Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Edited by
TABLE OF CONTENTS
vi
Table of Contents
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We wish to thank all the authors in this collection for their exciting
contributions as well as kind cooperation and patience.
We also wholeheartedly thank Filip for another excellent cover, and
Timfor his always welcomed precious critical insights.
Special thanks go to Amanda Millar, at Cambridge Scholars Publishing,
for her invaluable assistance in the final edit.
INTRODUCTION
MAGDALENA CIELAK
AND AGNIESZKA RASMUS
Introduction
Introduction
Works cited
Foucault, Michel. 1977. A Preface to Transgression. In Language,
Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard. Trans. Donald F.
Bouchard & Sherry Simon. New York: Cornell UP. 29-52.
CHAPTER ONE
PUNKS NOT DEAD
POST-PUNK AND GOTHIC
IN MUSIC AND FICTION
TRANSGRESSING CAPITALISM
IN KATHY ACKER AND MARILYN MANSONS
PUNK AND GOTH AESTHETICS
EMILIA BOROWSKA
Emilia Borowska
attitudes of Acker and Manson towards publicity, money and fame differ
significantly, the former highly critical and the latter complacently cynical.
While Acker throughout her writing career consistently made herself
unattractive to the mainstream, Marilyn Mansons capitalising on
transgression appears to be a fully conscious plan which he is pursuing
with the skill of a businessman, involving personal branding. The charge
of turning the Goth aesthetic into a sellable product is one of the main
reasons why the status of an authentic Goth is denied to him by purists, as
one of their fundamental prerequisites is isolating oneself from the pop
and mainstream.1
The Punk subculture, which emerged in the United Kingdom and
United States in the mid-seventies, evolved into a number of different
forms, including its Gothic offspring during the early eighties.2 Literature
on Punk and Goth aesthetics and ideology is too substantial to consider at
length. Rather, I want to trace and theorize the wanderings of a vulnerable
subcultural desire in the work of Acker and Manson, and consider selffashioning in late capitalism. The aim is to demonstrate that while in their
negotiation with the capitalist apparatus the transgressive potential of the
subcultural is possible, it is not naively or immediately available. In an
attempt to find a way out of the oppositional movements apparent
impotency in mass culture, I will explore two models: Adorno and
Horkheimers radical critique of the culture industry and Deleuze and
Guattaris schizoanalysis. I suggest that while Adorno and Horkheimers
closed model which they developed in response to historical fascism
dramatises desires annihilation by capital, Deleuze and Guattari in their
abandonment of dialectical thinking and emphasis on the social, open new
avenues for the subcultural ethos as a viable instrument of social
transformation.
1
Joshua Gunn notes that although Marilyn Manson is repeatedly referred to by the
media as a Goth-Rocker, he is not accepted as a Goth by the Goth subculture
members because of his appropriation of Goths products and turning them into a
commercial success. As Gunn and Hebdige assert, Goth subculture participants
fear assimilation by the mainstream which, they believe, inevitably [leads] to the
diffusion of the subcultures subversive power and coherence (Hebdige qtd. in
Gunn). Gunn argues, however, that mainstreaming can be vital for subcultures
survival (410-411).
2
While currently the term subculture has become widely used to describe a wide
variety of alternative exclusive cultures, it was originally a concept developed by
the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham in the seventies,
devised to highlight class-based, loosely organized resistance to the dominant
culture.
Emilia Borowska
10
Emilia Borowska
11
12
Emilia Borowska
13
The Punks and Acker share their project with Kafka. They are all,
however, vulnerable to the threat of reterritorialization. The liberated
flows can easily become a commodity if they fall victim to the capitalist
axiomatic force that fixates and homogenises desire. For the band Crass,
this threat has already taken its toll on the subversive potential of Punk and
has turned it into pure monetary value. Punk is dead:
Yes thats right, punk is dead
Its just another cheap product for the consumers head
Bubblegum rock on plastic transistors
Schoolboy sedition backed by big time promoters
CBS promote the Clash
Aint for revolution, its just for cash
(Crass 275)
14
Joe Moran writes that Ackers celebrity status is the product of a difficult
mediation between bohemian and mass culture (133). He reads Acker as a literary
celebrity alongside such American literature giants as Philip Roth, Don Delillo and
John Updikeeven though none of Ackers books has become a bestseller and her
fiction is very difficult to incorporate into the mainstream. Moran stresses the
media image in accentuating the attractiveness of Ackers unconventional image.
4
In the context of commerce, Mansons artistry is perceived as a mere fabrication
of a skilful businessman that capitalises on an imitation and appropriation of
Emilia Borowska
15
16
For discussion of Joy Divisions use of fascist iconography see Michael Bibbys
Atrocity Exhibitions: Joy Division, Factory Records, and Goth in Goth. Undead
Subculture (2007). Bibby argues that while punks uses of Nazi fetishes may have
been primarily used for iconoclastic shock value, such icons for Joy Division and
the Factory style took on a stronger sense of nihilismthey signified that all life is
atrocity, the concentration camp is the paradigm of existence, and history compels
us to failure, demise, and apocalypse (250). Manson seems to be continuing Joy
Divisions gothicization and allegorization of fascism as always present.
Emilia Borowska
17
18
Works cited
Acker, Kathy. 1984. Blood and Guts in High School Plus Two. London:
Picador.
. 1988. Empire of the Senseless. New York: Grove Press.
. 1997. Bodies of Work. London and New York: Serpents Tail.
Adorno, Theodor. W., and Max Horkheimer. 1997. Dialectic of
Enlightenment. Trans. John Cumming. London: Verso.
Adorno, Theodor. W. 2001. Culture Industry Reconsidered. In The
Culture Industry, ed. J. M. Bernstein. London and New York:
Routledge.
Bibby, Michael. 2007. Atrocity Exhibitions: Joy Division, Factory
Records, and Goth. In Goth. Undead Subculture, eds. Lauren M. E.
Goodlad and Michael Bibby. Duke University Press, 233-256.
Baddeley, Gavin. 2000. Dissecting Marilyn Manson. London: Plexus.
Emilia Borowska
19
Over the last few years there has been a dramatic return of post-punk
music, whether in terms of reissued recordings, live performances or, in
some cases, films of post-punk groups including Joy Division, The Fall,
Magazine, PIL (Public Image Limited.), and numerous others. The reemergence of this difficult music is the result of several factors ranging
from the decreased revenue for artists from recordings in the MP3 file
sharing era, resulting in greater economic incentives to go on tour, to the
rejection, at least on the part of older audiences, of both the bland pop fare
offered in the present and the sanitised versions of rock and pop nostalgia,
from which post-punk had, until recently, been almost entirely excluded.
Similarly, there has been an interesting shift in both music criticism and
cultural studies to a consideration of post-punk. If the 1977 punk
explosion is considered as an event then post-punk would refer to those
practices and cultures which sought to respond affirmatively to this event,
without merely imitating the music, gestures, clothing and style of punk
itself. Instead, post-punk groups took the initial subversive and
transgressive effect of the punk event and extended it into new forms of
experimental musical and cultural practice. This paper will firstly attempt
to define the field of subversive experimental practices that constituted
post-punk. Then, focusing on a range of post-punk groups including The
Fall, The Mekons, The Gordons and Laibach, it will attempt to bring out
some of the key questions raised by post-punk considered as a diverse
range of subversive cultural practices, whose coherence lies, in Simon
Reynolds words, in the desire to rip it up and start again, as he entitled
his recent book on post-punk (2005). For Reynolds, the inventiveness and
richness of the post-punk music of 1978 to 1984 by far outstripped the
short lived punk explosion that preceded it, and was one of the richest
musical eras in the history of modern popular music:
Michael Goddard
21
Young people have a biological right to be excited about the times theyre
living through. If you are very lucky, that hormonal urgency is matched by
the insurgency of the era, and your built-in adolescent need for amazement
and belief coincides with a period of objective abundance. The prime years
of post-punk were like that: A fortune. (x, emphasis in original)
22
belief in the power of the music, [...] which in turn made the question
Where to now, worth fighting over (11).
This question was one that was being openly posed in the 1970s and
80s not only in post-punk and other domains of cultural and intellectual
production but also in social movements, such as the German and Italian
Autonomy movements and squatting practices throughout Europe, to give
just two examples.1 I would argue that the field of post-punk
experimentation is symptomatic of the same seismic cultural shift that
gave rise to a whole range of experimentation in thought, affect and
cultural practices that took place in this period of economic, political and
cultural transition, a period in which a certain modern disciplinary regime
of stratification in all the above dimensions was breaking down,
accompanied by multiple expressions of creativity and resistance,
including free radio stations, autonomist and squatting movements and the
emergence of politically engaged cultural critique, including that of British
cultural studies, for example. In this light the range of practices that
constitute post-punk can be seen as heterogeneous responses to Reynolds
question of where to now? which in political, cultural and economic
terms in the 70s and 80s was one that was being openly posed in all
domains of cultural and intellectual production, as well as in social
movements.
Post-punk is as problematic a field to define as the postmodern not
least because of the tricky temporality of the prefix post which both fields
share. While Simon Reynolds Rip it Up limits itself to the fairly restricted
dates of 1978-1984, it soon becomes clear that many of the first post-punk
groups were in fact playing music (if only in their living room) well before
the punk explosion of 1977. Then again, there are a whole range of
arguments about the spatio-temporal coordinates of punk itself: was it a
phenomenon of London or New York in 1976-1977, does it date back to
the Stooges, the MC5 and the Velvet Underground or even 60s garage
music in general? In this regard there are key distinctions, as Stewart
Home has suggested, between Punk with a capital P and punk music as a
tendency that has accompanied rock music since its inception or at least
since the 60s, as exemplified by the Pebbles and Nuggets collections of
punk music from the 60s.2 Rather than engage with those interminable
debates, this paper will see Punk as a punctual event whose key proper
name is indeed the Sex Pistols. This is not to claim any originality or
advance in musical development on their part, relative to the rival claims
1
On the history of the Italian Autonomia movement see Wright (131-151, 197223).
2
On the distinction between Punk with a capital P and punk, see Home.
Michael Goddard
23
of their New York contemporaries, for example, but to underline the fact
that for a whole range of factors the Sex Pistols did indeed constitute an
event through which a fundamentally new space of creativity, experimentation
and cultural production opened up. As with 68, there is little point in being
nostalgic for this event or trying to replicate it by imitating its perceived
style as this is a type of unproductive repetition that only erases the event
by breaking it down into a series of stylistic elements, clothing, attitudes,
or chords as has been done exhaustively in cultural studies. More
interesting is the question of how to be worthy of this event and this is
precisely what post-punk music was responding to. To take some
Manchester examples, while The Fall were definitely energised and
encouraged to perform publicly after seeing the Sex Pistols, this was not at
all in order to be like them but rather a sense that if they could do what
they were doing in public, then The Falls own experimentation with
combining poetic expression with primitive music would at least not be
that bad. In contrast, Warsaw were generally acknowledged to be a
particularly uninspiring punk band and it was only when they stopped
trying to make punk music that they were able, as Joy Division, to invent
an entirely new style that had a massive influence on the future
development of music (see Reynolds 103-123).
Nevertheless, it would be entirely false to construct an opposition
between punk repetition and post-punk originality as if the two were
mutually exclusive. The question posed in post-punk experimentation is
not how to avoid repetition but how to repeat creatively, how to compose
repetitions that make differences rather than feed into the economy of
mass cultural standardisation. As The Fall put it on the B-Side to their first
single, Repetition, which can be understood as a statement of intent for
the whole post-punk field: Repetition in our music/And were never
going to lose it (The Fall, 1978). This is less an acknowledgement of the
banal repetitiveness of pop music as the statement of the explicit aim of
perverting this power of mass reproduction in order to produce something
new. As Reynolds puts it, one of the key reasons post-punk music inspired
a new level of writing about music was that it was a type of meta-music
aware of its own modes of production, inherited genres and relations to
consumption, without ever being cynically post-modern or indifferent; an
interview with a post-punk band was more likely to involve discussions
about art, politics or cinema than the mere laundry list of musical
influences and reference points it has largely become today (10). Bands
like PIL were explicitly based on a critique of the mechanisms of
marketing popular music which in turn determine and limit what gets
produced, whereas other groups considered their work to be a tactical,
24
almost military intervention into the field of the popular. This was
certainly the case of industrial groups such as Throbbing Gristle or
Laibach, who did not see themselves primarily as musicians but as the
operators of subversive machineries, using the popular as a way of
inserting anomalous materials into the heart of contemporary culture far
more effectively than if these procedures were carried out in the domain of
contemporary art which both groups had prior relations with.
Furthermore, post-punk groups had a tendency to emphasise territory
and to populate their music with local accents and references, not in order
to assert regional identities but rather to subject them to a form of
stammering in which they are at once recognisable but transformed, as is
evident, for example, in relation to the north of England in both The
Mekons and The Fall. Whereas the formers use of local accents
emphasised their provinciality and distance from the cosmopolitan centres
of punk and their ideologies, Mark E. Smith of The Fall developed a
unique tuneless vocal snarl as the ideal vehicle for his lyrical cut-up
imagery of the industrial North. Finally, post-punk music itself directly
rejected the opposition between high or modernist culture and the popular
by importing techniques of experimentation from the former into the
conventions of the latter as a way of exploding the artificial boundaries
between the two spheres. This had the effect of a double critique or double
capture of the conformity of popular culture in the first place and, at the
same time, of the ineffectiveness of contemporary art that only circulates
in a narrow, bourgeois milieu. Instead, drawing on multiple modernist
sources not only or even especially in music but also in writing, painting
and film, of which perhaps the key was the various modern forms of
collage or the cut-up, post-punk music was able to constitute itself not as
strictly popular culture or art but rather as a form of unpopular culture
not meaning a complete rejection of the popular whose avenues of
distribution it was appropriating for its own ends but rather the attempt to
create something genuinely new within the economy of the popular
through the creative repetition of styles and procedures taken from both
popular and modernist sources.
Next, northern post-punk groups in whose music the spectre of
political radicalism is clearly apparent, namely The Mekons from Leeds,
and The Fall from Manchester, should be discussed. Whereas The Fall
seemed distinct from Mancunian punk and post-punk groups such as Joy
Division because of their apparent political radicalism and embrace of a
modernist cut-up aesthetics, The Mekons distinguished themselves from
contemporary politicised groups in Leeds like the Gang of Four due to
their insistence on amateurism, experimentation and ultimately the
Michael Goddard
25
26
Trimdon Grange explosion was the cover of an old folk song recounting
a mining disaster. This latter example is significant not only because of the
combination of a political content, but for being haunted by an earlier
musical form that in turn recounted an experience of a haunting loss. In a
sense, this song prefigured the changing direction of The Mekons when
they reinvented themselves not as a punk band but as a form of Northern
Folk, albeit with constantly shifting relations to rock n roll, American
country and other styles.
It was after The Mekons folk re-invention that the spectre of militancy
becomes truly apparent in their music. In the track Darkness and Doubt
from The Mekons 1985 album Fear and Whiskey there is a direct
evocation of radical political action: In the clear red dawn/we moved like
a tide/but I went down in a baton charge. However, as the song
progresses it becomes clear that this militancy is clearly located in a past
that has been lost, through experiences of defeat and betrayal: They said
come back at 10 and sing the red flag/but the hall was cold and bare.
What is more, the style of the music no longer has the slightest trace of
punk or even post-punk experimentation but is rather classical, Hank
Williams style, country, in which it is a wailing violin rather than guitars
that are dominant, a shift in style given ironic confirmation in the final
lyrics over the horizon/I saw John Wayne ride. Rather than a sign of the
group compromising with traditional musical forms, the song is an
indication of a kind of contamination of past musical styles and the
exploitation of their affective powers by combining them with seemingly
incongruous lyrics, such as the above lament about the destruction and
loss of militant political community. As such, the song is doubly spectral
in that it is haunted by both the experience of political defeat and by
archaic musical forms, a combination that would increasingly characterise
The Mekons music. Similar examples could be multiplied; the much later
Ghosts of American Astronauts, for example, imagines American
astronauts haunting the hills above Bradford to set the scene for a spectral
treatment of 60s Vietnam war politics with lines such as Nixon sips a Dry
Martini or its a nice break from Vietnam (The Mekons 1988), while
Brutal combines a militant, post-colonial analysis of the colonial origins
and state-sponsored continuation of the drug trade with the subjective
experience of addiction: send in the army to deal some smack (The
Mekons 1991). But perhaps the fullest treatment of this haunting by
spectres of past militancy is the track Thee Olde Road to Jerusalem. In
this song, a deliberate reference to the Blake poem, there is an evocation
of the entire messianic history of the English left from the levellers to the
modern union movement and the labour party: All that March through
Michael Goddard
27
history must still mean something to you (The Mekons 2002). The
attitude in which this history is presented is neither pious nor ironic but
spectral and critical.
On the other side of the Pennines, The Fall were a very different band
and one with an even more complex relation to militant politics. While the
assumption of The Falls radical political stance found confirmation in
early tracks such as Hey Fascist, fifteen years later the track Hey
Student indicated not only a different target but gave the impression that
the earlier track may have been more a gesture of irritation than the
expression of any leftist political position. Nevertheless, in the early days
of the band at least one of their members was involved with the Young
Communist League and Una Baines remembers she and Mark attending
loads of political meetings (qtd. in Reynolds 108), but as observers
rather than participants. In a similar vein, the cover for the Early Years:
77-79 (The Fall 1981a) features on the reverse side the phrase the modern
day proletariat refuses to knuckle under, and in this period they supported
political causes like Rock Against Racism before becoming disillusioned
about the latters subordination and conscription of music purely to
advance their political agenda. Mark E. Smiths later vitriolic attacks on
middle class leftists talking of Chile while driving through Haslingdon
(The Fall 1980) on the track English Scheme, not to mention his
apparent support of Thatcher and the Falklands War, have also led to the
singer being labelled by some as a working class conservative, despite
plenty of indications to the contrary.4
As with The Mekons, it is a mistake to just extract from The Falls
lyrics a political content, since militant politics play an equally if not more
spectral role in The Fall than they do in The Mekons. However, whereas
The Mekons, after an initial phase of post-punk experimentation, preferred
to inject radical contents into archaic, residual forms, the music of The
Fall was driven by a relentless will to musical invention, even if this
invention paradoxically also involved the recycling of earlier forms taken
both from popular culture and from the legacy of modernism. However
much Mark E. Smith might have lambasted the left in interviews, the
music of The Fall is full of references to various forms of radical politics,
albeit in an often ambivalent and spectral form. One political issue that is
especially present is drug politics from the early Rowche Rumble that
attacks the hypocrisy of state and corporate sanctioned valium addiction
4
Smiths ambivalent relations with Thatcherism are evident in Ford (139) and
elsewhere. It is difficult to discern to what extent Smiths apparent conservatism is
sincere or a provocation of the left liberal opinion reigning in the English music
press such as NME.
28
Michael Goddard
29
30
Michael Goddard
31
32
in terms of industrial noise, Laibach saw disco as the industrial music par
excellence in that its repetitive rhythms were a training and mechanisation
of bodies perhaps even more potent than the regime of industrial labour.
For Laibach, disco expressed the essence of mass cultural music as eternal
repetition of the same and their strategy was simply to add another layer of
repetition. However, this affirmation of repetition resulted in a form of
simulation in which the hierarchy of the original over the copy is
abandoned. This is clearly a process fully engaged with temporality. Not
only do Laibach incorporate in the same recording untimely elements and
styles, but they also incorporate the power of popular music to generate
rhythms and thereby temporalise bodies into a hyper-temporalisation that
makes this process of control explicit: Disco Rhythm, as a regular
repetition, is the purest, the most radical form of the militantly organized
rhythmicity of technicist production, and as such the most appropriate
means of media manipulation (Laibach qtd. in Monroe 215). Rather than
resulting in a Fascistic control, however, this process is strangely
liberating for the audience, since it mystifies and demystifies at the same
time the very pleasures it is meanwhile generating.
This temporal dimension of Laibach was made explicit on one of their
most recent releases, WAT or We Are Time. This is Laibachs most
reflexive release, referring not only as usual to both recent history and the
history of musical styles but also to Laibachs own history through both
the sampling of their own early recordings and the lyrical content. On the
remixed version of the track We Are Time as it appears on the Anthems
compilation, which begins with a sampling of Laibachs own recordings,
they go furthest into their own myth to the point that they annex time itself
to themselves. The lyrics state that they are no ordinary group or
humble pop musicians (Laibach 2004) but rather time itself, an
association supported sonically by the constant presence of a ticking
clockor possibly a time bombthroughout the track. Later in the song,
Laibachs critique of the easy consumption of pop music and their
untimely divergence from it is made absolutely explicit: But when our
beat stops and the lights go out/And when we leave this place/You will be
left here all alone with a static scream locked on your face/We are time
(Laibach 2004).
The Gordons and Laibach clearly exceed both the temporal and
geographical mapping of post-punk in Reynolds book and show that postpunk is not defined by a set of dates or Anglo-American coordinates but
an aesthetic and political response to the event of punk. Furthermore, even
if this response now seems barely possible in a Western context, where
both punk and post-punk have been so recycled as to be merely part of an
Michael Goddard
33
apolitical style repertoire for groups like Interpol or The Editors, or worse
as commercially motivated parodic self-simulation as in the reformed Sex
Pistols, the example of Laibach gives some indication that the
constructivism of post-punk may still be possible in post-socialist contexts
as borne out, for example, by the Polish group Cool Kids of Death with
their anthem Generation Nothing expressing directly the historical
experience of the disadvantaged incorporation of Polish youth into New
Europe. As a final example of this continued possibility of post-socialist
post-punk, there is the video for Anglia from Laibachs recent album
Volk, which is composed entirely of national anthems, and which reprises
in a post-punk fashion, the Sex Pistols detournement of God save the
Queen but from a post-socialist position. After we see via a distorted lens
a decrepit older woman preparing bacon and eggs to reasonably faithful
rendition of the original anthem, Laibachs industrial techno rock breaks
out as the singer intones, So you still believe you are ruling the world
(Laibach 2006). This track and video is therefore a potent reminder of
post-punks militancy and ability, or at least intentions, to use music and
their accompanying media to destabilise aesthetic expectations and
critique existing power relations. Whether post-punk in the UK is still
capable of this is less certain but certainly its return gives the impression
that there is a strong desire for popular cultural forms capable of doing so.
Works cited
Ford, Simon. 2003. Hip Priest. London: Quartet.
Hebdige, Dick. 1979. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London:
Routledge.
Home, Stewart. 1996. Cranked up Really High. London: Codex.
Monroe, Alexei. 2006. Interrogation Machine: Laibach and NSK. Short
Circuits Series. Boston, Mass: MIT.
Reynolds, Simon. 2006. Rip it up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984.
London: Penguin.
Toffler, Alvin. 1970. Future Shock. New York: Random House.
Wright, Steve. 2002. Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle
in Italian Autonomist Marxism. London: Pluto.
Discography
The Fall. Bingo Masters Break Out/Repetition. 1978.
. Grotesque. 1980.
. Early Years: 1977-1979. 1981a.
34
. Slates. 1981.
The Gordons. Future Shock EP. 1981.
. The Gordons Vol. 2. 1984.
Laibach. Opus Dei. 1986.
. Anthems. 2004.
. Volk. 2006.
The Mekons. Fear and Whiskey. 1985.
. Ghosts of American Astronauts/Robin Hood. 1988.
. The Curse of the Mekons. 1991.
. Oooh! Out of our Heads. 2002.
CHAPTER TWO
TRANSGRESSING IDENTITY/
TRANSGRESSIVE IDENTITY
TWO MEN, TWO WOMEN AND ALEX
COME TOGETHER:
1968, PERFORMANCE, AND THE UTOPIAN
SPIRIT OF MERGING
MARTIN HALL
The film was shot in 1968, but was not released by Warner Bros until 1970 in the
US and 1971 in Britain. For a full discussion of the protracted struggle over the
films release, please see Colin MacCabes (1998) BFI monograph.
Martin Hall
37
38
Turner feels that he is no longer successful because he has lost his daemon,
which drove him. The film plays around with Jungian ideasarchetypes, the
animathroughout. However, this paper is not concerned with this approach. For
a full discussion see C. G. Jung (1993). I prefer to see this daemon as a form of
Thanatos, or death drive.
Martin Hall
39
40
in the mirror gives rise to a state where all the objects of his world are
always structured around the wandering shadow of his own ego (166).
What we have here then, relevant to both Chas and Turner, is the lack felt
in the mirror, that which is other, given structure within the external world,
obviously leading to more lack. This can be seen to function as an
example of what Ellie Ragland refers to as a barrier against limitless
jouissance (105).
The figures of Turner and Chas, in terms of identification, can also be
viewed through the prism of Freuds postulates on narcissism and objectchoice. Both characters have difficulty forming social relations with
others, and are incapable of meaningful object-choice and object-relations.
Throughout Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud creates a distinction
between primary and secondary narcissism, suggesting, according to Ellie
Ragland, that primary narcissism is a state of indifference between the
ego and the id, characteristic of newborns, psychotics and those depressed
or in mourning (23). This indifferent state is identifiable in Chas, who has
difficulty distinguishing between imaginary relationships and those
existing within the world of language. Turner also has similar difficulties:
his existence in the Imaginary bubble of the house as well as his current
lack of success as a musician have placed him in an indefinable place
outside of the world of language.
Some scenes from the film will be analysed now in more detail, with
attention paid to the various motifs outlined in the preceding paragraphs.
The first indicative scene is the primary meeting of Turner and Chas, after
Pherber has let Chas into the house and said that he can stay. Turner is
called upstairs to meet Chas, and enters an ornate and cluttered room that
has been described as decorated in the Gibbsan Moroccan manner
(MacCabe 9). The room is also littered with musical equipment, lost
objects and remnants of Turners previous life. They first see each other
through their reflections in a mirror on the ceiling, immediately setting up
their relationship in the narrative, as well as the relationship suggested
through this analysis. At this point, Turner does not want Chas to have the
room. There is then a conversation between the two, with them standing
on opposite sides of a screen: whilst not literally a mirror, the screen has a
signifying agency in the characters relationship. Chas, when told that he
wouldnt fit in replies, whilst looking upwards, Im an artist, Mr.
Turner, like yourself. Turner begins to take an interest in him when Chas
names him as his like: Turner, as has been stated, wishes to gain access to
the relevant parts of the world of (artistic) language. Chas seems to see
Turner in a contrasting size (un relief de stature) [] in contrast with the
turbulent movements that the subject feels are animating him (Lacan
Martin Hall
41
2002a, 3). Chas is in a state of flux at this juncture within the narrative: he
is on the run from his gangster bosses and is ill at ease in his new
surroundings. Later, whilst on the phone to his friend Tony Farrell (Ken
Colley), he is asked where he is: he replies that he is on the left.
Literally, this means West London, but the phrase has other connotations:
the political left, a place of strangeness,3 a space where lack is made real
through loneliness and the fear of being left. At this point, Chas, in a very
literal way, needs the approval of this other artist. He has run from a
situation of extreme peril and sees, or as it will turn out, misrecognises
Turner and the house as a person and a space where he can hide out, where
his identity can be reconstructed. He sees the house as a possible haven, a
place where all the eruptions of his unruly unconscious can be put to rest.
What follows on from Chass plea is the following interchange:
Turner: I wonder, if you were me, what would you do?
Chas: It depends who you are, which I dont know.
Turner: Who I am? Do you know who you are?
Chas: Eh? Yes.
Turner: Well that simplifies matters. You can stay.
The Latin word sinister, sinistre in Old French or sinistra in Italian, means left.
This predates its contemporary meaning. It meant left-hand in middle English
and is associated with the left hand path in magic, the black path. Of course,
until the first twenty years or so of the last century, the Catholic Church (and other
denominations) forced left-handed children to use their right, because of these
connotations.
42
alluded to, as well as the language of the figure of the law) makes
Chass (illusory) mastery of it attractive, with its dual associations for
Turner of jouissance and knowledge. As if to prove to himself that he
knows who he is, the next thing the spectator sees Chas do after he leaves
the room is wash off the hair dye that he had put on as a disguise before
entering the house.
The next emblematic section of the film is the trip scene, in many
ways the defining point of the narrative. To gloss over the early part of this
slightly, there is a discussion about Chass image, his act. We see
Turners face superimposed, via a dissolve, over Chass and hear the line
time for a change. After this there is a relay of looks between Chas and
Turner, defensive on the formers part, eroticised and inquisitive on the
latters. Chas tells Turner and Pherber that he needs his photo taken (for
his passport, which they eventually realise) and they begin to play with his
image, initially dressing him as a 1930s gangster. There is then a shot of
Chas, as a 30s gangster, reflected in the mirror, literally split in two. His
image reflects Turners idea of the type of masculinity that he thinks Chas
embodies, which we can think of as a maturation of [] power [] as
Gestalt [] in an exteriority in which this form is certainly more
constituent than constituted (Lacan 2002a, 3). Turner thinks that he can
access this through merging symbiotically with Chas. However, this type
of desire, as Lacan suggests, is a mirage. Due to Chass dissatisfaction
with this image of himself, Turner begins to wonder if he does know who
he is, if he does have access to what Turner is looking for.
The mushrooms are beginning to have an effect upon Chas at this
point, unlocking his unconscious and letting out his repressed sexuality
and desire for a more feminine aspect to his masculinity. We see him in
Middle Eastern clothes, almost in drag, looking at himself with
satisfaction in the mirror. There are more images of mirrors in the next few
minutes of the narrative, acting as both conduits and barriers between
Chas and Turner. These create a succession of subjects and Others. Lacan
suggests that [t]here is the real person who is before you and who takes
up space []. And then there is the Other whom we were talking about,
who is the subject also, but not the reflection of what you see in front of
you, and not simply what takes place insofar as you see yourself seeing
yourself (1993, 55-56). At this point Chas sees himself as Other (the 30s
gangster, as well as the hippy in Arabic dress), as imagined by Turner, as
himself as he existed before his entry into the house, as himself as ideal
ego through the prism of his identification with Turner, and in Turner as
ego ideal imagined in exteriority. Allied to this, he sees Turner as ideal
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ego and as ego ideal. Turner also sees Chas in a similar variety of
subject/object positions in this scene.
Chas is made aware of what he has taken and initially reacts badly.
Pherber calms him down by telling him that he is beautiful; they have just
dismantled him a little to see how he functions. We then see, in a
hallucinatory fashion, Turner, dressed as a 50s rocker, in leather, moving
and talking like Chas, deliver probably the films most famous line: the
only performance that makes it, that really makes it all the way, is the one
that achieves madness. Am I right? This is an explicit example of the
merging of the two egos previously referred to. In the context of the
narrative, the spectator must assume that this is diegetic and seen by Chas:
in fact, quite possibly his mirage. Chas and Pherber are now in a bedroom
and he is still wearing a very long wig. The following conversation takes
place:
Chas: Whats he want?
Pherber: Maybe a little mirror. A little dark mirror.
Chas: Imirror he shant, the thieving little slag!
Pherber, who has repeated twice the line a little dark mirror whilst
Chas is talking: He wont take it away, you fool! He just wants to look
at it. Hes stuck! Stuck!
This term literally means, from the Greek, the disappearance of sexual desire.
However, as the quote suggests, Lacan uses it to refer to the fading of the neurotic
subject. Bruce Fink suggests that, in aphanisis [o]bject a comes to the fore and is
44
lethal (Lacan qtd. in Mitchell 16). The lethal aspects of Chass feelings
towards Turners power over him as subject will be felt at the end of the
film. Chas as dark mirror also illustrates Turners misrecognition of
Chas and his access to this language of violence, which exists both in the
Imaginary and the Symbolic, as has been stated. The gap between Turners
need for this access and his demanding it is where his desire is situated,
which can be construed through a further section from Lacan: the
obsessional subject drags into the cage of his narcissism the objects in
which his question reverberates back and forth (2002b, 98). The question
for Turner of course is whether or not he again wants access to this
language of violence, the object of which can be seen as the little dark
mirror, the subject Turner himself, with both functioning as locus for this
question.
Chas then enters again the room in which he first encountered Turner
but everything has changed. The camera zooms into Chass ear canal,
making it clear that what we are about to see is from his point of view, part
of his hallucinatory experience. An iris-out takes us to Harry Flowers
office, where he is sitting in his chair, saying come in. The rest of the
gang are there, as is Chas. This is an echo of a scene in the first half of the
film. Flowers changes into Turner, who is repeating me, me, situating
Turner now both as Symbolic Father (Flowers has obviously functioned as
this in terms of being his boss. This has been seen in the various Oedipal
conflicts between the two) and placing him in Chass unconscious as the
object of his anger. The song Memo from Turner (which refers to Chas
as a faggy little leather boy, amongst other things) that follows takes
place within the future anterior register.
The tense, tone and address of Memo from Turner all work within
the register. Samuel Weber, discussing Lacans use of this tense to
describe the historicity of the subject, makes the point that the future
anterior breaks down the fixed subject positions associated with the
absolute knowledge that the present perfect tense allows for (7-9). Chas
has existed within this temporal discourse: despite his repressed sexuality,
his clothes, his use of violence, his physical presence, have all allowed
him to view himself as fixed subject in the present perfect. All of this is
what has made him attractive to Turner. The scene under discussion
removes Chas from this arena of temporal certainty, ironically through the
vehicle of Turners words. The tense calls into question subjective
identity (Weber 9) and is the first fissure in Chass personality. A
cast in the leading role in fantasy, the subject being eclipsed or overshadowed
thereby (73). This is a useful description of the beginning of the processes that
will lead to the end of the film.
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dialectic of uncertainty is created for Chas which later will break down the
relationships already formed between Turner and himself. The song tells
him what he shall have been for in the process of what he is becoming
(2002b, 94), to paraphrase Lacan. It forces him to re-write his possible
pasts to create the future(s) that he can become. One of the last lines sung
is remember who you say you are: Turner (both as Flowers and as
Chass conditional past creating his possible futures) smashes the mirror.
The affect of this is not felt until later in the film: it is repressed, to return
later. Chass sexuality is released and he goes to Lucy5 and the two of
them make love.
The affect of repression and its return is felt at this point in the text.
Freud states:
[p]sychoanalytical observation of the transference neuroses, moreover,
leads us to conclude that repression is not a defensive mechanism which is
present from the very beginning, and that it cannot arise until a sharp
cleavage has occurred between conscious and unconscious mental
activitythat the essence of repression lies simply in turning something
away, and keeping it a distance, from the conscious. (1985a, 146-147)
The song functions within the narrative as this sharp cleavage. Again,
this rupture is related to Chass move into an anterior state of time, with its
attendant associations of anticipated belatedness (Weber 9, his
emphasis). He knows that he is waiting for the return of his violence. It
marks the point where Chas represses this fissure created by Turners
breaking of the mirror. We shall return to the question of the future
anterior when discussing the death drive.
Chas, still dressed in a Middle-Eastern fashion and wearing the wig,
then goes to get Lucy some soap and is confronted by Flowers men in the
hallway. Effectively, Chas has allowed this to happen by forgetting to ring
Tony to organise his false passport for his escape to the United States.
This lapse can be seen as emblematic of Chass death drive. When he gets
up to the bedroom he finds Turner and Pherber in bed. His repressed
violence is returning, part of a revengeful aggressiveness [] in part
determined by the amount of punitive aggression he expects from the
father (Freud 1991, 322). The repressed memory of Turners mocking of
him during the scene previously analysed is returning, creating fear and a
desire for revenge. As Flowers transformed into Turner in the
aforementioned scene, and Flowers men are waiting to take him away,
Lucy turns into Turner at various points during the love scene.
46
this is also a fear of a real expected punishment from Flowers. The last
exchanges between Turner and Chas then follow:
Chas: Got to be off now.
Turner: I might come with you, then.
Chas, laughing: You dont know where Im going, pal.
Turner, childishly: I do.
An air of palpable tension then enters the room, accentuated by the music,
a rhythmic, accelerating pulse. Turner begins to pull the covers up to his
neck:
Turner: I dunno.
Chas: Yeah, you do.
Chas pulls out his gun, slides the chamber back twice at great speed and
shoots. Through a complex sequence of shots the bullet is seen entering
the ear canal of what we assume is Turners head, followed by a shot of
Jorge Luis Borges6 face, then a cracked mirror. The processes of
identification in the symbolic matrix (Lacan 2002a, 2) are, on one level,
broken, at an end. Turners misrecognition of Chas has become all too
clear to him. Chass ego has reasserted itself and he has reacted in the way
expected of him. Turners attempts to dismantle Chas have created this
rupture within him, which has taken form as bodily aggression.
Despite the perceived destruction of their roles as interchangeable
Ideal-Is the film ends with the ultimate gestalt: as Chas is driven away in
the car, it is Turners face that the spectator sees from the window. This
can be seen as an example of a perfect dialectical synthesis, that is
entirely discordant with reality (Lacan 2002a, 3). The two have become
one. Prior to this we have seen what appears to be Turners dead body
slumped in a cupboard, with no explanation of how it got there. Another
section from Lacan can hopefully illuminate the ending of the film. The
image of Turner in the car can be seen as an example of the virtual
complex (the movements assumed in the image, and the conclusion of the
discourses of the image already discussed), with the dead body as the
reduplicated reality (the reflected environment), (Lacan 2002a, 2), existing
outside the image. Allied to this, Lacans postulate that the obsessional
neurotic and his spectator are united by the mediation of death (2002b,
6
Jorge Luis Borges, particularly his story El Sur, or The South (1962) is an
inter-textual reference throughout the film. At one point we see Turner reading
from it.
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relationship with the political upheavals of that year: the working classes
are, as Colin MacCabe suggests, presented as irredeemably stuck; caught
in a vicious circle where homosexuality and chauvinism follow each other
in frozen narcissisms (81). Chas needs the help of the middle classes and
the Other (in the shape of the foreign) to change. However, the text does
provide a real space for hope in the England of 1968, through the notion of
merging across class, gender and (implicitly) race.
The end, as the ineffable space discussed earlier, due to its
connection to the death drive and the Real, also connects the text both to
Utopian aspects of the avant-garde and to the de-centred, proto-post
structuralist project of Situationism and the riots and protests in Paris, as
well as the similar disturbances taking place in the United States,
Grosvenor Square in London, and in other parts of the world in 1968. As
well as this, the fragmented form of the text, allied to the content, fits
perfectly with Jean-Louis Comollis and Jean Narbonis (1968)
contemporary descriptions of the functions of a radical cinema.
Furthermore, the film can be connected to Situationism through it
suggesting itself as a site for the irruption of play, festivity, spontaneity,
and the imagination into the political realm (Plant 70), as the events in
Paris have been described. The film is not about a macro-politic; rather, it
presents itself as a locus for change based in the coming together of
individuals who see the possibility of change in the transcendent
possibilities of freedom (31) present in the text, which Herbert Marcuse
situates in the politics of the era.
The film contains also the Utopian dream of the merging of two social
and sexual worlds, with its breaching of the rigid class divide between
aristocrat decadent and proletarian criminal [] under the sign of gay sex
(McCabe 9). Jon Savage has also identified a Utopian aspect to the end of
the film, referring to it as satisfying and curiously hopeful (qtd. in
McCabe 10). Allied to this, the film is inter-textually connected to the
discourses on freedom of the time through its connection to the Rolling
Stones. Jagger, and the Rolling Stones in general, were at the height of
their position as icons of the radical youth of the 1960s. The film was
made at the same time that the Stones were recording tracks such as
Street Fighting Man and Sympathy for the Devil. The first of these
tracks in particular has come to be forever connected with the events of
May 1968. The second links them to Jean-Luc Godards One Plus One
(aka Sympathy for the Devil) (1968), which interspersed scenes of the
Stones recording with found footage of various riots.
It is also possible to look at Performance as inter-textual collage of the
counter-culture. As well as the Stones generally, there is the figure of
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Brian Jones. Anita Pallenberg, as well as being an actor, model and icon of
the period herself, was Keith Richards girlfriend and previously, Brian
Joness. Jones is felt as a presence throughout the film. Turners house in
Powys Square is based upon Joness and Pallenbergs, one of the major
loci of the 1960s demi-monde, described by Marianne Faithfull, somewhat
mawkishly, as [a] veritable witches coven of decadent illuminati, rock
princelings and hip aristos (3). Allied to this, much of Turner comes from
Jagger doing Jones and Jones and Pallenberg were known to indulge in
sex games where Jones would wear drag; specifically, he would dress up
as the French singer Franoise Hardy, whilst Pallenberg would dress up as
Jones. Jones, like Turner, coped badly with the trappings of fame and
retreated to a private psychic space, before dying in 1969. Then, there is
William Burroughs, Borges, Hassan-I-Sabbah, Mikhail Bulgakov,
Christopher Gibbs, Michael Cooper, Georges Bataille, Antonin Artaud,
Jean Genet, Kenneth Anger, David Litvinoff, Cecil Beaton, Jack Nitzsche,
Randy Newman, The Last Poets and Buffy Saint-Marie, who are all either
referenced in the film, or are part of its production or an influence or trace
felt within it.
Finally, these remarks hopefully give the reader an impression of an
open fluid text that has myriad avenues of analysis open to it. The film is
at once Utopian and transgressive; whilst it is not one that is automatically
connected to political discourses of the time there are ways to read the film
as very much a product of the revolutionary spirit of the 60s. To further
this reading, the ending has been interpreted as replete with the Utopian
possibilities of the era. There are elements of the death drive that are
Utopian and which relate to inchoate longings which may be found in
many narratives: Performance is an example of this.
Works cited
Boothby, Richard. 1991. Death and Desire: Psychoanalytic Theory in
Lacans Return to Freud. London & New York: Routledge.
Borges, Jorge Luis. 1962. Fictions. Trans. Donald A. Yates et al. London:
Weidenfield and Nicolson.
Braudy, Leo and Marshall Cohen, eds. 1999. Film Theory and Criticism:
Introductory Readings, 5th edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Comolli, Jean-Luc and Jean Narboni. 1968. Cinema/Ideology/Criticism.
In Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, eds. Braudy, L
and Cohen, M. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. 752-759.
Copjec, Joan. 1994. Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists.
Cambridge, Massachusetts & London: The MIT Press.
52
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film which is about them (Sontag 136). For Sontag as well, even though
the word liminal does not appear in her essay, Bergman is interested
primarily in the liminal indeterminacy of the depths in which
consciousness drowns, which is shown through the prism of the womens
transactions1, the theme of doubling of identities, and the unrelieved
dualism of the chiasmic relationship between mask and person, to
recapitulate the most important points that Sontag makes (141).
Since in this essay I am interested in both the psychical and the
corporeal aspect of transactionality that occurs between the two women in
the film, I also find Blackwells study quite revealing as regards how
Bergman is preoccupied with the questions of seeing, gender and the body.
Blackwell notes that Bergmans feminist critics, while being generally
appreciative of the directors particular interest in the position of women
in cultural contexts in his films after 1960 (I am thinking here specifically
about Persona, The Silence, and Cries and Whispers) (1), have also
frequently emphasized and critiqued the ways in which Bergmans films
portray objectification of women and betray a thoroughly offensive
determinist misogyny (3). As Blackwell further observes, [f]or
Bergman, women are autonomous subjects and yet they are also construed
by the culture in which they live and by the act of representation (4). In
one of the chapters devoted to the film, Persona is analyzed from the
vantage point of feminist film theory with the focus on two lines of critical
investigation: deconstruction of the Self versus Other dualism and
instances of the false mergence occurring both within the film between the
female characters as well as between spectator and the films spectacle
itself. In her analysis, Blackwell draws from Sontags seminal
interpretation and argues that in Bergmans project interchangeability is
always equated with invalidity, because the transactions between the
characters are constantly subverted and deconstructed. According to
Blackwell, Persona shows that only false selves can merge; mergence
conflates false selves, not real subjecthoods (153). Because of that, her
way of approaching how Persona dwells on the unclear contours of the
1
Sontag uses the word transaction in her essay, but not quite in the sense in
which I will be using it in my analysis. I am borrowing the concept of
transaction from Shannon Sullivans 2001 study Living Across and Through
Skins: Transactional Bodies, Pragmatism, and Feminism, where she deploys the
term, via American philosopher John Dewey, to account for the dynamic, coconstitutive relationship of organisms and their environments [] [and to reflect] a
rejection of sharp dualisms between subject and object, and self and world, as well
as a rejection of the atomistic, compartmentalized conceptions of the subject and
self that often accompany such dualisms (1).
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57
self is hampered by the fact that she always construes the meaning of
transactions as negative and false, even though she is committed to
showing that Bergmans film deconstructs the Self versus Other binary.
Importantly, for instance, she analyzes the scenes in which Alma and
Elizabet touch, or the ones in which their images overlap, but she sees
these moments as instances of conflation of false selves that become
distortion and deformity (152). Along similar lines, while her
interpretation privileges and chiefly relies on the psychological mergence
of identities, what she actually focuses on are the many instances of not
only psychical but also physical intimacy, reciprocity of gestures, and
bodily interactions between the characters. While I can certainly see the
problems and limitations of Bergmans portrayals of women that
Blackwell points to, my focus in this paper is different. Given Bergmans
increased interest in human relationships, and the complexity of exchanges
between women in particular, in his films after 1960, I will contend that
Persona most fully brings these questions into focus by amplifying,
problematizing, and artistically exploring the issue of the two womens
intricate transactionality on many interrelated planes. I will try to show
that while Bergman certainly portrayed the transgressive chiasmic
relationship of Self and Other as highly ambivalent and conflicted, his
portrayal does not necessarily have to lead to the negative conclusions of
the intransgressible dualistic nature of the womens encounters that remain
further overshadowed by their vampirical intertwining, like Sontag argued,
or the false mergence as an underlying trait of the characters and
spectators transactions, which is the key tenet of Blackwells study of
Persona.
Bergmans interest in the irreducible transgressive transactionality
between Self and Other will hopefully become evident if we follow from
Foucaults conceptualization of transgression as an acknowledgement of
the existence of difference, here understood as the action of insistent
testing and contesting of forces that carry one towards the limit, as well as
testing and contesting of the limit itself, to Merleau-Pontys transgressive
notion of flesh presented in his unfinished work The Visible and the
Invisible in the Intertwining-the Chiasm chapter. According to MerleauPontys phenomenological account, the flesh of the world is non-dualistic,
that is encompassing both the psychical and corporeal lived experience,
and anonymous, that is prediscursive and prereflective realm that the
philosopher refers to as the wild being, and further explains it as the
tissue that lines the bodies, sustains them, nourishes them, and which for
its part is not a thing, but a possibility, a latency, and a flesh of things
where we interlive and transact with one another (132-133). In
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60
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62
the same time, however, this and other violent scenes in Persona show
that violence in the film is not, as Sontag suggests, only of the spiritual
kind. Towards the end of Persona, during a truly vampirical scene,
Elizabet drinks Almas blood drawn from a self-inflicted wound in the
final desperate effort to replenish herself through the nurses freshly
acquired strength, and perhaps also to recover the energy that Alma has
been drawing from her, which becomes a negative culmination of the
exchange between the two women. The duel of identities is also
explicitly the duel of bodies and the violence is both of the spiritual and
corporeal order, because both of these interconnected orders equally
strongly constitute and communicate Alma and Elizabets similarities and
differences, which once more brings us to the question of difference as
central to their chiasmic relationship. Whereas many critics focus on
physical similarities between both women, observing, like Blackwell, that
it is difficult to tell where one body ends and the other begins (152), it is
hard not to notice that Alma and Elizabet are in fact completely different
bodiesthey look different and they carry themselves in completely
different ways. As Steve Vineberg aptly observes in his essay Persona
and the Seduction of Performance, For all that has been written about
their similarity, Andersson and Ullmann are not truly look-alikes, and
Bergman continually underscores the physical differences between them
(124). Showing the women as both strikingly similar and strikingly
different, Bergman emphasizes the fact that we are all both similar and
different; we share the common interworld that is nevertheless a
separate project of each of us. In Merleau-Pontys philosophy, these
concerns are related to the interworld of selves that try to reach one
another and at the same time strive to preserve their autonomy; the
constant negotiation and transactionality that does not always have to be
successful or complete. The chiasmic transaction between the womens
intertwined conflicted subjectivities is always shot through with the
awareness of difference (just as it is shot through with the awareness of the
limit of being); even only a partial preservation of their anonymity
warrants their autonomy that the escalating intensity of their transactions
threatens, which explains their most violent exchanges as expressions of
contradictory desires to transgress ones own psychical and corporeal
boundaries, reach the other, master the other, become the other, yet remain
autonomous and different. Borrowing Blackwells term (via Irigaray),
both women may be seen as the subversive and transgressive body-whichis-not-one constantly traversing its external and internal boundaries;
morphing from ones body to the body of the other. Their caresses which,
like Sontag wrote, are beyond sexuality, beyond eroticism even, bring to
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63
Apart from the pre-oedipal metaphorics that Voglers letter clearly evokes,
and the images of fluidity emblematic of the feminine, Elizabets letter
strikingly makes no mention of the psychical consequences of her
withdrawal, and instead abounds in references to the bodily existence,
sensory perception, health, and almost primal vital power. Quite
predictably, however, the actresss withdrawal from the linguistic and
social reality is only momentary and quickly turns out to be illusory,
impossible, and ultimately even self-destructive. What she actually
accomplishes by abandoning the sociolinguistic sphere is only a shortlived recuperative illusion of residing outside of the confines of the society
and the roles she plays there. Towards the end of the film we see Elizabet
in her acting pose back on a movie set. Her strategic performance of silent
withdrawal is over, but by showing her on stage again, Bergman reminds
us that performativity and transactionality define our everyday lived
existence and can never be fully sidestepped. We may try to transgress the
limits imposed on us by the world we live in, but, more often than not, our
transgressions turn out to be momentarily comforting illusions as we are
simultaneously carried towards the limit of being. It is only from within
what is given to us as the flesh of the world that we are bound to
64
Works cited
Bergman, Ingmar, dir. 1966. Persona. Gutek Film, 2006.
. 1972. Persona and Shame: The Screenplays. Trans. Keith Bradfield.
London: Calder & Boyars.
. 1994. Images: My Life in Film. Trans. Marianne Ruth. New York:
Arcade Publishing.
Blackwell, Marilyn Johns. 1997. Gender and Representation in the Films
of Ingmar Bergman. Columbia: Camden House.
Derrida, Jacques. 2005. On TouchingJean-Luc Nancy. California:
Stanford University Press.
Fredericksen. Don. 2005. Bergmans Persona (Classics of Cinema).
Pozna: Adam Mickiewicz University Press.
Foucault, Michel. 1977. A Preface to Transgression. In Language,
Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard. Trans. Donald F.
Bouchard & Sherry Simon. New York: Cornell UP. 29-52.
Irigaray, Luce. 1993. An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Ithaca, New York:
Cornell University Press.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1962. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans.
Colin Smith. London & New York: Routledge/The Humanities Press.
. 1968. The Visible and the Invisible. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Evanston:
Northwestern University Press.
Michaels, Lloyd. 2000. Bergman and the Necessary Illusion: An
Introduction to Persona. In Ingmar Bergmans Persona, ed. Lloyd
Michaels. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1-23.
Orr, Christopher. 2000. Scenes from the Class Struggle in Sweden:
Persona as Brechtian Melodrama. In Ingmar Bergmans Persona, ed.
Lloyd Michaels. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 86-109.
Sontag, Susan. 1966. Bergmans Persona. In Styles of Radical Will.
New York: Picador.
Sullivan, Shannon. 2001. Living Across and Through Skins: Transactional
Bodies, Pragmatism, and Feminism. Bloomington and Indianapolis:
Indiana UP.
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XXY:
THE CINEMATIC POETICS OF TRANSGRESSIVE
VISUAL AGAINST SEXUAL
AND GENDER BINARISM
KATARZYNA POLOCZEK
In his book (2009), Between XX and XY: Intersexuality and the Myth of
Two Sexes the researcher, immunologist and pathologist, Dr Gerald
Callaghan puts forward the view that sexual and gender binarism is neither
an ever-lasting nor universally held belief, but is strictly socially bound
and contextual (xi). Very much in the same vein, in Sexing the Body:
Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality (2000), drawing upon
Kessler, Anne Fausto-Sterling admits that decoding whether to call a
child a boy or a girl, then, employs social definitions of the essential
components of gender. Such definitions [] are primarily cultural, not
biological (58). Callaghan comments upon a variety of possibilities:
In truth, humans come in an amazing number of forms, because human
development, including sexual development, is not either/or proposition.
Instead, between either and or there is an entire spectrum of
possibilities. Some people come into this world with a vagina and testes.
Others begin their lives as girls but at puberty become boys. Though weve
been told that Y chromosomes make boys, there are women in this world
with Y chromosomes. Beyond that, there are people who have only a
single unpaired X chromosome (people we call women who arent exactly
like other women). There are also people who are XXY, XXXY, or
XXXXY whom we call men but arent exactly like other men. There are
babies born with XYY, XXX, or any of a dozen or more other known
variations involving X or Y chromosomes. We humans are a diverse lot.
(xi)
Katarzyna Poloczek
67
In line with the above quoted argument, the main character of Lucia
Puenzos film, Alex (played by a female actress, Ines Efron), born with an
extra X chromosome, which produced an XXY chromosome variation,
does not fit within the binary gender scheme. The XXY syndrome,
discovered by Dr Klinefelter, who, in 19422, first described its symptoms
and enumerated its most crucial visible features: men have less, or no,
facial or bodily hair, their testicles are usually smaller, they tend to have
1
In the book (2003) The Man Who Would Be Queen: The Science of GenderBending and Transsexualism, Bailey claims that one under-appreciated
complication is that gender identity is probably not a binary, black-and-white
characteristic. Scientists continue to measure gender identity as male or female,
despite the fact that there are undoubtedly gradations in inner experience [...] (50).
2
According to the website of The American National Institute of Child Health and
Human Development, men with XXY syndrome usually tend to display language
disability and language acquisition problems, their verbal skills are lower, the
ability to read and write is impaired as well but this impediment can be eliminated
through regular practice.
68
larger breasts (gynaecomastia) and they produce less, or no, sperm at all.1
Furthermore, Callaghan informs that men diagnosed with this syndrome
usually have 47 chromosomes, but the label itself should not be limited to
the XXY variation only, as currently it has come to embody 48
chromosomes XXYY as well (63), or as Sharon Preves notices, even 49
chromosomes in an XXXXY variation (30). Surprisingly enough,
Klinefelter Syndrome is not as rare as one might assume: it affects 1 in
500 to 1 in 1000 men (Callaghan 63) and, in total, it amounts to 3000
XXY children being born annually in the US, and approximately 60 000
all over the world (Callaghan 63); according to Anne Fausto-Sterling (53)
around 0.0922 in a 100 newly born children are diagnosed with Klinefelter
Syndrome. Sharon Preves, using a broader term she employs in her book
(2008), indicates that sexually ambiguous children constitute up to 4%
of all newborns (2). Fausto-Sterling gives a more exact number of around
1.7 %.
In the XXY film, when Alex is born, his/her parents despite the doctors
suggestions do not agree on sex (re)assignment surgery (removing the
male sexual organs), which was at that time a strategy commonly
advocated by professionals. It was naively believed to leave no
psychological damage on a childs psyche and only result in a few bodily
scars. Beliefs of that kind can be traced back to the (in)famous Dr John
Money (and his colleagues organised around Johns Hopkins Hospital in
Baltimore), whose influential theory became responsible for performing
thousands of both unnecessary and invasive operations. Despite its past
prevalence, Callaghan is more than sceptical about Moneys approach
(118). What Callaghan questions most is the view the childs sex is
determined solely by social conditioning, and not biological or genetic
factors. Not only contemporary, acknowledged specialists, such as the
aforementioned Callaghan, Preves or Fausto-Sterling, are deeply critical
about Moneys ideas. Fausto-Sterling indicates that Moneys theory
aroused controversy even as early as the 1950s. It was around this time
that Dr Diamond, and later in the 1970s Dr Zuger, questioned Money on
the grounds of him suggesting that humans were sexually neutral at birth
(Fausto-Sterling 67-69), which, as both specialists argued, was undermined
both by past and current clinical research. What is more, Callaghan
reminds one that Moneys procedure used to be referred to as an optimal
gender policy (30), explaining it as follows: it was up to the pediatricians,
endocrinologists, plastic surgeons, and parentsnot chromosomes, gonads,
1
The website of The American National Institute of Child Health and Human
Development.
Katarzyna Poloczek
69
70
her son Alvaro and her husband Ramiro, one of the best Argentinean
cosmetic surgeons.
Unlike Suli, Kraken, Alexs father, affords the audience quite different,
much more positive and accepting, memories of Alexs birth. Kraken
admits that for him the infant was perfect, there was nothing to be
changed; he adds that it was his idea to refuse the surgical operation of
their newborn child, regardless of the doctors recommendations. As a
marine biologist, Kraken understands that sexual or gender dualism is
nothing more than a cultural myth, and that in nature there live many
organisms who defy the artificially imposed binary sexual divisions, or
change their sex depending upon altering circumstances.
In other words, the divergence in Alexs parents attitude remains on a
more or less similar level throughout the rest of the film till a resolution in
the climactic scene. In her earlier cited book Intersex and Identity: The
Contested Self, Sharon Preves enumerates several most common
assumptions regarding intersex children, two of which, strikingly, seem to
match those adopted by Alexs parents. Hence, looked at from that angle,
Suli seems to be on the side of those who perceive intersexuality as an
anomaly, or even pathology, that will hamper the fulfilling development of
any child (12). That is why she succumbs to the medicalisation (or
normalisation, as it was bitterly referred to by Scherer) of Alexs
condition as the last resort to repair what is malfunctioning. Kraken, on
the other hand, would subscribe to the view that researchers evince today,
according to which the motive for medical sexual assignment is to reduce
social discomfort and not physical danger (Preves 58) and that is why
intersexuality ought to be conceived of as an entirely social phenomenon
and should thus never be treated by any medical, let alone surgical means
(Preves 12).
Elsewhere, Preves maintains, very much in the same vein, that most
sexually ambiguous children do not require medical intervention for their
physiological health (11). The intervention is carried out so that the child
be medically assigned a definite sex, often undergoing repeated genital
surgeries and ongoing hormone treatment, to correct their variation from
the norm (Preves 11). Hence, as she clarifies in detail the meaning of the
term medicalisation, it becomes more and more dubious whether Alex
really needs to be involved in a painful process by which nonmedical
problems become defined and treated as medical problems, usually in
terms of illnesses and disorders (44). Furthermore, Callaghan elucidates
some of other non-medical factors that arise during a medicalisation
practice: physicians preference, custom, or even bias. [] reproductive
Katarzyna Poloczek
71
72
Preves recalls the personal narratives of intersexed children who referred to this
especially excessive medical control and manipulation of their bodies as sexual
abuse (72).
Katarzyna Poloczek
73
All children lack autonomy simply because they are children and are often
unable to make decisions and implement them independently. An
intersexual childs lack of autonomy is more evident than that of most
childrens, however, and this can impact the development and maintenance
of a coherent self-concept. Intersex children not only experience a
discerning mark or stigma associated with their bodies, but also feel that
they lack control over their bodies due to involuntary exposure to ongoing
examinations and other medical procedures. (72)
In the film, the turning point in the story is the arrival to the small
Uruguayan village of the Argentinean-based family with their teenage son
Alvaro. Nonetheless, even the climactic scene, (when Alex experiences
her/his sexual initiation with Alvaro), instead of providing a solution raises
even more questions. Having abandoned taking female hormonal pills,
Alex feels confused about whom s/he is and what s/he really wants and
believes that her/his first sexual experiences might help to find the answer
to these troubling issues. As a consequence, s/he makes a plain-spoken
sexual proposal to Alvaro in nearly the first conversation they have, but
Alvaro seems frightened and shocked with Alexs directness rather than
sexually stimulated by this perspective. Alexs impulsive and
straightforward behaviour constitutes a vivid contrast with that of Alvaro,
who is self-conscious, inhibited and dominated by his macho father.
Though sexually complicated as might seem3, Alex follows her/his instinct
and acts in accordance with it. As an spontaneous and self-assured person,
Alex can boldly argue her/his point and when disrespected, even resort to
physical violence to defend her/his dignity. That is why despite the initial
lack of erotic interest on Alvaros side, Alex seems determined to act upon
the impulse and finally s/he succeeds in getting Alvaro to have sex with
her/him. However, even at the moment of their lovemaking, Alvaro
displays hardly any initiative but only passively yields to Alexs will.
Surprisingly enough, that initiatory experience brings a revealing insight
3
On the other hand, it seems plausible to assume that what might have caused
Alexs problems was not a rare genetic variation itself but the unnecessary female
hormonal treatment and social conditioning that Alex underwent before
adolescence. Bailey argues that the diagnosis of Gender Identity Disorder (GID)
does not apply to people whose condition is caused by a diagnosed medical
disorder (mostly a genetic one) that affects the process of ones sexual
development (22). What is more, Butler reminds us of the increasingly vocal
protests of intersex and GLBT activists against using the GID label at all (76).
GID, according to them, instead of helping, only maintains an intersex and GLBT
stigmatization and results in their being considered by the rest of the society as
ill, abnormal, out of order, abnormal (Butler 76).
74
into both characters lives. During their sexual act, Alex performs anal sex
on Alvaro, who not only allows himself to be penetrated but, as he later
admits, draws physical pleasure from it. Being a submissive recipient in
the sexual act, Alvaro discovers Alexs secret but, above all, the truth
about his own suppressed sexual needs and desires.
After becoming acquainted with the aforementioned account, one may
still wonder why Alex has been persistent to experience sexual initiation
with almost a perfect stranger, at nearly any cost, and regardless of any
social or personal consequences. Nonetheless, this drive to know oneself
through sex seems to be quite typical for any sexually ambiguous people.
One of the intersexed people interviewed by Preves admits: I was trying
to find out who I was as a sexual being. I think I was trying to prove that I
was female through sex (84). Furthermore, Preves explains the above
mentioned experiments with ones sexuality (exhibitionism, excessive
sexual behaviour typical only for the identified with gender, having
many sexual partners, etc.) as follows: having received repeated
messages about ones inadequacy as a female or a male, receiving external
validation becomes extremely important (85).
There is one more element that seems to provide an insight into that
kind of behaviour, as Preves points out rightly: sexually ambiguous
children are either on purpose misinformed about their condition or simply
manipulated into whatever suits either caretakers or doctors. After the
series of interviews, Preves comes to the conclusion, that lacking
information about their bodies and medical histories was far more difficult
than actually learning the truth (74). For sexually ambiguous people,
sexual activity, then, becomes not only a formative and informative act but
a way of breaking the taboos of silence through interacting with others.
What is more, shocking as it might seem, the policy of secrecy was
also part of the aftermath of Moneys misconceptions, supported by the
families all too willingly:
If and when intersexuals do learn about their physical difference, they are
frequently told that they should not tell others. Withholding information
from intersexuals and encouraging them to keep secret what little
information they might have is isolating and may actually impede the
development of meaningful social relations. (Preves 77)
Katarzyna Poloczek
75
and mindless curiosity on the parts of the local male teenagers to see
Alexs double biological sexual organs. Hence, in the above mentioned
case, secrecy is both the cause and the effect of the disastrous events.
Keeping secret has made Alex vulnerable and susceptible to the aggressive
attacks of others. To issue a formal complaint at the police, Alex would
have to reveal the hidden truth about his/her sexual identity to the whole
community of the village. After the assault, Suli does not even agree on
Alex being taken to the hospital and examined in fear of her childs sexual
ambiguity being disclosed. However, the price for keeping secrets means
being relegated beyond the laws that might protect you and it has also a
more personal dimension. Establishing a sense of self for sexually
ambiguous people, Preves argues (60-76), has to begin with ending a
lifetime of silence, secrecy, and isolation (118). Moreover, Preves claims
that in order to develop connections with others, one must be freed from
obsessive secrecy and shame (107). Then, ones difference has to be
articulated to others and embraced in the process of self-disclosure
(Preves 118). She conceives of this part as an essential and indispensable
stage of any identity formation process (118), followed by the affirmation
of the previously questioned distinctness (121). Preves reminds us that
stigmatization leads to feelings of alienation, powerlessness,
meaninglessness, social isolation, and self-estrangement (123). That is
why being integrated within a community and being socially accepted
successfully completes this process.
In XXY, the process of integration may not go smoothly, not only
because of the social prejudice of a small village community, but also
because of the conflict between Alexs family and the local fishermen.
Before attacking Alex, the fishermens sons discard the broken sea turtles
shells in front of Krakens house. Thus, the additional reason for a brutal
sexual assault upon Alex might arise from getting even with Kraken, who,
in his defiant fight to protect the nearly extinct sea creatures, has got into
serious conflict with the local community who do not understand or
identify with his mission. For fishermen, the sea turtles are not an
endangered species but a source of extra financial income.
As a matter of fact, the location of the film in the sea village is no
accident. In terms of the camera work, XXY looks as if it has been taking
place under water: the colours are mostly blue and aquamarine, grey and
sand-like beige. There are few scenes in which other brighter colours
appear, e.g. red as the blood of turtles. Both in the houses dcor, the
pieces of furniture and the outdoor shooting, the colour of the sea and the
sky prevails. Suggesting that the film might be located under-water makes
more sense when one recalls the recurrent comparison between the sea
76
creatures and Alexs condition. The film starts with an image of ripping
open the belly of a dead female turtle, exposing it wide to the audiences
visual inspection. Dissecting is being done by Kraken, who, though being
unable to save the turtle from the fishermen, wants to find out the cause of
its death. We also see other sea turtles mutilated by fishnets, whom
Kraken managed to rescue but which, because of their injuries, will have
to live in captivity. Before the assault, we observe Alex floating peacefully
on the surface of water, looking serene and blissful. In the scene when
Alexs own bodily integrity gets violated, the gang of fishermens sons
attempt to open her/him up like a turtle and rape to see how Alexs
double sexual organs work. During the attempted rape, Alex tries to fight
them back but they outnumber her/him, and we see Alex lying helplessly
on her/his back, in a turtle-like manner, defenceless, overcome by her/his
abusers. In this scene, Alex does not scream but howls like a frightened
animal. Her/his entire outfit is reminiscent of the turtle shell; s/he is
wearing a brown hooded sweat jacket, and when seeing the danger, Alex
puts her/his hood on, as if trying to hide inside it. Furthermore, Alex is
wearing as a necklace a metal tag with a specific turtles identification
number and its migration routes.4 What is more, Esteban, Vandos father
and a local fisherman, refers to Alex as a representative of an endangered
species. Even Alexs father seems to subscribe to the sea imagery
connotation. With his beard and grim looks, keen on protecting all sea
creatures from evil humans, Kraken seems reminiscent of Poseidon, the
Greek god of sea and earthquakes.
Considering the above, Callaghan also uses a parallel between the sea
and the human world in terms of potential varieties of sexual patterns:
To most of us a girl becoming a boy is astounding. Not so with fish.
Among vertebrates, fish dominate. With some thirty thousand species
[] no other vertebrate species compares to fish for variety and sheer
numbers []. And when it comes to sex, fish have evolved some of the
most varied and interesting approaches among all the animals.
More than (perhaps a lot more than) one hundred species and twenty
families of fish are hermaphroditic []. Hermaphroditic fish come in two
common forms[] simultaneous hermaphrodites have reproductive
organs of both sexes at the same time. Sequential hermaphrodites have the
ovaries for parts of their lives and testes during other parts of their lives5.
(110)
4
Katarzyna Poloczek
77
78
Katarzyna Poloczek
79
that people hold. Studies on gendering movement have been carried out by
scientists since late 1990s (originated at Harvard in 1999 by Ambady)
(Bailey 73). One such experiment, described by Bailey, started with the
video recordings of the bodily movements carried out by the target group
(Bailey 74-75). According to Bailey, all the visible signs of the targets
gender identities were erased from these recordings to leave on the screen
only moving contours. On the basis of these studies, researchers selected
the sorts of bodily expressions repeatedly perceived by the experimental
subjects as typically masculine or feminine. Following this way of
thinking, one may argue here that in the film XXY it is the characters
movement that could to be a meaningful, though not conclusive, source of
information about their identification with stereotypical gender
behavioural traits. Alexs movement betrays mostly features defined by
the above experiment as masculine, such as long strides, free knee action,
minimum hip movements, straddling a line, arm movements from
shoulder, arms hang loosely from shoulders, feet apart, hands in pockets,
sitting with legs not crossed, buttocks away from chair back (Bailey 75),
whereas Alvaros movement can be rendered by the features related to as
feminine: short strides, controlled knee action, stepping on a line, arm
movements from elbow, upper arms fairly closely to body, hands on hips,
buttocks close to chair back, knee on knee. (Bailey 75). Those features,
however, might not be indicative of ones specific gender identity as the
scale is wide enough12. Rather than scientific truth, such experiments
prove only the social clichs and cultural stereotypes that people tend to
associate with particular gender identifications13. Once again, binarism
appears insufficient to render the truth and the richness of human
experience as such.
The only duality that has been meaningfully retained in the film, and
whose function seems to be justified, refers to its double mirrored
structure. The film depicts two different models of families: one family,
wealthy and rather patriarchally organised, is established in Argentina.
The latter, after their child was born, left Argentina to settle down in a
small village in Uruguay, to live undisturbed and away from other
peoples curiosity. The occupations of the fathers may seem similar: both
represent a medical profession and both perform bodily cuts: Kraken,
12
80
nonetheless, puts his heart into rescuing endangered sea species, whereas
Ramiro claims to do plastic surgery only for financial reasons. Both
families have one child and none of their children subscribes to a
stereotypical gender pattern. The families reveal contradictory approaches
towards their childrens problem: their attitudes vary from acceptance and
an attempt to do what is best for a child (Alexs family), to a judgmental
or contemptuous criticism on the part of Alvaros father. The model of
Krakens family relations could be called a democratic partnership, where
all its members have equal rights and duties. In such a family, parents, no
matter what might be happening, are always on their childrens side,
trusting, and not questioning their choices without apparent reason. Even
when Alex breaks her/his best friends nose, Kraken is certain it must have
been done for the right reason. He is ready to fight with the whole world in
defense of his child. Unlike Alex, Alvaro lacks the support of the family
and cannot freely experiment with his sexual identity in fear of being
rejected. No matter how much Alvaro would like to live up to Ramiros
expectations, his father constantly lets him know that his offspring
signifies for him only disappointment and failure. In the only candid
conversation that they seem to have had, Ramiro admits to his son that he
likes him only so-so, and in a degrading way expresses his disgust at the
thought that Alvaro might be, as he calls it, a fag. The highly acclaimed
plastic surgeon perceives his son as not talented enough to follow in his
professional footsteps, and not macho enough as a man, with his
vegetarian eating habits and dislike of alcohol. He tries to force his son to
drink alcohol, even when Alvaro refuses to do so. There is one scene in
the film, however, that shows Ramiro in a different light. Lying in bed
next to his wife and watching her put a facial night cream on her face,
Ramiro carefully removes the creamy remains from her skin and rubs
them into his. Is that the desire for perfection or maybe an ironic defiance
of gender stereotypes? The film ends with another mirror scene in which
Alvaros family is seen off to the ferry by Alex and her/his parents. Before
Alvaro leaves, Alex declares openly that s/he fell in love with him, despite
the initial objections and a strong resolution not to get emotionally
involved. Alvaro seems touched by that confession and he replies to Alex
in the same way. Alex, nonetheless, does not let her/himself be deceived
by that declaration, as is proved by the last question asked by Alex: what
do you regret more: not being able to see me again or not having seen it?
Shocked by such directness again, this time, Alvaro does not protest when
Alex, in tears, exposes herself/himself to him and he simply accepts this
farewell gift.
Katarzyna Poloczek
81
Works cited
Bailey, Michael, J. 2003. The Man Who Would Be Queen: The Science of
Gender-Bending and Transsexualism. Washington D.C: Joseph Henry
Press.
Bock, Robert. 1993. Understanding Klinefelter Syndrom.
http://www.nichd.nih.gov/publications/pubs/klinefelter.cfm. January
18, 2010.
Butler, Judith. 2004. Undoing Gender. New York and London: Routledge.
Callaghan, Gerald N. 2009. Between XX and XY: Intersexuality and the
Myth of Two Sexes. Chicago: Chicago Review Press.
Fausto-Sterling, Anne. 2000. Sexing The Body: Gender Politics and the
Construction of Sexuality. New York: Basic Books.
Preves, Sharon, E. 2008. Intersex and Identity: The Contested Self. New
Brunswick, New Jersey, and London: Rutgers University Press.
http://www.genetics.edu.au. January 18, 2010.
CHAPTER THREE
TRANSGRESSING FORM
BEYOND LITERATURE, THEATRE
AND TELEVISION
ELECTRONIC LITERATURE:
CONTENT TO (CON)FORM
TIM BRIDGMAN
Tim Bridgman
85
86
Tim Bridgman
87
88
nothing to do with the primal liberty of animal life but instead just opens
the door into what lies beyond the limits usually observed, but it maintains
these limits just the same as after the extremities end a new king is
established and normality returns. Here the transgression is a complement
to the everyday world, revealing its limits but never destroying it (Bataille
67), as could be the case with the end of paper publishing, the carnival of
electronic literature, and resumption of order as corporations flood back
into digital publishing.
If Adornos age old argument concerning the importance of
separateness of art from economics still applies, then literature and new
medias social worth can only arise from its distance from the milieu that
makes up capitalist society (Abbot 19) and it is this incompatibility that
should be aspired for. For this reason it is now worth shifting emphasis
from Hayles Electronic Literature: What is it? to its companion piece
authored as the first essay in the PAD initiative a full two and a half years
earlier entitled Acid-Free Bits. Written by Nick Montfort and Noah
Wardrip-Fruin Acid-Free Bits was originally conceived exclusively
from the perspective of increasing the longevity of works of literature in
new media, and with no apparent consideration to social activism or
transgression theory. But within it something far more transgressive is also
suggested.
The essay essentially has two main theses: the first that Those who
use open systems and adhere to open standards when creating electronic
literature have a much better chance that the format of their literary works
will be supported, or decipherable, in the future, and the second that the
program code of this literature should always remain human-readable to
ensure that the literary content will be recoverable whatever the
predicament (Montfort and Wardrip-Fruin).
The first thesis is concerned with the issue that writers must have full
access to all aspects related to the medium that they chose to write in or
otherwise they could lose the ability to run their own work in the future. It
is for this reason that Montfort and Wardrip-Fruin emphasise the
importance of writing only using open systems as while A closed system
may provide important capabilities that are otherwise not available, and
some closed systems may be very well suited for the type of literary
creation in which authors are interested, this can cause considerable
problems later on if electronic literature is not the main purpose of a
system and the system is modified to suit other needs and becomes
unsuitable for past ones (Montfort and Wardrip-Fruin). Using open
systems guarantees that the writer will always have full access to all areas
of their program code, as the system is beyond proprietary control, so they
Tim Bridgman
89
can always modify this code whenever needed to ensure their work will
continue to run.
This recommendation, however, also pushes writers in new media
away from the capitalist conformism consented to by writing on corporate
developed software. It directly encourages transgression away from this
world into another where new media software tools for writing literature
have been purposely developed to be of the greatest possible use to the
public (GNU General Public License) rather than an exercise in
accumulating personal wealth. It achieves transgression through writing in
new media developed outside of any sort of traditional market economy
and reveals how dependency on corporate software can lead to limitations
being imposed on the writer by the developer and that the constraints of a
given type of software or programming language then ultimately function
as literary constraints (Rettberg 89).
The second thesis contained within Acid-Free Bits confronts the
possibility of the unlikely occurrence, long into the future, of a new media
system now used for writing literature falling into such disrepair that the
only thing that remains accessible is the bare source code. Here the point
is that in such an event, if the source code contains the actual same words
that are generated in the final program, then at least these can be salvaged
and the piece of literature can be reconstructed again on an alternative
system. Again, all this depends on whether the source code is fully
accessible, which is only possible if written on an open system.
This recommendation also relates to a key issue identified by
Lievrouw, who explains that while mass media were well-suited to the
tasks of presenting consistent, repetitive messages to large, heterogeneous
audiences, shaping broad-based popular opinion, fostering mass
consumption, and mobilizing political movements, challenging oppositional
and activist forms of new media now often tend to be perishable,
ephemeral responses to rapidly-changing cultural contexts and meanings
capable of organising and disorganising continuously as through doing so
they become capable of taking risks, even if this means they might selfdestruct in the process (Meikle qtd. in Lievrouw). Therefore, for new
media literature to be written with the ability to collapse and reassemble
may in fact be a vital asset for transgression and one that should be
retained within its make-up.
Hayles openly realises the dangers of literary works in new media
being deeply entwined with the powerful commercial interests of
software companies, computer manufacturers, and other purveyors of
apparatus associated with networked and programmable media but has
not offered either of the above solutions as a remedy, leaving writers
90
Works cited
Abbot, Andy. 2007. Transgression, Cooperation and Criticality in Socially
Engaged Art Practice. http://www.yvonnecarmichael.com/andyabbott
.co.uk/files/AATransgressionSociallyEngagedArt.pdf. March 24, 2010.
Bataille, Georges. 1962. Death and Sensuality: a Study of Eroticism and
the Taboo. New York: Walker and Company.
Bolter, David J. 2000. Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the
Remediation of Print. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc..
Foust, Christina R. 2010. Transgression as a Mode of Resistance:
Rethinking Social Movement in an Era of Corporate Globalization.
Plymouth: Lexington Books.
GNU General Public License. Version 3, 29 June 2007.
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html. March 24, 2010.
Hayles, N. Katherine. 2007. Electronic Literature: What is it?
Tim Bridgman
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Pawe Schreiber
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Pawe Schreiber
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Pawe Schreiber
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departure, she and her daughter speak Polish, while her husband and
Jasiek use English. As the play progresses, however, the language used no
longer depends on the actor. Apart from the general tendency that Polish is
reserved to the Polish characters, each of the performers has to use both
languages present in Cherry Blossom. In order to make the play easier to
understand for the audiences, subtitles appear as part of the stage design.
They were the same in the performances in Edinburgh, Bydgoszcz and
Warsaw, translating parts of the spoken Polish text into English and vice
versa.
The result of all these design choices is a feeling of confusion. The
characters move in shifting, ephemeral spaces, structured by the moving
panels and projected onto the stage; the actors change their roles in each
scene; perhaps most importantly, the audience members who do not
understand both English and Polish may have some difficulty in following
the plot. What the Traverse Theatre/Teatr Polski performance of Cherry
Blossom requires, above all other things, seems to be the ability to adapt to
a constantly changing situation. This may be viewed as a disadvantage
writing about the decision to rotate the cast in the roles, The Times Robert
Dawson Scott says that its effect is so distancing, not to say downright
confusing, that it drains much of the available dramatic force. However,
as Mark Fisher puts it in his review for The Guardian, The disorientation
we feel watching Catherine Grosvenors Cherry Blossom is the
disorientation of her characters. The performance forces its audiences to
share the experience of Grayna, who, placed in an unfamiliar environment,
has to overcome her own confusion, start to comprehend the processes
taking place around her, and finally become part of the world she has
entered. Like her, they viewers have to face a foreign language which they
only partly understand and cope with the strange mechanisms of the
onstage world which have to be grasped on the fly as the performance
unfolds.
The draining of the available dramatic force by means of distancing
echoes Brechts practice of estrangement. The role shifts make it more
difficult for the audiences to empathise with the characters, and so reduce
the emotional impact of the piece. However, the connection between the
theatrical estrangement and the confusion felt by the immigrant in an alien
country moves Campbells and Grosvenors idea away from Brechtian
theatreforcing the audiences into the situation of an immigrant, they in
fact create a complex exercise in empathy, relying not on emotional
appeal, but on a shared experience.
The focus of the experience is transgression, but not only that
connected with Graynas crossing the border. Watching Cherry Blossom,
Pawe Schreiber
99
100
the rehearsals, and try to understand it in terms of the performance they are
preparing; the latter enter the space later on and make sense of the way in
which it has been appropriated by the theatre crew. In Cherry Blossom
these ordinary theatre transgressions become more prominent because of
the subject matter, itself dealing with crossing boundaries, and the
directors decision to highlight them in the performance, making it more
self-conscious. In this simple way, by making the notions of theatre and
emigration converge, the creators of Cherry Blossom have built a unity of
experience between the characters of the play, the actors and the audiences.
Pagets criticism of the recording trend in documentary drama is still
applicable to Cherry Blossom. Just like the text builds up a controversy
and then subdues it, its stage presentation invites all the participants to
transgression, but ultimately does not change themthe whole process is
more of a controlled experiment which has no immediate spectacular
results, as the identity shifts operate within the conventions of the theatre.
The transgression is only make-believe, and the steps beyond made during
the performance are withdrawn at the end.
However, it is precisely because Cherry Blossom relies on the makebelieve, and becomes a safe experiment in which any serious change can
be immediately cancelled that it succeeds so well in bringing the cultures
of the Polish immigrants and their British hosts together. Presenting a
strong, one-sided argument in a political or ideological debate proves to be
a less inspiring theatrical tool than freely exploring the others stance
through imagining oneself in their position. The freedom results from the
fact that in Cherry Blossom the theatre is more of a playground than a
tribune, and no change occurring in it is to be taken too seriously in terms
of the real world outside the stage. This detachment does not mean that the
joint Scottish-Polish project is not serious theatrethe role-playing
experience of the actors and the audiences may have very interesting
consequences for the participants attitudes towards emigration and
immigration.
In the traditional view of documentary theatre and film, as expressed
by Paget and Favorini, the stage is discussed in terms of opinions. The
point of a performance is to present a viewpoint that would clash with
those of the audience and ultimately modify them, making them transgress
their previous selves and forms of thinking. This notion of serious theatre
which effects powerful changes in the mass audience has by and large
become a fetish in criticism, one that is very commonly accepted, and very
rarely realised in practice. In Cherry Blossom, the performance is first and
foremost an experience, with opinion or mental change as a possible, but
not necessary, byproduct. The core of this experience is not the plot itself,
Pawe Schreiber
101
which only provides the subject of the exercise, but the make-believe kind
of transgression characteristic of all theatre. It is in many ways much
weaker than the real transgression demanded by the more radical theorists
of documentary theatre, but at the same time much more liberating. The
viewers watching the story of the Polish emigrants can step back from the
boundaries their imaginations have crossed during the performanceif the
theatre stage is to function as an undiscovered country, it is useful only
inasmuch as it allows the traveler to return and tell the tale.
Works cited
Borough of Islington. Wyobrania znokautowana przez edukacj. In Eteatr.pl-Nowa Sia Krytyczna, October 29, 2008. http://www.eteatr.pl/pl/artykuly/61450.html. February 19, 2010.
Cooper, Neil. Cherry Blossom, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh. In The
Herald, September 29, 2008. http://www.heraldscotland.com/cherryblossom-traverse-theatre-edinburgh-1.890644. February 19, 2010.
Favorini, Attilio. 1995. Introduction. In Voicing: Ten Plays from the
Documentary Theater, ed. Attilio Favorini. Hopewell: Ecco Press. ixxxix.
. ed. 1995. Voicing: Ten Plays from the Documentary Theater.
Hopewell: Ecco Press.
Fisher, Mark. Cherry Blossom. In The Guardian, September 30, 2008.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2008/sep/30/theatre. February 19,
2010.
Grosvenor, Catherine. 2008. Cherry Blossom. London: Nick Hern Books.
ubecka, Michalina. Emigranci bez polotu. In Gazeta WyborczaBydgoszcz, October 21, 2008. http://www.e-teatr.pl/pl/artykuly/
61030.html. February 19, 2010.
Paget, Derek. 1990. True Stories? Documentary Drama on Radio, Screen
and Stage. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Scott, Robert Dawson. Cherry Blossom Traverse in Edinburgh. In The
Times, September 30, 2008. http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/
arts_and_entertainment/stage/theatre/article4849197.ece. February 19,
2010.
Return because this was the most popular mode of showing plays on television
in its beginnings and evenfor financial reasons, perhapslater on, in the 1980s,
as Michlle Willems comments on French television.
Jacek Fabiszak
103
Limon discusses this issue thoroughly in his studies devoted to television theatre;
particularly relevant here is the employment of the camera and treatment of time
(2008).
104
broadcast is carefully edited and the shots are framed in such a way as to
render the desired effect on screen. Moreover, numerous cameras provide
the spectator with a multiple point of view. The result is that the narration
acquires features of a work of fiction.3 Also, the live quality of television
is very often only apparent, butas Limon reminds ustaken for granted,
which the inscription live accompanying some of the broadcasts clearly
indicates. In other words, television is characterised by a reportage
structure.
Of course, it would be tempting to simply apply this model to filmed
stage theatre productions, but it seems this would be an oversimplification.
As noted above, present-day Polish television in a sense revives a subgenre, or form, of television theatre, which was popular at the beginning of
television. Let us note that this coincides with a significant qualitative
change in producing television theatre: no longer do we deal with studiobased productions as they are replaced with ones shot on location. Bearing
in mind the technological and aesthetic development of television, it is
impossible to view filmed theatre in the same manner it was considered a
few decades ago; rather, it can be and should be treated as aesthetically
belonging to the group of productions filmed on location, except that in
this particular case the location happens to be a theatre stage, possibly with
an audience. Even when a production is shot without the presence of a live
audience, with an empty auditorium (which, for economical reasons is no
longer practised) the structure of a traditional theatre, with its division into
the stage and auditorium imposes a specific perspective on the viewer. The
effect is that, although a production need not be aired live, the viewer gets
what we might tentatively call theatre-within-television (theatre). In other
words, the production is necessarily highly metalinguistic, being at the
same time metatheatrical (about stage theatre) and metatelevisual (about
the ways in which it is transmitted on television). The latter element may
be additionally signalled by 1. the presence of the camera (which is
actually shown in the production; the director does not try to hide it, as
opposed to the cinema, as it constitutes part and parcel of the space that is
actually shownlocation); and 2. the acknowledgement of the cameras
presence by the actors, whofor exampleaddress it directly.
I would like to argue that Warlikowski (and the television directors,
such as Kasia Adamik in the case of The Tempest) in the television
versions of his stage plays explores these possibilities of the interplay
between theatre and television. The highly metatheatrical The Taming of
3
This is true about the coverage of sports events, too. Cf. Margaret Morses article
on sport on television (1983).
Jacek Fabiszak
105
It is worth noting that filmed theatre is more popular on this particular channel
than on Channel One, which regularly, on Mondays, has been presenting television
theatre productions for over 50 years.
106
Willems does not recognise in her classification television theatre and its
specific language as well as its complexity (although she is well aware of
the differences between the filmic, televisual and stage codes; 37). What is
significant here is Willemss description of the functions of the audience
of film, on the one hand, and television/filmed theatre/DVD on the other.
Thus, in film, the viewers are more often treated as a privileged peeping
Tom than as a partner in the task of exploring a difficult text, if only
because the actors never speak straight to the camera (Willems 38). On
the other hand, in the case of television/DVD [t]he audience are enrolled
as partners and accomplices in the cameras exploration of the text
(Willems 40). Naturally, this would account for one of the major
differences between film and television: the actors attitude to direct
address on screen: avoided on the big screen and employed on the small
one.
Michle Willems makes us aware of the complex situation of filmed
theatre when claiming that With videos trying to encapsulate stage
productions, we reach the height of paradox, since a live performance,
which is something essentially ephemeral and fluid, is suddenly frozen,
immobilised, preserved for endless repetition, although the singularity of a
theatrical experience can never be recaptured (43). On television, such a
production both is ephemeral and has the potential of being recorded and
becoming immobilised, as Willems phrases it. The latter, however, is
inscribed in the poetics of television theatre rather than being a mere
vehicle for other media (Willems 36). At least in the case of Polish
directors, television theatre is something they recognise as the obvious
frame in which to put a televised stage play. The television rendering of
Warlikowskis The Tempest appears to embrace such a frame: the opening
of the production does not at all indicate that the performance is located in
a theatre. The camera shows Prospero, Miranda and Ariel sitting at a table
by candlelight, focusing of course on their faces. The rest of the space is
dark, amorphous, whichaccording to Limon (2004, 88)is typical of
television theatre, where the space is shaped by the camera and is
Jacek Fabiszak
107
Cf. also Mikowskis review of the performance in which he compared the acting
to a radio broadcast.
6
Concordant, after all, with the larger-than-life world of Shakespeares
tragicomedies, including The Tempest, and Prosperos use of magic.
108
Jacek Fabiszak
109
framed in the play as a deformed and savage slave. In the context of the
Polish production, the fact that a figure of an alien is contentiously female
and German-speaking makes this figure doubly repulsive/ugly in a
patriarchal society. Let us note that Caliban/Jett in the production is also
strangely tattooed, which deepens her alienation. At the same time,
Prospero, Miranda and the androgynous Ariel are deprived of heroic
values and are presented, both on stage and on screen, as rather ugly: the
balding Prospero wearing a worn-out sweater, Miranda looking like an old
spinster and Ariel wearing a tracksuit. Interestingly enough, Ariel/Cielecka,
as mentioned above, when turned into a nymph puts on a short, shiny dress
and a blond, curly wig, which makes him (her) look like a cheap
prostitute. Here the camera is most realistic in that, in a truly televisual
fashion, it attempts to report on the characters looks as they are, without
presenting them in a heroic or any apparently artificial manner. Kasia
Adamik makes sure that the viewer gets bare bones, as it were; montage
is seemingly economical (which, naturally, conforms to the aesthetics of
the television theatre), yet the shots are in general quite varied, thanks to
which the production is both a comment on the tradition of televising
theatre in general and in Poland in particular, as well as the tradition of
putting the Bard on Polish television. In this way, Adamik and
Warlikowski produce a metatelegenic and metatheatrical performance,
very much in line with the nature of television theatre in Poland. At the
same time, one should remember the fact that the production was
originally designed for the stage. One should bear in mind that
Warlikowski had directed for both the stage and the studio before.
Another aspect to be considered is the growing televisuality or
filmicity of stage productions in general: theatre comes close to these
media, possibly, to attract audiences, an example of which is Grzegorz
Jarzynas 2007: Macbeth (2005). In this production Jarzyna situates a
number of stages in a multi-level structure (raised in an old decrepit
factory, which was pulled down shortly after the summer of 2005, when
the play was staged); the action moves from one stage to anotherthe
movements are marked by a stage being blacked out and the next one
brightly lit, which functions like film editing. Thus, it is absolutely
legitimate to look at a televised theatrical performance as a type of
televisual production.
As already pointed at above, Warlikowski/Kasia Adamik only
gradually show to the viewer more of the space: first one learns of the
complexity of the acting areathe stage proper as well as the space in
front of it, on the level of the auditorium. Then one discovers that the
production is a recording of a performance with a live audience, situated
110
very close to the acting area. The viewer is informed of the presence of the
spectators by the camera showing their silhouettes in rather stagy distant
shots. Furthermore, the theatrical location is underscored by lightingthis
time not candles but typically theatrical spotlights (in Warlikowskis
performance colouring with light becomes highly significant). In this way,
the production acquires a metatheatrical quality. The metatelevisual
element becomes manifest when the silhouettes of the cameras and
cameramen are revealed, which is yet another discovery made by the
viewer. This aspect of the teleplay is further highlighted by characters,
notably Prospero, addressing the camera directly in his last speech
(Epilogue), or winking at the viewer. Significantly enough, Kasia
Adamik signals these elements by employing long shots, ones that
emphasise the stagy nature of the production, such as shots from a camera
located in the very centre of the auditorium. This was the case in the early
days of television, and this is actually what Adamik explores in her
production, alluding to the manner in which filmed theatre was shown on
television in the 1950s and 1960s and, at the same time, resorting to the
reportage quality of television theatre.
The Epilogue provides a kind of a summary of the most characteristic
elements of this production, an interplay between a theatrical performance
and television theatre. The directors gradually move away from
theatricality to televisuality. The former is signalled in the last moments of
the final scene of the tragicomedy in which the viewer sees a long shot of
a fairly large fragment of the acting area with a table in it. Prospero and
the Three Men of Sin and Gonzalo are seated around the table in tuxedoes;
the camera also shows the offstage audience, mainly silhouetted against a
dark background, surrounding the stage/set. Interestingly enough, the
exchange between the characters is presented in a typically telegenic
manner: reaction shots are used, close-up shots focus on the characters
faces from a variety of angles and perspectives. In other words, these
images are not available to the spectator in the auditorium but only to the
viewer in front of the TV screen/computer, thus affecting the viewers
reception. At the same time, in concordance with the theatrical production,
the action is rather static, butinterestingly enoughnot the camera
work. The editing is quite dynamic though the viewer may not fully realise
it as he/she is lulled by deliberate and slow enunciation: the characters
give the impression of talking with difficulty; words are uttered with
visible effort by most of them, the most prominent examples being
Prospero and Caliban. Such an effect on the viewer is a result of the
directors combining the theatrical and televisual rather than the filmic,
although the fast editing seems to point to the latter. In this case, however,
Jacek Fabiszak
111
112
Works cited
Ellis, John. 1992 [1982]. Visible Fictions. Cinema: Television: Video.
LondonNew York: Routledge.
Fabiszak, Jacek. 2008. Shakespeare on Polish television in the 2000s:
forms, functions and challenges. In The Baltic Philological Forum.
Zeszyty Naukowe Instytutu Neofilologii i Komunikacji Spoecznej, ed.
Wojciech Klepuszewski. No. 1. Koszalin: Wydawnictwo Uczelniane
Politechniki Koszaliskiej. 35-46.
Gruszczyski, Piotr. 2003. Zmierzch bogw [Twilight of the gods]. In
Tygodnik Powszechny 3, 19 January.
Limon, Jerzy. 2004. Trzy teatry [Three theatres]. Gdask: sowo / obraz
terytoria.
Jacek Fabiszak
113
CHAPTER FOUR
THE MECHANISM OF HORROR
MYSTERY OF THE BODY
Nina Czarnecka-Paka
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118
Nina Czarnecka-Paka
119
fathers intervention, is the reason behind the childs gradual (not abrupt)
separation from the mother (87-166). By questioning the father as the
agent of castration, Creed also questions the validity of Freuds theory of
the Oedipus complex and his arguments about the nature of male fears of
woman. To support her claim that man fears female castrating genitals,
Creed refers to the representation of the monstrous-feminine in myths and
legends across a variety of cultures (e.g. the Medusas head) in which the
threatening aspect of the female genital is symbolized by the vagina
dentata or toothed vagina (105). Creed writes:
The myth about woman as castrator clearly points to male fears and
phantasies about the female genitals as a trap, a black hole which threatens
to swallow them up and cut them into pieces. The vagina dentata is the
mouth of hella terrifying symbol of woman as the devils gateway.
(106)
120
threaten to castrate, the sharp teeth threaten to devour. Creed observes that
male castration anxiety has given rise to two of the most powerful
representations of the monstrous-feminine in the horror film: woman as
castrator and woman as castrated (122). Representing woman as castrated
usually means literal castration when her body is mutilated so as to
represent a bleeding wound. This has been the tragic fate of numerous
unfortunate females populating the slasher film ever since Halloweens
release in 1978, fate shared also by heroines of earlier classics such as
Peeping Tom or Psycho, both from 1960. As for the female castrator, a
crucial point about her nature is Creeds insistence that she should not be
confused with the Freudian phallic woman. Whereas the latter, most
notably personified by the femme fatale figure of film noir, is constructed
in relation to the phallus in that through the workings of fetishism she is
supposed to represent a comforting phantasy of sexual sameness, the
former, the deadly femme castratrice constructed in relation to the vagina
dentata, represents a terrifying phantasy of sexual difference (158).
Assuming that the terrifying abject is forever present at the peripheries
of human consciousness, what can be done to ward off the threat it poses?
According to Kristeva, in order to do that, various cultures establish
various rituals, which she calls rituals of defilement. Kristeva believes that
the process of abjection is not a passing stage in human life but the abject
threatens the stability of the social order all the time; therefore, cultures
have set up various rituals, for example religious rituals, to ward off this
threat. However, in recent years a certain change has taken place. McAfee
writes: As societies develop and religions wane, art takes over the
function of purification, often by conjuring up the abject it seeks to dispel
(49). Barbara Creed, among others, believes the horror genre to be a form
of art that makes the purification of the abject its central ideological
project. All of the monsters, male or female, appearing in contemporary
horrors in one way or another violate the taboos and cross the borders of
the symbolic. Similarly to the mother, who is constructed by the symbolic
as abject, monsters evoke in the subject very ambivalent feelingsa
mixture of simultaneous attraction/curiosity and repellence. According to
Creed, ultimately, the border between the two orders must be reinforced
through the rituals of defilement. She writes:
The horror film attempts to bring about a confrontation with the abject (the
corpse, bodily wastes, the monstrous-feminine) in order finally to eject the
abject and redraw the boundaries between the human and non-human. As a
form of modern defilement rite, the horror film attempts to separate out the
symbolic order from all that threatens its stability, particularly the mother
and all that her universe signifies. (14)
Nina Czarnecka-Paka
121
Of course, this is true of horrors that have narrative closure. But what of
the multiple post-modern horror films in which the outcome of the
struggle between the forces of the Other and the symbolic order is
uncertain?
An interesting alternative to Creeds claim that as a ritual of defilement
the horror film eventually ejects the abject is offered by Isabel Christina
Pinedo. She analyzes horror films where at the end either the monster
triumphs (her example is They Came From Within (1976), where the
infected inhabitants drive off to spread the disease freely), or the result is
uncertain (a possible example being Dressed to Kill (1980), where the
final scene leaves the viewer wondering whether the nightmarish dream of
the killer escaping from a mental institution and cutting the protagonists
throat is a real possibility). Although Pinedo also sees the horror genre as a
form of cathartic experience helping to deal with the abject, her discussion
of the open ending shows that the boundary between the abject and the
social order, at least at the level of narration, is very much blurred and,
contrary to what Creed proposed, need not necessarily be redrawn. To say
that in the horror film the boundary is always first disrupted and then
restored exactly as it was would be to deprive the genre of any subversive
and progressive potential whatsoever. When discussing the political
valence of the post-modern horror film, Pinedo asks a significant question:
Does it subvert or reinforce the hegemonic order? (106). Her answer is
that it does both. She observes:
Much as the horror film is an exercise in terror, it is simultaneously an
exercise in mastery, in which controlled loss substitutes for loss of control.
It allows us to give free rein to culturally repressed feelings such as terror
and rage. It constructs situations where these taboo feelings are sanctioned.
[] A film promises a contained experience. What makes it tolerable for
the monster to persist in the open ending is the containment of the menace
within the temporal and spatial frame of the film. (41)
In the horror film, the fear of the abject Other is thus expressed within
socially tolerable means. The genre violates the taboos, transgresses the
borders, and evokes fear by confronting the viewer with the abject; but, as
all this takes place within the film narrative, it seems safe. After all, even
when the abject Other is not brought under control by the end of the film,
the viewer can still turn off the TV and sigh with relief. However, it does
not change the fact that by blurring boundaries and mixing social
categories, such as the notion of femininity as passive and masculinity as
active, it can open up a space for subversive readings, for example for
feminist discourse (Pinedo 83-84). In a very insightful essay entitled The
122
Indeed, the film features the story of a high school student Dawn (Jess
Weixler) who, being determined to stay a virgin until marriage,
understands very little of her repressed, yet awakening sexuality. When
one day her friend from a Christian abstinence group forces himself on
her, she discovers that her body has developed a certain adaptation. To
his as well as her horror, her vagina bites his penis off. By the end of the
film, two other naughty penises as well as a few fingers share the same
fate, and the last scene seems to suggest that, if necessary, more will
follow.
In her essay Film Bodies: Gender, Genre And Excess, Linda Williams
states that horror is the genre that seems to endlessly repeat the trauma of
castration as if to explain by repetitious mastery the originary problem of
sexual difference (278). However, as she and other critics stress,
traditionally, in the horror genre, it has been a woman/victim who has
suffered symbolic castration at the hands of a man/monster. Discussing the
issues of gender in the slasher film, Carol J. Clover observes that the
castration anxiety seems easier to explore via gender displacement, that is
via depictions of hurt female bodies (241). She goes on to notice that
hardly ever do we come across the expression of abject terror on the part
of a male (241), and even if we do, it is seldom literal castration. Teeth is
Nina Czarnecka-Paka
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124
Nina Czarnecka-Paka
125
Works cited
Clover, Carol J. 1999. Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film.
In Feminist Film Theory: A Reader, ed. Sue Thornham. New York:
New York University Press. 234-250.
Creed, Barbara. 2005. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism,
Psychoanalysis. London; New York: Routledge.
Grosz, Elizabeth. 1995. Animal Sex: Libido as Desire and Death. In
Sexy Bodies: The Strange Carnalities of Feminism. New York:
Routledge. 278-299.
Harold, Christine L. The Rhetorical Function of the Abject Body:
Transgressive Corporeality in Trainspotting. In JAC: A Journal of
Composition Theory, v20 n4 pp. 865-87 Fall 2000.
http://www.jaconlinejournal.com/archives/vol20.4/harold-rhetorical.
pdf. September, 19 2009.
Lichtenstein, Michael. 2007. Vagina Dentata. Feministing 2007.
http://feministing.com/2007/01/29/heres_one_for_the_netflix_queu/.
August, 13 2009.
McAfee, Nolle. 2003. Julia Kristeva. New York: Routledge.
Williams, Linda. 1999. Film Bodies: Gender, Genre and Excess. In
Feminist Film Theory: A Reader, ed. Sue Thornham. New York: New
York University Press. 267-281.
Still, one cannot deny the biological aspect of our being human. As
Henri Bergson notes, it was physical life that had created thought, in
definite circumstances, to act on definite things (20). Ours is a
psychology correlative to and defined by our biological character, but the
human psyche does not seem to be comfortably at home in this landscape.
In spite of the fact that the existential discomfort and the conflict between
the mind and the body are as old as humanity itself, in contemporary
culture a relatively new phenomenon may be observed. Not only does the
Dagmara Zajc
127
human mind tend to regard itself as above the biological; the body, with
all the horrors of its ungraspable bio-logic of hormone chemistry and
nerve synapses (Morgan 1), has gradually become absent from public
discourse.
This absence is not a simple matter of non-presence; it is a problem
more complex and multifarious. First of all, the knowledge of the human
body is more advanced at the moment than it ever was. Needless to say,
the knowledge is available to anyone at any time: amazon.com by itself
offers approximately 200,000 books on anatomy and physiology-related
topics. The fact that people like to talk about the body is also undeniable.
It is reflected by the enormous popularity of magazines and television
programs dedicated to health, dieting, and keeping fit, but also to the
topics of plastic surgery and genetic engineering. The viewers statistics
for TV stations such as Discovery Health or programs like the U.S. cable
talk show Wellness Hour show the audiences demand for information to
be almost insatiable. As everyone is becoming experts on vitamins, junk
food and eco-childrearing, taboos are being torn down also in the sphere of
human sexuality. Slogans such as be aware of your body, or know your
needs no longer have a revolutionary ring to them.
It would seem that representing the body in film and television has also
been freed from all checks and restraints. With the Hays Code long gone,
the body has been stripped of all its secrets. Not long ago, in both cinema
and television, a couple could only kiss in bed if their feet were still
touching the floor. Nowadays, daring sex scenes are not limited to
pornography as lovemaking on screen has become almost a standard in
most Hollywood productions.
The current interest in the body is also reflected by the enormous
popularity of a relatively new movie subgenre(s): exploitation films,
splatter films and gore cinema. Although specialists in the field describe
them as separate genres, the terms are often used interchangeably. One can
distinguish several fundamental motifs expressed in gore and similar
conventions. First of all, the emphasis on the destruction of the body
supposedly draws the audiences attention to human sexuality and physical
aspects of our existence. At the level of representation, numerous moral
and aesthetic taboos are transgressed.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, gore enjoys cult-like
following. One may find it curious that its audience often generates from
academics, who are able to decode the meaning of the text by applying
psychoanalysis and other methodologies. A typical viewer, when asked
what gore is, would probably answer that it is a particularly abhorrent and
drastic modification of horror. This statement is accurate, because it refers
128
Dagmara Zajc
129
especially among the city dwellers, are shocked and appalled when told
about a particular tradition, still observed in some Polish villages. When a
person passes away, his or her body stays in the house for three days
before the funeral, instead of being sent off to the morgue. The custom is
often perceived as a sanitary hazard at the worst, and as an aesthetic
violation at the best.
What was once considered obvious and natural is now thought of as
unpleasant and undesirable. The keywords are nature and aesthetics: we
have not fully come to terms with our organic life. The supposed
affirmation of the biological body has its limits: the physical is accepted
only if it remains aesthetically pleasing. One of the results is the use of
circumferential language by the media whenever a less savory aspect of
our functioning as biological beings needs to be addressed. Another
consequence is a form of censorship manifested through TV regulations.
The film My Bloody Valentine is allowed to be broadcast in prime time,
even though you cannot show a dead body on the eight oclock news.
This ambivalent attitude towards the physiological might be illustrated
by a curious, paradoxical phenomenon. Many teenagers enjoy hacking
their enemies to pieces in computer games. Nevertheless, more and more
of them cannot stand the sight of blood in real life. All in all, the horror
and abjection connected with the biological is acceptable in public
discourse as long as it is kept at a safe distance. Computer games and gore
cinema may be considered safe as they both represent bodily horror as
dramatized, theatricalized, and staged. The aesthetisation of the biological
body thus prevents it from becoming a tangible threat.
There are film critics who claim that subversive strategies are
nowadays employed mostly in the new genres, such as splatter films. They
argue that gore deals with a complex form of negation of culture. The very
reference to sexuality, used as a central element of representation,
becomes a violation of the taboo. Even though gore aesthetics has been
traditionally associated with cinematic transgression, there are other forms
that may be described as transgressive and at the same time more
realisticor perhaps realistic in a different way. Death, dismemberment,
and other kinds of bodily mutilation represented by gore productions are
in fact suggestive of a highly escapist viewer attitude.
Although the films are said to present realistic images of pain and
destruction, the very accumulation of such images has quite the opposite
effect on the audience. The abundance of special effects and graphic
details contributes to create an anti-realistic, phantasmagoric spectacle. It
creates in the audience a sense of detachment, allowing them to distance
themselves from the carnage. In other words, the viewers might very well
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In other words, many people commit criminal acts because they choose
to. According to Chris Jenks, If the transgressive act and the criminal act
are often compounded, which in an increasingly governed society they
inevitably are, then it is essential that the element of choice is elected as a
sovereign principle (176).
Apart from exploring the dangerous, anti-paradigm themes such as
crime which actually pays, Breaking Bad may be described as
transgressive on yet another level. Far from being graphic in its depiction
of death and violence, the series still produces a deeply disturbing effect.
While watching Breaking Bad, one can sense the dark, peculiar atmosphere
which could be described as profoundly unsettling. The disturbing
experience has been very well described by Stephen King:
The first thing we see in the second season of Breaking Bad is an eyeball
floating in a swimming pool while sirens rise and intermingle in the
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The first thing we notice about the series is that it evokes a profound
sense of discomfort. In Breaking Bad, the scenes of violenceor
foreshadowing violenceare presented in a manner which is highly
original. First of all, the camera does not allow us the full view of what is
happening: what we often get are but glimpses of the represented events.
Still, Breaking Bad is not Blair Witch Project: even though the camera is
at times moving, the image is never out of focus.
The picture that gets through often seems too sharp and too clear:
Gilligans idea for introducing the uncanny is shooting predominantly in
close-ups. In Breaking Bad, we are not allowed a broader view to take in
at our leisure: there is no possibility of visually distancing oneself from the
fictitious events. Instead, the display frames are cramped and claustrophobic,
creating the atmosphere of unpleasant, unavoidable intimacy. The viewer
often finds himself under the impression of being sucked into a crime
scene.
What is more, high contrast is used throughout the series, infusing the
image with a sense of striking clarity. In the scene of Walter getting his
lungs X-rayed (second episode of season two), there is a close-up of his
naked body set out with bright, unnatural light. The viewer is forced to
face the hyper-realistic view of the actors ageing skin, which could be
described as parchment-like and disturbingly white. Even though the scene
does not involve graphic violence of any kind, it confronts the viewer with
the inescapableand horriblereality of the biological: the body
corrupted by time and disease.
The destabilizing atmosphere of closeness is still intensified at the
sound level. Unlike in many TV productions, background sounds are not
removed or artificially suppressed. On the contrarythey are yet
enhanced in order to equally engage both sight and hearing. As a result, a
simple sound of an object falling to the ground comes through as an
unpleasant and disconcerting sensation. Certain sounds simply refuse to
remain inconspicuous and come through as the elements dominating a
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Beugnet also refers to the work by Laura Marks, titled The Skin of the
Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses, in which the
author describes the phenomenon of haptic gaze: Haptic images can give
the impression of seeing for the first time, gradually discovering what is in
the image rather than coming to the image already knowing what it is.
Several such works represent the point of view of a disoriented traveler
unsure how to read the world in which he has found himself (178).
Beugnet goes on to suggest that there is an inherently transgressive
element to this kind of filmmaking. Allowing oneself to be physically
affected by an art work and opening oneself up to sensory awareness is to
relinquish the will to gain full mastery over it, choosing intensity and
chaos over rational detachment (3). When such detachment is made
difficult, the border between subject and object may collapse.
If we consider the conventional conception of the relation between the
observer and the observed, theoretically the observers self stands as a
separate entity. In the case of Breaking Bad, however, the effect of looking
and listening takes on a mimetic quality, similarly to the films discussed
by Beugnet. This particular quality is indicative of an involvement with
the object of the gaze that pre-empts or supersedes this state of detached
self-awareness (5). The intensity and physicality of the described
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go. Walter deliberately stalls the killing, jotting down the pros and cons of
going through with the deed.
Even though he comes up with a number of arguments in support of
clemency, the sole entry in the kill him column helps his decision:
Hell kill your entire family if you let him go. Walter decides to make
the doomed man another sandwich, and collapses on the basement floor
while delivering it, shattering the plate. After regaining consciousness, the
protagonist reveals to the dealer that he suffers from lung cancer, as he
picks up the plate shards, leaving to make yet another sandwich. Upon
returning, Walter attempts to get to know the gangster, who still tries to
talk him out of the killing. Walter acknowledges that he is indeed looking
for a good reason to spare the dealers life.
The gangster tells the protagonist about his life and aspirations. The
two make an emotional connection, and the dealer suggests that Walter is
not cut out for murder. The latter finally decides to let the dealer live, and
goes upstairs to get the key to the bicycle lock securing the man to a pole.
Upstairs, a sudden inspiration prompts Walter to piece the broken plate
back together, and he realizes a large knife-shaped shard is missing from
the plates remains. Back downstairs, the dealer stands quietly as Walter
approaches, hesitating briefly. As Walter grasps the lock, he asks the
gangster if he was going to stab him with the broken piece of plate once he
was set free. As the dealer is frantically trying to stab him, Walter pulls
back on the lock. After a minute or two, the flailing gangster finally
expires.
The killing sequence is not an elegant, metaphorical spectacle of Park
Chan Wooks Sympathy for Lady Vengeance; it has nothing to do with
gore aesthetics either. The reality is not filtered by any kind of established
cinematic convention. In spite of this fact, or rather, precisely because of
it, the viewers instinctive reaction would be to shy away from the screen.
The sound, camerawork, lighting, and the mise-en-scne all work together
to create a claustrophobic and deeply unsettling atmosphere. The story
behind the incident is in itself quite disturbing: the viewer can almost feel
the unfortunate dealers tangible despair in the last moments of his life.
On the one hand, the sequence could not be described as aesthetically
pleasing. On the other hand, it does not rely on simple mechanisms of
revulsion, used by gore productions. It is a horrifying and gruesome scene
which requires the audience to participate by shamelessly assaulting all
their senses: at the same time, there is hardly any blood. Still, the sequence
makes the viewer want to turn away from the screen, similarly to both
killing sequences in Kielowskis Sixth Commandment.
136
Works cited
Bergson, Henri. 2005. Creative Evolution. New York: Barnes & Noble
Publishing.
Beugnet, Martine. 2007. Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art
of Transgression. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Giligan, Vince, dir. 2008. Breaking Bad. USA: High Bridge
Productions, Gran Via Productions, Sony Pictures Television,
American Movie Classics (AMC).
Jenks, Chris. 2003. Transgression. London: Routledge.
Katz, Jack. 1988. Seductions of Crime: Moral and Sensual Attractions of
Doing Evil. New York: Basic Books.
King, Stephen. Breaking Bad: A Review. In Entertainment Weekly,
March 6, 2009. http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20263453,00.html.
August 10, 2009.
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CHAPTER FIVE
GENDER TROUBLE
BLENDING GENDER CODES
IN FILM ADAPTATIONS
Everything mocked.
(The Diary of Virginia Woolf, 14 March 1927)
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Yet, this process always takes place under a kind of compulsion. Thus, it
may be assumed that we are inevitably prisoners of gender. Therefore,
an escape from gender understood as an oppressive phenomenon is sought.
This can be achieved by means of transgressing the barrier of social and
bodily conventions.
Hence, in Virginia Woolfs Orlando the problem arising around gender
identity and its subsequent implications finds the answer in androgyny as a
manifestation of gender-in-between. Androgyny, perceived as an attempt
of gender transgression, approves of polymorphous sexuality both
physically and mentally, giving proof that gender is only a performance.
Virginia Woolfs perception of androgyny, developed in her essay A Room
of Ones Own (1929), constitutes a healthy balance and a union between
the masculine and feminine elements in a single body, which implies an
original opportunity of liberation. Orlandos sex transformation, which
leads to the transgression of sex/gender boundaries, is indisputably the
central event in his/her growth as a human since [t]he complete human
being [] should embrace within a flexible self all manner of so-called
male and female impulses (Rosenthal 137). The supporters of such a
claim consider androgyny to be a perfect way of achieving full humanity
since it necessitates breaking the traditional norms and conventions which
restrict each individual to being only a man or a woman. Thus, Orlando
embodies a mixture of man and woman, one being uppermost and then
the other (Woolf 2003, 93).
Consequently, in the film adaptation Potter uses Orlandos androgynous
appearance to dismantle and deconstruct the prevailing gender roles which
are rooted in Western culture and society. The sexual confusion and
ambiguity are partly built by the fact that Orlandos male incarnation and
the female one are played by a woman (Tilda Swinton). Thus, casting
Swinton, who, though with slightly androgynous look, is transparently
female redirects the significance of the films introductory claim about
Orlandos indisputable maleness: There can be no doubt about his sex,
despite the feminine appearance that every young man of the time aspires
to. The same refers to the books introductory statement: HEFOR
THERE COULD BE NO DOUBT of his sex, though the fashion of the
time did something to disguise it [. . .] (Woolf 2003, 5). This purposeful
physical ambiguity of Orlando reveals the misleading character of
masculinity and femininity. The conclusion may be that not only are
masculinity and femininity superficial, but there is also much relativity to
them.
In her presentation of gender as performance, Potter points out the
mutuality between gender identity and social identity. Her perception of
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Orlando. The scene proves that the categories of man and woman are
burdened with the socio-cultural context.
In the novel, Woolfs main attempt is to challenge the established
norms and conventions in order to question the dominant and stereotypical
gender constructions. Consequently, Orlando undergoes a transformation
from male to female, which is the central event in his/her development of
self-awareness. In Potters film, Orlando becomes a woman in a shocked
reaction to the masculine demands of war. He rejects the master narrative
of militarism, and that is the moment when Orlando realizes he cannot,
will not be a man in the sense he is being asked to (Dargis qtd. in Humm
164). The character of Orlando experiences a sex/gender change in order
to reveal the complex mechanisms that govern the way in which an
individual functions in a society determined by a set of characteristic
privileges and constraints ascribed to the traditional notions of man and
woman. After a long sleep, Orlando changes his sex and becomes a
woman, which serves to justify the claim that sex is as much a convention
as gender, or any other role imposed by society. When Orlando awakes,
he/she is renewed and reborn from one existence into another. In the scene
in which Orlando sees her female figure in the mirror for the first time, her
new identity is being established. On discovering that now she is a
woman, Orlando declares to her mirror reflection: Same person. No
difference at all. Then she turns her head and adds looking directly into
the camera: Just a different sex. The sudden bodily change of Orlando
which transforms him into a woman does not seem to affect either the
protagonists character or identity: Orlando had become a woman there is
no denying to it. But in every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as
he had been (Woolf 2003, 67).
This nearly simplistic depiction of the whole process of gender
transgression, at least in comparison with the same scene described in
Woolfs novel, may illustrate how thin the line between a man and a
woman is. Crucially important is the fact that transcending gender binaries
leads to diversity. Consequently, there are multiple Orlandos, as Woolf
writes: Then she called hesitatingly, as if the person she wanted might not
be there, Orlando?. For if there are (at a venture) seventy-six different
times all ticking in the mind at once, how many different people are there
notHeaven help usall having lodgement at one time or another in the
human spirit? Some say two thousand and fifty-two (2003, 152). This
gender instability is characteristic of postmodernism which, in contrast to
modernism, allows for multiple identities. Consequently, this enables to
establish a new sense of multiple gender, which is constantly at the heart
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of both the novel and the film. Yet, it should be notified that this diversity
does not result in confusion, but in a richer unity.
In the film, this unity of masculinity and femininity becomes clearly
visible in the bedroom scene between Orlando and her lover, Shelmerdine.
The scene diminishes the importance of their separate physicality either as
a man or a woman. This happens due to a long take of the camera which
shows pieces of a naked body that cannot be unambiguously identified as
either male or female since they form a unity. The next take presents the
lovers lying in an affectionate embrace in bed. The specific arrangement of
their embracing arms gives an impression as if Orlando and Shelmerdine
have become one. Yet, it should be noticed that, though the lovers
represent unity between masculine and feminine elements, they are not
one as any particular man and woman. They are one beyond this gender
binary division. Moreover, Orlando who holds Shelmerdine in her arms is
still the Orlando who held Sasha, the Russian princess, in his. This is the
gender transitivity that is always present in the character of Orlando.
The issue of gender identity is the leading motif throughout the film, in
which Potters main attempt is aimed at uncovering the double (or even
multiple) nature of gender. In the opening scene introducing Orlando, the
viewers are assured of his indisputable masculinity by voiceover.
However, quite playfully, the same scene presents a woman in the role of
Orlando, who is supposed to be male. The physical beauty of Swinton
(slight, fine-featured and with a white complexion) suggests that her
masculinity is only a performance. Maggie Humm remarks that Swintons
extraordinarily luminous and unmarked complexion and studied
performance of a non-masculine yet non-feminised male draws attention
to the instability of traditional gender motifs (165). Consequently,
Orlando turns out to be either both a man and a woman or neither of them.
Yet, one does not contradict the other. This daring assumption may find
the answer once again in androgyny, which, on the one hand, allows for
the coexistence of masculine and feminine elements in a single body but,
on the other hand, it presupposes freedom from any sex/gender binary
divisions.
In the context of both the novel and the film the concept of androgyny
constitutes a representation of gender as an unstable and entirely
metaphysical construct. Although Orlando undergoes a sex change, his/her
gender remains ambiguous. It is even as if the sex change were to
symbolise the marriage of the feminine and the masculine in the figure of
Orlando. Moreover, not only does androgyny call into question the
conventional assumptions about gender but it also questions the
assumptions about language itself by challenging the theory of meaning.
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In particular, it calls into question the notion that words get their meanings
from things they refer to. Thus, it may be stated that androgyny reflects
sexual ambiguity as well as textual one. It threatens the stable categories
and rigid classifications. In reference to gender, androgyny undermines
above all the fixed gender polarities.
The arbitrary nature of gender makes it only a kind of convention
which one may or may not choose. This conventional character of gender
as a persons choice becomes evident in the film in a scene in which
Shelmerdine allows for the possibility of a double gender saying to
Orlando: You might choose not to be a real man at all say if I was a
woman. This allowance on the side of Shelmerdine, or even his
confession, confirms the assumption that all gendered selves can be read
as a series of performances. Thus, gender is only a masquerade, which
consequently results in a collapse of confidence in fixed gender norms and
a subsequent destabilisation of substantive identity. This, in turn, disturbs
the traditional perception of sex/gender, which for instance leads to
uncertainty and suspicion reflected in Orlandos words: You are a
woman, Shel!, to which Shelmerdine replies: You are a man, Orlando!
(Woolf 2003, 124). This is the most intense moment of their relationship
when Orlando and Shelmerdine recognise the presence of the opposite sex
in the other, which proves again sex/gender transitivity. Potter herself
explains that it is not that the book so much explores sexual identity as
dissolves them, and its that kind of melting and shifting where nothing is
ever what it seems for male or female (qtd. in Nelmes 299). Thus, this
recurrent ambiguity disrupts the established notions of gender refuting the
conventional categorisation of femininity and masculinity. Therefore, both
Shel and Sasha, the female lover of Orlando, wear certain traits of
ambiguity. Shelmerdine is characterised as a man as strange and subtle as
a woman (Woolf 2003, 127), while Sasha is at first vaguely described as
a person, whatever the name or sex (Woolf 2003, 17).
This gender ambiguity of Sasha, the Russian princess, is made evident
at her first encounter with Orlando: Legs, hands, carriage, were a boys,
but no boy ever had a mouth like that; no boy had those breasts; no boy
had eyes which looked as if they had been fished from the bottom of the
sea (Woolf 2003, 17). Sasha represents for Orlando not so much a lover
as an androgynous muse. In fact, she offers an alternative to the
conventional perception of gender as she personifies the third space, that
is a third sex uniting the virtues of power and beauty that Orlando has
been seeking. The fact that she manages to escape the traditional
categories of gender and eventually becomes unrepresentable in
conventional modes of discourse makes Orlando feel an insatiable desire to
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posses her not only physically but also in language: Ransack the language
as he might, words failed him. He wanted another landscape, and another
tongue (Woolf 2003, 22). However, Sasha seems to evade any kind of
either bodily or linguistic categorisation. Thus, although [i]mages,
metaphors of the most extreme and extravagant twined and twisted in his
mind Orlando is unable to capture Sasha in language since language is
insufficient to grasp her essence (Woolf 2003, 17). In terms of that
paradigm Sasha exists outside the boundaries of any linguistic system.
Instead she is embedded in ambiguity, which is reflected in the blurring of
her gender.
This ambiguity of the sexual identity of both Orlandos lovers, Sasha
and Shelmerdine, becomes even more evident and literally visible in the
film due to Potters purposeful choice of casting Billy Zane and Charlotte
Valandrey who wear certain resemblance to each other. Not only
physically do they seem to resemble each other, but they have also
strikingly similar smiles. Hence, they appear to be like two incarnations,
or even twin avatars, which embody the male and female aspects of
Orlandos ideal lover. The difficulty in ascertaining without doubt or
confusion the sexual identity of Shelmerdine and Sasha proves the
rightness of Woolfs statement: Different though the sexes are, they
intermix. In every human being a vacillation from one to the other takes
place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness,
while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what it is above (2003,
93).
All the masquerade and cross-dressing are an evident sign of gender
transgression. The sex/gender change of Orlando gives a clear example of
bodily transgression. The scene in which Orlando surveys her naked
female body for the first time calls up an association with Sandro
Botticellis The Birth of Venus, which depicts the pagan goddess of love
who, emerging from the sea as a fully grown woman, arrives at the
seashore. The resemblance between the film scene and the painting cannot
be denied since not only does the physical appearance of Swinton, that is
her white skin, slender body and long titian-coloured hair, call instantly to
mind Botticellis Venus, but also their posture and the arrangement of
arms are exactly the same. This unquestionable resemblance between
Botticellis Venus and Potters Orlando gives the sex/gender change the
significance of a peculiar rebirth from one existence into another.
What is more, Orlandos transformation from male to female acquires
a deeper meaning when analysed in reference to its social consequences
since the bodily transgression, namely the very aspect of sex transformation,
is of course imaginative. However, due to its importance as a starting point
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147
148
Works cited
Beauvoir, Simone de. 1974. The Second Sex. Trans. H. M. Parshley. New
York: Vintage.
Brown, Richard. 1989. Perhaps she had not told him all the story:
Observations on the Topic of Adultery in Some Modern Literature. In
European Joyce Studies 1: Joyce, Modernity, and its Mediation, eds.
Fritz Senn and Christine van Boheemen. Amsterdam; Atlanta: Rodopi.
99-112.
Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of
Sex. New York; London: Routledge.
Foucault, Michel. 1977. A Preface to Transgression. In Language,
Counter-memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel
Foucault, ed. D. F. Bouchard. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.
Humm, Maggie. 1997. Feminism and Film. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP;
Bloomington: Indiana UP.
Kuhn, Annette. 1994. Womens Pictures: Feminism and Cinema. 2nd ed.
London; New York: Verso.
Nelmes, Jill, ed. An Introduction to Film Studies. 2nd ed. London:
Routledge, 1999.
Potter, Sally, dir. 1992. Orlando. UK: Adventure Pictures.
Rosenthal, Michael. 1979. Virginia Woolf. London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul.
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of Ones Own. 1989. New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich.
Barbara Chya
149
CINEMATIC CARMILLAS:
PROJECTING SUBVERSION
AGNIESZKA OWCZANIN
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reset it in the post-Civil-War South of the US. With only a few exceptions,
the majority of productions merely allude to Carmilla; they augment and
distort the original storys subtle lesbian eroticism and make play with
gore and overt physicality, which, though cinematically effective, are
absent in Le Fanu.
The enduring strength of myths lies partly in their polysemic nature.
The appeal of the vampire myth and its inexhaustible capaciousness
results from its universal applicability; whenever it emerges it is always
seized by an overwhelming amount of meaning because the monster can
stand for everything that our culture has to repressthe proletariat,
sexuality, other cultures, alternative ways of living, heterogeneity, the
Other (Dolar qtd. in Gelder 52). Carmilla embodies symbols of
psychological repression anticipating the work of Freud (Barclay 30), its
lesbian vampirism powered by an undercurrent of matriarchy seeping
through a crust of male homosociality, and, thanks to its plasticity, it has
been appropriated and retold by cinema in a variety of ways. This
plasticity bends to new social conditions, the collective subconscious of its
audiences, thus becoming, as all horror films do in supplying a negotiable
pleasure, a barometer of contemporary culture whilst satisfying the
demands of an audience looking for gore devoid of lore.
The main focus of this paper is Roger Vadims Blood and Roses, 1960,
a film loosely adapted from Carmilla. I also refer to two other films that
borrow from Le Fanus story, Hammer Films The Vampire Lovers, 1970,
and the recent Lesbian Vampire Killers, 2009, which throw Vadims film
into stylistic and temporal relief. Since all vampire stories feature the
victim and the victimised, the perpetrator and the abused, blood running in
intimate, erotic contexts, and often endespecially in such Victorian
examples as Carmillawith a restoration of order desired by an
established male power, they tell us something about the cultural
allocation of gender and its concomitant anxieties. The three cinematic
adaptations of Carmilla under analysis, made in three different decades
(and separated by a span of half a century), mould the literary original in
their own way, revealing a distinct historical take on those anxieties with
distinct cinematic aesthetics.
Blood and Roses by Roger Vadim, a director associated with the
French New Wave, successfully combines the cinematic spirit of this
movement with the gothic atmosphere of the original story. In a similar
manner to Le Fanu, creator of the first literary female vampire whose
sexuality ruptures Victorian assumptions about femininity, Vadim is a
director recognized for bringing to post-war French cinema the image of a
youthful, modern woman, a signifier of subversive sexual freedom
152
(Darke 415). The story and the film present a reality that operates within
established social and gender codes, yet both also crack and loosen these
codes. Unacknowledged forces are glimpsed, their repressed potency
splintering through to the surface of a polished male hegemony and its
rational uniformity.
From the very beginning, the film prompts the audience to exult in the
unprecedented, the unknown and the repressed. It opens with a visually
striking scene in which the camera, placed in a plane cockpit, offers an
exhilarating view of a disappearing runway during takeoff. This, first of
all, places the action unmistakably in contemporary times. Second, it
offers unmatched views, unfamiliar to most spectators, who, even if they
have flown, are unlikely to have seen what a pilot sees; all that is available
to us passenger-spectators is the curtailed eye of a porthole, severely
limiting our view. This opening long-shot scene, with its novelty and
strangeness, is an undeniable thrill, even for twenty first-century viewers,
but it must have had an even stronger impact on audiences fifty years ago.
As the plane begins its takeoff the narrator speaks in voice-over, and, as in
the literary original, it is a first-person female, though at this stage she is
outside the diegetic world. This voyeuristic positioning, a disembodied
character in the imminence of the skies, makes her hover above the story;
at the same time, the sombreness of her voice conveys omniscience and
unwavering control. This unearthly, soft, velvety voice speaks with a
foreign accent, and tells us that its owner is taking this journey in time
from the past. This temporal manipulation is an interesting subversion of
gothic novel convention, where action is always shifted to the past.
Finally, the affective dimension of the scene relies on schemas relating to
erotic experience. From the very beginning, the rapid ascent has erotic
implications, which echo those of the original short story. Additionally,
the rising movement of the planethe next shot displays its full sleek,
streamlined shapeconnotes phallic imagery.
But running over this rising plane-phallus image is the female voiceover; the visible and the tangible are distinguished from the evasive,
elusive yet controlling power; the male is contrasted with the female,
nature with technology, the soft and curved shapes of the clouds envelop
the shiny machinery. Vadims reading of Le Fanus story acknowledges
yet undercuts dichotomies, blurring a straightforward black-and-white,
male-imposed stereotypical polarisation, and generic codes seem literally
to be sent flying.
In comparison with the literary original, the familial configuration is
altered; Carmilla (played by Annette Stroyberg-Vadim) is the cousin of
Leopoldo, who is about to marry Georgia. During their engagement party,
Agnieszka owczanin
153
Carmilla is lured to the Karnsteins tombs, and at this stage the unearthly
voice-over is embodied and becomes intra-diegetic: Carmilla is killed and
replaced by her vampire lookalike, Millarca. An interesting extension of
the transgressive nature of eroticism in the original story is the
introduction of Leopoldos incestuous relationship with Carmilla. Unlike
her literary prototype, Carmilla-Millarca here is of a quiet, submissive,
almost tragic nature, and erotically stimulates both Leopoldo and his
fiance. The relationship between Leopoldo and Carmilla dates back to
their childhood and in its continuity and familiarity enacts certain flavours
of Laura and Carmillas prototypical first encounter, thus mirroring the
storys Freudian uncanny effect, though transmuting lesbian familiarity
into incestuous experience. The dramatic irony which rests on the
audiences knowledge of Carmilla and Leopoldos relationship is suddenly
broken when Georgia, his fiance, discloses her awareness of Carmillas,
now Millarcas, love for him. This disclosure seems to stimulate Millarcathe-vampire into intimacy with Georgia. In their contact there is no
exploitive physicality, the scene taking place in a greenhouse full of
luscious greenery, and suggestive rather of paradisal, primeval elements.
The film makes full use of cinematic technique for transmitting its
meaning. The original storys evasiveness and ambiguity is enacted by
long shots and slow fluid camera movements (cinematography by Claude
Renoir). As in the story, an intoxicating atmosphere is obliquely
suggested; rather than explicitly shown, the vampiric abuse takes place
off-screen. It is in shifts and manipulation of the viewing gaze and in the
placing of the camera that the films meaning is best carried across, Vadim
demonstrating the correlation between the inconceivability of the
presented situations for the phallocentric homosocial network and the
possibility of a more holistic, female vision. This alternative
vampiric/feminine perspective is enacted in the very patriarchal locale, the
social framework, of a heterosexual standpoint.
Film female characters are stereotypically presented here as the
beautiful objects of male desire, conforming to the expected emblematic
sex kitten image, often characteristic of New Wave films. For example,
in the first scene, which takes place in the Karstein castle, Carmilla is
introduced as a beautiful character, a pretty, slim blonde in a tight-fitting
black dress; Georgia, too, is made to embody a paradigmatic object of the
male gaze. Later close-ups of Carmillas face, showing her sensuous lips
and wistful eyes, illustrate her erotic yet melancholic nature. However,
there is something more at work here. It is Carmilla who, in her quietness
and withdrawal, her beautiful fluidity of movement, contrasts with the
male showiness and verbosity of Leopoldo and unassumingly earns
154
attention that goes beyond her looks. Her aura aligns her with the
mysteriousness and softness of the opening voice-over, making her central
in this scene.
When she is encouraged to tell the tragic story of Millarca she becomes
so engrossed in the tale that she enters a near-hypnotic trance. With her
words she mesmerises other members of the party, but also the audience,
for whom her narrative is accompanied by a change in point of view. The
camera now adopts the perspective of the deceased Millarca and gazes at
the gathered company through a dreamlike, otherworldly blurred lens.
Thus the disembodied gaze of a ghost, its subjectivity of vision, becomes
ours. Effortlessly, the audience is positioned physically and psychically as
the ghost, Carmillas voice-over narration being the only link with
diegesis. This manoeuvre not only gives us access to Carmillas so-far
enclosed inner world but also makes possible a plurality of vision,
disinterring other ways of seeing. Nothing is what it seems; the same
room, the same company of characters may be perceived differently,
depending on who views them. It is Carmilla who grants us access to this
super-reality; she is the one who sees and feels more than the rest of the
company. This cinematographic manoeuvre demonstrates the verisimilitude
of reality blanketed by the other characters and thus establishes an
interesting perspective of dramatic irony for spectators; they no longer
identify with the perspective of the phallocentric order, as Mulvey
would have it (199). By playfully juggling with cultural expectations and
cinematic conventions of mainstream cinema Vadim ultimately subverts
them. Though their starting point is meant to connote to-be-looked-atness (Mulvey 203) and passivity and they do conform to the expectations
of the male gaze, these sex-kittens have an autonomy, visual and
narrative, that outstrips male desire, which is also a desire to control. This
male gaze proves to be pathetically limited and therefore incapable of
denying women human agency.
The positioning of the camera also underscores spectatorial distancing.
The characters are often seen from above, or through window panes.
When Leopoldo leaves the coroners after identification of the body of
Millarcas first victim, he is driven home by his servant, and we see them
en face, the camera on the bonnet. The scene takes place in a heavy
downpour, symbolically representing the familys doom and the ensuing
tragedy. But the focus is on the fast regular movement of the windscreen
wipers, which in an obsessive, fanatical way wipe off the pouring rain as if
wanting to erase the work of the elements. And in these few square inches
of windshield they do their job, the rain is wiped away, and Leopoldos
clear, singular, male vision is possible. After this brief close-up through
Agnieszka owczanin
155
156
Agnieszka owczanin
157
158
Agnieszka owczanin
159
Here, unlike in earlier horror movies, it is the woman who becomes the
predatoras McKay acknowledges, in the early 1970s Hammer women
started to take centre stage in a way that they did at no other studio
(179)and here the female bursts from restraining corsets, but as we see
too, female sexuality is portrayed as a malignant and unnatural force.
Female liberation and initiative are powerful but of short duration, not
acknowledged in their full right, but coded as iniquitous aberration,
provoking men first to condescending smiles, then united retaliation.
Female eroticism is viewed through a homophobic, patriarchal, Victorian
looking-glass. Women kiss, make love and fume in this film. But in the
end normality, understood as a return to patriarchal order, is restored; men
save the world by eliminating the dark powers of a destabilising vampiric,
feminine underground. Independent, unorthodox sexuality is curbed and
confined to the grave; a pack of men, guardians of respectability, perform
their ritual of driving a stake through the heart of the vampire, then
remove her head.
The barons sister, the generals and Mortons daughters all die under
their guardians noses, under the supervision of their male friend doctors,
who do not bother to take their patients relations into account. They do
not listen to them but patronisingly declare that their gradual loss of
vitality is due to anaemia, a female affliction common with young girls,
[] and a few old ones too. The womens night visitations are also
attributed to this cause: when body weakens, mind gets active, needs
some iron, that is all and so a drop of port is prescribed as a remedy. Such
an imperious attitude reveals the position of the paternal figure. Dramatic
irony, which allows us to witness what happens behind closed bedroom
doors, also makes us smirk at the mens obdurate bigotry. Unlike Le
Fanus story and Vadims interpretation, Bakers film ends with the total
obliteration of the female characters. Wifeless, daughterless, these
victorious men survive, but all that remains for them is their homosocial
bond.
However, viewed today, forty years after its release, it seems that this
film too has its tongue in its cheek. Polarisation of sexual difference is
taken to its limits and produces a visual hyperbole that is bemusing rather
than gratifying, with its decapitated blonde heads, comical rather than
terrifying. Literally speaking, visual melodrama rides on colour; Hammer
Films pioneered the use of lurid colour, red and blue especially
(Gelder 99). Visually, Vadims film is much closer to the atmosphere of
the literary original, black and white on screen somehow shadowing black
print on paper. Colour, which is often a signature of verisimilitude on
screen, is in Bakers film unnaturally saturated and thus becomes another
160
trajectory of excess and exhaustion. In the final scene where the general,
the baron and the doctor arrive at the Karnsteins tombs to annihilate
Carmilla, the baron recounts his opening of successive coffins and
piercing the whole family of vampires with a stake, one by one. He failed
to execute Carmilla for the simple reason that he was exhausted.
Tediousness, a strict method and the sheer effort of the procedure similarly
kill the potential and the drama of the scene. Also leaving the half-erect
stake sunk in Carmillas womb is a gratuitous enactment of the usual
climactic vampire-film moment, which by the 1970s must have been
viewed by the Hammer viewers as commonplace, if not household
(considering the fact that ninety per cent of British households had by then
access to TV, McKay 218). Similarly, the Venus-like image of Carmilla
getting out of a bath-tub in full-frontal nudity departs exploitatively from
the story, and this, along with the films narrative and historical
incoherence is likely to whimsically distance us from the film today.
In her analysis of camp Susan Sontag draws our attention to changes in
aesthetic perception afforded by the passage of time and attributes to it
change in reading and evaluation of a work of art:
Time may enhance what seems simply dogged or lacking in fantasy now
because we are too close to it, because it resembles too closely our own
everyday fantasies, the fantastic nature of which we dont perceive. We are
better able to enjoy a fantasy as fantasy when it is not our own. [...] It is
simply that the process of aging or deterioration provides the necessary
detachmentor arouses a necessary sympathy. [...] Time liberates the
work of art from moral relevance, delivering it over to the Camp
sensibility. (113)
That is why the film seems to wink, but only at the contemporary
audience. The displays of love and lore, authentic in the 1970s, are now
camp, bad to the point of being enjoyable in the 2010s. The seriousness
with which the film was made is now recognised as a seriousness that
fails (Sontag 112).
If The Vampire Lovers is campand pure examples of Camp are
unintentional; they are dead-seriousthen Phil Claydons 2009 Lesbian
Vampire Killers is an example of camping, that is Camp which knows
itself to be Camp (Sontag 110). Here, flesh, sex, lips and tongues are used
to very different effect than in the Hammer film, where eroticism is still
delicate, though also, as has been noted, deliberate, obvious (one is
tempted to say hammering), and meant to titillate the viewer with no
filters of irony and doublethink, those being owned more by the presentday viewer. Genuine camp, such as The Vampire Lovers, does not mean
Agnieszka owczanin
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162
Works cited
Baker, Roy Ward, dir. 1970. The Vampire Lovers. USA, UK: American
Internaltional-Hammer Film.
Barclay, Glen St John. 1978. Anatomy of Horror: The Masters of Occult
Fiction. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
Claydon, Phil, dir. 2009. Lesbian Vampire Lovers. UK: Vivendi
Entertainment.
Darke, Chris. 2007. The French New Wave. In Introduction to Film
Studies, ed. Jill Nelmes. London: Routledge.
Gelder, Ken. 1994. Reading the Vampire. London: Routledge.
Huddleston, Tom. Lesbian Vampire Killers review. Time Out London
Issue 2013, March 19-25, 2009. http://www.timeout.com/film/
reviews/%2086884/lesbian_vampire_killers.html. March 24, 2010.
McKay, Sinclair. 2008. A Thing of Unspeakable Horror. The History of
Hammer Films. London: Aurum Press.
Agnieszka owczanin
163
CHAPTER SIX
SUBVERSION AND NATION STATE
ARTISTS AGAINST THE STATE
WHAT A KERFUFFLE:
SKOLIMOWSKIS HAMLE
AND TOTALITARIAN REGIME
MAGDALENA CIELAK
AND AGNIESZKA RASMUS
167
168
What a kerfuffle
What a kerfuffle
169
170
171
The absurd deal of giving to the USSR traditionally Polish Eastern borderland
and in compensation getting a belt of German land resulted in massive tragedies of
the displaced civilians of all involved nations.
172
173
The lines Betrayal, again, harms the innocent ones./Even Laercio brings about
his own undoing,/As well as Szefowas,/And Szefs, too suggest that
Skolimowski sees Szef and Szefowa as victims of manipulations rather than
oppressors.
174
Works cited
Foucault, Michel. 1998. Trzeba broni spoeczestwa (Society Must Be
Defended). Trans. Magorzata Kowalska. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo
KR.
Jerzy Skolimowski, dir. 1959/1960. Hamle (Little Hamlet).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xwcGZyHrB8. September 10, 2009.
Kott, Jan. 1990. Szekspir Wspczesny (Shakespeare Our Contemporary).
Krakw: Wydawnictwo Literackie.
The d Film School. http://www.filmschool.lodz.pl/pages/view/591history. September 10, 2009.
Mazierska Ewa. 2010. Jerzy Skolimowski. The Cinema of the
Nonconformist. New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books.
The hopes of the late-1950s for major political change in the country were soon
replaced with increasing disillusionment in the 1960s. As a consequence, in 1967,
after his film Rce do gry (Hands Up!) was shelved by censorship, Jerzy
Skolimowski decided to leave the country for free Europe. His next few films were
not politically involved.
The more detached the work is from its origins, the more
dehumanized the work, the more it leads us into the open,
where a totally unique being can be brought forth. In this sense,
truth arises out of nothing that is not time, but detachment and
detachment brings to light the characteristics of an alienation
that is not oriented by presence. (Olkowski-Laetz 104)
In his essay Origin of the Work of Art, Martin Heidegger traces the
issue of detachment, alienation and separation from representation. This is
a lack, deformation or travesty of an origin that enables transgression of
distinguishable features of various forms. The process of defamiliarization
increases difficulty and length of the viewers reception, leading eventually
to a production of completely new readings. Open to a plurality of
interpretations and a series of relations, the work of art does not conform
to traditional conventions. It moves through several layers at once,
reworks space and time connections, adopts an extreme attitude to an
artistic vision and finally produces a new revaluation of formerly accepted
values. Such conditions are in opposition to the signification system. They
are ready to open a space for thought and the possibility of other logics
and grammars (Olkowski-Laetz 102). In the light of this, the supposed
truth comes out of the arteries of different meanings as formerly
subjugated individuals have now an opportunity to oppose or evade
normative behaviour and pluralize meanings of social experience and
relations. The empowerment of previously unprivileged groups aims to
blur social distinctions, exerting a tremendous effect upon the social state
and furthering an equality of expression.
176
Jarman notes in his journal that after being called The Dead Sea and The
Victorian Values, the suggestion was GBH (Grievous Bodily Harm), and, finally,
The Last of England was chosen as it emphasized the relation between the dying
culture of England and the destruction of the human body through AIDS
(Humphrey 213).
Justyna Stpie
177
178
Justyna Stpie
179
180
the Falklands War, which ended with the victory of Great Britain, and a
subsequent breath of militarism and nationalism of the country. Here,
patriotism can be associated with pointless deaths, aggression and social
terror that dominated the divided England, enriching the visual material of
the directors apocalyptic vision.
The soldiers are introduced by a series of machine guns, leading a
group of people from some interior spaces to a balcony. There is some
artificiality in the soldiers behaviour. They appear to perform some kind
of oppression at the dictate of society. Furthermore, it is difficult to
identify clearly the victims, who appear to be displaced people, contemporary
recluses who live against the frames imposed by society. Spring and
Spencer Leigh, the second major character of Jarmans vision, belong to
this group. The combination of scenes, with their varied contexts, speaks
against the growth of English nationalism and populist response to race,
immigration, sexuality and other artistic ideologies (Hill 15). These
elements dominate the second part of the film where hostages await their
execution and the terrorists dance around a bonfire. The scene becomes so
powerful visually that it reminds us of strange television footage of war,
leaving us with an impression of visual closure. Here, Jarman contrasts
darkness with the light coming from the torches and the ritualistic dances
of naked people. The dance scene is enriched by weird creatures that join
the trance-like circle. The madness of patriotism ends with the subversion
of the symbol of the Union Jack, which becomes only a piece of cloth on
which two soldiers have sexual intercourse. All these motifs encircle the
wider spectacle of terror. As Steven Dillon notices, conventionally
beautiful images of sunsets accompany the terrorists, but now these
sunsets connote the withdrawing of the light, the end of things, the last of
England (175).
The viewers thoughts have been set adrift and wander through the
multiplicity of forms, unable to distinguish past, present, or future. The
parody of aesthetic and cultural forms presented by Jarman belongs to
other places and to other times. As Dorothea Olkowski-Laetz asserts,
embedded in the postmodern sensibility, a wide range of formless forms
and objects available for nameless utilizations highlight the despair that
nothing will happen in the dismantling of time (113). This is clearly
indicated in a wedding procession scene, a parody of the Royal Wedding,
taking place in a deserted warehouse. The images of gathered and
costumed people express grotesque elements that subvert the elevated
social ceremony and ritual. Cross-dressers, photographers, a baby in a
pram covered with tabloid headlines, a chimney sweep straight out of
Victorian times, and the recordings of audio material from the Royal
Justyna Stpie
181
wedding of Charles and Diana all transgress ossified cultural forms and
puncture the artificiality of the public sphere. Nonetheless, for Steven
Dillon, there seems to be no hope as the private realm suggested by
naked bodies and Spring in former segments of the film, is also adrift,
despairing and terrorized (181).
The first of the concluding scenes with a dancing Tilda Swinton aptly
summarizes the directors apocalyptic construct and his meditation on the
monumentality of life through performance. The act of cutting and eating
the pieces of the wedding dress implies a rejection of cultural artifices and
the desperate position of a contemporary abject. The weeping and whirling
figure becomes an adequate response to the fragmented, disturbed
montage of the depicted state of the nation. It will be a rejection of
conservative views on family, tradition, patriarchalism and order;
structures through which the government meant to renew the spirit of the
nation are instead a hindrance to individualism. In fact, the dance may be
read as a powerful gesture of defiance against the death, destruction, and
the absence of human instincts the film has portrayed (Hill 159). These
shots are contrasted with a scene of a boat leaving British shores in an
unknown direction. The scene which, as already noted, refers to Ford
Madox Browns The Last of England, seems to be the final response to the
state of the nation as presented by Jarman. Here the assembled people,
who also signify contemporary recluses, do not rebel against the
conditions of ruined life but simply choose exodus. According to Steven
Dillon, water brings some tranquility, thereby indicating a transition into a
new order. As the people move, the fire in the foreground slowly burns
out, leaving the terror behind (Dillon 179). There is a new direction,
though it involves departure from British shores.
The streams of blurred images have a temporal character in Jarmans
vision. The systematic usage of anachronisms illustrates the directors
fascination with a frame-within-the-frame narrative. This generic
combination of narrative discontinuity with documentary subjects and
techniques, namely urban wasteland, home movies, and a handheld
camera, as well as the play with sound and colour all contribute to the
effect that The Last of England is beyond directly recognizable world,
time and genre (Dillon 185). In such conditions, the transgressive
aesthetics displays a history of trauma, both personal and public, rewritten
by Jarman. In other words, the film exists at the edge of ecstasy and decay,
reflecting continually deconstructed images that present the cruel and
hidden facts of the state apparatus at work. We are confronted with an
apocalyptic vision of an endless repetition of the horrors from which a
constructed subject wants to escape (Caruth 17). The amalgamation and
182
Works cited
Bahtsetzis, Sotirios. Place: a Philosophical Vocabulary.
http://www.d624.org/thesite/page02.html. 22 September, 2009.
Caruth, Cathy. 1996. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and
History. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins.
Colebrook, Claire. 2002. Cinema: perception, time and becoming. Gilles
Deleuze. London and New York: Routledge, 29-54.
Dillon, Steven. 2004. Derek Jarman and the Lyric Film: The Mirror and
the Sea. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Hill, John. 1999. British Cinema in the Eighties: Issues and Themes.
Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Humphrey, Daniel. Authorship, history and the dialectics of trauma:
Derek Jarmans The Last of England. In Screen 44.2 (2003): 209-216.
Jarman, Derek, dir. 1987. The Last of England. Anglo International Films.
. 1992. At Your Own Risk. A Saints Testament. London: Hutchinson.
Lash, Scott. 1991. Sociology of Postmodernism. London, New York:
Routledge.
Lippard Chris and Guy Johnson. 1993. Private Public, Public Space: The
Politics of Sickness and the Films of Derek Jarman. In British Cinema
and Thatcherism, ed. Lester D. Friedman. London: UCL Press, 278293.
Olkowski-Laetz, Dorothea. 1990. A Postmodern Language in Art. In
Postmodernism and the Arts, ed. Hugh J. Silverman. New York and
London: Routledge, 101-119.
Peake, Tony. 1999. Derek Jarman. London: Little, Brown & Company.
CONTRIBUTORS
184
Contributors
185
INDEX
6
60s, 1, 22, 26, 48, 51, 166, 168
A
abjection, 3, 116-118, 120, 129
abnormality, 71, 117
Acker, Kathy, 2, 6-8, 11-14, 17-19,
183
Adamik, Kasia, 104, 109, 112
adaptation, 106, 122, 140-141, 156
Adorno, Theodor W. and
Horkheimer, Max, 3, 7-9, 17-18
aesthetics, 1-3, 6-7, 9, 14-15, 18, 24,
29, 31, 103, 105, 107, 109, 129,
135, 151, 158, 162, 177, 181,
184
alienation, 47, 75, 109, 175
androgyny, 108, 141, 144
Anthems, 32, 34
avant-garde, 3, 50, 86-87, 157, 162
B
Bacon, Francis, 15, 19, 133
Baker, Roy Ward, 156, 158-159,
162
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 87
Bataille, Georges, 51, 87, 90
Bergman, Ingmar, 2, 54-60, 62-65
binarism, 66, 71, 77-79
Blood and Guts in High School, 12,
18
Blood and Roses, 150, 151, 163
Bowie, David, 15-16
Breaking Bad, 3, 126, 130-134, 136
Butler, Judith, 3, 73, 81, 142, 148
C
Camp, 3, 160, 163
Campbell, Lorne, 92, 98-99
capitalism, 7-12, 14, 17, 87, 90
Carmilla, 3, 150-151, 156-157,
161
castration, 72, 118, 120, 122
Cherry Blossom, 2, 92-94, 96-101
Claydon, Phil, 160-162
commodification, 9, 13-14, 18
consumerism, 14, 16
consumption, 9, 13, 23, 32, 87, 89
Cool Kids of Death, 33
D
death, 11, 37-38, 41, 45-48, 50-51,
76, 87, 92-93, 96, 128, 130-132,
134, 181
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix,
2-3, 7, 10-11, 13, 17-18, 178
Derrida, Jacques, 47, 52, 54, 63, 64,
142
deterritorialization, 10, 13-15
Devils, Rats and Piggies, 25
documentary, 94-97, 100, 177, 181
Don Quixote, 6, 13
Dziekaski, Robert, 92-94, 96
E
emigration, 93, 96, 100
Empire of the Senseless, 14, 17-18
eroticism, 62, 151, 153, 157-160
experimentation, 15, 22-27, 29
F
Falklands War, 27, 180
Fall, The, 2, 20, 23-24, 27-29, 33,
125
fascism, 7-9, 16
Fear and Whiskey, 26, 34
femininity, 67, 77, 121, 124, 141142, 144-145, 147-148, 151,
158, 161
feminism, 1, 147
femme fatale, 120, 169
Foucault, Michel, 1-4, 49, 52, 54,
57, 64, 122, 140, 148, 170-174
French New Wave, 3, 151, 162
Freud, Sigmund, 40, 45, 48-49, 5153, 118, 151
G
gaze, 3, 39, 54, 111, 133, 153-156,
158, 161, 173
gender, 1-3, 6, 38, 50, 56, 66-72, 74,
77-78, 80, 107, 122, 140-148,
151-152, 184
Gilligan, Vince, 130, 132
Gordons, The, 2, 20, 29-30, 32, 34
gore, 3, 127, 129, 135, 151
Goth, 6, 7, 11, 14-16, 18-19
gothic, 2, 16, 151-152, 157, 162
Goths, 6, 9, 11, 15-16
Great Expectations, 13
Grosvenor, Catherine, 92, 98, 101
H
Hamle, 166-168, 173-174
Hamlet, 3, 167, 169-170, 172
Hammer (Films, Studios), 150-151,
156-162
Hayles, N. Katherine, 84-90
hegemony, 2, 6, 8-9, 16, 31, 86-87,
95, 152
Hollywood, 3, 108, 127, 137, 158,
161
187
I
illusion, 36, 63, 95, 105, 117, 168,
171-172
immigration, 92, 94, 96-97, 100,
180
Internet, 14, 124
intersexuality, 70, 78
J
Jagger, Mick, 37, 39, 50-51
Jarman, Derek, 3, 176-182
Jarzyna, Grzegorz, 103, 109, 111
Joy Division, 16, 18, 20, 23-24, 29
K
Kafka, Franz, 13, 19
Kielowski, Krzysztof, 135
Kott, Jan, 167, 169, 174
Kristeva, Julia, 3, 116-118, 120, 125
L
Lacan, Jacques, 37-44, 46-47, 49,
51-53
Laibach, 2, 20, 24, 29, 31-34
Last of England, The, 3, 176-179,
181-182
Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan, 3, 150152, 159, 161
Lesbian Vampire Killers, 151, 160162
liberation, 49, 96, 140-141, 147, 159
Lichtenstein, Mitchell, 116, 122-125
Index
188
M
Madonna, 16
mainstream, 1, 7, 11-15, 154, 158,
162, 176
Manson, Marilyn, 2, 6-8, 14-19
masculinity, 11, 39, 42, 67, 77, 121,
141, 144-145, 147-148, 158, 161
mass culture, 6-8, 14, 185
mass media, 87, 89
Mechanical Animals, 15-16
Mekons, The, 2, 6, 20, 24-27, 29, 34
mise-en-scne, 37, 111, 135
modernism, 27, 143
monster, 121-123, 150-151
Montfort, Nick, 88, 90-91
Mulvey, Laura, 154, 158, 163
N
nationalism, 28, 177, 180
Nazi, 16, 31, 171
new media, 1-2, 84-91
New Wave, 153, 157, 166
Nirvana, 21
normality, 88, 117, 156, 159
nostalgia, 20-21
Nunn, Trevor, 106, 111, 113
O
Opus Dei, 31, 34
Orlando, 3, 140-141, 147, 149
Other, The, 3, 42-43, 49-50, 54, 5658, 60, 116, 121, 123, 151
R
realism, 103, 108, 130, 136, 177
regime, 1, 12, 22, 31-32, 87, 170,
172-174
revolution, 1, 8, 13, 17, 28, 31
Roeg, Nicolas, 36
S
Self, 3, 56-58, 60, 67, 70, 78, 81
Sex Pistols, The, 11, 13, 21-22, 33
sexuality, 1, 14, 42, 44, 62, 74, 77,
119, 122, 127, 129, 140-141,
151, 158-159, 178, 180
Shakespeare, William, 2, 25, 102,
105-107, 112-113, 167-172, 174,
183
T
taboo, 1, 87, 117-118, 121, 129
Taming of the Shrew, The, 102, 105
Teatr Polski in Bydgoszcz, 2, 92,
97-98
Teeth, 3, 116, 119, 122-124
television theatre, 2, 102-106, 109110, 112
Tempest, The, 102-107, 112
Thatcher, Margaret, 27, 176
Thatcherism, 1, 27, 176, 182
The Gordons Volume II, 30
The Quality of Mercy is not Strnen,
25
trauma, 59, 71, 122, 177, 181-182
Traverse Theatre, 2, 92, 97, 101
Treasure Island, 13
189
V
Vadim, Roger, 150-159, 163
vagina dentata, 3, 116, 118-119,
122-124
vampire, 15, 118-119, 150-151,
153, 155-163
Vampire Lovers, The, 150-151, 156158, 160, 162
violence, 14, 38-39, 44-45, 47, 49,
61, 73, 117, 130-132, 134, 176,
178-179
Volk, 33-34
W
Wajda, Andrzej, 166-167
war, 26, 36, 49, 143, 151, 166-167,
170, 172-174, 180, 185
Wardrip-Fruin, Noah, 88, 90-91
Warlikowski, Krzysztof, 102, 104106, 108-109, 111-112
We Are Time, 32
Woolf, Virginia, 3, 140-143, 145149
X
XXY, 2, 66-69, 72, 75, 77-79