PROJECTIONS : PHILOSOPHICAL THEMES ON FILM

PROJECTIONS : PHILOSOPHICAL THEMES ON FILM UNIVERSITYOFPORTELIZABETH PUBLICATIONS SERIES Research paper C29 Editors A.J. Christopher, H.J. Delport, S.J. Gerber PROJECTIONS : PHILOSOPHICAL THEMES ON FILM Set in 10 on 12 point Antiqua and printed by the University of Port Elizabeth, Summerstrand, Port Elizabeth, South Africa by BERT OLIVIER © University of Port Elizabeth 2002 Second, enlarged Edition UNIVERSITYOFPORTELIZABETH Research Paper C29 2002 Second, enlarged Edition. ISBN 0 86988 599 5 ISSN 0079 3965 vii CONTENTS Introduction: understanding film PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION viii 1. The art of the cinema 1 2. Identity and difference in Nicolas Roeg's Bad Timing 8 3. The significance of absence in Vicario's Wifemistress 16 4. Bertolucci's 1900 : a postmodern metanarrative 21 5. Pretty Woman — the politics of a Hollywood fairytale 34 6. Towards a postmodernist theory of film reception 44 7. Dislocating the everyday : David Lynch's Wild at Heart as cinema of the grotesque 64 8. Postmodern cinema and postmodern culture: informationcommunication, otherness and history in Wenders's Himmel über Berlin (Wings of desire) 79 9. Time, technology, cinematic art and critique in The Terminator and Terminator II — Judgement Day : a philosophical interpretation 95 10. Modernity, Modernism and Postmodernist film : surfaces in Verhoeven's Basic Instinct 111 11. No recording please! This is art. Or : What do Cynthia Hawkins and Walter Benjamin have in common (not)? 127 12. How remote is your control? Sliver, surveillance, sex and popular discipline 143 13. Pulp Fiction: the normalization of violence 160 14. Natural Born Killers: Violence and contemporary culture 173 15. The amplification of reason, or the recuperation of imagination: Peter Weir's Dead Poets Society 178 16. The power of the media: Wag the dog 203 17. Kieslowski’s Three Colours Blue, White and Red: The colours of life. 207 The second edition of Projections has been substantially expanded with the inclusion of four new chapters: on Natural Born Killers, Dead Poets Society, Wag the dog and Kieslowski's marvellous cinematic trilogy, Three Colours Blue, White and Red. The opportunity to enlarge this edition has been afforded by the (to me surprising) fact that the first edition of 1996 has been sold out. I hope it would not be premature to see in this an indication that the philosophical interest in film is alive and well in South Africa. The new chapters are written in the same philosophical mode as the earlier ones, namely that of critical, cultural-philosophical reflection on the themes, as well as the cinematic modes of presentation of these themes, as they are addressed in the films in question. As readers will notice, this is done in such a way as to make the relevant themes as accessible as possible, in the hope that the films dealt with here may gain greater meaning in the light of these philosophical interpretations. Have a good read! viii INTRODUCTION: UNDERSTANDING FILM We live in a culture that is saturated with electronic media of communication — or, what is not exactly the same, of information. As Alan Bloom remarks in The closing of the American Mind, earlier generations of students (until approximately the end of the 60's) still lived in a literary universe, whereas the students he taught at university in the 1980's no longer did. Instead (and this is far more the case today!) they lived increasingly in a mediated universe or, to put it differently, in a world where their "literacy" (note the scare quotes) is of an audiovisual kind, i.e. articulated in terms of audiovisual codes which take the form of a general iconography underpinning more specific iconographic modulations. Bloom's distinction between successive generations of students with different kinds of literacy means, in practice, that the earlier generation would recognise literary metaphors such as calling someone a "real Scrooge", "Fagin" or a "Mr Bumble" (Dickens), or responding to someone with the telling observation that "There are more things in heaven and earth Horatio, than we have dreamt of in our philosophies" (Shakespeare) on the basis of literary knowledge. In contrast, today's students are more familiar with quotations, allusions and metaphors drawn from movies, soapies and the like, from The Addams Family to Who's the boss? And yet, despite their familiarity with movies and TV programmes, very few students and school pupils ever reflect on the way in which the cinematic soundand-image-synthesis works, with the result that they lack the means to view films and TV critically. They (and contemporary audiences generally) are in this respect the modern counterparts of the chained cave-dwellers in Plato's ancient myth of the cave, who mistake the shadows (cast by the fire on the cave wall) for reality. A critical viewing ability implies an understanding of the significance of the different relationships between film images, and consequently a resistance to the hypnotic hold that audiovisual image-sequences have over viewers. It also means the increasing ability to recognise inter-filmic (or intertextual) references that enhance one's understanding of a film (a fact which is not different from a critical literary or philosophical awareness). It is therefore important to remember that, just as words and sentences in a novel constitute a meaningful text, so images, image-sequences, scenes and scenesequences constitute meaningful semiotic complexes in film or TV. When, in the opening scenes of Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse now the peaceful early morning beach scene is gradually filled with the sound of approaching choppers, followed by the appearance of the military flying machines bearing down upon the beach, one is struck by the helicopters' primitive appearance. Like huge dragonflies, they hover even as they fly. And in addition to this entomological i x visual metaphor for a primitive state of affairs, music — loud music — starts emanating from the helicopters. The audience knows this because the camera zooms in on loudspeakers fastened to the fuselage of the choppers. Recognition of the music adds another dimension of meaning — it is Wagner's "Ride of the Walküre" (Valkyries), an operatic piece set in the context of the myth of the Ring of the Nibelungen — the story of Siegfried the dragonslayer. In other words, the music propels the audience straight into Teutonic (German) mythology, despite the (misleading) fact that it is confronted by modern war machines. In other words, Coppola is uncovering the archaic, the primordial, in the modern, which sets the stage for the main character's journey into Vietnam to find and assassinate the renegade Colonel Kurtz — a journey that takes him further and further back to the primitive tribal hinterland that has been covered up by the veneer of American "Disneyland" civilization. Another visual motif adds to this in the opening scene: the audience notices surfboards hanging on the sides of the helicopters (we later learn that one of the US soldiers is a surfer). Why is this significant? Because surfing, or the surfing-subculture, is one which bears the connotation of an attempt to return to or rediscover an aspect of nature. It is therefore not at all surprising that it is the surfer who, later in the film-narrative, mixes easily and is soon assimilated by the Cambodian tribespeople that the soldiers encounter at the end of their journey up the river. In this way the individual images link together to form a meaningful pattern within which the narrative is set, but which surpasses in meaning the narrative as told by the assassin (Martin Sheen). A film's deviation from "normal" film practice, i.e. its overturning of familiar conventions, is usually not without reason. An extreme example is Luis Buñuel surrealist film, That obscure object of desire, the story of a wealthy Spanish gentleman's uncontrollable, but apparently futile desire for one of his household staff members, the excruciatingly beautiful Conchita. The film's title is therefore in the first place a reference to the object of the gentleman's desire, the elusive Conchita. Every time when it seems as if she is within his grasp, something unexpected happens, and his attempt fails once again. But there is more. In the second place the film's title refers to itself as an object of the audience's desire — its visual desire, or perhaps more accurately, its desire (all people's desire) to have or be able to identify objects of vision (visible objects) that allow us to orientate ourselves in the world. What is crucial here for our sense of causal predictability and anticipation is — as Immanual Kant pointed out in the 18th century — the ability to identify an object in and through time. Imagine getting into bed at night and leaving your watch on the pedestal in front of your bed, only to find, when you wake up the next morning, that it is an entirely new, different watch that has taken the place of your old one, and imagine this to occur morning after morning. It would, without a doubt, be exceedingly disconcerting. Or think x xi of the sequence of different faces, continually alternating from one to the next, in Michael Jackson's Black or White music video. If we did not know that this was done by means of "morphing" (computer language for metamorphosing), we would be unable to make sense of it. Bertolucci's film, 1900, shows a horrific sequence of events, in 1945, where Italian peasants chase a terrified man and his wife through the Italian countryside, corner them and eventually kill them with pitchforks. Then the camera abruptly returns to a scene in the year 1900, where a drunken Italian peasant stumbles down the road, singing snatches of an aria from a Verdi opera, only to be interrupted by the sound of a newborn baby crying. The narrative which starts to unfold from there, eventually leads the audience back to the future, so to speak, to that scene where the film opened, but this time with a difference. Whereas, the first time around, one's sympathy lay with the two people whose horrible demise one witnesses, by the time the narrative reaches that point again, near the end of the film's four hours' playing time, one hardly feels any sympathy for whom one then knows to be the unspeakably cruel fascist foreman and his wife whose sadistic acts the peasants had to endure for years, until the end of the 2nd World War brought liberation. By this time the audience knows that they deserve their fate. Now it is precisely this desire, or need for a stable, identifiable world of things and individuals that Buñuel taunts, plays around with, and frustrates in That obscure object of desire. And he does it by means of a very simple device. He simply uses two different actresses to play the character of Conchita at different times in the film-narrative. And he is fiendishly clever about it, which makes it even more tantalizing. The two actresses look very similar, but their resemblance is just sufficient to make the audience uncertain about their own growing disconcertment concerning Conchita's identity. Moreover, Buñuel complicates matters even further by creating the impression that the alternating appearances of the two actresses follow a definite pattern: the one appears as Conchita when she is totally unattainable, the other when she is within the gentleman's reach, and willing to accept his advances. Or so it seems, for as soon as you think that you have cracked his code, and understand the significance of the alternation, Buñuel reverses the pattern, or scrambles it completely. So bewildering is this confusion with regard to Conchita's visual identity for audiences that many can literally not endure it, and leave the theatre. I have seen the film a number of times, and every time I could hear whispered comments around me, such as: "Is that the same woman?" "No, it's not!" "But it must be!" "What's going on?" "This is a load of rubbish!" and so on. And in the meantime Buñuel's film is telling us something about ourselves, which most people don't seem to understand, probably because they do not stop to ask themselves why the same character is portrayed by two different people. Just as in a novel or in a poem meaning is constituted in terms of the relationships between signifiers in the form of words and sentences, so, in film, meaning depends upon the relationship between audiovisual images. In the era of the silent movies this was primarily the case in terms of the visual image, although one could show, I believe, that the music provided by a pianist or a small orchestra to accompany the actions of characters on the screen, was co-constitutive of cinematic meaning. The opening image-sequences of the river and the large expanse of the waterfall in The mission (a film familiar to many of you) are a good example of the way in which film language is used to set up a geographical, natural and/or social context within which the narrative can unfold. Everything that comes afterwards, the audience realizes implicity (although they do not yet know precisely how), is somehow related to that first scene. Similarly, the opening scene-sequence in In Terminator II — Judgement day, Cameron uses the fact that viewers are largely already familiar with the film-concept of a terminator, and importantly, with the fact that Arnold Schwarzenegger played the terminator in the first movie by that name, to play around with and frustrate our expectations. In the first Terminator film, the image of Arnie as the terminator, coupled with the sound of his inimitably accented voice, meant doom for virtually everyone whom he confronted. Hence when, in the 2nd Terminator film, Arnie makes his appearance once again, viewers familiar with the first movie "know" what to expect. Except . . . their anticipation is proved wrong, for although Arnie does indeed play the part of a terminator again, this time it is a protector-terminator, sent from the future to protect the boy destined to become the future human rebel leader threatening the rule of the machines. And his task involves facing another terminator — dubbed a T-1000 model — consisting of "liquid metal", so to speak, and able to adopt the shape of anything without too many heterogeneous components, from human to floor-covering material like lino. This enables director Cameron to use the image of both terminators with incredible effect, aided by computer simulation technology that makes the T-1000 terminator, chillingly portrayed by Robert Patrick, "morph" in front of your eyes from one thing into the other. (It is the same technology, incidentally, used by Spielberg in Jurassic Park for the simulation of lifelike dinosaur movements.) An early scene-sequence in Pump up the volume1, a movie which has almost reached teenager cult-status, illustrates beautifully how cinematic "language", 1. See in this regard Hurst A, and Olivier B, Introduction to critical practice (South African Journal of Higher Education, 1997, 11 [2]: pp. 157-165). Taking this movie as our point of departure we demonstrate in this article how popular cultural artefacts may function, through critical reflection on them, to inaugurate a critical practice aimed at transforming social life in emancipatory terms. xii xiii systematically, constructs the image-context identifiable as a (pirate) broadcasting centre — and clearly, as some of the images and word-images show, one with a difference. Moreover, they signify unambiguously that the film — apart from its narrative which centres around a teenager who combats his loneliness constructively by communicating by radio (and telephone) with his teenage listeners — thematizes the media themselves, of which film and radio are familiar instances. It also demonstrates the power which animates these media in a constructive, as well as a destructive way: not only does the main character manage, by means of the radio-medium, to mobilize the teenagers as well as some staff members at his school into resistance against the autocratic methods of the school principal, but the destructive power of the radio medium is demonstrated when one of his listeners, as a result of a misunderstanding, commits suicide. The boy's suicide is literally "mediated" by radio. Various instances, recently, of real deaths that were similarly mediated by TV and film (in Britain and America) demonstrate the power of the media in and over our lives. A recent film that thematizes the relationship, not only between the media, but between fact and fiction, reality and fairytale, showing clearly how difficult it has become in our post-modern era of media saturation to draw the boundaries between the real and the fantastic, is David Lynch's Wild at Heart. Images from fairytales or fantasy interact freely with "film-realism", undermining the latter in the process, but also imparting meaning to the narrative, giving the audience an interpretive key to an understanding of the events. So, for example, images from the story of Dorothy and Toto's journey to the land of Oz, permeate the filmnarrative of Lula and Sailor, who only meant to be "happy together", but whose happiness is undermined by Lula's mother, Marietta, who is linked to one of the wicked witches in the story of Oz by means of cleverly devised images, such as shoes, and fantasy-sequences of her on a broom above Lula and Sailor's car. Similarly, the yellow brick road that leads to the city of Oz is alluded to by the camera focusing on the yellow line in the middle of the road along which Lula and Sailor are driving, and by means of Lula's red shoes, that she clicks together, just like Dorothy does in the Oz story, when a situation becomes intolerable for her. without any dialogue, sets up the frame of reference within which this narrative of creative teenage rebellion (which ultimately yields liberating results, albeit not without some sacrifices along the way) takes its course The camera gradually, Unless one is aware of the function of these film-images, together with the other elements that constitute film as a medium, one's film-literacy remains incomplete, and prevents one from taking a critical distance from movies and TV programmes, not only to enable one to understand them better but also to grasp the way in which they transform the world before our eyes. These transformations can, after all, either threaten us as human beings, or provide the critical opportunity, as the Terminator movies do, to grasp the truth that we would lose ourselves, our humanity, if we relinquish our own decision-making ability to machines, or to technology generally — including the media. It is in this sense of a critique of technology, that the Terminator films may be understood. One last remark, in the form of a hint: Laura Mulvey distinguishes between the "traditional" kind of film, characterized by "narrative", and another kind which has in recent years become more prominent (if not dominant), namely films that are characterized by "spectacle" — in other words, those films, like Basic Instinct and Sliver (to mention only two), where the images and image-sequences have become more important than the narrative. In fact, sometimes this has the effect of the narrative losing its coherence in varying degrees, for example in Basic Instinct, where two conflicting sets of clues make it impossible to work out who the "real" murderer is. It is important to look for distinctions like this (between narrative and spectacle in film), because such differences are symptomatic of important cultural changes — in this case (disturbingly) an increasing lack of coherence manifested in certain cultural artifacts, namely films. If Mulvey is right in associating films where "spectacle" is dominant with the Freudian id or the realm of the irrational, and those sustained by a narrative structure with the ego or the domain of the rational, the swing towards the former kind of movie may be understood as signalling an abandonment of attempts to comprehend the world (things, events, relationships) coherently or rationally. For anyone interested in understanding the culture in which we live, film therefore offers a significant area of study, and for the philosopher of culture, a surprisingly rich one at that. This book explores a variety of such culturally significant themes in film (and also "on" film) from a distinctively philosophical perspective. The thread that runs through all of the essays which comprise it, is the philosophical one of asking: what is the significance of these images and image-sequences for our humanity? And: how do they help us to understand our place in the world? 1. THE ART OF THE CINEMA What is distinctive about the celluloid art of the cinema? Perhaps it is this, that of the arts it is the one most strikingly expressive of the 20th century spirit, which Franklin Baumer (in his book : Modern European Thought) characterizes as "the triumph of becoming" Firstly, as the word "becoming" suggests, the cinema is the dynamic art par excellence, not only because of its privileged access to the moving image, but also because the phenomenon that made it possible, viz. technology, perpetually widens the cinema's scope for innovation by means of more and more sophisticated developments — think of the differences between King Kong I and King Kong II, or between Kubrick's 2001 Space Oddyssey and Lucas's Star Wars. In the second place, however, despite its inalienable dynamism, cinema shares with the rest of the arts the capacity to transcend its own apparent nature in its creations. Movement, sculpted still in marble or bronze, addresses us in Bernini's, Michelangelo's and Rodin's works. The "empty" black canvasses of Ad Reinhardt and Malevich's "silent" white square are endowed with a life and movement of their own, as Karsten Harries has shown (in The Meaning of Modern Art). Some passages in music and ballet suggest silence or motionlessness despite sound and movement, and also vice versa — names like Stockhausen, Cage, Stravinsky and Nijinsky (think of The Rite of Spring) come to mind. Similarly, film can capture a stillness which peculiarly belies its nature as "movie": consider the final minutes of Antonioni's The Passenger, the "timelessness" of Resnais's Last year at Marienbad, some of the "motionless" scenes in Kubrick's Barry Lyndon, or, finally, that masterly cinematic distillation of the Egyptian temperament, Abdelsalam's The Night of Counting the Years. In a way, all the possibilities of the motion picture rest on a paradox, viz. creating (the illusion of) movement by means of the rapid successive framings of still images projected through a lens by a strong electric light. This technological combination of motion and rest may be seen to lie at the basis of and simultaneously express metaphorically the governing limits of cinematography. Within the realm established by the oppositional tension between motion and rest, therefore, these terms or their modifications do not assume a primarily mechanistic meaning. Rather, they should be understood, first, in Heidegger's sense of a mutually interpenetrating union, where "rest" includes motion to the extent of a "highest state of agitation". In other words — as Heidegger shows in The Origin of the Work of Art - there is a life-giving struggle between rest and motion, one which is never resolved and in which what we call the variety of meanings is born, in an intersubjective as well as a historical sense. This applies This article first appeared in Standpunte 171, Vol. XXXVII:3, June 1984. 2 3 fundamentally to all of the arts, but in the cinema it also has the secondary meaning — analogous to the first — of the specific iconographic range to which the cinematographer's medium is privy. to acknowledge their central role as audiovisual, cinematic interpretations of human experience. Consider, for example, Jules Dassin (in A Dream of Passion) using the Ullmann-Andersson scene from Persona — referred to above — in exactly this way, acknowledging Bergman's scene as paradigmatic for the experiences that he is exploring in his own film. We shall return to the cinematic function of this "film within (Dassin's) film" later. An example may clarify the above. In Ingmar Bergman's Persona there are scenes — as may also be said of The Seventh Seal — which are paradigmatic instances of the oppositional tension between transparency and opacity, motion and rest. Think of Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson, close to each other, leaning in opposite directions, their heads, hair, necks and shoulders in a configuration which simultaneously captures and covers up that enigmatic process by which one personality tends to assimilate the other in the film's context. Scenes such as this one not only concentrate within themselves the iconographic essence of an entire film, but also exemplify the conflict between motion and rest, openness and self-concealment, characteristic of the arts in general. Except for this standing conflict of appearance and withdrawal, art would not be, in Gadamer's phrase, "contemporaneous" - i.e. new and self-renewing in every age. Meanings which are readily apparent in one age withdraw in another, making room for new significance, realised in the lives and interpretations of succeeding generations. The cinema participates in its own unique way in this fundamental ontological structure of artworks. Sight and sound combine in the cinematographer's art to establish an iconographic tradition which functions in a way which is analogous to that of language and its creations in literature. In many quarters today what I call "an iconographic tradition" is simply assimilated to natural language, with a refusal to recognise that images speak to us in a way that cannot be reduced to natural language (e.g. English). Although I would not describe the central images and configurations of sight and sound in the cinema as pre-linguistic, I nevertheless believe that they have a quasi-linguistic, iconographic and formative status of their own. This is recognised by, for instance, Federico Fellini in Amarcord, Orchestra rehearsal and in City of Women. In the latter, Marcello Mastroianni (as the male protagonist — or is it antagonist?) has the opportunity, on a mammoth fantasy (?) slide, to recall and reconstruct all those archetypal feminine — as opposed to feminist — images or "icons" which shaped his male chauvinist sensibility during his youth and from which he cannot escape in his behaviour towards women. There is the sensual, generously bosomy fishmonger with her green cats' eyes and there is the playful, tender maid who understands a boy's need for tuition in certain areas. As these images flash back to Snaporaz (Mastroianni) and the audience, their ineluctable underlying presence (even in their absence) dawns on one. As such, they have meta-cinematographic implications. While, on the one hand, they elucidate everyday social experience between the sexes, some of these images may become established in cinema tradition as archetypes, as icons in a secular sense, enabling later filmmakers Returning to the successive images in the "fantasy slide" scene in City of Women, what they elucidate on a meta-cinematographic level further amounts to a vindication of the share which an iconographic element has in the medium's ontological status. There is a parallel between the images' formative hold over Snaporaz in City of Women and the formative effect of cinematographic images (in which sight and sound are fused) in general on an audience. Moreover, and perhaps most obviously, the cinema may use the shapes and forms, figures and structures of the everyday world or of what we call "nature" (as opposed to "culture") in a variety of ways : realistically, surrealistically or symbolically. In City of Women a shape known to most people — even city dwellers — viz. that of the praying mantis, in gigantic silhouette, simultaneously recalls and surpasses the everyday. It addresses one as the symbol of aggressive femininity, i.e. of the feminism in the film, and Snaporaz responds to it in a manner which confirms its lethal nature. In "normal", run-of-the-mill films, this simultaneous use of and departure from the ordinary is seldom achieved, however. They usually work in terms of what Lotman refers to as the "aesthetics of identity" (in which the "rules" satisfy reader or audience expectations), whereas "good" cinema or film art almost invariably corresponds to literary texts which are based on, in Lotman's terms, the "aesthetics of contrast" (where the expected "rules" are absent and the everyday assumptions of the reader or audience are unsettled). In terms of imagery, this simply means that cinema art, as in the case of the praying mantis profile, employs everyday shapes, forms or images in novel and sometimes unsettling, dislocating ways, making viewing a strenuous — but ultimately rewarding — affair, corresponding to what Roland Barthes designates as "texts of bliss". And this is not only true of surrealistic or symbolic films, for instance Buñuel's The Exterminating Angel or Bergman's Cries and Whispers, but of exceptional film realism as well, because the latter forces us to look at the stark realness of our all too familiar world with new eyes. Consider that classic of realism in the cinema, The Bicycle Thief, in which de Sica, without employing any contrived imagery, exposes the image-texture of a jobless Italian worker's world so utterly as to elevate it to the status of an exemplar — almost, paradoxically, of a "symbol" — of cinematographic realism. 4 5 From the above it must be obvious that cinema, or for that matter art in general, is not here considered as something which occupies the safe, innocuous position of "entertainment", a label too easily applied wholesale to everything from stage farce and extravaganza to "movies", modern dance, ballet and even to "serious" drama in contemporary society. On the contrary. Cinema art shares the capacity possessed by all art, viz. to "claim" the reader, viewer, audience or listener in such a way that an interpretation on their part involves an "application" — a term revived by Gadamer (in Truth and Method) and central to his dialectical hermeneutics — of this claim to their own respective personal situations. One should not construe this to mean that works of art have unambiguous, easily identifiable "messages". The "claim" embodied by a great literary work, or by a film, being expressed in terms of a medium with a linguistic or, analogously, a linguistic-iconographic structure, is "contemporaneous" precisely because of the fact that this medium carries within itself the accumulated experience and "knowledge" of numerous generations. This is what first makes human experience — in the fullest sense of the word — possible. It also makes the question of the writer's or director's exact original intention (a question which still plagues many hermeneuticists and critics today) superfluous. Rather, the medium — literature or film — embodies a subject-matter (e.g. human suffering, or selfsacrificing love) which transcends any author and which applies to the life of the "interpreter" (viewer, reader) in a singular manner, just as it does to the life of the author. The means for the unfolding of the hermeneutic process in the cinema — or, more accurately, in its reception — have their own distinctive character, of course. Perhaps an example is called for to illustrate this claim. I can think of few, if any, other films which reveal the "working" of Gadamer's hermeneutics as aptly as Jules Dassin's (previously mentioned) A Dream of Passion. In drama an equally paradigmatic instance is Shaffer's Equus, for, as in Dassin's film, it is not only the relationship between the play and the audience which lends itself to being understood as a questioning of the latter by the former, but the relationships "internal" to the drama also pattern themselves as a questioning and answering dialogue which constitutes the dynamic ground of a character's self-understanding. Each one of these arts has the task of exploiting its own mediating forms, conventions and devices in a manner which exhibits metaphorically the structure of the model of human experience projected by its action. In the case of the film and the play just mentioned, this model is dialectical in Gadamer's sense of the word, i.e. it takes experience to have the to-and-frostructure of play or of question-and-answer, where cognition is essentially recognition and understanding is simultaneously self-understanding. film does not only signify a return to the land of origin of the central character (an actress, played by the actress Melina Mercouri), but also a return to the historical origin of its (perhaps the whole of Western) culture in ancient times — an Odyssey in a double, even a triple sense, if the film's renewed search for the meaning of an Odyssey through the principal character's quest for Medea's and eventually her own true self is taken into account. Dassin's film takes us to modern-day Greece, to which a renowned Greek actress has returned to play the title role in a production of Euripides's Medea, directed by a man whom she knows well and who was once her lover. Hence, the In her resolve to understand the character which she has chosen to portray, the actress decides to acquaint herself with an American woman — like Euripides's Medea a child-murderess — imprisoned in a Greek gaol, in an effort to probe the motives of a mother who kills her own children. In the course of her "interviews" with the convicted murderess (brilliantly rendered by Ellen Burstyn) the actress gradually and with increasing disconcertment realises that she, and not the prisoner, is the one who is being questioned, interrogated, to the very core of her soul. As the American woman — over a number of meetings with the actress — slowly exposes the harrowing context of events (reconstructed by means of flashbacks) which culminated in her three children's death by her own hand, a mosaic pattern is revealed which shows a remarkable similarity to the one which constitutes the ground for Medea taking the lives of those she loved most. In both cases it is the anguish of a women who is defenceless against the torture inflicted by the knowledge of her husband's infidelity which eventually spawns the resolution to deprive him — and in the process herself too — of that which they prize above all else : their children. Medea's deed of revenge is intended to make her unfaithful husband, Jason, childless — a miserable and pitiable condition for a king in antiquity. The American woman, in turn, justifies her deed by clinging fanatically, obsessively, to the (religious) belief that, through it, the children's immortal souls will be purified and thus delivered from the blemish incurred by their father's infidelity. (Perhaps there is a parallel between this and the legendary promise by the goddess Hera to make Medea's children immortal, should she lay their corpses on the sacrificial altar in the goddess's temple — a favour bestowed upon Medea in recognition of her resistance to Zeus's amorous advances.) Gradually the Greek actress is brought to realise the extent to which Medea's and the American woman's respective similar, but different truths apply to her own life : she recognises herself, too , for the first time as a child-murderess. Some time earlier, when she discovered that she was expecting the child of her lover — the present director of Euripides's drama — she resolved to have the child aborted lest it should become an obstacle in her professional career. There is also the suggestion that this decision was contrary to the father's wishes. Now, with overwhelming clarity, she feels herself united, identified with Medea, through the mediation of the 6 American woman — so much so that she becomes Medea on the amphitheatre stage, and vice versa. How is this reciprocal working of "truth" on the various levels of fiction and reality effected by means of those features peculiar to the cinema? In Dassin's film the devices of stage, video screen, flashback and film within a film adopt configurations which are sometimes bewildering in their complexity. For example, there are scenes where Mercouri, the actress, portraying the character of a modern Greek actress, appears on a rehearsal stage as the latter acting the part of Euripides's Medea. On the cinema screen the audience sees her (in this double role) on a stage, and when Dassin's camera recedes we also see a video camera and screen on which the stage rehearsal is being recorded under the watchful eye of the play director. Now one may simply, in more or less platonic fashion, argue that every device — stage, video screen, film — represents a step further away from what we commonly call (although this is not the same as Plato's) reality, and is for that reason of increasing irrelevance, in that order. This is to assume that the stage, etc., in so far as it has the status of fiction, is only important to the extent that it is parasitic upon life. Such a view overlooks the aptness with which the contemporary media - film, and especially video or television epitomise the ontic ideal of modern society. Indeed, today Bishop Berkeley's adage in the 18th century, "to be is to be perceived," may be modernised as follows: "to be is to be televised". Hence, the threefold fictionalising of the Medearehearsal, viz. stage, video-screen and film may be seen as an increasing approximation of reality in terms of its 20th century idiom, and not the other way around. Moreover, when we consider the transforming effect of the actress's growing understanding of Medea's actions and motives, culminating in her own selfunderstanding, fiction in its various forms assumes further meaning. Instead of being at a remove from life, it shows itself as laying bare those contours and shapes which are, for the first time, recognisable as the very limbs of life. In the same way that the harrowing exchanges between the actress and the "deranged" child-murderess in prison guide the former's attention to hitherto not understood motives on Medea's part, finally focusing on the question of her own life's decisions and actions, so also the various "layers" of media, the uppermost of which is Dassin's film camera, guide our attention to the actions which, in the final analysis, do not leave our own lives untouched either. The scene in the film (referred to earlier) where the play director and members of the cast gather for a showing of Bergman's Persona (another film within a film) epitomises isomorphically the bearing of (Bergman's) film-fiction on the company's staging of the dramatic fiction of Euripides and, as it becomes apparent later in the film, on the personal 7 life of the central figure and on her subsequent interpretation of the part she has to play — that of the barbarian sorceress, Medea. By implication this scene is also isomorphic with the pertinence of Dassin's film for our lives. One does not have to be a child-murderess for such relevance to occur. The film as a work of art transforms the world, including our lives, in Gadamer's phrase, "back into true being" by interrogating us, in our effort to interpret it, as to its application to our own personal-historical situation : our love for our children or for our parents; our relationship with our wives, husbands or lovers; the importance of a career as opposed to the time and responsibility it takes to raise children, and so on. Gadamer's hermeneutics reverses in striking fashion the opinion that interpretation amounts to a questioning of the text or the work : it is we who are being questioned in the course of its unfolding. In Dassin's A Dream of Passion this dialectical structure of interpretation and understanding shows itself in an admirable manner. I have tried, among other things, to show briefly how it is achieved by means of the artifices which are the characteristic assets of the cinema. This by no means constitutes a philosophy of the cinema, nor even its rudiments. At most, it points questioningly in some directions. 8 2. IDENTITY AND DIFFERENCE IN NICOLAS ROEG'S BAD TIMING ". . .; for we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them". George Eliot, Middlemarch. The phrase "identity and difference" probably brings to mind the literary-critical and/or philosophical strategy of deconstruction practised by Jacques Derrida and others. The same may be said of "binary opposites" such as "presence and absence", "true and false", "speech and writing" and "visible and invisible", at least to the extent that these conceptual pairs are typically revealed by deconstruction not to be diametrically opposed, as is normally assumed. Instead, its inexorable interrogation of traditional metaphysical assumptions embedded in literary and philosophical texts brings to light "traces of transgression"; i.e. deconstruction unearths unexpected ways in which customarily opposed, value-laden concepts lose their respective indentities and not merely exchange places, but become intertwined, almost indistinguishable. Naturally, the displacing techniques of this "Gallic Scepticism" (as Harold Bloom has labelled it) has earned it many detractors, most notably those people who fear the consequences of (joyously?) exposing the arbitrariness of valorising speech above writing, presence above absence, male above female, etc. I do not doubt for one moment that there is reason for concern, but I think this is more properly directed at what one may call "the awareness of the lack of (an ontological) ground" in 20th century thought, than at the programme of deconstruction per se. The latter is, after all, symptomatic of the former. I do not propose, however, to venture into the futile exercise of either vindicating or condemning the axiological implications of deconstruction. Instead I shall attempt to show how the traditional scheme of things — the so-called "metaphysics of presence" — is deconstructed in a "serious" cinematic work, Nicolas Roeg's Bad Timing. This may at first seem inappropriate to deconstructionists who insist on situating their activity within the shifting environment of the written text. Only initially, though, for is it not in the final analysis the case that "there is nothing outside of the text"? Hence they need not be unduly disturbed if I should, occasionally, point to some characteristically cinematic phenomenon. Given the "intertextual" landscape in which all meaning and interpretation freely move, these cinematic features are, in terms of the model of the self-referentiality of language, after all only metaphors. If on the other hand, in the course of my analysis of the film, some axiological consequences do appear — which seems likely to happen — this should be regarded as an ineluctable corollary of the This article was first published in Standpunte 172, Vol. XXXVII:4, August 1984. 9 10 analysis. Like metaphor (Derrida would agree), interpretation is never innocent. tions. The present interpretation is elicited precisely by the film's play between mobility and stability, identity and difference. Roeg's film explores the complex, ambiguous love relationship between a research lecturer is psychoanalysis, Dr Alex Linder, and a beautiful, promiscuous young woman, Milena Flaherty-Vognik. After noticing him watching her intently at a party, she confronts him, tantalisingly blocking his way with a shapely leg thrust across the passage. As it turns out, she "obstructs his way" in more than one sense. Linder, an American from New York, is employed by the University of Vienna and becomes increasingly intrigued by and eventually infatuated with Milena, who knows a lot of men and is not reluctant to be openly intimate with them in public. The two of them spend more and more time together : at her apartment as well as at his — she moves in with him for a while; at art museums and restaurants; they even take a trip to north Africa. From time to time, Dr Linder does "profile" work for the military (NATO). Through one of these assignments he discovers that, contrary to what Milena had told him, she is married — to a Czech called Stefan Vognik (the man Linder has to "screen" for NATO). He infers from this that the "relative" whom she visits across the border in Czechoslovakia is really her husband, a man almost thirty years older than Milena. He does his best to persuade her to divorce Vognik and to marry him (Alex). He also comments disapprovingly, from time to time, on her untidiness. Despite her (unexpected) attempts to satisfy his demands, their relationship deteriorates to the point where Alex only seems to want her physically. When she creates "a scene" he rushes off. Once, when after a week's unexplained absence, she appears on the campus, they quarrel and she leaves in tears. By now it seems that, in spite of herself, Milena has become dependent on Alex. She telephones him, pretending (very convincingly) that she has "done something stupid", but it turns out to be a hoax. Another similar phone call follows some time later. She wants to "say a real goodbye". This time it is the real thing. Or is it? Everything is not as it seems in Bad Timing. For instance, the "story" that I have reconstructed above is not — as anyone who has seen the film will know — given as such, viz. as a straightforward series of chronological events. In order to grasp it as a "story", the audience has to reconstruct creatively the scenes appearing on the screen as an apparently jumbled collection of events (differing in duration). These scenes seem to allow different reconstructions. Nevertheless, by means of the internal "logic" of the film — as it emerges in conversations between characters which allude to past events, as well as via scene switches which gradually become recognisable as "flashbacks" or "flashforwards" — a pattern does emerge, albeit a mobile, shifting one which suggests various interpreta- This overall ludic structure of the film in terms of scene and event sequence is parallelled by the relationship between Alex and Milena. They form a pair of opposites. He is the analyst : dispassionate (almost devoid of passion), distanced, observant (nothing escapes his gaze) and intent on description, definition. She is mercurial, frivolous, gregarious, apparently promiscuous and a hedonist — albeit one whose greatest pleasure consists in giving pleasure. Alex Linder is the respectable academic who tries his best to inculcate a sense of identity in the erratic young woman, Milena. "You are either divorced or married", he tells her, "you can't be in-between". And, on another occasion : "Don't force yourself to be someone that you aren't!" But also, incongruously, when he reproaches her for disappearing without trace for a week: "Milena, you'll never change". The latter remark suggests that he is aware of her own essential "self", yet it is not the kind of identity he has in mind and valorises when he tells his students : "You have to know who you are before you will know what you are capable of". What is this identity that Dr Alex Linder pursues so relentlessly? Why does he insist on laying bare its lineaments in Milena, on uncovering her "definition"? What result does he desire? Does he require from her, in the words of the poem that he reads aloud in her apartment, "the lineaments of gratified desire"? This is an important clue, for it combines two opposites, once again, in an uneasy juxtaposition: gratification and desire. Schopenhauer already reflected that a gratified desire merely makes way for a new desire, i.e. the latter consists in an absence, a non-being, a ceaseless pointing beyond itself. Other clues seem to suggest that Alex does not regard the paradoxical "gratified desire" as an unattainable goal. When Milena asks him, half mockingly, "Do you think there is hope for us, Doctor?" he answers confidently, reassuringly, "Yes". On the hotel roof in a North African town he confronts her with two airline tickets to New York and the request to go with him and marry him so that they can "start with something solid". In contrast, Milena does not crave a solid foundation. She "loves this time" with Alex (in North Africa), every minute of it — the "now" has a self-sufficiency for her which exempts it from the tyranny of a privileged foundation. She is aware of the difference between her and Alex — a note in her apartment (discovered by the other, third important figure in the film, the police captain) reads: "I wish you would understand me less and love me more. Stop defining . . ." Compare this, again, with Alex's story of the beautiful building that "felt so close" and used to "guide him home through the park". Without its defining presence (when it had been demolished) Alex evidently felt lost. 11 12 But even as the male and female counterparts in the film become established as oppositional forces, the configuration remains elusive — there is something deceptive about the contrast between them. True, Alex appears increasingly, as the film simultaneously proceeds and retreats, to be the personification of what Derrida terms the "metaphysics of presence", characterised by "logocentrism" (word-centredness). But the matter is not that simple. He does insist on selfpresence in the form of identity, yet at the crucial moment his own identity assumes a wholly new appearance, at variance with his own distancing self and also strangely compatible with it. It has already been noted above, that a similar equivocality obtains between what might be called Milena's dissipation and her integrity, her "identity-in-difference". The other side of Alex, which subverts his analytical identity, manifests itself on the night of Milena's phone call to "say a real goodbye". After pondering a tape recording of the call, comparing it to an earlier one, spending time in a ladies' bar and in his car in front of her apartment, he finally enters her room more that two hours later and finds her huddled against the wall. What ensues, is reconstructed in a sequence of scenes which oscillates between the film present and the film past, between the police captain's probing analysis of the analyst's part in the events which culminated in Milena's admission to hospital in an advanced toxic condition and the events themselves. With increasing horror the latter unfold. Having finally been rendered conveniently helpless by the tablets that she has taken, she is shown supine on the bed where he has neatly placed her, as on a dissecting table in a laboratory. He waits and observes until she has entered a coma. Throughout this sequence of events one is never quite sure whether Alex still suspects, as he apparently did when she first telephoned, that she is just putting on an act. However, his removal of the telephone plug from the socket when Milena tries to dial someone (an ambulance?) with her last strength, as well as his (almost reassuring) muttering while watching her, "It is better this way, Milena," seems to indicate his realisation that she was deadly serious. At this point Alex the cold, analytical observer displays a trait which is both selfsubverting and also the "natural" supplement to his observing self. This becomes apparent when he plays a record of hypnotic Eastern music — the same kind of music to which the North African snake charmers practised their art in the square below the hotel roof where Alex was trying to talk Milena into a "new beginning" — music contrasting as sharply with his dispassionate self as the bite that she inflicted on his hand to jerk him back to the "now" of the snake charmer's music. This time however, the snake under the sway of the music (Alex), in turn, has in his power a victim defenceless against his bite (Milena). In a single — albeit multifaceted — film, in a single — although complex — character's actions, the intellectual history of modern Western thought finds its exemplary cinematic counterpart. In the seventeenth century Francis Bacon expressed the driving force of the newborn scientific ethos in the words, "Knowledge is power", while his contemporary, René Descartes, looked forward to the day when the new science would have rendered men "masters and possessors of nature". It is common knowledge among philosophers of science that one of the central concepts (even when its theory-dependence is asserted) in their meta-theoretical discipline is "observation". Early on in the (running time of the) film, Alex Linder delivers a lecture on the phenomenon of curiosity which, he tells his students, manifests itself as "spying" or "watching". When, in illustration, he shows slides of a child "spying" on his parents as they make love, of some "famous spies" in science (Freud) and politics (Stalin), a student enquires whether he could project his image in the same way, implying, as he seems to be doing, that everyone is a "spy" in that sense. Dr Linder answers in the affirmative, "although", he adds, "I prefer to label myself an 'observer.' "*Throughout the film, from beginning to end, Alex is seen to "observe". And his chief object of observation is Milena. She is also the object, as it turns out, of his will to master and possess (her elusive) nature. * Paradoxically, Alex, the observer, eventually seems to attach more value to what he does not observe of Milena's bahaviour than to what he does observe. The invisible takes precedence over the visible. Hence his growing suspicion of Milena. Alex's "other side" shows, more harrowingly still, when he opens the shiny (stainless steel?), ever present little pocket knife and with its blade cuts her underclothes from her limp, inert body. It is especially the calculated cut in the middle, down the front of her petticoat which brings the scalpel to mind. This time it is not the doctor's which has to perform a tracheotomy in order to save her life (thereby scarring her for the rest of it), but instead one which renders nature, the body, a passive object for the exercise of rapacious mastery. This is the kind of act which, as Heidegger has pointed out, does not "let a thing be" in such a way that its "ownmost" autonomy is preserved; it is an act which destroys the thing's integrity. In the same way, whatever integrity Alex Linder, the perpetrator of this act in the film believes himself to have as a self-identical, observing being, shatters when he mounts Milena's torpid, corpse-like body. The act of ravishment which he performs is simultaneously the suspension of the distance which he, as observer, has maintained, as well as its most brutal and lethal expression. For even in this physical "intimacy" the total lack of true intimacy, in the sense of a mutual body-and-soul-baring encounter, is evident. All that remains is mastery, which is all the more excruciating to witness on the screen with the realisation that this is the final reduction of Milena (to utter passivity) which Alex has always desired for his notion of identity to be satisfied. Paradoxical as it may seem, Milena's identity has been her difference, her playful, kaleidoscopic variegatedness which reveals itself throughout in her 13 manifold hairstyles, clothes and the actions which she performs. This is epitomised by the fact that she belongs to three countries — America, Austria and Czechoslovakia — and yet to none. To invoke Derrida — hers has been the "renunciation of recognition" in the presence of Alex, the "absolutized subject"; hers has been "sovereign laughter" in the presence of the master's "meaningful systems" and his "adequate speech". (Unlike Alex, she does not seek "truth" in words, and yet she obviously enjoys conversing with him). And eventually Alex, the "master", subdues her through his perverse act of sexual mastery. But it is an empty victory, for she is no longer herself when he finally reaches his goal, viz. to dominate her without any resistance on her part. The theme of mastery is made explicit by the enigmatic police captain (Harvey Keitel) when, in an effort to elicit a confession from an excessively reticent Dr Linder, he remarks that they — he and Linder — are "not unalike", and that people like Milena, who "live in physical and moral confusion", admire their "strength", their ability to "master reality". That they are indeed similar is borne out by considering the following. It appears to be no accident that the Herr Hauptmann himself displays the consummate skill of a "soul detective" in his questioning of Dr Linder about the fateful night's events, deftly exposing one incongruity after another in Linder's account. The camera affords one a glimpse of the investigating officer at home in his study, thoughtfully regarding a framed certificate of some kind — what seems like a graphic representation of a labyrinth. The camera eye also strays over other framed certificates on the study wall, among them a degree certificate from Harvard University. The two men, we realise, share an American university education. The very next scene shows Dr Linder in his study, framed certificates and all. Among them is the same picture of a maze that the detective contemplated, probably a symbol of the complex and deceptive structure of the human psyche, denoting a qualification in psychoanalysis. (Presumably one of the large dots in the maze represents Ariadne who, in turn, symbolises the psychoanalyst.) An even closer specification, therefore, of what the two men have in common. But these "identifying features" notwithstanding, there is a difference, first suggested by the fact that the policeman, after a few seconds' pondering, puts his "labyrinth-certificate" into a cupboard, as if to divest himself of its implications. This impression is strengthened by the way in which the captain strips his shirt from his body near the end of the film to rinse himself with water in what strikes one as an act, not only of physical but of moral purification as well. But the crucial difference between Linder, who insists on being Milena's "friend", and the captain, who in a moment of great intensity speaks of ravishment as "an abuse of those who love us", becomes apparent in the policeman's question: "For what is detection, if not confession?" His way of interrogating Linder has been, to say the least, unorthodox. After having revealed that a vaginal test for recent sexual intercourse, ordered by him to be performed on Milena at 14 the hospital, had been positive, he urges Linder to "confess", to provide a certain "confirmation". It is in his drive towards a confession on Linder's part that the Hauptmann establishes himself as the latters' counterpart, at once his adversary and his soul mate. For what is more alien to the analyst's disinterested status as an observer that the act of confession, with its religious connotations of an unconditional revelation of the most intimate guilts, fears and motives? And yet, do they not have something in common? Contrary to the defining categories which are indispensable for analysis, and which are by their very nature general, a confession exposes the uniquely personal, individual inner life of a person — in a certain sense, his or her distinctive soul. The psychoanalyst is interested in the structure and functioning of the human psyche in general, and disinterested with regard to the uniquely individual traits which resist procrustean psychological typologies. But "psyche" is but another word for "soul". And the intimacy of a confession — the individual "whatness" of the confessing soul — is transcended by the medium of confession, which is language. Language is the universal medium of human communication, but not by that token unambiguous. It consists, like the written text, of a structure of differences, and linguistic description as well as communication must therefore remain precariously poised between presence and absence, identity and difference. Perhaps this is why the police detective does not pursue his interrogation any further, although the arrival of Milena's husband on the scene at the moment when Linder's confession seems imminent is, for the detective at any rate, "bad timing." The film's title applies, as also in the case of Wim Wenders's Falsche Bewegung, to various events in the film (not only to the Czech's untimely arrival, mentioned above), but finally it is a metaphor which captures the image of the world projected by the film. For Milena to have met Alex when she did was "bad timing", as the final scene in the film testifies by revealing the ugly scar on her throat, for which Alex is ultimately responsible. Again, for Alex to have phoned the ambulance when he did was "bad timing", because (contrary to what he ostensibly believed) there was still time for the doctors to save her life, even though they had to resort to drastic measures. One is tempted to regard these as coincidences, and they certainly are, in the sense that no human actions (not even the director's — i.e. Roeg's — decisions regarding the fictional events in his film) are necessary as opposed to contingent. But it is not so much a matter of supposing that "better timing" could have altered the course of events, say, for the better. I think that Roeg's film suggests, rather, that given the contingency of human decision, we do not possess a criterion in terms of which such a judgement can be made absolutely. Any notion of "timing" however — be it good or bad — seems to presuppose such a "stable" criterion of judgement. And yet we know that it 15 makes perfect sense to talk about "bad timing" in the context of the film. Is there, then, a sense in which the film's title, insofar as it embodies the image of a contingent world, may be exempted from the charge of presupposing a similarly absolute criterion without simply resorting to the arbitrary? A clue for answering this question is afforded by remembering that Milena finds the "now" edifying without measuring it against an ideal, privileged time. Does this not bring to mind those familiar "times" or "moments" which possess a self-sufficiency "in themselves" — where "in themselves" does not denote the Kantian realm of cognitive inaccessibility of the so-called "Ding an sich", but instead a humanly accessible realm which lies, in Nietzsche's phrase, "beyond good and evil". Hence, the "bad" of Bad Timing seems to suggest that precisely those notions of "timing" (or time, for that matter) that do presuppose an overarching dimension of "Time", may be called instances of "bad" timing. It also suggests that the universe is contaminated, to its very core, by the ambiguity which makes any "final" judgement or interpretation impossible. We are all caught in a web of ambiguity — which means that this interpretation of Bad Timing, too, is subject to the inescapable sway of ambiguity. It is not final, but merely part of the ongoing game of interpretation, which is worthwhile as long as one loves the game. Near the end of the film Milena's husband remarks to Alex that it is "not enough" to love a "difficult woman" like Milena. "A man has to love her tremendously," he concludes, "even at the cost of his own dignity." The same may be said of the "difficult" game of life.* * I wish to thank Veronica Bowker for valuable suggestions concerning this essay. Any inadequacies which remain, however, are my own responsibility. 16 17 3. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF ABSENCE IN VICARIO'S WIFEMISTRESS marital alienation. Or was there something more fundamental than her frigidity? The notion of absence constitutes a vital clue to an understanding of Marco Vicario's film, Wifemistress. There are probably many films in which this idea plays an important part — Francois Truffaut's The Last Metro readily suggests itself — but I can think of few in which "absence" so thoroughly permeates the very fabric of the film as in Wifemistress. In a young doctor whom Antonia meets, she finds the first man who addresses her as an adult, an equal, on (among other things) the subject of sex, and it is this — his words acknowledging her own dignity — which finally evokes desire in her. They become lovers. Hence it appears that underlying her frigid self there was the degradation of a woman who was merely a tool, regarded as unworthy of acceptance as a full partner in communication. Luigi's wife, Antonia (Laura Antonelli) languishes in bed during her husband's long absences from home -— ostensibly visiting his many business associates. Antonia suffers from hysterical paralysis and her doctor encourages her in vain to get up and attempt to walk, until her husband's horse-drawn buggy returns home one day without her husband. She suspects that he has been murdered, not knowing that he is hiding in a shuttered room in his cousin's house right opposite her own bedroom. Luigi (Marcello Mastroianni) has decided to lie low for a while, as he has been accused of murder by the niece of a business associate upon whose corpse he had accidentally stumbled. Having sustained a wound in his flight from the murder scene, he is nursed and fed by his cousin. During this time he cannot resist spying on his wife through the shutters. He soon learns that, thinking him dead, she resolves to take over his business affairs, gets up, walks and even rides off in his buggy. The horse unexpectedly turns out to be her guide, stopping at each place (hotels, a hunting club) that formed part of Luigi's regular itinerary. By retracing her (apparently dead) husband's steps she discovers for the first time the real Luigi, the one who was absent most of the time. He is revealed to her by his business associates, the hunting club members and his mistresses as a man of the world, lavishly generous in entertaining and loving, as well as being a writer on a variety of subjects ranging from atheism, materialism and spiritualism to the emancipation of women. One may argue that the latter topic — the emancipation of women, or at least of a woman — is the main theme of the film. Antonia realises that, having restructured her husband's image (this time producing his "true", previously hidden image) she has to embark on her own feminine equivalent of an Odyssey, as it were, in order to achieve her full liberation and find herself as a person. The first stage of this journey ends in shipwreck, however, when she is accused of being frigid by the handsome soldier with whom she goes to bed (after carefully imitating her "late" husband's lately discovered mode of courting in a restaurant). It was this same compulsive frigidity which set her marriage on its course of intraThis essay originally appeared in Scenaria 57, October 1985. It is here reprinted with permission. But what about the alleged significance of absence in the film? Arthur Schopenhauer's remark, that the essence of something is known only in its absence (which presupposes its former or imagined presence) comes to mind. Antonia's reconstruction of the past and of her husband's character via conversations with people who represent his (hitherto unknown) world, reveals that Luigi did not seem to have any difficulty communicating with his mistresses as friends and equals. In fact, it appears that in the absence of his wife (the ideal, valorised role traditionally assigned to women with regard to men), Luigi could, paradoxically, acknowledge the dignity of women (in a traditionally disdained and deprecated role). Moreover, it seems as if the absent Luigi is the real one: the man of the world, the intellectual, the considerate yet passionate lover. And yet, a curious ambiguity manifests itself in the fact that all Luigi's writings appear under a pseudonym and that he is genuinely alarmed at what he perceives from his shuttered room to be, not Antonia's progressive liberation, but her corruption — in spite of the fact that she is merely appropriating for herself the kind of life which he has been living. Hence, one may legitimately ask: who is the real Luigi? The man of the world (who yet hides his identity from his readers and from his wife) or the concerned husband? There is no clear-cut answer. If there is a real Luigi, the term "real" assumes the same normative implications as when it is said that Antonia's emancipation brings her closer to her "real" self. Still, there is a sense in which the absent Luigi is the "real" one — in the same way as the paralysed Antonia is the real one. This fettered, repressed woman, Antonia, has her masculine counterpart in the worldly-wise businessmanphilanderer-writer, Luigi, who hides behind a nom de plume and is outraged by his wife's similar but to him totally improper behaviour. Her behaviour is not exactly similar to his, though. There is an openness and candour in Antonia's conduct which was absent from Luigi's: instead of entering into clandestine affairs with men, she establishes her relationships with them quite openly (thereby provoking the charge of shamelessness from a hypocritical community). Nor does she make a secret of her dissatisfaction with current church practice, whereas Luigi was satisfied — like the rest of the dissembling church assembly 18 19 — with pretence. In a word, the former life from which Antonia is freeing herself is an inauthentic one. "Wife" and "mistress": usually mutually exclusive concepts, but seen as mutually enriching when no longer regarded as opposites implying an either — or tension. Instead of the latter relationship of axiological conflict, Vicario postulates the ideal of opposites which are truly binary in the etymological sense of "two together": wife and mistress, but also, by implication, man and woman. Conceptual opposition, thus redeemed, entails a version of "absence" which avoids the pathological consequences of actual separation despite apparent involvement, as exemplified by Luigi's (the husband's) absence from his (paralysed) wife. "Absence", properly understood, means precisely the contrary: actual involvement despite apparent separation — not only in the sense of the binary, mutually implying intertwinement of presence and absence, but also with regard to the reciprocal exigency of masculinity and femininity. Once this radical mutual involvement is grasped, absence ceases to be pathologically denuded of its binary — i.e. accompanying — opposite: man and woman are seen to stand within a union of involute co-being in which the psysiognomy of communication is always already conceptually drawn. What about Luigi, then? Antonia's candour does not leave him untouched. Not only does she publish his newly discovered manuscripts under his real name for the first time, but, having discovered about his hiding place through his cousin's carelessness, she resolves to push this openness to the limit. She has decided to get even with him; now she knows that she must be seen — by him — to get even with him. She makes love to the young doctor in Luigi's full view, knowing that he is there behind the shutters opposite her open bedroom window, suffering as he watches. Her emancipation complete, she tells her lover, who implores her to go and live with him, that she no longer "belongs to anyone". And to the hiding Luigi she addresses the words: "Now we are equals". Predictably — because the internal logic of the film demands it — the film ends with Luigi returning to his house and to his wife (the real murderer has in the meantime confessed). For the first time they can meet on the same level. Hence, the previously formulated theme of the film must be enlarged because, in the final analysis, Antonia's emancipation has been parallelled by that of Luigi. By witnessing her unfettering he has gained a new authenticity himself. Innocence — or rather hypocrisy — has yielded to acknowledged experience. The illusion of purity in a world of "experience" is shown to entail the risk of, and sometimes — when this illusion is shattered — even to lead to death: the bridegroom-to-be of Clara, Antonia's friend and mistress to Luigi, has kept himself "pure" for their wedding night. He is bound, however, to discover Clara's "impurity" and when he does, has no alternative but to commit suicide. Antonia, who arrives on the death scene with others, grasps the futility of his deed. To cling to the impossible ideal of absolute purity in a world of human experience, where the opposites in the midst of which we live are inextricably intertwined, is to invite a judgement more lethal than any contamination experience can produce. Although presented in ontogenetic terms, i.e. in terms of the development of an individual (or individuals), Vicario's film has normative phylogenetic implications — in other words, it represents the possible development of womankind generally (together with the required concomitant development of the masculine sex, of course). Wifemistress — the film's title — then, succinctly expresses the prerequisite need for both components of the composite term to relinquish their former, separate identities (their mutual absence with regard to each other) in order to merge, to become intertwined, before a distorted, false existence of both man and woman in a male-dominated society can be transformed into an authentic one. Vicario's film does not — as a superficial viewing may seem to indicate — prescribe to women and men to enter into a competition of flaunting their amorous adventures. Rather, it dismantles the need for such competition by postulating free, open communication which, in turn, presupposes the mutual acceptance of each partner's autonomy (which should not be conflated with egological separateness). Because this is a film — a work in an audiovisual medium — certain features emerge which are peculiar to the cinema. It is not simply Luigi who witnesses, with his own eyes, his wife's appropriation of the kind of life (be it what it may) which men in general and her husband in particular have always claimed for themselves; he is seen by the audience to have this knowledge burnt on his soul through his eyes. Only when Luigi, burdened by this terrible but eventually liberating knowledge, can resist the appeal of deliverance by suicide — he contemplates a loaded pistol several times — and gather the courage to face her as his equal,* is he seen to have expiated his presumed male superiority. Without this knowledge, the suffering of which is recorded by the omniscient lens of the camera, no such expiation — and hence, no redemption — is possible. In view of the above, an appropriate alternative title for the film would be "The Passion of Luigi", with the rich ambiguity of the word "passion" holding sway throughout. (It appears, for instance, that what Antonia, reconstructing and imitating her absentee husband's lifestyle, does in her quest for the meaning of living, Luigi did in order to forget the causes of his suffering.) *Needless to say "equal" does not here mean homogeneity, but refers throughout to that space within which a face to face encounter of otherwise different people is possible, i.e. where a meeting without any prejudicial subordination can take place. 20 In conclusion, it may be noted that the pervasiveness of the notion of absence in Wifemistress opens up a psychoanalytic dimension in terms of which an alternative, albeit related analysis of the film may be carried out. In broad outline, such a reading would focus on the reconstruction of a "patient's" (here, metaphorically speaking Luigi's but by implication also Antonia's and on the phylogenetic level society's) "case history" as a prerequisite for the pathologically afflicted person's cure, i.e. his or her emancipation from constraining, repressed causes of (mental) disorder which function unconsciously. Put differently, Wifemistress displays a psychoanalytic structure in so far as it is shown that, bringing the manifestly absent to the level of consciousness has therapeutic consequences, provided the "patient" assents to the validity of the diagnosed causal nexus. It is only on the basis of such assent that Luigi — and perhaps one should infer: the male species — is able to succeed, finally, to a new mode of undistorted behaviour, matched by that of a newly unfettered womankind. 21 4. BERTOLUCCI'S 1900 : A POSTMODERN METANARRATIVE "We have art in order not to perish from the truth" — Nietzsche. One of the reviewers of Umberto Eco's remarkable novel, The Name of the Rose, drew a parallel between Eco's book and the book promised to Faustus by Mephistopheles, which, according to the latter, "contained everything" (Books and Bookmen). The Italians seem to have a penchant for encompassing artistic visions, for, if Eco's novel is a literary microcosm, Bernardo Betolucci's 1900 is its cinematic equivalent. This remark does not concern narrated time (days in the novel as opposed to decades in the film) or the immediate epistemic, semiotic or social significance of their respective themes, but rather the different, antithetical attitudes, experiences, beliefs; in short, the alternative, recurrent possibilities of human existence which constitute the fabric of their distinct narratives. I shall not here elaborate on Eco's book; it is precisely on the moment of recurrence in the narrative of 1900 that I wish to focus. As the film's narrative demarcates an ("identifiable") historical period, its "truth" obviously involves a certain conception of the cognitive import of (film) art but also of history, since this conception determines whether truth or, for that matter, justice is taken to "recur" or, alternatively, to be progressively in the making. I take my cue from JeanFrancois Lyotard's characterisation of "narrative knowledge" — to which he (surprisingly) bestows cognitive legitimacy equal to that of abstract scientific knowledge — in terms of temporality: "Narrative form follows a rhythm"; he says, "it is the synthesis of a meter beating time in regular periods and of accent modifying the length or amplitude of certain of those periods" (Lyotard 1984 : 21). Again: ". . . we can hypothesize that, against all expectations, a collectivity that takes narrative as its key form of competence has no need to remember its past" (p. 22). As Fredric Jameson remarks in the foreword to Lyotard's book, this is to say that narrative is here seen ". . . as a way of consuming the past, a way of forgetting" (p. xii). Precisely how Lyotard's conception of "narrative knowledge" applies to Bertolucci's film, I hope to show in what follows. At the same time, I should like to demonstrate that the film projects what may be called a postmodernist view of history. But perhaps the question of postmodernism should receive some amplification at this point, in order to provide a theoretical context for the subsequent analysis of Bertolucci's film. It is unlikely that any attempt to characterize "postmodernism" at this stage will or can be conclusive. In a way, it is a chameleon-like term which adapts This article first appeared in Journal of Literary Studies, Volume 2 (1), March 1986. It is reprinted with permission. 22 23 noticeably to the various conceptual environments in which it makes its appearance. Most familiar of these, perhaps, are current architectural theory and literary criticism. Writers such as David Lodge and Charles Jencks have given currency to the notions of postmodern(-ist) literary forms (e.g. the postmodernist novel) and postmodern architecture, respectively. For Lodge, postmodernist writing distinguishes itself from modernism (which replaces the traditional ideal of art as imitation with the model of self-referentiality) and from antimodernism (which, in the spirit of a modified realism, continues the mimetic tradition) in so far as it defies their respective rules of composition, substituting principles such as discontinuity, contradiction, randomness and excess (Lodge, 1977: 39-44). "Post-modern" may thus be seen as a category which serves to distinguish certain contemporary forms from others, and from older ones, e.g. in architecture the playful historicist creations of Michael Graves or Charles Moore from the platonic high modernist buildings of Mies van der Rohe, with their Utopian aspirations of totally transforming social life (Jencks, 1984: 5-37; 147-148). It is not, however, in the strictly literary or architectural-critical sense that 1900 may be described as postmodern, although these are related to the sense in which the term applies to the film. We have to move to a different context — the philosophical — for its appropriate application. growth of specialization has gone hand in hand with its separation from daily life — what Habermas calls "the hermeneutics of everyday communication" (9). Hence the attempts, in surrealism for instance, to "negate" this compartmentalized culture by "levelling" art and life (10). Habermas detects two reasons for the failure of surrealism. Firstly, the destruction of the aesthetic form which ineluctably accompanies the reconciliation of art and life precludes the emancipatory effects which follow where the transcendence of societal constraints by art is recognized. More importantly, however, given the three autarkical spheres of modern rationality, it does not follow, according to Habermas, that the dispersal of the contents of one of these, viz. art, can save everyday life from cultural alienation (Habermas, 1981: 10-11). What is needed, in his view, is nothing less than ". . . unconstrained interaction of the cognitive with the moral-practical and the aesthetic-expressive elements" (11). Habermas is thus engaged in the ongoing articulation of ". . . the presuppositions of the rationality of processes of reaching understanding, which may be presumed to be universal because they are unavoidable" (Habermas, 1985:196). In short, he is drawing the contours of a "procedural" or "communicative" conception of rationality which revitalizes the "intentions" of the Enlightenment tradition while avoiding the pitfalls of its mistakes, notably historicism and transcendentalism (Habermas, 1985: 193195). In a manner reminiscent of Husserl's discovery of universal structures underlying everyday experience as the very conditions of its possibility (Natanson, 1973: 20-41), Habermas claims to eschew the ". . . snares of Western logocentrism" (a term which, ironically, derives from a postmodern thinker, viz. Derrida) ". . . through the analysis of the already operative potential for rationality contained in the everyday practices of communication" (Habermas, 1985:196). Moreover, "postmodern" displays a family resemblance to a whole cluster of terms held together by the prefix "post". These include "post-individualist", "poststructuralist" and "postindustrialist", and although Bernstein seems to me to be right about the difficulty of filling in the "content" of these "posts" (Bernstein, 1985:25), I believe that their mutual resemblance derives from various forms of discontent with the condition qualified by "post"; or, again from an awareness that Western culture has somehow moved beyond a condition variously describable as "modern", "individualist", etc. It is a moot point whether this awareness is not more fundamentally a desire to leave behind a cultural ethos which seems to some to have foundered in a morass — perhaps "cesspool" is more fitting — a notion which again presupposes a pervasive dissatisfaction with this ethos. On a philosophical level it is precisely the question of the legitimacy of the latter — in the guise of the so-called "Enlightenment project" — which defines the space of the debate concerning modernity and postmodernity. Undoubtedly the main champion of modernity today is Jürgen Habermas who, in the face of all its detractors, persistently and persuasively argues that the project of modernity is as yet incomplete but not for that reason devoid of legitimacy. He accepts Weber's characterization of cultural modernity in terms of the division of reason into the tripartite structure of (the autonomous spheres of) science, morality and art, which, since the Enlightenment, has given rise to a culture of experts with respect to these domains (Habermas, 1981: 8-9). Unfortunately this Habermas's claims notwithstanding, Lyotard seems to have him in mind where he (Lyotard) illustrates the notion of a "metanarrative": "For example, the rule of consensus between the sender and addressee of a statement with truth-value is deemed acceptable if it is cast in terms of a possible unanimity between rational minds: this is the enlightenment narrative . . ." (Lyotard, 1984: xxiii). Metanarratives such as this one, according to Lyotard, serve as sources of legitimation of science, i.e. they justify scientific activity in so far as it seeks or approximates the truth. A science which has recourse to a metadiscourse for this purpose is designated as modern by Lyotard (xxiii), and, as in the Habermasian example above, it (the metadiscourse) may imply a philosophy of history which, in turn, faces the task of legitimating socio-political forms and institutions on a metanarrative level. Hence Lyotard's definition of postmodern: "Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives" (xxiv). For Lyotard contemporary advanced culture may evidently be shown to display postmodern features; we no longer seem to have reason to believe in historical progress in terms of knowledge or justice. Keeping this in mind, it is perhaps the 24 25 appropriate moment to return to Bertolucci's 1900 which, as will (I hope) be seen, so admirably embodies just this sceptical postmodern stance with respect to the grand (Enlightenment) narrative of historical, economic and socio-political progress. It is after all not the purpose of this article to defend either Habermas or Lyotard, i.e. to promote either a modernist or a postmodernist interpretation of the state of our culture. 1 The preceding discussion is merely intended to provide a setting for the understanding of the film in question. made way for understanding. Having witnessed the atrocities perpetrated in the course of more than twenty (narrated) years by the fleeing Attila (Donald Sutherland) and Regina (Laura Betti) — for they now have names — the peasants' vindictiveness has assumed the character of terrible justice. In 1900 the fundamental socio-economic opposition is between peasant and landowner or padrone. This antithesis is given narrative significance (and inversely, imposes narrative unity on the film) by the more or less simultaneous birth in the year 19002 of the two principal characters whose different, yet related lives are intertwined with and reflect the socio-political causes and consequences of the catastrophic historical events between 1900 and 1945. Finally, the (again) more or less simultaneous death (albeit ambiguously presented) of these two principals — Olmo, the peasant (Gerard Depardieu) and Alfredo, the padrone (Robert de Niro) — at an age and in a manner reminiscent of the deaths of their respective grandfathers, sustains the narrative coherence of the film by fittingly providing the "thanatic" (Gk. thanatos — death) counterbalance to the originary moment of birth. The film-narrative does not start with the birth scene in 1900, however. In a by now familiar gesture (in literature, cinema and theatre) it opens at a later point, viz, on Liberation Day in April, 1945, which is, in a sense, the end of the ("main body" of the) narrative. This beginning at or near the end, being the kind of beginning it turns out to be, is an effective hermeneutical device on Bertolucci's part, in so far as it highlights the difference in response (or "reception") — on the part of the audience — to the merciless and gruesome treatment meted out to a fleeing couple by a group of peasant women pursuing them with pitchforks at two distinct stages in the narrative. The first presentation of this scene, viewed by the audience in a tabula rasa fashion in relation to the rest of the narrative to follow — unless one has seen the film before, in which case there is a further modification of one's reception — evokes horror and an understandable puzzlement on the audience's part. Why this vindictiveness towards the retreating man and woman? By the time (near the end of the film) that the narrative catches up once more with this early scene — i.e. when it recurs — incomprehension has 1) Cf. in this regard Rorty's "Habermas and Lyotard on Postmodernity" (1985) and Watson's "Jürgen Habermas and Jean-Francois Lyotard: Post-modernism and the Crisis of Rationality" (1984) 2) The film's title, read together with the subtitle immediately subsequent to the opening scene on Liberation Day, April 1945, which says: "Many years before . . .", suggests that Olmo and Alfredo were born in 1900. The birth scene is introduced, however, by the hunchback Rigoletto(!) stumbling down the road behind the Belinghieri villa, crying: "Verdi is dead!" which, in turn, suggests their year of birth to be 1901. Typical of the narrative mode of temporality, though, when this scene recurs, it does not strike one as something past, something which happened "before" — even though some of it has been seen before — but as a present series of events. "The narratives' reference may seem to belong to the past", says Lyotard, "but in reality it is always contemporaneous with the act of recitation. It is the present act that on each of its occurrences marshals in the ephemeral temporality inhabiting the space between the 'I have heard' and the 'you will hear'" (p. 22). His remark applies to narrative as a whole, of course, but here its applicability is heightened by the recurrence of the scene in question. The "return of the same" is experienced as being the necessary present outcome of a causality of actions and events which also constitutes the present ground of understanding on the part of the audience. This holds true even though the fictional sequence of events is projected onto a recognizable historical field, viz. Italy in the first half of the twentieth century. The narrative "now" takes the place of the historical "then"; the spread of Italian socialism and the corresponding growth of fascism in that country between the two world wars may ordinarily be consigned to the past, but in the self-enacting film narrative they attain an enduring presence. The significance of this abiding present, as well as of the "return of the similar" in the film reaches far beyond the repetition of the film's opening scene, though, as will become clear further on. It does seem to give Bertolucci's motion picture a certain paradigmatic import from the start, however. By the time Attila makes his appearance in the story, Olmo has already returned from the trenches of the First World War. The roots of understanding the scene of the peasants' retribution against him and Regina go back further than this, of course, to the birth of Alfredo and Olmo, from which time the growing resentment and concomitant expectations of social justice on the part of the peasants are apparent. When the old Alfredo Belinghieri (Burt Lancaster), young Alfredo's grandfather, distributes bottles of wine to the peasant men working on his lands, they take their cue from Leon (Olmo's grandfather) when he initially refuses to drink with Alfredo to their grandsons' health. The old Alfredo is disconcerted when, as one man, they discard the bottles and carry on working. He senses their resentment, but insists that Leon join him in a toast. "Born together", he exclaims, "it must mean something!" "It probably means they'll die together", is Leon's cynical but significant retort. And indeed, over and above the virtually simultaneous birth and death of Olmo and 26 27 Alfredo, which neatly demarcate the temporal boundaries of the narrative, death functions as an equalising force in the film. Nowhere does it show any partiality to either peasant or landowner, fascist or socialist. From the very first scene of the motion picture, on Liberation Day, 1945, where a young shepherd dies, clutching his bleeding belly after being gunned down, while stammering uncomprehendingly that the war "is over", to the last, where Alfredo (by now virtually senile) lies down across the railway tracks in the path of an oncoming train, death is the one — the final — unifying principles.3 Near Alfredo in this scene, leaning his head against the telegraph pole whose humming fascinated him as a child, sits Olmo in exactly the same position as his grandfather sat against a tree when he died, also with his eyes open. This suggested simultaneity of their dying has perhaps the further explicit meaning that peasant and padrone, separated yet thrown together by the social and temporal accident of their birth, share at least a common human mortality. to lack Olmo's nerve when he initially fails to meet the latter's challenge to lie with him between the tracks while the train passes above them. But he goes back on his own, later, and performs the feat to prove to himself that he is not "yellow". Is it because of the "tyranny of the status quo"? To be born into a world where landowners in fact are assigned a position superior to that of peasants, has, like all factual states of affairs, a misleading normative force which may (and often does) stand in the way of reform. Is it Alfredo's eventual relish of the power — in its turn dependent on property and wealth — which his position as padrone affords him, which stands in the way of decisive action in the interest of at least the peasants who live on his estate? Olmo entreats him on more than one occasion to fire the murderous Attila from his post as foreman on the estate, but when Alfredo finally does it, it is too late to stop a massacre. (In fact, throughout the film, Alfredo is always "too late".) It is the social chasm between them that Alfredo is — curiously enough, considering his avowed friendship with Olmo — incapable of crossing. Various reasons for this incapacity suggest themselves in the course of the film. Despite the fact that Alfredo recognises the injustices committed by his father, Giovanni, against the peasant labourers and on occasion even comes up with an ineffectual attempt to intervene on their behalf — when his father ignores the custom of giving half of the maize harvest to the workers — he ultimately proves too weak to establish a just dispensation on the estate when he becomes the padrone. Given his landowner ancestry, it is perhaps too much to expect of him to run his estate socialistically or even democratically, although his wish to be at one with the peasants is poignantly expressed when, as a boy, he tells Olmo: "I am a socialist too, now!" Yet incidents like the half-hearted intervention mentioned above, or his telling departure from the church — an ironic symbol of power — where landowners (including his father) have just, with the approval of the clergy, pledged capital to the suppression of the socialist revolt, do create the expectation of rather drastic changes following his succession of his father as padrone. These expectations are disappointed. Although it is certainly true that one is afforded glimpses of more food on peasant tables when Alfredo is padrone than during his heartless father's time, he fails to face up to the realities around him in a manner demanded by a sense of justice. This is especially the case when fascism — the landowners' instrument in their fight against socialism — rears its ugly head. Why is Alfredo unable to oppose fascism firmly and courageously? Because of inherent weakness of character or simply cowardice? As a boy he does seem 3) This appears to be the significance, too, of the peasant Rigoletto crying "Verdi is dead!" while behind him, on the estate, the two baby boys are being born. Perhaps Alfredo's "weakness" is most accurately grasped — in cinematic terms, anyway — as the ineluctable contamination of those that have the most to lose under conditions of social and political conflict. Seen in this way, Alfredo's "escapist" spree in the company of his hedonist playboy uncle, Ottavio, and the fantasy-loving Ada — whom he eventually marries — shows itself to be the outcome of a conflict within himself: between his awareness of the growing threat of anarchy and his realisation that, sooner or later, he will have to face up to it. After his father's funeral this escapist tendency manifests itself once more when, instead of addressing his grief-stricken mother on the issue of the moment, he promptly (incongruously) announces his wedding to Ada. Ironically, it is the hedonist uncle and Ada who are able to identify the evil in Attila and his fascist henchmen immediately. Alfredo, on the other hand, is stricken or contaminated by a kind of helpless passivity, which in effect promotes the commitment of crime in the name of order and the "strength" of the Italian nation. At one stage Olmo rightly accuses him (Alfredo) and his kind to have caused the suffering around them: not doing anything about an unjust state of affairs is also a form of doing, of causing, albeit a negative one, which has the effect of reinforcing the existing condition. As when, after the boy Patrizzio's gruesome murder by Attila and Regina, Alfredo stands as if mesmerized, unable to stop Attila's blackshirts from assaulting Olmo, accused of the murder by none other than Attila himself. Yet he knows as well as Ada — who urges him to intervene — that Olmo could not have committed the crime, because he was in Ada's company during the time that it happened. This passivity on the part of Alfredo provokes an angry accusation by Ottavio that he has become "like them". Hence, the strands in the film's rich fabric are variegated, sometimes contrasting sharply, sometimes complementing one another, but always closely intertwined. 28 29 There are the various generations' "versions" of the padrone and of the peasant; there are the different varieties of hedonist, mixed together with differing quantities of escapism and moral assertiveness; socialists such as Olmo's fervent Anita oppose fanatical fascists such as Attila; Bertolucci's film even has its nihilist (in appearance as well as in speech and action). In the latter, the opposing forces of emancipatory socialism and authoritarian fascism come together and dissolve in a striking manner. The nihilist, who intervenes when the blackshirts are beating up Olmo — while Alfredo looks on passively — acts as a kind of catalyst. He confesses to the murder of Patrizzio although (we know) he is innocent, and when, some years later, he turns up unexpectedly at the estate where the peasants are slaughtering a pig, he tells an incredulous Olmo that he "confessed" simply to save the latter, and spent years in prison (until a general amnesty was declared). "In jail, under a tree, in a barn", he exclaims, "its all the same!" And, as he walks away through the archway — a visual image of the "framing" character of film, indeed, of all fiction — we hear his cry: "I walk and I walk and I walk. Can't stop! Where is socialism?" In this sense he is a catalyst: his wild, striding, nomadic figure, together with his words embody, not only a nihilistic assessment of all possible states of affairs as equally valuable or devoid of value, but also — more importantly — a spatial metaphor for historical mankind striving for the just social order which, in the face of the lasting desire for power, is never realized. a modification of this relationship to the detriment of the peasants on the estate (which, by the way, he secures for himself in a deceitful way after the old Alfredo's suicide). Apart from his contemptuous rejection of the customary sharing of the harvest with the harvesters, earlier on he leaves them destitute after an obliterating storm to make up for his losses, calling it their corresponding "sacrifice". This sets in motion one of the most moving scenes in the film, with the horrific response by one of the peasants to a snide remark by Giovanni about the size of his ears, viz. to take his knife and, with cool deliberation cut off one ear and hand it to the stunned padrone. "He only lost his ear," comments another peasant, addressing Giovanni, "but you've lost your soul!" The camera follows the mutilated man — a blood-soaked cloth wrapped around his head — to the hovel where his starving family quickly finishes the pitifully few chunks of food he shakes out on the table in front of them. When his children complain that they are still hungry, he takes out a kind of wooden flute and starts playing on it, exhorting them to listen, which will make them "forget their hunger". His art transports them from their present deprivation, just as Bertolucci's art transports the audience from the "real" world they inhabit. In fact, despite the desire for justice, poignantly (but also somewhat comically) expressed by Rigoletto at table on one occasion, things do not seem to change much by way of emancipation of the peasantry. Also, in spite of apparent progress — on a technological level, i.e. in terms of a hallmark of the "modern" world — we witness a recurrence, from one generation to the next, of the structure of social domination. We have an evocative filmic portrayal — in terms of sight and sound — of this recurrence in the scene where Alfredo's father, Giovanni, searching for him in the dark after Alfredo had run away from the dinner table, calls out his name repeatedly: "Alfredo! Alfredo!". In response to his calling the boy Olmo, fantasising about his own father (whom he never knew), imagines the latter calling out to him (Olmo) in similar fashion, and imitates this imaginary paternal calling, so that his voice, carrying his own name, alternates hauntingly with Giovanni's, the cadence of their voices an epiphany of the wave-like rise and fall of history itself: "Alfredo!" "Olmo!" "Alfredo!" "Olmo!" The historical struggle between classes is here sonically expressed in the form of two names voiced in counterpoint. To be sure, the quality of the relationship between padrone and peasants differs from one generation to the other — the "modifying accent" of rhythmic narrative form which Lyotard discerns. Alfredo's father Giovanni, for instance, represents In contrast to Giovanni's "rule" as padrone, there is ample evidence of the old Alfredo's generosity to the large "family" of peasants on his land. In the scene where the boy Olmo is addressed by his grandfather — who, it transpires, may not be his real grandfather at all — he is placed on the huge table where the fortyodd members of the clan are seated and makes his way through and over a plenitude of food and drink to Leon's partriarchal seat at the head of the table. Certainly, as Leon reflects on occasion, with the old padrone there is never any doubt as to who is in charge, but somehow the latter's presence never exudes the meanness which oozes from Giovanni. The young Alfredo, in turn, is — as may already be apparent — a thoroughly ambivalent figure. Involved with the peasants (he calls Olmo his best friend) as well as distanced from then (he tells the childless Ada, who dotes on Olmo's motherless little daughter, Anita, that the girl does not belong in the villa), he shows no malevolence towards them, except as already specified, in a negative manner by his lack of decisive action. (At one point he declares emphatically: "I never hurt anybody!".) He is willing to share a prostitute with Olmo, but does not come to the latter's rescue when he is unjustly attacked and, on becoming padrone, reminds Olmo that he is "his master". The modification in accent between grandfather, son and grandson should not disguise the fact that, as perceived by (at least some of) the peasants and also at crucial moments by the audience, they (these differences) are not essential. During Alfredo's "trial" on Liberation Day by the (armed) peasants led by Olmo — immediately after Attila's execution — one woman corrects another's erroneous accusation of Alfredo's 30 31 grandfather by pointing out that the particular injustice was committed by his son, Giovanni. The plaintiff is unimpressed, however. "A padrone remains a padrone", is her laconic reply. As if to confirm her cynical appraisal, Alfredo, who sat passively for the duration of his arraignment — ending with Olmo proclaiming the padrone's (figurative) death: "The padrone is dead!" — gets up after the peasants' disarmament by the representatives of the local liberation committee and informs Olmo and his youthful captor, Leonida, calmly: "The padrone's alive". The scene ends with the camera receding from the pair, Olmo and Alfredo, jostling and struggling with each other, Olmo pulling Alfredo this way and the latter shaking himself free and straining to go the other way. The very next scene, we soon realize, takes us about thirty years hence, with two old men, recognizable as Olmo and Alfredo, still jostling and struggling, still involved in the proverbial lovehate relationship — close yet distant. This scene closes with their (suggested) death, peasant and padrone finally reconciled by that grim, ineluctable judge. considers Lyotard's characterization of "postmodern" as "incredulity toward metanarratives" (p. xxiv). For what Bertolucci's 1900 articulates on a metanarrative level, i.e. in the form of a discourse on or "behind" the film narrative, is precisely a "postmodern metanarrative" i.e. one marked by an incredulity about the possibility of justifying any narrative which posits the attainment of a "good ethico-political end". In a sense, therefore, it may be said to formulate the "last metanarrative".4 Or, in terms of the currently fashionable critical strategy known as deconstruction, 1900 "deconstructs" itself as metanarrative; i.e. it systematically undermines the condition of its own possibility as a source of legitimation with regard to the belief in historical progress. (We may also note the curious combination of this "philosophical" postmodernism of the film with its "antimodernist" principles of composition [in Lodge's sense of the term, mentioned earlier]: a "modified" realism closely resembling history and suggestive of ". . . a reality that exists prior to and independent of the act of communication" [Lodge, 1977:40]. For lack of space this point cannot be further pursued at present.) These final scenes, which shatter the utopian dream of equality between peasant and padrone, provide the concluding articulation of the vision of history by which Bertolucci's film is animated and sustained. One doubts whether Olmo, who — perhaps out of compassion for Alfredo? — engineers the padrone's effective acquittal by cleverly announcing his "death" to the peasant "jury", really believes that equality between them can truly be realized. At any rate, in the film it is not, and if one wonders about the obvious correspondence between this state of affairs and historical reality, i.e. about the "truth" of the film narrative, perhaps the answer to the question is that, far from merely presenting a "documentary" of a certain period in Italian history Bertolucci's film explores the reasons — the exercise of power for instance — for the (recurrent) historical domination of one social class by another. Alternatively, returning once more to the earlier consideration of postmodernism, the film offers — in narrative form — a (philosophical) model for the understanding of history; something similar to what Lyotard describes as a metanarrative. Similar, but not identical, because the model mapped out by 1900 features an important difference. By "metanarrative", it will be remembered, Lyotard understands a "discourse of legitimation", a "grand narrative" — e.g. "the emancipation of the rational or working subject, or the creation of wealth" (p. xxiii) — with respect to the status of science. In other words, a metanarrative is the way in which that form of knowledge which we call science justifies itself as working towards some goal, which is already somewhat anomalous if we consider that, as Lyotard points out (p. xxiii), science is by its very nature "in conflict with narratives". It should be apparent, further, that 1900 does not project a metanarrative in this sense. In fact, the narrative model of history which emerges from the film by way of reconstruction is, in its turn, abnormal (if not paradoxical) when one This belief in progress, so strong in the 19th century, is after all one of the sustaining metanarratives of modern western culture. And while, as previously mentioned, 1900 provides the filmic images of apparent progress, these are juxtaposed with the more persistent and finally unsettling images of the perpetuation of "pathological" structures of social authority and power; in Nietzsche's phrase the "recurrence of the similar". The audience is afforded a view of significant instances of progress in agricultural as well as military technology — the latter very much understated — together with a demonstration of the consequences of such "progress". In fact, a consideration of the consequences or implications leads to a contradiction of the idea of progress, albeit on another (more fundamental) niveau. The introduction of machines into the agricultural domain, for example, receives a mixed reaction from the peasant workers. Their attitude alternates between open rejection, mistrust and a naive acceptance of these machines. In the latter case, it is accompanied by the belief that machines will relieve the worker of a portion of the labour-burden, which turns out to be justified to a certain extent, except that such relief is unavoidably linked to the growing redundance of the labourer on the farm. This increasing mechanization of agriculture and the concomitant lessening of padrone's dependence on peasant prepares the way for Giovanni's refusal to adhere to the harvestsharing custom, as well as for the scene where Attila attempts to rid himself of the troublesome Olmo once and for all by offering him and his daughter for "sale" together with some horses, having "replaced" these with a tractor. The fact that this scene ends with Attila's humiliation by Olmo (only to be followed, not surprisingly, by Attila's grim and cold-blooded revenge on the peasants, by which time Olmo and Anita have fled), does not obscure the extent to which the 4) I owe this phrase, with thanks, to Derick van Heerden. 32 33 progressive mechanization of agriculture goes hand in hand with the deterioration of the peasant labourers' lot. We witness the inexorable extension of domination through — and by implication eventually by — technology. This subverts the (superficial) impression of progress, the upshot being that, far from guaranteeing progress in the sense of social emancipation, technological development ensures (or at least provides the means for the continuation of) socio-political domination. In a striking — albeit countervailing — affirmation of the power of the machine, the peasants appropriate the tractor on Liberation Day to tear down a fence on the Belinghieri estate — a gesture symbolising their hope of liberation, just as the huge red "flag", stretched like a canopy over the dancers, embodies their dream of an all-embracing communal bond. That the dream cannot last becomes clear when Bertolucci's retreating camera — following Anita and her friends elatedly running with the flag — eventually picks up the diminishing patch of moving red against the green expanse of the fields, the large canopy now reduced to almost insignificant proportions. One final note: despite the fact that the film seems to lend itself to an interpretation in Marxist terms, I have avoided this as far as possible, although certain of my terms — e.g. emancipation — have familiar Marxist and neomarxist connotations. Besides, Bertolucci appears in the end to differ from Marx regarding the expectation of emancipation, and to be closer to the historical pessimism of someone like Adorno. In other words, in his view the dialectic in history does not resolve itself as a reconciliation of opposites in the form of a classless society; it turns out to be, in a sense, a negative dialectic.6 My evasive strategy does not do violence to the film, however. Like all works of art, it proves to be capable of responding to an alternative interpretation. By now it is a commonplace that authoritarian governments worldwide depend upon sophisticated technology — military and other — to perpetuate their oppressive rule. With the aid of the iconography which is peculiar to the cinema5, Bertolucci's film supplies us with the conceptual means to grasp how this is possible. But much more: in the process it reveals the paradigmatic contours of a philosophical model of social history. That it succeeds in sustaining the integrity and coherence of its sweeping vision for four hours (narration time), is ample proof of Bertolucci's artistry. Not that this essay, which focuses largely on one aspect of 1900, viz. its status as (meta-)narrative with regard to the question of history, progress and social emanicipation, can do justice to the richness of Bertolucci's vision. Because of this thematic demarcation, many of the film's constituent features escape the present perspective. These include the significance of the film's iconography, e.g. the pervasive imagery of the grotesque, as well as the question of its self-conscious theatricality — ostensible realism notwithstanding — nowhere more apparent than in the "Verdian" opening of the birth scene, where a costume-clad peasant hunchback called Rigoletto laments Verdi's death against a background of strangely portentous, artificial blue light. In view of all these considerations, but especially by virtue of the significance of the (meta-)narrative knowledge it imparts, Bertolucci's 1900 contributes in large measure to the redemption of "the storyteller's art", the erosion of which in our science-dominated world was pointed out by Walter Benjamin. 5) Elsewhere, in an essay entitled "The Art of the Cinema" (Standpunte 172, August 1984) I have elaborated on this subject. Obviously it is too complex a matter to examine in any detail here. BIBLIOGRAPHY Bernstein, R.J. 1985. Introduction. In: Bernstein, R.J. (ed.). Habermas and modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press, pp.1-32. Habermas, J. 1981. Modernity versus postmodernity. New German Critique 22:3-14. Habermas, J. 1985. Questions and counterquestions. In: Bernstein, R.J. (ed.) Habermas and modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 192-216. Jencks, C. 1984. The language of post-modern architecture. London: Academy Editions. Lodge, D. 1977. Modernism, antimodernism and postmodernism. The New Review 4 (38): 39-44. Lyotard, J.F. 1984: The postmodern condition : A report on knowledge. Tr. Bennington, G. and Massumi, B. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Natanson, M. 1973. Edmund Husserl — philosopher of infinite tasks. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Olivier, G. 1984: The Art of the Cinema, Standpunte 171: 15-21. Rorty, R. 1985. Habermas and Lyotard on postmodernity. In: Bernstein, R.J. (ed.) Habermas and modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 161175. Watson, S. 1984. Jürgen Habermas and Jean-Francois Lyotard: postmodernism and the crisis of rationality. Philosophy and Social Criticism 10 (2): 1-24. 6) This was pointed out to me by Jan Kirsten. 34 5. PRETTY WOMAN — THE POLITICS OF A HOLLYWOOD FAIRYTALE Richard Corliss (Time, July 30, 1990:70) describes Disney's Pretty Woman as "an airhead Cinderella comedy, that speaks to every man's dream of buying a beautiful woman and every woman's fantasy of a Beverley Hills shopping spree. . . " About the airhead I am not so sure, but the Cinderella is accurate enough. At first sight, Pretty Woman is just an innocuous vehicle for the final stage of Julia Roberts's rise to Hollywood stardom (having prepared the way with her roles in Mystic Pizza and Steel Magnolias) and for Richard Gere's return to the select company of that 20th-century American answer to the fascinating Olympians of Ancient Greece. A closer look reveals, however, that — apart from the superficial similarity between the society of Hollywood stars and that of the mythical Greek gods — Pretty Woman is sustained by a questionable fairytale structure: fairytale because it re-enacts familiar (universal) fairytale patterns, and questionable because it does so in an ostensibly realistic, but in fact self-consciously fictionalized, ideologically capitalist-materialist context which ultimately valorizes money1 for its own sake. I should add that the narrative displays a certain desultory moral development, but strictly within the established fictionalized ideological framework, i.e. with at most some scattered traces of an emancipatory ideal. In addition to Pretty Woman's fairytale structure, which I shall attempt to explore in some detail in this paper, there is, of course, also an obvious, although indirect mythical connection. Who can fail to recognize in Gere's Edward Lewis the mythical Greek, Pygmalion, whose sculpture in Aphrodite's image was animated as Galatea by the goddess out of pity for his unrequited love? Those moviegoers who are unfamiliar with the myth may recognize the similarities between Pretty Woman and G.B. Shaw's play, Pygmalion, with its metaphoric-mythological roots; or at least its resemblances to My Fair Lady — the film version of Shaw's play. The link with My Fair Lady is so conspicuous that it can hardly be overlooked; in fact, the name of the film — Pretty Woman — is the banal, kitschified version of (My) Fair Lady: "fair" belongs with "lady" as "pretty" belongs with "woman" (or "girl", for that matter). Eliza Doolittle's exuberant faux pas at the Ascot races (in My Fair Lady) is matched by Vivian Ward's incongruous physical This essay was first published in Scenaria 135, April 1992. It is reprinted with permission. 1) Here, and intermittently throughout this paper the term "money" is used metonymically in relation to "unrestrained" capitalism, i.e. capitalism as socio-economic organisational principle within a political context (usually taken to be a "liberal democracy") which (unlike a "social democracy") condones and consequently encourages financial profiteering, if not exploitation. 35 exuberance at the polo game (in Pretty Woman): both behaviours draw glances of surprise or indignation. It is significant that, whereas Eliza's faux pas is linguistic, Vivian's is nonlinguistic, except in the broad sense of body language. In both films a transformation takes place, but with a difference. Eliza's transformation is a Bildung effected through language which has (understandably) for centuries been the measure of civilization. (It is no accident that the word "barbarian" comes from the Greek barbaros which meant someone who spoke an incomprehensible babble, i.e. who did not speak Greek.) In My fair Lady, Professor Higgins's linguistic knowledge does not merely refine Eliza's pronunciation; the civilizing effect of the speech that she laboriously acquires is such that she becomes a lady. In Pretty Woman, Vivian (Julia Roberts) is also transformed, but one can hardly call it a Bildung, with its connotations of civilizing enlightenment through experience articulated in language. The transformation is effected almost solely and indispensably by means of the buying power of money, with the result that Vivian acquires (only) the appearance, the look of a lady, as Edward's assurance when they go to the polo game indicates: "You look like a lady". That she realizes how superficial the transformation is, becomes evident when her friend and fellow prostitute, Kit Luca (lucre?), visiting her at the Regency Wilshire in Beverly Hills, remarks approvingly that she has "cleaned up nicely", to which Vivian replies: "It's easy to clean up when you've got money!" In Pretty Woman the person who comes closest to My Fair Lady's professor Higgins with regard to a civilizing influence through knowledge, is the hotel manager, Barney Thom(p?)son, who assists Vivian in true chivalrous fashion when she finds herself in a predicament by arranging the necessary introduction for her at an exclusive dress shop, and teaching her the appropriate uses of the various items of dinner cutlery. One could argue that Edward also exposes Vivian to a culturally enriching experience when he takes her to the opera in San Francisco, except for the fact that the occasion is totally dependent, once again, on money — from the private jet flight to the "best" box seats at the opera — and not on an interpersonal solidarity and support through experiential wisdom, i.e. the kind of support that human beings can render one another regardless of the positions they occupy on the socio-economic ladder. By comparing Pretty Woman with My Fair Lady I have already touched upon some of the former's fairytale features. It is when these features are considered in psycho-analytical and aestheticist2-political terms that their significance be2) I use "aestheticist" here in the sense of generalising, i.e. extending the aesthetic sphere to include all of reality. Megill (1985:2) employs the term in this sense with regard to what he describes as the "crisis thought" of Nietzshe, Heidegger, Foucault and Derrida. 36 comes apparent. In other words, we have to answer the question: what politics is promoted by the pleasure which Pretty Woman, considered as a fairytale, affords its audience? Consider, once more, the question of Vivian's transformation in Pretty Woman. But think of it, this time, within the more encompassing topological transformation effected by the film as a whole. It opens and ends, like Blue Velvet in distinctly postmodernist fashion with a framing sequence which self-consciously establishes its own status as fiction, and at the same time transgresses the aesthetic limits apparently imposed by the frame. In the opening sequence we witness a Hollywood street scene. A character wanders, seemingly aimlessly, through the crowd exclaiming (something like the following — I am working from memory because the film is not yet [September 1990] available on video): "Everyone who has a dream, comes to Hollywood! What's your dream?" The closing sequence virtually duplicates the opening. The same character rambles across the screen in the vicinity of Vivian's apartment, where her "dream" has just been realized. This time he shouts out something to this effect: "Hollywood! The place of dreams . . . some come true; others don't!" This is precisely the point: while, on the one hand, the framing device ostensibly has the modernist implication of enclosing the narrated/filmed actions and events within its own autonomous aesthetic space, it shatters this modernist hermeticism by, firstly, situating the narrated events in a "really" existing place — Hollywood, Los Angeles — and secondly, introducing the discourse of "truth" into the diegetic space. The result is that, instead of simply assimilating an historical location into a fictional realm — as, for instance, London and Paris are drawn into Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities — the ontological charge of the fictional realm spills over into everyday reality, and the life-world — i.e. the world of common experience — is aestheticized. In the process we are invited to think of the world and our lives in it in fictional-fairytale terms: Hollywood becomes a metaphor for the world, a place of dreams, some of which are said to "come true". Having thus transformed our world in Hollywood's image — a cultural transformation which is characteristic of postmodernism3 — the transformation of Vivian on the diegetic level can begin. After showing the audience her rather unenviable living conditions (from which she escapes via a back route to avoid the landlord, who is looking for the rent), the camera follows her to a nightclub where she (Vivian) confronts her roommate, Kit, about using the rent money (usually kept in the toilet cistern) for drugs. In the course of their altercation one learns that Kit 3) I have in mind here the coexistence, imbrication, juxtaposition or superimposition, especially in postmodernist fiction, of ontologically diverse "worlds". Cf. Harvey (1990:4265) for an illuminating discussion in this regard. Hollywood may be seen as the paradigm of such a juxtaposition or intermingling of "worlds". 37 was responsible for showing Vivian the ropes in the hooker business, and later, when they assert their territorial rights on Hollywood Boulevard, Kit compensates for wasting the rent money on drugs by generously offering the wealthy wouldbe customer who stops near them in a flashy LOTUS to Vivian. Only . . . when Vivian leans down to accost the driver, this deus ex (or in) machina (Richard Gere) turns out to be someone who is lost at street level, and who seems to be having difficulty with the car's gearbox as well. A (for Vivian unusual) business transaction ensues which ensures her $20 in return for guiding him to the Regency Beverly Wilshire hotel, where, after some tentative parting noises another — this time, for Vivian usual — business deal is transacted and the blonde, long-legged, slightly awkward-looking beauty accompanies Edward Lewis into the hotel (the sheer luxury of which overawes her) and up to the penthouse. To cut a long story short: the initial $100-hour agreed upon stretches into a $300-night and, the next morning — having been told by his lawyer that he should take a female companion along to an important business dinner — swells (after some haggling in the bathroom) to a $3000-week, excluding money for fashionable clothes. Edward's explanation: he needs a woman companion, and, because the week is too important to leave time for romantic involvement, prefers to hire a woman — Vivian. This, in broad outline, forms the backbone of the narrative which enacts Vivian's transformation from hooker to a billionaire business tycoon's companion. Why, except for the most obvious of from-rags-to-riches reasons, do I compare it to a Cinderella-type fairytale? I say "Cinderella-type" because the fairytale code inscribed in the film is actually a mixture of Rapunzel- and Cinderella-elements. First of all, on a general level, there is the "dream"-frame (remarked on earlier) that gives the film its fairytale character. When Vivian tells Edward about the times when she used to be locked up (in the attic) by her mother for being naughty, and imagined how a prince would rescue her from her prison, it is a clear Rapunzel (-cum-Sleeping beauty) motif, reinforced by the scene, at the end, when Edward (despite his acrophobia) climbs up the fire escape to Vivian's room (Rapunzel's tower), is met halfway by her and asks: "What happens when he rescues her?" To which she replies: "She rescues him right back!" Her reply can be understood in conjunction with an earlier scene between Edward and Barney (the hotel manager), when Edward asks Barney for the favour of returning the borrowed $¼million-necklace to the jeweller from which he borrowed it for Vivian. When Barney, having asked Edward's permission, feasts his eyes on the necklace's splendour, he remarks: "It's a pity to let go of something so beautiful" — ostensibly about the necklace, but clearly a reference to Vivian, who had left earlier. The Rapunzel-motif here is that Barney's remark helps Edward to see Vivian clearly for what she is — parallel to the prince in Rapunzel who is 38 temporarily blinded before he finds his beloved again — and he arrives at her apartment in the white limousine (the white steed) to carry out the rescue work. The clearest Cinderella-motif in the film occurs in the hotel patio scene when her friend Kit asks Vivian whether she was going with Edward, suggesting something more permanent than the week-long business arrangement. In reply, Vivian is sceptical about the prospects of such a move, challenging Kit to name one girl for whom a similar decision has worked out. "You want me to give you a name?" Kit retorts. "Oh, God — the pressure of a name!" For a moment, her face all screwed up between her extended fingers, she is all concentration. Then she lights up. "I know — Cinde-fuckin'-rella!" (Very appropriately, the interposed word connects Vivian's life as a hooker with the fairytale.) Edward, who represents the fairytale prince on one level, corresponds to Cinderella's fairy godmother on another: he is prince and fairy godmother rolled into one. Regardless of the fact that she is carrying a large amount of money, Vivian is spurned by the sophisticated, condescending attendants at the first ladies' fashion shop (boutique) she enters, looking for a suitable dinner dress, because of her tartish appearance. When Edward, having learnt of her unfortunate experience, accompanies her to another clothes store and produces his credit card, announcing that he intends spending an "obscene amount of money" there, the credit card has an effect comparable to that of a magic wand: the store manager, and, under his direction, the shop assistants too, are galvanized into action, serving Vivian like a veritable army of enchanted minions, transforming her into a "pretty woman". With Roy Orbison's song throbbing in our ears, she walks down the street, unrecognizably transformed with the aid of Edward's credit card — the condescending attendants of the previous day fail to identify her when she flaunts her new self at them — turning heads as far as she goes. Again, very accurately, Orbison sings to us: "Pretty woman — I don't believe you, you're not the truth; no one can look as good as you . . ." The first stage in Vivian's transformation occurs much earlier in the film, of course, apparently in the guise, ironically, of what one may call a reverse Midas-effect. Having already been "touched" by Edward's "magical money" — the $300 she was paid for the night — and having made love to him ("had sex with him" is probably more appropriate at this point), we witness a different Vivian compared to the one who took over the steering wheel of the LOTUS from Edward in the street. The camera shows Edward, fresh from a shower, putting on a bathrobe. It also shows us a platinum-blonde wig, and Edward noticing — seemingly for the first time — the contrast between the long, dark curls of the sleeping Vivian and the blonde wig (which she never wears again in the rest of the film). 39 At least two other intra-cinematic motifs establish a line (especially) between Vivian and the world of fairytales and fantasy. It is no accident that, when she is lying in the enormous bath with closed eyes, singing (off key) with walkman earphones on, it is a song by Prince that animates her, enchanting both the onlooking Edward and the audience. And then there is the opera in San Francisco. Again, the connection between the narrative of the opera and Vivian's life is not accidental, and explains why she is so deeply moved by it. The opera which is enacted before her eyes is Verdi's La Traviata — the story of Violetta, a courtesan, and Alfredo's transforming (but ultimately futile) love for her. And at the end of the film, the music emanating from the limo bearing Edward to the (Vivian's) rescue, is the music of La Traviata (The Wayward One). Moreover, establishing a connection between the courtesan in the opera (within the diegetic space of the film) and the hooker in the movie is another aestheticist device: it transgresses the intra-cinematic frame between opera and narrated events, showing us that, ultimately, there is no ontological difference (with apologies to Heidegger) between them. The use of Verdi's music in the limo rescue scene near the end confirms this. Earlier, in the hotel, Edward had offered to set Vivian up in an apartment with everything she needed — what she admitted to be a "good offer" for a girl like herself — but she had declined, insisting that she "wanted the fairytale". She got it. I said earlier that the film's fairytale features had to be considered in psychoanalytical and aestheticist-political terms to grasp their significance. Within the available space I shall try to do so as succinctly as possible. Heuristically speaking, Bruno Bettelheim's The uses of Enchantment — The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (1988), with its wealth of psycho-analytical insights, proves to be invaluable in this regard in so far as it helps one to see that, its fairytale structure notwithstanding, Pretty Woman is really a pseudo-fairytale which fails the test of emancipation on psychological as well as social grounds. "Fairytales," says Bettelheim (1988:24), "unlike any other form of literature, direct the child to discover his identity and calling, and they also suggest what experiences are needed to develop his character further. Fairy tales intimate that a rewarding, good life is within one's reach despite adversity — but only if one does not shy away from the hazardous struggles without which one can never achieve true identity. These stories promise that if a child dares to engage in this fearsome and taxing search, benevolent powers will come to her aid, and she will succeed. The stories also warn that those who are too timorous and narrowminded to risk themselves in finding themselves must settle down to a humdrum existence — if an even worse fate does not befall them". So far so good, one may respond — Pretty Woman seems to satisfy all these 40 41 criteria: in true fairytale-heroine style Vivian left her safe but humdrum life somewhere in Georgia and came to the big, dangerous city, eventually choosing not only the "oldest profession in the world", but also (arguably) one of the most dangerous, especially today. Of adversity there is enough in the film. What about the "benevolent powers"? Again — Edward, the deus ex (in) machina, is the decisive embodiment of these, although Kit and Barney (as well as minor characters such as the hotel chauffeur) also contribute. The question is, however, how his benevolence, and importantly, its axiological underpinnings are construed. In this regard it is noteworthy that the crucial instances of what philosophers would call "value judgements" in the film, are inextricably linked to an unlegitimized valorization of money. For example, when Vivian discovers that Edward is acrophobic and points interrogatively to the discrepancy between that condition and staying in the penthouse, he simply replies that it is "the best", a response repeated when, at the opera, she queries his choice of box-seating on the same grounds (as pointed out earlier). Similarly, when Vivian takes her revenge on the snooty shop assistants who refused to serve her earlier, she flaunts her parcels and — having confirmed that they work on commission — tells them that it was a "big mistake". From their crestfallen looks it is clear that they agree. Further, when Barney first "interviews" Vivian in his office, setting the record straight about what is and is not admissible in his hotel, he intimates that he is willing to connive at her presence in the penthouse (as Edward's niece) because "Mr Lewis is a very good customer". In the same vein Edward tells the overawed Vivian that the $¼million necklace she is wearing to the opera is (only) on loan from a jewellery store because he (Edward) is a "very good customer". And the boutique manager, dancing to the tune of Edward's credit card, having been told that the amount of money Edward intends spending on clothes for Vivian is "really offensive", responds excitedly: "I love him so much!" Quite clearly, benevolence, value — simply the good life, happiness — in Pretty Woman is articulated in terms of money. help of his merciless, opportunistic (and possibly sadistic) lawyer; she manages to persuade him to take a day off (to the utter disbelief of his lawyer), which they spend together, reading Shakespeare in the park, walking idly along the street and talking intimately in a small restaurant. The effect she has on Edward is noticeable and upsetting to his lawyer, and the final straw comes when Edward decides not to destroy Mr Morse's company, but to help him retain it and become his partner instead. In this way he can help Mr Morse "build ships" — obviously an affirmative rejoinder to Vivian's question, near the beginning of the film, whether he "makes" things for a living and finding out that he does not — quite the opposite. Edward is also shown, after their day in the park when Vivian takes off his shoes, going for a walk on his own and discovering the grass under his bare feet once more with an expression of wonder on his face. Vivian clearly casts her own kind of spell on him — she "rescues" him right back. As we have learnt from Derrida, de Man, J. Hillis Miller and others, however, the overt "meaning" of "texts" (in the broad sense of the term) is usually undermined by less pronounced, but nevertheless active undercurrents of meaning. Pretty Woman is no exception. In fact, to use Foucaldian terms the "counterdiscourse" which combats the unbridled capitalist discourse in the film, is not even covert, but very explicit. I spoke earlier of a desultory moral development in the film. Such a development is articulated in terms of a counterdiscourse of "earthiness" (for want of a better term) by Vivian — an earthiness that does not leave Edward unaffected. She surprises him with her concern about her gums (which she cleans with dental floss); she gently alerts him to the fact that, whatever his professional intentions may be, he has shown a liking for Mr Morse, whose company he (Edward) intends to buy, break up and sell for a huge profit with the One may see her name — the root of which is etymologically related to the Latin (vivus) for alive or living — as the embodiment of her effect on Edward, whose name, in turn, with its connotations of royalty not only implies the fairytale prince, but is also tied up with his fear of heights. Significantly, he loses this acrophobia to some extent in the course of the film — he even ventures out on the penthouse balcony and actually climbs up the fire escape to Vivian's apartment (albeit with trepidation). The fact that Edward is afraid of heights, then, is a function of his existence which has been at a remove from the earth, until he encounters Vivian. It also explains why he never really knew his father, cannot drive a car with a gearshift properly (unlike Vivian) and why, in the end — having been brought down to earth by Vivian — an almost fatherly relationship develops between him and the old Mr Morse to whom he admits that, wanting to help him (Mr Morse) he finds himself in "unfamiliar" territory — to which the old man retorts that he is "proud of him" (Edward). Given these conflicting discursive tendencies in the film, what should we make of Pretty Woman? Does the counter-discourse of earthiness and the importance of human relationships (represented by Vivian) succeed in dislodging the dominant discourse of money/power (the American Dream in unadulterated form)? — a discursive complex, moreover, which could be demonstrated, along Foucaldian lines, to be linked to power/knowledge via epistemic modes such as legal studies, industrial psychology (especially market research) and strategic (international) studies; modes which are kept discreetly out of sight in the movie. Given its (pseudo-) fairytale structure, can or should we take it seriously, or is it just a "silly shallow comedy" (Excellence, Winter 1990:22) — as a critic recently described it? Firstly, because the change in Vivian's (and Edward's) fortune (as well as Kit's 42 when Vivian gives her some of her $3000 to do a beautician course that she — Kit — had always wanted to do) is not accompanied by any fundamental change in the socio-economic and -political framework within which the narrative is situated, but in fact presupposes it, the dominant discourse of money/power/ good remains in place. Within this discursive formation a more human approach is possible, as Edward learns, but the ideology that money is "good" because it gives us access to the "best", i.e. that it is indispensable for happiness, is never seriously questioned. Secondly, the fact the Pretty Woman parades as a fairytale, but — unlike authentic fairytales — mixes the real and the fantasy world in an aestheticist manner, causes it to have the opposite effect to that of a fairytale. Let me clarify: fairytales are usually set in a spatiotemporally unspecified zone, as "Once upon a time in a distant land" and "They lived happily ever after" indicate. But Pretty Woman is set in a familiar, really existing place at a specific time — when the threat of AIDS makes condoms an essential part of a hooker's equipment, even if her aesthetic sense impels her to carry a variety of colours. (Incidentally, think of the significance of Vivian offering Edward the one gold dollar condom she has left — what she calls the condom "of champions"). As Bettelheim points out (p. 64): "no normal child takes these stories (fairytales) as true to external reality". The child knows when it is time to leave her fantasies and go to the dinner table when her parents call. The danger with Pretty Woman is that it conflates the real world and the world of fantasy in such a way that the audience who gets lost in it because of the power and concomitant pleasure of its representation, is persuaded that there is no difference, ultimately, between the two worlds. Paradoxically, Vivian reminds Barney that the two of them live "in the real world", but although she only dreams of being rescued by a prince, she turns down Edward's "realistic" offer, insisting that she wants "the fairytale". Yet, she comes across as living with her feet firmly on the ground. Intradiegetically, therefore, fantasy codes and "realistic" codes mingle freely, and hence do not allow the film to function like an authentic fairytale, which is "psychologically convincing as no 'realistic' tale can be" (Bettelheim, 1988:133). Moreover, "the fairy story's happy ending occurs in fairyland, a country we can visit only in our minds" (Bettelheim 1988:133), while the "chorus" figure in the opening and closing sequences of the film invites us to "come to Hollywood", where some dreams "come true". Hollywood may be a "dream factory", but it is still very much part of the American landscape, and the aestheticist persuasion that everything, including everyday reality, is constituted on fictional/linguistic/discursive (i.e. on Hollywood-asdream-factory-) grounds, ultimately shattering the barriers between reality and fantasy, between Pretty Woman and our lives, cannot give us the means to transform the social world to which we return after being enchanted by the film's spectacle (cf. in this regard Polan 1986). But for this very reason we cannot afford 43 to dismiss it as a "silly-shallow comedy" either. We have to question it. In conclusion: if Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby showed us the emptiness of the "great American Dream", Pretty Woman blindly reaffirms that dream without any invigorating hope of a social transformation. Regardless of any (to my mind untenable) distinction between "high art" and "popular art", modernist "work" and postmodernist "text", it fails as art — Adorno and Foucault would, for essentially different reasons, agree — because it is virtually seamlessly connected with a social reality which makes it increasingly difficult to discern the contours of the "good life" — of an alternative "good life" — through the distorting veil that Edward's plastic wand has drawn over it. Its aestheticism works for most audiences (in "western" countries, anyway) because we live in an ideologically constructed world where money (i.e. unrestrained capitalism) is easily regarded as the panacea, as the sine qua non for happiness. And this is questionable. By affirming the status quo in postmodernist-aestheticist terms4, Pretty Woman refuses us more than a fragmentary glimpse of a social "other" which is somehow beyond the all too familiar realm where everything "worthwhile" seems to carry a price tag. BIBLIOGRAPHY Bettelheim, B. 1988. The Uses of Enchantment — The meaning and importance of fairy Tales. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Corliss, R. 1990. Time 31, July 30 (70). Excellence. 1990. Vol. 6 No. 2 (22-24). Harvey, D. 1990. The Condition of postmodernity. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Megill, A. 1985. Prophets of Extremity: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida. Berkeley: University of California Press. Polan, D.P. 1986. "'Above all Else to Make You See' : Cinema and the ideology of Spectacle", in : Arac, J. (Ed.), Postmodernism and Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 4) A comparison between Pretty Woman and Bagdad Cafe would be interesting, for while both are postmodern, aestheticist films, the latter construes art, and not money, to be capable of working "a little magic", but also without hope of transforming the status quo. Instead, in Bagdad Cafe, art (magic) becomes an anaesthetic, a means of escape from the drudgery of the everyday (represented by trucking in the film). 44 6. TOWARDS A POSTMODERNIST THEORY OF FILM RECEPTION "Only when what is can be changed, what is, is not everything" — Adorno Does reception aesthetics, which pertains largely to the (acts of) reading of written, literary texts, have any pertinence for the viewing of cinematic and television films and programmes? And if it does, is there any reason to believe that it is important to "apply" it to the reception of film? The answer to both questions should be, I believe, an emphatic Yes. It is up to me to provide a demonstration of the pertinence of reception theory for film. With regard to the second question we should note, despite the fact that educational authorities occasionally pay lip service to "audiovisual tuition", there is scant evidence in most of the language departments of universities, overseas as well as in South Africa, of a recognition that our (mass) culture — especially as far as young people are concerned — is increasingly becoming an "audiovisual" one.1 The written word is rapidly being replaced by the audiovisual image as a means of mass communication. This is one of the features2 of contemporary culture that makes it "postmodern" (Eagleton 1986:7; Arac 1986: xxxvi; Huyssen 1984:16; Jameson 1985:112). To put it another way: the fact that contemporary social, literary and cultural theorists can engage in debate about "postmodern culture" or "modernity vs postmodernity" is evidence of a cultural transformation on which Arac (1986:xxxix) comments as follows: "Mass culture is our element, neither a sudden and welcome liberation from a worn-out high culture, nor the threat to corrupt all that we most treasure. Since we come late enough not to confuse ourselves with the modernists, we can accept our condition as post-modern." Part and parcel of an intellectual's attempt at understanding this cultural condition — which involves self-understanding as well — has to focus fearlessly on cultural forms and processes in which the majority of people, including ourselves and the students we teach, participate. What is the point of only training students to read the difficult modernist poetry of Eliot and Pound, for example, if they have no means of being made critically conscious of the way in which viewing a "popular" film like Lucas's American Graffiti, Spielberg's Jaws or Boorman's The Emerald Forest works? Moreover — and here one confronts the crucial question of postmodernism's critical capability — does a postmodern exploration of film reception hold out the This article first appeared as a chapter in The Reader and Beyond, edited by Bernard Lategan, H.S.R.C. Publishers, Pretoria, 1992. 1. Cf. in this regard Colin MacCabe's illuminating autobiographical essay, "Class of '68" (1985: 1-32), which recounts his involvement with the film magazine, Screen, as well as with the Cambridge English Faculty. Cf. also Terry Eagleton's "The End of English" (1986). 2. Several attempts to outline such distinguishing features have been made, among them Huyssen 1984 (cf. esp. pp.50-52), Jameson 1985 and Foster 1985. 45 46 possibility of an audience's genuinely critical appropriation of a film, or does it have to content itself with the mere, unavoidable reinforcement, on the part of the audience, of the world as represented by the film? (Which means, of course, that a socially constituted world is represented — and viewed — as natural.) or even non-actors — as de Sica did in The Bicycle Thief — in order to avoid this, but more often than not the advance "star billing" advertising undermines whatever salutary effects may have followed.) But what is meant by a "genuinely critical appropriation" of a film (or a literary text, for that matter)? And in what way would a postmodern appropriation differ from other kinds of reception? If one takes one's cue from Theodor Adorno, one of the most uncompromising modernist philosopher-critics of our time, a critical stance to all the art products of mass consumer culture — from music to film — would entail their relentless negation, in order not to fall prey to the invidious process of identification, or "liquidation of the individual" (Adorno 1978:276). For Adorno, reception of, for example, music in contemporary society is a function of a socio-economic condition which systematically promotes the eradication of differences, of memory, of critical awareness — even in the case of great works which, when "received" differently, could conceivably impart an understanding of the relationship between parts and whole. Instead, various social phenomena conspire to bring about an impoverishing standardization effect3: from the star performer and star conductor (who use the musical works as occasions to show off their own brilliance and style) to the canonized repertoire of "classics", these developments are conducive to the concealment of the work's essential interplay between motif and complexity, and the equally essential interplay between sense, understanding and memory on the part of the listener. The latter mode of reception, which would do justice to the work, is all but impossible, given the way in which current performances and "consumption" have created — according to Adorno (1978:273-281) — a receptivity for a series of isolated "irruptions" which obscure the complex development of the work in question. Mutatis mutandis, the "star principle" in popular films — with reference to directors as well as actors and actresses — would not only detract from the audience's ability to experience the characters as individuals who respond uniquely to circumstances. (After a couple of films, Jack Nicholson is simply Jack Nicholson, playing a "new" — but somehow the "same" — part.) More insidiously, as in the case of repeated musical performances of the same "popular classics", audiences are lulled into a false sense of security by the regular re-appearance of the same "stars" in film after film. (To be sure, there are directors who purposely employ unknown actors 3. In Adorno's view, such an effect follows from the very character of cinema: "That, among its functions, film provides models for collective behaviour is not just an additional imposition of ideology. Such collectivity, rather, inheres in the innermost elements of film. The movements which the film presents are mimetic impulses which, prior to all content and meaning, incite viewers and listeners to fall into step as if in a parade" (Adorno 1981/ 82: 203). The kind of negative criticism which Adorno practised is a valuable reminder that the critical intellect is irreplaceable with regard to the stereotyped consumer world around us. But does his modernist elitism, with its contempt for a superficial mass culture, bring us closer to an effective manner of dealing with that culture, i.e. of short-circuiting the widespread complacency which continually reinforces it? It is true that although Adorno ultimately despaired of activism having any hope of success (he had seen its futility in an authoritarian fascist state) and despite his historical pessimism, he attached some hope to revolutionary theory (BuckMorss 1979:x). As I will try to show, however, postmodern theorists, no doubt with considerable assistance from poststructuralist "deconstructions" of the (false) opposition between (inter alia) theory and practice (Derrida 1986:168), do not accept the dichotomous separation of action and theory. Theirs is a discourse which proceeds on the premise of the "worldliness" of theory, whether it is literary criticism, philosophy or social science. In other words: "academic" disciplines are always already socio-politically relevant (Arac 1986:xxxix). But before we give all our attention to the postmodern theorists' attempts to come to grips with the question of postmodernism's own critical value, we should briefly interrogate a theory of reception which is most closely associated with the very concept of "reception". I am thinking of the work done by Iser and Jauss4 of the so-called Konstanz school of reception aesthetics, who carried further the hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer. Due to lack of space, I shall here concentrate on Iser's aesthetics rather than on the more historically oriented theory of Jauss. For Iser, instead of perpetuating the traditional but fruitless oppositional relationship between "fiction" and "reality", we should "replace ontological arguments with functional arguments, for what is important to readers, critics, and authors alike is what literature does and not what it means. If fiction and reality are to be linked, it must be in terms not of opposition but of communication, for the one is not the mere opposite of the other — fiction is a means of telling us something about reality" (Iser 1978:53). He therefore focuses on the pragmatics of literature, on what texts do in their interaction with readers, i.e. on their effect rather than their meaning. This entails, of course, that the reader — the "hitherto neglected recipient of the message" — has to figure prominently in Iser's investigations, at least to the extent that the "intersection" between text and reader (as well as between text and reality) has to be painstakingly charted. And he does so impressively, describing in 4. Cf. Iser, W., 1978; and Jauss, H.R., 1982. 47 48 illuminating terms how a text is grasped in the process of an interplay between text and reader. The very fact, however, that Iser chooses to talk about a "phenomenology of reading" raises the same doubts about the critical or normative potential of his project that have plagued Husserl's transcendental phenomenology and its social application by Schutz (cf. for example Bernstein 1976:167-169). How can a theoretical enterprise which proceeds purely descriptively provide the means for a truly critical appraisal of the reception of texts and artifacts in a media-orientated consumer society which teems with opportunities for manipulation in order to promote or reinforce vested interests? other words, will have actually happened. The reader is not so much radically upbraided, as simply returned to himself or herself as a more thoroughly liberal subject. Everything about the reading subject is up for question in the act of reading, except what kind of (liberal) subject it is: these ideological limits can be in no way criticized, for then the whole model would collapse. Admittedly, like Gadamer before him,5 Iser avails himself of a notion of transformation (cf. esp. Iser 1978:200-212) which does restore a measure of normativity to his theory. While this notion functions on various levels, for instance with regard to intra-fictional interaction and reciprocal modification of represented norms and characters, its most auspicious sense pertains to the reader's participation in the events of the text and to the concomitant transformation of his or her attitude towards the values involved. In other words, the act of reading (and by implication viewing) is always accompanied by the potentially emancipatory possibility of understanding given world-views, not as unchangeable verities, but as subject to change (Iser 1978:211-212). As will become apparent later, this consequence of Iser's theory is compatible with the theoretical demands of postmodern thinkers. With Terry Eagleton's assessment of Iser's position, the limitations of its critical potential come into view. According to Eagleton (1985:78-83), the "whole point of reading, for a critic like Iser, is that it brings us into deeper self-consciousness, catalyses a more critical view of our own identities". He goes on to point out that Iser's reception theory is not ideologically innocent, but is in fact underpinned by a liberal humanist ideology. This ideology is, moreover, "less liberal than it looks at first sight". Eagleton draws attention to a passage in which Iser (1978:202) remarks, apropos the reader's receptivity to the questioning of certain values by the text, that the more committed a reader is to a certain ideology, the less he will allow his own norms to be open to criticism (and hence, to revision). Eagleton (1985:79) then comments as follows: What this implies is that in order to undergo transformation at the hands of the text, we must only hold our beliefs fairly provisionally in the first place. The only good reader would already have to be a liberal: the act of reading produces a kind of human subject which it also presupposes. This is also paradoxical in another way: for if we only hold our convictions rather lightly in the first place, having them interrogated and subverted by the text is not really very significant. Nothing much, in 5. Elsewhere (1987), I have examined at length the importance of transformation with regard to the understanding of art and its reception. It may seem as if Eagleton is less than fair to Iser here, especially when we note a certain tension in his argument, namely between the supposed provisionality of the "good" reader's beliefs and his liberality. There is no good reason to assume that a liberal humanist, despite a certain characteristic openness to persuasion, is any less committed to this very liberalism than a Marxist to his marxism. On the other hand, Iser also seems to me to be wrong about someone with strong commitments in all likelihood not being a good reader. Again the example of the committed liberal humanist (Iser himself!) will suffice to prove the point: by definition such a reader, the more strongly he or she believes in the ethical and political priority of individual freedom and interests, the more he or she will be receptive to the edifying and enriching literary (or artistic) embodiment of human striving for fulfilment, even if such striving is enacted in the context of an ideology alien to her or his own. One cannot really blame Eagleton then for his interpretation of Iser when one considers that the latter does seem to suggest that the open-minded kind of reader (exemplified by the liberal humanist) does not generally have any strong commitments. But is the question not rather whether a reader, no matter if he or she is a Marxist or a liberal humanist, is dogmatic in his or her commitment?6 A committed Marxist, too, is constantly subject to having his or her beliefs tested and modified in the course of reading, provided there is no stultifying dogmatism to prevent this from happening. This, to my mind, is where the true critical potential as well as the limitations of Iser's theory lie: regardless of a reader's beliefs, their interrogation by the text may result in a transformation so radical that a transition from one set of values to another may be effected in a self-critical manner. The potential for transformation of this kind is limited, however, by the indispensable presupposition of receptivity, i.e. the absence of dogmatic ideological commitment which would, analogous to the "theory-laden perception" of which philosophers of science speak, predetermine every reading (or viewing) as a mere confirmation of intransigently held beliefs. If this were what Eagleton had in mind where he speaks of "ideological limits (which) can be in no way criticized" since it would cause the collapse of Iser's model, then one would have to grant him his point, on condition that he would extend his remark's applicability to ideological 6. Admittedly, in the case of a "dogmatic liberal humanism" it would seem like a contradiction in terms. 49 dogmatism of any kind. The notion of dogmatism affords us the opportune moment to shift our attention back to postmodernism, or strictly speaking, first of all to postmodernity, especially to certain features of this cultural condition. I have already mentioned the audiovisual character of postmodernity — perhaps its "most minatory aspect" in certain contexts, according to Eagleton (1986:7). Dana B. Polan (1986) demonstrates that this is closely bound up with what he calls the "ideology of spectacle" in cinema which, in turn, can be linked to the notion of dogmatism in the sense of a largely unconscious but authoritative desire to leave everything as it is, to maintain the status quo. Only in this case, as Polan shows, the desire is produced by modes of cinematic representation. In other words, a certain kind of recipient or subject is systematically constructed in terms of an ideological moment inherent in cinema's visual ("spectacular") character. What interests Polan as a postmodern theorist is the question of if and how a mass art like cinema can overcome the critical limitations coterminous with what he calls — echoing Nietzsche — its will-to-spectacle, which "asserts that world only has substance — in some cases, only is meaningful — when it appears as image, when it is shown, when it exists as phenomenal appearance, a look" (Polan 1986:60). But why, may one ask, is this most technologically advanced of the arts — think of "special effects" à la Lucas or Spielberg — not capable of overcoming what must after all be only a minor hindrance? Surely the technical means to inject a critical component into film must exist. The answer is simply that the most critically stultifying aspect of film coincides with its very essence as something which is shown, as image, an essence which no technological innovation as such can suspend without simultaneously destroying the condition of the possibility of film. "The image" says Polan, (p.61) "shows everything, and, because it shows everything, it can say nothing; it frames a world and banishes into nonexistence everything beyond that frame. The will-to-spectacle is the assertion that a world of foreground is the only world that matters or is the only world that is . . . the fiction film is an impressionist medium that claims that things described matter more than things understood." This (usually underestimated) power of the film-image is closely related to cinema's ambiguous — even contradictory — status,7 epitomized in Gorki's description of it as "the kingdom of shadows" (Polan 1986:57). After all, as Polan points out, the projected film is "physically nothing more than lights flickering on a screen — shadows, mere ephemera." "And yet," he continues, "those shadows, that mechanical act of projection, become caught up in another 7. In "The Art of the Cinema" (1984a), I attempted to express film's contradictory status in terms of the oppositional tension between motion and rest. 50 projection — the mental projection of audiences who gift this insubstantial material with a life and psychical force, and turn the emptiness of shadows into the fullness of a kingdom" (p.57). The socio-psychological significance of this kingdom is apparent from the fact that moviegoers — and this goes for television audiences as well, especially with regard to soap operas — tend to model their social behaviour on their cinema experience. (In a recent movie, Splash, this fact is assimilated into the film where the "mermaid", Madison, is socialized and acquires human language in a matter of hours by watching television.) This is particularly true where movie royalty — the "stars" — are concerned, irrespective of whether the emulated behaviour is on or off the screen. Polan's remarks on the social function of the "constellation of stars" are consonant with Adorno's analysis of the role of star conductors and performers (referred to earlier) in relation to musical reception. Nevertheless, one should remember that what ultimately differentiates between Adorno as modernist and Polan as postmodernist is the former's conviction that the falsification of reality and the reification of consciousness by the (mass) culture industry is total,8 while the latter holds out the possibility that a critical strategy may be evolved which will transform a mute cinema ruled by a the will-to-spectacle into an artform that "speaks" by virtue of a critical distance from itself (Polan 1986: 67). In order to grasp what is at stake here, it is necessary to look at Polan's analysis of the reception of specific films. To illustrate what he has in mind with "the social practice of a cinema of spectacle, its insertion as aesthetic practice into the fabric of everyday life", Polan (pp. 55-59) cites several films briefly before spending considerable time on a particularly exemplary instance of film spectacle, Minnelli's The Pirate of 1948 (pp. 63-68). His discussion of Give a Girl a Break, An American in Paris and 1941 paves the way for the extended analysis of The Pirate, for instance by lifting out the overwhelming force of the sheer performance by actor-dancers which, in transforming the world "into a good show," simultaneously relegates sociopolitical matters (in- as well as outside the film) to a position of inferior importance. One can easily overlook the fact that the reception of the film as spectacle reintroduces a political (ideological) moment on a different level: "Beyond an explicit message about the world, beyond a politics, the film, its entertainment, is all the more resolutely political as an aesthetic activity : a spectacle, precisely" (Polan 1986: 55-56). But while most films establish their status as spectacle largely in relation to the 8. This does not necessarily mean that Adorno despaired of all critical means of negating what he perceived as a false totality. His Negative Dialectics was perhaps his most consistent attempt at the articulation of such a critical strategy. 51 52 audience, The Pirate does so in a double manner : not only does the film audience witness the diegetic events on the screen; an intra-filmic audience and stage intensify the reduction of truth to that which is enacted, shown, looked at. In Polan's words (p.64), "The Pirate enacts the increasing spectaclization (to coin a word) of the world. The stage becomes a central locus for the film as the characters find it necessary literally to stage events in order to reveal their truths." Manuela (Judy Garland) for example, has to go to the (fortuitously present) stage in order to trick Don Pedro (Walter Slezak) into confessing that he is really Nacoco the Pirate. The stage bestows significance upon her actions, as well as on those of the respectable mayor Don Pedro when he mounts it to make the crucial admission. When he is finally captured, it is done by means of stage props like hoops and juggling pins. In Polan's words (p.64): "Spectacle becomes an allpervading, inescapable force." Moreover, it reaches mythical proportions in the form of "a guiding ideologeme, which . . . is that of the fundamental rightness of spectacle as a mediation of/for all differences." This is epitomized in the song, "Be a Clown", which is rendered twice in the film — first by men to an intra-filmic audience (as indicated by camera angles) and later by Manuela and Serafin (Gene Kelly) to the real, extra-filmic audience, in a full frontal sequence. The significance of this progression from the first version to the second is clear: "the complete capturing of woman and real audience (we spectators) in a specular9 relationship . . ." (Polan 1986: 65).10 appearances to the contrary, the given order is not self-sufficient nor selfjustifying, and needs to be shown to be surpassable, transcendable. But this is precisely the problem: "The narrative of the film is always a narrative inside spectacle; the film cannot outrun the fact that it is shown" (Polan 1986: 66). Polan concludes his analysis of Minnelli's film with the observation that, on a diegetic level, it is then "in some way about the loss of a woman's desire under the influence of the world of spectacle for which cinema, the film The Pirate itself, is a metonymic representation." It is at this point that we come face to face with that seemingly insurmountable obstacle (alluded to earlier) in the way of a postmodern cinema practice, i.e. one which accepts its inescapable insertion in a world of mass culture without abandoning its critical vocation concerning the latter — a cinema practice that proceeds in terms of the principle that, despite 9. It is important, here, to keep in mind the etymology of specular as well as of spectacle, according to which they are derived from the Latin words for observe (specere) and for mirror (speculum), among others. 10. Polan engages in a lengthy analysis of one scene in The Pirate, "that is virtually symptomatic in its desire to banish all meanings other than spectacle from its field of attention" (p.65). By tracing the semiotics, shot by shot, of the occasion when Manuela first sees the ocean, he reveals the conflicts and contradictions between the woman's desire and discourse and the man's, a collision in which the former inevitably succumbs to the force of the latter, reinforced by the power of spectacle. For lack of space I cannot reproduce the entire analysis here. It is worth noting, though, that Polan's observations about the significance of different camera angles can be applied illuminatingly to television reception of, e.g., news programmes, where different camera angles subtly differentiate between (for instance) various politicians with regard to the identity and status of the respective audiences they are addressing. Hence Polan's crucial question (p. 66), whether present film practice could engage in a critical practice "without that practice turning into spectacle". Is an "antihegemonic" cinema possible? As for himself, he notices promising (albeit ambivalent) signs of such a cinema in Godard's film, Les Carabiniers (1963), in which the character Michel-Ange, on his first visit to the cinema (within cinema), responds with predictable "suspension of disbelief" to the awesome illusionary power of film images — to such an extent that he inadvertently exposes their illusionary essence by accidentally tearing the screen and revealing a dirty wall behind it. But even here Godard comes up against what seems to be the inescapable limitations of a critical cinema : although Michel-Ange, by "puncturing" the images of spectacle, comes to realize that they are, after all, only images, signs, his discovery is shown to us in a film. "His grimy wall behind a movie screen is still a movie screen for us" (Polan 1986:66). How many of the spectators watching Godard's film will gain a liberating insight into the nature of film as something made, constructed (and as such, as a metaphor for society), on the basis of Michel-Ange's lesson? More often than not audiences display a moribund "complacency in the face of filmic deconstruction, . . .[an] . . . ability to make deconstructive practices a new form of seductive presence." As Polan (p.66) points out, this is precisely what the intra-filmic spectators in Godard's film epitomize as they impassively witness Michel-Ange's revealing blunder. Despite the fact that cinematic spectacle tends to "cinema" critical elements down, Polan (pp. 66-67) remains hopeful : "the film [Les Carabiniers] does begin to ask explicitly the questions that guide any attempt to create a political and critical art. What Michel-Ange cannot understand, we can begin to understand and analyse. Even in its limitations, the film is an emblematic call for the necessity of critical work on and in the cinema — for the transformation of the image through a knowledge that puts fictions inside quotation marks of analytic distance." At this point the question may be raised, namely: what is so urgently important about the ideological moment of spectacle, of the film image in cinema as well as in television? I would argue that it is of vital importance to anyone interested in the extensive exposure of people to the mass media (especially television) to note its insidious stultifying and distorting effect, brought to light by Polan's analysis. The manner in which the film image functions has a debilitating effect upon spectators, paralysing their discursive faculties with regard to what Hannah Arendt (1958: 9, 176) saw as the highest vocation of human activity, 53 54 namely action.11 There are exceptions to this rule, of course, where a film (a theatrical play, a novel, a painting) may succeed in galvanizing spectators into action via a transformation of consciousness12 — a possibility entertained by Iser (as we have seen) among others. But in the age of mass culture the odds are too much in favour of mass art with little or no means of such critical transformation, as opposed to instances of art conducive to emancipation, criticism and resistance to structures of domination, not to mention the obstacle posed by the complacency, the veritable rational and practical inertia13 on the part of the vast majority of people in contemporary society here and elsewhere. Hence the postmodern quest for an alternative, "critical" art. literally making a spectacle of themselves. Like other "candid camera" films it therefore affirms the social status quo, by and large, by picturing social reality as something at which the spectator/audience can, at most, laugh. This finds striking confirmation in the fact that virtually all the targets of Nofal's camera, when told about their unsuspected "rise to stardom", react in a manner affirming the unquestionable authority of the camera's picturing function and the status of the world as spectacle, including their own behaviour in it (even when this behaviour was deliberately provoked by actors Bill Flynn and Alain D. Woolf). In the scene where the "sky couriers" literally drop through the ceiling into the office of the horrified secretary to collect the parcel for urgent delivery, for instance, there is no more than embarrassment on the part of each secretary, in turn, when told about the hidden camera — no sign of indignation, alarm or anger at being "set up" as an object of amusement. Correlatively, the audience's reception of this scene-sequence is bound to be normatively structured by the tacit acceptance of the secretaries that access to technical means gives certain interestgroups the right to observe them with the aid of these means and to picture their behaviour (virtually in the behaviourist sense of the word) publicly in the form of a visual record of such observed behaviour. This holds true with regard to the vast majority of scenes in the film: with a few notable exceptions, everyone responds to the revelation of a set of deliberately constructed circumstances (aimed at "framing" them for the sake of spectacle) in a significantly passive manner, thus reinforcing the hegemony of prevailing (corporate and state) power structures. As far as South African cinema is concerned, especially (predictably) in the case of films produced as part of the local "film industry," the field abounds with popular films which cater for mass tastes. Inversely, of course, these films shape the tastes of the masses or, in terms employed earlier, a mass subject is systematically constructed on the basis of the ideological moment of spectacle constitutive of such films. The South African variety of the "candid camera" type of film is an interesting, almost paradigmatic case : not only does it construct a passive spectator/audience, but its own diegetic space is populated by images of mass subjects (the "public") — easy points of identification for the spectator. And yet, even into this domain of popular art critical potential leaks unpredictably, as I hope to show in a brief discussion of such a "candid camera"-type film, viz. Emil Nofal's recent You gotta be crazy. Unfortunately the latent social critique remains sporadic, undeveloped. You gotta be crazy has no pretensions to the status of art film, which makes it in a certain sense a more appropriate choice than an art film — the preferred object of modernist analysis — would have been in the present context. It promises to be nothing more (or less) than enjoyable popular entertainment. In the process of entertaining the populace the "ideology of spectacle" asserts itself with a vengeance. Most of the scenes are exemplary instances of "pure" or perhaps "instant", i.e. unrehearsed spectacle, with the unwitting victims of the camera's (and through the camera, the spectators') relentless eye(s) quite 11. Arendt (1958:7) describes action (as distinguished from labour and work) as follows: "Action, the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter, corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world. While all aspects of the human condition are somehow related to politics, this plurality is specifically the condition . . . of all political life." As she further points out (pp. 176-179), action and speech or discourse are inseparably connected (so that one could think of action as "discursive action"). 12. Cf. note 5, above. 13. Adorno and Horkheimer (1969:xiii) seem to have this in mind where they lament "the enigmatic readiness of the technologically educated masses to fall under the sway of any despotism . . ." Cf. also in this regard May 1986 : 84. A distinction should be drawn, however, between subjects' responses to the discovery that they "are on candid camera" (which, as pointed out above, mostly amount to a vindication of the social status quo in terms of the ideology of being looked at) and subjects' responses to the specific set of prearranged circumstances prior to their discovery of the artificiality of the situation. Some of the responses in the latter category are passively submissive in the sense that the chosen subjects not only accept that the (provocative) behaviour of the actors (Flynn and Woolf) is authentic, but also do not take exception to it. For example, neither the trolley-driving test in the supermarket, nor the mandatory brushing of customers' hands and feet at the supermarket entrance meets with any noticeable resistance. As in the case of "genuine" forms of social control and administration (which are imitated by these "staged" measures), the subjects in question submit with docility. Not surprisingly, this also happens in the scene where people are telephonically accosted in the street by "officials representing the Receiver of Revenue", as part of a "survey" concerning income tax returns. An interesting variation occurs, however, in the "nose-print" scene when an old lady, after going through the (degrading) motions of pressing her painted nose on some paper, inquires somewhat diffidently of Bill Flynn: "Sê nou ons wil nie?" ("What if we don't want to?") Flynn's retort, "Bevel van die 'government'!" 55 56 ("Command of the government!") elicits a knowing "uhuh — P.W. Botha?" from her : an incipient, justifiable resistance to (the fictional extension of) ubiquitous, dehumanizing administrative procedures gives way to tired resignation. therefore brought to light, and its narrative is shown to be life in whose story we — the "public" — are all characters. By implication we (like the characters in Nofal's film) cannot always distinguish between what is "natural" and what is socially constructed — in the end the artificially constructed scenes function as a metaphor for social reproduction and life as a whole : what we ordinarily take to be natural turns out to be a social construct, and as such, alterable. Once the audience has grasped this, You gotta be crazy has transgressed its own ideological boundaries, and the conditions of the possibility of the world as mere spectacle are seen to be themselves historical, subject to modification. But the most significant instances of justifiable resistance are not those where opposition is directed at the actors staging a certain event or at the idea embodied by the event, but where such resistance focuses on the element of spectacle itself. I referred earlier to the critical potential that seeps unexpectedly into this domain of popular art. This is where it emerges most clearly : in the (admittedly few) scenes where individuals protest about the (actors') actions being inflicted upon them, and persist in their opposition when told about the hidden camera, the hegemonic field of spectacle is breached. The camera lens which, like the Sartrean look, functions like a hole through which the being of the selected subjects flows away from them (thus reducing them to mere objects) is thus plugged, the process changed. Alterity is inserted into the domain of spectacle, undermining its force. In the scene where the yellow line is "painted" right across the parked cars, for instance, the Italian's lady's sense of outrage is heightened, if anything, when the obtrusive camera is uncovered. This is also the case in the scene where an exasperated baker confronts the "pest controllers" and eventually the camera. The limitations of the ideology of spectacle come into view here, revealing, firstly, the (artificially) constructed character of intra-filmic social reality (which functions as a metaphor for social reality as a whole) and, more importantly, the fact that the means and the authority by which such construction takes place can be challenged, that it is subject to change. Ostensibly such resistance reaches a climax in the last scene where the camera is exposed and apparently destroyed by an irate lady after discovering that the "baby" in the bag she was given is really a tape-recording of a baby crying. I say "ostensibly" because her assault on the camera is itself filmed by another (presumably the "real") camera and thus reduced to spectacle, and because the narrator, Joe Stewardson, tells the audience that the lady in question is an actress herself. Hence one has every reason to suspect that the last scene is not "candid" spectacle (as far as the "victim" is concerned), but "acted" spectacle in its entirety, with Bill Flynn and co. eventually joining the "enraged" woman in a (pseudo-) meleé around the fallen camera. Hence the critical potential of this scene is defused by the realization that the woman's outrage is not real, but staged, acted. And yet, perhaps a critical moment may be salvaged in this last scene, too, when one considers that it is after all meta-artistic (or meta-fictional), i.e. that it is recognizable as (popular) art about art. By implication this is true of all the scenes where the presence of the camera is uncovered. The role of the camera as narrator (in a more fundamental sense than the narrator's voice on the soundtrack) is There is no good reason for optimism regarding the prospect of any large-scale emancipatory social action on the part of audiences though, even if one could assume the latter's understanding of the normative implications of a mass film like You gotta be crazy. Such optimism would simply ignore the pervasive stultifying social complacency referred to earlier. To be sure, social phenomena such as the international women's movement and the ecological movement — themselves symptomatic of the postmodern condition (Huyssen 1984:51) — bear witness to forms of protest which contrast starkly with this complacency, and which are understandably viewed mainly with suspicion by the established middle classes. (It is not hard to think of local counterparts to these movements.) Moreover, I am aware of the fact that I am oversimplifying for the sake of the argument, and that a full analysis of the reasons for what I have called widespread complacency would require, inter alia, a critical reconstruction of Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment and a consideration of Habermas's contention that, today, administrative and economic imperatives are encroaching upon and eroding the "life-world" which continually functions as a resource for communication, including social and moral action, with the consequence that the potential for such action is systematically destroyed (Habermas 1981a:16-19). It is rewarding to read Habermas in the present context, not only because his work on modernity14 has situated the debate on postmodernism in a larger philosophical field than had previously been the case, but also because, despite his obvious allegiance to the (Enlightenment) "project of modernity," he has at least one thing in common with postmodern theorists, viz. a willingness to come "out of the theoretical ivory tower to take a political stand" (Habermas 1981c: 13; cf. also 1981b: 33*), if not a theoretical model that collapses the boundary between theory and action in advance. For post-modernists, as stated earlier, every theoretical, philosophical or critical stance (even by way of denial) is always already a sociopolitical act by 14. Cf. especially his essay, "Modernity vs Postmodernity" (1981a), which is reprinted in Foster (ed., 1985), as well as the collection of essays on this issue, viz. Bernstein (ed., 1985). 57 58 virtue of its insertedness in the world (Arac 1986: xxxix; Foster 1985: x; Owens 1985:63). such is obscured by various things, including its small town location, the ArtDeco style credits and William Hurt's ambiguous style of acting, reminiscent of an older generation of actor mixed together with a more recent one. The point of all this for Jameson (p.117) is that it seems "as though, for some reason, we were unable today to focus our own present, as though we have become incapable of achieving aesthetic representations of our own current experience". Hence the appropriateness of Plato's cave metaphor of confinement. "If there is any realism left here", says Jameson (p. 118), "it is a 'realism' which springs from the shock of grasping that confinement and of realizing that, for whatever peculiar reasons, we seem condemned to seek the historical past through our own pop images and stereotypes about that past, which itself remains forever out of reach." It should be obvious that Jameson's insights not only corroborate those of Polan, but that they highlight the need for a critical moment to be incorporated into the art products — especially film — of mass culture, although Jameson (1985:125) himself leaves open the question of the possibility of such a critical value. Anyone sceptical about the need — perhaps urgency is more fitting — for somehow jolting the multitude of spectators into critical awareness of the fact that they are potentially agents of significant speech and action with socio-historical import, only has to witness the curious phenomenon of the "cult film" in advanced consumer capitalist countries. The Rocky Horror Picture Show is a typical example. Wherever it is shown in the United States — and in some cities it is screened weekly, usually at the same venue — the audience mimics all the movements of the actors, utters their lines in unison with them and joins them in every song. Even the rain in the film narrative, as well as Brad and Janet's protective umbrella is replicated by the audience — quite a wet experience for the umbrellaless first-timer! What this (misleadingly exuberant) film reception in the form of cult behaviour constitutes is nothing less than the social equivalent of what Jameson termed pastiche in the context of postmodern art. There is the same imitation, the same repetitiveness, the same lack of ironical or satirical impulse, i.e. the same absence of critical normativity. There is only the synchronization of social with intra-filmic diegetic behaviour, thus reducing the truly social to the mindless behaviour of automata. A far more widespread manifestation of the same phenomenon, albeit in less concentrated form, concerns the patterning of social behaviour according to the songs, spoken phrases and movements of "commercial" actors in television advertisements. With regard to film reception it is striking how the notion of a by and large complacent populace, confirmed in that condition by means of mass media such as cinema and television, finds paradigmatic expression in the form of Plato's allegory of the cave. It is therefore no accident that several theorists of postmodernism have pointed out its pertinence as a metaphor for the combination of an inability and a reluctance to probe critically beyond the images — usually realistically presented — produced by popular culture. Polan, for example, commenting on the connection between the traditionally privileged sense of sight and knowledge, remarks (1986:60): "If Plato in The Republic gives central prominence to sight in the constitution of an epistemo-logy, then we can say that the cinema, modern cavern in which images parade before enraptured spectators, realizes a return to Plato's cave . . ." Jameson invokes the Platonic metaphor in an even broader postmodern context. Having characterized the postmodern spatial sensibility in terms of the notion of pastiche — i.e. the "neutral" imitation of specific artistic styles, without the motive of mocking or satirizing such styles, as in the case of parody — Jameson (1985:118) offers the following interpretive assessment of the current situation: "Cultural production has been driven back inside the mind, within the monadic subject : it can no longer look directly out of its eyes at the real world for the referent but must, as in Plato's cave, trace its mental images of the world on its confining walls."15 For Jameson this means that "postmodernist art is going to be about art itself" (p.115), even in non-sophisticatedly-meta-artistic instances of mass art, for example in the case of what Jameson designates as the (popular) "nostalgia film", which is really a mass-cultural form of pastiche. He cites Lucas's American Graffiti, which reinvents "a picture of the past [the 1950s in the United States] in its lived totality" (p.116), as one example, and adds some which, despite certain anomalies, also qualify for inclusion in this category. One of these is Star Wars, which, according to Jameson (p.116) sets out in a different way to reawaken a sense of the past (not our intergalactic past, but the experience of Saturday afternoon serials of the Flash Gordon type) in the form of a pastiche, thus enabling the adult public to satisfy a deep, nostalgic need to "live through" old artifacts once again. (Needless to say, younger viewers experience Star Wars and its sequels simply as adventures set in space.) More importantly, Jameson (p. 117) detects another anomalous variety of the nostalgia film instantiated by the disturbing stylistic "colonization" of movies with contemporary settings. This is the case with Body Heat, where the recognizability of contemporary artifacts as 15. Samuel Beckett's Endgame may perhaps be seen as an extended metaphor for this condition. Add to this the fact that the second basic feature of postmodernism analysed by Jameson in terms of the metaphor of schizophrenia, viz. its temporal sensibility, reveals a culture caught in the hold of a perpetual, intensely experienced present with virtually no sense of an historical identity enduring through time (Jameson 1985:118-123), and the picture is complete. The reception of film in contemporary mass culture evinces a collective social moment inculcated by an "ideology of 59 60 spectacle" and describable as a kind of mass stupefaction or, borrowing from Jameson, metaphorically speaking as mass "schizophrenia." Is it at all surprising, then, that television seems to have largely replaced newspapers as authoritative source of what the public perceives as "the truth"? Today, to be is to be televised. camera (and not a metalanguage, as in the realist novel) which shows the "true" state of affairs against which the different characters' discourses can be judged. In this essay MacCabe is especially concerned with formulating the conditions for disrupting the dominant position of the subject in the realist text (literary as well as filmic), together with the existing order (which is generally affirmed via the unquestioned status of the realist narrative). For MacCabe the critical task facing the cinema is to devise ways to problematize the dominance of the subject (and by implication the fixity of the object-world or of a repressive social order) by introducing a radical moment of temporality into film, i.e. a reminder of the everpresent possibility of change. (Recall my earlier observation regarding aspects of Iser's theory which are compatible with this element of postmodernist theorizing.) This is the state of affairs addressed by postmodernist critical thought of the kind I have been considering, which regards every instance of "critical intervention" as strategically, i.e. politically relevant. Other instances of this kind could be adduced : Craig Owens (1985) has demonstrated the point with regard to the work of feminist artist-critics; there are the critical contributions of Edward W. Said, Palestinian-born professor of literature in America, perhaps the exemplary postmodernist "other" who proceeds in a contextualist-interventionist manner (cf. Said 1985: 156-157), constantly stressing the "worldliness" of texts which are unavoidably related to forms of power and modes of affiliation. In the face of the "official" stories produced by institutions of power, Said promotes alternative accounts which aim at "the recovery of a history hitherto either misrepresented or rendered invisible,"16 to be followed by "the crucial next phase: connecting these more politically vigilant forms of interpretation to an ongoing political and social praxis", thus moving "from undoing to doing" (Said 1985:158). Obviously such an "alternative" approach is not limited to literature — it can be adapted for photo-journalism (as Said shows: 1985:158), for the cinema and for television. To conclude this exploration of the possibility of a postmodernist theory of film reception, I will give attention to pointers for such an adaptation provided by Colin MacCabe under the rubric of realism and representation in film. There is nothing accidental about the fact that MacCabe — following Brecht — recognizes realism and representation as constituting a crucial issue of our age (MacCabe 1985:58). Arac (1986:xx) singles out representation as an "exemplary" issue in the context of postmodernism, and it will be recalled that it (i.e. representation) is inseparably conjoined with the theme of Polan's enquiry, viz, spectacle, or the image and its ideological function in cinema reception. MacCabe adopts somewhat different positions vis-à-vis realism in various essays. In "Realism and the Cinema : Notes on some Brechtian Theses" (1985:33-57), he draws an analogy between literary and cinematic realism, showing how the "dominant discourse" of narrative prose and the narration of events in the realist film function in a similar fashion by providing transparency, i.e. a touchstone concerning the "truth" about events. In the realist film it is the 16. Herman Giliomee's article, "Port Elizabeth : Lyk ons Toekoms so?" (Die Suid-Afrikaan, Winter 1986) does precisely this with regard to recent events in Port Elizabeth's black townships. Two films which, in MacCabe's view, successfully introduce time (history) "into the very area of representation so that it is included within it" (p.55), are Kuhle Wampe (a film on which Brecht collaborated) and Godard-Gorin's Tout Va Bien. Instead of a privileged narrative which suspends the need for interpretive activity on the part of the spectator, both these films stress particular scenes, with the result that the viewer has to "produce" a meaning in the face of a number of contradictions, rather than having a ready-made meaning imposed on him or her (pp. 54-55). Similarly, both films end with an "emphasis on time and its concomitant change. 'But who will change the world' (Kuhle Wampe) — 'We must learn to live historically' (Tout Va Bien)— . . ." (p.55). I could add Roeg's Bad Timing17 to MacCabe's examples, given the effective modes of disruption that operate throughout the film, as well as a number of Bunuel's films, with That Obscure Object of Desire perhaps foremost among them. In this piece of cinematic surrealism Bunuel employs various devices to unsettle the security of the spectator's gaze or to undermine the representational aspect of the spectacle, the most conspicuous (and yet a severely dislocating one) being the fact that two different actresses alternate in the role of the same character, the excruciatingly desirable Conchita. Their close resemblance only serves to compound the confusion. Just how unsettling such (somewhat counterproductive) devices are, is proved by the phenomenon that many spectators fail to sit through the entire film, and prefer to leave. In another essay, "Theory and Film : Principles of realism and Pleasure", MacCabe (1985:58-81) departs from his assumption in the earlier essay, viz. that the (film-) text has a "separate existence". Here, realism "is no longer a question of an exterior reality nor of the relation of reader to text, but one of the ways in which these two interact" (p.78). As a consequence there is an even greater 17. Cf. in this regard my "Identity and Difference in Nicolas Roeg's Bad Timing" (1984b). 61 62 emphasis than before on the production of a certain reality by film, which points the way to possible means of meaning-production which, while accepting that it is not simply a matter of escaping from representation or of labelling it as "bad" (cf. Arac 1986: xx), promote a film-reception as active awareness of the conditions of meaning-production. Once this has been grasped, the position of the viewer-subject is robbed of its privilege and unmasked as just one possible position or point of view among many. MacCabe outlines how, despite some effective instances of displacement of the spectator's viewpoint — notably two occasions where a "look" threatens the security of the spectator (pp. 70-72) — American Graffiti remains, on the whole, within the traditional Hollywood practice of covering up or denying the process of producing meaning, i.e. in Polan's terms, the practice of offering spectators the false security of spectacle. I cannot dwell at length on the question of the "look" here; suffice it to say that its significance in MacCabe's discussion of American Graffiti is underpinned by a preceding examination of Lacan's analysis of vision, specifically of the "look" which always introduces a moment of difference, of unsettling the identity (i.e. fixity) of the person being looked at (pp.64-66). In precisely this way the overtly sexual gaze which the woman in the white T-bird directs at Curt Henderson in American Graffiti unsettles him with its evidence of feminine desire. And concomitantly, the audience is also unsettled in its position of "knowledge", which is thus rendered uncertain. constitution of our being if this were the case. It is therefore fitting to conclude with a quotation from that inimitable postmodern, neopragmatist philosopher, Richard Rorty : "The pragmatists tell us that the conversation which it is our moral duty to continue is merely our project, the European intellectual's form of life [by implication also with regard to interlocutors from other cultures]. It has no metaphysical nor epistemological guarantee of success. Further (and this is the crucial point) we do not know what 'success' would mean except simply 'continuance'" (Rorty 1982:172). These are but a few theoretical pointers for a postmodernist cinema dedicated to evolving the means to counter-hegemonic practices and edifices of identity in order to promote and cultivate (mass) awareness of the socio-historical character and conditions of existing sociopolitical states of affairs, and hence of their essential changeability via human action. Which means, of course, that the question of the critical potential of postmodernist (mass) art is all but settled. Is it not perhaps true that, as Adorno believed (and some continue to believe), art has to retain its (aesthetic) autonomy lest it forfeit its emancipatory capacity? Or can one have the best of both worlds? Can a "desublimated" art be proved capable of incorporating a critical element which will address spectators and audiences effectively? Postmodernism will have to be articulated in terms of such critical potential, otherwise it may simply turn out to coincide with the very structures of modernized mass culture which it sets out to combat by means of theory and practice (perhaps: theoretical practice). Moreover, for postmodernism to exceed a merely programmatic theoretical status, it will have to demonstrate (as some believe it already has, cf. Owens, 1985) that its theoretical-practical interventions yield concrete results with regard to, e.g., the restructuring of power formations. Not that any such results should be regarded as permanent. Postmodernism would be manifestly untrue to its own animating insight into the historical Postscript: In retrospect it seems that, in the context of postmodernism, confusion may be avoided by speaking consistently about a postmodernist theory of (film) reception, instead of a postmodernist reception aesthetics. After all, one of postmodernism's distinguishing features is that it does not recognize an "autonomous" aesthetic sphere, watertightly separated from, e.g., the sociopolitical realm. BIBLIOGRAPHY Adorno, T.W. 1978. "On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening", in : Arato, A. & Gebhardt, E (eds), The Essential Frankfurt School Reader. New York : Urizen Books. Adorno, T.W. 1981-82. "Transparencies on Film". New German Critique 24-25. Adorno, T.W., and Horkheimer, M. 1969. Dialectic of Enlightenment. New York : The Seabury Press. Arac, J. 1986. "Introduction", in : Arac, J. (ed.), Postmodernism and Politics. Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press. Arendt, H. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago : The University of Chicago Press. Bernstein, R.J. (ed.) 1985. Habermas and Modernity. Cambridge : Polity Press. Bernstein, R.J. 1976. The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory. Oxford : Basic Blackwell. Buck-Morss, S. 1979. The Origin of Negative Dialectics. New York : The Free Press. Derrida, J. 1986. "But, beyond . . . (Open Letter to Anne McClintock and Rob Nixon)". Critical Inquiry 13(1). Eagleton, T. 1985. Literary Theory : An Introduction. Oxford : Basil Blackwell. Eagleton, T. 1986. "The End of English". Journal of Literary Studies 2(3). Foster, H. 1985. "Postmodernism : A Preface", in : Foster, H. (ed.), The Anti-Aesthetic — Essays on Postmodern Culture. Port Townsend, Washington : Bay Press. 63 Giliomee, H. 1986. "Port Elizabeth : Lyk ons Toekoms so?" Die SuidAfrikaan, Winter. Habermas, J. 1981a. "Modernity versus Postmodernity". New German Critique 22. Habermas, J. 1981b. "New Social movements" Telos 49. Habermas, J. 1981c. "The Dialectics of Rationalization : An Interview with Jürgen Habermas". Telos 49. Huyssen, A. 1984. "Mapping the Postmodern". New German Critique 33. Iser, W. 1978. The Act of Reading. London : Routledge & Kegan Paul. Jameson, F. 1985. "Postmodernism and Consumer Society", in : Foster, H. (ed.), The Anti-Aesthetic — Essays on Postmodern Culture. Port Townsend, Washington : Bay Press. Jauss, H.R. 1982. Toward an Aesthetic of Reception. Brighton : The Harvester Press. MacCabe, C. 1985. Theoretical Essays : Film, Linguistics, Literature. Manchester : Manchester University Press. May, D. 1986. Hannah Arendt. Harmondsworth, Middlesex : Penguin Books. Olivier, G. 1987. "Art and Transformation". South African Journal of Philosophy 6(1). Olivier, G. 1984a. "Identity and Difference in Nicolas Roeg's Bad Timing". Standpunte 172. Olivier, G. 1984b. "The Art of the Cinema". Standpunte 171. Owens, C. 1985. "The Discourse of Others : Feminists and Postmodernism", in : Foster, H. (ed.), The Anti-Aesthetic — Essays on Postmodern Culture. Port Townsend, Washington : Bay Press. Polan, D.P. 1986. "'Above all Else to Make You See' : Cinema and the Ideology of Spectacle", in : Arac, J. (ed.), Postmodernism and Politics. Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press. Rorty, R. 1982. "Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism", in : Consequences of Pragmatism. Brighton : The Harvester Press. Said, E.W. 1985. "Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies and Community", in : Foster, H. (ed.), The Anti-Aesthetic — Essays on Postmodern Culture. Port Townsend, Washington : Bay Press. West, C. 1986. "Postmodernity and Afro-America". Atlanta Art Papers 10(1). 64 65 7. DISLOCATING THE EVERYDAY : DAVID LYNCH'S WILD AT HEART AS CINEMA OF THE GROTESQUE room (just before Marietta, Lula's mother [Dianne Ladd], calls him), witnessing a gory scene where wild dogs are tearing at a carcass. Johnny establishes the (Schopenhauerian) connection between himself as a representative of the human species and the savage dogs when he imitates their growling and tearing movements. Anyone familiar with Schopenhauer's depiction of the world as a place of unmitigated, purposeless suffering — given his belief that reality is, despite its apparent variety, the endless manifestation of the blind, insatiable and irrational Will — would find it hard not to think of the following passage (Schopenhauer 1966; Vol. 2:354) at a certain point in the unfolding narrative of David Lynch's recent film, Wild at Heart. In this passage, Schopenhauer reflects on the apparent fact that the sufferings of life far outweigh its gratifications: . . . We see only momentary gratification, fleeting pleasure conditioned by wants, much and long suffering, constant struggle, bellum omnium, everything a hunter and everything hunted, pressure, want, need, and anxiety, shrieking and howling; and this goes on in saecula saeculorum, or until once again the crust of the planet breaks. Junghuhn relates that in Java he saw an immense field entirely covered with skeletons, and took it to be a battlefield. However, they were nothing but skeletons of large turtles five feet long, three feet broad, and of equal height. These turtles come this way from the sea, in order to lay their eggs, and are then seized by wild dogs (Canis rutilans); with their united strength, these dogs lay them on their backs, tear open their lower armour, the small scales of the belly, and devour them alive. But then a tiger often pounces on the dogs. Now all this misery is repeated thousands and thousands of times, year in year out. For this, then, are these turtles born. For what offence must they suffer this agony? What is the point of this whole scene of horror? The only answer is that the will-to-live thus objectifies itself. The clue to the specific scene in Wild at Heart is, of course, the story about the turtles. On their way to New Orleans, the capital of blues music, Lula Fortune (Laura Dern) and Sailor Ripley (Nicholas Cage) stop to fill up their car at a gas station and she suggests that she take over the driving while he has a rest. The moment of (Schopenhauer-) recognition occurs when, with Sailor stretched out on the back seat, Lula starts turning the tuning button on the radio, only to find that every station she picks up is transmitting a report of violence or destruction of some kind, ranging from a family murder and rape to an item on how a large number of turtles were released into the Ganges river in an effort to clear it of waste, and authorities were considering following this up with crocodiles in order to get rid of the rotting (turtle?) corpses. Wild dogs, too, appear in the film narrative — in the scene where private detective Johnny Farragut is watching TV in his hotel This article was originally published in the South African Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 11, (4), 1992. It is reprinted with permission. What is the point? one may ask. That Lynch has probably read Schopenhauer and found this "scene of horror" suitably shocking to incorporate, somewhat modified, into Wild at Heart? And if this is the case, does that mean that the film is primarily about horror, or about the absurdity of life, given the Schopenhauerian characterization of it as the senseless oscillation between suffering and boredom? (Schopenhauer 1966, Vol. 1:312.) Again: how would that tally with the reference to the grotesque in the title of this paper? To begin with, and as 20th-century theories of the grotesque have shown, the phenomenon of the grotesque is strongly related to both horror (or the horrifying) and the absurd, but the relationship is a complex one and bears close analysis. (Cf. in this regard Thomson 1972: 2-9, 29-57.) Secondly, Schopenhauer's irrationalist philosophy of the (blind, irrational) will as the true motivating force behind human actions, instead of (traditionally recognized) reason, may be described as a philosophy of the absurd in the strict sense of "that which is contrary to reason." And a consideration of his thought may clarify some aspects of the grotesque and of the film. It is noteworthy, in this regard, that Samuel Beckett's novels and plays are among the most often cited sources of the grotesque, and equally striking that critical studies have highlighted the astonishing degree in which Beckett's literary art has assimilated Schopenhauer's philosophy (cf. Pankow 1985). Moreover, one is struck by the way in which certain temporal features of Wild at Heart exemplify Schopenhauer's observation (quoted above) that fleeting gratification contrasts starkly with long suffering in life: in terms of narrated time, Sailor spends an inordinately long time (more than 2 years for manslaughter, almost 6 years for robbery) in prison, compared to the relatively short (narrated) time that he and Lula enjoy the pleasures of each other's company (although it comprises a fair amount of the narrative time of the film). At a later stage the relevance of these considerations in relation to the grotesque should become clear. But that means that attention has to be given to the grotesque first. What does the phenomenon of the grotesque comprise? It may be easy enough to recognize when confronted by it, although less easy to analyse. We see it in the robbery scene (in Wild at Heart) for example, where the two men, bleeding profusely from multiple wounds inflicted upon them by Bobby Peru with a shotgun, are crawling around on the ground, one of them minus a hand. The other 66 67 one — although not really much better off — offers him consolation by pointing out that, once his hand has been sewn back on, he would be as good as new again; to which his unfortunate partner replies, with a mixture of frustration and panic in his voice, that he cannot find it, frantically looking around on the floor for his severed limb. Then the scene switches to the back door of the building (shown from the outside) from which a dog is emerging, carrying a human hand in its mouth. rather than reproducing clear images of the familiar world. Instead of columns they paint fluted stems with oddly shaped leaves and volutes, and instead of pediments arabesques; the same with candelabra and painted edifices, on the pediments of which grow dainty flowers unrolling out of robes and topped, without rhyme or reason, by little figures. The little stems, finally, support half-figures crowned by human or animal heads. Such things, however, never existed, do not now exist, and shall never come into being." Characteristically, members of the audience respond to this scene with a mixture of disgust and mirth. The question is: why? On the face of it (more so from my verbal description than from witnessing the actual scene) it would appear as if horror would be a more appropriate response than laughter. And the scene certainly is horrifying. But there is an undeniable comical element to it as well: the two miserable creatures on the floor, looking for a severed hand, optimistically hoping for its restoration to its owner's arm, while a dog proudly departs from the scene with the hand as a trophy. This scene therefore provides a number of clues for a conceptual analysis of the grotesque, although it should be kept in mind that, as a phenomenon, it is not restricted to cinema, drama, literature or the arts of painting and sculpture. On the contrary, the grotesque manifests itself in the everyday or the lifeworld as well — something of which art, literature and cinema (in this case Lynch's) can remind one forcefully. The rhetorical questions which then follow, show clearly that Vitruvius the classicist does not have much patience with such unreasonable products of fantasy, which transgress the principles of mimesis or realism: Philip Thomson (1972: 10-11) informs us that the grotesque has been more subject than most to the variation which affects the use of critical terms — perhaps, he suggests, because of its "radical and extreme nature". In fact, until fairly recently there has not been agreement on whether "the grotesque" is a meaningful critical category at all. And yet, as an artistic mode (of Western culture) it dates back at least as far as the early Christian phase of Roman culture. The discovery, around 1500, of mural paintings in this mode from that period gave us the word "grotesque", which derives from the Italian grotte ("caves"; cf. also the term "excavations") and the related adjective grottesco and noun la grottesca, which referred to paintings of this kind. It is interesting to note that the term is therefore a topological metaphor which associates certain characteristic phenomenal features of paintings with the place(s) of their discovery. (It will become apparent in due course, that its current usage as an aesthetic term can be metaphorically extended further to encapsulate the ambivalent character of [especially contemporary?] life or existence, which may perhaps be termed metaphysically grotesque.) What are the features of the kind of paintings discovered in the Italian grotte? Thomson (1972:12) quotes Vitruvius, writing in the Roman period, to the effect that: ". . . our contemporary artists decorate the walls with monstrous forms . . . For how can the stem of a flower support a roof, or a candelabrum bear pedimental sculpture? How can a tender shoot carry a human figure, and how can bastard forms composed of flowers and human bodies grow out of roots and tendrils? Thomson (1972:12) points out that Vitruvius's attitude of indignant rejection of a style which combines heterogeneous elements and forms — inorganic, vegetative, animal and human — is one which has persisted with regard to the grotesque since that time, especially in eras marked by classical preferences in art and literature. Regarding the features of the paintings described by Vitruvius, it is notable that he considers them simultaneously ludicrous and monstrous (Thomson 1972:12). Although early English usages of the term "grotesque" are limited to antique paintings and their popular imitation in the 16th century, its extension to literature and even to the non-artistic occurred in France in the same century — for instance in the work of Rabelais, who applied it to body-parts (Thomson 1972:13; Van Buren 1982:43-46) — but in Germany and England only in the eighteenth. This was accompanied by a broadening of the term's meaning, which, in 18th century aesthetics, became excessively associated with caricature and the related qualities of the ridiculous and the bizarre. This resulted in what the German critic and major contributor to the theory of the grotesque, Wolfgang Kayser, describes as a "loss of substance in the word", by which he evidently means the "suppression of the horrifying or eerie qualities" of the phenomenon in literature and art (Thomson 1972:13). An accompanying feature of this development in the context of 18th-century neo-classicism (as one may expect, in light of what has been said of classicism) is the disapproval and rejection of the distortions and absurdities characteristic of the grotesque in art (Clayborough, quoted in Thomson 1972:13), an attitude which continued to exist through the 19th and even into the 20th century. During this time, even writers who did not disapprove 68 69 of the grotesque were inclined to look upon it as a "vulgar species of the comic" (Thomson 1972:13). something is really funny and can therefore be "laughed off", or outrage and indignation at it for offending one's aesthetic and moral sensibilities (Thomson 1972:3) — does not diminish the primary dividedness of one's reaction, nor the correlative ambivalence of the phenomenon. All of this applies to Wild at Heart. Thus, Tony Karon (Vrye Weekblad, 8-14 November, 1991:32) comments on what he calls the "black humour" of the film in emotional terms that reflect none other than these tensions at the heart of the grotesque in these words: "Often though, your fear of what's coming next mutes your laughter." The point of this little historical excursion is to demonstrate what a thoroughly equivocal thing the grotesque is, incorporating conflicting features all of which are sometimes — in the case of Vitruvius and of Kayser, for example — recognized as being co-constitutive of the phenomenon, but only some of which are sometimes one-sidedly emphasized at the cost of their counterparts. Although the tendency to overemphasize the element of ludicrous exaggeration appeared to be predominant during the time referred to, some contemporaneous writers such as John Ruskin, Victor Hugo and Friedrich Schlegel refused to restrict their understanding of the grotesque in this way, insisting on the additional moment of the "powerfully unsettling" in order to do justice to it (Thomson 1972: 13-15). It would seem, then, that we have to take account of — in Thomson's words (1972:14) — "a co-presence of the ludicrous with the monstrous, the disgusting or the horrifying" in the grotesque, ranging from instances in the paintings of Bosch, Brueghel, Goya, Fuseli, or (more recently) Francis Bacon, to those in the writings of Swift (cf. especially A modest proposal), Blake, Beckett (think of Nagg and Nell in Endgame) or Kafka (Metamorphosis), and in the cinematography of Lynch. More-over, it is apparent that an historical moment plays a role here as well, as Thomson (1972:11) indicates: "It is no accident", he says, "that the grotesque mode in art and literature tends to be prevalent in societies and eras marked by strife, radical change or disorientation". The extent to which the 20th century fits this formula is so well known that it has the status of a commonplace. (Cf. Baumer 1977 for a lucid discussion of the 20th century as an era of unparalleled flux.) Not surprisingly, therefore, Thomson (1972:14) continues along these lines: It is perhaps easier for us, living in the second half of the twentieth century, to . . . insist on a component of horror or something similar in the grotesque. It may be said that our notion of the grotesque is conditioned by the many examples from modern and contemporary literature of the comic inexplicably combined with the monstrous, of the interweaving of totally disparate elements, producing a strange and often unpleasant and unsettling conflict of emotions. It is precisely this kind of emotional response, shot through with clashing tendencies, that scenes like the one from Wild at Heart, described earlier, provoke in spectators, corresponding to the structural tension or clash of phenomenal features in the film-text itself. The fact that, characteristically, an initial uncertainty is followed by divergent responses — either the decision that To facilitate our reading of Wild at Heart as cinema of the grotesque, I shall attempt to articulate my interpretation in terms of three pairs of concepts that express or embody the fundamentally oppositional structure of the phenomenon (Van Buren 1982). They are the oppositions: ideal body/exaggerated or interrupted body; realistic/fantastic; and tragic/comic (which is closely related to horrific/ludicrous). The first of these oppositional pairs, pertaining to the ideal image of the body and of its transgression, derives from Bakhtin's study of the grotesque representation in the "world" of Rabelais (Van Buren 1982:43-46). Bakhtin (spelled "Baxtin" by Van Buren) traces the grotesque image back to a carnivalesque origin and the way in which vulgar humour, typically, expressed itself by overturning normal standards of bodily appearance on these occasions (A look at Brueghel's "The fight between Carnival and Lent" is instructive in this regard). The important features of Bakhtin's theory of the grotesque (as represented by Van Buren) is firstly its primarily physical character — a point made by Thomson (1972:8) as well — and secondly the assumption of a system of conventions that regulate the representation (and by implication the presentation) of the body; hence the "ideal" body. While this "classical" body is governed by the idea of a complete whole, clearly separated from the outer world, with all protuberances or apertures softened and hidden or closed, the grotesque body manifests itself in the gross exaggeration of those parts that interrupt or protrude from the classical lines of the ideal body, such as mouth, nose, ears, belly, buttocks, phallus and breasts. The body grotesque may also appear in the substitution of "low-physical" attributes (parts below the belt) for "high-physical" ones (above the belt), in this way exploiting the resemblance between nose and phallus, or between the mouth and the apertures of the lower region. In this regard it is interesting to note that violation of the classical body-image by such substitution emphasizes, according to Bakhtin, the fundamentally life-affirming qualities of the grotesque (cf. especially the example of harlequin and the stammerer; Van Buren 1982:45) — a view which Van Buren is quick to correct by reminding one that such vitalistic attributes of the grotesque are counterbalanced by mortalistic ones (found in its sinister interpretation in the work of German romantics such as Hoffman or in Goya). 70 71 A striking instance, from Wild at Heart, of a scene that demonstrates these physical aspects of the grotesque, and which combines the vitalistic qualities of the grotesque with the mortalistic, is the shot-sequence of the encounter between Lula and Bobby Peru in her (and Sailor's) dingy motel room, when Peru (Willem Dafoe) more or less invites himself inside to use their toilet — which he refers to colloquially as a "head" — for urinating. Lula's apparent initially uncomprehending disgust at his phrasing establishes the tensional parameters for the grotesque body as analysed above: the toilet bowl, and its association with lower physical (excremental) functions are linked directly to the high-physical human head, associated with those faculties that have traditionally been regarded as elevating humankind above the rest of nature. (The connection is made explicit when Peru, noticing Lula's disconcertment, explains loudly that it is not her head he want to "piss on", etc.) terror. But this very same creature also signals the life-affirming side of the grotesque — hence the comparison of Lula with a "bunny rabbit" and himself with a "Jackrabbit", surely among the most reproductively fertile of animals. Hence also the Christmas-present simile, with its connotation of (spiritual) life, which is all the more grotesque in view of the harsh contrast between the spiritual values (e.g. self-sacrifice, love, resurrection) represented by Christmas and its biological counterpart as embodied in Bobby Peru. Moreover, the close-up shot of Bobby's face near Lula's — his deformed features, especially his protruding mouth, reminiscent of an animal's proboscis — constitutes a strange mixture of the terrifying and the clownish, as paradigmatic of the physical grotesque as anything one can find in Bosch or Brueghel. The same applies to the frontal shots of his grinning, stocking-covered face in the robbery scene, as he tells Sailor: "You're next!" — his features comprise a combination of a clown and a skull, like the faces in the paintings of Ensor. Nor does it end there. The life-and-death Lilith-face of the physical grotesque forms a complex pattern as the scene unfolds: Bobby Peru, having relieved himself, remarks on the fly-encrusted patch of vomit that Lula has left on the floor, and it does not take him long to guess, aloud, that she is pregnant — a fact so portentous because of the memory of her rape by "Uncle Pooch" and the subsequent abortion, that Lula could not tell Sailor verbally, but had to write it down for him the previous evening. When she asks him to leave, Bobby approaches her instead, telling her that he likes her breasts, comparing her to a "bunny rabbit". Moving closer all the time, and noticing her increasing terror, he taunts her sadistically, asking her whether she can "fuck like a bunny rabbit", and assuring her that he, Bobby Peru, will do it "hard, like a big old Jackrabbit", opening her up "like a Christmas present". Throughout this scene, the vitalistic and mortalistic moments of the physical grotesque are noticeably imbricated. With the aid of some clever cosmetic work — mainly by fitting false, ostensibly decaying dentures on his own, i.e. between his own teeth and his lips — Dafoe's (Peru's) face has been transformed into a paradigm of the body grotesque. As can be expected, his lips, having to accommodate this additional oral content are forced into a kind of permanent, protrusive grimace or sneer, revealing the hideously yellow bits of teeth and extensive gums whenever he talks or grins. Lula's obvious fear of him — he actually asks her, redundantly, whether he scares her — signals the thanatic or death-aspect of the grotesque. Clearly the man is lethal — the audience's knowledge, at this stage, that he served in Vietnam as a marine and was involved with one of the My Lai-type events where Vietnamese women and children were massacred in large numbers, reinforces his image as an angel of death. When he grabs Lulu and shouts at her with his horribly distorted face inches from hers, gripping her so tightly that she cannot move, she is clearly overcome with justified There are many more examples of the physical grotesque, as analysed above, in Wild at Heart . (This is the case in Lynch's other films too, viz. Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Dune and Blue Velvet, as well as in his television series, Twin Peaks. Cf. in this regard Skorman 1989:73; 131; 134. It is no accident that the reviews of these films in Skorman's book contain phrases like "surrealistic nightmare", "grotesque violence" [Blue Velvet], "deformed chicken-baby", "horrific vision", "bizarre images", and "in a twisted sort of way all this sickness is quite funny" [Eraserhead]. Clearly, Lynch is fascinated by the grotesque). These include the obscenely obese, semi-naked women involved with the making of the pornographic film, "Texas style"; the red lipstick-covered face of Marietta, talking to Johnny over the phone; the squawking man in the bar (obviously someone who has had a tracheotomy); the apparently blind woman who wanders across the screen with an empty smile on her face in the nightclub; the man with the spastic hand in the wheelchair on the scene of the accident near the end of the movie; Sailor's hugely swollen blue nose (broken in the encounter with the gang) in the closing scene; and, perhaps most striking because of its graphic resemblance of (Kafka's) Gregor Samsa's huge insect body with its ridiculously tiny legs (in Metamorphosis), the shots of Lula's disproportionately magnified face, distorted with pain, and her tiny arms, apparently growing out of the side of her lens-framed face in the abortion scene. One of the most disturbing images of the grotesque, however, is that of the woman with the walking callipers — first apprehended via her gigantic shadow on the wall, receiving assassination instructions from the bizarre Mr Reindeer. It is unnecessary to examine these at length, however — the point about the physical grotesque featuring prominently in Wild at Heart has, I believe, been adequately established. The second of the three conceptual oppositions that Van Buren locates at the 72 73 core of the grotesque, namely the pair: realistic/fantastic, pertains to the mode of presentation of events, images, and so on, in a literary or visual work of art (Van Buren 1982:46-50). Some critics attempt to reduce the grotesque in visual art and literature to social conditions or psychological motives by explaining either its realistic or its fantastic aspects as means to visualize or concretize suppressed needs and desires (e.g. Samsa's in Metamorphosis), or as ways to expose certain (undesirable) social conditions (e.g. the plight of common people in 18thcentury Spain, alluded to in some of Goya's works). Against them, Van Buren (1982:48) argues that this would result in one of the crucial constituents of the grotesque being sacrificed. "The grotesque", he insists, "does not belong to the realm of realism, nor, as others have declared, to that of fantasy. It belongs to realism and fantasy at the same time". The point made here by Van Buren explains why, characteristically, the grotesque may appear within, for instance, a realistic framework. When an incompatible, conflicting fictional mode like fantasy is introduced into such a realistic domain, it violates the latter precisely in the sense that the two different sets of conventions cannot be reduced to or reconciled with each other. Instead, the clash between the two remains in place, in this way giving rise to the grotesque. but because of the alternation or confusion of different perspectives. The hallmark of the grotesque in the realm of the fantastic is the conscious confusion between fantasy and reality".) To put it differently: when the mode of presentation of events in a narrative — for example in Wild at Heart — is such that it seems to require from a reader or an audience to understand them as real, the foundation has been laid for the irruption of the diegetic space by the grotesque via the introduction of (inter alia) fantastic elements. Thus, at the beginning of Lynch's film we are informed (and this sets the tone of the narrative) that we are at Cape Fear, on the border between two American states; a setting easily recognizable as belonging to the real, everyday world, and therefore one that prepares the way for the grotesque in the manner described. Thomson (1972:23) remarks that ". . . it is precisely the conviction that the grotesque world, however strange, is yet our world, real and immediate, which makes the grotesque so powerful". This also explains the effect of uncertainty on the part of the reader or audience: the clash of irreconcilable aesthetic-ontological modes, occurring within a realistic setting, understandably evokes bewilderment: having already "read" the narrated events (or presented images) as "real", the perception of something as being miraculous or fantastic — i.e. as inexplicable by means of natural laws — is to say the least, disconcerting (Van Buren 1982:48-49). (In passing, we may note that this is true even when the tables are turned on the realistic mode. Commenting on the less frequent manifestation of the grotesque within the fundamentally closed context of fantasy — in the sense that anything is possible in such a world — Mensching [quoted in Thomson 1972:23-24] says that, ". . . as long as the narrative perspective is retained unbroken it will be pure fantasy". But: "Such a story might become grotesque, not because of some extraordinary bizarreness of invention, It is not difficult to interpret Wild at Heart along these lines, especially if one considers Van Buren's observation (1982:49), that the transition from one aesthetic register to the other may be "more or less abrupt" — sometimes virtually fusing into one image, in other instances changing suddenly and abruptly from one mode to another. The main source of fantasy-images in Wild at Heart (its "pre-text", in the language of deconstruction) is The Wizard of Oz — a critic recently titled his review of the film The Lizard of Oz, probably with Lynch in mind (Tony Karon in Vrye Weekblad, 8-14 November 1991:32). On the level of fantasy, Lula is Dorothy trying to escape from the wicked witch of the West, Marietta, who, on the realistic level, is her mother, doing whatever she can to get rid of Sailor Ripley. Fantasy-images from The Wizard of Oz abound in the film — sometimes almost seamlessly united with the realistic audiovisual code, on other occasions interrupting the realistic narrative so unexpectedly that one is momentarily unsettled, caught off guard. In an early scene, after celebrating Sailor's parole with some steamy lovemaking in the Cape Fear hotel, Lula is getting ready to go dancing when the sound of a woman's laughter prompts her to liken it to the wicked witch's cackle, but Sailor shrugs it off with the remark — in realistic terms —- that, to him, it only sounds like an old lady having a good time. Later, having set out for California with New Orleans as their first stop, the camera focuses on the tarmac road. It is just an ordinary road, until the camera zooms in on the yellow lines in the middle, lingeringly transforming the realistic image into the fantasy image of the yellow brick road to Oz. Again: after Bobby Peru has left the bewildered Lula in her motel room, she remains standing in the same position, sobbing in desperation. The camera moves down her legs, finally focusing on her red shoes. Then she swivels her ankles outwards and clicks her heels together a number of times: the image of a frightened young woman fuses with that of Dorothy, clicking the magic slippers together, wishing to be home — away from the dangers of an alien world. Then there is the scene, near the end of the film, when Sailor, fresh out of prison, sees his young son, Pace, for the first time and gives him a toy lion as a present. A little later he shares some fairly banal words of wisdom with the boy, ostensibly to provide him with some reservoir of courage for life, in this way establishing a link with the fantasy figure of the lion in the tale of Oz, who needed to be told that he had courage inside himself. The scene with the bizarre man who keeps talking about his (invisible) dog, at one point suggesting that it might even be Toto, further reinforces the intimate juxtaposition of the realistic and the fantastic. Although these scenes may seem innocuous 74 from their description, they nevertheless have the effect of summoning up the grotesque in the sense of drawing attention to the disquieting presence of the alien in the familiar or everyday. In those scenes where the fantastic appears more abruptly, in stark contrast with the realistic setting, the grotesque looms larger, and has a more disturbing effect. When Lula looks up into the darkness to see the uncanny figure of a witch above and alongside of the speeding car, recognizing her mother in the eerily luminescent face of the witch, the audience's knowledge that the sudden invasion of the "normal" world by this irreducible product of fantasy generates something oppositional — the grotesque — reveals the ambivalence of existence more clearly and forcefully than any "realistic" image or description could. Similarly, when the camera moves to the lipstick-faced Marietta's feet when she is vomiting in the bathroom, finally resting on her black, upturned witches' shoes, the same effect is produced. Then, towards the end, when a dishevelled Marietta is once again trying to persuade Lula not to see Sailor after his release from prison, the switch from the realistic register to the fantastic is prepared for when Lula slams the telephone down and empties the contents of her glass over her mother's framed photograph. The actual switch occurs a little later, around the time when the good witch Glinda in the bubble — another fantastic emissary from Oz — has blown the prostrate Sailor a magic kiss, telling him not to turn away from love and to fight for his dream, in this way causing his reunion with Lula. The camera takes us back, briefly, to Marietta's fallen photograph, which evaporates miraculously before our eyes, just like the wicked witch of the West in Oz, when Dorothy flings water over her, freeing her from the witch's — and by implication Lula and Sailor from Marietta's — evil power. The ostensibly happy (banal!) ending, with Sailor singing "Love me tender" to Lula atop her car, does not diminish the overall effect of these grotesque images. They remind us irresistibly that, even in the most ordinary or apparently innocent events, objects or relationships there lurks the latent possibility of the irruptive appearance of the grotesque with all its disturbing contradictions. The crystal ball in which Marietta's pink-nailed, clawlike hands conjure up various images from time to time, functions as a forceful reminder of this grotesque tension between the realistic and the fantastic. The third conceptual opposition (discussed by Van Buren) which is fundamental to the grotesque, is that between the tragic and the comic, which, as I have remarked, is closely connected to that between the horrific and the ludicrous (Van Buren 1982:50-52). In fact, Schlegel defines the grotesque as the effect of a sharp contrast between heterogeneous forces that are simultaneously "ridiculous and horrifying", a clash enacted well by tragi-comedy (quoted in Van Buren 1982:50). In the early part of this paper I gave some attention to this ambivalence in the grotesque; hence I shall deal only briefly with it here. 75 Victor Hugo, too, asserts the link between the grotesque and tragi-comedy, which he sees as a new genre , the path towards which has been prepared by the relationship between the tragic and the comical in Shakespeare's tragedies — e.g. the gravedigger scene in Hamlet and, in sustained fashion, the counterbalance, in King Lear, between Lear's expressions of deep suffering and the comical remarks by the Fool (Van Buren 1982:51, Thomson 1972:53). Hugo regards the grotesque, not only as the chief device in the construction of the new genre of tragi-comedy, but as the "richest source" that art can draw from. This should be seen against the background of the traditional metaphysical belief (cf. Van Buren 1982:51) in the dual nature of man — immortal yet transient, carnal yet ethereal — that Hugo understands as the historical source of drama, in particular tragedy and comedy. His insistence on the need for a combination of the two shows his insight into the unresolvable ambivalence of human life, whether it is expressed in traditional metaphysical terms or in terms more suited to the secular world of the 20th century, for instance humankind's awareness of living in an indifferent universe, yet craving meaning. One could interpret Wild at Heart as a whole — and not only particular figures or events in the film — an as extended metaphor for humankind's tragi-comical condition, marked by extreme, unavoidable suffering on the one hand, mitigated by the comical, ludicrous or ridiculous aspects of that same existence on the other hand. Sailor Ripley is such a tragi-comical figure: from the perspective of tragedy, viz. that miserable consequences follow inexorably from certain characteristic actions (cf. Leech 1977:1-11), he pays the penalty for his rash actions and for his deviation from his resolution never to do anything again without a "good reason", by spending years in prison, where boredom (one of the chief sources of suffering, according to Schopenhauer) must surely take its toll. Sailor invites all this hardship by acting in accordance with his much-valued "individuality and his belief in personal freedom", of which his snakeskin jacket is, as he recites on a number of occasions, the "symbol". But, counterbalancing this personal destiny of suffering, the snakeskin jacket is precisely what imparts to Sailor a somewhat comical appearance — in fact, it bears a resemblance to a clown's outfit, or to Harlequin of the commedia dell'arte. In one scene an adversary actually tells him that he looks ridiculous in the jacket. The other, perhaps more conspicuous tragi-comical figure in the film is cousin Dell, who wants Christmas to last all year long, believes that aliens control our minds and are constantly trying to "get us" with black plastic gloves, and who keeps cockroaches in his underwear. (Lula tells Sailor that, once, he actually put a huge cockroach right "on his anus"). The grotesque in Dell's behaviour appears in the tension between his anguish — fighting with the plastic glove, agonizing over his lunch — and the strangely comical aspect of this behaviour, for instance his bizarre, gyrating 76 77 movements on the pavement, laughing to himself. (Involuntarily, one wonders if it has anything to do with cockroaches.) I started this paper on a Schopenhauerian note, and I shall sound it again in my conclusion. We have seen that the grotesque is a thoroughly ambivalent phenomenon, and we have traced its manifestation in Lynch's Wild at Heart in terms of various articulations of this ambivalence. I believe that Schopenhauer's vision of human life in terms of momentary pleasure or gratification and recurrent suffering is a philosophical metaphor, if you like, of the grotesque, and hence it implies that one may understand human existence in terms of this metaphor. Thomson (1972:11) confirms this when he calls it "a fundamentally ambivalent thing, . . . a violent clash of opposites, and hence, in some of its forms at least, . . . an appropriate expression of the problematical nature of existence". Moreover, the fact that Wild at Heart is a film text, not a literary text (although it is based on a novel by Barry Gifford) adds a significant dimension to the question of the impact on the audience of the grotesque images that populate its diegetic space. Jean-Louis Baudry has called attention to the similarity between dreams and cinema, noting that both have a "capacity for figuration, translation of thoughts into images, reality extended to representations", and offer the dreaming or viewing subject an experience that is "more than real" (quoted in Silverman 1983:107). As Silverman observes, this means that films share with dreams a considerable sensory and affective-emotional intensity and that, in Freudian terms, the "primary process" of the unconscious plays an important part in their creation. Without going into too much detail here, it is important to remember that the "endlessly displacing" primary process does not distinguish between image and reality in order to re-produce a pleasurable affect (which accompanies the memories of gratifying objects). Nor does it hesitate to substitute one image for another, but always with the same disillusionment or "unpleasure" as the result, i.e. with the frustration of the wish for gratification or the immediate release of tension or excitation, because these images have the status of hallucinations. (Cf. Silverman 1983:54-86 for a lucid discussion of the relationship and differences between the "primary process", associated with the unconscious, and the "secondary process", connected to the preconscious). The upshot is that, although hallucinatory and less capable of ensuring gratification than the thought-mediated strategies of the so-called secondary process or preconscious, the perceptual (i.e. sensory) projections or images of the unconscious (primary process) are far more intense than their putative counterparts in the preconscious. Add to this Freud's insight, that the unconscious harbours everything that has been repressed because of cultural prohibition — e.g. taboos, forbidden desires, etc. — and that this repression produces, inter alia, dreams in an attempt to fulfil wishes, then it should be clear why film images address audiences so powerfully, especially in the case of grotesque images that are likely to fall in the category of culturally prohibited (and therefore repressed) representations (e.g. the physical grotesque). In short, through their perceptual images, films impinge upon a primitive psychic state in a manner that literature, for example, cannot match. And while, in the case of images pertaining to repressed memories, etc., one would expect that viewing a film may have a salutary cathartic effect, the charge of prohibition that clings to these images will probably cause viewers to find the confrontation with such representations traumatic at the same time — a psychological effect that is consonant with the ambivalence that we have detected in the phenomenon of the grotesque. While horror films like Aliens have to take one to the furthest reaches of the universe to confront one with the unspeakably horrific (or bring the terrifying to earth, like the Critters) Lynch shows one that, just underneath the surface of the everyday, there lurks horror and terror, but not in unmitigated form — his cinematic art locates the grotesque in the tension-field of horror and the ludicrous, in this way making it bearable, tempering the demonic by means of some comic relief, or at least, as Wolfgang Kayser concludes (Thomson 1972:18) about the grotesque in art generally, attempting to control and exorcise the demonic in the world. The story of cousin Dell speaks of horror and the abyss by focusing on the alien within each one of us, but at the same time it stresses the ambivalence of our existence by revealing the comical side of Dell's behaviour. Life is a tragicomedy. In short, it is grotesque. Or, in Lula's words: "The world is wild at heart and weird on top". I could not have paraphrased Shopenhauer better. Postscript: In a more historical vein one may be tempted to claim — with Thomson's remark in mind, that the grotesque features prominently in eras of radical change and disorientation — that our own postmodern phase of modernity displays structural features that would invite or promote an art of the grotesque. This is not the place for a thoroughgoing examination of the possible connection between postmodernity (as a cultural phase), postmodernism (as a critical response to postmodernity, as well as to modernity and modernism) and the grotesque, so a few pointers will have to suffice. Firstly, postmodernity is characterized by cultural fragmentation, plurality, heterogeneity and differentiation, in contrast to the striving for cultural unity (e.g. internationalism) and homogeneity (e.g. its sense of urban space) on the part of cultural modernity. Modernism, in art and architecture reflects this striving in a critical sense: modernist literature, for example, set out to construct a pure, aesthetic sphere of its own, uncontaminated by the real world, and with strictly observed genreboundaries. Modernist architecture's homogenization of space was so successful that it was sometimes felt to be uninhabitable — as was the case with the notorious Pruitt-Igoe housing scheme (cf. Harvey 1990:39). Postmodernist art 78 and architecture, on the other hand, thrive on heterogeneity, play and disunity or fragmentation (cf. Feher, F:1987:195). Postmodernism in architecture as well as in literature, for instance, eschews aesthetic purity and revels in the often playful juxtaposition of different codes, modes and genres (in the "same" text). Wild at Heart is easily recognizable as a postmodernist film in this sense — it switches from one artistic mode or genre to another (and back again) all the time. Perhaps, therefore, one could go as far as saying that it is especially a culture or a society with the structural features of postmodernity and of its artistic products, that fits the metaphoric ephithet of a "grotesque" culture. This characterization is more intelligible in light of Clayborough's observation (quoted in Van Buren 1982:43), that: "Grotesqueness may appear in anything which is found to be in sufficiently grave conflict with accepted standards to arouse emotion"; as well as Ruskin's insight into the playful element in the grotesque (Thomson 1972:15). Hence, it may be more accurate to say that it is in cultural phases such as "postmodernity", that the grotesque aspect of (human) life is foregrounded while, in different eras, with predominantly classical sensibilities — such as the Enlightenment — it withdraws into the background. The relation between postmodernity and the grotesque is a theme that warrants an inquiry in its own right, however. I realize that one cannot do justice to it with these few remarks, and I can only hope that other researchers will respond to the present article by pursuing the subject further. BIBLIOGRAPHY Feher, F. 1987. The status of postmodernity. Philosophy and Social Criticism, 13:2. Harvey, D. 1990. The condition of postmodernity. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Karon, T. 1991. The Lizard of Oz. Vrye Weekblad, 8-14 November, p.32. Leech, C. 1977. Tragedy. London: Methuen. Pankow, E. 1985. Letzte und erste Worte. Schopenhauer und Beckett. 66. Schopenhauer-Jahrbuch für das Jahr 1985. Thomson, P. 1972. The grotesque. London: Methuen. Schopenhauer, A. 1966. The world as will and representation. 2 Vols. Tr. E.F.J. Payne. New York: Dover Publications. Silverman, K. 1983. The subject of semiotics. New York: Oxford University Press. Skorman, R. 1989. Off-Hollywood movies — a film lover's guide. New York: Harmony Books. Van Buren, M. 1982. The grotesque in visual art and literature. Dutch Quarterly Review, 12:1; pp. 42-53. 79 8. POSTMODERN CINEMA AND POSTMODERN CULTURE: INFORMATION-COMMUNICATION, OTHERNESS AND HISTORY IN WENDERS'S HIMMEL ÜBER BERLIN (WINGS OF DESIRE) What one may call the obscenity of information is the common thread that runs through Wim Wenders's film Wings of Desire, postmodern culture and Baudrillard's radical cultural critique. The latter shows that communication has degenerated into the availability of information (in advanced, post-industrial countries, at least), while Wenders's film provides a paradigm for the problematization of communication and personal history in a postmodern culture of fragmentation. Introduction What do angelic sentiency (á la Wenders), Baudrillard's cultural critique and postmodern culture have in common? In a word: the obscenity of information. Wim Wenders's hauntingly beautiful film, Himmel über Berlin (English title: Wings of Desire) is a narrative juxtaposition, and an eventual exchange of angelic and human modes of perception. It is also a simultaneous problematization and celebration of the possibility of human temporality as personal history and of communication in a cultural context characterized by fragmentation and what Lyotard calls "the temporary contract" (Harvey, 1990:113). This rather condensed description of the film clearly requires considerable elaboration, including a reconstruction of its narrative, however brief. Let me therefore begin with an apt evocation of "the condition of postmodernity" (which also happens to be the title of its source) by David Harvey. Cultural fragmentation Spaces of very different worlds seem to collapse upon each other, much as the world's commodities are assembled in the supermarket and all manner of subcultures get juxtaposed in the contemporary city. Disruptive spatiality triumphs over the coherence of perspective and narratives in postmodern fiction, in exactly the same way that imported beers coexist with local brews, local employment collapses under the weight of foreign competition, and all the divergent spaces of the world are assembled nightly as a collage of images upon the television screen. (Harvey, 1990:301-302) This article was first published in Literator 13(3), November 1992. It is reprinted with permission. 80 81 Harvey's verbal collage not only signifies the structure of postmodern culture, but at once touches upon important aspects of postmodern film — particularly Wings of Desire, as well as others such as Woody Allen's Zelig and Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, which will be referred to again. All three of these films articulate the sense of fragmentation — cultural and personal — that Harvey captures so well in the earlier quotation, and problematize the connections between time, space, history, self and others in different ways. Although the thematization in this article will focus on and develop very specific aspects of Wings of Desire, Harvey's perceptive discussion of the film is utilized in many respects. Although the causal link is not established explicitly in the film, this could at least partly be because the angels' attempts to influence human affairs are not guaranteed to succeed. The audience witnesses some successes on their part, but also failures — the young man, for example, commits suicide over his lost love despite the angels' attempts to prevent it. These attempts do not take the form of actual, volitional interventions in the course of human action, however: being outside human time, the angels can at best try to offer spiritual comfort by their presence. They cannot influence human decisions directly, or, as one of them points out ruefully, they cannot really take part in humans' lives — they can merely pretend to do so. The angel Damiel, already drawn to the 'here and now' of human existence, develops an interest in a beautiful trapeze artist, Marion. Although Harvey does not comment on the implications of her being a trapeze artist, it is significant. Of all 'heavy' humans, the trapeze artist, who defies the laws of gravity, not only thus approximates the 'lightness' of the angels, but exemplifies the precariousness and contingency of human spatio-temporality — which is precisely what attracts Damiel. From eternity to time in Wings of Desire In Wings of Desire this cultural fragmentation is presented to us in the first place from the spatiotemporally unbounded vantage point(s) of two angels. Unfettered by human perspectivism, they have full audiovisual access to humans and their private thoughts. These individuals come across as isolated, and their thoughts as unrelated and ephemeral, and are recorded in monochrome and monotone. (Cf. Blue Thunder as fictional technological approximation of angelic vision and hearing). The overwhelming impression created by the angelic perception of labyrinthine living spaces and their inhabitants, is one of isolation, division, alienation and non-communication. This is underscored by the fact that the filmnarrative is set in Berlin, where The Wall was until not so long ago a kind of archetype of the dividedness of the human race. The sequence of audiovisual images makes it clear, however, that Berlin is not unique in this respect, but simply representative of all the world's cities interconnected by global information- and transportation-networks, the implication being that, the advanced international information- and communication-networks notwithstanding, divisions remain intact everywhere. Transcending the angelic dimension of eternity Simplifying to the extreme, and ignoring sub-themes for the time being, one could say that Wings of Desire enacts the story of an angel, Damiel. Damiel is increasingly dissatisfied and frustrated at his inability to transcend the angelic dimension of eternity, in order to interact with humans, in time and in bounded space. He shares his desire to experience the 'heaviness' of human existence with a fellow angel — a desire which, incidentally, makes the English title of the film very appropriate. To use a familiar distinction from a novel by Milan Kundera — albeit here generating different connotations in a different context — Damiel is increasingly burdened by the 'unbearable lightness of being', and drawn to the 'heaviness' of human becoming. Here, already, is a potential point of encounter between Damiel and a human, in the midst of a postmodern landscape of fragmentation and interpersonal isolation. Add to this that Marion's act is located within the enclosed space of the circus tent (something that Harvey, [1990:318] does consider), which constitutes one of the spaces in the film (the other one being the library) where a fragile sense of human identity exists and interaction can take place, and the stage is set for Damiel's momentous decision. After all, a tent has long been associated with a nomadic existence, signifying brief, intermittent sojourns in the course of a life of travelling (or of life as a journey, perhaps even a quest). And the circus is the place that signifies the (pre-electronic media) spectacle where human daring and hard-won skills challenge human 'heaviness' and fallibility continually. As every circus artiste knows — anyone could fall, any time. It makes perfect sense that this environment, and this woman Marion in it, attract Damiel so powerfully. His decision to exchange angelic eternity for human history entails his falling into the temporal realm of mortality — an interesting inversion of the fall of Lucifer, whose fall, it must be remembered, was the result of his project of pride. Damiel's fall, in contrast, is not prompted by the (angelic) hubris of aspiring to divinity, but corresponds instead with the original lapse, to the extent that it renders him truly human. Insofar as the film-narrative emphasizes the contingency, alienation, precariousness, mortality, fragility and vulnerability of the human condition, together with the fact that this is precisely what the angel Damiel finds so powerfully attractive about it, Wenders's film is an anti-Platonic celebration of radical finitude and contingency. 82 The narrative problematizing of interpersonal communication and personal history What has been stated about the film-narrative should not be construed to mean that the 'human condition' is presented in a free-floating, apparently cultureindependent manner. The isolation and alienation of the people who inhabit its diegetic space are clearly shown to be the anthropological constituents of a postmodern media-, information- and diversified capital-saturated culture — which provides the necessary context for Wenders's narrative problematization of interpersonal communication and personal history. In short, the film explores the question: are communication and personal history (i.e. a sense of continuity and identity) possible in a culture such as this? This question is all the more important, given the conviction on the part of someone like Fredric Jameson (Nicholls, 1991:1-2) that postmodernism is a predominantly spatial phenomenon, with the problematics of time and history — so characteristic of modernism — all but eclipsed in a postmodern culture. Peter Nicholls (1991), for one, challenges Jameson's contention, citing Lyotard and various instances of recent writing to show that a sense of the problematics of temporality may indeed be located in the postmodern. Similarly, in so far as Wings of Desire takes up the theme of eternity (with its limitless perception) and temporality (with its challenging limitations), Wenders also appears to contest Jameson's contention that the thematics of spatiality constitute the major distinction between the modern and the postmodern. Damiel's eventual decision, in Wings of Desire, to enter human history, happens in the stretch of no-man's land between the two lines of the Berlin Wall, the potential disastrousness of which (emphasizing his newly acquired human vulnerability) is averted by his fellow angel who places him on the western side of the Wall. Harvey (1990:318-319) observes that Damiel's decision is triggered by two "catalytic moments" — which, incidentally, may also be read as transitional with regard to his impending change of status, given the fact that both events involve a certain closeness (itself a communicational motif) to human beings. In the first of these, Damiel sees himself in Marion's dream of the dazzlingly bright "other" and follows her into a nightclub where she feels and responds to his presence while she is dancing by herself. The second involves Peter (Columbo) Falk, playing an international media star (himself!) who happens to be an ex-angel that took the plunge some time before, and who, sensing the invisible Damiel's presence where he is drinking coffee at a stall, addresses the surprised angel, telling him how good it is to live in human time and experience the sensory variety of human materiality. When Damiel wakes up as a human, he perceives colours for the first time, 83 including the redness of his own blood (from a newly-made-possible wound sustained in his fall), which he identifies linguistically by interrogating a nonplussed passer-by. This is a significant event in terms of the theme of this article, because if differentiates between unidimensional information (the monochromatic omni-vision of the angels) and communication, which always presupposes an element of otherness that simultaneously necessitates and vindicates the communication between two or more persons. Equally significant is the fact that Damiel has to appropriate finite human spatiality by traversing the city on foot, in the course of which a certain sense of coherence emerges, replacing the overwhelming impression of fragmentation that issues from the (fictional) angelic omni-vision, however paradoxical that may seem. Harvey captures the difference between these two, the finite and the suprafinite, where he comments (Harvey, 1990:319): This human sense of space and motion contrasts with that of angels, earlier depicted as a hyper-space of speeding flashes, each image like a cubist painting, suggesting a totally different mode of spatial experience. Damiel shifts from one mode to the other as he enters the flow of time. The economic power of money in the human world is emphasized by the fact that, having become human, Damiel needs money to survive. The fact that money, like advanced information-systems, surpasses national barriers, thus homogenizing global economic space, is brought home by the scene on the set where Peter Falk is filming. The latter, realizing who Damiel is when he shouts to the media star through a fence which separates them, overcomes the constructed barrier by talking to the newly human ex-angel through the fence and kindly giving him some money. "Damiel's entry into this human world", says Harvey (1990:319), "is now firmly located within the co-ordinates of social space, social time, and the social power of money". The attempt to create a personal history The eventual meeting between Marion and Damiel happens at the same nightclub where she felt his presence before. After tentatively eyeing each other for a while they come face to face in an adjacent bar. Earlier, after the circus had closed down for lack of money (Lyotard's short-term contract), Marion had been resolute about making a story for herself, even without the circus (Harvey [1990:318] draws attention to the function of the photo image in this context, where Marion imagines using a photo-automat to create a new identity, something which is symptomatic of an era or society where the sense of continuity imparted by a coherent tradition is absent. In Blade Runner the replicants resort to photographs as well, to construct or fake the personal history which they lack). Now, in 84 85 Damiel's presence (in the bar) she prepares to enact her (hi-)story with him — to "supersede being with becoming", in Harvey's words (1990:319). Damiel, too, is ready to experience his new found mundane spatiotemporality to the full. What follows articulates an imagined antithesis to the fragmentation and discontinuity of advanced capitalist (postmodern) society. Marion makes it clear that she has a common project in mind for the two of them — a project that would overcome arbitrariness and temporariness, and would somehow forge something universal out of the particular (a problem that postmodern art and architecture have always struggled with, in their attempt to mediate between difference and the universalistic demands of modernism). From the lengthy discourse a new sense of wholeness and identity emerges, linked to an ideal for all of humankind — a renewed project of creating a story of unity-in-difference through a shared decision. The narrative ends with Damiel helping Marion with her trapeze act after their first night together: the angel-become-human reassuringly keeping a watchful eye lest this lightest of heavy humans should slip and fall — a striking image of interhuman support. The final shots also include footage of an old man, the storyteller, whose importance will also be touched upon. point is that both — modernism and postmodernism — are responses, in varying aesthetic and critical modes, to the sociocultural effects of modernization. These effects, some of which have already been mentioned, are related to what Harvey (1990: 147, 240-307) calls "time-space compression" — a concept the coining of which must be placed in the context of Berman's contention, that modernity is "a certain mode of experience of space and time" (cf. Harvey, 1990:201). Needless to say, the modernism/postmodernism debate is located, to a considerable degree, within the parameters established by this insight, and involves a host of thinkers that include Daniel Bell, Fredric Jameson, Jürgen Habermas, Jean-Francois Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard, to mention but a few. "Time-space compression", which Harvey associates primarily with the capitalist world, implies that, as illustrated by the following quotations (Harvey, 1990:147): . . . the time horizons of both private and public decision-making have shrunk, while satellite communication and declining transport costs have made it increasingly possible to spread those decisions immediately over an ever wider and variegated space. It is true that, as Harvey observes (1990:320, 322) the film's ending tends to become somewhat banal and suffused with romanticism as a possible source of dealing with the distressing conditions of an alienating culture. The fact that Marion and Damiel are prepared to learn from each other, however, constitutes a communicational paradigm, and explains Harvey's remark, that he interprets the part of the film that deals with their relationship: " . . . as an attempt to resurrect something of the modernist spirit of human communication, togetherness, and becoming, out of the ashes of a monochromatic and deadpan postmodernist landscape of feeling". I mean to signal by that term processes that so revolutionize the objective qualities of space and time that we are forced to alter, sometimes in quite radical ways, how we represent the world to ourselves. I use the word 'compression' because a strong case can be made that the history of capitalism has been characterized by speed-up in the pace of life, while so overcoming spatial barriers that the world sometimes seems to collapse inwards upon us . . . As space appears to shrink to a 'global village' of telecommunications and a 'spaceship earth' of economic and ecological interdependencies — to use just two familiar and everyday images — and as time horizons shorten to the point where the present is all there is (the world of the schizophrenic), so we have to learn how to cope with an overwhelming sense of compression of our spatial and temporal worlds. . . . Postmodernity, hyperreality and the obscenity of information To be able to appreciate what is at stake here, a detour is necessary through this postmodern landscape. The principal guide on this occasion will be Jean Baudrillard, whose radical critique of contemporary post-industrial culture provides an interpretive grid for cultural artifacts like Wings of Desire. It is important to remember here that despite the differences between a modernist and a postmodernist aesthetic — the fact that the former counters conditions of fragmentation, flux and ephemerality in modern society by insisting on (inter alia) unity, functionality, and rational planning, while the latter tends to revel in these differences, fragmentation and 'opaque otherness' — there is a strong continuity between them. Postmodernism may be regarded as a kind of crisis within modernism, one which manifests itself as scepticism concerning questions of universality, immutability, metatheory, and so on (Harvey, 1990:116). But the The experience of time-space compression is challenging, exciting, stressful, and sometimes deeply troubling, capable of sparking, therefore, a diversity of social, cultural and political responses (Harvey, 1990:240). Wenders's Wings of Desire is obviously one such creative response to "timespace compression". Baudrillard's cultural critique is another. Both enable one to understand and come to terms with a sociocultural condition that affects us all. Moreover, the film and the critique in question reflect upon each other reciprocally, with mutual enrichment and clarification. 86 Baudrillard's views on communication This article concentrates mainly on two of Baudrillard's essays — "The implosion of meaning in the media" (in Baudrillard, 1983) and "The ecstasy of communication" (1985), which are particularly suitable for the line of argumentation. In both these essays, Baudrillard delineates the transformation that communication has undergone in advanced capitalist society. In an earlier essay, in "In the shadow of the silent majorities", (1983:35-36), he had contended that the media function via what he calls "fascination" (i.e., in McLuhan's terms, the neutralization of the message in favour of the medium), in this way undermining communication 'by meaning' in favour of another communicational mode. He now shows (1983: 95109) that the increase in this alternative mode, namely information, is matched by a correlative decrease in meaning. In his own words (1983:96): . . . information is directly destructive of meaning and signification, or neutralizes it. The loss of meaning is directly linked to the dissolving and dissuasive action of information, the media, and the mass media. This state of affairs is exactly the opposite of common belief, which holds that information 'creates' communication, as it were — in other words, that the two processes are essentially one and the same. However, instead of promoting communication — which, as has been pointed out earlier, presupposes an element of otherness, or a self-transcending reality — information destroys its own contents. In order to explain why this happens, Baudrillard invokes his well known thesis, that the real has been abolished by an all-encompassing process of simulation in advanced capitalist society. Living in a simulated world According to Baudrillard the process of simulation means that, in this kind of society (which, with the exception of 'third world' areas, has virtually become global), we live in a totally simulated world, where the images, symbols, signs and concepts which are ordinarily regarded as mediating reality, have become self-sufficient. In other words, they no longer 'refer' to an object or a world, but comprise a 'hyperreality' of simulation in which we are trapped as in a closed, endlessly self-referential, self-simulating or self-replicating (Blade Runner!) , circular process. Nietzsche's "prison-house of language" has become a prison house of 'simulacra'. That which people still mistakenly regard as 'real' is manufactured from memory banks, command models and miniaturized units — it is no more than operational (cf. Gillies, 1991:51). Although it is not of direct relevance here, it is interesting to note that this information-permeated, simulated 87 hyperreality, by destroying the otherness, negativity and 'ontological difference' prerequisite for communication, also undermines the difference between the real and the imaginary as well as between true and false (Gillies, 1991:51), thus effectively invalidating science and critical thought. In Baudrillard's words (1983:35): Critical thought judges and chooses, it produces differences, it is by selection that it presides over meaning. The masses [the pseudo-social counterpart of the process of simulation; B.O.], on the other hand, do not choose, they do not produce differences but a lack of differentiation — they retain a fascination for the medium which they prefer to the critical exigencies of the message. If his assessment is correct, it means that the shadows on the Plato's cave-wall have asserted themselves pervasively in this (post-)modern, so-called enlightened era. The formula, that culture, art, science or language mediates reality, then collapses in the face of a new, unforeseen immediacy in the sense that there is nothing to be mediated; that 'media' is in fact a misnomer because they fabricate (hyper-)reality, and that even the mediation of or by the media is a pseudo-mediation because the terms of the so-called mediation are determined by the media themselves. Hence, total circularity. The way in which Baudrillard develops this vision in the later essay (1985) should highlight its relevance vis-à-vis Wings of Desire. Here the transformation of communication is traced in the 'proteinic' structure of networks, feedback and 'generalized interface', where both public and private space progressively disappear. The former is invaded and finally assimilated by advertising in its new version, which no longer simply promotes the sales of commodities, but becomes the all-pervasive organizing principle, through "omnipresent visibility" of public life and what used to be public scenery (Baudrillard, 1985:129). It is especially in his analysis of the loss of private space, which occurs simultaneously with the loss of public space, that the focal terrain of this paper is mapped out. The loss of private space While public space has lost its character of spectacle, resembling a great depthless screen instead, private space has lost its intimacy — it is 'no longer a secret'. This implies further that the opposition between exterior space as the 'scene of objects', and interiority as the sovereign space of the subject has been obliterated, resulting in what Baudrillard (1985:130), terms . . . a sort of obscenity where the most intimate processes of our life 88 become the virtual feeding ground of the media . . . Inversely, the entire universe comes to unfold arbitrarily on your domestic screen . . .: all this explodes the scene formerly preserved by the minimal separation of public and private . . . It is not difficult to understand what he is writing about here. Whether it is the formerly private, hidden details of some peasant or tribal communal or family ritual, or the rockface of some distant, challenging mountain; from the imagecharting of global and planetary geography to the media-recording of the most intimate interhuman transactions — everything has been brought within reach of the 'informed' (but unformed) masses in electronically reduced format. Baudrillard drives home the communicational consequences of this cultural condition in the following passage, which must be quoted in full, given its pertinence for the present theme. Referring to the lost era of the difference between public and private space, he writes (1985: 130-131): Certainly, this private universe was alienating to the extent that it separated you from others — or from the world, where it was invested as a protective enclosure, an imaginary protector, a defence system. But it also reaped the symbolic benefits of alienation, which is that the Other exists, and that otherness can fool you for the better or the worse. Thus consumer society lived also under the sign of alienation, as a society of the spectacle. But just so: as long as there is alienation, there is spectacle, action, scene. It is not obscenity — the spectacle is never obscene. Obscenity begins precisely when there is no more spectacle, no more scene, when all becomes transparence and immediate visibility, when everything is exposed to the harsh and inexorable light of information and communication. We are no longer a part of the drama of alienation; we live in the ecstasy of communication. And this ecstasy is obscene. The obscene is what does away with every mirror, every look, every image. The obscene puts an end to every representation. But it is not only the sexual that becomes obscene in pornography; today there is a whole pornography of information and communication, that is to say, of circuits and networks, a pornography of all functions and objects in their readability, their fluidity, their availability, their regulation, in their forced signification, in their performativity, in their branching, in their polyvalence, in their free expression . . . It is no longer then the traditional obscenity of what is hidden, repressed, forbidden or obscure; on the contrary, it is the obscenity of the visible, of the all-too-visible, of the more-visible-than-thevisible. It is the obscenity of what no longer has any secret, of what 89 dissolves completely in information and communication. Communication and history in Wings of Desire It is not difficult to grasp the angelic vision-cum-hearing of Damiel and his fellow angels in Wings of Desire as the imaginative paradigm of this pervasive dimension of information-communication which abolishes all privacy and intimacy, all otherness and difference — in this way undercutting the a priori of communication in the normative sense, namely, that the reciprocity of communication presupposes otherness. The humanizing upshot of Damiel's desire to exchange the obscene omni-visibility and ubiquitous information of the angelic universe for the limitations of the self-and-other-structured perspectivism of human existence, is this: the degree to which the information networks project a hyperreality of simulated worlds which ultimately exterminate the interstitial spaces that preserve human privacy and protect the reciprocity of communicative interaction, correlates with the extent to which the potential for interpersonal communication is eroded and distorted. The point is — as Baudrillard enables one to see — the readily available information-systems create the illusion that everyone who is exposed to them is more informed, and hence better able to communicate, than the members of all previous generations. The truth, however, is that, in the place of the alienation that Baudrillard associates with the (obsolete) oppositional coexistence of a public and a private sphere, a new kind of alienation has appeared. Unlike the older alienation, which justifies and motivates communication — even if, as in the modernists' work, it is accompanied by epistemological despair — this postmodern alienation of a fragmented, ephemeral culture does not cultivate or vindicate communication precisely because it goes hand in hand with the belief in its own superiority as the realization of true communication. The angels in Wings of Desire often come across as weary — they are seen resting in the library, for instance — which makes sense given the unbearable lightness of their being, i.e. the indescribable boredom of the instantaneous informational mode to which they are privy. The following remark by Harvey therefore comes as no surprise (1990:320-321): The fact that many angels, according to Falk [in the film; B.O.] have chosen to come to earth, suggests that it is better always to be inside than outside the flow of human time, that becoming always has the potential to break with the stasis of being. After all, one can only desire that which is other, which is not entirely within your reach or obscenely available; implying, not that this is why Damiel desires Marion, but why he desires human desire — the condition of the possibility of 90 experiencing anything as opaque and anyone as other, as desirable. A descriptive and a normative sense of communication We have to distinguish, therefore, between two senses of communication — a descriptive and a normative sense, respectively. Baudrillard uses it in the normative sense in the earlier essay (1983: 97-98) where he talks about information "devouring" communication. In the later essay (1985), however, he seems to equate the two, implicitly suggesting that in postmodern culture the process is complete: information has finally assimilated communication; descriptively speaking, communication in the informational mode is all that is left. This explains Wenders's attempt to resurrect a sense of the normative mode in the process of communication that develops between Damiel and Marion. Two things are important here. Firstly, one should question Baudrillard's cultural critique, especially with regard to its totalizing character. Is it not the case that, within the hyperreality of postmodern, advanced capitalist society, there are still areas or, more modestly, pockets of genuine communication, where actual interpersonal practices approximate the communicational norm — even if full, reciprocal 'presence' is never actualized? (If it were, it would destroy the a priori of communication, viz. the preservation of otherness, anyway.) Communication in this 'minimal' sense is still a possibility and often an actuality, and I therefore agree with Harvey (1990:291, 300, 351) that Baudrillard — while drawing our attention to important cultural transformations — exaggerates somewhat. Gillies (1991:61), too, criticizes Baudrillard while admitting the provocativeness of his vision. For him, Baudrillard's contention that the real, the object, has disappeared, entails the concomitant abolition of history and the future, which further implies that, in (neo-) Marxist terms, there is no possibility of redemption. After all, as Adorno knew, there is hope only if what is, is not all that can be. Does viable communication presuppose a historical context? The question of history is important here because it resurrects the earlier allusion to the function of the intermittently appearing old man in Wings of Desire while, at the same time, addressing the other remaining issue of the adequacy of the combined story or narrative initiated by Damiel and Marion. Simply put: is a sense of common purpose, born of romantic love, enough to serve as a paradigm for a culture awash in the socio-economic effects of time-space compression? As Harvey (1990:321) reminds us, Damiel has no history. (It is striking that, in this respect as well, the timeless angel exemplifies an aspect of postmodernity, viz. its loss of temporal or historical continuity, or what Jameson [1985:119] metaphorically terms its schizophrenia.) Add to this the fact that, when they meet, Marion is rootless as well and the problem assumes frightening propor- 91 tions. Harvey puts it tersely (1990:321): "Is it possible to set about the project of becoming a-historically?" He then proceeds by arguing that the old storyteller seems to question the viability of such an undertaking. The fact that the storyteller — who understands himself to be the "potential guardian of collective memory and history" (Harvey 1990:317) — is an old person, who would have been young before ephemerality and fragmentation became pervasive structural features of contemporary culture, makes him the embodiment of memory, a structural property sadly lacking in this culture. His role is ambiguous because he is a peripheral figure by his own admission: the group of listeners who used to gather around him has dispersed, having become mutually uncommunicative readers. (Ironically, he frequents the library in an attempt to preserve a sense of the history of Berlin!) The impression of societal fragmentation that pervades the film is reinforced when the old man complains that even language seems to dissolve into incoherent fragments. On the other hand, however — and this is where he interrogates the prospects of the project inaugurated by Marion and her ex-angel man — he insists that he cannot give up his narrative task, because without its storyteller humankind would lose its childhood. It would seem, then, that the old man embodies a corrective to the apparently a-historical project represented by Marion and Damiel. Is Wenders telling us that viable communication presupposes a narrative or historical context? If this is the case, it would be in agreement with this line of thought in the work of Gadamer, Habermas and MacIntyre, all of whom insist on an indispensable historical moment in interhuman communication. In this way finally, a problem is posed for postmodernity: given the fact that it lacks a sense of history or continuity — already implied and aggravated by what many critics see as the preponderance of (an aestheticized) spatial sensibility — what critical potential exists, and where, for a project of communication which would or could recuperate a sense of common purpose without totalizing effects? To put it in the language of Wings of Desire: how does an angelic culture (or one which aspires to angelicism, anyway; think of the implications of the "quest for zero defect") make its (re-)entry into human time and history? The dilemma that faces Marion and Damiel epitomizes the dilemma facing postmodern culture. A digression: more postmodern cinema To be sure, some theorists embrace the a-historicality and schizophrenia prevalent in contemporary Western culture (cf. Harvey, 1990:351), attempting to 'ride the tiger' of timespace compression. Others — such as Ridley Scott and Woody Allen — while providing striking cinematic images of ephemerality and replication, address this state of affairs in different ways. In Blade Runner, (cf. 92 Harvey, 1990:312) Scott has the replicants destroy their maker in a classic rebellion of simulacra granted a limited lifespan, again involving a clash of time scales — this time between humans and their replicas who, like Damiel, have no history either. Ironically, in Blade Runner the central character, Deckard, escapes from a decaying, post-industrial Los Angeles with a new-generation replicant, Rachel, who has no built-in limited lifespan, in a bid for happiness. This, however, is not really a satisfactory resolution (despite the reversion to time — by changing Rachel's lifespan — in an attempt to reach one) and a politically sterile one into the bargain. Despite obvious similarities with Wings of Desire, Blade Runner fails to address the problem of communication as seriously as the German film does. Both seem ambivalent with regard to the dilemma issuing from the absence of an historical context for the non-human agents, and in a certain sense for the humans as well. Woody Allen's Zelig, on the other hand, while presenting the audience with a chameleonlike subject that changes constantly by replicating the other in his immediate vicinity, retains a critical-parodic edge because it " . . . works both to underline and to undermine the notion of the coherent, self-sufficient subject as the source of meaning or action", in Linda Hutcheon's words (1989:109). The unstable character Zelig mimics its own culture, while it parodies the idealized modernist subject with its projected unity, integrity and wholeness, in this way questioning the historical construction of subjectivity and the public media's function in that process, insofar as the latter is responsible for the pseudo-unity of the endlessly mutating human cipher. Allen achieves a notable effect here, by destroying otherness through a character who incessantly replicates others, ultimately leaving his audience with the thought-provoking question concerning the requirements for a subject of historical significance. This little excursion on two other examples of postmodern cinema emphasizes the fact that these films, while imitating the structure of their material cultural context, do not do so passively, but engage critically with the problems that confront this culture. The discussion of Wings of Desire further illustrates that, while a film may reconstruct postmodern culture and its attendant contradictions — Baudrillard would say repetitions, which is contradictory in historical terms, anyway — very effectively, its treatment of these may in fact amount to a modernist project for the solution of a postmodern problem. Nor should this surprise us, for, as Lyotard observes perspicaciously (1984:79): "A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant". Seen in this way, modernism is the movement which counters the endless instability of the postmodern moment with stable forms. In these term, Wings of Desire exemplifies the conjunction of these two distinguishable, but inseparable 93 cultural modes. Concluding remarks: what about South Africa? Some readers may wonder what relevance the present interpretation of Wings of Desire in terms of modernism and postmodernism could possibly have for the South African cultural, socio-economic and political situation. Is this analysis not applicable exclusively to advanced capitalist countries such as (West-)Germany, France, Britain and the United States? South Africa seems to have cultural hybrid-status compared to these countries. I would therefore argue that, although social life in certain metropolitan areas in South Africa displays the same structural features, labelled 'postmodern' — fragmentation and ephemerality — in this essay, it is only partly for the same reason as in advanced capitalist societies, namely because of the 'time-space compression'-effect of the process of (capitalist) modernization. One might say, not inaccurately, I believe, that the condition of cultural fragmentation in this country (S.A.) has post- and premodern features. More specifically, it is the result of an initial confrontation between a colonized (indigenous) culture and a colonizing (alien) culture in which the latter's dominance and domination over the former, seriously affected its historical and narrative continuity, as well as its social (including educational and moral) coherence. This state of affairs continued in post-colonial times and was aggravated to the point of social pathology by coercive structural practices of exclusion (in Foucaldian terms) during the apartheid-epoch. In other words, South African society is a fragmented society for the additional reason (in metropolitan areas, and for the predominant reason, in rural areas) of the ideologically motivated, socially and politically divisive effect of apartheid practices in law, industry, education, religion, and so on. With this in mind, it should be (terrifyingly) clear that South Africans are faced with the awesome project of overcoming the legacy of a pathologically divided history and creating the basis for a united, communicatively interactive 'future history', to put it oxymoronically. This does not, as some may think, require historical amnesia with regard to the time of apartheid. Kundera (and before him Adorno) has warned about the dangers of forgetting. It requires, precisely, remembering (not commemorating or celebrating) the effects of apartheid and expiation for apartheid, lest it become an empty name of no axiological significance for future generations. Only in this way is interpersonal reconciliation possible. And, as for postmodern culture, this requires communication despite (and motivated by) remaining barriers. Needless to say, a crucial contribution to such a South African communicative project could and should come from educational institutions — primary through secondary to tertiary ones. These institutions (especially universities) have the linguistic, intellectual, scientific — in a word, the rational — resources to initiate and sustain the project of conciliatory, re-integrative communication in South Africa. 94 BIBLIOGRAPHY Baudrillard, J. 1985. The Ecstasy of Communication. In: Foster, H. The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Port Townsend: Bay Press, 126-134. Baudrillard, J. 1983. In the Shadow of the Silent majorities . . . or the End of the Social, and Other Essays. Tr. Foss, P., Patton, P. and Johnston, J. New York: Semiotext(e), Inc. Gillies, F. 1991. Hoping without Reason, Image or Object, or: How to Get from Marx to Baudrillard. In: The Provocation of Baudrillard. Ed. Ackbass. Hong Kong : Hong Kong University Press. p. 49-67. Harvey, D. 1990. The Condition of Postmodernity . Oxford : Basil Blackwell. Hutcheon, L. 1989. The Politics of Postmodernism. London : Routledge. Jameson, F. 1985. Postmodernism and Consumer Society. In: Foster, H. The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Port Townsend, Washington : Bay Press. p. 111-125. Lyotard, J-F. 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Tr. Massumi, B. and Bennington, G. Manchester : Manchester University Press. Nicholls, P. 1991. Divergences; Modernism, Postmodernism, Jameson and Lyotard. Critical Quarterly, 33(3). Autumn. p. 1-18. 95 9. TIME, TECHNOLOGY, CINEMATIC ART AND CRITIQUE IN THE TERMINATOR AND TERMINATOR II - JUDGEMENT DAY : A PHILOSOPHICAL INTERPRETATION The Terminator (1984: dir. James Cameron) and Terminator II - Judgement Day (1991 : dir. James Cameron), also referred to as Terminator I and Terminator II, are slick, state-of-the-art science fiction films. Although they are popular cinematic art-works, they address serious issues concerning the relationship between the history and humanity of mankind and advanced, science-based technology. In this article I shall attempt to deal with these issues within the framework of Heidegger's metatheory of modernity, which involves the crucial function of science, technology and art (including literature). I also hope to show that the paradoxical structure of time in the Terminator movies can be further elucidated in terms of the time-analysis in Heidegger's Being and Time, where the emphasis on the primacy of the future regarding human existence is particularly useful for the present interpretation. In addition to the application of these interpretive principles borrowed from Heidegger, an attempt will also be made to indicate the relevance of Habermas's contention, that art has the capacity to put an integrative and enlightening experience within reach of people (i.e. the public) in general. What follows, then, is a response to the following question: Beyond their breathtaking special effects, what conception of humanity, its history and its technological creations do these two pop sci-fi movies articulate? Moreover, given the thoroughgoing scientific-technological fabric of modern (or, for that matter, postmodern) society, should we not perhaps take note of the serious and far-reaching implications of this fictional projection of our possible future, even if, in the words of one of the films' characters, it is just "one possible future"? The present essay is an interpretive philosophical, as opposed to semiotic, elaboration on these implications, and is predicated on the belief that these films cannot be written off as mere entertainment. In the first place, like all genuine science fiction, they constitute a critique of technology.1 Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) and Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea This article was first published in Literator 13 (3), November 1992. It is reprinted with permission. 1. The distinguishing trait of "genuine" science fiction, namely, that it is invariably a critique of technology, was first pointed out to me by James Sey. 96 97 (1870) are paradigmatic early instances of this genre.2 Secondly, the 20th century has witnessed a number of reasoned affirmations of the ontological, epistemological and moral import of art, architecture and literature, in the face of the Enlightenment's relegation of art to the aesthetic sphere. These affirmations include the work of Heidegger, Adorno, Marcuse, Gadamer, Harries (cf. Olivier, 1987) and more recently that of Habermas — unlikely as it may seem, considering that he has certainly not displayed a predilection for aesthetic issues. Nevertheless, David Ingram (1991) has shown that while Habermas has acknowledged (in accordance with [Kantian] Enlightenment thinking) the legitimacy of a distinct aesthetic sphere, he has also argued that the latter should not be regarded as being exclusively accessible to trained experts. In Habermas's view, the general public should share in aesthetic rationality "in the form of allencompassing enlightenment" (Ingram, 1991:68) if not esoteric artistic and artcritical refinement. This means that according to Ingram (1991:68) aesthetic projects a redemptive vision in which alienating societal contradictions have been overcome, while the latter disrupts or unmasks the apparent but false harmony of contemporary secular society. Art should transcend the realm of subjective expression and illuminate life itself; aesthetic rationality should articulate an experience of truth capable of integrating and transforming cognitive significations, normative expectations, and aesthetic sensibilities. What Ingram alludes to here is parallel to Habermas's contention (1988: 312-313) that one of the most important tasks facing philosophy today is to mediate between the three discursive fields of knowledge, morality and aesthetic sensibility. To put it differently, in modern Western culture three distinct spheres of rationality have developed alongside of one another since the Enlightenment, namely a scientific-cognitive, a moral-political and an aesthetic-expressive mode of rationality, respectively — each with its own distinctive discursive rules. In the course of increasing specialization, these discourses have grown further away from one another, with devastating consequences for the life-world of human beings, where they (i.e. these three distinguishable modes of rationality) form one integrated whole. Habermas therefore enlists philosophy as a reconstructive discipline to assist in the reintegration of the human life-world, which has been "colonized", in his view, by "technical imperatives". This is also what is implied by his insistence, that art (including literature and cinema) has the capacity to make an all-embracing enlightenment available to the public. Ingram points out (1991:68) that Habermas's thinking has to accommodate two countervailing tendencies — the reconciliatory utopianism of romantic idealism as well as "the explosive negativity of modern realism". The former type of 2. In Verne's novel the critique of technology is articulated in terms of the ambivalence of Nemo's submarine, the Nautilus, which is at one and the same time a machine that puts humankind within reach of as yet unimagined wonders, and also one with immense potential for destruction. While the Terminator films are not utopian imaginings of an ultimately reconciled society, and although the amount of violence and destruction enacted in their narrative course may be seen as "explosively realistic" (or even as a confirmation of the status quo in a violent social environment), these films contain elements of both redemptive critique and of realism, as I hope to show. The point I wish to make by way of this introductory excursion in terms of Habermas's neoenlightenment thought, is simply that Terminator I and II afford us an enlightening experience. In other words, they enable an experience of the usually hidden truth about our technology-saturated world in a manner that highlights the ambivalence of our situation. Paradoxical time-relations in Terminator I and II Sometimes paradox is essential to make a point, for example the Socratic docta ignorantia, that the only thing we can know with certainty is how ignorant we are — "I know that I don't know" — which Descartes used, ironically, to establish certainty. In so doing he provided the modern version of the Platonic perversion of Socrates's paradigmatic philosophical insight, making the thinking subject the indispensable centre of the characteristically modern quest for knowledge and control of nature. We shall return to the importance of Descartes's epochal thinking at a later stage, but first we must look at the relevance of paradoxes of time in the Terminator films, remembering that paradox is a figure instantiated in actions or statements that seem absurd or self-contradictory, but which really embody truth of a certain kind. The Terminator and Terminator II - Judgement Day depend upon a paradox of time for their very narrative possibility. In both films, a terminator — that is, a sophisticated humanoid killing machine — is sent back through time from the 21st to the 20th century by "the machines", controlled by the Skynet computer, to terminate or destroy a human being who stands in the way of their complete triumph in the face of remaining human resistance to their rule. In The Terminator the machines' target is Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), mother-to-be of John Connor, leader of the human resistance in 2029 Los Angeles. Their aim: to destroy her before John is even conceived, thus precluding the possibility of his birth and of him becoming a major source of disruption to their bid for total domination in the 21st century. The humans, however, discovering the time-displacement unit, learn about the machines' plan and assign someone to the task of protecting Sarah from the terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger). This means that the human protector also has to traverse time, returning to 1984 from 2029. In the course of performing his duty the protector, Kyle Rees (Michael 98 Biehn), and Sarah Connor become lovers, and it is from their union that John is eventually born. Where is the temporal paradox in the events I have just described, one may ask? It consists in the fact that, firstly, in Terminator I, the terminator returns from the post-nuclear holocaust future to a past prior to this fateful day. The latter results from the fact that people relinquish their decision-making capability concerning national defence to a computerized system regarded as being fail-safe, but which does not fail to trigger the nuclear war in an attempt to achieve supremacy over humans. The terminator's programmed objective is to prevent the birth of the person destined, from a future retrospective, to become a major antagonist and obstacle to technological rule. But, in the second place, the human protector, also ex-future, fathers the very boy whose birth the machines attempt to obviate by intervening in the past. (They may as well have targeted Kyle Rees in 2029, in this way preventing the conception of John Connor in 1984!) This hypothetical future, being the extension of a past in which the boy has in fact already been born, paradoxically becomes the condition of the possibility of the very past which, in turn, makes such a future possible — otherwise the human resistance against the machines in the 2029 conflict could not pose the threat which necessitates the terminator's mission in the first place. Why? Because the future leader of the resistance is fathered by a protector sent back through time by himself. This future time (2029) therefore depends upon the past of his (John Connor's) being born, and this past (1984) depends, in turn, upon the future for his being conceived — a temporal relationship of reciprocity or circularity that seems alien to our everyday experience of time as a linear continuum. In Terminator II - Judgement Day, the paradoxical temporal configurations are even more complex. Again two emissaries are dispatched from the future on a dual pre-emptive mission. This time two terminators travel through time to the year 1995 from 2029. One (Robert Patrick) has the objective to annihilate John Connor, who is by now a very independently-minded young boy of ten. The other terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger), a cyborg (cybernetic organism), is programmed to prevent this from happening. (This protector-terminator has the odds against him, as the human protector in Terminator I did, too, because the killer machine he has to thwart is an advanced prototype model that can adopt the appearance of any human it has "sampled" by "morphing". Labelled a T-1000, it consists of mimetic alloy or "liquid metal", and shrugs off the most devastating effects of anything from pistol, machine gun or even shotgun fire. Only two things are lethal to the T-1000: extreme, sustained heat and cold). Again the protector is given his assignment by John Connor himself, reactivating the paradox of rescuing a past that is presupposed by a future which, by securing that past, in turn becomes its necessary antecedent. 99 But this time around there is another twist in the tale. Sarah Connor is incarcerated in Pescadero State Hospital, a maximum security retention facility for the criminally disordered, for what the psychiatric establishment regards as acute schizo-affective paranoia relating to an "imagined" threat concerning beings from the future. The disorder, so the chief criminal psychologist Dr Silberman believes, is what prompted her attempt to sabotage a computer factory, convinced as she was that these manufacturing corporations were responsible for developing the technology that would finally precipitate the nuclear holocaust. From the protector-terminator she learns that the man most directly responsible for developing the micro-processor eventually appropriated for defence purposes by the military, one Miles Dyson, works for Cyberdyne Systems Corporation. After escaping from the carceral institution with the help of her son and his protector, she sets out to eliminate Dyson in a pre-emptive bid to avert the nuclear catastrophe of August 1997. When finally faced with the task of killing the already wounded man in the presence of his wife and son, she is unable to pull the trigger, perhaps because of the boy's pathetic but moving attempts to shield his father from her gun, or perhaps because of some conflict within herself. After all, can Dyson be held responsible (in the usual sense of the word) for something that has not happened yet — at least not from his temporal point of view? As Sarah crouches over him, bitterly accusing him that it is " . . . all your fault!" the frightened man looks up at her distorted face uncomprehendingly, stammering, "What?" And later, after John and the protector have arrived on the scene, and the protector-terminator has convinced Dyson that he/it is really from a terrifying future made possible by — among other things — Dyson's research, the temporal paradox strikes one anew: not only does Dyson prepare the way for that future, but this future is itself implicated in that preparation. How is this possible? At the boy's (John's) command, the terminator cuts through and removes the organic material (i.e. living tissue and blood) covering the inner metal frame of his arm and hand, revealing a structure identical to the one in the vault at Cyberdene Systems Corporation — something Dyson has often looked at with awe. The mechanical arm kept in the vault together with a microchip (or CPU-unit) are the remnants of the first terminator sent to destroy Sarah in 1984, but finally crushed by her in a mechanical press. Dyson is one of the few individuals at Cyberdyne who knows about and has access to it. When the protector-cyborg therefore "bares it all" for Dyson, so to speak, the latter can be persuaded of the shape of the future he is in the process of co-creating because he has seen some of its evidence before. Here lies the hub of the paradox: Dyson is one of the factors in the seemingly inexorable march towards a ruthless future technocracy, but the products of that future (i.e. the remains of the first terminator) function as incentive 100 for his research, thus assisting in giving birth to the very future they represent. What Nietzsche (1967:§796) said in aestheticist vein about the world being a work of art that gives birth to itself, is here the case with the future. It is operative in creating itself, despite the fact that it is supposedly the extension of a past where humans voluntarily surrendered their volitional power to machines in the form of computers. The involvement of finite humans, with all their shortcomings, in this whole past/ present/future configuration is poignantly expressed by Dyson when he reproaches his indictors: "You are blaming me for things I haven't even done yet!" And, being human — i.e. limited in and by time and space — it would be impossible for him to foresee the consequences of his work. The relationship between John Connor and his father (the protector in Terminator I) is another case in point. In both films, the protectors are given their assignment by John Connor in the year 2029. In the earlier film, this means that he chooses his own father, as it were, although it is true that the latter tells Sarah that he volunteered to cross time for her because he loved her from her photograph that John had given him. But, John Connor having already been born in the past, which is therefore a given, makes it inconceivable that the future must be enlisted to guarantee his birth by providing a father, especially because, as Kyle Rees tells Sarah, it is just "one possible future", seen from her perspective. If that were indeed the case, the fact that they eventually succeed in destroying everything that was preparing the way for the Skynet computer-takeover, in this way inaugurating a different future, would mean, logically, that Kyle Rees's existence would have been annihilated together with that future. And by cancelling out John's father (Rees), John's own existence would also be nullified. Once again, human contingency is highlighted here: finite creatures that we are, our being born is no a priori necessity, but only a contingent possibility. This is no reason for despair, however. On the contrary, it is a reminder that the future is in our hands and that we are not subject to an impersonal and intractable fate. John Connor's father-to-be conveys a message to Sarah from her as yet unborn son, the future resistance leader. "Thank you Sarah for your courage through the dark years", John told Rees to tell her; "I can't help you with what you must soon face, except to say that the future is not set. You must be stronger than you imagine you can be. You must survive, or I will never exist". In Terminator II, Sarah is haunted by an image of the devastation caused by an exploding nuclear bomb — a powerful, horrific image of collapsing buildings, flesh being burnt and torn off people until only skeletons remain and flames that look as if they may leap out of the screen at any moment towards the audience, who is equally moved and appalled by the spectacle that horrifies Sarah. Having just come out of a kind of trance in which this catastrophic image held her in thrall, Sarah "writes" (cuts) 101 the words No fate with a knife on a table top just before she sets out to find Dyson. Defying the technocratic future that looms before her, she thus confirms the openness of the future and the open-endedness of the present. What is the significance of this "openness" of the future and the "open-endedness" of the present? Just like a postmodern novel, which re-enacts the time-honoured science-fiction theme of alternative futures, the present has no definitive conclusion in the form of an inescapable future. The "now" which, as Augustine noted, is no longer the moment it is spoken, is the seed of the future, but the plant that is always already being germinated in the ongoing present acquires its appearance in large measure from the specific character of the future envisaged by us. If that future had a definitive, pre-determined shape similar to the ostensibly ineluctable machine-dominated future hypothesised in Terminator I and II, we would live, like the blind prophet Tiresias, without hope3. Hope survives or is revived only if the future is still undetermined, to some extent dependent upon the present that we inhabit. This present, in turn, is — as the temporal paradoxes of Terminator I and II demonstrate — dependent to some degree on the specific way that the future manifests itself to us in our present. In this sense, then, we are primarily future-directed beings, as Heidegger's analysis of human temporality in Being and Time indicates. The future, as our project, shapes our present even as our present shapes the future in a reciprocal relationship. "Projecting discloses possibilities—" says Heidegger (1978:371), "that is to say, it discloses the sort of thing that makes possible". In other words, in the context of the historical situation of being human, the kind of future we are able to anticipate — given present actualization of past projects — functions as a directional incentive in the present. As long as that future seems fixed, present actions must be predicated on a belief which denies the "authentic" structure of our own temporality, and which simultaneously leaves no room for any hope. Heidegger articulates the various aspects of human temporality within the framework of the "primordial" structural dominant of the human condition which he terms "care". This simply means that everything humans do, whether it is theoretical or practical, presupposes "care" — i.e. that we are beings whose Being is unavoidably an issue for themselves. To live "authentically" in the midst of all the inauthenticity of being among other people and doing as "they" expect us to do, entails for Heidegger the acceptance of our mortality. This acceptance, described as "anticipatory resoluteness" is said to free us, not only to and for our own Being, but also for that of others and of nature. The temporal structure that belongs to such a "freed" existence is described by Heidegger (1978: 372-373) as a "coming towards" oneself that entails the following: 3. Marco Olivier, a fellow science fiction enthusiast, drew my attention to the parallel with the mythical Tiresias. 102 103 This letting-itself-come-towards-itself in that distinctive possibility which it puts up with, is the primordial phenomenon of the future as coming towards. If either authentic or inauthentic Being-towards-death belongs to Dasein's being [a reference to humans' capacity to accept their mortality; B.O.], then such being-towards-death is possible only as something futural . . . By the term 'futural', we do not here have in view a 'now' which has not yet become 'actual' and which sometime will be for the first time. We have in view the coming . . . in which Dasein [Heidegger's distinctive term for human being; B.O.], in its ownmost potentiality-for-Being, comes towards itself. Anticipation makes Dasein authentically futural, and in such a way that the anticipation itself is possible only in so far as Dasein, as being, is always coming towards itself — that is to say, in so far as it is futural in its being in general. Sarah carves on the table. The newly open or liberated future is poignantly captured in Sarah's narration accompanying their trip to Cyberdyne Systems under the guidance of Miles Dyson to destroy the fateful microchip and mechanical arm from the first terminator. Her words signify the transition from a paralysing, hopeless fatalism to the kind of (historical) temporality appropriate to being human: This passage is important for understanding the paradox of time in Terminator I and II. What Heidegger says here will no doubt strike readers as paradoxical as well. How does one come "towards" oneself? And in what way is that equivalent to the "future as coming towards" or simply to humans being futural, if that does not mean (as Heidegger explicitly points out) that it is a movement towards a predetermined future time which still has to be realized? Firstly, we are futural beings in so far as our activities are comprehensible in terms of their anticipatoryprojective status, even if they are rooted in the past (or what Heidegger terms the having-been). Our actions — for example hanging a picture, baking a cake, rowing a boat — are always the actualizations of previous pro-jects, as well as anticipations of, or preparations for something yet to come. Moreover, all of these actions point to the ubiquitous, tacitly underlying motif, namely that in some way or another, they aim at or embody an approximation of every individual's "true" being. This is clearly reflected in the manner that we customarily explain or justify our own actions and decisions. We "come towards ourselves" in everything we do, whether that "self" is "authentic" in Heidegger's terms (i.e. motivated by a resolute acceptance of individualising death as inescapable) or "inauthentic" (i.e. motivated by "the they" or conventional expectations that "cover up" our mortality). In cases where our actions are fatalistically construed as predetermined anyway, with little or no choice left to us in the process of the present actualization of future possibilities, rooted in past achievements or failures, these actions can only be "inauthentic" in Heideggerian terms. In Terminator I and II Sarah's actions are therefore freed from the inauthenticity imposed on them by the fatalism and hopelessness of "knowing" the future — that on 29 August 1997 Armageddon will occur — by the "future coming towards her" in the form of a protector-terminator that offers an alternative. The protector holds out the possibility of averting that seemingly inescapable future by identifying Miles Dyson as a key figure in its unfolding, which explains the words NO FATE that The future, always so clear to me, had become like a black highway at night. . . . We were in uncharted territory, making up history as we went along. This is precisely the point of the paradox of temporal reciprocity in the Terminator films: the primacy of the future as a matrix for all historically meaningful actions in the present is such that, without it, one could not even say "I", nor could one choose or decide anything. If everything were predetermined, we would lose our freedom of choice and hence our hope for a better future. Terminator's liberating temporal paradox is an enactment of the reciprocity of past, present and future that Heidegger explores in Being and Time. It shows, in the words of Kyle Rees (in Terminator I), that a future where technology has become totally hegemonic, is just "one possible future" among other possibilities. Technology's Temptation: the danger and the saving power If the rediscovery of the primacy of an open future in relation to the present frees Sarah and John from the stifling prospect of a technocratic future (in the most literal sense of a future ruled by machines), how do we deal with the obvious fact that a film with technology as a pervasive theme is itself a product of the most advanced film technology? This draws one's attention to a parodic moment of the films: together they constitute a devastating critique of technology, but they have been made possible by the very technology against whose autonomous functioning they warn us. To put it differently: the state-of-the-art special effects and illusions of the Terminator movies bear witness to the use or exploitation of the creative possibilities of a technology in order to articulate a caveat regarding the inherent drive towards domination on the part of this technology. In parodic fashion, it presupposes and uses the very thing it criticizes. This tendency on its part to become hegemonic features prominently in Heidegger's critique of technology, articulated mainly in the essay, "The question concerning technology" (Heidegger 1977b). A brief reconstruction of this assessment of technology's place in the modern world is necessary to understand the connection between the technology that made the Terminator films possible and the critical-reflective moment on which their narrative turns. 104 According to Heidegger, the most pervasively significant structuring force in the modern world is technology. Despite its structural ubiquity, however, and partly because of its familiarity and its apparent innocuousness, it remains virtually anonymous. Furthermore, technology is indissolubly linked to modern science as its foundation which, in turn, has its metaphysical roots in the epoch-making thought of René Descartes in the 17th century. For Heidegger it was Descartes's metaphysics that transformed humankind into the only real subject — the ontological centre of all relations — in so doing breaking decisively with the lingering theocentric medieval thought-world (Heidegger 1977 a:127-128). Through this the world is simultaneously transformed into a totality of calculable objects to which modern scientists apply their calculative procedures. In this way the ground is prepared for technology. What is technology? Heidegger believes that it is a grave mistake to understand technology in a merely instrumental sense, as a "neutral" means to different ends. This would imply that technology is something that we can "master", too, even as we exercise mastery over the world (natural and social) through technology. Instead he argues that the essence of technology consists in being a distinctive mode of revealing the world, a specific way in which "truth happens", in contrast to the other ways in which it has happened in earlier epochs, or still happens in other "places" where truth occurs, like art. In the case of the Greeks, for example, reality was experienced as physis, or as a dynamic actualization of potentialities. Modern technology, on the other hand, reveals the world, in Heidegger's terms (1977b:17) as a "standing-reserve". He recognizes it as a kind of "unconcealedness" — his term for truth; from the Greek aletheia — characterized by the fact that technology as standing-reserve presents everything as "ordered", "stored" or "set upon" for use, for instance the current of a river which is "commanded" into supplying hydraulic pressure for conversion into electricity. Heidegger calls this process of storing up natural forces for use "monstrous". Why? Because it reduces nature and even people into "resources" for use, concomitantly obliterating their Being along the way. In other words, in this technological-scientific era we experience things as something to be mastered, ordered and "developed" to an optimal degree. This way of experiencing the world is made possible by the essence of technology, termed "enframing" by Heidegger. As William Lovitt reminds us in a note to his translation of Heidegger's text (1977b:19,n.17), it would be a mistake to think of this simply as a "framework", in the sense of the context within which we unavoidably experience the world in the present era. To be sure, it is that, too. But above all it is a process, hence the "en"- of "enframing". This process is so encompassing that it has become the condition for the possibility of experiencing anything today, so much 105 so that nothing can escape its pervasiveness. " . . . perhaps even God is thought of as 'standing-reserve'" remarks Norman Melchert (1991:576), "a kind of public utility that can be used to gain the satisfaction of one's desires; one often gets this impression from the television evangelists . . ." And indeed, technology is every bit as ubiquitous as Heidegger claims. Not only do we find a "technology of religion", so to speak, but a technology of sport, of psychological health, of sexuality, of learning, of teaching, and so on. The fact that technology and its inseparable companion, science, are so omnipresent, easily leads to the belief that there are no other legitimate ways to approach reality. According to Heidegger (1977b:28), this impression constitutes the "extreme danger", because it obscures our being by covering up the fact that other, equally valid ways of revealing reality are possible. Two such alternative modes of "unconcealment" are thinking and art (or poetry). While "enframing" is the "danger", thinking and art are linked to the "saving power" which grows, ironically, in the enframing itself, to the degree that humans pay heed to the revealing power of technology's essence (Heidegger 1977b:28-33). This is the case because as alternative modes of unconcealment, art and thinking recall the being of things out of oblivion, supplementing the limited and limiting understanding of things that science and technology provide. Whereas they (science and technology) maintain themselves in a calculating and mastering of things, thinking, art and literature, by letting things appear as they are, free them from the imperialism of enframing. Thinking, art and literature let things (nature, human beings) be. As such, they are concerned with truth (Heidegger 1977b:3435; 1977c:49). Habermas, it will be remembered, is in agreement with Heidegger on this insight into the integrative truth-function of art and literature. It should not be difficult to assess the relevance of Heidegger's critique of technology for Terminator I and II. In Terminator I Kyle Rees sketches in broad outline the scenario of events that culminate in internecine global nuclear conflict. He tells Sarah about the impending nuclear war, and that it "was" started by "the machines . . . defence network computers . . . new, powerful, hooked into everything . . .trusted to run it all . . . They say it got smart . . . a new order of intelligence. Then it saw all people as a threat, not just the ones on the other side. It decided our fate in a microsecond . . . extermination!" In Terminator II a desperate Sarah interrogates the protector-cyborg on the precise stages of the technological development that finally leads to global conflagration. As indicated earlier, he informs her that he has "detailed files" and that Miles Dyson is the man most directly responsible for constructing the computer referred to as Skynet, because he develops a revolutionary new microprocessor (with the help of the C.P.U.-unit from the first terminator in the vault at Cyberdyne Systems). But the most significant information the cyborg gives her — in the context of Heidegger's 106 107 assessment of the place of technology in the modern world — emerges from the conversation where he tells her that: the demonstration of its dazzling capacity to "open up a world" (Wittgenstein's showing). Nor should this surprise us. Heidegger reminds us that the Greek word techné originally referred to art, and therefore belonged together with poiésis as the poetic moment shared by the fine arts and poetry (Heidegger 1977b:34). This initially close relationship between these root words should therefore serve as a constant reminder of what technology and art have in common — a commonality celebrated in Terminator I and II. They truly witness to the growth of the "saving power" within the "extreme danger". " . . . Cyberdyne will become the largest supplier of military computer systems. All stealth bombers are upgraded with Cyberdyne computers, becoming fully unmanned. Afterwards, they fly with a perfect operational record. The Skynet funding bill is passed. The System goes online on August 4th 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defence. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In the panic they try to pull the plug." "Skynet fights back", Sarah interjects. "Yes", replies the cyborg. "It launches its missiles against the targets in Russia . . . because Skynet knows that the Russian counter-attack will eliminate its enemies over here". The most important words in the above quotation are: "Human decisions are removed from . . ." In graphic fictional form, it marks the symbolic surrender of humankind's humanity to the mastering capability of technology, its subjection to the standing-reserve of information systems which is itself a manifestation of the mode of ontic revealing that is proper to the enframing. Compare this event in the film narrative to Heidegger's remark (1977b:32), that ". . . Enframing . . . threatens to sweep man away into ordering as the supposed single way of revealing, and so thrusts man into the danger of the surrender of his free essence . . .". The tendency on the part of people to valorize (especially computer) technology to the point where all shortcomings and mistakes are blamed on "human error", is symptomatic of the willingness, dramatically highlighted in the Terminator films, to relinquish humanly essential decision-making to what is widely regarded as the paradigm for approaching reality, namely technology. As director James Cameron's films suggest, such a surrender of our ability to choose would amount to a "termination" of our being. It will be remembered that the only hope, according to Heidegger (1977b:32), consists in the possibility ". . . that we, for our part, begin to pay heed to the coming to presence of technology . . . [which] . . . harbours in itself what we least suspect, the possible arising of the saving power". This "saving power", it will also be recalled, amounts to the insight into the enframing or essence of technology as being but one mode of unconcealment of being among others, notably thinking and art. Terminator I and II are instances of film art that reflect precisely this insight through their combination of film technology and film art. Technology becomes self-reflective, as it were, in these films by placing itself in the service of truth, i.e. of the unconcealment of its essence — both via its (technology's) thematization in the film narrative (Wittgenstein's saying) as well as by virtue of Perhaps the most exemplary aspect of Terminator II, as far as the convergence of art and technology is concerned, pertains to the fact that the protector-cyborg learns from John to respect human life, despite the fact that it goes against the grain of its own specific form of programmed technological mastery, which consists in killing or terminating people. He tells John that he has been designed to learn from people at a rate proportional to the amount of contact he makes with them. And indeed — not only does he refrain from killing people from the time that John instructs him not to, but eventually sacrifices himself in a strikingly "tragic", but more than that, humane, Christ-like gesture, literally (in terms of the narrative) so that John and Sarah may live. Symbolically, the protector-terminator's "death" also implies the survival of the whole of humankind, and more importantly, new hope for retaining its humanity. This sacrificial act on the part of the cyborg is a stroke of genius in the narrative. Basically it is a machine, albeit an intelligent one. Through contact with John and Sarah it increasingly behaves in an anthropomorphic fashion, however — to such a degree that ultimately it shows itself capable of the most un-machine-like act: self-sacrifice for the sake of human survival. Art and the essence of technology converge here, in the sense that what Heidegger perceives as the distinctive revealing power of both come together in the "user-friendly" protector-cyborg. On the one hand it is a machine, on the other, it disrupts our perception of itself as a machine by performing an act of self-sacrifice worthy of a human tragic hero, because it implicates a whole set of values concerning the essence and dignity of human life. After all, its own destruction does not only make the physical survival of humanity possible, but holds out the possibility that such physical survival will be meaningful, i.e. that humankind's essential humanity will not be permanently obscured by technology. In short, the protector-cyborg "reveals" (to use Heideggerian terminology) the "truth" about technology's essence as an ordering and mastery of reality, as well as representing the truth that is characteristic of art, namely to open up a world for us by defamiliarising the familiar (in this case its own technological character). In this way, it epitomizes Heidegger's remark, that the saving power grows where the danger is. 108 109 The fact that this essay adopts (as emphasized earlier) a philosophical rather than a semiotic approach to the Terminator films — in other words, that it focuses on ideas rather than images — should not be construed as detracting from the importance of their audiovisual semiotic dimension. After all, they are cinematic works that function or are constituted primarily in terms of sight and sound. To analyze the structural-iconographic dynamics of signification in these films would entail a separate, albeit related study, hence a brief reference to the important semiological aspect of their status as spectacle must suffice. In this way, the Terminator movies show that advanced film technology5 may be harnessed by popular film art to open the eyes of those who are committed to the dream of a computer technology-controlled world. They demonstrate that we should not mistake a simulated reality — however "perfect" the simulation — for human reality, even when we learn from it. The T-1000 terminator simulates everyone (and even some things) that it has "sampled" so perfectly that it is impossible to tell the difference. In this way it epitomizes, in its turn, the seductiveness of sophisticated technology, as well as its "danger": it simulates Sarah at one point in an attempt to lure John closer for the kill. Usually (although not with Sarah) it terminates a human subject it has sampled with the intention of simulating it. Baudrillard would point out that in a wider context, this is the case with the technologically sophisticated media today, too: they terminate human reality even as they simulate it (Baudrillard, 1983). Despite Baudrillard's apparent pessimism Terminator I and II give me hope, because, as film art combined with film technology, they attest to the integrative function that Habermas attributes to art and literature, while simultaneously relativizing the totalizing claims of technology as enframing by providing a powerful reminder that there are other possibilities of Being. In short, as film art, Terminator I and II have affirmative qualities which contribute to the recuperation of the idea of being human in a world choking on technology. It is therefore fitting to end this essay with Sarah's concluding statement in Terminator II — Judgement Day: While it is certainly true, as Polan (1986) has demonstrated, that spectacle plays a crucial role in cinema generally, a strong case can be put forward that it is particularly important in science-fiction cinema, where the thematics of an imaginative (and imagistic) extension of science and technology has to rely crucially on the impact of images for the effect and credibility of its persuasive illusions. For example, the breathtaking sequences, in Terminator II, where the audience witnesses the T-1000 "morphing" or changing from one form into another, consist of a succession of images that merge into one another in such a way that their very sequentiality vividly demonstrates the awesome, lethal capabilities of the machine — sometimes via the incongruity between the form it adopts (e.g. that of a woman) and the relentless, unswerving pursuit of its goal, viz. to destroy John Connor. In the scenes where we see transitions from its policeman- (Robert Patrick-) mode to the shiny, "liquid-metal" figure-mode, the spectacle is particularly pertinent to the theme of a dehumanizing technology. The scene-sequence where the T-1000 crashes through the glass panel on the motorcycle at the Cyberdyne Corporation building, becoming briefly airborne before attaching itself to the helicopter by means of arms-become-hooks, and breaks the helicopter cockpit-shell before "flowing" onto the seat next to the dumbstruck pilot, who promptly jumps out of the helicopter at the terminator's command, is a case in point. Here the visual images of intelligent humanoid machine (T-1000), riding machine (motorcycle), flying machine (helicopter) and intelligent but vulnerable human being, comprise a spectacular spatio-temporal configuration constitutive of the (power-) relationships at stake in the film. The mixture of awe, horror and incomprehension on the pilot's face is matched by the viewer response to the startling camera image of the killer android.4 4. 5. "In a similar vein", an anonymous, perceptive commentator has remarked, "I, for example, found a scene (in Terminator II) located under a broken truck which the Terminator tries to repair, particularly moving and explicit. (Here John Connor explains the cause of tears to the Terminator who, ignorant of human emotions, is able only to reduce tears to being responses to pain. Pain of course, has different resonances, as the verbal and non-verbal reactions of the child indicate). In a single frame, the camera captures feeling, thinking human being (child), "thinking" machine (Terminator) and "unthinking" inanimate machine (truck), in juxtaposition. All are powerful referents in the visual articulation of the theme of the films and the argument contained in the paper." I found this comment very helpful. For an informative report on the specific advanced film technology that was instrumental with regard to the special effects that won Industrial Light and Magic the academy award in the category Best Visual Effects for 1991 (for Terminator II — Judgement Day), cf. Corliss, 1992. The unknown future rolls towards us. I face it for the first time with a sense of hope, because if a machine — a terminator — can learn the value of human life, maybe we can too. BIBLIOGRAPHY Baudrillard, J. 1983. In the shadow of the silent majorities . . . or the end of the social, and other essays. Tr. Foss, P., Patton, P. and Johnston, J. New York: Semiotext(e), Inc. Corliss, R. 1992. They Put the ILM in Film. Time magazine: 70-71, April 13. Habermas, J. 1988. Philosophy as stand-in and interpreter. In Baynes, K., Bohmann, J., and McCarthy, T.(Eds), After philosophy — end or transformation? Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, pp 296-315. Heidegger, M. 1977a. The age of the world picture. In The question concerning technology and other essays. Tr. W. Lovitt. New York: Harper Torchbooks. Heidegger, M. 1977b. The question concerning technology. In The 110 question concerning technology and other essays. Tr. W. Lovitt. New York: Harper Torchbooks. Heidegger, M. 1977c. The turning. In The question concerning technology and other essays. Tr. W. Lovitt. New York: Harper Torchbooks. Heidegger, M. 1978. Being and time. Tr. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Ingram, D. 1991. Habermas on aesthetics and rationality: completing the project of Enlightenment. New German Critique 53, pp. 67-103. Melchert, N. 1991. The great conversation. London: Mayfield Publishing Company. Nietzsche, F. 1967. The Will to Power. Tr. W. Kaufmann & R.J. Hollingdale. New York: Random House. Olivier, G. (Bert) 1987. Art and transformation. South African Journal of philosophy 6(1), pp. 16-23. Polan, D.B. 1986. "Above All Else to Make You See": Cinema and the Ideology of Spectacle. In: Arac, J. (ed.) Postmodernism and Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. pp. 55-69. SF FILMOGRAPHY Cameron, J. 1984. The Terminator. Orion Films. Cameron, J. 1991. Terminator II — Judgement Day. Columbia Tristar. 111 10. MODERNITY, MODERNISM AND POSTMODERNIST FILM: SURFACES IN VERHOEVEN'S BASIC INSTINCT If the advent of postmodernity means the (provisional) triumph of the many over the one (McKinney 1986), it is no accident that so much of postmodernist cultural production has to do with surfaces, with superficiality and mere images. Postmodernist film is no exception — in fact, a preoccupation with surfaces (the many) instead of depth (the one) is one way of recognizing a film as being postmodernist, especially when this spatial characteristic goes hand in hand, in temporal terms, with ephemerality of images or image-configurations. From here the connections proliferate in network-like fashion: ephemerality ties up with the temporal category of schizophrenia that Jameson (1985:113-123) attributes to postmodernist sensibility, together with its spatial equivalent, pastiche, which emphasizes the self-sufficiency of surfaces once more. One can go further and trace a link between ephemerality and the moment of instability that Lyotard (1984:79) endows with critical primacy in relation to the modernist moment: "A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant". In other words, a "modern" work is "modern" by virtue of the fact that it arrests or stabilizes the flux which, at a more (critically) primary stage, it has to acknowledge.1 The tension that emerges from Lyotard's remark echoes an insight expressed more than a century earlier by Baudelaire (quoted in Harvey 1990:10) : "Modernity", he pointed out, "is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is the one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immutable". The difference is, of course, that Lyotard refers to that aspect of modernity which Baudelaire associates with contingency as "postmodern", reserving the epithet "modern" for the moment of stability (Baudelaire's "immutable"). For anyone familiar with the opposition between stability (or permanence) and instability (or the transitory) this would function as a reminder of the Platonic categories in terms of which Baumer (1977) characterizes the development of modern thought from the 17th century to the present as a movement from being to the dominance of becoming in every sphere of thought or activity. Ultimately this metaphysical pair of concepts goes back to Parmenides (the philosopher of being) and Heraclitus (the champion of becoming), of course, and one is struck by the remarkable fact that This article also appears as a chapter in Living in a postmodern culture, edited by Deon Rossouw. 1. I must stress that the present essay, while focusing on aspects of postmodernity, is itself not structured (or "unstructured") in a postmodernist fashion. It will be apparent to readers that given the distinction made here between modernism and postmodernism the attempt (made here) to write coherently and with a certain epistemic force about postmodernism means, finally, that this essay is itself written in a modernist mode, albeit 'contaminated' by postmodern elements like taking a popular film seriously. 112 113 the cultural conditions of modernity and postmodernity are still susceptible to their explanatory force approximately 2500 years after they were first introduced into the conversation of the West. cal despair" concerning the "true nature" of human beings. What is important is the fact that the main focus of modernists in every distinguishable field of activity seems to have been of an epistemological kind — to such an extent that McHale uses this as a means of differentiating between modernist and postmodernist fiction. The former, he points out (McHale 1987:9-11), is characterized by an "epistemological dominant" while the latter (postmodernism) is recognizable by virtue of its "ontological dominant". In other words, by extension epistemological issues dominate(d) modernist thought and cultural production, while ontological concerns seem to preoccupy postmodernist activity. The former displays an obsession with multiple ways of knowing, the latter with the plurality of what is known (or not "known", perhaps, but apprehended, confronted, "given"), i.e. with multiple "worlds". As we shall see, there is a strong connection between this "ontological dominant" of postmodernism and its preoccupation with the superficial or with surfaces. One should remember that, as Harvey (1990:10-21) reminds us, it would be an oversimplification to reduce modernism to the attempt, in various forms, at arresting the Heraclitean flux of the world-process in the name of the universal or the essential, while reserving the awareness of protean becoming exclusively for postmodernism. The fact of the matter is that modernists were only too keenly aware of the diversity and ephemerality of things, an awareness matched only by their determination to uncover the underlying, enduring essence in this very multiplicity — a determination, moreover, which manifested itself in modernism's preoccupation with language, i.e. with a search for an adequate way of representing those enduring truths which transcend the chaos of fleeting forms (Harvey 1990:20). This applies not only to the art of Picasso, Pollock, Kandinsky and Klee, but also to the architecture of Mies van der Rohe, Gropius, Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright, the novels of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Proust, the poetry of W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot as well as to the essentialist phenomenology of Husserl and the picture theory of language formulated by the early Wittgenstein, and finally, to modernist film classics such as Orson Welles's Citizen Kane and Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. One could add the work of depth psychologists such as Freud and Jung to this list, too, given their search for a distinctive code or vocabulary that would give us access to the domain of the unconscious. It is as if, in one way or another, these diverse figures from divergent creative and professional contexts set out to construct the sustaining myth identified by Nietzshe as the (indispensable) cultural component that modern Western culture was most in need of (having lost its own, the Platonic-Christian) and that he (Nietzsche) believed to have provided in the form of (the myth of) Zarathustra. A more detailed account of the multiplicity of "modernisms" and of the transition from modernism to postmodernism is not necessary at present. (For an excellent account of this transition, cf. Harvey 1990, Part 1). Suffice it to say that, in terms of modernists' preoccupation with language or the problem of representation — even when, as in Husserl's case, a more fundamental immediacy or "presentation" is presupposed — they had to acknowledge, finally, in Harvey's words (1990:30), ". . . the impossibility of representing the world in a single language. Understanding had to be constructed through the exploration of multiple perspectivism. Modernism, in short, took on multiple perspectivism and relativism as its epistemology for revealing what it still took to be the true nature of a unified, though complex, underlying reality". To be sure, its endeavours in this regard were accompanied by what Baumer (1977: 419-421) terms "epistemologi- The emergence of a new, "postmodern" sensibility from the maelstrom of modernist responses to the cultural condition known as modernity is an extremely complex issue. A brief overview will have to do. The "project of modernity", as Habermas (1985) calls it, which has taken shape since approximately the 18th century, is recognizable in a specific configuration of forces which include the concrete embodiments of science and technology, universalistic law and morality, as well as autonomous art. Coupled with the Enlightenment belief in progress, the guiding vision of modernity as articulated by Enlightenment thinkers was an unbelievably optimistic one, shaped by the expectation that reason — in the tripartite form of science, morality and art, instead of an earlier, substantive reason — would not only make the technical control of natural forces possible, but ensure social, political and moral emancipation as well (Habermas 1985:9). Needless to say, the cataclysmic events of the 20th century, together with the experiences that accompanied them, have obliterated such optimism (Baumer 1977: 402-416; Harvey 1990:13). What is important at present, however, is that modernism — which was earlier described as consisting in certain (artistic, literary, architectural, philosophical or scientific) "responses" to the cultural condition of modernity — thrived on the typical, increasingly fragmented and transitory structure produced by the forces constitutive of modern culture in view of the opportunities it provided for creativity and discovery, but at the same time it also incorporated a critical moment with regard to that very culture. Given the course of events since the early 20th century, it is not surprising, for instance, that modernist art-movements like abstract expressionism (e.g, the work of Kandinsky, Pollock or Rothko), Malevich's suprematism or the constructivism of artists such as Braque, Léger, Feininger or Albers denote a critical rejection of the social reality that surrounded 114 115 them (Harries 1979:61-73; Harvey 1990:36). The same may be said of the modernist literature of Woolf, Eliot, Lawrence, Joyce, Proust and Faulkner, among others, given the subversive effect of its critical edge on the society of their time. This is not to deny the simultaneous existence of an affirmative modernism that glorified rational planning and bureaucratic power, especially as embodied in the (myth of the) efficiency of the machine (Harvey 1990:31-36) in areas ranging from transportation and industrialization to high-density development and architecture, and celebrated in, for example, the futuristic art of the time. and the forces of technology and science. In terms of the earlier distinction, formulated by Baudelaire, between the eternal and immutable on the one hand, and the transient or fleeting on the other, postmodernism's hostility towards the Enlightenment tradition is apparent in what Harvey (1990:44) calls the "most startling" fact about it, namely ". . . its total acceptance of . . . ephemerality, fragmentation, discontinuity, and the chaotic . . . It does not try to transcend it, counteract it, or even to define the 'eternal and immutable' elements that might lie within it. Postmodernism swims, even wallows, in the fragmentary and chaotic currents of change as if that is all there is". Postmodernist film is no exception to this rule, although it should be added that, in some instances, filmic strategies are adopted with the aim of transcending the very structural features that define postmodernism. In terms of this characterization, therefore, it is not difficult to recognize a paradigmatically postmodernist film such as Wim Wenders's Wings of Desire by means of formal features and thematic material like cultural fragmentation and the related absence of authentic communication (Olivier 1992a). Although the structural characteristics of postmodernist cultural products display a certain family resemblance and can therefore not be completely separated, the present essay concentrates on a different feature of these artifacts: their superficiality or preoccupation with surfaces as exemplified in Cindy Sherman's photography (cf. Harvey 1990: 7-8) and in Paul Verhoeven's films, particularly Robocop and Basic Instinct. If these are some of the representative modernist appropriations of modern culture, alternately criticizing or glorifying its characteristic features, and postmodernism was described at the outset as being different in kind from modernism, displaying a predilection for surface and unstable forms rather than depth and stability, how did this change in sensibility come about in historical terms? In a nutshell, it emerged from the anti-modern and counter-cultural movement of the 1960s. This movement, in turn, was a multi-faceted reaction to what it perceived as the empty universalism of what had once been subversive high modernist art, but had since been rendered ineffectual by its institutionalization in universities, art museums and academic circles. Moreover, the neutralization of a once strongly political aesthetic allowed its assimilation into establishment ideology and its utilization for purposes of (American) cultural imperialism (Harvey 1990:36-38; Jameson 1985:111-112). It is at this point that one encounters a crucial shift within the history of modernism. Harvey (1990:37) puts it as follows: ". . . for the first time in the history of modernism, artistic and cultural, as well as 'progressive' political revolt had to be directed at a powerful version of modernism itself". What was an antimodernist revolt against the pretensions of international "establishment art and high culture" — a global rebellion that culminated in the metropolitan fringeculture and university-based cultural uprising of 1968 — was in effect the "cultural and political harbinger of the subsequent turn to postmodernism" (Harvey 1990:38). This explains the complexity of postmodernism being (like modernism) a critical response to cultural modernity, but in addition directing its critical energy at modernism itself as well, for example at its (ineffectual) distinction between facts (the domain of science) and fiction (the realm of art). Hence postmodernism's aestheticization of the world and of experience (Megill 1985:2). This "change [or shift] in sensibility" — as Huyssen (1984) terms postmodernism — has manifested itself in a broad range of cultural practices over the last two decades, from architecture and urban planning to advertising, film/video, literature, philosophy, painting, and music. One of the strongest expressions of this shift is its antipathy to the Enlightenment legacy of humanism, abstract reason One may wonder what the interest in surfaces has to do with the preceding sketch of the transition from a modernist to a postmodernist sensibility. The connection is not difficult to understand if one recalls that, for historical and philosophical reasons, modernism's primary emphasis has been epistemological. Given the three distinct spheres of rationality that comprise the so-called modern project — three discursive realms, moreover, that have their foundation in the three Critiques rendered by the quintessential Enlightenment thinker, Immanual Kant — it is hardly surprising that the historical unfolding of this project has consisted to a large extent in the working out of the distinctive "logic" or epistemic rules pertaining to the domains in question. And although only the first Kantian Critique (of pure reason, 1781) strictly dealt with the epistemological question concerning the conditions of the possibility of knowledge, there is a sense in which the problematics of the other two, concerning the foundations of ethical and aesthetic judgments, also involve "knowledge" of a certain kind. This is reflected in Kant's four famous questions (Baumer 1977:161) namely: "What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope?" and "What is man?" As has been noted, these questions reverberate throughout the modernist works of the first half of the twentieth century, often accompanied by signs of despair, but also by attempts at finding the right formula to provide epistemological 116 117 reassurance. Given the history of the institutionalization (i.e. domestication) of modernism, and its cynical exploitation for internationalist purposes, the disillusionment that led to the global (social) turbulence of 1968 is hardly surprising. That disillusionment may be seen as the (logical) historical precursor of postmodernism's overt scepticism concerning epistemological claims and its related preference for ontological issues. In what is by now a classic statement of the postmodernist position, Lyotard (1984: xxiii-xxiv) formulates its scepticism concerning the claims of modernism like this: ". . . I will use the term modern to designate any science that legitimates itself with reference to a metadiscourse [philosophy] . . . making an explicit appeal to some grand narrative, such as the dialectics of Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working subject, or the creation of wealth . . . I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives". Several theorists (e.g. Foster 1985:xii; Connor 1989:158, 172, 181), have commented on the dichotomy between a "postmodernism of reaction" and one of "resistance" in Foster's terms; in other words between social and cultural processes which legitimize innovative, even disruptive avant-garde cultural strategies by absorbing, incorporating and thus neutralizing them, and on the other hand, transgressive forms of cultural production that activate differences and a critical sense of the right to be different, while keeping alive the question of what it means to be human in a global technophilic culture. It is a small step from such epistemological misgivings concerning philosophical justification to McHale's "ontological dominant", encountered in postmodernist literature and art in the guise of an exploration of different "worlds" or spaces, and in postmodernist philosophy as the rejection of epistemology as a legitimate discipline, for example in the antifoundationalist neopragmatism of Richard Rorty (1983). Once the epistemological quest for "deep structures" or foundations has been relinquished, what remains is the bewildering variety of surfaces and textures that things, language(s), people or culture exhibit. One could, of course, see in the surface once again the essence or true being of things — the way minimalist art did - but that would be a modernist "solution". Postmodernist art, architecture, photography, film, video, television and so on, by contrast, show an interest in, almost an obsession with surfaces without an accompanying epistemological urge. Instead of betraying an inclination to dig beneath the surface of things, the surfaces are treated, presented in Nietzschean fashion, as self-sufficient, proliferating masks. Postmodernism thus displays, not so much an active epistemological scepticism (which is still argued, after all), but a lack of interest or an indifference with regard to "explanation" of all kinds. As Harvey says, it "wallows" in the multiplicity of (post-)modern culture, it skims over its surface(s) without any concern either for what things may have in common, or for what differentiates between them. As I shall point out, this reflects a considerable degree of cynicism. To be sure, these observations raise the spectre of a cultural condition which systematically rules out the potentially salutary effects of an epistemologically motivated, critical moment embodied in the cultural products themselves or articulated in the "critical" cultural theory that accompanies their fervid reproduction. Hence, lest the impression be created that no space remains for any critical appropriation of the cultural milieu that we inhabit, let me hasten to correct it. Postmodern critical theory does not escape this dichotomy either. It seems as if the institutional demands to which it is subject sometimes has the effect of changing it into a mere celebration of the very condition(s) that it describes, for example the later work of Jean Baudrillard (1985 and further), or the derivative work of his adherents, such as the sociologists Kroker and Cook (Connor 1989:171-172). Their critical theoretical counterparts include Foster (1985), Arac (1986), Hutcheon (1989), Connor (1989), Harvey (1990), Huyssen (1984), Jameson (1985) and Megill (1985), to mention but a few. Because they are situated in a field of continual technological innovation, television, video and film are mass media which are particularly susceptible to the dichotomy between transgression (or resistance) and incorporation (or reaction). Lack of space prevents a thorough discussion of TV and video at present (cf. Connor 1989:158-172 for an excellent overview and evaluation of work in this field), hence some introductory remarks about postmodern film will have to suffice before a more detailed analysis of a particular motion picture is attempted. From what has been said it follows that "postmodern" films may also be divided, broadly, into those that are "incorporative", i.e. movies that display all the structural features of postmodern culture such as multiplicity, superficiality and so on, without any sign of attempting to transcend these, and those — the transgressive variety — that are not content merely to embody these features, but resolutely problematize or question them and by implication the postmodern condition as such. This means that, instead of passively reflecting the endless proliferation and multiplication of forms, styles, cultures and behaviours, the second type of postmodern film does not celebrate this multitudinousness for its own sake, but submits them to a critical reading in light of questions regarding human communication, gender, the status of art and culture, and so on. Films of the incorporative type are understandably more numerous than criticaltransgressive ones. They include what Jameson (1985) calls the nostalgia or "retro" film, like Raiders of the Lost Ark, Chinatown, Body Heat, Star Wars, Dirty Dancing, or Peggy Sue got married, which do not attempt to recreate a particular 118 119 historical situation, but rather the kind of cultural experience of a specific period, for example the kind of narrative experience peculiar to the viewing of a romantic movie, an adventure story, a science-fiction film or a detective movie of the 1930s or the 1950s. Others that fit the "incorporative" profile include more recent, "glitzy" movies like Pretty Woman (cf. Olivier 1992), Final Analysis, Consenting Adults, Robocop, Basic Instinct, and Single White Female. postmodern times. It is imperative to analyse and understand mass-cultural products such as Basic Instinct for the important reason that they, as much as their critical counterparts, help us to understand our postmodern cultural milieu. At first sight these films may seem to be instances of the dominant "classicrealist" mass-cultural entertainment movie of Hollywood, with its dependence on the realist assumptions, techniques and characterizations of the 19th-century novel, but a close look reveals that, despite the employment of realist conventions, these films exhibit unmistakable postmodern features such as masking, aestheticism, ephemerality, multiple worlds and genres and, perhaps most importantly, depthlessness in the form of a lack of characterization and a fascination with material surfaces. In Final Analysis for example, the initial promise of psycho-analytical depth-explanations of characters' "pathological" behaviour disappointingly makes way for the most materially superficial motive of them all: greed for money. In the "final analysis", the film seems to suggest, all depth-understanding has to yield to "material" explanation. At the other end of the postmodern film spectrum one encounters those "transgressive" cinematic texts that problematize postmodern culture even as they display or (re-)present it. A postmodern "classic" like Beineix's Diva, while ostensibly fitting into the mould of a racy murder-and-corruption thriller, erases the historical and generic (modernist) boundaries between high and low art and combines popular accessibility with the complexities of ontological-aesthetic Benjaminian questions concerning the status of the artwork in the age of (mechanical-) electronic reproduction. While Diva merits a full analysis (cf. chapter 11 of this text) that would do justice to its metatheoretical challenge of Benjamin's claim regarding the vulnerability of the artwork's "aura" to reproductive processes, by demonstrating cinema's capacity to create aura despite its (film's) ephemerality (cf. Connor 1989:173-181), the present essay focuses on Basic Instinct, a film text of the more numerous "incorporative" variety — not because it is a more worthy subject, but precisely because of the "hype" which surrounded its release and its consequent enormous popular appeal. If importance were measured only by the worthiness of a film's (or novel's) subject matter and its formal treatment, it would be easy to justify the preferential scrutiny of films such as Diva, The Decline of the American Empire, Jesus of Montreal, Wings of Desire, Paris, Texas or Bad Timing in terms of an elitist, high culture academic mentality. As the preceding remarks as well as these "critical" films themselves show, however, such an attitude can no longer be maintained in If Harvey (1990:58) is right in observing that it is difficult not to regard Jameson's description of postmodern architecture in terms of "contrived depthlessness" as ". . . the overwhelming motif in postmodernism", then Verhoeven's Basic Instinct (1992) is overwhelmingly postmodern. The film "plot" (note the scare quotes) concerns a murder suspect, Catherine Tramell (Sharon Stone), who also happens to be a murder mystery writer with a difference: her murder fictions have a mysterious tendency to turn into (intra-filmic) fact. This disappearance of the boundary between fact and fiction enacted by the film-"narrative" is consonant with postmodernist juxtapositions of different "worlds" of which none can claim any priority over others, with the implication that they are all equally "fictional" — an aestheticizing tendency, alluded to earlier, which is part and parcel of postmodern sensibility (Megill 1985:2). The film does not seriously probe the reasons for these uncanny predictive properties of Ms Tramell's mystery novels; in other words, whether they are the result of supreme coincidence, or whether they are deliberately used as a (fictional) basis for her own subsequent, horrific acts of murder, if she is in fact the murderer, or, alternatively, whether they are the occasioning causes of murders committed by someone else, who has read them. Even the psychologist's discussion of the matter with the police moves on an abstract, hypothetical level, where the concrete motivational links between the stories and the murders are not really scrutinized. To tell the truth, the film does not provide much in the form of reasons or motivations. One learns, for instance, that both women with whom the apparently bisexual Ms Tramell is involved, are motiveless murderers: one, Hazel Dobkins, a housewife who massacred her entire family one day without rhyme or reason; the other — her live-in lover Roxy — a sultry but surly young woman who turns out to have committed double fratricide, again "on impulse", without any apparent provocation or premeditation. And whoever is guilty of the spectacularly violent murder with which the film opens, and (presumedly also) of killing detective Nick Curran's partner, has no plausible motive either. Curran (Michael Douglas), a tough, volatile cop who is investigating the (opening-scene) murder of a former rock star, "falls in lust" with Tramell — as Richard Schickel aptly puts it (1992:67) — despite his realization that she is the number one suspect, and learns of her (chilling) intention to make him the subject of her next book. Along the way just enough seeds of information are sown about the College connections between Tramell and the attractive police psychiatrist, Dr Beth Garner (Jeanne Tripplehorn), who is in love with Curran, to make it plausible that she, and not the writer, is the real murderer. Moreover, when it finally comes to unravelling all the "evidence" 120 121 that should enable the viewer to answer this question once and for all, one discovers with frustration that one line of reasoning points to the psychiatrist, while another chain of evidence seems to confirm beyond doubt that Tramell is the killer, thus bringing us face to face with conflicting pseudo-explanations — "pseudo", because they are mere circumstantial glimpses; blips on the surface of a radar screen. So, Beth's claim that a tape-recorded message lured her to the building where Gus (Nick's partner) was killed, is contradicted by the fact that no such message is found, and together with the discovery of the .38 pistol that was earlier used to kill a policeman, as well as evidence that reflects a strong interest in Catherine Tramell, also found in her apartment, this seems to conclude the case against her. On the other hand, however, Nick reads about Shooter's (i.e. his) partner's death on the printout of her (completed) novel at Catherine's house before Gus's death, confirming the postmodern pattern of fact following fiction, and the film ends with the camera showing Catherine's hand reaching for an icepick underneath their bed. We are left in the air. uncrosses her legs during police interrogations to reveal what newspapers tend to refer to as a lack of underwear . . . in all its pink and glistening three foot glory". Schickel (1992:67) comments on this aspect of the film as follows: ". . . the film breaks faith with the most inviolable convention of the whodunit — refusing to state firmly which of the two women dunit. This reflects its fundamental flaw of arrogance, a smug faith in the ability of its own speed, smartness and luxe to wow the yokels". Appropriately, he titles his review "Lots of skin, but no heart". One may therefore understand the resistance of the film-"narrative" to conclusive inference as the effect of what Schickel also describes as the "heartless and relentless thrill-seeking of Paul Verhoeven's direction, . . . the too intricate, not entirely persuasive plotting required to create an alternate suspect". But more importantly, one may see it as a manifestation of the postmodernist sensibility that I have tried to characterize, in so far as the provision of underlying reasons and of clues that ultimately form a coherent pattern is noticeably absent. Nor is it important to give the audience access to motives or even possible motives on the part of one or more suspects, as convention would require in a traditional Agatha Christie novel or its cinematic counterpart, where Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot would in the end neatly sort out the spurious clues from the true ones to determine the identity of the culprit. Just as in Verhoeven's earlier film, Robocop, the audience had to be content with a series of successive scenes where the spectacle — i.e. what is visually given — comprises a kind of loosely arranged collage of serial images, more or less held together by fragmentary, desultory bits of pseudo-dialogue, Basic Instinct, too, refuses to give one a glimpse of any substantial explanatory motif underneath the surface-texture of titillating and shock-thrilling images. These range from graphic sex-scenes and equally graphic, gory murder scenes to what Powell (1992:32) describes as ". . . that moment where Sharon Stone, in shocking frozen slow motion crosses and Powell's unusually reflective review of Basic Instinct — aptly titled "Learnedly saying vibrator" — actually represents a reading of the film that confirms its status as a typical postmodernist artifact in terms of its obstinate indulgence in superficiality in the literal as well as the figural sense of the term. The following lengthy excerpt from Powell's review (1992:32) captures this air of surface-ness which pervades Basic Instinct in an exemplary fashion: Psychology, character, motive, even storyline are to Basic Instinct pretty much what paint is to a building, a decorative finish overlaid on the structure. What is really important here is the surface. It is not, as convention would have it, the other way around. This is not at all to say that Basic Instinct is merely a bad film. Simply that it is a film which deals in surfaces, which is about surface, and which, as much as Robocop was, is thoroughly obsessed with surfaces. One of the film's most revealing tiny moments has detective Nick Curran (Michael Douglas) pulling up outside the super-luxurious home belonging to the prime suspect in his investigations, praeternaturally Californian murder mystery writer Catherine Tramell (Sharon Stone). Parked in the driveway of the lifestyle mansion, there stand . . . three or maybe four gleaming Ferraris. [I think they are actually Lotuses, which look very similar; B.O.], latest model, identical except for their colour. There are no visitors in the house and, moreover, only one of these cars is ever seen or alluded to later. [Again, not quite accurate, although forgivable: the black one features twice — once when Curran follows Tramell on a near-suicidal risk-taking trip to Dobkins's home, and once when Roxy tries to run Nick over and ends up dying in the car after a chase. After this incident the white Lotus appears fleetingly when Tramell and Dobkins are shown getting into it; B.O.]. They are just there, for that single shot as a kind of consumer fetish, a serially reproduced perfect glittering surface of the good life. In a similar kind of vein, the film's major characters flip with an almost psychopathic ease from the cool and impersonal to the sultry and pornographic. No normality in between. They are represented not as people in any relevant sense, merely as modes of desire. Modes of desire. The point is that director Paul Verhooven [sic], as a Dutch 122 123 immigrant to the U.S., is infatuated as only a non-American can be with the textures and the rhythms, the look and the shameless superficiality of America. It is these things which make up not only his basic concern as a film maker, but also the real content of his films from Robocop onwards. medium's reduction of, among other things, historical events to a collection of qualitatively equal happenings (Harvey 1990:61). "It is hardly surprising", says Harvey (p.61), "that in the era of mass television there has emerged an attachment to surfaces rather than roots, to collage rather than in-depth work, to superimposed quoted images rather than worked surfaces, to a collapsed sense of time and space rather than solidly achieved cultural artefact. And these are all vital aspects of artistic practice in the post-modern condition". What I am wanting to say here is that Basic Instinct is in many ways a very abstract kind of film. We are not given so much characters by scriptwriter Joe Eszterhas as pegs on which to hang characters. They talk in punchlines rather than dialogue, they do not so much relate as explore variable possibilities of relating in film. Powell's remarks on the insubstantiality of the characters in the film are parallelled by Charles Newman's observation, that current American novels are populated by ". . . the flattest possible characters in the flattest possible landscapes rendered in the flattest possible diction" (quoted in Harvey 1990:58). The kind of depthlessness that Powell's review highlights so well with regard to Basic Instinct is clearly a common feature of cultural production in a variety of fields — a "fixation with appearances, surfaces, and instant impacts that have no sustaining power over time", in Harvey's words (1990:58). Judging by this it is as if, since the advent of postmodernism, we have been moving into a Humean universe, or rather "pluriverse", comprising a multitude of essentially isolated impressions loosely held together by "psychological association" based on contiguity and succession. The "presupposition of universal causality", as Solomon (1990:127) calls it, seems to have collapsed, leaving in its place the discontinuous, disconnected, but overwhelmingly vivid present of a (metaphorically speaking) schizophrenic mode of living. This is precisely what Jameson (1985) understands by schizophrenia as temporal characteristic of postmodernity. The fact that its spatial counterpart, pastiche, emphasizes depthlessness, that is, mere surface-ness, should not be overlooked either. In semiotic terms this is tantamount to saying that postmodern artifacts reflect a preoccupation with the signifier instead of the signified. Harvey (1990:61) also draws our attention to the "shaping role" which the widespread use of television has played (and still plays) with regard to the fascination that surfaces exert on the postmodernist imagination. The format of television images is an important contributing factor here. It presents things as a ". . . stitched-together collage of equi-important and simultaneously existing phenomena, largely divorced from geography and material history" (Taylor, quoted in Harvey 1990:61). Moreover, television "posits" (and constructs) a viewer that unavoidably perceives history in a manner determined by the These insights certainly clarify a lot of things about a film like Basic Instinct or the earlier Robocop, but they also enable one to recognize the postmodernism of other recent movies such as Final Analysis and Consenting Adults. Harvey warns us, however, against the trap of a simplistic technological determinism (p.61): television did not "cause" postmodernism; it is one of its formative sources, perhaps even manifestations. He reminds us that television is "itself a product of late capitalism and, as such, has to be seen in the context of the promotion of a culture of consumerism" (p.61). His next statement gives us a vital clue to understanding what I referred to earlier as the cynicism reflected by Basic Instinct's blatant superficiality: "This directs our attention", he says, "to the production of needs and wants, the mobilization of desire and fantasy, of the politics of distraction as part and parcel of the push to sustain sufficient buoyancy of demand in consumer markets to keep capitalist production profitable." This explains the arrogant refusal of Verhoeven's film to give its audience any deeper satisfaction than that of immediate needs and desires for titillation and surrogate violence. Why do more? As Powell (1992:32) shrewdly remarks, ". . . what Basic Instinct is in the final analysis [is] . . . a superb piece of cinematic marketing . . . . . . It has large helpings of sex because the film makers have identified in audiences an unsatisfied appetite for sex in these post-Aids days. It has murder and action and car chases, because they work. It has taboos which it shamelessly exploits for mere titillation, and frisson; it courts from conception to realisation to viewing, the notion of scandal as that which will draw the audiences in". Its cynicism, in short, consists in the fact that there is abundant evidence (albeit of a superficial nature) that it does not suppose its audience to need more than a series of vicarious pleasure-thrills, alternately of the pseudoerotic and -horrific varieties. It is instructive to note the contrast between Basic Instinct and Orson Welles's classic modernist film, Citizen Kane, where the Rosebud-motif — that is, the explanatory function of the sled named "Rosebud", from which the young Kane is separated more or less at the same time that his relationship with his mother is ruptured — pervades the narrative in such a way that it enables the audience to understand Kane as a character via the detective work of the reporter (in the 124 film) who reconstructs Kane's life bit by bit. "Rosebud" is, in psychoanalytical language, an "objet petit autre" or "object(a)", which derives its importance and value from being identified with some lost element of the subject's self and is therefore experienced as being somehow part of the self. In other words, an object(a) is not clearly distinguished from the self as something "other". In the film the sled, "Rosebud", is identified (by the young Kane) with his mother, and its loss functions as the organizing principle of his subsequent life. Hence the audience is afforded an integrative understanding of the film-narrative through this motif (Silverman 1983: 156-157). In Basic Instinct, as I have tried (with the help of others) to demonstrate, such an integrative grasp of the intra-filmic events is kept tantalizingly out of our reach. As pointed out earlier, this does not mean that all films which are recognizably postmodern fail to give us more than a concatenation of thrill-shocking surfaces. Films such as Diva, Jesus of Montreal, Blade Runner, Wings of Desire or the Terminator movies show that postmodernist films sometimes incorporate a liberating critical moment with regard to the cultural and technological conditions of their production (cf. Snyman & Lötter 1992; Olivier 1992a, 1992b & 1993). It may be argued that the preceding analysis has been too hard on Basic Instinct, and that it, too, displays certain critical features. One could give it a parodic reading for instance, which would mean that it is a parody of the whodunit genre, tempting its audience into viewing it as such, while refusing to fit neatly into the category2. Hence the two sets of conflicting clues. It would be difficult to sustain the claim that such a reading is critical in more than a superficial, playful sense, however. In conclusion we may note that Basic Instinct plays the same kind of game with its audience that Catherine plays with Nick in the film. In this respect, too, it is thoroughly postmodern: Lyotard (1984:10; 14-16, 61-67) characterizes "the postmodern condition" in terms of a diverse plurality of "language games" (a Wittgensteinian concept), for instance, in which the players' purpose is to make moves that will gain them the upper hand over their opponents. If Catherine is the murderer (and this goes for any other candidate too, notably Beth) her only discernible "motive" is such a ludic impulse, in other words a postmodern willto-play. At one point she tells Nick that the boy (-character) who kills his parents in one of her books does so to see if he can "get away with it" — a "playful" impulse that may easily be attributed to her as well. Hence, all the murders in the film can be construed as surface moves in a (dangerous) game played on the chequer(ed) board of an increasingly complex mode of living. And that, finally, means that the film title, Basic Instinct, is a misnomer. Whatever used to be (or still is?) basic and/or instinctual about human beings has there been reduced to a series of 2. This possibility, viz. "reading" Basic Instinct as a postmodern parody,was pointed out to me by Tim Huisamen, and would correspond to Linda Hutcheon's notion of postmodernism (Hutcheon 1989:11-12). 125 conditioned surface-responses. No more. A different way of understanding the title of the film would be to say that it is (deliberately) ironical, playing on the fact that "normal" attitudes would project heterosexual expectations on to the central female character, instead of which we are given a bisexual character, thus confounding the "basic instinct"anticipation on the part of the audience. Such a breaking down of traditionally valorized sexual roles is, finally, another unmistakable postmodernist moment, structurally parallel to the characteristically postmodernist interweaving of different genres. Hence the fact that theorists of the postmodern are confronted with the startling phenomenon of sometimes bewilderingly heterogeneous artifacts which pose the crucial question (focused on earlier) namely: do these cultural products merely reflect, celebrate and hence legitimize a certain cultural situation, or do they (some of them, at least) embody critical strategies capable of transforming a technophilic culture fascinated by the technological proliferation of depthless images and surfaces into one that recognizes diversity and the right to be different, without relinquishing the primacy of a common humanity in the process? Postmodern theory, no less than postmodern film, faces the task of highlighting this distinction and of promoting a critical awareness of the dehumanizing dangers of technological incorporation through reproduction. Only in this way can the conflict between the One and the Many be turned into a lifegiving tension. BIBLIOGRAPHY Arac, J. (ed.) 1986. 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The saving of appearances: Denys Arcand's Jesus of Montreal. Literator 13(3), p. 83-91. Solomon, R.C. 1990. The big questions. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich. 127 11. NO RECORDING PLEASE! THIS IS ART. OR: WHAT DO CYNTHIA HAWKINS AND WALTER BENJAMIN HAVE IN COMMON (NOT)? How many of us think of movies as art ? Or of music recordings, for that matter? And I don’t only mean “art films” (which we all recognize) or “serious music” (misleadingly labelled “classical”) — I have in mind popular films and popular (“pop”) music in all their variety. It is hardly imaginable that there would be musical performers today, moreover, who would refuse to have their performances recorded, lest it detract from their “art” — or is it ? Those of us who know Jean-Jacques Beineix’s work know that he (and before him a novelist) has imagined such an artist. And if one is familiar with the famous debate between Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno during the 1930s on the status of art in the era of advanced technological development, these questions have crucial implications for aesthetics and the history of ideas. The most obvious of these concerns Benjamin’s claim that the artwork has lost its “aura” in the age of “mechanical reproduction” — a claim contested by Adorno with regard to film, for instance. And if the structure of artworks has indeed changed historically, how has that affected the receptive-social relations in which art is embedded ? In an attempt to clarify and perhaps answer these questions, I shall examine a movie sometimes cited as a typical postmodernist film text, namely Jean-Jacques Beineix’s Diva. Diva (the film) is based on a novel by Delacorta, but its theme reveals a veritable exigency for the film-medium, where, because of the crucial importance of reproduction in the narrative, it achieves a remarkable consonance of form and thematic material. Film (including Diva) is after all, one of the exemplary arts of reproduction, and in Diva the action revolves around two instances of reproduction (albeit of a different kind) — the illicit tape-recording of a unique musical performance as well as an incriminating tape-recording which exposes a law officer as being a criminal. The first recording concerns the value of an unrepeatable artistic event — its “aura”, as Benjamin would say — while the second concerns the value of evidence regarding the identity of an elusive and astute criminal. Both involve danger. In the first case danger is present in a twofold manner: in the sense in which every artwork, including a musical performance, always carries the risk of failure, precisely at its highest or most innovative levels of achievement; and in the sense that its very uniqueness as a recording — while paradoxically destroying the aura of the concrete, time- and place-bound performance, (simultaneously) — rescues it from obsolescence, in this way establishing an This article also appears in S.A. Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 15 (1), 1996. It is printed with permission. 128 economic value of such magnitude that unscrupulous racketeers are prepared to kill for it. The second tape-recording involves danger for obvious reasons. The character armed with state-of-the art recording equipment and the right mixture of devotion and audacity to take this equipment into the auditorium where his idol, the opera singer or diva Cynthia Hawkins is giving a performance, is Jules — a young French postal delivery official. Jules is unaware of the fact that two agents of a Taiwanese music distributor (one which is not a signatory to the international copyright agreement) witness his surreptitious recording of the diva’s mesmerizing performance of Catalani’s La Wally. It is this fact that exposes Jules to the predatory intentions and activities of the two Taiwanese recording pirates. But that is not all. In her desperate attempt to escape from her former lover’s henchmen, a woman drops a tape cassette into Jules’s postbag the next day, minutes before she is brutally murdered in the street. The recording incriminates the local commissioner of police (her exlover) in drug smuggling and prostitution, which makes it the second recording in Jules’s possession that exposes him (unwittingly) to (another group of) unscrupulous people with only one aim: to retrieve the recording at all costs. The pivotal element of the film narrative is therefore a double instance of audiorecording. In both cases their value consists in the conventional recognition of their authenticity as recordings. In the case of the diva’s recording however, the value is enhanced by the very opposite of this convention, namely her own denial of its authenticity. (Until quite late in the narrative she does not know that it actually exists). The point is that Cynthia Hawkins, like Walter Benjamin in the 1930s, believes that the reproduction of an artwork ineluctably destroys its aura, i.e. its unique value as something created, brought into being at a specific time and place, and therefore, strictly speaking, as something irreplaceable, unrepeatable. This aura is arguably even more decisively applicable to the performance of a musical score than to the visual arts, as Theodor Adorno, Benjamin’s friend, knew very well. Unlike a painting, for example, in which visual images have a certain material (albeit perceptually latent) “completeness”, a musical score has to be reproduced, i.e. produced or created all over again with each performance, the interpretive quality of which may vary considerably from one performance to the next. As Susan Buck-Morss, commenting on Adorno’s preference for music as model of cognition (rather than surrealist art, appealed to by Benjamin at a certain stage) puts it (Buck-Morss 1979:134): .... while the art image existed ready-made, music had to be reproduced, translated from written text into sound, and this meant that it had to be 129 thought through, interpreted in order to exist at all .... the very existence of music necessitated its critical interpretation,.... in the performance or (nonmechanical) reproduction of music the two moments of creation and interpretation fell together, whereas the immediate appearance of the art image and its interpretation were separate and self-contained activities ... The analogy of musical performance with lovemaking is tempting here. (Musical performance is an unusually versatile model: Karsten Harries [1980] even likens the appropriation of architectural space to a specific rendition — i.e. performance — of a musical score). As the very word suggests, lovemaking consists essentially in the specific or particular act of psychosexual intimacy, always embedded in a set of circumstances that are historical or time- and place-bound. Significantly, to the extent that these circumstances are experienced as “the same as always”, the love-making fails as the unique realization of mutually fulfilling pleasure, and instead degenerates into mere mechanical repetition. Which is why, as all lovers know, variation adds quality to lovemaking. The quality of the lovemaking, and indeed also of performances of what is (ostensibly) the “same” musical score, may vary greatly. Cynthia Hawkins’s rendition of La Wally, secretly recorded by Jules, is no exception. Everyone agrees that it is her best performance yet. And its aura is heightened by the diva’s steadfast refusal to allow her performances to be recorded, despite her agent’s strenuous efforts to persuade her that it is her only defence against time, against increasing age eventually preventing her from performing in a way that satisfies her and her fans’ or critics’ expectations. The diva’s insistence that she needs an audience, that no performance is really possible for her without that unique rapport between her and her receptive, appreciative audience, bears the closest resemblance to the sensitive give-and-take relationship of two people making love. But is Cynthia Hawkins right about this ? Does recording and/or reproduction of unique musical performances or works of art destroy their aura so completely that no recording/reproduction of any kind ever captures anything of it ? And even if this were the case, might there not be another reason why such technological reproduction/recording should be welcomed rather than lamented ? Certainly Benjamin and Jules (the postmodern juxtaposition of historical and fictional figures being unproblematical, of course) both welcomed it, albeit for essentially different reasons. It enables Jules to relive his diva’s approximation of the Kantian sublime, where the imaginable and the intelligible no longer gel and where the repeated presentation (in the gesture of the da capo) of what is, like the Schopenhauerian will, strictly unrepresentable, reduces him to the pas- 130 131 sionate passivity of aesthetic contemplation. Clutching his newly acquired fetish — the diva’s gown, snatched on his way out of the opera — Jules surrenders himself tearfully to the music captured on this paradoxical tape (paradoxical because it is a unique recording of a unique event). Fredric Jameson (1992:56) comments on this scene in the following way: the Kantian notion of the sublime), then Diva is indeed paradigmatically postmodern. What does this have to do with the question of the reproducibility of art ? Simply that, just as the auratic moment of an artwork’s uniqueness is affected by its reproduction (perhaps even compromised by it), so the ontological status of postmodern culture is “affected” by the metaphoric mode of its reproduction or representation in the garage-loft scene. As pointed out, and if Jameson and Lyotard are right, postmodern culture is, strictly speaking, not reproducible in the sense of re-presentable in all its complexity — an ironic state of affairs if one considers that it is a culture in which (especially media-) reproduction or representation is pervasive. Postmodernity and Cynthia Hawkins therefore share a certain “aversion” to re-presentation or reproduction, albeit for different reasons. Jules’s wide eyes are the space of perceptual receptivity, of the openness into which the diva’s extraordinary sound will flow — the 'endless melody' which constitutes, better than any logic of the narrative sequence, the irreversible temporality of the film, sonata-form repetition rather than the Freudian kind, the grand 'inevitability' of the climactic return. This early scene (as well as the later one when his Vietnamese friend listens to the tape) in Jules’s garage-loft captures the film’s postmodernity perhaps most graphically. Accompanying Jules’s listening to the precious tape, the camera moves along the interior space of the garage-loft, exposing a fragmented “culturescape” which is nothing less than a metaphor for our late 20th-century cultural condition, a wasteland-mixture of hyperrealistic paintings on the walls and floor, with real car-wrecks all around. Jameson (1992:57) evokes these qualities effectively in his description of the scene: The tape inserted, Jules then sprawls upon a water-sofa in the corner, abandoning his rapt body motionless for the camera to explore as for the first time it discovers the whole enormity of the place in which we find ourselves. Stricken beneath the world of sound, yet still glowing with pale colors, this is now a dead immobile landscape in which Jules’s body has an unearthly pallor with few equivalents in other media .... And it comes with the little inner jolt of the unexpected freeze-frame, the sudden deathly transformation into a still photograph, except that the camera continues to move and in so doing betrays the garish and real photorealist mural behind this staged pastiche: a whole heaven of cars in flight in all directions, a wall of open sky into which the battered material carcasses in the garage beneath have been translated and transfigured. We never see this mural in its entirety, but only fresh angled shots and ever new figures and details (the human occupants spilling out of a restive convertible, for instance); my own suspicion is that, like the multistaged eponymous being of Alien, it never did (does) exist as a completed thing, an object that could be represented. If, as Lyotard (1984:81) has it, the “postmodern would be that which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself; that which denies itself the solace of good forms” (a formulation which conspicuously resurrects Walter Benjamin’s reasons for welcoming those technological developments that have made mechanical (and we could add electronic) reproduction of artworks possible, are somewhat more complex in an aesthetic as well as an idea-historical sense than Jules’s ecstatic enjoyment of their benefits. Essentially, Benjamin regarded the mechanical reproducibility of the artwork (in principle it had always been reproducible; cf. Benjamin 1969:218) as a progressive development: unlike literature or painting, which had always been directed at the individual, an artform like film is aimed at mass society, i.e. at the collective, a fact which opened up unheard-of socio-political possibilities of mobilization for Benjamin (1969:224, 240). To be sure, as pointed out earlier, this development was not achieved without sacrificing a moment of authenticity, viz. the traditional artwork’s aura. What precisely did Benjamin have in mind with this elusive concept, and why should it perish with the advent of mass-produced artworks ? Here I must quote Benjamin (1969:220) at length: Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be. This unique existence of the work of art determined the history to which it was subject throughout the time of its existence. This includes the changes which it may have suffered in physical condition over the years as well as the various changes in its ownership. The traces of the first can be revealed only by chemical or physical analyses which it is impossible to perform on a reproduction; changes of ownership are subject to a tradition which must be traced from the situation of the original. The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authen- 132 133 ticity. .... The whole sphere of authenticity is outside technical — and, of course, not only technical — reproducibility. .... (p. 221): The situations into which the product of mechanical reproduction can be brought may not touch the actual work of art, yet the quality of its presence is always depreciated. ... The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced. ... One might subsume the eliminated element in the term “aura” and go on to say: that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art. number of reproductions of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, distributed all over the world, the more insidiously the aura of the “original” work is undermined to the point where, today, it is questionable whether it makes sense any longer to talk about such “original” paintings that have been reproduced virtually out of existence (paradoxical as it may seem). Clearly, what Benjamin has in mind is something of an historical and material kind, which also means that it is radically individual. In fact, an artwork’s aura derives precisely from the conjunction of these three moments, i.e. from its (for instance Michelangelo’s David’s) being made or structured materially at or in the course of a given time and at a certain place. The fact that a work may be moved from its “original” place means that such a removal would form part of the work’s unique history and, as such, of its aura. It is therefore a pre-eminently unique, historical, material entity whose subsequent history is registered in the very medium of its materiality. As Richard Wolin puts it (1982:187-188): “The aura testifies to the authority of art in its cultic form, its condition of inimitable uniqueness, a singularity in time and space which is the hallmark of its authenticity”. In the case of the David any damage that it may have suffered, such as a toe being partly pulverized by a hammer-wielding vandal, as well as its subsequent repairs, would form part of its aura in the sense described above. The same holds, mutatis mutandis, for paintings. The fine cracks that develop in the painted surface through time enhance, rather than destroy the aura because they attest to its individual-historical authenticity. And when skilled craftsmen restore a painting to what may seem like its pristine condition to counteract the effect of ageing or of damage inflicted upon it by grudge-bearing vandals, it does not detract from the aura either — provided that the artwork’s structural integrity (which is a prerequisite for its interpretability) remains intact. If that is destroyed, one would witness varying degrees of mutilation of the work’s aura up to the point where, should no material trace remain of the original work, its aura would merely linger in the collective and individual memory of those who knew it, perhaps in the mode of suggestion by its absence and other reminders of it like copies or photographs. It follows from what Benjamin says, however, that in the case of “mechanically reproduced” copies like photographs or lithographically reproduced posters of paintings, the quality of its (the work’s) presence is always depreciated, even when (as in the vast majority of instances) the works still exist. The greater the Personally, however, I believe that, the overwhelming experience of being confronted by a Van Gogh in the museum bearing his name in Amsterdam, or by a work like Odilon Redon’s Apollo in New Haven, attests to the authority of the original. In the case of the latter, the inscrutable figure of the god takes shape in the material medium - at once accessible and inaccessible, appearing and withdrawing, revealed and veiled by its structured layers. Even a technically satisfying reproduction of the work would fail to capture precisely that indefinable, shifting boundary between the materiality of the coloured medium (which is, at times, an object of perceptual wonder in its own right) and the interpretable horizon of meaning that opens up by means of it. The point is that one could argue, against Benjamin, that the authority of the original (in the case of painting and sculpture) does not decrease at all in the face of the proliferation of reproductions, at least for as long as the original is identifiable. In fact, to take the matter one step further: it could just be that, the more reproductions there are, the more powerfully the “original” would assert its authority and value. In this light, the notion of “aura” would itself seem to be subject to historical change in the form of reassertion in a new context of reception. How does this lengthy consideration of the concept of an artwork’s aura explain the fact that Benjamin thought of the technological reproducibility of artworks as politically progressive ? Is the loss of aura on the part of traditional artworks not too high a price to pay ? For the answer to these questions one has to turn to those artforms that are paradigmatic of the 20th century, such as (pre-eminently) film, audio-recording and, more recently (although it falls outside the scope of this paper) video, especially music videos. Briefly, according to Benjamin (1969: 223-224) mechanical reproducibility has changed the position of art in society fundamentally. While the earliest art served a ritualistic purpose (initially of a magical, and later of a religious kind), to which its aura was intimately connected, this new mode of reproduction has liberated art from its dependence on ritual. The dialectic initiated in this way leads, in his view, from reproduced artworks to those “designed for reproducibility”, with the further result that authenticity is no longer a consideration, for instance in the case of prints from a photographic negative. “But”, says Benjamin (1969:224), “the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based 134 on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice — politics”. What Benjamin has in mind here becomes clearer in light of the fact that photographs, unlike paintings — which demand a contemplative attitude on the part of the viewer (1969:238) — have become what he (1969:226) calls “standard evidence for historical occurrences”. This draws attention to their “hidden political significance”, which becomes more explicit with the directives supplied by accompanying captions. This effect is heightened in the case of the motion picture, where (as he puts it; p. 226): “.... the meaning of each single picture appears to be prescribed by the sequence of all preceding ones”. The “political significance”, (and one could add “ideological potential”) of the cinema, perceived so clearly by Benjamin, is abundantly evident from this remark. Small wonder that he could contrast (1969:234) the “... reactionary attitude toward a Picasso painting” on the part of “the masses” with their “progressive reaction toward a Chaplin movie”. The scene-sequence in a film, being the result of controlled editing of filmed scene-footage, predisposes audiences to view or perceive (and therefore also to understand) the film-narrative in a certain (conventional) way, unless the filmmaker deliberately introduces a critical, dislocating element to undermine this predisposition — for example Bunuel’s use of two similar, but different actresses to play the same character (the tantalizing Conchita) in That obscure object of desire, which disrupts conventional, identity-oriented ways of looking almost unbearably. It is this control of imagesequence that explains what Benjamin sees as the “... direct, intimate fusion of visual and emotional enjoyment with the orientation of the expert” (1969:234), so typical of film audiences, where enjoyment seems to coincide with criticism. When it comes to cinema, every member of the public is willing to offer an “expert” opinion. Moreover, added to this question of "critical distancing" there is the shock effect of film, created by its continual alternation of scenes (1969:238240) — hence its social significance as mass art for Benjamin who, as a neoMarxist, had an interest in the emancipation of the masses from oppressive social and political conditions. Film thus seemed to him to hold great potential as an instrument for such emancipation, an issue on which his friend and colleague Adorno disagreed uncompromisingly with him, highlighting instead the systematic “liquidation of the individual” — i.e. the person who is able to offer critical resistance — by what he perceived as the alienating collective-cultural and economic forces embodied in (inter alia) mass cinema and audio-recording (Adorno 1978:299). More pertinently, however, Adorno also happened to disagree with Benjamin on the question of film’s aura, which brings us back to Diva as film and to the status of audio-recording in its narrative. In opposition to Benjamin, he claimed that film was “highly auratic” (Letter, Adorno to Benjamin, March 18, 1936, in 135 Benjamin: Gesammelte Schriften I, 3:1004, quoted in Buck-Morss 1979:149). What could he possibly have meant ? After all, Benjamin tied the notion of aura to an artwork’s unique existence, and we know that films and music recordings (audiotapes, compact discs) are distributed, like photographs or lithographs, in large numbers as copies of “originals”. And, if Benjamin is right, the very fact of copying an original detracts from or depreciates the original — although, as I have pointed out, this claim may be challenged. But even if we grant him his point with regard to, say, the insidious and invidious erosion of the aura of Bosch’s singular Garden of earthly delights in the Prado by the distribution of innumerable reproductions of it throughout the world, does the same thing happen with a film like Diva, or with a recording of the (intrafilmic) performance by Cynthia Hawkins of La Wally ? I believe that Adorno (1984:49) was right when he remarked that “.... Walter Benjamin exaggerated considerably the difference between what he calls auratic and technological works of art, at the price of ignoring the common element in them, thus exposing his theory to dialectical critique”. In other words, by uncovering the functioning (or “presence”, if you like — and note the deconstructive scare-quotes!) of an aura in technologically reproduced artworks, one can launch Benjamin’s theory against its own claims, employing the very categories that he coined, with illuminating effect. What Adorno has in mind becomes clearer from his interpretation of the Benjaminian notion of aura (1984:66-67): “As Benjamin pointed out, the aura of art works is not only [my italics: B.O.] their here and now, but also their content in so far as it points beyond a work’s givenness. One cannot abolish content without abolishing art altogether”. This “pointing beyond” themselves by artworks constitutes an element of transcendence which may be shown to be inseparable from their aura, as hinted at by Adorno in the following remark (1984:386): “What is called aura in this passage [from Benjamin’s artwork essay; B.O.] is something that is familiar to artistic experience. It generally goes by the name of ‘atmosphere’. The atmosphere of a work of art is the connection of its moments in so far as they point beyond themselves, singly and together. ....It is something fleeting and elusive, as anybody who has ever tried to capture the atmosphere of a work of art in descriptive terms knows only too well”. This applies not only to traditional works of art like paintings, sculptures, poems and novels, but to (some) films and audio-recordings as well, despite the latter two being instances of technologically reproduced artworks. Take Diva, for example. When Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez in the role of Cynthia Hawkins as the recording-shy diva appears on the opera stage early in the film, the way she looks at the audience, smiling with the mixture of shyness and 136 137 confidence of someone who knows that she is in the presence of (by and large) her admirers, establishes a rapport not only with the intra-filmic audience but with the film audience as well. Moreover, it introduces the aura of the film as well as of the performance of Catalani’s La Wally, into which she moves gently as soon as contact with the orchestra conductor has also been established. The point is — and here lies the crux of filmic and audio-recordings’ aura — that while we as the film audience have access to the singer-actress’s sublime rendition of the music only via the copy of Beineix’s Diva (the film) that is shown at a particular movie-theatre at a particular time, what it gives us access to is as unique and aura-pervaded (or pervasively auratic) as any great, unique painting hanging in any particular museum anywhere in the world. Not only does it make the specific musical sound of the singer’s rendition of La Wally at the time when it was filmed and/or recorded (these two have to be distinguished, for obvious reasons) accessible to the film audience, it also incorporates a materially transcendent, historical moment (of the kind that Adorno mentions) into the film-experience, i.e. into our experience of the film. What I have in mind may be clarified in the light of an insight articulated (ironically!) by Benjamin himself (1969:229) in the artwork-essay: “For the film”, he says, “what matters primarily is that the actor [or actress; B.O.] represents himself [or herself; B.O.] to the public before the camera, rather than representing someone else”. When Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez therefore appears before the camera as Cynthia Hawkins, she is still herself, the singer-actress Fernandez. This constitutes the material (visual-auditory) moment of transcendence that Adorno alludes to, which becomes incorporated into a narrative as a specifically structured totality that lends itself to multi-dimensional interpretations. auratic one like Diva, on its aura. The same holds, incidentally, for repeated listening to one’s “favourite” tape- or CD-recording: invariably, playing it over and over makes it stale. No wonder Adorno (1978) spoke of the “regression” of listening in the contemporary era! To put the matter differently: whether you see the film on its first release or twenty years later, as a member of its audience you and I are privy to the material-historical, experiential uniqueness (i.e. aura) of that audiovisual performance, whether or not a studio-recording was matched to the filmed stageperformance of the actress-singer or not. To be sure, the more one watches this scene (or the movie as a whole) the more stale it will become — in the same way as looking at Picasso’s Guernica every day will probably impose a layer of alienating familiarity upon its aura. This may throw new light on Benjamin’s observation (1969:229), that: “.... for the first time — and this is the effect of film — man [the actor; B.O.] has to operate with his [or her; B.O.] whole living person, yet foregoing its aura. For aura is tied to his [ /her; B.O.] presence; there can be no replica of it”. Notwithstanding his intention, what Benjamin says here applies, in the case of film, in the first place to repetition of the film-experience (e.g. of the musical performance in Diva), and not to the replica of the actor in his or her film image. If one understands it in this way, it would explain the detrimental effect of repeated viewings of a film, even a highly These considerations would clarify another phenomenon, namely the cult movie, specifically the decrease of its aura in proportional relation to its increase in cult status. Ironically, the very thing that singles it out for eventual cult status — its aura — becomes the basis for the aura’s self-liquidation. (In some circles Diva may already have reached this point in terms of cult reception.) A good example is The rocky horror picture show, where the tangible aura exuded by Tim Curry’s Dr Frank-n-Furter on his initial song-appearance in the film has by now been all but obliterated by its cult-familiarity in cinema theatres as well as through the familiarity of the film’s soundtrack. There is another irony here, which concerns the whole question of art as “cult object”: according to Benjamin, with the disappearance of the “authentic” artwork its “cult value” disappears to make way for an “exhibition value”, where the latter refers to the “point of intersection between work and onlooker” (Wolin 1982:188). The ironical thing is that, in a curiously dialectical manner, the exhibition value of certain artworks (like Diva and The rocky horror picture show) has become the basis for a new cult value, where its “exhibition” (i.e. screening) engenders a new, non-religious kind of ritual behaviour on the part of audiences. It therefore seems as if Walter Benjamin and Cynthia Hawkins have much in common. He notes the liquidation of the aura in film (and in audio-recordings) while Cynthia Hawkins refuses recording precisely for this reason. And yet, there is more to this than meets the eye. In the first place (and as I have indicated) Benjamin does not exactly lament the demise of art’s aura, affirming the progressive character of the new mass art forms instead. This contrasts sharply with Cynthia Hawkins’s affirmation of the value attaching to the unique, unrepeatable artistic performance which — as we saw earlier with the help of Adorno — requires a new act of interpretative performance, contingent upon ever-changing factors such as personal knowledge and confidence, as well as rapport with a specific audience, every time, in order to actualize the music. In short, Cynthia Hawkins values the aura of her art so highly that she willingly sacrifices the huge amounts of income that recordings of her voice would generate. So, on this score she and Benjamin do not have much in common, as the parenthetical Wayne’s worldish “(not)” of this paper’s title in fact suggests. But the matter does not end here either — which is why the “(not)” in the title is bracketed. This ambiguity points to the second consideration, viz. the fate of Jules’s singular, sacred recording of Cynthia Hawkins’s stirring performance. What happens to this tape, and why is it important ? It is important because 138 139 the events to which it is subject in the film narrative — and most notably the culminating event — all signal the fact that the socio-economic context of this narrative (i.e. constituted by it) is that of the so-called postmodern world. One may therefore reasonably expect Cynthia Hawkins to wake up to the crucial position occupied in postmodernity by such practices as audio-recording or, more generally, by (electronic) media — so much so that John Thompson (1990) speaks of our “mediated” culture. Not surprisingly, given Jameson’s (1992:55) description of Diva as the “first French postmodernist film”, she does eventually adjust her position vis-à-vis the question: “to record or not to record” (in a manner of speaking/writing). What do we learn from this ? Not necessarily that Cynthia Hawkins has changed her mind about recording for commercial purposes - in an earlier scene of a press conference she tells reporters that commerce should adapt itself to art, and not the other way around. But it does tell us that she has discovered something valuable about recording. For the first time, she can hear “herself” singing (that is, not while she is actually singing) — an experience that affords her the novel opportunity of critical distance from her own singing, as perceived by Benjamin (and referred to earlier) in connection with film reproduction. Cynthia may therefore be seen as discovering what in more general terms may be called the cognitive function of post-auratic or reproducible art (keeping in mind what was found earlier with Adorno’s help, viz. that aura still accompanies artworks of this kind, albeit in latent form and subject to erosion by excessive use or exposure). Before we reach this point in the sequence of filmically narrated events, however, Jules has to run the gauntlet between the two Taiwanese recording racketeers (who are after the Hawkins recording) and the police chief alias drug-andprostitution-lord’s two henchmen (who are after the tape which blows the lid of his cover). With the help of his kleptomaniac Vietnamese friend (Alba) and her boyfriend, however, Jules manages to survive relatively unscathed, while — through the infallibly smooth and efficient intervention of the boyfriend, Gorodish — the Taiwanese as well as the (criminal) police commissioner meet with suitably sticky ends. In the meantime, in the course of events Jules has befriended his diva, Cynthia Hawkins, albeit at the initial risk of being prosecuted for the theft of her gown when he returns it to her. An even greater risk looms, however, when he finally faces the unavoidable task of revealing his alter ego to her as the mysterious recording agent. It occurs in the final scene-sequence of the film, in the same concert hall where Jules made the coveted recording, and as a repetition of the performance with which the film-narrative commences, so that the performance and its “reproduction” neatly quasi- “frame” the film as a whole. In the climactic scene the diva walks onto the stage and sings a series of notes, her sonorous voice resounding in the auditorium. Then, as the sound subsides, overwhelming audience applause fills the auditorium — incongruously, for it is empty. Except .... for Jules, who comes walking towards the stage from the back, where, of course, he has just, moments ago, started playing the unique taperecording over the concert hall’s sound-system. When she sees him, things fall into place for the diva: the applause she has just heard is the recorded applause that greeted her when she first appeared on the stage for the La Wally performance. “You!” she gasps, as Jules approaches her on the stage. “It was you ....” “It is the only one”, he retorts. “It is my gift to you”. Disconcerted, she turns around: “But .... I have never heard myself sing!” Then, as the ethereal music of La Wally once again resounds in our ears, they embrace on the stage, listening, while the camera slowly recedes and the film credits start appearing. This, then, is the upshot of Beineix’s answer to Benjamin (and to Adorno): initially Cynthia Hawkins clings stubbornly to Benjamin’s conviction of the death of aura in the age of art’s reproduction in an effort to preserve the aura of her own art. With the help of Jules, however, she discovers what she may gain from such reproduction, and perhaps also that (as Adorno realized) it preserves the possibility of experiencing aura (as long as the audience’s receptivity has not been blunted by overexposure to the reproduced work). Moreover, as suggested earlier, it may just be that the availability of recordings would confirm the auratic value of (her) “live” performances more decisively. (The popularity of live performances by the likes of Pavarotti seems to confirm this). It must be noted, however, that this insight has to be balanced with the question of the autonomy of art, which (because of its complexity) has not been dealt with in this paper, its pertinence notwithstanding. Its relevance may briefly be stated in the following way: for Adorno, art’s autonomy consists in its (growing) independence from society (Adorno 1984:320) — an independence that, combined with its social factuality, comprises the “dual essence of art”. This means that, contrary to previous eras, art has become “art for itself” (art for art’s sake), which is precisely what enables art to stand opposed to society: “By congealing into an entity unto itself — rather than obeying existing social norms and thus proving itself to be 'socially useful' — art criticizes society just by being there” (Adorno 1984:321). Again: “If any social function can be ascribed to art at all, it is the function to have no function” (p. 322). Cynthia Hawkins’s refusal to be recorded may, in these terms, be seen as a radical affirmation of art’s autonomy, i.e. its refusal to submit to socio-economic criteria of functionality. Does she compromise herself at that moment when she discovers, through Jules’s recording of her singing, the critical distance that puts her (for the first time) in the position of an audience with regard to her own art? (This position, we should remind ourselves, is analogous to that of a writer who becomes just another reader of 140 141 his/her text once it is written — a fact which is not surprising if one considers the multivocality of language through which it surpasses a writer’s intentions.) As far as I can judge, such a compromise does not necessarily follow. Regardless of the effect that reproduction of artworks has on their aura, the autonomy of art need not be compromised at all, given the fact that it is through the emancipation of aesthetic form from societal functionality that autonomy is won in the first place. To the extent that art appears to serve the principle of exchange by virtue of its economic value, it may seem to fit into the socio-economic totality, but through its society-negating aesthetic form it undermines this totality. After all, as far as the aesthetic dimension of art as such is concerned, no socio-economic function can be discerned. This aspect of art cannot be reduced to the status of a commodity, even when a price tag is attached to a work of art — whether it is a novel, a painting, an operatic performance, or a film such as Diva, which retains an aesthetic moment even as it transgresses the aesthetic frame. the distinction art/reality in the first place, thus making it more post-structuralist than postmodernist in light of its critical destabilization of “normal” (i.e. conventional) distinctions. On the question of the film’s postmodernity (touched upon earlier), a brief look at the “framing” effect of the (opening) operatic performance and its (concluding) reproduction yields interesting insights. It may seem like a typical modernist device that demarcates the diegetic film-space in relation to the world “outside”, as it were, thus highlighting the film’s fictional or aesthetic status, were it not for a crucial consideration, viz. the difference in ontological status between the intra-filmic performance and its recorded reproduction. The latter, as reproduction, stands to the former — the performance — as “copy” to auratic “original”, or as “representation” to (intra-filmic) reality, a relationship that undermines the modernist implications of the frame. After all, the performance signifies “reality”, which is precisely that which is represented in the recording, so that the relation reality/representation is problematized instead of retained in its modernist form. (A framed Rauschenberg collage, with certain “components” literally “hanging over” the frame, achieves the same effect). To be sure, the intrafilmic “performance” is also, as part of the film, a soundtrack recording, but it does point towards an extra-filmic performance and hence towards what we call social reality. One way of reading this is in terms of what Megill (1985) calls 'aestheticism' — i.e. the characteristically postmodernist extension of the aesthetic sphere to the whole of reality, reducing everything to the status of fiction, as it were. On this interpretation the “real” performance by the singer/ actress Wilhelmenia Fernandez, that eventually forms part of the soundtrack — first as intra-filmic performance and subsequently a number of times as intra-filmic reproductions — is at best also no more than a species of the aesthetic, given its creative unity and especially its ontogenetic or world-creating linguistic status. Personally I would disagree with this interpretation of the framing device for reasons outlined above, which point to the questioning or problematization of In conclusion we may note that Beineix’s “resolution” of the question concerning the artwork in the age of its mechanical reproduction comes to us in the tantalizingly postmodern form — over and above those postmodernist features that have already been discussed — of an “art film” that is also, at the same time, a thriller that sometimes keeps you on the edge of your seat. It neither fits into the mould of “high art”, nor into that of the Hollywood sausage machine thriller. Diva is precisely a postmodernist hybrid, combining the best of both worlds by addressing important and difficult questions in the context of a breathtaking narrative with danger around every corner. In fact, the two tapes on which the narrative turns, may be regarded as a metaphor for the danger or the risk that all art ineluctably involves: not only the auratic risk of failing at the point where the greatest beauty or truth requires the greatest effort, but also the risk of exploitation by an industry that may, at any time, unscrupulously subordinate the irreplaceable value of art to the reifying power of the profit motive. BIBLIOGRAPHY Adorno, T.W. 1978. On the fetish-character in music and the regression of listening. In: The essential Frankfurt School reader. Ed. by Arato, A., & Gebhardt, E. New York:Urizen Books, pp. 270-299. Adorno, T.W. 1984. Aesthetic theory. Tr. Lenhardt, C. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Benjamin, W. 1969. The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. In: Illuminations. Tr. Zohn, H. New York: Schocken Books, pp. 217-251. Buck-Morss, S. 1979. The origin of negative dialectics. New York: The Free Press. Harries, K. 1980. The dream of the complete building. In: Perspecta The Yale Architectural Journal, pp. 36-43. Jameson, F. 1992. Diva and French socialism. In: Signatures of the visible. New York & London : Routledge. Lyotard, J-F. 1984. Answering the question: what is postmodernism ? In: The postmodern condition: a report on knowledge. Tr. Bennington, G., & Massumi, B. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Megill, A. 1985. Prophets of extremity. Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida. Berkeley: University of California Press. 142 Thompson, J. 1990. Ideology and modern culture. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Wolin, R. 1982. Walter Benjamin - an aesthetic of redemption. New York: Columbia University Press. FILMOGRAPHY Jean-Jacques Beineix (Director) 1981. Diva. Producer: Irene Silberman. France: Electric Pictures (French with English subtitles). 143 12. 144 HOW REMOTE IS YOUR CONTROL? SLIVER, SURVEILLANCE, SEX AND POPULAR DISCIPLINE the film's preoccupation with visuality and with looking or the "gaze" (as Sartre and Foucault would say). Imagine if Jeremy Bentham, who imagined the perfect prison in the late 18th century in terms of the idea of a panopticon — an architectural construction, if not machine, for the optimal surveillance of inmates — could see the imagined high-rise apartment block in Sharon Stone's recent soft-porn showpiece, Sliver. Bentham would no doubt have been impressed by the technological ingenuity that allows Zeke Hawkins (William Baldwin) visual access to every nook and cranny of every apartment in the block from a central location in the building. This was, after all, Bentham's guiding idea. There is a crucial difference between his brainchild and the surveillance system in Sliver, however. Bentham's prison wardens would have direct visual access to the inmates' behaviour in their cells, while Zeke's voyeuristic access to the tenants in their (and incidentally also his) apartments is mediated. Through the chief editor of the publisher she works for, Carly meets Jack Lansford, (Tom Berenger) a writer of murder mysteries who is eager to hear her opinion of his work. With uncanny "coincidence" he happens to live in the same sliver as she does, and when she gives a house-warming reception he arrives uninvited. Television — including closed-circuit television — is, after all, a medium of information, something that mediates between viewer and world and, in extreme cases of media-saturation, seems to become a substitute for the world, in the form of what Baudrillard calls hyperreality. But even if one resists the temptation of understanding contemporary society in such an extreme manner as Baudrillard does — i.e. as a closed universe of screen-images feeding parasitically on one another, (think of MTV), destroying the boundaries between public and private as well as any possibility of critical engagement with this totality of simulacra — it still remains a fact that we live in a culture that deserves the name of "mediated society", as John Thompson suggests (1990). It is precisely the extent to which this is thematized in Sliver, as well as the implications of this thematization for our humanity, that I would like to explore from a perspective on power opened up by the work of Michel Foucault. In the process we shall also examine various instances of what Foucault terms the micro-technologies of bio-power, or control, or discipline, that operate on our bodies (more or less all the time) in contemporary society. In Sliver, Sharon Stone plays Carly Norris, an editor at a publishing company who moves into a vacant apartment in a "sliver" — one of the tall, narrow buildings peculiar to space-hungry Manhattan. Only after moving in does she find out that its previous occupant (one Naomi Singer) vacated the apartment in terminal fashion, falling to her death from the balcony — 20 storeys up. Moreover, as more than one startled fellow tenant assures Carly, she bears an uncanny resemblance to the unfortunate girl, a fact which turns out to be relevant with regard to This article also appears in an HSRC publication, Proceedings of the Conference on Knowledge, Method and the Public Good, 1994. It is reprinted with permission. Among her invited guests there is another significant male, Zeke Hawkins, also an occupant of the block, and one who has been helpful to her on several occasions. Despite herself Carly, who is recently divorced, becomes sexually (and presumably also emotionally) involved with Zeke, whose persistence and charm eventually elicit a positive response from her. He insists, for instance, that she accompany him to the gym for a weight-workout. In response to her indication that joining him is conditional upon the absence of mirrors at the gym he denies that there are any, but when they get there, it is clear that he told her a barefaced lie. But what is the point of it all, over and above the fact that it sets the stage for a series of deaths at apartment block no. 113? The presence of mirrors in the gym is symptomatic of contemporary society's preoccupation with representation or with the image in various modes. In fact, Martin Heidegger (1977) argues persuasively that we live in the "age of the worldpicture", i.e. of the world as a picture or image. This is so familiar to us that we do not bat an eyelid when people talk about their "world-view", or about their "image of the world". And yet, as Heidegger shows, this only makes sense on the assumption that what exists, can be represented, or represented as a concept, idea or image — a distinctly modern notion that dates from the seventeenth century, notably in the emerging modern science of Galileo and (later) Newton, as well as in the dualistic metaphysics of Descartes and Locke. In our own time representation has become ubiquitous, as the unexceptional presence of television in our homes amply demonstrates. In Sliver, mirrors are just one (and probably the most innocuous) embodiment of our obsession with the image. The less innocuous manifestations are pervasive in the film. It opens with the audience looking at a number of (closed-circuit) television screens with fluctuating images of various interiors. Some of these include (the images of) occupants of these interior spaces, such as the one that the camera gradually focuses on to the exclusion of the others, until it fills the whole of the cinema screen — cinema and TV screen briefly coinciding — showing a blonde woman in a lift, until she steps out of the lift and out of the TV screen, the camera cutting to the intra-filmic interior of the building. It is Naomi 145 Singer, on her way to her apartment and to her appointment with death. These television screen-images are central to the panopticon-theme identified at the outset in this paper. Throughout the film-narrative, first at intermittent intervals and confronting the cinema audience without the interposition of anyone else between us and the TV screens, and later with the controlling, viewing subject in place before them — by then identified as a central character in the narrative, no doubt — these screens function as a multifaceted monitoring device with regard to the (observed) behaviour of the tenants in the apartments at No. 113. Sometimes we, the cinema audience, are afforded a glimpse of a closed-circuit TV camera trained on, for instance, people entering the building. (The cameras monitoring the apartment interiors, in contrast, are hidden behind one-way mirrors so that the audience always sees through them without ever looking at them.) Several other events further expand and diversify the theme of looking, of surveillance and of its effects. One of her fellow tenants, a lonely-looking gentleman who confesses to having been "mates" with Naomi Singer, introduces himself to Carly as Gus Hale, an academic who teaches courses on "the psychology of the lens." (Ironically, the hidden camera-lens in his bathroom reveals his dead body in the shower booth — he had slipped and broken his neck — enabling Zeke to call the police and the ambulance. One wonders how he explained his knowledge of the accident to the police!) The sub-theme of the lens becomes even more graphic when Carly arrives home to find that someone had left her a telescope as a present, neatly set up on its tripod at her lounge window. The power of its lure is demonstrated on more than one occasion, for example when one of her cocktail party guests trains it on one of the adjacent apartment blocks and discovers (with a shriek of delight) a couple making love in front of an open window — a discovery that leads to the predictable desire on the part of the other guests (and their hostess) to sneak a peak for themselves. In a scene after her guests' departure, there is a striking reversal of roles — the viewing subject becoming the viewed object — when Carly decides to take another look at the lovers through the telescope, only to find that they are focusing theirs on her! There are literally lenses everywhere: telescopes, hidden television cameras in apartments (and outside them), in lifts, in shops and, of course, the cinematographic lens through which the narrative unfolds before our eyes. Nor does the theme of surveillance end with lenses. The day after her first sizzling encounter with Zeke in his apartment, Carly is in her office at work, about to do something on her computer, when the monitor goes blank without warning and a love-message, complete with graphics-rose adornment, appears on the screen, obviously from Zeke. Such electronic media access demonstrates in 146 frighteningly graphic form the awesome power which it wields (or can exercise) over our lives. Before we approach the issue of power from a more philosophical-theoretical perspective, a closer examination of the surveillance-system/power nexus in Sliver is necessary. After all, although it comes packaged as a murder-and-sex thriller (not necessarily in that order of box-office importance), its most philosophically interesting aspect is the pervasiveness of the power-through-surveillance theme. On entering Zeke's apartment unexpectedly, Carly finds to her surprise that an opened panel reveals a huge room with television monitorscreens (some smaller, some large) virtually covering the entire wall facing the control-console, with Zeke behind it. She has entered the heart (or rather mind) of this high-tech panopticon (of which he turns out to be the owner) with its capacity not only to invade the private lives of all its inhabitants to such an extent that the difference between public and private collapses, but also to exercise power over those lives with regard to actions as well as intentions. Just how seductively this technological voyeurs' dream may address us, we can imagine by extending the effect of more familiar technological devices on our actions, such as powerful motor cars or, closer to our present concern, video cameras or video games (especially "virtual reality" games). With the promise of a certain level of "performance" it is almost impossible for an operator to resist the technological quest for control. Carly is no exception. Despite the fact that her initial fascination is succeeded by distaste — at one point she exclaims: "It is like playing God. It is wrong!" — she eventually yields to the temptation, and encouraged by Zeke, starts operating the controls of this secular counterpart of divine omniscience. But there is more. Among the audiovisual image-configurations that appear on the screens before her, there is one of a young girl complaining to her mother that her stepfather "touches her." When the mother expresses her disbelief, Zeke informs Carly that the girl is telling the truth, and that he has often (through his spycameras) witnessed the man's hands on her. The matter does not end here either. At a later stage in the narrative Zeke tells Carly excitedly that he has phoned the man (anonymously, of course) and threatened to kill him if he ever touches the girl again. And in a follow-up scene we witness the frightened stepfather apologizing to the girl and assuring her that he will never do it again. Exhilarated by his successful intervention Zeke tells Carly that they should wire the rest of the town, that there is a lot of "good" they could do. The means of "doing good" include, one would assume, the fact that the interior scenes under surveillance are video-taped, in this way comprising a source of information with 147 148 varied and far-reaching uses — as Carly discovers when (at her request) Zeke shows her the video of the two of them making love. Later she also discovers that it is another case of "sex, lies and video-tape" (with apologies to Steven Soderberg), and that her lover gets his greatest kick, not out of sex itself, but out of the post-coital, narcissistic indulgence of observing himself in the act with various women, including two recently murdered ones - Naomi Singer and Vida Warren. greater extent — (cf. chapter 10 of this book). The interesting thing about this apparent digression on different kinds of film — something that simultaneously brings us back to the theme of surveillance, sexuality and control — is that Mulvey associates film narrative with the Freudian ego, and film spectacle with the psychosexual drives of the id (Sarup 1993:175). If we keep in mind that Freud's ego represents the domain of reason, while the id denotes the instinctual realm of irrationality, this insight has the disturbing implication that recent developments in cinema (including Sliver) reflect a societal tendency in the direction of increasing irrationality. Paradoxically, this goes hand in hand with increasing technological rationalization, which should not be confused with rationality in the encompassing sense that includes considerations such as the "good life" in a societal, i.e. ethico-political sense. (Cf in this connection Belling 1992: 41-42, for a discussion of the manifestation in the film, Alien — at the level of advanced cinematic technology — of the regression to the realm of the presymbolic or prelinguistic.) From the perspective opened up by Mulvey's distinction, then, movies like Sliver and Basic Instinct testify to the "spectaclization" (to use a term coined by Dana Polan; cf Polan 1986) of social reality in contemporary cultural artifacts, notably cinema. This means further that films (the case in point being Sliver) that embody or reflect societal practices such as various modes of (technological) surveillance, also put the viewing audience in the position of being the subject of surveillance (the extra-filmic counterpart of Zeke in Sliver) and, simultaneously, its object (represented by all the video-images of people on the multiple screens in Zeke's control room). Today, to be — most people would agree — is to be televised. We are thus, in Mulvey's terms, participants in the shift from narrative to spectacle, from reason (signified by narrative coherence) to the id and the "primary process" (signified by fragmented, discontinuous images; cf Silverman 1983:54-86). In a nutshell, contemporary society is becoming more irrational, a process proportional to the increasing technologization of society. It is but one step further to the issue of technologies of power that operate on us, on our bodies. Enter Michel Foucault. Judging by the way Zeke looks at and addresses the hidden camera while he is having sex with these girls, his sexual behaviour is decisively mediated by the audiovisual recording device. Incidentally, one would think that the availability of these video-tapes would have enabled Zeke to identify Naomi Singer's murderer — after all, she was thrown over the balcony of her apartment, which is under constant surveillance. Incongruously, however, it is Carly who discovers the crucial video-tape and zooms in on the face of the culprit, Jack Lansford, who has by then also expired. It would not be in the interest of the — indispensable — suspense that has to be engendered on the part of the audience by a film of this kind, of course, to reveal too early who the real murderer is. Which explains why, until near the end, some "clues" seem to suggest that it is Jack, while others point to Zeke. Interestingly, Zeke's "failure" to inspect the tell-tale video is incongruous in terms of the "narrative logic" of classical-realist Hollywood cinema, ostensibly still exemplified by Sliver. It is perfectly compatible, however, with the "logic" of what Laura Mulvey (Sarup 1993:175) claims to be the structuring principle of mass-market cinema, viz. spectacle, specifically of women's sexual images. In Sliver the spectacle includes the images of a man, copulatively juxtaposed or conjoined with those of various women in different configurations. Perhaps it would be more accurate to talk of the technological images of a man here, given the fact that Zeke appears as the male sexual body-machine in perfect functioning order in relation to the sexual satisfaction it dispenses. It therefore makes sense that, just before Carly points the remote control at the film camera (i.e. at the cinema audience) to switch it off, she tells Zeke (and by implication the audience) contemptuously to "get a life." (This marks one of the few — and the most radical one — of the film's critical moments with regard to our culture of electronically [re-]produced images.) And indeed, his character merges almost seamlessly with the technological world of machine-produced images, the hyperreal "spectacle" which is increasingly (as Mulvey indicates) becoming a dominant feature of masscirculation postmodernist cinema. Another telling instance of film as spectacle is Basic Instinct, where the exigencies of narrative logic are subordinated to those of spectacle to an even Contrary to appearances, Foucault's main aim —- judging by a self-characterisation from the early 80's (Rabinow 1984:7) — has not been to examine "phenomena of power" as such, but rather to investigate the ways in which human beings are simultaneously made into subjects as well as objects in our culture. Our discussion of Sliver has already demonstrated an instance of this process, which will become even clearer in light of (especially) Foucault's (later) work. Briefly, following his own schema, Foucault's "alternative histories" focus on modes of objectification of human subjects that may be termed, firstly, "dividing practices"; secondly, "scientific classification"; and thirdly, "subjectification" (Rabinow 1984:7-11). 149 "Dividing practices" identified by Foucault include the isolation and confinement of various groups such as the insane and the poor in Paris in the 17th century; the practices of clinical medicine in relation to the taxology of diseases in early 19th-century France; the effects of exclusion that accompanied the entry of modern psychiatry into hospitals, clinics and prisons in the course of the 19th and 20th centuries; and the "medicalization, stigmatization, and normalization of sexual deviance" in modern European society. These "dividing practices" are essentially processes of objectification by which divisions are established either within subjects themselves or between subjects and "others." Concomitantly, a personal as well as a social identity is constructed for the subjects involved. This occurs through the manipulative combination of a mediating (pseudo-) science and practices of exclusion in a social and (usually also) a spatial sense. Needless to say, such a combination allows for high levels of social control. Although "scientific classification" is related to practices of division, it operates independently, emerging from "the modes of inquiry which try to give themselves the status of sciences" (quoted in Rabinow 1984:8) — such as linguistic disciplines that objectivize the speaking subject; economic disciplines that objectivize the labouring, productive subject; and the biological disciplines that objectivize life in all its variegation. Compared to the first mode of objectification, the relation between these scientific classifications and strategies of domination and control is more indirect and oblique. In the case of the increasing tendency (in the course of the 19th century) to treat the human body as a thing-object in the context of the clinic, for example the manner in which manipulation and control are engendered, is less direct than, albeit parallel to the dividing practices enacted within the confines of the clinic in social, spatial and temporal terms. The third mode of objectification described by Foucault is not only his most original insight regarding the emergence of the modern subject — it is also most pertinent to the present investigation. Foucault (quoted in Rabinow 1984:11) characterizes it as the "way a human being turns him- or herself into a subject", and Rabinow simply calls it "subjectification." As pointed out by the latter, this process differs in important ways from the other two, both of which apply largely to and further the construction of passive, receptive and constrained subjects. "Subjectification," by way of contrast, marks "those processes of self-formation in which the person is active . . . those techniques through which the person initiates an active self-formulation (Rabinow 1984:11). The "complicated genealogy" of these activities comprises, in Foucault's words (quoted in Rabinow 1984:11) various ". . . operations on [people's] own bodies, on their own souls, on their own thoughts, on their own conduct." Add to this that such operations typically go hand in hand with a growth in self-understanding, "mediated by an external authority figure, be he [or she; B.O.] confessor or psychoanalyst" 150 (Rabinow 1984:11), then it is clear that only a small step separates such conventional, legitimate mediating figures and the hidden, but all-observing figure represented by Zeke in Sliver. Recall how drastically self-regulation (or literally: self-control) is set into operation on the part of the child-molesting stepfather by one phone-call from Zeke: his actions as well as his very intentions are subjected to self-regulation. (He is shown telling the girl apologetically that, before, he could not control himself and assuring her that it will never happen again.) In the light of this fictional situation one could go further and show that the mediating authority figure need not be present in relation to the subject in question. All that is required is an implied presence. But before we pursue this question further (viz. of the absent authority figure that mediates our actions as [post-] modern subjects), we have to examine the specific form of "subjectification" that applies to Sliver more closely. In fact, it was introduced at the beginning of this paper, in the image of the panopticon — an architectural model of optimally efficient incarceration based on the maximum visibility of its inmates to the supervising prison officials. How does this panoptical ideal relate to the mode of subjectification or self-formation pertinent to the fictional world of Sliver (but also, I would argue, to contemporary urban social reality — our world — with its increasing subjection to surveillance in various forms)? Here I must quote Foucault at length from what has been described as his masterpiece, Discipline and punish (in Rabinow 1984: 189-193). It comes from a section on one of the "instruments" of disciplinary power, viz. "hierarchical observation": The exercise of discipline presupposes a mechanism that coerces by observation; an apparatus in which the techniques that make it possible to see induce effects of power and in which, conversely, the means of coercion make those on whom they are applied clearly visible. Slowly, in the course of the classical age [from approximately the middle of the 17th century until the French revolution in 1789; B.O.], we see the construction of those 'observatories' of human multiplicity . . . Side by side with the major technology of the telescope, the lens, and the light beam, which were an integral part of the new physics and cosmology, there were the minor techniques of multiple and intersecting observations, of eyes that must see without being seen; using techniques of subjection and methods of exploitation, an obscure art of light and the visible was secretly preparing a new knowledge of man. It sounds familiar, doesn't it? It gets even more so — the following passage (p190) sounds as if it formed the basis of the imagined surveillance-wired high-rise block in Sliver: 151 A whole problematic then develops: that of an architecture that is no longer built simply to be seen (as with the ostentation of palaces), or to observe the external space (cf. the geometry of fortresses), but to permit an internal, articulated and detailed control — to render visible those who are inside it; in more general terms, an architecture that would operate to transform individuals: to act on those it shelters, to provide a hold on their conduct, to carry the effects of power right to them, to make it possible to know them, to alter them. To be sure, the era that Foucault is talking about here, still lacked the sophisticated electronic technology that forms an integrated high-tech system together with instances of contemporary architecture, exemplified by apartment block no 113 in Sliver. Moreover, his descriptive analysis pertains in the first place to the architectural design of buildings like prisons, hospitals and schools. No wonder it is Foucault's considered judgement that we live in a "carceral" society! And if the imagined high-tech extension and "improvement" (if one could call it that) of surveillance capacities encountered in Sliver seem incompatible with the social area of Foucault's focus, don't be too sure. A number of thinkers have remarked on the extensive (if not excessive) "administration" and mediasaturation of contemporary society — something that may seem innocuous, but in fact harbours vast potential for societal control and ideological manipulation, as John Thompson (1990) has demonstrated at length with regard to the pervasiveness of the electronic media in our lives. Sliver is the imaginative application of present technological capacities to what is ostensibly harmless voyeuristic fun on the part of a certain character, but with disturbing possibilities, as we have already seen. Hence the "carceral" character of our society may manifest itself in our home as well, whether it is an apartment or a house. Besides, although the buildings may change, the goal of societal discipline remains the same, as the following excerpt from Discipline and punish shows. (Rabinow 1984: 191-192): The perfect disciplinary apparatus would make it possible for a single gaze to see everything constantly. A central point would be both the source of light illuminating everything and a locus of convergence for everything that must be known: a perfect eye that nothing would escape and a centre toward which all gazes would be turned. This is what Ledoux had imagined when he built Arc-et-Senans; all the buildings were to be arranged in a circle, opening on the inside, at the centre of which a high construction was to house the administrative functions of management, the policing functions of surveillance, the economic functions of control and checking, the religious functions of encouraging obedience and work; from here all 152 orders would come, all activities would be recorded, all offences perceived and judged; and this would be done immediately with no other aid than an exact geometry. Forget for a moment that Foucault is describing the multi-faceted disciplinary function of the "ideal" (note the scare-quotes!) prison here — which, incidentally, has been imagined many times, in increasingly frightening detail. One of its most recent imaginary instances is the subterranean high-tech prison in the science fiction-film, Fortress, where everything (including the prisoners' dreams) is electronically monitored and therefore controlled (largely by the prisoners themselves, to avoid punishment). The point is that, if Foucault is right, we don't literally have to be in a prison to be the object of the disciplinary gaze that is mediated by surveillance systems (and by which our own self-disciplining subjectivity is mediated). We don't even have to imagine ourselves in Zeke's sliver-apartments under the invisible but ubiquitous gaze of his recording videocameras, or as being one of the totally monitored inmates of Fortress's underground prison. If the perspicacious Gaul is right, we already live in a prison, metaphorically speaking. This means that what is implicated here is, as he himself described the subject of his work in Discipline and punish (Foucault 1979:30): "the soul, prison of the body." (Is that why many of Francis Bacon's subjects were painted with cage-like structures around them, "framing" them? And is that the ultimate implication of Heidegger's contention that our lives are inescapably subject to the essence of technology, i.e. to the Gestell or Enframing?) If this sounds far-fetched, let us remind ourselves of the ubiquity of surveillance in our own lives — in shops, in banks, on the street, increasingly wherever we go in public. Sliver shows just how easily it could invade our private lives as well. Consider how the implied omni-presence of speed-trap cameras in streets, on freeways and national roads modifies our behaviour. (Even the pseudo-gatsometer lines painted on road surfaces evoke the reflex behaviour of slowing down on our part!) We have internalized the possible presence of this surveillance equipment on the road to such an extent that we monitor and control — i.e. we "police" — our own behaviour most of the time. Just how strong the effect of this, what one may call the "disciplinary unconscious", on us really is, is demonstrated by the fact that if or when we get caught, we seldom take out our frustration or resentment on the traffic officer who redundantly informs us about the details — we take it out on ourselves by means of an interplay of recriminations, selfreproaches, rationalizations and justifications or (ineffectual) excuses. In our era with its ideal of efficient bureaucratic administration, the religious basis of guilt has largely been replaced by a secular, disciplinary one. It is one of 153 154 Foucault's merits that he has articulated the anatomy of this disciplinary apparatus which, in its most efficient form, operates from within ourselves. To be sure, as Sarup (1993:68) has remarked, there are parallels between the social panopticism uncovered by Foucault and the all-seeing Christian God, as well as Freud's notion of the superego "as the internal monitor of unconscious wishes", but the Frenchman's original contribution enables us to see how this panopticism manifests itself in our daily lives, even when we are not always conscious of it. All individuals in the modern state, i.e. under advanced capitalism, are monitored by means of sophisticated electronic equipment, from cameras to computers. None of us doubt that, do we? But we also have to agree with Kearney (1988:330) who, referring to Deleuze's characterization of postmodern cinema, draws our attention to the "growing sense of unease about the invasion of human privacy and interiority by a communications system which reprocesses human experience in the form of electronically reproducible images . . ." authoritative if entertaining fashion, what is normal or abnormal, natural or unnatural, excessive or prudish about sex? In other words, don't they establish a kind of "normativity" for sexual behaviour, i.e. a set of norms that function in what Foucault calls a "normalizing" manner? And is this not tied up with the "disciplinary gaze" — a notion explored earlier with reference to Sliver? I believe that this is indeed the case, and that it can be demonstrated — which is what I would like to do in the concluding part of this paper. Everything considered, then, how remote is your — our — control? Is it restricted to the kind of behaviour alluded to above? But how wide are the parameters of this behaviour? And what is its source? Taking our cue from the behavioural spectrum that unfolds on Zeke's multiple screens, it is very wide indeed. From a Foucaldian perspective, a certain kind of behaviour is particularly pertinent, though. Remember the molesting stepfather, and the rapid modification of his behaviour on discovering about its surveillance? This focuses sharply on sexual behaviour, or in Foucault's terms "sexuality" — the theme of his investigations at the time of his (untimely) death in 1984. As in the case of his work on practices of incarceration, his interest in sexuality also concentrates on its imbrications with power. So, for instance, he argues in the first volume of The history of sexuality that, contrary to what the "repressive hypothesis" claims — viz. that in the bourgeois era human sexuality has been, and still is, largely subject to repression — sexuality has been "produced" by a variety of discourses on sexuality since the 18th century. Sarup (1993:72; cf. also Foucault in Rabinow 1984: 292-300) summarizes the book's Nietzschean argument neatly as follows: ". . . sexuality is not a natural reality but the product of a system of discourses and practices which form part of the intensifying surveillance and control of the individual." And for those among us who believe that we have long since shaken off the shackles of the Victorian era, his next sentence may come as a surprise: "Foucault suggests that liberation is a form of servitude, since our apparently 'natural' sexuality is in fact a product of power." This must surely sound like Greek to all those avid readers of popular articles on sexual customs or habits, aversions, perversions and pleasures that appear in virtually every glossy magazine from Fair Lady and Femina to Cosmopolitan and Style. Don't these articles tell us, in fairly Before focusing on these popular magazine articles, however, I must point out that, as an observant critic has reminded me, one should not overlook the complexity of Foucault's position here. While it is certainly the case that his work — from Madness and civilization through The birth of the clinic and Discipline and punish to The history of sexuality — testifies to the central role played by observation, the (medical) gaze and hierarchical surveillance in the complex reciprocal relations between the functioning of (institutional) power and the development and constitution of specific domains of knowledge, what emerges, crucially, is that power in the modern era consists characteristically in the subjectivization (or internalization) of the rule of visibility. Whether this took the form of an analysis of a "mad" subject's relation to itself and to others, or of criminals' self-image in relation to punitive rationality and the formation of the idea of criminality, his earlier work was in a certain sense preparatory to Foucault's more pertinent focus, in his later project on the history of sexuality, on what I have referred to as subjectification or self-formation. In the context of this project the construction of modern subjectivity is articulated in terms of a variety of discourses on sexuality, motivated by the desire for self-understanding and by considerations of health (individual as well as collective). What is important at present is precisely the connection between these "proliferating" discourses on sex and the production of individual subjectivities of a certain kind. And lest anyone suspects that the process in question is a straightforward, behaviouristically explicable stimulus/response determination of individual consciousness, let me hasten to point out that — as the sexually abusive stepfather-incident in Sliver demonstrates — the sexual construction of modern subjects, according to Foucault, is a complex, tensional process that is enacted in the oppositional field between individuals' constant awareness of their potential for deviant sexual behaviour and the countervailing force of various normalizing discourses on sex (cf. Foucault in Rabinow 1984: 301-329). In a nutshell: modern power operates psychologically as "normalizing selfcontrol" in the face of and activated by individual tendencies towards sexual aberration. The modern message is that constant vigilance is required regarding this perpetual threat. 155 But the converse is also true (Foucault in Rabinow 1984:327): We have not only witnessed a visible explosion of unorthodox sexualities; but — and this is the important point — a deployment quite different from the law, even if it is locally dependent on procedures of prohibition, has ensured, through a network of interconnecting mechanisms, the proliferation of specific pleasures and the multiplication of disparate sexualities. In short, sexual discursive practice (specifically normalizing discourse) is productive of, even as it feeds on (the threat of) that which has to be controlled, disciplined, viz. wayward, perverse sexuality. In the Preface to the second volume of The history of sexuality Foucault (in Rabinow 1984:333-334) explains the purpose of this research in the following terms: My object was to analyse sexuality as a historically singular form of experience. Taking this historical singularity into account . . . means an effort to treat sexuality as the correlation of a domain of knowledge, a type of normativity and a mode of relation to the self; it means trying to decipher how, in Western societies, a complex experience is constituted from and around certain forms of behaviour: an experience which conjoins a field of study . . . (with its own concepts, theories, diverse disciplines), a collection of rules (which differentiate the permissible from the forbidden, natural from monstrous, normal from pathological, what is decent from what is not, etc.), a mode of relation between the individual and himself [or herself; B.,O.] (which enables him [or her; B.O.] to recognise himself [or herself; B.O.] as a sexual subject amid others). Anyone familiar with the practice of psychiatry or psychology would recognize in this passage the cardinal constituents of the experiential field that these disciplinary practices pertain to. And if the correlative connections between them is not clear, for instance between psychiatry as science and normal behaviour, think of the psychiatrist, Dr Dysart in Peter Shaffer's Equus, reflecting on his therapeutic role in relation to the severely traumatized Alan Strang as that of a high priest who has to cut something out of each child that is placed on the altar before him. He knows that his therapy will "normalize" Alan, but at the cost of what made him a wholly unique individual. The role of the practitioners of the sciences of the psyche is indeed crucial with regard to "normalizing judgement" — they constitute what was earlier referred to as the "mediating authority figures" in the process of subjectification. 156 Sarup (1993:72) characterizes Foucault's work in relation to such normalizing practices like this: Foucault's primary objective is to provide a critique of the way modern societies control and discipline their populations by sanctioning the knowledge claims and practices of the human sciences: medicine, psychiatry, psychology, criminology and sociology. The human sciences have established certain norms and these are reproduced and legitimized through the practices of teachers, social workers, doctors, judges, policemen and administrators. This list can be extended by adding the words: "and the writers of popular magazine articles and advice columns," of the kind found in the popular magazines that I mentioned earlier. I am convinced that the normalizing and disciplinary effect of such articles can easily be underestimated, and that this effect is in fact widespread among the thousands of people that comprise their readership. Still focusing on sexuality, and selecting one of these glossy magazines at random, viz. the December 1993 Cosmopolitan, I detected at first glance no less than three articles on sexual behaviour: "Sexual signals — new bullets in the feminism war" (p16); "When you're hot and he's not" (p188); and "Get ready for great sex" (p200). These articles testify abundantly to Foucault's claim that, far from society labouring under repression, social discourses on sex proliferate. In the first one ("Sexual signals . . .") Philip Norman writes: All of us consciously or not strike the balance between prude and lewd. We know that a careless or flippant attitude towards sex can reduce a beautiful and otherwise blameless human being into a walking cadaver. Notice the "normalizing" rhetoric, disguised as descriptive language that merely "reflects" what is normal — "All of us . ." and "We know . . ." In the second article (p188) Tania Unsworth writes: The women I know agree that a woman's sexual desire ebbs and flows. But men work hard at perpetuating the myth of constant availability . . .'Couldn't you just try?' I think. But no. Demanding sex from a man who 'doesn't feel like it' provokes only outrage. The world is full of women who, out of the goodness of their hearts, from time to time close their eyes and do it for their country, but men are totally unpatriotic in this respect. 157 158 Although it is entertainingly humorous, even this excerpt from the article in question establishes one generalized norm after another, sometimes even conflicting ones. At one point the writer complains — in dead give-away fashion — that : "There don't seem to be any rules for this situation." And indeed, this is what pop-mag articles on sex (among other behavioural areas) seem to be all about: establishing rules (i.e. norms) for behaviour, even if they do not always come across as coherent. a powerful woman; and one that frees us all from the confines of 'normal' sexual behaviour. Kate Saunders, the writer of the third article (p200), confesses (another "normalizing" activity with regard to our sexuality, as Foucault has pointed out) that: Frankly, when I embarked on my first relationship, all this came as a terrible shock to me. For instance, the realization that what goes up must come down. Used sperm (so to speak) has a terrible habit of leaking into your underwear at the least convenient times and making you smell like a fleet of fish trawlers . . . I was disappointed, but I would have died rather than confess it. Being 'good at sex' was the duty of every liberated woman and I didn't want my friends to think I was frigid. [Obviously a deviant condition to be avoided like the plague; B.O.] Besides, there was always the shaming possibility that I was doing something wrong. Despite the effective use of irony to debunk the myths of yesteryear, this much is clear: they were adhered to as if they were gospel truth. The writer then goes on to tell us what the "truth" in fact is, in this way substituting a new set of norms for the discarded ones via a "discourse of truth" about the necessity to face up to a few unavoidable "squelches and grunts" between lovers. It is clear that popular sexual discourse, and correlatively, popular sexuality, is pervasively norm-structured. Sex-advice columns, like Femina's The sexpert's guide, make this even more obvious, indicating the extent of the need for "normalizing judgement" on the part of the letter-writers, and the extent of the (albeit popularized) discursive normalizing arsenal on the part of the columnist (who is usually, in the case of such columns, a qualified sexologist or sex therapist). Just how precariously the modern sexual subject is suspended between normality and "sexual freedom" (or perversity?) is apparent from a fourth article (Cosmopolitan, Sept 1993: 120-122; 176; "The lowdown on libido lost") by Lianne Burton: We — both men and women — do need a sexual revolution [she says]. One that empowers women and frees them to explore their sexuality to its fullest extent; one that frees men to appreciate the powerful sexuality of The double-edged character of normalizing discourses on sex is clearly demonstrated here — so much so that the very thing that these discourses are supposed to contain, viz, chaotic, individualising sexuality (which lies beyond "the confines of 'normal' sexual behaviour") is here discursively promoted or produced. In this way the "abnormal" or aberrant is itself "normalized". Witness the "proliferation of diverse pleasures" that Foucault wrote about. The answer to our question: How remote is your control? therefore seems, after consideration of disciplinary panoptical surveillance à la Sliver, as well as of the normalizing functioning of popular discourses on sexuality, to come as no surprise. It is not at all remote, despite the fact that we customarily locate its source at some level of government or in some institutional hierarchy. Via our "subjectification" into (post-)modern subjects of discourse and action, the source of our control is located within each one of us, from where it exercises its selfdisciplining power. There is nothing less remote than self-control. Like the electronic monitor-cum-terminating device that prisoners are forced to swallow in Stuart Gordon's Fortress, the "disciplinary unconscious" constructed within each one of us, structures our behaviour, our actions, to a greater or lesser extent. We cannot escape it completely. But we can limit its effect by employing something else that is part and parcel of our humanity, namely our critical intellect, which is itself discursively structured and therefore capable of questioning our "disciplinary unconscious." For the sake of the public good, it is our duty to do so, lest we become disciplinary automata. But that is the subject of another investigation. BIBLIOGRAPHY Belling, C. 1992. "Where meaning collapses": Alien and the outlawing the female hero, in: Literator 13, 3: 35-49. Cosmopolitan, September 1993 Cosmopolitan, December 1993 Foucault, M. 1979. Discipline and punish: the birth of the prison. Tr Sheridan, A. New York: Vintage. Heidegger, M. 1977. The age of the world picture, in: The question concerning technology and other essays. Tr Lovitt, W. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 115-154. Kearney, R. 1988. The wake of imagination. London: Hutchinson. of 159 Polan, D.P. 1986. "Above all else to make you see": Cinema and the ideology of spectacle. In: Arac, J. (ed.): Postmodernism and politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota press, 55-69. Rabinow, P. (ed.) 1984. The Foucault reader. New York: Pantheon Books. Sarup, M. 1993. An introductory guide to post-structuralism and postmodernism. Athens: The University of Georgia Press. Silverman, K. 1983. The subject of semiotics. New York: Oxford University Press. Thompson, J. 1990. Ideology and modern culture. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 160 13. PULP FICTION: THE NORMALIZATION OF VIOLENCE Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994) marks a phase in the development of postmodern popular film culture which could be variously described as the aestheticization, the domestication or the normalization of violence. Why call it postmodern at all? one may wonder. If postmodern artifacts are marked by a flagrant disrespect for traditional generic boundaries, as well as by an indifference to “depth” interpretation (Harvey 1990:58-59), these formal attributes appear in Pulp Fiction in a surprising manner - surprising, because the erasure of boundaries is here executed not only at the level of fictional genres, or with regard to the distinction between fiction and reality, but at the very basic, “worldly” level of the everyday, intuitive, customary differentiation between the normal and the abnormal (not necessarily in the pathological sense), the civil and the criminal, or the moral and the immoral. In fact, it could be argued that a certain amorality or moral indifference pervades the film, despite the pseudo-ethical and theological issues raised as easily in conversations between the crime-boss’s two henchmen as the executions they routinely carry out. Assuming that, as we have known since Aristotle, the artwork (and here I would include popular art) does not reflect, “imitate” or re-enact social reality in a passive, mirror-like fashion, but establishes a complex, transformative mimetic relationship with the world instead, an intriguing question raised by Tarantino’s film is nevertheless this: does Pulp Fiction point to or articulate a (postmodern) social condition where these fluid relations between supposedly distinct categories in fact prevail (albeit implicity) or is it a caricature by exaggeration, thus keeping the distinction between the moral and the immoral, the civil/lawful and criminal intact? (Tarantino’s earlier cinematic creation, Reservoir Dogs [1992], as well as two films scripted by him, True Romance [1993] and Natural Born Killers [1994], suggest similar difficulties.) A comparison of Pulp Fiction with a psycho-crime thriller like Silence of the Lambs is instructive in this regard. Nowhere in the latter is the audience ever left in any doubt as to the moral or psychological status of the killers whose paths cross that of FBI-agent Clarisse Starling (Jody Foster). Neither the imprisoned psychopath-cannibal Dr Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins), nor the human skincollecting psychopath-murderer, “Buffalo Bill”, whom she traces with Lecter’s help gives the viewer any reason to doubt their pathological condition as being precisely that - with the corollary that the distinction between the abnormal and the normal, the civil/lawful and the criminal is maintained, at least normatively speaking. This is not to deny that, in “real life” there is sometimes only a thin red line that separates these opposites, and that it is not impossible that a “healthy” psyche may flip over into a pathological condition of some kind because of a 161 severely damaging or traumatic experience. In other words, to read these normative distinctions off a film like Silence of the Lambs should not lull us into thinking that these are hard-and-fast opposites that will never merge. Gray areas do exist, and part of the burden borne by a philosophical disposition is to do justice to the complexities of the human condition, and to resist the temptation of reactionary oversimplification. Pulp Fiction, on the other hand, seems to be predicated on the belief that the “gray areas” extend over the social world in its entirety. While it does not address the question of the criminally pathological (either directly or, with the possible exception of a sodomitic rape, indirectly), the normative barriers between the civil/ lawful and the criminal as well as (by implication) between the moral and the immoral, disappear in the course of its intertwining narratives. Moreover, as intimated earlier, this marks an extension of the general tendency on the part of postmodernist cultural artifacts to erase or level distinctions such as those between fact and fiction, or between different fictional genres. It may be illuminating, at this point, to quote David Lyon (1994:16) on some relevant features of postmodernity: “Signs lose contact with things signified; the late 20th century is witness to unprecedented destruction of meaning. The quest for some division between the moral and immoral, the real and the unreal, is futile”. (This is, in part, a comment on the work of Baudrillard, the theorist of “hyperreality”. BO.) Again (p 58): “Certainly it is hard to find clear cultural boundary markers today. The rise of consumerism and of TV has accelerated the ‘implosion’ of reality, obscuring previously cherished distinctions between highbrow and lowbrow, between the culture of the elite and the culture of the masses........ In the world of fiction, ‘contemporary’ novels and science fiction are harder to tell apart. No more using techniques to help us grasp and even conquer complexity, writers now lead us deeper into their confusion about who they are and how to respond to strange and split worlds of surfaces and signifiers.” Keeping Lyon’s characterization of postmodernity in mind, we are in a better position to take a closer look at Pulp Fiction, for instance at the way in which it knits comedy and (gangster-) thriller-type movies together almost seamlessly. Hilarious scenes flow, without warning, into scene-sequences accompanied by heightening tension, culminating in excessive, sometimes bloody, violence; or else the funny scenes simply flip over into scenes of violent killing, followed almost immediately again by incongruously comical events or dialogue. The effect of this unpredictable concatenation of funny scenes and stomachturning violence borders on the psychology of the grotesque, with its typical ambivalence regarding the comical and the horrific, that is its refusal to resolve 162 163 it either way (cf. chapter 7 of this book). “Borders on”, because I think it may be more accurately described in terms of the psychology of the bizarre, which similarly juxtaposes strictly irreconcilable experiences without synthesis, but is less specific than the experience of the grotesque with regard to the comical and the horrific. In other words, instead of encountering the horrific in tensile relation to something funny, the latter could be paired with something violent, threatening or disgusting - for example, in Pulp Fiction, the scene-sequence where Jules (Samuel L Jackson) and Vince (John Travolta) are driving away from a bloody execution scene, discussing the possibility that divine intervention saved them from an unexpected point-blank gun attack (itself an incongruous speculation), and Vince, carelessly pointing his pistol at their associate, Marvin, on the back seat, accidentally blows the latter’s head off, literally, with the result that both of the gangsters in the front seats are nauseatingly showered with blood and brains. The strangely comical conversation that follows, alternating between reproaches and excuses, counter-reproaches and alarm - not concerning the fate of the dead man, but regarding the conspicuously bloody state of the car - heightens the experience of the bizarre. It is significant, however, that there are structural parallels between the phenomenon of the grotesque and that of the bizarre, specifically in so far as they may be detected in cultural artifacts that exhibit postmodernist features such as blurring genre-distinctions. As I have argued about the phenomenon of the grotesque in David Lynch’s filmwork (chapter 7), it seems as if it (the grotesque, but also the closely related bizarre) could usefully be regarded as a metaphor for the often disconcerting and incongruous juxtapositions encountered in postmodern culture. where the audience has learnt to anticipate more blood and gore - “I gotta go pee!” What is this, Quentin? you feel like shouting. Comedy or what? The bizarre linkage of scenes which one has been accustomed, by virtue of customary genre-separation, not to associate with one another, functions as a symptom of such genre-disintegration (recall David Lyon’s characterization of postmodernity, quoted earlier), but it is not the only symptom of its kind. As in the case of the grotesque, the bizarre does not only manifest itself in the incongruous relations between scenes and scene-sequences. It appears, more powerfully, in specific images and image-configurations. The sight-and-sound image of cold-blooded killers earnestly discussing the moral status of giving the boss’s wife a foot-massage (as opposed to sleeping with her) in relation to commensurate retribution, or of Jules, seconds before pulling the trigger, quoting at length from the biblical book of Ezekiel to his helpless victims, presents such a powerful, unified image configuration of what is ultimately irreducibly bizarre, that the audience is left suspended between laughter and nausea. Imagine “Honey-bunny” (Amanda Plummer), legs apart, on top of a fast-food restaurant table, wildly pointing her revolver in various directions in the charged atmosphere of a hold-up where Jules has just turned the tables (so to speak) on her boyfriendpartner (Tim Roth), suddenly exclaiming - in the thick of a situation of the kind No wonder Pulp Fiction won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1994, ahead of what seemed like the obvious choice - Kieslowski’s Red, and has raked in rave reviews all the way. Tarantino, himself a cinematographer-prodigy spawned by Baudrillard’s image-universe or hyperreality - since childhood he has, by his own testimony, immersed himself in the world of movies - has managed, even better than in Reservoir Dogs, to capture the prevailing collective “postmodern” sensibility in Pulp Fiction. No probing after psychological motives for characters’ actions; only the “surface”-actions and the accompanying cliché-like phrases matter. No coherent narrative; instead, three spectacular, criss-crossing, loosely (but sometimes fatally) connecting and interweaving mini-narratives. Characters that do not fit into the typological mold of gangsters or robbers. In short, a cinematic microcosm of a fluid, “pulpy” society in which no high culture and low culture can properly be said to exist - at least separately - any more, but where everything is mixed together in a postmodern “soup” of sorts. Moreover, in Pulp Fiction the state of affairs described above is presented in the context of a global culture, with the suggestion that things are pretty much the same all over the world. (The recent book by Hardt and Negri, Empire, provides a sustained, and frightening, confirmation of this state of affairs in terms of global power and sovereignty.) Vince Vega, “our man in Amsterdam”, has just returned from Europe where he represented Mr Wallace’s interests. He nonchalantly tells the ostensibly awed Jules what linguistic forms the ubiquitous Macdonalds food products assume in European countries: “Le Big Mac” for “Big Mac”, and “Royale” instead of “Quarterpounder”. Add to this the belief, propounded by Vince in his attempt to change Jules’s mind about giving up his life as a gangster (in view of the conviction, on the part of the latter, that their lives were saved by “divine intervention”), that what they do for a living amounts to respectable employment, and the implication is clear: not only is crime, like Macdonalds, an integral part of the global economy, but being a criminal is simply holding down a job like any other. If he opts out, Vince tells Jules, he would be nothing more than “a bum” - without a job, without an income. The same “normalizing” implication concerning criminality may be read off the conversation between “Honey-bunny” and “Pumpkin” in the opening scene of the film. Seated at a restaurant table, they matter-of-factly discuss the pros and cons of various kinds of robbery - robbing a bank as opposed to holding up customers and staff at a restaurant, for instance. This is, after all, just another way of making a living in what appears to be a curiously amoral universe. Or so Tarantino’s films would have us believe. 164 In an interview that formed part of a documentary programme broadcast on BBC1 TV, Wales, 25 October 1994, on this most recently discovered Hollywood director-prodigy, Tarantino pointed out that part of his aim in Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction was to show that criminals are just ordinary people in many respects, exchanging views with one another and conducting conversations similar to those between other people. This may be the case, but the effect of his films, where such conversations between gangsters are knitted together with those deeds that constitute the doers as criminals and murderers, goes much further than one may think on the basis of a casual remark about the similarity between gangsters and “ordinary” people. It concerns the concomitant implication, as well as its tenability, that the “ ordinariness” of criminals should prevent us from judging them too harshly in ethical terms, and that a “live and let live” ethos should really be applied to their chosen “lifestyle” in the spirit of a postmodernist attitude of tolerance towards one and all in a pluralistic postmodern culture. Needless to say, the “anything goes” mentality behind all of this can (and should) be challenged - not because cultural pluralism is unacceptable, but because its very possibility would be threatened by tolerating a way of living (unchecked murdering, extortion, etc) that undermines all others. To put it another way, the limits and vulnerability of cultural pluralism as the “normal” state of affairs come into view when violently destructive modes of behaviour are introduced into the pluralistic structure and “normalized”: like a virus in a computer programme, it threatens to gobble up everything around it. This is not to deny that, descriptively speaking, criminal and violent forms of behaviour co-exist (and always have, to a greater or lesser extent) with other forms in society. In this sense, it is certainly true that exploits like those of Vince and Jules do comprise some of the variegated components of postmodern culture. But to lend ethical approval to these violent components would be to legitimize them, ie to move uncritically from the descriptive to the normative, conflating them in the process. I realize that the language of normativity brings one face to face with the thorny issue of the possibility of normative criteria for judgment in a pluralistic context - an issue I do not wish to confront at length in the present essay. Here I am more interested in the question of the implications and possible effects of Pulp Fiction’s “normalization” of violence regarding the actual and potential behaviour of people in contemporary “postmodern” society. After all, one of the most pervasive features of this society, over and above its pluralism of cultural forms, is the presence of the media, including cinema. John Thompson goes as far as characterizing our culture as “mediated” (1990), meaning by this nothing less than the claim that the actions of individuals and groups of people are in an ascertainable sense the result of specific receptions or interpretations of media information. Our actions, in other words, are 165 mediated. If this is indeed the case, then Pulp Fiction is no exception. It is bound to affect the behaviour of social actors in specific ways, by knitting together the “ordinary” and the violent in a seamless manner, with the concomitant suggestion (however tacit) that, if social actors (criminals) who act violently as a matter of course also behave in ordinary ways for the rest of the time, it may be okay for “ordinary” people to indulge in a bit of murder and mayhem from time to time. I believe that there is good reason to say this, because I agree with Dana Polan (1986) about the effect of what he calls the “ideology of spectacle” which is intimately bound up with cinema, and which leaves the world constructed by the cinema-spectacle “as it is.” In other words, with the exception of a critical cinema that exploits the nature of the medium in such a way as to subvert its ideological tendency to “spectaclize” (cf. chapter 6 of this book), film usually operates in such a way as to legitimize the state of affairs that it depicts or (more accurately) constructs. But even if a less radical stance than Polan’s - which construes the ideological effect of cinema as coinciding with the very form of the medium - is adopted, the “ideological” capacity of the media generally, and of a film like Pulp Fiction especially, to affect social behaviour in far-reaching ways, should not be underestimated. Such, at any rate, is the view of John Thompson (1990:19-20): It is only with the development of mass communication that ideological phenomena could become mass phenomena, that is, phenomena capable of affecting large numbers of individuals in diverse and segregated settings. If mass communication has become a major medium for the operation of ideology in modern societies, it is because it has become a major medium for the production and transmission of symbolic forms, and because the symbolic forms thereby produced are capable of circulating on an unprecedented scale, reaching millions of individuals who may share little in common other than their capacity to receive mass-mediated messages. I should add that Thompson’s critical conception of ideology (1990:7), by which he understands “... the ways in which meaning serves, in particular circumstances, to establish and sustain relations of power which are systematically asymmetrical .... broadly speaking, .... meaning in the service of power,” is sufficiently wide to accommodate the meaning-effects of film, and particularly of a film like Pulp Fiction, because of the ease with which its narrative lends itself to being integrated with the lives of the people who comprise its audiences. This may sound like the proverbial “long shot”, especially when one keeps in mind that the relations of domination that Thompson mentions refers, most obviously, to political power-relations such as those sustained by governments, as well as (in 166 a broader sense of “political power”) those relations established and reinforced, through agencies like advertising, by powerful corporations. The latter include a broad range of corporations, ranging from car and electronics manufacturers to mass communication conglomerates (including film companies) themselves. In each case, what Thompson calls “symbolic forms” - ie newspaper or magazine reports, advertisements on radio or television, and so on - mediate on a mass scale to establish and maintain asymmetrical power-relations of influence, dependence or control. The question of whether this applies to film as well, and if so, how it applies to Pulp Fiction, is difficult to answer, because it is not clear what asymmetrical power-relations are at stake in or via the movie, and what entity, group or agent(s) would benefit from such domination. Criminals as a class or group, as well as film corporations are possible candidates for ideological beneficiary-status, but because this question opens up the whole complex and controversy-fraught terrain of ideology - which merits a separate inquiry in relation to cinema - I shall not pursue it further at present, but rather return to the issue of the film’s social effects. While I am not in a position to comment on specific, large-scale responses on the part of audiences to Pulp Fiction - having seen the movie three times in theatres of varying sizes in Britain and South Africa, I only have the directly observed behaviour of those audiences, as well as several conversations about it to go by - I believe that some of Thompson’s insights articulated in the context of “a social theory of mass communication” (1990:225-248) are helpful in answering the question concerning the possible social effects of the film's “normalization” of violence. Thompson (p.225) argues that: .... the deployment of different media of mass communication should not be seen as a mere supplement to pre-existing social relations, as the introduction of neutral channels which diffuse symbolic goods within society but leave social relations unchanged. On the contrary, the deployment of technical media has a fundamental impact on the ways in which people act and interact with one another. This is not to say that the technical medium determines social organization in some simple, monocausal way; the deployment of technical media is always situated within a broader social and institutional context which limits the available options. But new technical media make possible new forms of social interaction, modify or undermine old forms of interaction, create new foci and new venues for action and interaction, and thereby serve to restructure existing social relations and the institutions and organisations of which they are part. 167 This “interactional impact of technical media” (as he calls it; p.226) has four dimensions, namely: (1) their facilitation of interaction across time and space; (2) their effect on ways in which individuals act for distant others; (3) their effect on ways of acting in response to distant others; (4) their effect on the action and interaction of individuals in the context and process of the reception of mediated messages. Not all of these strike one as being equally relevant for assessing Pulp Fiction’s effect on or reception by its audiences. The first one, for instance, applies in an obvious sense to telephone conversations, phone-in radio and television programmes and, in the mode of what Thompson calls “mediated quasi-interaction”, to the predominantly one-way “communication” between, e.g. TV personalities and viewers - “quasi”-interaction because the responses on the part of the latter are strictly limited. The fact that he includes film stars among the figures with whom audiences can enter into “quasi-interaction” alerts one to the possibility that these film stars (John Travolta, for instance) may be interviewed on television about a specific role (that of Vince in Pulp Fiction, for example), which would set the scene for audience and film star “quasi-interaction” by way of extending their earlier responses to the movie - in the case of those no doubt considerable numbers among such an audience who would have seen it, given its notoriety, as a result of it having been marketed well ahead of its release. And if this is the case, nothing prevents the same kind of “quasi-interaction” from occurring between audiences and film stars who portray fictional characters such as Vince and Jules in Pulp Fiction. It should be apparent that such behaviour is “mediated” in the sense of being the result of a certain reception of films or television programmes. The other three dimensions of interactional media-impact mentioned earlier may help clarify this; in fact, they readily link with the kind of examples referred to. Acting for distant others - i.e. acting in a way “regarded as worthy of transmission via television” (1990:231) describes, first and foremost, actions performed by individuals or groups who act in that specific way with the purpose or in the hope of being televised and thus reaching a vast audience, removed from them in space. Such actions include hijackings, mass demonstrations or meetings arranged with the purpose of gaining maximum exposure via television. Indirectly, however, it also draws attention to an ethos, pervasive in the contemporary world, that may be articulated as an updated version of Berkeley’s “to be is to be perceived”, namely: “to be is to be televised”, or, in somewhat more upmarket terms: “to be is to filmed.” Is it far-fetched to imagine that this ethos has not only given rise to the third of Thompson’s dimensions, viz. “acting in response to distant others”, but to yet another social category, viz. “acting like or in the same manner as distant others”? Perhaps not, if one considers the frequency with which TV, rock and 168 169 film stars (e.g. in the role of soap opera-, sitcom- or film-characters) are invoked as role models by thousands of “wannabees” who copy their dress, hair styles and mannerisms. cation” is foregrounded by Hollis Alpert’s observation (in Ferrell & Salerno 1970:529), that: In a recent article Robert Wright (1995: 48-49) observes: As evolutionary psychiatrist Randolph Nesse has noted, television can also distort our self-perception. Being a socially competitive species, we naturally compare ourselves with people we see, which meant, in the ancestral environment, measuring ourselves against fellow villagers and usually finding at least one facet of life where we excel. But now we compare our lives with ‘the fantasy lives we see on television’..... ‘Our own wives and husbands, fathers and mothers, sons and daughters can seem profoundly inadequate by comparison. So we are dissatisfied with them and even more dissatisfied with ourselves.’ (And, apparently, with our standard of living. During the 1950s, various American cities saw theft rates jump in the particular years that broadcast television was introduced.) This is related to social behaviour associated with such “cult films” (in the US, at least) as The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Harold and Maude, where audiences mimic the actions of the actors on screen throughout the running of the film. It is not difficult to imagine such mimicry being supplemented by “copycat” behaviour outside the movie theatre, in this way bridging the gap between fiction and social reality in exemplary postmodern fashion. That such copycat-behaviour is not necessarily innocuous is evident from various press reports, following the release of Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers (scripted by Tarantino), about “copycat” murders linked to the film in the US. (cf. chapter 14 of this book, as well as Olivier 2000, where I pursue the issue of mediated behaviour further in light of a psychoanalytical model derived from Freud's early theory of the mind.) In an era when the boundaries between fact and fantasy, reality and fiction are increasingly being blurred, it is easy for recipients of media images to model their actions on “fictional” behaviour that is often perceived as real, so much so that actors are sometimes identified with the fictional characters they portray. As long ago as 1967, when Mike Nichols’s The Graduate was released with Dustin Hoffman in the role of the principal character, a critic noticed the tendency on the part of the public to identify an actor with the character in a movie (Macklin in Ferrell & Salerno 1970:503) - a portent of more postmodern “erasures of distinctions” to come. Another, perhaps even more pertinent sense of “identifi- Letters from youthful admirers of the movie have been pouring in on Dustin Hoffman, the talented thirty-year-old actor who plays the unprepossessing twenty-one-year-old Benjamin Braddock. A strong theme of identification with Benjamin’s particular parental and societal hang-ups runs through these letters, as it also does in the letters to Mike Nichols, the director...... But while, in the case of these responses to The Graduate, it was clear that there were strong moral reasons for young people’s identification with Benjamin - their perception of the same hollowness, hypocrisy and unadulterated materialism that surrounds him, in their own world, too - one can hardly say the same thing of the characters in Pulp Fiction, nor, for that matter, in the other films directed or scripted by Tarantino. As pointed out earlier regarding Pulp Fiction, a curious indifference to morality pervades these movies, despite the concerns expressed by Vince and Jules about the moral justifiability of giving the boss’s wife a footmassage. At best this is pseudo-morality, because what counts in the end is what one can do with impunity, as Butch’s double-crossing of crime-boss Wallace also illustrates when he reneges on the agreement to lose the boxing match, absconding with the pay-off money into the bargain - his pride intact. Such pervasive moral indifference characteristic of a 90s film judged “good” enough to be crowned at Cannes, does not mean that the kind of identification with a character, apparent on the part of young people in the late 60s in the context of The Graduate’s reception, does not occur here, minus the moral dimension, however. Significantly Richard Corliss (1993:73), commenting on the two central characters in Tony Scott’s film, True Romance (scripted by Tarantino), observes that: “Clarence (Slater) and Alabama (Arquette) may be amoral, but they’re role models in this rowdy movie about two crazy kids running drugs to L.A.” Again: “Their moral code is hardly more righteous than that of their pursuers, but they’re on their way, down a white-brick road toward the end of the rainbow.” The pertinence of audiences responding to these films by way of identifying with characters, or by viewing them as role models, seems to me to be spread across more than one of Thompson’s “dimensions” for understanding the interactional impact of the media: acting “for”, as well as “in response to” distant others, to which we may add the category suggested earlier, viz. acting “like” distant others (who may, I would like to point out, not always be experienced as being all that “distant” in the context of the shrinking world of modern communications systems and media; cf. Harvey 1990: 240-259). The following passage captures 170 171 the distinctively novel features of social behaviour under the impact of mass media (Thompson 1990:233): specific ways in which these messages are attended to (or ignored) by the individuals who receive them” (p.316); and, With the development of mass communication and especially television, the nature and scope of responsive action is both greatly increased and rendered less determinate. It is greatly increased in the sense that a plurality of individuals may act in response to distant others: messages are now received by audiences which may comprise thousands or millions of individuals, spread across a diverse array of spatial and temporal contexts; and these individuals may act, in one way or another, in response to the messages they receive. Such responsive action is less determinate than that characteristic of telephone conversation in the sense that, in the case of mass communication, responsive action is not constitutive of the interaction itself. That is, the mediated quasi-interaction does not require an ongoing and active response from recipients, and the production and diffusion of mass-mediated messages generally takes place in the absence of immediate feedback....... The recipients of mass-mediated messages are generally able to respond in a variety of ways to the messages they receive, and the constraints which operate on their action derive less from the nature of the mediated quasi-interaction than from the conditions under which the process of reception takes place. ..... we may relate the everyday understanding of media messages to the social-historical characteristics of the contexts of reception, and seek thereby to ascertain whether everyday understanding varies systematically in relation to social-historical characteristics - for example, in relation to the class background, ethnic background, sex or age of the recipients (p.317). It is especially the last sentence in this passage that is illuminatingly relevant regarding my argument that, in the context of a postmodern culture, (where - as Lyon points out - a certain fluidity marks the collapse of former lines of demarcation), the reception of a film like Pulp Fiction could evince the same “normalization of violence” that characterizes the intra-cinematic world of criminals who are “just ordinary people.” This is perhaps more intelligible in light of further observations by Thompson (1990: 315-317), commenting on the everyday appropriation of mass-mediated messages. Among these, the following insights are relevant to my argument: The reception and appropriation of mass-mediated products must be seen as situated practices, that is, as practices which take place in particular social-historical contexts, in particular times and places, in isolation or in the company of others, and so on” (p.315); If we view receptive activities from this perspective [viz. the context of social activities within which they take place; B.O], we can see how misleading it would be to try to infer the consequences of media messages from the messages alone, ...... since such inferences would take no account of the Keeping these remarks in mind, it bears repeating, first of all, that while I have pointed to the importance of the intra-cinematic (diegetic) suspension of barriers and distinctions between civil and criminal behaviour, I have also insisted that this levelling process should be understood within the broader context of postmodern culture with its pervasive destruction of recognizable boundary markers. And it is precisely this postmodern social-cultural context that constitutes the broad “social-historical context of reception” which Thompson suggests as being important for understanding the everyday appropriation of mass-mediated messages. Add to this the hermeneutic insight, on the part of Gadamer (1982:167), among others, that understanding has the structure of a (so-called hermeneutic) circle - i.e. that understanding involves a repeated interplay between parts and whole, and always proceeds from and on the basis of the familiar towards the new, integrating and comparing the latter with the former all the time - then one is struck by the likelihood that, structurally, mutual corroboration and reinforcement of postmodern culture and postmodern artifacts occur when films like Pulp Fiction are appropriated by audiences. If this is indeed the case, such reinforcement will probably not be innocuous. After all, the “structural” equation of violent and everyday, non-violent forms of behaviour is no longer comprehensible (in modernist fashion) as being restricted to an aesthetic sphere, but finds its structural counterpart in postmodern culture. Unfortunately, once this equation has “spilt over” the aesthetic frame, so to speak, “mediating” the behaviour of individuals and groups who appropriate the “messages” of movies, TV programmes and the like, its import is no longer merely structural, but manifests itself concretely in the lives of people. And if the onscreen normalization of violence in Pulp Fiction is anything to go by, its uncritical acceptance ultimately implies an equally uncritical acceptance of and connivance at such normalization in "real" terms, given the character of the relationship between the media and society that emerges from the work of scholars such as Thompson. 172 BIBLIOGRAPHY Alpert, H 1970. “The Graduate” makes out. In: Ferrell, WA and Salerno, NA Strategies in Prose. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Corliss, R 1973. Goons go gun crazy. (Review of True Romance.) Time, September 27, p.73. Gadamer, HG 1982. Truth and method. Tr Barden, G and Cumming, J New York: Crossroad. Hardt, M. & Negri, A. 2001. Empire. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Harvey, D 1990. The condition of postmodernity. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Lyon, D 1994. Postmodernity. Buckingham: Open University Press. Macklin, FA 1970. “....Benjamin will survive....” An interview with Charles Webb, author of The Graduate. In: Ferrell, WA and Salerno, NA Strategies in Prose. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Olivier, B. 2001. Freud and the question of mediated social behaviour. In: Society in transition, 31 (2), pp. 163-174. Polan, D 1986. “Above all else to make you see”: cinema and the ideology of spectacle. In: Arac, J (ed) Postmodernism and politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Thompson, J 1990. Ideology and modern culture. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Wright, R 1995. The evolution of despair. Time, August 28, p.44-50. 173 14. NATURAL BORN KILLERS, VIOLENCE, AND CONTEMPORARY CULTURE One of the most familiar symptoms of the fact that we live in a postmodern culture is the collapse of rigid genre distinctions and characteristics according to which artworks were traditionally classified, such as documentary, detective novel, psychological drama, comedy, and the like. What “characterizes” postmodern texts (instead of “works”) is precisely the absence of any unifying characteristics or principles according to which they may be classified. Small wonder, then, that critics often differ about the specific category that such a text or film belongs to, even if such debates may lack the relevance they once had. In the case of Oliver Stone’s controversial film, Natural Born Killers, matters are further complicated by the fact that it seems to go further than the avant-garde film’s resistance to narrative structure - to such an extent that it sometimes functions like an experimental videotext, with its incessant, rapid succession of images and image-complexes which radically undermine “normal” time-awareness. The film-script was written by Quentin Tarantino, who has attained notoriety in recent years as director of Reservoir Dogs (1992), Pulp Fiction (1994), and most recently Jackie Brown, as well as for scripting True Romance (1993) - all of them films which overflow with violence of various kinds, but mostly reflect the modern world’s obsession with guns. The extraordinary thing about the violent scenes in these movies (especially Pulp Fiction) is their virtually seamless connection or interwovenness with humorous scene-sequences, love-scenes, and so on, with the result that the violence becomes “normalized” in the process (cf. in this regard chapter 13, which focuses on this aspect of Pulp Fiction). In other words, the shock effect which one would expect them to have, largely disappears or is reduced to the level of everydayness. Tarantino’s success with this strategy is measurable by the startling fact that some members of audiences often seem to find the bloodiest scenes screamingly funny, while some are apparently uncertain about how to respond. In Natural Born Killers the excess of violence is also transformed on screen, but by way of Stone’s direction in a manner that differs radically from Tarantino’s mainly realistic approach as director. The technique by means of which Stone reconstructed the events surrounding the assassination of President Kennedy in JFK, namely an alternation between diverse kinds of audiovisual as well as visual material (documentary stills and film-sequences, combined with his own origiThis article first appeared in the South African Journal of Art History, Number 14, 1999. It is reprinted with permission. 174 nally filmed rendition of events) is carried to extremes in Natural Born Killers in terms of the sheer conventional variety, as well as the changing structure of the image-sequences. As a result, the “story” or narrative of mutually infatuated mass murderers Mickey and Mallory is not really a story, given the virtual absence of any narrative structure. It is left to the audience to glue the loose, apparently arbitrary sequence of images and image-flashes together into a narrative of sorts, with more or less the following (meagre) result: Mickey (Woody Harrelson) and Mallory (Juliette Lewis) leave a three-week long trail of blood, starting with the horrific murder of her abusive, incestuous father and conniving mother, and continuing in random fashion through the countryside. A television journalist, Wayne Gayle (Robert Downie, Jr), exploits the opportunity to promote his own career by elevating Mickey and Mallory to superstardom by means of the media. Virtually overnight the two psychopathic killers are transformed into sex symbols with a global cult following, in other words in all those countries which can be reached by means of the international news media (from satellite television to news magazines). The climactic moment in the film is reached when the journalist conducts a “live” television interview with Mickey in prison, and the latter, in response to a question, nonchalantly claims that they have murdered dozens of people because he and Mallory are probably “natural born killers”. From Wayne Gayle’s ecstatic reaction the audience can gather that he regards this statement by Mickey as a jewel in the treasure chest of the history of television journalism. Natural Born Killers leaves one in no doubt that Oliver Stone is, technically speaking, a master filmmaker. It should be added that the film may be read as a parodic satire, with a vaguely recognizable Bonnie and Clyde-theme, but (in typical postmodernist fashion) without any psychological dimension which could help explain the murderers’ motives. Their killing spree is literally without rhyme or reason. All that Stone’s film provides is a series of images and imageconfigurations - fleeting surfaces and forms lacking any illuminating coherence. What some critics have pointed out regarding contemporary music videos applies to Natural Born Killers as well: all that seems to remain is the arbitrary play of signifiers which we call postmodernism .... But what about the supposed satirical character of the film? Stone himself has indicated that it was meant to show how today’s media transform criminals into heroes, and the juxtaposition of photographic images of mass murderers like Charles Manson and Ted Bundy with the gruesome image-sequences of Mallory and Mickey’s indiscriminate slaughter does lend credibility to a satirical understanding of the film. And yet, something is lacking for such an interpretation to be plausible. Is it irony, parodic critique, humour that permits genuine laughter, as comedy does? Strikingly, audiences tend to laugh intermittently, even 175 frequently, in the course of viewing the film, although there are no truly comic scenes or situations. It is rather a case of uncomfortable laughter in the face of the grotesque, the macabre, and sometimes the demonic - for instance in the scene-sequence where the audience is introduced to Mallory’s weird family in a “sitcom” context, with her ludicrously grotesque father touching her lasciviously to the accompaniment of a built-in studio audience’s canned laughter. (For a thematization of the symptomatic - mainly visual - functioning of the phenomenon of the “grotesque” in an exemplary postmodern film, namely David Lynch’s Wild at Heart, cf. chapter 7.) Despite the fact, therefore, that it may be understood as a satire regarding the central role of the media in our society, Natural Born Killers does not, in the final analysis, succeed as such. Intra-cinematically, one witnesses the irony of two unscrupulous mass murderers being transformed into cult figures by the media, regardless of the reasons for their sudden prominence. They virtually become public figures in the process. But precisely this accurately perceived functioning of the media in postmodern culture is such that any critical effect which the ironicsatirical moment in the film could possibly have had, is undermined. When we remind ourselves that, as the British social theorist John Thompson (1990) has argued at length, we live in an increasingly mediated society, the improbable popularity of Mickey and Mallory becomes more plausible. But in addition to this we should not forget that Stone’s film itself shares, as important media component, this mediating function with the rest of the media. In other words it contributes significantly to the shaping or construction of viewers’ subjectivity (i.e. their “selves” as source of judgment and action). To put it in concrete terms: our actions are co-determined by the information, the image-configurations and diverse representations which reach us through the media. But why should the fact that Natural Born Killers contributes to the construction of the “postmodern subject” neutralize its potential (and intended, if we accept the director’s bona fides) satirical effect? Largely because, instead of incorporating a critical element into the structure of the film - in the guise of, say, a reflective commentator-character, or a moment of comicality or ridiculousness - the movie simply allows the incoherent, disruptive image-sequences to perform their shaping function unchecked and unmodified in relation to a predominantly uncritical audience. Add to this the continual alternation between “black and white” and colour sequences, cartoon inserts, superimpositions, “realistic” scenes, still photographs, “morphing” distortions of facial features, and more, then things start falling into place. This technique of kinetic image pastiche-structuring (“destructuring” would be more fitting) systematically undermines a realistic experience of the intra-cinematic world in which Mickey and Mallory wreak 176 177 bloody havoc. Concomitantly the film’s quasi-experimental, video-esque structure also affects the manner in which audiences experience the glut of violence in the film, namely in equally unrealistic terms. Some viewers have been reported as saying that the only reason why they found the violence “bearable” was its comic-strip character, probably because of the distance that it creates between the screen and the audience. spectacle and the chaotic, irrational functioning of the, id, on the other. According to this classificatory schema, Natural Born Killers belongs to the category of spectacle, where image-complexes and -sequences comprise the decisive structuring principle. Set in the context of contemporary culture, we are confronted with the implication that Stone’s film may be seen as a symptom of extreme irrationality - an insight which is, to say the least, cause for concern. Nor can we ignore its irony. After all, this embodiment of social irrationality (if such a reading is indeed valid) was constructed by means of an advanced form of technical rationality, namely state-of-the-art film technology. It may be argued that, for this very reason, the film is innocuous regarding viewerreception - after all, if its presentation of violence is one of de-realisation, surely no harmful effects could follow. Such a position would overlook an important consideration, however. Audiences may indeed find that the violence strikes them as being unreal, but at the same time they tend to associate the context within which it occurs with the social reality of television journalism (i.e. of the media) and of regular occurrences of murder, assault or rape. The result is that the true character of such acts of violence is systematically obscured by means of a kind of anaesthetizing effect accompanying the diaphanous layer of derealization imposed on them by the film-techniques mentioned earlier. In other words, instead of presenting violence in all its horror (the way a movie like The Untouchables does, for instance), Natural Born Killers presents it in disguised, bearable form, but simultaneously makes of it the very fabric which holds the film’s fragmentary elements together. It is not difficult to understand that all of this, which has the effect of eroding the distinction between real violence and its representation by means of hyperreal images, must unavoidably affect people’s behaviour. (Elsewhere - Olivier 2000 - I have examined this effect of mediated images on people’s behaviour at length, using Freud’s early theory of the mind to understand the puzzling social phenomenon of especially violent “mediated behaviour”.) This is because of the weakening of their ability to distinguish these images - given their pseudo-journalistic format - from those that populate daily television news-broadcasts, supposedly representing real events. With the omnipresent reduction of reality to images in the media, is it at all surprising that viewers’ sensitivity to the true nature of violence is anaesthetized? Perhaps we should take it more seriously than we usually do that so-called “copycat” killings have occurred which seem, undeniably, to be linked to the viewing or reception of films like Natural Born Killers. In fact, Stone’s film has been implicated in cases of such killings (cf.Gleick 1996; Olivier 2000). It is significant to note that, in Visual and other pleasures (1989), film theorist Laura Mulvey distinguishes between “narrative” films and films of “spectacle”, depending on which of these constitutes the dominant structuring principle in a specific movie: the coherence of narrative or the spectacular character of imageconfigurations. She further posits a connection between narrative film and the Freudian ego, ie the coherence of reason, on the one hand, and between film of One should add that Mulvey is not alone regarding her awareness of the dwindling fortunes of narrative in our culture. Several cultural critics and philosophers have pointed to this dying of the art of narrative communication or storytelling, from Walter Benjamin in the 1930s to Paul Ricoeur and more recently Richard Kearney (1988). Ricoeur, for example, has raised the startling possibility of a culture without narrative communication (Kearney 1988:315). The fact that films in which “spectacle” seems largely to replace narrative as structuring principle appear to be in the process of becoming the norm rather than the exception - think of any number of recent (especially “Hollywood”-) films such as Armageddon, Deep Impact or Meet Joe Black - may be a sign that the possibility of such a culture is not all that far-fetched. But the question is whether it is desirable. Each one of us has her or his own “story”, after all. But when technologically advanced, mass cultural products in our everyday environment continually undermine this familiar mode of communication, as Natural Born Killers does, it could happen that the everyday capacity to narrate our lives to one another will be replaced by a kind of social co-existence which borders on schizophrenia. And such a cultural condition would be “normal”. REFERENCES Gleick, E. 1996. A time to sue. TIME, June 17. Kearney, R. 1988. The wake of imagination. Ideas of creativity in Western culture. London: Hutchinson. Olivier, B. 2000. Freud and the question of mediated social behaviour. In: Society in transition. 31 (2), pp. 163-174. Mulvey, L. 1989. Visual and other pleasures. London: Macmillan. Thompson, J.B. 1990. Ideology and modern culture. Critical social theory in the era of mass communication. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 178 15. THE AMPLIFICATION OF REASON, OR THE RECUPERATION OF IMAGINATION: PETER WEIR’S DEAD POETS SOCIETY Introduction: Should one conceive of reason as being inclusive of imagination, or not? When one surveys the history of philosophy since the ancient Greeks until the late 20th century (Kearney 1988), the lasting impression is one of sustained attempts – until deep into the 18th century – to purge reason of the ‘dangers’ supposedly posed by the imagination regarding the pursuit of knowledge and truth. Descartes’s strenuous effort to deny the operations of the imagination any legitimacy in his methodical search for an indubitable starting point to the process of acquiring knowledge (Descartes 1972:144-158) is paradigmatic of this ingrained epistemological suspicion towards the faculty of images. It would probably be difficult to identify a ‘body’ of philosophical literature that is explicitly devoted to the question of ‘the amplification of reason’ – in the sense that this phrase is used in the present article – but I would nevertheless argue that it is implicit in the works or texts that constitute the history of philosophy, especially of epistemology, aesthetics and ontology. In the case(s) of Descartes and especially of Kant (dealt with at length here), for instance, an investigation of the place of imagination in their thought reveals the extent to which they regarded it as legitimately belonging to the province of reason, or not belonging to it, for that matter.2 It therefore seems to me that the question of the (historically changing) conception of the relationship between reason and imagination comprises an important and potentially illuminating area of research. Moreover, I believe that it is best addressed in the particular terms provided by what may, for present purposes at least, be described as a work of the imagination, that is, a specific work of art. This article therefore focuses on a particular artwork, namely, a film that lends itself to a philosophical exploration – in the form of a kind of dialogue between Kant’s (and others’) insights concerning imagination and the film in question - of the tensions between reason and imagination, and ultimately on the question whether these two faculties may legitimately be regarded as belonging together in the encompassing embrace of an amplified conception of reason itself. Among the thought-provoking films - including Picnic at Hanging Rock, The last wave, Mosquito coast, Gallipoli, Witness and, most recently, The Truman Show - directed by Australian Peter Weir, the one that engages most conspicuously with crucial philosophical, aesthetic and literary issues, is certainly Dead Poets Society. At varying distances these issues seem to orbit the conceptual pair, reason and imagination, and the gravity which regulates their respective disThis article first appeared in SA Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 20(2), 2001, pp.171-190. It is reprinted with permission. 179 tances is the same force that constitutes the tension between the members of this couple which, at different times in the history of their relationship, have been alternately close and distant (cf. Kearney 1988; Baumer 1977:268-400). Questions or issues concerning freedom and responsibility, creativity and discipline (or structure), romanticism and enlightenment, as well as individuality and tradition (convention, conformity), are therefore thematized in the film in such a way that they never leave the gravitational field of concepts governed by the tensile bond between reason and imagination. ‘Tensile’, and not oppositional, because this relationship has not been one of unambiguous mutual exclusivity, although at times reason and imagination have been treated as if they were ‘binary opposites’ - for instance in the early modern period, when Descartes (already referred to) and Spinoza, to mention only two influential figures, stigmatized imagination in various ways as being inimical to the ends of reason (Kearney 1988:161-162). Not that binary opposites are conclusively mutually exclusive: each term in a binary opposition is always already marked or contaminated by the trace of the other, as Derrida has shown at length (e.g.1976:46-48). That is probably why even the most strenuous efforts in the history of thought have been unsuccessful in their attempt to purge reason of imagination once and for all. Kearney’s The wake of imagination (1988), referred to earlier, explores these attempts in the context of a genealogy of the imagination. Personally I believe that the question of the deep-seated suspicion, if not the veritable repression of imagination in the history of western culture - something which Kearney does not pursue in a thoroughgoing fashion, although it is made abundantly apparent in the course of the genealogy he provides - would, if addressed systematically and painstakingly, lead to the articulation of a kind of ‘pathology’ of western reason. The valorization of imagination among 19th-century romantics would equally belong to this ‘pathology’. What I would like to show in this essay, is that Dead Poets Society may be seen as the cinematic ‘dramatization’ (etymologically speaking, the cinematic presentation of deeds and their consequences; or, alternatively, of deeds of consequence) of a way to conceive of the relationship between reason and imagination which does justice to both. Further, that the important place occupied in the film narrative by the participation of one of the central characters, Neil Perry (Robert Sean Leonard), in a presentation of William Shakespeare’s A midsummer night’s dream, is no accident. It alerts one to the remarkable fact that Shakespeare preceded Kant in the rehabilitation of the imagination vis-a-vis the demands of reason - so radically, in fact, that (like Kant) he demonstrated the powerlessness and hence, death, of a reason devoid of imagination, at the same time as the latter is revealed as being anarchic, even destructive, without the mediation of reason. 180 Carpe diem: In an early scene in Dead Poets Society, the new English teacher, Mr John Keating (Robin Williams), takes his class of senior boys into a hallway at the prestigious boys’ school, Welton Academy in Vermont, and invites them to take a close look at the photographs of earlier generations of students displayed there, after he has instructed one of them, Pitts (James Waterston), to read the first few lines of a poem from their textbook. The Latin for the first line, “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may”, he tells them, is “Carpe diem”, the meaning of which is readily supplied by one of the boys, Steven Meeks (Allelon Ruggiero), in response to Mr Keating’s question in this regard. “Carpe diem”, Meeks points out, means “Seize the day”. It is at this point that the teacher asks them to come forward and take a closer look at the photographs of sports teams, social groups and classes of boys dating back to the earliest beginnings of Welton a hundred years before, in 1859. As they gaze at the photographic images, he reminds them that the expressions on those faces and eyes reflect the same feelings of hope, invincibility and youthful enthusiasm that they themselves feel, so many years later, and he poses the question, namely, whether the class thinks that those boys in the photographs wasted any time in realizing their own dreams - because, Mr Keating hastens to remind his class, they are by now “...fertilizing daffodils”. To the disconcertment of some of the group, he emphasises that each and every one of them will also one day, like every member of every generation before them, “...stop breathing, turn cold and die”. To anyone not familiar with the film, this may sound like an indulgence on the part of a morbidly obsessive teacher, which is far from being the case in the narrative. Keating, whose first encounter with the boys contrasts sharply with the pedantic, test- and assignment-orientated meetings they have with the Latin, Mathematics and Chemistry teachers immediately prior to that, is clearly employing a variation on Brecht’s alienation principle in an effort to impress on them, through defamiliarization, that he does not simply intend to ‘prepare them for the final examination’, but to impart some wisdom to them through the ‘study’ of English literature. Hence his opening gesture as a teacher: to frame his teaching - a framing perhaps exemplified by the picture frames, in the literal sense, from within which the faces of previous generations tellingly stare forth at the present generation - with a lesson on the transitoriness of human life. This explains why Keating urges the boys to lean forward and listen to their forebears whispering their “legacy” to them, namely, “Carpe diem!”: ‘Seize the present day’, a saying which has its classical locus in Horace: “Seize the present, trust tomorrow e’en as little as you may” (Evans 1983:200). As suggested by his concluding ‘whisper’ 181 on behalf of the boys’ predecessors in the hallway, namely, “Make your lives extraordinary!”, and as we see in the course of the unfolding narrative, Keating is encouraging the boys to set individualizing ideals for themselves while, at the same time, initiating their realization through deeds. This motif provides the dynamic or narrative impetus to Weir’s film, in the unfolding of which the confrontation between imagination and reason is played out. Reason: I should stress, at the outset, that more than one ‘model’ or conception of ‘reason’ operate in Dead Poets Society. The first and most powerfully present or hegemonic model, at Welton, is introduced in the course of the opening scenesequence, when the audience witnesses some behind-the-scenes preparations for, and part of the opening ceremony marking the commencement of the academic year at Welton. The preparations are followed by a procession into the hall, where most of the teachers and the boys, as well as their parents are seated. It includes someone playing a march on the bagpipes, a teacher carrying a symbolically lit candle - ‘the light of knowledge’, used to light the candle held by a junior boy, who ‘passes it on’ to others - and four boys, each carrying a standard or banner bearing a single word (a different one in each case) above the school colours. These are the four words which the principal of the school, Mr Nolan (Norman Lloyd), after a short introductory speech, exhorts the boys to proclaim in traditional fashion (as at the beginning of each new semester) with the question: “Gentlemen, what are the four pillars?” Rising, the boys recite in unison: “Tradition! Honour! Discipline! Excellence!” This encapsulates Welton’s sustaining notion of reason. One would be correct to infer from this veritable litany, firstly, that Welton places a high value on the maintenance of standards set by previous generations of scholars in all the domains of school activities, from sport and cultural pursuits to academic achievement - as also attested by the fourth ‘pillar’, namely, ‘excellence’. Hence ‘tradition’, which cannot, moreover, be separated from ‘honour’, which in turn would, presumably, derive its imperative status at least partly from the requirement to uphold past achievements, lest dishonour befall an erstwhile ‘honourable’ (and honoured) institution. Nor could ‘discipline’ be read separately from ‘honour’, because it is through discipline, which entails punishment when deemed necessary, that honour is earned anew and therefore maintained. Clearly ‘education’, at Welton, is pretty much something aimed at ‘normalizing’ the individual, as Foucault (1984:195) would say, in accordance with the perceived needs and interests of the collective - in this case the school community, past and present. ‘Reason’ would then amount to a mindset and, correlatively, a mode of behaviour which effaces the needs and aspirations of the 182 183 individual - should they be noticeably different - in favour of those of the school community as determined by the school authorities, that is, the guardians of the school’s ‘honour’, in conformity with the rules that regulate pupil conduct at Welton. ‘practical reason’ and of ‘judgment’, respectively) in the 18th century, each of which represents an autonomous rational sphere. To this one may add a fourth moment, which, as Heidegger (1977:21-22) demonstrated, cannot be divorced from the theoretical in the guise of ‘calculative’ (that is, positivistic) science, namely the technological, the earliest manifestation of which was the industrial revolution of the 18th century. Moreover, any characterization of Enlightenment reason which does not inscribe all these constituents in an encompassing belief in the ‘law’ (in Lyotard’s terms a ‘metanarrative’; 1984:xxiv) of historical progress - in fact, a philosophy of history which regarded progress as being inevitable would be incomplete (Baumer 1977:245; 332). Needless to say, ‘positivism’, in both its 19th-century, Comtean, as well as its 20th-century ‘logical positivistic’ guise, represents an attenuation and narrowing of the Enlightenment model of reason; one which, in our time, manifests itself in (among other things) the socialscientific tendency to subject everything to measurement or quantification (Baumer 1977:305-308; Mouton 1993:24). Although I hope to show, by way of addressing the relationship between reason and imagination in Weir’s film, that ultimately these three spheres of rationality cannot be separated, distinguishing them enables one to see more clearly where Welton’s allegiance lies. Evidently, judging by the didactic emphasis on measurable (and measuring) students’ performance, a positivistic reduction of Enlightenment rationality to a state of affairs where the cognitive-instrumental predominates, fulfils a crucial governing function at Welton. From a number of incidents and exchanges between some of the boys, their parents and teachers, as well as from the Principal’s proud exclamation, that Welton has become “... the best preparatory school in the United States”, one further gathers that ‘Welton reason’ fits into and is determined by a context of expectations relating to entrance requirements at the Ivy League universities and, perhaps more importantly, to a certain set of professions, such as medicine, law, engineering and accounting. It is this, more than anything else, which marks the prevailing model of rationality at Welton as articulating a certain Enlightenment, or, to be more specific, positivist type. I say a certain ‘type’, because it requires a certain qualification - one which, as I shall show, introduces a moment or constituent into the equation, so to speak, which does not sit comfortably with the rest of this model’s components. Moreover, it is precisely with regard to the constituent in question that Mr Keating’s role in the senior boys’ lives becomes decisive, given the adversarial, and in a certain sense, ambivalent position that he occupies in relation to the model of rationality exemplified by Welton. But first the notion of ‘Enlightenment reason’ has to be fleshed out to be able to draw more clearly the parameters demarcating the film’s diegetic space. Habermas (1985:8-9) identifies this - that is, ‘enlightened reason’, or the conception of reason introduced by the historical Enlightenment - with the socalled ‘project of modernity’, which is characterized by a tripartite structure of autonomous rational spheres: They are: science, morality and art. These came to be differentiated because the unified world-views of religion and metaphysics fell apart. Since the 18th century, the problems inherited from these older world-views could be arranged so as to fall under specific aspects of validity: truth, normative rightness, authenticity and beauty. They could then be handled as questions of knowledge, or of justice and morality, or of taste. Scientific discourse, theories of morality, jurisprudence, and the production and criticism of art could in turn be institutionalized...There appear the structures of cognitive-instrumental, of moral-practical and of aesthetic-expressive rationality, each of these under the control of specialists who seem more adept at being logical in these particular ways than other people are. While Habermas associates this idea with Max Weber, it follows the contours first laid by Immanuel Kant in his three famous ‘Critiques’ (of ‘pure reason’, I hinted earlier that the description of Welton’s sustaining conception of reason requires some qualification which introduces a destabilizing element into its ostensibly harmonious and mutually reinforcing structure. This qualification pertains to the first of the ‘four pillars’, namely ‘tradition’, and for a reason that should be obvious to anyone familiar with the most striking differences between the historical Enlightenment and the reaction or rebellion against it, known as Romanticism. To put it in a nutshell: tradition involves history, towards which the Enlightenment adopted a cautiously skeptical attitude, unlike the Romantic movement, whose champions valorized history, and with it, the traditions which - especially in the case of medieval times - were generally scorned by the Enlightenment. In so far as Welton embodies an institution affiliated to an Enlightenment conception of rationality, therefore, by embracing tradition as one of its ‘core’ values, it (anomalously) introduced a romantic motif into this model. This requires some explanation, however. Although the Enlightenment was, in so far as it became apparent across a broad range of activities, disciplines, practices and events, an 18th-century phenomenon, its archetypal gesture, in modern times, is to be found in Descartes’s socalled ‘methodical doubt’ in the 17th century; that is, a method of systematically 184 185 doubting everything in the glaring light of the measure of truth, namely ‘clarity and distinctness’. And whatever cannot be affirmed as being indubitable by that criterion, should be rejected (Descartes 1972:144-158). This systematic doubt found its way into what became known as ‘historical Pyrrhonism’ (skepticism), associated with Pierre Bayle in the 17th century, and appropriated by 18thcentury Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire in a less extreme form as a critical approach to history (Baumer 1977:238-239). Romanticism, by contrast, which had its roots in the 18th century but reached its zenith in the 19th, represents one of this century’s strong historically-minded currents - another being evolutionary theory - which contributed to the remarkable fact that it may be seen as the first era that recognized history for what it is, namely fundamental, irreversible change (Baumer 1977:260-265). Moreover, Romanticism, again in marked opposition to the Enlightenment, emphasized differences rather than similarities at all levels: among nations, epochs as well as individuals, without necessarily denouncing reason (Baumer 1977:283-297). For obvious reasons a positivistic approach to society in general and education in particular would not be compatible with one that emphasizes irreducible differences, which do not lend themselves, after all, to measurement. Needless to say, and in view of what was said earlier about Welton’s ethos of suppressing individual differences which were not consonant with the dominant ‘Welton profile’, anyone - especially a teacher - who would promote a sense of individual destiny and the exploration of distinctive talents among the boys, would risk facing the full force of Welton’s disciplinary (or ‘ideological’, Althusser would say; Silverman 1992:25) apparatus. It should already be apparent that Mr Keating, by encouraging the boys to “make [their] lives extraordinary”, identifies himself as being a romantic and as such furthers the development of ‘tradition’- not in the ‘normal’ (Weltonian) sense of affirming the dominant type, but in the Romantic sense of the historically and anthropologically unique or distinct appropriation of and creative contribution to traditional culture (the “powerful play” to which they may “contribute a verse”). In doing this as their English teacher, ‘imagination’ plays a major role in Mr Keating’s teaching practice. liberator of the imagination, namely Immanuel Kant - as Kearney demonstrates so well (1988:167-177). It is perhaps one of the lacunae of Kearney’s book, however, that he does ample justice to Kant in this regard but spares Shakespeare only one cursory remark, albeit on what is probably the most pertinent of the bard’s plays in the present context, namely A midsummer night’s dream. As I shall attempt to show, Shakespeare preceded Kant by almost two centuries in his liberating appraisal of the role of the imagination. And, remarkably, it is precisely this model of the imagination that underpins Mr Keating’s teaching in Dead Poets Society, and which (as hinted at before) explains the crucial place occupied by Neil Perry’s participation in a performance of A midsummer night’s dream in the film-narrative. But what is this ‘model’ of the imagination, and how does it differ from the way the Enlightenment conceived of it? Imagination: It is not difficult to recognise in Pritchard’s approach the literary-critical equivalent of a calculative, quantification-oriented scientific approach, intent on judging everything in terms of measurable properties. This is confirmed when Mr Keating, after painstakingly drawing the schema described by Evans Pritchard on the board, together with the areas covered by the hypothetical poems - an activity clearly regarded by the boys as a display of his agreement, judging by the zeal with which they all copy it in down - utters one word, to the boys’ disconcertment: “Excrement!” “Armies of academics”, he continues with heavy sarcasm, “going forward, measuring poetry!” “We’re not laying pipes”, he tells the dumbstruck boys, “we’re talking about poetry”. And then, to their utter astonishment, he In the light of my earlier remark with reference to Kearney (1988), that the human faculty of imagination was, for a long time in western history, at least, repressed, Welton must surely emerge as typical of this tendency. After all, to be different requires the ability to imagine an alternative to the status quo; and difference, at Welton, is only countenanced in the form of variations within strictly observed limits. This is not without its anomalies either, though, if Welton is taken as representing an Enlightenment-type of institution, because it was the Enlightenment philosopher par excellence who also happened to be the great historical It is instructive to return, at this point, to two scene-sequences in the film narrative. The first concerns a poetry lesson where Mr Keating asks Neil to read aloud from the Introduction to their collection of poetry, written by J. Evans Pritchard, PhD., and entitled ‘Understanding poetry’. (Apart from setting the stage, as it were, for introducing the senior boys to the powerful operation of imagination in poetry, it also prepares the way for a sharply contrasting scene near the end of the film which involves the same book, this time used by the positivistic Principal to ‘teach poetry’.) In the Introduction that Neil is reading, Pritchard deals with rhyme, metre and figures of speech in order to set out a schema, as it were, for determining the “greatness” of a poem. He suggests using two axes, at right angles to each other, the horizontal of which represents the “perfection” of a poem, while the vertical serves to register its “importance”. In this way, he informs his readers, a poem by Byron might score high on the vertical but average on the horizontal, while a sonnet by Shakespeare might score high on both, thus rendering the area covered by connecting the points on the axes to their point of intersection larger in the case of the Shakespeare than that of the Byron poem. In this way, Pritchard argues, one can easily learn to determine the relative “greatness” of a poem and increase one’s enjoyment of poetry ( ! ). 186 187 instructs them to “rip out that page”. Even to a group of boys who have obviously been taught well how to follow examples and instructions - judging by the readiness with which they copied his earlier illustration - this order goes against the grain of their Welton education. Tear out a page written by an ‘authority’ unthinkable! And to add insult to injury, Keating proceeds by telling them to tear out the entire introduction by Evans Pritchard from their books. When they start doing so, first hesitantly but then with increasing enthusiasm, after the ice was broken by the ever-daring Charlie Dalton (Gale Hansen), he informs them that it is “a battle, a war”, and that “the casualties” could be their hearts and souls. “In my class”, he assures them, “you will learn to think for yourself again. You will learn to savour words and language. No matter what anybody tells you, words and ideas can change the world!” between life and death, personal fulfilment and tragedy. It also involves the relationship between reason and imagination. This is heady, daring romantic stuff - the kind which motivated the likes of Lord Byron to challenge fate in the heyday of the Romantic movement. But it is not acceptable in the positivist surroundings of Welton; as demonstrated, first, by the consternation on the part of Mr McAllister (Leon Pownall), the Latin master, when, alarmed by the shouting and laughing (accompanying the tearing-out of pages) emanating from Mr Keating’s classroom, he storms in, demanding an explanation - only to find Keating there, calmly presiding over the vigorous iconoclasm. This episode has a sequel when, at dinner that evening, Mr McAllister remarks to Keating that it was “an interesting class” he taught that day, “misguided though it was”. When Keating retorts that he hadn’t taken McAllister as a cynic, the latter, momentarily taken aback, replies: “No, not a cynic; a realist”. From this and the rest of their conversation it is apparent that he had also, perhaps, had his own “foolish dreams”, but decided that the way to happiness lay in disabusing himself of them, while Keating, in turn, in romantic fashion, regards such ‘dreams’ as the true space of freedom and the source of giving a meaningful shape to one’s life. In particular, McAllister criticizes Keating’s attempt to make “freethinkers” of the boys “at seventeen”. It is significant that McAllister thinks of himself as a realist, if one considers that realism is the aesthetic most consonant with the positivistic manifestation of Enlightenment thought - indeed, this could clearly be seen in the place occupied by Courbet’s painting in relation to the so-called ‘New Enlightenment’ of the 19th century (Baumer 1977:308-310). In contrast - and this resurrects the question of the imagination, but also of reason in his teaching - Keating valorizes the enrichment of ‘reality’, if not its transcendence, by means of an imaginative, but discernful attunement to the transformative resources of literary, thoughtprovoking language (cf. in this regard Olivier 1987). This does not label him a romantic who is hopelessly out of touch with the everyday world, however. As we shall see, he is only too keenly aware of what can and cannot be changed in this world. But on an understanding of this crucial distinction hinges the difference To examine this relationship more must be said about the imagination, first. In the scene-sequence where the boys are told to tear out part of their books, Keating concludes by telling them that he has “a little secret” for them. “We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute”, he insists; “We read and write poetry because we’re members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion!” “Medicine, law, business and engineering”, he continues, “These are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life; but poetry, beauty, romance, love - these are what we stay alive for....” After quoting from Whitman to emphasize his point, he ends on a powerful note, appealing, as it were, to their capacity for making imagination the source of giving direction and purpose to their lives. He stresses the decisive importance of the fact that they are there and “...life exists; and identity”. Further, that “the powerful play goes on”, and they may “contribute a verse”. Looking around at the boys’ rapt faces, he directs a final question at (by implication each one of) them: “What will your verse be?” Judging by the expression on some of their faces, including Todd Anderson’s (Ethan Hawke) and especially Neil’s - where growing excitement is evident - the seeds that Keating has sown, have fallen on fertile soil. It should be noted that Mr Keating does not advocate, in this scene, the abandonment of those practices that exemplify pragmatic, calculative, or technical reason; on the contrary, he affirms their necessity for sustaining human life. What he regards these professions as being incapable of, however, is of imparting meaning or purpose to life, without which purpose they, too, would be meaningless. For that, we must turn to and acknowledge the domain of the imagination, which includes (surprisingly) ‘knowing’ in the most fundamental sense (and even the very sense of being a self), the practice of art as well as freedom. Art, yes; we may retort. But knowing, and freedom? How does imagination operate in these matters? It is illuminating to turn to Kant on this score. Imagination presupposed by reason: The ‘philosopher of the Enlightenment’, Immanuel Kant, effected his ‘Copernican Revolution’ not only by demonstrating that the world ‘conforms’ to the rational subject (instead of the reverse), but, equally radically - in the first edition of the Critique of pure reason, - that the so-called ‘productive imagination’ is the hidden source of our very awareness of being in a world. He distinguished this from the ‘reproductive imagination’ (Kant 1978:142-143): 188 189 ...only the productive synthesis of the imagination can take place a priori; the reproductive rests upon empirical conditions. Thus the principle of the necessary unity of pure (productive) synthesis of imagination...is the ground of the possibility of all knowledge, especially of experience. In this epistemological sense, then, imagination is entitled to stake its claim to having priority over the pragmatic and calculative operations of reason as they are manifested in disciplines such as medicine, engineering, law and accounting. Moreover, the insight, that imagination is the indispensable condition of all knowledge, means that it should no longer be seen, in accordance with the tradition, as being antithetical to reason, but as being part and parcel of reason. In less technical language this means that the ‘productive ‘ imagination functions, for Kant, independently of perception, while the ‘reproductive’ imagination functions precisely where perception, that is, experience, is concerned. In other words, ‘reproductive imagination’ enables us to impart coherence to successive, diverse impressions by ‘connecting’ them, and in this way to match perceptions, for example of leaves blowing in the wind, with previous ones that are similar, and to distinguish them from dissimilar ones, while the ‘productive’ variety makes perceptions - all and any perceptions - possible in the first place by providing the image-’mould’ or ‘-rule’ for the presentation of perceivable things in general. In this sense the (productive) imagination is the condition of the possibility of knowledge, including science. Moreover, in its ‘transcendental’ function, the productive imagination is responsible for the so-called ‘unity of apperception’; that is, for establishing a bond between one’s perceptions and one’s consciousness of oneself as the source of unity which enables one to say that ‘these are my perceptions’ (Kearney 1988:170). In a certain sense, therefore, one could say that Kant has provided an argument to the effect that one’s very sense of self depends crucially on the imagination. (Although this is not the place to go into it, one could further show that Jacques Lacan, in his discussion of the ‘mirror stage’ in the development of the child, affirms, in a different manner, the crucial role of what he calls the ‘imaginary’ in the formation of a sense of self, albeit one beset with all kinds of difficulties. Cf. Lacan 1977). It would help to recall that Kant resolved the impasse between 17th- and 18thcentury rationalism and empiricism by showing that, instead of believing, as empiricists did, that knowledge of the world derives exclusively from experience (in contrast to ‘relations between ideas’), or of claiming, as rationalists did, that reason is the sole legislator in epistemic matters, we may regard knowledge as the product of a synthesis between experience and what was previously thought of as reason in a substantive, non-differentiated way. The difference was that, for Kant, experience was no less a function of reason than abstract reasoning; it is possible on the basis of the combined operation of two distinct faculties of reason, namely sensibility, or the a priori forms of intuition (space and time), and understanding, which comprises a priori categories such as causality and substance. Together, sensibility and understanding render intelligible objects in space and time. The upshot of Kant’s revolutionary claims on behalf of the imagination was that these functions of reason presupposed an even more fundamental, productive or synthetic activity - that of the ‘productive’ imagination. While these epistemological insights of Kant concerning imagination are not explicitly thematized in Weir’s film, but mostly function in an implicit, presuppositional manner in Mr Keating’s teaching, the experience of beauty and of the sublime in relation to the sphere of imagination constitutes one of its major themes, as, indeed, is the case in Kant’s aesthetics (in The critique of judgement). It is therefore profitable, once again, to cast a recollective glance in the direction of the Enlightenment philosopher before returning to the filmnarrative. This is especially important because of the integral bond between imagination and freedom, for Keating, and the related connection posited by Kant between “ideas of freedom” and “the works of creative imagination” (Kearney 1988:171). What could the function of ideas be in relation to the imagination? Kant’s specific name for these is ‘aesthetic ideas’, which he defines as follows (1952:175-176): ...By an aesthetic idea I mean that representation of the imagination which induces much thought, yet without the possibility of any definite thought whatever, i.e. concept, being adequate to it, and which language, consequently, can never get quite on level terms with or render completely intelligible. Kant adds, moreover (p.177), that it is in poetry “that the faculty of aesthetic ideas can show itself to full advantage”. What does he mean? If we keep in mind that, for Kant, poetry (which “holds the first rank among all the arts”) “expands the mind by giving freedom to the imagination”, then it is hardly surprising to find him arguing for poetry’s capacity of “rising aesthetically to ideas” (p.191) by providing us, through imaginative ‘play’, with a wealth of subject matter for thought - which, at the same time, defies any attempt at definite, conclusively clear or adequate expression. Thus, paradoxically, poetry cannot be said to give us knowledge of the world in the same sense as science does, and yet it provides “food for the understanding” (p.185) by opening up unheard-of spaces of the imagination which understanding “may turn to good account and employ for its own purpose” (p.192). ‘Beauty’ is associated by Kant (1952:183) with the expression of such aesthetic ideas, which, in transcending nature and society, bathe them in the light of new possibilities - possibilities which manifest the freedom of the imagination to create its own order in contrast to that of the extant world. Marcuse (quoted in Kearney 1988: 171-172) captures the import of the connection between beauty, aesthetic ideas and freedom in Kant’s aesthetics well when he says that: 190 Beauty...demonstrates intuitively the reality of freedom. Since freedom is an idea to which no sense-perception can correspond, such demonstration can be only indirect, symbolical, by analogy. One should now be in a better position to understand the claim that Mr Keating is not simply a champion of imagination at the expense of reason, but takes care to place imagination within the compass of reason: he affirms the necessity of the pragmatic and calculative professions, on the one hand, but also counsels the boys that words and ideas can ‘change the world’, and argues, against Mr McAllister, that it is only in one’s ‘dreams’ (that is, imagination) that one is ‘truly free’. By consistently promoting the interests of poetry and imagination in their lives, he attempts to let them see things differently, in this way helping them to find their own, respective voices in the face of what could be the stifling effect of convention. There are a number of scenes which attest to this in the film; for instance, where he gets on top of the desk in his classroom, and invites them to do the same, in order to remind themselves that the world can appear differently from up there. The most striking of these, however, is certainly the one where, after a number of boys have had their turn to read the ‘poems’ they had been instructed to write for a specific English class - some clumsy but sincere, others deliberately, defiantly, un-poetic - he tells the anxious, self-doubting Todd Anderson to come forward so that he may be put “out of his misery”. When Todd retorts that he did not write a poem, Mr Keating, refusing to give up, writes on the board the sentence: “I sound my barbaric YAWP from the rooftops of the world; W.W.” indicating that it comes from “Uncle Walt [Whitman] again”. Then he tells the startled Todd that he would like him (Todd) to “give us a demonstration of a barbaric YAWP”. Leading the reluctant Todd to the podium, Mr Keating encourages him to utter a YAWP, with Todd responding unenthusiastically in an ordinary tone of voice at first, and then more loudly in response to Mr Keating’s relentless exhortations of “Louder!” “Louder!” until, exasperated, he utters a stentorian “YAWP!” Conspicuously pleased, the teacher mutters that he (Todd) has “a barbarian in (him) after all”, but, refusing to let him go, directs Todd’s attention to a framed picture of Walt Whitman on the wall: “Look at Uncle Walt up there - what does he remind you of?” With a mixture of coaxing and harassing, prodding and gently urging - encouraging Todd to use his imagination, for instance - he elicits, first, “A madman”; then “A crazy madman”; and finally, “A sweaty-toothed madman”, from Todd. Exclaiming that there “is a poet” in him, but still unsatisfied, Mr Keating urges the boy to close his eyes and to describe what he sees. Haltingly, Mr Keating’s hand covering his eyes and the teacher slowly, 191 hypnotically, turning him round and round, with intermittent interjections, Todd utters the words: I close my eyes...and this image floats beside me...the sweaty-toothed madman with a stare that pounds my brain... (“Now give him action - make him do something!”) His hands reach out and choke me...and all the time he’s mumbling, mumbling...(“What’s he mumbling?”) Truth...like...like a blanket that always leaves your feet cold. ([The rest of the boys laugh.] “Forget them, forget them! The blanket - tell me about that blanket!”) Push it, stretch it, it’ll never be enough...You kick at it, beat it, it’ll never cover any of us...From the moment we enter crying to the moment we leave dying it’ll just cover your face...as you wail and cry...and scream. When Todd finally opens his eyes, after uttering the last few intense words, Mr Keating and the other boys are silent, awe-struck, before him. Then they applaud spontaneously. What Todd and his teacher achieve together, here, is nothing less than an instantiation, firstly, of Kant’s contention that imagination is essential for a sense of self; and secondly, a demonstration of the ‘creation’ or articulation and development (albeit brief) of an aesthetic idea in the Kantian sense. In this case, it is the idea of what may be called the tragic human condition (an idea developed by Nietzsche in The birth of tragedy, together with a creative way to come to terms with this condition, not unlike Mr Keating’s own approach) exemplified by the image of truth as a blanket that never quite succeeds in fulfilling its purpose of imparting a feeling of warmth and comfort. Without this imaginative effort on Todd’s (or anyone’s) part - not necessarily in such a poetic sense, but minimally in the form of having an imaginative grasp of one’s position in the world - one could not even begin to exercise reason in the narrower pragmatic and calculative sense. Reason presupposes imagination, or perhaps rather: imagination is inextricably part of reason. In his book, Radical hermeneutics (1987), John Caputo makes a similar point in a variety of illuminating ways. One of the most striking of these occurs where he discusses Heidegger’s “delimitation” of the deadly seriousness of modern reason (which would correspond, roughly, with what I have called ‘positivistic reason’), his questioning of the sovereignty of “stiff-necked” reason by way of a demonstration that there are other - less calculative – ways, such as poetry, of entering into a relationship with things. The poetry of Angelus Silesius served Heidegger well to make his point (quoted in Caputo 1987: 224): The rose is without why; it blooms because it blooms; It cares not for itself, asks not if it’s seen. 192 193 Significantly, it is a flower - one of the most inexplicably beautiful and simultaneously defenselessly vulnerable of beings - which is used by Heidegger to confound the designs of calculative reason. As Caputo explains (p.224): it has nothing to fall back on but its own ingenuity, then reason is fully at work, which means fully in play. Notice though that the poet does not say that the rose is without reason or ground, but without why. The mystical rose then does not exactly contravene the principle [of reason; B.O.] so much as it ignores it and takes no part in its seeking and asking for reasons....The poet lets the rose be, lets it rise up and linger for a while in its own emergent physis.... Heidegger thus exposes the rule of the principle of reason to its other, to the thinking which has the boldness and the audacity not to demand reasons - rather the way one learns to float only by surrendering every attempt to swim and by remaining perfectly still. That takes practice and a bit of courage; it is simple but hard. Poetic thinking is like that. It achieves a relationship with the world which is more simple and primordial than reason; it is in touch with things long before the demand for reason arises and, indeed, is so deeply tuned to things that the need for reasons never arises. But although Caputo (p.224) grants that Heidegger thus achieves an insurpassably wonderful “delimitation” of reason, by “leaping”, as it were, off the “ground” of reason to the “groundlessness” of poetic play or flux, he is not entirely satisfied with such a move. Caputo (p.225), like Mr Keating, is all too aware that it is at one’s peril that one takes reason too seriously, but - and here he adopts a strategy similar to the one Kant adopted in the 18th century, and that Mr Keating adopts in Dead Poets Society, (and, of course, which I employ in this paper) unlike Heidegger, he wishes to locate a moment of play, a playful moment, within reason itself. As he puts it (p.226): Heidegger found a reason not to take reason seriously by finding a sphere of play outside of reason. But I want to let play infiltrate reason itself. I do not want to leave the country but, remaining within its borders, to insist upon the play of reason itself. I want to say that just because reason is serious business, we must keep it in play and give up the thought of escaping across its borders.... ...For it is my view that reason itself, not just mystical poetry and Silesius’s rose, cannot be understood for what it is apart from the play. When the chips are down, reason finds itself without the help of established rules, on its own, in free play, in motion, in kinesis. When the guard rails which science devises for its comfort and guidance fail it, when it is thrown on its own, when When Caputo speaks here of the “ingenuity” or the “play of reason”, I think that he is on the same terrain as Kant was with his notion of especially the “productive” imagination in the (first edition of the) first Critique, and the capacity of the imagination to produce “aesthetic ideas” in the third. If the latter are ideas which “induce much thought”, and yet can never be fathomed completely, it means precisely that imagination, in so far as it is part and parcel of reason - that is, inseparable from it - exceeds the calculative aspects of reason in producing these. Or, in Caputo’s terms, reason’s ingenuity springs into action when existing rules do not suffice, and it has to come up with something new, something unforeseen and irreducible to the parameters of familiar paradigms or frameworks. In Dead Poets Society, Mr Keating represents a position consonant with this with John Caputo’s unwillingness to relinquish reason to those who would tie it uncompromisingly to a supposedly failsafe algorithmic formula. And the point is: if one yields to the pressure of the representatives of positivistic reason, and agree to locate ‘play’, ‘ingenuity’ or imagination outside of reason, one has in effect surrendered to the charge that imagination and its fruits are irrational and deserve to be regarded with suspicion, while ‘stiff-necked reason’ assumes the selfrighteous airs of lawmaker and judge at the same time. And, as any experienced judge would tell you, a judge who is not open to the possibility of learning something true about human affairs in new situations – to what Kant calls “reflective judgements” - is not a worthy judge. Shakespeare - to whom I now turn - apparently knew this, too. Shakespeare, reason, imagination and moral action:3 I said earlier that Neil Perry’s participation in a production of A midsummer night’s dream in the course of the film-narrative is crucial for understanding the model of the imagination (we can now say the amplified model of reason) that underpins Mr Keating’s teaching. Why is this the case? What does Shakespeare’s comedy have to do with the tragedy of Neil’s suicide, after being summarily berated and told by his intractable, authoritarian father (Kurtwood Smith) that, because of his disobedience - playing the part of the mischievous Puck in the play, despite unambiguous instructions to the contrary - he was being taken out of Welton and enrolled in a military academy, from where he would go to university to study medicine (whether he liked it or not)? The answer is complex. What the dramatic action in A midsummer night’s dream signifies, not only confirms the inseparability of reason and imagination (to the extent that they may be distinguished) that 194 195 our examination of Kant’s, and also Caputo’s, insights on this score has brought to light; it further affirms the decisive connection between such an amplified conception of reason, on the one hand, and action - notably moral action - on the other. This, I shall attempt to show, is true of the dramatic action in Shakespeare’s play, but also, in a certain sense negatively, in the narrative of the film as far as Neil’s moral choices and actions are concerned.4 In turn, this will enable one to grasp clearly that reason only ‘works’ or operates fully when all three the ‘components’ distinguished by Habermas (discussed earlier) work together, as it were, instead of being subjected to the impoverishing effects of, for instance, a positivistic reduction. If we imagine no worse of them than they of themselves, they may pass for excellent men. Very briefly stated, Shakespeare’s play enacts the transition from the ‘irrationality’ of love through the cathartic confusion and excess of fantasy or imagination to the amplified rational ability to act in a morally mature and accountable manner. The young lovers embark on a passage from Athens, which represents the laws of reason, through the forest, the emblem of nature as well as imagination, illusion and excess, even unreason, and emerge on the other side strangely enriched by their disturbing experiences. Some people may scoff at this, and indeed, Theseus does (Shakespeare 1978:107), where he declares that the “lunatic, the lover, and the poet” are all similarly possessed by an imagination that “bodies forth...forms of things unknown” - “[m]ore than cool reason ever comprehends.” Hippolyta is wiser, however (1978:107): But all the story of the night told over, And all their minds transfigured so together, More witnesseth than fancy’s images, And grows to something of great constancy; But howsoever, strange and admirable. Reason, in other words, has been amplified by imagination, with salutary results. Or, to put it in terms of Kant’s insight: reason has become what it truly is, namely a faculty which includes imagination. “They” (the lovers), says Stanley Wells (1978:34), “bring back into the ordinary world something that they learned in the world of imagination. The illusory has its part in the total experience of reality.” Moreover, as Wells further points out, just as the lovers require the (imaginative) understanding and tolerance of other people for their happiness, the play elaborates on the function of the imagination in society in bringing about social harmony, by way of the artisans’ play within a play, performed in honour of Theseus and Hippolyta, which requires the nobles’ imaginative indulgence, lest it founder on the shortcomings of the actors. Hence Theseus’ remark (1978:114): Needless to say - and as Puck suggests in his farewell address - just as the sometimes ham-handed and knotted-tongued artisan actors require a charitable openness of imagination on the stage-audience’s part, Shakespeare’s comedy also needs its (real) audience’s imaginative participation to work. (The same goes, incidentally, for movie-audiences of Weir’s film.) As far as the theme of the present essay is concerned, the significance of Neil’s participation as Puck in a production of Shakespeare’s comedy is therefore considerable. By the time of the performance in the film-narrative, the audience already knows that Neil has disobeyed his father’s explicit instructions, to concentrate on his schoolwork and not to get involved with anything ‘extraneous’, like editing a school newspaper or acting. (In this respect, Neil’s actions may be said to parallel those of Hermia in the Elizabethan comedy.) We also know that, despite Mr Keating’s (and Todd’s) advice - very ‘rational’ advice, it should be noted; certainly not what one would expect from a wild-eyed anarchist - to play open cards with his father, to let him understand ‘who he (Neil) really is’, Neil has not told his father about going ahead with acting the role of Puck in the performance. Considering the fact that Neil takes the role of Puck, a representative of nature’s power and of the imagination - recall that in his final speech he exhorts the play audience to lend reality or credence to the play’s action through their imaginative participation - it is ironic that he (Neil) does not go beyond playing the role of Puck to actualize an alternative to the life that his father has chosen for him. While arguably making the imaginative leap to consider other possibilities of action open to him, beyond his brilliant, but brief performance as Puck he does not actively engage in the realization of those possibilities, instead of the horror (an instance of a ‘bad’ or terrible sublime; cf. Olivier 1997:10) of suicide in the face of his father’s intransigence or lack of imagination. Because a similar fate threatens Hermia, she and Lysander consider (imagine) alternative possibilities that would take them outside of the reach of the very ‘rational’, but harsh, Athenian law, and set out to realize them. It is only after their ordeal with the illusionistic, transformative power of the imagination - as represented by Puck, Titania, Oberon and the forest - however, that their rationality is restored; or, perhaps more accurately, that it comes into its own for the first time, in this way enabling them to effect a reintegration with society. Neil’s suicide, in the face of his father’s blind authority - which contrasts sharply with Theseus’ understanding authority - precludes such social reintegration. Neil’s death is all the more ironic if we keep in mind that he is one of the boys most moved and influenced by Keating’s teaching. It is because of this teaching 196 197 - or rather, his misunderstanding of it - that he resolves to audition for the play, and to take part in it without his father’s knowledge, much less his consent, when he gets the role of Puck. Why misunderstanding? Because, like Charlie Dalton - who takes Keating’s teaching as giving him carte blanche for performing harebrained practical jokes intended to demonstrate his disdain for the school authorities, like staging a phone call ‘from God’ for the Principal at assembly he does not understand and act in accordance with the interdependence of imagination and reason. Considered in isolation from each other, reason and imagination are limited, and in practice these limitations can have grave consequences. While Charlie eventually gets himself expelled for his share in what the school authorities characteristically construe as the ‘cause’ of Neil’s death, namely an alien element at Welton in the person and influence of Mr Keating, the consequences of Neil’s misunderstanding of what Mr Keating is trying to teach them culminate in his death. relation with the dreamworld of the play to be able to lend it a certain reality and force in their lives, Mr Perry is utterly impervious to them. (Neil may be seen as addressing specifically his father, standing at the back of the hall like the angel of death, in this scene.) Having clearly identified himself earlier as someone with positivist values, determined to imprison Neil, too, in their straitjacket, he has absolutely no receptivity to the suggestion that a play - and a comedy into the bargain - has the power, like Oberon’s and Titania’s forest, to enlarge one’s faculties and capacity for moral action in a manner which evinces tolerance and a willingness to let others be themselves. Puck’s - Neil’s - closing words therefore become a desperate plea to let him - Neil - be himself. But to no avail. After a halfhearted attempt, later, to persuade his father to allow him his own way, and unsupported by a weak, dominated mother, he retires to his bedroom at his parents’ home. It is here that the tragic scene starts unfolding when they are asleep: opening the bedroom window to let the icy air in, bare-chested, Neil places Puck’s headdress of twigs and leaves on his head like Christ’s thorny crown, descends the stairs to his father’s study, takes the revolver from the drawer and ends his young life.6 It is important to understand, here, that in addition to highlighting the value of beauty, of imagination, Keating’s teaching has the further consequence of stressing the moment - the unavoidable, though contingent, possibility - of individual appropriation of meaning; not only in the sense of ideas, but as the concrete instantiation of decision, choice and (ineluctably) action. For Keating, as for Kant and Shakespeare, there is a connection between the products of imagination - sometimes fantastic and seemingly irrational - and moral action worthy of the epithet ‘rational’ in an amplified sense.5 Knox Overstreet (Josh Charles) seems to have understood this in the film narrative. His decision to court Chris in the lion’s den, as it were (first at the party, and later at her school), which may initially seem foolhardy and reckless, represents an instance of combining imagination with reason and courageous moral action: imagining the unlikely possibility of Chris becoming his girlfriend, and thinking of ways to persuade her - against all odds, but ultimately in her own interest, too - to leave her jockboyfriend for him, at considerable risk to his own well-being. This does not evince any rationality, it may be objected, but the “seething brains” that Theseus detects in lovers and madmen (Shakespeare 1978:107). I would argue, on the contrary, that it is eminently rational (in the amplified sense elaborated here) to act when a time-gate opens, as it were, for a few short moments only, and one realizes that the question of whether and how one acts - before it closes again - may make a crucial difference to the rest of one’s life. Why then do things go seriously wrong, despite Neil’s exposure to Mr Keating’s teaching and Shakespeare’s wisdom? Apart from Neil’s failure to act according to an imagined alternative to deceiving his father, it happens crucially because, instead of being open to Puck’s - Neil’s - parting words at the end of the intradiegetic play-performance, exhorting the audience to sustain their imaginative It is no accident that several thinkers have remarked on the fact that comedy has as its theme the ‘integration of society’ (Megill 1985:267). The function of A midsummer night’s dream in Weir’s film is therefore to provide a foil, an illuminating and ironic contrast to the events in the characters’ lives in the narrative, especially Neil’s. It enables one to see more clearly, as Kant might put it, the blindness and potential destructiveness of an imagination, cut off from reason; and conversely, the emptiness and lifelessness of reason operating without imagination. Moreover, it shows us how easily such a separation may prove fatal, tragic, in the lives of individuals. Conclusion: The answer to the question raised in the title of this paper - an answer which is elaborated in the preceding discussion - could therefore be succinctly restated as follows: Weir’s film, Dead Poets Society, in so far as it thematizes the relationship between reason and imagination (and one could add, moral action), bears witness to the inseparability of these two distinguishable, but essentially conjoined, interdependent, faculties. The work of Kant on this relationship, together with Shakespeare’s art, may be understood as providing valuable and illuminating philosophical perspectives on the film. Perhaps one of the most important insights arrived at via the philosophical appropriation of Weir’s rich film-text is this, however: it confronts us with the (to some people unpalatable) truth that, as Caputo (1987) has argued convincingly 198 199 - following thinkers such as Aristotle, Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Derrida - life is unavoidably difficult. There are no easy, ‘instant’ solutions to life’s problems. We have to confront life in all its radical contingency and unpredictability courageously, armed with what I have here called the insight that imagination is part of reason. The fact that Mr Keating encourages his students tirelessly to “catch the day”, find their own voices, or to “contribute a verse” to the powerful, ongoing play of life, should be understood together with his counsel, not to abandon reason in the process - his disapproval of Charlie’s foolish audacity and his advice to Neil, to play open cards with his father about his play-acting, testify to this. Neil’s fatal, misguidedly self-sacrificing decision, which is born of the one-sided dependence on imagination, is not the answer; nor is the positivistic one represented by Welton tradition, which eschews imagination in favour of a narrow, truncated conception of reason. Foucault, M. 1984. The Foucault reader. Ed. Rabinow, P. New York: Pantheon Books. Gadamer, H-G. 1998. Truth and method. Tr. rev. Weinsheimer, J., and Marshall, D.G. New York: Continuum. Habermas, J. 1985. Modernity - An incomplete project. In: Foster, H. (Ed.) The anti-aesthetic: Essays on postmodern culture. Port Townsend: Bay Press, p. 3-15. Heidegger, M. 1977. The question concerning technology and other essays. Tr. Lovitt, W. New York: Harper Torchbooks. Kearney, R. 1988. The wake of imagination. London: Hutchinson. Kant, I. 1952. Critique of judgement. Tr. Meredith, J.C. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Kant, I. 1978. Critique of pure reason. Tr. Smith, N.K. London: Macmillan. Lacan, J. 1977. The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience. In: Ecrits: A selection. Tr. Sheridan, A. London: Tavistock, p.1-7. Lyotard, J-F. 1984. The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge. Tr. Bennington, G., and Massumi, B. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Megill, A. 1985. Prophets of extremity. Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mouton, J. 1993. Positivism. In: Snyman, J. Conceptions of social inquiry. Pretoria: Human Sciences Research Council. Nietzsche, F. 1967. The birth of tragedy. In: The birth of tragedy and The case of Wagner. Tr. Kaufmann, W. New York: Vintage Books. Olivier, B. 1987. Art and transformation. South African Journal of Philosophy, 6(1), p.16-23. Olivier, B. 1996. Beyond hierarchy? The prospects of a different form of reason. South African Journal of Philosophy, 15(2), p.41-50. Olivier, B. 1997. The sublime, unpresentability and postmodern cultural complexity. South African Journal of Philosophy, 16(1), p.7-13. Shakespeare, W. 1978. A midsummer night’s dream. Ed. Wells, S. Middlesex: Penguin Books. Sheridan, A. 1981. Michel Foucault: The will to truth. London: Tavistock Publications. Silverman, K. 1992. Male subjectivity at the margins. New York: Routledge. Wells, S. Introduction. In: Shakespeare, W. A midsummer night’s dream. Ed. Wells, S. Middlesex: Penguin Books. That Mr Keating’s teaching was not in vain, despite the terrible cost of Neil’s life, is evident from the final scene in the film. Here Keating - the main scapegoat in the aftermath of Neil’s death, is busy gathering his things before departing from Welton. Todd takes the lead, in the face of Mr Nolan’s apoplectic outrage, in courageously staging a symbolic expression of gratitude to Mr Keating. After an initial outburst, he gets on top of his desk, utters the words, “O Captain my Captain”, and, followed by Knox, Pitts and the majority of the class, faces Mr Keating, who acknowledges their salute. If the claim is worth considering, that it is only in our dreams that we are truly free, it is certainly true, as we learn from Kant and Shakespeare, as well as from the fictional Mr Keating, that these dreams may prepare us for the difficult decisions we have to make in this life of human finitude. We face the task of, in Caputo’s words (1987:1), “[r]estoring life to its original difficulty”. To this end, a film like Dead Poets Society could be an admirable guide. REFERENCES Baumer, F.L. 1977. Modern European thought. New York: Macmillan. Caputo, J.D. 1987. Radical hermeneutics. Repetition, deconstruction, and the hermeneutic project. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Derrida, J. 1976. Of grammatology. Tr. Spivak, G.C. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Descartes, R. 1972. Meditations on first philosophy. In: The philosophical works of Descartes. Tr. Haldane, E.S. and Ross, G.R.T. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Evans, I.H. (Ed.) 1983. Brewer’s dictionary of phrase and fable. London: Cassell. Filmography Weir, P. (Director.) 1989. Dead Poets Society. Screenwriter: Tom Schulman. Touchstone Pictures. 200 Notes: 1 In the present article I assume a familiarity with the film in question on the part of readers, especially as far as the detail of the scene-sequences and imageconfigurations is concerned. For the sake of providing a context for the discussion that follows, however, a brief synopsis of the narrative would be useful. The filmnarrative is set at Welton Academy, an exclusive American preparatory school for boys in Vermont, New England. It involves the events in the lives of a group of boys in their final year, specifically in so far as their relationship with their new English teacher affects their lives. It soon becomes apparent that his teaching sets him apart from the other teaching staff at Welton - that he, in contrast to Welton ‘tradition’, encourages individualism and difference, but also (and this is crucial, for it is misunderstood by some boys) a ‘reasonable’ approach to life. Upon discovering that, when Mr Keating was at Welton as a schoolboy, he was involved with the so-called ‘Dead poets society’, where members (according to his own testimony) learnt to “suck the marrow from life”, Neil Perry persuades his friends to join him in resurrecting the ‘society’, which meets intermittently in the old Indian cave near the school to read poetry and indulge in other things that give schoolboys a thrill. With the benefit of Mr Keating’s teaching some boys, like Todd Anderson, overcome old fears and lack of confidence, while others - notably Neil - while benefitting intellectually, take his teaching as justifying an attitude of carpe diem without the necessary (rational) responsibility. Against his disciplinarian father’s wishes, and Mr Keating’s as well as his friend Todd’s misgivings notwithstanding, Neil accepts a part in a production of Shakespeare’s A midsummer night’s dream, only to discover, just before the end of the performance, his father’s grim presence at the back of the hall. On their arrival at his parents’ house a one-sided argument ensues between father and son, but it is cut short by his father’s intransigent insistence that there is no future for Neil in acting and that he is being moved from Welton to a military academy, there to prepare for a career in medicine. Afterwards, when his parents are asleep, Neil commits suicide, using his father’s revolver. In the wake of Neil’s death, a witchhunt is conducted at Welton to find a scapegoat and clear the school’s ‘good name’. Predictably, it is Mr Keating who is identified as the source of all the trouble, and he is asked to leave Welton, while some of the boys, who are also identified as troublemakers, are expelled. The film ends with the majority of the senior boys engaging in a silent, but resolutely defiant protest at Mr Keating’s dismissal, a collective gesture which is simultaneously a symbolic statement of their appreciation for his teaching. 2 Although it does not fall within the scope of this article, it is an interesting fact that, what I here (in what follows) refer to as Kant’s ‘liberation’ of the imagination in the first Critique, pertains to the first edition of that work, and that Kant toned down the radical implications of his notion of the ‘productive imagination’ in the second edition of the Critique of pure reason. It would be illuminating to probe the 201 reasons for this, especially in the light of the important role that Kant attributes, once again, to the imagination in the third Critique (of Judgment), and to assess if or how the latter model differs from the one outlined in the first edition of the first Critique. Obviously this cannot be done here. In addition to examining Kant’s thought on the faculty of imagination in relation to Dead Poets Society here, I also explore the relevance of A midsummer night’s dream in so far as the relationship reason/imagination is crucially thematized in this play by Shakespeare. Further, the attention given to Caputo’s work (1987) in the present article shows, similarly, the light in which he regards imagination vis-à-vis reason, compared to Heidegger, for example – although he (Caputo) uses the metaphor of ‘play’ for what I here call the imagination. Gadamer (1998:101-134; 497-499; 557), too, uses a similar notion of ‘play’ in Truth and method to come to grips with the characteristic structure of understanding as hermeneutic event. All of this has to do, I believe, with the question of the scope of what is traditionally termed ‘reason’. Elsewhere (Olivier 1996) I have explored the possibility of what may also be termed the ‘amplification of reason’ in a different context and in different terms – not of the imagination, but of the abandonment or transcendence of (social) hierarchies. 3 It is well known that, painted in broad brushstrokes, the dramatic action in A midsummer night’s dream concerns the conflict between a young woman, Hermia, and her father, Egeus, because of her unwillingness to marry Demetrius, whom her father has chosen as suitable husband for her. Instead, Hermia is determined to marry Lysander, who is equally smitten with her. While Demetrius is no less determined than Lysander to make Hermia his wife, Helena is desperately in love with him. Egeus approaches Theseus, Duke of Athens - who is preparing to marry his betrothed, Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons, in four days’ time - for his judgement in the matter. This human discord is matched by disharmony in the world of fairies and nature - which the fairies seem to represent as quasi-anthropomorphic embodiments of natural forces - in the form of a lovers’ quarrel between Oberon, King of the fairies, and Titania, their Queen. To cut a long story short, as the saying goes, Lysander and Hermia decide to flee from the harsh Athenian law which demands her life (or her seclusion as a ‘nun’) in the event of her continued disobedience to her father, and Helena, with whom they share their plans, betray them to Demetrius, who follows them to the wood, or forest, followed, in turn, by Helena. What happens in the forest - the domain of nature and the fairies - prepares the young lovers for more mature and stable, if ardent, relationships. These events, which also involve a company of amateur actors (all artisans), are largely ‘directed’ by Oberon and his messenger-agent, Puck, who play havoc with the lovers’ and Titania’s affections by squeezing the juice of a Cupid-enchanted flower into their eyes, thus causing them to love passionately whomever they see first on awakening (who, in Titania’s case, turns out to be Bottom, one of the artisan-actors, by now complete with ass’s head). In a word: confusion reigns, before Oberon restores harmony once more with 202 Puck’s help. The play ends with the newly reconciled society of nobles witnessing the performance of a play (within the play) by the artisans, before Puck exhorts Shakespeare’s audience to grant the imagination its power, and “all is mended”. 4 The fact that only excerpts from the performance of Shakespeare’s play are actually shown in the film does not diminish its significance, namely as representing a model of the interdependence of reason and imagination. Every reference to the play therefore symbolically draws what it stands for into the filmnarrative. 5 This insight reminds us irresistibly of Foucault’s contention that, before unreason in the guise of the insane was excluded from western reason, there was a healthy dialogue between the two. It is not surprising that one of his historical sources of evidence is Shakespeare. Cf. Sheridan 1981:22. 6 The significance of the fact that, via the crown of twigs and leaves, he seems to be identifying with Puck as representative of the creative forces of nature as he goes to his death, should not be overlooked. It is as if, in doing so, Neil symbolically turns his back on human affairs – which have proved incapable of providing, for him, a satisfactory ethical solution to his dilemma – and signals his tragic resolve to return, as it were, to nature in de-individualizing, Dionysian death. His act also marks him as a romantic, as opposed to Mr Keating’s stance, which, as has been argued, accords with those of Kant and Shakespeare in so far as it integrates imagination with reason. 203 16. THE POWER OF THE MEDIA : WAG THE DOG When we think of the media - radio, television, movies, videos, newspapers, magazines and, more recently, the internet - power is probably not the first thing that comes to mind. Entertainment, an evening out, a relaxing time in your favourite armchair with the Sunday Times or with Fair Lady; those are the things associated, first and foremost, with the concept ‘media’. These sources of information and entertainment have, moreover, become so integrated with our daily lives that we tend to take them for granted, most of the time uncritically, except in so far as we may encounter, through them, opinions and views that conflict with our own. When this happens, we often blame ‘the press’, or ‘irresponsible journalists’, or ‘SABC bias in favour of the governing party’ - which, of course, does not bear on the media as such, but on agencies or groups of people that ‘make use’ of the media with certain ends in mind. The moment we reflect on this, and ask: ‘How is it possible to make use of the media to reach a specific goal or attain a certain result?’, however, it directs our attention to the fact that the media, by their very ‘nature’, exercise power. What does this mean? To say that the media are a source of power is another way of saying that they have a political function - not in the narrow, party-political sense, but in the fundamental sense of having the capacity to bring about change in society. From this perspective, power (or politics) and the media are inseparable. If this sounds strange, simply think of the way in which advertising depends on the media for its effects; and don’t these effects (launching a new product, establishing a persuasive link between a certain product - e.g. a car or a fashionable watch - and social status, to mention but a few) demonstrate the media’s power beyond any doubt? I’m sure you will agree. But there is good reason to go further than this fairly uncontroversial claim about what seems to amount to no more than asserting the usefulness and the effects of the media. In fact, if one considers the work of some of the contemporary theorists working in the field, we encounter some surprising and far-reaching claims about the ways in which the media have transformed, or even constructed social reality for us. Among these, three come to mind, because they draw our attention to different aspects of the media’s power. They are John Thompson, Sherry Turkle and, perhaps the most disconcerting social theorist around today, namely Jean Baudrillard. In a nutshell, John Thompson has demonstrated that we live in a society that, for the first time in known history, can be described as a ‘mediated’ society. This An earlier version of this article was printed in ILISO ("The Eye"), Volume 3, Number 1, February 1999. This amplified version is printed with permission. 204 205 simply means that we cannot understand social behaviour or action today without taking the effect of the media on such behaviour into consideration. Whether it is our buying patterns as consumers, or our social habits involving relaxation or entertainment, or our political behaviour leading up to an election, or our economic activities relating to investment or expenditure, our behaviour as social actors is incomprehensible without the role of the media in our lives. How many of us can resist the announcement of a ‘special’ in our favourite line of food at the supermarket, or ignore the latest (or regular) sporting event(s) featured on television - the world cup (soccer) and Wimbledon (tennis) being cases in point? Or how many people tune in anxiously to the radio news in the morning these days, apprehensively anticipating the latest on the battered Rand - information pertinent to their investment advice to clients or to their own financial planning? What we don’t often reflect on, is the extent to which these events dictate the social lives of most people who have access to the media. Or the degree to which our political sentiments are swayed by the media - think of the effects of the wide news coverage of President Clinton’s alleged affair with Monica Lewinsky on Americans’ perception of the way that he is fulfilling his duties as president. This includes the surprising fact that, after an initial perceptibly negative effect on the opinions of people surveyed in the US, it seemed to reach a saturation point, where they started favouring Clinton precisely because the media (as well as Kenneth Starr) were increasingly perceived as going too far in the process of invading the President’s privacy. the presidential election, which, needless to say, could prove to be fatal regarding his chances for re-election. The classic political response to a crisis of this sort, namely to create a diversion, takes a new turn here. Not just any diversion will do: in fact, nothing short of ‘creating’ or constructing a non-existent (?) war against Albania, on Albanian soil, will do! This is done via a liaison between the President’s ‘Mr Fix-it’, Connie (Robert de Niro), and a Hollywood producer (Dustin Hoffman), who accepts the challenge of persuading the American public by means of clever television image-construction and -manipulation that the US has been forced to intervene militarily in a conflict in Albania, in order to preserve national security. When apprehended by the CIA at a certain point, and challenged to reveal the reasons for their ‘game’ - the CIA arguing that their surveillance network has failed to uncover any ‘real’ evidence of the supposed conflict - Connie promptly gives the CIA agent a lecture on the nature of ‘reality’: reality is no longer what their spy-cameras and agents can uncover ‘out there’ in the ‘physical’ world - on the contrary, reality is what people like himself (with the aid of the media gurus) construct on television screens, on the radio and in newspapers. The very next scene sequence confirms that the CIA has taken him seriously - a TV broadcast announces that all hostilities in Albania have ceased and American troops are returning home! A clever move on the CIA’s part, who have learnt to play the game of constructing reality via the media. The most telling instances of ‘mediated behaviour’ are probably those where the only available source of information concerning certain events is the media, and people act in response to these events without doubting their veracity or accuracy for a moment. There was the case, for instance, of someone immolating himself in front of the BBC buildings in Britain to demonstrate his sympathy with the suffering of the Bosnian Muslims at the height of the conflict in that country. And his only source of information was the media. But that is acceptable, you may say - not the man setting himself alight, to be sure, but acting on information that reaches us via the media. We do it all the time. But - here’s the rub - how far should our faith in the media go in this respect? A recent film (itself a media product!) by Barry Levinson, Wag the Dog, thematizes this faith in the media in a dramatic and frightening manner. One could say that it demonstrates the late 20th century’s radicalization of Bishop Berkeley’s (18th century) observation, namely, that ‘to be is to be perceived’: today, ‘to be is to be televised’. The film narrative is set in the context (not surprisingly) of an American president being accused of conducting a sexual affair with a ‘firefly’ - a girl scout or female cadet of sorts - while being on a state visit to a foreign country. To exacerbate things, this comes a few weeks before Our producer is not phased, however. Instead of allowing them to wrest advantage away from him and destroy their ‘diversion’, in this way exposing the President to the negative effects of media speculation concerning his sexual adventures once more, the producer takes the game one step further: all his energies and media helpers are enlisted to create the heart-rending story of a soldier, one Schumann, caught behind enemy lines. Even a ‘long-forgotten’ popular song, ‘Old Shoe’, is composed, recorded, and smuggled into the Library of Congress where it is fortuitously ‘discovered’ and used to drum up further collective emotional support for ‘Schumann’- who, incidentally, has been ‘created’ in the meantime by giving a long-time criminal inmate of a high-security prison a new identity and flashing his image on national television with a morse code message in the form of strategic tearing of his shirt, proclaiming something like: ‘I love you Mom’, or ‘Don’t worry Mom’. Needless to say, the fictional ‘war’ and its convoluted consequences, all orchestrated by a media-master, are as persuasive as anything could possibly be. The President’s foreign policy, especially his decision to ‘bring Old Shoe home,’ wins him massive support among voters. The question the film raises is this: apart from its entertainment value, does it not remind us forcefully that in the contemporary world, where we take the media and their ‘reliabilty’ at face value, we are in fact the largely helpless recipients (or dupes) of the most powerful means in history to manipulate our beliefs and our actions? 206 This brings us to Jean Baudrillard. According to him, we live in a time when ‘reality’ as we knew it has disappeared, as indeed has the social. In its place we have ‘hyper-reality’, consisting of an endless stream of circulating images or what Baudrillard calls ‘simulacra’ - images that hide the truth, namely that they no longer represent a separately existing world or reality. As a case in point he wrote at length on the Gulf War, describing it as a war that existed only on television screens. If one objects, arguing that there is plenty of evidence that it was a real war, one only has to ask oneself, consistently, what evidence we have for that claim. Invariably, the answer will be: the media - which seems to confirm Baudrillard’s point! It is but a small step from here to Sherry Turkle’s findings (in Life on the Screen) regarding the effect of the internet on our conceptions of personal identity. Succinctly put, she demonstrates that the ability provided by the internet - and by implication this is the case in various ways where the other media are concerned, too - to ‘create’ certain identities for oneself when you communicate with others that you cannot ‘see’ in the usual sense, affects one’s self-image, your conception of yourself, radically. In many cases it seems to be a liberation - men can pretend to be women or vice versa; your creative capacity for imagining yourself to be someone or something else has only one limit, namely your own inventiveness. And the surprising thing is that people take these ‘identities’ so seriously that what happens to them in the cyberspace of the internet affects them profoundly. Turkle reports the case of a cyberplayer who experienced the trauma of a cyber-rape, in virtual reality, as intensely as if it had ‘really’ happened. All of these considerations seem to me to indicate that the media and their power to affect our lives should not be taken lightly. In fact, indications are that they signify a profound social and economic change which is in the process of occurring, and symptoms of which we witness in various ways, every day, without always being aware of what it is that we are perceiving. I would suggest, in conclusion, that we should not relax into a kind of blind assimilation of the manifestations of this phenomenon, but exercise our critical faculties ceaselessly, lest we become the victims of a system that we cannot control. At least we can resist its effects. In fact, the recent horrific attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York and on the Pentagon in Washington D.C., are a powerful reminder that the status of film and television images should not be confined to that of 'hyperreality'. I would argue that those events have changed the status of the image decisively. What television viewers could not believe to be happening before their very eyes - those image sequences seemed like a replay of Independence Day - turned out to be horribly real. Perhaps this will contribute to our ability, in future, to appropriate all media images with heightened critical awareness. 207 17. KIESLOWSKI’S THREE COLOURS BLUE, WHITE AND RED: THE COLOURS OF LIFE. Krzysztof Kieslowski’s cinematic trilogy, Three Colours Blue, White and Red1 must surely rank among the greatest film-art in the history of cinema. This could be demonstrated at many levels, including the visual-chromatic, the auditory (especially regarding the musical score) and the cinematic-narratological. An artphilosophical (perhaps: cinemato-philosophical) approach to these three films would have to take all these levels into account, to a greater or lesser extent, to be able to arrive at a responsible interpretation, keeping in mind that each of them (the films) represents Kieslowski’s response to one of the colours of the French flag, the Tricolour, specifically to what each colour symbolises, namely one of the concepts that, together, comprise the tripartite motto of the French Revolution. In the case of Blue, it is ‘liberty’, of White, ‘equality’, while Red stands for ‘fraternity’ or friendship. What I would like to do here, is to explore the actualization of these three themes in the three films concerned, and to show how they intertwine or combine to articulate a philosophy of life which addresses some – if not all – of the fundamental issues that most humans have to grapple with in their lives. In brief: a specific, to my mind exemplary, philosophy of life ‘comes to life’ here. Because what is at stake is the relevance of these cinematic artworks for human life, I shall be guided by Gadamer’s tripartite hermeneutic schema for interpretation, namely understanding (the implicit orientation in one’s world, without which no human being could function), interpretation (the explicit, linguistic articulation of the specific way one understands something like a text, an artwork, a conversation, etc.), and application (the way in which a specific interpretation applies to one’s own situation or life) (Gadamer 1982: 274-275). One possible angle of incidence into the complex world of human relationships mapped out by Blue, White and Red would be the interrogative mode. Accordingly, each film might be said to pose a question in terms of its symbolic correlate (freedom, equality and friendship), and to provide an answer to this question in the course of its unfolding along multiple axes of meaning. In the case of Blue, the question is: ‘Is it possible to be truly free (liberated) without love?’ In White the question is: ‘Can there truly be equality without comparable (or shared) power?’ Red, in turn, poses the question: ‘Is friendship truly possible without communication which is predicated on otherness?’ The rich, poetic, multifaceted answer provided by each film is astonishing in its insight regarding the human condition. If art, in the course of its long history, is indeed the repository of humankind’s self-understanding - a repository that may be revisited again and 1 Blue appeared in 1993, followed by both White and Red in 1994. (Cf. Bleiler 1996:58-59, 421, 562.) This article also appears in the South African Journal of Art History , 17, 2002. It is reprinted with permission. 208 209 again by subsequent generations of people, given the manner in which what Heidegger (1975a: 44; 66-67) called a ‘world’ is ‘preserved’ in artworks - then these three films by Kieslowski represent some of the most profound disclosures concerning the cultural ‘world’ of the 20th century, as I will attempt to show in the following interpretation. seems to her utterly meaningless when she regains consciousness in hospital after the accident, and learns from medical personnel that neither of the other members of her family has survived the accident. So devoid of meaning everything appears, in fact, that she attempts to commit suicide by stuffing a handful of pills into her mouth - only to find herself unable to swallow them. This does not seem to be the case physically, but more in an existential sense: one gets the impression that, try as she may, she is incapable of taking the intended step of initiating a sequence of events that would terminate her life. The successive events in Julie’s life reveal to the viewer why this is the case. 1: From understanding to interpretation: philosophy and the cinematic genesis of meaning in the narratives of Blue, White and Red. To be able to demonstrate how the themes of freedom and love, equality and power, and finally, friendship and communication operate and intertwine in the films in question, it is necessary to reconstruct their respective narratives. The reason for this is not hard to understand: none of these themes or phenomena (freedom, etc.) occur intelligibly outside of the events that comprise human lives – which, in the form of life-stories or biographies, ineluctably have narrative structures - and therefore it would be impossible to grasp their relevance and significance in the absence of a familiarity with the narrative contexts within which they are played out here. In the course of delineating the narrative sequence of each film, I shall attempt to indicate how the events which are readily understandable, in Gadamer’s sense of the term, to a cinematic audience at the first level of identifying the characters as fellow (if fictional) human beings in a recognizably human or social world, can, at a secondary level, be interpreted (that is, explicated) along the thematic axes that I have indicated above. In the process, I shall also try to connect this ‘genesis of meaning’ to specific cinematic elements, such as a certain striking image-configuration, or a play of colours, or sequence of audiovisual images representing (or sometimes metaphorically refracting) narrative events. I should stress, however, that I do not claim my interpretation to be the only valid, or perhaps rather, ‘responsible’ one that could be offered of these cinematic works of art. Like all great artworks – for there are also artworks which may be called ‘bad’, or kitsch – they are sufficiently rich in signification to be able to accommodate various valid responses. The test of a responsible interpretation is whether one is able to demonstrate the meanings derived from the film- (or literary, or philosophical) text in question in relation to its generally accessible constituent elements, and, accordingly, to refrain from arbitrary ‘reactions’. a. Blue: The narrative of Blue unfolds the tragic events of the death, in a car accident, of the composer husband (Patrice de Courcy) and young daughter (Anna) of Julie de Courcy, neé Vignon (Juliette Binoche), and her subsequent struggle to come to terms with this profound loss. One could also say: ‘…her subsequent struggle to liberate herself from the effects of this profound loss’, for Julie’s life (initially) After discovering her inability to end her own life, Julie nevertheless decides to withdraw from society, from friends and acquaintances, as well as from all kinds of responsibilities, as far as possible. To this end, she refuses to talk to a television journalist who visits her soon after leaving the hospital, despite the curious question put to her by this woman, namely, whether it is true that she wrote Patrice’s compositions. Julie’s determination to liberate herself from all previous ties is also evident when she visits another woman – apparently a manuscript-copyist - with whom she (and probably her composer-husband, Patrice) seems to have collaborated, and fetches a musical score which she discards at a rubbish dump. She also calls an erstwhile colleague of her deceased husband, Olivier, and asks him if he is still in love with her. When he affirms this, she invites him over to her denuded apartment (the furniture having been sold) for the night, makes love to him on the only piece of furniture she has left, a mattress, and, when he wakes up the next morning, tells him, in effect, that now he should know that she is just a woman like any other, with a body on which the effects of mortality are inscribed, and that he would therefore not miss her. Then she leaves, leaving him nonplussed. (It later turns out that he has, sentimentally, bought the mattress on which they made love and has continued sleeping on it!) Julie makes arrangements with the family lawyer to sell not only the apartment and everything in it, but also a beautiful old villa which she visits to make arrangements for the payment of the staff and to say goodbye to them. Then she looks for an apartment in a part of Paris where no one knows her, and when she finds one through an agent, sets out to live a reclusive life. But she cannot refrain from taking something from her former life with her - a beautiful hanging lamp or ornament consisting of pieces of glass in various shades of blue, that she takes from a room in the villa. This serves as a poignant visual reminder that she is unable, try as she may, to divorce herself completely from the memories of her life with Patrice and her daughter Anna, on the one hand, and concentrates, visually and chromatically, the significance of the colour blue which pervades Kieslowski’s film. Blue is the colour of sadness, of melancholy, so well known 210 211 from blues music, but it also connotes truth, as well as spirituality, holiness or sanctity, and evokes the symbolism of infinity that one associates with the sky. Hence one could say that the blue ornament signifies the fusion, for Julie, of sadness, in the face of loss, with the beauty and truth of her memories of lost loved ones. But importantly, it also signals the truth about her inability to free herself from the things that constitute the material world in which we live, in an absolute manner. Short of committing suicide, we are always already in a world, or, as Heidegger pointed out in Being and Time (1978): Dasein (his word for an individual human being) is coterminous with Being-in-the-world. There is a beautiful, cinematically minimalist scene where she is sitting in a restaurant with a cup of coffee on the table next to her. Lost in silent thought, she holds a sugar cube just above the surface of the hot coffee, but close enough for the sugar cube to draw some coffee into it, eventually to be saturated. The scene becomes a powerful visual metaphor for Julie’s inability - but at another level for the undesirability, not only for her, but for all humans - to withdraw or free herself from her surroundings once and for all: even things (the coffee, the sugar cube) conspire to merge with her, to draw her into their embrace. Here, Blue succeeds in visually inscribing a woman as representative of the human species into a material context that comprises her (and our) inescapable, and therefore uniquely valuable, surrounding world.2 What is instantiated here, in cinematic terms, is what Heidegger (1975: 149-150) described as dwelling in relation to the ‘fourfold’, namely, ‘earth and sky, divinities and mortals’ – in other words, in relation to ‘things’ as ‘places’ which ‘gather’ the ‘fourfold’ in such a way that human beings or ‘mortals’ are reminded of the way they belong to the ineluctable interrelations of sky (the open limit of our concrete existence), divinities (even if these are felt as being absent) and earth (as the condition of our existence). A thing as apparently insignificant as a sugar cube concentrates in itself this ‘fourfold’. This, as well as other instances of human involvement with the world, or ‘fourfold’, contribute to making Blue a veritable cinematic paean to our earthly existence.3 There are a number of scene-sequences where Julie is seen swimming in an indoor swimming pool, suffused by hues and shades of blue, from a light blue to bright blue, to deep blue, almost purple. Given the minimalist cinematic economy of Kieslowski’s film, these usually take place in virtual silence and in semidarkness, with no dialogue or even monologue on Julie’s part. The impression created is that, in swimming, she surrenders herself to the water as a primordial feminine medium, like the amniotic fluid in a mother’s womb - almost as if she is attempting to return to the origin of all being, before any division takes place. But on one of these occasions, when she is again overwhelmed by sadness (after discovering that her husband led a double life involving another woman before his death), she stays underwater for a long time. When she finally surfaces, gasping desperately for air, one realises that it was another suicide attempt that ended in failure. In Lacanian terms, she seems to be making an (futile) attempt to overcome the ‘lack’ by which every human subject is characterised (Lacan 1981: 103-104; 204-205) from the moment that sexual differentiation takes place in the womb. The successive moments of birth or parturition, of the territorialisation of the body into specific erogenous zones, the so-called mirror phase, when the subject misrecognises its own mirror-image as ‘itself ‘ or its ‘self’, as well as the subject’s entry into language, are all successive moments of loss of wholeness which, in Julie’s case, has been exacerbated by another, devastating loss – that of her family through death. Her expressions of longing for a union with a watery medium may be understood in this way, as such a desperate attempt to return to an origin or fullness before loss, which is also a way to conceive of death, as Freud did in Beyond the pleasure principle (1968). The theme of liberty, then, articulates itself in Blue along two axes: ‘freedom from’, and ‘freedom to’. Everywhere that Julie turns to free herself from the ‘hold’ that the world, things in the world, and the past have on her, in a desperate attempt to live out some kind of minimalistic nihilism, or even to die, finally, she finds that the world, things and individuals resist her attempts, and draw her into proximity with themselves. No matter how hard she tries, in the end she finds herself unable to relinquish her responsibility towards the world and the people in the world. If Julie is unable, despite her effort to do so, to withdraw from the things in the world, the same is true of other people – while sitting in a coffee shop with Olivier, just after he has finally tracked her down after her disappearance, they notice that a flute player who is busking outside a restaurant is playing a melody that is only too familiar to her, but in reply to her question, where he has learnt the music, the beggar merely replies that he invents lots of new tunes. The beggar flautist becomes another element that stands resolutely in the way of her quest to withdraw from the world. But the event that most decisively demonstrates to her that she is destined not to be separate from others, concerns Lucille, a prostitute who lives and works in an apartment one floor below her. When one of the other tenants comes around to Julie in an effort to solicit her signature for a petition that aims to get Lucille evicted from the building, Julie (predictably) refuses, saying that she does not want to get involved. Some time later it becomes apparent that 2 Karsten Harries, in The ethical function of architecture (1997), elaborates on this involvement of humans with the things in their world, in this case architecture. According to Harries, architecture is capable of imparting to people a sense of their ethos or ‘place’ in the world, something which goes beyond Heidegger’s analysis in an original, insightful way. 3 Another film that achieves such exemplary cinematic celebration of human life, is Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire (Himmel über Berlin). For a thoroughgoing examination of the manner in which this is done, cf. chapter 8 of this book. 212 213 this symptom of withdrawal has been mistakenly interpreted as an act of consideration for another’s freedom, when Lucille visits her to express her gratitude to Julie for effectively preventing her (Lucille’s) eviction. The irony is not lost on Julie, however, and the fact that Lucille has successfully demonstrated to her that, somehow, she is not ‘destined’ - in the sense of a personal, instead of an impersonal, overarching destiny - to live a life that is isolated from others, is underscored when Lucille comments that the beautiful blue glass hanging lamp in her apartment reminds her of one just like it that used to hang in her room when she was a child, as if to connect the present with the past, as well as with other people, in a conspicuously meaningful way. Julie to destroy the composition-manuscript, she had made a copy of it beforehand and sent it to Olivier, who has been using it in an attempt to ‘complete’ Patrice’s cruelly interrupted work on the ‘Concert for the unification of Europe’. When Julie faces Olivier, she has two issues to address - the work on the composition as well as the (to her astonishing) news, fortuitously seen and heard on television at the nightclub when she went to Lucille’s aid, that Patrice seems to have had a lover. She tells him that he has no right to attempt completing the unfinished composition, and, very significantly, he replies that his stated intention to do so was the only thing he could do to elicit something, some decision, from her (Julie) – it was all he could do to make her ‘want’ or ‘not want’. As Kierkegaard (1987:164-165) would say, Olivier is attempting to make Julie realize that, sooner or later, she has to choose, the alternative to which is to ‘lose’ herself. Not to choose, is not to exist. In Lacanian terms (1981: 243, 278) on the other hand, Olivier may be understood as trying to help Julie discover her own desire, in contrast to the desire of her alienated self, who attempted to withdraw from the world and society. About Julie’s ignorance concerning Patrice’s mistress Olivier is surprised; he thought she knew. He tells her that Patrice’s erstwhile mistress works at the courts of law, and Julie, having seen her on television, and determined to lift the veil, finally, on this part of Patrice’s life that has been completely hidden from her, seeks her out. Initially the woman is taken aback by the direct confrontation, but when it becomes apparent that Julie means her no harm, merely wanting to know the truth, she relaxes and answers her questions. The woman, Sandrine – who wears a cross on a chain, just like the one that Julie lost at the scene of the accident, found there by a boy, Antoine, who wanted to return it to Julie, only to be told by her that she wanted him to keep it - affirms that Patrice loved her, and reveals, moreover, that she is pregnant with his child. In fact, Lucille turns out to be the human thread that reconnects Julie with the life and the people that she has tried - not with full conviction, to be sure - to leave behind her. Late one night she gets a phone call from Lucille, who pleads with her to come to a nightclub in Pigalle where she works, because she needs help. Reluctantly Julie eventually agrees, and discovers on her arrival that Lucille is in a state of shock, having seen her own father in the audience watching the sex show on stage. The fact that Julie has responded to her call seems to confirm to her that there is still someone she can believe in. It is at the sordid nightclub where something happens that puts her before an agonizing choice. Lucille draws her attention to a television screen where an image of her, Julie, has just appeared, and, fascinated, Julie watches and listens to the programme, which concerns the music her late husband, Patrice, had been commissioned to compose before he died - a symphony for the unification of Europe. In the programme, her lover of one night (and erstwhile colleague of her dead husband), Olivier, explains to the television-interviewer (the same journalist who tried to interview Julie just after her discharge from hospital) that he has managed to track down a copy of the commissioned symphonic music that Patrice was working on at the time of his untimely death, and that he is doing his best to complete the symphony as intended by Patrice. The programme also features a woman, seen in photographs with Patrice in a manner which, to Julie’s astonishment, seems to indicate that they were in some kind of relationship. Here Kieslowski demonstrates how public, electronic media of ‘communication’ (in the broad sense), such as television, is able to affect the private lives of contemporary individuals, in this case Julie, by divulging information which would, at an earlier stage of cultural development, probably have remained unknown to them. (As I shall show, this theme of communication and electronic media is foregrounded in Red.) Clearly upset, Julie wastes no time the next day in confronting the woman (the copyist) from whom she fetched the musical score some time ago - the one she dumped in a rubbish container. To her dismay it turns out that, fully expecting The rest of the film-narrative shows a new, newly resolute Julie, who starts working alongside Olivier on the score of the unfinished concerto, supposedly left in that state by her late husband. It soon becomes clear, however, that she bears more than a passing acquaintance with the composition in question; on the contrary, she works with the authority of an experienced composer. In fact, something becomes apparent that emerged hypothetically earlier (without ever becoming certain until now), namely, that she, Julie, is the ‘real’ composer - of the ‘Concert for the Unification of Europe’, but probably also of most of the musical compositions that had made Patrice famous. Why this should be the case - why anyone would do something as self-effacing as composing serious music of such quality and beauty that it could certainly have earned her an international reputation, and then let someone else (in this case her husband) receive the recognition, honour, acclaim and fame attendant upon published work of such magnificence – becomes clear to the audience when Julie is seen instructing her 214 215 lawyer not to proceed with the sale of the villa, and taking Patrice’s former (pregnant) mistress, Sandrine, there, telling her that the villa now belongs to her and her unborn child. Sandrine, stammering in a voice which registers a mixture of unbelief and gratitude, exclaims that Patrice told her that Julie was ‘good and generous’. Here things come together, but with an important difference: When Julie calls Olivier to tell him that she has finished the finale of the concert, and that he could fetch it, he resists, telling her that he is able to finish it himself, although it would be a bit heavy and clumsy, comparatively speaking. But it would be his work, not hers. He would accept her help, but everyone has to know. The implication is clear: if she wants him to accept her work on the completion of the concert, she would have to come out of hiding, as it were, and accept responsibility for it. In other words, unlike Patrice before him, Olivier is unwilling to take credit for Julie’s work as a well-intended gift (probably born of love for Patrice, and now, for him). Julie is in a dilemma, but finally, she makes up her mind, phones Olivier, inquires whether he still sleeps on her mattress and whether he is alone, and to his affirmative reply, responds that she is ‘coming’, the implication being that she is at last able and willing to take responsibility for her own work. And his contribution, in the form of judicious action, to her discovery of her ‘desire’, and her freedom to affirm this desire, cannot be denied. White thematises Equality, the second member of the French Revolution’s triune motto, but as previously intimated, it does so in relation to power, along the axis of the question: ‘Can there be equality without shared power?’ In the course of providing a negative answer to this question, Kieslowski also broaches the question of the relation between power and (linguistic) communication: Where the power of the self falters, can language play the role of what Freud (following Bertha Pappenheim) called the ‘talking cure’, in the restoration of the self, of selfconfidence, or faith in one’s own power? If White is anything to go by, Kieslowski would certainly seem to grant language (or perhaps what Foucault would call ‘discourse’) a crucial role in this process, but it seems to me that, for him, language is just one factor among several, including economic wealth. It is appropriate that White should be connected to equality and power, given the fact that the colour white is not imbued with melancholy, like the colour blue, or charged with the vitalistic values which pervade red. It is a cold, harsh, pitiless, inexorable (non-) colour, in a way, and one could argue that, as such, it equalizes people the way the clinical white surroundings of a hospital reduces all those who lie in its white beds to the same status. And yet, the way in which Kieslowski uses it as the a-chromatic key to understanding White, also makes it a persuasive backdrop for the kind of power or domination exercised here so ruthlessly between non-equals, even where it is done with the purpose of equalizing the stakes. The final scene-sequences of the film alternate between scenes of lovemaking between her and Olivier, Sandrine looking at an X-ray scan picture of the child in her womb, Julie’s mother (whom she visits in the course of the narrative), and the boy Antoine touching the pendant cross that Julie gave him. Concomitantly, the audience hears excerpts from a performance of the (presumably completed) ‘Concert’, the choral parts of which comprise lyrics based on the familiar eulogy to love in Paul’s New Testament Letter to the Corinthians, testifying to Julie’s discovery, that it is finally not possible, sufficient or (especially) desirable to be ‘free from’ the things and people in the world, even when that is what one wants most, as she did after losing her family. Through the fortuitous intervention of Lucille, who had mistaken Julie’s attempt to be ‘free from’ others as concern for her (Lucille’s) right to privacy, as well as through Olivier’s love for her, she has discovered that, on the contrary, one should aspire to being ‘free to’ fulfil oneself in the world, and - perhaps most importantly - that such fulfilling liberty is only truly attainable if one has found love in the reciprocal sense of loving and being loved by someone. This is Kieslowski’s first great philosophical lesson for lovers of the cinema: One can only truly be free when one has found love. But this truth cannot stand alone in something as complex as life in human society - hence the philosophical lessons of the other two members of the trilogy. b. White: Certainly the harshest perspective on interhuman relations of Kieslowski’s cinechromatic trilogy, it unfolds the narrative of Karol Karol (Zbigniew Zamahowski), a Polish hairdresser from Warsaw who fell in love and married a French hairdresser, Dominique (Julie Delpy), only to find that, being unable to find a job in Paris, and not being fluent (in fact, very awkward) in French, he feels increasingly powerless. This lack of power manifests itself in the most devastating manner imaginable for a man (given the vulnerability of the male ego in this area of experience): sexual impotence. The problem reaches such chronic proportions that Dominique sues for divorce, and the more poor Karol tries to convince the judge that he still loves his wife and that the problem will be overcome, the less interested (the appropriately named) Dominique seems - so much so that she states emphatically that the marriage has no future because she does not love Karol any more. The divorce is granted. When Karol asks the judge, in broken French, whether he is to be discriminated against because he can’t speak French, it is a poignant reminder of the importance of communication4 for the maintenance of one’s interests, and, more importantly, of one’s 4 As will become apparent in the following sub-section, as well as in the last section of this article, communication is thematised most explicitly in Red, but is interbraided with the other themes addressed in the trilogy. This moment of Karol’s undoing, partly through his linguistic inadequacy, emphasises the indispensable role of language in self-empowerment. 216 217 ‘power’ in the broad sense of self-empowerment. (It is not by accident that God, in the Genesis-myth of creation, gives Adam the power of naming – language is the primary means through which humans subdue nature and one another.) In a last-ditch effort to persuade her to change her mind, Karol, lugging a huge suitcase, hurries after Dominique as she walks to her car, but she merely waves him goodbye in a gesture of dismissal more eloquent than words. When he attempts to draw money with his ATM card, the machine not only swallows his card, but, adding insult to injury, informs him that his account has been closed - his last means to self-empowerment in Paris, France, has been destroyed. Disconsolately, Karol prepares for a night on the streets, until he remembers that he still has a key to the hairdressing salon where Dominique works, and which, under the circumstances, is a shelter not to be sneezed at. suitcase, instead of the expected goods with exchange value, the unfortunate Karol is disgorged, much to their chagrin. To compensate for their disappointment they beat him up and leave him lying in the snow. The bleak snowy landscape exemplifies the manner in which Kieslowski uses the (non-) colour white to establish a mood of harshness and pitilessness in the film by that name. Some snowscapes – especially those we associate with Christmas - are beautiful and pristine, but the snow-covered landscape outside Warsaw, with its motley patches of dirty, industrial brown like festering sores, simply strikes one as being sordid and merciless. This is exactly how Karol experiences his life at that moment. When he finally manages to drag his battered body to his brother’s house with its adjacent hair salon, the latter’s sole reason for welcoming him back home seems to be that his female clients have been asking for Karol’s deft hairstyling touch. It is clear that Karol’s heart is not in his hairdressing, although it does contribute financially to his ultimate goal: to win Dominique back, for he still loves her. Karol’s realization that, as a citizen of a country that is not economically on a par with France, he is at a disadvantage to Dominique, a French citizen, reflects Kieslowski’s insight into the crucial power of the economic sphere – and in the present world dispensation this translates into money, or the question of the degree of one’s access to money. Here’s another significance of White: white stands for the equalizing power of money, which Karol understands. The next morning he is awakened by Dominique’s key turning the door lock. An argument ensues between them, with Dominique eventually standing, masterfully, astride his legs where he is still seated. Noticing a certain expression on his face, she checks herself in mid-sentence and, her eyes meeting his, she reaches downwards, verifying that he does, indeed, have the erection that his look betrayed. Without further ado, Karol with a triumphant look, and Dominique with mounting excitement, they start making love, with her sitting on top of him. But not for long. As if to rub salt into his wounds, his recalcitrant member wanes as suddenly as it waxed - judging by the changed expressions on both their faces: he looking crestfallen and she contemptuous - and she straightens herself, restores her underwear, and orders him out. When he tries, hesitantly, to reason with her, she sets fire to the curtains and phones the police, warning him that he would be blamed for the blaze. Karol’s defeat is complete, or so it seems. In the next scene the audience sees him sitting at the station, producing incongruous noises (supposedly music), blowing on a comb (between his lips) covered with silver paper from a cigarette box. A man is attracted by his pitiful attempts, and drops some coins in the container next to Karol, informing him that he knows the tune Karol is ‘playing’ because he is Polish, too. The man, Mikolaj, starts a conversation with Karol, in the course of which he learns of poor Karol’s plight. In response, he tells him that, if ever Karol needed money desperately, he knows a man who would pay anyone a large sum of money to kill him, because he has no reason to live, but does not want to commit suicide. Mikolaj takes pity on the impecunious Karol, and undertakes to smuggle him back to Poland in his (Karol’s) own very large suitcase. Despite the discomfort, the plan succeeds as far as the airport in Warsaw, where the suitcase with Karol inside mysteriously disappears, to Mikolaj’s consternation. As it turns out, Karol’s suitcase has been stolen, together with a number of others, by a gang of thieves that operates at the airport. When they open the But how to make more money? In order to supplement his income as a hairdresser, he starts working as a bodyguard for a Polish Mafia-type, shadowing his employer with a gun under his arm. Judging by his remarks to his associates, the wheeler-dealer clearly regards Karol as his inferior, and as pretty thick into the bargain. But underneath his sometimes comatose appearance, sitting in the back of the car with his eyes half-closed, Karol listens carefully to all the conversations around him. Just how carefully, the audience realizes when he visits a farmer and makes him an offer on his property that substantially exceeds the offer made previously by the Mafia type in Karol’s presence. Naturally, the old man sells to Karol, who has taken out a bank-loan for the purpose. He does this a number of times, buying property which is well located for commercial purposes at better prices than those offered by his boss, but without the latter’s knowledge of his bodyguard’s duplicity, of course. As he anticipated, his boss eventually cottons on, and threatens to execute him on the spot. Karol has made provision for such an eventuality, however. If you kill me, he tells the astonished man, the Church will inherit all the property that is in my name. Realizing that he has been outsmarted, and admitting grudgingly to a measure of respect for Karol’s ingenuity, he agrees to the audacious deal Karol proposes: to ‘buy back’ the property from him at more than double what Karol paid. Overnight, by risking his life in an improbable scheme, Karol becomes wealthy, thus taking a huge step 218 219 in his self-empowerment. It should be noted, though, that Kieslowski has not neglected the issue of empowerment through language – the audience is afforded several glimpses of Karol listening to ‘Teach yourself French’ tapes, and doing the requisite verbal exercises. In other words, he is preparing himself for a showdown. death. They draw her attention to the fact that her passport tells a different story, and that she had in fact entered Poland before Karol’s death. (It is not difficult for the audience to grasp the fact that this is another forgery that was not difficult for Karol to procure with the necessary funds – the insight on Kieslowski’s part, that money is the means to virtually anything one needs, is not without its critical, satirical side, although it is directed mainly at the socio-economic conditions which make such dubious uses of money possible.) At this point it suddenly dawns on Dominique that she has been framed, and that this is Karol’s revenge for the devastating, disempowering way she treated him in Paris, when she was on home territory, and had the linguistic as well as the economic advantage. The tables of power have been turned on her, and things have been equalized. He contacts his erstwhile benefactor, Mikolaj, and inquires whether the man he had told Karol about, is still willing to reward someone richly for ending his life. Mikolaj confirms this, and they arrange for Karol to meet his prospective ‘client’ that evening. Unsurprisingly, the client turns out to be Mikolaj himself. Having satisfied himself that Mikolaj truly wishes to die, and having received the payment for his services in advance, Karol lifts his revolver and pulls the trigger. When the anticipating Mikolaj opens his eyes and realizes that he is still alive, and that the firearm was not loaded, Karol inquires whether he still wants to die. If so, he would load the gun, and do the deed. He wanted Mikolaj to be sure, hence the initial fake shooting. Predictably, Mikolaj has changed his mind, but insists that Karol keep the money. Instead, Karol informs him that he would like Mikolaj, who is an experienced businessman, to come into business with him, and Mikolaj agrees. (In the scene-sequences that follow, it is clear that this near-death experience has given Mikolaj a new taste for life.) Their business prospers, and Karol confides in Mikolaj that his ultimate purpose is to use his wealth to win Dominique back. When the time is ripe, he plans and stages an elaborate scheme with Mikolaj’s help. First, they stage Karol’s ‘death’ by using a corpse (easily acquired in Poland, in exchange for money, of a man accidentally crushed by a large vehicle, and unrecognizable as a result) to ‘impersonate’ him, and a death certificate is duly issued in Karol’s name. Karol instructs Mikolaj to communicate to Dominique the news of his ‘death’, and of being named in his will as heir to a large sum of money, on condition that she attend his funeral and collect the inheritance personally. He also instructs Mikolaj to buy two air tickets to Hong Kong. On the day of the ‘funeral’, Karol hides in the cemetery at a vantage point that enables him to observe Dominique, and tears of gratification appear in his eyes when he witnesses her crying at ‘his’ graveside. To him, this is proof that she still cared for him at the time of his ‘death’. When she enters her hotel room that evening, she is understandably disconcerted to find Karol in her bed, alive, naked and amorous. Moreover, he addresses her in fluent French. It does not take much persuasion for him to make love to her – successfully. Evidently, he has been re-empowered. To her further astonishment, when she wakes up in the morning he has gone, and she receives a visit from the police, who charges her with the murder of Karol Karol. At first she tries to convince the sceptical officers that he is very much alive. When she realizes that this is to no avail, she protests that she only arrived in the country after his The question is, of course: will Karol leave it at that? Or will he try to make good his attempt to win back her love? Dominique is imprisoned, although it is not clear whether this is because of having been found guilty of Karol’s murder, in the absence of any exonerating evidence, or pending her trial. Not that it matters. As we already know, if you have money in Poland, anything can be procured, including the freedom of a prison inmate. The film ends with Karol, tellingly carrying luggage, being let into the prison courtyard, and meeting Dominique’s eyes where she is looking down at him from inside a cell. She smiles, and signals with her hands that she is ready to go with him, wherever he wants to go. With tears running down his cheeks, Karol looks back at her, bathed in the white glare of the prison-courtyard lights. And the audience is reminded of the two tickets to Hong Kong that Mikolaj has arranged at Karol’s request. Hong Kong, significantly, is neutral territory. The lesson of White should be clear: whether between individuals, or between countries, there can be no equality if there are no symmetrical power-relations, or at least comparable power, between the people or nations in question. And the indispensable means to gain or maintain power include, among them, linguistic prowess as well as economic means such as money. But Kieslowski goes even further: without such comparable power, and hence equality, there can be no question, in the long run, of love between individuals either. In this way he provides another thread, in addition to communication, that links all three films thematically. c. Red: As intimated earlier, Red addresses questions of communication in relation to friendship in terms of conditionality: what communicational conditions have to met for friendship to be possible? The central character in the narrative is Valentin (Irene Jacob), a young French woman who works as freelance model, whose boyfriend is always on the road, travelling, whose brother has a drug problem, and 220 221 who is lonely. Her boyfriend, Michel, phones her occasionally, and displays all the signs of possessiveness through the suspicious questions to which he subjects her. One evening, after an advertisement shoot, she accidentally runs a dog over in her little car. She stops, drags the dog - which can apparently not step on her hind leg - into her car with difficulty, and drives to the address she finds on the dog’s collar, only to find that her owner, an ageing, apparently cynical man (Jean-Louis Trintignant), is indifferent regarding Rita’s (the dog’s) fate. She decides to take her to a veterinarian clinic, where Rita’s leg is treated, and is subsequently told by the dog’s owner, who sends her a refund for the cost of the veterinary treatment, that Rita is hers. Soon after this, she takes Rita (who, it turns out, is pregnant) for a walk, but as soon as she takes the lead off the dog’s collar, she absconds. Valentin drives to Rita’s (ex-) owner’s address, and, as she expected, finds her there. the challenge and tells the startled man over the phone that he ‘deserves to die’. She sees him looking around frantically and then hurrying inside. She is uncompromising in her condemnation of what the judge is doing, however, and insists that it is ‘like playing God’. This visit proves to be a turning point, for, on entering the living room, she discovers the old man listening, by means of a powerful shortwave radio set, to a telephone conversation between a man and a woman who - it gradually dawns on her - are obviously in an illicit relationship. Noticing Valentin’s interest, or perhaps rather her undisguised dismay, he informs her that he is spying on his neighbours. In the conversation that ensues, Valentin learns that the old gentlemen is a retired judge, and although he seems to have adopted a nonjudgmental attitude to the individuals whose actions – ranging from private relationships to criminal misdemeanours – he has access to via modern communications technology, one gets the impression that he is challenging her to condemn him for his electronic eavesdropping. Which she does, exclaiming that: ‘Everyone has a right to privacy!’ Here the audience witnesses the ironic situation of someone whose profession required of him to judge people, presumably in a situation where adequate evidence or information was sometimes lacking, whereas now his situation was one where he possessed a certain technological ‘omniscience’, but this time accompanied by a suspension of judgement. The judge challenges Valentin to interfere in the lives of the people whose private lives they have access to, telling her which house it is, at that moment, where a married man is talking to his mistress over the telephone. She rushes out, and is admitted to the house by the man’s wife, who, at Valentin’s request, calls up to him that there is someone to see him. While she is waiting, she notices the couple’s daughter, eavesdropping on her father’s illicit conversation, using another telephone receiver, and changes her mind about accosting him. Back at the judge’s house, he mocks her inability to persevere with her intention, and proceeds to point out a man talking on a mobile phone next door, walking in his driveway. He tells her that this man, whose conversations are among those he taps into regularly, is a drug dealer, and, dialling his number, invites her to talk to him. Valentin, in a state of outrage and confusion, takes up In this encounter between Valentin and the retired judge, Kieslowski highlights the two aspects of modern tele-communications: on the one hand it gives one tremendous power to negate distances and overcome natural obstacles in the way of ‘reaching’ other people – something emphasised at the start of the film when the camera scrupulously follows the telephone wire from Valentin’s phone, where she is dialling her boyfriend’s number, to where it joins other phone connections in the complicated mass of wires at a switchboard, and from there to where these connections are linked together to form an undersea cable, carrying her voice, together with thousands of others, to interlocutors at the other end of these connections, in other countries. But on the other hand, as the judge’s illicit eavesdropping demonstrates, this communicational power is easily abused. The technological power to extend or enhance our ‘naturally’ given capacity to communicate is ambivalent – something usually thematized by science fiction5 – insofar as it has the potential to open up new worlds of experience, but simultaneously also to destroy a truly human way of living, in this case the ability to have privacy, to prevent everything from becoming public.6 Implicitly, therefore, Red issues a warning in this regard, not to abuse the capacity of electronically mediated communication to destroy what must, after all, be presupposed by the attempt to communicate, namely otherness. Unless the participants in a communicational process are ‘other’ in relation to each other, the attempt to communicate would make no sense. And otherness, in turn, requires a certain 5 Elsewhere (chapter 9 of this book) I have pursued at length this capacity of science fiction with reference to Cameron’s Terminator films. 6 In my discussion of Wenders’s Wings of Desire (chapter 8) I utilized Baudrillard’s contention that the distinction between private and public has collapsed in the contemporary, postmodern world, to interpret the relevance of the angels’ omniscience in Wenders’s film as a device to render a critique of this world’s fragmentation and attendant lack of communication between individuals. In Red the judge’s comparable access to other people’s private lives is put to different critical use, namely to emphasise the human need for privacy, so easily undermined by electronic communications technology. Kieslowski also draws attention to the plight of the lonely - in this instance, the judge – and the temptations offered to them by this kind of technology, especially in the absence of friends. Another cinematic thematization of the ambivalence of interpersonal as well as electronically mediated communication, again from a different angle, is found in the film, Pump up the Volume. This film is especially useful for the teaching of critical practice courses to university students, given the fact that its narrative plays out in the context of a high school where one of the pupils, at first unintentionally, orchestrates a rebellion against a tyrannical school principal by means of his shortwave pirate radio station. What he and his fellow students learn (sometimes painfully) in the process, is that electronically mediated communication is immensely powerful, but that this power can have destructive as well as constructive, salutary, effects (cf. Hurst & Olivier 1997). 222 223 privacy to flourish – a world in which everyone is constantly in the glare of public exposure through communications systems or media, would be a world in which true communication, namely the exchange and sharing, not only of information, but also of joy, sorrow, pleasure and pain, is redundant as well as impossible.7 In the case of Valentin and the judge, Kieslowski could not have emphasised this mutual otherness more. In effect, the complications of the narrative, which set them up as being on opposite sides of a moral divide on the question of the ethical justifiability of invading the privacy of unsuspecting individuals, establish otherness as the condition of the possibility of communication in an exemplary manner. In this case, unlikely as it may seem, it also prepares the way for friendship. interests have shifted – despite numerous attempts at contacting her by phone, she has become elusive. Then, at his peril, he decides to visit her apartment, and on arrival decides to play peeping-Tom to see what is happening in her lit bedroom. This entails the difficult feat of climbing up onto the second-floor balcony wall, and once there, he witnesses what he feared, but did not want to see, namely, his (erstwhile) lover making love to another man. Shattered, Auguste returns home, and in typical human fashion, takes out his disappointment and rage on his dog, who welcomes him in anticipation of a walk. Instead, Auguste bundles the poor animal into his car and takes it to a spot where he ties it to a lamppost before driving off. (Needless to say, his conscience bothers him sufficiently later to fetch the dog again.) Valentin’s uncompromising condemnation of the judge’s actions proves not to be in vain. After she has left, he writes letters to all the people on whose telephonecommunication he has been eavesdropping, as well as to the local telecommunications authorities, informing them of his illicit activities. Predictably, a court case follows, in which he is found guilty of contravening the law pertaining to telecommunications. Two of the individuals to whose intimate conversations he has listened, are a beautiful young woman and a handsome young man, Auguste, who lives in an apartment just opposite Valentin’s, and whose path has often nearly crossed with hers – in fact, when a giant poster of her face, against a red background, is put up along the route he normally drives to work, he stops to look at it, stunned by her beauty, not realizing (as the audience does) that the woman in the picture lives just across the road from him. Before the commencement of the court case against the prying judge, the audience witnesses Auguste, who drives a red jeep, and the blonde woman to whom he talks over the phone, begin a relationship which obviously causes great excitement on especially Auguste’s part. On one of the occasions when he and Valentin unwittingly pass by each other (she in her car, just before she accidentally knocks the judge’s dog over, and he crossing the road), he drops the bundle of books he is carrying, and one of them falls open on the road. Superstitiously, he looks at the pages where it opened, and pays special attention to that particular section in his preparation for the law examination which, if he passed, would qualify him as a judge. After the exam he meets his girlfriend, who gives him a beautiful pen as a commemorative present, and jubilantly informs her that he had in fact been required to write on the section that had fallen open before him. Unbeknown to them, however, things are about to change. At the court case she meets another man (also one of those involved in the judge’s telephonic misdemeanours), and gradually her relationship with Auguste peters out, to be replaced by one with her new acquaintance. Auguste cannot fail to read the signs that his erstwhile lover’s 7 Again, the pertinence of Baudrillard’s critique of contemporary culture regarding the nonequivalence of information-exchange and communication must be stressed. I address this issue at greater length in relation to Wenders’s Wings of Desire (chapter 8). The fact that the events in Auguste’s life are shown to the cinema audience in tandem with those that pertain to Valentin, the judge and his dog, Rita, together with the manner in which these events are presented – with their lives ‘crossing’, but not quite connecting at various junctures – sends unmistakable visual signals to the audience that, sooner or later, they are bound to meet. Moreover, the role of the judge in this is such that the narrative may be read, at a level secondary to the primary, realistic plane, in terms of a kind of divine intervention on the part of a ‘retired’ deity who has, nevertheless, not lost all of his powers. This is what happens: when Valentin reads a report in a newspaper on the court case involving the judge and those on whom he spied gratuitously, she pays him a visit, and he confesses to her that part of the reason why he revealed his nefarious activities, was in the hope of seeing her again. He offers her a glass of peach brandy (it turns out to be his birthday), and the fact that she accepts his offer, signals her appreciation of what she sees as a moral - or morally good – decision and consequent action on his part. Valentin invites the judge to a fashion show in which she is modelling. The scenesequence of this fashion pageant is one of the most eloquent in the film in chromatic terms, in so far as the rich red upholstery of the theatre where it is set, resonates in tone and mood with the theme in question, namely friendship and communication, but more than this, with the combined themes of Kieslowski’s 8 Leonard Shlain (1998:269) provides a penetrating insight into the symbolic significance of the colour red. He points out that it has been associated for thousands of years with female sexuality, with blood, vitality and passion. Hence, while it may at first seem that the pervasive presence of red in the film by this name is incongruous in relation to the friendship that grows between Valentin and the judge, this is not the case, as will be seen in what follows regarding the role that this friendship plays concerning Valentin’s future love-life. Secondly, Red - being the culminating film of the trilogy – brings together the themes of all three, which comprise, as I argue here, nothing less than the indispensable threads in the fabric of a truly human mode of living. As such, it is fitting that red should be its symbolic colour, given – as Shlain shows – that it is first and foremost the colour of life. After all, ‘feminine sexuality, blood, vitality and passion’ are all inseparable from life itself. 224 225 film-trilogy, which, in its entirety, concerns life in its fullness. And red is the colour of life.8 After the show, when everyone (except the janitor) has left, they sit talking in the theatre. In the conversation it becomes apparent – building on information that emerged in earlier exchanges between them – that the judge was in love once, and that, in a manner that bears an uncanny resemblance with Auguste’s experience, he witnessed another man (as he puts it) ‘between the long white legs’ of his beloved. As a result, he never married, and he intimates that Valentin may be the woman he never met subsequently. In a curious twist of fate, the man whom his beloved chose above himself, appeared before him in court, accused of manslaughter as a result of negligence. Instead of recusing himself, as he knows he should have, he found the man guilty and subsequently took early retirement, out of a certain disgust, it seems, with his profession’s duties and limitations. Another strange similarity between the judge and Auguste which emerges, is the fact that, like Auguste, the judge had dropped a book shortly before his legal examination that would qualify him as a judge, and he had also studied, and been asked, in the examination, the section at which the book had fallen open. Earlier, when Valentin told him that she was planning a trip to Britain to visit her (elusive, yet possessive) boyfriend, the judge recommended that she take the ferry instead of travelling by air and, as if to seal something already decided upon, the judge asks to see her ticket for the ferry, which she readily hands to him. He has also promised, at her request, to reserve one of Rita’s puppies for her. the names of the survivors as they step past the camera, wrapped in warm clothing. Apart from the barman of the stricken ferry, whose name does not ring a bell, there are Julie and Olivier (from Blue), Karol and Dominique (from White), and, of course, Valentin and Auguste. (I would not be surprised if the supposed ‘barman’ turns out to be Kieslowski himself – one arbitrary character among the six principal characters from the trilogy would be incongruous.) The rest of the narrative of Red gives one the impression that Kieslowski’s tale moves at two levels: the largely, although not entirely – given the judicious use of music, colour, camera angle, and so on - realistic level, where the characters are understood as real human beings, and events come across as credible happenings in recognizable social space, and also a second level (hinted at earlier), where the judge suddenly appears to be just that little too prescient, if not omniscient, to be a mere mortal. When Valentin boards the ferry, we are not really surprised to see Auguste there as well – after all, he needs a vacation after the devastating loss of his girlfriend, and, besides, he has crossed paths with Valentin several times before. Before the start of their journey on the ferry, the audience is informed that stormy weather has been forecast for the channel separating France and Britain, and when the audience witnesses the judge listening to a radio report about a ferry, among other vessels, which has disastrously overturned during the storm over the channel, with only a few survivors, he does not seem unduly perturbed. Instead he switches on the television set (brought to him by Valentin’s brother, whose drug-rehabilitation seems to have begun through her friendship with the judge), and calmly – without any apparent concern or surprise - watches as the seven survivors are shown, being brought aboard a rescue vessel. The television commentator announces At yet another level, however, in so far as he appears to ‘direct’ the flow of certain events, the figure of the judge seems to function as a metaphor for the director of the films in question, in so far as he appears to ‘direct’ the flow of certain events, reminding the audience of the power that the film director wields over the manner of presentation of the narrative which unfolds before our eyes – a narrative which is, regardless of its illuminating mimetic qualities, in the final analysis a construction, a work of cinematic art. Not that such power is absolute – and in this respect the judge (or Zeus) is, again, an appropriate metaphor – film directors have the power to manipulate the materials of his or her medium for the best achievement of their desired ends, but those materials (language, light, colour, music) are not of their creation. The director, like the judge/Zeus, can ‘order’ or organise a (chaotically) given set of elements or components in a certain way, but those components are always already there, including a certain measure of chance or errancy which, when it occurs, can be either affirmed or negated, excluded (after the fact) by the director. Moreover, as Plato (2000: 47e-48b; p.36) knew, not all errancy can be successfully organized or subjugated, ‘persuaded’ by intellect, because of what he termed ‘necessity’ (Gr. ananké, ‘fate’), which introduces a ‘straying’ or ‘errant’ cause into the course of events. The film ends with the judge smiling an enigmatic, somehow knowing smile, and the image-configuration of Valentin’s face (in exactly the same profile as on the gigantic red poster that brought a stunned Auguste to an abrupt stop), juxtaposed by Auguste’s, freezes the flow of narrative time. At this point the judge’s role in all this seems, in retrospect, to be (at the secondary level) something akin to that of a mythical figure like Zeus, who acted as judge, but also as the god who saves, in the mythical context of Olympian deities, and who had some commanding knowledge of, if not influence over the weather. Hence his suggestion that Valentin travel by ferry. Not only this seems to suggest a deliberate orchestration of events on his part, though – the way his dog, Rita, seemed to guide Valentin to him, the similarities between his life and that of the young judge-to-be, Auguste, and his remark that Valentin seems to be the woman he never met, are all factors that could be read as pointing to a ‘replay’, by means of another ‘incarnation’, as it were (Auguste), of his (human) life that had gone awry at a certain point, and which he wishes to rectify. 226 227 What Red contributes to the thematics of Kieslowski’s trilogy, then, is the insight – that may be gleaned by perceptive readers from the narrative reconstructed above – that not even the advanced electronic telecommunications of the late 20th century, such as telephones, television and radio, suffice to guarantee that there will be true communication between people. And such communication is a prerequisite for friendship, but also for love. The telephonic communication between Valentin and her possessive boyfriend is alienating rather than intimate; when Auguste most needs to talk to his girlfriend (who has apparently found a new love), the ringing telephone remains an empty promise; the judge’s electronically mediated ability to eavesdrop on private conversations gives him no fulfilment in the end. What does give him satisfaction, finally, is the friendship that gradually, through verbal conflict and confrontation – followed by moral action – grows between him and Valentin. It is in the development of this friendship that Kieslowski demonstrates, not merely that there is no friendship without communication, but that this communication is of a very specific kind – it is an exchange between individuals which is predicated on their difference, their otherness in relation to each other. Their eventual friendship happens then, improbably, partly because of otherness of character which is openly revealed in their mutual communication, through which they also discover what they have in common as human beings, namely, the need for friendship. And it does not end with friendship between human beings, either. In Red, friendship is the thread that connects, ultimately, all living creatures. Without a sense of caring, Valentin would not have stopped and taken the injured dog, Rita, to the veterinary clinic. Nor would Auguste have gone back for his dog, abandoned in a moment of projected resentment. When we see the judge putting a (red) collar on the puppy that has been promised to Valentin, this visibly completes the bond of friendship between humans and dogs as representatives of all other living creatures. that is a quasi-supernatural force, or simply what the ancient Greeks called ananké or fate, necessity (referred to earlier), which cannot be finally controlled by humans, no matter how much they strive to exercise technological control over nature and society. (Interestingly, Valentin expresses her desire, as opposed to demand, to the judge where, in response to him telling her that he has dreamt of her as she would be several decades later, she inquires urgently whether he saw her with someone in his dream. He simply responds by saying that he saw her turn towards someone next to her, in this way strengthening the audience’s impression, at the conclusion of the film-narrative, that the ‘someone’ in question will turn out to be Auguste.) As the ancient Greeks taught us, friendship or philia is a species of love, the other two kinds being agape (respect, awe, or love of humans for the divine and vice versa) and eros (erotic love), and it is therefore not surprising that eros is also addressed in Red. It is clear from the start that Valentin is searching for someone to love, and that her desperate need, expressed in the form of various ‘demands’, is not likely to be fulfilled by her absent boyfriend. The gap separating (biological) need and its expression in speech as demand, is precisely what ‘desire’ amounts to, according to Lacan (1981: 243, 278), and Valentin’s desire, while (unlike need) being ultimately not completely fulfillable, does not find an appropriate ‘object’ or counterpart, until she and Auguste (who finds himself in exactly the same position) finally meet, apparently by chance. Except that, as indicated above, the presence of the principal characters from Kieslowski’s two earlier films in the rescue scene reminds us that their meeting has been orchestrated, not merely by the director of the three films, but also by what the judge represents, whether 2: Application: What these artworks mean for contemporary humans. The question, in terms of the last component of Gadamer’s tripartite hermeneutical model, namely, how does the understanding and the more explicit interpretation of the three films, as carried out in the previous section of this article, apply to the lives of individuals living in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, may be stated as follows. It is significant that Kieslowski uses various cinematic means to indicate explicitly that the three films should be viewed as being interconnected in thematic terms. In other words, given these explicit links between them, they appear as cinematic elaborations of different, but interconnected, inseparable aspects of human life. These intra-cinematic, but self-transcending links include the scene-sequence, in Blue, where Julie, looking for her dead husband’s former mistress at the law courts, peeps into a court in session, and we hear Karol – one of the protagonists of White - ask the judge whether he is being discriminated against because of his inability to communicate fluently in French. In White we encounter the same event, witnessing Julie looking in, but this time from within the court, instead of from outside the courtroom. Apart from setting up connections between these two films which reflect the chance criss-crossing of human lives on a daily basis (mostly without individuals being aware of the specific nature of their respective projects and goals), Karol’s lack of communicational ability, which is connected with lack of power in White, appears in Blue as well, in the context of Julie’s quest to communicate with Sandrine in order to hear the truth about her and Patrice firsthand, so to speak. In Blue, however, this desire to communicate is linked to the self-empowerment that Julie craves at that point, which is the counterpart of Karol’s predicament, and which he proceeds to overcome by actualising his communicational powers, once back in Poland. Add to this Karol and Dominique’s appearance at the end of Red, which thematizes communication most explicitly of all three films, and it becomes clear that, while each film is explicitly dedicated to the elaboration of one of the themes of freedom, equality and friendship, these 228 229 themes are intertwined as the film-narratives are intertwined. I have already referred to love as an important interconnecting thread as well: in Blue, it is crucial for Julie’s attainment of freedom to actualise herself; in White, love is that which depends, ultimately, on shared power, and hence, equality, between lovers; and in Red, it is shown (both as philia and as eros) in its interbraidedness with communication. to something that would be, in a sense, ‘inhuman’ – in the first sense that JeanFrancois Lyotard distinguishes in his book by that name (1991: 6) – namely, what he calls the ‘inhuman’ ideology or system of ‘development’, which appears, in Red, in the guise of mediating (but sometimes alienating) electronic communications systems. But asymmetrical power-relations, whether of an interpersonal kind, like those between Karol and his dominating wife/ex-wife in White, or of a political, or an economic kind (like those between an impoverished Eastern Europe and a wealthy Western Europe in White), also threaten a truly human life. And so does the withdrawal, or putative ‘freedom from’ society on the part of intrinsically caring individuals, represented by Julie in Blue. Unless caring people everywhere could, like Julie, discover a reason – and what better ‘reason’ than love? - to enact their ‘freedom to’ build a better society, human social life faces formidable difficulties. The films are also connected through music, generally, in so far as the specific music of each soundtrack, like the predominant colour setting the tone appropriate to the theme of each film, enhances audience-awareness of the theme in question.9 In Blue the music is most conspicuous in its melancholic (but eventually also joyous) ‘tonal’ function, as it collaborates with the different hues of blue as well as with Kieslowski’s judicious use of silences in the narrative to evoke the enigmatic velleities on Julie’s part. In White the kind of music that accompanies the unfolding conflict between Dominique and Karol is, appropriately, far more aggressive, especially in counterpunctal form, while Red’s musical soundtrack is as richly life-affirming as the various shades and hues of red in its scene-sequences. More specifically, the music of Von Budenmayer, which is mentioned by Julie to Olivier as an element or source of the Concerto in Blue, also features in Red, where Valentin selects it to listen to in a music shop. Given these significant interconnections among the three members of Kieslowski’s cinematic trilogy, then, what does it mean for us, as inhabitants of a technologyor artificial intelligence-saturated world where truly human desires and needs seem to be relegated to a more and more exiguous status every day? How, in Gadamer’s terms, does their thematic focus, as it appeared in my preceding interpretation of their respective narratives, apply to our lives? Obviously every person who views these films would have to decide for themselves, on the basis of her or his understanding and interpretation at the time (and being historical creatures, at different times people would find that different aspects of these rich film-texts would address them more forcefully than at other times). Their application to my own life is not important here; what is important, however, is how they apply to human life, to our social sphere, at this time in history. And it is not difficult to perceive that they remind us of the inalienable importance, for people, of freedom in its relation to love (Blue), of equality in relation to power (White), and of friendship in relation to communication and otherness (Red), respectively, but also together, in so far as those phenomena are inextricably intertwined in a recognizably human world. As such the themes elaborated in these films function as markers, as it were, to identify a human world as opposed 9 The specific semiotic relevance of the music and the colour-dominance as well as -variations in the film trilogy of which this article is an art-philosophical interpretation, could obviously be addressed at greater length and in more detail. That would require another article, however. This is how the ‘applicability’ of the films in question to contemporary individuals may be articulated. Everyone who reads this article, and who is familiar with the films, may decide for her- or himself how this ‘application’ should be modulated to apply to her or his life. In the final analysis, then, Kieslowski’s cinematic trilogy – to my mind a milestone in the history of cinema - is a celebration of human life, and may legitimately be called ‘the colours of life’. REFERENCES Bleiler, D. 1996.TLA Film & Video Guide 1996-1997. Philadelphia: TLA Publications. Freud, S. 1968. 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