the anxiety provoking the dream pushes itself almost to the point of unbearability: the moments connected to his profession. On the other hand, the wake-up scene is itself compromised by the fact that it comes at the moment when the whole game that is the film is up, when there would be the most motive—as in Gilliam’s Brazil--for Robinson to go psychotic and dream of an alternative space, in a falling asleep of reason. To be able to recognize the more plausible of these interpretations, it helps to be one of him; you have to remember that an academic’s profession isn’t printed on his driver’s license; it just feels like it is.

Support Tenure for Andrea Smith

NOTE: Thank you very much to Jed Rasula, who pointed out that I had conflated The Woman in the Window with Scarlet Street (which shares its director and cast) in the earlier version of this post. I'll let the still from Scarlet Street stand as a memento to the paraprax!

Image: Edward G. Robinson and Joan Bennett in Scarlet Street

Reverb

Apparently, it’s common for a blog to go through a “crisis.” Often, it has to do with uncertainty of audience. The art blog Anaba, written by Martin Bromirski, had one last June. Bromirski described his longing for a “motivation transfusion”:

Sometimes I get kind of blah about this blog.... like... what is the point, who cares, nobody comments anyway, artists are not taking control, this is too much effort on my part, i want to focus on PARKOUR now, etc. . . .

Plus, and related, someone mentioning something negative about blogs appearing self-promoting.... aargh, that bothers me. I am ALL FOR artists promoting their work, in whatever way they best know how... whether that means moving to NYC and networking, or putting your shit on a blog.... just hate the hangups and hypocrisy people have about it, acting blase... the stealth shit. SORRY, I am not trying to be confrontational.

A couple of Bromirski’s friends wrote in: “Martin. Screw it. Just do it.” “Think of all the new friends you've made, Martin.” The crisis passed.

My contribution to the crisis genre, which at least provides some comic relief, seems to be my continued perplexity at having readers. It may be that the goals and questions phrased at the outset could have been better pursued in anonymity. Writing to people you know, social obligations hover. To a group at UC Irvine, I’d find it strange never to mention common experiences and problems, institutional issues, people we know, and the like, and stranger still never to use direct address, never to say “you” or “we.” Yet I wouldn’t want to duplicate or intensify here the exchanges I already have—to do that, there’s no need to write. This conflict, if that’s the right word, hasn’t resolved itself; I don’t resolve it, I set it aside. Meanwhile, it rained, the garden got wet, the cultural offerings contracted, my mother got no better, the work got denser, my hard drive expired. A friend with glaucoma and an active but largely invisible inner life identified with the protagonist in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly--“There aren’t many films about people who live out of one eye”--and decided to have a baby with a co-worker. It’s like a post-Symbolist poem, "Spleen" V or VI or VII or "2,000 Light Years From Home." These are the cypress trees in our yard, these pages are from this postmark.

Hydraulics of Cinema History

It’s hard to understand, and I’m not sure I do, how Paul Thomas Anderson can have made a film so apparently straightforward as There Will Be Blood, so almost transparent, out of materials so crude, at a date so late as this, that is so powerful in its effects. I can see why people are going back to 1940s films for comparisons; so why doesn’t Anderson’s movie seem nostalgic? It isn’t quite transparent, although it lets you see it that way or want it to be; it conveys historical self-consciousness, not through what usually goes by the name of irony, but in all but invisible ways that serve similar functions. Daniel Day-Lewis’s manipulation of his voice, for example, into something artificial that’s broadcasting all the time, makes clear that his character, Plainview, has at some point we never see poured himself into a mold. He’s beside himself from the beginning, remote-controlling himself from an undisclosed location. Day-Lewis method-acts a method actor character. Everyone has only residual spontaneity; they’ve paid out everything human before the plot begins. Plainview’s child, H.W., shows the process in motion, soft matter being shaped into a businessman. Dealing only with calcified objects—including Lewis's dusty novel—Anderson can afford to evoke the fluctuating life inside these objects. (This is a film about hydraulics, of course, like Written on the Wind and Chinatown, that suggests that psychic and kinship logics underlie and even explain economics.) Because the forms are not “revitalized” but treated as dead, the emotions seem to be outsize because they have to be to penetrate the crust that has formed over everything. Anthony Lane’s review of the Coens’ No Country for Old Men just misses a similar point, complaining that the Coens taxidermize classic U.S. film genres (New Yorker, Nov. 12, 2007). They do, and that’s what allows their films to be so creepy. Similarly Stephanie Zacharek in Salon (Dec. 26, 2007): "There Will Be Blood" only pretends to be elemental and raw: It's really tempered and wrought,” etc., etc.--when its "really" being elemental and raw would cover over the lethal reification, the difficulty, and with it the counterforce.

One of the tropes of There Will Be Blood is the lengths to which people will go in the attempt to recover, or cover over, a loss; thus the apt comparison to Citizen Kane. Anderson gives the content of the loss in the opening scenes, before we know what the film is about and what to look for, so that we have the equivalent of an unconscious memory of it. Plainview (we don’t know who he is yet, we can’t even see him clearly) in a mine shaft, under great duress, checks the silver particles inside a stone and says “There she is, there she is,” self-soothingly as you’d say “There, there.” “She,” when people will ask throughout the film where his wife is, and the closest anyone comes to mentioning his mother is “I’m your brother with a different mother.” While their absences are conspicuous, we’re liable to miss completely “her” presence in the rock, as does Plainview himself, in a way. The grammar conceals the particular in the conventional, but it’s a scene of necrophilia. Every scene but the last two take place inside the ravenous deprivation of the desire to raise the dead or live with them. The last ones correspond to a historical jump that marks, more importantly than a number of years, a shift in eras. There, with the thematization of modernity, it’s as though the film’s self-consciousness comes forward, alligning itself with the audience to look back at the preceding film, and confesses itself to be a long, cold perspective like Stanley Kubrick’s. The very last scene reminds me of the final interior scenes of 2001, which take you as though to the place where the film was made (not a very habitable place)—here, after all the film's obsessing over the turn of the 20th century, in the end it might as well be 2501. From there you’re offered a view of what has been given to see and what has been giving it to be seen, but it’s likely to be more than you can absorb.

"Desert Flowers"

Is there a film that aligns itself more fully with what Erving Goffman calls “the normals” than My Darling Clementine (1946), the scariest film I saw last year? There must be a thick literature on Ford’s interest in foundations of various sorts, and on his racism—observations on this can’t be new; so why is the film still surprising? It’s unimaginably upfront about the costs of what it depicts; it’s all in the daylight. It’s very early on that Henry Fonda/Wyatt Earp gets himself nominated marshall by slipping into a dark saloon to deal with an armed “drunken Indian” whom no one wants to confront, and emerges dragging the inert body, which he proceeds to insult and abuse before shoving it permanently offscreen. The power of this self-nomination to “proper authority,” as he calls it, radiates from Fonda’s sensitive, precise body language in long, silent shots as he hangs out, doing nothing, on the porch, and is elevated by Ford in symbols that go deeper than “religious imagery.” Fonda’s natural morality, for example, is figured in the wildflower fragrance that the barber spritzes on him and that people comment on thereafter (“The air is so clean and clear! The scent of the desert flowers!” “That’s me. Barber”). He’s anointed with oil, but he’s no Jesus type; he’s something better, he’s the pagan stud that preceded Jesus,who doesn’t need to be saved. (“Nobody with a good car needs justification” [Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood].) The central scene in which the citizens gather without a minister for a secular dance on the foundation of the future church uses the same logic, implying that we’re looking at something more ancient than any religion, from which religions evolve; and Wyatt Earp’s and Clementine Carter’s walk down the sidewalk in the sunshine, shot head-on and faraway to look like a walk down the wedding aisle, is fresher than any wedding—it uses the future wedding to make us nostalgic for the present. (This is a totally magical cinematic moment, like the carriage-house kiss in Vertigo.) There’s a little of this nostalgia in the use of the title song, which is temporally disruptive; it plays before Clementine is introduced, and at the same time the Clementine in the song is dead while Ford’s is young and alive. Ford presents the time of the film as a momentary eternity, even altering the refrain of the song in its last rendering from “You are lost and gone forever, / Dreadful sorry, Clementine,” to “I’ll be loving you forever, oh my darling Clementine.” But it’s plain enough that they can have only a short time. It’s only the loss of the civilization left behind that exposes the layer of radical purity in which the film is invested, and which gives it its “sweet” air, so in a way, the normals are working against themselves by community building—or at least, they will experience declining returns. If law and church were already established, Wyatt Earp and Clementine Carter would be invisible, which is why they like it out there in the territory even though they could be more comfortable and wealthy back East. Fonda’s soliloquy over his young brother’s grave, claiming that the point (of ejecting and slaying the unfit, or dying yourself to do so, as amply shown) is that kids like him be “able to grow up and live safe,” does nothing to account for why you’d want to go to the Arizona Territory to do that. So, discontent with the limits of civilization gets sublimated into the fantasy of civilization-creation, which comes with the bonus of seeming to get to stand outside it for as long as the construction lasts.

Image: Henry Fonda in John Ford's My Darling Clementine, 1946

Filling the Graves, or, The End of the Iliad

Abraham and Torok observe that the melancholic often imagines the lost object feeling the pain that she or he actually feels because of the loss of object: the melancholic “pretend[s] that the suffering is not an injury to the subject but instead a loss sustained by the lost object” (Abraham and Torok, “Mourning or Melancholia,” The Shell and the Kernel [U of Chicago P , 1998], 127). Maybe unexpectedly, this is one of the most intuitive, easily exemplified points in psychoanalytic literature. The lover imagines her ex to be suffering terribly, to be unable to bear the information that she has a new lover, but in keeping this secret, it’s she who shields herself from the finality of the loss of the former lover. (Dean Wareham, who’s tough on erotic illusions, may be getting at this when he suggests instead that “the lost glove is happy.”) The most spectacular example of Abraham and Torok’s ”endopsychic encryption” is Achilles in the madness of non-mourning, who insists at one point that he cannot give up Hector’s body because if he did, Patroclus would be angry. It takes a while for the magnitude of the distortion to sink in: Achilles, the paragon of outsized rage, who has been dragging Hector’s corpse around for days, claims that the problem is that Patroclus, who is dead, might get angry. Achilles comes out of it through a radically banal series of maneuvers whose main function is to get Achilles to acknowledge his, and Patroclus’s, place in an economy of substitutions in which Priam, representing outside interests, also participates. Priam quantifies Achilles’s grief and his own in the ransom of “gifts beyond number” that he is willing to pay for Hector’s body (XXIV:504), and by the way reminds Achilles that he has a dead father as well as a dead companion, so that “"Achilleus wept now for his own father, now again for Patroklos" (510-511). Achilles accepts the ransom by promising himself to "give [Patroklos his] share of the spoils" (595). Under the safe pretext of service, however, the subject being served slips from the the dead to the living body. Achilles eats again instead of being “eaten out” from within by Patroclus; and Abraham and Torok’s “false I,” able to speak only in the borrowed voice of the dead, is exchanged for one that takes up its “divine right” to live (“The Lost Object—Me,” The Shell and the Kernel 155-56). Simone Weil and Sharon Cameron in her essay on Weil comment that The Iliad treats bodies as flesh and parts subject first and last to the laws of physics. Their writings (Cameron’s essay intensifies Weil’s) point to an unspoken connection between positivism and the prosaic procedures of funerary rites: in both, necessities are separated from desires, not so that we should give up desires, but so that they could be recognized as desires, stripped from the facts in which mourners attempt to conceal them. In the interlocking structure of Book XXIV, a direct barter in losses is the only thing that interrupts the killing. The soft, suspensive ending of the poem seems to drift off in the preparations for Hector's funeral. The Trojans have a truce of a limited number of days to perform these, then it''ll be back to the business of their annihilation, but the poem never goes back. (Aesthetic suspension? There's a fantasy that as long as one is writing or reading or reciting a poem, one isn't doing something else, such as hurting or being hurt.) Mourning without end, here, though, looks less like melancholy circulation than like the infinity of desires imprisoned by melancholy and liberated by mourning, as though contact with those desires and war were incompatible.

Acknowledgment: still spring 2005 (SK, TT, JN), also winter 2006

Image: Cy Twombly, Synopsis of a Battle, 1968

Meta

I was considering writing a New Year meta-letter reflecting on nine months of posts, on such topics as whether there is a provisional “answer” to my “question” in the right column; the scarcity of the first person in these writings; mixed feelings about their relative restraint and polish; the sense I can’t shake that optimally, ideas in this format should be created for this format (so that it seems not enough to have had ideas in some other place I was and write them here, but rather that I need extra ideas beside any others I might have had), etc. And I’m still considering it. Briefly: wanting a space to be deliberately less than other spaces (less weighty, less read if not less written, less determined) is almost indistinguishable from wanting it to be more. And if my hopes for this lessness get too developed, they actually become more prescriptive than my hopes in other areas where I expect “more.” The idea was to leave things for others to pick up or not, and notice how often it doesn’t make any difference. It is literally true that it doesn’t make any difference. But instead I often hope for nothing, which is a hope that’s sure to be defeated. Not only has there been little first person, there’s been no second person, except in comments-and-countercomments initiated by a particular person who can be addressed individually. That’s been deliberate, because the overuse of a rhetorical second person in many blogs is glaring—“you,” and more strongly, “everybody,” as in “OK, everybody . . .,” get hailed hopefully, as the writer fears lack of audience most of all. Casual language is part of that: the meaning of “OK, these are just a bunch of thoughts but I’ll post them anyway, here goes” is mostly: Anyone who talks like this must be speaking to a group, as you can see. And this rhetoric of the largeness of the group stands in for the phobia that no one is there at all--not really there. The trompe-l’oeil of Work Without Dread is, rather, negative-theological: it’s “Reader, I’ll never call you ‘Reader,’ but I’ll hint that you don’t need to reveal yourself, and thereby that you exist; your nonappearance will never be able to prove your nonexistence, so it’ll often be as though you were there, but only as though; and you’ll have none of the disadvantages of presence or absence.” This fantasy is important for writing; all writing, by which I mean the possibility of any writing, gives access to it and to its momentary relief-effect from society. Those of us who have it, like to write a lot, we just can’t get enough, it’s very easy, and that’s a secret that people who are pained by the lack, or possible lack, of audience never get to know. The best thing you can do to produce writing is to feel the extent to which it is not a mode of communication. We couldn’t live without the possibility of noncommunication, and, though it may never really be lost, writing instantly and blissfully gives its knowledge back to us. In practice, though, and in a way that may be especially clear in this format, and which I’d like to follow up on in future, the main thing about you, reader, is that you’re there. That it’s not up to me to do anything in particular about that—that’s what’s so hard to understand.

Image: http://www.12k.com/steinbruchel.html