Trauma and Style
Films about recent historical traumas (the Holocaust) or deific figures are not supposed to be highly stylized, which many viewers associate with artificialness. History is documentary. Thus, in Spielberg’s Schindler’s List or Lincoln, or Spike Lee’s Malcolm X style operates in a largely “realist,” self-effacing, invisible mode, as if an excess of auteur style might come to signify flippancy.

Style is Never Invisible
And yet style is never invisible, but rather “natural” so that it appears invisible. For instance, “long takes” are called “long takes” not because they are really long (a two- or three-minute uncut shot in an Orson Welles or Stanley Kubrick film is considered a long take) but because the norm is shorter takes, faster editing. Thus, long takes are considered “stylistic.”

Black Spectacle
On their way to Candyland to rescue Django’s wife Broomhilda from Calvin Candie’s nine-circles-of-hell plantation Candyland, King Schultz (Christoph Waltz) explains his plan to Django: that Django must act the part of a free black interested in purchasing one of Candie’s slave fighters: “Because when a man has one of the four biggest cotton plantations in Dixie, but the only thing that seems to ring his chimes is beg sweaty black makes, if WE want to get his attention, we better be talking about big sweaty black males.”

Django must impersonate, he must act, he must do exactly what he did as a slave: play pretend for whites.

Cornel West
Black masculinity is a “stylization of the body over space and time.”

The Wound
There is something wounding about Django. It drains just a bit of humanity from you. There are reasons for this, probably, that are rational, that can be explained. After all, it’s just a movie, you tell yourself. What is it that Django has taken away from you (other than your money)? It has shown you that you are hard enough to watch. You are that kind of person. You watch, wounded.

John Hoberman

I wanted [in his book Darwin’s Athletes: How Sport has Damaged Black America and Preserved the Myth of Race] to produce a socially useful analysis of black subjugation to white institutions and the racial folklore that sustains it; this meant following the black athlete around the postcolonial world and connecting his status to that of his ancestors, who once dealt with colonial masters who whose interest in sport was both passionate and political in nature.

The Problem With Django
The problem with Django is that is fails to provide the familiar comfort of genre.

The Emergence of the Problem
In the decades of the 1950s and 60s, Django Unchained might have been categorized as a “social problem” film, a wilder and less restrained version of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. But even then, in 1967, there was an understanding between audience and film, and that understanding was this: that the film would police its own boundaries. It was a difficult, tenuous understanding, but an understanding nonetheless, a sort of love, really, this compact.

The Problem Blooms
At some point, history as agreed upon collapsed. Perhaps it happened on the evening of February 27, 1968, when Walter Cronkite on national television suggested that the United States might not be victorious in the war in Vietnam. It would take at least a decade for the Right to realize that, yes: history hitherto had been, by and large, written and narrated by the Left. In the collapse, there were noble recovery efforts: the 1977 miniseries Roots, for example, and Jesse Jackson’s 1984 presidential campaign. These were meaningful. They failed.

Django to Schultz
“Eskimo Joe’s a quality nigger, no doubt about it.” At this point in the film, there is a level of unbearable uncertainty, and it comes down to this: is Jamie Foxx pretending to be Django pretending to use the word “nigger” with no irony? Audiences, some in the audience at least, want to know the answer to that question, but the answer is hidden within the folds and blood-splattered cotton fields and dynamited plantations of the film itself.

(Re)chained
If Django is unchained, why does it feel so terribly like something else has happened, something that cancels out his freedom? What will become of him? More tellingly, what sort of man has be become? He has massacred whites and blacks alike. He is a terrorist of the screen. A sniper of ideas. He has seized the narrative, but only partially. If only, at the end, he could turn from the dynamited Candyland Plantation to the screen itself, the camera and its attendants, and destroy it, as well.

Blood
A villainous movie spills blood in ways that seem incoherent. The blood is the same spurted, make-believe Hollywood red as in every other stupid film, coating the walls, the screen death of characters mixed together. And yet there is a difference. The blood splashes outside the frame, onto our faces, and this is not simply because there is too much blood, but because of some other, mysterious reason. It is why we discover traces of that blood in the creases of our clothes weeks after seeing the film. There is unease about Django Unchained not because of its content, but because, in its direction, it speaks to both vigilantism and compromise: the careful engine of its plot (Schultz) is killed off before the third act, leaving Django to make possible—through indescribable violence—Schultz’s unspoken will.

Who is Schultz, really? A German, for one thing. The character who sets the moral compass of the film spinning is German. He is, let us speculate, forty-something years old in the universe of the film, which is set in the 1850s. His potential German grandchildren, back in Düsseldorf, in Tarantino’s universe, might be the Nazis in Inglourious Basterds.

Endurance
Candie to his sister Lara Lee, re: Broomhilda’s scarred-by-lashing back, whom he has just shown to Schultz: “But Lara Lee, Dr. Schultz is from Düsseldorf. They don’t got niggers there. I’m sure it would fascinate him, the niggers’ endurance for pain.” That last sentence seems directed at the audience.

George Fitzhugh
In 1854, the pro-slavery writer George Fitzhugh published a book entitled Sociology of the South, or, the Failure of Free Society. (An excellent collection of related documents and critical commentary is available in The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South, 1830-1860, edited by Drew Gilpin Faust and published by The Louisiana State University Press.) Fitzhugh’s words helped sustain the evil of slavery and contributed to the myth of slavery as a “benign” and even “benevolent” institution.

Fitzhugh: Part of the Family

Slavery protects the infants, the aged and the sick; nay, takes far better care of them than of the healthy, the middle-aged and the strong. They are part of the family, and self-interest and domestic affection combine to shelter, shield and foster them.

Fitzhugh: A Humane Community

But it is domestic slavery alone that can establish a safe, efficient and humane community of property. It did so in ancient times, it did so in feudal times, and does so now, in Eastern Europe, Asia and America. Slaves never die of hunger; seldom suffer want.

Fitzhugh: Gradual but Certain Extermination

In the last place, the negro race is inferior to the white race, and living in their midst, they would be far outstripped or outwitted in the chase of free competition. Gradual but certain extermination would be their fate. We presume the maddest abolitionist does not think the negro’s providence of habits and money-making capacity at all to compare to those of the whites. This defect of character alone would justify in enslaving him.

When is a Movie Not Just a Movie?
According to the experts, movies are never innocent. They betray the anxieties and desires (often repressed) of the society from which they emerge.

Whose Wishes?
But whose desires, whose wishes? Is historical slavery entertainment? A spectacle for the purposes of entertainment? When Candie watches the two slaves fight to the death right before his eyes and only inches a way from him in the well-appointed room of his plantation under the glow of chandelier lights, some might say that the pleasure he derives from the scene is the same as the viewer’s pleasure. The viewer is “sutured” into Candie’s angle of vision via carefully timed point-of-view shots. We come to identify with the spectacle as he sees it. There is nothing new in the depiction of the suffering of others. It is the prerogative of the artist to render these depictions compelling and saleable (in the case of Django, at the cost of around 87 million dollars, primarily from The Weinstein Company). The question is: having indulged with such excess, detail, and relish in the fight (which ends with the forced smashing-in of the losing slave’s head by hammer at the hands of the winning slave) can the film possibly recuperate its message of justice? Or does this terrible scene of “with Candy” (i.e., with and from the perspective of Candy) burn so strongly that no other moment in the film can possible re-shuffle it into its proper moral order?

The Culture
What is it in the culture that makes possible a movie like Django Unchained? For one thing, nostalgia, not simply (and this is a terrible thought) for the vigilante, but for the very system of injustice which provides moral justification to his actions.

Performance
Jamie Foxx is not a slave. Samuel L. Jackson is not a slave. They are paid to perform the parts of slaves and free blacks for the director Quentin Tarantino. They are in blackface. Especially Samuel Jackson, whose exaggerated minstrel show blackness is the only reason for his character’s existence.

Regarding the Pain of Others
In her book Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag thought about why there is no national museum on slavery in America:

To have a museum chronicling the great crime that was African slavery in the United States of America would be to acknowledge the evil that was here. Americans prefer to picture the evil that was there, and from which the United States—a unique nation, one without any certifiably wicked leaders throughout its entire history—is exempt.

In the absence of an official memorial to slavery, there are films like Django.

In an Interview
In an interview with The Miami Herald, Quentin Tarantino said:

Most countries have been forced to deal with the atrocities of their past. And America has conveniently chosen to avoid dealing with it, this subject, because it’s uncomfortable and people would rather avert their eyes. I’m here to put you in that place and say, ‘This is America. This is us. This is how this country was founded.’ If you want to know why things are the way they are today, look at this.

The Western
Parts of Django Unchained are like a western. The western is, some say, a dead genre. Django, in Django, is a cowboy who rides to his own rescue.

The Authority to Depict
Who has the moral authority to depict the enormity of violence against a people or a race? Of the directors and producers of the 1977 miniseries Roots, only one—Gilbert Moses—was African-American.

Pure Cinema
Django Unchained verges on what the French avant-garde filmmaker René Clair called, in 1925, cinéma pur—pure cinema—the “elemental origins” of cinema in “vision and movement.” Which brings us back to style. How should a film be? Should a film depicting the excess of evil also be excessively evil? For it may be that the story that any work of art tells—whether a novel or a painting or a film—is really and secretly the story of its telling. And the less invisible the style, the more this becomes obvious. Which is to say: often, a supposedly righteous film tells a story of terrible things, such as Schindler’s List. But sometimes, and more rarely, a villainous story is told by a truly villainous film.

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“As a first step, the whole system of society is to be torn down, and built up anew.”
–from The Scarlet Letter

***

She—let’s call her Emily—is the one leaning forward. Eyes shut when all the others are looking. Her hair pulled back and smoothed across her head. The room is hot, the lens on her microscope has fogged, and with her right hand she adjusts it, bringing it closer to the sample on the stage. She had recently read H. G. Wells’s When the Sleeper Wakes, in serialized form, and Edith Wharton’s strange and dark-patched novel The Custom of the Country, and its line about “the need of feigning complete indifference” has somehow wormed itself in her head. These books have unsettled her in a way she doesn’t quite yet understand, and when she first sees—moments before this picture is made—the spider’s leg through the microscope, with its hair and the way it appears broken or maybe just bent at a joint, something in her tremors, falters, and then corrects itself.

Emily understands already that looking through the microscope has changed her, reaffirmed what she always felt: that the visible world is not as it appears. Her father is a preacher, and this thought (“for now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face”) has been the subject of many a sermon, but she means it in a different way, and it comforts her to think that her perception is so limited that it captures only one small sliver of reality as it is. To look inward, at the smallest of things—this is what novels do. And now microscopes.

The women with her in this photograph will fall out of her life gradually with the exception of her young teacher—Ruth—standing, whose views on marriage will not so much challenge Emily’s views on the subject as re-affirm what she has felt for a very long time but could never put into words. But there is something more that will keep the teacher and Emily close for the next fifty years (until the week before Kennedy’s assassination, when they both will die days apart) and that is a fierce darkness that seems to reside within Ruth, a darkness whose depths Emily has never fully plumbed, a darkness that repels and attracts her, and that even on the day of this photograph she felt, as Ruth passed behind her, as if she had fogged Emily’s lens with her very presence, or sucked the light away from her microscope.

In fact, if Emily had ever seen this picture of her and Ruth, which she never did, she might notice that the real subject of observation is not the slides in the microscopes, but rather the young women themselves. They are the experiment, and Ruth its director. And of those in the photo, only Emily will be selected for further study, and when, twenty minutes after this image is taken, Ruth befriends her in the copper-colored hallway (copper-colored because of the way the late afternoon sun at just that moment comes in from the high windows and reflects the light off the newly tiled walls) it will mark the beginning of a new experiment, with Emily as its subject.

At what point did Ruth cease to think of Emily as the subject of an experiment and begin to think of her as a true friend? In truth, never, for these two ways of thinking co-existed in Ruth’s mind from the beginning, even as she steered Emily into ever deeper waters of doubt. There was a passage from Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century affixed to Ruth’s writing desk, a passage that was in fact the basis of her experiment:

Union is only possible to those who are units. To be fit for relations in time, souls, whether of Man or Woman, must be able to do without them in the spirit. It is therefore that I would have Woman lay aside all thought, such as she habitually cherishes, of being taught and led by men.

An experiment in control, the complete control and direction of one human being by another. And it was this desire that Emily detected in Lucy and thought of as darkness (“oh, dark Lucy” she would write in letters during their separations). At Emily’s marriage—which followed Lucy’s by one year—Lucy sang an old hymn by Isaac Watts whose last verse went like this:

There are no acts of pardon past
In the cold grave, to which we haste;
But darkness, death, and long despair
Reign in eternal silence there.

***

And there is another clue in the photograph that, had she seen it, might have brought Emily to the understanding that, subsequent to befriending Lucy, no major decision she made in her life was really hers. The clue is the small, square-shaped object in the background, a frame holding a photograph of two women—she and Lucy. They are gazing out of the frame of the photo towards something that seems to have startled them both. The photograph was taken—must have been taken—prior to the photograph it appears in, the one that is the subject of this writing, and yet Lucy and Emily had not formally met each other, let alone posed for a photograph together, prior to this one.

That the framed photograph is there, impossibly, in the background of a photograph taken before the framed photo could possibly exist, is something hinted at least several times in letters from Lucy to Emily, whom she sometimes still addressed as “My dear Student.” In one letter, from 1921, Lucy writes that “I knew you before I knew you,” which Emily interprets as yet another of Lucy’s taunting aphorisms in the spirit of Fuller or Emerson or even one of Lucy’s playful but dark New Testament-like mockeries, her reminder to Emily that her father was a preacher, a man who refused to give communion to the non-believing. In another letter Lucy writes the cryptic line “that first day at the school lab I glimpsed you out of the corners of both eyes; you spread my vision wide,” referring, probably, to the fact that from where she was standing at the moment the photo was taken she could glimpse Emily—simultaneously—to her right, where she was seated with the microscope, and to her left, where she appeared in the far photograph.

The saddest truth about the impossible photo within the photo is that Emily, eyes shut, of all people, would have marveled at its existence. Would have marveled to discover that she actually had met Lucy before she met her—and that there was photographic evidence to prove it. Most of all Emily would have, much like she did with the stories she so loved by H. G. Wells, curled it into mystery, a mystery as vast and many chambered as anything she could possibly imagine.

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In theoretical terms, the ruling has a lot in common with reader-response criticism, which was pioneered by Stanley Fish and others in the 1960s and 70s in reaction to the New Critics and others who held that the meaning of a text was to be found primarily within the text itself. Reader-response critics shifted the focus away from the text as a sacrosanct repository of meaning (whether fiction, poetry, drama, etc.), and even its author, to suggest that meaning is created in a hard-to-define, super-charged zone of interaction between text and reader, and, even more radically, that the reader in fact activates the meaning of the text. In the Entertainment Merchants case, Justice Scalia’s arguments turn out to embody a kind of libertarian strain of reader-response theory. “All literature is interactive,” he writes, countering those who find special danger in violent video games because of their interactivity. He cites judge and legal theorist Richard Posner: “Literature when it is successful draws the reader into the story, makes him identify with the characters, invites him to judge them and quarrel with them, to experience their joys and sufferings as the reader’s own.”

In his concurring opinion Justice Alito also explores the interactive dimension of video games (such as Mortal Kombat [1]) although, unlike Scalia, he finds that this quality fundamentally distinguishes video games—in potentially dangerous ways—from the interactivity of books and films. In language which is, paradoxically, a representation of violence in the same way that video game images are a representation of violence, Alito becomes, briefly, a horror writer depicting a gruesome murder, as he describes an avatar who

sees a realistic image of the victim and the scene of the killing in high definition and in three dimensions; who is forced to decide whether or not to kill the victim and decides to do so; who then pretends to grasp an axe, to raise it above the head of the victim, and then to bring it down; who hears the thud of the axe hitting her head and her cry of pain; who sees her split skull and feels the sensation of blood on his face and hands.

“Alito recounts all these disgusting video games,” Scalia writes, “in order to disgust us—but disgust is not a valid basis for restricting expression.” It’s an argument that is both simple and complicated, veering into semiotics: the relationship between the signifier (words or images that represent something) and the signified (the idea or concept to which the signifier refers) is really a matter of imagination. The “real” to which language refers is always a product of language itself, so that reality is cajoled, conjured, and brought into being by the very signs we use to describe it. Scalia flirts with these deconstructive ideas throughout the majority opinion, as when he suggests that “Alito’s argument highlights the precise danger posed by the California Act: that the ideas expressed by speech—whether it be violence, or gore, or racism—and not its object effects, may be the real reason for governmental proscription.”

All of which raises the question: what does it mean when the sort of reality that the justices legislate is not so much reality per se, but representations of reality, and is there even a difference? We are getting into metaphysical quicksand here. When Breyer writes that “extremely violent video games can harm children by rewarding them for being violently aggressive in play . . . thereby teaching them to be violently aggressive in life,” he suggests a distinction—as do the other justices—that the boundaries between virtual reality and reality are blurred and fluid, if even they exist at all. And is it the role of the State to regulate and police, the justices ask, the shifting thresholds between these two overlapping realities? Later in his dissent, Breyer cites studies suggesting that—in a body-technology connection reminiscent of David Cronenberg’s Videodrome—the brain’s neural patterns actually change as a result of playing violent video games.

The dispute that language—or any form of representation—can in and of itself be “violent” is strangely similar to an interview exchange between authors Ben Marcus and Brian Evenson in StoryQuarterly in 1995:

Marcus: When writing is called “violent,” a fundamental semantical mistake is being made, unless the claim is that the writing is itself a violent agent. In some ways, a writer can be pleased to see language being accorded the power to destroy objects . . .

Evenson: To render a violent act in language is not at all the same as committing a violent act. The writing itself is not violent, but rather precise, measured, controlled, in the grip of certain arbitrary but self-consistent rules.

***

In an even murkier and more troubled sense, the anxiety not only about violent video games but about video games in general that weaves through the Court’s decision has more to do with realism than violence. And in this regard, the decision as a whole—the opinion, the concurring opinion, and the dissenting opinion—is a skeptical meditation on the fragility of “the real” in an era when reality itself seems on the verge of being replicated in unprecedented ways. At times the decision—which is over 90 pages long—reads like a crazy hybrid of Marshall McLuhan, Julia Kristeva [2], and Wayne C. Booth, as the Justices struggle to theorize the meaning of violent video games in our culture. Tensions about realism and art—literature especially—are long standing, and periodically emerge as new art forms experiment with new ways of representing and re-creating reality. In his classic study The Rise of the Novel, Ian Watt suggested that the novel as a new genre in the seventeenth century was indeed “novel” because, in large part, it re-created the feeling of real time for readers in ways that previous forms of literature did not. Watt wrote about “the effect upon characterisation of the novel’s insistence on the time process. The most obvious and extreme example of this is the stream of consciousness novel which purports to present a direct quotation of what occurs in the individual mind under the impact of the temporal flux; but the novel in general has interested itself much more than any other literary form in the development of characters in the course of time.”

For Justices Alito and Breyer (one of the two dissenters, the other being Justice Thomas), it is precisely the immersive, choice based, hyper-realistic, real-time nature of the games that poses an almost existential threat, as if reality itself were in danger of being replicated. It’s as if, during their exposure to the games during the course of the hearing, Alito and Breyer found themselves dropped into some sort of Philip K. Dick world, and it horrified them. “The means by which players control the action in video games,” according to Alito, “now bear a closer relationship to the means by which people control action in the real world.” Breyer goes even further, citing studies which suggest that “the closer a child’s behavior comes, not to watching, but to acting out horrific violence, the greater the potential psychological harm.”

In his frantic, supercharged book The Perfect Crime postmodern theorist Jean Baudrillard (whose words drop and slot into your mind as if formed from heavy metals) wrote that

It is not then, the real which is the opposite of simulation—the real is merely a particular case of that simulation—but illusion. And there is no crisis of reality. Far from it. There will always be more reality, because it is produced and reproduced by simulation, and is itself merely a model of simulation. The proliferation of reality, its spreading like an animal species whose natural predators have been eliminated, is our true catastrophe.

And this shimmering, fragile fear, I think, is what haunts the logic of the Court’s ruling. Not the fear of video game violence per se, and not the typical and familiar fear of virtual reality, but rather the fear of another, second order of reality itself, arriving near the point when it will be indistinguishable from the first order of reality that we take for granted every day. “These games,” writes Alito, “feature visual imagery and sounds that are strikingly realistic, and in the near future video-game graphics may be virtually indistinguishable from actual video footage.” And in a footnote, he cites this passage from the book Infinite Reality: “Technological developments powering virtual worlds are accelerating, ensuring that virtual experiences will become more immersive by providing sensory information that makes people feel they are ‘inside’ virtual worlds.”

So while the Court’s decision is ostensibly about the constitutionality of a law that forbids the sale of violent video games to minors, it’s also—at a deeper and more Charlie Kaufman-esque metaphysical level—about the fragility of “the real” in a age when that very concept is under assault. There is something charming and humbling about these Justices, who range in age between 57 and 79, grappling not just legalistically but theoretically with the meaning of these video games, struggling to find precedent for the fast-evolving art form of storytelling and recognizing, with a certain grace and even humor, that, at least for now, the swift and sometimes disturbing passage of ideas through new mediums is too precious to restrict.

——————————–

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Film exchange row was on Fourteenth Street in New York City, and with the reels under my arm, that’s where I headed. First I called on Empire Film Exchange. . . . The exchange was owned by Adam Kessel and Charles Bauman. There was the usual counter where the operators from the nickelodeons brought back the reels of the program they had shown to exchange for other reels to make up their next program. Empire had a small office for the bosses and a still smaller screening room where they looked at pictures they might buy. –From One Reel a Week, University of California Press, 1967.

Here is one of those nine photographs, and its possible, secret story.

She exists, now, in sepia. She is taking notes in the offices of the Empire Film Company in New York in a photograph from 1910, her hair done up in the style of the day in the years before the “war to end all wars” which, beginning just four years after this photograph, will claim over 15 million lives. His suit is too big. The sole of one of his shoes is exposed beneath the chair. He looks weary.

They are in the offices of Empire Film at a moment in time when there is not yet any such thing as a motion picture industry, but rather a diverse assortment of scrappy film productions companies—some very short lived—including The American Mutoscope and Biograph Company (which D. W. Griffith joined in 1908), Majestic Films, The Edison Manufacturing Company, The Duquesne Amusement Supply Company, The Selig Polyscope Company, The American Vitograph Company, and others.

There are so many details in the picture, but which ones are important? Neither of them are looking directly at each other. He might be dictating; she might be taking notes. Or perhaps she is simply recording information, tallies of how many reel rentals there were this week, etc. Or there is nothing written at all on her pad of paper; she is posing, acting for the camera, just like the actresses in the films of the offices of the Empire Film Company. There is the carved face on the wall above her head. There is his seat cushion. There is the overexposed window behind him, which is open. There are many objects on the desk whose meaning can only be guessed at. It’s not fair that we don’t know.

Their story could take the guise of any of the film genres that guided thought in the 1910s and 20s. In the western he is the new sheriff and she his young wife, and when she sees a man’s throat slit behind a barn and the way he tries to hold his life in as it bleeds through his fingers something in her mind will become dislodged and even the act of acting happy will be impossible for her. In the train robbery version her husband will act the hero, stupidly, to the bandits (including a boy no older than ten) who are about to burst into the photograph from off-screen right and demand the cash from the day in the hidden drawer next to the man’s left knee. In the Civil War nostalgia film version she will treat the house slave with unexpected compassion, subtly reinforcing the fact that she, the mistress of the house, has the power to confer such compassion. In the domestic melodrama version she will be the mistress, seated in the very chair where he first fell in love with her, the light coming in from the window at frame left illuminating her face in such a way that makes us wonder even now, over one-hundred years later, what she is thinking about.

There are the moments after this photo was taken, moments that while lost to documented reality exist nonetheless. In these, after the photographer is satisfied and wipes the sweat from his brow, the woman will throw her hands to her mouth in laughter. Her brother (his name, let’s say, is Edward), seated opposite her, will laugh also, because this is what they have always done; this is their way. She laughs and then he laughs. Sometimes they don’t even know why. No, wait: he knows why. When she (her name is Evelyn) was a girl, she nearly died of scarlet fever, the rash slowly spreading from her neck to arms to back as if she were being consumed by her very own body. He stayed with her for those two weeks (he was ten; she was seven), sleeping on the wooden floor beside her bed, and listen to her labored breathing and the mysterious, incoherent phrases she would sometimes call out during her fevered nightmares. And sometimes, now, years later, when her face flushes in embarrassment, he calls her Scarlet, and she smiles and laughs. And then he laughs. It is these small, private exchanges that—in a way that even he himself does not fully understand—give order to his life.

But there is also a darker version of events, one in which Evelyn never wakes up from the scarlet fever, and Edward, perhaps too sensitive to the tragedies of this world, as if even the sight of broken-winged sparrow fluttering in the street gutter would tinge his day with sadness, never recovers from the loss. Oh, he appears to. And in this version of the story the woman in the photograph is not his sister at all, but rather some other person, hurried in from the outer offices of The Empire Film Company to fill the seat. And even at the moment this picture is made, Edward can feel himself being torn between two possibilities: the so-called real world and the world of magic cast by the very movies he has helped to produce.

The only book he has ever truly loved is Henry James’s The Golden Bowl, which he first read several years prior to this photograph, when it was still James’s latest book. And in that novel (whose words to him are like steel cage bars that either protect him from something terrible or else trap him away from something wonderful) one phrase especially has stuck with him: the darkening shadow of a false position. That’s how he feels now, looking at this photograph: that ever since his sister’s death (for she died, not “nearly died”) he has lived more and more comfortably beneath the darkening shadow of a false position. The false position of hope.

The most horrendous—but also the truest—version of what happens in the moments after this image was taken is that there will be a knife fight between them, whoever they are, and fuck Henry James, because this will be the real thing. She will strike first, out of lustful revenge (“You promised. I was the only one!”) and he will be wounded in the arm and leap out of his chair, scattering papers. He has no knife per se, so he reaches for the silver letter opener as she takes another jab at him, puncturing his leg. He falls back against the wall. A framed picture falls. She will shake her hair loose and for a moment it’s possible that, rather than kill each other, they’ll have sex right then and there. But then he lunges at her with the letter opener and punctures the soft flesh beneath her ribs. Her white blouse is stained in crimson blood (scarlet you might say were this the different version of the story) and she lunges right back at him and gets him in the same spot, beneath his ribs, and life leaks out of both of them now. And then, unexpectedly, she jabs him again, and again, in the same spot. It’s as if she has prepared all of her life for this very moment. In desperation he lunges for her in agonized fury and bites her arm so hard he breaks a tooth.

Just over a month before this picture was taken, a bomb destroyed the Los Angeles Times Building, killing over 20 people, and when he hears gunshots outside the window his mind is seized with the images of the mangled dead in Los Angeles, their severed parts in the dust only to be re-animated in the second coming (“He will come again to judge the living in the dead”) and this epiphanic moment of his gives her time to finish him off, to gut him like she gutted deer so many times as a young girl with her full-bearded uncle in Oneonta, New York.

There is so much blood now on the wall and the window and the desk and the floor that she slips. Somewhere, not far away, a camera is rolling and Edwin S. Porter is directing a scene from the short film The Greater Love. The earth passes through the tail of Halley’s Comet, and a woman in Philadelphia is said to die from the resulting cyanogen gas. President William Howard Taft has a nightmare in which the sheets of his bed metamorphosize into sheets of black quicksand that suck him into outer space. H. G. Wells republishes his story “When the Sleeper Awakes” which contains the lines “We have our troubles . . . this is a time of unrest.” There is so much blood now, even the sepia can’t disguise the color.

But the story doesn’t have to end this way. Why should it? It could end, instead, in the very instant it began: the precise moment of the photograph. There is no before. There is no after. There is just the forever now of this frozen moment, full of possibilities, when their eyes are always-already on the verge of meeting.

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It was in black and white, except for the flashbacks, which were in color. Maybe colorized. An American pilot crash-landed in a wet field outside a French village and was taken in by a family whose daughter, the pilot came to suspect, was a Nazi collaborator. She was beautiful, and not in a movie actress way, and I remember thinking that maybe this was an Italian neorealist film, but it didn’t make sense that it was set in France and that the dialog was in English. There was a dog with a limp, I remember, that was poisoned and that died terribly and melodramatically, clawing at its own stomach, and that’s when the pilot began to suspect that the daughter was on the Nazi side, and that she had murdered the dog—her own dog from childhood—to prove her allegiance to the Reich somehow.

There was a castle-like factory, I think, not far from the farm house that sheltered the American pilot, and that’s where he and the girl went to have long, philosophical conversations (the French girl speaking English in a beautiful, broken, menacing way that suggested she knew English better than she was leading on), conversations that inevitably turned into Production Code-era love-making scenes that were interrupted by machine-gun fire or the breaking of dawn. That’s when the flashbacks happened, for some reason, at dawn, as the factory engines began to ramp up for the day (it was a secret factory where bullets were manufactured for the French Resistance, although I can’t remember how the film conveyed this). In the first flashback, Total War switched suddenly to color, and it wasn’t a nostalgic flashback like you’d expect, but a bloody one that showed the slow, methodical slaughter of a pig by two men whose faces were obscured on a farm from what appeared to be the American pilot’s childhood memory, although why his dreams were presented in color in the film was never clear. (One suspected that the filmmakers were secret experimentalists or avant-gardists subverting the war-movie genre from within.)

Then the dream switched without warning to something very simple, so simple as to be terrifying. An open meadow bathed in orange sun, a blue sky, the meadow-grass and wildflowers moving in the wind, and a man on a black horse slowly crossing the meadow from screen left to right, the camera stationary. One thing that’s always bothered me about that scene: it was silent except for what appeared to be a gunshot. At least that’s what I remember from that night, watching the film that no one else wanted to see because it wasn’t by David Lynch. The gunshot. But no corresponding action in the scene. Neither the horse nor the horseman reacted to the sound, as if it was meant only for the audience, some sort of secret signal from the filmmakers to us.

After this, the film fell back into the expected patterns: the American pilot, on the mend, began to suspect with more confidence that the girl was a Nazi sympathizer; he lied and told her that he was Jewish in hopes of catching a reaction from her, and that his presence at the farm endangered her family; the girl went out for a walk in the woods in the middle of night, unaware that the pilot watched her from the window of his room. Just then a shot rang out in the forest and, although the pilot’s first thought was that this was a trap, and that perhaps the girl had indeed seen him watching from the window, he pulled on his wool coat and dashed out into the cool night. For the next several minutes, the film went black. Instead of images, there was nothing except the sound of the pilot running blind through the night, his labored breathing, his footsteps across the field, the call of an owl. Twice the pilot called out the girl’s name breathlessly as he ran, until another shot rang out, and the moon cleared from behind the clouds. There at his feet was a young man in a torn soldier’s uniform that appeared to be German, although it as hard to tell in the dark, and the uniform from what I could tell wasn’t even World War II era. The soldier grasped his throat, obviously dying from gunshot wounds. The pilot leaned down to listen to the man’s dying words, in the moonlight.

“She can’t . . .” said the German soldier before breathing his last in a gurgling whisper. Before the meaning of this settled in, the screen grew brighter, in flickers, and the pilot look back over his shoulder to see—in a point-of-view shot—a fire in the distance. He took off running back to the farm, and within a few seconds it became clear that all was lost. By the time he arrived the farm house was engulfed in flames and the pilot fell to his knees and slumped forward. Then something very strange happened: the film switched to color again, but not because it was a dream or flashback. Bathed in the yellow light of the fire, the pilot remained hunched forward in sorrow and despair as a shadow—the shadow of a human being—emerged from frame right.

It was the girl, in color, wearing a bright red beret. For the first time you could see that her eyes were blue. She kneeled down beside the pilot and put her hand beneath his chin and gently lifted his face toward hers. By this time the color had become almost psychedelically saturated, with both the girl and the pilot bathed in the hellish, red light and black leaping shadows from the fire. The camera slowly panned down, revealing her clenched fist, which she slowly opened, palm up. In her hand she held a small, silver swastika, which gleamed in the light. It seemed to move imprecisely in the palm of her hand, as if animated. Then film switched again back to black and white, and the familiar Hollywood music began, signaling the end. The camera slowly panned back up to pilot’s face, which wore an expression of agony or ecstasy. After holding there for a moment, the camera continued panning up to the sky, revealing the moon, partially obscured by the black smoke from the smoldering farm house.

At the time, I thought the ending was clear: the girl had torn the swastika from the uniform of the German soldier she had shot in the woods. She was a double agent, working for the Resistance, and murdered the German before he had a chance to sneak into the farm house to murder the pilot. But later, as I thought more about the film (which I only watched that once) I wondered if the swastika might have been the girl’s confession, an affirmation of what the pilot had suspected: that she was a Nazi and worse yet, a Nazi out of choice, not coercion. There was also the fact of the burning farm house, which seemed to me symbolic of the irrational terror of total war. But back then we found symbols in everything. Afterwards, I tried to explain the film to my friends, but the more I talked about it the more confused it became in my mind. I’ve never really searched for the film. I have no desire to see it again. In a way, it was the most horrifying film I’ve ever watched, and I watched it alone.

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So I was surprised that Paranormal Activity 3 continues pushing the envelope in terms of formal experimentation in a mainstream genre. What follows are some rough notes from my one viewing of the film, in a theater packed with teenagers who were so embarrassed (it seemed to me; I may be reading the whole vibe wrong) by the genuine terror (i.e., the presence of “Toby,” the invisible demon that functions as a horrific, nightmare version of the “pooka” from Harvey) of the film that they laughed, talked back to the screen, and made such a general ruckus that not one but TWO theater managers were called in to try to quell the noise. I say “rough notes,” but I don’t really mean that. I’ve thought about this too much, but the more I think about it, the rougher and more unformed the central idea becomes, so I’m putting it out here before the idea loses its shape entirely.

1. Paranormal Activity 3 is a structural film, in the avant-garde tradition, described best by P. Adams Sitney in Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde:

The structural film insists on its shape, and what content it has is minimal and subsidiary to the outline. Four characteristics of the structural film are its fixed camera position (fixed frame from the viewer’s perspective), the flicker effect, loop printing, and rephotography of the screen. Very seldom will one find all four characteristics in a single film, and there are structural films which modify these usual elements.

2. In the film, the husband/father Dennis (Christopher Nicholas Smith) attaches a VCR camera (holding 6-hour tapes) to the base of an oscillating fan in order to capture a wider angle of vision in the kitchen/dining room/ foyer entrance.

Kubrick-like, the film in these stretches (some of them quite long) becomes automated, as the notion of a director is erased. If “the structural film” insists on its shape, then this is all shape. These long takes, as the automatic camera pans steadily from left to right, from right to left, not pausing to reflect on any dramatic action, erases traces of human agency, and what emerges is the pure structure of the film.

3. In his ever-surprisingly-current 1967 essay “The Death of the Author,” Roland Barthes wrote: “Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing.”

4. The underlying terror of the Paranormal films is not their invisible demons so much as their invisible authors. The fact of the fixed camera’s supposed impersonality—in an era of hyper-confessionalism—suggests that we are, after all, merely subjects of our own subjectivity.

5. Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968) with its off-screen presence of the demonic, is literally the father/mother/baby of the Paranormal films. And Michael Snow’s structural masterpiece Wavelength (1967), with its 45-minute slow zoom, and the death that occurs in that film, is also somehow responsible for the fierce, formalist constraints of the Paranormal films.

The creeping darkness, and the darkness of words, where we always struggle together, dear reader, rare and true,

Reader unmov’d and Reader unshaken, Reader unseduc’d
and unterrified, through the long-loud and sweet-still
I creep toward you. Toward you, I thistle and I climb.

–Olena Kalytiak Davis, “sweet reader, flannelled and tulled” from
shattered sonnets love cards and other off and back handed importunities

8. The wondrous indecipherability of “Toby.” The camera, endlessly (as long as the power holds out, as long as the camera functions, as long as the tape VHS tape lasts) panning horizontally, back-and-forth, across the blank and filled-in spaces of an American home, haunted not by demons, but by cameras.

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Movies like this, they figure out a way to dominate us.

CREDITS:

“Watching Hollywood films delayed both reinforces and breaks down these oppositions [between active male and passive female]. The narrative drive tends to weaken if the spectator is able to control its flow, to repeat and return to certain sequences while skipping others. The smooth linearity and forward movement of the story become jagged and uneven, undermining the male protagonist’s command over the action.” Laura Mulvey from Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image

“Most of what we ‘see’ is really just what we ‘remember’ because at any given moment, the majority of the image will not be seen, merely remembered. The cognitive quilt that was sewed by foveal vision is the cognitive map we have, both obscuring and defining the shape of the real image that lies beneath.” Mark Stephen Meadows, from Pause and Effect

1. Donnie and his girlfriend Gretchen are outside the theater, buying tickets for Evil Dead. In an early version of the Evil Dead script, there is this exchange as the characters arrive at the remote cabin:

LINDA:  This place is perfect.

CHERYL: The woods come awfully close to the house don’t they?

SCOTT: So what’s wrong with the woods, they can’t bite ya.

CHERYL: It’s just a little claustrophobic, that’s all.

LINDA: Well, I think it’s beautiful.

2. CUT to inside the theater, as Donnie and Gretchen watch the movie. The camera slowly tracks closer, showing them to us in right profile.

 We hear the sound of The Evil Dead, but will we see its images? In some part of our brain, we understand that this is a copyright question, and that the Law and what it says about Property determines and shapes the context for what we are permitted to see. Will we be permitted to see what Donnie sees?

In an interview with Rebecca Murray, Richard Kelly said:

In the script, they went to see the movie “C.H.U.D.” But our friends at 20th Century Fox Archives told us it would take 8-12 weeks before they could process the paperwork to begin to tell us whether or not we might be able to use the footage from “C.H.U.D.” We needed to know in a week, and it wasn’t going to happen. Linda McDonough at Flower Films is close friends with Sam Raimi’s producing partner. Sam Raimi and his partner own “Evil Dead.” They own the negative so there isn’t a sludge of bureaucracy associated with getting “Evil Dead.” You’ve got to call up Sam’s partner, and he’s cool. He’s like, “Yeah, sure you can use it.” We could get it and it became so much more appropriate.

3. CUT to their left profile, close-up. Gretchen sleeps. In terms of narrative point of view, we are gradually being drawn into Donnie’s consciousness. In his classic study The Rhetoric of Fiction, Wayne C. Booth explored the mechanisms by which literature drew readers into an imaginative identification with characters: “The changes which go to make up the story are all changes in fact and circumstance and knowledge, never in the essential worth or rightness of the character herself. She must be accepted at her own estimate from the beginning, and that estimate must, for greatest effect, be as close as possible to the readers estimate of his own importance. Whether we call this effect identification or not, it is clearly the closest that literature can come to making us feel events as if they were happening to ourselves.” The curious thing here is Booth’s notion that how readers feel about a character is linked to how they feel about themselves. In this sense, we might say that movies are projections on at least two levels: of light onto the screen, and of ourselves into that light.

4. CUT to a shot of Evil Dead, as suggested from Donnie’s point of view. The audience is now cut (“sutured”) into Donnie’s angle of vision, and this is the most totalitarian aspect of cinema: to assume control of our gaze so completely that when we look, we look through the eyes of another. Jacques Aumont has written about “the frequent use in cinema of ‘frames within frames (or ‘over-framing’), for instance through the inclusion of a mirror or a window.” Rather than fill the screen with The Evil Dead, Kelly has left space around it, so that we literally are watching a frame within a frame, which serves as a visual reminder that not only is Evil Dead just a movie, but so is Donnie Darko.

5. CUT back to a shot of Donnie watching the movie again, as he slowly turns his head towards the camera.

6. CUT to a shot from the same angle as in #2, this time with Frank sitting beside them. Frank functions as the evil “other” and projection of Donnie himself, just as Frank (Dennis Hopper) functions this way for Jeffrey in Blue Velvet. And then there is little “Donny” in Blue Velvet, a time-warped echo of Donnie Darko himself. This tangle of associations doesn’t really mean anything on an interpretive level, and it’s not something most viewers of Donnie Darko might even notice. Let’s just leave it at this: the Frank/Frank, Donnie/Donny connections are terrifying, either by design, or by coincidence, and are perhaps better left as one of the film’s mysteries. The demonic bunny mask echoes not only the implied reverse of the invisible pooka/rabbit from Harvey (1950), but also more obscure sources, such as the Easter Bunny (with its overdetermined ears) in “Hopping Down the Bunny Trail” from the 1980 DC comic “Unexpected.”

7. CUT back to Donnie, who asks Frank: “Why are you wearing that stupid bunny suit?”

8. CUT to Frank, who slowly turns to face Donnie, and who replies: “Why are you wearing that stupid man suit?” This recalls (in the same impossible time-wormhole way that governs the logic of the film) another David Lynch project, his series of short films “Rabbits” (2002) some of which made its way into Inland Empire, and which features humans wearing rabbit suits to such a visually literal extent that the figures become at once non-human and non-rabbit at the same time.

Neglected, forgotten, and ignored in these “CUTS” are the cuts we make ourselves as we watch the film, our eyes choosing what to look at in any individual shot. But also the cuts we make between the film itself and our surroundings: whatever it is that tempts and distracts us in the theater or at home or in a coffee shop or in a dorm room or on a train or wherever we are as we watch the movie. Liberated from the dark, movies no longer tyrannize us today. Who would have guessed that one day we would find ourselves longing not for freedom from the image, but for bondage to it? And yet, just when you think you are free, along comes something like the Franks . . .

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This ongoing experiment in film writing freezes a film at 10, 40, and 70 minutes, and keeps the commentary as close to those frames as possible. This week, I examine

10 minutes

Marnie (Tippi Hedren), visiting her mother, suffers one of her red-flash anxiety attacks upon seeing red gladiolas on a table. “I never could stand gladiolas,” she says as she walks over to replace them, which this shot captures. Released in July 1964, the film’s shooting schedule (slated to begin November 25, 1963) was delayed in the aftermath of Kennedy’s assassination, and indeed the film itself is haunted by a sadness and humorlessness that in some way absorbs the national mood at the time. (The film was shot in studios in California at various locations around the U.S.) That tension is evident in Marnie’s face, which rarely shows a smile. The red she approaches with terror in this frame and throughout the film is not just a visible sign of her childhood trauma (she murdered, at age 6, a man she saw fighting with her mother the prostitute) but also, a weird way, Presidential blood. And for audiences at the time living at the height of the Cold War (the Cuban Missile crisis had occurred just two years earlier) red wavers a dangerous, unstable, coded sign for the other Red. And then there is the little neighbor girl, Jessie, peering from behind the doorway, a substitute Marnie who sort-of lives with Marnie’s mother. This frame captures Marnie caged by three gazes: the little girl’s, her mother’s (off-screen right) and the camera’s. In other words, Marnie is right where Hitchock wants her, just like he wanted all his screen women: pinned and tormented by the the relentless Gaze.

40 minutes

Having just come from the racetrack, Marnie and the wealthy publisher Mark Rutland (Sean Connery), the man she will marry soon, are on their way to visit Mark’s father, whom Marnie is about to meet for the first time. This catches her by surprise, and she worries that she’s not dressed properly for the occasion. It’s a small moment that reveals the complex power dynamics at play in the film, for just as Mark exerts control over Marnie by throwing her off balance with small but authoritarian gestures like this, so too Marnie has her own secret knowledge, her own trap to spring to Mark after their marriage, as he has little awareness at this point of the depth of her madness. “At the opposite pole to this nature of darkness,” Michel Foucault has written, “madness also exerts a fascination because it is knowledge.”

And there also is the gravitational pull of Sean Connery to account for, who was the face of James Bond, having appeared in From Russia with Love that same year, and Dr. No previously. It is perhaps not possible to watch Marnie while forgetting that it is Sean Connery—not James Bond—playing Mark Rutland and this fact casts the film with an aura of artificiality that only strengthens the dream-like quality of the film. Of all of Hitchock’s films, Marnie is the most bold when it comes to functioning as a traditional narrative film that pulls us in through the classic strategies of invisible editing, while at the same time exposing its own artifice. Hitchcock’s post-1960 films for the most part stubbornly refused the visual anarchy of the French New Wave and hand-held cinema vertité which informed another film released in 1964, Richard Lester’s A Hard Day’s Night. In shots like this, which depended on rear-camera projection, Hitchcock doesn’t seem to be seeking realism so much as a symbolic, elegant expression of realism.

70 minutes

On their honeymoon, on a cruise, Mark discovers that not only does Marnie not want to sleep with him, but she doesn’t even want to be touched by him. “Don’t—please don’t,” she pleads with him at this moment. In the trip-wired logic of the film, Marnie exists at this moment as the female “hysteric” in need of being cured by the same beast that wrecked her: a man. But she also exists, if less clearly, as the coming woman of the new Age of Aquarius, resisting—and let’s just be frank—being fucked by a man. For the whole film is really a giant narrative equation trying solve the problem of: why doesn’t Marnie want to have sex? But while it’s tempting to see the movie as a yet another Hollywood male fantasy, it’s also true that the sheer power of Hedren’s iron-willed performance is so overwhelming and focused that we can’t help but identify more strongly with Marnie than with Mark. For Marnie has some serious problems, which means, in other words, that she’s recognizably human in all her flaws. She is us, and despite the narrative momentum towards her “cure,” she can no more be cured than being human can be cured.

The difference between Marnie in 1964 and Marnie in, say, 1967, is that in 1964 her combustive personality is still repressed, controlled, in the same way that Hitchcock’s visual style remained controlled in the face of the coming anarchy of the New American Cinema, epitomized by films like Easy Rider (1969). Even as he was a hero and an inspiration to the directors of the French New Wave, especially Truffaut and Godard, the tightly controlled formalist universe of his films stood in contrast to the restless “mistakism” of the new wave. In an essay published in Cahiers du cinéma just before the release of Breathless (1960), Godard wrote:

Broadly speaking there are two kinds of film-makers. Those who walk along the streets with their heads down, and those who walk with their heads up. In order to see what is going on around them, the former are obliged to raise their heads suddenly and often, turning to the left and then the right, embracing the field of vision in a series of glances. They see. The latter see nothing, they look, fixing their attention on the precise point which interests them. When the former are shooting a film, their framing is roomy and fluid (Rossellini), whereas with the latter it is narrowed down to the last millimetre (Hitchcock). With the former (Welles), one finds a de ́coupage which may be loose but is remarkably open to the temptations of chance; with the latter (Lang), camera movements not only of incredible precision in the set but possessing their own abstract value as movements in space.

Marnie is perhaps the closest Hitchcock ever got to matching form and content in a film, as Marnie’s repression (her caged body language and the position of her left arm and hand in the 70-minute frame) is mirrored in the tightly controlled montage of the film’s visual style. Some of these techniques, which were already becoming anachronistic by 1964, included extensive use of rear projection and matte shots, which have a weird, double-effect on the film. These formal strategies, by 1964, called attention to themselves as artificial, and were just a few cultural moments shy of becoming camp. “The center cannot hold,” Joan Didion wrote in 1967 and in Marnie you can see and feel its disintegration, burning through the screen, as the black hole gravity of the late Sixties destroyed all the old forms, only to make them new again.

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The entire trailer is so Kubrick-like in its formality that it verges on a sort of avant-garde Puritanism. In an age where graphic depictions of sexual practice proliferate and are available with a few keystrokes (production design be damned!) the trailer’s sheer force of aesthetic and tonal seriousness suggests either something ironic or deeply reactionary.

Shot 1: The titles OFFICIAL SELECTION COMPETITION FESTIVAL DE CANNES, in white, over the screen, as a woman, in medium shot, walks from left to right across the screen, apartment complexes looming behind her. Our vantage point is from across the street, and as she appears between a parked truck and a parked car she stops and crouches down, it appears, to adjust the strap on one of her high-heeled shoes. She is too distant to be recognizable.

Shot 2: In voice-over, a woman (Clara, we will come to presume) speaking the words “Thank you for coming.” The only movement in the frame comes from the laptop where, presumably, Lucy has arrived at the mansion for her interview. That seems to be her getting up from the chair, but we can’t be sure. Her face has still not been shown to us. The angle and point of view of the shot suggests that we—the audience—have adopted the point-of-view of someone looking at the laptop screen but again, we can’t be sure; perhaps there is no one behind the desk and the shot is, instead, simply the perspective of the camera itself. The frame within the frame suggests two different camera perspectives: the surveillance camera that Lucy may or may not be aware of, and the motion picture camera, the one filming a movie called Sleeping Beauty.

Shot 3: The voice over: “Such a pleasure to see such a unique beauty.” This coincides with the first time we see Lucy clearly enough to appreciate her “beauty,” which makes us weirdly complicit in a way that watching movies is in itself an act of voyeurism. In this shot, as Lucy’s face turns slowly towards the camera, her pale-skinned face framed against the heavy oak, the mansion itself is imagined as a palace with a series of doorways, in this case the doorway Lucy passes through in the background, and the doorway in the foreground which frames her actions.

Shot 4: An establishing shot of the presumed mansion wherein the story unfolds, with the words JANE CAMPION PRESENTS filling the screen in white letters. It is not a dark, gloomy mansion but something open and available in the full sun, as if to suggest that the darkest secrets are hidden in the plain light of day.

Shot 5: Clara’s voice over, as we see her watching as Lucy is inspected: “Let me tell you how things should proceed.” Lucy’s body seems to be glowing. It is white beyond white. The man’s hand upon her thigh, in which direction does it move? The bonsai in the background, carefully selected and tended and restricted in their growth, suggest what will become of Lucy.

Shot 6: Lucy walking along a brick wall, at night, moving towards something, reaching out casually and touching the vines: “I’ll describe the job and then, if you’re interested, we’ll discuss particulars.”

Shot 7: A static shot of Lucy sleeping, naked, her back toward the camera, that seems to recall a shot from Sophia Coppola’s Lost in Translation. A FILM BY JULIA LEIGH in the center of the screen, again in clean white.

Shot 8: “You will be working with other girls, some of whom will have . . . more responsibilities.” That beat, that pause between have and more seems ominous, freighted with meaning, as if the narrator wanted to speak more openly but thought better of it and stopped herself. Why? Who is she afraid of? In this shot, the camera tracks left, to reveal Lucy, standing outside in front of a door into the mansion, looking to her right at something happening off-screen.

Shot 9: For the first time, we adopt Lucy’s point of view, witnessing what she is witnessing: a mincing scene of a woman (another “worker?”) being put, forcibly it seems, into the back of a car. There is no voice over to lead us into understanding the significance of this moment. The bridge between shots 8 and 9 sutures us into the narrative thickness of the trailer, as we take the position of someone within the film: Lucy. First (in shot 8) we see her looking, and then (in this shot) we adopt her gaze as our own.

Film theorist Kaja Silverman has written that “Equally important to the cinematic organization are the operations of cutting and excluding. It is not merely that the camera is incapable of showing us everything at once, but that it does not wish to do so. We must be shown only enough to know that there is more, and to want that ‘more’ to be disclosed. A prime agency of disclosure is the cut, which divides one shot from the next. The cut guarantees that both the preceding and the subsequent shots will function as structuring absences to the present shot. These absences make possible a signifying ensemble, convert one shot into a signifier of the next one, and the signified of the preceding one.” The process of suture is fundamentally tyrannical (Orson Welles once said that he preferred long shots with no editing because they were more democratic, allowing the viewer’s eyes to wander the screen) because we don’t noticing it happening, as classical film editing is largely invisible to us. Lured on by the expectations and pleasures of the unfolding narrative (what is going to happen next?) we don’t notice (or don’t want to notice) the process by which we are sutured into locked, limited point-of-view shots within the film. The speed of editing and the point of view of shots binds us into a perspective that is simultaneously a way of knowing. In this case, the case of shot 9, we can’t help but identify with Lucy, as we see this act of aggression from her point of view and wonder, as she must: might this happen to her/me?

Shot 10: We are back in the mansion, where Clara and Lucy sit uncomfortably across from each other. “There is room for promotion,” Clara says in voice over. This frame is like an oil painting where the monster is so carefully hidden between brushstrokes, waiting patiently for centuries.

Shot 11: “We rely on mutual trust and discretion and I am obliged to tell you there are . . .” says Clara as Lucy burns what appears to be money. Obliged by whom? The formal obscurity of Clara’s warning suggests a spidery bureaucracy of violence.

Shot 12: “. . . heavy penalties, very heavy . . .” as Lucy rides in the back seat of a car. What, exactly, does she mean? The mind races to imagine the worst sorts of things one human being could do to another.

Shot 13: “. . . penalties for any breaches of discretion. Am I clear?” The driver’s eyes are reflected in the rearview mirror. Just before “Am I clear,” the eyes avert from the road and seize upon Lucy, and once again we have been sutured into her position and are somehow warned, as viewers.

Shot 14: Lucy, dressed casually again, in the “outside” world, it seems, keeping one self hidden from the other self. “It’s not a game.”

Shot 15: This is the shortest shot in the trailer, lasting only one second. A woman in lingerie falls and drops a tray in an opulently outfitted room, and the overdetermined danger of this moment recalls the criticisms leveled against Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut: that the film (as evident in this shot and in shot 18) takes its subject matter more seriously than the audience.

Shot 16: It feels like this shot comes from near the beginning of the movie, perhaps after Lucy has agreed to the job after learning “how things should proceed.” In a white, sterile lab-like room Lucy sits chin up, mouth open, eerily passive (she is someone who allows things to be done to her) as a man in a white lab coat inserts something into her mouth. Perhaps he is making her “more beautiful” (see shot 21).

Shot 17: Now it’s dark, and Lucy is in action, in an even darker bar, revealing her legs to a well-dressed man. He wants them.

Shot 18: A pretty startling image. In her classic essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey wrote that in “a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female figure which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness.” Even thirty-six years after its appearance (and Mulvey’s own reconsideration of the essay) “Visual Pleasure” vibrates like an arrow that has just struck its target. Yes, the person who directed the film and who wrote it is a woman named Julia Leigh, and there is Jane Campion’s name, right below the prostrate, please-behead-me-or-at least-do-with-me-what-you will position of a woman. The trailer, and this shot in particular, bring to mind a rush of contradictory, fragmented thoughts:

1. post-feminist feminism
2. there can be power in the rendering of powerlessness, can’t there?
3. the shot adopts a presumed male gaze only to subvert it in the parts of the film we haven’t seen
4. the clash of formal restraint and blazing sexuality in this frame is interesting
5. Leigh’s statement that she was “intrigued by the idea of how would you feel if you knew something was happening to you in your sleep, but you didn’t know exactly what it was.”
6. Alfred Hitchcock’s statement to Peter Bogdanovich in 1963: “As I tried to explain to that girl, Kim Novak, ‘You have got a lot of expression in your face. Don’t want any of it.’”
7. visual pleasure in the age of visual pleasure

Shot 19: Lucy arises from a chair in an elegant room and begins to take off her dress.

Shot 20: “You are very beautiful, very talented . . .” says the voice, as we glimpse Lucy’s naked body on her back on a bed, a male patron on top of her. The camera moves in on her forearm. She is, presumably, sleeping.

Shot 21:  “. . .but we’re going to make you even more beautiful . . .” continues the voice, as this shot is linked to the previous by another image of Lucy’s forearm, her palm opening to reveal something.

Shot 22: “. . . even more talented.” An elderly man in a white beard (Chris Haywood) looks directly at the camera . . .

Shot 23: . . . which is followed by Clara—presumably the voice in the voice over—also looking directly into the camera which, again, may be the implied space where Lucy is. “You’ll feel  …”

Shot 24: “. . . profoundly restored.” We see Lucy in water at night, her face like a beacon.

Shot 25: The screen goes black. “Goodnight.”

Shot 26: The dramatic final chords, an image of Lucy asleep in a luxurious bed, her face between the words SLEEPING BEAUTY.

In Briar Rose, his retelling of the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale, Robert Coover describes the prince: “Caught in the briars, but still slashing away valiantly, driven more by fear now than by vocation, he seeks to stay his panic with visions of the sleeping princess awaiting him within, as much in love with her deep repose as with any prospect of her awakening.” This is almost too unbearable and totalitarian in the way that romanticism is totalitarian, pretending to free human desire from the artificial restrictions of culture only to lock it back into the prison-house of human signs and words and images. Sleeping Beauty is ever thus, beautiful as long as she remains asleep. In the tightly sealed, hermeneutic world of the Sleeping Beauty trailer, the only way that Lucy will ever feel “profoundly restored” is to never wake up.

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***

The Rumpus: Hi, are you there?

Megan Boyle: Hi Nick, yes, I’m here, just getting situated hold on one second… sorry.

Rumpus: Oh good. I’m rusty at this. I just poured, spilled, some wine that was a gift, hold on.

Boyle: Oh, damn. Red or white?

Rumpus: Red but it was cheap. It’s okay. Are you in Brooklyn?

Boyle: I’m in Manhattan in Think Coffee by NYU trying to counteract loud music via loudly playing quiet music on earphones. Where are you?

Rumpus: We just had a big thunderstorm here in Ann Arbor and I think that contributed to the wine spilling. Thanks for doing this.

Boyle: Thunderstorm contributing to wine spilling sounds interesting. Barometric pressure wine interactions…no problem (re doing interview). I liked reading the ones you sent me. I usually type without caps, should I upper-case things?

Rumpus: This is a silly question but can you send me a copy of this afterwards in case I mess up saving it? Oh yes, lowercase is fine. Do you want to go to Wikipedia and I’ll go there too and you can click on random article and tell me where it takes you then I’ll go there. It may take a few seconds, that’s okay. (And I’ll clean up typos, etc and make minor edits before this appears.)

Boyle: Sure. Do you think people ever purposefully select random articles they think are more interesting/have more to say about? (Just wondering.) (I won’t do that.)

Rumpus: I’ve thought about that myself and that’s the part of human nature I like.

Boyle: Yeah… think I like that too. Seems endearing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_Football_League_1924%E2%80%9325

Boyle: Damn.

Rumpus: Is it 1924-25?

Boyle: Yes. Trying do discern whether their team names are towns or just like, phrases of the day. “ayr united.” The way the teams are listed reminds me of little league or some forgotten little league team somehow garnering a Wikipedia page. Team 12 in ‘Scottish league division three’ is named ‘Dykehead.’

Rumpus: So of that first list, division one, which of those names strikes you? I like “Motherwell” and “Aberdeen” but only because, I think, of the grunge, riot grrrl, Nirvana connection. But ‘Dykekead’ — this is my new favorite team name.

Boyle: I think I like ‘Bo-ness’ because it sounds like a sweet name for a rapper, and ‘Stenhousemuir’ because it sounds like the result of someone trying to insult someone and remember the name of a dinosaur at the same time. ‘Dykehead’ seems great. Their coach probably had a time machine.

Rumpus: Yes, and ‘Raith Rovers’ sounds like someone trying to say something else while holding the tip of their tongue.

Boyle: The name ‘Mid-annandale’ sounds like they weren’t even trying…like, no wonder they placed 15^th.

Rumpus: I think “Patrick Thistle” was a name Ian Fleming rejected for a villain in one of his James Bond novels. Actually this whole list is a weird poem.

Boyle: ‘Raith Rovers’ also sounds like someone’s first death metal cover band.

Rumpus: Do you want to click on another?

Boyle: Sure.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_County_Championship

Boyle: Jesus. It must be UK sports night at Wikipedia random article generating headquarters. Instinctually felt like clicking another one for diversity.

Rumpus: Let’s skip it, we make the rules!

Boyle: Yeah we do.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_%282008_film%29

Boyle: Sweet. Didn’t know this movie existed. Title seems controversial. Immediately pictured it would be a documentary-like series of short interviews of diverse opinions on ‘blackness’… seems like, no… the main character’s name is ‘black’ and he’s black it seems.

Rumpus: It looks like it wasn’t released theatrically in the US.

Boyle: Must be some kind of tour video. Interpol tour video (jk). Plot sounds kind of formulaic. Feel like most copies must be in French ‘discount bins’ now.

Rumpus: The synopsis is almost like a Marxist tract. The last line about how it’s ‘peppered with comedy and mysticism’ is worrisome. The word ‘mysticism’ is like a warning…

Boyle: Seems like they were obviously trying to get in on the success of the ‘three colors’ trilogy. On a side note, for some reason I think the word ‘mercenaries’ is really funny…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-waste_village

Rumpus: This one is strange. I need a second. Since when did ‘Hi-Fi’ become obsolete? Do you have a turntable?

Boyle: I do. I don’t use it much anymore but used to a lot… crackly record noise…

‘The opportunity to cheaply dispose of these substances forms the economic incentive behind the exporting of E-waste to countries such as China, India, and some African nations which have little or no environment checks and control. This export creates a global E-waste village.’ Seems really terrible.

Rumpus: They still use the word ‘First World’ which is strange and anachronistic because it’s not the First world, far from it.

Boyle: The ‘electric waste by country’ section looks unfinished, maybe intentionally/out of shame like the wiki page is perpetuating the shittiness of what it’s describing just by existing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_registration_plates_of_Lorestan

Rumpus: My God.

Boyle: I laughed when I clicked on that… seems… like perhaps the most obscure wiki page, like its author and us are the only people who have ever seen it. Wikipedia itself might not be aware of its existence.

Rumpus: Do the numbers 31 or 41 mean anything to you?

Boyle: My initial thought was they’re prime numbers.

Rumpus: For the love of God, Megan. Click on one of the cities and I’ll follow you.

Boyle: I clicked ‘Dorood.’

Rumpus: I’m following you there…

Boyle: Follow me to Dorood.

Rumpus: I feel like I know so little…

Boyle: Me too.

Rumpus: There are over 100,000 people there, and I don’t know any of their names.

Boyle: I’m down to do a few more articles, if you are.

Rumpus: Let’s do it.

Boyle: I just resisted temptation to click ‘Portuguese Wikipedia’ and surprise you by only speaking Portuguese for the remainder of the chat… however, I landed on “Luke Hamlin.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luke_Hamlin

Rumpus: Buenas figaros spieta andula.

Boyle: Obrigao lisbon.

Rumpus: “Luke Hamlin.” What’s strange about his name is that “Luke Skywalker” was played by Mark Hamill.

Boyle: I thought that too. Seems strategic, on his part. Oh wait, no, he was born in 1904. “Nicknamed ‘Hot Potato’”…the bolded ‘hot potato’ is really funny.

Rumpus: Okay: speaking of Star Wars. If you were to make a sci-fi movie… well, would you ever consider making a sci-fi movie?

Boyle: Yes, I would consider that. I’m intrigued by sci-fi things/feel like a lot of my thoughts naturally veer towards sci-fi-like things.

Rumpus: Like the world is just, sometimes, a little bit off?

Boyle: Yes, definitely. I think I always feel ‘a little bit off,’ maybe or assume I am, just out of not ever being able to viscerally experience another person’s reality so ideas about different realities seem interesting. The world seems mysterious. Do you like sci-fi?

Rumpus: You know, it’s very strange having you type, knowing you are somewhere. What you say about experiencing another person’s reality, maybe that’s why writing and making movies is so imperative. I love sci-fi, like Alien and Moon and The Descent, which is I guess isn’t really sci-fi.

Boyle: I agree. I think whenever I gchat with a person I almost unavoidably mentally picture their surroundings (like I feel like you’re in a leather chair in the corner of your living room and there is a large window in front of you and a porch and it’s raining). Yeah, I think that’s why I like writing and making movies. That’s it, definitely, actually the fundamental thing. I saw Moon recently and really liked it.

Rumpus: Moon is good. I only found out after I watched it that it was directed by David Bowie’s son and then I thought that makes sense, because the movie is about identity changing (“Changes”) and he gets so pale like Bowie the Pale King. Sorry, this is the geeky film prof.

Boyle: It’s probably actually his attempt at a biopic about David Bowie’s ‘true life’ before he returned to earth.

Rumpus: Or a metaphor for what a rock star or any celebrity goes through: changing into something, a version of themselves that they only partially recognize.

Boyle: Seems like that can apply to non-celebrities also. Like altering your persona based on your surroundings/audience in addition to more long-term personal changes. Running around being clones of ourselves.

Rumpus: I really like that idea of being clones of ourselves. It’s something I think you and Tao brought to light in the Bebe Zeva movie. Because while Bebe was “Bebe” she was also someone else, and especially in that scene near the end in the pool, where she seemed most unguarded and afraid. That scene was genius and very touching. It was, honestly, hard to watch but in a good way. It was almost as if she was on the edge of something, some decision. I’m wondering, were you aware of this or did this just happen sort of fast and naturally?

Boyle: It happened mostly fast/naturally but I had been aware of the shift in group dynamic since returning to the hotel (“since returning to the hotel” is like a cliffhanger…) and how we were talking in the hot tub seemed like a quiet, distracted almost ‘mirages’ of the high energy conversations from earlier…There was an awareness that each of us were probably aware of that and I was wondering what Bebe was thinking a lot, thinking she may have been having personal conflicts with Travis that she might want to keep private, but we were filming a documentary about her. At that point in the night I think all of us were subtly aware of things ending but unsure of how the ending would happen.

Rumpus: And that tension really shows up beautifully in the film. Do you want to go to one more?

Boyle: Yes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fauna_Foundation

Boyle: ‘Fauna foundation.’

Rumpus: What is it with Canada and chimps?

Boyle: The combination of the notification that the article is “an orphan, as few or no other articles link to it” and last sentence “it is the first sanctuary to accept chimpanzees with HIV.”

Rumpus: “150 acre farm”? Is that significant?

Boyle: Hm, seems like average farm acreage. Seems like Canada should be able to do ‘way better.’ However. I feel like there must be so much land in Canada… somehow…

Rumpus: And so much mercy…

Boyle: Just pictured Canada as the ‘hair’ of the earth, like it actually ‘rolls down’ onto Russia.

Rumpus: Okay… the lights are dimming.

Boyle: Enjoy the storm. Thank you Nick. This was fun.

Rumpus: It was great talking with you, thank you for your creativity.

Megan Boyle lives in Baltimore, co-founded MDMAfilms, has been published by Muumuu House, Thought Catalog, Vice, 3:AM, Pop Serial, and has a Twitter account. Her debut poetry collection, “selected unpublished blog posts of a mexican panda express exployee,” is forthcoming from Muumuu House on November 15, 2011.

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