Like a Film

Ideological Fantasy on Screen, Camera and Canvas

Timothy Murray

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134900510
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Popular Culture in Art

In this stimulating collection of theoretical writings on film, photography, and art, Timothy Murray examines relations between artistic practice, sexual and racial politics, theory and cultural studies.
Like a Film investigates how the cinematic apparatus has invaded the theory of culture, suggesting that the many destabilising traumas of our culture remain accessible to us because they are structured so much like film. The book analyses the impact of cinematic perceptions and productions on awide array of cultural practices: from the Renassance works of Shakespeare and Caravaggio to modern sexual and political fantasy; and the theoretical work of Lyotard, Torok, Barthes, Ropars-Wuilleumier, Zizek, Silverman and Laplanche. Like A Film responds to current multicultural debates over the value of theory and the aim of artistic practice.

1

INTRODUCTION

Ideological Fantasy in Reverse Projection

The cultural elites respect neither tradition nor standards. They believe that moral truths are relative and all lifestyles are equal. They seem to think the family is an arbitrary arrangement of people who decide to live under the same roof, that fathers are disposable and that parents need not be married or even of opposite sexes.

(Dan Quayle)

We work within the realm of fantasy, and in that realm there are a number of things we can do against the grain of stereotypical representations and discourses.

(Isaac Julien)

Imagine a script for a horror movie about a fragile, American urban environment teetering on the brink of collapse. The film centers on a slice of time from life in an urban park in which conflicting cultures have learned to maintain a fragile coexistence in semi-indifference to one another. Modeled after Washington Square Park, the cultural center of Greenwich Village, this multiblock square is portrayed as the gathering-place of homeless families, gay parents, senior citizens, drug dealers, students, musicians, political activists, and the multicultural peoples who now constitute the lifeblood of America’s cities. A large crowd’s celebration of the first warm day of spring is disrupted by the sudden appearance of a gray, 1987 Delta 88. No, it does not bring Dan Quayle to attack the cultural elite. Instead, it jumps the curb and careers out of control through a crowded end of the park. Sounding like an exploding bomb, the car slams through the Park’s gates and heads right toward the audience from the upper left of the screen. The spectators are confronted by a wave of terror as park benches topple and screaming pedestrians fly through the air. Once the battered Olds comes to a rest, the camera pans its flat tires and shattered windshield. The film then cuts to a tight shot of two spring jackets lying on the bloodied pavement next to the car. Next, the camera zooms in even closer to catch sight of an open textbook crumpled under the right front tire. Finally, the spectator views an eery shot of freshly splattered blood dripping slowly from the hood. All of this is followed by a contrasting sequence in which onlookers pull a 71-year-old woman from the car as people explode in rage, yelling and cursing at the dazed driver. They violently accuse her of driving the Olds in excess of sixty miles an hour straight into the crowd, killing three people instantly and critically injuring many more. She looks confused by the spectacle of the man next to her, who moans while bleeding profusely from the head.

But rather than a horror film, Crash in Washington Square: A Scene of Death and Chaos would be advertised as a docudrama of an event that shocked New York City on the first warm day of spring, April 23, 1992.¹ This was an event tailor-made for Hollywood with ironic urban subplots and sinister connotations. As Javier Ipurralde recounts his sunny afternoon stroll with his injured friend, 21-year-old Nadine Hachuel, ‘I was looking at her and we were talking, believe it or not, about the apocalypse, because New York seems very apocalyptic right now. The car went under my friend and my friend was gone. She was first picked up by the fender and bounced several times on the windshield, and the last time she flew and ended up in front of the car’ (Kleinfeld 1992: B2). Stressing the paradox of this tragedy, a reporter from the New York Times suggests that the arbitrary event similarly brought the apocalypse now to the shocked and bewildered driver, ‘her life irrevocably changed in one horrible instant’ (Schemo 1992: B2).

I open this collection of essays on film, photography, and art with this gruesome scenario to provide a cinematic introduction to the concept of ideological fantasy that holds these chapters together. The imaginary film script of this traumatic accident could easily serve as a blueprint for what Christian Metz terms the (ideological) ‘problems of denotation in the fiction film’ (Metz 1986). Such a script exemplifies the crucial semiological aspects of docudrama’s analogical realism. On one level, it capitalizes on Metz’s notion of the analogical motivation of cinematic denotation. The fictional adaptation of an historical event depends first on film’s technical ability to portray a literal sense based upon perception. In ‘Problems of denotation in the fiction film’, Metz clarifies how the medium of film is motivated by the partial equations of visual and auditory analogy, by the perceptual similarity of signifiers and signifieds. That is, the ghoulish nightmare of a stroll through the Park here would be matched by the apocalyptical likeness of one horrible instant of film. On another, more complex level, Metz stresses how the symbolic nature of cinematic connotation overtakes perceptual analogy as the latter accrues value through the additional meaning it receives from sociocultural codes. Connotating the ideological fantasy of the apocalyptic future of urban culture, Crash in Washington Square Park reveals, for instance, the brutal irony of the death of a brave elderly woman who had survived the daily onslaughts of New York’s downtown drug culture: ‘Esther Rintel, a seventy-one-year-old lifelong resident of the area, had narrowly missed death. A park acquaintance who had been sitting near her, however, was hit. “My poor Ruthie is gone”, Ms Rintel said sadly, “She’s gone”’ (Kleinfeld 1992: B2). A further ironic analogy could be said to deepen the specifically cinematographic codification of this scene (the meaning of each visual element taken separately). For Ruthie met death arbitrarily at the hands of a respected Yonkers senior citizen who was ‘active in church functions, charities and the anti-abortion movement’ (Schemo 1992: B2). One might also acknowledge Hollywood’s tendency to overaccentuate sociocultural analogies by imagining the tragic twist of an additional subplot about a young woman shown to have been lobbying in the Park for ‘Freedom of Choice’ just prior to her untimely death at the hands of an elderly ‘Right to Lifer’.

But what fascinates me more is that the scenario of Crash in Washington Square Park exemplifies how cinematographic analogy is itself a mixture of two important signifying organizations: what Metz calls ‘specialized codes’ and ‘cultural codes’. Specialized codes are said to be purely cinematographic signifying features: ‘montages, camera movements, optical effects, “rhetoric of the screen”, interaction of auditory and visual elements, and so on’ (Metz 1986:38). Cultural codes constitute the iconographical, perceptual, and other codes of given social groups. These cultural codes are ‘so ubiquitous and well “assimilated” that the viewers generally consider them to be “natural”’ (ibid.: 38). Of particular importance to me is not so much the distinction between these codes as the implications of the ‘modulation’ of the two analogical systems. For Metz’s distinction seems open to the possibility that the specialized codes of cinema can themselves become, or always already are, ‘naturalized’ or ‘cultural’.² In this sense, they ‘return’ to cinema not as ‘specialized’ but as cultural codes that function for the most part ‘within photographic and phonographic analogy’ (ibid.: 38–9). These would be the sorts of cinematic codes that ‘intrude to the film by means of perceptual analogy each time an object or an ordering of objects (visual or auditory) “symbolizes” within the film what it would have symbolized outside of the film—that is to say, within culture’ (ibid.: 39). To emphasize such a modulating relation in which the specialized discourse of film is folded back upon itself as ‘naturalized’, I would like to introduce this book with one more suggestive detail from the script of Crash in Washington Square Park. It takes place within a sequence following the crash that depicts the feeble efforts of news reporters to assemble the facts of a story which are available, as Brecht might say, only through the impressions of benumbed witnesses. At the heart of this segment would be the account of Evie Hantzopoulos, an NYU graduate student who described the scene to the New York Times: ‘It was like a surreal experience. We couldn’t believe what was happening. It was like a movie’ (Baquet 1992: B2).

‘Like a movie’, ‘like a film’. This collection dwells on the various ways the cinematic experience has pervaded contemporary cultural production only to return to itself ‘im-segno’. This is the concept coined by Pasolini to suggest how diff ferent basic elements of filmic discourse ‘carry with them, before even “cinematographic language” can intervene, a great deal more than their simple identity’ (Metz 1986:39). Like a Film reflects on the broad impact of the cinematic apparatus on interdisciplinary experimentations in the arts (Rainer, Jarman, the Harrisons), on social and political narratives (the discourses of feminism, homosexuality, race, and ecology), on representational and visual theory (Barthes, Lyotard, Silverman, Torok, and Laplanche), on perceptions and articulations of history (from the Renaissance of Shakespeare and Caravaggio to the modernity of military cartography and global rings of fire) and, ultimately, on the subsequent return of the procedures and results of interdisciplinary experimentation itself to the cinema and its language. A startling example of the complexity of such a composite return occurs at the end of Yvonne Rainer’s film Journeys from Berlin/1971 (1979), a film I discuss in Chapter 2.Converted video footage portrays Rainer herself (see figure 2.8) performing a tearful monologue, ‘Dear Mama’, which recounts her viewing of a film, Morgen Beginnt das Leben, directed by Werner Hochbaum in Berlin in 1933. ‘She describes the gasps and murmurs she heard as young members of the audience identified the street signs of neighborhoods that were otherwise unrecognizable. The film is their link to pre-war Berlin, a city “that is no more”’ (Rainer 1989:168). Here the video-montaged ending of Rainer’s experimental, feminist film is enveloped in an uncanny acknowledgement of contemporary cinema’s traumatic debts to its cinematic and/or phantasmatic precursors. What is more, this example suggests the degree to which the traumas of historical fantasy are enveloped in film and the sites of its projections.

IDEOLOGICAL FANTASIES/CINEMATIC DIFFERENDS

This book reflects my ongoing interest in how differing cultural milieux are caught up, bound up, with the schemata of visual theory and artistic practice. I reflect, to borrow a notion from Jean Laplanche, on how the theoretical enterprises of philosophy and psychoanalysis ‘invade’ the cultural ‘not only as a form of thought or a doctrine, but as a mode of being’ (Laplanche 1989:12). From this perspective, theories of sexuality and trauma, such as the Oedipus and the castration complexes, would be seen as ‘possible variations on culturally determined scenarios’ (ibid.: 163).³ Conversely, Like a Film reflects on how the cinematic apparatus itself has invaded the theory of culture as a mode of weaving together the disparate

‘psychopolitical’ fabrics of cultural production, psycho-analysis, and politically marked subject positions.

The reporting of Crash in Washington Square Park makes especially apparent how the analogical relation inscribed in the formula ‘like a film’ can now be said to constitute the foundational fabric of cultural narrative, rather than being a mere fictional by-product of film’s distanced depictions of urban ecology and its tragedies. For what makes Crash in Washington Square Park describable, if not also comprehensible, to the readers of the New York Times is its almost necessary translation into the surreal experience of cultural fantasy, ‘like a movie’. Suggested by Evie Hantzopoulos is the complex way that ‘what is happening’ in culture remains inscribed in the denial of its belief or, similarly, in the analogical modulation of belief and fantasy: ‘We couldn’t believe what was happening. It was like a movie/Otherwise put, the cinematic ‘happenings’ of culture—of identity, identification, and politics—are often believable precisely because they are structured so much like film. They are virtual constructs related to the plane, screen, or mirror of their personal and communal projections.

To explain this relation, I turn to my book’s subtitle and the concept of ‘ideological fantasy’. I loosely appropriate this notion from Slavoj Žižek’s The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989a) where it signifies the belief supporting the fantasy that regulates social reality.⁴ With this term, Žižek turns his attention away from the received notion of ideology as ‘false consciousness’ to the complex strata of fantasy-construction itself:

ideology is not a dreamlike illusion that we build to escape the insupportable reality; in its basic dimension it is a fantasy-construction which serves as a support for our ‘reality’ itself: an ‘illusion’ which structures our effective, real social relations and thereby masks some insupportable, real, impossible kernel (conceptualized by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe as ‘antagonism’: a traumatic social division which cannot be symbolized). The function of ideology is not to offer us a point of escape from our reality but to offer us the social reality itself as an escape from some traumatic, real kernel (Žižek 1989a: 45).⁵

What appeals to me is Žižek’s reconfiguration of ideology as a doubled phantasmatic screen of the pleasure of illusions and the fetishistic preservation of the residues of trauma. For Žižek, a key feature of this function is that the social realities of late capitalism—the social ‘relations between things, between commodities—instead of immediate relations between people’ (ibid.: 33)—themselves believe for the subject, act on its behalf. Countering the commonplace that belief is something interior and knowledge something exterior, Žižek adopts the Lacanian proposition that

‘the most intimate beliefs, even the most intimate emotions such as compassion, crying, sorrow, laughter can be transferred, delegated to others without losing their sincerity’ (Žižek 1989:34). He explains such a claim analogically by citing the example of television’s ‘canned laughter’, which relieves fatigued viewers of what he calls the ‘duty to laugh’:

So even if, tired from a hard day’s stupid work, all evening we did nothing but gaze drowsily into the television screen, we can say afterwards that objectively, through the medium of the other, we had a really good time…. The lesson to be drawn from this concerning the social field is above all that belief, far from being an ‘intimate’, purely mental state, is always materialized in our effective social activity: belief supports the fantasy which regulates social reality.

(ibid.: 35–6).

But the fact that this example of ‘canned laughter’ could appear trivial or insignificant to many readers suggests that Žižek’s notion of ‘materialized belief need remain somewhat more open to the shifting transferential nature of ‘good times’ and ‘effective social activity’. Does not the mixed appeal of television itself contest any universal response to its effectiveness as a thing, a commodity, an ‘apparatus’? Just such an emphasis on how subjects are often positioned differently, and also position themselves (for what is ‘pernicious’ to some is empowering to others), in relation to the lure of ‘appeal’ motivates my analyses of film, art, photography, and theory. For it is the very ‘appealing’ nature of the phantasmatic relation, the polymorphous web of interpellation, which I think contests any trust in, say, a universal response to the media, on the one hand, or a blurred, but still distinct ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of representation, on the other. Following Žižek’s own lead, might not we say that more emphasis on what Laclau and Mouffe call the ‘contingency’ of interpellation itself will work to cloud the distinction between ‘immediate relations between people’ and ‘social relations between things’? Why not claim that relations between people can only ever have been as immediate and universal as they have appeared on the screen? Universality and immediacy, that is, can be structured only like a film—as materializations of the many contingencies of enunciation and its social conditions.

The consequences of filmic contingency are brought home by the example of another horror show from American popular culture. I am thinking of the Associated Press report of the sensational White Plains, NY, trial of Carolyn Warmus for the murder of Betty Jean Solomon. When asked by a reporter what it was like to sit through the trial, Joyce Green, the sister of the victim, replied: ‘it doesn’t seem real. You can detach yourself.… It’s like being in a movie or some horrible book. You don’t think it will ever happen to you’ (Ithaca Journal, April 22, 1991). Green’s filmic analogy refers less to what she believes is (not) happening ‘to her’, being in a movie, than to what the prosecution maintains happened to Carolyn Warmus, who wa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction Ideological fantasy in reverse projection
• Part I: Pictures of the living dead
• Part II: Dirty stills
• Part III: Lines of demand
• Bibliography
• Index