Katy Perry's Binding of Isaac

It was early in the morning, Abraham arose betimes, he had the asses saddled, left his tent, and Isaac with him, but Sarah looked out of the window after them until they had passed down the valley and she could see them no more. They rode in silence for three days. On the morning of the fourth day Abraham said never a word, but he lifted up his eyes and saw Mount Moriah afar off. He left the young men behind and went on alone with Isaac beside him up to the mountain. But Abraham said to himself, "I will not conceal from Isaac whither this course leads him." He stood still, he laid his hand upon the head of Isaac in benediction, and Isaac bowed to receive the blessing. And Abraham's face was fatherliness, his look was mild, his speech encouraging. But Isaac was unable to understand him, his soul could not be exalted; he embraced Abraham's knees, he fell at his feet imploringly, he begged for his young life, for the fair hope of his future, he called to mind the joy in Abraham's house, he called to mind the sorrow and loneliness. Then Abraham lifted up the boy, he walked with him by his side, and his talk was full of comfort and exhortation. But Isaac could not understand him. He climbed Mount Moriah, but Isaac understood him not. Then for an instant he turned away from him, and when Isaac again saw Abraham's face it was changed, his glance was wild, his form was horror. He seized Isaac by the throat, threw him to the ground, and said, "Stupid boy, dost thou then suppose that I am thy father? I am an idolater. Dost thou suppose that this is God's bidding? No, it is my desire." Then Isaac trembled and cried out in his terror, "O God in heaven, have compassion upon me. God of Abraham, have compassion upon me. If I have no father upon earth, be Thou my father!" But Abraham in a low voice said to himself, "O Lord in heaven, I thank Thee. After all it is better for him to believe that I am a monster, rather than that he should lose faith in Thee."

Blood is thick but
God is thicker

Musically, Katy Perry's "Unconditionally" does three things that, with my infantile grasp of music and its theory, I find both compelling and, in at least an elliptical way, articulable. They are:

1. The sparse opening, which consists memorably only of a squelch at the end of each bar;
2. The inclusion, halfway through each verse, of drums which, set against this sparse backdrop, resemble nothing so much as worship music; and
3. un-,kun-dish-'shun-ul

Four years ago, of Perry, I wrote:

[W]hat is really remarkable about Perry's music is that it, while in the middle of presenting all of these fantasies about becoming consumable, buries deep within itself the vicious pain that this process involves. Think, for instance, of her endless choruses, especially the one in California Gurls, that always end up with Perry basically wailing inarticulately. If it weren't for the massive amounts of work done in post-production, from structural shaping to lathered-on AutoTune, what we would have as the core of this song would be simply Katy Perry screaming.

That she had previously worked as a church singer was something, even then, of which I was aware. But it predated, I think, the thread in her work that would bear out that connection. That didn't really codify, at least as far as I can tell, until "Wide Awake." With "Unconditional" she has reached that strange status where she gets as much praise from Christian blogs as she does condemnation for being a product of MK Ultra. That 'wailing,' however, remains.

Which, among other things (including, incredibly importantly and in a way I can find no other space in which to claim, the bodily (read, vocal) pleasure of the song lies), is where the third presses itself as a point important to the diachronic reading of Perry. That she shifts the Dish out of view for the Shun might be a fun instant, but it is the way that, characterologically, we might classify as restraint that which, lacking such a situated abstraction, would certainly be nothing less than an embarrassing overzeal that (and again, hidden in the aside: one potential ending here is simply "makes this so enjoyable to scream/sing along to") impresses itself, moves this song beyond the pleasure of confirmation and into the pleasure of living time.

Here, then, is the second point, on which I will not linger. Like no other artist, Katy Perry is, for me, full of dread. From the instant that sexual performativity becomes the origin of the character, who nevertheless insists quietly on the worshipful backstory and normative identity, everything bleeds. That this is nothing more than the status quo, a story of the individual in the stead of the (material) universal, is, for a situated abstraction, only reinforcing.

Dread is, of course, a convenient lie.



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My two favorite songs by The Residents, probably, are both off Wormwood. One, unfortunately, is the studio version, while the other is on the live album; what's relevant here, however, is that neither of them are "KILL HIM!"



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Another, earlier contemner of the world, who said that he had been a king in Jerusalem, had touched on the heart of the problem, almost with these very words: The spirit whirls in all directions, and on its circuits the spirit returns. All revolutions go down in history, yet history does not fill up; the rivers of revolution return from whence they came, only to flow again.

The moment comes at the end of the second verse, the last before the song enters the chorus-bridge-chorus endgame; it's The three words, but it is Them in repetition. It is, more than anything, the (tellingly) unnecessary emphasis, the sudden obliteration of the possibility of cordial conversationalism. The lie is given in ostensible service of an intensification: "(I do it all because) I love you. I LOVE YOU."

The line itself is, in its performance and in its familiarity, out of joint in time (or, at least, tense); what is there is a phrase of having done, of having been. Did, there, can be sympathetic, or comical, because it allows the slightest distance in the midst of the outburst. Do, baldly, is a threat.

And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of.

Dread is, among other things, the way that Kierkegaard, in Fear & Trembling, indexes the specificity which marks, finally, Abraham, during the binding of Isaac, as the father of faith. It is, among other things, what separates him from the ordinary individual who, rather than paradoxically transcending the universal by achieving the individual through it, simply transcends the individual into the universal.

And so the lie; because what that emphatic repetition reveals is that Perry sings from the point of view of the knight of faith, Abraham.

There is, of course, the immediacy; where the bridge becomes what it was meant against, where "open up your heart and just let it begin" is not an exhortation but, suddenly, like "what's really on the inside," is tangible. That is -- it is a promise, in the figure of a knife.

To begin his text, Kierkegaard, pseudonymously, critiques his work, and then offers it; but before he gets into Reason, he offers a small fable, in which a man imagines possible iterations of the story of the binding of Isaac. This, too, then, begins with one imagining. What Kierkegaard accomplishes is not the vaunted toolbox, but the ellipse, the endless working around the issue that speaks it in a way unavailable to the declamation.

What Perry accomplishes, as she subsumes the knight of faith in point of view, is pain. What this means is an emptiness, a figuring of the shifting of signs and the laborious (re)production of bodies as affective; what it does is to fill space in which screaming & singing is done.

2013 in Shit: The Childhood of Jesus

The dialogue around The Childhood of Jesus so far insists on a few things; namely, allegory, socialism, and the enigma of the title. The middle term seems, from what I have read, to be a shorthand not for a mode of production but for some vague notion of what its incidental effects might entail; namely, hard labor, dietary restrictions, bureaucracy, and an emphasis on goodwill over desire. This is a dull usage of the term, and not worth dwelling on.

What seems to be absent from the discourse are the concrete and abstract cores of the novel; both respectively and irrespectively, language and the family. The former, of course, being, in the first instance, and excepting the materials like paper and ink and binding, what the novel is concretely made of, and the latter what that language, in the form of the novel, struggles with thematically; but from within the inverse holds true, as the concrete experience of constructing and navigating and maintaining a family is abstracted into struggles with language.

Family, in Childhood, is an idealist construction. The novel opens with Simón and David, recent immigrants into a land without history or memory, entering the town of Novilla with less than fluent Spanish and no money, recently come from a camp where they were taken after a shipwreck, on a quest to find David's mother. Simón insists that the two will know her on sight, and that he is merely the child's guardian (although he accepts the roles of uncle, padrillo and godfather throughout the course of the novel explicitly). They settle in to Novilla, with Simón finding work as a stevedore, and eventually find a woman who Simón insists is David's mother. Inés agrees that David is her son and takes charge of him. They have some tribulations and, ultimately, through the apparatus of the school in which David is enrolled, come into a sort of conflict with the state. They flee, finally constituting (with the anomalous and otherwise pointless appearance of a hitchhiker) an ideal nuclear family unit; a(n absent) father, a mother, two sons, and a potentially vicious Alsatian.

Simón is the focal character of the novel, with the narrative voice sticking very close to his own. So while the title in its misdirection suggests otherwise (at least on an initial reading), the story's primarily one not about childhood, but Simón's own embodiment of the absence of the father. He himself suggests throughout that it is maternity which is natural, necessary, and sufficient, all on transparently (due to the contrivances of novelistic circumstance) bullshit grounds, and all while pointedly refusing to accept the mantle of paternity that the other characters seem (due to the contrivances of novelistic circumstance) to be singularly-mindedly thrusting on him, whether directly or obliquely. Whether in the constant mistaken assumptions about the relationship between Simón and David or in the heated discussions of sexual difference and appetite, or conditions of labor, or the essential chairness of chairs, Childhood is always concerned with Simón's status as a particular kind of not-a-father.

In Novilla, it is quickly established that the residents primary affective register is one of goodwill, against which Simón clings to desire. This manifests in both direct interpersonal interaction, as when Simón considers his own sexual appetite (or lack thereof) in regards to every woman he encounters, and in broader, politicized strokes, as he argues for modernization of labor in the form of machines on the basis of a progressive faith in history. In an early discussion with Ana, a woman who works at the transitional housing complex that Simón and David first arrive at, Simón insists that his appetites are natural and good and deserve to be fed; Ana cuts through his bullshit about "Beefsteaks dripping in meat sauce" and calls him out on his desire to fuck her. There is a reading of this that allegorizes each participant into a mode of production, I'm sure, and I suspect that reading the novel at that level of abstraction could produce interesting objects. But it seems to me that it would necessarily miss an important aspect of what is going on here: that Simón is a gross old dude trying to wheedle his way into a younger woman's pants.

If family is the ideal abstraction that the text constantly advances toward, and unfatherhood is the particular dramatic means by which this is accomplished, the gross old dude aspect of the exchange is important for how it begins the process of decoupling the ideal from the good; Simón's grossness is as much about the family as a coercive institution as it is about his own personal character. The reading of the novel as utopian (or occasionally dystopian) is as bizarre, in the context of what actually happens in the story, as the readings that insist on its socialism, and almost certainly lean too heavily on the presumption that the it is still clever to note that utopia means "no place" rather than (or in addition to) “good place.” Given that this critique of the family remains a constant undercurrent throughout the novel, its near-total abstraction of the spatial through its use of language is almost certainly not pointing towards the goodness (or badness) of the place, but to the way that naturalized social structures overdetermine and usurp geography in the process of their own creation.

There is a moment in the novel when Simón, convinced by his comrade Eugenio, attends the first few minutes of a philosophy class. It reads, initially, as hypocritically unself-aware; Simón abandons a discussion on Platonist essences out of boredom, and the writing uncritically reflects his smugness in doing so. Up to this point the novel has paid minute attention to all the pseudophilosophical bullshit that Simón has been spewing; why, then, does it think it can trust the reader to suddenly side with Simón against philosophy in the context of a school?

The answer comes when Simón runs into Ana, for the final time, in the hallway outside the class. She informs him that she is rushing off to model for the Life Drawing class; he is immediately interested, and then, once he finds out the class is full, loses all interest in the school whatsoever. The real crime of talking about the essential qualities of chairness isn't that it's inherently any more boring than the monologues he constantly goes off on, it's that it provided him no opportunity to consolidate or purposefully abdicate power over a child or a woman. The philosophy teacher's unattractiveness to Simón is pointed out immediately; Simón's attraction to Ana is established. His brief spark of interest in the school is predicated solely on his seeing a way to use it for his own satiation: while it is never explicitly mentioned that Ana is doing nude modelling for the course, one imagines this is the case (and even if it is not, it is an opportunity for him to objectify her with no possible repercussions). When this is taken from him, he eats the school's spaghetti, complains about the lack of spices in the sauce, and returns home, never to think of the school again.

Simón's constant reduction of everything to his desire is predicated on his paternalistic denial of paternity; the figure of the absent father is invoked by him multiple times to argue on the essential abstraction of fatherhood and the attendant biological essentialism of motherhood, often through syllogisms as profound as “Inés is your mother. She is a true mother to you. She is your true mother.” That both are roles of social, not biological, reproduction is inconvenient to his need to predicate his actions on a fundamental absence. His inability to leverage the Institute's structure against that gap ends quickly in his total disinterest for the school. But when David, later, shows a similar disinterest in his own schooling — and for reasons that closely mirror Simón's own, in their inability to accommodate to his own perceived gap in the abstract structures of language and math — Simón immediately performs an about face, recognizing the way that the particular absence that he desires, to be a father both present and in absentia, can be made much more simple by the school's own task of social reproduction.

Most of the latter portion of the novel revolves around David's schooling. At first championed by Simón, it soon becomes a mixed experience, as he vacillates between the dictates of the school officials and his own love for David. Underlying both his contrary positions is his own desire, in his unfatherhood, to maintain full power over the child from an arbitrary distance. Again and again, Simón monologues both for and against the suggestions of the school, until the school enlists the arm of the state to attempt to enforce a division in the quasi-family that Simón has so painstakingly created, using precisely the gap he has insisted on for legitimacy; his own refusal to accept legal paternity. Rather than jeopardize the unstable edifice he has built toward his own valorization, of course, Simón flees with David and Inés to a new town, where he can continue to facilitate his own little autocracy.

Being a novel, the whole of this is mediated through language; and, being a Literary novel, this mediation itself forms a key object of reflection. Throughout the novel, most often in the form of David's expression of his hatred for the language, the reader is reminded that the sole language of this new land is Spanish. In David's occasional outbursts of "I hate Spanish," and in the praise that Simón receives on occasion for his increasing felicity with the language, the reader is also reminded that the novel's two main characters are not native speakers. The unspoken assumption, in a book read in English, is that the occasional marked forays outside of Spanish — when a word or phrase is being translated, for instance — occurs in the language of the text. It is, of course, not so simple.

In a brief scene, David shows off his singing with the opening stanza of Goethe's "Der Erlkönig" in the original German before insisting that he has been singing in English. Simón doesn't dispute this; when David asks what it means, Simón claims only that he does not know English. This seems to suggest that either the characters’ non-Spanish language is not English, against the readers probable assumption, or that it they are speaking English, only they do not recognize it as such, even enough to be convinced that German is called English.

Whether the characters are not speaking English or simply don't recognize that the language they are speaking is also the language they know as English, the text insists on translating the occasional words actually rendered in Spanish, almost universally, immediately into English. This question of where the language that constitutes the novel interfaces with the contents of the novel is suddenly shifted; while it hangs from the first moment this dialogue heavy novel tells us that we are reading it in translation, it takes on new epistemological weight with the revelation that the characters themselves are, in one way or another, alienated concretely from the words out of which they are formed.

The two scenes which embed this question of translation most effectively are, not incidentally, the same as two of the scenes in which Simón's desires are most effectively challenged; in the argument with Ana and in the last ditch attempt to reconcile David with the ordinary school.

In the first case, the foregrounding of translation is plausibly mimetic; Ana calls Simón's desires "Una tontería," and Simón has to ask what this means. It has been well established by this point that Simón's Spanish isn't great, and the text to this point has hewn closely to his perspective (despite a third person point of view), and so it makes representational sense that the dialogue is not purely objective, but filtered, at least to some extent, through Simón's subjectivity. As soon as we get the hint of this, however, he asks for clarification, and the argument effectively ends, the thread lost. Ana's reply of "Nonsense, rubbish," can be read not as an actual act of translation, then, but her using synonyms in the original Spanish. Regardless of the probable diegetic explanation, however, the reader engages with the text at the level of the text first, and for her what has happened is that a Spanish phrase has been translated to English.

As the act of (non)translation shifts the dialogue away from an attack on Simón's desire, it effectively signals the end of his attempts to argue his way into Ana's pants, as well. This, ultimately, fits perfectly with his goal, leaving him an object of desire over whom he can imply dominance without having to be put in a position where it might be challenged.

The second case has no mimetic reading that doesn't require serious work on the part of the reader. In the school that David is being kicked out of, he, in a last ditch effort to avoid the reformatory, is told to “[w]rite, Conviene que yo diga la verdad, I must tell the truth" on the blackboard. Instead, after having succeeded at following the rest of the teacher’s instructions, David writes “Yo soy la verdad, I am the truth." Both the Spanish and the English translations are within quotation marks, seemingly indicating that Señor Leon is translating as he speaks. But the mimetic reading of the conversation with Ana makes no sense here; Leon is a teacher instructing a student to write a specific phrase. He wouldn’t then say a synonymous phrase, much less translate it into whatever language Simón and David (presumably) share outside of the classroom. And the idea that David, whether he does this out of spiteful rebellion or because he has processing issues (this possibility is suggested throughout the book, but left vague), would in either case translate his own inaccurate rendering of the teacher's edict seems incredibly unlikely.

These acts of translation are the literary bed on which the claims of abstraction (and allegory) rest, even if they are unspoken. And, as the latter example makes clear, they do ultimately suggest a thematic rather than narrative consistency. But their placement, in two of the most narratively charged scenes in the novel, is not incidental.

As language is thematized within a context of structured language, it must necessarily double in on itself, creating an ironic distance. This distance, rather than provoke humor, mirrors the distance that Simón creates between himself and the fatherhood he refuses to completely occupy, in order that he can more completely control those with less access to power around him. In his lessons with David before the child goes to school, this is made clear: Simón asserts that he “can look at the page and move [his] lips and make up stories in [his] head, but that is not reading. For real reading [he has] to submit to what is written on the page. [He has] to give up [his] own fantasies.”

David’s response operates at the level of the symbolic. He begins “whipping furiously through the pages,” and, when pressed as to why, claims that,

“‘Because. Because if I don’t hurry a hole will open.’
‘Open up where?’
‘Between the pages.’”

These are not the actions of an allegorical Christ; they are the only recourse of a child denied even the symbolic, ersatz power provided by the traditional structured familial relationship allowed under capital. It is no grand, distant, theological abstraction that animates these actions, but a sensitivity to the methods that the adults around him use to structure his existence. When this is done through tightly controlled gaps in naturalized systemic roles, there is not much David can do; but in gaps in translation, he can revolt.

And in the end, as Simón takes them to a new land to reassert his autocratic desire, he can invite in the hitchhiker, and have a real family.

2013 in Shit: Love is the Law

I suspect much of it is particular to me, but Love is the Law is the second novel by Nick Mamatas that I've read (the other being Bullettime) and the second that I've largely bounced off. To be fair, I have felt the same way about all of his short fiction I've read as well. I dig his blog though. And his magazine.

Love is the Law is a short crime novel about a Marxist Crowleyite named Dawn, set in Long Island in the early stages of neoliberalism's being imported back to the colonial center.

As with Bullettime’s Erisian school shooting, and Arbeitskraft’s steampunk Engels, I figured there was enough there that I was more or less guaranteed to dig it on some level; and as with those two, I came away feeling like Mamatas is, for no reason I can pinpoint, a writer whose works I admire and don’t really care for.

I kind of don't want to write this? Because on the one hand I think Nick Mamatas seems real cool, and on the other I don't particularly give a shit about any of his work. And on the other other hand it seems really unlikely that he won't see this review at some point, which inclines me to both suppress and to enhance my dislike of the book, for conflicting reasons. The genre fiction community is basically just a populist form of marketing, and it's pretty hard to avoid engaging it exclusively in screeds or passive acceptance.

But hey, I do feel hella ambivalent about this book, and I don't really care if anyone reads it or doesn't, ever. So yeah. The book.

Dawn is a just-out-of-high school punk rock girl whose magickal mentor she finds dead. She decides to get to the bottom of it (the apparent suicide doesn't sit well when she realizes the gun was in his non-dominant hand), and in doing so explores the underbelly of the suburban island she lives in, from performance art metal shows in squats to hyperfactionalist Trotskyite perpetual graduate students. Diversions through discussions about things like how Long Island's urban planner designed the community as a reactionary stronghold are the books biggest strength, in my mind at least, tying Crowleyite magick with Marxist analysis together in their divergent focus on material conditions and symbolic effects; it gets, that is to say, how these ideological modes synthesise despite their opposing tendencies, and it is (should be?) cool as hell to see that, as someone who has, at various points, had a lot of interest in both things.

And on top of that, it is perfectly willing to refuse to localise these things, setting the novel in the rise of neoliberal capital because it is a novel about the rise of neoliberal capital, and referencing the fall of the Berlin Wall because it is an important event in the psychic lives of the characters, which are not some irreducible bourgeois interiority but a processual expression of various aspects of the mode of production. Do you get why I'm surprised I bounce off this yet? If you can figure it out let me know.

In terms of things I care for less but people generally seem to ascribe high value to, the narrative itself is tightly drawn and doesn't pull punches; this isn't the story of the ascendance of a future cop via vigilantism that so many crime novels suggest themselves to be, thankfully. Even when those digressions I mentioned above happen they are quick and to the point, conveying information economically and remaining firmly under the shadow of the plot as it moves on. And hey, while I'm at it, it is a pretty well written book at the sentence level too; like I've been saying, nearly everything about this book is solid to great, except that it inspired in me nothing but ambivalence. Place is drawn convincingly, as are characters, whether in broad strokes or incidental details. The novel's climax manages to juggle being high pulp, sociological commentary and narrative peak. It's impressive. I felt much being-impressed while reading.

I thought, after reading Bullettime, that I would have seen it as transformative had I read it, say, in late high school; after having an equally tepid reaction to Love is the Law I am less sure of that. Certainly some degree of my ambivalence has to do with, say, how influential The Illuminatus! Trilogy was on my reading habits, and how relatively rigid my critical practice is after so long. But much of what attracted me in the Roberts' epic, or, say, in Danielewski, was, I think, in their messiness of form, in how in many ways they were aggressively poorly written. There is a certain (spatial) dimensionality to the sorts of works of fiction that are poor examples of craft that I find lacking in writers like, say, Pynchon or Mamatas. There's worse company, I suppose.

Is that it? I think that's basically all.

Well, maybe there's one more thing. Like with Piñeda's Apology, I suspect that Love is the Law offers a particularly novelistic take on the cycles of violence mode; rather than viewing this through the lens of a series of biographical sketches, though, Law views it through a close attention to the class politics of an affluent island by way of certain fantastical modes of being. Its focus on things like the Berlin Wall and the rise of neoliberalism against the nihilistic or socialist end of capitalism makes it a significantly more global book, in focus if not in makeup, and that too is an element that is largely missing from the pseudo-genre I'm talking about this week; as with the Coens, most examples of cycles of violence narratives rely heavily on a strictly delineated (read: white) community in which the interlocking groups are set. There might be an irruption into this community that implies the existence of a world outside it, but that irruption is rarely more than an excuse to orient the narrative frame around this particular set of groups of folks. And unlike Apology, Love is the Law doesn't reduce women largely to objects. Which is pretty cool of it.

2013 in Shit: Stoker

Stoker is the sort of movie that, even as it slips out of memory, does so with a gleeful whisper. Its forgetability seems, as it goes, less like a consequence of its capableness as a film and more like an aspect written with occult significance into every frame, every expression (especially Kidman's), every absence of music. What would it even mean for a film to be unforgettable? I would suspect nothing but the worst, if one was.

If there was one way that Stoker played on the things that excite me, it was the use of the basement. I assume, by now, that the sort of folks to whom this blog is a thing know well enough that I am endlessly enthusiastic about houses in fiction, and particularly in film. Stoker's basement is a bit forward in its psychoanalytic connotations for my unguarded enthusiasm, unfortunately, but I still did sit in the theater with a grin whenever it showed up. As an id, I think, it is pretty whatever, and it can be hard not to map it in that way, reducing all the particularly filmic devices it uses to a representation of a theory of the mind. I struggle, too, to clarify to myself whether the scenes with the phone booth bolster or undermine that particular interpretation, shot through as they are with a similar cinematographic sensibility as regards, most especially, lighting and the dislocation of space. A weird sticking point, I’ll gladly admit, given how charitable I generally feel to anything Park Chan-Wook does (even if his Three...Extremes short is easily the weakest of the bunch), but there it is.

And regardless of the strong desire to reduce it to the cleanliness of metaphor, the technique is still present, the immanence still gorgeous. It's not (just or primarily) the head in the freezer; its the winding passage that leads to it, the impossible filmic space that the basement becomes through tracking and lighting and set design, removed so far visually from the clean sterility of the house which rests atop it that (and again the metaphor creeps) it reads more like dream sequence than continuity editing. But then, the dirty secret of psychoanalytic interpretations of films is always that, divested of the material spaces that create the conditions for the talking cure, reading through that frame is only ever a way of using certain inapt concepts to talk about structures of affect enacted by filmic techniques, and syllogistically applying them to the mind. And damned if I am not willing to go to bat for the particular structure of the It Was All A Dream narrative, if only on the grounds of undermining the sanctity of narrative and characterization, but there again is the impasse; the critical apparatus which makes available this mode of reading is so derived from a theory of mind that its use endlessly inclines toward those representational components most ready at hand, and so psychoanalytic film criticism moves toward the characterological study, and boooooooo to that.

Would it undermine my lazy attempts to break out of the claims of psychoanalysis in regards to this movie to say that the directorial style is clinical? I expect it would. In a strange way, I think the closest Park Chan-Wook movie to Stoker, rather than Thirst (his actual vampire movie), is I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK. Despite the tonal (Cyborg being a romantic comedy, sort of) and thematic differences, at least in terms of their major preoccupations, both Cyborg and Stoker are, more than any other of his films I've seen, strongly informed by women's desires through toxic forms of socialization, and shot through with a kind of mediative attendance that otherwise Park usually reserves for moments of intensity. Taken as an isolated statement, this is pretty fucking gross, and there are certainly plenty of gross things about the movies that Park has directed.

Similar, too, are there use of artificial lighting with a predominance of white in the frame (also used in the hospital scenes of Thirst, admittedly) to convey an emptiness and focus, unlike, say, J.S.A.'s muddy browns, or Oldboy's oppressive darkness shot through with moments of claustrophobic neon palette, or even Lady Vengeance's bright, empty whites that functionally predated this current style of Park's but which are used to suggest, along with that film's very peculiar editing, a more immediate abstraction of form. This is, of course, dependent on the scene, but it might be interesting to see just how much the basement shots echo J.S.A., a movie that I think is widely forgotten from Park's ouevre. Not that I've seen it in the last, like, seven? years though.

Where in Cyborg this lighting and framing was made ostensible by the setting, though, in Stoker it seems more a conscious choice of thematic framing; it might be weird (and deeply misleading) to say, too, that Stoker is the most Sophia Coppolaesque of all of Park's films, but I think it isn't strictly inaccurate. That the cinematic shorthand for the ennui of wealth is deployed to Stoker's particular ends is also, well, very weird, and beautiful, and unsettling, and there is some overlap with the Fargoesque "cycles of violence" mode as well.

There are two scenes in particular; the near-rape in the snow and the scene where the camera rotates steadily through the party. The former is, basically, Coen Brothers, validated in that (final?) shot of India holding a hunting rifle into the camera and ostensibly at a cop, the site of violence that shifts from one atomized social to another through an act of communicative intimate violence. The latter is Hitchcock all wrong, marking the scene of unseeability with an eye (or, rather, the scene of unhearability with an ear) to function as the site of trauma that doubles as the act of filmmaking. This is the basic dialectic, in reverse, of American film, probably, sweeping statements are fun, who cares; the film as sight of trauma versus the film as connective tissue in the social body of violence. Park, being the director of the revenge trilogy, has an obvious inclination toward the latter mode, but, bizarrely, the relative strength of this movie in particular are almost exclusively held by those aspects which incline more toward the former (including, goddammit, and maybe even justifying, god fucking dammit, the basement as id, goddammit). That is, Stoker is more Hitchcock than Coen, even as Park is a more Coenesque director than Hitchcockian, at least in terms of social dynamics, and somehow this resolves into an, if not the, greatest strength of a movie that is all around pretty strong.

Of course, I've completely neglected to follow up on the claim that Stoker moves along the axis of female desire in a toxic sociality, which is, much more than the aesthetics, the most interesting thing about this movie. It does so in ways that are strange and estranging, relying on both difficult and too-easy formal cliché; on the one hand, Kidman's performance is incredible, on the other she is clearly often an instance of the monstrous feminine that India is both to become and overcome. What Park's aesthetic decoupling from a cycle of violence filmmaking style does is basically just to amplify the dissonance of this characterization/character existence that is present in each of the film's people, with Kidman only being the most egregious example; by framing the film not as connective body but as itself the site of violence or trauma as in Hitchcock, it intensifies its own forms of (gendered) violence, making them subject rather than an object (in the sense of the subjectivity, I mean). That this violence is situated within a social that is marked as wealthy, incest-driven and monstrous (per the title) is just to say that the movie itself is positioned as these things, and any attempt to escape or distinguish itself from them is at best a bid for emancipation, at worth a bad faith manipulation. For all its beauty it is often a hard film to watch, at least for me, even as India's becoming-monstrous is incredibly exciting in its own way. And I think that's how it should be.

2013 in Shit: Apology

I feel bad for how little interest I felt in reading Jon Piñeda's Apology: A Novel; some of my ambivalence, I suspect, has to do with how much I disliked the reader of the audiobook. Did I mention I listened to a number of the books I'll be reviewing? Because I definitely did, and that's kind of weird to me. I kind of never listened to an audiobook until I discovered Librivox last year, which is a great resource, especially if you want to hear Fritz Leiber's The Big Time read fantastically well or get into William Hope Hodgson or M.R. James. I still feel weird about listening to books, but hey, who cares.

I mention this because it is hard to tell where my strongest complaint against the novel lies, and there's still enough of an academic in me that I am loathe to ignore the ways in which an adaptation mediates my reception of a text. Because, of all things, Apology bothered me most in that critical term which relies most heavily on the metaphorical hearing of a text; that is, the voice (or more specifically the tone).

Apology follows a migrant worker named Exequiel who has come to a town to stay with his brother, whose son Mario accidentally gives a young girl serious brain damage. Exequiel takes the fall and is imprisoned for fifteen years, while Mario grows up to be a brain surgeon. The bulk of the novel consists of digressions through the histories of the Guzman and Serafino families (the latter being the family whose daughter was hurt) and the people that surrounded them.

It’s a pretty phenomenal structure for a novel, and the lives it delves into are all interesting. This is, unfortunately, about as deep into it as I can get, given how little I remember, but I do kind of hope I know someone who has read it so that I can hear why I ought to give it a second chance.

The most egregious example of my problem with the book's tone was in its use of metaphor; every time one was used it was presented with so much self-righteous satisfaction that I couldn't help but cringe. Another issue with audiobooks is that it is much harder to find examples, so this is going to have to be largely on faith, and it is entirely possible that it is an artefact of the audiobook reader's very arch tone throughout, but I suspect that the performance only exacerbated an already existing problem. There is, if I recall correctly, a moment when someone or something is described as “like a peacock;” on top of the already uninteresting comparison, the explanation of the likeness is delivered in such a way as to belabour a point that next to nothing about the subject itself. And at the same time, it comes across in a way that leads you to believe that This Is It, this is the description you’ve been waiting for this whole time. Except that it’s not and it’s just really off putting.

One of the reasons that I wish I hadn’t run up against the tone of the novel so hard as to make it nearly impossible for me to pay attention to it in a deeper way is that I suspect that Apology is an incredible example of how the “cycles of violence” thematic genre (which I am running into the ground on this very special week) translates from film to novel. Prior to this I have only really considered it in terms of film, which is partially why I identify it so closely with the Coen Brothers; it obviously predates them and is practiced both by more prominent and more adept filmmakers, but I personally started thinking about it in relation to my resistance to their films, and the way that other films (most especially Let The Right One In) do the same things that they do without quite so much cop fetishization. Apology has all the characteristics of this quasi-genre (excepting the overwhelming whiteness, of course, which is welcome) down to the regrettable gendered focus on the men as subjects and the women as objects.

The premise of the novel makes this (where “this” means both the gendered implication in and the general posited-genre of inquiry) incredibly clear, of course; the whole thing takes off from a point of unspeakable violence at one of the few osmotic points in a relatively stratified social situation. The whole novel unravels, in one sense, as an investigation into the lived worlds of the people who are closest to this moment, and how it affects them both going forward and looking backward. And both because of and in relation to that moment, there is a certain clarity cast on all the ways that these moments of social transgression are brought about through violent actions. Sometimes by the character, and other times upon, and sometimes in the form of direct physical violence and others in more indirect modes like forgetting and ostracizing and ignoring. It’s Apology’s ability to focus on the ways in which this structuring incident moves against time, rather than exclusively forward through it, that makes the way it works so potentially interesting.

I (to make a brief detour) don’t care overly much for those arguments about literary fiction as a genre, if only because they seem mostly to be really boring. But an early scene in Apology sees Exequiel masturbating at his work site before work starts, and that shit is seriously fucking dull. It is, of course, done in a Very Literary way, and if I could just not have to deal with Very Literary Masturbation Scenes anymore I would be pretty happy with that.

And, of course, the way that the novel is structured almost exclusively through the points of view of the male characters feeds into this (where "this" is both High Literary and potentially interesting in relation to the other examples of this "genre"), even as it closes off interesting possibilities. I think? Maybe it’s just gross.

Another part of the reason that I wish I had liked Apology more than I was able is because it is clearly a novel about class, even as it refuses to hector the reader about that. And more than that, it’s about the intersection of the state, in the form of the legal and educational systems, with class, which is determined at least in part by race, nationality and generation. These are all things that tend to be absented from the “cycles of violence” narratives, and instead subsumed into the aesthetic move from the landscape mode to the portrait mode. Apology’s aesthetics, on the other hand, are mostly just High Literary self-righteousness, which exists somewhere between the Realist and the Modernist modes, which is to say between the Lukácsian exploration of objective systems and the Joyceian totalization of interiority. Which is to say that it is the completion of the Coensian movement rather than its enacting, and which is also (also also) to say that it’s kind of a muddled mess. In terms of the ideology its aesthetics presents, I mean. Which really isn’t a problem except insofar as it is realized as a tendency to, say, make really awful metaphors seem like they are meant to be incredibly deep expressions of the human condition, or something.

But it also reveals the ways in which the Cycles of Violence films movement from landscape to portraiture can be roughly mapped to the distinction between literary realism and modernist expressionism, or the exploration of objective systems to interiority. Hopefully at some point I will find the time to reread this novel and figure out if it actually offers a way through this, whether through its being better than I experienced it or through its failure to be “good.” At the moment I can only experience it, through memory, as a sort of vague set of potential mired in an overwhelmingly righteous tone, which kind of sucks.

2013 in Shit: Carrie

Carrie was the sort of movie that saw me catching myself, repeatedly, laughing at my own apophenia. It is the sort of film that begs to be read in what I generally refer to using the shorthand of the Coen Brothers as exemplars, that particular American "cycles of violence" genre that Let the Right One In did better than anything else I am aware of, but which each Coen Brothers film pushes. As a genre, the identifying tropes usually run as so: disparate social subjects grouped with tenuous connection to each other; a tendency to be exclusively interested in the present (diegetically speaking) above all else; relatively complex, but still primarily causal, character relations, primarily viewed through the spread of violence from one group (often institutional, like a police force or an elementary school) that resolves in an individual whose goal is to demystify these complex chains by pinning them to an individual subject (which is why the Coens do so love cops); relatedly, a broad visual arc beginning with a sort of landscape-oriented cinematography and transitioning slowly (although often with a certain ecstatic instant marking the total transition, as in the Fargo woodchipper scene) to portraiture.

If Carrie is this sort of movie, it is one that lacks a Frances McDormand or a Tommy Lee Jones. It's a cycles of violence movie with neither center nor sublation, an impossible knot with no sword at hand. Or maybe it's more a Solomon, in keeping with the new introductory scene (compared to de Palma's version, at least; I haven't read King's); all sides are equally valid, everyone is deeply fucked with and even more deeply fucked up, so the infant has to meet the scissors, face first.

When I say that Carrie is a really enjoyable movie I don't mean that it doesn't engage in some deeply fucked up shit; only that it moves well to the beat it establishes, and knows things like when Julianne Moore can do Piper Laurie and when she's better off doing her own thing, or that the new kid shouldn't even try to do a Travolta, or how to bring personal communications technology in without relying too heavily on the sorts of thematics that would make it useless. And it is utterly confident that you won't give the slightest fuck about its fantastical aspects, to the point where a screamed infodump is a weirdly pleasant little bizarre alienating effect. It is, unfortunately, less confident in where Spacek ends and Moretz begins; she does a good job (and, given that she played Abby in Let Me In, seems destined to be the leading lady of every "not quite a 'cycles of violence'" film, which are, anyway, much better than those which they aren't) and the increased attention to her powers (and also to how much she enjoys them) feels right for this actress, but otherwise it's a bit second-order.

I'm also not saying that the remake soft sells any of the original film's misanthropy; a Carrie film in which anyone is even remotely sympathetic would, I suspect, be a deeply shitty Carrie film. It is a story in which really shitty things happen to people, and their reactions are uniformly a mixture of obscured power dynamics and self-aggrandizement, dialed up just one or two notches too high. It's all "be careful for what you wish" fulfillment, and Peirce's rectifying of de Palma's lack of ability to show just how cruelly pleasant being able to enter into that dynamic is for Carrie is maybe the single most important revision that this version offers. I seem to recall that some reviewers were less than pleased with the way Carrie orchestrates (one of them even compared it to a superhero movie, as I recall, which is exciting) the deaths at prom rather than their being indiscriminate outbursts of rage, to which I say, ha. As though the way that de Palma’s camera overwhelmed that scene had nothing to do with the perception and was only style for style’s sake? Why even learn to pull movies apart if you refuse to put them back together, I mean honestly. As though de Palma’s hyper-stylistic representation of the prom was anything but a very well choreographed, superhero-like sadism to begin with. And while I admit that I prefer that sadism done with unnecessary split screens and quickening circle tracking shots, I can’t say I was at all disappointed that Peirce finally gave that sadism to Carrie to enjoy, after she’d been denied it for so long.

I do mean, on some level, that it is a much less striking film than de Palma's, and not just because there's no awkward splitscreen that somehow manages to be totally out of place and perfectly resonant; the whole thing is paced to the story (at least insofar as the story is the simmering destruction of each character with a speaking role) instead of the mood or the themes, and so its brisk, well-lit falling and rising move in a cinematic idiom that is much more similar to the thriller or the blockbuster than the pseudo-arthouse horror. Pleasant doesn't (necessarily) mean (aesthetically) toothless, but, yeah, there's some closeness there.

Which is to say that this is a movie whose misanthropy is presented in a slick, not-too-stylized fashion, which I suspect is a great crime to many but seemed to me perfectly coherent and productive of a reimagining of the core story which, while continuing to deny the obvious moralizing core metaphor (menstruation is scary), manages to provoke certain questions of violence and desire and their entanglement in calcified institutions. Or, rather, to embed them in the movement of a representation that orients itself, both in terms of marketing and clearly in terms of construction, as the iteration of an earlier representation, which itself had little concern for the ways that violence moves through communities but offered that possibility, and which this movie brought slightly more to the surface.