Green Filter

Kieslowski’s A Short Film About Killing (1988) was part of a discussion we were having in the course The Politics of Crime in 2008 to try to get under the idea of “random” crime. Most interpretations of this film focus on the apparently arbitrary nature of the protagonist’s murder of a taxi driver he does not know, and the mirroring of that murder in the depiction of his subsequent execution. There’s scandal in the fact that the apparatus of justice is not likely to make the viewer feel much easier about the death by hanging of the young criminal, Jacek (Miraslaw Baka). In the terms made prominent by biopolitical theories, Jacek’s death should appear as the ritualized legal death of a human with rights and responsibilities; but Kieslowski seems to attack the purported distinction between such a death and the “killing” of a body as nonhuman. Death with dignity at the hands of another, even if that other is the state, is played instead as a merely romantic notion, actually a contradiction in terms. Kieslowski makes this point in another, and if you think about it even more scandalous, way by portraying the taxi driver (Jan Tesarz) as such a cad that one is likely to feel most outrage on his behalf when, no longer able to take the sight of his sufferings, Jacek covers his face with a cloth. This conventionally dehumanizing, defacing gesture—as Jacek intends it to be—promptly increases the pathos and the difficulty, as though we were more prepared to defend the driver’s nameless and innocent body than his speaking and corrupt person. (A point made by Lucas Chan.) I believe this driver gains a name in the narrative—“Waldemar Rekowski”—only as the deceased in the trial.

These interesting reversals of certain biopolitical assumptions are well understood in the reception of the film (if not explicitly connected by critics to biopolitics). They leave aside the whole of the film before Jacek and the driver meet—a long stretch of aleatory scenes in which Jacek wanders the city and both Jacek and the driver perform strange acts of minor destruction: dropping a small rock into traffic from an overpass, or deliberately dividing a passerby from the dog she is walking, respectively, among other examples. These gestures appeared to us as intended magical gestures, pieces of reality testing in which the characters reveal, by reaching out of it concretely for a moment, the irrational fantasy of omnipotence in which they must always live. And where there’s omnipotence there is guilt, since if you’re omnipotent, why isn’t the world any better? This reversible, hazy egotism of unlimited aggressive power and unlimited responsibility may be another reading of the sepia miasma that permeates the film, achieved by a green filter, so they say. That atmosphere reminded us of the psychotic imagination of vigilante justice in the narrative of Pierre Rivière (I, Pierre Rivière, having slaughtered my mother, my sister, and my brother: A Case of Parricide in the 19th Century, ed. Michel Foucault, trans. Frank Jelinek [Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1982]). Eventually, the viewer understands that Jacek suffers from the kind of misfortune that disproportionately befalls the poor--the death of his kid sister, run over in the muddy ruts of his home village by a vehicle driven by his friend, in which he was himself a passenger: the sort of injustice for which no one is ever convictable. He feels not only grief but guilt; he goes to a photo shop with a picture of his sister and says, gently and apologetically, “I creased it.” (It may not be possible to erase the damage completely in a copy, he is told.)

Thus Jacek’s obsession with tiny mechanical possibilities that might (magically) add up to an overwhelming difference in the world. They belong to the series, “If he hadn’t had the last drink . . . if there had been more of a moon . . . if she hadn’t been tired . . .” It’s as if, after her death, it still was not too late for the world to be different. Jacek wills things to matter: he shouts at a bakery cashier that he wants that particular cream puff, not the one next to it (and why couldn’t it have been “the next one”? Why her and not another? Why, at other times, someone else and not me? So, the taxi driver plays the lottery). Plot is replaced by the characters’ associative testing of their sense of unbearable exigency against exaggerated dramas of agency, leading up to the existential act of murder.

As in Pierre Rivière, the final difference offered is Jacek’s suicidal sacrifice of himself. This outcome is not “random” but obviously entailed—only made easier by Jacek’s activating the machine that is the legal system, so that it can do its automated work. (Rivière also does this, as Foucault points out.) The machinic, abstract element makes it possible for the justice system to kill at all, and it is in this sense that it becomes quasi-automated that execution should be easier than murder, but it never becomes easy. The little acts of physical intervention into the world "take"--it does make a difference if you drop a stone from an overpass--but they can’t add up to the big difference hoped for, the exchange of death for life, sacrifice for redemption. Or perhaps Kieslowski thinks that offscreen--off the world screen, so to speak--they can. To the extent that this question can’t be answered in Kieslowski’s universe, he makes justice through law look merely mystified even as the still more mystical idea of justice through redemption remains possible. Kieslowski’s Christianity, like other dark versions, consists in the suspension (hanging) of this possibility over the miasmatic world. His view of the suspension of the film image is scarcely less mystical, as becomes clear when Jacek pauses at the window of the photographer, with its banal wedding and first communion portraits, as though it were a sacred place. Divided from it by glass, he enters, as he sees it, to submit his sister's body for restoration. He can’t see himself where we see him, hovering in Kieslowski’s frame. The alcove the images are in reflects the lightbox he is in, image himself. This fact itself furnishes at least the aesthetic substitution for grace, although only in the Kieslowski-universe. The division of labor between Kieslowski and his god: Kieslowski can arrange for things to happen and he can film them, but he can’t make them appear on film.

Reckoning with Ferenczi

Freud’s pessimistic view of human commitment to reality is developed by Sandor Ferenczi, psychoanalysis’ virtuoso on this topic. In “Stages in the Development of the Sense of Reality” (1913) and “The Problem of Acceptance of Unpleasant Ideas—Advances in Knowledge of the Sense of Reality” (1926), Ferenczi shows just how long the infantile illusion of omnipotence may hold out. In “Stages,” Ferenczi posits a subtly graded sequence of rationalizations that softens the impact of the baby’s expanding world. Passing from assumed self-sufficiency in the womb to making “increasingly specialized signals” (“Stages,” 225), Ferenczi proposes, the infant believes that its magical words and gestures show a special gift for seducing the sympathetic circle of adults that Ferenczi calls “the entourage” (“Stages,” 230). “The child can still appear to itself as omnipotent,” he suggests, by imagining that its omnipotence simply “depends on more and more ‘conditions’” (“Stages,” 225, 224). The “almost incurable megalomania of mankind” interprets the endless accumulation of evidence against omnipotence as an increasingly elaborate framework for it (“Stages,” 231). Even reality testing doesn't necessarily help. Ferenczi reasons that if reality testing can be used to discover reality, “there is nothing to prevent its being placed at the disposal of the repression” either (“Stages,” 235). Evidence of reality can be used to minimize contact with reality.

Ferenczi updates his theory of reality thirteen years later, upon the appearance of Freud’s “Negation.” Freud had argued that “negation of reality,” in Ferenczi’s words, is “a transition-phase between ignoring and accepting reality.” So Ferenczi now proposes that the child achieves a sense of reality through an operation of double negation. Only now does he begin to give content to “acceptance.” In the impressive speculation that follows, he weaves loving, hating, identification, and ambivalence into a utilitarian account of the functions of the sense of reality. Throughout, Ferenczi’s reality principle remains anchored in his pleasure principle, never anything other than a particularly ferocious supplement. He insists that the reality principle is not disinterested. As patients who accept painful realizations require the “consolation” of “transference-love,” “in a similar fashion we must suspect the presence of a compensation even in the very first appearance of an acceptance of something unpleasant; indeed in no other way can we conceive of its originating in the mind, for this moves always in the direction of least resistance, i.e. according to the pleasure-principle” (“Acceptance,” 369). Or, again, “it is only when we take into consideration the fact of compensation and avoidance of a still greater ‘pain,’ that we are able in any way to understand the possibility of an affirmation of ‘pain’ without being compelled to renounce the universal validity of the search for pleasure as the fundamental psychical trend” (“Acceptance,” 369). The last clause suggests that Ferenczi a priori rules out “renounc[ing] the universal validity of the search for pleasure,” although one would think that in searching for the point at which unpleasant ideas are accepted, he would be trying to do precisely that. In the absence of a strong example of an accepted idea not assimilable to pleasure, he implies, no one affirms pain—only “pain,” as his quotation marks suggest, that is, pain relativized by greater pain. “Since . . . a quota of Eros, i.e. of love, is necessary” for the recognition of wishes that will never be fulfilled, “and since this addition is inconceivable without introjection, i.e. identification, we are forced to say that recognition of the surrounding world is actually a partial realization of the Christian imperative ‘Love your enemies’” (“Acceptance,” 374). To cast our lot with the reality principle, we must turn our fundamental objection to reality into love for reality or reality testing. None of this contradicts Ferenczi’s insistence that it is still difficult to understand how we can accept unpleasant ideas at all:

We must not disguise from ourselves that all these considerations still furnish no satisfactory explanation of the fact that, both in organic and in psychical adaptation to the real environment, portions of the hostile outer world are, with the assistance of Eros, reckoned as part of the ego, and, on the other hand, loved portions of the ego itself are given up. Possibly here we may have recourse to the more or less psychological explanation that even the actual renunciation of a pleasure and the recognition of something unpleasant are always only “provisional,” as it were; it is obedience under protest, so to speak, with the mental reservation of a restitutio in integrum. This may hold good in very many cases; there is evidence for it in the capacity for regression to modes of reaction that have long since been surmounted and are even archaic—a capacity that is preserved potentially and in special circumstances brought into operation. What looks like adaptation would thus be only an attitude of interminable waiting and hoping for the return of the “good old times,” differing fundamentally, therefore, only in degree from the behavior of the rotiferae which remain dried up for years waiting for moisture. We must not forget, however, that there is also such a thing as a real and irreparable loss of organs and portions of organs, and that in the psychical realm also complete renunciation without any compensation exists. Such optimistic explanations, therefore, really do not help us. (“Acceptance” 376)

Ferenczi’s quandary is not explaining how the reality principle works, but explaining how anyone can subjectively accept its workings. He struggles with the difference between treating the reality principle as an instinct—to live, something about us must notice that we’re not omnipotent, even if we keep this notice as disguised as possible—and understanding whether the psychical apparatus takes up or identifies with its sense of reality. Ferenczi’s ambivalence appears in his prose: “we must not disguise from ourselves” the unsatisfactory nature of our own clarification. Delving in the name of self-knowledge into this theoretical dissatisfaction, Ferenczi launches into a reverie whose theme, “mental reservation,” names a way of not knowing one’s limits. He recalls himself from this parenthesis, in turn, by reinvoking as sheer fact what still lacks explanation: “complete renunciation without any compensation exists.” Ferenczi’s digression ultimately stresses that the ego’s renunciations in the name of reality are themselves real, even to the point of being really self-destructive. By surrendering the option of pretended adaptation favored by the “optimistic” rotifer, Ferenczi disagrees with Freud’s suggestion in “Two Principles of Mental Functioning” that “actually . . . the reality principle implies no deposing of the pleasure principle.” It does. But we don’t accept it! Because of their very seriousness,the ego’s renunciations are so hard for Ferenczi to conceive that he rejects them as acts. If they are real and really without compensation, they cannot be mostly conscious. That's how Ferenczi continues the paragraph above:

Such optimistic explanations, therefore, really do not help us; we must have recourse to the Freudian doctrine of instinct, which shows that there are cases in which the destruction-instinct turns against the subject’s own person . . . . The remarkable thing about this self-destruction is that here (in adaptation, in the recognition of the surrounding world, in the forming of objective judgments) destruction does in actual fact become the ‘cause of being.’ A partial destruction of the ego is tolerated,but only for the purpose of constructing out of what remains an ego capable of still greater resistance . . . . When the tendency to set aside the surrounding world by means of repression or denial is given up, we begin to reckon with it, i.e. to recognize it as a fact. A further advance in the art of reckoning is, in my opinion, the development of the power to choose between two objects that occasion either more or less unpleasantness, or to choose between two modes of action that can result in either more or less unpleasantness. The whole process of thinking would then be such a work of reckoning—to a large extent unconscious, and interposed between the sensory apparatus and motility. In this process, as in modern reckoning-machines, it is practically the result alone that comes into conscious view, while the memory-traces which which the actual work has been performed remain concealed, i.e.unconscious. (“Acceptance” 377-378)

So Ferenczi subcontracts the “actual work” of renunciation to largely unconscious computation. We can be aware of the results of the process and also of its ultimate purpose—to “become the ‘cause of being.’” We can be aware in these ways without having to be awake for the whole agonizing operation of selecting and destroying parts of our own egos. Ferenczi thinks the system “modern,” and it is, for it treats quality as quantity at the point of emergence, and understands that judgment of maximal complexity —especially maximal complexity— implies no imperative to “consciousness” in the classical sense. Recognition of a fact’s reality can exist as a mere back-formation of reckoning with it.

Image: rotifera