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.

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.)

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?

Hannah Montana Vs. Wolverine?

If you didn't hear the news that has all the fanboys astir this morning (or afternoon, or evening, or whenever one wakes up. we're not prejudiced against late-risers around here), everyone's favorite mouse-eared conglomerate has purchased comic book bastion Marvel.

You can read more about it here.

What does this mean for the future of marvel franchises? Will the Marvel movies that have been coming out like clockwork lately actually get... *gulp*... worse?

Disney has had a pretty stellar track record lately, so I don't think that fans of the Marvel movies have much to worry about. In fact, with the influx of ideas, personnel, and most importantly of all cash, i think Marvel movies could actually get a whole lot better. And if they don't, at least they'll be squandering the maximum amount of possible resources in the process.

...

I don't see Disney keeping too tight a fist on the comics side of the business, at least not at first. I really think the biggest fireworks we are going to see from all of this are going to be in the form of irate fans worried about the direction of their precious storylines.

But seriously, who doesn't want to see Punisher and Aladdin in a Baghdad brawl over opium smuggled out of the palace? Maybe a Snow White and the Seven Dwarves reboot starring Wolverine as Grumpy? there's potential here, people.