IPSEITY, YOU SAY?
PRELIMINARY NOTES ON THE REDEMPTION OF THE SUBJECT IN FILM
ipseity - n., selfhood
There seems to be a blurry line in the eye/mind of the cinephile between exploitation films and films that resemble exploitation films (or, more to the point, sexploitation films). The latter, of which a significant batch has emerged in the late 90s, suggests that, despite the genre-bending exercises of would-be auteurs, the fundamental positions assumed in these edgy, often mock-noir films is a product of the edgy and mock-noir times in which we find ourselves. The shock value of sex and/or mayhem is not, however, the main event in the genre-bending films of the last few years. Many of these films are exploring, instead, the inner limits of subjective rebellion (in many cases brought on by a crisis or catastrophe consistent with the archaic precepts of tragedy).
A director's restrained handling of the melange of sex and gore in exploitation films may be the first sign of secondary intentions in such a film. But in the case of the apparent exploitation film the handling of sex and gore is the paramount sign of primary intentions. Tarkovsky certainly did not need any such flimsy apparatus to prop up his extraordinary opus The Sacrifice (1986). He did, however, have to burn down the house (twice, as it turned out). Neither did Kubrick's swan song, Eyes Wide Shut (1999), actually require gratuitous sex and lurid scenes of picturesque depravity to score its points regarding the Master-Slave narrative (even though many so-called critics decided to aim their barbs at the weakness of this very element!). The larger critical structure, that which seems to run like a red thread through the high-brow party scenes and the sordid world depicted in the marketing of flesh or the re-victimization of victims, was clearly Kubrick's prime concern. The shiftiness of the characters is sufficient only insofar as they barely understand their own roles in the unfolding tragedy, and they surely pull back just in time to prevent being exposed.Ipseity and alterity, the now classic post-structuralist dyad describing subject-object relations, is, here, the critical nexus -- the switching mechanism -- that situates such films within a larger, comprehensive narrative regarding the proprietary nature of intersubjectivity. The mechanisms that rule social orders are often pushed to the extreme limits of exacerbation to bring on the psychosis -- viz., the plunge into the inner world of demons and the exceptional encounter with one's self as demiurge. This collapse occurs through an explosive refusal of one or the other, in the subject-object continuum, to continue to play "by the rules". In many cases, the rules often are broken simply to break out of the game itself and -- instinctively/paradoxically -- destroy/rebuild the structures (psychological and social) that fix the Master-Slave dialectic in time and space.
This psycho-social complex (and its collapse) is played-out in innumerable, mind-numbingly bad films as well -- hundreds and hundreds of times more so than with those few/rare films that bring the same tragic complex to closure. "To closure" -- or to integration -- renders the tragic and apocalyptic scenarios of such occasions somehow redemptive (or, paradoxically, 'irredemptive'). This occurs either on the battlefield of contemporary society (strewn with innumerable victims/casualties) or in the individual psyche (strewn with the rubbish/phantasms of an out-moded way of being). Here The Mahabharata is the penultimate cipher for this game (Peter Brook's film and stage version no less than the ancient text itself). The battlefield is the psyche-as-image-of-the-world (the world-as-image-of-the-psyche). It is important to point out, however, that this construct is not an image of pathetic, garden-variety solipsism. It is, instead, an image of the fragile nature of intersubjective relations and the socially-constructed phantasms of war, poverty, and anomie. If the world 'outside' and the world 'inside' are one and the same thing, there is no excuse whatsoever for not picking up your bed and walking.
Film noir is the eternal return of the always-already marred psycho-social matrix. This is because the hidden structures of domination (and damnation) must remain hidden. It is not permitted, in noirish nightmares, to reveal the source of the soiled laundry of the world. If a window is opened, it is quickly shut again. (This is especially true in the soiled and sordid noirish world of politics.) Redemption is glimpsed, but always shut down. If somehow that window stays partly open, and redemption leaks in, a glimmer of hope (light) weakens the noir atmosphere/ambiance. Asia Argento falling in love, in Scarlet Diva (2002), is such a flaw. This cursory refusal of redemption -- even marred redemption -- is but one luminous point that distinguishes the standard exploitation film from the recent rash of genre-bending films that appear to be exploitation films but are, after all, altogether different. Of course it is Hollywood's love of the proverbial happy ending that ruins so many otherwise serviceable noirish films -- films that might shine an at-the-least dim light on the demented machinations of our collective capitalist prison-house. You can't really blame David Lynch for unloading the bleak and sinister Mulholland Drive (2001) onto an otherwise anesthesized public when all around us we see the schizophrenic meltdown of an empire of dreams.Lars von Trier's Breaking the Waves (1996) literally blew people away, and, in a way, opened the floodgates for a new wave of auteur-driven vehicles. It did so by appropriating the same Deus ex Machina as Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice. The protagonists in both of these films willingly descend into madness/Hell (depravity and self-annihilation) to save not-themselves. They make a pact with God to undo themselves -- to do themselves in -- to save someone else. The Self-Other divide collapses. In the cathartic moment when they seal their own fate, the act of self-destruction becomes an act of redemption. Kubrick steered clear of redemption by allowing Eyes Wide Shut to close in on itself and end where it began. This was the deferred tragedy. The implication is that, beyond the last frame of the film, these same events/situations will return again and again until they implode. The endless cycle of social anomie is the amalgam that substitutes for the almost-always deferred singular instance of breaking the cycle.
Gavin Keeney (August 2002)
NOTES & OUTTAKES
"Ipseity and Alterity will address issues involving the analysis and representation of the self and the other in literature, philosophy, psychology, and the human sciences. Is it ever possible to understand the individual person without reference to other persons? Are ipseity and alterity necessarily co-defined? To what extent does personal identity depend on differences between persons? Is interpretation of the other person ever complete? How is the other constituted within imperfect communicative practices? To what degree do certain psychopathologies involve failures of intersubjectivity? To what extent does theory of mind depend upon language and narrative? We seek papers written from various perspectives and in various disciplines. Cognitive approaches, critical theory, developmental studies, feminist theory, literary analysis, phenomenology, philosophy of mind, psychology, semiotics, etc." - Reading Ipseity (Canisius) - Preview of Ipseity and Alterity: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Intersubjectivity, Shaun Gallagher and Stephen Watson, eds. (Rouen: Presses Universitaires de Rouen, 2002)
"The pre-reflective-self, often termed ‘ipseity’, is not supposed to arise by some subtle process of self-reflection: it is non-relational, and cannot correspond to any introspective process. But then how can it relate in any manner at all to external input? In so doing it would be polluted by content. How can it help create the ‘qualia’ of experience if it itself has no content?" Through the Looking Glass (Science & Consciousness Review, 06/02)
CINEMATIC FORMS/ANALOGUES
LARS VON TRIER'S BREAKING THE WAVES (1996) - "Over a colour-enhanced panoramic view of a Skye bridge, David Bowie sings the opening lines of 'Life on Mars': 'It's a godawful small affair, to the girl with the mousy hair.' This moment, when director Lars von Trier is, in his own words, 'striving for a grand gesture', is one of several featuring 70s pop songs in Breaking the Waves, which many feel should have won this year's Palme d'Or in Cannes. But such moments (designed to 'expose a greater banality') are pauses in an otherwise harrowing and realistic tale about a woman driven to self-destruction by her passion for her paralysed husband. Though this need to seek relief from extreme emotion was considered a flaw in his earlier work, now he has successfully worked it into a searing drama about the power of faith." Interview w/ Lars von Trier (Sights & Sounds Magazine, 1996)
MICHAEL HANEKE'S LA PIANISTE (2001) - "A modern day tragedy, this film is difficult to watch and left this reviewer feeling emotionally drained. It is sparse, it is bleak, it isn’t particularly heart warming. It is however beautifully filmed with an at times spine tingling use of music and Huppert’s portrayal of self-loathing and emotional detachment is a wonder to behold." Review - Interview w/ Isabelle Huppert (The Guardian Unlimited, 2001) - Details
CORALIE TRINH THI & VIRGINIE DESPENTES' BAISE-MOI (2001) - "Based on codirector Despentes’ novel of the same title, the film follows the adventures of Manu (Raffaela Anderson) and Nadine (Karen Bach), two bored, beleaguered, sexually aggressive young women. Manu is an underage porn star; Nadine is a prostitute. 'There’s no work in France,' one of them says, and we can believe it as we watch aimless youth and the not-so-young wandering the streets, setting up cheap dope deals, smacking each other around, loitering in pool halls, and generally running (make that slouching) amok. This is not exactly Paris in the Spring." Review (Lip Magazine) - Official SiteASIA ARGENTO'S SCARLET DIVA (2002) - "Indeed, having starred in several of her father's iron maidens, the brooding, swollen-eyed Argento may be world cinema's premier gamine victim, but now she's become her own persecutrix. Scarlet Diva is '60s-style lurid-and-cool, executed with unmistakable need. The movie's seemingly artless title corresponds to its triple-threat self-flagellation, an organic spectacle of subjective ordeal in which the 26-year-old star splays herself across the bloodied altar of international show business and fame-privilege backdraft." Review (The Village Voice, 08/07/02)
CATHERINE BREILLAT (2001 / 2008) - Interview 1 (The Guardian, 11/23/01) / Interview 2 (The Telegraph, 04/05/08)
Proper FILM REVIEWS ...
