Iris, Winslet, Der Vorleser.
Intellectually charged Winslet in the role of illiterate Hanna, mismatched role in a charming trick.
I thought of young Iris Murdoch that Winslet played in the film Iris. Probably she's the only one who can deliver the unfathomable yearning for the pleasure and enlightenment, bodily and intellectually.
'Love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real' - Iris Murdoch.
Saturday, 7 March 2009
Friday, 26 September 2008
Lost Horizon
At the moment I saw this photo, 16 days had passed after its appearance on the NYT to commemorate the 7th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.
Edward Ruscha, who took the picture in 1961, remembered 'forlorn and empty' financial district skyline, lamenting the city's vastness, exuberance and fast tempo of living.
'The delicious place' that Ruscha visited is vanishing away in the centre of the picture, but several seagulls are still lingering around freely. It seems that there is a kind of gravity stemming from the horizon, invisibly attracting those tiny creatures to its centre.
The kernel of that illuminating horizon is accentuated by the knowing that it's no longer there. Just when I nearly fell into a solemn and even melancholy state for the void, the scissor-gate would protrude into the vista and the space of imagination, separating the past from the presence.
The beauty of the loss, innocently young but irreversibly gone, that's what Ruscha has captured in this wonderful temporal frame. Marvelling at the impeccable composition of the photo, I can feel sheer sentiment for a lost Utopian world, nearly overflowing but wisely being contained by the scissor-gate at the foreground.
Such an implication might never be revealed at the moment it was shot. Isn't this pure apres coup effect a perfect eulogy for the ground zero?
Edward Ruscha, who took the picture in 1961, remembered 'forlorn and empty' financial district skyline, lamenting the city's vastness, exuberance and fast tempo of living.
'The delicious place' that Ruscha visited is vanishing away in the centre of the picture, but several seagulls are still lingering around freely. It seems that there is a kind of gravity stemming from the horizon, invisibly attracting those tiny creatures to its centre.
The kernel of that illuminating horizon is accentuated by the knowing that it's no longer there. Just when I nearly fell into a solemn and even melancholy state for the void, the scissor-gate would protrude into the vista and the space of imagination, separating the past from the presence.
The beauty of the loss, innocently young but irreversibly gone, that's what Ruscha has captured in this wonderful temporal frame. Marvelling at the impeccable composition of the photo, I can feel sheer sentiment for a lost Utopian world, nearly overflowing but wisely being contained by the scissor-gate at the foreground.
Such an implication might never be revealed at the moment it was shot. Isn't this pure apres coup effect a perfect eulogy for the ground zero?
Friday, 5 September 2008
Invisible writer
Occasionally, one would encounter a rare piece of writing, so rich and so deep, that it enters directly into your soul with its magic elevating force.
Writing, a lonely silhouette at the dark night, talking to no one but by yourself, these acts and image juxtapose with each other, speaking loudly from Cynthia Ozick. I barely know her before this rendezvous, symbolically through digital media, and her family name sounds jarring to me. She must be very strong, mentally speaking.
It puzzles me a bit as I encountered another story about a female poet Bachmann yesterday. Intuitively, I guess they are the same type, extremely rare, with probability I guess less than 100 million to 1, but it just happened in this virtual world.I was moved by the story of both, although one is written in the form of a speech, another one is simply a report on a new biography.
Such a coincidence is worth writing down something, to capture this delicate disturbance of a peaceful mind of mine, which has absorbed too much information without truly being moved. After swallowing all these plain journalistic writings, reading the sentence like 'Nothing is more poisonous to steady recognition than death: how often is a writer – lauded, fêted, bemedalled – plummeted into eclipse no more than a year or two after the final departure?' suddenly gives you a refreshing literal sense, poetic and challenging, with a control of tempo and nuance of fine words.
Nabokov, Henry James, Rilke, all probably fall into the so-called 'the madness of arts', just like Ozick's insurmountable madness drives her through 7 years' austerity as an invisible writer. I don't know how such a life experience has changed her view, but her self-righteous feeling has been voiced loudly.
'Writers are what they genuinely are only when they are at work in the silent and instinctual cell of ghostly solitude, and never when they are out industriously chatting on the terrace.'
While a true writer is invisible, a fraudulent writer on the contrary is 'the visible one, the crowd-seeker, the crowd-speaker, the one who will go out to dinner with you with a motive in mind, or will stand and talk at you, or will discuss mutual writing habits with you, or will gossip with you about other novelists and their enviable good luck or their gratifying bad luck.'
How bitter Ozick's tone is! How unapologetic! What kind of solitude she has been living through before uttering such a strong feeling!
That was the moment that I thought about the tragedy of Celan, his complete and hopeless defeat in facing his lover's dedication to writing, the madness of self-devotion to poetry, which once engulfed Rilke.
The literal and poetic consolation I once retained from Rilke and Nabokov hasn't lasted long, someday I suddenly realized that all that had happened in my mind was just an illusion, since their flesh and blood had been long gone. The idea continues to inspire, like what it has done to Ozick. Its magic but dark shadow will cast spell on a writer until the moment the deadly solitude captures his/her soul, transforming flesh and blood into cold words, and waiting for some readers to pick them up, and being transfixed.
Chilling, warm, disenchanting but moving, Ozick's speech is marvellous.
Writing, a lonely silhouette at the dark night, talking to no one but by yourself, these acts and image juxtapose with each other, speaking loudly from Cynthia Ozick. I barely know her before this rendezvous, symbolically through digital media, and her family name sounds jarring to me. She must be very strong, mentally speaking.
It puzzles me a bit as I encountered another story about a female poet Bachmann yesterday. Intuitively, I guess they are the same type, extremely rare, with probability I guess less than 100 million to 1, but it just happened in this virtual world.I was moved by the story of both, although one is written in the form of a speech, another one is simply a report on a new biography.
Such a coincidence is worth writing down something, to capture this delicate disturbance of a peaceful mind of mine, which has absorbed too much information without truly being moved. After swallowing all these plain journalistic writings, reading the sentence like 'Nothing is more poisonous to steady recognition than death: how often is a writer – lauded, fêted, bemedalled – plummeted into eclipse no more than a year or two after the final departure?' suddenly gives you a refreshing literal sense, poetic and challenging, with a control of tempo and nuance of fine words.
Nabokov, Henry James, Rilke, all probably fall into the so-called 'the madness of arts', just like Ozick's insurmountable madness drives her through 7 years' austerity as an invisible writer. I don't know how such a life experience has changed her view, but her self-righteous feeling has been voiced loudly.
'Writers are what they genuinely are only when they are at work in the silent and instinctual cell of ghostly solitude, and never when they are out industriously chatting on the terrace.'
While a true writer is invisible, a fraudulent writer on the contrary is 'the visible one, the crowd-seeker, the crowd-speaker, the one who will go out to dinner with you with a motive in mind, or will stand and talk at you, or will discuss mutual writing habits with you, or will gossip with you about other novelists and their enviable good luck or their gratifying bad luck.'
How bitter Ozick's tone is! How unapologetic! What kind of solitude she has been living through before uttering such a strong feeling!
That was the moment that I thought about the tragedy of Celan, his complete and hopeless defeat in facing his lover's dedication to writing, the madness of self-devotion to poetry, which once engulfed Rilke.
The literal and poetic consolation I once retained from Rilke and Nabokov hasn't lasted long, someday I suddenly realized that all that had happened in my mind was just an illusion, since their flesh and blood had been long gone. The idea continues to inspire, like what it has done to Ozick. Its magic but dark shadow will cast spell on a writer until the moment the deadly solitude captures his/her soul, transforming flesh and blood into cold words, and waiting for some readers to pick them up, and being transfixed.
Chilling, warm, disenchanting but moving, Ozick's speech is marvellous.
Tuesday, 17 June 2008
V for Vendetta
It's quite rare that nowaday a mainstream film could tackle such a subject as big as liberty, and is full of metaphors and metonyms that are quite relevant to the current world. The experience of watching V for Vendetta is accompanied with the reflection of some hot topics recently emerging from humanitarian fields, such as emerging empire, i.e.in what Antonio Negri would say in Empire, preemptive measures against terrorists, as what Bush administration would justify any causes of war against terror, or the end exceeding the means, as what have been accepted by the democratic regime to justify the torture of illegally captured prisoners in Guantanamo.
Wachowski brother's return to a more realistic world from the futuristic concern about the human being in the trilogy of the Matrix is a welcome sign. It inspires me to think what the real meaning of liberty is. And for those who are familiar with Slovaj Zizek's works, it's not difficult to tell that the filmic narrative embodies some key elements of about the political struggle and the Lacanian psychoanalytical notions such as double death, death drive, and traversing fantasy. One of the most stunning segment in handling psychological twist is about V's conspiracy to torture Evey, as a kind of path for Evey to the self-emancipation. Its ethical indication is not so clear and the demarcation line between what is the right and what is the wrong is blurred. This of course can not be considered as a flaw in the film, but rather, the key to disentangle what the liberty means, and what prices one has to pay to achieve absolute freedom.
First judgement: the masked V in the film is not a real man but as a specter or a personification of the abstract spirit of freedom. So, if you, as a spectator, dwells too much on the logic about whether V's undertaking to torture Evey as the path for her enlightenment is illegitimate or not, you are still fooled by the appearance of the filmic narrative - a kind of confusion between the Real and the movement from the Symbolic to the Real. In fact, what has been embodied by V and his action constantly changes as the situation or setting in the filmic narrative changes. At the symbolic level, V as a liberator is actually identical to the person that always appears on the big screen to command as an absolute authority – a dictator – from the perspective of power structure; however, at the level of the Real, there is a thin line between a liberator and a dictator, and this thin line couldn't be detected unless one to look awry from the perspective of the mass, i.e. from Evey or from those being executed and oppressed.
In fact, there is one episode in the filmic narrative, which is treated as a kind of comic subversion that is made by Dietrich – Evey's boss- to caricature the dictator. In that embedded segment of TV comic show, the dictator is identified as the man behind the mask of V. When his identity is revealed to his guards, one couldn't tell who is the real V and who is real dictator. The transgressive effect of this episode couldn't be ignored as it exactly shows the identical characters of a liberator and a dictator at the symbolic level of the power structure that both of them seem to have absolute power and to do whatever they want. There are fairly amount of depiction in the film about how both of them can control mass media, and how V is the only one in the narrative free from the restrictions of night curfew. Even the naturally made butter is only consumed by these two guys; albeit for the dictator the supply is a privileged one, and for V, he has to steal. Isn't V's treatment to Evey – a test to her in the cell – exactly the same way that the regime in the filmic narrative treats rebellions? No wonder the moment Evey knows the truth, she couldn't bear it at all and nearly suffocate. However, at that critical point, Evey is reminded by V to recollect the moment she is ready to sacrifice her body for something higher, and she then regains the strength. Since this episode is so short, but it reveals the key element of enlightenment, so it's worth to expand a bit further here.
When Evey realizes that she is cheated by V, her emotional reaction is hatred, and she accuses him of an evil. From psychoanalytical perspective, it's quite easy to tell such a reaction derives from the subject's fantasy being traversed – the process of subjective destitution. If it stops there, which means Evey would maintain her hate feeling to V, since her trust to V has been betrayed, the transferring process from V to Evey would never happen, and the Real of the liberty would never be revealed. However, when V confesses his intention to Evey, and guides Evey to recall her decision to sacrifice, Evey starts to forgive V. It's worth to emphasize that such a forgiveness couldn't happen unless one is bestowed to the power which is beyond our grasp of the world. Here lies the difference between V and the dictator at the level of the Real. Even though they share the same power structure from the positive side and from the negative side respectively, just like the two sides of the same coin, the reception from the mass is completely different. For the dictator, the obedience of his subordinates and the mass is from the fear for being persecuted by the state machine; they are forced to obey. However, for the liberator, Evey and those who put up the mask that voluntarily gathering and marching to the Parliament Building, are self-motivated; their obedience to wear the mask is not to V but to something higher which makes them free from fear.
What that power is and where is it from? The answer of course is the spirit of liberty, the God, or the Thing – something beyond the grasp of the Symbolic. When Evey stands at the roof of the building receiving the shower of the rain, one shot is from the low angel POV just like Evey undergoing baptism from the God. The following cross-cut sequence shows that Evey's gesture to receive rains – blessing from the God - and V's silhouette with the backdrop of the fire – a kind of reincarnation or nirvana coincides with each other. The underlying meaning of the sequence is that something strange – the Thing – has entered their bodies and makes them indestructible. The revelation of this cross cutting is that what has been experienced by Evey is the same as V when he survives the fire of the concentration camp. Until then, the transference from V to Evey has been accomplished, and the process of the creation ex-nihilo has empowered Evey just as it has done to V. This is the reason that I think V in the film is only a personification of the specter – the spirit of freedom, and Evey's love for him has undergone the movement from the love to a person, albeit at the symbolic level that V is always behind the mask, to the passionate attachment to the Thing - the spirit of freedom. Exactly for this reason, Evey is empowered to forgive V for having cheated her that she is no longer bounded to any worldly attachment. The thin line between a liberator and a dictator therefore lies in such forgiveness. Since V is forgiven by Evey, he is to her a liberator, or a messenger to enlighten her on the path to the self-emancipation. Otherwise, V would be in the same category of the oppressor, just like the one that always appears on the screen to command the obedience of his subordinates and mass media in the name of social stability.
After the transference from V to Evey is accomplished, V is ready to die, or in director's subjective treatment, can die. The underlying reason for such a movement in the filmic narrative is that the spirit of freedom has found its inheritor - Evey. In another words, the specter of liberty has found a body to reside, so its eternality is guaranteed. Here comes the second death of Guy Fawkes, which coincides with V's death, bodily. In fact, there are two deaths in the film about Guy Fawkes. In the opening sequence, the real Guy Fawkes is garroted; near the end, V in the mask of Guy Fawkes is shot to death. A standard account about Guy Fawkes is that he is the Britain's most notorious traitor against the ruling master. The tradition of firework day is to burn the effigy of Fawkes on the November 5th each year to celebrate the foil of the Gunpowder Plot and the safety of the King. The film actually opens with this historical event in 1605. I guess anyone familiar with this historical story will see the spirit of freedom in the motivation for the Gunpowder Plot, so the firework glorifies such a spirit rather than celebrating the safety of the ruling master (be it a King, a dictator, or a ruling party).
These two deaths of Guy Fawkes reveals the emergence of what has been called the death drive – the Thing that makes the subject fearless and completely free. The Freudian death drive is quite obscure and has been criticized a lot; the film however, presents it in a very neat and understandable way. Simply put it, death drive is something that drives the desiring subject to abandon completely all attachment to the world, something one could sacrifice one's life, in order to defend something inexplicable – the Thing that could be symbolized in all sorts of religion, but actually is the Void. According to Zizek, its real face can only be seen from looking awry. Just like Evey, she can't see the real spirit of freedom when she knows being cheated by V; only when she is reminded of looking at it from another perspective does she start to realize what she has been though. Looking awry means the self-negation that denies the subjective perspective, and such a psychological process is enabled by the subjective destitution.
Evey goes through such a subjective destitution in a prison cell, and the sequence about her path to the enlightenment is a psychological climax of the filmic narrative. When she's not afraid of losing her life anymore to defend V's existence, she actually defends the spirit of freedom. It's like a chain reaction: the story about a dedicated love against the oppression is written with the unyielding spirit of an oppressed lesbian, and her message about striving for the freedom is conveyed to Evey through a hidden note. The message is clear, that what is immune from the disease of the oppressive regime is the Idea. It's bullet-proof, as V says before he dies, so as long as such an Idea could be inherited generation after generation, it will not disappear.
Having said all these inspirations I have drawn from this marvelous film, I must admit that I don't think the director tries to claim that such a subjective destitution is the precondition for revolution, since the overthrowing of the dictator in the film is accomplished by his subordinates, i.e. Creedy's coup, not in the name of defending the spirit of liberty, but stemmed from the fear of being persecuted by the dictator if they fail to prevent V from executing his plan. So the final scene – the gathering of the mass in which everyone wears the mask of Guy Fawkes is the artificial rendition of the people's power. This is irony actually, since the successful explosion of the Parliament Building - the fulfillment of Guy Fawkes' desire - is not achieved through the people's power, but through a kind of personal arbitration – Evey's choice to give the mass hope. It would be a bit too much to say that the director intentionally shows the factor of contingencies in the historical process, but it does has such an indication. Isn't Evey's uttering of 'we need to give them the hope' a word rather from the God than a common woman? Of course, it can only happen after Evey is transubstantiated. This is the real flaw of the film which betrays the director's idealistic tendency.
If there is any evidence that the film is not subversive at all, this subjective treatment from the director about how the people's power goes nowhere but being nullified, is the most obvious one. Exactly for this reason, the film should not be elevated to a social critique, but rather a fantasy about the revolution that might happen elsewhere.
Wachowski brother's return to a more realistic world from the futuristic concern about the human being in the trilogy of the Matrix is a welcome sign. It inspires me to think what the real meaning of liberty is. And for those who are familiar with Slovaj Zizek's works, it's not difficult to tell that the filmic narrative embodies some key elements of about the political struggle and the Lacanian psychoanalytical notions such as double death, death drive, and traversing fantasy. One of the most stunning segment in handling psychological twist is about V's conspiracy to torture Evey, as a kind of path for Evey to the self-emancipation. Its ethical indication is not so clear and the demarcation line between what is the right and what is the wrong is blurred. This of course can not be considered as a flaw in the film, but rather, the key to disentangle what the liberty means, and what prices one has to pay to achieve absolute freedom.
First judgement: the masked V in the film is not a real man but as a specter or a personification of the abstract spirit of freedom. So, if you, as a spectator, dwells too much on the logic about whether V's undertaking to torture Evey as the path for her enlightenment is illegitimate or not, you are still fooled by the appearance of the filmic narrative - a kind of confusion between the Real and the movement from the Symbolic to the Real. In fact, what has been embodied by V and his action constantly changes as the situation or setting in the filmic narrative changes. At the symbolic level, V as a liberator is actually identical to the person that always appears on the big screen to command as an absolute authority – a dictator – from the perspective of power structure; however, at the level of the Real, there is a thin line between a liberator and a dictator, and this thin line couldn't be detected unless one to look awry from the perspective of the mass, i.e. from Evey or from those being executed and oppressed.
In fact, there is one episode in the filmic narrative, which is treated as a kind of comic subversion that is made by Dietrich – Evey's boss- to caricature the dictator. In that embedded segment of TV comic show, the dictator is identified as the man behind the mask of V. When his identity is revealed to his guards, one couldn't tell who is the real V and who is real dictator. The transgressive effect of this episode couldn't be ignored as it exactly shows the identical characters of a liberator and a dictator at the symbolic level of the power structure that both of them seem to have absolute power and to do whatever they want. There are fairly amount of depiction in the film about how both of them can control mass media, and how V is the only one in the narrative free from the restrictions of night curfew. Even the naturally made butter is only consumed by these two guys; albeit for the dictator the supply is a privileged one, and for V, he has to steal. Isn't V's treatment to Evey – a test to her in the cell – exactly the same way that the regime in the filmic narrative treats rebellions? No wonder the moment Evey knows the truth, she couldn't bear it at all and nearly suffocate. However, at that critical point, Evey is reminded by V to recollect the moment she is ready to sacrifice her body for something higher, and she then regains the strength. Since this episode is so short, but it reveals the key element of enlightenment, so it's worth to expand a bit further here.
When Evey realizes that she is cheated by V, her emotional reaction is hatred, and she accuses him of an evil. From psychoanalytical perspective, it's quite easy to tell such a reaction derives from the subject's fantasy being traversed – the process of subjective destitution. If it stops there, which means Evey would maintain her hate feeling to V, since her trust to V has been betrayed, the transferring process from V to Evey would never happen, and the Real of the liberty would never be revealed. However, when V confesses his intention to Evey, and guides Evey to recall her decision to sacrifice, Evey starts to forgive V. It's worth to emphasize that such a forgiveness couldn't happen unless one is bestowed to the power which is beyond our grasp of the world. Here lies the difference between V and the dictator at the level of the Real. Even though they share the same power structure from the positive side and from the negative side respectively, just like the two sides of the same coin, the reception from the mass is completely different. For the dictator, the obedience of his subordinates and the mass is from the fear for being persecuted by the state machine; they are forced to obey. However, for the liberator, Evey and those who put up the mask that voluntarily gathering and marching to the Parliament Building, are self-motivated; their obedience to wear the mask is not to V but to something higher which makes them free from fear.
What that power is and where is it from? The answer of course is the spirit of liberty, the God, or the Thing – something beyond the grasp of the Symbolic. When Evey stands at the roof of the building receiving the shower of the rain, one shot is from the low angel POV just like Evey undergoing baptism from the God. The following cross-cut sequence shows that Evey's gesture to receive rains – blessing from the God - and V's silhouette with the backdrop of the fire – a kind of reincarnation or nirvana coincides with each other. The underlying meaning of the sequence is that something strange – the Thing – has entered their bodies and makes them indestructible. The revelation of this cross cutting is that what has been experienced by Evey is the same as V when he survives the fire of the concentration camp. Until then, the transference from V to Evey has been accomplished, and the process of the creation ex-nihilo has empowered Evey just as it has done to V. This is the reason that I think V in the film is only a personification of the specter – the spirit of freedom, and Evey's love for him has undergone the movement from the love to a person, albeit at the symbolic level that V is always behind the mask, to the passionate attachment to the Thing - the spirit of freedom. Exactly for this reason, Evey is empowered to forgive V for having cheated her that she is no longer bounded to any worldly attachment. The thin line between a liberator and a dictator therefore lies in such forgiveness. Since V is forgiven by Evey, he is to her a liberator, or a messenger to enlighten her on the path to the self-emancipation. Otherwise, V would be in the same category of the oppressor, just like the one that always appears on the screen to command the obedience of his subordinates and mass media in the name of social stability.
After the transference from V to Evey is accomplished, V is ready to die, or in director's subjective treatment, can die. The underlying reason for such a movement in the filmic narrative is that the spirit of freedom has found its inheritor - Evey. In another words, the specter of liberty has found a body to reside, so its eternality is guaranteed. Here comes the second death of Guy Fawkes, which coincides with V's death, bodily. In fact, there are two deaths in the film about Guy Fawkes. In the opening sequence, the real Guy Fawkes is garroted; near the end, V in the mask of Guy Fawkes is shot to death. A standard account about Guy Fawkes is that he is the Britain's most notorious traitor against the ruling master. The tradition of firework day is to burn the effigy of Fawkes on the November 5th each year to celebrate the foil of the Gunpowder Plot and the safety of the King. The film actually opens with this historical event in 1605. I guess anyone familiar with this historical story will see the spirit of freedom in the motivation for the Gunpowder Plot, so the firework glorifies such a spirit rather than celebrating the safety of the ruling master (be it a King, a dictator, or a ruling party).
These two deaths of Guy Fawkes reveals the emergence of what has been called the death drive – the Thing that makes the subject fearless and completely free. The Freudian death drive is quite obscure and has been criticized a lot; the film however, presents it in a very neat and understandable way. Simply put it, death drive is something that drives the desiring subject to abandon completely all attachment to the world, something one could sacrifice one's life, in order to defend something inexplicable – the Thing that could be symbolized in all sorts of religion, but actually is the Void. According to Zizek, its real face can only be seen from looking awry. Just like Evey, she can't see the real spirit of freedom when she knows being cheated by V; only when she is reminded of looking at it from another perspective does she start to realize what she has been though. Looking awry means the self-negation that denies the subjective perspective, and such a psychological process is enabled by the subjective destitution.
Evey goes through such a subjective destitution in a prison cell, and the sequence about her path to the enlightenment is a psychological climax of the filmic narrative. When she's not afraid of losing her life anymore to defend V's existence, she actually defends the spirit of freedom. It's like a chain reaction: the story about a dedicated love against the oppression is written with the unyielding spirit of an oppressed lesbian, and her message about striving for the freedom is conveyed to Evey through a hidden note. The message is clear, that what is immune from the disease of the oppressive regime is the Idea. It's bullet-proof, as V says before he dies, so as long as such an Idea could be inherited generation after generation, it will not disappear.
Having said all these inspirations I have drawn from this marvelous film, I must admit that I don't think the director tries to claim that such a subjective destitution is the precondition for revolution, since the overthrowing of the dictator in the film is accomplished by his subordinates, i.e. Creedy's coup, not in the name of defending the spirit of liberty, but stemmed from the fear of being persecuted by the dictator if they fail to prevent V from executing his plan. So the final scene – the gathering of the mass in which everyone wears the mask of Guy Fawkes is the artificial rendition of the people's power. This is irony actually, since the successful explosion of the Parliament Building - the fulfillment of Guy Fawkes' desire - is not achieved through the people's power, but through a kind of personal arbitration – Evey's choice to give the mass hope. It would be a bit too much to say that the director intentionally shows the factor of contingencies in the historical process, but it does has such an indication. Isn't Evey's uttering of 'we need to give them the hope' a word rather from the God than a common woman? Of course, it can only happen after Evey is transubstantiated. This is the real flaw of the film which betrays the director's idealistic tendency.
If there is any evidence that the film is not subversive at all, this subjective treatment from the director about how the people's power goes nowhere but being nullified, is the most obvious one. Exactly for this reason, the film should not be elevated to a social critique, but rather a fantasy about the revolution that might happen elsewhere.
Wednesday, 27 February 2008
Notes on Michel Houellebecq and The Elementary Particles
First impression:
He has observed keenly the malaise of contemporary society, and writes the story patiently and sharply. His unfathomable frankness and courage to confront the engulfing predicament of modern man is unprecedented in the art of novel. He has extended the boundary of novel writing to the forefront of biological philosophy, and touched the hardcore of the real problem a modern man is facing.
Philosophical Ponderings:
Metaphysical mutations, in Houellebecq’s words, are the global transformations in the values to which the majority subscribes, and they are currently ongoing. One of the characters of such mutations is that philosophy is no longer considered being of practical significance, ‘an age that men live out their lonely, bitter lives, and feelings such as love, tenderness and human fellowship had, for the most part, disappeared'. He describes this as the third turn of western civilization, in par with the emergence of the Christianity and the dawn of modern science.
The logic of such a third mutation is represented through the story of twin brothers – Michel and Bruno. If there are some words to describe the character of these two brothers, we might say Michel is an extreme rationalist, who believes in scientific certainty, while Bruno an ultra sensationalist, who only finds solace in sexual pleasures. Both characters are searching for the solutions to their own problems, but only Michel reaches his goal by accepting his own metaphysical mutations, at the expenses of his love and life. The central idea however is conveyed through by prologue and epilogue.
It has been largely agreed that something radically different would happen in our history with the development of genetic engineering, but nobody has presented a clear paradigm for an individual to localize properly in such a shift. In the fictional world of Houellebecq, Michel’s proposal at the end of his life to this problem is: mankind must disappear and give way to a new species which is asexual and immortal, a species which has outgrown individuality, separation and evolution.
Asexual reproduction with the help of genetic engineering might be realized soon, so this problem is actually not a worthless fantasy, rather it is urgent. It’s understandable also that such asexual reproduction is discordant with the religious doctrine of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, because it undermines ‘human dignity in its unique relationship with the Creator’. ‘Only Buddhists demurred, noting that all of the Buddha’s teachings were founded on the awareness of the three impediments of old age, sickness and death, and the Enlightened One, if he had meditated on it, would not necessarily have rejected a technical solution.’ (p258)
Sex, de-sublimation, spiritual struggle, endless chase of pleasures, love, desire, banality of life, and problems thus caused, when all these elements are woven into a novel and widely acclaimed, it surely will catch the attention of Zizek. His critique titled ‘No sex, please, we’re post-human’ is a typical Zizekian one - sharp, brusque and majestically rational, but is it too dry to go such an extreme reasoning, which has been portrayed sympathetically by Houellebecq in his depiction of Michel?
I’m more and more convinced that such a critique doesn’t work, although I was once an avid follower of Zizek. Something is missing in such an analytical certainty, which will alienate readers further. Hedonistic Bruno and rational Michel, they are the parts within one subject. They should not be treated as a separate individual, but the split from within.
3 Categories of Man
The idea Houellebecq tries to convey through the character of Bruno seems to be that confusion the passion for life with the endless sexual gratification would definitely leads you to the state of sadness, depression and mania. This actually is the fallacy that man is prone to be trapped. Interestingly, Houellebecq seems to blame an individual’s downfall to a consumerism driven society, especially the mass consumption of sexual pleasures, initially started in States and swept France and other European society in 1960s.
He categorizes individuals into three kinds, namely, the symptomatic who leads uncomplicated live in the mainstream of society and remains at ease as long as they are in part of it; the precursor, who are ‘well adapted to their time and way of life on the one hand’, and ‘anxious, to surpass them by adopting news customs, or proselytizing ideas still regarded as marginal’ on the other; and the last one – the revolutionary and prophet, who has the power to break down social norm and impose a new direction on events. (p20)
What if these three states are lived through by one person? It seems that Houellebecq is approaching to the status of a prophet, if not a revolutionary.
There are some keen observations regarding how a man would be influenced or symptomized by sex that I couldn’t imagine anything nicer than “having clitorises all over your body.” Houellebecq’s remark immediately reminds me of an anecdote of a monk on the way to the spiritual elevation. In his meditation, he is constantly bothered by an image that he’s surrounded by countless clitorises yearning to be satisfied. He has tried many ways to eliminate such an illusion, but all are in vain. After several days, he suddenly has a solution.
When the time that image appears again, he imagines himself becoming countless erected penises, penetrating clitorises one-by-one in his mind, satisfying their needs. After a while, everything is gone, and he thus enters a state of tranquility. Since then, the image of clitorises stops appearing in his meditation.
A very rewarding reading experience indeed. It's a pity that it's still not translated into Chinese.
He has observed keenly the malaise of contemporary society, and writes the story patiently and sharply. His unfathomable frankness and courage to confront the engulfing predicament of modern man is unprecedented in the art of novel. He has extended the boundary of novel writing to the forefront of biological philosophy, and touched the hardcore of the real problem a modern man is facing.
Philosophical Ponderings:
Metaphysical mutations, in Houellebecq’s words, are the global transformations in the values to which the majority subscribes, and they are currently ongoing. One of the characters of such mutations is that philosophy is no longer considered being of practical significance, ‘an age that men live out their lonely, bitter lives, and feelings such as love, tenderness and human fellowship had, for the most part, disappeared'. He describes this as the third turn of western civilization, in par with the emergence of the Christianity and the dawn of modern science.
The logic of such a third mutation is represented through the story of twin brothers – Michel and Bruno. If there are some words to describe the character of these two brothers, we might say Michel is an extreme rationalist, who believes in scientific certainty, while Bruno an ultra sensationalist, who only finds solace in sexual pleasures. Both characters are searching for the solutions to their own problems, but only Michel reaches his goal by accepting his own metaphysical mutations, at the expenses of his love and life. The central idea however is conveyed through by prologue and epilogue.
It has been largely agreed that something radically different would happen in our history with the development of genetic engineering, but nobody has presented a clear paradigm for an individual to localize properly in such a shift. In the fictional world of Houellebecq, Michel’s proposal at the end of his life to this problem is: mankind must disappear and give way to a new species which is asexual and immortal, a species which has outgrown individuality, separation and evolution.
Asexual reproduction with the help of genetic engineering might be realized soon, so this problem is actually not a worthless fantasy, rather it is urgent. It’s understandable also that such asexual reproduction is discordant with the religious doctrine of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, because it undermines ‘human dignity in its unique relationship with the Creator’. ‘Only Buddhists demurred, noting that all of the Buddha’s teachings were founded on the awareness of the three impediments of old age, sickness and death, and the Enlightened One, if he had meditated on it, would not necessarily have rejected a technical solution.’ (p258)
Sex, de-sublimation, spiritual struggle, endless chase of pleasures, love, desire, banality of life, and problems thus caused, when all these elements are woven into a novel and widely acclaimed, it surely will catch the attention of Zizek. His critique titled ‘No sex, please, we’re post-human’ is a typical Zizekian one - sharp, brusque and majestically rational, but is it too dry to go such an extreme reasoning, which has been portrayed sympathetically by Houellebecq in his depiction of Michel?
I’m more and more convinced that such a critique doesn’t work, although I was once an avid follower of Zizek. Something is missing in such an analytical certainty, which will alienate readers further. Hedonistic Bruno and rational Michel, they are the parts within one subject. They should not be treated as a separate individual, but the split from within.
3 Categories of Man
The idea Houellebecq tries to convey through the character of Bruno seems to be that confusion the passion for life with the endless sexual gratification would definitely leads you to the state of sadness, depression and mania. This actually is the fallacy that man is prone to be trapped. Interestingly, Houellebecq seems to blame an individual’s downfall to a consumerism driven society, especially the mass consumption of sexual pleasures, initially started in States and swept France and other European society in 1960s.
He categorizes individuals into three kinds, namely, the symptomatic who leads uncomplicated live in the mainstream of society and remains at ease as long as they are in part of it; the precursor, who are ‘well adapted to their time and way of life on the one hand’, and ‘anxious, to surpass them by adopting news customs, or proselytizing ideas still regarded as marginal’ on the other; and the last one – the revolutionary and prophet, who has the power to break down social norm and impose a new direction on events. (p20)
What if these three states are lived through by one person? It seems that Houellebecq is approaching to the status of a prophet, if not a revolutionary.
There are some keen observations regarding how a man would be influenced or symptomized by sex that I couldn’t imagine anything nicer than “having clitorises all over your body.” Houellebecq’s remark immediately reminds me of an anecdote of a monk on the way to the spiritual elevation. In his meditation, he is constantly bothered by an image that he’s surrounded by countless clitorises yearning to be satisfied. He has tried many ways to eliminate such an illusion, but all are in vain. After several days, he suddenly has a solution.
When the time that image appears again, he imagines himself becoming countless erected penises, penetrating clitorises one-by-one in his mind, satisfying their needs. After a while, everything is gone, and he thus enters a state of tranquility. Since then, the image of clitorises stops appearing in his meditation.
A very rewarding reading experience indeed. It's a pity that it's still not translated into Chinese.
Thursday, 19 April 2007
Perfume, the Story of a Murderer
The most obvious and profound change in Tom Tykwer’s filmic adaptation of Patrick Suskind’s Perfume is the humanization of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille. Together with other modifications on the protagonist, the film director’s subjective view forms a kind of dialogue with Suskind’s original novel, which offers both readers of the novel and spectators of the film very rich and subtle text to marvel at, to indulge in and to lose oneself. Tykwer’s adaptation fulfills my expectation, I must say. Though initially I thought it’s an impossible task to transfer magic words on olfactory capability of Jean-Baptiste into a motion picture.
To see how Tykwer’s film interacts with the original novel, one must go back to the original novel and do some textual analysis. Someone once said that a critique without textual analysis is equivalent to treason, I can’t agree more. The text I will refer to is the Penguin Red Classic 2006 issue, translated by John E. Woods.
The first obvious difference one might notice lies in the death of the girl with plums. The killing scene in the novel is quite sketchy, without too much dwelling on Jean-Baptiste’s emotion:
‘She was so frozen with terror at the sight of him that he had plenty of time to put his hands to her throat. She did not attempt to cry out, did not budge, did not make the least motion to defend herself. He in turn, did not look at her, did not see her delicate, freckled face, her red lips, her large sparkling green eyes, keeping his eyes closed tight as he strangled her, for he had only one concern – not the lose the least trace of her scent.’ (p49-50)
Before that, Suskind meticulously depicts the scent from this virgin girl with plums as the pure beauty, which represents‘the higher principle, and the pattern by which the others must be ordered’. Although Jean-Baptiste’s attraction to her is solely by her scent, and nothing is more than that, one simple word ‘strangle’ still seems not enough to convey how such a pure beauty can be killed so neatly. In fact, the depiction of the killing in the novel seems to presuppose Jean-Baptiste as a cold-blooded monster, whose aim is only to capture the enthralling pure beauty of the girl.
In the film however, Jean-Baptisite’s killing seems to be an incident. Interestingly, before he kills the girl, they have met once in the street. This episode is the addition to the original novel. Sensing someone is following her, the girl turns her back, and even offers two plums to Jean-Baptiste. Here, Tykwer’s depiction of the pure beauty of the girl is enhanced by a female vocal choir with a celestial touch, as if the scent from the girl is not from the filthy and noisy world that Jean-Baptiste lives in but from heaven. The fatal attraction that draws Jean-Baptiste to her home causes her death, yet it is unintentionally accomplished. Contrary to the novel, Jean-Baptiste’s innocence remains intact at that moment. I think such a humanized change has created a myth, in which Jean-Baptiste becomes a demon embodied in a human-being. The clear-cut impression one would have about Jean-Baptiste in the novel is blurred by Jean-Baptiste’s strong emotion after he realizes he incidentally kills the girl.
Comparing to the simple, and rather chilling, depiction of the first killing in the novel, the modification on Jean-Baptiste in the film greatly enriches the character. The psychological space left for the spectator to speculate is expanded, which makes the protagonist more sophisticated. Ben Wishaw’s performance conveys wonderfully such a complex figure. I think Tykwer’s film identifies the weakest link in the narrative of the original novel. Such imperfection is not easy to detect, since my first reading of the novel was overshadowed by the labyrinth of scent created by Suskind’s magic words.
The filmic adaptation follows three phases structure of the original novel; that is, the development of the self, the revelation of the self, and the sacrifice of the self. In the first phase, the moment Jean-Baptiste is touched by the beauty of the girl is the turning point in his life. Tykwer’s humanized touch to Jean-Baptiste in this phase elevates the development of his olfactory capability into a kind of aesthetic enlightenment. The fragrance of the virgin girl represents the pure and absolute beauty that every artist strives for. Once Jean-Baptiste senses it, he realizes that capturing such a beauty is the meaning of his life. However, the incident of the girl’s death reveals another side of such a pursuit; that is, the encounter of the death. In fact, one might say Jean Baptiste’s search for the absolute beauty of scent is driven by the spectre of the girl. Such a theme of the Freudian death drive holds the key to understand the fantasy created by Suskind. It underlies the statement that an artist’s pursuit of the absolute beauty is equivalent to the embrace of the Thanato, and the alienating impact would transfer a human being into an evil. This fundamental issue of continental aesthetics is the hard kernel of the original novel, but it is discretely embedded in all sorts of lengthy depiction of olfactory experiences. If one discards all these beautiful words, one might find the character of Jean-Baptiste is quite limpid.
Suskind's very presupposition of Jean-Baptiste as a naturally born monster makes this character a bit flat, exactly because it lacks a kind of movement in his evolvement from a human being to a satanic being. The very act of killing the first virgin girl in the novel signifies such a presupposition. The lengthy and powerful descriptions of all his smelling experiences cannot hide such a flaw, which can not be easily located in the odor-saturated world created by Suskind.
With the help of some bits of aerial choirs, Tykwer’s color contrast on the screen conveys well the feeling of scent elaborated by Suskind’s words. The dirty filthy Jean-Baptiste with extraordinary smelling talent is uplifted by the magic power of the scent emitted by the pure white virgin. The enlightening moment implements an aesthetic seed into Jean-Baptiste’s mind; since then he starts the journey of the real creation – the process he struggles to capture the fragile absolute.
The encounter with the girl hereafter repeats three times in the filmic narrative. All of them are in the dream, and each time the dream scene is slightly different from the real one. Retrospectively, one might find that the appearance of three dreams coincides with three phases of Jean-Baptiste’s life. The first dream occurs after he becomes a protégée of perfumer Giuseppe Baldini (Dustin Hoffman). Since the real encounter with the virgin girl and the scent of her beauty imparts the aesthetic sensibility into him, the first dream seems to be a first wet dream in Jean-Baptiste's youth. It's not difficult to tell the pleasure it brings to him. However, such an encounter also drives him to the destructive journey of himself.
The second dream finds him when he retreats into a cave and falls into a state of pure solitude. Suskind’s depiction of the discovery of his odorlessness - the revelation of the self, though is not the same as the film, is succinct enough. The tempo of the narrative is carefully and tightly controlled. From the catastrophe that happens ‘in a dream while he slept in the heart of his fantasies to the final walk-out of the cave that he has dwelled for 7 years, the emotion of Jean-Baptiste has undergone fear, doubt, disappoint and despair. Tykwer’s film skips completely the errand part of the fluidum letale in the original novel. In stead, the protagonist is in the state of despair until he catches the scent of Laura. In the words of the narrator, ‘God has last begun to smile at him’.
Although the filmic depiction of the second dream is different from the novel, its message is the same – the revelation of the inhuman Thing that parasites in a human body. The cave functions as a vehicle for Jean-Baptiste to know himself, while the dream holds the key to start the vehicle. Exactly at that moment, the perspective of the film narrative starts to shift from the aesthetics of the scent to the religion of the scent. Therefore, the following killing scenes all become sketchy as what matters are the making of the ingredients for the perfume par excellence. The film depicts well enough how each victim vanishes into a drop of oil. Isn’t this drop of life essence the objet-petit-a in the Lacanian sense? And by mixing 13 of them, a smart change in the film to illustrate how the head chords, heart chords, and base chords are composed into a holy omnipotent perfume, Jean-Baptiste is equipped with the power to turn the world upside down.
The farce of the bacchanal scene is subversive and its making surely will have a mark in the history of world film. The camera movement is so lucid and powerful that it breaks up the transparency of the narrative. Such a subjective treatment has a cooling de-sublimating effect on the ecstasy state of people which is extremely difficult contain on the screen. Technique speaking, the magic camera movement in Tykwer's film, if not exceeds, at least matches the words by Suskind.
‘The people were now pure liquid, their spirits and minds were melted; nothing was left but an amorphous fluid, and all they could feel was their hearts floating and sloshing about within them, and they laid those hearts, each man, each woman, in the hands of the little man in the blue frock coat, for better or worse. They loved him.’ (p274)
In the film, such a magic power is conveyed through a wave of golden light. Everyone seeing the light would be enlightened and touched by it, even the bishop falls into its prey. Here, Tykwer’s film once again shows its difference from the novel. The reaction of Jean-Baptiste to the orgy is full of hatred and disgust in the novel, while it is more sophisticated in the film. The third occurrence of the dream in the film brings Jean-Baptiste to the final consummation with the plum girl, as if the perfume unleashes the ultimate gratification of his desire. It commands the total submission of any human being, just like at the presence of Almighty Thing. The close-up of Jean-Baptiste’s face with tear drops is resonant to the one with amazement brought by the sense of beauty when he firstly encounters the plum girl in the street of Paris. Tykwer’s skill is mastery; the regression to the sexual fulfillment in the third dream however is problematic as it signifies the fall of Jean-Baptiste, which leads him into the third phase – the destruction of the self.
From the above-mentioned perspective, Tykwer’s filmic adaptation can also be viewed as a critique to the original novel. He obviously disagrees with Suskind’s two-dimensional treatment of Jean-Baptiste, which lacks sufficient emotion of a human being. The changes in the filmic narrative have identified the blind spots of Suskind’s subjective overture on this character, crystallizing the excessiveness of its author.
From any aspects of film making, Perfume does not fail to deliver. In fact, reading the original novel accompanied with watching the film is a feast to one’s mind, as well as visual and auditory senses.
The narrative structure is a delicate and perfect model for anyone who seeks to understand how aesthetic experience works in one life. The lasting subjects such as death and sublimation, creation ex nihilo, the meaning of love, and religious experience have all been skillfully woven into the narrative. There is a strong sentiment in the narrative that the real talented people deserve respect and well-being, and those who don’t follow this mandate would be punished. Suskind is a moralist, since all those who disrespect Jean-Baptiste’s talent and mistreat him would die miserably one way or another. But the law in charge of their lives is the law of Suskind’s own, so it also creates an illusion of absolute free will which is embodied by Jean-Baptiste. Although the protagonist is constantly in a miserable state, he is a perfect autonomous subject. Isn’t such a creature the ideal embodiment of liberty? Herein lies the reason that both the novel and the film have such a strong appealing sense, even though the protagonist is a horrible murderer. Lacan once called such a subject as an ex-timacy; it is so intimate to us and it fulfills our fantasy yet it’s completely alien to us.
The narrative of Perfume creates an anamorphosis through which one can see the real face of Love – the one with the capital ‘L’ that has been used in the end of the novel.
‘When they finally did dare it, at first with stolen glances and then candid ones, they had to smile. They were uncommonly proud. For the first time they had done something out of Love.’ (p296)
Such reading might be labored as reductionism, but only with this hard kernel in mind, one's fantasy of a perfect perfume might not be traversed. Reading Perfume is like eating a puffer, the extraordinary delicious taste can only be savored while one realizes how intoxicating the little creature is.
Tuesday, 27 June 2006
the Author is Dead
Roland Barthes’ famous saying - the author is dead – has been cited quite often as a signifier for the dawn of post-structuralism. Yet I always doubt if his meaning has been misunderstood and misinterpreted, or quite possibly, Barthes himself falls short on thinking further about the subject. To make a judgment that writing is beyond the control of individual writers like what Barthes has said in the death of the author, ‘in the multiplicity of writing, everything is to be disentangled, nothing deciphered’, is not something new and original. It is rather the first step of reflective thinking, which means the readers’ understanding about a piece of writing, is still subjective.
Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse is a perfect example for such subjective interpretation of writing. He is quite well aware of such seemingly cheery picking style of different works by different authors. In the short preface of this book (English translation by Richard Howard and published by Hill and Wang), Barthes says that ‘the lover’s discourse is today of an extreme solitude’. The discourse is spoken, perhaps, by thousands of subjects, but warranted by no one; it’s forsaken by the surrounding languages: ignored, disparaged, or derided by them, severed not only from authority but also from the mechanisms of authority (sciences, techiniques, arts)’. These are highly stylish words, I must say. The underlying truth is that the Real of love is untouchable and inexplicable, since it’s beyond the power of words. Paradoxically, by denying the existence of one single subject that can speak the truth of love, the Real meaning of love emerges from Barthes’ collection of various fragments from different writings on the subject of love.
To accomplish this work, Barthes must have searched, read, and thought a lot of books. In fact, just scanning its structure and key words he has selected, one would be dazzled by the manifold of this subject. Barthes’ meticulousness has created an alluring labyrinth, which is ready to engulf any desiring subject. But be alert, here lies in the truth of ‘the author is dead’. Barthes as a desiring subject for the true love is actually dead by finishing the book, so he can calmly disembody so many subjects into fragments, and organizes them into his own work. Without understanding such a stance, one would never fully grasp the meaning of ‘the author is dead’. This sounds a bit crude, but it is the truth of creating the masterpiece, or the Tao of the arts. The masterpiece needs not to be analyzed, because it itself is already the Real.
Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse is a perfect example for such subjective interpretation of writing. He is quite well aware of such seemingly cheery picking style of different works by different authors. In the short preface of this book (English translation by Richard Howard and published by Hill and Wang), Barthes says that ‘the lover’s discourse is today of an extreme solitude’. The discourse is spoken, perhaps, by thousands of subjects, but warranted by no one; it’s forsaken by the surrounding languages: ignored, disparaged, or derided by them, severed not only from authority but also from the mechanisms of authority (sciences, techiniques, arts)’. These are highly stylish words, I must say. The underlying truth is that the Real of love is untouchable and inexplicable, since it’s beyond the power of words. Paradoxically, by denying the existence of one single subject that can speak the truth of love, the Real meaning of love emerges from Barthes’ collection of various fragments from different writings on the subject of love.
To accomplish this work, Barthes must have searched, read, and thought a lot of books. In fact, just scanning its structure and key words he has selected, one would be dazzled by the manifold of this subject. Barthes’ meticulousness has created an alluring labyrinth, which is ready to engulf any desiring subject. But be alert, here lies in the truth of ‘the author is dead’. Barthes as a desiring subject for the true love is actually dead by finishing the book, so he can calmly disembody so many subjects into fragments, and organizes them into his own work. Without understanding such a stance, one would never fully grasp the meaning of ‘the author is dead’. This sounds a bit crude, but it is the truth of creating the masterpiece, or the Tao of the arts. The masterpiece needs not to be analyzed, because it itself is already the Real.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
