film club XL: the vanishing

So, this week, Film Club continued our investigation into cinematic sociopaths by looking at George Sluizer's The Vanishing (the 1998 original).

The setup of The Vanishing is relatively simple: a Dutch couple, Rex and Saskia, are on a roadtrip together...

They stop at a roadside service plaza and Saskia goes in for a Coke and a beer while Rex waits outside. Rex, waits, and waits, and waits... but Saskia never returns to the car.

Like Psycho, then, The Vanishing uses a woman's disappearance as an early turning point in its narrative, and it spends the later part of its narrative following the lover of that woman as he searches for her. Both films also spend large chunks of narrative time following the psychotic or sociopathic individual to blame for the woman's disappearance.

Unlike Psycho, however, which spends its time following Norman Bates in the aftermath of his murders, The Vanishing's narrative attention goes to the sociopathic individual, Raymond Lemorne, in advance of his act: we see a number of flashbacks which show him planning out the abduction, working out key details, revising and re-revising elements of it. Here, for instance, we see him rehearsing exactly how he might chloroform someone:

This is interesting because it presents an alternate view of the psychology of sociopathy. In Psycho, Norman Bates' psychology is driven completely by emotion and impulse— grief, jealousy, arousal, rage— emotions which clash inchoately until they find form in violent outburst. Raymond functions as the exact opposite: his actions are methodical, pre-meditated, and even (we learn) in line with an internal philosophy and morality which retains integrity even as it leads him to do evil things.

Watching a character work out a plan like this tends to generate a desire to see the plan play out, although we never quite identify with Raymond the way we did (momentarily, horrifyingly) with Norman (discussed in full last week). Part of the reason for this is that this film, unlike Psycho, has the investigating male, Rex, serve as a stable protagonist throughout the entire run-time. So the (potentially troubling) desire to see Raymond's plan come to fruition is neatly folded into Rex's more socially-acceptable desire to learn exactly what happened to Saskia.

This keeps us in a "safer" space, psychologically-speaking: having Rex as the point of audience identification allows us to maintain a comfortable distance from Raymond. However, Sluizer is a canny enough director to exploit this "safe" identification to great effect. Late in the proceedings, the narrative presents Rex (and, by extension, us) with something of a diabolical choice. I won't spoil it for those who haven't seen the film, but suffice it to say that Rex is given the opportunity to learn what really transpired, although taking advantage of this opportunity will put him in the path of real danger; in fact, even at the outset of the decision it is almost certain that he will be killed, or possibly something worse (earlier on, Raymond casually makes mention that he doesn't consider killing someone to be the worst thing you can do to them).

Rex wants the knowledge of Saskia's fate, however horrible. He wants it badly enough that he's willing to risk self-annihilation. And in effect, we are presented with the exact same bargain: do we want to know what happened, enough to be willing to risk our protagonist / self-analogue? Even though we know it will be horrible? Only the most sensitive viewer could decline such a bargain. But why? What do we gain from taking in disturbing knowledge? Why would the film feel so emotionally disappointing were Rex to decide he had learned enough, and to walk away at the last second? In these final scenes, The Vanishing looks nakedly at the core offer that is at the root of horror / shock films from Psycho to Hostel II: I have something terrible to show you. Do you want to see it?

Next week: more sociopathic abduction narratives: we'll be watching Skunkcabbage's pick, Stanley Kubrick's Lolita (1962).

Labels: character, horror, knowledge, media commentary, narrative

Thursday, September 04, 2008
11:29 AM
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the season of comics II / comics as knowledge-system

The season of comics continues unabated, with three or four more graphic novels lying in wait to be read, including the gigantic Daredevil Omnibus, kindly loaned to me by my Film Club compatriot Skunkcabbage.

Reconnecting with comics, with the Marvel Universe in particular, has been providing me with very real pleasure this winter, and I've been speculating as to why that is. There's probably a way in which the much-remarked-upon escapist or power-fantasy aspects of comics act as to temporarily stave off some of the depressing realities of adulthood (in the same way that they temporarily staved off some of the depressing realities of adolescence) but I don't really think that tells the whole story.

Late last night, K. and I discussed the idea that comics form a "knowledge-system," a body of deeply specialized / obscure (yet knowable) information that is rewardingly vast and crannied (yet navigable, and ultimately finite). Similar knowledge-systems might be things like jazz, or World War II history, or contemporary poetry. There is a certain pleasure, if you're a geek, in diving into a system of that sort, and learning the way that information functions in it. Who are the key figures? How are they related? What are the central narratives? What's the chronology of key events? These questions are a very satisfying sort of mind-candy.

With comics—particularly Marvel Universe comics—I have the advantage that the central roster of characters is pretty familiar to me, and has been since I first learned my way around the Marvel Universe knowledge-system in, oh, 1984 or whenever. Plunging back in mostly means learning where the stories are now—what's happened in the interval since I stopped reading. (Or filling in blind spots: hence my interest in the Daredevil Omnibus—Daredevil was never really a character I read when I was younger.) I've argued elsewhere that comics characters should age in more-or-less real time, but I'm learning that a stable roster of characters provides a certain orienting structure within the knoweldge-system, which is definitely making it easier for me to re-enter it.

Labels: comics, knowledge, pleasure

Monday, March 10, 2008
1:03 PM
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provoking meaning (part I)

For Christmas, I received a copy of Henry Jenkins' Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers, his new collection of essays on fandom / "participatory culture." I'm about halfway through and it's pretty great.

Perhaps the most interesting piece so far is "Interactive Audiences? The 'Collective Intelligence' of Media Fans," in which Jenkins uses Pierre Levy's notion of the cosmopedia (roughly speaking, cosmopedia can be understood as collective information-banks enabled by computer networking).

Jenkins sees Internet-enabled fan culture as an incarnation of Levy's idea:

"Online fan communities might well be some of the most fully realized versions of Levy's cosmopedia, expansive self-organizing groups focused around the collective production, debate, and circulation of meanings, interpretations, and fantasies in response to various artifacts of contemporary popular culture."

and he posits a practical reason for why this might be so: "The fan community pools its knowledge because no single fan can know everything to fully appreciate [a] series."

But as the fan community develops their collective knowledge-bank, they also develop a pretty intense capability to process series-based information. Jenkins quotes Nancy Baym (who literally wrote the book on online soap opera fandom) on this point: "A large group of fans can ... accumulate, retain, and continually recirculate unprecedented amounts of relevant information."

So this would appear to be another force driving media producers to create more complex and dense works (the trend examined by Steven Johnson's Everything Bad Is Good For You). And, accordingly, Jenkins has a prediction: "To be marketable ... new cultural works will have to provoke and reward meaning production through elaborate back stories, unresolved enigmas, excess information, and extratextual expansions of the program universe."

This essay was first published in 2002, predating the first episodes of Lost by two solid years, but Lost features those four methods so pointedly that Jenkins should practically get a credit on the show.

This also serves as a potential occasion to re-evaluate exactly how "marketable" those four methods are. Critics both at mainstream venues and within fandom seem to be increasingly losing patience with the precise devices that Jenkins argues should be provocative and rewarding. What's behind this frustration? Are the devices inherently misguided, or is the Lost team's particular use of the devices flawed or mishandled? I have some potential answers to this question, but they'll have to wait until the next post.

Labels: fandom, knowledge, media commentary, narrative

Sunday, January 21, 2007
10:10 AM
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in defense of don rumsfeld

I'm no fan of Donald Rumsfeld, and I won't be sad to see him go. But his departure has sparked some retrospective commentary, in which his (in)famous statement about "known knowns" has made another round of appearances. I've always felt that it is, in fact, misguided to present this quote as a golden example of governmental obfuscation, which seems to be what people intend when they trot it out. Let's give it a listen:

"There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know."

OK, I'll admit that the repetition is initially curious to the ear, but beyond that neither the English nor the meaning behind it is particularly tortured. Furthermore, this is a completely reasonable, strategically sound, and actually somewhat insightful way to think about not only military knowledge but knowledge in general. I'd go so far as to say that maintaining an awareness of "unknown unknowns" is good mental practice, a vaccination against hubris.

It is true that Rumsfeld leaves a quadrant of his scatterplot chart unarticulated: "unknown knowns," things that we don't know that we know. The omission may be revealing. Slavoj Žižek, writing on this, relates "unknown knowns" to the Freudian unconscious, and describes it memorably as "the disavowed beliefs, suppositions and obscene practices we pretend not to know about, even though they form the background of our public values." Perhaps this blind spot helped contribute to Rumsfeld's failure.

Labels: knowledge, politics

Thursday, November 09, 2006
5:31 PM
1 comments

MetaFilter post griping about the the Mayday Mystery texts.

"If I had money I would offer a reward to anyone who can demonstrate that the ads refer to anything other than themselves. Anyone can go to a library and clip passages from books and periodicals to make a collage of disparate meanings. The reader will then bring his own context to the work and will find meanings in it ... I actually think that the ads are shallow and that the whole thing ... is either a somewhat mean-spirited prank or a symptom of insanity."

I'd quibble with the wording here: it's obvious that the ads "refer to [things] other than themselves"—being (at least in part) a collage of images and texts the ads (at the very minimum) refer back to the source texts. But I think what the author here is expressing is doubt that the ads can be "solved" in such a way that yields a coherent statement about the world. This complaint raises a good question: does an amibiguous system of meaning need to have a decodable worldview behind it in order to be worthy of attention?

Frankly, I lean towards "no." Even if the Mayday Mystery system is ultimately undecodable, there are undeniable aesthetic pleasures to be gleaned from it. I enjoy being immersed into the welter of a thickly-referential text, just on the level of the individual reference: even if the references don't "add up" into a statement they still point me towards areas of knowledge that I'm not proficient in; they remind me of the immensity, complexity, and, ultimately, the unknowability of the world as a whole, which, for me, is a pleasing reminder. (I'd rather live in a world that was infinitely, richly unknowable rather than one that could be rather easily "solved.")

It also seems undeniable that the Mayday texts aren't wholly random: on at least some level there is a human consciousness selecting and arranging this material (regardless of whether it is in accord with an internally consistent "plan" or not), and thus it allows me a glimpse into the subjective consciousness of another human being, which is one of the things that art is able to do. As for dismissing the work on the grounds that it might be a "product of insanity," I'd have to admit that whether an artistic subjectivity is generally considered "sane" or "insane" is not particularly important to me: we all know that the line between the two is more akin to a large, diffuse grey area. Furthermore, if we accept that one of the things that makes art valuable is its ability to expose us different points of view, then certainly artworks that help us gain access to "insane" points of view—those most different from our own—are more valuable, not less.

For instance: artist Paul Laffoley, whose diagrammatic artworks are a kind of cousin to the Mayday texts, is rumored to have struggled with mental illness, but this does not make his pieces any less beautiful or compelling, nor does the fact that I can't figure them out, nor does the fact that I'm not even certain that there's anything "there" to "figure out" at all.

(I'd also say, by the way, that just because a piece of art is "a symptom of insanity" doesn't automatically mean that it hasn't also been built according to a discernible plan. Schizophrenics often seem able to maintain worldviews that adhere to a kind of consistent internal logic: the problem comes when they find out that that worldview is incongruent with that of the culture that surrounds them.)

Labels: art, knowledge

Wednesday, September 22, 2004
3:46 PM
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