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Smashing Pumpkins and Counter-Histories Robert Cheatham I resisted going to see 'Pumpkin' even though I had a free ticket. For some reason I thought it would be a sappy, sentimental take on a sorority girl and the crush she develops on this 'mentally challenged' guy called Pumpkin. I guess I've forgotten completely that such films seem to only appear on certain channels on cable television. This is the era of counter-sentimentality with the only sign of authenticity being the banana peel. After watching Pumpkin I'm reminded of something Baudelaire wrote; "The intelligent man, who will never find himself in agreement with anyone, must apply himself to delighting in conversation with imbeciles and to reading bad books. He will find bitter pleasures therein." Apparently a whole coterie of film goers are now finding solace in such bitter pleasures (even if, almost simultaneously, an ideological synaesthesia sets in and the bitter is converted to the sweet, in a neat little dialectical throb). So, first things first, since I want to talk about 'Minority Report' with almost, but not quite the same breath as Pumpkin. Christina Ricci stars in Pumpkin (acting very much like Reese Witherspoon) as a sorority girl whose sorority, alpha omega pi, is going to sponsor a series of event to help get 'challenged' athletes into shape for a big contest. The real reason they are doing it however is to win the on-campus contest for best sorority. The story that ensues is that Ricci falls in love with her charge for the contests and goes through a personal crisis in her own attitudes. It's not necessary to recount the whole movie since it is a set up we've seen many times before. What it reminded me of more than anything else was a satiric Bizarro World version of a combination of The Sterile Cuckoo, the Graduate, and a slight flavoring of the Stepford Wives (which was actually alluded to in the movie). Those movies, even Stepford Wives, conveyed some sense of, for lack of a better word which we'll have to modify, 'authenticity' (having genuine substance, or a connection between the inside and the outside and that the expression of that connection is straightforward, or 'heartfelt' as the expression goes. To answer the question asked by Stanley Cavell in Must We Mean what We Say?, the answer, from the point of view of one who is trying to be 'authentic', can only be a resounding YES! However, the answer to that question in 21st century American media can only be a muffled grunt.) After we catch which way the wind is blowing in this movie, it would be difficult to say whether or not there is a sincere, authentic moment in the whole film. All the bits and pieces of the film jostle each other into, eroding our confidence that ANY thing in the film is sincere. Once the tone is set, we enter into an hallucinatorily odd oscillation where no gesture seems authentic, from the heart. The set piece of the movie where such terms are addressed overtly is in Ricci's interaction with her poetry professor, a gruff, street-wise black poet who eschews being called 'professor' and who tries to get his class to make contact with their 'inner pain' and reality. As Ricci supposedly makes contact with her own 'inner pain' she calls him out for grading such pain, and stomps out of the class. But even this friction, which in a film made in 1969 (like the Sterile Cuckoo) would have set the stage for the beginning of 'authentic adventures,' or a breaking through of the protagonist into 'realness' , just leads us in Pumpkin around in more confusing circles. It's like a certain reality has vanished. Some, like Jean Baudrillard perhaps, would argue that reality turned to 'reality' at the advent of the media age and that it is on an accelerating course into a condition of complete disappearance. It could also be said that the movie illustrates what has been said of the nihilism: that it is the triumph of the personal narcissistic over all other elements, everything dissolves into the subjective. The nihilistic thus resides "not in the dimunition of the will but in its magnification, in the doctrine of an absolute human will and freedom." (Nihilism Before Nietzsche, M. A. Gillespie). The movie is very funny, in the dark way in which many of us are forced to find our humor these days (viz., the Baudelaire quote above), which helps to make it go down easier I suppose. (Recall that laughter the transparency of the emperor's clothes is what brought him down. The difference now is that we are ALL wearing the Emperor's New Clothes. The satirical and the deconstructive seem to share similar modes.) Which leads to my point of distress. What becomes of counter-histories under the pressure of this evaporation of reality, experience, and history? David Biale in a biography of Gershom Scholem calls a counter history the realization that not everything takes place on the plane of the obvious, the belief "that the true history lies in a subterranean tradition that must be brought to light, much as the apocalyptic thinker decodes an ancient prophecy or as Walter Benjamin spoke of 'brushing history against the grain'". Part of the 'Ecstasy of communication' is that everything seems to reside on the same level, the same plane of consistency, leaving us with little idea of what to rub against what so that we rub up against everything. Either we are suffering from a surfeit of history or its disappearance. Either way, the flattening effects seem the same. As Baudrillard has written, our sense of continual catastrophe comes because our communications are too good, too comprehensive, too … communicative. There has now developed a whole category of movie wherein incessant internal referencing has become the norm: The Royal Tannenbaums, Kids, Friends and Neighbors, Pumpkin, Man Bites Dog, Pulp Fiction, Blue Velvet, etc etc. . Perhaps it could be said that the closest they come to elucidating a counter-history or counter-discourse is through an unbelieving, deconstructive laughter whose gestural figuration has truly been one of the prime counters to 'official' hagiographies all throughout recorded history. (I would not be surprised if someone were to come up with the argument that these types of film constitute the ONLY possibility for counter-history at the moment. I would not be surprised but neither would I be excited at the prospect. An interesting chapter in DISCOURSE AND COUNTER-DISCOURSE by Richard Terdiman called "Counter-Humorists" puts the problem with satire -- really a way to re-frame and quote aspects of a culture back to itself -- makes the points that such satirical mimicry acts to overflow the banal with itself, creating a dual vision, creating a difference in the normal order of things just by mocking something back to its audience. A re-framed mimicry makes an ideology visible that previously had been naturalized as 'the the way things are'. Black humor and satire from this reading would act to break the apparently seamless circuit of symbolic exchange. The paradox to contend with is twofold, one of which Terdiman puts as fatigue in the face of the possibility that EVERYTHING can come under the gun and that everything contains inconsistencies and contradictions: "We face nothing less than the exhaustion of imaginable discourse. Even if the whole of the bourgeois world could be re/cited, the result would only be an epochal emptiness. And this fantasized self-silencing [….] we might characterize not quite yet as nihilistic but as cosmically sarcastic." The other problem is that such conditions merely leave everything as they were, and that a certain inertness sets in and that such paralysis always favors the status quo. [Another take on comedy by John Limon, "Stand-Up Comedy in theory, or, Abjection in America," takes a more pessimistic approach -- if one is looking for a valorization of counter-histories through the E.N.C. Effect [Emperor's New Clothes]-- by viewing comedy as a form of pscychoanalytic cast-off or shit that we can't quite scrape ourselves free of nor fully incorporate. At any rate it doesn't bode well for the desire to see things in ways other than the way things are by reducing that desire to an excretory function.) But still…there seems something missing. The guffaws at least indicate a bodily reaction, even if it is in reaction to disappeared-reality-made-abject, reality made to slip on a banana peel. It also indicates a sort of slippage or framing, whereby a 'secondness' can make an appearance, even if not fully acted upon, even if not very visible, it covers the footprints of a subversive possibility, submerged beneath the peals of laughter. At the stage of chaos, laughter seems propaedeutic to another coming, even if it is an inchoate, unforeseeable coming, a coming built into the walls of the cells of the body as it were. The body becomes lost to itself in laughter, becoming more akin to landscape or reflex, some physical process with no accountability to ego or even id. This gestural doubleness opens the door to allegory, that much forgotten mode beloved of earlier ages. There, in fact, in allegory is where we find a rich stream of counter-discourses and coded speech; where 'official' realities and their doubled-over secrets intertwine in a queasy alliance (much as the 'shell' -- yet internal -- of the body -- the skeleton -- moves with the flesh, a relationship much noted in medieval times when allogoresis was in its heyday.) So it should come as no surprise to see the comeback of what we may loosely term 'allegory' in the movies, fueled by special effects and latter day scientificity. Here is where we find counter-histories run rampant. Here is where memories can be forged wholesale, where transvaluation of values can become a fundamental enterprise. And also, as often happens in these film, frame it's own enterprise even as it is enacting it. Ok, confusing enough so let's talk about MINORITY REPORT, the new film by Spielberg, based on a story by Philip K. Dick, the arch Gnostic of modernist fiction. The first action that a dominant discourse makes against a counter discourse or history is to demonize it. This happens in overt and covert ways, usually in a virtually inextricable mixture. By the time some sort of sense can be made of a discourse, a prophylactic apparatus of one sort or another has been installed which filters out competing epistemologies and cultural values. The framing apparatus of techné, or technology broadly conceived, apparently is one of the most effective at such ontological-level re-appointments. Even simple tool-using actions in the world entail a broad range of complications which, for example, creatures without hands (porpoises let's say) are not entailed by. (It should be noted that even the way in which I framed this argument can be seen to be result of techné, if by that is meant a certain sort of placement in the world. A good/bad example of such a state of affairs is given by the movie, REIGN OF FIRE, wherein technique breaks into the lair of fire-breathing dragons and they begin to lay waste to the world, turning it literally into ash which they consume. The dragon itself is allegorically emblematic of a radical counter-historical set of circumstances, which is not only counter-historical but in opposition to the human. The fire-breathing dragon EMBODIES a certain ur-technological fantasy: that of superceding the tool by becoming the tool, a transformative conceit that perhaps has more to do with alchemy than science. Thus, the very first and most radical counter-history, that of non-technology, is not readily available to tool users. (Some may contend that this is not a counter-history at all since it precedes the 'historical' as such.) Another sort of problematic availability of counter-histories are those which might have been but are not; those which are thought to be the case but are not; and those states of affairs which seem to run consistently alongside dominant discourses , becoming more or less visible as the cultural climate dictates. (We can't really say nowadays that fire-breathing dragons exist. Yet in some sense they most definitely DO exist, even if 'only' as a special effects display.) A counter-history is not exactly a utopia as we popularly imagine it. They are both unrealized potentials but counter-history has about it simply a parallel stream of development. Counter-histories have about them certain questions about the possibility of justice, a justice which most often seems impossible in a situation of 'things as they are'. And here the concept of 'justice' would entail also 'being adequate to' the singularity of the individual subjectivity, but in the form of universalized subjectivity, as in the phrase 'and justice for all'. Of course unpacking that becomes very problematic, since many injustices seem to be 'grandfathered' in, that is, have an irreducible temporal quotient that do not allow of a solution which is purely 'now'. It often seems that the counter-claims to justice most often lead to a fork in the road: between comedy or tragedy (and prophecy, in all its forms, as a promise of the redemption to come and the installation of a condition of universal justice [or universal singularity]. Both religion and secular social movements share this expectation of justice/redemption to come. The condition of 'justice without sacrifice' -- apocatastasis -- seems, on the face of it and from the point of view of modern jurisprudence, to be incompatible with justice as a universalized singularity. 'Time travel' or precognition does not solve the problem but simply puts sacrifice before justice In MINORITY REPORT, prophecy and justice-seeking converge. The Government has come upon Delphic oracles who are able to see into the future, with respect to the tragedies of murder. The enforcement wing of the Law can now stop murders before they happen by recourse to a set of submerged and electronically augmented psychics. As it turns out however the system is being manipulated by one of the administrators of the system to cover up a murder, and our protagonist, played by Tom Cruise, is set up as the fall guy. After escaping from his immediate circumstances of immanent capture, Cruise finds that, while the official reports that come from the psychics is a compendium of their responses, there is also a report that amounts to a break in that consensual reality that amounts to a minority report and which gives a slightly different version of events. In the state of affairs envisioned by the movie, reality would become a series of temporal loops, registered and monitored by the state, with the ability to intervene, ostensibly to prevent destruction of life. But as Walter Benjamin once remarked in another context, once the dominant discourse wins out completely (as it always does since there is always a dominant discourse), 'even the dead aren't safe.' The fleeting feeling I often have on social/political/cultural matters is that we have inherited a vast almost-disintegrated machinery of warring histories, a warfare that still goes on, even in folks backyards as it were. The victors have been fairly consistent over the past few thousand years but, as the saying goes, the past is not dead, it's not even past. As Philip K. Dick was fond of repeating in his later novels, 'the Roman Empire lives' and lives on through our own lives. If that is true in at least some ways which are incontestable, then the idea that there are gnostic heresies, for lack of a better word, must also be plausible. The conquering empire has not yet conquered everything; somehow, hegemonic powers carry within themselves their counter-parts, swept up in a millennia old dance of power, doubled speech, in a dyadic swirl through time (much like astronomers now speculate that most stars are linked to a double. Movies seem to inevitably bring in their wake such speculations since a movie IS in its essence a 'special effect', a perturbation and modification of 'natural' perception and apparently always a modification towards what Marshall Mcluhan proclaimed as a bodily extension or a doubling of the human organism. The very light in 'Minority report' seemed to ooze metallically from another dimension, spraying and lighting up in a cold gleam, quite unlike the autumnal seep of light in 'Blade Runner,' the film most cannily allied with 'Minority Report so that the carriers themselves stack up, double, comment on. It will perhaps be the case that the gods come back to us on the screens of our technologies, inhabiting that gnostic realm where bodies are woven of every form of light, projected and absent but also oddly … present. |
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