Oh the Horror: Identity, Kristeva and The Thing

"I know I'm human. And if you were all these things, then you'd just attack me right now, so some of you are still human. This thing doesn't want to show itself, it wants to hide inside an imitation. It'll fight if it has to, but it's vulnerable out in the open. If it takes us over, then it has no more enemies, nobody left to kill it. And then it's won." -MacReady (Kurt Russell), in "The Thing"



What is the significance of Identity in John Carpenter's "The Thing"?

Obviously, identity is a concept at the forefront of the film, since the plot deals so extensively with the main characters trying to establish who is rightly themselves and who is 'The Thing', a process which quickly gets out of hand. But aside from their specific identities, the concept of identity as a whole is called into question through the film. Ultimately, the scientists are unable to solve their problem: almost all of them die except MacReady (Kurt Russell) and Childs (Keith David), and at the end neither the audience nor the characters themselves can know if either of the survivors is in fact truly themselves. What Mac and the others are really trying to solve is not simply the murder of a shapeshifting alien, it is a problem of resolving identities. Are the people we know, befriend, and work with truly the people we believe them to be? Our identities are constructed through our actions, beliefs, and language, but they are also dependent on a complex set of social symbols and interactions. As Childs says, "If I was an imitation, a perfect imitation, how would you know it was really me?"

Of course, Julia Kristeva could have told us this was the inevitable ending: "Even if human beings are involved with it, the dangers entailed by defilement are not within their power to deal with." The Thing defiles the borders of identity, occupying the physiological selves of the other scientists and representing itself as them in every possible way. The Thing exposes the "frailty of the symbolic order," and causes the scientists to question how they can ever really know who is who, or even what it means to be oneself. As the new concept of identity proposed by The Thing comes into existence, their individual identities become irrelevant: they either art The Thing, or they aren't.

MacReady's quote at the top of this post posits a particularly interesting question of identity not as a personal quality, but as a social one, comprised basically of belonging or not, a reading of identity that makes it inherently divisive, interesting in light of Kristeva's commentary regarding the warring of the masculine and feminine, of religious prohibition meant to separate men and women.

What is the significance of this problem of identity to the horror genre?

Although calling into question our sense of self is horrific enough on its face, Kristeva illuminates how "Excrement and its equivalents stand for the danger to identity that comes from without: the ego threatened by the non-ego, society threatened by its outside, life by death." In this passage, we are reminded of one crucial aspect of our identity which we rarely are even conscious of: the aspect of being alive. This is truly at the root of our identities, and comprises the basest sense of self we are afforded.

In the end of The Thing, this is dealt with in a most curious way: even though Childs and Mac are neither one certain that they have succeeded in their mission to wipe out The Thing, they are content to not kill each other. Childs asks "What do we do now?" and Mac simply responds "Why don't we just wait here for a little while... see what happens," further evidence of humanity's inability, in the final analysis, to deal with this crises of defilement of identity. In the end, Childs and Mac (or The Thing, if one of them is) decide to capitulate to the shared aspect of their identity: alive.

Ma Vie En Rose through the lens of Schiavi and Irigaray

One scene in director Alain Berliner's "Ma Vie En Rose" that really stuck with me after the viewing was the scene in which Ludovic disassociates from himself following the mock wedding he puts on with the neighbor boy. In the face of his mother's ire and the neighbor's fainting, Ludovic adapts a trick his grandmother taught him and closes his eyes, imaging the world is as he wishes it to be. This finds him flying, away from the troubles and up and out into the air... where he looks down and sees himself, being hauled across the lawn by his angry mother. He is promptly thrust back into his own body.

What is the significance of this scene?

For me, this image in "Ma Vie En Rose" was very powerful. We are witness to a division of self, a multiplicity of identity: Ludo's "idealized" self gazing down at the self, the identity, generated by his parents and the rest of the neighborhood. This "Ludo as spectator" looking down on "Ludo as spectacle" highlights the way in which Ludo is, as Michael Schiavi writes, "the object of perpetual observation" (9). It also begins the period described by Pollack in the Schiavi text in which "boys become extremely watchful, carefully monitoring how other boys act" (10). Ludo does this, watching his brothers closely and trying for a brief period to mimic them (even practicing in the mirror, what Schiavi calls a "Lacanian sketch") but when it fails, he quickly rejects this period which Pollack describes as so crucial. Because Ludo has no desire to be a boy: this crucial boy stage for him is nothing more than a phase.

What is the significance of this in light of Irigaray's "The Sex Which Is Not One?"

"'She' is indefinitely other in herself," writes Irigaray, describing the plight of the woman, a plight which Ludo is familiar with. Irigaray writes of women's use of language being not exactly what they mean, of discourse as disconnected from their true selves as a function of a gender role premised on an inherently flawed sexual role. Ludo's frustration with this phenomenon he cannot explain is evident in his neologism: after a biology discussion with his sister, he coins the term "girlboy" to describe himself. Yet even this term is a case in which the woman "steps ever so slightly aside from herself with a murmur, an exclamation, a whisper, a sentence left unfinished" (29). Ludo cannot just express his gender identity without addressing a role already assigned to him, one he is powerless to negate (Even in my post, lade with masculine pronouns) and therefore must account for in his linguistic attempts to establish a gender identity.

Farther and Farther From Heaven

"The greatest obstacle to making sense of Far From Heaven's relation to the present is its seemingly banal treatment of race and sexual orientation." -Salome Skvirsky



what is the significance of this banal treatment of racism and homophobia in Todd Haynes' Far From Heaven?

i think that the banality Skvirsky addresses, rooted in "displays of racism and homophobia and the surface-level injunction to tolerance and color-blindness" functions as a font of absurdity. the audience recognizes a certain lack of believability in these scenes: they aren't "genuine," and they don't resemble the far more subtle and insidious forms of racism and homophobia we all must unfortunately regularly encounter in our own lives. when the young black boy enters the pool and everyone clears out of it, we the audience are left to gape in disbelief at the sheer absurdity, and absurdity is ever the most useful implement of that great, Swiftian-style satire. Paeans to colorblindness and tolerance, outmoded ways of addressing racial and sexual difference in modern society, seem at best like the idyllic dreams of foolishness, concepts worth considering but ultimately impractical in addressing racism and homophobia. I see the film suggesting that as horrible as the attitudes of our society may have been in the fifties, our "solutions" were equally untenable.

what is the significance of this sort of criticism?

as Skvirsky notes, "the interest of Haynes' film lies in the way it questions the ability of the moralizing mode of melodrama to address the social issues of the contemporary historical moment," but i think it goes further, to perhaps call into question the ability of narrativization to in some way affect the social issues. Haynes doesn't really do anything in his re-imaging of Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows to try to dispel the regrettable social blights of homophobia and racism. He fails to offer us a reasonable alternative: in fact, he seems to be purposefully presenting us with an unrealistic and untenable alternative in the form of implausible "colorblindness" and the regrettable concept of "tolerance", now rightly regulated to its proper status as an unacceptable capitulation in a failure to achieve true acceptance. Here, we seem to have a nihilistic dichotomy: society can either consume itself with its prejudiced bigotry, or with its insufficient means of dealing with said bigotry, and no part of the narrative seems to help provide an answer. We are left in the same state as Cathy Whitaker: crying as the train pulls away from the station without us aboard.

bjork meets marx: dancer in the dark

"The estrangement of man, and in fact every relationship in which man stands to himself, is first realized and expressed in the relationship in which a man stands to other men" -Marx

What is the significance of the hand-held camera in Dancer in the Dark?

I found the hand-held camera to be one of the most crucial elements of the film, directed by Lars Von Trier, as it determines the relationship between the viewer and the other characters. The hand-held camera erases the illusion of detachment, and renders the viewer as a character of sorts: a silent character, unnoticed by the other characters, yet a character nevertheless. When we see the protagonist, Selma, tediously navigating her way home via the train tracks because of her blindness, we stand witness beside her friends Kathy and Jeff, similarly powerless to help her, aghast at the spectacle of her looming lack of sight. On the gallows before Selma is hanged, we stand shaky beside the other nervous guards as she strapped to the board and hanged in mid-song.

The fact that we, the viewers, are rendered into these passive witnesses makes us very much a part of the story and facilitates the establishment of a relationship between ourselves and the other characters in the film. And the true horror of Dancer is that we are mute witnesses, impotent to straighten out the misunderstandings, right the wrongs, prevent the tragedies. In a way, we are the opposite of Selma: we can see everything that she can not see, and yet where she is constantly affecting the lives of those around her (some for the better, like her son, and some for the worse, like Bill, the cop she kills) we are unable to affect anything, but simply to watch the plot play out.

What is the significance of this neutered relationship, as it relates to Marx?

In the Marxist formulation, encapsulated in the quote above, we are all estranged from each other. And we see this in the film: Selma's refusal to let Jeff give her a ride, the perversity of Bill's crime against Selma, Kathy's inability to reason with her friend Selma, the reduction of factory works and court sketch artists to their roles, deprived even of a name. In a similar fashion, Trier's film condemns our own distance from Selma, holds us accountable for the way we go about our lives. The final words of the film, occupying a sudden silence, read like a epitaph, honoring Selma in death despite our inability to help her in life.

Dave McKean film

Dave McKean, who did the best of the Sandman art, is working on a film based on one of his comic books. read more here!

Tension and Dual Voyeurism: Hitchcock and Mulvey

"The mass of mainstream film, and the conventions within which it has consciously evolved, portray a hermetically sealed world which unwinds magically, indifferent to the presence of the audience, producing for them a sense of separation and playing on their voyeuristic fantasy." -Laura Mulvey, in her essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema"

What is the significance of audience voyeurism in Rear Window?

Obviously, voyeurism is a major theme of Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window. The main character, LB Jefferies (portrayed by Jimmy Stewart), engages in a great deal of voyeuristic behavior via the titular window of his apartment. But the interesting aspect of the voyeurism in Rear Window is that it is bifurcated; the audience is very much a part of Jefferies' voyeurism as well as engaging in their own, a duality that serves to make the audience painfully aware of their own scopophilia in contrast to Laura Mulvey's quote above.



One way in which Hitchcock accomplishes this is to make the audience very aware of the camera. Hitchcock is constantly reminding the viewer of the act of filming and viewing, by having Jefferies constantly using his own cameras and optical equipment to spy on his neighbors. Not only does Rear Window give us shots of Jefferies using a camera, but we are also permitted to see exactly as Jefferies sees, through his eyes and through the lens of the camera. Hitchcock accomplishes this effect by rounding off the edges of his image, giving us a circular frame instead of a square one. This makes the audience implicit in not only their own voyeurism, watching the characters in the film play out their plot, but also in Jefferies' voyeurism, watching the lives of his neighbors.


What is the significance of allowing the audience to participate so directly in Jefferies' voyeurism?

By regularly using Jefferies as a catalyst by which he can direct the audience's voyeurism, Hitchcock causes the audience to identify with his protagonist to a great degree, and closes the gap between audience and character, erasing the "sense of seperation" mentioned by Mulvey. Although audiences regularly sympathize, empathize, or support the protagonists, they are rarely transported into that character, but Hitchcock uses Jefferies to achieve exactly that. This makes the final showdown between Jefferies and the murderous Lars Thorwald (Raymond Burr) that much more intense: here is a situation where we most certainly do not want to be in Jimmy Stewart's shoes. And although we might try at this point to distance ourselves mentally from Jefferies as his death seems imminent, Hitchcock again robs us of our voyeuristic distance by having Jefferies try futilely to use the flash on his camera as a means of keeping the killer at a distance. But just as Jefferies fails to stop Thorwald with his means of voyeurism, so too is the audience unable to distance themselves from Jefferies by their means of voyeurism. What follows is a violent, chaotic physical confrontation that capitalizes on the connection Hitchcock has worked so hard to develop.

What is the significance of the voyeuristic tension created by Hitchcock?

By clearly "playing on our voyeuristic fantasy" as Mulvey claims all mainstream film does while simultaneously depriving us of the safety of our seperation, Hitchcock is creating tension. Hitchcock enhances this tension by never letting our voyeurism pay off. All of the truly horrific elements of the film take place offscreen: Thorwald murdering his wife, the murder of the dog, etc. So we are not truly witness to any of the "action," only ancillary events and secondhand evidence. We hear a scream, and that is our only direct perception of the murder. This auditory cue is then picked up when Jefferies can hear Thorwald climbing the steps to come for him. The auditory hallmark of impending violence cues our voyeuristic desire, and here we have it, in the total darkness of Jefferies' apartment: we will finally get the release of our voyeuristic tension, when we see what has been obscured and witness what goes on the dark. This echoes what Laura Mulvey notes (via Freud) as the "desire to see and make sure of the private and forbidden."

(other topics to consider further: sexuality and physical inadequacy in Rear Window, gender roles, social structure, etc.)

Time and Pacing in Graphic Novels: Corrigan, Tomine, and others.

"In comics you make the strip come alive by reading it, by experiencing it beat by beat as you would playing music. So that's one way to aesthetically experience comics." -Chris Ware, via Raeburn, via Bredehoft.

Reading for the first time through Adrian Tomine's "Sleepwalk (and other stories)" I was struck by the effect of the story's rhythm. I observed that Tomine's pacing was so regular and linear: each panel was like a beat. First this happened, then this, then this, then this, then the end. This pacing seemed almost metronomic: so deliberate and measured, with events flowing easily and methodically along a very pronounced and regular narrative arc.

So how does Tomine achieve this effect formally?

One of the major factors that helps him to accomplish this is simply the regularity of his page. With the exception of his title pages, Tomine uses somewhere between four and twelve panels per page for the entirety of his book, and every last panel is rectangular. There is an even greater uniformity of form and structure within individual stories from "Sleepwalk"; 'Long Distance' (23-24) is two pages of four panels each, and 'Drop', on the following page, is only a single four-panel page. 'Echo Ave' (18-22) begins with a seven-panel title page and concludes with a ten-panel page, but the interior pages are all twelve-panel pages of exactly the same style. This rigidity actually serves to facilitate a receding of form into the background, the nondescript panels and gutters becoming an unnoticed backdrop to the facet of tomine's work that truly takes center stage: the stories themselves.

Tomine reduces any remaining chance of confusion for the reader with his proliferation of text boxes. Readers unfamiliar with the graphic novel will be right at home as the narrative stretches out through offset text boxes at the tops and bottoms of panels. There's no iconic arrangement to puzzle out in order to follow the plot, here. Tomine seems to want to make traversing the format as effortless as possible for us, so that our time is spent with his content instead of his form. The process of closure that Scott McCloud talks about in "Understanding Comics" is as basic and simple as possible, here, with most of these "interims" easy to fill in and supposedly uneventful.

Naturally, the next question I explored was how time and pacing were handled in the other graphic novel I was reading at the same time, (Well, not literally the same, as that would have been quite difficult, but the reading of one was interspersed with the reading of the other. Come on, people. You get it.) the critically-acclaimed graphic novel by Chris Ware, "Jimmy Corrigan: the Smartest Kid on Earth." It was clear that the pacing of "Corrigan" was very different from that of "Sleepwalk," but how?

I observed that "Corrigan" is a much more difficult text to navigate. Here, narratives are filed away inside one another. There are sudden leaps back and forth in time between the story of the main protagonist, Jimmy, and his grandfather of the same name. If Tomine's steady beat was your favorite song, easy to hum along with and tap your foot to, then Corrigan is the bizarre jazz fusion band your backward cousin likes that he listens to in the car on the way downtown to buy drugs. Ware's pacing can occasionally be just as moment-to-moment as Tomine's, but other times the same moment may be repeated, only with a different gaze, or there may be great leaps in time from panel to panel, producing a frenetic pace. Occasionally, the panels may not even be connected along linear time, but only related thematically.

So, as expected, is Ware's pacing so difficult because of formal aspects much different than Tomine's?

To some extent, yes. The panels and gutters in "Jimmy Corrigan" are actually as regular and rectangular as anything from "Sleepwalk." In fact, the regularity of the lines is even more precise. But there are exceptions, and when there are exceptions, they are massive. Thomas Bredehoft describes an early one in his essay "Comics Architecture, Multidimensionality, and Time: Chris ware's Jimmy Corrigan: the Smartest Kid on Earth":

"[T]he more-or-less conventional sequence of panels and pages that the book presents to its readers is interrupted by a page that shows a series of cut-outs: complicated shapes that can be literally cut from the pages of the book and assembled into a working zoetrope, a cylinder with a series of images on the inside (visible from the outside through vertical slits) that can be seen as a moving picture when the cylinder spins" (869)

There is also a page with cut-outs of a house, and a page that seems to be comprised of collectible cards of an urban landscape, with each picture having an accompanying description on the reverse page describing the historic or cultural significance of the bleak and nondescript property. These pages eject us from the narrative briefly and force us to recontextualize our reading experience.

Bredehoft also writes of an early page in which "At least four narrative lines, then, are clearly indicated [. . .]: the timeless narration of place—which takes us from the cityscape to the photo in Jimmy's drawer to the depiction of the photo as torn, with one half in the frame and the other in the dump—and the three time-lines that show the lives of Jimmy, his mother, and his father" (878). This page contains an anomalous 45-52 panels, depending on how one wants to define "panel", as some panels overlap one another or fit inside one another. Certainly, this sort of formal approach complicates and slows the reader's process, but by doing so Ware manages to control the pace much in the same way Tomine does. Ware is forcing us to spend time with thematic elements which we may gloss over, left to our own devices.

Ultimately, I am impressed by how both Tomine and Ware manage to control and manage their pacing in a way most suitable to their respective works. I may have more to say later about signifiers, transitioning, and closure, but that's all still percolating a bit.

McKean and "Sandman"

What is the significance of McKean's cover art in "Sandman"

Of all the bizarre imagery in the first volume of Neil Gaiman's "Sandman" imprint, entitled "Preludes and Nocturnes," the most striking visuals in my opinion are the fantastic cover art pieces created by Dave McKean. Of course, there is a practical reason that the art is so different: McKean is more of a traditional artist than a comic book artist, having worked in film, photography, and design, but the covers he has created resonate with the comic medium while still providing unique representations of Lucifer, Dream, and other characters from the comic. the little shadowboxes that line the edges of the pages form a sort of paneling that mirrors the comic while still providing something much more abstract and realistic. The use of shadowboxes is interesting because the medium in a way echoes the themes of darkness and shadow in the graphic novel and is reminiscent of the dark palette which regularly surrounds the protagonist throughout the story.

What is the significance of the artifacts, relics, trinkets, and other objects located in the shadowboxes in McKean's covers for "Sandman"?

The use of these abstract objects, often unexplained or even difficult to identify, deepens the sense of the mysterious that is found in the series and also serves to locate this sense of mystery within the object. Tying significance to objects is a theme found in the first six issues of Gaiman's "Sandman," which the protagonist Dream spends trying to recollect the artifacts of his office, which are laden with both symbolic power and a very tangible, "actual" power as well. The plot teaches us to regard these sorts of objects (a mask, a pouch of sand, a jewel) with suspicion, interest, and wariness, and we are thus invited by McKean to regard the objects in his illustrations in the same way.


In the chapter "A Hope in Hell" for instance, the shadowboxes are filled with burnt and charred pages that appear to come from either Milton's "Paradise Lost" or Dante's "Divine Comedy," both classic pieces of literature which describe a descent into Hell. That the pages are burnt evokes the power of Hell so evident in the chapter, the memory of fire without actually visually showing the fire itself. McKean does a fantastic job of capturing that sense of the ominous which the reader encounters regularly throughout "Preludes and Nocturnes".

The Restructuring of DC

“It’s no secret that DC has myriad rich and untapped possibilities from its deep library of iconic and lesser-known characters.”

That understatement of the month comes from Alan Horn, President and COO of Warner Bros., in a statement released today that announces the restructuring of DC Comics. I don't think this necessarily means much for most of the comic book artists and writers working for DC, but it has major implications for future films based on DC characters. Read more about that here.

I see this as being reactionary to last week's news regarding Disney's acquisition of Marvel. Maybe the unintended side-effect of that acquisition will be to provide (as the slashfilm article speculates) a kick in the pants to DC movies, which have been few and have generally sucked (Christopher Nolan's uber-successful Batman movies notwithstanding).

And speaking of those Batman movies, word is that Nolan isn't really interested in making another Batman movie anytime soon, and shifting at the top isn't likely to bring him back into the fold, in my opinion.

Interesting to see how these things will shake out.

Lobo to the Big Screen

God, this is going to be a disaster of epic proportions.

I mean, I like Guy Ritchie movies as much as the next guy, but the script sounds awful, the studio wants it to be PG-13 (to be fair, a movie about an alien biker mercenary pretty much has 13-year-old mindset written all over it) and most importantly, no one who is not a comic geek has ever heard of him. If this actually makes it to the filming process with director and script intact, I'll eat my friggin' hat.

But just in case... actor speculation? Can we just assume it's Vinnie Jones?