The Fetishist's Guide to Cinema!

a bit of paraphernalia i fnd on wd doc for course nostalgia

2009-06-23T08:55:00.000-07:00

The Scream and the Roar

Just as in Piccadilly the question in the alternative endings of the dénouement is not “who killed Shosho”? but that in fact “both Jim and Mabel” killed Shosho (Jim perhaps in the Symbolic, to save Shosho’s honour, and Mabel in the Real: message being Wong must die more than one death, her death must be fetishized under the law), so it is possible to suggest that in the same way, Kong has to die and die. The repetition of his death is necessary for his survival. With Kong, it is not only his desires for white woman that killed him but also his attempt to escape (or defeat) a totalizing modernity and his spectre as grand freak commodity. Just as Wong’s death is heavily ambivalent, Kong’s death in the dénouement can also be read as double-edged: not related to one singular cause.

Another interesting intersection between the films is that the causes of death of the Other both fall into categories, “realms.” The economic causes (Mabel in Piccadilly and the commodity economy in Kong) seem distinct from the cause of desire (Jim’s love and the Beast’s love). Thus, economies of desire and economies of commodity conspire to bring the downfall of the sexed, beastly, Otherly subject-object of the spectral gaze. The gigantic Empire State Phallus is the site which Kong must always climb, only to be abjected again. This is why Kong should be female, to signate the phallus as that which forces a kind of “circuitry”, round-trip of the drives: woman must try to make it but will never quite make it, always regressing to the exceptional, the beyond. Phallus as The Fountainhead, the pleasure is in the circumlocution the desired object, not obtaining it. When Kong tries he dies.

For me, the brilliant, central cinematic gesture in the 1933 King Kong version is the figuring of Kong and Anne as in a supplementary, reciprocal relationship of circular Otherness of beast, the fear imbricated in Modernity. Anne is praised for her seduction of Kong and Kong is praised for his momentary escape from colonization (and his seduction of the spectre of media by his timely death). In both, the camera is the threat, the craze of the media which “gratifies” your curiosity, or “follows the scream” (or roar).

1. In native society, the white woman is the beast, held up as crucifix for Kong. The Scream.
2. In the capitalist media driven society of voyeurism and spectre, the black beast is held up as crucifix for the woman. The Roar.

Anne also starts out as a kleptomaniac, caught ostensibly trying to steal fruit. It’s kind of Marnieesque (for Hitchcockeans), and confirms her status as hysterical patient when a ship-hand goes “you think she’s crazy, skipper?” Another replies glibly “just enthusiastic.” But these lines, along with the notion of the masculine as the “eggshell”: when broken it’s a mess, don’t, I claim, point to a problem in perceptions of woman, as such, but questions of what is masculine. For the women, everybody knows what the female fantasy is, but what’s the absent male fantasy? Kong? Monstrosity? If the masculine is purely a structure, an encircling framing device for woman, then where is it and what are its qualities? The arranging of her body as a still-life, (“you see me, you smile a little, then you listen, then you learn”) spectre of the gaze “looks kinda silly, don’t it” (I’m quoting the masculine tags on the sidelines) but the fetishist’s gaze is controlled not only by the camera but as much as by the male voice. You “see her face” but you only “hear his voice.” The masculine frames, arranges, functions, but what is it? Woman as arranged object parallels, of course, Kong as arranged object. The ritual dancing is so highly stylized and formalised (you rarely get such a stiff savage-dancing) that it is almost tempting to read that the point is not Third World, outside, the Other, deep prehistory, “beastly chivalry” catching up with the present, the Real undermining capitalist economy, etc... but that this is merely a subplot to the signification of Kong and his “soft centre,” the inadequate male giving into female desire and thus leaving himself at the mercy of a politics of economy... While the natives’ fires at night remind Carl Denham of “election night,” a comparison between both societies might, I’d posit, obviate the film’s other complex qualities.

But to dwell on Kong as possible exotic Other, the point to be made here is that last thing to escape Progress and Modernism is the ultimate point de capiton: the fear above all fears. In late global capitalism, which the 1976 film is more capable of dealing with, the fear is of the last great bastions of belief (and the Islamic world which owns the oil as threat to Judeo-secular “post-ideological” civilisation), but it is fair to say the fear in the 1933 version is first and foremost the fear of Modernity, capitalism’s impossibility ground in the Babel-like figure of the Empire State Building as culture’s triumph over nature etc.)In this sense, Kong is the Real, who both invites signification and dies because of it: “beauty killed the beast. ” The fear that capitalism hasn’t conquered everything, is the true fear here. It’s the fear, not of the particular, but that the universal has not been made choate. It’s the fear of non-totality, not of totality itself. Thus the castration, or emasculation, of Kong, could be seen as the ritual emasculation of the masculine by capitalist labour. Or, if we parallel Kong’s emasculation alongside the women presented as sacrifice to Kong, we see the levels here: white woman subjected to black beast, black beast subjected to white man, black beast follows his desires and loses to white man, and white man loses to black beast (in the social of the films critical life). But it ought not be so black and white. The ritual sacrifice of the black beast in effect castrates the white man, for it sets up the loss in the white woman of the new found love interest (and the subsequent inadequacy of the white man to fulfil the grey area of the white woman’s desires). It is woman’s unattainable desire, not man’s, that is the concern. Thus the masculine-sexuated kernel escapes notice. It disappears, or, being merely a framing device for gazing and fetishizing woman, the kernel doesn’t even exist in this autonomous aesthetic world.

Contrastive Kongs and their representations

Subtended by the big 1933 and what seems like the all-enclosing 2005 version (which could be read as comparatively similar in many ways to the original), the most interesting Kong work I found was, contrary to what critics would tell me, the 1976 Dino De Laurentiis remake. It was my favourite not because it was wondrously made, it’s not as taut and terse as the other versions, but because it seems strangely relevant in a post 9/11 world. The final scene happens at the World Trade Center, where, as I read it, we actually witness the American fantasy as proposed by Slavoj Zizek for the destruction of America and the alternate desire for the “Desert of the Real.” The image of the twin towers is superimposed with an image of Kong’s habitation, (Jack Prescott “I’ve seen that before”) which in the shape of two tall stones, resembles the twin towers, hence the idea that the Real of prehistory and the hyperreal of capitalist hegemony are, in effect, the same; heading for destruction. The Americans watching would rather global capitalism, tribal hyper-media and the Twin Towers fall, than see Kong fall (but then revel in his fall as galvanising spectre: the fantasy is ruined but more pleasure is to be had in the afterwards anyway), this being the perfidious nature of the recyclative capitalist market to advertise, enjoy and destroy. Yet here Kong is the sacrifice American’s weren’t willing to make for the backbone of their existential civilisation. Issues, discourses and ethics of ecology, sex, genetics, science and erotics of body. Portrayals of America, market, oil, petroleum, (Kong is unveiled as a rupture, borne from inside a large petrol station filling tank...”eggshell”... presaging the wars in the Middle East and the possibility of a Huntington “Clash of Civilizations”?), freedom and concurrence as well as the spectral collocation of public interference and public menace, and scopophilia of the street as a site highly invested with scenes, sights, scandals, make it a worthwhile film.

I don’t know whether this one is popular or not, but Queen Kong (also 1976) offers the camp, hyphenated (un)reading, unravelling of the Kong trope. It’s hard to know whether the women are in fact sex-objects or sexed subjects, for at times they seem both, trotting and trancing around in their bikinis (mostly white, also, the black women feature only in sideshow interludes), but whether that is part of the mad artifice and majestic stylization of this light piece of absurd cinema, it’s hard to tell whether it mocks or tropes feminism. I suspect the former. You get the usual vamped lines of the budget stylised art-film, outrageous elasticity, vexed repetition, hyper-theatricality, subterfuge, the man-object of desire revealed in a kind of plastic cake with a lid-top, expropriation of schemes and vicarious plotlines and their fustian, high-school-theatre type delivery (as well as successfully hammy, and intentionally bad special effects). It’s not surprising de Laurentiis filed a lawsuit against the piece.

But all these oddities combined to provide a strangely readable and highly unsettling DVD experience, quite strange/joyous, for me anyway. The gaily pop-ethical, inflated feminist-protest ending did it for me: one of the classic disturbing scenes that I got out of this C-cult film: Queen Kong carted off on a barge having shed the shackles of her chain-bra. It’s emancipation at its oddest, most starkly profane. You can sort of laugh, but there’s no jollity either, it’s just plain awkwardity. Weirdly, I loved Queen Kong. It’s so staged that Queen Kong’s almost more real than real. And the (gender inverted) man who plays the part of the beast’s love-interest is deliciously fad, ironic, absurdist, and effeminate to the nth degree. But more importantly, the film highlights what feels like the total impossibility of figuring Kong as non-phallic. It’s almost like to have a non-phallic Kong it has to be a farce to even make sense, or make it onto film. This is a bit disappointing, perhaps.

But to what extent are women still subordinated in film? Aren’t women’s shopping films, where the poster has a woman holding a thousand shopping bags, precisely meant to convey the woman’s attachment to the patria of the cosmopolitan fatherly law of global capitalism: and the subordination thus? Is her apparent sexual freedom (many male sexual partners that she cannot choose between) not compensated by a much more drastic, unfreedom: her complete submission to the name of the State, the true, spectral Father? which she perceives as the freedom to spend, to submit to the laws of capitalist economy?

The interesting thing about Kong films is that whatever happens to him or her, (s)he will always be resurrected. It’s a quirk of fate that Kong will always be dying, redying, living and reliving. But one thing for sure is that Kong will never be tied down, that politics and discourses of containment, rise, fall, clash of civilisations and nature vs. nurture ecological concerns will always call, and have called for, a new, revivified Kong. Even if that means (s)he escapes on a barge from her chain-bra.

2009-04-09T19:38:00.001-07:00

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/bonnets-for-blokes-in-tv-nostalgia-20090409-a1yc.html

Fantasy and Wongscape: gazing in Piccadilly

2009-04-09T00:48:00.000-07:00

Our spectatorship, our look, at Anna May Wong, is one of fetishistic denial. Matthew Sweet, of the Guardian, puts it well: “this is the trouble with Anna May Wong. We disapprove of the stereotypes she fleshed out - the treacherous, tragic daughters of the dragon - but her performances still seduce, for the same reason they did in the 1920s and 30s.” It is impossible not to gaze at Anna May Wong. But her relation in the star system of Hollywood is an ambivalent one. Her credits, or creditors, undoubtedly knew that the size of her name was much larger than it could be portrayed. The opening shots of nodal cosmopolitan movement, (and double-coding the film’s public star-life into the diegetic world of the film itself), share similarities with the opening scenes of Hitchcock’s best early film “The Lodger.” This cinematic gesture foreground’s the movies as thoroughly commodified, presaging tropes of fandom, gaze and look the film explores in Wong’s figure. There seems no escaping the fact though that it was known but not-known that she was the subject of the gaze, the voyeuristic male gaze. The “open secret” of this fixation, of the figure of Anna May Wong, was, and is still, everybody’s private fantasy.

But is our look drawn towards her because of the eroticization of her body, or is it because she functions as a darkened shadow against the scrim white background? Is our fixation, our gaze, on her as other to the white stage?

In Cynthia Liu’s When Dragon Ladies Die, she observes that “Wong’s participation in the shaping of her own “star discourse” in mass-media outlets apart from studio films may serve as the membrane separating the actor’s subjectivity from that of the roles she purportedly embodies.” Liu’s public “membrane” though, is mediated by Wong’s brilliant, mercurial and subtle face-acting on screen. As we noticed in class her "nosferatu" hands, her gestural flair, auratic corporeal evocations in sensual dance, facial ambiences, introspection, disingenuous irony, all of which constitute more than just mystery. In this way, I think she subjectivises herself on screen, perhaps even “returns the gaze” as subject. It is impossible to separate Wong’s life from her work. Anna May Wong’s body becomes part not only of the framing of erotics in the film, but lives on in life: art as life, life-art, being wedded to the cinema, renders her body as visceral to the diegesis of the film. We can “know” (both in the carnal and sense of the look) Shosho by watching her live in Piccadilly. Her death, also, is literal and impossible. Lara Keller Bell on http://www.laurahird.com/newreview/piccadilly.html claims that “The film ends on the note that life goes on. But for the actors and crew in this film, life is over. They are nothing more than celluloid ghosts.” And yet, “The Anna May Wong of ‘Piccadilly’ has been resurrected... the long dead film goddess is still alive, still young, and still enticing.” Sex, death and Chinoiserie live on in the desires of the spectator to possess Anna May Wong, but she ends up possessing us. Our Oriental fantasies can be projected onto the scrim, be it “cheesecake sexiness” or “droll camp” [Liu (25): Chu (1976, 288)], but we always know what Wong is thinking of it, “I got so weary of it all-of the scenarist’s concept of Chinese characters.” (Liu, 28). We can still fantasize, but her words emasculate, undermine our gaze, rob it of meaning.

My reading of the film was that both Mabel and Anna May Wong consciously and unconsciously compete, both inside and outside the film, for ascendancy as sexual object. Mabel eating the biscuit with a shadow obscuring half her face suggests the depths to which she would go to please Valentine… “you can imagine all the rest” says one spectator, and of course anything could have happened when Shosho ascends the euphemistic stairs, the pre-(quasi)-Hitchcockean, vertiginous “spiral of desire” to “finalize the contract.” Val’s predation is thus the genus of desire and its manifestations throughout, leaving us to ruminate upon the erotic tympanum of the film’s deep, affective economy of spectatorship. The variegated regression into the levels of labor, from complaint in the open arena of the restaurant, to kitchen, to scullery, represent not the problem of the space itself, but Val’s own desire, his “broken eggshell.” When Kong follows woman, that spells his death. Val’s desire is the source: Wong is the other, the scintillating celluloid object of jouissance, the screen onto which his desires are projected. But she keeps her own desires and fantasies private, beyond spectacle: autoerotic, we cannot access them. It is for this reason that we cannot watch the kiss of Shosho and Jim. It must be obscured, censured, imbricated, “screened” by the newspaper, the press media itself must “blotch out” the desire that is not Val’s, the master-signifier’s, desire.

First Post

2009-03-13T07:49:00.000-07:00

Observations, on Cocteau… carceral mirror and “boxing effect”

A cultural theorist and Hitchcock film obsessive Slavoj Zizek commented in the deleted scenes part of the DVD movie of the same name (Zizek!) [thx Liz for lending it to me it was great!] that though he wrote on many films, extensively, he had not seen half of the films he wrote on because in his own words, if he had seen them that would disprove the theories he made up about them!

But luckily I managed to see the Blood of the Poet and Rose Hobart although I am only imaginatively cognizant of the opening scene of Le Sang d’un Poete since the suitably ‘scattered’ YouTube version starts immediately from the statue scene. So I’m not making everything up as it is. But to me a lot of things are floating around in these films, especially related to drive and the unconscious.

I think the first interesting point that came to me was after I read on your site Jaraya (hi! if you see this) about, yes, the Classical and Christian imagery, but also your point about the filmic ‘techniques’ and how it becomes interesting for us to go through that process of the ‘imaginative leap’ so openly since we are, of course, used to very realistic special effects. I found this interesting. Most of us would probably have encountered this question once before…

My response to that would be in fact that this very imaginative process, and that more ‘obvious’ gap between what we perceive to be a real-realistic sequence (Independence Day) and an unreal-real sequence, (…Poete) is the very site of enjoyment. More precisely, the gap between knowing something is realistic-real and losing the exciting friction of the “not knowing” and ‘not knowing’ if it’s real and gaining the imaginative capacity to the unstructured, ticklishly joyous ‘imagined’ of your own. This idea that of the confusion of subject-viewer with subject-voyeur is left wide open, that the site of memory of the film is somwhere between a detached reading and an intimate fantasising. While in the real real film there is a wall between you and the text, you just watch it and it happens, the surreal movie is a much more complex phenomenon, psychologically; don't we enter the realm of the unconscious, of phantasy?

I would claim, and I wonder if you’d agree, that all this stuff in the Burgin article about the unconscious scattering and fragmenting, of kind of ‘qualia’ or sensory affect; what Burgin via Barthes sees as the film itself, becomes more apparent where we are forced to make this 'imaginative leap' in the openly Surrealist film.

Perhaps to be more precise is in theatre. Last time, I went to Venus and Adonis by Bell Shakespeare. Of course the play can only have two characters, and it had one set. And thus it was the responsibility of the director to make the most out of light-dark, chiascura effects, claustrophobia, agoraphobia, stage space all that stuff, in order to get across not only a plausible ‘narrative-affect’ but to involve the audience in this process of narrative and affective construction and consumption . In short, you had to make imaginative leaps, but it was in those precise leaps that the jouissance/frisson/pleasure/fluctuating desires of your viewing would occur etc… whereas when you go to the cinemas or watch DVDs you risk becoming an automaton, a ‘desensitized’ lifeless consumer…. so it’s almost like the less you notice (of the real) the more fun it is…. ok so yes! We should go back to performing on the floor, on the stage…

In Poete, what do we make of the male character's incarceration in the world of the mirror? I don’t think that the object here is stripped of its formal function, I would claim that Cocteau actually is given its proper function, that of the mirror which ‘swallows’ the male ego. What is Cocteau trying to say here? Could you read it as that kernel of ‘desire’ which swallows it’s subject, in opposition to ‘drives’ which make the subject circle around it?

The typical Lacanian formulation of drives part of the function of drive is for the motion to be somewhat circular, like, going round and round the object but never getting to it. It's a bit like in a horror movie where you're scared all the way until you see The Thing, you scream and the rest of the movie is an absolute apathetic kind of 'post-coital' glum bore because you've seen the thing and you hardly give a crap what happens next. In other words, my point is obvious apropos the Lacanian formation of desire/drive, (let's be a little vague here) that concealment is necessary for the process of drive...

And thinking about the keyhole scenes… I guess it reminded me of the idea of the box (think if you’ve ever read Poe's The Oblong Box, where the man's is smuggling his dead wife in the coffin for an overseas and another has to 'pretend' to be his wife to fill in as the fake 'fill-in' for the object-coffin...thus the whole story is how this box is a source of mystery but also power (when the boat sinks the husband sinks with the coffin) and think also Poe's "Purloined Letter" where you have the hidden letter whose contents determine the way all subjects act around it, the scandalous message is sealed, hidden, 'boxed up,' and you don't know what it's exact co-ordinates are except that it generates power for whoever possesses it. But the box also as a way or means of generating desire around the object it conceals. I was reading recently about the box as it forms in Robert Lindner’s "the fifty-minute hour" Freudian case studies where there's this rapist-murderer who has childhood traumatic memories of his mother's wedding-ring box which was a source of arousal for him and also profound denial.... this creates a fixation with boxes, a fetishisation of the box, he 'must know' what's in all boxes in case they contain the prized object (mother's wedding ring) of his own desire and simultaneous castration. Even if they don't contain it the pleasure is in the finding out. I think the box engenders, not only a certain mystery but also a certain fetishization of the outer-surface of the box as itself an object of desire. Post ‘glimpse’ you are condemned to orbiting the object autoerotically and in vain, like the Danaides (condemned for killing their husbands) in Greek myth (H.A. Guerber "Greek myths and legends") where they rotate round and round filling the bath with water hauled up the mountain in bottomless vases…

But I think it would make a good study, this notion of absence/presence in relation to the mis en scene of object-subject. Also this idea of “apperception”, apperception of the object: the deadly snowball, but also 'who's watching,'? where are you, does the screen displace/replace the viewer, viewee... perspectival shifting: note the eye (seen from inside the door) the idea that you can be on two levels: 1) looking in with the character who'se looking in or 2) looking out from the 'in' at the character who's looking in, and thus you get a kind of split-paranoiac 'frisson' high moment of perspectival suspension, that highly pleasurable nowhere-kernel between interiority and exteriority, the 'door,' maybe. You dissappear into that void where you are neither looking in or looking out, you as viewer 'dissappear,' become dissembodied....

But also this notion of dissappearance, swallowing, being swallowed. I guess this relates to wider tropes of Death and Time which you could play with. But for me there certainly seems to be something in the refraction of the mirror, the statue, lost in space, something that signals or speaks to notions of infinity, eternity, death, trauma, the afterlife or 'inter-life' of the Soul, purgatory perhaps, punishment (the punishment of the child).... like what you said Jaraya about the Christian imagery…

Lastly what did people think about the role of repetition and pastiche in the film? the slo-mo effects of the man getting shot? What does this say about the fetish? Isn't a similar phenomenon happening here, with the film? Isn't this somewhat how desire functions with Cocteau?

And finally-lastly the statue, I hope there's a body of feminists here who can agree with me, but to me at least, the surface implication is 'ok, you can smash the woman when you've finished with her, you have given her voice so you have the power to destroy it etc and so on...' But more importantly, what does this say about the image of the statuette, the object-Woman, who defies history, time, perhaps the underlying message is that actually that Woman survives, is Eternal, and men keep disappearing or suffering from neurosis from this unattainable, hard-cored object of desire, the Delphic oracle is spoken through the word of the Woman, who prophecies her own destruction.

Testing...

2009-03-13T06:45:00.000-07:00

I'm very traumatised I thought this would fit in my profile but it didn't so I will beat the system and do my profile on this thing instead and it will fit yes? I don’t know if anybody sees this or has time to read this ! but apparently on blogs when you want to make it more “personal” you have to do some kind of profile, but I could not bring myself to do one, honestly, out of some fear of voyeurism etc people will find out about my tragic inner-life, and it would end in debasement, humiliation, anxiety, or make me have multiple personalities, etc but if I did do one I thought it would be better to do two profiles not one,

so in other words the profile I would have put in would be structured very precisely, they really should be more mindful of the kind of schizoid split function of the mind and trouble the stupid ‘personality-category’ cliché etc right?.... so you have to have two parts to it, ok, so say this was the profile of ‘David’ somebody you or I don’t know, Jean, whoever, it would have two parts: First part: what you want others to see. Second part: what you want others to see that they weren't meant to see: like this....

Primary Ego: reading, chatting to pensioners, sunny days at the beach, petting small animals, watching melodrama and sound of music…

Secondary Ego: burning books, using their pages as tissue to wipe stains of the carpet, stealing expensive walking sticks off crippled pensioners, dark days in labyrinths and poking the eyes out of small animals, watching slash films...

But then you see my plan is you must leave it up to the person who is getting to know you to wonder and speculate which of the two parts is the ‘true’ constitution of the person and which descriptors are the a-constituents, the 'fake' of the person, but it always remains a secret and it gives the Other free will to choose what person they can make you, think of you as… so, of course, if you are really very nice and they think you are evil, then when they find our it will be ‘O he’s so nice I didn’t think he/she would be etc’ and vice versa if he you are really evil you can act out your Primary Ego, and either way you would not be forced to adopt one personality and have several if you wished and you could control perceptions of you more successfuly than in real life… no?