(Space(y)-Time Hyperstition)
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[Media 1: The Usual Suspects / Se7en (1995) = PLANE OF CONSISTENCY;
Media 1-3: American Beauty (1999), The Life of David Gale (2003), House of Cards (2013-2017) = Lines of flight drifting across the plane; Media 4: Let Me Be Frank (2018) = Schizoedipal reterritorialization of said lines] |
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The Fall of Spacey
"My name is Lester Burnham[...]This... is my life...In less than a year, I'll be dead. Of course, I don't know that yet." - Kevin Spacey as Lester Burham, opening lines of American Beauty (1999)
"I had always heard your entire life flashes in front of your eyes the second before you die[...]that one second isn't a second at all, it stretches on forever, like an ocean of time..." - Kevin Spacey as Lester Burham, closing lines of American Beauty (1999)
In the first quote, replace 'life' with 'career' and you have an eerie narration of 2017 Spacey looking towards 2018; repeat this with the second quote and you have an eerie narration of 2019 Spacey looking back on nearly a decade of spectacular work, from The Usual Suspects and Se7en, to American Beauty and The Life of David Gale, and finally, to House of Cards. As the subtext of American Beauty hints at through its first and last scenes, time is strange, it works in both directions.
These media works depict - predict really - Kevin Spacey's downfall. As we know, in 2016 Kevin Spacey was accused of boozing up and sexually groping an 18 year old boy, with more accusations coming from House of Cards cast and crew in 2017, followed by a flood of prior accusations which emerged for the first time, or reemerged out of a collective social o/re/pression. Examples include Spacey's sexual assault of a 14 year old boy, not to mention many other underaged and of age boys, with Spacey often abusing his place of power or utilizing alcohol to seduce / assault / rape (Vox, terribly inaccurate/biased pop-news site, has a surprisingly good timeline of Spacey's accusations here). The internet soon intensified the accusations by circulating accounts of Spacey's supposed dark underage sex romps in Thailand. Soon after these accusations which resulted in Spacey's removal from all current projects, Spacey, to intense media criticism regarding the timing, came out as gay.
Lets boil this down to the basics:
- Place of power and alcohol used to seduce and ultimately rape people, sometimes the underage
- Secret history of homosexuality (this term is used non-polemically and non pathologically)
- Likable 'good guy' actor being exposed as a secret 'bad guy' the whole time
Now let's look at Spacey's career.
Kevin Spacey plays Kevin Spacey in the new film Kevin Spacey (2033) written and directed by Kevin Spacey
Similarly to the merged narrative of Suspects and Se7en, American Beauty and Life of David Gale can be viewed as sharing a similar narrative. In both, a sexually repressed upper middle class suburbanite turns bad and engages in prohibited sex. Both films feature well to do men having sex with younger girls (illegal /socially prohibited- taboo porn narratives like underage; father / daughter's friend; teacher / student). In Beauty, Spacey, castrated and mired in the grey goo of middleclass drear, lusts after his daughter's 16 year old friend, ultimately offering her alcohol and seducing her but stopping right before the full act of sex. In David Gale, Spacey, a university academic who in one scene lectures on Lacanian desire and the barred subject (a theory which is itself so pertinent to film criticism, not to mention the concept of objet petit a so well depicted in the inter/intra -character dynamics in American Beauty), is seduced by one of his female students where the two have consensual sex after drinking at a party. The female student later falsely accuses Spacey - or David Gale - of rape. In House of Cards, it is revealed in the last season with Spacey as Frank Underwood that Frank is secretly gay and engaged in a sexual affair with a younger man (not illegal this time, but unknown to the public and certainly tabooed due Frank's marriage to Claire and position as the president).
This reference to a secret homosexuality in House of Cards is consistent with the homosexual themes in American Beauty (while in general, Frank Underwood, a good guy Democrat who is secretly a sociopathic manipulative bad guy, is consistent with our oeuvre from Suspects and Se7en). The gay neighbor couple who are introduced five or so minutes into the film are used as a plot device to introduce us to the homophobia of the other neighbor, a conservative ex-Marine. Of course, as those who have seen the film know, the ex-Marine believes his 17 year old son is having sex with Spacey (though he is actually just dealing Spacey weed), a belief which prompts the ex-Marine to confront Spacey, a confrontation which turns into a gay kiss between ex-Marine and Spacey. In a classic truism, the ex-Marine's homophobia is a reactionformation to his repressed homosexual desires - his 'closeted gayness.' Spacey gently declines the homosexual advance, a move which is felt as an utter rejection by the ex-Marine who, in breaking down and finally accepting and expressing his inner desire for the first time only to have it be rejected (shame, what repression in part defends against), has a semi-psychotic break. He returns with a gun and shoots Spacey who has just recently decided not to have sex with his daughter's 16 year old friend. Put vulgarly (and highly reductively), Spacey is killed for a confusion around pedophilic intentions which are mistaken for homosexual intentions (and, for the run of the mill Freudian psychoanalyst, perhaps incestuous intentions as desire for the daughter's friend is simply a displaced desire for the daughter, something which is also hinted at in the film).
Let's jump back to Life of David Gale again. In this movie, Spacey's character does have sex with the young but legal girl, his student, but this time is wrongly accused of rape. The movie makes it clear that Gale has transgressed the taboo - having relations with a student (hence the Lacnian desire bit - lust for the unattainable) - but has not in any way coerced, forced, or drugged the girl (though the two were drinking). This moment in the film is a subtext to the larger plot of the film: Gale is a philosophy professor and anti-death penalty activist (SPOILER ALERT) who engineers a situation in which he is sentenced to death for a murder he did not really commit. It is only after his state execution that it he is found to be innocent of the murder he was accused of. This is proof, for Gale and his activist group, that the death penalty can mistakenly kill the innocent based not so much on lack of or incorrect evidence, but perspective and narrative shaping (there is a scene that explicitly hints at the postmodern academic cliche that the perspective of a viewer or camera [lens] can drastically effect the way an event is perceived - pg. 49 here - a scene which foreshadows the later literal moving of a camera which reveals / hides a crucial fact to the plot and to Gale's freedom). Both the sub plot and the main plot can be summed up as 'the innocent can be wrongly accused and sometimes the consequences of this accusation can't be taken back' with a subtext lurking below that is something like 'and narratives or beliefs around 'facts' have more effect than the facts themselves.' We will get into this in a moment.
For now, the parallels between Spacey's life and his film characters' lives practically write themselves. As we mentioned above:
- Place of power and alcohol used to seduce the underage
- Secret history of homosexuality
- Likable 'good guy' actor being exposed as a secret 'bad guy' (or at least 'turning bad' or learning to be a 'bad boy') the whole time.
However, we need to add one thing to the list:
- Narrative and belief structure (especially the function of the camera or lens/scope) and how they shape our processing of events (blurring of perception / reality) and how it relates to false accusations of rape / murder and tarnished reputation.
This gets us to Spacey's most recent production, Let Me Be Frank.
Let Me Be Frank and Hyperstition
- A: unconsciously siphoning off his repressed wishes or instincts (desire, whatever) into his acting roles, either to distance himself of possible dystonic feelings, or, in a way, to show off his crimes (like the sociopath in Suspects or Se7en) [putting the shadow or bad part objects into film];
- B: consciously using his personal life struggles to inform his media roles as to express socially unacceptable wishes/instincts/desires in a way that is acceptable and received by an other, i.e. sublimation. [A is repression, B is sublimation, though, here I admit these are bad concepts to commit to, as Spacey was clearly acting on the wishes, thus they were not properly, in Freudian terms at least, repressed or sublimated. Thus, we use them loosely];
- C: engaged in some sort of method acting, the trope we see with Heath Ledger and the Joker, where Spacey's characters became mixed up and confused with Spacey's self.
All of these theories rely on a sort of positivist and naturalist (i.e., old classical philosophy) model and its assumptions, the dualisms of real/fake, authentic-self/character-acting, etc. - the idea of a real world of objects and its corresponding mental representation (Rorty's metaphysics of the mirror). Or, in one handy metaphor, these theories rely on the old idea that the theatrical mask still hides a true fac(t)e. In opposition we propose, only as a start, the Baudrillardian idea that the mask (map) has become the face (model), or that the face is itself a mask, or that the mask resembles the face as to hide itself as being a mask, (i.e., Lacan's purloined letter [hiding in plain sight]). In other words, the Lacanian styled idea that face is already patched together to cover something up (reminiscent of Deleuze and Guattari's 'faciality'). This gets us to a more interesting theory - one that Life of David Gale touches upon itself - which has to do with cybernetics and post-deconstructionist literary theory (both of which are still bound up with psychoanalysis [schizoanalysis]).
For cyberneticists and (oc)cultural researchers at the CCRU (cybernetic cultural research unit), literature - myth, belief, religion included (though each is distinct and theorized in its own right) - is purely an affective trigger for a techno-bio-psycho-social feedback loop. This is a fancy way of saying that believing a fiction can have the same effect as experiencing a 'fact,' while other times the fiction or belief forces itself upon us in a way that does not permit the space to belief or not believe, but intervenes on our body and mind as a fact. This is simply the age old adage of psychoanalysis - borrowed from hypnosis and occult magic of course - that symptoms can be reduced or extinguished through suggestion from the physician or analyst (or induced if we are evil gaslighters). Believing you have been cured in fact cures you. In medical-scientific jargon, a placebo effect. For the CCRU, this is a cybernetic process, and when a cybernetic feedback loop gets going, it tends to take off and the relationship between the modules feedbacking, say A and B, becomes completely blurred. Fiction turns into reality - or hyperfiction / hyperstition. Simply defined by the CCRU, hyperstition is a fiction that makes itself real. This has nothing to do with representation or metaphor, but with diagrams and affect. Here, signifying mediation is, theoretically speaking, formally redundant.
Spacey and the characters he play have become one. There is no blurring of actor and character, but simply a hyperstition. One body and its articulations - a becoming. Representation and the representer are old news. Positing Spacey and the characters he plays as meaningfully different presupposes an idealism, a Cartesian split between mind and matter, body and soul, etc. There is one body, Spacey, and its articulations, Spacey-becoming-Kint; Spacey-becoming-Doe; Spacey-becoming-Burnham; Spacey-becoming-Gale; Spacey-becoming-Underwood; and finally, Spacey-becoming-Spacey...
This all sounds like jargon, but this hyperstition comes to life in Let Me Be Frank...
The internet has had a fucking field day with this one, and rightfully so. However, before we see how far the rabbit hole really goes we're just going to watch the video:
In case you didn't muster the courage to click play, here is the tl;dr:
- It is initially unclear if Spacey is talking about himself or Frank Underwood, the character he plays on House of Cards.
- As the video unfolds, Spacey embodies Underwood but still addresses topics and enunciates sentences that could refer to himself as Spacey OR Underwood (and certainly both).
- Spacey does not make definite claims one way or the other, but intensifies and extends the ambiguities, intentionally begging questions through rhetorical prose rather than making claims or arguments.
- The content concerns all the themes we have hitherto touched upon, especially those emphasized in Life of David Gale - perspective and belief (Underwood dying off camera, how a restricted view of lens can determine a belief); guilt and innocence paired with the confusion between belief and fact, wrongful accusation/persecution; narrative formation, etc.
The video really requires no further analysis. It is the culmination of the narrative I have laid out here, it is a complete fusion between reality and fiction, or as one Forbes author puts it "It’s as though Kevin Spacey is secretly a brilliant conceptual artist who just created the ultimate piece of ironic, postmodern commentary on modern-day society...pretending to be a fictional antihero..." (However, to deepen the hyperstition, watch QBluesky's excellent video on Spacey and the Deepstate here, and to go even deeper, just google your way into a clickhole on Spacey's relationship with the Clintons and their associated conspiracy theories which are too deep and eerie [and perhaps unsafe] to get into now...).
All this talk of representation, fiction, belief, reality, fact, etc. etc., really makes you re think this .gif...
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| You can't make this shit up... |
Spacey is disguised as himself.
Spacey is himself a character played by a deeper 'subject,' Deep-Space(y)
Spacey is playing himself as Spacey
Or is this more about hiding in plain sight?
