The Road: A Brief Comment on the Post-Apocalyptic Western

/ Bradley J. Fest / Leave a comment

So I recently saw John Hillcoat’s excellent adaptation of The Road (2009), and though there are probably a number of ways to talk about it, as the film offered a plethora of post-apocalyptic issues to consider, what struck me most was the continuing resonance of the post-apocalyptic narrative w/ the Western genre.  I was only made aware of this after seeing the film, but Hillcoat also directed the fabulous The Proposition (2005), an Australian Western written by, of all people, Nick Cave.

The Proposition not only proved that there are still productive paths to pursue in the genre in general, but that this gritty, morally ambiguous, post-spaghetti Western was able to transcend the genre’s traditional US borders and communicate w/ other post-colonial experiences of something like the “frontier” in a serious manner.  The fact that the Australian Outback is just as appropriate a setting for a Western as the United States beckons to a far larger relevance to the Western genre (as, of course, did the multitude of Italian Westerns of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s), a relevance that goes far beyond privileging the American experience of the frontier as singular and unique.  The Proposition offers a version of a colonial past, of the nineteenth century, steeped in blood as it was, which does not shirk the weight of history, as did so many specifically American Westerns.  It clearly and unambiguously understands how the colonial war machine worked on the frontiers, interstices, boundaries, and edges of the “civilized” world; in other words, the violent logic of The Proposition can clearly be read as an extension of the logic of British colonialism.  Despite the perceived temporal distance of the Western genre, its lessons still resonate today, if for no other reason than so many of today’s violent encounters occur in just such marginal spaces: harsh, blasted landscapes where not only the rule of law has been suspended, but access to something resembling “civilization” is one or two steps removed at best.  Merely to inhabit Australia was, in some sense, to already be criminal, and there are of course many such zones today.

Furthermore, The Proposition, being the (at least critically) successful film that it was,[1] its indie and Sundance cred (perhaps) paved the way for No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood cleaning up at the 2008 Oscars.  (It need hardly be noted here that No Country was also a Cormac McCarthy adaptation.)  In a few short years, a genre that had been perceived dead, had bounced back not only w/ gusto, but with critical and box office success.[2] I have a number of times myself declared, and don’t necessarily disbelieve this statement today, that it is quite difficult if not impossible to make a (“traditional”) Western after Unforgiven (1992).  Much like Gran Torino (2008) was a send-off of Eastwood as an actor, Unforgiven represented to Eastwood his final statement on the Western, the culmination of his many years in the genre.  Though the ‘90s saw some excellent Westerns made after Unforgiven, there didn’t appear to be much more to say w/in the realm of its specific mode.  Jarmusch’s Dead Man (1995) is perhaps a perfect example of this.  It is thoroughly and unapologetically a Western, delivers one of the best soundtracks in the genre from Neil Young, and does much to quite self-reflexively play w/ Western tropes, but for all that, it does not have a clear genealogical descent from past-Westerns, a genealogy defined in the 70s and 80s by Eastwood, and sewn-up tight w/ Unforgiven.  Dead Man, despite its successes, was strangely and perhaps purposely divorced from the genre, sending out feelers for how to continue, how to stay relevant, and how to change.[3]

So what, if anything, does this all have to do w/ The Road and w/ post-apocalyptic narratives?  For one, when I finally figured out who directed the McCarthy adaptation, it came as no surprise to me that it was John Hillcoat.  That he would have been tapped to direct a(ny) McCarthy novel made to me complete sense.  But, peculiarly, the logic of this was not based on McCarthy’s own long interest in the Western.  Rather, it directly and clearly presented me w/ the now long affinity b/t the Western and the post-apocalypse.  As early as Walter M. Miller Jr.’s Canticle for Leibowitz (1960), w/ its setting in the Arizona or New Mexico desert, there has been a symbiosis b/t the genres.  (Examples of this would be too long to list, but suffice it to say even the forthcoming Book of Eli clearly picks up on this.)  The Road, even filmed in Western Pennsylvania (Pittsburgh, yay!) as it was, unambiguously plays w/ many Western conventions: the journey, the lone hero (w/ son), a haunting past before the protagonist’s or civilzation’s fall—specifically in the form of a lost woman (Charlize Theron)—a moral “code” by which the hero lives by (good guys and bad guys—i.e. those who eat humans and those who don’t), a tragic but noble fate, and, ultimately, riding off into the sunset for a “better tomorrow.”  Mix in a harsh, unforgiving landscape, restless and dangerous “natives,” an old wise coot, even a reappearance of Guy Pearce. . . take away the end of the world stuff, and one has a pretty solid formula for a Western.

This, of course, should not be surprising at all, considering McCarthy’s previous work, and the obvious apocalypticisim of something like Blood Meridian, but The Road the novel, w/ its lack of specific geographical referent, the quite vague cause of the Apocalypse (as opposed to the film where it is a bit more clear that it is nuclear in nature), and the persistent, all-encompassing ash,[4] reads far more like wandering outside the windows of Beckett’s Endgame than it does Apocalypse-made-Western.  The novel’s prose is sparse and simplistic, as opposed to the baroque eloquence of Blood Meridian, and it has striking existential moments wholly—and I think for the better—missing from the film:

“He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world.  The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth.  Darkness implacable.  The blind dogs of the sun in their running.  The crushing black vacuum of the universe.  And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover.  Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.”[5]

Suffice it to say, these moments of reflection and prosodic expression are rare in the novel, and importantly so.  The novel is incredibly sparse and consequently ridiculously allegorical in a way simply not possible to successfully portray in an adaptation.  And I don’t think this is for the worse.  To me, it doesn’t so much matter whether the novel or the film is “better.”  In fact, each seems to stand on its own quite adequately.  The differences b/t each could be listed and nit-picked ad nauseum, but I think simply the difference b/t the mediums is enough to place each in different aesthetic, or generic, regimes.  In other words, the visual image provided by the film creates a much clearer Western generic marker than does the work of the novel.  I agree that this could be debated, esp. b/c it is difficult to read McCarthy at all w/o the Western in mind, but to my thinking, The Road the novel is McCarthy attempting to take on some quite different, more (as mentioned before) Beckettian material than his previous work, and I think he is ultimately successful in doing so.  The film’s stunning, if still harrowing and drab visuals, create a specificity, a “real” referent, a localization, and a sense of the past which are all absent from the novel.  This, of course, is simply a result of pointing the camera at something (I assume), but even the presence of Charlize-Theron-as-memory,[6] which was definitely played-up in the adaptation, reveals the sovereignty of Hillcoat’s lens no matter what the source-material.

This is all a long way of suggesting a couple of hypotheses which would take me much more time and thought to fully flesh out, but since I already have been far from brief in getting to them, will be so to conclude. 1)  That perhaps the real disappearance of the Western, if in fact we mark it around the 1992 appearance of Unforgiven, was in fact the result of something quite different.  Namely, the end of the Cold War.  W/ the threat of nuclear war, presumably, off the table, the aesthetic logic of the Western—its reliance on harsh, blasted, post-apocalyptic landscapes—ceased to have the same subconscious cultural cache than it did previous to 1992.  Eastwood himself had long relied on overtly religious or apocalyptic themes in his work (see High Plains Drifter and Pale Rider), and though Unforgiven may not be as clearly apocalyptic, it definitely puts to rest the avenging, angel-of-death type of messianic judge who Old Munny clearly is even there.[7] 2)  That it is perhaps not retroactively inappropriate to re-read many Westerns as ultimately tarrying w/ thoughts of the nuclear or the post-apocalyptic.  I’m esp. inclined to include Leone here.[8] What was able to break the Western out of its celebration of the US was implicitly an awareness of how this very cowboy logic would/might lead to the final scene in Dr. Strangelove: waving a cowboy hat while riding the bomb. . . . The brutality and violence of the Spaghetti Western, more than simply historically revisionistic, was actually an imagined future, a projection of the same sort we get in The Postman or perhaps even Syriana.  3)  Finally, that the re-invigoration of the Western genre is inextricably linked to changes in the apocalyptic imagination and the plethora of present day global conflicts.  The specific lack of nuclear narratives of late (see my postings on 2012 and its addendum), have consequently led to a more subtle, less-overt apocalypticisim in the Western, one that now highlights oil and border crossing (No Country and Blood respectively) rather than the nuclear.  Suffice it say, however, that if we place The Road firmly in the Western tradition, it is apparent that the nuclear is still very much w/ us, but that it has been sublimated to such a degree that it takes an overt nuclear post-apocalypse to reveal a Western, rather than the other way around.  This is not necessarily to suggest that perhaps the Western has been wholly absorbed into other genres, and can only function, say, how it does in Star Wars, but it is to say that, b/t Unforgiven and The Proposition, something has changed, and whatever that change is, the ultimate result is The Road.

All in all, I’m almost embarrassed to be even be posting all this, as it seems far too obvious, but hopefully what it really speaks to is how The Road is an incredibly timely and important film, esp. compared to something like 2012.  It is, in other words, no accident that it was filmed in Pittsburgh, as the atmosphere of economic collapse both past and present, simply oozes in every frame.  And who knows, maybe even right now Hollywood execs are contemplating what would be a truly terrifying film—one which didn’t have recourse to the fantasmatic nuclear or whatever to destroy the world, but might simply show what could have happened, and still might, in our current economic climate.  I can only imagine these films would also find the burgh adaptable.  28 Years Later anyone?

[1] And of course it didn’t hurt that it was bolstered by some star power: Nick Cave’s screenplay and Guy Pearce’s captivating role as the protagonist.

[2] For instance, on Wikipedia’s list of Westerns released in the 2000s, it says only 4 were released in 2004 (which I don’t quite believe).  Of these, one was a French film, Blueberry, that went straight to DVD (though it does look fascinating) and Disney’s animated Home on the Range.  How this last fits into the “Western,” I’m not quite sure, but then again. . . (thank you Wikipedia), it also lists From Dusk till Dawn 3, Grey Owl—a Richard Attenborough production(!)—Shanghai Noon (w/ Jackie Chan), The Last Samurai, Joss Whedon’s Serenity (which isn’t such a stretch. . .), The Quick and the Undead, and The American Astronaut (which is excellent, but perhaps not a Western).  Suffice it to say, that this list is classic-Wikipedia in many ways.  Not only does it not even include No Country or There Will Be Blood, but what is there is quite suspect.  My point still stands, however, that from a #-of-releases-per-year-in-the-genre standpoint, in the early aughts (read before 2005, the year The Proposition was released) there was a distinct slowdown in the production of Westerns.  Afterward, in addition to No Country and Blood we received a number of more-or-less classic western films that probably wouldn’t have even been made in the first place if not for the mid-aughts Western revival, among them: 3:10 to Yuma (a fair remake), Appaloosa, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and Seraphim Falls.

[3] An oft overlooked and at times fascinating film, Way of the Gun (2001) w/ Ryan Phillipe and Benicio del Toro, also attempted this if in a wholly different direction.  Unapologetically a nod to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Way of the Gun, however, ultimately found itself w/o a solid generic foundation other than its references to older films in a strikingly similar, if wholly non-parallel manner to Dead Man.

[4] The ash is noticeably absent from the film, except in its washed-out light, perhaps simply b/c it would have been nearly impossible to portray this visually and still be able to construct an interesting image.  The film is already bleak, who wants to watch a completely gray film?

[5] Cormac McCarthy, The Road (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), 110.

[6] Btw, why is it that Theron so often plays a role in which the drab, even ugly appearance of her only serves to highlight how “beautiful” she is?  Would this effect even be possible w/ a “truly” ugly, or even an “average-looking” woman?

[7] Again, to invoke Dead Man, Jarmusch’s idiosyncratic way of tarrying w/ the apocalypticisim of the Western was in not-at-all-subtle references to William Blake.

[8] For the purposes of brevity, I’m not going to even get into Mad Max or such.  And, of course being Australian, Hillcoat does give a nod to the Thunderdome in the wardrobe of many of the characters in The Road.

2012: An Addendum

/ Bradley J. Fest / Leave a comment

Just picked up Žižek’s new short book on the economic crisis, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, and it struck me while reading it last night that perhaps, even though 2012 was in production far before the “economic downturn” which struck in the Fall of 2008, the real horizon of the film is in fact the “seemingly out of nowhere,” “once-in-a-century credit Tsunami” (Greenspan).[1] (I am indebted to Kirk Boyle for making me recall this insight, as he made much the same point about 2012 on a panel we were both on last fall in NY.  Check out his abstract for “Metaphors that Destroy Us: Projections of the Financial Crisis,” and his very interesting article “Children of Men and I am Legend: the disaster-capitalism complex hits Hollywood.”)

The lack of any concrete, “real” cause of disaster in 2012, the fact that the films just spirals out-of-control between one seemingly unrelated disaster to the next (i.e. how could Yellowstone turning into a Volcano and the San Andreas Fault be related. . .), that drastic measures must be taken immediately w/ little to no concern for the constituency of the country, that the leaders in power ignore any other solution to the problem other than vast influxes of capital into abstract arks—rather than say mobilizing the workforce to save itself (the economy)—all these point toward the fact that 2012 may in fact be (metaphorically) dramatizing the global economic disaster.  And yes, this is perhaps to give Emmerich too much credit, that the film seems far more enamored w/ its special effects and lackluster narrative, but despite all this, what is on display in 2012 is the disaster at the heart of capitalism itself.  Not some pseudo-scientific excuse to blow up the world again, but an acknowledgment that the apocalyptic rhetoric spread around the financial collapse was far more extreme than for real natural disasters; only a film like 2012 could actually give us an image of what was being imagined in the minds of bankers, financiers, and government officials at all levels: total global destruction.

Strikingly, and I’m inclined to not wholly agree w/ him on this, Žižek focuses on various sites of apocalyptic threats as the only sites which could give the communist “Idea a practical urgency.”[2] In his latest book more clearly than ever before, capitalism contains a multitude of apocalyptic scenarios in the heart of itself—it is apocalyptic.  And it is the very ways in which it is apocalyptic which could create new antagonisms for the universality contained w/in communism, not a hearkening back to the past, either its successes or failures, but rather reinventing the lines along which the battle must be waged entirely.  He is very clear that there are four such sites of impending capitalist disaster which may in fact provoke such a reinvention:

The only true question today is: do we endorse the predominant naturalization of capitalism, or does today’s global capitalism contain antagonisms which are sufficiently strong to prevent its indefinite reproduction?  There are four such antagonisms: the looming threat of an ecological catastrophe; the inappropriateness of the notion of private property in relation to so-called “intellectual property”; the socio-ethical implications of new techno-scientific developments (especially in biogenetics); and, last but not least, the creation of new forms of apartheid, new Walls and slums. . . . What the struggles in all these domains share is an awareness of the potential for destruction, up to and including the self-annihilation of humanity itself, should the capitalist logic of enclosing the commons be allowed a free run.[3]

Prior to the release of 2012, there was a viral marketing campaign of videos (even though they were also OnDemand) which showed Woody Harrelson’s character running through the list of possible scenarios that would “prove the Mayans right” (including nanobots, the Hadron collider, aliens, nukes, eco-disaster, etc. etc.—all the usual suspects and more).  What is interesting about these, is that 2012 could have made use of any of these threats, most of them a result of capitalism (or its future).  They are all contained w/in the logic of the film.  So the fact that 2012 had to pull a magical-rabbit-disaster out of its pseudo-scientific hat proves all the more what is at stake.  For Emmerich, and for Žižek as well, we are living at the end times.  And, whether acknowledged or not, capitalism is the horizon in which we experience what that actually means.  Of course, knowing that one is living near the end of the world is nothing new, but notice Žižek’s conviction that we are in fact there:

We need a more radical notion of the proletarian subject, a subject reduced to the evanescent point of the Cartesian cogito.  For this reason, a new emancipatory politics will stem no longer from a particular social agent, but from an explosive combination of different agents.  What unites us is that, in contrast to the classic image of proletariat who have “nothing to lose but their chains,” we are in danger of losing everything: the threat is that we will be reduced to abstract subjects devoid of all substantial content, dispossessed of our symbolic substance, our genetic base heavily manipulated, vegetating in an unlivable environment.  This triple threat to our entire being renders us all proletarians, reduced to “substanceless subjectivity,” as Marx put it in the Grundrisse.  The ethico-political challenge is to recognize ourselves in this figure—in a way, we are all excluded, from nature as well as from our symbolic substance.  Today, we are all potentially homo sacer, and the only way to stop that from becoming a reality is to act preventatively.  If this sounds apocalyptic, one can only retort that we live in apocalyptic times.  It is easy to see how each of the three processes of proletarianization refer to an apocalyptic end point: ecological breakdown, the biogenetic reduction of humans to manipulable machines, total digital control over our lives. . . At all these levels, things are approaching a zero point; “the end of times is near.”[4]

And this is the whole problem.  If on the one hand, we have Bush, McCain, and Obama declaring the end of the world as we know it unless we push through the stimulus package, and Žižek saying that it is the very threats capitalism introduces which would cause the end of the world and may become sites for radical political upheaval, AND Roland Emmerich getting us all collectively “off” w/ abstract spectacles of some vague disaster-reality—do we not need to dial it back a bit?  Yes, 2012, you may be “about” the Fall of 2008, but that simply puts you (and Žižek and all the rest) in a ridiculously long tradition of this sort of thing.  A tradition that has at the heart of itself the fact that this apocalypse never happens! We are always living in the end times.  This is why all these rhetorical eschatologies are so effective.  If in fact what 2012 is enacting is financial meltdown, thank god it looks so familiar, that it is just another rhetorical disaster which will never occur, but whose effects will have real world consequences—i.e. more banking corruption, etc.  Perhaps the real lesson here is that we should just multiply possible rhetorical apocalypses, all so to insure that none of them ever happen.

[1] And perhaps nowhere is this Tsunami imagined better than when it is sweeping over the Himalayas.

 

[2] Žižek, Slavoj.  First as Tragedy, Then as Farce.  New York: Verso, 2009.  90.

[3] ibid., 90-1.

[4] ibid., 92.

2012

/ Bradley J. Fest / Leave a comment

I’ve been eagerly anticipating Roland Emmerich’s recent 2012 for quite some time now.  One of the first previews for the film released early this last year showed a Tibetan monastery high in the Himalayas being engulfed by gigantic waves.  This and other previews seemed to promise a spectacle of global destruction heretofore only hinted at, a disaster so large and frankly absurd that even the highest point on Earth wouldn’t be immune from its sublimely catastrophic effects.  Except for the strangely missing nuclear referent, Emmerich has tackled most of the major versions of global apocalypse and epic disaster.  He gave us aliens destroying the White House and the Empire State Building in dramatic fashion in Independence Day (1996); attempted and failed to revamp the monster movie in Godzilla (1996); gave us a global warming eco-apocalypse based on ridiculously sketchy science in The Day After Tomorrow (2004); and even gave us a pre-history apocalypse—in the sense of massive civilization change—in 10,000 BC (2008) (btw, for those who are following, yes that is two movies in a row whose titles are dates).[1] W/ 2012 I could only imagine that he would go above-and-beyond the all-out destruction of those previous films, as he would have to simply go bonkers-overboard to top them.  I even permitted myself to hope that he might actually deliver on his and our desire to see it all end spectacularly on the big-screen in all the CGI glory he could muster.  In all earnestness, I was excited for 2012 not because it would be some genre-bending, metacinematic commentary on apocalyptic tropes, nor would it be some prophetic warning to humanity,[2] nor would it be some careful and subtle exploration of a post-apocalyptic situation. . . no, I was excited for 2012 for the sheer spectacle of the thing: no substance, just everything going to hell.  And in that, it was pretty successful.

Don’t get me wrong, 2012 is an awful film that even the intrepid John Cusack couldn’t save.  Like all of Emmerich’s films, rather than the disaster taking center stage, he inevitably only uses it as a background to tell a laboriously clichéd, trite, normative, banal “family” narrative that barely holds together.  For all the quite visually captivating death and destruction, the entire film culminates in Cusack having to free a stuck gear.  That’s it.  A wire is coiled around a gear that is preventing the gate from closing on one of the arks.  And it takes twenty minutes for this to resolve in the manner we were all expecting in the first place—i.e. Cusack fixes the gear, the gate closes, everyone is saved from drowning, he reunites with his ex-wife[3] and kids, etc. etc.[4] Up until that point, the narrative was simply a convenient vehicle to transport us from one site of disaster to the next, with ridiculous, last minute escapes from each: L.A. falling into the San Andreas Fault and the Pacific Ocean, Yellowstone Park blowing up (largest volcano ever),[5] the proverbial waves coming over the Himalayas, etc.[6] (I won’t even get started w/ all the other convoluted, unnecessary plot points except to mention the whole thing still ends up being conservatively “moral” at the end and the science is even worse than The Day After Tomorrow: gigantic solar flares have caused a new (new! how does he get away w/ this shit!?) radioactive element in the Earth’s core, and it is heating up the entire planet, causing the tectonic plates to massively shift and, you know, sorta melt.  Clear?)  But for all that, my anticipation was still satisfied.  L.A. dropping into the San Andreas fault was perhaps one of the most captivating images of massive destruction yet “captured” on film.  I won’t even really try to describe it, and really anything less than the big screen won’t do it justice, but I will say that the detail is so fine one can actually see tiny people falling through the smashed windows of toppling skyscrapers.

My desire to see this film was simply a desire to see how he would pull off more destruction.  Mercifully, this film was (fairly) free of big, famous, historic landmarks blowing up or being encased in ice (w/ the one exception of an aircraft carrier smashing into the White House riding the back of a Tsunami[7]; I wish I could say it was some sort of commentary on the military industrial complex or perhaps New Orleans, but frankly Emmerich probably thought it just looked cool.[8])  What this film appeared to promise (and almost fulfill) was disaster w/o context, disaster simply for the sake of it, w/o warning, narrative, or meaning.  This was ultimately what his previous work bordered on, but the obvious eco-guilt-trip parts of The Day After Tomorrow, the strange patriotism of ID4—esp. considering Emmerich is German[9]—prevented this.  These films were still part of the Hollywood-summer-blockbuster ethos that you can only show disaster to this extent if the end result is uplifting for the human spirit or whatever.  2012 is not a summer blockbuster.  It came out in November for chrissakes.  It skirts the “human spirit,” but ultimately the moral question it asks—who gets saved and why if we can only save a percentage of a percent on the ark—seems tacked on at best, and completely opaque and mishandled at worst.[10] The moral dilemmas raised by the film are an afterthought, something to “justify” the rest of it.

And this is ultimately Emmerich’s problem.  His films don’t need justification.  If he took a Koyaanisqatsi approach to disaster filmmaking (70mm visuals w/ Philip Glass music), he would finally achieve what he’s been trying to all this time because at this point no one cares about the who, what, when, where, why, how, etc.  We just want the image.  An anti-narrative apocalyptic disaster film w/ a Hollywood Budget, now that would be something.  He comes mighty close to this in 2012, perhaps the closest because it is arguably the worst film out of them all (or best. . .) in that it is more difficult than ever to care about any of the loosely constructed characters, but it ultimately fails because you could tell exactly the same story w/ [insert disaster, however minor (say, a broken leg), here].  His films try so desperately for substance, pulling every possible heartstring and using the rhetorical gravity of global catastrophe to do so, but always ultimately ignore what is so enticing and brilliant about them: their special effects.  Nothing else.  If he was faithful to what he was actually doing, making a film which resided completely and only on the surface, he might actually achieve some depth.  Rather than trying to insert meaning w/ whatever hackneyed father has to save his children bullshit that winds up in every one of his films, if he simply eschewed meaning, gave up cause-and-effect, morality, messages of warning, the human spirit. . . really everything except the special effects, he’d really be on to something.  I know we’ll never get this film, but hey, we do have 2012.

[1] Also, one can easily see from his first student film, Das Arche Noah Prinzip—in which a “weather” satellite has the power to create massively destructive natural disasters—that Emmerich has for a long time been in the business of megadeath.  He also looks like he’s about to take on another version of this by making Asimov’s Foundation (at least according to imdb).  I’m sure hardcore SF fans the world over are groaning.

 

[2] There isn’t any, b/c this film reverts to an apocalypse wholly outside of human control.  It is destined, prophesied in the old traditional style.

[3] Who, not ten minutes before this had lost her current husband, and poor-ole Amada Peet acts like it never happened once Cusack comes through.

[4] I feel no guilt if I’ve “spoiled” the movie here.  This is sorta the point.  The narrative doesn’t matter at all.  We already know what is going to happen.  It is moot.  My question, why even bother w/ a narrative at all in such a film?

[5] Though Woody Harrelson does have a delightful cameo here as the crazy End-is-Nigh guy.

[6] Actually, for the global nature of the disaster in 2012 we get quite a limited version of it.

[7] Literally.

[8] It did.

[9] He also made The Patriot (2000) w/ Mel Gibson, btw.

[10] I.e. the governments of the world knew about this impending disaster 3 years beforehand, but kept it under their hat so the world wouldn’t descend into anarchy, secretly building 4 arks to save government members and the fabulously rich.  When one of the arks fails near the end the major moral question is: do we let these 100,000 people on knowing that it might endanger those already here.  This is of course to gloss over the fact that everyone might have been saved if the initial decision was to tell the planet and mobilize the entirety of global production toward one single goal: survival.  Where to enter this morass, or even worse why one would enter it, is beyond me.  No one could take this film seriously enough to seriously answer the moral questions it tentatively raises.

On Beginning; or, Finally Defining the Name of this here Blog

/ Bradley J. Fest / Leave a comment

Beginning the Fragment or Fragmenting to Begin—“They” say that the Fall is a time for new beginnings, a time when Americans choose to change.  Beginning only means being in thrall to the past while anxiously casting away one’s more-than-likely future, like being surrounded by a roomful of books you’ve read but cannot remember a single word of and choosing where to start your reading over again.  For my part, I’ve started dressing nicer recently.  By “nicer” I still mean jeans.  Jean Baudrillard, Jean Claude van Damme, Jean Grey, Gene Fest, Wyclef, Sartre, Rousseau.  (Searching my .docs, there is no satisfactory origin for the concept of origin.  Either a “Riot Grrrl History,” a bunch of lonely sexual ramblings, or Yaphet Kotto.  Oops.)

Beginning Again—This is more like it.  Origins are categorically onanistic.  How much seed need be spilled in pursuit of beginning something that must inherently end?  Like when Eve recounts her birth, Milton inscribes the myth of Narcissus upon her before she even meets Adam.  Before the beginning (what else is Paradise Lost about?) of human history, we have a being obsessed by its encounter w/ the mirror-stage, its beginning of self-awareness of the other (self), before the sad descent into history.  I’m sick of: the end of the beginning, the beginning of the end, the end of the end, the beginning of the beginning, or the beginning of the end of the beginning of the end of the beginning.  It’s why humans drunk-dial/-text.  At least in America.  TFLN (Txts Frm Lst Nght[1]) is only the most conspicuous aspect of this: we collectively cannot remember how “last night” ended, and thus, waking up (beginning) in the mo(u)rning, we are shocked to learn that our present has been inscribed by a past w/ no present whatsoever.[2]

Beginning over Again—Ugh, how Derridean.  The proliferation of forms has made formalism de trop.  Perhaps we should start teaching our students about the impotence of form, about the form that comes from not taking Viagra  (Wow, that’s in my spell check!).  As in: logorrhea is a form in-and-of-itself. . . if not the form.  Is hyperarchivization anything less than this logic?  Like in Paradise Lost (again) when Adam and Satan both complain about the fact that neither had any say in the manner of their creation.  Oh, the wisdom of Silenus.

A Perhaps Even More Pressing (Form of) Beginning—Can I only write as if it were about to be immediately posted to the interwebs?

(Apocalypse) Now Begun—To those who perhaps do not understand the liminalities of this here present undertaking, let me be frank in my reference: “These are the two fantasmatic limits of the book to come, two extreme, final, eschatic figures of the end of the book, the end as death, or the end as telos or achievement”[3]; “the hypothesis we are considering here is that of the total and remainderless destruction of the archive,”[4] or the total infinite accumulation of that archive w/o end.  It is b/t these things, b/t these two ultimate limits, impossible in their irreducible extravagance, where we attempt to locate ourselves in the HYPERARCHIVAL PARALLAX.

Let me attempt to be clear: any writing, any writing whatsoever, occurs b/t these two poles.  These are the poles which inscribe any attempt to write, in all its banal euphoria.  So, on the one hand, the hyperarchival parallax attempts to incorporate everything, but on the other, to destroy everything, to destroy everything it incorporates, and thus it is able to exist b/c it is aware that it can never reach these untransgressible limits.[5]

When Foucault writes on transgression, he says that “the twentieth century will undoubtedly have discovered the related categories of exhaustion, excess, the limit, the transgression—the strange and unyielding form of these irrevocable movements which consume and consummate us.”[6] The hyperarchival parallax seeks to undo the 20thc’s discoveries.  Not that F. was wrong, far from it, but rather b/c it seeks a transgression of the gap b/t liminalities.  “The first critical move is to replace this topic of the polarity of opposites with the concept of the inherent ‘tension,’ gap, noncoincidence, of the One itself.”[7] Consequently, if the “ONE” is the “ARCHIVE,” the hyperarchival parallax seeks to highlight the fact that the archive is never the archive: it is always hyperarchive.  The two sides of its coin are (perhaps) the interwebs as infinite accumulatory archive and the interwebs as an archive that is always undergoing the process of its own destruction infinitely.  If these are untransgressible limits, they are only so b/c we don’t have an AI strong enough to breach them, or our posthumanity has not caught up w/ its reality yet.  “We should therefore also assert a gap between life and meaning, analogous to the gap between truth and meaning—life and meaning do not in any way fully overlap.”[8] Thus. . . .

To Begin Again, Anew—Thus, “Sun is shining, / Birds are singing, / Flowers are growing, / Clouds are looming and I am flying.”[9] The shit has been defined, and, whether or not the birds are singing tomorrow b/c its pgh and the sun don’t shine, it (the sun) will rise tomorrow (hopefully).  But that’s the whole parallax, right?  The birds surely sing when the sun goes down.  I got these birds in my more-or-less-backyard that for periods of time make a squawking, quaking type of noise every day when the sun goes down.  I think they’re related to the blackbirds/crows that used to perch there/fly across the sky every eve at sundown.  Or else, “the sun has gone down for the last time.”[10] But that still ain’t a solution to beginning.  We’ll see.

[1] How Hebraic.  YHWH-damn.

 

[2] The first instance of this that popped up when I visited this site on 10.24.2009 was: “You were so drunk last night you typed http://www.face.come/cheese.com as if you were logging into facebook.”  Point.  Win.  Though I will admit this is a fairly banal case-example/-study of what I’m talking ‘bout.

[3] Derrida, Jacques.  “The Book to Come.”  Paper Machine.  Trans. Rachel Bowlby.  Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005.  15.

[4] Derrida, Jacques.  “No Apocalypse, Not Now: Full Speed Ahead (Seven Missiles, Seven Missives).”  Psyche:   Inventions of the Other.  Vol. 1.  Trans. Catherine Porter & Philip Lewis.  Eds. Peggy Kamuf & Elizabeth Rottenberg.  Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007 [1984].  400.

[5] For instance, “Otis Nixon” is the most hit-upon reference in this archive.  Destruction!

[6] Foucault, Michel.  Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews.  Trans. Donald F. Bouchard & Sherry Simon.  Ed. Donald F. Bouchard.  Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977.  49.

[7] Žižek, Slavoj.  The Parallax View. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2006.  7.

[8] ibid., 182.

[9] M83.  “Birds.”  Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts.  EMI, 2003.

[10] Milemarker.  “Sun Out.”  Ominosity. Eyeball Records, 2005.

Let there be a Postmodern Drip; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Milton

/ Bradley J. Fest / Leave a comment

[Note: my problem w/ footnotes still remains.  Sorry.]

So I just accidentally caught a bit of PBS’ art:21.  Not having ever really seen the show, I cannot comment at length other than to say I’m mildly surprised by a few things about it.

1)  Its existence.  That, despite the slashing of budgets around the country for publicly-supported arts—perhaps most notably in our public school system—PBS has devoted an impressive amount of time and funding to archiving the contemporary art scene (or at least an institutionalized take on it).  2)  The speed of whatever (might still be said to) come(s) under the heading “avant-garde” in its ability to slink into the “mainstream” of public television.  For instance, I only sat and watched long enough to get what the show was trying to do: interview artists, show their work, talk about their process, etc.—all in a more-or-less banal fashion—but was immediately struck by the “painter” and “sculptor” Jeff Koons sitting and talking to the camera while the shots of his work being created resembled factory floors with many laborers toiling to produce surplus value, and the owner (read: artist) was nowhere to be seen except talking to the camera.  If this is the avant-garde, like a video I watched of the making of Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party (1979) in a undergrad women’s studies class, at least we don’t have the myth of the lone, toiling, individual artist to contend w/ anymore—it is a collective, Stalinst endeavor, a 5-year Plan, if you will (. . .); and it is formally sanctioned by PBS (better than FOX I suppose).  3)  Baudrillard was “right” (perhaps, at least in this regard) when he wrote:

“Therein lies all the duplicity of contemporary art: asserting nullity, insignificance, meaninglessness, striving for nullity when already null and void.  Striving for emptiness when already empty.  Claiming superficiality in superficial terms.  Nullity, however, is a secret quality that cannot be claimed by just anyone.  Insignificance—real insignificance, the victorious challenge to meaning, the shedding of sense, the art of the disappearance of meaning—is the rare quality of a few exceptional works that never strive for it.  There is an initiatory form of Nothingness, or an initiatory form of Evil.  And there are the inside traders, the counterfeiters of nullity, the snobs of nullity, of all those who prostitute Nothingness to value, who prostitute Evil for useful ends.  The counterfeiters must not be allowed free reign.  When Nothing surfaces in signs, when Nothingness emerges at the very heart of the sign system, that is the fundamental event of art.  The poetic operation is to make Nothingness rise from the power of signs—not banality or indifference toward reality but radical illusion.  Warhol is thus truly null [yay to living in pgh], in the sense that he reintroduces nothingness into the heart of the image [my emphases].  He turns nullity and insignificance into an event that he changes into a fatal strategy of the image” (“The Conspiracy of Art.”  The Conspiracy of Art: Manifestos, Interviews, Essays.  Trans. Ames Hodges.  Ed. Sylvère Lotringer.  New York: Semiotex(e).  2005 [1996].  27-8).

4)  The final spoken line of Mary Heilmann’s segment, which filmed her “finishing” a work: “let’s leave that postmodern drip.”

And this brings me to the point that has been on my mind all day: how is simply leaving a drip, an “accident,” a self-referential awareness of the artifice one is creating postmodern!?  (Has Cervantes taught us nothing?)  Heilmann, here at least, is intentionally inscribing postmodernism not into her painting itself, but into her filmic inscription of that painting, into the institutionalized, publicly accepted portrayal of her artistic process.  This is not really to comment on her art at all (a visual practice that perhaps reached its peak in Mondrian—oops, that’s a comment in-and-of-itself. . .), but rather to suggest that this perhaps off-the cuff, highly edited comment is both obscene and untimely.  Obscene b/c it attests to her own self-aware position as a filmic representative of 21st-c. art, in all the excessive surplus of her reification.  Untimely, b/c I couldn’t help but to inscribe my own current teaching of Paradise Lost upon it—i.e. I am weirdly and perhaps desperately attempting to locate some sort of hip, postmodern take on Milton to “dazzle” my students w/, and am simply not finding it.  Milton is an incredibly drippy poet, this is a given.  But where is that postmodern drip!?

Rather, and I know this is quite an unexpected (except for the title) left turn, but it is precisely the traditional, canonical, and established take on the aporias of Milton’s text which are fascinating me right now, which are dictating my pedagogical approach to something I probably have no right to be teaching in the first place.  For instance, over the past two classes, we talked about light, the Word, language, gender, freedom, predestination, Satan’s status, good vs. evil, authority/discipline/sovereignty vs. the individual, etc. etc.  And it has been kinda gettin’ my rocks off.  I don’t know what it is.  Perhaps it’s the old dead white-guy in me (I’m one of those things, and approaching [the] (an)other[s]), but some of the most enjoyable things I’ve taught in the past couple years, of course w/ some notable exceptions, have been, for lack of a better term, canonical.  Where does this come from?

Well, that is probably a pretty damn (stupid-)easy question, in oh-so-many ways, so let me rephrase it.  Why do I, as someone who has for so long valued the new, the minor, the interstitial, the subversive, the alternative, the marginal (or was I just deluding myself before . . . !? [oh no; damn]), all of a sudden get this supreme satisfaction for engaging, teaching, and in some cases writing about, such a text?  And not even in some sort of new or interesting way? but in the same-ole’ way my a-bit-more-than-slightly-overweight undergrad Miltonist did?  (Seriously, take a look at his page.  He literally looks exactly like what one would expect a corpulent Miltonist to look like.[1] And yet I’m realizing what an incredible debt I owe(d) him.  So I apologize if this is a bit adolescent.  Hell, one of the best things my students said today was that Paradise Lost was like a simplistic teenage drama, w/ Satan as the rebellious son.[2] Sheer gold.)  Is it possible that PL has certain universal resonances that not only myself but my students can appreciate, understand, be frustrated by, and work w/?  Or is this simply yet another case of the ability for PL to be, in short, Blakean?

Or is something entirely different going on?

Like, where’s the postmodern drip?  If Stanley Fish’s Surprised by Sin is the major contemporary reinterpretation of PL (and of course, I’m drawing upon his introduction to the second edition of Is There a Text in This Class for the title of this piece. . .[3]), it would appear there is still an ample amount of work to be done w/r/t this question.  And so of course it is here rather than somewhere else that perhaps even an inkling of what this work might consist of can be posited.

In other words, if PL is anything, it is a case of absolute archival over-accumulation, excess, abundance.  It splits its seems.  There is simply too much textual, historical, critical, and classical crap, which it holds gravitationally w/in its constellation, to dismiss its archival logic, its hyperarchivization.   The manner in which it has presented itself to me and the manner I cannot but help to present it to my students is wholly reliant on the fact that it is a significant node w/in the archive, not least b/c it is something I have decided to take into close-account.  Though the archive’s logic may be dictated by virtually anything but oneself, that is perhaps the entire point of PL: I’m Satan; I dictate my own goddamn archive.  No law rules the freedom of my textual play.  I cannot be subsumed systematically.  My freedom spreads, and it is an archival spreading, not necessarily subject to any authority whatsoever.  The Fall is a realization.  Humanity enters historical time, archival time w/ man’s first transgress; holy crap it would’ve been boring otherwise.  The very thing that makes possible the thinking, imagining, or writing of PL is the subject of itself.  W/o the Fall: no archive, narrative, history, art:21. . . no postmodern drip.  No Jayson Green screaming “I am Nietzsche!”  And so for a brief moment, is it perhaps alright to, I don’t know, love Milton a bit? to be all Christ-y w/ him and break the law (in more ways than one, if you know what I mean)?

Walking home from the liquor store tonight, reading as usual (re: walking, not the liquor store), I was pointed to/reminded of a text I’d forgotten about w/r/t the Fall: chapter 3 of Žižek’s The Puppet and the Dwarf.  Re-reading it tonight, thinking it would offer me that postmodern drip, the only thing that really stood out (as it often does in the case of that Slovenian) was a joke in a footnote:

(Before the footnote (i.e. in the text proper): “In a wonderful alternative history essay, ‘Pontius Pilate Spares Jesus,’ Josiah Ober entertains the hypothesis that Pilate did not yield to the pressure of the mob, and spared Christ, who survived, and thrived to a very great age as a successful preacher, supported by the Roman authorities against the Jewish establishment; his sect gradually became dominant, and also became the Roman state religion, albeit in its more Jewish version, without the Cross and Redemption by Christ’s death.  The coincidence of Fall and Redemption makes this hypothesis strict sensu beside the point.”)

“This also makes meaningless the well-known Christian joke according to which, when, in John 8:1-11, Christ says to those who want to stone the woman taken in adultery, ‘Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone!,’ he is immediately hit by a stone, and then shouts back: ‘Mother!  Didn’t I ask you to stay at home!’” (The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity.  Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2003.  77, 181).

And perhaps therein lies the ultimate lesson of any take on PL.  Subverting it ultimately, imagining that therein (and, by proxy, in Genesis too) Eve (and Adam) never eat that fruit, but remain in Eden forever, happy, genuflecting, praising God, and fucking/multiplying in the most holy of ways (read: w/o pain)—what would be the point of that?  The reversal of the Fall, unlike the reversal of so many other things that we encounter in the phenomenal world, isn’t funny.  There is no irony possible if Eve doesn’t eat the fruit.  No laughter at all (Dionysian or otherwise).  Unlike most jokes, which require some small amount of distortion from the “real,” the only thing that is funny about the Fall is the Fall itself rather than its inversion.  There is no humor in an unfallen world.  The Fall literally produces the possibility (and thus the instantiation) of laughter! And this is perhaps the real question of PL: what is happiness w/o laughter?  What then is the more privileged human quality: freedom or laughter (and of course we get both in the Fall)?  Happiness isn’t even an issue here—its question is ludicrous.[4] Freedom or laughter, or are they not synonymous?

I cannot help but to think here of Jubal Harshaw’s response to Mike from Mars’ question: “What is ‘Man?’” in Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land.  Faced w/ the near impossible task of defining exactly what makes humans human, Harshaw responds to Mike that “Man is the animal who laughs.”  “Because man is the animal that laughs at himself.”  Ultimately for Harshaw, this ability to laugh resides in our ability to feel pain—we laugh ’cause it hurts.  To watch Laurel and Hardy, the Three Stooges, Jim Carrey and laugh, is to laugh at the pain they are having inflicted upon themselves.  And, at least for Heinlein (here), this is the most fundamental aspect of being human! In other words, Milton’s great ambition (perhaps not realized in something like Paradise Regained) may have been, in a very real way, to write the comedy of the West, the narrative which produced laughter (perhaps as a by-product of freedom or vice-versa).  W/o the Fall, w/o transgression, pride, knowledge, etc. etc., there would be no laughter.  And this is why I am so stricken w/ PL, b/c I want to end on a question akin to: “and is it possible to be human w/o laughter,” when in fact this is a very traditional/canonical/normative question to ask when faced w/ a text such as PL, and, indeed, one which has been asked in far more subtlety, detail, and complexity quite a while ago in Nietzsche.  But I cannot refrain.  Is perhaps the postmodern dripping I am so eagerly and desperately seeking not simply this: wtf does PL have to do w/ laughter?  This: is there any the difference b/t Adam and Eve laughing gloriously at their fall and the final scene of Dr. Strangelove, w/ that dude waving his cowboy hat while straddling the bomb, laughing gloriously?  And yet, still no postmodern dripping. . . .

[1] Btw, take a look at the image on his desktop—priceless.  Esp. w/r/t myself and its archival resonance.  In other words, my moms had a bunch of cheap art books in our massive library (which was of no interest to my young self b/c it was all—except for these art books and a few others—my pops’ English history before 1800 [if only I’d’ve known!]), and one of their covers was that image, one which weirdly assailed me at every point.

 

[2] i.e. “Fuck you Dad,” you don’t understand me!  I’m moving out as soon as I’m 18!

[3] To say absolutely nothing of Kubrick, the apocalypse, or the bomb. . . .

[4] Like when someone responds to the question: “what do you want out of life,” w/ “I just want to be happy.”  Yeesh.

Nomadology (I); or, This Concerns All of Us

/ Bradley J. Fest / Leave a comment
Nomadology I

Roberta Gentry, This Concerns All of Us, Write and React, Arts Incubator Gallery, Tucson, AZ, May 2008.

Recently found this gorgeous semi-collaborative piece Roberta Gentry painted for a poem I wrote a few years ago.

Nomadology I(; or, This Concerns All of Us)

This does not concern the silent emissaries
floating in their homemade boats of warehouse shelving
floating toward Yuma and Dubai, and
the rescue of senusalists everywhere.

They are, indeed, not heralds of anything whatsoever.
So this concerns my wandering.  For when it will pass,
for what it will traverse, for the alleys soon locked
by failed transmissions and succeeding parentheses.

This is a forgetting.  One small leap in space
with porous limits and ill-defined rules.  Where
if the cantankerous restlessness pouring out my eyes
is to be believed as the impossibility of universal consent,

then the throwing motion underneath bronze shields
is both an opening and closing to one hundred hands clapping.
But it is not.  There are a few busted filaments, cracked
tires, broken needles, and blown speakers; maybe

thousands of paradoxes inspired by the conundrum of:
high-jumping the state line or roadside Jesus look-alike contests.
Or maybe this is an affirmation of passive reception and
active errantry, lost when the planets first collided,

a sitting still and motioning weakly toward the window–
fallowness another name for meditation.  The balm for
over-traveled feet rests in a god’s medicine cabinet
where it is slowly approaching its expiration date.

There were only a few short yarns spun yesterday.
And the failure to evince the proper emotion
accorded them was something prepared for.
I fall into song and cannot return.

Media and the G20

/ Bradley J. Fest / Leave a comment

So the G20 was in Pittsburgh last weekend.  I don’t really have much to say about it beyond the fact that the massive police presence (4000 police)–many hired specifically for this occasion from other departments around the country, also including national guard, etc.–appears to me like a clear case of (over-)accumulation to prevent the movement and realization of an alternate, or subaltern, history.  (Archivally) over-accumulate police!  Then no Seattle!–I suspect was the thinking behind this.  Original estimates planned on something like 35,000 protesters.  The actual amount of people at both licensed and unlicensed protests was more b/t 3,000-5,000.  (By all accounts, there may have been more police than protesters. . . .)  I don’t know if this says something about pittsburgh, the current state of things, or whatnot, as I cannot lie about a general kind of ambivalence toward the whole thing–i.e. if the G20 had been somewhere else, would I, in my cloudy-haze of academic self-absorption, even have noticed beyond a passive reading of the news?  But all in all, it was one of the more-interesting times to be living here in my now going on 6 year tenure.  Many of the shots from television and such occurred only a couple blocks from my house.  The town was shut down, martial-law style.  (One guy said it was like Kent State mixed w/ Mardi Gras.)  And commentators couldn’t help but overly-stress how pgh has bounced back after the disaster of the late-70s and 80s.  It is a lovely town to live in, yes.  It is cheap, livable, and has fared better than many places during the “recession.”  But come on, it’s still pittsburgh, and any perusal of much of the town will reveal a past which it is desperately trying to escape, a city defined by antagonisms: a mixture of weird post-apocalyptic ruins and Banana Republics; an infrastructure which is barely being held together mixed w/ SF-like health-care; complete geographical racial and economic segregation mixed w/ exciting sports championships; yinzers and state-o-the-art education.

—

So, some media:

That said, my friends and colleagues Molly Nichols and Katherine Kidd, two quite amazing women, were more-or-less literally taken off the streets to appear on the Sean Hannity show.  Watch the interview here. It is awkward, to say the least.  Who knew that being a lit. PhD was a way to get on tv, and Fox News no less.

—

This recent story on a judge’s ruling in favor of the city police, a lawsuit brought against the city by Seeds of Peace, literally occurred right outside my window.  The day they towed the SoP bus away from its location on Melwood Ave., parked in front of no one’s property, and not hindering traffic flow in any way, I was sitting at my window working and overheard the entire discussion b/t the police and the owners of the bus.  I can say w/o compunction that the police were unnecessarily harassing the owners of the bus, had no reason to be there (i.e. I guarantee none of my wonderful neighbors called them about the bus), and were quite obviously abusing their power.  I can’t help but think that the police said to themselves something along the lines of: “oh, there’s a dirty anarchist bus.  Let’s get rid of them.  Otherwise they might disrupt the G20.”  In terms of what I overheard, they towed the bus b/c either a) the owner was not present, b) the owner could not produce documentation that s/he did in fact own the bus, or c) one of the people involved provided false identification.  Whether or not any of those things are true, they might as well tow every car on my block.  It would be as justified to randomly come up to me and ask me to prove that I own my car when parked on the street.

—

Lastly, on a slightly lighter note, please visit hotmetalbridge.org, as our new call for papers just went up.