Soanyway River

Most of what’s has been written in English on Zabriskie Point was written when it came out in 1970. Commentators (mostly Italian) in the post-neorealist milieu taking Antonioni to task for not articulating a clear political position converge with those (mostly American, notably the narratologist Seymour Chatman) opining that the films are formal experiments crafted to be “incapable” of political argument (Chatman, Antonioni or The Surface of the World [1985], 78). Zabriskie Point incorporates this monotonic circle of realism and aestheticism when the male lead actor, Mark Frechette, complains about the “reality trip” his associates have been on. Asked “Were you in with that group? Why didn’t you get out?” he responds in part: “I wasn’t really in a group . . . . But when it gets down to it, you have to choose one side or the other.” “There are a thousand sides, not just heroes and villains,” Daria Halprin, the female lead, responds. Her suggestion multiplies neorealism by a thousand, surpassing it by outdoing it.

Frechette’s character has been read as an object of satire, but in many ways Antonioni does hurry to establish the film’s “side” and shows sympathy for his need for things to happen before their time. Zabriskie Point presents group conflicts with unmissable crudity: right and left, white and black, man and woman, rich and poor, old and young, South and North. Although differences between black and white militant students are shown as tense yet susceptible to discussion, and a moment of mutual recognition seems to pass between the white, sexually exploited Daria and an indigenous-looking Latina housekeeper in a corporate villa, the capitalist developers, police, and tourists with bumper stickers from the South are linked by what Antonioni portrays as an incapacity for thought. There’s no suggestion to see their lives as credible options. There may be a thousand possible sides, but those aren’t among them.

The problem that emerges only when “side” is not a problem is how to live one’s sidedness. Live doesn’t only mean “express”; in the conditions to which Antonioni repeatedly returns, it usually doesn’t get to. He tries to register intransigent conditions without, like Hegel or Marx or Deleuze or Lacan in different ways, suggesting that life does or will necessarily burst out of of them. Frechette’s allusion to Marx, “People only act when they need to, but I need to sooner than that,” conveys that. The meeting of militants that opens the film debates the question of how to be on a side as one of political strategy and goal. When Frechette leaves the meeting, his exit line, “I’m also willing to die, but not of boredom,” was read at the time as criticizing the immaturity of characters who don’t understand that political action is different from moral impulse. The film nonetheless implies that they have a “point,” even if it's one point in the “center of nothing” (Antonioni’s interview with Roger Ebert [1969]). Antonioni seems to posit that something does happen when his characters finish their inventories of the limits that enclose them, and further--this is the part that bears more thinking about--that it’s not possible to say, only to show, what that something is.

Zabriskie Point is an outlook in Death Valley over a panoramic view of a prehistoric lake bed. The notion of "Zabriskie Point" as a "place" involves a Cartesian emplotment of the necessary and the arbitrary, a piece of language nailed to a vast expanse. The name selects one of a thousand possible, in many cases equally grand, views. Rather than commemorating a significant human history, it points to a geological formation that indexes time itself. “This is an area of ancient lakebeds deposited five to ten million years ago,” Halprin intones, reading from the actual State Park sign, after which the camera shoots what one can see from the outlook. A shred of the actual, one of the many documentary elements of Zabriskie Point, the moment forms part of Antonioni’s analysis of the reality trip: a “blind spot,” if you want an impossible Real (cf. Fabio Vighi, Traumatic Encounters in Italian Film [2006], 78). Antonioni plays with the idea that a portal to the scarcely knowable can expose the contingency of human acts. What Halprin can see from Zabriskie Point is the almost arbitrary power in its naming. It makes her think, a little later, that “’Soanyway’ ought to be one word—the name of a place or a river. Soanyway River.” The name here is a shortcut past slower changes in grammar.

Halprin's “ought to be” mode amplifies in her vision toward the end of the film, in which she imagines, and Antonioni imagines her imagining from thirteen angles, how it would look if the developers’ modernist architectural paradise were blown up. This famous sequence works like the still more famous sequence in L’Eclisse when a minute of silence on the Bourse passes in real time, Alain Delon whispers to Monica Vitti that the minute is costing money, and the viewer realizes that every passing minute of a film production also costs money. In Zabriskie Point, Antonioni’s realization of a destruction that is counterfactual inside Zabriskie Point is the opposite of the almost-free documentary moment of reading a State Park sign. Showing assets blowing up, Antonioni is also really burning cash in “the biggest controlled explosion ever filmed” up to that time (Barry Miles, Hippie [2005], 351).

Fictively virtual, the explosions (but not the destruction of the house) are literally actual. We know they are supposed to be virtual within the logic of the film partly because the house blows up again and again, violating a chronology which until now has been paratactic ("so anyway") but linear. The thirteen or thousand realities of destruction project the film’s technical capacity into Halprin’s “inner” space of transformations and vice-versa. She doesn’t need to be able to see each angle in order to be able to imagine them, while Antonioni gathers them in one place--serially instead of spatially as the geological Zabriskie Point gathers slices of time--so that we can see them. I can’t work my way around to reading the sequence as claiming that its crossing of the virtual and the real is efficacious or inefficacious, or even that it is pre-efficacious. Showing what people wish for without suggesting that because it is impossible, they should wish for something else, the scene stops short of wish fulfillment. So anyway . . .

Within the plot, Halprin doesn’t have the leverage of the Borax Company, which got Zabriskie Point named after one of its early 20th-century mining executives; but behind the plot, Antonioni did. Even though no one liked Zabriskie Point at the time—or maybe because people hated it so spectacularly—the spot in the park refers back to the film now. They say Foucault took acid there in 1975 (James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault [1993], 245). I don’t know what the radical architect Paolo Soleri made of Antonioni’s use of his house to exemplify the corporatization of avant-garde art; he started building his visionary desert community, Arcosanti, in the same year. He’s 92 now and it’s still unfinished, and that still cuts two ways.



Zabriskie Point's final sequence: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJsW6ta4X8o

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