Imagined last lines to The Communisation Manifesto:
Workers of the world, self-abolish!
(Or, for the Gordian knot of now: workers of the world, untie! The rope doesn't wait for the King's sword, instead unravels its own solution...)
The twine unwinds (150 years on, perhaps)
Imagined last lines to The Communisation Manifesto:
Workers of the world, self-abolish!
(Or, for the Gordian knot of now: workers of the world, untie! The rope doesn't wait for the King's sword, instead unravels its own solution...)
Painting the glass house black (Part Two)
[This is a placeholder for an extended set of reflections on the "occupation movement" here in California. It is the second part of an longer piece, the first part of which will be appearing on Mute. Check back here in the near future for the Mute link and the promised ramblings.]
Salvagepunk, running hard, thumping ahead...
Hahahahaha. Salvagepunk spreads its creaky wings and starts to make a mess in the house of pop criticism: Roger Ebert latches onto our bastard progeny, apparently.
(thanks very much to the handiwork of my favorite cultural terrorist for putting the hint in the gears)
If you don't know, now you know
The future of music videos: time-lapse putrefaction. Total Request Live becomes other demands - show us the one with the dead reindeer atop the tundra permafrost!
Surplus-aggression
Three moments.
One. The object-world, invested with the rabbit's sadism, joyous and spiteful for getting to be instrumental, becomes self-illuminated. The swallowed light-bulb flashes the beat of the phantom clock. It marks time until the hunting morning, shoves light out from the dog's body, the windows of the eyes.
Two. The dog, having accepted the transference of instinct from kill the rabbit to kill what is obstinate, chokes a telephone to death. Its pink tongue hangs.
Three. A final stick of dynamite, the unnecessary blow, is a goodnight kiss to the unfuckable pursuer who's dead-tired in your bed. Surplus-aggression, repeated without emotion. A unit in a series, it makes all that had to be done before recognizable for what it had to be: cruelty beyond utility, the meanest pleasure of survival. Lights out, baby.
An open invitation to dynamiters
We have no predilection for the charms of ruins. But the civilian barracks that we build in their place are so gratuitously ugly as to be an open invitation to dynamiters.
- Potlatch #7 3 August 1954
Ruins as the precondition - and nostalgic after-home yearned for - of built mediocrity.
Who said anything about winter coming?
Object lessons from "Matryona's Home": from that which can't be talked about
to shoving through without tickets.
"... and all the carriages were empty, they were all empty"
Here one sees the rot...
Father Gabriele Amorth, the vatican's chief exorcist and author of the internationally acclaimed Memoirs of an Exorcist, drops some demonology science: "When one speaks of 'the smoke of Satan' [a phrase coined by Pope Paul VI in 1972] in the holy rooms, it is all true – including these latest stories of violence and paedophilia."
The Devil is alive and well, stalking the Vatican. Sex scandals the phenomenal trace of smoke. (And yes, there is an official Association of Exorcists.) More importantly:
Father Amorth told La Repubblica that the devil was "pure spirit, invisible. But he manifests himself with blasphemies and afflictions in the person he possesses. He can remain hidden, or speak in different languages, transform himself or appear to be agreeable. At times he makes fun of me."
He said it sometimes took six or seven of his assistants to to hold down a possessed person. Those possessed often yelled and screamed and spat out nails or pieces of glass, which he kept in a bag. "Anything can come out of their mouths – finger-length pieces of iron, but also rose petals."
Possession as generative principle: therein the underbelly wish of the the present. No workers, no wages, no exchange, just the body held in thrall. Foaming productivity, and from the mouth, iron, roses, electric cars, oranges, comedy, nails.
The frozen sea, the city
“One day you will live in cities that resemble petrified oceans!”
The gap between this dream of frozen form and the accompanying future of unfrozen, non-gridded movement and passages. To what degree does the thought of moving fluidly through the city require that the city look like the ocean? But the petrification of the ocean means that any movement is just surface skating: fish out, and on top, of halted water, and beneath them, the dense, still, immense weight of a dead sea.
Du soleil ont éteint la gloire.
Sinister black butterflies
Have blacked out the radiant sun,
And the horizon seems a grimoire
Scrawled in ink when day is done.
From occult censers drift
Memory-troubling perfumes:
Sinister black butterflies
Have blacked out the radiant sun,
Monsters with viscous suckers
Searching for blood to drink,
And from the skies, a powder black,
Descends upon our despairs.
Sinister black butterflies.
Albert Giraud (Émile Albert Kayenberg),
Virtuosic Apocalypticism and Other Clever Things
Go toward Ptak Science Books, which is rapidly becoming an invaluable store of esoteric images and scientific false starts, particularly of the martial kind. Learned outcomes with deadly processes, mobile Maginots, and nuclear drift.
(thanks Giovanni for the reference)
The 3rd Key
San Francisco Argento Three Mothers-themed metal. Yup. Thanks, Aesop, for making my, and brightening this, grayer day.
An internally agitated life of the dead
"needs and labor ... [create] a monstrous system of mutual dependency, an internally agitated life of the dead, which, in its motion, moves about blindly and elementarily, and like a wild animal, needs a steady and harsh taming and control."
Hegel - System of Speculative Philosophy (1803-4)
(thanks, A, for this)
The sound of futures past
Many, many thanks to those who put the work in to getting this up: audio recordings from our last HM conference in NYC. (Including me saying giving a motor-mouth delivery of scattered thoughts on feudal village defense committees and how communism must start with destroying what we have in common.) A lot of seriously captivating thoughts - and a document that catches a bit of what happens when Trots and ultra-lefties get together in the same room (and bar) - on audio record thanks to our NYC comrades.
A post-apocalyptic cinema is not a kind of film
My article for Mute on "catastrophe cinema in the age of crisis" is up online here. As they put it:
"Dusting off the tedium and ash deposited by Hollywood's recent spate of catastrophe movies, Evan Calder Williams takes aim at their world-affirming pessimism and calls for some real apocalypse..."
Indeed...
Twilight of the idle (On the acts of waiting and of striking)
On Sorokin's The Queue and what's to be gleaned, for resistance and refusal now, from an experimental novel about being stuck in line, interminably, waiting for an unsure object - is it American? is it shoes? - and all that happens while waiting for that unsure thing to come:
The novel is caught somewhere between 1) a husky, black-bile laugh at the bureaucratic nightmares of USSR's final years, and 2) in Sorokin's afterword, a nostalgia for the thought of rational organization that still persisted, in whatever perverse, flickering, shadowy forms. As such, it appears initially stuck between the thought of two failures: the failure that was the organization of daily life (the queues, the shortages, the inability to correlate "need" and "desire"), and the failure of the Communist project to stick to its guns. (The failure of Communism to be Communist.) The nostalgia isn't just retrospective, not from the hindsight of Putin years. Rather, it's there, in the queue itself, in the still-active years of the Soviet Century: the absent homeland on which you still live and never really left, even as it left behind what would have been, the absent distance that would let you declare fully, this isn't how it was supposed to be...
But to say that the novel is pulled in these two directions doesn't indicate either the affects it describes or the affects produced by reading it. More simply, it may exist between these two failures, but what exist is something quite different. Against these double-bleed outs of emiserated, stuck present and entropic, lost present that should have been, the novel is ruddy, full-blooded, goofy, vertiginous. There's a lot of fucking, swearing, joking, drinking, and fighting with sausages, even if the latter is relayed from the experience of another queue. There are pages (see image above) primarily filled with, Aaaaah... Haaaahh..., a guttural see-saw sex scene. If the queue is a site of deferred satisfaction, the object that will never come, plenty of satisfaction comes during the act of waiting. And given that the book ends with the sated couple in bed, having learned that the fools are temporarily "queueing for nothing," the point of the queue simply becomes the queue itself. The absent object is the occasion for what would not happen unless we thought we'd get something out of all this.
Furthermore, as a book basically about how we bide our time when the rationalization of time spent breaks down, it creates a further gap, perhaps beyond "success" or "failure," between what this time is supposed to be like and how it is experienced. M. made the necessary point that while it is "about" unending waiting and slowness, it reads very quickly: there's a total breakdown of the prospect of mimetic sympathy here. She's spot on, for we may get bored with the book, but it's a different boredom than that of the queue itself: it's the flitting boredom of the distracted reader, who sees pages and pages of what looks to lack difference, and idly skips ahead. (Pages and pages of roll-call Russian names being called out, followed by the affirmative "Yes!", or this slightly more dizzying array of potential objects, but which we nevertheless see as litany.) Our boredom is not durational, for we can fast-forward, slip ahead. Nowhere more so than the blank pages inserted to cover the time of the night, when speech doesn't happen. How are we to read them? There may exist readers fastidious enough to let their eyes rest on them for an appropriate amount of time (like those museum goers who stare into a Robert Ryman white canvas for what they imagine to be enough time to "get it," or at least to fake it for others in the gallery). But I'm not among them.
We might ask more broadly about the difficulty of writing in reproducing boredom or the feeling of the interminable mimetically. Obviously, the vast majority of writing bores us. But thinking here of writers such as William Gaddis, who's closest to Sorokin in terms of the "unattributed speech" style, it's hard to fathom how to make us read slowly, to replicate the particular boredom of a situation without providing a form that allows us to short-circuit the whole thing, to skip ahead, to jump the line.
Maybe that's the point, this coming undone. Genuinely absent from The Queue is the rationalization of time. If one of the promises of state socialism was an organization of time beyond the systemic irrationality of the market, of exertion that only happens for a discernible, logical purpose (i.e. necessary goods, food, culture, etc), in the novel's waiting, we see time divorced from instrumentality in the service of unburdened - and unachievable - consumption. Even if the queue doesn't ultimately get what it came there to get, it never knew what it came there to get, and it doesn't have to labor to get it. Or so it seems, for what is the time invested in the queue if not the labor of shopping, of consumption itself becoming the structural principle of time spent. The nightmare of the Soviet - the breakdown of supply and demand, and with it, the breakdown of the collectivity over individual desires - is here the dream of contemporary first-world capitalism: labor is being done somewhere else, by someone else, and the sheer fact of our consumption time (and consumption of time, just continuing to bide our time) is enough to jolt ahead the circulation and auto-generation of capital.
Of course, in fiction as in economics, this doesn't work out so well. And what remains from this is this coming-unstuck from time as value. Our waiting is genuinely valueless: we have time to kill. And kill it we must, because hovering behind the chaotic carnival of the queue is the lingering connection between boredom and horror. Of facing non-productive consumption, unconsummated, formless, unable to give shape or order. How can one not yearn to skip the line?
Next week, in these days of strikes across universities and across the nation, there will be endless queues: there will be lines of people, some more orderly than others. Waiting. Perhaps generally with the expectation that the time put into the act of waiting - that is to say, of not working - and crowding the roads will result in the missing object to come. What is the imagined, missing object for which we invest our time, for which we declare an exception to the normal phases of work and rest? It's too easy to say that "it's different for everyone," that a politics of "coalition" or the like would imply: same means, different envisioned ends. More generally, we seem to wait for something that won't just signal an end to this particular time of waiting but that would seemingly reinforce both its necessity and negate the need for it to continue: a governmental promise, a monetary commitment, a phase shift that indicates a different direction in public education and a fairer treatment of workers.
But we know that such an object will not come, insofar as our waiting remains a waiting for. The queue won't end if we get that absent object. This is not to dismiss the genuine concerns that lie behind the strike: the continued harassment, humiliation, and degradation of low-paid workers, the structurally determined privatization of public education, the simultaneous shrinking access to and quality of that education. Rather, it's because those concerns do matter - because they are lived, and they are things that need to be remedied, particularly when the desperate concerns of those treated worst and with the least possibility of striking back individually against such treatment - that we should insist that nothing can be given that will remedy them. However, neither is this to claim that the solution is a false immediatism, or a simpler fantasy that anything we could take would suddenly fill that gap.
Against this waiting for, a thought from The Queue. At one point in the novel, the entire line shifts its location to be able to get a drink. And in this, we see what we feel elsewhere, that the queue itself constructs another possibility held out and deferred: of fully grasping a passage from the accidental collective which happens to come together because of waiting for something to happen
to the the fact that such a waiting together is the very thing that is supposed to happen.
That there is no thing to be given or received in reward for such waiting. That the real move forward - not skipping ahead in the line, but the line as a whole skipping ahead - is in the queue turning back upon itself, looking at what has emerged in the contingency of all asking for the same thing and being told not yet, not yet... And like the line moving as a whole to get what it wants, it isn't far to start imagining the mobile, roaming queue, that waits for nothing, that isn't a fixed structure, that isn't exceptional or temporary. The strike not for the necessary and impossible object, but for the grounded collective that emerges only in such an occasion as its long overdue eclipse.
Wookie cage fighting! (And other things more boring than they have any right to be)
[meant to post this a while back, when I was fresh from the theater last week, but now, having just rewatched Dog Soldiers, can't help but be reminded, by contrast, of what left me cold, high, and dry with Wolfman...]
The new Benicio Del Toro The Wolfman reload: Burton's Sleepy Hollow plus William Morris wallpaper plus working through your Daddy issues via furry, cuddly, bloody wolf-on-wolf action.
It's a resolutely awful film, which isn't to say that it has nothing to enjoy looking at. (See here: said wallpaper, a very pretty decaying mansion, Hugo Weaving's facial expressions, decently unsexy lycanthropic transformations.) But above all, it just isn't much fun at all. It feels dry and joyless, both hurried and bored, always in a rush to get to the next thing, even if that next thing is more of the rushed same. And nowhere more so than the moments of intended fever pitch: when it's busy depicting what should be the bloodbath's ecstasy, it's a yawn of the utterly perfunctory.
Even the throwback movie monster howl at the moon - an act the film uses to keep signaling its Old School cred, even as it can't commit - becomes the occasion for eye-rolling. As it should be, but this is wrong kind of roll, not the kind accompanied by the creeping smile of collective movie-going involvement which always exceeds the disavowal of cheesiness. That's to say, we shouldn't assume that the sense of earlier monster films as laughable is just a product of our being hardened, post-Hostel blood-waders: it's there from the start. And with it, that double mechanism, where your eyes don't just roll away from the screen (oh, give me a break) toward cellphone or watch but toward your fellow watcher, the opportunity to share in the act (oh, give me a break, and don't we love it anyway?).
As always, the mediocrity of one film or another isn't particularly compelling. To be sure, there are concrete reasons why it doesn't entertain, the usual suspects of what we often can't put our finger on, but which dictate the real phenomenal experience of watching: the sequencing, editing, making-rhythmic of it just doesn't work. (Among many things Eisenstein was right about, perhaps none more than this: if it doesn't click and clatter right, we never get into it. And if it doesn't halt and jerk forward wrongly enough, we also don't feel it, caught in a dead zone of uninvolved but unreflective.) And moreover, there's a number of things The Wolfman does that feel repetitive, which makes a relatively short film (102 min.) feel much longer, not just internally repetitive - watch him bone-stretch heel-jut transform again! watch Emily Blunt act fragile again! watch foreshadowing of his father's possible lycanthropic involvement be made very obvious again! - but of other films, primarily other "reloads" of older horror traditions (i.e. Sleepy Hollow, Van Helsing).
But beyond the potential and probable ineptitude, three thoughts as to what produces the staleness of this "fresh new take."
1. Gothic clutter
My friend Katie was on this as soon as we left the theater: "It's basically a Gothic novel proper." I think she's entirely right about this, as The Wolfman captures two tendencies of the Gothic, back when it had little to do with Bauhaus and everything to do with very drawn out landscape descriptions. First, attention not just to setting but to non-action itself, to those descriptions which don't just call attention to "atmosphere" and "mood," but to the sheer duration of reading through them, which itself produces a world of non-intervention and witnessing. The act of sitting through one more (castle, shadow that may indicate sinister goings-on, dirty family history, painting in which something is very wrong indeed, unswept floor, smell of crypt in the air) isn't a failure of the genre - it is the genre.
Second, a flurry of potential explanations or framing devices, none of which ever quite stick or are properly discounted, even as they are all mutually exclusive. (For example: in the Gothic, it isn't necessarily a trick of the eye or a real ghost: what should be either/or breaks down, and we're left with something closer to the and/or with which I'm obviously fascinated.) If the honed edge of the murder mystery/detective novel is the fact of its narrowing, as red herrings are tossed out when discovered, in the Gothic, they remain part of the decoration of that world, its cluttered pleasure or claustrophobia. A longer question, to be raised unanswered here, is why this doesn't click right in The Wolfman: has something of the historical grounding for the Gothic - not as content but as these organizations of too much and the co-existence of what should be mutually exclusive - been lost, or rather, become unsettling?
2. The time-lapse hustle
The Wolfman opens in a hurry: with the breathless toddler pacing of a "MTV editing" parody, it whips through, in about two minutes, a gravestone inscribed with the infamous "even those pure of heart" werewolf poem, establishment of locale, the gory death of Larry's brother, the grieving widow, the return of Larry, and the general sense that ill-deeds are at hand. This doesn't let up, and the insistent use of sped-up/time-lapse effects only heighten this impatience. We're both asked to get into the vibe of misty forest, ground-into-centuries custom, ancient evil and the slow death of the aristocracy, and demanded that we get that by watching the time-advanced arc of a full-moon across the sky while clouds whip across the screen. It's assumed that we're so used to the "point" of creepy dark woods that it takes three shots in four seconds total to put us there.
This isn't to lament an absent cinema of slowness, not to ask that all decapitation have the pacing of Ozu or Tarr. One of the genuine pleasures of horror happens when it lets itself be what it wants to be all along, a stripped-down machine for the delivery of effects and affects. Because when it does that, it almost always "fails" in more compelling ways: by putting a premium on occasions and passages, when it urges toward an economy of getting us what we want, it does one of two things: 1) like the "original" Universal monster movies, it knows that the production of that stripped-down pleasure requires a great deal that isn't stripped down, it requires the full drawn out minutes of wandering the forest, the full brunt of not-so-witty dialogue, all the taking your time that makes the sudden delivery of the promised laughter and jolt possible , and 2) like the odder instances of giallo, Spanish horror, grindhouse, etc, the very attempt to be "minimal" and efficient produces an overburdened tension that relocates the emphasis on all that isn't necessary, not on the kill sequences, but on the deep weirdness of what is supposed to be perfunctory and not-worth-noticing. The Wolfman doesn't nail either tendency, nor does it move past them toward another kind of enjoyment: it can neither acknowledge itself as a scare-machine nor allow us the slow build-up, through supposed denial or through an understanding of its instrumental purpose, of all the background material that is what we really come to see.
3. Making campy what is already camp
Barring the petty Freudianism of "Fear What is Within," the taglines for the film beat us over the head with the coding of the film as about a legend:
"The Legend is Alive"
"When the moon is full, the legend comes to life"
"Ce n'était pas qu'une legende" ("It wasn't only a legend")
From the advertising start, then, the film stands on weird terrain: it's unable to either access this legend (there's a bit of "doth protest too much" in its insistence that the legend is indeed alive and well) or phenomenally outstrip it (through the boredom of the watching experience) and thereby pump some blood into the vacant heart.
The problem with all this is that it very much wants to be - or to play at being - an "old-fashioned" film, while it insists that we can't have those kind of films anymore. It wants to situate itself within the shared cultural legacy of another moment, another kind of watching, another mode of narrative that both hails to the category of legend and accesses it only as imitation. It's that same turn in Van Helsing and Sleepy Hollow: in declaring itself to be of "another time" (through its explicit selection of legendary/early cinema/folk content, and the attempted tone of "not being so serious"), it insists on the inaccessibility of the moves of that other time. But it doesn't give up on being "about" those kind of moves and movies. Even though sandwiched between Matrix style wolf cage fights and time-lapse hallucination montage, we still get the iconic howl. In short, it does the work of declaring as "campy" things we already can only see as such.
Camp may always be in the "wrong" places, and following Sontag, perhaps you indeed "can't do camp on purpose," but the The Wolfman didn't get the message. My question isn't whether or not you can "do it on purpose," or whether or not it's wrong to try and do so. Rather, it's to ask where the pleasure has gone, why the resurrection of the past becomes a yawn in the present, why we need to further distance ourselves - as if past a break that can't be mended - by enacting a willful return to what never went away, how the fur can fly and still leave us so unscathed.
The new Benicio Del Toro The Wolfman reload: Burton's Sleepy Hollow plus William Morris wallpaper plus working through your Daddy issues via furry, cuddly, bloody wolf-on-wolf action.
It's a resolutely awful film, which isn't to say that it has nothing to enjoy looking at. (See here: said wallpaper, a very pretty decaying mansion, Hugo Weaving's facial expressions, decently unsexy lycanthropic transformations.) But above all, it just isn't much fun at all. It feels dry and joyless, both hurried and bored, always in a rush to get to the next thing, even if that next thing is more of the rushed same. And nowhere more so than the moments of intended fever pitch: when it's busy depicting what should be the bloodbath's ecstasy, it's a yawn of the utterly perfunctory.
Even the throwback movie monster howl at the moon - an act the film uses to keep signaling its Old School cred, even as it can't commit - becomes the occasion for eye-rolling. As it should be, but this is wrong kind of roll, not the kind accompanied by the creeping smile of collective movie-going involvement which always exceeds the disavowal of cheesiness. That's to say, we shouldn't assume that the sense of earlier monster films as laughable is just a product of our being hardened, post-Hostel blood-waders: it's there from the start. And with it, that double mechanism, where your eyes don't just roll away from the screen (oh, give me a break) toward cellphone or watch but toward your fellow watcher, the opportunity to share in the act (oh, give me a break, and don't we love it anyway?).
As always, the mediocrity of one film or another isn't particularly compelling. To be sure, there are concrete reasons why it doesn't entertain, the usual suspects of what we often can't put our finger on, but which dictate the real phenomenal experience of watching: the sequencing, editing, making-rhythmic of it just doesn't work. (Among many things Eisenstein was right about, perhaps none more than this: if it doesn't click and clatter right, we never get into it. And if it doesn't halt and jerk forward wrongly enough, we also don't feel it, caught in a dead zone of uninvolved but unreflective.) And moreover, there's a number of things The Wolfman does that feel repetitive, which makes a relatively short film (102 min.) feel much longer, not just internally repetitive - watch him bone-stretch heel-jut transform again! watch Emily Blunt act fragile again! watch foreshadowing of his father's possible lycanthropic involvement be made very obvious again! - but of other films, primarily other "reloads" of older horror traditions (i.e. Sleepy Hollow, Van Helsing).
But beyond the potential and probable ineptitude, three thoughts as to what produces the staleness of this "fresh new take."
1. Gothic clutter
My friend Katie was on this as soon as we left the theater: "It's basically a Gothic novel proper." I think she's entirely right about this, as The Wolfman captures two tendencies of the Gothic, back when it had little to do with Bauhaus and everything to do with very drawn out landscape descriptions. First, attention not just to setting but to non-action itself, to those descriptions which don't just call attention to "atmosphere" and "mood," but to the sheer duration of reading through them, which itself produces a world of non-intervention and witnessing. The act of sitting through one more (castle, shadow that may indicate sinister goings-on, dirty family history, painting in which something is very wrong indeed, unswept floor, smell of crypt in the air) isn't a failure of the genre - it is the genre.
Second, a flurry of potential explanations or framing devices, none of which ever quite stick or are properly discounted, even as they are all mutually exclusive. (For example: in the Gothic, it isn't necessarily a trick of the eye or a real ghost: what should be either/or breaks down, and we're left with something closer to the and/or with which I'm obviously fascinated.) If the honed edge of the murder mystery/detective novel is the fact of its narrowing, as red herrings are tossed out when discovered, in the Gothic, they remain part of the decoration of that world, its cluttered pleasure or claustrophobia. A longer question, to be raised unanswered here, is why this doesn't click right in The Wolfman: has something of the historical grounding for the Gothic - not as content but as these organizations of too much and the co-existence of what should be mutually exclusive - been lost, or rather, become unsettling?
2. The time-lapse hustle
The Wolfman opens in a hurry: with the breathless toddler pacing of a "MTV editing" parody, it whips through, in about two minutes, a gravestone inscribed with the infamous "even those pure of heart" werewolf poem, establishment of locale, the gory death of Larry's brother, the grieving widow, the return of Larry, and the general sense that ill-deeds are at hand. This doesn't let up, and the insistent use of sped-up/time-lapse effects only heighten this impatience. We're both asked to get into the vibe of misty forest, ground-into-centuries custom, ancient evil and the slow death of the aristocracy, and demanded that we get that by watching the time-advanced arc of a full-moon across the sky while clouds whip across the screen. It's assumed that we're so used to the "point" of creepy dark woods that it takes three shots in four seconds total to put us there.
This isn't to lament an absent cinema of slowness, not to ask that all decapitation have the pacing of Ozu or Tarr. One of the genuine pleasures of horror happens when it lets itself be what it wants to be all along, a stripped-down machine for the delivery of effects and affects. Because when it does that, it almost always "fails" in more compelling ways: by putting a premium on occasions and passages, when it urges toward an economy of getting us what we want, it does one of two things: 1) like the "original" Universal monster movies, it knows that the production of that stripped-down pleasure requires a great deal that isn't stripped down, it requires the full drawn out minutes of wandering the forest, the full brunt of not-so-witty dialogue, all the taking your time that makes the sudden delivery of the promised laughter and jolt possible , and 2) like the odder instances of giallo, Spanish horror, grindhouse, etc, the very attempt to be "minimal" and efficient produces an overburdened tension that relocates the emphasis on all that isn't necessary, not on the kill sequences, but on the deep weirdness of what is supposed to be perfunctory and not-worth-noticing. The Wolfman doesn't nail either tendency, nor does it move past them toward another kind of enjoyment: it can neither acknowledge itself as a scare-machine nor allow us the slow build-up, through supposed denial or through an understanding of its instrumental purpose, of all the background material that is what we really come to see.
3. Making campy what is already camp
Barring the petty Freudianism of "Fear What is Within," the taglines for the film beat us over the head with the coding of the film as about a legend:
"The Legend is Alive"
"When the moon is full, the legend comes to life"
"Ce n'était pas qu'une legende" ("It wasn't only a legend")
From the advertising start, then, the film stands on weird terrain: it's unable to either access this legend (there's a bit of "doth protest too much" in its insistence that the legend is indeed alive and well) or phenomenally outstrip it (through the boredom of the watching experience) and thereby pump some blood into the vacant heart.
The problem with all this is that it very much wants to be - or to play at being - an "old-fashioned" film, while it insists that we can't have those kind of films anymore. It wants to situate itself within the shared cultural legacy of another moment, another kind of watching, another mode of narrative that both hails to the category of legend and accesses it only as imitation. It's that same turn in Van Helsing and Sleepy Hollow: in declaring itself to be of "another time" (through its explicit selection of legendary/early cinema/folk content, and the attempted tone of "not being so serious"), it insists on the inaccessibility of the moves of that other time. But it doesn't give up on being "about" those kind of moves and movies. Even though sandwiched between Matrix style wolf cage fights and time-lapse hallucination montage, we still get the iconic howl. In short, it does the work of declaring as "campy" things we already can only see as such.
Camp may always be in the "wrong" places, and following Sontag, perhaps you indeed "can't do camp on purpose," but the The Wolfman didn't get the message. My question isn't whether or not you can "do it on purpose," or whether or not it's wrong to try and do so. Rather, it's to ask where the pleasure has gone, why the resurrection of the past becomes a yawn in the present, why we need to further distance ourselves - as if past a break that can't be mended - by enacting a willful return to what never went away, how the fur can fly and still leave us so unscathed.
Escape to Los Angeles
Next weekend, I'll be down in LA to lock horns at a SoCal iteration of the Continental Drift seminar taking place at the Public School. Won't be able to stick around the city for too long, but if you're there, come to this... Besides, I've got a sneaking suspicion that there will be equal parts theory and carousing. Website here, info below.
Continental Drift: Control Society/ Metamorphosis
On the weekend before the March 4th state-wide UC strike, we invite you to participatein a two-day theory convergence, a “Continental Drift” seminar with the Paris-based theorist, Brian Holmes. Past Drifts has taken a variety of forms in its manifestations at 16 Beaver (2004-2006) in New York, or through the Midwest’s radical culture corridor (2008); and here in Los Angeles it will confront a California whose infrastructure is crumbling, whose government is disfunctional, and whose public education is in crisis from the space of an autonomous education alternative.
Although this Continental Drift is situated here, in a time of occupations and walkouts, it will connect the changes occurring at our universities to the emergence of a neoliberal control society over the past few decades.
The structure of the weekend will be two-days in four parts. Most parts will be structured as participatory conversations, guided by an interlocutor; togetherwe will explore these themes.
On the first day, we try to understand the massive economic and psychological shifts that have occurred since the end of the 1960’s.
And on the second day, we will locate possible territories for resistance, autonomy, or invention. Continuing in the spirit of our collective conversations so far, we are leaving the lecture-Q&A format aside for themed discussions.
Location:
The Public School
951 Chung King Rd., Chinatown,
Los Angeles, CA 90012
February 27
12:00 Disassociation (Liz Glynn and Marc Herbst)
2.00 Financialization (Aaron Benanav and Zen Dochterman)
4.00 Occupationation/Collective Speech (Cara Baldwin, Nathan Brown, Maya Gonzalez, Evan Calder Williams)
7.00 Day 1 Discussion- Brian Holmes Facilitator
February 28
12:00 Autonomous Spaces (Hector Gallegos, Robby Herbst)
2.00 Precarity (Sean Dockray and Christina Ulke)
4.00 Brian Holmes Lecture
7.00 Sharable Territories/Bifurcation (Ava Bromberg and Jason Smith)
Organized by Zen Doctherman, Cara Baldwin, Jason Smith, Sean Dockray, Liz Glynn, Solomon Bothwell, Christina Ulke, Marc Herbst, Robby Herbst
The Continental Drift is a nomadic seminar organized collaboratively between Brian Holmes and DIY spaces. The first Drift occured at 16 Beaver in NY (2005) and has been held there and elsewhere since. The Drift is a conversation around particular elements of neoliberalism.
The Public School Los Angeles is a school with no curriculum. It is not accredited, it does not give out degrees, and it has no affiliation with the public school system. It is a framework that supports autodidactic activities, operating under the assumption that everything is in everything.
Add "Corrosive Negativity" To Your Shopping Cart?
Ben's book is up on Amazon, yes, yes. I got the chance to read an earlier version of this, and it's a hell of a tome. Pressure your library to get, or knock off your local Negri-loving accelerationist cognitariat-dreaming supermarket and put the cash to good use...
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