Johnny Stein's Blog

The Truman Show is a unique film that mirrors (in extreme fashion) elements of contemporary, American society. Everywhere, we see powerful shapers of media such as entertainment companies, news organizations, corporations and political groups, all offering us a benevolent face, with promises of enjoyment and ease. Behind the mask, however, is surveillance, manipulation and social control.
The surveillance/tv show is a direct exercise of power by the show’s execs/producers over Truman (the only inmate). It is also serves as an indirect exercise of power in the sense that viewers can watch every single minute of Truman’s life while he (initially) has no idea of the fact. In either case, there is no automatic functioning of power that is taking place. Rather, the producers and viewers of the show are exerting power to invade Truman’s home space.
The instruments of surveillance provide the show with its narrative apparatus, for the same mechanisms that enable the television producers to track Truman’s position on the island are also the ones which capture the video and audio signals to be broadcast to the television audience. During the first hour of The Truman Show these instruments are also the narrative devices of the film itself: outside of occasional cuts to various audiences watching the show at home or in public places, the scenes from the end of the opening credits to the first appearance of Christof in the film are seen and heard through the same cameras and microphones which survey Truman, who simply believes he lives in a peaceful and uneventful world. Little does he suspect that everything he does is monitored, controlled and contrived. When he realizes something is wrong and tries to break free, he then discovers the control, manipulation, and prison of his life.
We are constantly reminded of this by the fact that most shots are framed in round or elliptic shapes which reflect the hiding places of the various cameras, by the range of different lenses employed and by the unusual angles which suggest that the scene is not totally free but constrained by the necessity to maintain secrecy. (For example: the camera placed behind the transparent front panel of the stereo in Truman’s car and the one behind his bathroom mirror).

With Battlestar Galactica, I had to do a little bit of “catching up,” so to speak. I had no idea what was going on and quickly realized I was far outside of a certain kind of discourse. The show seems complex and even disturbing. From what I have gathered, the series is focused on an age old narrative of humans resisting some hostile “race” (see V, The Matrix, Falling Skies, and on and on). In this particular case, the Cylons threaten humankind. I also learned that Battlestar Galactica is a multi-media/transmedia phenomenon with games, comic books, novels, movies, spin-offs, and webisodes.
In the Downloaded episode of the series, I can see the connection to class discussions even though I basically had no idea what was going on or the nuances of the characters. Basically, when a Cylon is downloaded once more into a new body, they retain their memories and experiences so that they are both “old” and “new” at the same time. The situation reminds me of some sort of genetic memory that can be passed down from generation to generation. Perhaps because my research focus is on material bodies, I immediately started to question potential plot holes (or results of my outsider status and ignorance) for clarity. Where does the initial body come from and where do the “boxed” memories go? What happens to the body after memories are copied into new ones? The question is probably tangential to the overall plot but I’m curious about the amalgamation of body to mind/memory. Since one can take memories and implant them into a new body, where can we locate personhood? Is the identity in the mind, transferable from body to body? I hesitate to say so since this would (re)perpetuate the myth of the Cartesian split as well as formulate binary apparatuses on identity. The body as a material entity has no agency, no power except as a projection of the inner memory/identity, person. Hmmm.

The very notion of what it means to be human permeated the show as well. If any digital media is a “shout out” to posthumanism/transhumanism/post-post modernism, this is it. Donna Haraway theorized years ago that it is becoming more difficult (impossible) to define the human. These thoughts lead me to question who is human in Battlestar. If what it takes to be human is certain ethical and moral imperatives, the Cylons have us beat. Essentially, the Cylons are human. Any defining human quality can be found in the Cylons and one could argue that they are more human than human. With hybridity, lines become blurred and distinctions are white washed so that we can no longer tell human from non human. Even if the show is an extreme example of this (Harawaynian?) hybridity, it resonates today in our world of hardwired humans. We can no longer locate human and non human on opposite ends of a binary pole.

First off, for Sita Sings the Blues, I was instantly struck by how easy it is to view this film. On her website, Nina Paley writes: “I hereby give Sita Sings the Blues to you. Like all culture, it belongs to you already, but I am making it explicit with a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License. Please distribute, copy, share, archive, and show Sita Sings the Blues. From the shared culture it came, and back into the shared culture it goes.” This resistance to current oppressive/repressive copyright laws immediately put the film into a certain light even before I watched it.
The statement, “from the shared culture it came . . .” is also a striking statement because the film is an interweaving of parallel cultures and stories. The ancient myth of the Ramayana actually ends up telling the story of a contemporary plot. It really gets interesting with the animation style, which I had never before seen. The two-dimensional collage style of the narrator segments, the classical artistic design of the Rama-Sita story, the pencil sketch style of the modern story, and musical numbers in a two-dimensional animation altogether different from the first, took some getting used to. The Greek chorus style speakers were even more fascinating because I felt like the conversation was an impromptu coffee house discussion that ended up on film. They even debate about details of the myth as well as the emotional and physical motivations of Sita.
In the end, my favorite of the four or so styles of animation was the musical numbers (which is great because I can’t stand musicals normally). The almost uncanny appropriateness of each modern day blues song highlights the cross cultural message of the film as well as indicate a narrative spanning hundreds of years. In other words, the story never originates, it just changes its form. The message is the same. It has simply been re-written and copied and imitated so that what was once an ancient myth is really a contemporary story.

This is perhaps the strangest movie I have ever seen and it’s not because it is overtly bizarre or oddball. It is about what I would expect from Takashe Miike. Years ago, during my culty-weird-movie phase, I discovered Miike with Audition. I was riveted. I immediately checked out Ichi the Killer and Visitor Q. Neither are for the faint of heart. He later did a musical-horror- something movie of which I can’t recall the name but Miike has remained, for me, the most bizarre film director I have ever known.
For Sukiyaki Western Django, there is little of the over-the-top violence, necrophilia, incest, rape, horror, or madness of his earlier films. Instead, what makes this one pluck away at the bizarre strings is the uncanny setting that is just slightly not right. There are so many elements that are familiar—the long standing feud between two sides, the dusty West, the shoot out finale, the stranger who rides into town—and all of these familiarities are copies of traditional spaghetti westerns. The movie is almost schizophrenic (as is its town sheriff) in a (re)mixing of styles.

Beyond those observations, the character most intriguing to me is Bloody Benton. Kwai-Cheung Lo writes about female women warriors where we would do damage to think of the female warrior as copy-original and should instead look to an assemblage of social constructions. They are a creation of something not-yet-present. This idea speaks to me as I consider such characters as Uma Thurman in Kill Bill. Furthermore, Bloody Benton is fully capable as an experienced gunslinger and implodes the ubiquitous fashioning of the female gender role. So the question becomes: did Takashe Miike make something that is not yet present, that is a remix of traditional (original) styles, that is a representation of a new, present, genre, or what?

Being John Malkovich
My reaction to the film was ambivalent, at best, when it started with a close up of puppeteering. However, I was instantly involved the moment Craig applied for a filing job on the 71/2 floor. The ceilings were hilariously low. From that moment on, it had me.
As far as class considerations are involved, the movie is a complex dynamo of metaphysical conversation, intriguing sets, and conceptions of selfhood. Since I am primarily interested in the material body and identity, this film operates as a paramount resource. I began to take notes on the idea of the “self” and bodily agency. What is the body? How is it connected to the mind? When another person in inhabiting the body of John, who exactly is embodied? For example, when Lottie inhabits John and interacts with Maxine, which body is presented? John or Lottie? Perhaps both? In one of the final scenes, Maxine accepts Lottie as the father of her child although the body “utilized” was John’s. Interestingly, what occurs is that Maxine considers Lottie to have physically fathered the child. In this sense, the mind takes precedence over the material body. However, if we are to consider Lottie as the sole father, then would we be subscribing and (re)perpetuating the problems of Cartesian dualism? (as a myth). What role does the body play in subjectivity? If the body and mind are, indeed, reconnected outside the myth of Cartesian dualism, then we would have to allow John’s body a role to play. Essentially, there are four components that should be intertwined: Maxine’s mind, Maxine’s body, John’s body, and Lottie’s mind. All of these factors contribute to the sexual interaction between two material bodies as well as the conception of a child. Otherwise, the body would be denied as it historically has been for ages.
Furthermore, when the old people enter John’s body, they speak of the body as a “vessel” and nothing more. The body is viewed as a mere vehicle for transportation of the consciousness. Again, this denies the ability of the body to make meaning, to prescribe texts, and to write. In other words, when the consciousness changes, so too does the body. They are interconnected rather than diametrically opposed or split.

Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo was an amazing and complex film. Watching the film for the first time, I was most likely unable to fully capture that complexity. However, there were obvious machinations that were clearly intended to place that complexity in the forefront of the viewer’s consciousness.
Vertigo refers to a feeling of dizziness or motion when one is stable. In order to highlight this experience, Hitchcock uses the eye as an interesting mechanism. The eye is a vehicle for the visual, a window of sorts through which to see the world and take in visual meaning. Vertigo begins with the blank, deadpan image of a woman’s face. At first, all the viewer recognizes is a close-up of the lower face as the camera pulls to her lips and then, finally, her eyes. They are shifting, anxious, frightened and darting as if she is hunted/haunted. The straight on close up of one eye contains the title of the film, Vertigo. It is at that very moment, as the title disappears, that the spiral first emerges from the depths of the pupil. The eye and the spiral are both integral to the film and it is no coincidence that they are the first images communicated to the viewer. The eyes have often been described as “windows to the soul” and there are countless moments when they reappear as key images at key moments in the film. One example is when Scottie sees Judy in the streets of San Francisco and he is instantly struck by… something. Even though Judy’s hair is reddish and her manner slightly different, he sees his former lover in her eyes. Although I am a fairly well versed Hitchcock fan, I have never before seen the film ( I am one of those surface fans rather than a fanatic and so have repeatedly watched Psycho and The Birds among his other well known films). I do see a recurring theme of “the eye” in the famous shower scene (Psycho) as well as Rear Window.
The spiral is the other mechanism that is very clear. I can only speculate about Hitchcock’s intentions, but it would seem that the spiral is representative of a greater discourse where we “spiral out of control” or “spiral into madness.” The spiral’s ends never connect and so the true goal (whatever that may be) is always out of reach.

There is so much more to say about the complexity of the film. It is no wonder that it is Hitchcock’s masterpiece work.

One of the contributing authors of Mashup Cultures, Doris Gassert rightly points out that Fight Club has long been criticized for its violence, and “its raw and offensive portrayal of brutal violence, its ambiguous rendering of a ‘crisis’ of masculinity and its homoerotic elements. Some academics denounced it as pedagogically irresponsible, symptomatic of a wider symbolic and institutional culture of cynicism and senseless violence that exerts a powerful pedagogical influence on the imagination” (49). Certainly, its academic reception was overshadowed by the seemingly mundane and senseless violence with unoriginal undertones of a growing anti-capitalistic youth culture. Once those initial impulses are set aside, however, deeper, more intelligent dialogue has emerged.
This re-emergence is a positive result of examining Fight Club on a deeper level. For one thing, the film displays a multitude of unique impressions that highlight its difference from mainstream Hollywood. If Fight Club is watched with a thoughtful mind turned toward patterns of representation, replication, and mirroring, we can see that the film shows one image but communicates another. The viewer does not know this until the end whereby Tyler Durden is revealed to be the same person as the narrator. In fact, it wasn’t until I began to think about this film on a deeper level that I realized the protagonist doesn’t have a name. His character as listed in the credits is simply “narrator.” This result is obviously because he is Tyler Durden. It is only after this is revealed (near the end) that the audience understands what they have been seeing and recognizing is a falsehood. Every image to that point was understood one way but communicated another. Secondly, when a viewer sees the film a second time, the message will be entirely different. It is and is not a second viewing.
Gassert also points out the cinematic achievements of “lying” to the audience: “Fight Club’s Jittercam, described in the beginning, clearly visualizes that something crucially ‘disturbing’ is happening with cinema and its image at the dawn of the new millennium: the film itself unraveling as the (indexical) photographic image basically jumps off the film reel rattling through the mechanical projector ‘was our way of cuing the audience that reality was getting ready to run off the rails” (50). Film is becoming increasingly postmodern, answering for itself and allowing the audience to look back at themselves as viewers. There is even an aside where the narrator turns to the audience and explains the changeover reel. A small cigarette burn will appear in the corner of the screen for a flash of a second. The audience is then able to see themselves as viewers and, later, as manipulated into believing/trusting the image communicated which, it turns out, is in an entirely different manner than first thought.

Nosferatu and Shadow of the Vampire, when watched with each in direct consideration of the other, offer a superb example of art blending. Nosferatu was filmed in 1922 as an adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Count Orlok is played magnificently by Max Schreck, who makes a real-estate deal with Thomas Hutter. Hutter is bitten by Orlok who travels to Bremen where the plague immediately rises in the town. Orlok’s desire is to seek Hutter’s wife, who has a psychic connection to Hutter and Orlok. Orlok arrives in her bedroom and drains Ellen’s body of blood.

The Shadow of the Vampire, by contrast, stars John Malkovich as F.W. Murnau and Willem Dafoe as Max Schreck. It is the fictionalized story of the making of Nosferatu, stemming from the possibility that Max Schreck might have been a real vampire. When, near the end of the production, the filmmakers find themselves stranded on a remote island with the vampire, they come to understand that there is only one way to survive: by finishing the movie.

It is no coincidence that Shadow of the Vampire is titled as it is because it works to merge the past with the present. While Nosferatu is an adaptation of a story, so, too, is Shadow. Although fictionalized, it re-writes the history of one of the most well known and popular movies of the past. The writing, re-writing, erasing and revising of history on screen, from both a narrative and sociological perspective, is a constant occurrence in both literature and (especially) on film. The vampire is an archetype that is ripe for reproduction, mirroring, remaking, or copying. Each of the two films is a different story but they converse with each other to produce something entirely new. Shadow reproduces actual scenes from the “original” and yet re-writes the story completely. It may act as a “shadow” of the “original” but it also produces a new body. After watching Shadow, the text of Nosferatu changes. In other words, the addition of a behind-the-scenes storyline (even fictionalized) brings to life an element of the “original” never before considered. In this way, the two films act as reflections of each other even though they span decades and one produced after the other. So, while the past informs the present, the reverse is equally possible and becomes especially embodied within these films.

Culture jamming, remixing, collaborating, downloading, reloading, uploading, and a host of other ideas come together in the film, RiP!: A Remix Manifesto by Open Source Cinema. One of the major tenets of the film is the concept of sharing media openly and freely. Accessibility. Although there are a number of resisters to current copyright law such as the M.L.F. (Mouse Liberation Front), the very ideas of free sharing and unlimited access are difficult to place in the dominant paradigm of capitalism. Unfortunately, the episteme in the U.S. doesn’t have much room for the idea of sharing despite the fact that we are taught to “share” as children. At some point (when money enters the picture), ownership and the accumulation of wealth supersede the idea.
I applaud the makers of RiP! to further the conversation about the absurdity of copyright law. However, I think dominant discourses need to radically shift in order to fully realize change. The film makes the point that the past always tries to control the future as every succeeding generation is accused of pirating. If conversations are truly extensions of past dialogue or “utterances previously uttered” as Foucault would put it, then this one has been going on for quite some time. For example, the political activist, Abbie Hoffman, famously wrote Steal this Book which acted as a treatise on how to live beneath the capitalist system in the sixties. The “Yippies” have been pranking the “system” for decades and Frank Zappa’s 1966 Freak Out! Album combined covers, mash-ups, and remixes to promote cultural self expression and a new idea about originality. And now, the digital age has the unique potential to alter dominant discourses about money, originality, sharing, open sourcing, copyright, and ownership like none before it. The information age is rapidly mashing cultures and ideas, highlighting the fact that our copyright system has been co-opted by large corporations whose profit motives directly conflict with the fundamental goals of copyright policy. Whatever the format, all of these dialogues have a similar component. In the end, it is about our human right to democratic and free self-expression.