“Curled delicately, its oil having spread out in a bloom across the pages, the hair is part of a human body in a book about numbered bodies, enslaved and free, the insane, the married and unmarried, the ones with terrible secrets, the somnambulists, the literate and the ones for whom printed words exist only as abstractions…”

Related Posts:

• An Oxford American Update
• Emily, Eyes Shut
• “The Removals”
• The Supreme Court School of PoMo Theory
• Lit Link Love

“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.

Related Posts:

• PANEL BUSTING: The Census
• “The Removals”
• The Supreme Court School of PoMo Theory
• Rombes Rocks Berfrois
• Empire

“They took you to the first house, and then, later, to the second. By the time they had removed you to the third house you knew the process was underway. Each house presented its own puzzles and, ultimately, its own terrors.”

Related Posts:

• Getting to Know Thurston Moore, Poet
• PANEL BUSTING: The Census
• Emily, Eyes Shut
• Suspended Detachment
• The Supreme Court School of PoMo Theory

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.

——————————–

Related Posts:

• Supreme Court Gay Marriage Roundup
• “The Audience Is Performing the Art”
• The Little Tolls and Pitfalls of Modern American Racism
• Blame Game
• PANEL BUSTING: The Census

Rombes curated an array of excellent pieces, including Rumpus editor Isaac Fitzgerald’s “In Love in San Francisco,” Peggy Nelson’s “Short Attention Span Theater,” and two poems by John Freeman.

Related Posts:

• THE LOVE SONG OF ISAAC FITZGERALD
• Pen & Ink, The Book!
• The Blue Velvet Project Goes to Argentina
• Alcott Rumpus Reading
• PANEL BUSTING: The Census

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.

Related Posts:

• Total War: A Film Reminiscence
• Talk About “By the Numbers”
• An Evening with Derek Waters at SFIFF
• The Rumpus Review of Trance
• The Rumpus Review of The Place Beyond The Pines

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.

Related Posts:

• Empire
• Talk About “By the Numbers”
• An Evening with Derek Waters at SFIFF
• The Rumpus Review of Trance
• The Rumpus Review of The Place Beyond The Pines

The breakdown is happening in a trifecta of weekly blog posts for Filmmaker Magazine, 47-second increments of the film detailed in cinematic analysis. Scott Macaulay introduces the project, lauding Rombes’ impressive undertaking and the DVD player for making pausing film feasible. And here is the first installment of the epic Blue Velvet breakdown!

Related Posts:

• The Blue Velvet Project Goes to Argentina
• PANEL BUSTING: The Census
• Emily, Eyes Shut
• “The Removals”
• The Supreme Court School of PoMo Theory