"If you fake the funk, your nose will grow." — Bootsy Collins
I just signed the collective letter of protest being sent by university professors to The New York Times, in objection to the paper’s “mean-spirited and uninformed” obituary for Jacques Derrida.
I just signed the collective letter of protest being sent by university professors to The New York Times, in objection to the paper’s “mean-spirited and uninformed” obituary for Jacques Derrida.
I know Scott Westerfield as a science fiction writer, but his novel So Yesterday is set in the present, and it is categorized and marketed as “Young Adult” fiction, rather than SF. Be that as it may, So Yesterday is a clever and pointed novel about corporate logos, innovation, and the concept of “cool” — which to my mind are science fictional subjects, or at least aspects of our current reality that are themselves already science fictional.
The narrator of So Yesterday, 17-year-old Hunter, is (as his name implies) a coolhunter, also known as a Trendsetter: one of those people who discovers the newest trends, recognizing them before anyone else, and thereby helping to market them to the masses, to make them “cool.” The object of his affection, Jen, is an Innovator: one of the people who actually invents the trends (in fashion, clothing, etc.) that are then picked up by the Trendsetters and marketed. Hunter works freelance for “a certain athletic shoe company named after a certain Greek god,” advising them on what’s cool and what’s not. (The narrator promises that there will be “no product placement in these pages,” which is why he resorts to such cute euphemisms).
The plot of So Yesterday brings Hunter and Jen in contact with the Jammers, a group of renegade Innovators and Trendsetters, activist pranksters whose aim is to gum up the works: to subvert the process by which innovations turn into trends through corporate logo-ification and marketing. The fictional Jammers are reminiscent of many activist groups that really exist, such as Adbusters and rtmark and the Yes Men; but they go further than these actually existing groups both in the ways they take the cutting-edge technologies and networks of production, marketing, and distribution and turn them against themselves, and in the ways that (like an actual guerrilla/revolutionary group) they go well beyond the bounds of legality.
Logos, brand names, and so on, are so important a component of the construction of our social reality today that I’m surprised that more fiction writers haven’t taken it up. (Aside from So Yesterday, the books that come most readily to mind are William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition, and Bret Easton Ellis’ Glamorama).
What’s most interesting about So Yesterday is Hunter’s (and on a different level, Westerfield’s or the novel’s) ambivalence about the whole corporate machinery of cool. On the one hand, we have the sense of something creepy, something lost, when an in-group tells everybody else what to do — when that in-group, especially, promotes fads that take over people’s minds so stealthily that they do not even realize they are being manipulated. They just spend their dollars, which immediately turn into runaway corporate profits. And despite being on the cutting edge, Hunter remains oppressively aware of the social hierarchies of “cool,” among both teenagers and adults. He knows you can never trust the kids who are cool, or the people who are rich and fashionable.
Yet the concept of “cool” itself is never questioned by the novel. It’s axiomatic that certain things (or ways of being, or fashions) are cool, and that not everybody can embody such coolness. The cool object — in this novel, the ultimate object of cool is a running shoe produced surreptitiously by the Jammers, and adorned with an anti-logo, a design that negates, by crossing it out, the famous Nike swoosh — is instantly dazzling in its coolness to the cognescenti, the Innovators and Trendsetters, but only dimly apprehended by the mass of consumers who will end up purchasing it. If Hunter and Jen are attracted by the Jammers, it’s because the Jammers’ brand of subversion is itself the coolest thing out there.
And though the Jammers themselves are initially presented as revolutionaries, who want to tear down the whole corporate system, it turns out that their real interest is something more, or less. Their aim is not to destroy the system of cool, but if anything to restore the prestige of cool by mystifying it, making it more sticky and less transparent. Their objection to the corporate system is that “the cool hits the mall, before it has time to digest.” They aim, therefore, to “market confusion, jam the ads until the Consumers don’t know what’s real and what’s a joke.” They are anit-corporate Dadaists; but they know they live in an age when Dadaism, together with all the other High Modernist shock tactics, has itself become a highly effective advertising tactic the corporate arsenal.
Towards the end of the novel, “the client” (Nike) gets ahold of the designs for the super-cool shoe that the Jammers invented. Nike never releases this shoe as it is; “instead, they pirate little bits of it every season.” For the corporation follows “the first rule of consumerism: Never give us what we really want. Cut the dream into pieces, and scatter them like ashes. Dole out the empty promises. Package our aspirations and sell them to us, cheaply made enough to fall apart.” What’s utterly remarkable about this passage is how it negates itself. It provides a full critique of the commodification of desire, of how it works through negation and lack, of how it mobilizes infinite deferral. Except… that what it posits as the (lost) originary object of completely gratified desire is itself nothing more, or other, than the commodity fetish par excellence (the coolest running shoe ever made). And this deflates the whole point of the critique.
My point here is not to criticize Westerfield, or his novel, for being insufficiently revolutionary. But rather, I want to suggest that the ambivalence I’m describing — the doubt as to whether you can really separate coolness from corporate branding, given that coolness in our society inevitably involves hierarchies of both money and taste, organized around the symbolic powers of brand names and logos — is a justified sort of “realism” or cynicism, when it’s juxtaposed with the utopianism of, say, the free software movement, or more generally of Hardt and Negri’s “multitude.”Hardt and Negri (and, in a different way, McKenzie Wark, whose wonderful Hacker Manifesto I will be writing about soon) argue cogently that, in our current network society, creativity and innovation are necessarily collective. Westerfield’s characters, to the contrary, never question the “cool pyramid,” with lonely Innovators at the top, and the need of a marketing and profit-extracting machinery to filter the innovations and make them trickle down to the mass of Consumers. I’m inclined to say that, in a certain sense, both sides in this argument are right. The ambiguity of Westerfield’s Jammers (an elite group intervening against, but yet retaining an allegiance to, the elite and corporate machinery of “cool”) points to a real difficulty, one that Hardt/Negri, Wark, and the no-logo and free-software activists don’t seem to have addressed with sufficient rigor.
The problem is this. In the high-technology, highly networked world we now live in, our highest value is always innovation. I myself see this as the highest value, and I have no wish to contest it. (Postmodernity is all about serial repetition of cultural codes and cliches that already exist, but this doesn’t contradict my point. Hip hop, for instance, is totally about innovation: its problem is precisely how to deploy samples, the already-sedimented, in such a way as to make them innovatively new; the High Modernist imperative to “make it new” has been transmogrified, but not abandoned). But innovation is nearly impossible to disentangle from the ways in which our entire society is saturated by fashion, marketing, and consumption. The innovator is not the same as the entrepreneur; Westerfield recognizes this as much as anybody. But different as these roles are in essence, it is almost impossible to detach them in practice. Innovation is inextricably tied in with entrepreneurship, marketing, advertising, and branding, since these are the conditions of its possibility: the only ways it can be made-present, or come to any sort of being-in-the-world. So the move to Hardt/Negri’s affirmation of the multitude, or Wark’s self-recognition by the hacker class of its own class position, is fraught with much more difficulty — both conceptually and pragmatically — than these theorists recognize or acknowledge. Ironically limited and non-utopian, So Yesterday makes us aware of this situation.
I know Scott Westerfeld as a science fiction writer, but his novel So Yesterday is set in the present, and it is categorized and marketed as “Young Adult” fiction, rather than SF. Be that as it may, So Yesterday is a clever and pointed novel about corporate logos, innovation, and the concept of “cool” — which to my mind are science fictional subjects, or at least aspects of our current reality that are themselves already science fictional.
The narrator of So Yesterday, 17-year-old Hunter, is (as his name implies) a coolhunter, also known as a Trendsetter: one of those people who discovers the newest trends, recognizing them before anyone else, and thereby helping to market them to the masses, to make them “cool.” The object of his affection, Jen, is an Innovator: one of the people who actually invents the trends (in fashion, clothing, etc.) that are then picked up by the Trendsetters and marketed. Hunter works freelance for “a certain athletic shoe company named after a certain Greek god,” advising them on what’s cool and what’s not. (The narrator promises that there will be “no product placement in these pages,” which is why he resorts to such cute euphemisms).
The plot of So Yesterday brings Hunter and Jen in contact with the Jammers, a group of renegade Innovators and Trendsetters, activist pranksters whose aim is to gum up the works: to subvert the process by which innovations turn into trends through corporate logo-ification and marketing. The fictional Jammers are reminiscent of many activist groups that really exist, such as Adbusters and rtmark and the Yes Men; but they go further than these actually existing groups both in the ways they take the cutting-edge technologies and networks of production, marketing, and distribution and turn them against themselves, and in the ways that (like an actual guerrilla/revolutionary group) they go well beyond the bounds of legality.
Logos, brand names, and so on, are so important a component of the construction of our social reality today that I’m surprised that more fiction writers haven’t taken it up. (Aside from So Yesterday, the books that come most readily to mind are William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition, and Bret Easton Ellis’ Glamorama).
What’s most interesting about So Yesterday is Hunter’s (and on a different level, Westerfeld’s or the novel’s) ambivalence about the whole corporate machinery of cool. On the one hand, we have the sense of something creepy, something lost, when an in-group tells everybody else what to do — when that in-group, especially, promotes fads that take over people’s minds so stealthily that they do not even realize they are being manipulated. They just spend their dollars, which immediately turn into runaway corporate profits. And despite being on the cutting edge, Hunter remains oppressively aware of the social hierarchies of “cool,” among both teenagers and adults. He knows you can never trust the kids who are cool, or the people who are rich and fashionable.
Yet the concept of “cool” itself is never questioned by the novel. It’s axiomatic that certain things (or ways of being, or fashions) are cool, and that not everybody can embody such coolness. The cool object — in this novel, the ultimate object of cool is a running shoe produced surreptitiously by the Jammers, and adorned with an anti-logo, a design that negates, by crossing it out, the famous Nike swoosh — is instantly dazzling in its coolness to the cognescenti, the Innovators and Trendsetters, but only dimly apprehended by the mass of consumers who will end up purchasing it. If Hunter and Jen are attracted by the Jammers, it’s because the Jammers’ brand of subversion is itself the coolest thing out there.
And though the Jammers themselves are initially presented as revolutionaries, who want to tear down the whole corporate system, it turns out that their real interest is something more, or less. Their aim is not to destroy the system of cool, but if anything to restore the prestige of cool by mystifying it, making it more sticky and less transparent. Their objection to the corporate system is that “the cool hits the mall, before it has time to digest.” They aim, therefore, to “market confusion, jam the ads until the Consumers don’t know what’s real and what’s a joke.” They are anti-corporate Dadaists; but they know they live in an age when Dadaism, together with all the other High Modernist shock tactics, has itself become a highly effective advertising tactic the corporate arsenal.
Towards the end of the novel, “the client” (Nike) gets ahold of the designs for the super-cool shoe that the Jammers invented. Nike never releases this shoe as it is; “instead, they pirate little bits of it every season.” For the corporation follows “the first rule of consumerism: Never give us what we really want. Cut the dream into pieces, and scatter them like ashes. Dole out the empty promises. Package our aspirations and sell them to us, cheaply made enough to fall apart.” What’s utterly remarkable about this passage is how it negates itself. It provides a full critique of the commodification of desire, of how it works through negation and lack, of how it mobilizes infinite deferral. Except… that what it posits as the (lost) originary object of completely gratified desire is itself nothing more, or other, than the commodity fetish par excellence (the coolest running shoe ever made). And this deflates the whole point of the critique.
My point here is not to criticize Westerfeld, or his novel, for being insufficiently revolutionary. But rather, I want to suggest that the ambivalence I’m describing — the doubt as to whether you can really separate coolness from corporate branding, given that coolness in our society inevitably involves hierarchies of both money and taste, organized around the symbolic powers of brand names and logos — is a justified sort of “realism” or cynicism, when it’s juxtaposed with the utopianism of, say, the free software movement, or more generally of Hardt and Negri’s “multitude.”Hardt and Negri (and, in a different way, McKenzie Wark, whose wonderful Hacker Manifesto I will be writing about soon) argue cogently that, in our current network society, creativity and innovation are necessarily collective. Westerfeld’s characters, to the contrary, never question the “cool pyramid,” with lonely Innovators at the top, and the need of a marketing and profit-extracting machinery to filter the innovations and make them trickle down to the mass of Consumers. I’m inclined to say that, in a certain sense, both sides in this argument are right. The ambiguity of Westerfeld’s Jammers (an elite group intervening against, but yet retaining an allegiance to, the elite and corporate machinery of “cool”) points to a real difficulty, one that Hardt/Negri, Wark, and the no-logo and free-software activists don’t seem to have addressed with sufficient rigor.
The problem is this. In the high-technology, highly networked world we now live in, our highest value is always innovation. I myself see this as the highest value, and I have no wish to contest it. (Postmodernity is all about serial repetition of cultural codes and cliches that already exist, but this doesn’t contradict my point. Hip hop, for instance, is totally about innovation: its problem is precisely how to deploy samples, the already-sedimented, in such a way as to make them innovatively new; the High Modernist imperative to “make it new” has been transmogrified, but not abandoned). But innovation is nearly impossible to disentangle from the ways in which our entire society is saturated by fashion, marketing, and consumption. The innovator is not the same as the entrepreneur; Westerfeld recognizes this as much as anybody. But different as these roles are in essence, it is almost impossible to detach them in practice. Innovation is inextricably tied in with entrepreneurship, marketing, advertising, and branding, since these are the conditions of its possibility: the only ways it can be made-present, or come to any sort of being-in-the-world. So the move to Hardt/Negri’s affirmation of the multitude, or Wark’s self-recognition by the hacker class of its own class position, is fraught with much more difficulty — both conceptually and pragmatically — than these theorists recognize or acknowledge. Ironically limited and non-utopian, So Yesterday makes us aware of this situation.
Colin Wilson says wonderfully about Whitehead:
“This, I think, is ultimately what I find so amazing about Whitehead. The style and the manner convince you that here is a more-or-less academic philosopher, building his incredibly abstract system in a kind of vacuum, when in fact he is a creative genius of the same order as Plato or Beethoven.”
Colin Wilson says wonderfully about Whitehead:
“This, I think, is ultimately what I find so amazing about Whitehead. The style and the manner convince you that here is a more-or-less academic philosopher, building his incredibly abstract system in a kind of vacuum, when in fact he is a creative genius of the same order as Plato or Beethoven.”
Jacques Derrida’s death today at age 74 marks the end of an era. He’s the last of that generation of French thinkers who revolutionized thought in the 1960s.
Derrida doesn’t mean as much to me as Foucault does, or Deleuze (or Deleuze and Guattari), or even Lacan (despite my very serious reservations about the latter). (I wrote about my sense of Derrida’s achievements and limitations when I blogged the documentary about him). But he was a philosopher very much worth reading, and who had a certain (mostly good) influence on the world of ideas. I largely concur with Nightspore’s estimation of his significance.
To speak in more personal terms: Derrida was important to me because, when I first read his early writings, my understanding of the world changed. I was never able to see things the same way again. There are not too many writers, philosophical or literary, about whom I can really say something like that. Later on, I came to feel that Derrida was not as profound, or as deeply relevant, as many of the thinkers who influenced him (Nietzsche, Bataille, Blanchot), or as certain of his contemporaries and peers (the aforementioned Foucault and Deleuze especially). But Derrida provided me with a way in, which at the very least enabled my reception of those other thinkers. For one thing, he helped me to understand the radical contingency of meanings, and of all the constructions we erect upon the basis of those meanings. For another, his ideas about decentering, and the infinite process of relationality or reference, and the logic of difference, remain crucial elements in all the criticism I write (even if they are rarely at the forefront of my interests and intentions). I’d even say that there’s an odd synergy between what I learned from Derrida, and what I learned from LSD (which I first experienced around the same time that I first encountered and studied Derrida): they both gave me the same sense of how whatever is (intellectually or emotionally) significant also tends to be extremely fragile and fleeting (by which I mean both transient, and continually, mercurially moving from point to point).
Well, I don’t take psychedelic drugs any more, and I don’t often find myself impelled to read Derrida. But they’ve both left their traces in my psyche. I was never as interested in the later writings of Derrida as in his earlier ones: though their meditations on death and mortality, and on friendship and obligation, are undeniably moving, they didn’t have the same sort of revelatory effect on me as Of Grammatology or Writing and Difference did. (This is probably because, by the time I came to Derrida’s later books, I was already familiar with the writings on these themes by Blanchot and Levinas, and by their brilliant interpreter Joseph Libertson).
Finally, I think that Derrida’s philosophical importance is that he upheld the spirit of Kantian critique for the late 20th century. For Kant, one of the most important tasks of philosophy is to criticize and undo what he calls “transcendental illusions.” These are, Kant says, “sophistries not of human beings but of pure reason itself. Even the wisest among all human beings cannot detach himself from them; perhaps he can after much effort forestall the error, but he can never fully rid himself of the illusion that incessantly teases and mocks him.” Derrida followed Kant’s program, in that he ceaselessly interrogated these illusions that are built in to the very nature of rationality itself, and endeavored, patiently and carefully, to undo them, while remaining aware that such an undoing will never be definitive or final. I’m inclined to think that philosophers in general make too much of reason, and give it a more prominent place than it actually occupies in human life. Be that as it may, it’s clear to me that Derrida was a far better philosopher, and far more committed to rationality and truth, than those (and there were many) who ignorantly accused him of being an irrationalist, a nihilist, and an obscurantist.
Jacques Derrida’s death today at age 74 marks the end of an era. He’s the last of that generation of French thinkers who revolutionized thought in the 1960s.
Derrida doesn’t mean as much to me as Foucault does, or Deleuze (or Deleuze and Guattari), or even Lacan (despite my very serious reservations about the latter). (I wrote about my sense of Derrida’s achievements and limitations when I blogged the documentary about him). But he was a philosopher very much worth reading, and who had a certain (mostly good) influence on the world of ideas. I largely concur with Nightspore’s estimation of his significance.
To speak in more personal terms: Derrida was important to me because, when I first read his early writings, my understanding of the world changed. I was never able to see things the same way again. There are not too many writers, philosophical or literary, about whom I can really say something like that. Later on, I came to feel that Derrida was not as profound, or as deeply relevant, as many of the thinkers who influenced him (Nietzsche, Bataille, Blanchot), or as certain of his contemporaries and peers (the aforementioned Foucault and Deleuze especially). But Derrida provided me with a way in, which at the very least enabled my reception of those other thinkers. For one thing, he helped me to understand the radical contingency of meanings, and of all the constructions we erect upon the basis of those meanings. For another, his ideas about decentering, and the infinite process of relationality or reference, and the logic of difference, remain crucial elements in all the criticism I write (even if they are rarely at the forefront of my interests and intentions). I’d even say that there’s an odd synergy between what I learned from Derrida, and what I learned from LSD (which I first experienced around the same time that I first encountered and studied Derrida): they both gave me the same sense of how whatever is (intellectually or emotionally) significant also tends to be extremely fragile and fleeting (by which I mean both transient, and continually, mercurially moving from point to point).
Well, I don’t take psychedelic drugs any more, and I don’t often find myself impelled to read Derrida. But they’ve both left their traces in my psyche. I was never as interested in the later writings of Derrida as in his earlier ones: though their meditations on death and mortality, and on friendship and obligation, are undeniably moving, they didn’t have the same sort of revelatory effect on me as Of Grammatology or Writing and Difference did. (This is probably because, by the time I came to Derrida’s later books, I was already familiar with the writings on these themes by Blanchot and Levinas, and by their brilliant interpreter Joseph Libertson).
Finally, I think that Derrida’s philosophical importance is that he upheld the spirit of Kantian critique for the late 20th century. For Kant, one of the most important tasks of philosophy is to criticize and undo what he calls “transcendental illusions.” These are, Kant says, “sophistries not of human beings but of pure reason itself. Even the wisest among all human beings cannot detach himself from them; perhaps he can after much effort forestall the error, but he can never fully rid himself of the illusion that incessantly teases and mocks him.” Derrida followed Kant’s program, in that he ceaselessly interrogated these illusions that are built in to the very nature of rationality itself, and endeavored, patiently and carefully, to undo them, while remaining aware that such an undoing will never be definitive or final. I’m inclined to think that philosophers in general make too much of reason, and give it a more prominent place than it actually occupies in human life. Be that as it may, it’s clear to me that Derrida was a far better philosopher, and far more committed to rationality and truth, than those (and there were many) who ignorantly accused him of being an irrationalist, a nihilist, and an obscurantist.
George W. Bush is a speed freak. The only explanation for his performance in the second debate tonight is amphetamines. He showed all the symptoms: the twitchy aggressiveness, the excitement, jumping to his feet all the time, speaking much more quickly than he usually does, almost shouting some of his replies… You even saw the moment, about 2/3rds of the way through the debate, when he started to crash — he faltered for a moment, then went on but without quite the same level of energy. The drugs also released his inhibitions, so that we saw the return of his frat boy smirk and his self-congratulatory nods and winks.
Well, I guess that’s one way to overcome the confusion, the lack of focus, and the deer-caught-in-the-headlights look that Dubya exhibited in the first debate.
I’d worry that this would impair the President’s judgment, much more severely than the alcohol he used to consume in great quantities did; but since Dubya lacks all judgment even when sober, there isn’t anything to impair.
As for Kerry, he did an OK job as Mr. Facts-and-Figures; too bad American voters don’t really care about that. I very much fear that the polling figures will swing back to Bush in the next few days, now that he has proved that he can (with the suitable chemical enhancement) “perform.” Why, speed for Dubya is just like Viagra for Bob Dole; it gives him the macho potency that Americans want in their Commander in Chief, and it probably even raised his IQ a few points.
Seriously, you know there’s a problem when Kerry can’t even bring himself to say that he’s pro-choice without a lot of mealy-mouthed evasions. This means that the game is fixed: according to the rules Kerry can only say he will do Bush’s policies better than Bush himself does. Any actual alternative is considered out-of-bounds from the get-go.
You wouldn’t know, from watching this debate, that things are completely and radically going to hell: that scores of people are being blown up every day in Iraq, while at home civil liberties are being slowly but surely abolished, democracy is being transformed into theocracy, millions of people are being shorn of their medical coverage and old age pensions (not to mention the large numbers who don’t have these things in the first place), and a gang of rapacious good old boys is bleeding the country dry, redistributing nearly all the remaining wealth from the other 98% of the population to themselves. Kerry certainly isn’t addressing these issues. He’s arguing from a position in which Bush’s near-psychotic reality-distortions are taken for granted as a starting point — and that’s an argument he cannot hope to win.
You’d also think, if this debate were your only source of information, that America is almost entirely white. In the debate’s “town meeting” format, all the questions but one were asked by white people.
George W. Bush is a speed freak. The only explanation for his performance in the second debate tonight is amphetamines. He showed all the symptoms: the twitchy aggressiveness, the excitement, jumping to his feet all the time, speaking much more quickly than he usually does, almost shouting some of his replies… You even saw the moment, about 2/3rds of the way through the debate, when he started to crash — he faltered for a moment, then went on but without quite the same level of energy. The drugs also released his inhibitions, so that we saw the return of his frat boy smirk and his self-congratulatory nods and winks.
Well, I guess that’s one way to overcome the confusion, the lack of focus, and the deer-caught-in-the-headlights look that Dubya exhibited in the first debate.
I’d worry that this would impair the President’s judgment, much more severely than the alcohol he used to consume in great quantities did; but since Dubya lacks all judgment even when sober, there isn’t anything to impair.
As for Kerry, he did an OK job as Mr. Facts-and-Figures; too bad American voters don’t really care about that. I very much fear that the polling figures will swing back to Bush in the next few days, now that he has proved that he can (with the suitable chemical enhancement) “perform.” Why, speed for Dubya is just like Viagra for Bob Dole; it gives him the macho potency that Americans want in their Commander in Chief, and it probably even raised his IQ a few points.
Seriously, you know there’s a problem when Kerry can’t even bring himself to say that he’s pro-choice without a lot of mealy-mouthed evasions. This means that the game is fixed: according to the rules Kerry can only say he will do Bush’s policies better than Bush himself does. Any actual alternative is considered out-of-bounds from the get-go.
You wouldn’t know, from watching this debate, that things are completely and radically going to hell: that scores of people are being blown up every day in Iraq, while at home civil liberties are being slowly but surely abolished, democracy is being transformed into theocracy, millions of people are being shorn of their medical coverage and old age pensions (not to mention the large numbers who don’t have these things in the first place), and a gang of rapacious good old boys is bleeding the country dry, redistributing nearly all the remaining wealth from the other 98% of the population to themselves. Kerry certainly isn’t addressing these issues. He’s arguing from a position in which Bush’s near-psychotic reality-distortions are taken for granted as a starting point — and that’s an argument he cannot hope to win.
You’d also think, if this debate were your only source of information, that America is almost entirely white. In the debate’s “town meeting” format, all the questions but one were asked by white people.
KJ Bishop‘s The Etched City is a delirious fever-dream of a novel. I suppose it can be classified as “dark fantasy,” as it is set in an imaginary world and involves certain supernatural occurrences (though for the most part its technology is Victorian); but such a label doesn’t really get us very far. The book is more a hypercharged, yet heavily mannered, poetic meditation; it evokes, and is deeply influenced by, late-19th-century decadent literature.
In other words, The Etched City is not a “world-building” fantasy (a category that comprehends texts as different from one another as the novels of Tolkien and Mieville); Bishop is much more concerned with effects than with consistency. The novel begins as a Sergio Leone-esque Western, with the monotony of a hostile desert landscape punctuated by brief and violent gunfights, as a pair of political outlaws, with uncertain agendas, battle for survival. But it quickly moves to the tropical city of Ashamoil, a vast metropolis oozing with moist heat and corruption, with obscenely fecund life and myriad stalking forms of death.
The people in this book are “beyond good and evil.” The main character, Gwynn, a gunfighter, a dandy, and a former revolutionary, finds work as a thug and enforcer for a powerful slave trader, while pursuing a love affair with a woman he does not understand, an artist who seems to have powers of alchemical transformation. There’s also a doctor who becomes obsessed with the deformed and stillborn fetuses that she collects in sample jars, and who devotes herself to helping the poor almost out of perversity, in order to confirm for herself her absolute lack of conscience, compassion, or empathy.
Odd portents abound in Ashamoil. A child born with a human head, but the body of a crocodile; a man with a flower growing out of his navel; corpses of people hacked to death by a gigantic axe, who have green leaves sprouting out of their mortal wounds. The rich entertain themselves with parties and duels, while the poor live in the absolute squalor of cramped and broken-down dwellings, suffused with fetid odors and carrying the constant danger of plague. All this is presented with a cold, amoral detachment (which is not a criticism, but a description: the realization of this coldness, at the very heart of feverish intensity and violent obsession, is precisely the brilliant achievement of the novel).
Indeed, everything in the novel is eroticized and aestheticized by Bishop’s wonderfully dank, languorous, and overwrought prose. Her descriptions of violence, in particular (ritualized knife fights, stabbings and poisonings, sadistic mutilations and murders, chaotic battles and skirmishes) are charged with great detail and a hyperreal, hallucinatory clarity. To the contrary, when Gwynn actually takes psychedelic drugs (as he does a number of times in the course of the novel) his visions are oddly detached and allegorical. In between, there are erotic tableaus that are all the more suggestive in that they are not entirely explicit. The novel is also punctuated by the characters’ long (and sometimes drunken) discussions of theology and aesthetics, which never come to any conclusions, but circle restlessly around themes of transcendence and transmutation.
It would do the novel an injustice to reduce its impressions and effects to some discussion of what it all means. I’ll just say that I find its gorgeous and carefully crafted extremity quite haunting. This is not a book that sweeps you away on wings of fantasy, but one that makes you hyper-aware of its own programmed machinations, which become even more disturbing than the explicit horrors depicted thereby. The Etched City is as beautiful as it is opaque, as difficult to forget as it is to grasp, as impassioned as it is chilling. Bishop at once immerses us into a world of roiling passions, and observes those passions with the cool detachment of an anthropologist from another planet.
KJ Bishop‘s The Etched City is a delirious fever-dream of a novel. I suppose it can be classified as “dark fantasy,” as it is set in an imaginary world and involves certain supernatural occurrences (though for the most part its technology is Victorian); but such a label doesn’t really get us very far. The book is more a hypercharged, yet heavily mannered, poetic meditation; it evokes, and is deeply influenced by, late-19th-century decadent literature.
In other words, The Etched City is not a “world-building” fantasy (a category that comprehends texts as different from one another as the novels of Tolkien and Mieville); Bishop is much more concerned with effects than with consistency. The novel begins as a Sergio Leone-esque Western, with the monotony of a hostile desert landscape punctuated by brief and violent gunfights, as a pair of political outlaws, with uncertain agendas, battle for survival. But it quickly moves to the tropical city of Ashamoil, a vast metropolis oozing with moist heat and corruption, with obscenely fecund life and myriad stalking forms of death.
The people in this book are “beyond good and evil.” The main character, Gwynn, a gunfighter, a dandy, and a former revolutionary, finds work as a thug and enforcer for a powerful slave trader, while pursuing a love affair with a woman he does not understand, an artist who seems to have powers of alchemical transformation. There’s also a doctor who becomes obsessed with the deformed and stillborn fetuses that she collects in sample jars, and who devotes herself to helping the poor almost out of perversity, in order to confirm for herself her absolute lack of conscience, compassion, or empathy.
Odd portents abound in Ashamoil. A child born with a human head, but the body of a crocodile; a man with a flower growing out of his navel; corpses of people hacked to death by a gigantic axe, who have green leaves sprouting out of their mortal wounds. The rich entertain themselves with parties and duels, while the poor live in the absolute squalor of cramped and broken-down dwellings, suffused with fetid odors and carrying the constant danger of plague. All this is presented with a cold, amoral detachment (which is not a criticism, but a description: the realization of this coldness, at the very heart of feverish intensity and violent obsession, is precisely the brilliant achievement of the novel).
Indeed, everything in the novel is eroticized and aestheticized by Bishop’s wonderfully dank, languorous, and overwrought prose. Her descriptions of violence, in particular (ritualized knife fights, stabbings and poisonings, sadistic mutilations and murders, chaotic battles and skirmishes) are charged with great detail and a hyperreal, hallucinatory clarity. To the contrary, when Gwynn actually takes psychedelic drugs (as he does a number of times in the course of the novel) his visions are oddly detached and allegorical. In between, there are erotic tableaus that are all the more suggestive in that they are not entirely explicit. The novel is also punctuated by the characters’ long (and sometimes drunken) discussions of theology and aesthetics, which never come to any conclusions, but circle restlessly around themes of transcendence and transmutation.
It would do the novel an injustice to reduce its impressions and effects to some discussion of what it all means. I’ll just say that I find its gorgeous and carefully crafted extremity quite haunting. This is not a book that sweeps you away on wings of fantasy, but one that makes you hyper-aware of its own programmed machinations, which become even more disturbing than the explicit horrors depicted thereby. The Etched City is as beautiful as it is opaque, as difficult to forget as it is to grasp, as impassioned as it is chilling. Bishop at once immerses us into a world of roiling passions, and observes those passions with the cool detachment of an anthropologist from another planet.
Mamoru Oshii‘s Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence is so dense, graphically, verbally, and intellectually, that I find it difficult to write about it after just one viewing. It’s the film The Matrix wanted to be but failed to be, a profound pulp-fictional exploration of virtuality and cyborg-being. (There’s even a character called “Haraway”). Though plot-wise the film is a direct sequel to the first Ghost in the Shell, conceptually and affectively Innocence moves onto an entirely different plane.
Visually, the film is quite “advanced,” with its fluid cityscapes and technoscapes, and mixture of flat and more 3D animation techniques. Oshii of course does not have the technological resources of Pixar or Dreamworks, but then his aims are far different from theirs. He isn’t interested in the kind of “realism” that is the holy grail of Pixar animation. Nor does he go for the sort of iconicity that is frequently the strength of both comics and animated film. Rather, Oshii aims for a sort of abstraction that is both expressive and representational. Forms are abstracted and simplified, as befits the animated medium; there’s no attempt to reproduce the shades and subtleties of emotion that would go through a live actor’s face. And the environments and backgrounds — though their surfaces are often lovingly rendered, and they are active, and metamorphize, in ways that would be impossible with “real” locations — never seem (as Pixar’s often do) like advertisements for the use of massive amounts of computing power. But these abstract visuals are expressive, because of the way Oshii draws upon, but mutates, what I think of as the “heavy metal” style of certain comics, together with borrowings from such cinematic sources as film noir and post-James Cameron action editing. And Oshii’s abstraction is also representational, because of the way it conflates physical/urban space with virtual/informational space. Schematic (though messy) abstraction is a form common to the film’s futuristic cityscapes (which draw heavily on the already-abstract languages of modern and postmodern architecture) and its depictions of computer datascapes. The point is that these two necessarily flow together, because all the human characters in the film have cyborg enhancements which allow them to experience “cyberspace” more or less sensorially; and because computing is so thoroughly embedded into physical places, machines, and landscapes that physical and informational spaces have come to be thoroughly isomorphic in any case.
In terms of visual style alone, Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence has accomplished what no live-action film ever has (no matter how expensive and brilliant its special effects): it makes visible (and audible; though without repeated exposure I am able to say nothing concrete about the film’s electronic sound track) how computational technologies have penetrated and transformed the real itself. (It’s important to maintain that these technologies are themselves thoroughly real, constitutive and constituent of the real, in short part of the very fabric of the Real; against the fashionable claims that they have murdered the real, denatured it, reduced it to spectacle or simulacrum).
(One side note. Several reviews that I have read have made the well-nigh inevitable comparison to Blade Runner; but I think the similarity is greatly exaggerated. Yes, Oshii places high-tech androids and cyborgs in dark and gritty, but media-pervaded, urban settings; but in terms of lighting, editing rhythms, pace of action, and so on, Innocence could not be more unlike Blade Runner).
I won’t try to summarize the plot of Innocence — which was too detailed, too economically expressed, and with too many subtle twists for me to grasp all of it on a first viewing — except to say that it revolves around a police investigation that is also, equally, a metaphysical investigation. The cyborg detective protagonist is trying to find out why “gynoid” robots (basically, animated female sex dolls who have been devised to service men sexually) have suddenly started killing their owners (which should be impossible according to Asimovian laws of robotics). But he’s really trying to find out what it means to be posthuman (a question which assails him, not only because he is dealing with sentient machines, which in this case basically means sex dolls, but also because of his own cyborg enhancements — not much of his original human body remains with him — and because of his former partner, who — at the end of the first Ghost in the Shell — had cast off her human embodiment entirely, choosing instead to vanish into the Net). This question comes up thanks to the very nature of the case, but also through the interchanges between the protagonist and his new (still mostly human) partner/sidekick: in the course of their investigation, they exchange aphorisms and citations deriving from a wide range of religious, philosophical, scientific, and science-ficitonal sources of both East and West.
The film explores both different levels and layers of reality — from the purely physical, through the hallucinatorily virtual — at one point, the protagonist and his sidekick pass through a series of virtual-reality loops, whose imagery, both idyllic and horrific, is ironically far more “organic” or biomorphic than anything else in the film — up to the machinic and the spiritual. What’s noteworthy — especially in contrast to the Manicheanism of The Matrix, and so much other Hollywood SF — is how the distinctions the film draws are never dualistic. Innocence is not monistic either: the differences it draws between body and soul, and between various degrees and circumstances of embodiment are never abolished or dissolved into oneness. But the film espouses a pluralism, in which body and soul, or human and machine, or living organism and doll, or materiality and virtuality/information, are neither fused together nor conceived as opposites. They are more like different floors of the same mansion (to use Deleuze’s metaphor to describe the relation of body and soul in Leibniz). There’s certainly a lot of tension between body and soul; indeed, the solution to the mystery of the criminal investigation (and perhaps to that of the metaphysical quest as well) turns on what happens when they are put into violent conflict. But Oshii doesn’t present this conflict as inevitable, or as essential and all-embracing. Boundary displacements are inevitable, but they need not be seen as absolute and definitive. The film defuses Cartesian paranoia together with the kinkiness of its initial erotic premise. Oshii suggests that Descartes’ Evil Genius (whose challenge is taken up in The Matrix, as well as in the novels of Philip K. Dick) and the sexualized uncanniness of dolls (a theme which one can trace, in the West, from Hoffman through Freud to Bellmer and other Surrealists; it apparently has great resonance in Japanese culture as well, but of this I know little) are really just two sides of the same coin. And in displacing and rearticulating the energies present in both these myths, he opens up the possibility of thinking them in different terms, telling them in different narratives. Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence is too skeptical, as well as too sensuous and affectively ambivalent, to offer a new philosophy of cyborg-being; but it powerfully points up the inadequacy of our current conceptions. Events are outstripping the categories we apply to them; the most difficult thing, but also the most necessary, is to be “as radical as reality itself.” Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence takes us a few steps in that direction.
Mamoru Oshii‘s Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence is so dense, graphically, verbally, and intellectually, that I find it difficult to write about it after just one viewing. It’s the film The Matrix wanted to be but failed to be, a profound pulp-fictional exploration of virtuality and cyborg-being. (There’s even a character called “Haraway”). Though plot-wise the film is a direct sequel to the first Ghost in the Shell, conceptually and affectively Innocence moves onto an entirely different plane.
Visually, the film is quite “advanced,” with its fluid cityscapes and technoscapes, and mixture of flat and more 3D animation techniques, as well as of hand-drawn animation (for the characters) and computer-generated (for the intricate backdrops). Oshii of course does not have the technological resources of Pixar or Dreamworks, but then his aims are far different from theirs. He isn’t interested in the kind of “realism” that is the holy grail of Pixar animation. Nor does he go for the sort of iconicity that is frequently the strength of both comics and animated film. Rather, Oshii aims for a sort of abstraction that is both expressive and representational. Forms are abstracted and simplified, as befits the animated medium; there’s no attempt to reproduce the shades and subtleties of emotion that would go through a live actor’s face. And the environments and backgrounds — though their surfaces are often lovingly rendered, and they are active, and metamorphize, in ways that would be impossible with “real” locations — never seem (as Pixar’s often do) like advertisements for the use of massive amounts of computing power. But these abstract visuals are expressive, because of the way Oshii draws upon, but mutates, what I think of as the “heavy metal” style of certain comics, together with borrowings from such cinematic sources as film noir and post-James Cameron action editing. And Oshii’s abstraction is also representational, because of the way it conflates physical/urban space with virtual/informational space. Schematic (though messy) abstraction is a form common to the film’s futuristic cityscapes (which draw heavily on the already-abstract languages of modern and postmodern architecture) and its depictions of computer datascapes. The point is that these two necessarily flow together, because all the human characters in the film have cyborg enhancements which allow them to experience “cyberspace” more or less sensorially; and because computing is so thoroughly embedded into physical places, machines, and landscapes that physical and informational spaces have come to be thoroughly isomorphic in any case.
In terms of visual style alone, Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence has accomplished what no live-action film ever has (no matter how expensive and brilliant its special effects): it makes visible (and audible; though without repeated exposure I am able to say nothing concrete about the film’s electronic sound track) how computational technologies have penetrated and transformed the real itself. (It’s important to maintain that these technologies are themselves thoroughly real, constitutive and constituent of the real, in short part of the very fabric of the Real; against the fashionable claims that they have murdered the real, denatured it, reduced it to spectacle or simulacrum).
(One side note. Several reviews that I have read have made the well-nigh inevitable comparison to Blade Runner; but I think the similarity is greatly exaggerated. Yes, Oshii places high-tech androids and cyborgs in dark and gritty, but media-pervaded, urban settings; but in terms of lighting, editing rhythms, pace of action, and so on, Innocence could not be more unlike Blade Runner).
I won’t try to summarize the plot of Innocence — which was too detailed, too economically expressed, and with too many subtle twists for me to grasp all of it on a first viewing — except to say that it revolves around a police investigation that is also, equally, a metaphysical investigation. The cyborg detective protagonist is trying to find out why “gynoid” robots (basically, animated female sex dolls who have been devised to service men sexually) have suddenly started killing their owners (which should be impossible according to Asimovian laws of robotics). But he’s really trying to find out what it means to be posthuman (a question which assails him, not only because he is dealing with sentient machines, which in this case basically means sex dolls, but also because of his own cyborg enhancements — not much of his original human body remains with him — and because of his former partner, who — at the end of the first Ghost in the Shell — had cast off her human embodiment entirely, choosing instead to vanish into the Net). This question comes up thanks to the very nature of the case, but also through the interchanges between the protagonist and his new (still mostly human) partner/sidekick: in the course of their investigation, they exchange aphorisms and citations deriving from a wide range of religious, philosophical, scientific, and science-ficitonal sources of both East and West.
The film explores both different levels and layers of reality — from the purely physical, through the hallucinatorily virtual — at one point, the protagonist and his sidekick pass through a series of virtual-reality loops, whose imagery, both idyllic and horrific, is ironically far more “organic” or biomorphic than anything else in the film — up to the machinic and the spiritual. What’s noteworthy — especially in contrast to the Manicheanism of The Matrix, and so much other Hollywood SF — is how the distinctions the film draws are never dualistic. Innocence is not monistic either: the differences it draws between body and soul, and between various degrees and circumstances of embodiment are never abolished or dissolved into oneness. But the film espouses a pluralism, in which body and soul, or human and machine, or living organism and doll, or materiality and virtuality/information, are neither fused together nor conceived as opposites. They are more like different floors of the same mansion (to use Deleuze’s metaphor to describe the relation of body and soul in Leibniz). There’s certainly a lot of tension between body and soul; indeed, the solution to the mystery of the criminal investigation (and perhaps to that of the metaphysical quest as well) turns on what happens when they are put into violent conflict. But Oshii doesn’t present this conflict as inevitable, or as essential and all-embracing. Boundary displacements are inevitable, but they need not be seen as absolute and definitive. The film defuses Cartesian paranoia together with the kinkiness of its initial erotic premise. Oshii suggests that Descartes’ Evil Genius (whose challenge is taken up in The Matrix, as well as in the novels of Philip K. Dick) and the sexualized uncanniness of dolls (a theme which one can trace, in the West, from Hoffman through Freud to Bellmer and other Surrealists; it apparently has great resonance in Japanese culture as well, but of this I know little) are really just two sides of the same coin. And in displacing and rearticulating the energies present in both these myths, he opens up the possibility of thinking them in different terms, telling them in different narratives. Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence is too skeptical, as well as too sensuous and affectively ambivalent, to offer a new philosophy of cyborg-being; but it powerfully points up the inadequacy of our current conceptions. Events are outstripping the categories we apply to them; the most difficult thing, but also the most necessary, is to be “as radical as reality itself.” Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence takes us a few steps in that direction.
Michael Moore spoke to a crowd of 4000 or so on the Wayne State University campus this afternoon. His theme: we need to defeat Bush on November 2nd. He spoke for an hour. I’m too cynical to take any political speech (even when, as with this one, it is for a cause I totally agree with) at face value; but I can say that Moore is a brilliant showman and rhetorician, superb at moving a crowd with a mix of indignation, jokes, and banter. He probably mentioned Kerry less than ten times in the entire course of the speech; which was just as well, given Kerry’s extreme lameness; but also appropriate, given that his theme was, not that Kerry is great, but that we have to vote for him anyway, because it’s the only way to get rid of Bush. The talk was not without self-aggrandizement (he made a big point of encouraging screenings of Fahrenheit 9/11, whether via DVD (it comes out next week) or — to his credit — via bootlegs. But all in all, Moore’s performance was a superb piece of propaganda (a word I am using neutrally and descriptively, not critically: we need this sort of propaganda if we are ever to put an end to Bush’s reign of terror), albeit one that was devoted to rallying the troops rather than to convincing the undecided.
Moore exhorted everyone not to believe the polls, and not to give in to pessimism. Because pessimism leads to demoralization, and thence to not bothering to vote. Though I definitely will go to my local polling place and cast an unenthusiastic vote for Kerry, I remain extremely pessimistic. Kerry still hasn’t put together any sort of effective campaign; he still doesn’t seem quite to understand what sort of vicious game the Bushies are playing. (Or maybe he does know, but is just too lame to make any sort of effective rejoinder. I guess we will see what happens in the debates, starting tomorrow). Even taking the polls with a grain of salt, it does look like Kerry is slipping badly in many of the crucial swing states, failing to mobilize support in places like Ohio, and needing to divert precious resources just to hold on to states like Michigan (where I now live), Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, which he ought to be able to take easily. The only scenario I can see in which Kerry wins is if large numbers of people who have never voted before are angry and upset enough to come out and vote for him this time. I’m not betting on it.
Michael Moore spoke to a crowd of 4000 or so on the Wayne State University campus this afternoon. His theme: we need to defeat Bush on November 2nd. He spoke for an hour. I’m too cynical to take any political speech (even when, as with this one, it is for a cause I totally agree with) at face value; but I can say that Moore is a brilliant showman and rhetorician, superb at moving a crowd with a mix of indignation, jokes, and banter. He probably mentioned Kerry less than ten times in the entire course of the speech; which was just as well, given Kerry’s extreme lameness; but also appropriate, given that his theme was, not that Kerry is great, but that we have to vote for him anyway, because it’s the only way to get rid of Bush. The talk was not without self-aggrandizement (he made a big point of encouraging screenings of Fahrenheit 9/11, whether via DVD (it comes out next week) or — to his credit — via bootlegs. But all in all, Moore’s performance was a superb piece of propaganda (a word I am using neutrally and descriptively, not critically: we need this sort of propaganda if we are ever to put an end to Bush’s reign of terror), albeit one that was devoted to rallying the troops rather than to convincing the undecided.
Moore exhorted everyone not to believe the polls, and not to give in to pessimism. Because pessimism leads to demoralization, and thence to not bothering to vote. Though I definitely will go to my local polling place and cast an unenthusiastic vote for Kerry, I remain extremely pessimistic. Kerry still hasn’t put together any sort of effective campaign; he still doesn’t seem quite to understand what sort of vicious game the Bushies are playing. (Or maybe he does know, but is just too lame to make any sort of effective rejoinder. I guess we will see what happens in the debates, starting tomorrow). Even taking the polls with a grain of salt, it does look like Kerry is slipping badly in many of the crucial swing states, failing to mobilize support in places like Ohio, and needing to divert precious resources just to hold on to states like Michigan (where I now live), Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, which he ought to be able to take easily. The only scenario I can see in which Kerry wins is if large numbers of people who have never voted before are angry and upset enough to come out and vote for him this time. I’m not betting on it.
La Habanera (1937) was the last film Douglas Sirk made for the Nazis, before he fled Germany in 1938. It stars Zarah Leander, the Nazis’ answer to Garbo and Dietrich.
The film is, of course, a melodrama. Leander’s character, a Swede vacationing in Puerto Rico, is charmed by the romance of the tropics and swept off her feet by the romantic local landowner. She jumps ship, stays in Puerto Rico and marries the landowner. Cut to ten years later; she is miserable, and dreams only of returning to Sweden. But her husband, revealed as a corrupt dictator and a jealous sadist, won’t let her take their son away with her if she leaves. Meanwhile, an old flame of hers, a doctor back in Stockholm, comes to the island with the double aim of rescuing her and finding a cure for the mysterious “Puerto Rico fever” that kills hundreds yearly. You can imagine where this is going. The picture ends “happily,” with the landowner himself dying of the fever that he didn’t want cured, and Leander returning home with the dashing doctor.
The film works as Nazi propaganda, since the bad guys are associated with US-style capitalism, and since the Aryan woman is recalled from the dirty tropics to her pure and proper racial roots at the end. Still, there are many signs of Sirk’s irony, undercutting the official ideology of the film in much the same way that irony worked against the overt messages in Sirk’s 50s Hollywood melodramas. (By applying the same doubling strategies to the films he made for Goebbels as to those he later made for Ross Hunter, Sirk in effect validates Theodor Adorno’s gloomy observations on the similarities between out-and-out fascism and the ultra-commodified “administered society” liberal democracies were more and more turning into; though Sirk of course has a lighter touch, and an empathy with the characters whom he depicts as subject to these constraints; Sirk is utterly free of Adorno’s elitist disdain and condescension for anything even remotely popular).
For one thing, Sirk’s irony is evident in the ways that he makes the heated tropics seem appealing; so that when Leander is about to return to Sweden at the end of the film, she seems to be more regretful than anything else at the prospect of leaving the island. The use of the title song, “La Habanera,” as a leitmotif throughout the film, sustains the mood of fantasy and romantic regret (both of which would be utterly repressed in the Aryan homeland). At one point, Leander sings this song, wearing sort-of ‘native garb,’ in a hypnotic performance, with the camera lovingly dwelling on her face in a moment that nearly attains a von Sternberg/Dietrich level of camp hysteria.
But the greatest scenes in the film are those betweeen Leander and her nine-year-old son, who comes out as a perfect, idealized specimen of blond Aryan youth (despite the swarthiness of his father). The child is an utter mama’s boy, who yearns desperately for the Sweden he has never been to, playing with a sleigh and dreaming of the snow he has never seen. Leander sings several duets with him, all about snow and winter and longing for the homeland: these scenes are cloying, static, suffocatingly oedipal, and gorgeously designed in exquisite contrasts of extreme light and dark, black and white. These scenes are as over-the-top delirious as anything Sirk later did in Magnificent Obsession or Written on the Wind; they theatricalize and estrange the film’s ostensible ideology in ways that were presumably not available to the original audience, but which seem glaring in retrospect.
La Habanera (1937) was the last film Douglas Sirk made for the Nazis, before he fled Germany in 1938. It stars Zarah Leander, the Nazis’ answer to Garbo and Dietrich.
The film is, of course, a melodrama. Leander’s character, a Swede vacationing in Puerto Rico, is charmed by the romance of the tropics and swept off her feet by the romantic local landowner. She jumps ship, stays in Puerto Rico and marries the landowner. Cut to ten years later; she is miserable, and dreams only of returning to Sweden. But her husband, revealed as a corrupt dictator and a jealous sadist, won’t let her take their son away with her if she leaves. Meanwhile, an old flame of hers, a doctor back in Stockholm, comes to the island with the double aim of rescuing her and finding a cure for the mysterious “Puerto Rico fever” that kills hundreds yearly. You can imagine where this is going. The picture ends “happily,” with the landowner himself dying of the fever that he didn’t want cured, and Leander returning home with the dashing doctor.
The film works as Nazi propaganda, since the bad guys are associated with US-style capitalism, and since the Aryan woman is recalled from the dirty tropics to her pure and proper racial roots at the end. Still, there are many signs of Sirk’s irony, undercutting the official ideology of the film in much the same way that irony worked against the overt messages in Sirk’s 50s Hollywood melodramas. (By applying the same doubling strategies to the films he made for Goebbels as to those he later made for Ross Hunter, Sirk in effect validates Theodor Adorno’s gloomy observations on the similarities between out-and-out fascism and the ultra-commodified “administered society” liberal democracies were more and more turning into; though Sirk of course has a lighter touch, and an empathy with the characters whom he depicts as subject to these constraints; Sirk is utterly free of Adorno’s elitist disdain and condescension for anything even remotely popular).
For one thing, Sirk’s irony is evident in the ways that he makes the heated tropics seem appealing; so that when Leander is about to return to Sweden at the end of the film, she seems to be more regretful than anything else at the prospect of leaving the island. The use of the title song, “La Habanera,” as a leitmotif throughout the film, sustains the mood of fantasy and romantic regret (both of which would be utterly repressed in the Aryan homeland). At one point, Leander sings this song, wearing sort-of ‘native garb,’ in a hypnotic performance, with the camera lovingly dwelling on her face in a moment that nearly attains a von Sternberg/Dietrich level of camp hysteria.
But the greatest scenes in the film are those betweeen Leander and her nine-year-old son, who comes out as a perfect, idealized specimen of blond Aryan youth (despite the swarthiness of his father). The child is an utter mama’s boy, who yearns desperately for the Sweden he has never been to, playing with a sleigh and dreaming of the snow he has never seen. Leander sings several duets with him, all about snow and winter and longing for the homeland: these scenes are cloying, static, suffocatingly oedipal, and gorgeously designed in exquisite contrasts of extreme light and dark, black and white. These scenes are as over-the-top delirious as anything Sirk later did in Magnificent Obsession or Written on the Wind; they theatricalize and estrange the film’s ostensible ideology in ways that were presumably not available to the original audience, but which seem glaring in retrospect.
Jia Zhang Ke’s Unknown Pleasures drifts entropically as it chronicles the desultory, unfulfilled lives of young people in a Chinese provincial backwater. Long shots, long takes, natural lighting, flat affect, disjunctive edits, and elliptical narration have almost become cliches of a certain sort of international art cinema. But here, as in his earlier, and equally remarkable Xiao Wu — I still haven’t seen Platform, said to be the best of his films — Jia makes the style really work: not only does it mirror the anomie and hopelessness of the characters (form matching content), but it also performs a subtle yet incisive political critique.
In trading Maoism for capitalism, Jia suggests, China has merely substituted one form of tyranny with another. Instead of the totalitarian frenzy of mass mobilization, contemporary China in Jia’s eyes now offers only random drift and impoverished imaginings; gangsterism and currying favor with the bureaucracy are sometimes capriciously rewarded, but most people find themselves doomed to passivity and empty consumption, even if they are lucky enough not to be victims of social predation. Jia’s style establishes and embodies the topography of such a world.
In one telling moment of Unknown Pleasures, one of the protagonists describes to his girlfriend the opening scene of Pulp Fiction, which he has seen on video, and which for him only signifies the distant allure of a glamor he can never hope to attain. The point is precisely that we never get to see anything like Pulp Fiction in the actual world of Unknown Pleasures. Even when the protagonists plan a bank robbery, there is nothing exuberant or crazy or Tarantinoesquely tongue-in-cheek about it; instead, it just goes stupidly and humiliatingly awry. By the end of the film, the characters have nothing left to lose; but they certainly don’t experience their situation as any sort of freedom or release. Instead, they are trapped in a world in which only money talks, even if there isn’t much that money can buy.
Jia Zhang Ke’s Unknown Pleasures drifts entropically as it chronicles the desultory, unfulfilled lives of young people in a Chinese provincial backwater. Long shots, long takes, natural lighting, flat affect, disjunctive edits, and elliptical narration have almost become cliches of a certain sort of international art cinema. But here, as in his earlier, and equally remarkable Xiao Wu — I still haven’t seen Platform, said to be the best of his films — Jia makes the style really work: not only does it mirror the anomie and hopelessness of the characters (form matching content), but it also performs a subtle yet incisive political critique.
In trading Maoism for capitalism, Jia suggests, China has merely substituted one form of tyranny with another. Instead of the totalitarian frenzy of mass mobilization, contemporary China in Jia’s eyes now offers only random drift and impoverished imaginings; gangsterism and currying favor with the bureaucracy are sometimes capriciously rewarded, but most people find themselves doomed to passivity and empty consumption, even if they are lucky enough not to be victims of social predation. Jia’s style establishes and embodies the topography of such a world.
In one telling moment of Unknown Pleasures, one of the protagonists describes to his girlfriend the opening scene of Pulp Fiction, which he has seen on video, and which for him only signifies the distant allure of a glamor he can never hope to attain. The point is precisely that we never get to see anything like Pulp Fiction in the actual world of Unknown Pleasures. Even when the protagonists plan a bank robbery, there is nothing exuberant or crazy or Tarantinoesquely tongue-in-cheek about it; instead, it just goes stupidly and humiliatingly awry. By the end of the film, the characters have nothing left to lose; but they certainly don’t experience their situation as any sort of freedom or release. Instead, they are trapped in a world in which only money talks, even if there isn’t much that money can buy.