Videodrome by Cronenberg, 1983

“I live in a highly excited state of overstimulation.” Nicki Brand

“The television screen has become the retina of the mind’s eye. That’s why I refuse to appear on television, except on television. O’Blivion is not the name I was born with. It’s my television name. Soon, all of us will have special names, names designed to cause the cathode-ray tube to resonate.” Professor O’Blivion

“It’s just torture and murder. No plot, no characters. Very, very realistic. I think it’s what’s next.” Max Renn

“You know, in Brazil, Central America, making underground videos is considered a subversive act. They execute people for it. In Pittsburgh, who knows?” Max

“Watching TV will help patch them back into the world’s mixing board.” Bianca O’Blivion

“I am my father’s screen.” Bianca O’Blivion

“My father has not engaged in conversation for at least 20 years. The monologue is his preferred mode of discourse.” Bianca O’Blivion

“The battle for the mind of North America will be fought in the video arena, the Videodrome. The television screen is the retina of the mind’s eye. Therefore the screen is part of the physical structure of the brain. Therefore, whatever appears on the television screen emerges as raw experience for those who watch it. Therefore, television is reality and reality is less than television.” Professor O’Blivion

“I had a brain tumour. And I had visions. I believe the visions caused the tumour, and not the reverse. I could feel the visions coalesce and become flesh, uncontrollable flesh. But when they removed the tumour, it was called Videodrome.” Professor O’Blivion

“It bites. Isn’t that what you said? What kind of teeth do you think it has?” Bianca O’Blivion

“My father helped to create Videodrome. He saw it as part of the evolution of man as a technological animal. When he realised what his partners were going to use it for, he tried to take it away from them and they killed him, quietly. He became convinced that public life on television was more real than private life in the flesh. He wasn’t afraid to let his body die.” Bianca O’Blivion

“I believe that the growth in my head, this head, this one right here… I think that it is not really a tumour, not an uncontrolled, undirected little bubbling part of flesh, but that it is, in fact, a new organ, a new part of the brain. I think that massive doses of Videodrome signal will ultimately create a new outgrowth of the human brain, which will produce and control hallucination to the point that it will change human reality. After all, there is nothing real outside our perception of reality, is there? You can see that, can’t you?” Professor O’Blivion

“Hi. I’m Barry Convex, chief of special programmes. I’d like to invite you into the world of Spectacular Optical, an enthusiastic corporate citizen. We make inexpensive glasses for the Third World and missile guidance systems for NATO. We also make Videodrome, Max. As you know, when it’s ready for the marketplace, things will never be the same again. It can be a giant hallucination machine and much, much more.” Barry Convex

“It won’t hurt you. You might slide in and out of a hallucinatory state afterwards. If you do, just relax and enjoy it. It will soon go away. But for now, you might find a little S&M will be necessary to trigger a good healthy series of hallucinations. That’s why our show is so strange. It’s the effects of exposure to violence on the nervous system. It opens receptors in the brain and they allow the signal to sink in.” Barry Convex

“You’ll forgive me if I don’t stay around to watch. I just can’t cope with the freaky stuff.” Barry Convex

“Well, here we are at last. Right where we ought to be. On Videodrome. What are you waiting for, lover? Let’s perform. Let’s open those neural floodgates.” Nicki Brand

“North America is getting soft, patrón, and the rest of the world is getting tough. Very, very tough. We’re entering savage new times and we’re going to have to be pure and direct… and strong… if we’re going to survive them. Now, you and this… cesspool you call a television station… and your people who wallow around in it and your viewers… who watch you do it… you’re rotting us away from the inside. We intend to stop that rot.” Harlan

“Videodrome is death. That’s better. So much better. It’s always painful to remove the cassette… and change the programme. But now that we have… you’ll see that you’ve become something quite different. You’ve become the video word made flesh.” Bianca O’Blivion

“Death to Videodrome. Long live the new flesh.” Max Renn

Bleu, 1993

Polish director Krysztof Kieslowski’s last films comprised a trilogy. Bleu, Blanc and Rouge, the French tricolor — liberté, egalité et fraternité. Bleu begins with a car crash that kills the woman’s husband and young daughter. She tries to free herself not just from her memories but from all involvement with life. But she can’t do it: the present and the past keep impinging on her. The blue glass beads from a ceiling ornament reflect sunlight onto her face, reminding her of her child — and of the music her husband, a famous composer, had left unfinished.

Or, as had been rumored, was she really the composer? She destroyed the unfinished manuscript after he died, but a copy survived. Here, as at last she finishes the piece, we see her pen and its shadow, as if another ghostly hand were helping to inscribe the notes on the page.

Surface, reflection, depth, rising from the blue into the blue.

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Hairspray (1988)

Does Atonement the Movie Betray the Book?

I previously wrote a short post about Ian McEwan’s Atonement. Yesterday I saw the film version, which for the most part renders the book faithfully. The cinematic version diverged significantly on three points from (my memory of) the book, each of which I regard as a significant distortion of the original.

Firstly and most trivially, the “bad guy” is American in the book but English in the movie. It’s not enormously important to the story, but when McEwan made this conscienceless opportunist and war profiteer an American he was, I thought, adding to the political subtext. Robbie, the tragic hero, is lower class and hence expendable, both in the romantic intrigues of the upper class and in war — this is explicit in both the book and the film. But the opportunity to convey McEwan’s commentary on possibly dishonorable American motives in WWII is lost.

Secondly, when I read the book I thought the first half, which takes place entirely in the protected world of the aristocratic English countryside, was rendered more completely, compellingly and realistically than were the parts set in wartime France and London. In the book these latter scenes felt more wooden, 2-dimensional, contrived. In the movie, by contrast, these wartime scenes were presented surrealistically and spectacularly, even to the point of overwhelming the first half in terms of sensory and emotional intrusion on the viewer. This surreal spectacle might have made more sense if we were meant to be perceiving these events from beyond the grave as it were, from the perspective of those spectral characters who dominated this part of the story. But we come to find out that, whereas the teller of the tale actually participated in the English countryside part of the story, she was fabricating the wartime narrative as a romantic wish fulfillment of her own. In that sense the second half really was less real to the storyteller. It manifests certain unconscious longings to be sure, but the sense of walking ghostlike through a nightmare wouldn’t have been her perspective as the contriver of a happily-ever-after scenario.

Thirdly, the end of the movie betrays, I believe, the end of the book. The book is called Atonement for a reason: it’s about the storyteller’s lifelong attempt to atone for a wrong she committed as a young girl. In the book the atonement is deferred until it’s too late, not just in the failure to make things right for those who were hurt by the original betrayal but also in the failure to bring justice and punishment to those who benefited from it. One is left with the sense of the girl having always managed to evade the consequences of her moral failing, her bad conscience never keeping her from enjoying success and acclaim, never provoking her to exercise the extreme bad taste of ruining rich and powerful people’s reputations. In the movie, by contrast, the atonement succeeds in the end. Through her power as a storyteller the girl, now an old woman, enwraps the tragic victims of her wrongdoing in a painful yet ultimately satisfying reconciliation. Sure it’s fictional, but it’s what she can do, it’s her responsibility to make things right for them as her last creative act. She bestows upon herself a heroic sacrificial mien in the film, whereas in the book she rejects this self-delusion.

I regard each of these three deviations from the book as unfortunate. It would have been good to see an American bad guy. We moviegoers have become accustomed to seeing war scenes as surrealistic spectacles, to the point where we’d probably be disappointed if we were to arrive at a real war scene and not see an anomalous merry-go-round spinning around on a sepia-toned, overexposed beach. To see a more obviously staged war scene would have disrupted our cinematic expectations far more than the admittedly wonderfully realized scenes shown to us in this movie. We want our atonements to succeed, and it’s disturbing when we fail, which we so often do even when we persuade ourselves of our own moral rectitude. Each of these three cinematic deviations from the book is, I think, a conciliatory gesture to the movie-going marketplace, to American sensibilities, to those Hollywood insiders who vote on the Oscars. It’s an act of bad faith, even a moral failing, perpetrated presumably for art’s sake but more likely for the sake of money and acclaim.

A Corpse in Eastern Promises (2007)

[I previously posted on this movie, but my erstwhile collaborator encouraged me to write a portalic piece about it. I’m working from somewhat old memories, so I have no quotes or screen shots to illustrate the idea.]

Russian mobsters must like to carve up bodies, because they do a lot of it in Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises. The knife, not the gun, is the weapon of choice. We watch two men’s throats get slashed: are the gaping red wounds emblematic of castration, or perhaps the carving of a vagina into men for whom the loss of manhood is more important than the loss of life? Or maybe the horizontal gash across the larynx is a double of the mouth — open, breathless, silent. Nikolai Luzhin gets tattooed with the gang’s markings: it’s part of a symbolic transfer of allegiance, from the family of one’s birth to the mob family. Most importantly for the story, though, the tattoos make it possible for a rival gang to mistake Nikolai for his boss’ son, who bears the same permanent markings of identity inscribed in his flesh. The tattoo isn’t just a marking of identity; it’s a medium of communication – or in this case, of intentional miscommunication.

Early in the movie we watch Nikolai snipping off the fingertips of the first throat-slashing victim so that the body cannot be identified – again, carving up the body prevents the communication of identity. Not until much later do we find out that the body did carry information, but the message isn’t borne in the flesh of the corpse. When the police pull the body out of the Thames they discover that Nikolai has written a note to his boss and stashed it in the body’s coat pocket. But his boss isn’t a mobster; it’s a Scotland Yard chief. It turns out that Nikolai isn’t really a Russian gangland thug; he’s an undercover agent of the British police.

We saw Nikolai convey a message on paper before. Early in the movie he screws a whore, presumably to demonstrate his manhood but mostly to pleasure the mob boss’ voyeuristic son, but afterward he writes a note on a holy card and hands it to the young woman: it’s a contact that will help her escape the mafia’s clutches. And we know that another young prostitute’s diary has fallen into the hands of Anna, a nurse who attended to the delivery of the Russian girl’s baby. The diary names the mob boss as the father of the girl’s child — a written testimonial that he raped a minor, evidence that can put him away.

This is the way we do things in the West: we write things down on paper and tuck these notes into the pockets of our clothing; we speak to one another or we choose to remain silent. In a word, we are civilized. The Easterners don’t just keep silent; they cut each other’s throats. They don’t just write messages; they tattoo them into the flesh. They are a barbarian horde inscribing their rude corporeality into Western culture. By means of a floating corpse, its throat cut and its fingers snipped, doubly silenced through bodily violence, but carrying in its pocket the pen-and-paper communique of one civilized man to another, a message at once so fragile and impermanent and yet ultimately so powerfully dominant, we are transported through the portal between East and West.

In Eastern Promises Cronenberg extols the strength of the Western symbolic order. The Russians are corrupt: they aren’t shown as being in decline but rather as never having risen above the direct, corporeal, beastial expressive register. Nikolai’s manliness in the Russian mob world is all physical, almost iconically so, pointing backward to some primal image of man. But at the same time it’s feminizing, subjecting him to bodily mutilation and perverse voyeurism by the leaders of the pack. As a Western man Nikolai is kind, just, subtle, more androgynous in a traditional sense but more powerful and masterful than his Eastern self.

A Toy Rabbit in Ikiru (1952)

Kanji Watanabi is Section Chief of the Tokyo Public Affairs Department. His job is to stamp each piece of paper that passes across his desk to indicate that he has handled it. He’s not supposed to accomplish anything in this job: whatever needs doing is by definition somebody else’s responsibility: the buck passes from department to department until it finally gets lost in the paperwork.

Very early in the film Kurosawa shows us Mr. Watanabi’s stomach X-ray, revealing a cancer that will kill him in six months. This revelation changes Watanabi’s life. Actually it brings him back to life, since he’s been all but dead for the thirty years he’s been a minor governmental functionary — before, during and after World War Two. But now that he’s alive, what should he do? He comes across a ne’er-do-well “novelist” in a bar who takes him out on the town: gambling, night clubs, women, a new hat. But for Mr. Watanabi that’s not living. He can’t bring himself to go back to the office, so when he leaves the house every morning as usual he wiles away the hours just walking around town. He tries to tell his son about his death sentence and his existential crisis, but the son is too worried about the father squandering his inheritance on loose women to listen. Toyo Odagiri, a girl who works in the department, tracks down the Section Chief to get him to stamp her letter of resignation. Attracted by her youthful vivacity, Watanabe attaches himself to Toyo, taking her to tea, on walks, to dinner. She confesses that she had a nickname for him: The Mummy. He’s stunned, then he laughs: yes, you’re right, he tells her.

For several nights this goes on until finally she tells him “no more.” He tracks her down at her new job at a factory – it hardly seems like a more appealing option than the city bureaucracy. She sends him away, then reconsiders – once more, then that’s the end. They go to the tea house (again), where after some desultory and silent sitting he proposes they take a walk (again). Toyo can’t stand it any more; she tells Watanabe she thinks he’s a creep. Keep your old man’s infatuation, she tells him, but leave me alone. No, that’s not it, he insists. He mutters and stumbles in his usual way, until finally:

“…in other words, why are you so incredibly alive? You’re just so alive. That’s why I’m envious. This old mummy envies you. Before I die I want to live one day just like you do. I’ll live that way before I die. Until I’ve done it, I can’t just give up and die. In other words, I just want… I just want something to… I want to do something. But it’s just that… I don’t know what. But you do know. No, maybe you don’t, but you… No, tell me how I can be like you.”

“But all I do is work and eat.”

“And what else?”

“That’s all. I mean it. All I do is make these little things.” Toyo takes from her purse a toy white bunny. She winds it up and it hops across the table toward Watanabe. She grabs it and does it again. “Even making these things is so much fun. Making them, I feel like I’m playing with every baby in Japan. Why don’t you try making something too?”

Watanabe is disconsolate. It’s too late. Besides, what can he possibly make at the Public Affairs Department? Then, suddenly, he’s struck by something. Maybe it’s not too late for me. Yes, I can do something there – if I have the will. Grasping the toy rabbit in his hand he leaves Toyo in the tea house, a man possessed of new resolve.

And sure enough, he finds the will to push one small project through the governmental bureaucracy: a city playground, built on reclaimed land over what had been an open sewage cesspool. Mr. Watanabe has to hand-carry the paperwork from department to department, all the way to the Deputy Mayor himself, in order to get the project budgeted and the work accomplished. He dies one snowy night in the new park — the policeman who saw him before he died said he had looked so happy sitting there on a swing, singing softly to himself. The Deputy Mayor tries to take credit for the playground – re-election is coming up, after all – but the neighborhood women come to Watanabe’s wake to light incense and mourn the man who they know is the one responsible.

The windup toy rabbit that Watanabe carried away from the teahouse was one among countless others, indistinguishable and trivial – not unlike the post-war Japanese industrial workers making cheap consumer goods for world markets. Watanabe was insensate, non-communicative, inert — as if he had died in the War, enshrouded like a mummy in the tomb that Japanese society had become for those old enough to remember the old glories and aspirations. The toy rabbit was the portal that reanimated the corpse that Watanabe had become, transforming his mindless and trivial labor into something meaningful. Within the alienating and depersonalized bureaucracy Watanabe was able to find a way to make something. It may have been a small something, but it wouldn’t have happened without him. The toy rabbit was the portal from structural determinism to personal agency, from the death of the old self-contained and stagnant Japan to its revitalization as active participant in the modern world.

The Image in All About Eve (1950)

[Here’s another movie portality piece I wrote last week. I have two more to put up: one for Kurosawa’s Ikiru, and another for Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises.]

The movie begins with Eve Harrington being handed the coveted Sarah Siddons Award for Distinguished Achievement in the theater. Addison DeWitt, critic and star-maker, introduces Eve in voice-over narration:

“Life goes where she goes – she’s been profiled, covered, revealed, reported, what she eats and when and where, whom she knows and where she was and when and where she’s going. Eve. You know all about Eve. What can there be to know that you don’t know?”

The rest of the film tells what we don’t know about Eve – how she got to the top, which is mostly by climbing over the backs of everyone who has helped her, everyone who had been her friend on Broadway, not least of all Margo Channing. DeWitt tells us that “Margo is a great Star, a true Star; she never was or will be anything less or anything else.” As the story begins Margo is on top and Eve is nobody. But Eve wants to be somebody. More to the point: Eve wants to be Margo.

Eve gets her first chance to meet Margo after an evening performance. She stops on the stage and faces the empty seats. “You can breathe it, can’t you,” she says to Margo’s friend Karen, “like some magic perfume.” Immediately Eve insinuates herself into Margo’s life, becomes her personal assistant, moves into her home. Flattered at first, pleased to be taken care of by an adoring fan, Margo comes gradually to mistrust Eve. Margo’s fiance Bill chastises her for being jealous of a stage-struck kid. Margo is incensed.“Stage-struck kid?! She’s a young lady of qualities. And I’ll have you know I’m fed up with both the young lady and her qualities! Studying me as if – as if I were a play or a blueprint! How I walk, talk, act, think, eat, sleep! It so happens there are particular aspects of my life to which I would like to maintain sole and exclusive rights and privileges!”

Margo means Bill, of course, and she’s right – Eve has designs on Bill, who is a successful Broadway director being courted by Hollywood. Toward the end of the film Margo undergoes an identity crisis. She confides in Karen: “More than anything in this world, I love Bill. And I want Bill. I want him to want me. But me. Not Margo Channing. And if I can’t tell them apart – how can he?” “Why should he,” Karen asks Margo, “and why should you?” To which Margo replies: “Bill’s in love with Margo Channing. He’s fought with her, worked with her, loved her… But ten years from now Margo Channing will have ceased to exist. And what’s left will be… what?”

Margo decides she’s going to find out what’s left, stepping out of the spotlight in order to give the conniving Eve the chance she’s fought so hard for. You get the sense that Margo has no idea what it means to be herself without the image — she seems prepared to exchange the role of Star for the role of Wife:

“Funny business, a woman’s career. The things you drop on your way up the ladder, so you can move faster. You forget you’ll need them again when you go back to being a woman. That’s one career all females have in common, whether we like it or not: being a woman. Sooner or later we’ve all got to work at it, no matter what other careers we’ve had or wanted… and, in the last analysis, nothing is any good unless you can look up just before dinner or turn around in bed — and there he is. Without that, you’re not a woman. You’re something with a French provincial office or a book full of clippings — but you’re not a woman… (Margo smiles at Karen) … Slow curtain. The end.”

Of course Eve takes advantage of her big chance, even to the point of seducing Karen’s husband the playwright in order to corner the market on his talents. As Margo starts trying to become herself, Eve becomes… Margo. It’s not Margo the woman that Eve has been studying like a blueprint but Margo the image, Margo Channing the Star. And now, as recipient of the Sarah Siddons Award, Eve has been transformed into the image.

The image is the portal in this movie. Margo tries to separate herself from that image, while Eve discards everything about herself in order to become the image. The Bible says that Adam and Eve were created in the image and likeness of God. But that wasn’t enough: Eve wanted to be even more godlike, and so she ate the forbidden fruit. Eve gained the image but lost the substance. At the end of the film Eve, already grown cynical and disillusioned, returns to her apartment while the after-award party goes on without her. Phoebe, another star-struck acolyte, has finagled her way into the apartment. Eve is distressed at first, but immediately gets used to the idea of someone idolizing her, taking care of her, imitating her. In the last scene of the movie we watch Phoebe, draped in Eve’s gown, holding Eve’s award, watching herself in the mirror. But it’s not herself she sees reflected back at herself in infinite replication: it’s the image.

UPDATE: To illustrate the continuity of image-as-portal across cinematic history, Dejan sent me this screen shot from Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. The dark-haired woman, suffering from amnesia, glimpses the image of someone else in the mirror: it’s an old movie poster of Rita Hayworth. The dark-haired woman decides that her name is Rita; she later becomes a film star (or was she already a star?).

The Other in Solaris (1972)

[I know, I know, I said I was done with Ktismatics. But this isn’t really a Ktismatics post — it’s a sort of demo for a possible new collective blog focusing on movies. Maybe if two or more people write the posts then the diversity of perspective gets interesting, and the pressure on any one blogger (me, for instance) to write posts is alleviated. I’m particularly interested in cinematic portals: objects/places/people that occupy two realities at the same time, allowing transport between the two.]

It’s the planet itself that’s portalic in Tarkovsky’s Solaris. I haven’t read the novel on which the film was based, so I can’t really say whether the Solaris that Tarkovsky created is true to Lem’s vision. You could ask the same question about the planet Solaris: does it accurately capture humans’ memories and fantasies, or do the humans adapt themselves to Solaris’ representations? Solaris makes fantasies real. Kris, the psychologist sent to the space station to investigate reported anomalies, goes to sleep, dreams about his dead wife Hari and voila! he awakens to find her, alive, in the room with him. She’s not really his wife, of course; she’s a replicant created by Solaris, her substance made not from atoms but from neutrinos. But Solaris isn’t a robot-manufacturing facility; it’s a living being, a seething sea of intelligent goo. Presumably this living planet is allocating parts of itself to materializing the cosmonauts’ fantasies.

Why is the planet doing this? It’s hard not to think of Solaris as a physical extension of the human unconscious: I imagine something, and the planet expresses my imagination materially. The humans try to distance themselves from their uncannily replicated “guests,” visibly struggling to reconcile desire with repulsion. The cosmonauts try to kill the guests, but the simulacra always regenerate themselves, and we interpret this perpetual resurrection as the power of the unconscious, the eternal return of repressed desires, which are also our deepest dreads.

But what about the guests themselves? Hari, though not really human, is the most vibrant character in the film. She’s trying to build a self out of Kris’ fragmented memories. At first she’s barely self-aware: she doesn’t know if she even looks like herself. But gradually she “remembers” more about her past – how can that be? Presumably being confronted by a physical manifestation of Hari triggers more of Kris’ memories, which then find their way into Solaris’ simulacrum of her. She comes to realize that she died ten years ago, that Kris didn’t really love her then, that she killed herself because of it. Kris acknowledges as much: I didn’t love you then, but I love you now. Is it the guilt at being complicit in her suicide that makes him love her now; or is it because now, as a physical representation of his censored mental represention of her, this resurrected Hari manifests only those parts of her that he used to love? Again, though, we’re thinking about her from his perspective.

Why does Hari want to kill herself again? Is it because she did it before, in real life, and it’s part of her destiny, or her DNA, or Kris’ image of her as already dead? Is it because she realizes that her uncannily undead presence torments Kris, that if she stays he will end up killing himself because of her? Again, though, all these ideas of motive come from our human subjectivity. We are confronted with the problem that she isn’t real, that she’s a projection of human fantasy, and that she has to react as a projection might react.

Just because she isn’t really human doesn’t mean she isn’t real. She is a manifestation of Solaris, and Solaris is real, an embodied intelligence. But Solaris is so different from us, so entirely other. The planet is trying to make contact with human intelligence, and it does so by making itself intimately familiar to the humans it encounters. But Solaris’ projection into human awareness works all too well: contact between human and Solaris is reduced to contact between human and human, which ultimately devolves into a solipsistic encounter of the human self with its own memories, fantasies, transferences. There is no relation between self and other this way. Maybe that’s why she kills herself: in trying to make contact she’s lost her own Solaristic identity without really taking on an autonomous human self; she’s only a projection of another. Or is that too just a projection of how we would feel if we were in her shoes (though she never does find her shoes)?

Maybe that’s not what Solaris had in mind. Maybe these were experiments that Solaris was conducting on the human visitors: probe their memories and fantasies, simulate other humans on the basis of these mental representations, then observe how the humans respond. And by becoming the simulation, Solaris learns from the inside what it feels like to be human – or nearly human.

We never really find out what Solaris is thinking. The astronauts seem completely incapable of making contact, of projecting themselves out of themselves and into the other. They bombard the planet’s surface with X-rays, presumably to see what’s inside the impenetrable surface of the other. Later they transmit their own human electroencephalagram outputs electronically to the planet, as if they’re trying to implant their human consciousness directly into Solaris. They observe the guests the planet generates, and later they observe that the liquid surface of Solaris is beginning to generate islands, but they never try to understand these manifestations as anything other than the materialization of their own fantasies. They never come to any understanding of Solaris as a sentient other.

I suppose that’s the question Solaris leaves us to consider: do we ever encounter the other on his or her own terms, or do we always transform the other into a reflection of our own selves? And can we ever stop this sort of solipsistic reflection about the other from within our own heads and consider what it’s like to be the other to the other, to be encountered only as the reflection of the other’s fantasies and fears and not on our own terms?

Re-Entering the Bathysphere

It’s another sign that I’ve about reached the end (again!) in writing this blog: events that I’ve found moving, ideas that challenge my assumptions, possibilities for stimulating conversation — I no longer want to write posts about them. I’d rather keep my thoughts entirely private or write them in a book, buffering myself from online exchanges that I’d just as soon evade, even if those exchanges were to provide the sort of emergent enlightenment and camaraderie that the Internet promises and that justify the frustrating dead-ends and misunderstandings that seem so often to get in the way.

Since killing off Ktismatics over two months ago and fusing myself with its spectral afterlife, I’ve tried letting others be the cause of my desire, following trajectories set by other bloggers in whose gravitational fields I had already found myself attracted. These forays have met with some success, inasmuch as I rediscovered a couple of things I’ve known for a long time: I can usually find something that engages me in practically anyone’s agenda, but other people seem to have a harder time engaging in mine. Is it this an accurate evaluation on my part, or just another indicator of my intransigent egotism? Or is my stuff really less interesting than other people’s? I don’t really want to know; I don’t really want to talk about it.

I’ve also wandered more resolutely through the chamber of mirrors suspended between the actual and the simulacrum, between invisibility and the spectacle. Am I the monk or the one who writes the monk’s lines? Am I the torturer or the victim or the not-so-innocent bystander, the director or the audience or the actor? I still don’t know for sure, but I’m pretty sure I’m ready to wind my way back out of the labyrinth. I could write at some length about my recent adventures in blogspace and the self-awarenesses and self-deceptions they’ve induced, but I no longer want to write about it here, simultaneously anticipating and dreading comments, hoping for mutual acceptance and understanding but expecting the opposite, all the while fearing most of all the distinct possibility that what I write will be ignored altogether.

There’s no question that I’ve learned a great deal as an active participant in blogging culture. I also have a sense of completion, that this last round of blogging afterlife has reached its denouement. And I do intend to carry on with writing, preferring to re-enter a self-imposed isolation that I find conducive to writing extended pieces. I want to rethink the Genesis 1 book based on what I’ve learned. There’s also another novel starting to take shape. And of course there’s also the unrealized potential of my psychology practice to torment me.

I do thank all who have read what I’ve had to say and who have engaged in discussions in this space. Feel free to carry on without me, and I will continue to respond to comments and questions here. And I look forward to keeping in touch with my online friends by email. This time, though, I’m committed to resisting the temptation to write more posts. I expect I’ll also stop commenting on other blogs, which is how I ended up inadvertently resurrecting Ktismatics. I’ll try harder to let it rest in peace.

Heterocultural Psychology

I’ve been having a hard time picturing my psychology practice, which hasn’t gotten off the ground at all since we’ve been back in the States. I’ve been pestered by the sense that there is no framing context in which my practice might make sense to a potential client. I don’t propose to help people adjust to reality, where “reality” holds no ontological primacy beyond its status as an interrelated set of social constructs that happen to have achieved cultural dominance in this particular place and time. I’m not interested in becoming a purveyor of those psychological benefits that society holds forth as most desirable: happiness, success, self-actualization, balance. As a consequence, I’m not attracted to cognitive-behavior therapy, coaching, pharmacotherapy, psychoanalysis, or any of the other paradigmatic praxes for normalizing the outlier with respect to these desired outcomes.

I probably won’t have too many people seeking out my services. The question is: who would? I’m presuming it’s somebody who’s alienated from mainstream society and its cultural norms, or at least someone who’s aware that culture might be a source of difficulty. There will always be workers who are alienated from business, Christians alienated from church, students alienated from school — but how would they ever find me? It’s unlikely that someone who’s in charge of a mainstream social setting would refer someone to me knowing in advance that I’m not committed to keeping that person “in the fold.”

So I’m thinking: what about expatriates? When we lived abroad we were acutely aware of the mismatch between ourselves and the culture in which we were embedded. At the same time we became more alienated from our home culture. Living in a foreign country makes you aware of the ways in which society shapes your own subjectivity. It’s disconcerting, but it affords an opportunity to gain perspective.

Suppose I make my services available to foreigners who are living in the States. This is a university town that attracts graduate students and faculty members who hail from other countries. Would it just exacerbate the alienation to go for therapy to an American? Maybe, but as I’ve mentioned here before, I used to counsel Vietnam vets even though I was never in the military. I had a sense that I offered something different to the vets as a representative of the mainstream cuture who still valued the differences they carried back with them from the war. Couldn’t I do the same thing with expatriates, representing the Big American Other who isn’t just trying to absorb them into the Borg? Together the client and I would occupy some hybrid heterocultural space where the unconscious influences of both the home culture and the foreign culture can be examined.

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(UPDATE, 22 DEC.) Maybe, if I have this idea of a heterocultural practice in mind as a framing context, I could gain access to other kinds of social settings. I could draw the analogy between an expatriate and someone in a church who has become aware of the way in which cultures conflict, revealing the self as a nexus of cross-cultural conflict and a subject dominated by social forces beyond one’s control or awareness. Even the cultural ideal of individual agency is largely a cultural byproduct by which the self can be unwittingly manipulated. Some churchgoers become aware of Christianity’s conflict with secular culture; others realize that the secular culture is an extension of Christian culture. Some want out of Christianity, while others want to get deeper in: both are thwarted by conflicts with the church culture.

I keep having the feeling that, just because I’m not a Christian, I shouldn’t be barred access to the Christian culture. I recognize that I’m an outsider to that culture, but I’m also an outsider to war veteran culture, or expatriate culture, or school culture, or corporate culture. In practice I position myself in heteroculture — not acultural or supercultural in some transcendent sense, but also neither an advocate nor an adversary of the cultural forces that affect the client, me, the interaction. The question is whether the pastor of a church would get it, would regard my cultural outsider status as critical to my therapeutic position vis-a-vis the client.

The question then becomes: is this framing context that emphasizes the interaction between self and culture, between subjective and intersubjective realities, sufficiently distinctive from the psychosocial space that other kinds of therapists occupy?

Call Me Paranoid

…but on my morning walk I found myself wondering about the recent incident where some guy walked into two different evangelical institutions here in Colorado, 6o miles and several hours apart, and proceeded to shoot people, killing I think two at each place before dying of gunfire himself. Originally the story went like this: a couple years ago the guy had been kicked out of the first place, a training school for world missionaries, and had borne a grudge ever since. He had sent hate mail and threats to the school. He had written a series of blog entries saying that he hated Christians and hinting that he might be planning to do violence reminiscent of the Columbine High School shooting, which also took place in Colorado, and which left something like twenty people dead. After killing two people at the training school he then headed for an evangelical megachurch, again opening fire, killing two more people. There seemed nothing to connect the shooter to this particular church, until word got out that his victims had been associated with the same organization that runs the missionary school. The shooter was brought down by one of the church’s armed security guards — apparently the church had gone on high alert in response to the killings at the missionary school earlier that day.

As time has passed the details of the story have changed a bit. The shooter didn’t die from wounds inflicted by the security guard; he committed suicide. The guard was a former policewoman who had been dismissed from the force for improprieties. There is no evidence that the shooter threatened the training school in advance. It’s not clear that the shooter was the author of the blog entries that allegedly signalled his murderous intent.

So I wonder…

• The reports of the shooter’s threatening mail and blogs, subsequently retracted — could this faulty and misleading intelligence have been released as a planned attempt to justify Homeland Security domestic spying? It’s been repeatedly demonstrated that Americans remember the initial headlines rather than the subsequent retractions buried in the back pages, and that they typically believe the original story even after it has been debunked.

• It’s no secret that the church where the shooter ended his spree, got shot by the guard, and killed himself is the same megachurch whose pastor was dismissed a couple months ago for engaging in homosexual prostitution, the news of which received big play in the American media. Is it conceivable that this church orchestrated the shooting in order to reverse the flow of negative publicity directed not only at the church but at evangelicalism in general?

• Is it conceivable that the missionary school too participated in the shooting? After all, the killer had trained briefly at the school, presumably because he wanted to extend the evangelical Christian presence into other parts of the world. If he professed to be a Christ-hater and attacked the school, wouldn’t he in effect be helping to promote the missionary agenda, as well as the American-led wars against the anti-Christian enemy in the Middle East?

• Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee has come out of nowhere, surging into a virtual tie with Rudolph Giuliani in national public opinion polls. Hackabee is an evangelical Christian who used to be a Southern Baptist minister. This latest shooting incident could only have helped his campaign.

• Recently Jonathan Erdman contended on Theos Project that the angsty loner American shooters share with Near East suicide bombers the yearning for immortality, either in the martyr’s afterlife or in the media spotlight. What if this latest Colorado shooter really was a suicide bomber seeking both sorts of immortality? What if, when the guard who had been assigned to kill him failed to finish the job, he had to kill himself? What if he was acting as part of a conspiracy to bolster the flagging presence of evangelical Christianity in American politics, to reinforce public support for domestic surveillance, and to extend the missionary zeal of the American people in support of an ever-expanding war in the Middle East?

Am I paranoid, or what?

Personal Political Manifesto 2

About a week ago I wrote a personal political position statement, based largely on the acknowledgment that governments act in the interests of their own constituencies and that nations act on behalf of national interests. But to what extent should the interests of humanity broadly construed trump these more local interests? It’s always possible to disguise self-interest behind a veil of altruism, but should that realistic acknowledgment serve as the basis for abandoning altruism altogether as the basis for good governance? Awareness of obstacles to the pursuit of justice needn’t become a cynical justification for realpolitik as the way government “ought” to work. I’d rather regard America not as a nation but as a localized manifestation of a more universal commitment to principles like “liberty and justice for all.” The American government would act on our behalf in pursuing policies that are guided by our shared commitment to these universal humanistic principles. The US Constitution was crafted according to these broader principles; the structure of the government and the democratic process don’t hinder this more universalistic outlook.

The American Multitude and their representatives should recommit themselves to humanity over and above personal, local and national interests. In order to prevent rhetorical manipulation and bias, safeguards would have to be installed to make sure that the evaluation of policy based on universal humanistic principles aren’t being coopted. Policy bodies that are structurally buffered from partisan political and economic considerations need to be strengthened, both within the US and internationally. Just as scientific practitioners use agreed-upon procedures to converge on closer and closer approximations to reliable human knowledge and understanding, so too should practitioners of public policy be able to converge on government practices that represent practical implementations of a principled commitment to universal humanism.

So in that light I think I’m prepared to overhaul my personal political position, moving away from pragmatic self-interest and toward principled universalism.

1. The United States is a national expression of a universal humanistic commitment to “liberty and justice for all.”
2. As participants in a democracy, Americans should attempt to act in accord with this broader commitment to humanity rather than regarding government as a means of advancing their own self-interests.
3. Those who work for the government should act on behalf of the American people in pursuit of the nation’s stated commitment to universal humanistic principles, over and above the localized self-interests of their constituents.
4. Policy advisory bodies within the US government should be buffered as much as possible from political and economic influence, and these bodies’ findings and recommendations should be made available for public scrutiny.
5. US governmental actions that have repercussions beyond the national borders should be vetted through international policy advisory bodies like the UN and the World Court. Inasmuch as these international tribunals are also not immune from political bias, I’m not certain about the extent to which the US government should agree to cede its decision-making authority to them. However, as a corrective to the historical American tendency to pursuing its self-interests abroad, I think the international bodies’ judgments ought to be the default preference for the American government unless compelling reasons can be brought forward and made public to demonstrate that in a particular situation the international judgment is fatally compromised.

One Step Closer

– acrylic by Kenzie Doyle, 2007 (with permission of artist)

What About Bali?

USA DUA, Indonesia (Reuters) – The European Union threatened on Thursday to boycott U.S. talks among top greenhouse gas emitting nations, accusing Washington of blocking goals for fighting climate change at U.N. talks in Bali. The December 3-14 Bali talks are split over the guidelines for starting two years of formal negotiations on a deal to succeed the Kyoto Protocol, a U.N. pact capping greenhouse gas emissions of all industrial nations except the United States until 2012. Washington, long at odds with many of its Western allies on climate policies, has called a meeting of 17 of the world’s top emitters, including China, Russia and India, in Hawaii late next month to discuss long-term cuts. President George W. Bush intends the Honolulu meeting to be part of a series of talks to feed into the U.N. process. Washington hosted a similar meeting in September, which attracted few top officials and achieved little. The EU wants Bali’s final text to agree a non-binding goal of cuts in emissions of 25 to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 for industrial economies as a “roadmap” for the talks. The United States, Japan, Canada and Australia are opposed, saying any figures would prejudge the outcome.

“Those who are suggesting that you can magically find agreement on a metric when you are just starting negotiations, that in itself is a blocking element,” said James Connaughton, Chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. “We will lead, we will continue to lead. But leadership also requires others to fall in line and follow,” Connaughton said. U.S. climate policy is to invest heavily in new technologies such as hydrogen and “clean coal,” without Kyoto-style caps.

The range of 25-40 percent cuts for rich nations was given in studies by the U.N. Climate Panel this year, which blamed mankind for stoking warming and urged quick action to avert ever more floods, droughts, melting glaciers and rising seas. Kyoto binds 37 industrialized nations to cut emissions by an average of 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-12. Poorer nations, led by China and India, are exempt from curbs. Washington pulled out in 2001, saying Kyoto would harm the U.S. economy and wrongly excluded goals for developing countries.

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Global warming exemplifies the limits of American isolationism. America minding its own business is the main source of the problem, resulting not from national political action but from the distributed acts of the Multitude. The right thing to do seems obvious: the US signs the international agreements, then establish some sort of process whereby the targeted emission reductions can be achieved. But I can think of no precedent for the US government interfering in the domestic economy like that. Enforcing adherence to Kyoto and subsequent treaties wouldn’t just call on voluntary lifestyle changes percolating throughout the multitude at the individual, household and corporate level. These changes would be mandated, with punishments meted out to violators. When other than during wartime has the US government actively interfered in a way intended to slow down consumption and to shift production in specific ways that might not increase the GNP?

There aren’t enough economic incentives to hand around to energy companies that would make it profitable for them to shift rapidly and massively away from fossil fuel. Penalties for fuel emissions would have to be drastic and stringently enforced. Case in point: since the Iraq incursion began the price of gasoline at the pump has more than doubled in America, in effect amounting to a huge tax levied on the American consumer the proceeds of which are handed over to oil companies. But despite the big price bump consumption has not gone down.

The libertarian position is roughly this: Let’s say the scientists are right — global temperatures are going up because of emissions, the ice caps are melting, widespread flooding is likely to occur in coastal plains, that massive shifts in populations and agriculture will need to take place. So what? There’s money to be made: a new coastline means new shorefront housing to be built, when farming becomes unviable in one part of the world it will become profitable somewhere else, an ice-free Arctic opens new oil drilling fields, when the oil runs out the energy companies can shift to other energy sources and jack up prices some more.

Reducing American complicity in global warming cannot rely on spontaneous adjustments of the marketplace. Some sort of global idealism would have to motivate the US government to mandate reduced consumption. The federal government would have to act on principle against the economic interests of the Multitude. And to enforce such an act would require the government to act in a more invasive way, taking direct centralized control of economic forces. I don’t think either American business or the Multitude would stand for it. And though I’d rather have Al Gore appointees sitting at the multilateral global warming table, I don’t know what he would have done that’s different from Bush’s inaction.