Choke on a DeathCam

Click for the presentation:

Choke on a DeathCam

Choke Presentation

***ATTENTION***

On Tuesday (03, Nov, 2009) I will be giving this presentation on Chuck Palahniuk’s Choke. Just for the heck of it, the presentation will be available and published at the same time, when the class begins, that is at 1200.

A link will be provided, which will either guide you to the presentation or -if i can work it out- the presentation will be found here @ drugsinmilk.

thanks for listening!

The guiding f(l)ame: Lady Gaga at the drive-in

I want to make some notes on Naught Thought’s post on Lady Gaga, concerning the always maddening and always mad nature of fame.PArtly because, I have been preparing for a post dedicated to LG, and because I saw her upcoming album’s cover.

Lady Gaga has been a success to producers; and since downloading statistics are recorded, LG’s “Pokerface” (or “F*ck her face”, as some would hear it in the chorus) has been No 1. song that’s been downloaded.

“Pop (my note: and maybe fame) ate my heart [...] like a beautiful monster” –as she confesses , resulting in her, being a grudge-like figure on her upcoming album’s cover, entitled: ‘Fame Monster’

Her faming ‘death’ , or murder symbolizes the two sides of the Lacanian curse: ‘Be careful what you wish for!’ The drive for fame -as all drives in the Lacanian sense-is destructive, a death drive as LG’s new album cover implies. In this situation, the masochistic approach to drives , e.g drives circulate around a goal, changes from ‘making oneself to be seen’ to ”making oneself to be seen -dead.’ (more info: The Circuit of the Drive ) This is the point of  recent interest of LG, as she said:

Gaga further explained that she was obsessed with monster movies then and “I’m kind of obsessing over the decay of the celebrity and the way that fame is a monster in society! That’s what my new record is about, so it was kind of a perfect fit.

 

 

Is there a fringe in the story?

****SPOILER WARNING****

The most horrifying moment in the first Saw movie was of course when, at the end, we get to know that the corpse lying on the floor is really the living Jigsaw. Following the traditional receipt of classical mystery story, the first Saw movie seems to play a conscious play with what Donald Kunze calls ‘teleological hinge’. ‘This device is what manipulates spatiality within any kinds of fiction: the effective use of time and space is crucial.

Within the diegetic reality, when our spectatorship is disturbed, just as in the case of Saw,  we have to re-construct our ‘frame’ in order to even out the disturbancs and let us enjoy the show. This is a common cinematic device, to use these kinds of internal frames, or teleological hinges. What immediately comes to one’s mind is what Lacan said about the free play of signifiers, the inconsistency of meaning. That is there is never an ending proper in the text.The same cinematic device was used in the show (Fringe) that kindly piqued my interest in the paranormal (maybe, because i haven’t seen too much X-Files). This show had a weak, but intriguing pilot episode, in which two FBI agents (man and woman) fall in love with each other, and the man acquires an airborne disease that induces coma. At the end of the story, we acknowledge that the agent was infected by someone who had interest in spreading the disease and with whom he had previously had common business. 

Both the Saw and the Fringe pilot episode prove the return of the impossible -Real, e.g we cannot believe what we see, we are left contemplating who the insider from the FBI can be, when it is made obvious that he was all along in front of our eyes.

The postmodern gist in the Fringe episode is the following: the only way Olivia Dunham can catch the bad guy is through the agent’s mind in coma (á la The Cell). The body of the FBI-agent in coma is transparent, implying a system, where the Žižekian subject is thrown into (in the figure of the woman agent, Olivia Dunham). According to Žižek, there is a move from the modernist culture of calculation to the postmodernist culture of simulation. The term ‘transparency ‘ gives the indication of this move. Olivia Dunham has to find her way through the agent’s mind, just like one has to find their way in the postmodernist cyberworld (that are not regulated by logical or rational rules). Žižek moreover propses the very proper question: what if our phenomenological sense of the world is another interface, another IRC (Internet Relay Chat) world? Or our consciousness is a frame through which we perceive the universe, as a kind of interface?

The phenomenological play with the frames is best shown in the Buster Keaton movie, Sherlock Jr. (1924) where our main hero has to travel through scenes – mediated between real life and diegetic reality – to get his lady back.

Semiotica Agriensis 2009

With almost 100% certainty, I’ll be at the seventh Semiotica Agriensis in Eger, Hungary. My topic tackles psychoanalysis, schizophrenia and Chuck Palahniuk’s Haunted and the (rather-exploited story of) Fight Club, under the title of The elusive logic of Haunted and Fight Club: A Lacanian journey into the semiotics of Chuck Palahniuk’s fiction.

When in Fight Club, Jack realizes Tyler, being his “other”and schizophrenic self, this actualization takes place from an external position. It is an openly lacanian moment: we define ourselves from an external agency (i.e Big Other). Tyler ex-sists, being the embodiment of Jack’s repressed (and most-inner) desires. This repression requires that external (id-)entity (mind you that this play with the words is inevitable: what we repress dwells in our id-s) re-defines the subject, hence the elusive logic.

The concept of elusion develop

ed by the Scottish psychiatrist, R. D. Laing talks about an external, imagined self- position from which the subject can imagine his original self back.

“If this is your first night , you have to fight”

This friend of mine, he waits months under a black cloud, waiting for his folks to confront him. And they never do. Ever. Even now he’s grown up, that invisible carrot hangs over every Christmas dinner, every birthday party. Every Easter egg hunt with his kids, his parents’ grandkids, that ghost carrot is hovering over all of them

At this point, two announcements have to be made: 1, this blog has reached its 100th post, which is amazing and 2, my ongoing “research” – which is in its initial phase- has set out to deal with the new media relevance of the often entitled postmodernist and minimalist American transgressional fiction writer, Chuck Palahniuk the author of Fight Club, Choke and Haunted ; and Lacanian theories being applied to his works.

Palahniuk, who describes himself as a romantic writer, whose characters seek acceptance from other people, has created worlds of killers, people sufering from mommy/daddy issues, perverts and castaways.

As there have been zillions of (e)-documents published on Fight Club discerning issues, like

- masculinity/(fe)male body/schizophrenia/interpellation-deficiency in Fight Club etc., I would be interested in how we can see Tyler as a sinthome or how the Symbolic Other creates a paradox situation, as Paul Kennett wrote in his “Fight Club and the Dangers of Oedipal Obsession”.

Moreover Palahniuk’s site entitled “the Cult” has been the source of inspiration for yet unknown writers, on YouTube users have generated fan-based videos for Palahniuk books (more of it in Hungarian and example here.)

And if You are interested in what an invisible carrot is good for, please read “Guts” by Palahniuk.

Fight Club and the Dangers of Oedipal

Obsession

summer 2009

Dear Visitors! drugsinmilk has gone on holiday.

Hopefully, it will be back on 10 August, 2009

Contract with the (Pervert) Other

What Žižek tells us about the anxiety of the Other in his Welcome to the Desert of the Real seems to be working in the staggering Milos Forman movie: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. What is this about?

In his seminar on Anxiety, Lacan designated the true aim of the masochist: it is not to provoke jouissance in the Other but to generate anxiety. That is to say, if the subject acknowledges/admits his submissive position in the game, he also wants to make the rules and precisely this rule-making act is what makes the Other anxious: just think of the “innocent” rape fantasies.

For example in the movie, Choke a woman gets her desire fulfilled by meeting up strangers telling them the script (i.e how she wants to be “raped”) in great details- she admits her submission, but it is exactly which gives her the upper hand during the “play”. The Other might find the situation hard to control, that is why, for example in this movie, Victor leaves the room, being perplexed by the exact wishes from her.

In another recet reading of mine, The Collector, we can also recognize this pattern: the castrated character Frederick willingly admits his inability to cope with his dream having come true- hence the Lacanian “curse”:  we should be aware what we wish for, it might come true.

In the Forman movie, these mechanisms of setting the rules by the lunatics shows the growing tension and anxiety within the staff, precisely because their professional reaction to subversive elements such as McMurphy only involves ECT ( abbr. for electroconvulsive therapy). The method might mute the deliquent to a braindead state, but this is exactly what impotent person does: they annihiliate the weaker to prove his potency, no matter what. This is the most-inner fear of the staff: the ECT-machine embodies their inability to cope with the ‘lunatics’. Instead of curing therapy (think of how Billy’s stuttering stopped after a night spent with a hooker), the choose a pervert method of humiliating attitude towards the inmates.

Within this heterotopia (Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution, Pendleton, US-OR), we can see the weakness of the medical Other: the  the able body is the image of the Other, here, are the ‘lunatics’ and ‘perverts’ different from Nurse Ratched – whose name refers to ‘wretched’?

Choke (2008)

It would be pointless to talk about the movie version of Chuck Palahniuk’s Choke along with Fight Club, precisely because if two movies are from the same author, it doesn’t necessary require drawing analogies between them. Nevertheless, i can’t help noticing the presence of the group therapy and the derogating illustration of sex and the main character  as a socially incapable person, an urban misfit, a deviant hero of our time.

Choke also tackles mummy-daddy issues, the inability for anchoring down to a partner possibly  stemmed from the lack of a normal childhood (i’m being really superflous here- what is “normal”?)

What I did like about Palahniuk is the originality around which he constructs his stories: the idea of choking and how it is played out, the the setting of colonial America etc…

Donnie Darko & his incompossible worlds

When I re-watched Richard Kelly’s 2001 cult movie, Donnie Darko, the movie was more compelling, than the time I last saw it, which was..hmm..some 8 years ago. Anyhow, the question is still lingering around:  Isn’t Donnie Darko the visual representation of he logic of Borge’s  The Garden of Forking Paths (1941)? I took a seminar on Digital Theory and quite interestingly this concept of  ”the garden”is what many dynamic medium use (wikipedia.com or we can say that even the Internet itself is what the intertextuality per se). To escape from general assumptions, let me reflect on the incompossible worlds, which is a groundbreaking idea in the history of cinema, yet, we are unable to accomplish to entirely visualize this idea. (and some parts of me say, we will never be able to do so). Deleuze’s and Leibnitz’s approach to the notion of free will and predestination could be used in New Cinema, as well.

David Norman Rodowick in his “Deleuze’s Time Machines”, talks about the possibility of a naval battle to illustrate the notion of imcompossible worlds, but I found a better example:

Think of a machine that can take you back in time August 2001 and you warn the authorities what is gonna happen in September. The chain of events will justify you (let’s just skip the scenario, when thorough investigation will be made to clarify your innocence, i.e how the hell did you know this information) and finally the attach does not take place. Mission accomplished, now, you wanna get back where you freakin came from. But that place is a place where 2001 doesn’t take place, a totally new space. What happens to you? Where you came the attach did take place, therefore that place does not exist anymore! Because of you have changed the entire history of the world (not just yours!) your action induced-theoretically-an alternative reality, where the WTC stands and one where it doesn’t. This theory is stemming from quantum theory, where EVERYTHING is possible. These two places is what I see to be  an example of the incompossible worlds. This highly adoptable theoretization belongs to Keith Mayes, thanks to him!

Now as time travel is in the game- which is one of the central themes of the movie -it is high time to talk the fictitious book of Roberta Sparrow’s “The Philosophy of Time Travel”. The book -along with Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time”- refers to the Einstein- Rosen Bridge Theory. It discusses a quite astonishing question, concerning free will. From some characters’ navel area a jelly-like lightning comes out, designating his path.  Donnie, being able to see this can question his own free will or what God pre-decided for us.

Donnie Darko provides the possibility for presenting two alternative worlds for the viewers, the idea of which could be a useful and feasible for New Cinema.