Hillhouse / Blye Manor: Mnemics, Traumatics, Therapeutics, and Haunted Attics

Mnemics (memory); Traumatics (injury); Therapeutics (therapy);  Haunted attics (haunted attics).

The first three (memory, injury, and therapy) first:

For Freud, a certain kind of forgetting is pathological; For Nietzsche, a certain kind of remembering.

For Freud, repression is an instance of forgetting that disrupts bodily processes; a dematerialization that leads to dystonic symptoms.

In Studies On Hysteria he writes

"intentional repression is...the basis for the conversion...total or partial, of the sum of excitation. The sum of excitation, being cut off from psychical association, finds its way all the more easily along the wrong path to a somatic innervation...the repressed idea takes its revenge...by becoming pathogenic" (pg. 102).

"the repressed idea would persist as a memory trace that is weak (has little intensity), while the affect that is torn from it would be used for a somatic innervation (that is, the excitation is 'converted'). It would seem, then, that it is precisely through its repression that the idea becomes the cause of morbid symptoms...becomes pathogenic" (pg. 251).

In Freudian psychoanalysis, the main cause of illness is when material and its forces are separated from it’s a/effects such as when a stimuli (Id, instinct, drive, thought, affect, feeling etc.) is denied by the 'subject' (superego censors the ego, ego censors the Id, Id overwhelms the ego or overstimulates the body, ego and superego conflict, etc.) and therefore becomes detached, decontextualized, displaced, and transformed into a symptom (the inside is projected outside, into an object, as in the bodily appendages in the hysteria case of Anna O., or the horse in the obsessional neurosis case of little Hans, a foot the object of displaced sexual fixation for the fetishist, etc.). 

Following this line of thinking, that which is repressed is often that which is traumatic. The 'material-> force->a/effect' diagram would not be interrupted if not for its implications. As Wilfred Bion has shown, one destroys his or her associative links between body sensations, affects, feelings, and ideas, because the anticipated outcome of the possible associative chain is highly disturbing, or possibly dangerous (for those without good impulse control: 'anger = violence, so to prevent violence, I will eject anger, leading to schizophrenia). 

We've been trained by decades of unrelenting humanist social worker cultural influence to think that trauma is an instance of a toxic external stimuli overwhelming or damaging a subject, but for Freud what constitutes trauma is not necessarily an external threat, but rather whatever is found overstimulating and intolerable arising from 'inside' and thereby ejected, blocked, etc. In this sense, trauma is an intense affect unable to be contained by the psychic apparatus. An overhwelming stimulus - whether form inside or out - unable to be processed and used by the 'inside' (relatively speaking) system. In all cases, trauma is libidinal excess - and even a lack, or a negative, such as a death, is an excess of absence. 

In other words, thinking and feeling is traumatic to the body. 

About two decades after his exploration of hysteria, this model of thought is put to use by Freud in Mourning and Melancholia to explore not hysteria, but what would now be called (somewhat incorrectly) depression. In experience-near language: if something makes me sad such as a loved one dying, and for whatever reason (perhaps my father told me to be a man, perhaps I feel that if I begin to cry I may never stop, etc.) I am not able to access and utilize my sadness and convert it into appropriate thought or action such as talking about sadness, ritualization, or crying, then sadness and the behavior or thought it intends to trigger become disconnected, and with this disconnection, melancholic affects become free-floating, freed up to attach to other thoughts, affects, and stimuli. Perhaps now something that I previously found cheerful now saddens me in a way not proportionate to the object, or perhaps I know feel a general sense of sadness without knowing why. 

When material forces and e/affects are disconnected, and these kinds of 'pathological' rhythms are enforced, or when one experiences a trauma one is unconsciously attempting to process and master after the fact, one is prone to compulsively repeat the same conflicts. When one has no insight into what impersonal forces operate their body like a meat puppet, and one follows crystalized paths, one repeats the same, creates the same, etc. Put differently, when one cannot remember certain aspects of the past, and at the same time cannot forget certain aspects of the past (see Nolan's Memento, for example), one is certainly doomed to repeat the past forever; one's future is just the past. This is what Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle refers to as 'the repetition compulsion.' 

This is in part why a (misused and misunderstood) goal of psychoanalysis is 'to make conscious what is unconscious,' with its method being to use language to connect instinct, impulse, affect, and thought. 

Nietzsche, on the other hand, champions the position that to want to 'make more consciousness' is itself sickly and neurotic, and that one should aim to become less conscious, more intoxicated, and more in touch with instincts and impulses. In this sense, Nietzsche explicitly encourages a kind of 'forgetfulness' as both a way to return to instinct, but also remedy resentfulness. 

The small, serious, resentful man worries too much about history, both personal and collective. He carries the weight of burdens that aren't his to bear - Christ's cross, a people's national history and its forced allegiance, the state's humanist spooks, etc. - and he feels obligated to bear them to the ugly end; to be guilty for a sin - cultural or theological -  he did not commit, to be loyal to an abstract people composed of ancestors he never knew nor agreed with, to follow totems and taboos that don't serve him, etc. The small, sickly, serious man remembers all who have wronged him, or  all those who wronged the people and places he's supposed to be loyal to, and he does not let these memories go, refuses to move on. He cannot forget. He feels eternally owed payment that is lost to time. The small, sickly, serious man is stuck in the past and thus he can neither experience the present nor forge the future. 

To synthesize Nietzsche and Freud, Freud argues in Civilization and its Discontents that some repression of instincts and impulses is healthy to function in our everyday life, and additionally he has the concept of primal repression, where things that were never meant to be conscious are never recorded to begin with - they are repressed from the start. Both are a healthy repression, a healthy Nietzschean forgetting. I tell some of my patients 'we probably don't want or need to remember early memories of feeling in extreme danger, or even the many benign experiences that don't stay with us...' 

Finally, as with Nietzsche, for Freud, part of the healing process of analysis is a forgetting that is not sickly like repression that opens up space for new thoughts and feelings, new 'object relations.' That is, old ossified unconscious cognitive, thought economizing tools - internal representations, predictive models constructed from aggregated experiences of personal history, etc., such as a 'cold mother' or 'harsh father' -  these are broken down (analyzed), associated to new 'objects' (the analyst) and their associative networks loosened up. Instead of 'when A, then B, then C' the patient now has recourse to 'when A, perhaps B, C, D, or E, depending on X, Y, Z,' etc. Thoughts, affects, and behavior matrices are now complexified. In other words, stereotyping models are less rigid, more able to dynamically map the real, present moments (neurosis is after all a valuation of ghosts of the past over traces of the present). 

To forget in a Nietzschean sense, to remember in a Freudian, and then forget and remember anew in both senses, are two sides of the same therapeutic coin.  We must reconnect with our repressed past, but also forget that which we obsess over, that which we mourn, that which does not aid us. 

Now - Haunted attics:

In the Sublime Object of Ideology, Zizek argues that Marx discovered the Freudian symptom in that he, as I described above regarding Freud, shows that Capitalism through its mediating function of capital, exchange value, etc., disconnects the material from its effect/affect, thereby dematerializing the world, throwing things into disarray. Mark Fisher, who Zizek refers to as his friend (Ziz also writes a nice blurb on the back of Fisher's Capitalist Realism),  reimagines Derrida's hauntology (which was in reference to Marx and Engels famous line about the specter of Capitalism), while Derrida's wife - a psychoanalyst - likens Derrida's hauntology to psychoanalysis in that the analyst excavates the analysand's past, dredges up old memories, phenomenon that linger long past the body that prompted it, i.e. ghosts.  

This all a lot to say that Psychoanalysis and Marxism align in their materialist conceptualization of pathology. In this limited sense, psychoanalysis is a 'hauntology.' Following this, in a moment of Marxian structuralism, 'Haunt' etymologically breaks down into 'hant' or 'home;' Ghost, into geist, or spirit / soul. This means that the material house is the substructure or base material for the superstructure that is the spirit. To this effect, if a good ghost story has ever demonstrated anything it is that reality is much scarier than any ghost story. As several characters recount in Haunting of Hill House, 'a house is like a body, the pipes are veins, this room a heart, that one a stomach, etc...' 

Not unlike The Shining - which Haunting of Blye / Hill clearly borrows much of its conceptualization of ghosts from - The Haunting of Hill House and The Haunting of Blye Manor are stories about real trauma, human stories, family dramas that use 'ghosts' to  communicate real but inarticulate, inexpressible horror (as horror is apt to do). Hill House is the better written of the series, but Blye Manor, in its simplicity, is a better account of the healing process of remembering and forgetting. 

Without belaboring the point and giving too much away, in Blye Manor traumatic events of the past beget the telling of traumatic historical narratives, narratives which are told and retold, each time becoming more traumatic as the teller attempts to split off or deny (and denial is an explicit theme of the show) the trauma by covering up the negative emotions or events with wishful, overly-idealized, fantasies and dreams. Eventually some of the ghosts become aware - conscious - of their existence as a ghost through repeating the same memories until they desire a new outcome, a new point of growth for their narrative arc. At the same time, we the viewer learn of a ghost so mired in negation, and resentment, that it has completely forgotten its own narrative - why it haunts - and reverted to a brute mechanistic loop; that is, the ghost quite literally follows the same exact track, the same path, every night, each time fading away more and more from its original event that trapped it in the ghostly world

That is, some ghosts remember their trauma so that they may forget and move on, while others forget and continue to repress their trauma so that they compulsively repeat. What eventually heals the resentful ghost (thereby freeing all the other ghosts in the house) is when someone - a survivor of the ghastly house -  is able to tell a new story about the haunted house, a story that turns the 'ghost story' into a 'love story.' This mirrors one of the scientific understandings of contemporary psychotherapy, that retelling a story - a narrative of the self - over and over in therapy to another who listens restructures the narrative and provides a healthy distance from the original traumatic events via language. That is, through therapy one gradually and implicitly learns to tell a neutral, then good story through internalizing the therapist, where one could previously only tell a bad story. 

As a final caveat: the patients staying at the mental ward I work at would stay up late, playing with Ouija boards, claiming they saw or heard ghosts, say things move on their own, etc. Meanwhile, they're bones were hollowing out, their heart rates dangerously low, their skin torn up by razor blades, their throats eroded from vomiting, etc. Despite my bosses wish to take away the Ouija, I did not intervene. This was an escape for them, and a somewhat healthy one. This did not stop me, however, from quietly thinking 'the real horror is not the ghost, but what these people have been through, what traumas they've been subjected to, and the significance of their mental anguish.

The real horror is quite mundane...

-------------------------

(for a related blogpost, see my exploration of hauntology and ghosts here)

Fragments and Essays on Representation in Film

Index: Fight Club /  Taxi Driver / Ghost in the Shell / Critique? 

A collection of Guattarian thoughts on representation as it appears in different forms in film presented in installments. 

1: the fighting in Fight Club is not representational; 2: unwoke Taxi Driver is more representational of underrepresented folks than woke Marvel films; 3: Film has never been a game of representing people, but precisely of illustrating the gap between the thing and and its representation; 4: Drawing from Shaviro's The Cinematic Body (1993), film is most interestingly conceptualized as affective and non-representational.

Installment 1...

1: FIGHT CLUB

1a: Introduction 

I've asserted that David Fincher's Fight Club (1999) is not a critique; not of capitalism, masculinity, homophobia, whatever, etc., - its about fighting, and that's about it. 

This is a position that claims Fight Club is not 'metaphorical' or 'symbolic' which at a glance appears naïve and counter intuitive. 

Though we must concede that of course a film as seemingly rich in memetic content as Fight Club must necessarily make use of symbolism and metaphor to convey some 'deeper meaning' other than superficial violence, we must importantly add that the presence of metaphor and symbolism does not necessitate that the violence, the fighting, the bodies, etc., in the film are reduced or flattened onto or into a metaphorical / symbolic register. 

In other words, fighting expressed in a symbolic register - as what other way is there to express fighting, especially when expressing it on film? - is not equivalent to symbolic material expressed through or as fighting. 

In fact, when one considers the narrative arc of the film, one sees that the fighting is anything but symbolic / metaphoric. 

More generally, we must also assert that when the medium of film is explored without appeal to 'social critique' and 'metaphor/symbolism,' we have more fun; we engage less in redundant anthropomorphic conceptions of film and society and instead learn more about the actual world - metaphysics (the Outside) and metapsychology (the Outside folded in), i.e. the threshold where the inhuman transforms into the human, and where the limits of human understanding into its own inhuman origins are experienced.

1b: Civilization 

In the cult classic film Fight Club, Edward Norton's character is fed up with the Sisyphean, quotidian drone; he's psycho-ideologically beat down - foreshadowing his physical beatdowns to come - by his middle class status quo bureaucratic office job and the arbitrary oppressive rule-set and lifestyle that comes with it. 

When we consider how this middle class office job meme by association and definition falls smack dab in the middle of the civilization bell curve - to the left of the curve being abject poverty, to the right excessive wealth (its called 'middle' class for a reason) - this amounts to saying that Norton's character is in large fed up with  civilization itself. 

Fight Club is then a rejection of civilization, and therefore signification, and therefore oedipialization, and therefore symbolism / metaphor.

In his Hobbesian-Rousseauean-flavored text Civilization and its Discontents and his Nietzschean-flavored text Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego Freud argues that civilization is the partial -renunciation and mostly-sublimation of violent and sexual impulses.

In Group Psychology Freud writes

“We have only to think of the troop of women…all...enthusiastically in love...who crowd round a singer...after his performance. It would certainly be easy for each of them to be jealous of the rest; but, in the face of their numbers and the consequent impossibility of their reaching the aim of their love, they renounce it, and, instead of pulling out one another's hair, they act as a united group, do homage to the hero of the occasion with their common actions, and would probably be glad to have a share of his flowing locks. Originally rivals, they have succeeded in identifying themselves with one another by means of a similar love for the same object. When, as is usual, an instinctual situation is capable of various outcomes, we shall not be surprised that the actual outcome is one which brings with it the possibility of a certain amount of satisfaction, whereas some other outcome, in itself more obvious, is passed over because the circumstances of life prevent its leading to any such satisfaction”

People who would otherwise fight for what they want tend to opt out of a possible fight by identifying with each other and a common goal, even if it means sacrificing their actual or full desire for something lesser, in order to extend the enjoyment extracted from the object or event. 

In other words, the group would 'choose' (submit to impersonal unconscious survival incentives is more accurate) to stay together and receive merely a portion of the pie rather than fight one another at the gamble of having all the pie or none of the pie (again, the 'middle' of the bell curve - "outcome which brings possibility of satisfaction" - wins out against the left, those who fight at high risk and lose, and the right, those who fight at high risk and win). 

As Hobbes’ banality goes, ‘the state of nature is nasty, brutish, and short; a war of all against all' where anxiety is excessive and paranoia is the rule. 

In this fictional state of nature, one may pursue his or her desire, and take what he or she wants – the whole pie - but one would always sleep with one eye open, forever wondering if someone stronger would not come along and take the pie from him as he himself had done to others (might is right mentality - or fighting - is not a fertile milieu for the growth of a population, but the 'middle' of the curve - constancy, consistency, etc., - is). 

Thus, as the myth goes, humans entered into the social contract (unconsciously guided by impersonal incentives to extend enjoyment extracted from resources on the one hand and minimize high risk of pain or death on the other) where they sacrificed some aspects of life - instinctual desire, the possibility of having everything they could acquire by their own power at the risk of death - for the feeling of safety and the reduction of tension more viable to population growth [some of this was taken from another essay of mine here]. 

Tl;dr: life is longer for all of us if we don't fight each other all the time. 

This is all a lot to say  'Civilization is the act of replacing disorganized, small-scale, short-time-preference in-fighting with organized, large-scale, long-time-preference fighting that economizes and outsources violence.' 

1c: Signification 

Civilization is signification.

Quoting some author, Freud once said - 'civilization began when man hurled an insult instead of a spear.' 

Language (long time preference) over action (short time preference).

For Freud and psychoanalysis, metaphor and symbolism - sublimations of instincts and impulses - are necessarily signs of linguistic development and therefore Oedipal level development (as opposed to pre-oedipal, i.e., schizophrenic), and therefore castration (as opposed to psychosis or hysteria).

As Deleuze and Guattari have pointed out when explicating Freud in order to critique him, schzios do not use language the same way neurotics do. 

They use language diagrammatically - to induce action, to produce affect; they operate 'on the level of word as thing' (intensity) as opposed to 'the level of word as sign' (representation). 

The schizophrenic is in contact with 'the real' in that, to use Lacan's language, their 'signifying chain has broken down' (or never been constructed to begin with...), and thus they experience states of raw (or nearly raw) qualitative intensities. 

A schizo hears a word and plays with the word in its mouth like its a handful of rock candy - 'Connecticut... connect-I-cut...;' experiences it as a grouping of phonemes, the physical feeling in the throat, the vibrations in the larynx, the rumble of air in the chest, or an image - a cascade of non-relenting flashing images of solar anuses. 

For psychotics language is a bodily experience, a physical affair.

The schizo is a body experiencing itself in waves of intensities.

Fight Club is a film composed mainly of sublimated, neurotic bodies - middleclass pencil pushers speaking and signing 'impotent' language - becoming violent bodies acting on other violent bodies, but as it is a film, the narrative arc or vector of change  (for Freud regression, Lacan a breakdown, etc., whereas Guattari and Land reject these simple models of temporality that from the start beg the question) from the symbolic/metaphorical register to the 'becoming-real' register can only be depicted in symbolic/metaphorical terms. 

Put generally, a film cannot capture the real other than in terms of everything and anything other than the real. 

Similarly, in A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari remark that language is a unescapable, necessary evil that is never completely overcome, but only used to further deterritorialization (see more here).

To this effect, Norton's character is sick of sublimating and repressing his violent and sexual instincts as civilization requires, and gives into acting on them, but does so in a schizophrenic or 'split-off' (schized) way, through an alternative identity of Tyler Durden (the clinical origins of schizophrenia - a breakdown of the signifying chain, an attack on links, as violent and sexual instincts are found too intolerable to the ego and superego, and thus are split off and assigned another identity to give distance to the intolerable feelings).

Interestingly, where things get out of hand is when this 'regression' from neurosis to acting impulse turns into what it was originally attempting to escape; when the meaningless, loosely organized, small-scale, short-time-preference in-fighting violence of the Fight Club takes on a global-spanning, cult-like, terrorist level place in the world, and thus lapses into organized, large-scale, long-time-preference fighting that outsources violence. 

As we established earlier,  'Civilization is the act of replacing disorganized, small-scale, short-time-preference in-fighting with organized, large-scale, long-time-preference fighting that minimizes and outsources violence.' 

The 'small-scale' is important here. 

Freud makes the mistake (likely inherited from Hobbes) in Civ. and its Disc. of making war the bad guy (understandable as he has WWII on his mind, not to mention his backyard), but as many theorists understood better than Freud (Nietzsche, Bataille, Deleuze and Guattari, Land, Myself), War, or large scale organized group violence, is very much specific to human civilization.

That is, what sets civilization apart from non-civilization is how violent fighting is extinguished and economized.

The Fight Club turns into war, turns into civ; war against the machine turns into a new state war machine; anicivilization into a new kind of civilization; local anarchy into global state terrorism. 

As Deleuze and Guattari warn us, a schizo line of flight can re-territorialized as misguided, political violence.  

1d: Conclusion

The film is about escaping the quotidian hell of middle class life, a film about  'exiting language,' to use a Guattarian adage, to return to a pre-verbal reality of fighting and fucking, one that warns of exiting society or language too quickly as to return to it in an even sicklier way.  

But of course, the only way to display a change from representation to non representation is through action, or representation; fighting and fucking can only be represented via the medium of film, other wise it would not be a film  - other wise you just would just be actually fighting!

***

The comparison between Taxi Driver and Marvel films is from the start a terribly boring and unfair comparison. This is why my goal is not to compare the content or intent of two films as much as it is to use the categorically strange comparison as a vehicle for discussing representation in a way consistent with installment 1. 

Installment 2...

2: TAXI DRIVER

2a: Introduction

I claim Scorsese's 1972 film Taxi Driver is more 'woke' - whatever that word means - than the contemporary pandering film cottage industry brands such as Marvel. 

Put differently, intending to depict a progressive ethos can undermine the desired effect, while intending to produce a film devoid of any specific progressive ethos can prove to be more effective at displaying progressive ethical themes. 

Martin Scorsese, when asked why "his movies are dominated by male characters and show little interest in female stories" replied “That goes back to 1970. That’s a question that I’ve had for so many years. Am I supposed to? If the story doesn’t call for it…It’s a waste of everybody’s time. If the story calls for a female character lead, why not?” " (Indiewire article by Zack Sharf). 

In a separate interview around the same time as this ordeal, Scorsese lambasted the Marvel movies for not being 'true' cinema.

 

Considering these two incidents map onto roughly the same audience feeling criticized (mainstream 'woke'-leaning 'consoomers'), it’s no surprise that the Twitter hashtag for Scorsese synthesized the incidents together into the following narrative: 'Marvel has put more women and people of color on screen in the last few years than Scorsese has done in his whole life.' 

Some responded to this in defense of Scorsese - 'Scorsese funded this or that film organization that helped outsiders and up and coming artists break into the industry, many of which were women and people of color,' but we are uninterested in defending Scorsese.

What we are interested in, however, is exploring the Scorsese incident as an example of what I will describe as the mainstream 'woke' consumer tendency to endorse molar and representational solutions - which unbeknownst to them are antithetical to their very idea of social progress - while neglecting molecular processes that are closer to their idea of ‘progress.’ 

 

2b: Molecular, not Molar; Show, not Tell

Don’t worry, we’re not going down a jargon rabbit hole here. 

Here's a very vulgar reduction - real scholars turn away now - of the otherwise complex concepts of molar and molecular: 

The molar in Deleuze and Guattari's thought is opposed to the molecular. 

Though the two thinkers reject the equating the terms, in shorthand we can say that molar is similar to 'macro,' the molecular to 'micro.' 

Molecular revolution or micropolitics = radical novel practices that rupture the continuum of sense and order (what we're used to) thereby introducing previously unthought or unfelt ways of organizing desire and people - a body without organs ("Why not walk on your head, sing with your sinuses, see through your skin, breathe with your belly…Let's go further still, we haven't found our BwO yet" - pg. 150-151 A Thousand Plateaus, and see pg. 6 in my extended essay here for more on this). 

Molar politics are state bureaucratic mechanisms that ensure repetition of the same old same old while squashing anything novel that could lead to forces escaping from the state's grasp (Oedipal either/or as opposed to Asiatic Production / Disjunction Synthesis of or,or,or...see here for more). 

The molecular are processes of the multiple as opposed to the Molar which is unitary. 

Molar entities are larger aggregates composed of many things under a unifying factor such as the family, the state, the ego, etc. 

The micro or molecular is schizo and operates on levels of intensity and affect while the macro or molar is oedipal and works on levels of representation and information. 

The molecular is 'polyvocal,' that is, many voices exist at once without negating each other. 

The molar is 'univocal,' that is, the many voices are reduced to one voice that stands in or 'represents' the many. 

Though many of these statements would be found disagreeable by D and G scholars, never mind D and G themselves, when grouped together they provide a 'vibe;' a breadcrumb trail that leads us in the right direction (just as Guattari in his solo work tends to reiterate the same idea many times in many different technical languages, attempting to capture a living process not easily reduced to language...).  

If this all sounds like mumbo jumbo to you and you're wondering what any of this has to do with Scorsese, women, and Marvel, all will be explained momentarily.

The old adage in writing - which includes the writing required for film production - is that one should show not tell. 

To move the plot along in a thriller for example, rather than have a scene in which the main character voices aloud his discovery - 'Ah, yes, I understand now! So and so did this which means this!' - we should instead have a scene in which we as the viewer witness the main character stumbling upon a previously hidden piece of evidence that triggers a memory which helps the character make a new discovery, etc. 

That is, we should be shown events that register on an affective and narrative level, not relayed information explicitly and on a cognitive level; we should experience things in a way where the viewer pieces together the 'meaning' or sense themselves with the addition of an emotional investment and where the film is not encumbered with unneeded dialogue and dead screen time.

 

The problem with the 'woke' progressive narrative of 'Marvel has put more women and people of color on screen in the last few years than Scorsese has done in his whole life' is not that it is untrue, but that the method is trapped in telling instead of showing (a heuristic binary that corresponds to the neorationalists [proving through argument] vs. the libidinal materialist [creating affective fictional resonances]).  

That is, the Marvel narrative rests on the notion of  'more’ - number or quantity - and 'people of X and Y’ - category. 

'If Marvel has 10 of Y and Scorsese has 5 of Y then Marvel wins.' 

The complex process of social progress (bound up with aesthetic cultural production and perpetuation of hyperreal fictions) is reduced to a simple molar, univocal (large, whole, concrete, binary) game of 'more beats less.'

Univocal-representational thinking: we've heard it before - the argument is that certain groups of people need to be 'represented' in film (which was also a criticism of Marvel’s Dr. Strange which cast a white woman as a character originally conceptualized as Asian). 

A person from X group on the screen stands in for all people of X group around the world who need a strong figure like them to identify with, whether for self-esteem, moral support, or political representation (and remember the molar institution par excellence is the family and its cousin, the state; the molar is univocal or reduced to one and therefore oedipal, and 'identification' and 'representation' are two concepts undoubtedly bound up with oedipal development); the voice of many 'invisible' people is represented - to a degree - by the amplified presence of one highly visibly person. 

Unitary-monolithic-phallic-signifier stands in as representation of all others; many voices flattened into one, the mouth-piece of God. 

For an indisputable concrete example of this look no further than the scene in Marvel's End Game where literally all the female characters - who were just previously scattered across the large battlefield - with the aid of poor editing, seem to magically assemble for a very obvious girl power moment. 

Women of all backgrounds are represented in one concentrated moment of lip-service.

That is, neither the narrative nor the imagined physical situation within the scene necessitated or organically produced such a moment, it was clearly an intentional thought by the production team to throw the woke audience a bone (not that there’s necessarily anything wrong with that…). 

The film moment is uncoupled from aesthetic truth, from desire, and is instead the product of a team of marketers appealing to trends; a low hanging psyop. 

Marvel is telling you how woke it is with numbers while Scorsese, as we will see, is sharing with you an aesthetic vehicle produced by desire that captures some social realities. 

2c: Taxi Driver, A Woke Film?

Scorsese says the question of female characters in his film goes back to the 70s, so let’s go back to the 70s. 

Taxi Driver (1976) is one of his earliest films and certainly one that many people associate with Scorsese's name. 

Though the film follows a brooding, disgruntled, male - setting the course of countless movies like this to come (see my Joker film analysis here), it also features two lead female characters, and considering there are really only 4 main characters - Travis, Betsy, Sport and Iris - this is not an insignificant fact. 

However, this is still playing the silly molar game of more beats less - let’s get molecular.

 

Taxi Driver does not 'tell' you it’s a progressive film by appealing to the kind of progressive stuff the audience expects to see - 'we have 2 female leads!!!' -  it utilizes violence and dark sexual and racial social realities to rupture and shock the viewer into contemplating concepts and experiencing feelings otherwise left uncontemplated and unfelt. 

It's a fictional-aesthetic vehicle for capturing and reproducing reality.  

Whereas Marvel films take the tired structure of 'good vs. bad and good heroes prevail over bad villains in the end' and injects it with some new content - 'woke women and people of color' - which is ultimately a superficial marketing team spectacle, Taxi Driver digs in deep and presents important realities about women and people of color - not to mention what we might call 'male privilege' - that are uncomfortable to think about.

For those who have not seen the film, Travis is a vet just returned to the Big Apple from 'Nam; he's punch drunk, traumatized, schizophrenic, and in need of something to make cash and, more importantly, in need of anything to occupy his time as to keep him from going insane. 

He takes up the job of driving a Taxi and one evening a very young prostitute tries to escape her pimp by getting into his taxi only to be forcibly pulled out of the car by the pimp, Sport. 

Later Travis finds the 12 year old prostitute Iris and befriends her. 

Fed up with the crime in the big apple and looking for an object to receive his inarticulate male rage, Travis decides to kill Iris' pimp so that she can return to her parents and have a normal childhood.

 

A third wave feminist argument would claim Travis to be a patriarchal tyrant  projecting victimhood onto a woman in order to enact a savior fantasy of preventing an empowered woman from using her body as she likes. 

Meanwhile, a second wave feminist argument would applaud Travis for using direct action (as opposed to impotent activism) in turning against his own - another man - in order to aid an abused girl.

I think the former is academic ivory tower red herring intellectualization that neglects the material reality of populations and thus, as far as I am concerned, does not warrant a response, while the latter makes more intuitive sense (people will find fault with this dismissive comment, but the writer feels that no argument against the former or for the latter will be constructive or worthwhile).

This is without mention that the film deals with racism and masculinity in a critical context. 

The sub-plot of the film concerns Travis falling in love with a woman named Betsy. 

As the classic trope goes, Travis is enraptured by Betsy and very aggressively follows her to her work place to ask her on a date. 

She agrees and they have an OK first date and a terrible second one as Travis attempts to bring Betsy to a pornographic film theater where Betsy is disgusted and offended, and Travis  unaware of his transgression. 

In portion of film that follows, Travis cannot let go of the fact that Betsy refuses to see him and it is implied that Travis is resentful and feels entitled to something from Betsy (constant phone calls, sending flowers, etc.).

 

To be painfully brief - you'll just have to watch the film - by the end of the film Travis, in a wonderfully subtle scene, realizes the error of his ways - i.e. Betsy owes him nothing, he can't treat women like this, etc. - and kindly and heroically helps Betsy to her home without being intrusive or making her feel uncomfortable. 

Here Travis abides by the contemporary post-#Metoo sexual codes in that he accepts that as a man he shouldn't follow a woman to her work place, force her to go on a date, introduce her to pornography, or assume a position of entitlement wherein a woman owes a man something simply for the man's romantic effort (friend-zone / incel). 

That is, despite its reliance on masculine-hero stereotypes, the film is critical of what might be called male privilege in that Travis, who by woke logic could very well be a rapist or a pimp, learns through killing the rapist-pimp that he should treat women with decency.

 

A similar 'argument' (I use the term loosely) can be made for the film being critical of 'white privilege.' 

Taxi Driver gets called a racist film now and again. 

Tarantino (who is not woke and is not liked by progressives...) responded to this by saying the film is not itself racist but about a racist character. 

I argue this is untrue. 

As Lauren Price argues in her piece for Filminquiry, Travis doesn't use racial slurs like other characters in the film, drives to all parts of New York, and, unlike other drivers, explicitly states he has no qualms about Taxiing any and all people (though he does appear uneasy around people of color). 

One scene emphasizes this difference of Travis and others in a similar position as Travis. 

In this scene Travis picks up a man (ironically played by Scorsese) in his taxi who claims his wife is cheating on him with a black man which he refers to as the N word slur; he mixes racist and sexist discourses when, after talking about killing the black man, he utters the now famous line “You should see what a .44 Magnum's gonna do to a woman's pussy…” 

In this scene Travis appears incredibly uncomfortable but also not ready to confront the overtly racist and misogynistic man. 

The complexity here, in woke logic, is that Travis is not actively racist, but not actively working against racism. 

Here Scorsese, unintentionally consistent with contemporary wokeness, portrays a white male who fails to be an ally for people of color and women while also showing white racial paranoia (the porn narrative of the black male and white women; 'they’ll steal our women'). 

That is, Scorsese does not try to portray any sort of progressive fantasy but instead shows the nasty reality of the world, a nasty reality that would seem to validate the narrative and experience of woman and people of color (though it is up to them to decide if they are 'validated...), the idea that white men do not use their position in society to work against misogyny and racism, and that these people are wrongly treated.

 

2d: Conclusion 

Why is this woke? 

The word is nebulous, polemic, jargon, so I use it ironically, however...

What would be unwoke is if Taxi Driver depicted a knowledgeable white man free of racial bias effortlessly understanding and aiding women and people of color. 

Nothing is hated more by the woke than a ‘privileged’ person depicting themselves in a good light. 

In many ways Travis is a failure, and that is why he is woke by woke standards. 

Taxi Driver is old fashioned woke because it depicts flaws; it’s an example of Scorsese showing a harsh real world wherein a white man fights against child prostitution, learns to treat women appropriately, and fails to be an ally for people of color and in this way Taxi Driver shows the real situation of women and people of color by inducing an aesthetic affective experience. 

Marvel films, despite having more women or people of color, tell you about political tropes of women and people of color rather than depicting social realities.

 

Marvel is the simulation experiencing and reproducing itself; Taxi Driver is a glimpse at something other. 

Installment 3...

3: Ghost in a Shell 

3a: Introduction

Back in 2017 the live action adaption of beloved anime Ghost in the Shell became mired in controversy over 'white washing' - casting a a white actress to play an 'Asian' character (something we briefly covered earlier, when talking about Marvel - see more here). 

Much could be said about this - we could highlight the apologetic remarks Johansson made, point out that Anime regularly markets itself to Western audiences by animating Western-looking characters (and therefore Johansson and the character she plays look incredibly similar even throughout the many different anime adaptions), that the film industry game is played by elites who want to make money (and therefore will cast actors who draw audiences), or that original Ghost in the Shell anime creator endorses the position that the character Johansson plays is a cyborg whose physical form is, as the name would imply, a mere 'shell' being appropriated by a impersonal force, etc. 

No, we don't want to talk about any of this. As with our Scorsese being woke debate, this conversation is reactionary and boring. 

3b: Metaphysics of the screen/mirror

Oshii, the creator of the original anime, also introduces us to what we do like to talk about:

“In the movies, John Wayne can play Genghis Khan, and Omar Sharif, an Arab, can play Doctor Zhivago, a Slav. It’s all just cinematic conventions...If that’s not allowed, then Darth Vader probably shouldn’t speak English, either....I can only sense a political motive from the people opposing it, and I believe artistic expression must be free from politics.”

Though naïve, there is something of value to be extracted from this position. 

The difference between the actor and the character they 'represent' is precisely the birth place of the artistic gesture - the gap where aesthetics comes to life (or rather the gap wherein life expresses itself through aesthetics). For example, when Charlize Theron plays female serial killer Aileen in Monster we think of it as an impressive performance because a beautiful, high class, male-loving, civilized woman is able to portray the opposite - a low class, ugly, man-killer. She is tastefully able to transform herself into something she is not (same can be said about Christian Bale's losing weight for the Machinist, or gaining it for other roles). It is significantly less impressive when someone who already lives a certain lifestyle imitates or reproduces that lifestyle on screen. Having a serial killer portray or simulate serial killing is a snuff film; having a machinist portray a machinist in fact boring. 

For the actor or actress to produce an effect on the viewer through a process of learning and work - researching and getting into a role being other than what is, incorporating the outside, 'becoming a large body of water' as Nietzsche (the aesthetic thinker of masks par excellence)  puts it, etc., - to simulate an identity that is different than one's own identity, that is the 'work' of the art. 

The need for one to have a 1 to 1 correspondence between the actor / actress and the role represented on the screen betrays a strange return (of the repressed) to boring positivism, naïve realism, what Rorty calls 'the metaphysics of the mirror.' Or in other words - a lack of imagination. 

Rorty writes

"The picture which holds traditional philosophy captive is  that of the mind as a great mirror, containing various representations -some  accurate,  some  not...Without the notion of the mind as mirror, the notion of knowledge as accuracy of representation would not have suggested itself.  Without this  latter  notion, the strategy common to  Descartes and Kant - getting more accurate representations  by  inspecting,  repairing,  and polishing the  mirror, so  to  speak - would not have made sense..." [see my old blog post here].

Why would we want this? Mirror metaphysics, with its need to make all things a copy of themselves, an 'apparent world and a real world' (Nietzsche), always feels dead. 

Those who desire such a thing unconsciously want all film to be nothing other than a re-enactment, documentary, or snuff film, all of which are boring or depressive and function to overload the collective cultural imagination with misery. It betrays a sickly post Y2K obsession with 'accurate information,' being right, having the legitimate position, etc. (see your 'film' critic who can't enjoy a film for what it is and instead picks apart logical details and internal inconsistencies, as if these somehow damage the movie's overall narrative, etc...). 

Baudrillard's information age of simulation. With this, art, the aesthetic 'spirit,' etc., takes a back seat. 

In fact, if art has any liberatory or progressive power it is precisely in the aesthetic gap of difference between the performer and the performance, a space that rejects the correspondence theory of naïve realism, etc., not the stifling, energy deadening metaphysics of the mirror that flattens all things to a copy of itself, not unlike the redundancy of signification. The need to depict tired pasts, stale presents, and boring, tried futures, instead of imagining difference, and allowing the aesthetic gap to generate the possible occasion of unforeseen strangeness that may breathe some life back into living. 

This is not to say that allowing John Wayne to play Genghis Kahn is somehow revolutionary. Rather, it is to say that being unconcerned with turning film into a mirror of the world is and instead working towards using film to loosen up rigid, archaic philosophical structures is likely more 'progressive' than adhering to some strange Oedipal-register representational politics. 

Installment 4...

4: A Brief, Inconclusive Conclusion

All that I have said in this blog entry can be summed neatly in the following passage:

"the...mistake of formalist and semiotic theory is to assume that, since the cinematic image is constructed (since it cannot be a direct presentation of reality...) it must be deciphered as a mode of ideological representation..." 

- Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body, 1993, pg. 36.

Or as I said earlier, because non-representation can only be expressed in representation, people mistake non-representation for another kind of representation.

Shaviro (pg. 2-6) understands film as not a way of repeating 'archetypes' or familiar tropes, but rather a space to subvert expectations, and play with tropes by scrambling codes. If the viewer knows the plot and the characters, use this shared, anticipated knowledge as a reference point to introduce something alien. 

That is, much to the effect of what I've argued here, one thing can be used to bring about its opposite; fixed territories serve as vehicles for deterritorialization; stability for instability, etc. - representation a medium for introducing that which cannot be fully represented.

However, for Shaviro, this is not a dialectical process. Film is an aesthetic medium. A film is a collection of images that are captures or simulations of events that occurred in 'reality' (whether with actors or computer generated characters) that by themselves are not connected but with the help of a team are threaded together with a narrative that relies on the viewer to partake in and continue the narrative-constructive process (pg. 14-16). 

These images, despite containing a significant narrative aspect, act on our bodies primarily and our minds (which is an incorporeal aspect of body) secondarily.

To this effect Shaviro writes:

"Images are neither true nor false...real nor artificial...present nor absent...they are radically devoid of essence...Simulacra...without hope of regulation or control..." (pg 16). 

"The cinematic image is at once intense and impalpable...images confront the viewer directly without mediation" (pg. 25); "Images literally assault the spectator, leaving them no space for reflection" (pg. 49)  (as in a train coming towards the audience that causes the naive viewers to react as if they are going to be hit by the speeding vehicle (pg. 32)). 

Two dimensional fictions (see Paul Virilio's short but informative books Lost Dimension and Information Bomb) effect reality by manifesting effects in a body in three dimensional space. 

As Shaviro puts it himself - 

"Cinema produces real effects in the viewer, rather than merely presenting phantasmic reflections to the viewer" (pg. 50).

The intellectual understandings rooted in representation - critiques of this or that, endorsements of this or that - these are present and real, but secondary to the visceral experience the film induces in the body (because the mind is just a feedback arc of the body's signals experiencing itself anyways...). A critique is always a reterritorialization of a line of flight; a coding up and shutting down of the actual force of change. 

Anyways, all the miscontextualizing and strawmanning of psychoanalysis aside, the book is a good take on a schizoanalytic framing of cinema as an aesthetic endeavor that is worth reading. 

Consistent with Shaviro's use of the concept of Simulacra in its relation to cinema, I end with a meme (a Simulacra):

Someone shared with me - I forgot who - that the irony here is that the Gundam brand was quite literally made by a toy company with the sole intention of making money. The supposed critique is just another marketing ploy...

This meme was going around a bit ago. The message is that the average viewer misses the critical message of a piece of visual media by focusing on the superficial spectacle. For instance, people like Gundam for the mechs, not the anti-war critique (or people like Fight Club for the fighting, not the anti-capitalist critique, etc.). The implication is that you should feel bad for doing so.

I'm here to remind you that there is no critique. Anti-war may be part of the narrative, but art is not just a critical theory argument set to or expressed in a series of image. A medium is only as good as its effects. If Gundam makes kids go out and wage war, despite its supposed anti-war rhetoric, it's not anti-war; if Gundam makes kids put together Gundam model kits and stay out of trouble, its an effective anti-war show...etc.

Schizoanalysis is about what effects an assemblage has on what another assemblages does, not on its modes of representation.