In Praise of getting lost
Sooner or later a motorist obsessing about the instructive Global Positioning System affixed to the dashboard/windscreen of their car will drive it off the road and into a tree. This will be the ultimately referential disclosure and we can only hope the encoded textual display will emit the call that the car and perhaps even the driver is fucked. Of course in many ways this declaration was made long before the car left its comfortable garage on its journey. The car and the driver were suitably fucked even before the purchase of the aforementioned virtual road atlas. This is not the Ballard inspired crash of auto porn but just the impotent fury of the post-human committing pinpoint accuracy techno-suicide, the destiny on the GPS leading drivers not to where they need to be but into metaphorical then literal trees.
Sooner or later a tourist armed with their Nokia E90 Communicator will step in front of a London Bus while trying to find Big Ben dying in an ecstatic flurry of geographic confusion as if the portable device barking electronic directions, neglecting to inform of the impending date with destiny in the from of the fatal bus. But as this a philosophical presentation I am obliged to outline my case on what it is to be suitably fucked, to be up a tree or under a bus without a virtual paddle. Or in this case to be up a tree with a virtual paddle, the GPS pinging out instructions to the dead. The only things the deceased may have known nanoseconds before they died was exactly where they were on the earth when they fell from it. This is precise death recorded for posterity and infamy by a satellite, smiling above us not screaming co-ordinates to the geographically bewildered but a soft resonant mantra of “I told you so”
This is a call to arms, in praise of getting lost. The paper will unfold in three seriously considered and logically reasoned steps. The first section is called TURN ON where I will argue that the GPS has corralled and totalized thinking about time and space to the point where it leads to a state which we may describe as more accurate than accurate, the hyper-accuracy of the mentally atrophied. The Second is called TUNE IN where I will argue that the GPS causes cancer of the imagination leading to the banal and irreversible expression of geographic and temporal cliché and the final we will DROP OUT advocating that the totalizing narrative of the whole GPS techno-fascism is promoting an unhelpful and constricted heterogeneity. The call here is to not know, to approximate and to deflate the status of enforced precision, quantification and accuracy in stead for a more passionate attachment to getting lost.
Turn On
The GPS is an ecstatic instrument, a modern marvel calibrating with the use of technology our precise locations on the planet. They are found in most forms of transportation vehicles and are no doubt useful in emergencies. They are also economically expedient for commercial purposes defraying business costs etc etc. But as happens so often in the postmodern, post-human times the device leaps from its symbolic to its semiotic, from its use value to its sign value until we find it affixed to cars and installed into mobile phones that don’t need it. And it is on the word need that we must focus, to tune in as it were.
TBC
Monday, July 14, 2008
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
Hostel as anti-movie
The veils of adolescent fantasy:
Adolescent hyperreality and popular culture
In Eli Roth’s 2005 horror/thriller movie Hostel three backpackers are seduced into visiting Slovakia on the promise of sexual adventures. In Slovakia they find themselves immediately immersed in casual erotica, surrounded by beautiful women juxtaposed against the more drab (however fictional) Slovakian landscape. Of course events soon go awry and they realize they have been duped learning the Hostel is in fact a front for a sadistic form of “torture tourism” for which they are to be victims.
Interestingly, when the lead characters are eventually tortured the camera, in contradiction to “mainstream” cinema practice often lingers on the torture itself allowing the gaze of the viewer to not be forcibly averted. This has traditionally been achieved by dissolve or reversing to another point of view in the diegetic space. In Hostel it is locked into the factual effects of the torture (flesh being drilled, Achilles tendons severed, eyes blowtorched etc) Here the camera and the viewer merge into active participants in the torture scene, with the splatter literally now in our faces instead of our imaginations.
The relationship of the viewer and the screen in this instance needs to be more fully scrutinized. The question is how is the adolescent processing such a scene and what “knowledge” is brought to such processing? What history does the subject bring to bear to read these particular types of graphic images (as cool?) and how does this history “work”? More importantly, within this contingent history what material factors come in to play that help to structure these questions? To ground this question I propose a brief thought experiment. Suppose I build a time machine and , armed with a copy of Hostel travel back to the 1960’s and show it to an unsuspecting audience replacing it at a screening of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. How would such an audience react? More importantly what knowledge would they employ to deal with something so potentially confronting to them? If
"From the very first screenings, audience reaction, in the form of gasps, screams, yells, even running up and down the aisles, was unprecedented[1]
in 1960 what effect would Hostel have on them on this imaginary screening? This though experiment begs all the questions my research proposes. What has changed from 1960 to the present make images like on the overhead less remarkable? Can we propose a material explanation for these changes? Ultimately my wager is there is a material explanation. The screen itself, the form delivering the image establishes its own “self determining status”. This determination is embedded within an ideological narrative which says in translation that being on the screen is evidence enough of cultural legitimacy. Therefore in specific sociocultural regions at specific times the screen has something “more in it than itself”, a thought I shall pursue presently.
For some adolescents, the cultural productive process led by the screen’s ubiquitous instruction presents as a master signifier of “knowledge”. The productive process, channels particular subjects into very specify and homogenous intellectual narrative paradigms (The screen reflects an objective world, it reflects a non ideological presentation of consumer desired content, it only reflects what the society wants etc). If the adolescent is deprived of the critical scrutiny to apply any radical thought to the screen the signification that these narratives are all there is to know becomes seductive.
This paper wants to ruminate on the shifting epistemological horizons this type of thinking opens within the context of adolescent critical subjectivity. What I want to explore is not talking about a loss of moral standards or the precious tentacles of cinematic capitalism promoting splatter to sell tickets. This does not explain from any deeper point of view why this alteration to the cinematic landscape of images has been established. If I was to bemoan anything it is the subjects diminishment of critical self and the hands of the screen whose edict led by the valorization of the image which often reads preference the visual or more dangerously “enjoy only the visual”.
I want to assert a strategic shift in the sociocultural horizon that since the middle sixties has been underpinned by the emergent gravitas of the screen, or more correctly the plethora of screens I in the television, computer and mobile phones) which has helped reconfigure the critical faculties of the adolescent to, in Neil postman words to being less able to “wrench moments out of their contexts”.[2] The inability to wrench a moment out of its context leads to a bland template of homogenized subjectivity convinced the truth lies in the screen rather than accepting the challenge the screen is to be constantly questioned.
This results, for adolescents, in many cases an emergent Plague of Fantasies. Following Slovenian theorist Slavoj Žižek, this plague is the deleterious effect that is facilitated by the domination of the visual image to the point where it infiltrates the capacity for the subject to effectively resist territorializing of the visual. In the case of Hostel, the visual is the film, the horror lies on the surface provoking little possible analysis. This deceit of aesthetics consumes the space open for discussion about the form especially within this particular genre.
For many adolescents critical subjectivity is impeded by this visual colonizing traditional complexity, nuance and qualification of a more traditional episteme.[3] This is, in effect a picture replacing the thousand words with no real equivalence value. To support this assertion I evoke French cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard who suggests this confrontation between images such as I am juxtaposing results in the territorializing of one form over the other which he would denote as a key feature of hyperreality.
Violent death now becomes the centre of the diegetic space in this instance rather than its lack. In Psycho the contrary is true, where death is achieved in shadow, jump cut and intrusive music. In Hostel the death is a raw sustained explosion of gore achieved through technical expertise and as mentioned an immobilized camera. Hitchcock’s challenge is to the fertile imagination of his viewer. As he had no access to computer effects or latex prosthetics, or highly articulate cameras he relied on an explicit symbiotic relationship between viewer and screen. In Hostel little relationship exists here beyond the concrete. The graphic death is without traditional referent, it might be “ecstatic” cinema to evoke Baudrillard which is stylized image which overshadows plot, or theme, or logic or meaning, a kind of MTV clip without the band. The genealogy of horror on the screen as opposed to in the mind reveals the vertiginous descent into graphic as “good”.[4]
What I propose happens is the viewer, in this case the adolescent is fed a diet of constantly intensifying scenes dependent on the whims of censorship and the bravado of the film production system. For some this has an ideological effect of creating the expectation of gore for entertainment. Now for a select few this effaces their capacity to “read” other less confronting forms of the genre which often implies the loss of the capacity to see this genealogy of the genre. This subject will see Psycho as little more than primitive cinema devoid of (to them) the requisite blood and dismembering.
When this adolescent is watching Hostel, the commonsense reading would be to suggest they are deriving some perverse’ pleasure in the gratuitous violence, a transgression off acceptable viewing. The subject views the Hostel images as “legitimate” or “acceptable” or “entertaining” yet underlying all these signifiers lies in enjoyment itself. This subject takes pleasure in the act of, not the nature of the transgression. Here I return to the material presence of the screen. These signifiers are applied retrospectively. The subject is seduced into seeing the acceptability of the image legitimized through it being on the screen itself rather than through any other interpellative process. Hence the subject never questions the authority of the screen because controversial images are condoned by the screen “that is supposed to know”. These are simply images of the good because they are on the screen, not put on the screen because they are acceptable. This inversion of logic leads us to Žižek.
Therefore I would, following Zizek suggest a more complex libidinal operation is in play. The ‘pleasure’ derived in watching Hostel is not through a transgression of acceptable social standards or moral codes (that is its enjoyable because others thinks it is offensive) but the pleasure in such an experience is chosen to reinforce the private acceptability of such a viewing.[5]The object of “viewing desire” here is the result of a complex process of specific interpellation for a growing number of adolescent subjects. The horrific images occur on the screen arise as a result of two distinct features.
Firstly, as mentioned the technical and historical acumen of the filmmakers allows bodily torture to by cinematically realized. The rapid imposition of computer generated effects, the development of prosthetics etc has allowed the staging of mutilations to be filmed. Secondly and more importantly the commercial pressure of filmmakers to deliberately “push the boundaries” as a demarcation device pushes images out of the viewing imagination and into the filmic space in a vertiginous and ecstatic form of one-upmanship. Hence a sadistic torture scene is no longer played out in our imaginations using sound (as in De Palma’s Scarface,) reverse point of view (as in Tarantino’s Reservoir dogs) or observer testimony (as in Kitashi’s Hana Bai) The result is the horrific images become expected rather than surprise and the lack of image, what would historically structure the underlying libidinal trauma of viewing within the genre is replaced by the concrete presentation of it. At certain times this becomes dysfunctional because this afflicted adolescent preferences the visual actuality over the imaginative fantasy. The horror then is a material confrontation with gore rather than a mythical confrontation with what Žižek following Lacan would call the “horror of the Real”, the powerful psychic destabilization which we can only know through a phantasmic construction of a subjective reality. In contemporary filmic terms for some subjects the monster cannot frighten unless it dismembers within the diegetic space. This is why so many adolescents are untouched by Psycho and laugh uncontrollably at William Freidkin’s The Exorcist. (Perhaps this also why so many “traditionalists” are repulsed rather than entertained by Hostel or the Saw trilogy)
In Jean Baudrillard’s world this ecstatic vortex of graphic images wrenches itself free of a more meaningful signification. The individual subject in the 1960’s, for Baudrillard was ensconced in what he terms a world of “golden illusion”. For Baudrillard illusion is a more powerful reality than what becomes for him post-illusion, a world of floating signs or hyperreality. This hyperreality is a “double of the world” that moves away from the original until any notion of an original is lost. In cinematic terms it is“pure” image in the sense that the connection between the representation on the screen and what it is intending to discuss can only be talked of in terms of other images (signs). This is in contrast to a cinematic representation that is intended as metaphor, that is calculated to intellectualize an exchange of ideas rather than an exchange of pure signs.
This is in many ways observable when Hostel is juxtaposed against Psycho. Hostel has, because of its strong unambiguous and emotionally dominant images left most notions of modernist classic cinema behind. It has become “brand”, trademarked for its accentuation on gore and preposterous plot.[6] Of course Hostel could be defended as a genre specific film, a niche for a specific audience. The third order of simulation, where the copy, in this case Hostel should have some historical connection to an original such as Psycho. But in the case of this copy of the copy it bears no witness to any original because it has no deep or explicable symbolic referents. Hostel bears no metaphorical invitation, and can only be discussed against other visual depictions of splatter.
For Baudrillard hyperreality has a very specific context for theoretical application. Baudrillard sees it lamentably as the psychic loss of a stabilizing traditional referential system replaced by a dizzy vortex of images. To achieve hyperrreal status the object works to efface and in some cases obliterate the original symbolic meaning of the referent. In Hostel we see this in full operative mode. In Hostel the violence establishes its own “code of production” becoming more “violent than violence”, a voyeuristic cine-terrorism with its own internal logic of deliberate territorialized effrontery of the senses. We could ascribe some original status to a film like Psycho, but Hostel effaces these symbolic referents of Psycho by following this territorializing process. Against Psycho, Hostel as a similar genre as Horror/Suspense that has proved so popular since the 1920’s. However Hostel as a commercial product advanced as art claims by territorialization the space Psycho holds by insinuating Hostel is, because of its grizzly special effects an enhanced horror film rather than a derivative computer effects dependent one. Psycho from within this context presented to an uncritical audience is lacking what Hostel contains. It is a film of excess that has effaced Psycho lack. However it is this lack which gives Psycho its specific symbolic gravity, where we can go in discussion. This is what Žižek would say gives it its artistic success. This very lack, a positive constituent of the aesthetic impact.[7] It is indeed this lack which makes the audience work to read the film beyond the surface. Hostel duplicitously attempts to fill in this lack selling tickets, which are in Baudrillardian terms a “neutralization and destabilization”[8] of cinematic form for commercial purposes. This is horror/splatter as “brand” rather than art.
Because the images are placed there as a commercial necessity, and are constantly intensified by the rise of techno-wizardry the screen constantly raises the bar on grizzly images. This now works on a number of levels. Firstly the image itself intensifies. The track from Hitchcock’s shower scene to the grizzly torture scenes in Hostel traces this movement from imagination to screen reality. More importantly the “work” the viewer has to do is done for them by the screen. The reliance on the purely visual, where the visual image becomes the dominant signification of the pleasure has a profound effect on the nexus of art and commerce. Now in many subjects symbolic universe the pleasure becomes dominated by the visual as the most powerful criteria for aesthetic judgment. The ideological benefit of this operation is double.[9] It suggest to the less critical audience this type of presentation is the horror genre par excellence , the film deters the audience from examining their own predicament.[10] This is in every sense a political movement of interpellation on behalf of the productive process of the film industry for the subject whom while expressing a supposed “free choice” to view these films does not have the critical awareness to see how they fit into the productive process of much mainstream cinema. In short the choice to watch these films is often a forced choice because of a deficit of knowledge about film potentiality.
It also allows the film industry a powerful and totalizing productive force to imagine they are providing what the public demands rather than the other wary around. This “spell” caste by the producer is based on the premise the arrangement between producer and viewer is reciprocal and democratic, but the arrangement is reducibly so because of the epistemological status of the screen. Its growing colonization of information delivered primarily as visual medium infuses it with an enhanced eminence. So many uncritical viewers keep having their knowledge delivered as image that it slowly becomes a more dominant signification substituting for a more broad conception of knowledge.
Baudrillard, J. (2002). The Perfect Crime. London, Verso Books.
Postman, N. (1986). Amusing Ourselves to Death. London, Heinemann.
Zizek, S. (1997). The Plague of Fantasies. London, Verso Books.
[1] http://www.film.queensu.ca/Critical/Sage.html(acessed 26/10/06)
[2] Postman, N. (1986). Amusing Ourselves to Death. London, Heinemann.
Pg 73
[3] Ibid.
Pg 105
[4] If we start with Sam Peckinaph’s The Wild Bunch we see a gradual shift into graphic violence as the norm
[5] Zizek, S. (1997). The Plague of Fantasies. London, Verso Books.
Pg 15
[6] For example, the escaping couple, immediately after having fingers severed with a chainsaw and an eye gouged with a blowtorch respectively, calmly drive through the town as if looking for McDonalds
[7] Zizek, S. (1997). The Plague of Fantasies. London, Verso Books.
Pg 1
[8] Baudrillard, J. (2002). The Perfect Crime. London, Verso Books.
Pg 72
[9] Zizek, S. (1997). The Plague of Fantasies. London, Verso Books.
Pg 18
[10] Ibid.
Adolescent hyperreality and popular culture
In Eli Roth’s 2005 horror/thriller movie Hostel three backpackers are seduced into visiting Slovakia on the promise of sexual adventures. In Slovakia they find themselves immediately immersed in casual erotica, surrounded by beautiful women juxtaposed against the more drab (however fictional) Slovakian landscape. Of course events soon go awry and they realize they have been duped learning the Hostel is in fact a front for a sadistic form of “torture tourism” for which they are to be victims.
Interestingly, when the lead characters are eventually tortured the camera, in contradiction to “mainstream” cinema practice often lingers on the torture itself allowing the gaze of the viewer to not be forcibly averted. This has traditionally been achieved by dissolve or reversing to another point of view in the diegetic space. In Hostel it is locked into the factual effects of the torture (flesh being drilled, Achilles tendons severed, eyes blowtorched etc) Here the camera and the viewer merge into active participants in the torture scene, with the splatter literally now in our faces instead of our imaginations.
The relationship of the viewer and the screen in this instance needs to be more fully scrutinized. The question is how is the adolescent processing such a scene and what “knowledge” is brought to such processing? What history does the subject bring to bear to read these particular types of graphic images (as cool?) and how does this history “work”? More importantly, within this contingent history what material factors come in to play that help to structure these questions? To ground this question I propose a brief thought experiment. Suppose I build a time machine and , armed with a copy of Hostel travel back to the 1960’s and show it to an unsuspecting audience replacing it at a screening of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. How would such an audience react? More importantly what knowledge would they employ to deal with something so potentially confronting to them? If
"From the very first screenings, audience reaction, in the form of gasps, screams, yells, even running up and down the aisles, was unprecedented[1]
in 1960 what effect would Hostel have on them on this imaginary screening? This though experiment begs all the questions my research proposes. What has changed from 1960 to the present make images like on the overhead less remarkable? Can we propose a material explanation for these changes? Ultimately my wager is there is a material explanation. The screen itself, the form delivering the image establishes its own “self determining status”. This determination is embedded within an ideological narrative which says in translation that being on the screen is evidence enough of cultural legitimacy. Therefore in specific sociocultural regions at specific times the screen has something “more in it than itself”, a thought I shall pursue presently.
For some adolescents, the cultural productive process led by the screen’s ubiquitous instruction presents as a master signifier of “knowledge”. The productive process, channels particular subjects into very specify and homogenous intellectual narrative paradigms (The screen reflects an objective world, it reflects a non ideological presentation of consumer desired content, it only reflects what the society wants etc). If the adolescent is deprived of the critical scrutiny to apply any radical thought to the screen the signification that these narratives are all there is to know becomes seductive.
This paper wants to ruminate on the shifting epistemological horizons this type of thinking opens within the context of adolescent critical subjectivity. What I want to explore is not talking about a loss of moral standards or the precious tentacles of cinematic capitalism promoting splatter to sell tickets. This does not explain from any deeper point of view why this alteration to the cinematic landscape of images has been established. If I was to bemoan anything it is the subjects diminishment of critical self and the hands of the screen whose edict led by the valorization of the image which often reads preference the visual or more dangerously “enjoy only the visual”.
I want to assert a strategic shift in the sociocultural horizon that since the middle sixties has been underpinned by the emergent gravitas of the screen, or more correctly the plethora of screens I in the television, computer and mobile phones) which has helped reconfigure the critical faculties of the adolescent to, in Neil postman words to being less able to “wrench moments out of their contexts”.[2] The inability to wrench a moment out of its context leads to a bland template of homogenized subjectivity convinced the truth lies in the screen rather than accepting the challenge the screen is to be constantly questioned.
This results, for adolescents, in many cases an emergent Plague of Fantasies. Following Slovenian theorist Slavoj Žižek, this plague is the deleterious effect that is facilitated by the domination of the visual image to the point where it infiltrates the capacity for the subject to effectively resist territorializing of the visual. In the case of Hostel, the visual is the film, the horror lies on the surface provoking little possible analysis. This deceit of aesthetics consumes the space open for discussion about the form especially within this particular genre.
For many adolescents critical subjectivity is impeded by this visual colonizing traditional complexity, nuance and qualification of a more traditional episteme.[3] This is, in effect a picture replacing the thousand words with no real equivalence value. To support this assertion I evoke French cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard who suggests this confrontation between images such as I am juxtaposing results in the territorializing of one form over the other which he would denote as a key feature of hyperreality.
Violent death now becomes the centre of the diegetic space in this instance rather than its lack. In Psycho the contrary is true, where death is achieved in shadow, jump cut and intrusive music. In Hostel the death is a raw sustained explosion of gore achieved through technical expertise and as mentioned an immobilized camera. Hitchcock’s challenge is to the fertile imagination of his viewer. As he had no access to computer effects or latex prosthetics, or highly articulate cameras he relied on an explicit symbiotic relationship between viewer and screen. In Hostel little relationship exists here beyond the concrete. The graphic death is without traditional referent, it might be “ecstatic” cinema to evoke Baudrillard which is stylized image which overshadows plot, or theme, or logic or meaning, a kind of MTV clip without the band. The genealogy of horror on the screen as opposed to in the mind reveals the vertiginous descent into graphic as “good”.[4]
What I propose happens is the viewer, in this case the adolescent is fed a diet of constantly intensifying scenes dependent on the whims of censorship and the bravado of the film production system. For some this has an ideological effect of creating the expectation of gore for entertainment. Now for a select few this effaces their capacity to “read” other less confronting forms of the genre which often implies the loss of the capacity to see this genealogy of the genre. This subject will see Psycho as little more than primitive cinema devoid of (to them) the requisite blood and dismembering.
When this adolescent is watching Hostel, the commonsense reading would be to suggest they are deriving some perverse’ pleasure in the gratuitous violence, a transgression off acceptable viewing. The subject views the Hostel images as “legitimate” or “acceptable” or “entertaining” yet underlying all these signifiers lies in enjoyment itself. This subject takes pleasure in the act of, not the nature of the transgression. Here I return to the material presence of the screen. These signifiers are applied retrospectively. The subject is seduced into seeing the acceptability of the image legitimized through it being on the screen itself rather than through any other interpellative process. Hence the subject never questions the authority of the screen because controversial images are condoned by the screen “that is supposed to know”. These are simply images of the good because they are on the screen, not put on the screen because they are acceptable. This inversion of logic leads us to Žižek.
Therefore I would, following Zizek suggest a more complex libidinal operation is in play. The ‘pleasure’ derived in watching Hostel is not through a transgression of acceptable social standards or moral codes (that is its enjoyable because others thinks it is offensive) but the pleasure in such an experience is chosen to reinforce the private acceptability of such a viewing.[5]The object of “viewing desire” here is the result of a complex process of specific interpellation for a growing number of adolescent subjects. The horrific images occur on the screen arise as a result of two distinct features.
Firstly, as mentioned the technical and historical acumen of the filmmakers allows bodily torture to by cinematically realized. The rapid imposition of computer generated effects, the development of prosthetics etc has allowed the staging of mutilations to be filmed. Secondly and more importantly the commercial pressure of filmmakers to deliberately “push the boundaries” as a demarcation device pushes images out of the viewing imagination and into the filmic space in a vertiginous and ecstatic form of one-upmanship. Hence a sadistic torture scene is no longer played out in our imaginations using sound (as in De Palma’s Scarface,) reverse point of view (as in Tarantino’s Reservoir dogs) or observer testimony (as in Kitashi’s Hana Bai) The result is the horrific images become expected rather than surprise and the lack of image, what would historically structure the underlying libidinal trauma of viewing within the genre is replaced by the concrete presentation of it. At certain times this becomes dysfunctional because this afflicted adolescent preferences the visual actuality over the imaginative fantasy. The horror then is a material confrontation with gore rather than a mythical confrontation with what Žižek following Lacan would call the “horror of the Real”, the powerful psychic destabilization which we can only know through a phantasmic construction of a subjective reality. In contemporary filmic terms for some subjects the monster cannot frighten unless it dismembers within the diegetic space. This is why so many adolescents are untouched by Psycho and laugh uncontrollably at William Freidkin’s The Exorcist. (Perhaps this also why so many “traditionalists” are repulsed rather than entertained by Hostel or the Saw trilogy)
In Jean Baudrillard’s world this ecstatic vortex of graphic images wrenches itself free of a more meaningful signification. The individual subject in the 1960’s, for Baudrillard was ensconced in what he terms a world of “golden illusion”. For Baudrillard illusion is a more powerful reality than what becomes for him post-illusion, a world of floating signs or hyperreality. This hyperreality is a “double of the world” that moves away from the original until any notion of an original is lost. In cinematic terms it is“pure” image in the sense that the connection between the representation on the screen and what it is intending to discuss can only be talked of in terms of other images (signs). This is in contrast to a cinematic representation that is intended as metaphor, that is calculated to intellectualize an exchange of ideas rather than an exchange of pure signs.
This is in many ways observable when Hostel is juxtaposed against Psycho. Hostel has, because of its strong unambiguous and emotionally dominant images left most notions of modernist classic cinema behind. It has become “brand”, trademarked for its accentuation on gore and preposterous plot.[6] Of course Hostel could be defended as a genre specific film, a niche for a specific audience. The third order of simulation, where the copy, in this case Hostel should have some historical connection to an original such as Psycho. But in the case of this copy of the copy it bears no witness to any original because it has no deep or explicable symbolic referents. Hostel bears no metaphorical invitation, and can only be discussed against other visual depictions of splatter.
For Baudrillard hyperreality has a very specific context for theoretical application. Baudrillard sees it lamentably as the psychic loss of a stabilizing traditional referential system replaced by a dizzy vortex of images. To achieve hyperrreal status the object works to efface and in some cases obliterate the original symbolic meaning of the referent. In Hostel we see this in full operative mode. In Hostel the violence establishes its own “code of production” becoming more “violent than violence”, a voyeuristic cine-terrorism with its own internal logic of deliberate territorialized effrontery of the senses. We could ascribe some original status to a film like Psycho, but Hostel effaces these symbolic referents of Psycho by following this territorializing process. Against Psycho, Hostel as a similar genre as Horror/Suspense that has proved so popular since the 1920’s. However Hostel as a commercial product advanced as art claims by territorialization the space Psycho holds by insinuating Hostel is, because of its grizzly special effects an enhanced horror film rather than a derivative computer effects dependent one. Psycho from within this context presented to an uncritical audience is lacking what Hostel contains. It is a film of excess that has effaced Psycho lack. However it is this lack which gives Psycho its specific symbolic gravity, where we can go in discussion. This is what Žižek would say gives it its artistic success. This very lack, a positive constituent of the aesthetic impact.[7] It is indeed this lack which makes the audience work to read the film beyond the surface. Hostel duplicitously attempts to fill in this lack selling tickets, which are in Baudrillardian terms a “neutralization and destabilization”[8] of cinematic form for commercial purposes. This is horror/splatter as “brand” rather than art.
Because the images are placed there as a commercial necessity, and are constantly intensified by the rise of techno-wizardry the screen constantly raises the bar on grizzly images. This now works on a number of levels. Firstly the image itself intensifies. The track from Hitchcock’s shower scene to the grizzly torture scenes in Hostel traces this movement from imagination to screen reality. More importantly the “work” the viewer has to do is done for them by the screen. The reliance on the purely visual, where the visual image becomes the dominant signification of the pleasure has a profound effect on the nexus of art and commerce. Now in many subjects symbolic universe the pleasure becomes dominated by the visual as the most powerful criteria for aesthetic judgment. The ideological benefit of this operation is double.[9] It suggest to the less critical audience this type of presentation is the horror genre par excellence , the film deters the audience from examining their own predicament.[10] This is in every sense a political movement of interpellation on behalf of the productive process of the film industry for the subject whom while expressing a supposed “free choice” to view these films does not have the critical awareness to see how they fit into the productive process of much mainstream cinema. In short the choice to watch these films is often a forced choice because of a deficit of knowledge about film potentiality.
It also allows the film industry a powerful and totalizing productive force to imagine they are providing what the public demands rather than the other wary around. This “spell” caste by the producer is based on the premise the arrangement between producer and viewer is reciprocal and democratic, but the arrangement is reducibly so because of the epistemological status of the screen. Its growing colonization of information delivered primarily as visual medium infuses it with an enhanced eminence. So many uncritical viewers keep having their knowledge delivered as image that it slowly becomes a more dominant signification substituting for a more broad conception of knowledge.
Baudrillard, J. (2002). The Perfect Crime. London, Verso Books.
Postman, N. (1986). Amusing Ourselves to Death. London, Heinemann.
Zizek, S. (1997). The Plague of Fantasies. London, Verso Books.
[1] http://www.film.queensu.ca/Critical/Sage.html(acessed 26/10/06)
[2] Postman, N. (1986). Amusing Ourselves to Death. London, Heinemann.
Pg 73
[3] Ibid.
Pg 105
[4] If we start with Sam Peckinaph’s The Wild Bunch we see a gradual shift into graphic violence as the norm
[5] Zizek, S. (1997). The Plague of Fantasies. London, Verso Books.
Pg 15
[6] For example, the escaping couple, immediately after having fingers severed with a chainsaw and an eye gouged with a blowtorch respectively, calmly drive through the town as if looking for McDonalds
[7] Zizek, S. (1997). The Plague of Fantasies. London, Verso Books.
Pg 1
[8] Baudrillard, J. (2002). The Perfect Crime. London, Verso Books.
Pg 72
[9] Zizek, S. (1997). The Plague of Fantasies. London, Verso Books.
Pg 18
[10] Ibid.
Monday, July 7, 2008
Hyperreality and kevin Rudd
Jean Baudrillard courted controversy when he (in)famously claimed that the Gulf war did not take place. Aside from translation problems, he was alluding to the destruction of reality by technology which creates the illusion that the war itself was in a sense virtual, taking place only on our television screens as if it was an elaborate Hollywood fictionalization. This allowed us to be de-sensitized to the real prosecution of horror and carnage that accompanies all war. For Baudrillard hyperreality is the capacity of the system to be more real than real, to colonize the social real with a copy that has no original.
Doesn’t this theoretical position offer us some purchase into understanding today’s political landscape where the leader is in fact virtualized, where he or she becomes more politician than politician, a hyperreal version of the political figure, completely controlled by media spin and carefully constructed and controlled media images.
In these terms Kevin Rudd does not exist. His reactions to current political events in Australia suggest that all his press releases and media door stops are, in fact virtual constructions intended to maximize voter potential rather than add to the traditional dialectical debate that accompanied political agendas. Kevin Rudd therefore does not exist. He is an illusion that appears on my television screen to tell me about the virtual reality that is the world. He tells me that Bill Henson is revolting and that climate change politics will be painful. But he really tells me nothing, because like a good drifter, he is a virtual ship in the night. Something to be played with rather than taken as the ultimate real. Let’s thank Baudrillard (and Guy Debord) for this.
Doesn’t this theoretical position offer us some purchase into understanding today’s political landscape where the leader is in fact virtualized, where he or she becomes more politician than politician, a hyperreal version of the political figure, completely controlled by media spin and carefully constructed and controlled media images.
In these terms Kevin Rudd does not exist. His reactions to current political events in Australia suggest that all his press releases and media door stops are, in fact virtual constructions intended to maximize voter potential rather than add to the traditional dialectical debate that accompanied political agendas. Kevin Rudd therefore does not exist. He is an illusion that appears on my television screen to tell me about the virtual reality that is the world. He tells me that Bill Henson is revolting and that climate change politics will be painful. But he really tells me nothing, because like a good drifter, he is a virtual ship in the night. Something to be played with rather than taken as the ultimate real. Let’s thank Baudrillard (and Guy Debord) for this.
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