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The veiled screen: uncanny crystallizations in the moving image

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The veiled screen: uncanny crystallizations in the moving image

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Content The Veiled Screen Uncanny Crystallizations in the Moving Image by Guillermo Rafael Rodríguez-Romaguera A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (COMPARATIVE STUDIES IN LITERATURE AND CULTURE - COMPARATIVE MEDIA AND CULTURE) December 2017 Copyright 2017 Guillermo Rodríguez-Romaguera ii For James Baca. I could not have done this without you. For my parents, Teresita Romaguera and Cholo Rodríguez, And my siblings Jose Rodríguez-Romaguera and Patricia Rodríguez. iii Acknowledgements This project owes its bones to the guidance of Julián Gutiérrez-Albilla, its heart to the mentorship of Sherry Velasco, its organs to the collaboration of Anna Krakus, and its soul to the inspiration of Akira Mizuta Lippit. It also owes its flesh to Erin Graff-Zivin and Roberto Díaz who contributed a substantial part of the DNA for this hybrid project. It is truly a Frankenstein creature forged in lunacy and passion that breathes life thanks to the tutelage of these six incredibly generous minds. I also want to thank Peggy Kamuf, Laura Isabel Serna and Dianna Niebylski, whose laser-sharp eyes aided in carving many features embedded in its physiognomy. I owe my sanity to my colleagues Erin Mizrahi and Jacqueline Sheean who provided much support and feedback along the way. I also wish to thank the Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture doctoral program at USC for their financial support of this project. The research and writing of The Veiled Screen was also funded in part by the USC Graduate School Endowed Fellowship, an advanced fellowship awarded to outstanding Ph.D. students with compelling research projects, and the Del Amo Foundation, who provided funds to travel and conduct summer research in Spain. Part of Chapter 1 will appear in the forthcoming article: “Hermetic Space as Abstraction of the Mechanisms of Censorship: Symptomatic ‘Archive Fever’ in Carlos Saura’s La madriguera” in Bulletin of Spanish Studies. Part of Chapter 2 appeared in an article entitled: “‘Y te sacarán los ojos’: The Defiance of Reconstituted Sight in Dictatorship and Post Dictatorship Spanish Cinema,” Studies in European Cinema 13.2 (2016), 119-133. Chapter 6 is a substantial revision of the forthcoming article: “The Quixotic in Horror: Self- Generating Narrative and Its Self-Critical Sequel in Wes Craven’s Self-Reflexive Horror Cinema” in Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America. iv Table of Contents Dedication ii Acknowledgements iii Table of Contents iv Abstract v Introduction The Screen is The Brain 6 Chapter 1 The Confined Spectator: Striped Minds in Hermetic Spaces 22 Chapter 2 The Blinded Spectator: The Defiance of Reconstituted Sight 50 Chapter 3 The Conscious Spectator: An Intermedial Contemplation of Las meninas 89 Chapter 4 The Spectral Spectator: The Visor Effect in Film 107 Chapter 5 The Crystallized Spectator: The Spectator’s Double in the Cinematic Abyss 131 Chapter 6 The Self-Reflexive Spectator: The Quixotic in Horror 164 Chapter 7 The Delusional Spectator: Meta-Film as Virtual Oneiric Simulation 193 Conclusion The Screen Unveiled 225 Bibliography 231 v Abstract This dissertation theorizes how thinking can be generated through the act of film spectatorship. It explores instances in which cinema reflects the thoughts of those who place themselves in its presence by generating uncanny self-reflexivity. By basking in audio-visual art that seems to mirror their own position as viewers, spectators are able to engage with film as a simulation of their own potential mental images as if cinema was thinking for them, with them, as if by them. This active engagement with film has the potentiality to transform reality by summoning hidden thoughts within the spectator to a conscious level. The project illustrates this spectatorial engagement through a variety of comparative visual and textual examples that range from Spanish cinema’s role in Spain’s transition from dictatorship to democracy to the relationship between postmodern American horror films and Don Quijote. The concept of an uncanny crystallization, an idea that imbricates Freudian psychoanalysis with Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of cinema, is at times extrapolated from the central relationship between viewer and film at the core of the argument to observer and artwork in the case of Diego Velázquez’ Las meninas or reader and novel in the case of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quijote. Even though its primary focus is cinema, this dissertation initiates a broader theory about the role of art in shaping the mind not by limiting it to the confined worldview delineated by an artist but by opening up potentialities of thought that can liberate it precisely from the limits of the frame, the page or the screen. 6 Introduction The Screen is the Brain “Parrhasius, on the other hand, exhibited a curtain, drawn with such singular truthfulness, that Zeuxis, elated with the judgment which had been passed upon his work by the birds, haughtily demanded that the curtain should be drawn aside to let the picture be seen.” - Pliny the Elder, The Natural History In an interview with Cashiers du cinema, Gilles Deleuze famously proclaimed that “the brain is the screen” and that “the biology of the brain” has more to offer to the connection between “spiritual life” and film than psychoanalysis and linguistics as “cinema not only puts movement in the image, it puts movement in the mind” (Deleuze 2000, 366). Just as written signs prosthetically transmit thoughts from author to reader in a literary text to suggest to the reader an uncanny transcription of his or her own thinking, the screen acts as the double of the brain’s activities as much as the brain seems to duplicate the screen in motion, a recursive mise-en-abyme in which the spectator falls into the abyss between thought and image. The Veiled Screen: Uncanny Crystallizations in the Moving Image engages the literary theme of the doppelgänger through cinema, beyond the uncanny duplication of the self in the Freudian literary sense and towards Deleuzian crystallization within the film of the way in which film uncannily duplicates human consciousness. It also illustrates how horror in this medium symptomizes the mental repression of film spectators, including those contending with traumatic events under totalitarian regimes in Spain, Latin America and Eastern Europe, and proposes we view cinema as an uncanny duplication of the workings of the brain – a doppelgänger to human thought. Through this doubling, film can also generate a resistance in the viewer against his or her own constrictive condition, not only to liberate the body from its restrained physical state, but to unleash synaptic associations within the brain 7 that cannot be controlled by outside forces as they remain impermeable to the state. The Spanish, Latin American, Polish, Canadian and American trans-generic films analyzed in this study seem to step out of the diegesis and engage the viewer metafilmically in polyvalent and experimental ways. These cinematic texts are explored in conjunction with Spanish seminal literary and visual works that also deploy metareferential techniques such as Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s surrealist short film Un chien andalou (1929), Diego Velázquez’ baroque painting Las meninas (1656), and Miguel de Cervantes’ El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha (1605, 1615). Employing the lenses of critical theory, psychoanalysis, surrealism and horror, The Veiled Screen seeks to comparatively elucidate the uncanny encounter of the spectator with these cinematic mise-en-abymes across differing socio- cultural contexts by applying an intermedial approach in which text, painting and the moving image overlay to illuminate the spectator’s position in front of the screen. Referencing how Parrhasius’ ‘painted veil’ deceived Zeuxis into believing it concealed something underneath (as described by Pliny in Naturalis Historia), I propose we view cinematic artifice as a veiled screen that draws viewers to believe in celluloid’s life-like illusions not as reality but as a reflection of that which lies hidden within their own minds. It is a simulated encounter with thoughts yet unformed or buried deep within our subconscious that we recognize as our own as if one were looking at one’s own reflection in a mirror. The first chapter, titled ‘The Confined Spectator: Striped Minds in Hermetic Spaces,’ juxtaposes Buñuel and Dalí’s emphasis of objects and space in Un chien andalou to depict how institutional structures confine irrational desire with a theoretical reading of Carlos Saura’s understudied La madriguera (1969) to elucidate how the director’s comparable use of anachronistic objects and claustrophobic space unveil the mechanisms of censorship affecting the Spanish spectators of the 1960s. By imbricating the concepts of archive, allegory and memory, the chapter 8 explores how space and performance interact to dispel any notion of chronology in the sealed domesticity of Francoist Spain. The second chapter, titled ‘The Blinded Spectator: The Defiance of Reconstituted Sight,’ focuses on Spanish films made at the end of the Franco dictatorship and under the subsequent democratic period as they echo the famous opening scene in Un chien andalou where Buñuel sliced the eye of a woman with a razor. It compares the child protagonists from The Spirit of the Beehive (El espíritu de la colmena, Erice, 1973) and Raise Ravens (Cría cuervos, Saura, 1976) and how they process the violence removed from their sight to the main characters in horror films from the democratic period that deal with the defiance of sight in a direct way, Bigas Luna’s Anguish (1987) and Alejandro Amenábar’s Thesis (Tesis, 1996). The chapter also examines Lucrecia Martel’s Argentinean film La mujer sin cabeza (2008) as a film that prevents the spectator from seeing the horrors its title suggests, hence eviscerating their capacity to face its violence, in order to mirror the nation’s pervasive blindness to the disappearing bodies during the Junta years. The third chapter, titled ‘The Conscious Spectator: An Intermedial Contemplation of Las meninas,’ provides a detailed critical exploration of Diego Velázquez’ 1656 baroque painting Las meninas as an epistemic, auratic, and self-reflexive work of art that prefigures the prosthetic elements of cinema in its fusion of two perspectives into one stereoscopic vision, thus representing the very illusion of the three-dimensionality of human perception. The fourth chapter, titled ‘The Spectral Spectator: The Visor Effect in Film,’ engages in an intermedial reading of the ‘visor effect,’ a key concept in Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx intertextually borrowed from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, to theorize film spectatorship as a simulation of temporal dislocation and spectral ubiquity. Through close readings of key scenes from films by Krzysztof Kieślowski, David Lynch, Pedro Almodóvar and Spike Jonze, the 9 chapter threads a theoretical discussion of how film can simulate a spectatorial hauntology in which spectators disrupt the diegesis “without being seen” by its characters. The fifth chapter, ‘The Crystallized Spectator: The Spectator’s Double in the Cinematic Abyss,’ discusses Freud’s ‘The uncanny’ in conjunction with Deleuze’s varying crystals from The Time-Image to build the idea that the film screen is an abyss from which the spectator’s thoughts are uncannily duplicated. Through Deleuzian readings of Polish auteur Andrzej Zulawski’s French-German horror drama Possession (1981) and Krzysztof Kieślowski’s La double vie de Véronique (1991) and a Rancièrian reading of Fernando Pérez’ aesthetic redistribution of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) in his Cuban film Madrigal (2007), this chapter illustrates varying instances in which duality emerges within the diegesis to reflect the uncanny doubling of the spectator’s mental predicament as what is projected visually on the screen. Chapter Six, ‘The Self-Reflexive Spectator: The Quixotic in Horror,’ explores genre transformations in horror cinema through a close reading of how Quixotic techniques are echoed by contemporary filmmaker Wes Craven in his metafilmic reinvention of the horror genre with films such as Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994) and the Scream series (1996-2011). The comparison between Cervantes and Craven’s deployment of metafictive devices elucidates an active shift in consciousness about gender and narrative as they respectively unmask and repurpose the chivalric romance and the horror film, genres in which women have typically played a passive yet central role as damsels and victims. Through a comparison with the cave of Montesinos episode in Miguel de Cervantes’ second volume of El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha, the seventh and final chapter, ‘The Delusional Spectator: Meta-Film as Virtual Oneiric Simulation,’ fuses psychoanalytic, feminist and games theories to problematize the convergence of the oneiric with the metafilmic in Alejandro Amenábar’s Abre los ojos (1997) and David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ (1999), films that are self- 10 reflexive by taking place entirely in a virtual world its protagonists’ inhabit as if they were dreaming them. The links between cinema and spectator at the center of my project depict a reflective relationship in which the brain’s activities are virtualized through mediation. In some of the contexts of the various case studies I explore (Spain, Latin America and Eastern Europe), the presence of dictatorial censorship and its post-dictatorship echoes affect such a relationship as the filmmakers must not only contend with its limitations but also mirror their effects back to their respective audiences who are in turn subjugated by the physical and mental repression instigated by the regimes. In the pages that follow, I will attempt to illustrate how engaging with celluloid in such circumstances can illuminate our thoughts as much as our reflection in a mirror can reveal the contours of our visage. 1 1 This dissertation explores the relationship between cinema and spectator in fiction films, which begs the question as to whether there are any nonfiction film examples that could fall into the cinema of the veiled screen proposed in the pages that follow. The short answer is yes. One such film is Albertina Carri’s Los rubios (2003), an Argentinean self-reflexive documentary that follows the filmmaker’s investigation into her parents’ disappearance under the military dictatorship of the late 1970s and early 1980s. In her essay “Postmemory Cinema and the Future of the Past,” Gabriela Nouzeilles points out the metafilmic aspects of Los rubios by focusing on “the mirror effect created by the arrangement of the movie within the movie, looking for ‘Los rubios’, the equivocal parents,” that turns out to be “indistinguishable from looking for ‘Los rubios’, the elusive movie” (Nouzeilles 2005, 269). She also pinpoints three versions of Albertina Carri: author (the filmmaker outside the documentary), auteur (her presence as a documentary subject within the documentary when it depicts the documentary making itself) and character (played by an actress in the ‘reenactments’). These ‘selves’ that reflect upon each other seem to be approximations toward a reconstruction of the past via the generation left behind by ‘the disappeared,’ the offspring of the victims of the horrors 11 Ideology, Apparatus, Suture, Cognitivism and a Hispanist Intervention Before we proceed, it might behoove us to do a brief and incomplete history of other film theories that have come close to the ideas explored in this dissertation. In this necessary literature review, I will not refer to the theories I will deploy within the chapters as those will be reviewed within the text itself in relation to close readings of specific films. These include surrealism, psychoanalysis and horror; works by Laura Mulvey, Mary Ann Doane, Christian Metz, Slavoj Žižek as well as critical theorists such as Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze among many others. Instead, I will of the Argentinean dictatorship that escape representation. This insistence on keeping the term ‘los desaparecidos’ as opposed to victims or the dead (given the impossibility of an unveiling of cadavers, the end product, so the viewer - and the children of the disappeared - can hold witness and in a way have peace) reflects the absurdity of this process that Nouzeilles calls postmemory. How can Albertina remember her parents, their cause, and their demise when she was not a direct witness to any of it? The film starts as a search for the past and becomes “performative” and humorous as a way to repair the mourning that was lost (the loss of the loss in a way, another reflection of a reflection like the three Albertinas). The self-reflexivity employed by the documentary seems to reflect on the very nature of memory, its reproduction on camera, testimony and truth. Given that none of these are possible in the case of ‘los desaparecidos’ (the documentary can’t even pin down the true color of the parents’ hair, hence the title), these representations of “the unrepresented” by Carri are “the result of creative memory” which makes them, Nouzeilles argues, “‘true’ to the past” (270). Truth therefore is arrived through these mirror reflections established by the documentary- within-the-documentary (much like Hamlet’s play-within-the-play is used to get ‘proof’ that Claudius murdered Hamlet’s father). Truth (or, more accurately, some semblance of it) is arrived by pointing the camera back unto itself. In this project, we will explore how this works on fiction. What happens when it is applied to non-fiction (as is the case with Carri’s documentary) will remain a project to be explored in the future. 12 attempt to place my theoretical intervention in the field of film studies by discussing a few of its main threads as they relate to my project. It does not intend to cover all of film theory but the few strands that have in one way or another contributed to my arrival at the basis for this dissertation. Let’s begin with Jonathan Crary and the concept of vision before modernity. In Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the 19 th Century (1992), Jonathan Crary pinpoints a shift in the function of vision that precedes the advent of modernity by keenly examining what the camera obscura’s cyclopean interiorization of the world revealed about the pre-modern observer. The device encases the observer inside a dark room to illuminate him with a monocular reinscription of a single image. It literally lays out representation as an object to be examined on a tabula rasa. The observer in his chamber can thus touch the projection and objectively isolate it from its environment, like Johannes Vermeer’s geographer traversing land and sea with his fingers on the surface of a map in the painting The Geographer (1668/69) or his astronomer sifting through a globe with one hand in The Astronomer (1668). The Geographer (1668/69) The Astronomer (1668) 13 Vision before the nineteenth century was a metonymic exercise in which the observer could contain a representation of the world in the form of an atlas or a globe or a piece of it reflected in a dark room and study it as if he or she were God. What Crary seems to be suggesting is that vision was about the power to isolate and contain knowledge, as the camera obscura perfectly illustrates. It illuminates via single source an unquestionable reproduction of the outside world and allows its observer to contain it. What sets modernity in motion according to Crary is not the invention of photography but the reconfiguration of vision from being about the object observed, the whole world contained in a dark room, to being about the subject observing and the sensations that visual stimuli can imprint upon that which he or she sees. The afterimage, for example, in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Theory of Colours (1810) adds an element of temporality to the way in which our eyes and subsequently our brain take in the external world, throwing in a wrench to the idea of a purely objective and containable reality. No longer a thing one can behold in a dark room and shelf away like an atlas, what one sees is not just there objectively for the taking but a product of our own sensorial engagement with an exteriority via the illusory merging of dual stereoscopic perspectives (or 3-D vision). 2 This 2 Crary’s argument can be summarized in my experience visiting the Velaslavasay Panorama – an exhibition hall, theater, and performance venue in Los Angeles, California, featuring the only painted, 360-degree Arctic panorama created in the United States since the nineteenth century. The camera obscura in the venue’s garden was akin to entering a cave and finding on the floor an oracle that showed a vision of another space. It was about divine ubiquity, the power of seeing (even being) somewhere else without being seen. On the other hand, when I climbed the stairs up to the panorama, my senses were immediately engaged through suggestive changes in light and sound, altering my perception of my surroundings. It was not a window unto another space, 14 is a power that cinema comes to exploit in the twentieth century – the power to engage the mind through audio-visual stimulus and potentially change the way we think in the new ideological relationship established with the cinematic apparatus. In “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes toward An Investigation),” Louis Althusser defines ideology through a paradoxical interplay between several notions: that ideology is an imagined relationship of individuals to their conditions of existence, that it is material as it is reflected in actions, and that it has “always-already” hailed individuals as subjects since the ideology that rules our subjectivity precedes our birth. This a-historical, spectral yet embodied concept seems to be apt to also describe the relationship of the spectator to audiovisual representations of reality as worked through the film camera. For instance, Jean-Louis Baudry’s argument in his essay “The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression of Reality in Cinema” privileges the subjective relationship the viewer has with the apparatus of cinema rather than the representation. He writes: “the spectator identifies less with what is represented, the spectacle itself, than with what stages the spectacle, makes it seen, obliging him to see what it sees: this is exactly the function taken over by the camera as a sort of relay” (Baudry 1974-1975, 45) as “it is the apparatus that creates the illusion, and not the degree of fidelity with the Real” (Baudry 1992, 695). This is precisely what Dziga Vertov’s Man with the Movie Camera (1929) was exposing as it but an immersive experience in which I saw things that were not there but brought upon by the stimulation of light, shadow and sound. What I saw was partly manufactured by my brain as a reaction to the stimuli that changed over time as the light played with the painting. My observation is therefore not merely determined by the array of objects in front of me but by how I am seeing it and for how long. 15 makes the apparatus of a mediated cinematic gaze into the object of its camera in order to reflexively project its ubiquity of perception, thus illuminating its own tacit construction of subjectivity. It expresses the repression of the ruling ideology on the proletariat through the camera’s constant oppression of its spectator’s perspective, perhaps awakening the audience to the reality of ideological colonization and freeing the scope of what they see. The cinema of the veiled screen proposed in this dissertation shares this goal of revelation with apparatus theory as well as employing the self-reflexivity of the medium to achieve such a goal, but its spectatorial engagement is less pragmatic than Althusser’s concept of ideology as it relies on an uncanny encounter to elicit freedom of thought. My theory has perhaps more in common with interventions on how ideology is sutured within the fiction film. The system of suture, as explored initially by Jean-Pierre Oudart, is one where an ideology expresses itself in stealth. It does so through the illusion of the imaginary when it becomes the signifier of an absence as the “absent-one” implied by the cinematographic frame becomes filled with a character within the fiction. As Stephen Heath succinctly defines it, “Suture names the relation of the subject in the symbolic which is its join in the chain, its representation from signifier to signifier and its identification as one in the fiction of the sign” (Heath 1977, 74). For Daniel Dayan, what are sewed-in are the conditions of production, the apparatus of cinema invisibly pushing forward its agenda by speaking through the diegesis of the fiction, the diegetic character being “the ventriloquist of ideology” (Dayan 1974, 31). Therefore, the film conceals its ideological purpose by continually revealing a character in place of that absence that commands the frame – which the spectator mistrusts upon its appearance. Nonetheless, what is at play beneath the synthetic skin is a carefully constructed mechanism that is zipping up the narrative from the inside, giving the spectator the illusion that it is he or she who sews when in fact it is they who 16 zip that which the spectator ‘reads’ or interprets on the surface. Dayan describes it as “the function of transforming a vision or seeing of the film into a reading of it [and] introduces the film (irreducible to its frames) into the realm of signification” (29). Dayan equates that vacancy implied by the cinematographic frame with a ghost whose ethereality is the signified of the symbolic or imaginary character that comes to take its place as the next shot emerges. While it agrees with suture theory on the act of concealment at play in the fiction film, my concept of a veiled screen does not imply such a programmatic ideological purpose of shot/reverse shot but rather an invitation to think through that which is absent in the film as generated by an uncanny encounter with the images. The absence is not a semiotic signified but signification itself, an entirely new system with its own signs and meanings that appear as if they are coming from the film but in fact are being generated in the spectator’s mind. In his article “Against the System of Suture,” William Rothman refutes this semiotic binary of shot/reverse shot as replacing an absence in his analysis of Alfred Hitchcock The Birds (1963) by invoking a third perspective, that of the “view,” which dispels the notion of absence or ghostliness. He states, “no ghostly sovereign is invoked by the point-of-view sequence” but rather “the point-of-view sequence… manifests the film’s power of appropriating a character’s gaze without authorization” (Rothman 1975, 48). In my view, Rothman fails to construct a convincing argument against the suture Oudart and Dayan describe. Rather, it is Nick Browne in his detailed analysis of a sequence from Stagecoach (1939) that bridges the gap by introducing the ubiquitous nature of the spectator’s point of view, both literally and critically as his shifting orientation not only places him in different positions physically but also transforms his “approval or disapproval” of such perspectives. In “The Spectator-in-the-Text: The Rhetoric of Stagecoach,” Browne states that “identification… need not be with the character whose view [we] share, even less with the 17 disembodied camera… [because] the spectator is several places at once… like the dreamer, the filmic spectator is a plural subject: in his reading he is and is not himself” (Browne 1974- 75 ,115). His analysis of the relationship between Dallas, Lucy and the spectator in terms of how the suturing of the film operates reveals a much more complex engagement, one that is more Bordwellian as it takes into account a degree of cognition as well as the film’s structural enunciation. In his book Narrative in the Fiction Film (1985), David Bordwell makes a strong case for viewing cinema as a cognitive engagement between the mind of the spectator and the stimuli it processes visually and aurally. After dispelling mimesis, semiotics and structuralism as inaccurate theories for film spectatorship, he argues that “most productive is the assumption that the story action is in the spectator’s mind; it becomes a construction which the viewer puts upon configuration of stimuli” (Bordwell 1985, 14). Rather thoroughly, Bordwell breaks down how spectatorship is not merely viewing or seeing a narrative passively but “a constructive activity, involving very fast computations, stored concepts, and various purposes, expectations, and hypotheses” (32). What Bordwell describes is the interactive nature inherent to processing the narrative construction of a fiction film. For him, “narration is the process whereby the film’s syuzhet and style interact in the course of cueing and channeling the spectator’s construction of the fabula” (53). He spends most of the book exploring this interplay between plot (or syuzhet) and the style, whether it is through time manipulations and/or space construction, in divulging to the viewer rather obtusely yet actively the content of the story (or fabula). Film digestion for Bordwell is akin to building a jigsaw puzzle of a pre-existing full picture storyline through the implementation of intrinsic and extrinsic knowledge, meaning what the viewer brings to the table in terms of story construction as well as the pieces the film distributes piecemeal to provide the neurological 18 activation that enables the spectator to interact with the fiction. The problem with his cognitive argument is that it’s based mostly on classical narrative films and, despite dedicating a section to arthouse cinema with an intriguing detour into what he calls parametric narration (which we will come back to in Chapter Seven), his theory on cognition and cinema remains somewhat schematic and does not account for subconscious mental processes or the more sublime aspects of the artform. In his Poetics of Cinema (1995), 3 prolific Chilean filmmaker Raúl Ruiz strips down to the bone the hegemony of the “central conflict theory” (Ruiz 1995, 9) over contemporary cinematic narrative (the case with most of Bordwell’s film examples) as not only exposing the slavery of perception to plausibility (29) but also symptomatic of its own cyclical reproduction that can paradoxically both exclude and produce ingenuity. Copying does not have to be redundant, it can be copulative, procreating through reorientation, innovating through illumination, discovering through image augmentation like the impenetrable yet magnifying enigma at the heart of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup (1966). Ruiz rejects the empire of sense as prescribed by Hollywood’s classical code of protagonist identification and linear conflict resolution and proposes a poetics that attempts to pictorially suggest the invisible, reveling in the mysterious before it gets co-opted by the ministerial, and provides an immersive, dreamlike trance into that unconscious and invisible tapestry threaded behind the images, what he calls “the secret film” (109). He wants the spectator to enter a cinematic piece as it were walking into a mirrored labyrinth for the first time, guided by intuition not foreknowledge of cinematic conventions and expectations based on familiar codes, infused with the irrationality of dreams that serves as an unconscious splicer of lived fragments 3 Coincidentally perhaps, Bordwell also published a book titled Poetics of Cinema in 2007. 19 stitched together like Frankenstein’s monster. This oblique sub-engagement of a film goes beyond the “hypnotic point” (119) of the spectacle’s image consumption and operates on the uncanny encounter with images ‘already-seen’ as the materials of his proposed cinema poetics are subsumed and rethreaded from lived or re-appropriated imagery, accessing the potentiality of fragments against the smoothing illusion of numbing narratives. He sees in this hidden translucent quality the possibility of taking cinema off the graveyard of reasonable plots and jolting it back to life through “the logic of nonsense” (117) that guided Don Quixote from one maddening adventure to the next. This is the cinema that inspired me to pursue this project – the cinema of the veiled screen. The Uncanny in the Crystals of Time The merging of two seemingly antithetical theoretical interventions in film studies, Freudian psychoanalysis and Deleuze’s philosophy of film, lies at the heart of this dissertation, hence the term ‘uncanny crystallization’ in its title – a theoretical imbrication of Freud’s 1919 essay on ‘the uncanny’ with Deleuze’s ‘crystals of time’ from Cinema 2: The Time Image (1989) that will be discussed at length in Chapter Five. When analyzing case studies from both Hispanic and non- Hispanic cultures (and even beyond the national in transcultural co-productions such as La double vie de Véronique), an uncanny crystallization describes a spectatorial encounter with something recognizable yet foreign in the reflective spectrality of time simulated by the moving image. It is the moment our thoughts encounter their ‘double’ within film. Yet, it could also describe the juxtaposition of competing and contradictory theories I deploy in this dissertation, not only between Deleuze and Freud through their application to film but also between theories typically reserved for literature, such as Derridean deconstruction and the political philosophy of Jacques Rancière, as well as feminist interventions on film such as the theories of embodiment of Laura U. Marks and Vivian Sobchack and the alternatives to the Lacanian gaze suggested by filmmaker 20 Laura Mulvey and artist Bracha Ettinger. In Chapters One and Two, which focus on Hispanic case studies, there are uncanny crystallizations across time as covert film images operating under Franco’s dictatorial censorship become overt in Spain’s transition from dictatorship to democracy or are deployed obliquely in Chile and Argentina’s post-dictatorial perpetuation of its blindness to state terror. There are also uncanny crystallizations across politically opposing cultures, as we study in Chapter Five the uncanny presence of a classical Hollywood movie in a subversive film produced for the citizens of communist Cuba or the use of doubles to depict transitional and competing subjectivities between eastern and western Europe by Polish filmmakers exiled in France. And lastly, there are uncanny crystallizations between artistic mediums as the self-reflexive techniques of a baroque painting has echoes centuries later in the advent of 3-D cinema (discussed in Chapter Three), the first modern novel finds an unlikely heir in the postmodern turn of the horror film genre in recent decades (as argued in Chapter Six) and the logic of video games and virtual reality percolates into the postmodern aesthetics of Spanish and Canadian filmmakers (as we will see in Chapter Seven). The chapters build a theory on how cinema, and by extension other forms of art such as painting and literature, can simulate a double to our mental processes by depicting a veiled diegesis that appears to hide an extradiegetic reality that remains unseen by the spectator. The films I have chosen to discuss in this project all possess such a meta-referential construction of occlusion. They are veiled screens built to inspire in the viewer a desire to unveil a curtain that ultimately hides nothing other than a reflection of their own thoughts which are thus synthesized in the uncanny engagement with the artwork as if they were caught in a self-reflexive crystal circuit with the images. This is what I call an uncanny crystallization. We begin our journey with the first attempt at such a relationship between the moving image and its audience – the work of a 21 filmmaker and a painter that inspired a movement and continues to crystallize uncannily in the work of filmmakers’ today. 22 The Confined Spectator Striped Minds in Hermetic Spaces “There is not one mal d’archive, one limit or one suffering of memory among others: enlisting the in-finite, archive fever verges on radical evil.” - Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever Depicting Irrationality in Un chien andalou With Un Chien andalou, cinema delved into the mind as a mine for the art form for the first time, sacrificing linearity and pushing the eye to its viewing limit, literally and figuratively. It became an emblematic effort of the surrealist movement in the 1920s and spawned a series of revolutionary avant-garde movements in Europe and America. Nonetheless, Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s 1929 seminal short film “retains its importance while the works of the avant-garde have retreated into oblivion, or historical curiosity, or ridicule” (Aranda 1969, 64). The film connects with viewers in such a visceral way that its effectiveness surpassed its historical context and became an untimely source of inspiration. By addressing the spectator in a direct manner to trigger subconscious awareness and engage in a surreal conversation with the mind, it liberates the linguistic and social constraints of thought by depicting the cycle of repressed desire within us through strictly visual means. When initially screened, its success baffled the filmmaker himself, given that he intended to detach his work from being a novelty of the emerging avant-garde wave. In retrospect, he reflected upon its reception in his introduction to his published version of the scenario: “what can I do about those who seek every novelty, even if that novelty outrages their most profoundly held convictions […], about this imbecilic crowd that has found beautiful or poetic that which, at heart, is nothing other than a desperate, impassioned call 23 for murder?” (Buñuel 1995, 162). Buñuel’s intention appeared to be corrupted by the success of Un Chien andalou. Critics and intellectuals began to imbue the short with poetic beauty when his intention was more akin to incite, shock and address basic desires that lay essentially repressed under current societal and moral values. “His aim was not to please but to provoke” (Aranda 1969, 63), and thus Buñuel rejected any pleasing or superficial reading of the images. They are primal, disruptive, irrational but never conventional, harmonious or sublime. Buñuel and Dalí established a simple rule before commencing the scenario: “No idea or image that might lend itself to rational explanation would be accepted” (Buñuel 1982, 104). They wanted to express the latency of unfulfilled desires, their power in our behavior and their unconscious battle with civilized rules that were construed to suppress and imprison them. The film is structured around spatial and temporal discontinuities that serve Buñuel and Dalí’s manifesto on representing irrationality. Nonetheless, the recurrence of desires clashing against external societal barriers and self-imposed moral walls gives meaning and purpose to this apparently chaotic structure. The repetition and alternation of the musical selections, accompanied by recurring images and character behavior, enhance the theme of subconsciously processed desires that are at odds with the constructed reality and fail to be expressed externally. The film is precisely a representation of those inactive desires in what could be construed at first glance as the visual depiction of a dream. According to Buñuel, the language of dreams and its opposition to rational thought triggered the project from its inception. He states in his autobiography that Un Chien andalou came from an encounter between two oneiric experiences. While he dreamt that “a long, tapering cloud sliced the moon in half, like a razor blade slicing through an eye,” Dalí had a dream of “a hand crawling with ants” (Buñuel 1982, 103-104). The close-up of the sliced 24 eyeball and the ant-plagued hand are single handedly the two most memorable images of the film. Their vivid crudeness and confrontational presentation could be viewed as containing the premise of provocation that the filmmakers intended. Buñuel himself portrays the razor- wielding figure that mutilates the eye as an introduction to the film’s venture beyond conventional perception and into the primal nature of the subconscious mind. Therefore, as Linda Williams states in Figures of Desire, “the exploitation of the film’s resemblance to the dream image led to a new kind of film content: the film itself considered as an image- generating process of unconscious thought” (Williams 1981, 51). Nonetheless, according to Buñuel, viewers should be warned against digesting the film as a mere dream, since such a reading implies the unreal. Buñuel expounds, “Although I availed myself of oneiric elements the film is not the description of a dream. On the contrary, the environment and characters are of a realistic type” (Buñuel 1995, 250-251). Once again, Buñuel reacts against any metaphorical analysis of the imagery, instead promoting it as a sensorial-external execution of internally repressed impulses. He wants to provoke by making these latent mental processes look and feel real. As if it were a mirror, Buñuel and Dalí’s images reflect back to the spectator that which lies dormant within his or her mind, thoughts of desire and violence waiting to be triggered by the same external provocations they seek to emulate. They generate a cycle of reflective irrationality in an attempt to trap its precarious effects in between two opposing mirrors facing each other, the mind and the film, perhaps aiming to contain its noxious effects within their reciprocal exchange of images. Opening the Box of Repressed Desire The diagonally striped box stands out as one of the objects that recur throughout the film. In my view, it signifies microcosmically the theme of “circulation of desire” which Richard Abel refers to in his book (Abel 1984, 484). The box recalls Pandora’s curiosity in 25 Greek mythology in that it unleashes desires and triggers primal impulses in the characters, causing some of their shifts in behavior and/or identity. Its meaning, like every other figure in the film, comes about through a process of free association; yet it is one of the few objects that seem to reappear regularly in the random succession of logically unrelated elements. The motif of diagonal lines is also present in other objects that make their debut on the film simultaneously: “It must be noted that the rain, the box, the tissue paper, and the tie all are shown with diagonal lines that vary only in width” (Buñuel 1995, 163-164). These images are relationally introduced and duplicate in meaning as the filmic events progress: “What fascinates Dalí in paranoia is the way it invests the entire perceptual field with double significance: that of the objects themselves and their ordinary meanings and that of their repressed meanings” (Williams 1981, 44). For example, the ordinary meaning of a tie becomes an instigator of another Batcheff doppelgänger. It is an article of clothing, a dress for composure and self-restraint, that represses behavior but here brings about a younger, book-armed antagonist to the darker, impulse-driven primal Batcheff. The basic Batcheff ends up killing this antagonistic figure of civility and moral decorum, shielded by the organizational nature of books. Dalí’s “double significance” implies a reversal, the repressed becomes overt in Un Chien andalou and annihilates the instruments of façade in his external persona (literally throws them out the window) and his more repressed double. Are the stripes then imbued with a representational characteristic associated with the rules of society and morality? The ubiquitous box appears next in a scene involving Mareuil: “It should be noted that when the policeman gives her the box, she is overcome by an extraordinary emotion that completely isolates her from everything. It’s as if she were subdued by distant strains of religious music; perhaps music she heard in her earliest childhood” (Buñuel 1995, 164-165). 26 A new evocative power is attributed to the striped box in this instance of the scenario. Its effect on Mareuil is to evoke a sensory experience from her past, but it has a similar representational quality to its duplicating effect on Batcheff. The box once again implies youth and the institutional imprisonment of thought within society. For him, it’s the entrapment in an attire of composure; for her, a reminiscence of the submissive institutionalization of her beliefs through lulling music. The emotion “isolates” her; the books become his weapons for murder. Both transmigrations of images prove fatal. In his own scenario for the short film, Buñuel accompanies the action description of throwing these striped articles out the window with a sense of doom: “The box follows, along with the straps, which the patient tries in vain to save from the catastrophe” (Buñuel 1995, 167). Although such a sense of futility pervades the screenplay, the actual cinematic depiction adds a new layer to the role of fate in projecting the subconscious outwardly. It is now ruled by a randomness custom of our repressive mental processes, by “the sense of being absorbed into a universe in which the Cartesian coordinates of space and time, on which our whole thinking and culture are based, have disappeared” (Aranda 1969, 64). Since space and time have been extracted from the equation, the spectator is left to experience the subconscious in a visually provoking manner. Like the razor-slicing of the eye, his own mind has been intruded upon unwillingly and uncomfortably. Therefore, the employment of images as provocation for the eye is essentially a trigger for subconscious discourse. The effectiveness of Buñuel’s short film is due in part to the figures he chose to highlight cinematically, emphasizing them in closer shots and showing their role in the characters’ consequent irrational impulse. The characters in the film transform identities or shift objectives according to the irrational displacement of such desire unto new objects and spaces. In this dynamic lies the coherence of an otherwise illogical film structure, which 27 enhances the nightmarish repetition and frustrating irresolution of containing the desire within the confines of a striped mind. After summarizing the different critical perspectives on the film through the years, Richard Abel arrives at the core of the film’s central theme: “Dismemberment and disintegration mark the film on all levels – in the bodies of the characters that multiply and fragment, in the body of a narrative that fails to resolve itself, in the body of the meanings that refuse to cohere, in the body of the viewing subject whose desire is engaged and unfulfilled” (Abel 1984, 485). He explores the question of the film’s physiological effect on its own personages and answers a key premise which the film poses: that the disembodied feelings associated with repressing the basic nature of every part of your body eventually lead to personal disintegration, both physically and psychologically. Linda Williams in Figures of Desire adds to Abel’s assessment the fact that these effects are instigated not by the characters but by the film itself: “Un Chien andalou is a film composed entirely of visual formulations of (sexual) desires and fears. But these desires and fears are not anchored in a character; they are figures generated by film text itself - a text whose dynamics are modeled upon the rhetorical figures of unconscious thought” (Williams 1981, 51-52). Buñuel’s film works like a projector of real images enacting the conflict that occurs within the illusive subconscious mind. Figures such as the diagonally-striped box and its contents are highlighted through extreme close-ups and fetishized into objects of desire, whereas the characters of Batcheff and Mareuil act as mere deliverers of pure irrational impulses run amok through twisted time lapses and incongruently transforming spaces. They are subject to the whims of time and space as manipulated by the filmmakers, serving as pawns of an allegorical abstraction of how moral codes attempt to confine the mind’s primal urges against their illogical will. 28 Space and the Mechanisms of Censorship in La madriguera Building on this filmic inversion of objects and characters in Un chien andalou, a close reading of Carlos Saura’s understudied La madriguera (1969) elucidates how the director’s similar privileging of material and spatial configurations expose a hermetically sealed Spain under Francoism during the ‘apertura’ period of the 1960s. Saura’s use of claustrophobic space, foregrounded in the film through its protagonists’ self-imposed hermetism, mirrors the mechanisms of censorship as they affect the Spanish spectator of the 1960s much like Buñuel’s striped objects reflect the restraint imposed on our unconscious desire to unleash irrational thinking within the mind. The film reveals these mechanisms through a metafilmic language by self-reflecting in its domestic fortress, in the theater of its protagonists Teresa and Pedro constantly performing roles of a ‘time out of joint’ in the Shakespearian sense, recollections of childhood and virtual fantasies which have no place in the present that mirror the spectator’s own spatiotemporal displacement as viewers of the film. After a Mercedes Benz pulls up to what looks to be a granite fortress, Carlos Saura’s La madriguera opens with a tracking shot that reveals the massive grey structure to be the modern home of a young wealthy couple entertaining guests. The camera lingers on their patio looking through glass panels where a conversation unfolds silently within the house, as if it were an uninvited specter seeking access to the inside of both the house and the narrative. There is a sense that we as an audience are sealed off from the interior of the property. In the next scene, we are introduced to Teresa (Geraldine Chaplin) as she signs off on the arrival of a truck full of furniture that belonged to her family and instructs her servants to clear the cellar to allow space for the incoming antiques and family heirlooms. It is through that basement that the camera (and the audience hidden behind its gaze) enters the domestic – and hence the private lives of its inhabitants (if one were to think of film 29 spectatorship as an inherently voyeuristic act). Disrupting the mundane routine of the opening sequence, the film then dives into a Buñuelian oneiric sequence in which a young girl is awakened at an orphanage and ushered by nuns to meet what seems to be a statue of a petrified older couple in which the man is sitting at a desk while the woman stands beside him, an image reminiscent of the final shot of Un chien andalou where Mareuil and Batcheff appear motionless half-buried in the sand. The girl screams in terror as the film cuts to Teresa waking up from a nightmare in the middle of the night to the concern of her husband Pedro (Per Oscarsson). From here on, La madriguera unfolds as a series of hallucinations that plague the childless couple within the confines of their modern fortress as Teresa appears to be possessed by the presence of her family’s anachronistic material legacy. Slowly, Teresa’s sleepwalking excursions to the cellar in order to lose herself in childhood recollections amidst the belongings of her past lead to the replacement of the modern décor in the rest of the house with the antique fixtures stored in the basement. As Pedro joins in Teresa’s delusional engagement with her memories via the residual impression of old furnishings and uncovered mementos that take over their abode, the psychic trace of the past directs their present into theatrically performing not only an ‘impression’ of Teresa’s childhood experiences but what might arguably be a fantasy that has never occurred, as indicated by the role-playing of Pedro’s affair with an imaginary lover which Teresa acts out for his satisfaction. Invaded by the mnemonically charged materiality of these objects specifically attached to Teresa’s traumatic infancy, the house functions as the unlocking of an archived familial past that returns to demarcate not only the behavior of its owners as they get lost in role-playing games that eventually become indistinguishable from reality but also displace them spatially until their present, their presence, is no more. Paralleling how Buñuel and 30 Dalí’s diagonally striped box unleashed that which was repressed under societal decorum, this chapter seeks to unlock how Saura’s audio-visual puzzles in this film stage an analogous allegorical abstraction 4 of the role of censorship under Franco’s dictatorship as it affected the establishment of a fragile modernity in its late period while seeking to confine the minds of its dictatorial subjects as the country opened itself to the outside world. Hermetic Spain Following his exploration of mature characters stunted in adolescent behavior in Peppermint Frappé (1967) and Stress is Three (Stress es tres, tres, 1968), La madriguera marks the beginning of Saura’s exploration of adults who become infantilized through a conflation of past memory and present behavior – a trope that also works as a censorship-proof covert allegory of Spain’s flawed integration into modernity without having outgrown the cultural stagnancy that resulted from the lengthy political seclusion under Franco. Paralleling its theme of domestic isolation, the film was a box office success in Spain but failed to gain as much traction internationally as some of Saura’s previous films (D’Lugo 1991, 91). While his feature film debut Los golfos (The Delinquents, 1960) premiered at Cannes and his third film La caza (The Hunt, 1966) won the Silver Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival, La madriguera was released in France in 1979 (ten years after its domestic release) and is mostly perceived as prefiguring Saura’s more renowned 1970s oeuvre – The Garden of Delights (El jardín de las delicias, 1970), Anna and the Wolves (Ana y los lobos, 1973), Cousin Angelica (Prima Angélica, 1974) and Raise Ravens (Cría cuervos, 1976) which we will discuss in the next chapter. 4 By allegorical abstraction, I refer to the way in which films under censorship communicate subversive ideas about dictatorial repression through allegory. The concepts are hidden within the figures of the film, that is, in the characters’ relationship to each other as well as the objects and spaces with which they interact. 31 In these films, Saura famously deploys allegorical devices to explore how displaced memory precludes Spaniards from outgrowing their traumatic dictatorial infancy, but the understudied La madriguera retains in my opinion a unique place in Saura’s filmography for its specific treatment of matter and space to depict the limits of mnemonic recollection and its effect on the present behavior of its characters, a kind of revisiting of Buñuel and Dalí’s surrealist privileging of objects as the triggers of their characters’ irrational desires in Un chien andalou. The theatrics at play in the film between the couple, the house and the inherited old furniture and stored objects (filled with memory for its female protagonist Teresa) can be interpreted as an allegorical reflection of the negotiation between traditional values and modernization facing ‘apertura’ Spain. Sally Faulkner writes in A Cinema of Contradiction: “the coexistence of traditional and modern values following rapid industrialization and urbanization, and the timid acceptance of limited change by Franco’s authoritarian regime, are symptoms of the uneven modernity that scholars argue characterizes Spain of the modern era” (Faulkner 2006, 1). Faulkner’s use of the term “uneven modernity” can perhaps be further deepened beyond her argument of coalescence between new and old cinema practices in 1960s cinema if we view the regime’s censorial reaction to its own efforts of belated integration into modern Europe for economic survival as a reinscription of the anachronic, the traditional (as the furniture in the film signifies), into the inevitably progressive thrust of modernity pouring through this opening, this economically necessary ‘apertura.’ As Marvin D’Lugo stipulates in his analysis of the role the domestic plays in La madriguera, “one recognizes that the house is merely the façade of an illusory modernity intended to cover personal conflicts and contradictions of its inhabitants” (D’Lugo 1991, 86). Hence, La madriguera, as an allegorical portrayal of ‘apertura’ Spain, exemplifies how 32 allegory in subverting its true meaning to figuration manages to slip through the cracks of such censorship, as Saura’s aesthetic begins to adapt in order to pass unnoticed through the state’s censorship board. Román Gubern writes: “censorship restrictions helped to shape the very personal elliptical style of Saura’s powerful allegorical and symbolic films about the dictatorship” (Gubern 2013, 398). Like Buñuel and Dalí’s use of space and objects as the triggers of irrational desire in its characters to represent the impulses that lie beneath the façade of a mutually constructed civility, I argue that Saura’s use of claustrophobic space goes beyond a reading of the film as mere political allegory and suggests rather an unveiling of the process of mental confinement embedded in the mechanisms of censorship through a juxtaposition of the conditions of film spectatorship with the unquestioned agoraphobia of the film’s protagonists. As D’Lugo further writes in The Practice of Seeing, “the underlying strategy of The Bunker [his translation of the title – La madriguera] seems to be the gradual elaboration of the mental machinery of constraints and inhibitions that have constructed a trap within which the individual is immobilized” (D’Lugo 1991, 86). Therefore, the film’s meta exposure of the cognitive mechanisms that pin down the spectator’s body in his or her chair serve to allegorize the condition of unawareness of the censored dictatorial subject. Since “a major consequence of censorship was the creation of active spectators ever ready to read between the lines – sometimes imagining things that were not the case” (Gubern 2013, 391), La madriguera’s aesthetic perhaps educates the viewer to bring forth the hidden allegorical meaning to visibility through an awareness of his or her own narrowed perception of reality. As I will argue, the film’s visual construct, especially its deployment of dreams, instructs the spectator to recognize the artifice of a hermetic space through the exposure of its ultimately manufactured limits. 33 Imbricating Archive, Memory and Allegory Before teasing out specific sequences from La madriguera, let’s mix together the concepts of archive, memory and allegory as theorized by Jacques Derrida, Henri Bergson, Pierre Nora and Walter Benjamin in order to cement the groundwork on which to build our reading of Saura’s film. In Archive Fever, Jacques Derrida aligns the concept of the archive with a structure that is both domestic and authoritative, a house that orders not only spatially but in the sense that it ‘gives orders’ as to what can be contained within its walls and what must be left out, censored to an exteriority. He writes: “the meaning of ‘archive’, its only meaning, comes to it from the Greek arkheion: initially a house, a domicile, an address, the residence of the superior magistrates, the archons, those who commanded” (Derrida 1995, 9). The archive therefore materializes at a place in which knowledge is ordered, compartmentalized, assigned its place, and shelved for future use – as Derrida proceeds to imbricate the archive with the concept of the promise in Jewish messianism. In Derrida’s notion of the archive, memory can be something to which one has external access in a place where it was stored with the promise of a forthcoming extraction. Therefore, to archive is to consign memory processes to an outside. Likewise, in Matter and Memory, Henri Bergson places memory in the image of the object perceived rather than the body since “the brain is an instrument of action and not of representation” (Bergson 1998, 83). Therefore, memory can never be lost but rather the body’s mechanisms of recollection and/or sensory-motor habits are broken. Using studies on brain lesions, Bergson illustrates that losing a motor function such as the use of language (aphasia) signals a rupture in the process in which memory actualizes itself and not a destruction of the memory per se. If we coalesce Bergson’s appointment of memory to the material with Derrida’s domesticated archive, a memory-image when placed in an archive 34 succumbs to the authority of a domestic arrangement, a material space, with a promise to be accessed at a later date to be employed as action by the brain retrieving it. For Derrida, “It is thus, in this domiciliation, in this house arrest, that archives take place” (Derrida 1995, 10). The archive thus holds a power to deposit what it chooses, to consign within its walls, not only artifacts that serve the purpose of preserving history, memory contained in matter as Bergson proposes, but also the pairing of signs, the privileging of certain meaning over others, the weeding out of a corpus that is deemed canonical through its archivization. The archive can also be confused with the actual recollection of that which leaves the imprint on the material substrate, perhaps the memory attached to the object on which it impresses itself. As Derrida discusses through Freud’s reading of Wilhelm Jensen’s novel Gradiva (1903), in which an archaeologist becomes obsessed with the bas-relief of a woman he saw in a museum in Rome, the impression or imprint of a footstep, such as the one that haunts Norbert the protagonist of Gradiva, can become a memory, the pressure exerted on the stones in the living moment, undistinguishable from the mark it leaves, hence “the trace no longer distinguishes itself from the substrate” (62). In this sense, the object and the memory it invokes become one and the same in the eyes of the beholder through this perceptual interchangeability. Moreover, as Pierre Nora postulates in “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” memory in modernity is inextricably intertwined with the archive as it “relies entirely on the materiality of the trace, the immediacy of the recording, the visibility of the image” (Nora 1989, 13). If we imbricate Derrida, Bergson and Nora, the substrate, the matter upon which events impress themselves, can thus conjure the trace in a delusion that is as mnemonic as it is illusory. These are the perils of a history that annihilates memory in its archival compartmentalization and tends towards repressing events to oblivion through 35 exclusion. Therefore, what is repressed from the archive can also be what is forgotten through what is ultimately archived, since its remembrance is relegated to the material, to where the mnemonic trace is imprinted, and kept away from present access. This is what Derrida calls archive fever, a sickness propelled by an infinite death drive to demarcate a prosthetic finitude in the seeming harmlessness of a domestic encasing. Gradiva’s bas-relief that is housed in the museum yields a delusion for Norbert that is defined (given finitude) by the limitations of the substrate, both in that it excludes other material evidence of the woman’s impression and in that it guises itself as the trace of her gait, the re-presentation of her bygone footstep – that is, a bringing back into presence of that which has passed, or even yet, a return of the specter of the past in the perceptual present through material recollection. The bas-relief represents the gait in that it both stands for it as a signifier but also recalls it spectrally to the now in its palpable materiality. It presents it again to Norbert as present. It is here once more as it once was there on the substrate. The archive, like the biblical Garden of Eden, claims to house all necessary knowledge for its inhabitants. Stepping out from it is to succumb to temptation, a temptation of an exteriority, of a world beyond the order of the house, that results in the punishment of banishment, of exclusion, of oblivion, and ultimately hell. Conversely, for Derrida, by “enlisting the in-finite, archive fever verges on radical evil” (Derrida 1995, 19), meaning that the power to archivize, to delineate what is preserved and what is discarded as knowledge for the future, what is worth remembering, makes archiving a dangerous task, a task only God can have, that can spread like a deathly plague and result in evil equivalent to the genocide of the Holocaust. But as Walter Benjamin reminds us in his academically banished dissertation The Origin of German Tragic Drama, “evil as such, which it cherished as enduring profundity, exists only in allegory, is nothing other than allegory, and means 36 something different from what it is” (Benjamin 1998, 233). The allegorical here finds its origins precisely in Medieval Christianity that sought to annihilate paganism, the gods of antiquity that threatened the authority of monotheism, by binding all materiality, that is all knowledge that is inscribed in objects perceived, as the locust of evil in the allegorical figure of Satan. It is therefore in allegory where “this devilish essence of matter” (227) is both born as a conceptual threat whose dissemination is used as a weapon of socio-cultural domination (as the Crusades, the Inquisition and Nazism can all attest) and unmasked as an artifice from its inception, as it is “both convention and expression” (175). As Benjamin expounds, allegorical meaning is “an object of knowledge which has settled in consciously constructed ruins” (182). This association of allegory with decay, with the build-up of ruins, conjures the notion of archive as allegorical in that it conceals meaning by constructing its own structure of knowledge to become ruin in the future, an archaeological artefact to come. The archive might claim to erect a house of privileged knowledge for future generations to uncover, but in fact, if we imbricate Derrida with Benjamin, the archive can be viewed as a prefigured allegorical construction with deadly portent as it can spread like a fever, like a medieval biblical plague, and bring forth death and destruction to future generations (as it has always- already done in history), a radical evil that albeit non-existent other than in allegory can materialize quite destructively as the decayed, enclosed, and forcibly limited conventional knowledge that lays false claims to infinitude – to eternal truth. Laying Derrida’s notion of “archive fever” over Benjamin’s assessment of allegory, we will now engage in a close reading of La madriguera and how Saura’s use of spatial and material configurations disclose a hermetically sealed Spain under Francoism during the ‘apertura’ period of the 1960s when the state had presumably ‘opened up’ its cultural exchange with the world in an effort to reintegrate economically. We will begin by exploring 37 how the role of dreams within the film informs and mirrors the role of the viewers outside of it. The Oneiric Condition of Spectatorship At times in La madriguera, both Pedro and Teresa slip into dream states that they cannot distinguish from reality until they wake up. As we described earlier, the film unnoticeably cuts from its opening scenes to an apparent dream about Teresa’s childhood in an orphanage in which nuns wake her up to go meet a statue of what we come to assume are her dead parents. From this oneiric sequence onward, it seems like Teresa ceases to distinguish between what she is dreaming and what she is living, between what she unconsciously imagines and what she spatially embodies, as she continually appears to sleepwalk into the basement delusionally trapped in what appear to be childhood recollections such as the one she dreamed. Similarly, later in the film, Pedro wakes up from the antique bed Teresa brought up from the basement, in which they role-played sleeping beauty during one of her waking dreams. He walks into the bathroom to get a glass of water from the sink when he turns to encounter a tub full of living crayfish. Using a bassinette, he proceeds to pour the crayfish over Teresa’s sleeping body lying in bed as she writhes and moans in ecstasy. Then, he wakes up again revealing the previous scene to have been a dream, but as he goes to get the glass of water for real, he looks in the tub and sees it filled with crayfish just as it was in the dream. In both filmic insertions of dream sequences, the spectator is momentarily disoriented by the fact that the characters wake into the dream to then later wake out of it, bringing forth the question of what is real and what is imagined – a notion that parallels Teresa and Pedro’s subsequent purposeful loosening of their reality into an imagined existence through their role plays, whether it be Pedro’s fantasy or Teresa’s memory or perhaps the other way around. For instance, Pedro could be lying about the 38 imagined nature of his allegedly non-existent affair as the material existence of the black dress (and the subsequent intercut image of a woman wearing it while lying in bed) can verify. And the orphaned Teresa might have never had any memorable childhood interactions with her father. For instance, a crayon drawing and an obituary Pedro finds in an old drawer imply her parents perished in a plane crash when Teresa was too young to remember them. In any case, the puzzling nature of the characters’ dreams in Saura’s film – the indistinguishable nature between what is lived, relived or most likely imagined – mirrors the role the spectators’ play themselves from outside of the diegesis as they question not only what is real and what is fantasy to Pedro and Teresa but also the characters’ level of awareness between the two as they lose themselves in the roles they play more and more dangerously. Is the film therefore reflecting back upon the viewers their own engagement with the images, Saura’s cinematic fantasies for which they suspend their grip on reality in their immobilized and spatially restrained state? Is the film’s engagement with the oneiric a reflective trope of the semi-conscious conditions of spectatorship in which the spectator’s lack of awareness of his or her perceptual captivity by the film is allegorically unveiled as an abstraction of his or her own censorial subjugation to a totalitarian construct, to a manufactured archive of what is to be housed or thought of in the conscious chamber of the mind, a comfortably domestic and familiar arkheion, and what is to be displaced, excluded and discarded to the oblivion of the unprocessed unconscious – the outside of the inhabitable, of the materially palpable? One of the aspects of Sigmund Freud’s description of dreams is the condensation of the dreamwork as “exclusion of unnecessary detail” (Freud 2001, 17) as well as the repression of unfulfilled desires through the censorship applied by the dreamwork as it converts it into a digestible dramatization that provides the illusion of wish-fulfillment and 39 thus prevents wakefulness. Therefore, Freud posits the “dream as the guardian of sleep” (38) much like a film keeps its audiences hypnotically glued to their seats using picture editing to condense the narrative as well as subtextual nuance in performance to elicit an identifiable connection. For Christian Metz in his 1976 essay “The Fiction Film and Its Spectator,” this theory of dream creation has a partial analogy in spectatorship as film mimics a dream state in waking form since “the filmic state thus embodies in a weaker form certain economic conditions of sleep” (Metz 1976, 86) such as impaired motor functions and involvement with fabricated images. Following Freud, Metz carefully exposes how both in dream and in film viewing there’s a limited degree of awareness that ironically keeps the dreamer asleep and the spectator focused through minimal motor functions. He explores the limitations inherent in the comparison since “the degree of illusion of reality is inversely proportional to that of wakefulness” (79) for the dreamer, and a spectator is essentially embodying “the delusion of a man awake” (80) or what he defines as a paradoxical hallucination. Whereas the dreamer loses consciousness the deeper he sleeps and cannot dispel the illusion as such, the spectator retains the awareness of his waking state and therefore willingly basks in cinema’s fictional mirage. Furthermore, through a linking of cinema with the ‘allegory of the cave,’ Jean-Louis Baudry’s essay “The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression of Reality in Cinema” suggests Plato’s text to be historical evidence of the always-already conceptual existence of the apparatus on which cinematic engagement operates by interpreting “the allegory of the cave [as] the text of a signifier of desire which haunts the invention of cinema and the history of its invention” (Baudry 1992, 697). He goes on to link this immanent desire to psychoanalysis by comparing cinematic spectatorship to dreams, correlating its unquestioned illusion, motor inhibition and state of artificial regression. Baudry goes on to 40 conclude that “the dream itself, the visual representations which are projected upon it, would correspond to the desire to be awake” (701), which would imply that cinema operates on an aspiration for its own dissolution. It holds its audience captive like the prisoners in Plato’s cave, subjected to its materialization of an imaginary reality, perhaps effecting the prefigured ideology of an unconsciously ruling power, by obfuscating its construction through the illusion of movement. In its deployment of dreams that slip into and become indistinguishable from the diegetic reality of its protagonists, La madriguera exposes the oneiric-like state of the Spanish subject restrained by the mechanisms of totalitarian censorship to a somnambulistic reality. Therefore, the spectator’s willing enslavement to the influx of cinematic images reverberates in the self-imposed enclosure that Teresa and Pedro unquestioningly inhabit within the walls of their modern fortress of domesticity. Edenic Allegory, Archive Fever and Entropic Reversal With its hermetic setting and a childless couple as its central characters, La madriguera could be interpreted as a Garden of Eden allegory – where evil thus emanates from within, in that self-censorship, self-enclosure of the house the couple is not allowed to leave and where temptations emerge in the artifice of their play-acting with the material. In this regard, paralleling the implicit decree for immobility by the projection of images in a darkened theater (or perhaps the domesticity of a living room with a TV) that functions as the ‘cave’ for willing yet obliviously imprisoned spectators of an imposed cinematic ideology (perhaps as Adam and Eve were in the garden of Eden), the house and the inherited old furniture from Teresa’s family can be viewed as exacting an archival command over the characters as they not only dictate each of their theatrical re-enactments but also tempt them to relive the memories embedded in these anachronistic objects of the past. Therefore, these antiquated materials that arrive via shipping truck come to signify the Satanic temptation, a notion that 41 brings us back to the embedding of Benjamin’s notion of the containment of evil in Christian allegory with Derrida’s juxtaposition of archive fever with “radical evil.” Derrida describes this fever to store certain knowledge for future use, to restrict what is accessible at a later date for material recollection, as a dangerous symptom that perhaps augurs a fatal malady to come: It is to burn with a passion. It is never to rest, interminably, from searching for the archive right where it slips away. It is to run after the archive, even if there’s too much of it, right where something in it anarchives itself. It is to have a compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement. (Derrida 1995, 57) In La madriguera, Teresa is first plagued by an archive fever that manifests itself as somnambulistic regression, an unconscious desire to which she is powerless once the substrates that conjure her childhood like a waking dream project unto her surroundings a psychic phantasmagoria of imagined circumstances that return her psyche to its repressed traumatic origin. Just as Adam followed Eve, Teresa guides Pedro into her delusion, her passion for the archived past misconstrued by the presence of her parents’ antiques, a temptation to which they both succumb that leads to his self-extrication from the hermetic fortress of modernity as it is overtaken by archaic objects. Once Pedro excludes himself from both the sealed-off anachronistically diseased superficially modern abode and the cancerous artificial theatrics of his marriage (an arguably archaic institution in its own right), Teresa shoots him on his way out and in turn shoots herself within the confines of the house. Total annihilation is the end result of this radically evil fever that symptomatically expressed itself initially in Teresa’s irrepressible desire to not only return to her origin but also dissolve herself back into non-existence, as the furniture signify a time before her birth. 42 But the question remains: of what disease is this archive fever a symptom in La madriguera? What is this old spatial malady that takes over Teresa and Pedro’s fortress through mementos and fixtures? What is at the root of their disintegrating marriage? What is this regressive materiality devolving the modernity not only of the domestic space but also of the behavior of the inhabitants? I want to propose that it is the corrosive accumulation that results from the total repression of time by the artificial privileging of space as the only ruling power of the present, that is, the allegorical equivalent of paradise in the Christian sense – a place without end, a space that has conquered and annihilated time altogether. As Mary Ann Doane observes when teasing out Derrida’s Archive Fever though Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in her book The Emergence of Cinematic Time, “archival desire in an attempt to halt the vertiginous movement of mechanical and electronic reproduction” (Doane 2002, 222). Hence, in Doane’s own embedding of Derrida with (later) Benjamin, the feverish desire to put away certain knowledge for future rememoration seeks to reduce the progress of modern technologies in order to stop time itself from its forward machine-like thrust, a reminder of the entropic shriveling that signifies an inevitable death to come. It is a desire for an eternal pause in a certain space, a timeless preservation by keeping the past forever present in material substrates that refuse to be forgotten by remaining in the shelves of the domestic archive. Furthermore, she goes on to say that “the archive is a protection against time and its inevitable entropy and corruption, but with the introduction of film as an archival process, the task becomes that of preserving time, of preserving an experience of temporality, one that was never necessarily ‘lived’ but emerges as the counterdream of rationalization, its agonistic underside – full presence” (223). Therefore, as an answer to our above posed questions on the disease at the core of Saura’s film, what eats away at the permanence of the 43 archive, the massive stone walls of this Edenic domestic fortress that Pedro and Teresa inhabit, is the result of an attempt to reverse the Second Law of Thermodynamics that entropically balances the deterioration of the past with renewed energy, a recycling of old useless antiques into new materiality, by precisely annihilating that “experience of temporality” in a hermetically sealed space in which the opposite takes place. This reversal of the natural course of entropy thus dreams up an illusion of eternity, the artificial manifestation of presence without the corrosion of time through the persistence of past objects in present space. Film constantly phantasmagorically reprojects an archived past, as its images depict a materiality cinematographically captured in an otherwise forgotten anteriority. It is accessing a temporality, an experience of present time that belongs to the past. The celluloid itself is the substrate upon which a mechanically possible conjuration of a recorded memory is possible. It is the artificial possibility of ‘seeing’ the woman from Gradiva walking, experiencing her gait virtually as opposed to the mere mnemic suggestion afforded by the bas-relief substrate. In my view, Saura hints through his mise-en-scène in La madriguera at this counterattack space can theatrically enact against time that is only possible through the illusion of cinema. Meta-Performance and the Spectator’s Body La madriguera’s setting, the space, seems to delineate the story in opposition to the passage of time, its irreversibility, which is subsumed, hidden, within its allegorical trope of meta-performance as actors Geraldine Chaplin and Per Oscarsson perform not only Teresa and Pedro but also Pedro’s fantasy lover and Teresa’s father as well as earlier or possibly imagined versions of themselves. In Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, Judith Butler exposes the “implicit operation of censorship” (Butler 1997, 141) that is primitive to performative speech, to language itself, as an ultimately inefficient effect of state power in 44 the formation of its subjects because it ends up propagating that which is seeks to sublimate. She writes: The performative is not a singular act used by an already established subject, but one of the powerful and insidious ways in which subjects are called into social being from diffuse social quarters, inaugurated into sociality by a variety of diffuse and powerful interpellations. In this sense the social performative is a crucial part not only of subject formation, but of the ongoing political contestation and reformulation of the subject as well. The performative is not only a ritual practice: it is one of the influential rituals by which subjects are formed and reformulated. (Butler 1997, 160) Butler’s assessment of the way in which social performative speech conditions behavior from within, such as the one performed by Teresa and Pedro as they reenact (or reformulate in the present) their engagement five years prior in an effort to mnemonically manifest their dwindling affections prior to the subsequent theatricalization of their inevitable separation (and actual death), reflects the abstract way in which the mechanisms of state censorship obliquely operate always already in the way the unaware censored subject performs social rituals he or she unquestioningly attributes to his or her own will. The conflicting emotions Teresa feels as she directs the theater of both her past engagement to her husband Pedro and her future disengagement from their marriage stem not only from her growing frustration in being unable to discern when Pedro is performing an act and when he is revealing his true feelings about their relationship but also from her unspeakable realization that she is as equally unsure of her own capacity to discern what is true and what is pretense about herself. As D’Lugo keenly points out about the playacting in the film, “this game motif dramatizes on one level the deformed and suppressed communication between two individuals who, in their repressive social milieu, have become alienated from their inner selves” and “points outward to the no-less deformed system of visual and narrative allusion 45 Spanish cinema is forced to adopt in order to communicate with its audience” (D’Lugo 1991, 87). This meta-performativity within Teresa slips through the screen in Chaplin’s performance for the camera, reflecting onto the immobile spectator his or her own intrinsically censored subjectivity as a Spaniard under Franco’s totalitarian conditioning, as it indirectly invites them “to read their own regressive cultural experience into Teresa’s and Pedro’s actions” (89). Therefore, on one hand, the self-reflexivity evoked by the role play within the film serves as “conscious and overt” allegory typical of what Jameson calls “third- world national allegories” in which there exists “a radically different and objective relationship of politics to libidinal dynamics” since “the telling of the individual story and the individual experience cannot but ultimately involve the whole laborious telling of the experience of the collectivity itself” (Jameson 1986, 78-80, 85-86). 5 And, on the other hand, it strikes a meta-filmic nerve on the viewer who recognizes uncannily his or her own ambiguous relation to the role he or she performs socially within the hermetic confines of Francoist Spain. The metafilmic trigger of La madriguera resonates from actors Chaplin and Oscarsson through the characters Teresa and Pedro (and the roles they play within them) to a reverberation emanating simultaneously from within the body of the spectator as he watches. Despite his inert state in the theater, the cave to which he is willingly imprisoned for the 5 Although Spain is not technically a third-world country, it shares a legacy of socio-cultural repression with its Latin American progeny through its precarious dictatorial isolation throughout the twentieth century. Jameson even designates nineteenth century Spain as quasi-third-world by calling it “semi-peripheral” in relation to the rest of Europe when discussing national allegory in Benito Perez Galdos’ Fortunata y Jacinta (1887). See Fredric Jameson, “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Social Text 15 (1986): 65-88. 46 span of the film’s duration, the spectator becomes self-conscious of his or her spatial embodiment and thus aware of his or her unconsciously conditioned social performance through the meta-performative self-reflexivity of the film. Hence, the film echoes inside the body through a metafilmic vibration, as the spectator feels himself seeing and hence becomes a metonymy of Saura’s unfolding images. For Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the body is correlative to “a work of art” (Merleau-Ponty 2004, 174), and therefore perception is not necessarily sensed through ocular sight but through the way the body uses its motor functions and its sense of touch to perceive things tactically, akin to a “blind man’s stick[‘s]” transference of pressure to the hand as way of giving corporeal acuity to the mind of the object we come in contact with (177). This corporeal perceptivity, free from ideology and unbound from signification, comes in contact with our body in its awareness of its own spatial and motorized fleshed out materiality in pure, unadulterated form whether it be in the particular cryptographic rhythms of the novel, the inimitable brush strokes of a painting or the composition and editorial arrangement of cinematographically conceived shots in motion. Art has its vibrant skin, its mobile surfaces, its imprint, and its effects on our subjectivity as beings of flesh inhabiting the spatiality of our environment precedes and exceeds the subsequent colonization by words to reductive analysis or restrictive meaning. In my view, Saura achieves an unadulterated engagement with his audience through this metafilmic echo the spectator feels in the flesh that subverts the censorship exerted by the state on the artistic expression of political dissidence by exposing affectively the censorship encoded in social performance and therefore making the space in which the body feels itself embodied the source of conflict for the characters. It is the house that is invaded by the objects of the past, metonymically implicating our own bodies as substrates being taken over from within by the external echoes of a bygone utterance, a feeling imprinted in our 47 emotional bodily reaction to something once said but not by us – to us as if by us, to you through me, to you as me. The Spatial Repression of Time As D’Lugo declares in his analysis of the film, “the setting is the story” (D’Lugo 1991, 85). The objects, the furniture, the ruins of the past, take control of the characters and designate the roles they must play in a determined space. When formulating his concept of the “time-image” in Cinema 2: The Time-Image as the post-World War II inversion of the subjugation of time to movement typical of pre-war realist cinema, Gilles Deleuze writes: “It is this reversal which means time is no longer the measure of movement but movement is the perspective of time” (Deleuze 2005, 22). Therefore, in ‘watching’ movement within a single shot we have a direct image of time itself rather than an indirect representation through montage-generated action. Curiously, in the case of this film, movement seems to indicate a perspective on spatiality rather than time, on the mise-en-scène itself. Time seems to be taken out of the equation, suspended by the theatrics, and relegated to a hidden plane, an unconscious that both blurs the characters and the spectators’ awareness of time, as it passes-by uncounted by the characters immersed in their performative games and by the audience lost in Saura’s effacing of the film’s cinematic time. As Sally Faulkner points out when discussing the “idle periods” of Saura’s La caza (The Hunt 1965) as experimental “time- image” disruptions in a primarily “movement-image” classic film, time in this type of cinema can “transcend the tyranny of the present and space may thus become indeterminate and strange” leading the viewer to question their “perception of time, space and the body” (Faulkner 2006, 164, 163). If La caza finds Saura working mostly in a cinema of the movement-image with these occasional time-image interludes, then La madriguera reverses that balance as it primarily relies on the spatiotemporal disorientation of the “time-image.” 48 Watching La madriguera is like entering a black hole where time is repressed and matter gives existence its death drive, as the confines of Teresa and Pedro’s grey-stoned domestic fortress not only propels the games that lead to their psychological and eventual physical disintegration but also swallows all calendrical notions of time as days, nights and weekends mesh into each other when Pedro forsakes his own work schedule at the factory altogether. Movement is therefore circular and determined by space as opposed to time, as Pedro and Teresa move about the basement, kitchen, bedroom, living room and bathroom of the house enacting repeatedly in each chamber the possible past (or future) in complete disregard to whether its day or night, Saturday or Wednesday. In the film, the cinematic articulates a process of abstraction in which time, chronos, as well as any notion of chronology itself, must yield to the unruly redistribution of anachronic matter within the domestic space, of objects that dissolve chronology through their very appearance (or reappearance, as they are unearthed from that bunker through trancelike reenactments of childhood). The house, that domestic yet rigid and massive grey edifice, comes across the screen as something beyond allegory, in which typically the figuration of political circumstances occurs strictly through characters. More akin to Buñuel and Dalí’s surrealism, it is a kind of cinematic metallurgy that stands for the totalitarian Francoist ‘apertura’ re-structure that still annihilates progress, perhaps time itself – a repackaging of the nationalism that sealed off post-civil war Spain in autarchy now forced to assimilate a modern exterior for survival like a chameleon. This anti-chronology edifice creates a certain kind of subject through a performative conditioning that is the very condition of inhabiting such a space. Therefore, in employing such audio-visual alchemy in which old matter slowly redresses the modern space, the film meta-cinematically sparks the spectator’s awareness of his conditioned illusion of spatial realignment from the theater to a ‘time out of joint,’ from 49 the real to the virtual, as a mirror to the censored condition of subjectivity within the Francoist regime simulating integration into modernity. It might seem like Teresa and Pedro operate within a modern space, wearing modern clothes, but in fact, like Batcheff and Mareuil’s irrational response to the diagonally-striped box in Un chien andalou forty years earlier, they are subject to the will of the anachronistic objects underneath the foundation, inhabiting the basement with insidious intent to spread out unto the main floor and eventually take over all the rooms – as a cubist lamp is replaced by an antique crystal chandelier, the patio furniture made of metal and fabric replaced with a wicker set, and oval mirrors proliferate throughout the walls. 50 The Blinded Spectator The Defiance of Reconstituted Sight “Blind spots… demand an aesthetic of diffuse lighting, so that their forms acquire the indirect meaning of what is shown obliquely, of that which circulates along the narrow paths of recollection, filtered by barely discernible fissures of consciousness.” - Nelly Richard, The Insubordination of Signs Eye Evisceration Beyond Un chien andalou In the opening balcony scene of Un chien andalou, Luis Buñuel the filmmaker introduced unsuspecting spectators to a surreal journey into the repressed mind. Linda Williams expostulates that “the spectator’s identification with the character on the screen is ruptured by the similarity between round moon ‘sliced’ by clouds and round eye literally sliced by a razor” (Williams 1981, 27). Hence the dreamlike is abandoned for the visceral. The detachment implied in screen fantasy is quickly dispelled by a shocking confrontation with the fear of blindness. Such a reaction is achieved by employing a non-illusory profilmic effect: “Profilmic effects are special effects achieved before the actual shooting of the film... [and] differ from cinematographic effects in that the viewer experiences no sense of distortion or difference in the most fundamental process of the film medium: in the perception of the image” (Williams 1981, 49). This profilmic method brings out a reality in what could otherwise be a safe dreamlike rendering. In this case, the filmmakers slashed a dead calf’s eye in close-up to create the illusion that it was the eye of the unsuspecting woman in the final cut. The spectators share the fear of eye laceration. It is subconsciously ever present. Their role as viewers of Un Chien andalou makes the fear even more intensely relevant. It is also the inciting incident of the piece, giving way to further moments of intrusion, confrontation and provocation directed at the viewer: 51 As a narcissistic act of self-destruction, the eye-slashing sets in motion an unending cycle of repeated ruptures. In the final rupture (the ‘happy ending’), effigies of a man and a woman are framed in a grim still life - immobile, paralyzed, castrated. This final gag makes explicit what they have been all along the fetish objects of the spectator as voyeur. (Abel 1984, 485-486) In the end, the film reflects back onto the spectator their desire to watch and highlights the repressed impulse behind such a voyeuristic act on their part. The still life of the couple stranded on the sand reflects the spectator’s own immobile and powerless position upon seeing the images roll before their eyes, as we also saw in the dream at the beginning of Saura’s film. Just as Parrhasius deceived Zeuxis to want to see what’s underneath his painted veil, the allure of Buñuel’s film lies in its depiction of a horrifying reality that occludes reason and forces the viewer to reflect how logic and decorum has been draped over their irrational desires. Beyond its surreal representation of imprisoned desire seeking release, the film is also a provocation for the spectator to get up from their seat and peel off the screen to see what phantoms lay behind it. Ever since Buñuel sliced the eye of a woman with a razor in that opening scene through the profilmic effect of a dead calf’s eye, many filmmakers have strived to achieve its extreme visceral effect on the spectator, to which the works of contemporary filmmakers such as Alejandro Jodorowsky and Guillermo del Toro can attest. Un Chien andalou’s surreal depiction of irrational impulses can be viewed as the precursor of the modern horror film, a form of cinema whose audio-visual imagery attempts to leap from the screen and inflict virtual brutality upon its viewers. Buñuel made his film almost a decade before the onset of the Spanish Civil War, and was thus as yet unaware of the terror Spain would endure for the 52 next forty years under Franco’s regime. 6 But his unshakeable image of eye evisceration as a representation of the violence inflicted in the mind’s eye would recur in Spanish cinema decades later. Through a threaded discussion of four key films released as Spain transitions out of dictatorship in the 1970s and settles into democracy in the 1980s and 1990s, this chapter attempts to elucidate how visual echoes of Un chien andalou’s infamous eye slashing reoccur in scenes of self-reflexive horror that compel viewers to identify with the films’ female protagonists as they defy that which was censored from their field of vision as well as their own self-imposed blindness in order to overcome the crippling effects of a potentially traumatic experience. Censored Sight in The Spirit of the Beehive Inspired by a dream where a cloud sliced the moon “like a razor blade slicing through and eye,” Buñuel performed the slicing of the eye on a female actress in the opening of Un chien andalou to extricate the eyesight of the spectator who instinctively looks away or covers his or her eyes in repulsive anguish – an act that can be interpreted or assimilated as a form of visual censorship, as it forces the viewer literally not to see the slicing as it is happening. Forty-four years later, Víctor Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive (El espíritu de la colmena, 1973) opens with a crowd of children in 1940 Spain gathering to watch a screening of James 6 One can privilege Spanish surrealism’s obsession with the horrific in its engagement with what cannot be represented – rather than Un chien andalou’s much-discussed theme of repressed desire – as prefiguring the rupture brought upon Spain by the Civil War. Such obsession with the horrific can be seen subsequently in the work of Carlos Saura (La caza/The Hunt, 1966) and Juan Antonio Bardem (Muerte de un ciclista/Death of a Cyclist, 1955). 53 Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) in a small rural village. The film opens with a warning: “Be forewarned. You might be scandalized, maybe even horrified. Few films have caused a greater impression on the world, but I advise you not to take it too seriously.” In the young audience, six-year-old Ana and her sister Isabel watch mesmerized as a little girl (named María in the Spanish dubbing of the film) plays with the monster, showing him how to throw flowers in a pond and watch them float. The second half of the scene that shows the monster picking up the girl and throwing her in the pond, hence causing her to drown, was censored upon the film’s 1931 release (the scene was not re-inserted into the film until 1986). Because the violence against the girl by the monster is excised from the film and censored from the audience’s sight, Ana becomes curious as to whether the girl (and by extension the monster) is alive or dead. Despite her sister’s explanation that the film is ‘fake’ (and thus the girl is still alive regardless), Ana becomes entranced by what she was not allowed to see. Since the edited scene precludes her from witnessing the violence perpetrated upon the girl, a character with whom she evidently identifies, she is able to empathize with the monster as the film progresses and her confusion of reality with fiction takes hold of her imagination. Ana is attracted by what she blindly perceives as the benevolent monster. Blindly because, much like Buñuel’s surreal evisceration of the eye, Ana’s vision was violated by the censorship of the splicer employed by the state in America 7 to cut the scene of violence. Therefore, we can read the poetic language of Erice’s film through the eyes of the child Ana as the gaze of a 1970s Spain awakening to the censored reality of their existence under the 7 The state here refers to the state censorship boards in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and New York that in 1931 were responsible for cutting out the second part of the scene in which the monster throws the little girl into the lake where she drowns (Vieira 2003). 54 dictatorship that followed the Spanish Civil War. Dominique Russell points out that the censored scene “would confirm Ana’s sense that there is good in what is deemed ‘evil’ by authority [and] the film’s first Spanish audience . . . trained to read between the lines by the literalness of the censors, could read much the same lesson in relation to the history of the war” (Russell 2007, 186). In a later scene, Ana provides a Republican maqui who has taken refuge near a well with food and one of her father’s coats, which contains a watch in one of its pockets that later incriminates her father who, like the fugitive, was on the losing side of the Spanish Civil War. As a Republican, Ana’s father is already under suspicion for aiding the maqui by the repressive Nationalist regime. Echoing the visual excision of María’s death from the Frankenstein screening, the maqui’s execution is also cinematically censored from sight as we hear only the gunshots over a distancing wide shot of the sheepfold where he was hiding out. Ana’s aiding the Republican maqui, deemed an enemy of the state as his off- screen execution confirms, is fueled by her empathy with the Frankenstein creature who, in her censored viewing of the James Whale film, did nothing wrong. In a later scene at the school, while placing cardboard cut-outs representing vital organs on an anatomically exposed mannequin named Don José, Ana’s teacher instructs Ana to place the last missing organ, Don José’s eyes, on the cartoonish figure. The teacher then declares: “Now, Don José can see.” Encoded in the poetics of the narrative and under the seemingly apolitical innocence of children learning and assimilating their environment, Erice provides a lesson that gives back to the audience its capacity to perceive what has been for so long violently excised from their field of vision. Ana began the film as a passive spectator, watching the monster genre movie and letting it look at her, her eyes bathed in its projected light, hypnotizing her and guiding her imagination through its visceral yet censored portrayal of real danger. As Russell points out, “the female [gaze] remains central to the monster 55 movie… [Her] look is the reaction shot; as she looks, she is looked at… Ana’s gaze, and our look at her looking, is essential to the structure of [The Spirit of the Beehive]” (193-4). Yet as the film evolves and Ana’s heightened imagination with it, Erice transforms Ana’s eyes from those of a passive spectator, who falls victim to what she is not allowed to see, into active conjurers that can discern good from evil beyond the limited vision of a censored horror film such as Frankenstein: “the conjuring up of the monster [is] carried out throughout the film through an act of looking, of visual identification with the monster, an act of ‘opening her eyes to it’” (Deleyto 1999, 50). Ana’s eyes do not just take in what they see as a given but construct their own vision of what is real by projecting a phantasmagoria of their own invention onto a real landscape as the imaginary encounter with the monster in the pond at the end of the film comes to exemplify. Her relationship to danger brings to mind a concept from Beyond the Pleasure Principle in which Sigmund Freud theorizes how children master what is unpleasurable by means of repetition: In the case of children’s play we seemed to see that children repeat unpleasurable experiences for the additional reason that they can master a powerful impression far more thoroughly by being active than they could by merely experiencing it passively. Each fresh repetition seems to strengthen the mastery they are in search of. (Freud 1955, 35) Ana actively re-projects her impressions of the monster unto what she sees – and what we ourselves see as spectators of the illusion of Erice’s film in the imagistic conjurations of its central character. She masters the unsettling nature of the monster by repeatedly conjuring with her eyes the images that transform his unpleasurable nature into a kind and gentle presence incapable of causing her harm. Beyond merely watching images from her seat at the local theater, Ana actively looks for their counterparts in reality as the film develops, 56 searching for the answer to her question about whether María and the monster are dead inside a well, deep in the woods or under the real pond. It’s as if she is searching for the deleted scene, the censored moment of violence in its physical form, as if it occurred somewhere in the periphery of her village – perhaps a dead body remains. In essence, as exemplified in the scene where her sister pretends to be dead, Ana, through playacting and repetition, seeks a mastery over the seemingly unpleasurable and mysteriously absent act of killing as perceived in the horror film that censored the moment in which the girl was murdered. She replays from her mind using her eyes as a kind of film projector and treating her surroundings as if reality were a blank screen on which she can superimpose repeatedly her own imagination until the monster is no longer threatening. Her act of imagistically conflating the images imprinted on her mind’s eye by the horror film, both what it unveiled and what it blocked, lead her not only to see benevolence in what is deemed evil, just as she believes the Republican refugee to be a sort of monster himself, a monster with a gentle face whom she does not fear, but also to seek a kind of instinctual and childish pleasure in what is dangerous, possibly life-threatening. Freud eventually concluded, “the pleasure principle seems actually to serve the death instincts” (63). Ana continually puts herself in harm’s way as she searches for answers about death, for the monster in the woods, perhaps indulging a violent instinct she has inherited. In reconstructing what she finds unsettling into a projection of good, she takes a risk she knows might lead to her own death as she inferred from María’s edited death in the screening. In Freudian terms, Ana replays María’s encounter with death in an attempt to overcome her fear of it as well as to see if she can survive such an encounter. In one of the final scenes of the film, Ana sees her reflection on a pond that ripples into a reflection of the monster with whom she subsequently shares a tender moment. In her hallucination, the monster is also 57 her father whose caressing of her cheek does not lead to her demise, as it did for poor María in the projected Frankenstein. A metaphorical reaction to Spain’s blindness toward its own violent history, toward the disappearances and executions that were occluded during four decades of Francoist oppression, Ana develops a vision that, beyond any evil that can hide in the guise of good, can stare at the face of the monster – her father in the case of her mushroom-induced hallucination (perhaps Erice’s Freudian metaphor for Franco himself) – and emerge not only unharmed by the violent legacy of her fatherland and the violence obliterated from her sight, but also in control of its monstrosity, its specular faculties and its violent impulses. Uncanny Encounters in Raise Ravens A comparable dynamic of ocular defiance takes place in Carlos Saura’s Raise Ravens (Cría cuervos, 1976). In one of the film’s opening scenes, another Ana (also played by Ana Torrent) sits in front of a mirror as her nanny combs her hair. In the subsequent shot, Saura’s camera takes the point of view of the mirror, making the spectator or audience the reflection of Ana looking at herself. The staging of the scene is reminiscent of Buñuel’s eye- slicing sequence in Un chien andalou (the razor replaced by a non-threatening comb) with the added layer of the audience being on the other side of a two-sided mirror. From this hidden perspective behind the mirror, the ghost or memory of Ana’s mother enters the frame and takes the place of the nanny in order to comb Ana’s hair. Saura’s spatiotemporal ambiguity blends the fantasmatic with the workings of the orphaned Ana’s memories as they physically enter and exit the frame sometimes at random, other times as an unwelcome haunting of a traumatic recent past. As Marvin D’Lugo points out in his book on Saura’s work, “the film formulates the conflation of historical and personal time as a textual problem for the spectator to confront and decipher, that decipherment keyed to the historical issues that the 58 Spaniard faces outside the film” (D’Lugo 1991, 131). This logic recurs at other times in the film, such as the moment when Ana observes her nanny cleaning a window. Every time the spectator is about to witness a memory, Ana looks at a reflection of herself which is equivalent to looking straight at the camera, hence at the spectator on the other side of the screen, and conjures the past spectrally into the film’s present, so the audience can witness it by acquiring subjectively her traumatized and melancholic gaze. In the spectral moment, her mother playfully asks “And what happens if I bite your neck,” and then proceeds to look at the mirror – that is, directly at the camera and the spectator beyond the reflection. Moments later, Ana asks the nanny whether the cross she wears belonged to her mother, to which she answers: “this cross protects you from demons.” Her younger sister Mayte interjects that it is also used as protection against vampires. Later in the film, in another moment of spectral intrusion of memory, Ana watches her mother writhe and moan in bed from the pain of her illness, a moment that evokes the vampire-infected Lucy Westenra in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Toward the end of the film, Ana lies on the couch while lip-synching to “Porque te vas” (‘Because you are leaving’) by Jeanette, a song she replays several times throughout the film and that becomes the anthem of her melancholic state. She suddenly turns to the camera while fixing her hair, recalling the earlier scene where the ghost or memory of her mother combed her hair, and shares with the spectator her intentions to kill her aunt with the baking soda powder she deems poisonous: “let her die, I want her to die.” Ana’s gaze not only conjures the specter of her mother from the past as a kind of vampire but also projects into the future as her older self interrupts the narrative of the film on several occasions to narrate her childhood. Saura’s choice to have Geraldine Chaplin (his partner at the time) play both the dead mother – who recurs like a broken memory or a restless ghost – as well as Ana as an adult looking back at herself as a precocious child 59 evokes feelings of Freudian uncanniness, as adult Ana relates the story of how her mother (also Chaplin) told her about the poisonous effects of a white powder (“with a teaspoon you could kill an elephant”) that she uses to ‘kill’ her father and her aunt. The two Chaplins also collapse the timeline of Ana’s life, her past and her future – her mother and her adulthood – into one image co-projected in a perennial present, the synchronous atemporal melancholically stagnant world of the vast isolated house of Ana’s childhood depicted in a successive film that plays itself as an illusion of diachrony, of narrative – a “playland” in Giorgio Agamben’s sense as theorized in his essay on history and play: Playland is a country whose inhabitants are busy celebrating rituals, and manipulating objects and sacred words, whose sense and purpose they have, however, forgotten. And we should not be amazed if through this oblivion, they free the sacred, too, from its link with the calendar and with the cyclical rhythm of time that it sanctions, thereby entering another dimension of time, where the hours go by in a flash and the days are changeless. (Agamben 1993, 70) The aimlessness of Ana and her sisters as they dance around the house in circles to Jeanette’s song or perform the drama of their parent’s dysfunctional relationship suggest the use of play (or playacting) to engage with a traumatic history and to bring synchrony into diachrony in Agamben’s terms. The adults (represented by the Aunt) keep busy with the funeral of Ana’s father ignoring the violent oppression he exerted on the deceased mother or the orphaned sisters, that is, relegating the traumatic to oblivion just as Spain eventually did upon Franco’s death. Meanwhile, Ana’s gaze continually invokes the dead mother into the dimension of her games and imagination – as envisioned in both the sisters’ theatrical reenactments of their parent’s arguments as well as Ana’s visual conjuration of their memory one night. Her fantasies about poisoning her adulterous father with baking soda are not only part of what Marsha Kinder calls the “Spanish oedipal narrative” where “the children are 60 frequently precocious yet emotionally stunted, for they have been traumatized by personal and collective history” (Kinder 1993, 214-5); they also lie at the heart of Saura’s encoded condemnation of Franco’s patriarchal repression to which his choice of title can attest: “Saura’s choice of proverb for the title of this film [‘Raise ravens and they will pluck your eyes out’] is an accurate reflection of fascist use of language…an authoritarian form of speech that appears to be beyond question… [and] is especially typical of a repressive, fearful, and conformist myth such as that of the Franco regime” (Higginbotham 1988, 92). This image of the traumatized child ravens – Franco’s children constantly grounded to look at a wall in the corner while the state extricated all rebellious resistance – gearing up to pluck out the oppressive surveillance of the state terror’s watchful eyes brings to mind the figure of the ‘Sandman’ from E.T.A. Hoffman’s short story The Sandman, famously deployed by Freud in his essay “The ‘Uncanny’” to embody an infantile precursor for the fear of castration. The nanny in Hoffman’s story describes the Sandman to the child Nathaniel as “a wicked man, who comes to little children when they won’t go to bed and throws handfuls of sand in their eyes, so that they jump out of their heads all bloody” (Hoffman 1985, 2). In Saura’s film, one could view Ana as becoming a sandman figure because she fantasizes using the poisonous baking soda to kill the patriarchal oppression of her father’s repressive gaze, having learned such violence from her own mother. Like the other Ana’s identification in Erice’s film with the perpetrator creature from Frankenstein, an imagistic metonymy of her own beehive-tending father, Saura’s Ana – via a gender bending oedipal identification with her mother’s vampiric memory – enacts the sandman-esque censoring terror learned from her general father to avenge her mother’s artistic blood-letting and physical obliteration by her father’s neglect, betrayal and patriarchal reprimand. Her father’s coercive treatment of her mother as a child who must obey without question unpacks the irony embedded in the 61 authoritarian proverb “cría cuervos…” (‘raise ravens…’) as the child Ana sees herself growing into the spitting image of that childishly treated mother. But this Ana, this Geraldine Chaplin with a Spanish accent (dubbed by actress Julieta Serrano to match Ana Torrent), strikes back with murderous thoughts against oppression and reinterprets her own childhood. In “The ‘Uncanny’,” an essay examining precisely the return as an adult of what one represses from childhood, Freud interprets “the fear of damaging or losing one’s eyes” as such “a terrible one in children” that they eventually “substitute [it] for the dread of being castrated” (Freud 1964, 231). Saura’s twist on Freud’s interpretation of the fear of losing one’s eyes lies in the fact that his protagonist is female and hence lacks a penis. She has the power to look back and defy, to which the moments where she turns to the camera and invokes her mother’s ghost can attest. As if by looking into that mirror that separates her world from our own as the audience - the film screen, she can access the past and “voluntarily summon up the apparitions of her dead mother, just as Ana in The Spirit of the Beehive persisted in summoning Frankenstein’s monster” (Labanyi 2007, 98). In the essay “In Playland,” Agamben goes on to describe the ghost as “a signifier of synchrony which appears threateningly in the world of the living as an unstable signifier… which can assume the diachronic signified of a perpetual wandering (alástòr… the spectre of the unburied), and the impossibility of attaining a state of fixity” (Agamben 1993, 82). Death in Ana’s playland, exemplified by her mother’s spirit continuous wandering in and out of her field of vision, keeps the past vivid by projecting itself disruptively into the present, thus collapsing temporal difference and refusing to recede into history – to be buried in oblivion. It also maintains Ana fixated in childhood, looking in a mirror where she sees her mother’s image reflected back as living in her and processes it as an image of her own self in the future, all 62 possible through the illusion of conjuring death by the power of her gaze. Because this gaze is also directed at the spectator, it is as if it summons the audience to be complicit in her dual excavation of what has passed and what will pass, as she continues to exhume her dead mother’s presence into her present as well as project herself as her exact likeness in the future. As Paul Julian Smith explains about Erice’s Ana, through “the power of [Ana’s] look, a power that is at once poetic and historical, experienced in isolation and as part of a community… of citizens, [the spectators] are obliged to recreate the story inside their own consciousness” (Smith 1999, 108-9). That secret exchange between Ana and us as she looks in her mirror and we watch on our screen allows a demand to transgress the gap between the filmic and the real, hidden from the possibility of state censorship. It bespeaks the conjuring of ghosts, the invitation of vampires, the summoning of monsters and communicates a desire to vanish the spirit into afterlife, stake the undead into proper burial and disassemble the trauma of a nation in the eyes of its young, Spain’s new generation. Horror in the Transition Both The Spirit of the Beehive and Cría cuervos not only revolve around children in the context of the Spanish Civil War or the repression that followed but also engage their childhood gaze in conjunction with elements of the exploration of fear through fantasy and horror. In her essay “Teaching History through Memory Work: Issues of Memorialization in Representations of the Spanish Civil War,” Jo Labanyi makes a case for films, Cría cuervos and The Spirit of the Beehive among them, that use a non-linear approach to the traumatic past which is more akin to the workings of memories: “The earlier films circumvent censorship by focusing not on the past but on the memory processes whereby an unspeakable past is recovered by later generations (hence the predilection for child protagonists)” (Labanyi 2007, 439). While Ana in The Spirit of the Beehive introjects the censored horrors of the film 63 Frankenstein losing herself in her imagination of them, Ana in Cría cuervos re-projects her undead mother’s image onto her “playland” in the present as well as diachronically onto the vision of her future self. Therefore, in both Erice and Saura’s cinematic engagements with the horrific, a spectral engagement exists as a confrontation beyond linear narrative not only with the traumatic past, as Labanyi points out, but also with the projected screen itself – the censored Frankenstein in one case and the dual appearance of Geraldine Chaplin as mother and adult Ana in the other. In her book on Spain’s post-dictatorship “wounded culture,” Cristina Moreiras describes Spain’s artistic output when it moves beyond dictatorship upon Franco’s death in 1975 and into the consumerist abandon and pursuit of a cultural identity in Europe in 1980s as “the erasure of a past that is determined to be lost in oblivion logic and… that is installed in the national collective under the premise of an imperative need to open up to a new reality that has nothing to do with its previous one” (Moreiras Menor 2002, 28). 8 As Paloma Aguilar keenly points out when referring to the politics of the transition, “this kind of reconciliation is somewhat fictitious in the sense that it is based on amnesia and not directly on forgiveness” (Aguilar 2002, 18), highlighting Spain’s suppression of the process of mourning in its collectively assented fabrication of amnesia. Moreiras argues that such a cultural practice, in blocking the trauma for the sake of reintegration into the global market, 8 Moreiras refers here not to the ‘Pact of Consensus and Forgiveness’ (that is, the pact of oblivion) established in 1975 through which Francoists gave themselves immunity from prosecution in the emerging democracy, or the subsequent Amnesty Law in 1977 that exonerated all political prisoners, but to the culture of amnesia it generated, where forgetting or burying the past was part of generating a new image for Spain as reintegrated into Europe, a movement that culminates in the fulfillment of its neoliberal economy when it joins the E.U. and NATO in 1986. 64 perpetuates Spain as a melancholic society despite its openness because it does not grieve or provide proper burial to the Franco atrocities. Alberto Medina describes this unconscious process of melancholia in Spain as an active agent that serves as “an instrument of continuation” (Medina Domínguez 2001, 16) that “attempts a projection into the future of the regime” (39) and stunts Spain’s growth in the recurring infantile dynamic of the dictatorship like the one figuratively depicted in Cría cuervos where Ana’s deceased mother becomes identical to her future self. However, although the film’s representation might be a symptom of the budding programmatic melancholia of transitional Spain, it also visually exposes its mechanisms to its audience, the same melancholic subjects who are the object of its allegorical construction. In his book on Spanish visual culture, Paul Julian Smith goes on to dismiss Moreiras and Medina’s psychoanalytical model of the transition as a melancholic process opting instead to read post-dictatorship cultural movements of the 1980s such as ‘la movida’ as more in line with “Freud’s successful mourner” (Smith 2006, 53). Therefore, one could argue that films such as Cría cuervos and The Spirit of the Beehive set up the seeds of the transition to come by already converting the unconscious loss into a conscious one and instead combating the perpetual nature of the melancholic state by allowing spectators at the time an opportunity to see its cyclical and vicious effects at work. Furthermore, the horrific embedded within the poetic language of Erice’s film or processed through the Oedipal murderous imagination of Ana in Saura’s film comes to the foreground when filmmakers such as Bigas Luna and Alejandro Amenábar engage the unprocessed trauma of Spain more directly in their respective self-reflexive forays into the horror genre even as they enshroud its effects under the guise of a neoliberal product intended for entertainment and economic gain. 65 Because horror as a genre is in essence transnational since horror is the same despite our specific national acculturation, it can fearlessly engage from beyond national borders what the nation dares not face or purposely avoids as it seeks to restore post-traumatic order. In her introduction to The Wounds of Nations: Horror Cinema, Historical Trauma and National Identity, Linnie Blake argues that horror cinema punctures a wound in the homogenizing discourse that attempts to restore national identity after periods of trauma. The international success of films like Ringu (and its American translation The Ring), prolific serial killer franchises such as Friday the 13 th and Nightmare on Elm Street during the Reagan era, and what she coins “hillbilly horror” – in which she links post-911 paranoia and its militaristic agenda in Iraq to a traumatic repetition compulsion on a national level of the neo- colonial failure of Vietnam – reflect a desire of the populace to engage through the mediation of the horror genre with the violence the state has inflicted directly or indirectly upon them, to work through the anxiety that the trace of the trauma has left behind. These films bring to the foreground what the post-traumatic national agenda censors and represses through the guise of reconciliation: The representational strategies of post-1960s horror can be seen to actively discourage any easy acceptance of cohesive, homogenizing narratives of identity, national or otherwise, promoting instead a form of encoded/decoded engagement with traumatic events that may allow for the cultural assimilation of traumatic experiences that is a vital prerequisite for healing. (Blake 2008, 14) By viewing horror films as “encoded articulations” of repressed national trauma, Blake seems to suggest that an audience’s engagement with the fictional trauma narrativized through a horror film has the potential of being cathartic because it allows one to face and safely relive the extreme anxiety of that trauma in order to possibly come to terms with its 66 repressed state within ourselves. In the shared public experience of the movie theater, the individual could possibly ameliorate his or her own traumatized national identity and plant the seeds for a new subjectivity that can overcome the pain caused by his or her nationally inflicted wounds and begin the process of suturing those scars from within. In Antonin Artaud’s concept of a “theater of cruelty,” the immersion of the spectator within the spectacle furnishes him with a vicarious engagement with the thought of violence that is far worse than the violence committed in actuality and thus can annihilate the inherent passivity of a typical audience and transform them from within their subconscious through an assault on their senses (Artaud 1958, 84-88). A concurrent paradox occurs in the horror film spectator as he or she affectively responds to the narrative while being aware of its artifice, a paradox also at play in Noël Carroll’s concept of “art-horror” in which one’s fear is generated by the thought of a monster without having to believe in its existence (Carroll 1990, 29). Carroll also distinguishes a second paradox within the horror milieu in the audience’s contradictory desire to be horrified (or arthorrified). His answer is that horror is a form of storytelling that seems to propagate the dominant ideology through how the monstrous is ultimately subverted yet concurrently allows for repressed subversive content to come to the surface (201). This ebullience of repressed content recalls Buñuel’s use of the horrific eye slashing not for the audience’s pleasure, but to instill discomfort and incite awareness about how decorum imprisons irrational desire. Although many have argued for the pleasures afforded by the horror genre in releasing such primal inhibitions, one can also foreground its Artaudian transformative capabilities through a Buñuelian confrontation with violence that can be repulsive and painful, especially within the framework of a traumatic history such as Spain’s. It is in this context that we place Catalan- born filmmaker Bigas Luna’s Anguish (1987) – a Spanish film disguised as an American 67 horror movie, a neoliberal product easily dismissed as pointless entertainment, that cannot avoid the subtext not only of the legacy of Buñuel’s images but of Spain’s bleeding post- dictatorship wound. The Traumatized Spectator in Anguish Recalling the warning before the screening of Frankenstein at the beginning of The Spirit of the Beehive, Bigas Luna’s English language 1987 horror film Anguish opens with an equally ominous and doubly cautionary warning. While a voice declaring itself to be a certain Tom Goldman playfully provides the legal disclaimer from the theater owner, an onscreen text declares: “During the film you are about to see, you will be subject to subliminal messages and mild hypnosis. This will cause you no physical harm or lasting effect, but if for any reason you lose control or feel that your mind is leaving your body – leave the auditorium immediately.” As it is later revealed when the camera pulls back to reveal a theater audience, what appears after the disclaimer is a film-within-the-film entitled The Mommy in which a diabetic orderly who works in an ophthalmology clinic is hypnotically instructed by his mother, who has ubiquitous auditory presence via seashells, to extract the eyes of the people who have done him harm. This situation ‘spirals’ into an eye-gouging killing spree at a local movie theater showing The Lost World (1925). At the precise moment the maternally controlled orderly extracts the eyes of his first victim, the camera reveals an audience at a movie theater in Los Angeles watching the film and focuses on a distraught spectator named Patty who begins to suffer psychosomatic eye irritation in response to the enucleation occurring on-screen – much to the chagrin of her unfazed friend Linda who is entranced by the violent horror film’s hypnotic effects. This mise-en-scène of two young teenagers watching a horror film brings to mind the sisters Ana and Isabel watching Frankenstein at the beginning of The Spirit of the Beehive, as well as Ana’s questioning of the 68 film’s elusive and censored depiction of death and the subsequent effects of the film on her mental and physical health. Whereas Ana’s hallucinations are triggered by what she does not see (or is not allowed to see), Patty’s bodily reaction is effected by the opposite, by seeing too much. The graphic nature of the images she watches not only cause her body to react but cause the hypnotically puppeteered perpetrator literally to leap off screen and proceed to take her hostage and enact brutal violence on the audience in the last act of the film. As the domineering witch mother from The Mommy declares, “all the eyes of the city will be ours,” we can read the film as attempting allegorically to gouge out the audience’s eyes, perhaps the eyes of Spain, through violence in cinema – an ocular enucleation not unlike Buñuel’s eye slicing of his actress almost sixty years earlier and reminiscent of the proverb that inspired Saura’s film title “cría cuervos y te sacarán los ojos” (‘raise ravens and they will pluck your eyes out’). The self-reflexive violence-within-violence as the madman’s gun emulates the diabetic orderly’s scalpel onscreen (Patty’s reification of Ana’s phantasmagoric conjuration of the Frankenstein monster) creates a sense of self-consciousness in the spectator of Anguish – the terrifying feeling that the violence on-screen is actually happening around them and that the psychosis can be transferred on to the susceptible viewer. In the climax of the film, the orderly on-screen turns to face the traumatized Patty now released from the gunman’s grip and says, “I want your eyes too, like all the others,” and stabs her with the scalpel on her eye through the screen. Patty holds on to the scalpel puncturing her eye as it bleeds profusely – the film now having literally plucked her eye out – later to be revealed as happening only in her traumatized mind as well as our own. In an earlier scene, as the witch mother hypnotizes her son – and metonymically The Mommy’s audience, with enhanced effect on the impressionable Patty (and perhaps ourselves) – the Buñuel-inspired surreal sequence superimposes her face on that of a raven, evoking all 69 its eye gouging proclivities, and climaxes with the plunge of an unborn baby into a womb, perhaps her own, that then dissolves into an image of her son kneeling in front of her with his eyes closed. This moment can be defined by what Adam Lowenstein calls an allegorical moment: “The allegorical moment exists as a mode of confrontation, where representation’s location between past and present, as well as between film, spectator, and history, demands to be recalibrated” (Lowenstein 2005, 12). Critic Edward H. Friedman classifies Anguish in its entirety as “an allegory of representation that illustrates the fragile, and mutable, nature of perception” (Friedman 1999, 78). Hence, this moment in which the traumatized spectator Patty appropriates violently through filmic representation the trauma of the fictional serial killer as inculcated by his mother since his emergence in her womb is but an allegorical meeting point between the spectator’s inner gaze, the one that exists beyond representation, and her fragile subjectivity imbricated in the cinematic representation as engaged by her vulnerable eyes. As we saw earlier, Linnie Blake argues that the horror genre is a mode of spectatorship that, in surpassing the limits of the national, can ameliorate the subject’s trauma by prosthetically suturing his or her wounds through the unconscious interplay between its encoded mechanisms and the viewer’s fragility. One can reconsider Patty’s seemingly traumatic allegorical moment as effecting a kind of positive transubstantiation, even perhaps reparative – an encounter with what Bracha Ettinger coins the matrixial gaze 9 9 A fragilizing yet non-threatening alternative to both the phallic gaze that exists outside the self to which the subject loses his or her power, as posited by Jacques Lacan in his seminar Four Fundamental Lectures of Psychoanalysis, as well as Laura Mulvey’s feminist conceptualization of the male gaze which equates cinema’s objectifying and inherently heterosexual male gaze with the patriarchally colonized (and hence equally male) female gaze, as expounded in her 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” 70 of the artist: “The gaze offered by the artist, …transported into and conducted via the artwork, …transform[s] the point of view of the viewer in difference from, yet in relation to, the non conscious swerves and rapports of the artist, who captures/produces/conducts ideas, traumas and phantasms…” (Ettinger 2001, 111). Ettinger seems to be describing the engagement that occurs outside of the realm of the visual, of what cannot be represented in plain sight, between the spectator of a work of art, in this case a film that multiplies and diffracts in its own self-reflexive allegory of sight and blindness, and the artist’s processing of his own traumatic past, that is, the unaccounted for bleeding wound of post-Franco Spain and its self-imposed blindness when it comes to the horrors it melancholically and recursively exacts upon itself until the country’s self-esteem is reduced to its own form of oblivion. Patty is allegorically reinserted into the metaphorical womb of John the orderly onscreen, making us participate in his murder spree whose ultimate goal is to enucleate the eyes of the entire city, including Patty’s, as John’s scalpel leaps through the screen and into her eye in the climax. It is through an outside spectator, basking in the hypnotic transference of what he sees represented, that the trauma can perhaps be unearthed from oblivion and remembered via its representation’s ability to conjure matrixially Ettinger’s “floating eye” in a collective audience. The spectators can now realign this dismembered gaze relegated to inexistence with their respective individual vision. The eye of the world is made flesh in our own everyday perception as we leave Bigas Luna’s film with a newfound alertness to the presence of trauma in our midst. Active Resistance in Thesis In Alejandro Amenábar’s 1996 horror thriller Thesis/Tesis, the fearful viewer in a darkened theater from Bigas Luna’s 1980s genre effort – as represented in Patty, the traumatized victim of a violence cutting through the screen into her eyes, literally – becomes 71 the inquisitive VHS watching voyeur. Ana Torrent – the Ana from both The Spirit of the Beehive and Cría cuervos now grown up – remerges in this postmodern thriller as Angela, a doctoral student writing a dissertation on audio-visual violence that seems to be at once attracted and repulsed by it. For example, when fellow classmate Chema forces her to watch the snuff videotape in which their missing classmate Vanessa is dismembered, Angela is first repulsed, censoring her own eyesight by looking away from the televised violence. Upon her initial glimpse of the horror, a zoom into Angela’s shocked eyes is intercut with a sharp zoom into the terrified eyes of the victimized Vanessa as she is being tortured by the off- screen perpetrator – a dizzying effect that self-consciously exposes both, the digital artifice of a camcorder as an apparatus that can mechanically capture/replay past memories as well as the filmic artifice embedded within Thesis as a postmodern film aware of its own representative language, and blends it with the ‘reality’ of the snuff torture playing out on Chema’s TV. This vertiginous disruption produces a visceral reaction in Angela who exits the room to spill her guts by vomiting in the bathroom, a trope that brings to mind not only Anguish’s pre-credits warning about possible physical effects on its viewers but also Patty’s bodily reactions to the brutality of The Mommy. Angela returns, now unblinkingly entranced like Chema, to witness Vanessa being shot. Eerily echoing her younger self in the opening scene of The Spirit of the Beehive, when, as little Ana, she asks her sister if María has been killed by the monster, Angela asks Chema, “Is she dead?” But unlike little Ana’s fearless and unflinching gaze, Angela places her hand over her eyes “trapped by a self-imposed expectation of repulsion towards the objects of her gaze” (Klodt 2007, 8) and watches (or tries to not watch) Vanessa being ripped apart by a chainsaw through the protective partial obfuscation of her fingers, her eyesight shielded by a semi-censoring cage of her own making, “a reaction which mirrors our spectatorial response [as] the object of her gaze is 72 withheld from our frustrated view, renewing our consciousness of our own complicity in craving a glimpse” (Lev 2000, 34). Amenábar “uses Angela’s famous eyes as a mirror [where] we see our own desire to see and not to see” (Russell 2006, 86) as “Torrent’s resurfacing within the 90s Westernized capital [superimposes] conflictual histories told in transition cinema upon a presumably democratized, postmodern Spanish topography” (Lev 2000, 35). Censorship is one of the transition themes that resurface from the days of The Spirit of the Beehive, reinforced by the uncanny presence of the adult Ana Torrent (who 20 years later looks nothing like Geraldine Chaplin – who as we mentioned played her older self in 1976’s Cría cuervos). For example, a few scenes later, using the remote to rewind and replay, Chema demonstrates to Angela the almost imperceptible cuts that have been applied to the snuff VHS in order to excise references to the ‘name’ of the perpetrator possibly uttered by the victim, hence identifying him to the viewer. As Chema points out, “snuff movies rely on the promise and the lure of direct, unmediated access to the scene of violence and death in order to satisfy the viewer’s morbid curiosity” (Jordan 2008, 193). Thus, one could equate snuff viewing with a possibly unmediated encounter with the horrors of state terror under dictatorship. Yet, this expected form of raw violent content is also censored, as it has been tampered with almost unnoticeably. Whereas the censorship inflicted upon the film Frankenstein as highlighted in The Spirit of the Beehive blocks out the violence and death of a seemingly innocent little girl, perhaps disguised by the intention to protect the susceptible spectator from its noxious effects, the censorship applied to the snuff VHS in Thesis is not intended to protect the onlooker but the perpetrator’s identity – perhaps a reflection on how Spanish post-dictatorial culture came to terms with the imagistic ebullience of a violent traumatic past previously repressed under censorship by excising from view, from the possibility of justice as stipulated in the ‘pact of oblivion,’ the cadavers that are evidence of 73 the state crimes as well as the identities of those who committed such violence. 10 Such evidence comes to public light at the end of Amenábar’s film in an ironic condemnation of the commodification of violence on TV and its narcotic effect on a hospitalized audience “wholly entranced by what they see, seemingly transformed into automata” (190) as they are exposed to the snuff VHS on a national primetime newscast. The anchor, prefacing the broadcast of the snuff film in which Vanessa was mutilated, asks the viewer: “The question we ask ourselves is: How can someone do something like that?” This rhetorical question resonates with a country that must process the violence perpetrated against itself not only during the Spanish Civil War but also during its aftermath under Franco’s oppressive rule. Evoking Anguish’s disclaimer on the hypnotic and visceral effects The Mommy might have on its audience, as well as the warning preceding James Whale’s Frankenstein in Erice’s film, Thesis also concludes with a textual admonition: “We warn that the images you are about to see may wound the sensibilities of the spectator” (emphasis added). This wounding of sensibilities not only recalls Moreiras’ depiction of post-dictatorship Spain as a “wounded culture,” but also Blake’s argument for the way in which national trauma, when encoded within the horror genre – a mode of cinema that transcends the national and partakes in an 10 This chapter restricts its scope to the last decades of the twentieth century, before the excavation of mass graves from the Spanish Civil War in the early 2000s marked a cultural shift in facing the horrors of the dictatorship as well Spain’s political reconsideration of their seamless transition without truth and reconciliation commissions – a sentiment stirred by Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón’s issuing of an international warrant in 1998 against Augusto Pinochet who made himself immune to prosecution before stepping down as Chile’s dictator in 1990, and culminating in 2007 with the passing of the ‘Ley de memoria histórica’ that publicly condemned the Franco regime. 74 internationally linked subjectivity – can unlock its viewing subject’s pain via the genre’s visceral engagement and potentially start the process of sealing that wound from within him or herself. Therefore, Thesis final warning calls for ripping out the stitches put in place by the previously consented oblivion in order to expose the trauma, to see it, face it, in hopes of alerting Spain to its perennial collective blindness, which prevents it from completely facing the depth of the wound. Much like Ana’s narcissistic identification with the Frankenstein creature on the waking dream by the pond at the climax of The Spirit of the Beehive, Angela finds herself not only sexually magnetized by the creator of the snuff films Bosco and hypnotized by the glamour projected from his vampire eyes, but delusionally desiring to see benevolence in him – like Mina under the spell of Dracula in Bram Stoker’s gothic novel: “as if impelled by a bizarre desire for self-punishment, given her fascination for Bosco’s perversions and the snuff scenario, Angela almost appears to seek out her own oblivion as his ‘real’ snuff victim” (188). As Chema points out, “you have fallen in love with the bad guy, stupid.” In the final act of the thriller, Angela finds herself inside the set of the snuff film she so feared to watch, now its victim and star. In that secret garage where Vanessa’s blood was once spilled and recorded, Bosco ties Angela, the precarious spectator, down in a chair ready to slice her guts out, reminiscent of Buñuel’s eye slicing of the unsuspecting female in Un chien andalou or Bigas Luna’s captive audience fearing to be eye-gouged or shot by the oedipal madman crossing over from the filmic into the real. And so, “like Un chien andalou’s slicing of the eyeball to usher in a new way of seeing, Tesis uses the gaze to snap its audience out of our complacency” (Klodt 2007, 14). Just as Ana in Erice’s film sees herself as the violent monster, or Ana in Saura’s oedipal drama sees herself as the perpetrator poisoning first her oppressive father and later her repressive aunt, Angela (literally the adult Ana) progresses 75 from being a traumatized spectator, a Patty unable to take in the violence projected incisively unto her virginal eyes by the images, to replacing the perpetrator as the one who ultimately takes him out in the final and ultimate snuff film – screened on national news in the final sequence at the hospital. She is the answer to the proverb ‘raise ravens and they will pluck your eyes out’ and perhaps Amenábar’s aesthetic answer to combat the complacency (and inherent complicity) of Spain with the ‘pact of oblivion.’ He has tapped into “a dark reservoir of unprocessed recent history [that] remains just beneath the surface of a Westernized, technocratic social-cultural veneer” (Lev 2000, 38). If the state continues to censor not only the memory of what happened but also the obfuscated horror that occurred during the dictatorship years, the repressed trauma will continue to recur as a Freudian repetition of Buñuel’s act of evisceration, an Agambean game that injects disruptive diachrony like a film projected – slicing frame upon frame into the numbing rituals of 1980s Spain that watched in stillness, hypnotized by spectacle and consumerism, unable to face Franco. Perhaps Thesis symptomizes a possible transformation in which the gaze of the artist can reconstitute what was censored. Thus, the spectator can finally face the trauma and put a stake in Franco’s vampire, who returns undead to hypnotize and perpetuate Spain’s stasis, lulling its citizens in a melancholic anemic state under the glamorous deception of a forcefully stitched together Catholic nation composed of culturally diverse and incongruous parts. The Excision of Guilt in La mujer sin cabeza Employing the intermedial lens of a book on Chilean literature and art culturally suppressed by that country’s post-dictatorship’s homogenizing discourse, we will now examine how this evasion of sight plays in the Latin American context by examining Lucrecia Martel’s Argentinean film La mujer sin cabeza (2008) as a film that resorts to visual omission in order to 76 force the spectator into reconstituting the horrors potentially perpetrated by the titular female protagonist. Martel’s cinema puts “movement in the mind” (to refer back to Deleuze’s proclamation) through an indirect conjuring within the spectator of that which was eviscerated from the screen precisely by Martel, echoing once more Buñuel’s act of eye evisceration within the diegesis to provoke a reaction outside of it. In her book The Insubordination of Signs, Nelly Richard seeks to cite the forgotten voices of an artistic Chilean movement known as the “new scene” that emerged in the aftermath of the 1973 coup d’état to oppose the cultural repression under Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship in order to emphasize how the subsequent transition to democracy risks “homogenizing” the culture through “official pluralism” (Richard 1994, 94). Richard seeks to give value to the deconstructive, the anti-linear, the antihistorical as fragmentary signs that are revealed against an “official history” that seeks to synthesize with the past, an opposition to the “sense” that sub-ordains and represses dissenting fragments, modes of rupturing art, in an attempt to re-edit the country’s traumatic memory. As we saw in our discussion of the Spanish transition through the cinema of Erice, Saura, Luna and Amenábar, there’s a resistance in Spain against the consented blindness toward the traumatic effects of the Franco regime that persists through censorship boards during the dictatorship and into the cultural oblivion assented by the political transition to democracy. In my view, there are uncanny echoes of Spain’s transitional cultural predicament (as expressed in the films previously discussed) in Richard’s argument about Chilean art. Like Cristina Moreiras’ depiction of post-dictatorial Spain as a “wounded culture” in her book Cultura herida, Richard’s book describes the post-dictatorship scene in Chile as “suturing the borders of a wound that separates punishment from forgiveness” (13). The rhetoric Richard employs views traumatic Chile as a body that needs to resurface in memory, 77 like the corpses of the countless disappeared – a “strange body that we must keep afloat as a hybrid recollection” (18). This body is not clean but full of wounds, as a result of Pinochet’s regime - wounds that post-dictatorship wants to embalm as if they never existed, so the mourned past can be viewed as a loved one lying in a casket, a practice meant to facilitate grief. But Richard points out: Semi-obscured in a plot that subsumes the more residual history of these breaks lie hidden the still clandestine threads of many other artistic and cultural memories, memories that rebelled against the ideological determinism of rationalities unified by final and totalizing truths. (Richard 1994, 14) According to Richard, these wounds were exposed by the clandestine “threads” of a series of dissident artistic voices that existed outside the margins of the official story later condoned by post-dictatorship culture 11 – works that emerged during the dictatorship that seem to be lost in the stitching of those traumatic years because they don’t fit in the continuity that tries to “to file down every rough spot on the already too-polished and polite surface of the signs of agreement” (18). With her book, Richard wants to place the hand of the reader over that roughness so he or she can feel the scar left behind by the sutured wound. In La mujer sin cabeza, we can perhaps think of Martel as employing the visual equivalent of Richard’s argument in order to force the spectator to imagine that which falls out of his or her peripheral vision – the elusive evidence of its main character’s potential violence against an innocent member of the lower class through a hit and run accident. 11 Richard specifically alludes in her book to the photographic collage “Common Grave” (‘Fosa Común’) of Eugenio Dittborn, the plays of “the new scene” and the performative art of CADA (Colectivo Acciones de Arte) among others. 78 Like that “strange body” that doesn’t fit the clarifying vision of post-dictatorship’s smoothed-out or filed-down surface that Richard describes, Martel points with her title to a body that is mutilated, missing a head, perhaps to imply that her film is missing essential parts, key images, shots. Therefore, the title of the film already leads viewers to think not about the “woman” but about the missing “head,” that is what the viewer will look for – what was severed from the narrative. Martel’s visual compositions also call the viewer to notice what is outside of the frame, that which is cropped out and deemed unnecessary for the narrative. Hence, what we are not allowed to see becomes the center of the mystery, the desired focus of the spectator’s eye. We begin to question why the camera does not turn as it conventionally does, or why we are not cutting to a close-up when we crave to see the protagonists’ reaction – there must be a missing angle here that Martel has left in the cutting room floor, like an invisible footnote that cuts through a text of Chile’s “new scene” intended “to break the forced linearity of meaning programmed in an authoritarian manner through false images of enunciative coherence” (71). Martel’s aesthetic, much like the use of incisive citations by Chile’s “new scene” writers, highlights what has been left off, what is missing from the main text, and also implies that such deleted scenes and unphotographed angles, as well as that which was framed out, are what the spectator must uncover, dig out from the sidelines of the visible. Richard describes post-dictatorship’s discourse on memory as a tension between forgetting and remembering, between “covering up” the unburied bodies and “discovering” that which hides them. But Richard argues that the work of memory overlaps and twists in a much more complex manner than this simplistic binary approach. Its intricacies are capable of forming constructive and productive links between past and present; yet such discrepant and uncomfortable memories are being silenced by so- called official memories. That tension between covering up and discovering, between 79 burying and excavating, is precisely the way Martel plays with her viewer. The film forces the spectator to actively recover the fragments in his own head, pointing to what Richard describes as the inner workings of memory. The spectator thus works as the missing head that recalls “constructively and productively” as opposed to the female protagonist’s decapitated amnesia that treats memory as a passive object to be recovered (or buried deep where no one can find it). This productive engagement with the film digs out not only its true meaning but also that which it seeks to sever, to obscure, to leave out. During the inciting accident of the film, the spectator rides on the passenger seat as Verónica, a bleached-blond Argentine socialite and the film’s eponymous main character, suffers a concussion after hitting something on the road with her car. His or her disorientation within the film, trying to piece who is related to who, where we are, what is going on, mirrors Verónica’s apparent memory loss as a result of the accident. The spectator does not know anything that preceded the film’s opening scenes, so his or her disorientation is inherent. On the other hand, Verónica seems to be aware she’s being watched, maybe by her own conscience, by a specter of who she was before the accident, by us from across the lens of the camera. We are perhaps placed in the witnessing position of a jury. She therefore could be performing her amnesia in an attempt to have us, the spectator, absolve her of her guilt. But an implication of guilt seeps through the fissures of her acting, through the edges of the frame, through that which we are not allowed to see. The same way the literature written under Chile’s dictatorship “took on the task of fissuring them with words hostile to the claims of official truth” (25); Martel’s visual construction infuses her narrative with cracks the viewer can peer into. For example, right after she runs over something on the road, she clearly chooses not to look back and see. She just puts on her sunglasses to dim down 80 her vision, to obscure her gaze, and drives away. Perhaps, if she were blind she would not be able to see the body anyway. In the shot from the rear window, we see an unknown black object on the right edge by the ditch (perhaps a shoe) and “what appears to be the bloodied corpse of a dog, but in frustration of our natural impulse to look closer in order to achieve better focus, the camera only carries us further away toward the blur of visual—and factual—uncertainty” (Lund and Reber 2012, 49). That section of the ditch just out of frame, that’s where the body most likely fell. Next thing the film doesn’t allow us to see is her reaction as she gets out of the car and walks off frame. Both a shot of the child’s body in the ditch and a close-up on her expression as she paces about outside would incriminate her in front of the spectator, but instead they are excised from the film. These are the fissures, the “narrative cues” Martel places to create discomfort against the smoothed-out continuity that Verónica follows, that her class confirms. They are edited out, censored by Martel’s ironic aesthetic. By cutting out the incriminating close-up and framing out the possible dead body, she points at the fact that both are missing. Like these unseen fragments of La mujer sin cabeza, the bodies of the disappeared are still missing in Argentina but so are the faces of guilt. In the scene where her x-ray is taken, the arm of the x-ray machine blocks Verónica’s face so the spectator cannot see her expression as her head is examined. Any possible signs of guilt are obscured. In these sequences following the accident, it is important to note how through purposeful omission the spectator is forced into confusion. We don’t see Verónica checking into the hotel or who picked her up and took her to the hospital. These omissions create in the viewer a sense of disorientation so he or she vicariously interprets Verónica’s action as those of an amnesiac. But close observation of actress María Onetto’s performance says otherwise. Her action of hiding in the bathroom and turning on the shower after her 81 husband arrives hints at a sense that she fears her husband might see through her and read the guilt in her expression. Again, like in the moments after the accident, Verónica’s face is only partially seen through a mirror or obscured in a dark corner of the frame or behind the shower curtain or simply off screen. Her fear of being discovered is a giveaway so it must be excised visually as to conform to the narrative of a woman without memory, a woman without a head. Verónica tries to be a person without memory, devoid of all agency, by meandering through the routine like a zombie. In the shot where she stands by the window as her husband’s hunted animal is placed on a table outside, not only is Veronica’s head literally cut off the top of the frame but also the wooden curtain shade is drawn. The spectator cannot see Verónica not only because her back is towards the camera but also because her head is outside the image. On top of that, Verónica cannot even look outside the window through the drawn shade. In this effect of double obfuscation, Verónica’s blocked out gaze coincides with the spectator’s incomplete view. It’s a moment of visual identification in which the aesthetic of Martel’s camera places us artificially in the position of Verónica without the use of a literal POV (which would show merely the wooden horizontal panels of the shade). This juxtaposition creates the sense that Verónica is peeping unnoticed because the spectator can see the body of the animal being laid out through the partial lower view of the window. However, Natalia Barrenha reminds us “in La mujer sin cabeza Martel seeks to link the blindness of the past with the blindness of the present” (Barrenha 2012, 650). Therefore, what is occurring is quite the opposite: Verónica is choosing once again not to look, much like she did in the moments after the accident. She does not want to witness the carcass of the dead animal exposed in the sunlight. Like in the moment where she puts on her sunglasses, she wants to dim her view, blind her sight, and erase her mind’s eye. Perhaps the animal reminds her of the body 82 she might have left on the side of the road, of the violence she may or may not have committed. Barrenha concludes: “Through the operations of seeing/not seeing/not wanting to see, Lucrecia does not dissolve the tension of the tragic past, but rather lives from it by pointing out the mechanisms of forgetting and hiding that could be reinventing themselves in the present” (651). The tension between Verónica’s refusal to see and our position from the present to be able to look at what she does not is precisely how Martel seeks to undo such blindness — that turning away from violence that Argentina has become accustomed to since the dictatorship ended. The spectator, in engaging with Martel’s visual construct, is forced to not only imagine but also to want to look at that which Verónica does not. By cutting out the potentially guilty elements from the film, Martel urges the viewer to dig them out and place them back in. The “new scene” writers during Chile’s dictatorship described in Richard’s book required “a reader who was not only complicit but also expert in trans- codifying maneuvers,” and reading their works was “an exercise in cryptanalysis that challenged the presupposed transparency of direct forms of communication” (64). Martel’s spectator is analogous to these new scene readers. Like those disruptive inconvenient wounds that the artists of “the new scene” expose in the body of tortured dictatorial Chile, that Richard’s book opens up through her “gashing” flow of fragmentary citations, Lucrecia Martel invites the spectator to decipher what they are seeing, to drive to that ditch and see if there’s a young boy’s body, to turn in the incriminating shoe left by the side of the road. As Verónica, her sister, her niece and her niece’s friend drive by what appears to be the site of an accident—but is possibly the digging out of the boy’s body from the canal— the film returns to the aesthetic of the first half of the film during the accident scene. A song plays in the background as we once again are denied Verónica’s close-up implying her expression would give her away. At this point, the spectator accustomed to Martel’s visual 83 language is more aware that the film seems to be hiding Verónica’s visage to highlight her potential guilt. Someone without guilt would have nothing to hide. At this moment, “without uttering a word, the whole atmosphere of the film evokes the dictatorship years” (Sosa 2009, 257). Oscar Jubis explains how: This story about a boy who disappears mysteriously evokes the fate of the desaparecidos, the thousands of young people arrested by the right-wing dictatorship that governed Argentina in the 1970s. Years later, it was revealed that they were thrown into the Atlantic Ocean from airplanes or buried clandestinely. Those in the upper class who were not directly implicated in the conduct of the government chose to enjoy their pleasures and privileges while turning a blind eye on the atrocities. The potential that Vero threw Aldo in the canal with her car and the possibility that Vero could have offered assistance to, perhaps, save his life but chose not to even get out to look, create strong crossgenerational parallels. (Jubis 2009, 101) As Verónica and her family pass by in the safe bubble of their car, a symbol not only of their status but also of their distance from what’s outside, the spectator witnesses these bourgeois women watching the product of their own distancing. They are repeating Verónica’s hit-and- run action, now as a group of women instead of just one. The crime of omission has now multiplied. As Martel has mentioned on several interviews, hit and run accidents increased during the SUV boom of the 1990s in Argentina as members of the higher class got away with running over those of the lower. For her, a car accident represents the divide between classes. And this scene recreates that refusal to get out of the car and offer help to those who are left by the side of the road suffering, the difference being that it is no longer a singular act performed by Verónica but a collective violence perpetuated by class and status, who excuse themselves by remaining on the other side of the glass. The spectator is in a similar position as he or she watches the film safely through the looking glass of the film or TV screen: “While [exposing] the secret nuances of a terrible machinery of silence, the film 84 addresses the spectators with an uncomfortable question: Do you want to be complicit too? In that way, The Headless Woman develops a form of trust and responsibility towards the future” (Sosa 2009, 256). While pointing out what Chilean exiled author Ariel Dorfman (or any gaze from outside Chile) fails to account for in his play Death and the Maiden (1990), Richard renders what falls outside such literature of the defeated, such direct portrayals of victimhood, as “blind spots that demand an aesthetic of diffuse lighting, so that their forms acquire the indirect meaning of what is shown obliquely, of that which circulates along the narrow paths of recollection, filtered by barely discernible fissures of consciousness” (34). These blind spots that must be viewed through an x-ray as to keep its indirect grip on the edges of memory can also describe the way Martel shows the guilt filtering through Verónica’s barely cracking conscience and the film’s stitched together version of reality. The invisibly edited film vanishes not only Verónica’s guilt but also her conscience, her thoughts, her humanity. In disappearing the act of violence, the film lobotomizes its own main character. Her actions resemble those of a zombie, as not only did she ‘not’ commit the crime but also she does not do anything at all. She is dressed, driven, put to bed by servants, her sister, her husband and her incestuous lover. She is the living dead, an unpunished murderer, a faceless killer, an invisible monster. And according to Martel, those are the scariest of all: “the most terrible violence is that which one gets used to and ceases to see” (Foundas 2009, La mujer sin cabeza DVD). In the final scenes of the film, Verónica finds herself in the hotel she stayed the night of the accident. A crack in the narrative occurs when suddenly her sister gives away that she knows what happened with a look to the floor. Verónica feels guilt for the second time in the film as her eyes swell up momentarily, her only emotional moment in the film that is 85 visible on camera. Her sister’s judging gaze could be construed as the only true admission of guilt in the film because it ultimately terrifies Verónica. But this fissure is fleeting and easily covered up with a smile, like the strands of Verónica’s grey hair that a box of dye can easily conceal. In the last shot of the film, the spectator is left outside of a room where a bourgeois party takes place, looking through a glass darkly at a possible murderer and the society that might be conspiring with her, by looking the other way, “a community protected by its ability to self-protect through the manipulation of institutional archives that is homologous with an erasure of personal memory” (Lund and Reber 2012, 49-50). With this final image, Martel tells the viewer to keep looking and “call[s] attention to a comforting, but depoliticizing and thus injustice-perpetuating, mechanism that facilitates a willful oblivion” (Losada 2010, 307). Martel’s splicing of the film to accommodate a convenient narrative that absolves Verónica not only of facing her apparent guilt but of all agency, as if the bourgeois class can look away from the horrors of the dictatorship unscathed – ignoring the missing bodies of 30,000 desaparecidos – mirrors the sutured wounds that attempt to erase the work of the “new scene” at the heart Nelly Richard’s argument: the <<new scene>> sought out to elaborate interstitial tactics subverting authoritative norms, multiplying small margins for the insubordination of signs within the system of repressive punctuation. (65-66) Those small margins of insubordinate signs are precisely those edges of Martel’s frame. They are brought to the foreground by that spark of curiosity in the spectator wielded through the director’s Pandora’s box of cropped image fragments and excised scenes. The film is enacting the violence present in the not looking, the not acknowledging, by precisely doing that: cutting off the frame just on the edge of the horrific, excising scenes with potentially 86 incriminating evidence. By hiding it from the spectator’s sight, she is implying the probable presence of that violence in the way Verónica, as a member of her privileged class, might have gotten away with murder by acting oblivious. Through the medium of film, Martel points out the performance in such an act, as the spectator’s imagination unveils what he or she is not allowed to witness. Cecilia Sosa writes: “the film invites viewers to consider the distortions of their eyes, and eventually to re-make reality” since “silence means complicity and ultimately to remain captured in the old machinery of guilt” (Sosa 2009, 259). Through visual occlusion, the film encourages the viewer to imagine the potential horrors hidden underneath Martel’s veiled screen, just like the censored Frankenstein peaked the curiosity of The Spirit of the Beehive’s Ana and the cuts applied to Vanessa’s snuff videotape enticed Angela’s reticent attraction to violence. The Spectator Defies Its Spatial and Visual Limits As a film that borrows from Freudian psychoanalysis to expose a surrealistic milieu, Un Chien andalou sought to project the unconscious and play out the circular frustration of desires that haven’t found direct translation into action due to constraints from society and moral codes. It wanted the audience to feel the mind, to open that box of repressed desire and take in physiologically the truth that they’ve been confining behind their conscious thoughts which is essentially a propelling force to their behavior. Buñuel and Dalí’s surrealist endeavor into the lair of repressed desire continues to have an untimely impact on world cinema because its direct, unconventional and revolutionary approach still retains its shocking and alluring power. Not only does “the use of angles, focus, opticals, transitions; the alternation of long-shots and close-ups, interiors and exteriors, reveal a very rich and individual cinematographic language” (Aranda 1969, 65); it also depicts the universal psychological struggle between our dormant minds and the constrictive world around us. In 87 “showing desire as a prisoner of all the ‘respectable’ values and describing the liberation which his personages seek, Buñuel created a work of great aesthetic and revolutionary sensibility, and of lasting value” (65). Un Chien andalou, like the diagonally striped box within it, recurs and evolves through film history to uphold its surrealist carcass and unveil its desire to slice the human eye into deeper levels of sight. As our reading of Carlos Saura’s La madriguera demonstrated in the previous chapter, Buñuel and Dalí’s surrealist provocation recurs in the film’s use of hermetic space as a way to awaken in the spectator’s body that which is latent in his or her habitually censored mind as a conditioned subject of the Franco regime. Furthermore, as elucidated in our threaded discussion of The Spirit of the Beehive, Cría cuervos, Anguish and Thesis, it continues to incite a release of repressed desires as its infamous eye slashing reoccurs in images of self-reflective horror directed at the viewer of the Spanish transition who must see beyond his or her own self-imposed blindness in order to absorb the horror of his or her origins and be liberated from its crippling effects. Finally, as we saw in our reading of Lucrecia Martel’s La mujer sin cabeza through Nelly Richard’ rhetorical exercise in excavating dissenting art under a totalitarian regime, Un chien andalou even has transcontinental echoes in a Latin American film that audio-visually performs that repression of mind it sought to abolish, that self- censorship of a socially-shared guilt that threatens to suppress our thoughts in order to yield to a falsely pacifying narrative construct. Reverberating that intent to incite, to shock and to unbind desire from the self-imposed limits of a constructed civility, the legacy of Buñuel and Dalí’s imagery, a diagonally stripped box that unleashes irrationality in its characters and an act of eye evisceration that provokes awareness about self-imposed blindness, lies not in its imitation but in its subversive redeployment to plant the seeds of a mental awakening in the spectator that will enable a community of habitually conditioned subjects to defy the limits 88 imposed on their thinking and ready themselves to exit the cave of their ideologically imprisoned predicament while reconstituting censored horrors outside the frame of their narrow perception. 89 The Conscious Spectator An Intermedial Contemplation of Las meninas “The punctum, then, is a kind of subtle beyond - as if the image launched desire beyond what it permits us to see.” - Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida Having peaked under the veiled screens of Spanish and Latin American cinema as they beguile spectators coming out of totalitarian conditioning in the twentieth century, we must now turn to a work of visual art that despite being three-and-a-half centuries old continues to draw observers into an ocular puzzle that also relies on what you don’t see. Much like María’s drowning in the Spanish-dubbed Frankenstein, the killer’s name in Thesis’ snuff videotape and the hit-and-run accident in La mujer sin cabeza, what is left out of Diego Velázquez’ baroque opus Las meninas (1656) is the painting itself. In this chapter, we will rummage through the self-reflexive layers of Velázquez’ painting in order to unveil what’s behind its persistent auratic draw, a lure that evokes Parrhasius’ deceit of Zeuxis with his painted veil. This chapter also revisits and questions Michel Foucault’s deployment of the painting as emblematic of an epistemic transition from the spatial to the representative in light of the painting’s many subsequent interpretations and argues that it possesses a prefigural intermediality with photography and cinema. Foucault’s Void and the Visual Immediacy of Las meninas Foucault prefaces his book The Order of Things: An archaeology of the human sciences (1966) with a comical reaction, a kind of nervous laughter, to a quote in Jorge Luis Borges’ essay “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins” (1952) of a most likely fictitious Chinese encyclopedia entitled Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge which classifies animals in a 90 bizarre taxonomy of wild categories. This involuntary response sparks in Foucault a desire to explore the transformation of thought from the Classical age to Modernity, how the way we order things and represent them has morphed from proximity in space to succession in time. His main argument highlights a shift in the nineteenth century in which language ceases to be the fabric of thought, the space upon which knowledge is threaded, and is replaced by historicity and time – a kind of archaeological excavation that unearths knowledge submerged upon knowledge like bones buried deep beneath the soil we stand on. 12 Objects are no longer classified by laying them out on a tabula to observe similarities and differences but by placing them on a timeline, excavating via critical archaeology that which became historical a priori. Foucault refers back to his dissertation Madness and Civilization (1964) to correlate findings of the history of the “Same,” of resemblance, of how culture establishes the correlation between things, with the history of the “Other,” of foreign intrusion, of how culture sets itself apart from exteriority. 13 Foucault then moves his discussion from that 12 Foucault writes: “from the nineteenth century onward, the theory of representation disappears as the universal foundation of all possible orders; language as the spontaneous tabula, the primary grid of things, as an indispensable link between representation and things, is eclipsed in its turn; a profound historicity penetrates into the heart of things, isolates and defines them in their own coherence, imposes upon them the forms of order implied by the continuity of time” (Foucault 1989, xxv). 13 Foucault writes: “The history of madness would be the history of the Other – of that which, for a given culture, is at once interior and foreign, therefore to be excluded (so as to exorcize the interior danger) but by being shut away (in order to reduce its otherness); whereas the history of the order imposed on things would be the history of the Same – of that which, for a given culture, is both dispersed and related, therefore to be distinguished by kinds and to be collected together into identities” (Foucault 1989, 91 which disrupts order to how that order is established in the first place – how this state we call sanity to which madness is in opposition, the taxonomy of normalcy, is defined. His answer, which comes to him while reading the Borges’ essay, is that such construction is arbitrary. Borges writes: “I have registered the arbitrarities of Wilkins, of the unknown (or false) Chinese encyclopedia writer… it is clear that there is no classification of the Universe not being arbitrary and full of conjectures. The reason is very simple: we do not know what thing the universe is” (Borges 1993, 3). As if it were a mysterious Chinese text that quite possibly does not exist, Foucault seeks to estrange that which we accept a priori, the unquestioned manner in which at a given time philosophers and scientists have followed an arbitrary arrangement of signs, by highlighting epistemic shifts in historical epochs that expose such randomness in thought. Laying out this foundation, Foucault submerges himself in a detailed, close and labyrinthine observation of Velázquez’ Las meninas to illustrate how meaning is extracted in a Classical work of art via spatial correlations within the parameters pictorially established by the painting and not by peeling off its material skin to engage with it as an artifact of history. Unlike Jonathan Brown’s historical approach, which reads the painting from a modern stand point – unmasking it as Velázquez’ attempt to elevate not only his rank in the royal court but also the status of painting from a plebeian act of the hand to a skill of the mind worthy of nobility, 14 Foucault reads the ocular puzzle of Las meninas as a depiction of pure representation by restricting his analysis to the visual language the painting itself provides. For example, he briefly refers to the figures reflected in the mirror as King Phillip IV and his xxvi). Insanity points to things that are out of order, misplaced, infected or derailed from that which is deemed normal. 14 …making “the painter as worthy because, not in spite, of his art” (Brown 2008, 73). 92 wife Mariana for a paragraph or so, but then swiftly returns to erasing those “proper names” and looking at what he calls the painting’s “grey, anonymous language” (Foucault 1989, 10) where its true essence lies – that superimposition (or Sameness) between the gaze of that which is being represented (the royal couple), the gaze of the artist transposing such a gaze via its representation on the canvas (Velázquez) and the gaze of the spectator contemplating the representation of the model’s gaze through the gaze of the artist (Us). 15 Foucault equates the three gazes in one point of view as the spectator sees through the artwork that which the artist saw which is what the model sees, that is the artist at work looking at them as he represents them. Essentially, in Foucault’s interpretation, Velázquez is able to gaze through the model at him gazing back at them; and the gaze of the model is both the royal couple and the eventual spectator of the painting. This echo of gazes, Foucault concludes, creates an “essential void” as it annihilates in absence both what is being reproduced in the painting and the spectator in whose eyes it is only a reproduction, leaving the process through which one is made the Same with the other liberated in its “pure form” (18). In Chapter Two, he uses this analysis of how classical painting was based on resemblances of space, in reflecting and/or repeating nature, reenacting life, as a springboard to explore the pre-modern classification of knowledge. 16 Employing his own Borgesian 15 Foucault writes: “These three ‘observing’ functions come together in a point exterior to the picture: that is, an ideal point in relation to what is represented, but a perfectly real one too, since it is also the starting-point that makes the representation possible” (Foucault 1989, 16). 16 Foucault writes: “Painting imitated space. And representation – whether in the service of pleasure or of knowledge – was posited as a form of repetition: the theatre of life or the mirror of nature, that was the claim made by all language, its manner of declaring its existence and of formulating its right of speech” (Foucault 1989, 19). 93 encyclopedic taxonomy on the concept of similitude, Foucault breaks down this reflective quality into the four types of similitude: Convenientia, characterized by propinquity in spatial adjacency where “the world is linked together like a chain” (21); Aemulatio, characterized by being reflective yet no longer constrained by space and able to exist at a large distance, enabling “things to imitate one another from one end of the universe to the other without connection or proximity” (22); Analogy, characterized by both the chain-like linking of ‘Convenience’ and the distant reflection of ‘Emulation,’ making possible “the marvelous confrontation of resemblances across space; but it also speaks of adjacencies, of bonds and joints” (24); and Sympathy, characterized by an instantaneous speed-of-light Sameness that can assimilate both things into one identity, having “the dangerous power of rendering things identical to one another” (26). Additionally, Sympathy has a counterbalancing twin in Antipathy which prevents each thing from losing its singularity, maintaining “the isolation of things and preventing their assimilation” (27). Foucault then proceeds to expose how similarities express themselves by leaving a mark, a signature that identifies them, transforming “the space inhabited by immediate resemblances [into] a vast open book [bristling] with written signs” (30), additively forming what he calls the ‘episteme’ of the sixteenth century that spirals into itself, endlessly repeating and building upon itself a knowledge of the Same thing – limited only by the proportional expansion of a microcosm into a macrocosm. 17 This logic is how erudition and divination, knowledge and magic, came 17 Foucault writes: “By positing resemblance as the link between signs and what they indicate (thus making resemblance both a third force and a sole power, since it resides in both the mark and the content in identical fashion), sixteenth-century knowledge condemned itself to never knowing anything but the same thing, and to knowing that thing only at the unattainable end of an endless journey” (Foucault 1989, 34). 94 to be hermeneutically wrapped upon each other – language being graphically indebted to both the esoteric and scientific disciplines, or as Foucault puts it: “caught in the interstice between the primal Text and the infinity of Interpretation” (45), perhaps fulfilling Plato’s prophetic warning of writing being a dangerous pharmakon – a Greek word meaning both poison and remedy deployed by Jacques Derrida in his essay “Plato’s Pharmacy” to illustrate how text can alternatively harm or cure according to interpretation and/or logical reapplication or enunciation. Once text is divorced from its logos and embroidered as a fabric, a code, open to divination it becomes archaeology, hieroglyph, signs with multiple signifiers – mirrors facing each other infinitely expanding interpretatively with the messianic promise of coalescing into one unequivocal revelation, “the promise of an effectively written text which interpretation will one day reveal in its entirety” (46). The visual language of Las meninas challenges Foucault’s own observation of the pre- modern privileging of written language, of words, as the threads from which Text and the divination of Text conjure an infinitude of Interpretation incommensurable to such a degree that to unveil its full meaning it would have to contain the whole universe within it, that Borgesian concept of “Universe” that is unclassifiable by its very essence. Velázquez focuses on an ocular engagement that goes beyond the merely textual, the reading and deciphering literature’s arbitrary order, as it is a beholding of knowledge through a seemingly direct reflection of the real, not contaminated or delayed by graphically encoded signs. Therefore, Las meninas although engaging in an interplay of similitude is also extrapolating the episteme of the Same to a new fabric, not a parchment on which signs are inscribed as a text and flipped over to a narrative opening itself to both erudition and magic, but a canvas on which all the information is taken in at once, its pictorial knowledge flooding into the intellect instantaneously, unmediated or slowed down by the codifying quality of words. One can 95 apply Foucault’s four similitudes to the painting: there’s an illusion of spatial convenience that places the painter, the model and the spectator in close quarters; an emulation through the mirror reflection of that which is distant in rank, the royal couple, with the spectator that views the painting in a museum, outside of the royal palace; an analogy of the spectator with the royal couple that is established by both our proximity (perhaps equivalence) within the painting to their position and our distance as viewers outside the painting looking from a different place; and a sympathy since the spectator is spatially assimilated as being in the royal couple’s position, courting the danger of mingling his or her identity with theirs, yet counterbalanced by the antipathy that he or she is only illusorily standing in the royals’ place, hence not truly there, as the spectator in reality stands outside of the frame elsewhere. Also, similitudes can be applied between our gaze and the gaze of the artist as we are also conveniently placed in his presence, emulating his gaze as we look upon the Las meninas from a position analogous to his own as he painted it and hence can sympathetically identify our gaze as the artist looking at himself painting that which we see but are antipathetically singularized by our absence within the frame of the painting itself. Therefore, the painting stages in its self-reflexive resemblances the recursive spiral of the Same, being emblematic of the episteme of classical times as theorized by Foucault. Nonetheless, its non-textual immediacy might hold a clue as to Las meninas’ recurrent conjuration beyond the classical period and into theoretical discourses in modernity. Las meninas’s Persistent Auratic Draw The royals Phillip IV and Mariana might be long dead, and hence historically devoid of their monarchic power as the mirror foreshadows their loss by placing their reflection among the obscurity of other forgotten portraits, yet the painting somehow defies losing its aura despite the advent of technical reproduction in the close of the nineteenth century – 96 Foucault’s second epistemic turning point – as expounded by Walter Benjamin in his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” (1939). Las meninas is not emancipated “from its parasitic subservience to ritual” (Benjamin 2003, 24) as many continually flock to Museo del Prado in Madrid to behold its puzzling involvement of the spectator in the process of its own representation. Perpetuating its auratic draw, the painting self-engenders itself as the gaze of the modern onlooker is absorbed by the rendered Velázquez and illusorily applied to his invisible canvas. Las meninas no longer conjures just the presence of the royals in the room as an allegory of their ubiquitous power over the kingdom. It also superimposes such a presence over our subjectivity as beholders, an effect that is reversible in that our presence takes over their image giving us the surrogacy of absolute power and the illusion of recognition as confirmed by the deferring gaze coming forth from the Infanta Margarita and her entourage. Beginning his essay on “Velázquez’ Las Meninas” (1981) by telling the story of how the text we are about to read has been unearthed from obscurity sixteen years after it was written, Leo Steinberg, in the essay within the essay, a lecture that was never delivered, calls for the reader to put aside historical explanations or other critical perspectives and just sit in front of the painting and ask “What does Las Meninas actually show?” (Steinberg 1981, 48). His interest lies in a kind of pure, unadulterated beholding of the work itself – like Foucault, he disavows a limiting historical analysis and opts for a strictly spectatorial engagement. Throughout the essay, he always brings his observations back to the viewer: “the very effectiveness of our presence – ricochets from the picture, provokes an immediate response, a reflex of mutual fixation evident in the glances exchanged, the glances we receive and return” (50). Steinberg argues that the painting’s success, or shall we say, refusal to recede into obscurity (or in Benjamin’s term, the persistence of its aura as it continues to draw in 97 both loyal visitors and scholarly scrutiny), stems from the fact that it involves the viewer in its event. We are an integral part of the painting, not just an outsider. But what exactly is our role in the plot of Las meninas? Steinberg starts by describing the actions of the dramatis personae, concluding that “the big canvas at left is under attack” and that the represented Velázquez is “waiting for things to settle” (50). Diverging from Foucault’s interpretation that the position of the spectator is convergent with that of the ‘model,’ Steinberg places the spectator as laterally adjacent to the invisible presence of the royal couple. And then he mathematically proves that the glances of the dramatis personae, including Velázquez, must be directed not at us but at Phillip IV and Mariana, as “those many looks that art hitherward out of the picture must be their due rather than ours,” but that we are integral because “we see ourselves seen” (51). The viewer is a ghostly presence from the future, invisible, travelling through time to witness this event. For the rest of his lecture, Steinberg pinpoints how Velázquez “made his composition seem improvised and unstable” (51) through the presence of three scattered focal points – the Infanta’s left eye at the center of the canvas, the man on the stairs at the center of the perspective and the mirror at the center of the room. But most importantly, Velázquez has “located the picture’s dramatic and psychological focus outside itself” because the center of the action, what the characters are beholding, is beyond the painting, specifically (as the vanishing point indicates) “on our left” (52). Following this logic, Steinberg concludes that what the King and Queen are seeing in the mirror is equivalent to what we ourselves see and is both the painter’s representation of the royal presence as well as the actual royals present. Thus the painting seeks “to represent the truthfulness of the painter’s art” (52) by converging in reflection the real with the depicted. Furthermore, Steinberg explores how the characters in the painting “are grouped and ranked according to what they see” (53), establishing three equilateral triangles: the 98 Infanta, the lady and the female dwarf; the kneeling boy, the menina and the talkative chaperone; and the painter, the shadowy guard and the man on the back stair. Then, he places the viewer and the royal couple as part of a fourth triangle with the mirror and the canvas by which Velázquez is presenting “the real, the reflected, and the depicted as three interdependent states” thus “reality, illusion, and replication by art conspire in ceaseless recirculation” (53). Taking Foucault’s conclusion that the painting is “representation in its pure form” (18) one step further, Steinberg states that it is the viewer’s presence that makes Las meninas “a metaphor, a mirror of consciousness” (54) because in looking at the painting we are conscious not only of its illusion but of its uncanny ability to depict reality. We are aware of its mimetic brilliance. Steinberg’s blacked-out criticism that he chose to re-enlighten through the publication of the undelivered essay recalls the obscurity of the paintings that hang in the background of Las meninas – Peter Paul Rubens’ Ovid series including Arachne punished by Minerva (1636) and Apollo and Marsyas as well as copies of works by Jacob Jordaens. Those finished works of art stand back in the shadows to let the event taking place – the painting of the painting – stand in the spotlight, the illuminated foreground. Velázquez seems to want to capture (and highlight) the very moment the painting is being created. It is the act of painting itself that must be immortalized, before such works recede to the obscurity of the background, of history. He wants to freeze the moment of creating and have us witness it forever (as well as be conscious that we are witnessing). And to this day we revel in its brilliance, literally and figuratively. The mere fact that we still discuss Las meninas at length in the twenty-first century proves that Velázquez succeeded. Las meninas in 3D As Jonathan Brown argues in his historical unmasking of Las meninas, the 99 seventeenth century painter sought out to elevate “the condition of painting as a liberal, noble art and thus painters as artists entitled to enjoy the privileges of high social status” (Brown 2008, 54) because their craft required both intellect and dexterity. Despite the numerous approaches to Velázquez’ masterpiece, whether the mirror is reflecting the king and queen in reality or in art, whether the gaze is a reaction of our presence or merely directed at the royal couple’s entrance, Foucault and Steinberg can handily agree with Jonathan Brown that Las meninas depicts “an activity that is interrupted by something that occurs outside the picture frame” (51). The awareness in the “playlet” is not in question. What appears ambiguous is who exactly is engaging the theatricality of that instant. That ambiguity, that distance between representation and reality, between what looks and what is being looked at, presents itself, in my view, as a play on human three-dimensional vision, on the duplicity inherently engaged by looking not through one but two perspectives that merge into one and create the illusion of depth. Brown himself points out that Velázquez’s affinity for “mathematics, geometry and perspective” and the “splendid illusion” of the painting is a result of “many years of interest and preparation” of such fields (59). Hence, it is very likely that when rendering the perspective effect of Las meninas Velázquez could have taken into account the biological fact that human vision engages two perspectives coming from separate but parallel points, our eyes. In his article “Three-dimensional displays and stereo vision,” neurobiologist Gerald Westheimer writes: “The stereoscopic apparatus teases out the difference in the retinal images of the two eyes that result from their view of the three- dimensional object world from dual vantage points some distance apart in the head” (Westheimer 2011, 2247). If we follow this logic, the painting might very well be presenting the natural fact that if we blended our vantage point with that of the real king and queen as if it were “some distance apart in the head” we would in fact be looking at both the self- 100 reflection of the king and queen and the reflection of its representation in Velázquez’ canvas, two perspectives conjoined in the three-dimensional vision of the same brain. The royal couple and the spectator in a museum are but two eyes looking at the same mirror, and the depth created in the blending of both perspectives makes the painting alive. The royal couple is in fact as real in Velázquez’ painting as their own self-reflection. The interplay between the two is the very illusion of the three-dimensionality of human vision – depth perceived by the brain’s synthesis of what each eye sees individually. Westheimer writes: “In an innate anatomical arrangement, neural paths from points on the two retinas with the same spatial signature converge on single cells and, when stimulated together, the observer will see single points in fixed locations” (2241). Therefore, Brown is correct to assume that Velázquez is elevating the act of painting by exposing how it engages the intellect as well as the eyes, but so are Steinberg and Foucault in their own views of who’s looking at what and the subject of the mirror’s reflection as “the indispensable condition for a three-dimensional stereo display is to give each eye its own separate view of the world” (2243). Therefore, Las meninas is a work of art that engages two views and makes them one, creating a third view that not only encompasses each separate view but proposes a third one – a deep, illusive, ambiguous yet utterly natural perspective. Velázquez is reflecting the intellectual engagement of looking at his painting by exposing the dual perspective merged into a third, like eyes that see more deeply in 3D. The Two-Sided Window of Las meninas Las meninas attempts to evoke the mortal and/or immortal powers of art by pointing at it, yet it does so by employing opposite perspectives within the work itself. In her essay “Interpretation without Representation, or, the Viewing of Las Meninas” (1983), Svetlana Alpers criticizes Foucault’s interpretation of the painting for rendering the viewer an absent 101 void by vanishing both model and spectator from its expression of “pure” representation. 18 She instead privileges the viewer in her analysis by highlighting how the painting engages dueling views of observation – how he or she looks through it both as an open window onto the world as well as a cartographic imprinted reflection of it: “the reciprocity between absent viewer and world in view is produced not by the absence of a conscious human subject, as Foucault argues, but rather by Velázquez’s ambition to embrace two conflicting modes of representation, each of which constitutes the relationship between the viewer and the picturing of the world differently”(Alpers 1983, 36). In her interpretation, she bridges the gap between seeing the world through the frame of the painting, and being seen by the world of the painting, by Velázquez in the painting gazing in our direction while he paints: “What is extraordinary about this picture as a representation is that we must take it at once as a replication of the world and as a reconstruction of the world that we view through the window frame. The world seen has priority, but so also do we, the viewers on this side of the picture” (37-38). She establishes a magnetic tension between the two that is essentially uncollapsable. Perhaps she is pointing at a second antipathy in the painting – a reflective engagement of looking and being looked at that equates us narcissistically with Velázquez’ 18 In The Order of Things, Foucault writes: “At once object – since it is what the artist represented is copying onto his canvas – and subject – since what the painter had in front of his eyes, as he represented himself in the course of his work, was himself, since the gazes portrayed in the picture are all directed towards the fictitious position occupied by the royal personage, which is also the painter’s real place, since the occupier of that ambiguous place in which the painter and the sovereign alternate, in a never-ending flicker, as it were, is the spectator, whose gaze transforms the painting into an object, the pure representation of that essential absence” (Foucault 1989, 335). 102 image that is perpendicular to the juxtapositional one that keeps in check the dangerously sympathetic lateral conflagration of being the same as the model, one with the royals, the one Steinberg privileges in his essay. Rather than Foucault’s view of Las meninas as an allegory of the unadulterated power of resemblance without model or spectator, Alpers coincides with Steinberg in recognizing an element of self-consciousness, to which the presence of the viewer is key, that confirms Brown’s historicist reading that Velázquez sought to infuse an awareness of the intellectual engagement inherent in representative art, in painting specifically. Cinematic Time in Las meninas In Las meninas, the spectator never sees the completed canvas. He or she is not allowed to see either the representation being painted or the reality of that which is being represented, being only a witness to the process through which one becomes the other. In Marshall McLuhan’s words, “the medium is the message” (McLuhan 1994, 13), as it’s literally what’s being depicted – art in the making without the model or its pictorial rendition. Velázquez invokes the power of art to alter consciousness, as the painting evokes not only our curiosity but also our capacity to mentally represent in our imagination that which exceeds the limits of the canvas. The past recedes into the obscurity of the background, as previous artworks are forgotten by the passage of history, while the present is illuminated in the middle, the moment of artistic creation; and the future stands foregrounded and out of the frame in the eyes of the beholder, the gaze of the spectator. Therefore, the spatial axis established by the background, middle and foreground also represents time. While the background is forgotten in darkness, the foreground has yet to materialize. The mirror reflects that which beholds from outside the frame, the invisible foreground, but frames what it reflects among the darkened paintings of the past with the difference that it is 103 privileged through illumination as it lies in the space of the future – the mirror is therefore not only an illusion but a ghost of what’s to come. Foucault says “the mirror [is] showing us what is represented, but as a reflection so distant, so deeply buried in an unreal space, so foreign to all the gazes being directed elsewhere, that it is no more than the frailest duplication of representation” (Foucault 1989, 335). The royal couple might be seeking immortality through representation, but such an eternal instant as the one granted in portraiture is illusory since what awaits once its full portrayal lies on the canvas is the oblivion of obscurity. The royals want to live forever in their reflection, as does the spectator through them. One can therefore see in the painting this tension between the inevitable passage of time and the human desire to be immortalized in art. The contemporary spectator literally looks from the future at a painting in a wall, a seductive canvas that is eternally immune to the obfuscation of history because it eternally remains in that moment, that strong presence of the process as it is happening. The painting therefore collapses past, present and future in one spatially co-habiting instant. Cinema does the same thing as the audience watches in front of their very eyes the very instant the film was cinematographically captured – a presented past, a presence of the past, a past pre-sent to the audience to be projected as an image of the future. The onlooker’s implication in Las meninas prefigures both projection and spectrality as he is also a specter into the painting – a hologram from a future, our time, appearing virtually in a representation of an event that has long passed yet is still very luminously displayed in front of us. The eye of our past, the royals long perished, and the eye of their future, the spectator who now looks upon the making of their portrait, meet in the same point and bring into focus the moment of artistic creation – a focus artificially effected by the brain function the painting simulates, that of the ocular alignment of two eyes engaging two non-simultaneous perspectives of the 104 same event while revealing its third dimension, a forever instant trapped in the ephemeral prison of time passing from foreground through middle to background, from future through present to past – Velázquez’ ingenious way of perennially performing the intellectual engagement of his craft to every beholder of his work. Past and future meet in an eternal present. Foresight and hindsight coalesce as we become witnesses to the moment when a creative thought precedes a stroke of genius. The painting, through this complex entanglement of gazes from different times meeting in one spatiality, allegorizes the mystery of creation as it simultaneously and ubiquitously proceeds to and precedes from creativity. The Punctum of Las meninas In his book Camera Lucida (1981), Roland Barthes sets out to explore not only how to distinguish photography from its referent by critically ruminating rather personally his own affective reactions to certain black and white photographs but also how it transforms a subject into an object, making a specter out of it in turn micro-simulating the process of death. Barthes goes on to distinguish between two types of effects a photograph might have upon its spectator, effects which are of a personal nature and hence do not necessarily duplicate from one spectator to the next. The first one he coins as studium, by which he means an average somewhat general interest in what the photograph captures as a kind of artifact that one can extract a curious knowledge, perhaps a detail, but does not elicit a strong reaction. That kind of sting that pops out from a photograph that goes beyond the studium he calls the punctum – Barthes term for how a photograph can leap out of its two- dimensional corpse-like state and imprint upon the spectator a punctured wound, akin to the perforation of Cupid’s arrow, from which arises not only affection for the photograph but also its poignancy, its ‘three-dimensionality.’ Barthes pinpoints the punctum of a photograph to specific elements within it that expand it beyond its own context and creates the 105 singularity of the photograph for Barthes as a spectator. This punctum is a result of an accident and its lasting effect can be latent and express itself after the spectator ceases to look at the photograph, like the trace that remains imprinted in our memory beyond the visible. It’s literally what sticks out. Since it “gives the appearance of a snapshot” (Alpers 1983, 31), what would be the punctum of Las meninas if it truly were indistinguishable from the reality it strives to resemble and hence could be treated as a photograph in Barthes’ sense? First of all, to locate it one has to emulate the painting’s play of interrelated and fused gazes and apply a critical superimposition of the focuses of Steinberg, Brown, Alpers and Foucault’s respective interpretative analyses to find that point on which all four coincide. For Steinberg, it is a metaphor that reflects human consciousness. For Brown, it is Velázquez’ manifesto for the nobility of art. For Foucault, it is the absence of both the observer and the model observed. For Alpers, it is the viewer looking at the world as it in turn looks upon him through a double-sided frame. Therefore, one can agree that they all locate the punctum of the painting outside itself, since whatever causes the disruption of the moment, that which all the characters in it look at with such intent, whether it be Velázquez painting, the royals walking in or the spectator being discovered spatially and temporally ‘out of joint’ (I will return to this point in the next chapter), is simultaneously present and absent: “Even so, that absence is not a lacuna, except for the discourse laboriously decomposing the painting, for it never ceases to be inhabited, and really too, as is proved by the concentration of the painter thus represented, by the respect of the characters portrayed in the picture, by the presence of the great canvas with its back to us, and by our gaze, for which the painting exists and for which, in the depths of time, it was arranged” (Foucault 1989, 335-6). That absence left vacant by the painting is therefore its punctum because it’s literally where the spectator stands, that 106 position where the viewer finds himself in affective arrest by the painting’s ocular and neurobiological predicament, as we saw in Westheimer’s scientific article on the brain’s role in the eyes’ perception of three-dimensionality through stereoscopic vision. Similarly, audiences today flock to movie theaters to inhabit a created space via the illusion of three- dimensional vision effected by a pair of 3D glasses. In doing so, they experience a consciousness that is not their own, belonging perhaps to the film’s director. Anticipating elements of modern cinema, Las meninas functions as a transplant of Velázquez’ consciousness unto the spectator, a prosthesis that generates an arresting feeling of self- awareness that is self-evidently the proof for how art engages us neurobiologically by mirroring how the brain synthesizes two focal points in 3D perception. It is as if our brain were a mirror to the artists’ brain when conceiving the perspectival work of art, which in turn depicts how the spectator’s brain will engage with the artwork. Like Las meninas, cinema also functions as a dual-sided mirror in which a thought bounces in recursive reflection as if the screen generated it with us, for us, as if by us. When we look upon Velázquez’ painting, we inhabit its creator’s head as if wearing a phantasmagoric helmet, not unlike the one worn by the ghost of Hamlet’s father in Shakespeare’s play, and engage in a space virtually arranged to provide the experience of seventeenth century royal consciousness made possible by the brush strokes of artistic creation. 107 The Spectral Spectator The Visor Effect in Film “This is what distinguishes a visor from the mask with which, nevertheless, it shares this incomparable power, perhaps the supreme insignia of power: the power to see without being seen.” - Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx Specters of Film In Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews (2002), Bernard Stiegler and Jacques Derrida discuss live television as a spectral construction in the sense that its actuality is both artificial and virtual, or what Derrida coins as its “artifactuality and actuvirtuality” (Derrida 2002, 3). In the section entitled “Spectographies,” Stiegler brings up Ken McMullen’s 1983 film Ghost Dance to question Derrida about the links between the specter as theorized in Specters of Marx (1994) and his views on cinema as it pertains to this manufactured actuality of the televisual. In the film, Derrida calls cinema “an art of the ghost” and says to the late actress Pascale Ogier 19 “here, the ghost is me.” He also describes film as a phantomachia, a battle of phantoms, and affirms, “the future belongs to ghosts.” Derrida is referring here to his own speech and presence as spectralized from the film to future viewers. In his response to Stiegler, Derrida compares cinema’s phantoms to the figure of the ghost of Hamlet’s father that he deployed in Specters of Marx to express what he coins the ‘visor effect,’ that is “the power to see without being seen” (Derrida 1994, 8), meaning the power to be present without being in the presence of the gaze of the future onlooker who watches him in the film. For Derrida, cinema expresses a hauntology that gives the absolute ‘right of inspection’ 19 French actress Pascale Ogier passed away from a heart attack at the age of 25, a year after the release of the film. 108 to those who speak through it without reciprocity; but what about the reverse, what about a spectatorial hauntology of the mute viewer who is afforded the illusion to invisibly pry into the diegesis “without being seen” as well? Taking the terms ‘visor effect’ and ‘spectrality effect’ from Specters of Marx and applying them to the medium of film, this chapter seeks to theorize the presence of the spectator as an invisible specter looking through a raised visor, not of an anachronistic armor but of the lens of a camera, unto a fictional vision of another time, perhaps a representation of the past or that of an imagined future, or, in Shakespearian terms, ‘a time out of joint.’ That which we, as spectators of cinema, witness through the visor of the film screen is a nonexistent time that coalesces with the present spectrally, like the projection of a magic lantern to simulate a ghostly apparition, whether it be the return of the dead or an augur of what’s to come. Las meninas depicts a spectral moment in that it’s an illustration that was rendered in the past, when the painting was produced, to suggest a present engagement, a snapshot of an imagined instance (that is, the fictional instance the painting is simulating which is the creation of itself), while also auguring its future success that would not only elevate the craft of Velázquez’ work to masterpiece status but grant him knighthood under the Order of Santiago (as the red cross painted on his chest foretells). Like cinema, Las meninas gives its spectators the simulation of “the power to see without being seen.” They are able to see royalty in the privacy of their palace, up close, something that would “have been a breach of court protocol” (Brown 2008, 64), without the Infanta or her meninas being aware of their presence – if we follow Steinberg’s interpretation that the object of their gaze is the royal couple and not the spectator who stands invisible to their right. The dramatis personae of the painting (Velázquez, la Infanta, her meninas, etc.) seem to know someone is watching them. But their spectator remains anonymous behind the protective frame of the painting 109 despite the fact that “we are also implicated since we see ourselves seen” (Steinberg 1981, 51). Exploring the interplay of the spectral gaze through instances where films, like Las meninas, seem to be aware of that presence within the visor, that specter under the helmet, that viewer on the other side of the screen, we will look closely at key scenes from Krzysztof Kieślowski’s La double vie de Véronique (1991) and Trois Couleurs: Rouge (1994), David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997), Pedro Almodóvar’s Los abrazos rotos (2009), and Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich (1999) to explore how the ‘visor effect’ and ‘spectrality’ inform the viewership of these works. The scenes discussed are metacinematic instances in which the directors stage varying degrees of phantomachia, or battle of phantoms (to borrow Derrida’s term from Ghost Dance), but in this case between the viewer as specter and celluloid’s illusions as opposed to emanating from the film itself. Before teasing out specific sequences from these films, let’s define generally how Derrida’s concept of the ‘visor effect’ can be applied to the medium of film. In the “Exordium” of Specters of Marx, Derrida defines “a spectral moment” as “a moment that no longer belongs to time, if one understands by this word the linking of modalized presents (past present, actual present: ‘now,’ future present)” (Derrida 1994, xix). What he describes is in essence a collapsing of time, as an image of the past brings a vision of the future in the present moment. In Shakespeare’s play, the apparition of Hamlet’s father not only brings the past into the present, as it is one who has passed away who appears, but also augurs the future as it imprints upon Hamlet his vision of revenge. Therefore, the specter comes from the past to lie out a future. A film, whose precursor is precisely the Magic Lantern, a projection of an image to simulate an apparition, is a spectral projection in that it casts images that were captured in the past, when the film was produced, to suggest a present engagement with an imagined future, that is, the fictional realm the film is simulating. We are 110 calling the time of the film a “future” but in reality it is asynchronous as the film might very well be set in the past (History), the future (Science Fiction) or a parallel universe (Fantasy). In any case, the time of the film is outside our own time, ‘a time out of joint,’ as it is a projection of an event that has not happened nor will it likely ever happen. Nonetheless, it is still a possible future. For our purposes, a spectral moment is therefore the moment when a spectator (he who watches specters) sits down in a dark room, whether it is a movie theater or a living room, and watches a film projected through or onto a screen. The film’s length might be roughly two hours, but the time contained within the film might be days, years, decades. It has its own clock. However, in the presence of this specter, this apparition that we call a film, the spectator himself or herself becomes spectralized into the time of the film, meaning he or she is a specter in its universe. The spectator takes the position of the ghost of Hamlet’s father as he gazes unseen into another time: Nor does one see in flesh and blood this Thing that is not a thing, this thing that is invisible between its apparitions, when it reappears. This Thing meanwhile looks at us and sees us not see it even when it is there. A spectral asymmetry interrupts here all specularity. It de-synchronizes, it recalls us to anachrony. We will call this the visor effect: we do not see who looks at us. Even though in his ghost the King looks like himself (“As thou art to thy selfe,” says Horatio), that does not prevent him from looking without being seen: his apparition makes him appear still invisible beneath his armor. (6) The ‘visor effect’ gives “the Thing” the ability to be ubiquitous in time without being seen by that which he observes. The “thing” is therefore akin to a spectator gazing through the screen via the lens of a camera—which serves as his armor, his ‘cloak of invisibility.’ This placing of a camera lens on top of the spectator’s eye gives the spectator a visor, like that of the ghost of Hamlet’s father’s armor, from which he or she can gaze invisibly: “This is what 111 distinguishes a visor from the mask with which, nevertheless, it shares this incomparable power, perhaps the supreme insignia of power: the power to see without being seen” (8). Cinema gives its spectators the simulation of that power. 20 They are able to see other people in moments of intimacy, up close, without the people they are watching being aware of their presence. This is the illusion cinema provides—a spectral voyeurism shielded by the ‘visor effect’ provided by the camera. On the other hand, the actors who perform for the camera the illusion of not being watched know someone (even possibly everyone) is watching them from an unspecified future. But their spectator (or audience) remains anonymous behind the mechanical gaze of the camera. The spectral moment therefore goes both ways. During the production of the film, some “thing” (or perhaps many Things) in the future is (are) watching through the armor that captures their act: The armor, this “costume” which no stage production will ever be able to leave out, we see it cover from head to foot, in Hamlet’s eyes, the supposed body of the father. We do not know whether it is or is not part of the spectral apparition. This protection is rigorously problematic (problema is also a shield) for it prevents perception from deciding on the identity that it wraps so solidly in its carapace. The armor may be but the body of a real artifact, a kind of technical prosthesis, a body foreign to the spectral body that it dresses, dissimulates, and protects, masking even its identity. The armor lets 20 While the discussion of the ‘visor effect’ in film in this chapter relies on an ocular (and hence phallic) view of power in line with Lacan and Mulvey’s theories on the gaze, it might perhaps be viewed as being in opposition to Ettinger’s ‘matrixial gaze’ discussed in a previous chapter. While Ettinger’s matrixial gaze privileges a fragilization of the subject in relation to the artwork, it does not necessarily exclude the phallic structure but rather provides a supplemental alternative. See Julián Gutiérrez-Albilla Aesthetics, Ethics and Trauma in the Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar (2017). 112 one see nothing of the spectral body, but at the level of the head and beneath the visor, it permits the so-called father to see and to speak. (7) Like the armor, the camera protects the spectral gaze of the film’s future spectator, preserving not only his anonymity but also his physical presence against any danger. Behind the lens, the future looks at the actor’s performance and speaks through the voice of the “father” of the film, its director, who in his mind’s eye has a vision of the completed film that this future spectator will watch. During a film’s production, the director customarily sits close to the camera or looks through a small monitor, essentially being the film’s first spectator. Like the “so-called father,” the film director gives voices to that future collective of spectators by commanding the performers in this illusion of time-travelling immateriality. The goal is to provide each individual spectator the experience of the ultimate power—to appear somewhere insubstantially and shielded from harm, to watch but not be watched in order to see what happens when we are not there. In essence, cinema allows us to be ghosts. It simulates immateriality and stretches time. For a couple of hours, film provides surrogacy for immortality and serves a slice of eternity. La double vie de Véronique In his 1991 film La double vie de Véronique, Krzysztof Kieślowski explored the idea that there might be another version of oneself in the world. The film begins with the tragic tale of Weronika in Poland who sacrifices her ailing heart in order to pursue her singing talent. She literally sings until her heart stops. Then the film moves to France to follow her double, Véronique, who faces a similar dilemma, but out of intuition, perhaps signaled by the demise of Weronika, she decides to quit music and remain a teacher. This is Kieślowski’s initial foray into film outside of Poland, as it is his first production after the fall of Communism in 1989. One possible interpretation is that Kieślowski is exploring how the 113 specter of communism still haunts its Western European counterpart, as Polish Weronika dies so that French Véronique can continue living—an idea that would make Derrida’s critical text ideal for exploring the haunting occurring in this film. However, Kieślowski repeatedly expressed no overt interest in political readings of his films, 21 visually represented here when Weronika walks through the Main Market Square in Kraków, ecstatic for her audition and clutching her music sheet folder, ignoring the flow of ardent protesters and only showing interest in a tour bus where she has an uncanny encounter with Véronique. Kieślowski’s interest is more personal and perhaps relates to his own transformation from an Eastern European filmmaker to an internationally renowned French auteur—which this film signifies. Annette Insdorf comments: “Maybe Kieślowski is asking whether there can be in God’s spectacle, which includes individual damage, a double who prepares us for survival or are we the double setting up the stage for someone else to live more wisely” (Insdorf DVD commentary). The film therefore explores personal intuition as a kind of prescience, a lesson learned through a parallel life, as Weronika’s dooming choices inform Véronique’s survival. In Doubling, Distance and Identification in Cinema, Paul Coates reads the film’s use of this 21 Kieślowski shunned strictly political interpretations of his films claiming that his primary interest was always in “themes common to humanity, and the question of what it means to be human” (Stok 1998, xiv). He said in his interview with Danusia Stok from Kieślowski on Kieślowski: “During martial law, I realized that politics aren’t really important. In a way, of course, they define where we are and what we’re allowed or aren’t allowed to do, but they don’t solve the really important human questions. They’re not in a position to do anything about or to answer any of our essential fundamental human and humanistic questions. In fact, it doesn’t matter whether you live in a Communist country or a prosperous capitalist one as far as such questions are concerned, questions like, what is the true meaning of life? Why get up in the morning? Politics don’t answer that” (Kieślowski 1998, 144). 114 doubling as a dialectical relationship between closeness and distance both formally (in terms of certain shot compositions) and thematically (as the diegesis contains two identical selves that are far in distance but near in heart) to theorize Kieślowski’s metaphysical extension of the self through a visual rhetoric of what’s inside and outside the frame (Coates 2015). He emphasizes scale, especially through reading the film’s use of mise-en-abyme miniaturization such as the puppet versions of the two Véroniques, to theorize the film’s unique representation of the relationship between immanence and subjectivity. I want to take his reading of the film as step further and theorize what’s lies beyond Kieślowski’s frame as a spectral spectator that watches from an outside yet still haunts the diegesis through ‘visor effect’ surrogacy. After Weronika collapses during her concert, dying presumably of a heart attack, the camera flies briefly over the audience, perhaps implying that her soul has catapulted itself into the air. This motif of the floating camera recurs at several moments in the film, implying that the ghost of Weronika is not only haunting the life of Véronique but is also inhabiting the gaze of the spectator. Like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, Weronika sees her double Véronique without being seen and also provides the spectators a kind of surrogacy for her spectral presence. One can argue that the film’s personification of personal intuition as prescient happens precisely by the hovering invisible non-presence of the camera as Weronika, who tries to communicate to Véronique not through dialogic voice but through her art, her singing, as the film’s soundtrack eerily replays the last piece of music Weronika sang at the concert. It recurs both diegetically, as the piece itself is what Véronique is teaching in her music class, and non-diegetically on the film’s score. In one of the film’s most enigmatic scenes, Véronique arrives home to receive anonymously a piece of string in the mail. Later we find out that Alexandre, as part of his 115 experiment in luring Véronique, mailed her this piece of string. However, at this particular moment, the spectator is not privy to the machinations of the puppeteer and thus, with Véronique, reads the arrival of the string as an uncanny message. It not only resembles the string Weronika snapped off her music folder during her audition but also matches the one attached to Véronique’s music folder as the scene goes on to reveal. A dancing spectral light awakens Véronique from slumber; a light she comes to discover is the reflection of a boy playing with a mirror in a nearby window. However, a second light emanates suddenly and seems to point Véronique in the direction of her own music folder with the matching string. This second spectral intrusion does not have an explainable source within the context of the film. It seems to project from beyond the physical realm; perhaps it is the light of the film projector spilling into the room through the screen. After Véronique discovers the similarities between the two strings, a symbol perhaps of not only their parallel musical affinities but also the two fragile heartbeats, their parallel timelines, she turns towards the camera as if she feels the gaze of someone, some Thing, looking at her: “It is unclear what she is looking at there. But the upward glance and the tilting of the camera suggest perhaps an intuition of something above and beyond her. Perhaps the spirit of Weronika” (Insdorf DVD commentary). As the camera tilts to acknowledge her looking, the spectator is placed in what seems to be the surrogate position of the ghost of Weronika as it attempts to guide Véronique towards the string, a warning perhaps of her ailing heart and the dangers of straining it via the pursuit of music. Derrida provides insight as to what Véronique is experiencing: “This spectral someone other looks at US, we feel ourselves being looked at by it, outside of any synchrony, even before and beyond any look on our part, according to an absolute anteriority” (Derrida 1994, 6). Therefore, the audience is that “spectral someone” peering through the ‘visor’ of the film camera/movie or TV screen into Véronique’s 116 apartment. The spectator gazes outside of “any synchrony” as he or she looks from a future time, whenever the film is screened, perhaps at its World Premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in 1991 or merely a late-night home viewing of the Criterion Collection Blu-ray edition on a 32-inch TV in his or her living room. Whatever the time and place of this spectral event, the fact is that Véronique, or Irene Jacob’s performance of Véronique, looks back at the spectator, who hides perhaps inside the carapace of Weronika’s ghost as the score indicates once more. Jonathan Romney writes: “While most events in the film are witnessed or experienced by one or the other of the two heroines, here we cannot be sure who sees these images, or what the filter is that they pass through. At such moments, the film’s precarious realism collapses, and a sense of the mystical or metaphorical imposes itself” (Romney 2011, 14). However, Véronique, as we come to find out, is mistaken in interpreting the signs she receives as “mystical,” otherworldly, or being sent by her deceased double, since it is Alexandre the puppeteer guiding her with his web of objects and audio tapes. Yet at this moment, she thinks she identifies the invisible gaze looking at her as that of her guardian angel, her double Weronika or, as some critics have suggested, her mother. The truth is that what looks at her is a machination of the father puppeteer, Kieślowski, the filmmaker behind the camera, pulling the strings (and placing the synonymous strings in the narrative) so that the audience can have the power to “see without being seen.” In enacting the invisible presence of a double self, a specter from Poland that is identical, Kieślowski not only places us anonymously in the world of the film via the ‘visor’ of the movie camera but also simulates our spectral projection unto its world by having us interact with Véronique through this armor, this device, the spectrality that ensues between capturing film and projecting it. The spectator not only appears to direct Véronique with the reflected light 117 possibly emanating from the projector but also spectralizes as an apparition through the movement of the camera that simulates the tilting of his or her head. Towards the end of the film, Véronique wakes up in Alexandre’s apartment, where once again the floating camera that simulates the ghost of Weronika seems to hover above her. However, as Véronique stands and walks toward the hallway, the external gaze of the specter, the spectator’s privileged visor position, merges with Véronique’s literal POV as she walks through Alexandre’s apartment and into his studio where he is working on his puppets. The swelling music score during this sequence is the same musical piece that accompanied Weronika’s voice when she died at the concert hall. As the POV shot reveals Alexandre’s studio, the music abruptly ends at the exact same high note she was singing the moment her heart stopped. Once Véronique arrives at the workroom table, the camera unhinges from within her and once again hovers by her side as the spectator regains surrogacy over the external spectral gaze of Weronika. Kieślowski is perhaps suggesting that now the specter of Weronika continues to live through her other, the French Véronique—a visual metaphor for the inner workings of a prescient intuition as one possible life informs the other. It happened and happens both now and in the past, the spectral “past present,” so the instance can be infused with previous knowledge of itself. In terms of film surrogacy, it happens inside and outside of the self, as the gaze from the double outside the self—that is a specter of the past that provides guidance for the future (or the spectator’s gaze from a future time that looks into an asynchronous realm)—floats within and over, vicariously and voyeuristically. 22 The film therefore is not only spectralizing through time in its metaphorical 22 Slavoj Žižek theorizes: “This perception of our reality as one of the possible, often even not the most probable, outcomes of an open situation, this notion that other possible 118 engagement with the previous Weronika and the surrogate positioning of the future spectator via the ‘visor effect’ but also refracts into parallel versions of itself. As Romney observes, “Kieślowski even considered preparing multiple versions of the film—one for every screen it played on” (Romney 2011, 14-15). This calls attention to the fact that film is a kind of prism that provides alternate universes the ability to coexist and inform each other simultaneously by collapsing time. 23 It is not two different Véroniques but the same Véronique experiencing a different time and place as Weronika, therefore making different choices as one time immediately precedes the other. Derrida remarks: Before knowing whether one can differentiate between the specter of the past and the specter of the future, of the past present and the future present, one must perhaps ask oneself whether the spectrality effect does not consist in undoing this opposition, or even this dialectic, between actual, effective presence and its other. (Derrida 1994, 48) The “spectrality effect,” that elimination of the gap between past and future in the present, not only describes the act of watching a film outside of time but also brings together in an instant the numerous possibilities of what one can do at any moment. In that final scene where spectral gaze becomes real gaze, the past Weronika takes control of the future of Véronique, literally what she sees in front of her eyes, which is why she suddenly chooses to reject the manipulative strings of the author puppeteer (perhaps the audience can also reject outcomes are not simply cancelled out but continue to haunt our reality as a specter of what might have happened, conferring on our reality the status of extreme fragility and contingency, implicitly clashes with the predominant linear narrative forms of our literature and cinema” (Žižek 2001, 24). 23 Žižek writes: “So in The Double Life of Veronique, perhaps, we are not dealing with the ‘mystery’ of the communication between two Véroniques but with one and the same Véronique who travels back and forth in time” (Žižek 2001, 28). 119 the manipulation of the filmmaker at this point as the film is about to conclude) and runs to her father at the conclusion of the film. Weronika, who has lived just before her, but also next to her, can guide her with what she herself has learned at the same time but just before it happens. 24 If one views La double vie de Véronique as a ludic metaphor where a first attempt at playing it gives us the knowledge to succeed the second time we play, Véronique is the avatar of that second game that plays through her own existence with the wisdom gained on that first, failed game. Film itself provides such a game for its spectator, the ability to exist within a fictional universe, to experience a time outside of time. But unlike the players within the game who can die and begin from a starting point, the spectator has immunity as he or she is protected by the armor of the film camera, gazing through the visor of a silver screen or a dark TV, safely looking without being discovered. Trois Couleurs: Rouge Kieślowski’s last film of the Trois Couleurs trilogy and his life, Rouge (1994), has been described by the filmmaker himself as “a film in the conditional mood” in order “to show what can only be sensed” (Lim Blu-ray video essay). Here, the lessons imparted by that prescient intuition/specter explored in La double vie de Véronique are displayed as an alternate past in the present (Auguste, the hopeful law student) that seems to be ushered in by a failed future (the embittered Judge) to be redirected towards success (love, a chance meeting with 24 Žižek explains: “Kieślowski’s universe of alternate realities is thoroughly ambiguous…its lesson seems to be that we live in the world of alternate realities in which, as in a cyberspace game, when one choice leads to the catastrophic ending, we can return to the starting point and make another, better, choice—what was the first time a suicidal mistake, can the second time be done in a correct way, so that the opportunity is not missed.” (Žižek 2001, 36). 120 Valentine) —like a game being literally replayed by the player who died. Whereas the trope of the camera/Weronika’s ghost/spectator avatar in Véronique utilizes the ‘visor effect’ visually as we engage with Véronique through the surrogacy of the ghost of Weronika, Rouge employs a more classical and literal spectator personification, that of the voyeur looking through a glass from a distance, removed, alienated by his own paralysis much like Jimmy Stewart in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) gazing into other windows with a binocular. The judge spies on his neighbors by hearing without being seen, through the aural equivalent of the ‘visor effect’—his radio that catches the private conversations of those living near him. He says to Valentine about his illegal hobby: “Here, at least I know where the truth lies. You have a much better vantage point than in a courtroom.” Although Rouge reflects on our desire to see and hear without being heard or seen through this character of the spying Judge, it is also an invitation to pass judgment as if that which we see or hear is exposed inside the courtroom of a movie theater—the images being the evidence, the supporting characters an array of witnesses. Valentine, initially disgusted by the spying, gets eventually addicted to it when it becomes personal—as imparting judgment on a heroin dealer provides a catharsis for her frustration with her brother’s addiction. It is the very desire to see without being seen in order to judge more transparently by literally seeing firsthand what we can only get through testimony or hearsay. For example, when Auguste goes to his girlfriend’s apartment, instead of knocking on the door and putting himself in the position of possibly being lied to, he climbs on to the windows of the apartment complex in order to witness through a window the evidence of her betrayal—her engaging sexually with a new lover. His desire “to see without being seen,” to possess the power that the ‘visor effect’ provides, propels him to gaze through that window, unnoticed as he is in an illegal position of privileged sight, allowing him firsthand knowledge of the 121 truth behind her behavior, the fact that she has fallen in love with someone else. Many of the shots of the film are from that perspective, from outside a window. Rouge, whose title refers to one of the three colors of the French flag signifying ‘fraternité’ (brotherhood), is in essence the story of two spectators, the Judge and Valentine, who view and listen differently, but through the sharing of these different aural and visual perspectives, a new future is forged for both, Valentine and Auguste (who is essentially the Judge’s second chance). This is where the ‘visor effect’ of the audience comes into play as the film includes moments where the camera moves from observing Valentine to observing Auguste within the same shot, usually from outside their windows and sometimes floating like a specter. The position of this camera not only recalls Auguste’s perspective from outside his girlfriend’s window but also seems to be spying like the Judge, but instead of looking out from the comfort of his house he is astrally projecting, overseeing the fates of Valentine and Auguste like a puppeteer. 25 The camera can see both Valentine and Auguste, constantly connecting the two in the same gaze and putting the viewer in the role of matchmaker via the ‘visor effect’. Thus the camera is not only a godlike entity, as it seems to be destining two lovers to meet, but it also signifies the Judge looking spectrally into his past in the present and redirecting it. Like Weronika’s specter guiding Véronique, the Judge 25 Žižek writes: “And is not the figure of the Judge in Red, Kieślowski’s last film, a kind of mega-puppeteer? The Judge’s ‘sin’ (secretly listening to the private phone-conversations of his neighbors) involves precisely the unpardonable act of anonymously penetrating others’ intimacy, of ‘trespass’. So is it not as if the Judge is making documentaries which ‘go all the way’ and violate the barrier of intimacy? And, insofar as the Judge is, up to a point, Kieślowski’s rather obvious self-portrait, does he not stand for a temptation of Kieślowski himself?” (Žižek 2001, 72-73). 122 desires to change his fate and give himself a second chance by leading Auguste to accidentally meet Valentine. Functioning similarly to the Judge’s prefigural dream of a fifty- year-old Valentine waking up next to her lover, “Kieślowski’s camera enforces or perhaps foresees a bond” (Lim Blu-ray video essay) and creates a spectrality as the future of that moment is seen, like an augur or a dream, in the present time. The spectator therefore gets to experience through the ‘visor effect’ not only the power to see invisibly but also the power to transparently judge what is true and seal the fates of those deserving of happiness. Lost Highway and Los abrazos rotos Like the Judge’s unspoken (and visually unrealized) desire to reincarnate himself as Auguste in order to be with Valentine and have a second chance at love, the character of Fred in David Lynch’s 1997 horror noir Lost Highway literally morphs into a younger James Dean-esque version of himself named Pete in order to escape jail after murdering his wife in a jealous rage. He encounters his second chance by meeting a seductive blonde version of his frigid brunette wife, René—the femme fatale, Alice. Whereas in Rouge’s conclusion the Judge appears to have succeeded, the road paved by David Lynch in his neo-noir fantasy seems doomed to eternal failure as each possibility of this moebius strip 26 journey ends with Fred back in jail, morphing back into Pete and trying all over again. Fred is playing a game he cannot win because he “is attempting to construct for himself the very cinematic representation of male mastery that the masculine hero commonly presents to film 26 Moebius strip is a surface with one continuous side formed by joining the ends of a rectangular strip after twisting one end through 180°. David Lynch describes the structure of the film using this term in an interview: “The story melts prior to the beginning to arrive at the end. More than a circle it is a spiral or a Moebius Strip which is twisted around itself” (Henry 1997, 9). 123 audiences” (O’Connor 2005, 17). Fred’s second chance never yields a positive result because it is marred by fantasy, a fantasy forged on Hollywood films and false iconography, on the illusion of virility as a means to control destiny, the same trap that infused his jealousy with anger and violence. 27 Within the context of the film’s milieu, Fred wants to “see without being seen,” escape into a filmic fantasy by escaping into the gaze of Pete—a fantasy of his younger, more virile self—to avoid not only the guilt but also the punishment of his murder, which he can’t recollect, but is able to see only through a videotaped version. Fred can only see what he saw as an audience, as a spectator via the ‘visor effect’ of his own forgotten gaze. The problem lies in that fact. Unable to recall his own past gaze, he is unable to apply that acquired knowledge to the second pass, mend mistakes and achieve his rehabilitation. Instead he is lost in a highway of pin-up fantasies, lurid pornography, and shiny surfaces—a gaze always outside of itself. Like Weronika inside Véronique, Fred’s specter not only haunts the film from within the gaze of Pete but he also coincides at times with the gaze of the spectators within the ‘visor,’ as we can see exposed in the scene where Pete first sees Alice getting out of Mr. Eddy’s car. The flickering over Pete’s POV shot not only recalls the flickering of a film projector but also makes the film aware of itself as it reveals in slow motion the fact that it is only a succession of still images creating the illusion of motion. It also calls into attention a 27 O’Connor writes: “Film spectators are often captivated by cinematic illusions primarily through regressing to a dreamlike, presubjective state… Fred’s regression into a fantasized, hallucinated reality is a kind of warning to the audience about its customary but problematic acceptance of the idealized mastery of the resentment and violence inherent in any desire to regress into a nostalgic fantasy that attempts to refashion empirical reality according to idealized representations” (O’Connor 2005, 17). 124 stretching of time, that slice of eternity that film can simulate, as Lou Reed’s cover of The Drifter’s “This Magic Moment” (1995) imbues the shot with a sense of timeless unreality, of time out of time. Hence, we get a double ‘visor effect’ in this scene as we gaze unseen through the eyes of Fred who gazes unseen through the eyes of Pete. Through this metonymic Chinese box of gazes within gazes, the enigmatic Alice looks back not only as Pete’s object of lust but also as Fred’s reinvented René and as the spectators’ vision of Marilyn Monroe. In Pedro Almodóvar’s 2009 film Los abrazos rotos, the character of Ernesto Martel allows his young mistress Lena, played by the filmmaker’s muse-du-jour Penélope Cruz, to indulge her dream of becoming an actress by financing the film in which she is cast, a comedy entitled “Chicas y Maletas” (‘Girls and Suitcases’). 28 But as the production goes forward, so does the aging mogul’s jealousy, as well as his desire to watch over Lena when he is not in her presence. Much like Patricia Arquette’s dual role in Lost Highway, “With simple changes in costuming, Cruz evokes an array of dead movie stars, from Audrey Hepburn’s ingénue to Marilyn Monroe’s seductive platinum blond, reminding us that cinema brings ghosts back to life” (Kinder 2010, 28). Martel’s relationship with the young ingénue precisely mirrors Fred’s lurid and disingenuous inhabiting of Pete’s youthful and virile gaze infused by the language of Hollywood iconography, a desire to possess that impossible erotic fantasy of the pin-up girl or the over-sexualized porn star. Therefore, Martel devises a plan in order to “see without being seen” what Lena does when he is not present during the shooting of the film, specifically her interactions with the director Mateo Blanco. He enlists his son Ernesto 28 This film-within-the-film is a metafilmic doppelgänger of Almodóvar’s popular eighties comedy Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios (Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, 1988). 125 Martel Jr to shoot a supposed behind-the-scenes documentary as an excuse to have eyes on Lena, through the ‘visor effect’ of the son’s camcorder. As Martel confirms his suspicions by enlisting a lip reader who can read out loud what Lena and Mateo are saying to each other as the video is projected in Martel’s private screening room, the spectator watches the mechanism of the ‘visor effect’ as employed by a character who is a spectator himself, recalling the characters of Rouge who watch through windows without being seen. These metafilmic instances within Almodóvar’s universe “remind us there is a real person behind the camera—pursuing his own desires” (30) and infuse our own ‘visor effect’ experience of the narrative with the notion that we share our gaze with that of the insidious Martel Jr or as he calls himself in the future, Ray-X. For example, in the scene when the spectator finally sees for himself Lena and Mateo having sex in the production office, the film camera moves frantically above their lovemaking much like the neurotic camera of Martel Jr’s camcorder has been importunely intruding throughout earlier scenes. The spectator feels that his or her gaze coincides with the gaze photographed by the camcorder and that Martel Sr is watching simultaneously. The scene cuts to a close-up of Martel Sr as the audio of Lena and Mateo’s sexual moaning lingers over the shot, implying that the insidious Martel is watching the previous scene, that his ‘visor effect’ gaze through the lens of his son’s camera into the intimacy of his mistress’ betrayal was in fact our own. In Lost Highway, the videotape device is not employed to spy on the possibly unfaithful René when Fred is not present but to record Fred when Fred himself is not present, meaning when he suppresses his own memory—memory understood here to be the ability to record inside his mind that which he has seen or done. Fred himself says in one instance when explaining his distaste for video cameras: “I like to remember things the way I remember them not necessarily the way they happened,” meaning he does not wish to keep a record 126 but to have the option to delete certain memories as he pleases. Like the unwelcome intrusion of Ray-X and his insidious camera in Almodóvar’s melodramatic non-linear thriller, the Mystery Man in Lynch’s universe (played eerily by Robert Blake who went on to be accused of murdering his own wife after the completion of the film) is “a ghoul who bi-locates” (O’Connor 2005, 14) that “represents the gaze that sees all” as “he knows more about Fred than Fred does” (20). He has the ability not only to penetrate Fred’s house without breaking in but also to be in two spaces at the same time. He demonstrates this power in the scene in which he instructs Fred to call him in his house because that’s where he actually is. This notion implies that his presence in the party is perhaps a specter incarnate, the apparition of that armor shielding the identity of the one who is really gazing from another place and time. Therefore, one can say that this unblinking pale asexual Mystery Man is but a personification of the spectator behind the visor manifesting itself as the ‘armor’ that is the camera. He is the living gaze from another time brought to the present by the prosthesis of the filmic device as envisioned by David Lynch: “At once cunning, inventive, and machine-like, ingenious and unpredictable, this war machine is a theatrical machine, a mekhanē” (Derrida 1994, 192-3). The Mystery Man is that cunning “mekhanē” that seems to possess quasi-divine ubiquity and hyperlucid omnipotence. He represents the film’s power to move our gaze within the visor anywhere it pleases as it presents us with its vision. He is the armor moving from room to room by his own accord, perhaps ruled by subconscious and dreamlike urges that the spectator (as well as Fred looking through Pete’s gaze) cannot control from inside of the helmet, the darkened movie 127 or home theater. 29 The Mystery Man chooses what Fred (as Pete; or the spectator(s) as Fred in Pete) looks at and when he (or she or us) looks at it, which makes him also an embodiment of the director’s will, but gives the illusion that Fred (or the spectators through Fred) have control of the fantasy we are experiencing that is the film narrative itself. In the scene at the party “when the Mystery Man approaches Fred, Fred slips ‘out of time’ into an ideal space where the Mystery Man fantasmatically demonstrates that such mastery over the external world is possible” (Žižek 2000, 23). Therefore, on top of his ubiquitous power to be here (at the party) and there (inside Fred’s house), the Mystery Man also demonstrates that he has the spectral ability to stop time and stretch it, an ability that the watching of a film simulates for its spectators. Derrida writes: “The specter is also, among other things, what one imagines, what one thinks one sees and which one projects-on an imaginary screen where there is nothing to see” (Derrida 1994, 125). The Mystery Man’s paleness and sexual ambiguity imply that he is a medium through which Fred can record (and simultaneously project) and thus, through the ‘visor’ surrogacy of Pete, embody an existence that both allows an escape from his predicament to come (convicted of murder, sentenced to the electric chair) and indulge in the fantasy of seducing René as Alice. 30 The Mystery Man exists outside of Fred’s time (and twice removed 29 Žižek writes: “The Mystery Man [is] the ultimate horror of the other who has direct access to our (the subject’s) fundamental fantasy; his impossible/real gaze is not the gaze of the scientist who fully knows what I am objectively (like the scientist who knows my genome), but the gaze able to discern the most intimate, subjective kernel inaccessible to the subject himself” (Žižek 2000, 20). 30 Žižek writes: “He is, prior to that, the fantasmatic figure of a pure and wholly neutral medium-observer, a blank screen which ‘objectively’ registers Fred’s unacknowledged fantasmatic urges. His timelessness and spacelessness (he can he at two places at the 128 from the spectator of Lost Highway’s time), as he already knows upon meeting Fred at the party what Fred is going to do—that he is going to kill his wife. As he is not bound by time and exists atemporally, he will always already wait or has waited inside Fred’s house, to record the murderous event with his camera so that Fred can delete it from his memory and proceed to fall through the rabbit hole and look for the Alice inside his fantasy: Pete’s Hollywoodean noir-ish world. The Mystery Man is therefore the spectral presence (outside of its time) of the spectator inside Lost Highway (the armor/camera as flesh apparition) as controlled by its director David Lynch without being seen by either the spectators or Fred offering thus the illusion of free will for both. It’s the power of the director to pull the strings of the narrative, its characters and the invisible spectators within the ‘visor’ without being seen himself—the ability to maneuver what the spectator sees without being seen without being seen as well. Being John Malkovich To conclude this chapter, Spike Jonze’s 1999 film Being John Malkovich enacts what is perhaps the most direct manifestation of Derrida’s ‘visor effect’ in film as characters fall through a Carrollesque rabbit-hole-type portal that allows them to see the world through the eyes of obscure yet renowned thespian John Malkovich. The film’s trope problematizes not only the contemporary cultural notion that “being is so escapably tied to seeing” (Dragunoiu 2001/2002, 5) —that what we see superficially can constitute rather fleetingly who we are— but also that the position provided by the ‘visor’ is mostly inherently and confusedly same time, as he proves to Fred in the nightmarish phone conversation scene) signals the timelessness and spacelessness of the synchronous universal symbolic network of registration” (Žižek 2000, 23). 129 masculine. As Laura Mulvey theorizes in her famous essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975), cinematic pleasure has been intrinsically linked with male desire and operates “on voyeuristic active/passive mechanisms” (Mulvey 1975, 722) that masculinize the viewer. In Being John Malkovich, “the ‘masculinization’ of the spectator position finds its literal fulfillment when Craig, Lotte, and others travel through the portal and become locked into Malkovich’s perspective” (Dragunoiu 2001/2002, 7). This masculinization occurs most prominently when the character of Lotte opts to engage in sexual encounters with Maxine through the ‘visor effect’ of inhabiting invisibly Malkovich’s carapace, a metafilmic depiction of “the female spectator’s phantasy of masculinization” that is “at cross-purposes with itself, restless in its transvestite clothes” (Mulvey 1981, 8). Mulvey’s theory that cinema is “structured around masculine pleasure” and “the active point of view” (4) resonates in this transvestial subjectivity in which Malkovich stands in for Lotte. In the film, Maxine sets an appointment to meet Malkovich only when she knows that he is only an ‘armor’ whose ‘visor’ hides Lotte’s feminine longing. She waits for the right time and then looks into Malkovich’s eyes and experiences that arousal of seeing something through an act of faith as she could never be completely sure whether it is Lotte or Malkovich (or Craig pretending to be Lotte in Malkovich as it happens later in the film) looking back at her: “And even when it is there, that is, when it is there without being there, you feel that the specter is looking, although through a helmet; it is watching, observing, staring… but you do not see it seeing, it remains invulnerable beneath its visored armor” (Derrida 1994, 124). Through these ‘visor effect’ experiences with Maxine in which she diegetically experiences Mulvey’s spectatorial masculinization, Lotte has the epiphany that she is in fact a transsexual – a man trapped inside a woman’s body. Therefore, Lotte’s surrogacy of seeing through John Malkovich without being seen has revealed to Lotte what 130 could very well be her true inner self, or at least a version of herself until now unimagined. The film has introduced the possibility that her own gaze is but the ‘armor’ to someone else that resides within, someone male unseen beneath the ‘visor’ of her eyes. What is this specter that resides within Lotte until now unacknowledged? Is it her soul? Is it a double like Weronika guiding her towards survival, or more appropriately, the Fred to her Pete, a puppeteer to which she is the fantasy? Perhaps what is protected inside the helmet, that invisible gender-anonymous spectator that can see without being seen, constitutes not only the secret held by unarticulated thoughts and immaterial feelings trapped unseen within the spectator’s consciousness (or subconsciousness) but also, in the spectral engagement with film, a time out of our own time, a clandestine but brief appointment that is beyond images, time and words with what we most desire our present to be. At the very instant we watch a film, we become a spectral spectator into a possible alternate present future right now. It simulates the extraction of our desires and projects one possibility unto a blank screen through the strings of the filmmaker. Therefore, the spectator thinks he or she sees what is behind his or her own gaze looking back at him or herself. It artificially conjures an encounter with our own specter, that immaterial being within ourselves that exists out of time and possesses knowledge of what our future should be because it knows what we don’t know about ourselves. 131 The Crystallized Spectator The Spectator’s Double in the Cinematic Abyss “The crystal-image is the point of indiscernibility of the two distinct images, the actual and the virtual, while what we see in the crystal is time itself, a bit of time in the pure state, the very distinction between the two images which keeps on reconstituting itself.” - Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image Uncanny Crystallizations The technique of the Doppelgänger, or ‘double’, has been employed in Twentieth- Century literature to depict a fragmentation of the self, a psychological disintegration that manifests itself through a parallel being. As exposed by Sigmund Freud’s famous essay on the “unheimlich” (the ‘unhomely’ or ‘uncanny’), doubling appears in fiction as the mental division of the ego which results in the creation of an equal but opposing entity, the alter- ego, accompanied by “the extraordinary strong feeling of something uncanny that pervades the conception” (Freud 1964, 236). But, what is so frightening about the double? Why is it that it has become “a thing of terror” as Freud puts it? At the beginning of “The Uncanny” (1919), Freud immediately aligns the term ‘unheimlich’ “to what arouses horror and dread” (219) and proceeds to unpack its myriad of meanings in order to work through a certain aesthetics of fear involved in the strange representation of a oneself that is not oneself, a terrifying duplication that is simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar in that it reveals through mirroring a concealed or repressed otherness now embodied outside the self. Freud goes on to discuss E.T.A. Hoffman’s short story “The Sand-Man” (1816) as an allegory of the fear of castration that serves as a literary example of how the uncanny is a return to infantile materials. In deploying the figure of the “Sandman” as embodying the infantile precursor of castration anxiety, Freud looks into a literary text as if it were a mirror to his own achievement 132 of psychoanalysis. Through a paraphrasing of the story to represent his own theory, Freud attempts to subordinate literary achievement, of which he was envious for its historical recognition, to his own achievements on the workings of the unconscious by reading the text as if it were a dream – that is, an encryption in textual signs and literary figuration that signifies his own theory of how repressed psychic debris arranges itself in a symbolic and oneiric narrative. Hence, Freud himself faces his own double in “The Uncanny” as literature serves as a doppelgänger to psychoanalysis. Nonetheless, what Freud’s reading fails to see in the fictional mirage of Hoffman’s ‘Sandman’ is that this strange repetition of coming across an ‘other’ that seems like oneself does not merely confirm sameness or similitude within the unfamiliar. It also illuminates a stark difference. From Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) to the recent film Enemy (2014), an adaptation of José Saramago’s O Homem Duplicado (2002), the double has not been merely depicted as a physical copy but as a conscious manifestation of all that the original has repressed within, and hence all that the original lacks or is not. Thus, the double comes to personify a deceitful incarnation of difference hiding within an image of similitude. It is a living mirror that, although identical in appearance, is utterly different in consciousness and behavior. Therefore, one might argue that what makes it precisely uncanny is that it is an unknown host, a psychic parasite, inhabiting a familiar body. Only the shell is deceitfully self-reflective. What lies unseen under the skin of the double remains terrifyingly alien. In this chapter, I propose the idea of cinema as a double to the spectator’s consciousness, the screen being the mirror surface on which we have an uncanny encounter with our own frame of mind. Recalling Henri Bergson’s terminology from Matter and Memory (1896), the virtual projections of the brain are duplicated by something unknown that lies beyond the cinematic image, whether it is the glass on a television or the white canvas of the 133 silver screen. In Chapter 2 of her book Death 24x a Second (2006) entitled “Uncertainty: Natural Magic and the Art of Deception,” Laura Mulvey discusses Freud’s conception of ‘the uncanny’ against Ernst Jentsch’s original pseudo-psychological treatment in his essay On the Psychology of the Uncanny (1906) from which Freud inherited the term. She aligns Freud’s disavowal of cinema with his focus on Olympia from Hoffman’s ‘The Sand Man’ as merely an illustration of castration anxiety present in scopophilia, whereas Jentsch privileges her status as an automaton from which the magic trick of animation is possible as the site of a technological uncanny. Paralleling the Freud against Jentsch paradigm, Mulvey proceeds to delineate a contrast in early cinema between the Lumière brothers as representing the uncanny in “seeing movement fossilized for the first time” and Georges Méliès as conjuring uncanniness through technological trickery (Mulvey 2006, 36). One privileges the uncanny effect in seeing reality through the medium, locating uncertainty within the gaze, whereas the other places the uncanny in the practice of deception through technology, locating uncertainty in the filmmaking practice. When discussing how Hoffman metatextually evokes feelings of uncanniness in the reader, Jentsch writes: “The dark feeling of uncertainty, excited by such representation, as to the psychical nature of the corresponding literary figure is equivalent as a whole to the doubtful tension created by any uncanny situation, but it is made serviceable by the virtuosic manipulation of the author for the purposes of artistic investigation” (Jentsch 1995, 11-12). If we transpose this artistic notion of the authorial uncertainty behind the manipulation of words via Mulvey’s argument about cinema’s deceitful possibilities with Méliès, it is in this figure of the trickster behind the images, the wizard of Oz that conjures illusion technologically from beyond the silver screen, where Jentsch places the source of illusory duplication that has the power to be uncanny through a 134 kind of artificial mirroring – a doubling that reveals difference not through what it shows to be exactly the same but through what it manifests aside from the visual. In this regard, the illusion of doubling that only cinema can construct can be as insightful about human specificity as the remediated observation of an uncertain reality through celluloid. What makes us different is not necessarily what meets the eye but rather what generates that which the eye perceives, that is, the Bergsonian image generator that is the brain of the spectator doubled in the simulated brain performed by the images generated cinematically onscreen. Gilles Deleuze begins volume I of his philosophical treatise on cinema entitled Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (1983) by refuting Henri Bergson’s latter notion from Creative Evolution (1907) that the relationship between movement and duration in an image is a “cinematographic illusion” when in fact he agrees with his initial assessment of the movement-image in the first chapter of Matter and Memory as a visual illusion that precedes the invention of cinema as such as it can be traced back all the way to Zeno’s paradoxes. The illusory nature of motion is not a modern concept but a condition inherent to human audio- visual perception. Cinema merely rediscovers it and reflects it back upon its spectators, hence doubling uncannily what we already do with our eyes and brains. Parting from Bergson, Deleuze teases out three theses or tenets of movement: instantaneous images or any-instant-whatevers, which are immobile sections of movement that are not privileged, as photography and painting usually represent, but any particular image or pose in a movement- image that is interchangeable with the ones around it; movement-images, which are mobile sections of duration (here defined as the whole in which all mobile sections play out that does not stop changing and is always open); and time-images, which are beyond movement itself and contain within it duration, change, relation – difference. A movement-image, or image of movement, is a section that is mobile as opposed to an image to which movement 135 is added. He defines and teases out throughout the rest of Cinema 1 three avatars or varieties of the movement-image: the perception-image, which one can align with the ‘long shot’ in pre- World War II and contemporary commercial cinema; the action-image, to which one can ascribe the ‘medium shot’ typically used in tracking shots; and the affection-image, of which the ‘close-up’ becomes quintessential as we can see in movies such as Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928). Taking Bergson’s concept of time as a flow of matter rather than as isolated moments, Deleuze proposes with his theory of the time-image in Cinema 2 (1985) a philosophy of reality in which past, present and future constantly intersect in single images of both a virtual and actual nature. For example, the past for Deleuze differs from mnemonic recollection in that the past is an actual image preserved, whereas a recollection is a neurobiological virtual projection. When we search for things from the past, we are looking for the virtual – what he goes on to label as a ‘recollection-image’ – not the actual past as it was. He defines the time-image, or image of time, as an image that contains time within it – which is both actual and virtual to itself and hence infused with past-future. Differing from the sequential nature of movement-images that he tackled in Cinema 1 in which a perception is followed by an affective reaction that in turn propels an action, time-images bring montage into the image itself. Therefore, the collapsing of the virtual into the actual, that is, the past into the present, the future into the present or both the past and future into the present, dissolves the idea of time difference as sequential as if the beads of a pearl necklace were severed from its thread and spread out onto one coexisting plane. The first time-image is the recognition-image, the shallowest level of digging into the depth of present/future/past in which one recognizes something as actual because you have seen it before or imagined it so. The second level of depth is the aforementioned recollection-image, in which one dives into 136 memory to reconstruct a scene from the past and one is therefore less present than in recognition. The third and deepest level possible is that of the dream-image, where one has barely any connection to the present such as is the case during sleep and takes in a virtual image generated by our subconscious as actual whether it be a fantasy, a hallucinogenic drug trip or a nightmare. The fourth, which collapses all three into one, is “when the actual optical image crystallizes with its own virtual image on [a] small internal circuit” (Deleuze 2005, 69). Deleuze coins this as the crystal-image – that is, two mirrors facing each other creating a mise- en-abyme that contains pure difference within its illusion of eternal duplication in a kind of Borgesian aleph. 31 In the crystal-image, the level of presence is askew in that it is simultaneously deep and shallow as it both renders the poly-virtual indistinguishable from the uni-actual as it repeats abysmally, doubling the double recursively, and unmasks the illusion of falsification through its very crystallization of an actual original into multiple virtual counterfeits. The double in the crystal-image is at once hidden in the eternal duplication from which one cannot discern the original and revealed as such by unveiling its duplicitous nature as “one virtuality among others” (70). The duplication of the spectator’s consciousness in the constant crystallizing occurring on the cinema screen through its proliferation of artificially generated images that reflect back as potential copies (that is, crystal reflections) of those generated by the mind of the viewer is what I propose as an uncanny engagement of the human psyche with the cinematic abyss. In that moment in which the spectator willingly 31 In his short story “El aleph” (1945), Jorge Luis Borges the character has the following vision in the aleph which is a point in space that contains all other points: “I saw, close up, unending eyes watching themselves in me as in a mirror; I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me” (Borges 1978, 26). 137 locks his or her eyes into the artificial world of a film, the projector virtualizes his or her thoughts as if they were standing in between opposing mirrors. The spectator meets his or her psychic double within, over and over, falling into an abyss in which time as he or she perceives it in reality is not only warped and distorted but also utterly annihilated. In Chapter 4 of Cinema 2 (section entitled “The crystals of time”) Deleuze officially designates four types of crystal-images: perfect crystals (a prismatic proliferation of endless actual-virtual reflectivity which he aligns with the films of Max Ophuls such as Lola Montes (1955)), cracked crystals (where mimicry between characters is disrupted by an event that serves as an exit from the hall of mirrors which he identifies with Jean Renoir’s Rules of the Game (1935)), forming crystals (a seminal reality in which a character’s inner life crystallizes into virtual flights of fantasy as it occurs with Guido in Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2 (1963))and decomposing crystals (disintegration of the wealthy and powerful as their world of mirages decrystallizes which occurs in films by Luchino Visconti). Nonetheless, despite such thorough typological schemata, Deleuze appears to have had already introduced an unofficial ‘fifth’ type during his initial discussion of the crystal-image in the first section when describing the cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky. He describes The Mirror (1975), Stalker (1979) and Solaris (1972) as films of the turning crystal – films in which images attempt to reflect the process of crystallization of time itself, a continual churning of self-differingness or a “perpetual self-distinguishing” (82) between actual and virtual. They provide a peek into the true nature of the crystal that turns to reveal its artificial and reflective nature as the imaginary appears to spill into the real and the diegetic rips through the screen into the viewing chamber of the spectator. It is to films of such kind that I would like to turn in order to illustrate (or crystallize in words) by reading closely – or rather seeing keenly – perhaps narcissistically facing a (cinematic rather than textual) double just like Freud did in 138 Hoffman’s Sand-Man in “The Uncanny,” in an attempt to self-reflect my theory with the hopes to refract discursively unto the reader, perhaps quasi-abysmally, how the spectator’s reflexive brain is reflected recursively in cinema’s crystallization of time. The Cinematic Abyss in Possession Such a film is Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession (1981), a strange hybrid both inside and outside the diegesis, in which a couple’s marriage violently disintegrates in a series of horrific revelations about what transpired with the wife Anna and the couple’s son Bob while the husband Mark was away on a spy mission beyond the iron curtain. An Australian actor, Sam Neil (Jurassic Park, The Piano), and a French actress, Cannes Best Actress winner (for this film) Isabelle Adjani (Queen Margot, Camille Claudel), play what we assume are a German couple living in West Berlin that speak fluent English in mismatching foreign accents in a film directed by exiled Polish auteur Andrzej Zulawski (The Devil, On the Silver Globe). Since we are calling this a film of the “turning crystal,” of which Deleuze mentions Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris as a prime example, it is curious to note that Solaris is based on a novel by Polish author Stanislaw Lem, who was heavily influenced by Zulawski’s great-uncle, Jerry Zulawski, who wrote the novel on which his subsequently censored and state-seized film On the Silver Globe is based (Lem actually wrote an introduction to an edition of that novel). 32 Given these connections to Tarkovsky, the question becomes: what makes Possession a film of 32 In 1977, the newly appointed vice-minister of culture Janusz Wilhelmi viewed the film as an obvious allegory of Poland’s struggle with totalitarianism. He shut down the project, which was near completion, and ordered all materials to be destroyed. The film was ultimately preserved by the studio and crewmembers and eventually reconstituted and released at the 1988’s Cannes Film Festival. 139 ‘the turning crystal’ and how does it relate to Tarkovsky’s sci-fi drama about scientists in emotional crisis and a planet that manifests their thoughts in carnal form? As we are hinted at throughout the film and come to confirm towards the end, Anna seems to have forged doppelgängers of both herself and her husband by giving birth to creatures which, through sexual intercourse, she ‘turns’ into green-eyed clones of themselves – psychically cleansed immortal doubles not prone to the human debasement to which the originals have succumbed through infidelity and violence. Given the duality of the film being set in a divided Berlin, as Anna seems to alternate residency between both sides of the wall while conceiving the clones in the East, these doubles can perhaps be read as an allegory of the communist ideal subject, programmed through socialist equalitarianism to annihilate all human difference and perform optimally for the totalitarian regime. Their composed unfazed presence and apparent immunity to violence contrasts starkly from the originals’ constant hyper-emotional and physically violent confrontations. As Jean Baudrillard expounds in his chapter on clones in Simulacra and Simulation (1981), through genetic duplication “one will be able to eliminate all the vicissitudes that once constituted the aleatory charm of individuals” (Baudrillard 1994, 69). Therefore, in their eradication of the randomness that distinguishes individuals as unique, the clone copies are everything that their human originals are not, being only identical in appearance except for the eyes – a feature that makes them seem uncannily soulless like the automaton Olympia in Hoffman’s “The Sand-Man.” In begetting these uncanny clones that grow out of deformed fetal monsters, Anna becomes equivalent not only to the conjurer of reflective images, as teased out in Mulvey’s juxtaposition of Méliès’ technological trickery with Jentsch’s privileging of the automaton’s illusory possibilities in his essay on ‘the uncanny,’ but also to what Deleuze coins as ‘the 140 character of the forger,’ one of the four powers of the false (Character, Object, Genre and Plot) that constitute the crystalline regime in film (as opposed to a traditionally organic one). Deleuze writes: “[the forger] is simultaneously the man of pure descriptions and the maker of the crystal-image, the indiscernibility of the real and the imaginary; he passes into the crystal, and makes the direct time-image visible; he provokes undecidable alternatives and inexplicable differences between the true and the false, and thereby imposes a power of the false as adequate to time, in contrast to any form of the true which would control time” (Deleuze 2005, 132). Oscillating between eastern and western spatialities that stand interchangeably for what is real and what is imaginary, Anna continually crosses in and out of the crystal, in whose liminal space she bears a reflection indistinguishable from the original that can replace the real by becoming a physical incarnation of that which she imagines. In a moment that prefaces a flashback to the birthing sequence that takes place in a tunnel between east and west Berlin, Anna hysterically responds to Mark’s interrogation about her activities during the year they spent apart: “I’ve been a cheater, a liar, completely alone, wounded. And you think I’m immoral shit. I think so too but not for the same reason. I feel nothing for no one!” Here the camera emerges in front of her as she looks at it obliquely while trembling. She continues: “It’s as if two sisters were too exhausted to fight anymore. You know these women wrestling in an arena of mud with their hands locked at each other’s throats...” Here, Adjani turns slightly and looks directly into the camera to finish her monologue: “…each waiting to see who will die first. And both staring at me.” A similar instance of direct address to the spectator occurs near the end of the film when Anna climbs up the spiral staircase towards a wounded Mark to unveil his clone to him: “I wanted to show it to you. It is finished.” Therefore, Anna becomes not only the creator of the monstrous clones within the diegesis but also the forger of the cinematic illusion unfolding 141 in front of the viewer who watches from a darkened theater as projected by the automaton of film. In a coincidental extradiegetic anecdote about the making of the film, Zulawski relates in the DVD commentary how the producer hired special effects artist Carlos Rambaldi fresh off the set of his Oscar-winning work on Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) to design the creature in Possession. Not having had the time to which he was accustomed from working on Hollywood productions, Rambaldi had to improvise overnight something made out of film stock and glue to stand in for the creature in the scene when it is discovered by the detective on the bed in Anna’s East Berlin apartment. Perhaps one can view the monster in Possession as Possession itself being created haphazardly by Zulawski and Rambaldi, a gory mesh of film stock and glue that somehow ends up being the perfect clone, carbon copy of its male protagonist Mark, born out of Anna, from the seed of her alienation – the pristine duplication of reality borne out of the messy cutting and pasting of the cinematic artist that splices celluloid together with tape, the forger of illusion at work, to convey an artificial truth that reconstitutes the director’s own harrowing agony as a result of his recent failed marriage. 33 As Deleuze points out about the crystal nature of the metafilmic, “sometimes it is the film which is reflected in a theater play, a show, a painting, or, better, a film within the film; sometimes it is the film itself which takes itself as its object in the process of its making or of its setbacks in being made” (75-76). This notion of a film- within-the-film not only becomes a peek into the true nature of the crystal that turns to reveal its artificial and reflective nature, as Anna does when looking directly at the audience 33 On the DVD commentary, Zulawski relates how the film is autobiographical as it reflects his own painful experiences while going through a divorce from his former muse and actress Malgorzata Braunek, which whom he had a son. 142 unveiling momentarily the illusion created by actress Isabelle Adjani, but also a blurring of the distinction between fiction and reality as the imaginary appears to spill into the real and the diegetic rips through the screen into the viewing chamber of the spectator. Perhaps the most piercing crystal-image in Possession comes about in the scene where Mark watches an 8mm reel of film delivered to his doorstep by Anna’s lover Heinrich. In the foreground, we see Mark’s back on a rocking chair next to a table on which a film projector stands; while on the far background, we see the 8mm image projected on a screen in which Heinrich holds the camera reflected on a mirror of a dancing studio in which Anna teaches ballet to several young girls. The projected image is also reflected inversely on the shiny surface of the table on which the projector lies. In the images emanating from the projector, which after the camera dollies into the 8mm projection come to fill the full 35mm frame of the film thus becoming the images we are watching, Anna verges her own frustrations as a failed dancer unto a student by forcing her to hold a rather painful position through the guise of teaching her (and the rest of the class) a lesson on the necessary endurance for success. Her torturing educational technique lays in stark opposition to the gentle image of her doppelgänger Helen, Bob’s humble and patient pre-school teacher (also played by Adjani). On another extradiegetic note, Possession’s director of photography Bruno Nuytten was Adjani’s husband at the time to which she apparently was being very cruel during filming, as claimed by Zulawski on the DVD commentary, a notion that adds another layer to her performance in addressing the camera directly at this moment. In that initial shot where Mark watches in his darkened apartment, Zulawski’s metafilmic composition reflects not only Mark’s position as a spectator of his wife’s secret recent past from which she proceeds to address the camera, that is, her lover at the time Heinrich, as if it (the camera lens) or he (Heinrich) were standing for the future Mark 143 himself, a messianic Mark to come that now watches through time in a recorded image of time, but also imbricates ourselves as spectators of Possession watching Mark just as he watches Anna in a ‘direct image of time.’ As Deleuze sketches in his book, the film-within- the-film “is a mode of the crystal-image” (77). It is a crystal-image duplicated within a time- image, in turn forming another crystal. These layers of mirroring not only bring into the fold as to which of the images are ultimately reflective of Anna’s true self but also force us to question our own involvement in the artifice since we are caught in the hall of mirrors created by the film’s duplications as Anna also addresses us in the darkened theater (through Heinrich in the studio and Mark in his apartment) when she turns to the camera to say: “Well, that’s why I’m with you. Because you say ‘I’ for me, because you say ‘I’ for me.” Since the camera falls into the projected 8mm and makes it the full 35mm frame, she’s talking not just to Heinrich or to Mark or to us but to the film itself, to Possession, to the film stock which served as materials for Rambaldi to form the monster, her offspring of self-reflection which will develop into Mark’s clone; to the camera that is the instrument of duplication of reality, of falsification through reflection, a duplication disjoined from real time as Mark watches the past in virtual present through the projection of the film – a flashback that is a film within the film, a ‘sheet of the past’ within a ‘peak of present.’ The collapsing of realities in this sequence in which a film-within-the-film reflexively implicates the spectator in a doubling of how it also implicates Mark, the spectator’s double within the film (himself a double to the implied spectator of Heinrich’s 8mm film), creates what I call a cinematic abyss in which mirroring realities facing each other in eternal duplication yield a terrifying void – an absence reminiscent of the ‘essential void’ generated by Las meninas as described by Foucault in The Order of Things. Anna ultimately addresses this black hole in the maddening rant that follows, where she rests her back against a mirror while 144 talking to the camera. For example, she looks straight into the camera, as if the camera was looking back at her, and says: “you look at me as if I were an empty space, as if I needed you to fill me up.” She therefore describes herself as the cinematic mirror, a blank screen onto which the camera can project its emptiness. Furthermore, her monologue seems to reveal the cracks in Adjani’s performance as she repeats a line several times in order to express it correctly while self-reflexively commenting on the performativity of her own madness: “And then I read that private life is a stage. Only I’m playing in many parts that are smaller than me and yet I still play them.” Finally, while commenting on how cancer and madness distort reality, she introduces a third possibility, one that “pierces reality” and concludes, “goodness is just some kind of reflection upon evil.” Throughout the semi-incoherent monologue, Anna seems to have difficulty in expressing herself in words, as they seem to constantly betray her thoughts, yet, in those moments where she trips and repeats a sentence, we see the actress acting, perfecting her line delivery, as well as the film building itself into cohesion as several cuts signal perhaps the splicing of a better take. In this moment – in which her performance and the editing seem to blur the line between acting and being, in which we see the crystal as it turns, as it crystallizes into being like the creature made of film stock and glue in the process of becoming a mirror image of Mark, pure duplication, an automaton, a clone – in this moment, the spectator’s consciousness through its double, Mark, who is himself being duplicated by Anna the forger, falls into the screen, a screen which Deleuze famously equated with the brain, and loses itself into an abyss that absorbs the difference between its perceived reality and the one simulated by the film. Crystals in La double vie de Véronique Another example of a film of the turning crystal that contains uncanny crystallizations within and outside itself is Krzysztof Kieślowski’s La double vie de Véronique (1991), which we 145 discussed in the previous chapter as an example of visor effect in film. Like Possession, La double vie is also a hybrid international coproduction directed by an exiled Polish auteur, a dual language film that similarly traverses the iron curtain from east to west, this time from Poland to France. Kieślowski sets up the first third of La double vie in a reflective relation to the last two thirds, overlapping by an uncanny encounter between the two protagonist doppelgängers in a plaza in Poland. The story of the Polish Weronika, which constitutes the first third, comprises one side of a crystal circuit with the subsequent events in French Véronique’s life. If we overlay Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the crystal on this cinematic doubling, what we have is an example of the turning crystal in which we see through the narrative arrangement of the film how either side could be interpreted as the actual while the other serves as its virtual reflection: “When the virtual image becomes actual, it is then visible and limpid, as in the mirror or the solidity of finished crystal. But the actual becomes virtual in its turn, referred elsewhere, invisible, opaque and shadowy, like a crystal barely dislodged from the earth” (70). They feed each other, especially upon multiple viewings if the film were to be read in terms of Laura Mulvey’s concept of ‘delayed cinema,’ 34 but 34 In Death 24x a Second (2006), Laura Mulvey bridges the gap between photography and cinema by bringing into the fore the concept of a “delayed cinema,” only possible in the digital age at the close of the twentieth century. With the ‘death’ of film as the primary viewing medium in 1995, cinema starts being consumed beyond the 24 frames per second in a darkened theater, now open to the temporal manipulations available in home video DVDs. The digital introduces both to the cinephile and to the scholar the ability to freeze an image in stillness, reverse time, slow down a sequence to study otherwise unnoticed details: “The flow of a scene is halted and extracted from the wider flow of narrative development; the scene is broken down into shots and further subjected to delay, to repetition and return” (Mulvey 2006, 144). Through the possibilities of its digital manipulation, cinema finds common ground with Roland 146 ultimately Weronica’s side becomes opaque as it transmits all its luminosity towards her French counterpart. As we proceed in the narrative, we begin to see how the actions of Weronika come to inform Véronique’s decisions as if she were a parallel dimension running slightly ahead of the second one, ‘peaks of present’ to use Deleuze’s terminology in which the present past heeds the way for the present of the present to in turn manifest a new future present to come: “a time is revealed inside the event, which is made from the simultaneity of… three implicated presents [or] de-actualized peaks of present,” that is, “a present of the future, a present of the present and a present of the past, all implicated in the event, rolled up in the event, and thus simultaneous and inexplicable” (100). The inability to coexist of the two presents (Weronika’s ‘present of the past’ and Véronique’s ‘present of the present’) generates a third possibility (a ‘present of the future’) that allows Véronique to subvert the weakness of her heart by quitting her music career. One could read the film in terms of a haunting in the Derridean sense, as the eastern European Weronika dies so that her French counterpart can live. Nonetheless, a certain sacrifice is at stake in this transition, as we come to see what Véronique has to give up in order to avoid Weronika’s fate. Perhaps the film is highlighting in its crystal circuit the role of the ‘original’ in the propagation of the ‘copy,’ the ‘seed’ in relation to the ‘environment’ it engenders: “the seed is on the one hand the virtual image which will crystallize an environment which is at present amorphous; but on the other hand the latter must have a structure which is virtually crystallizable, in relation to which the seed Barthes concept of photography as it is now capable of allowing for a punctum to pierce through and take in the spectator in a particular detail. Mulvey’s argument reconnects the illusion of life that is cinema with its hidden connection to death in the single frame, its animation of the inanimate, the inorganic. 147 now plays the role of actual image” (74). Given that both doppelgängers where born at the same time, the question remains as to which one is which. The narrative progression implies a movement from eastern to western geographies, but when read through the lens of Deleuze’s crystal-image and Mulvey’s pensive/possessive spectator dichotomy, 35 that can study the film in either direction in its digital form as well as freeze frame certain images like the uncanny encounter of the doppelgängers through the glass of the tour bus, one can see a Bergsonian tunneling of a virtual or imagined parallel existence feeding into an actual present as to actively propel certain choices in one direction. At the same time, one can interpret the second two thirds as a virtual projection, even perhaps a dream-image, of a different life for Weronika in a different country. As we mentioned earlier, once Weronika dies while singing at the concert hall, the camera appears to fly over the audience as if her spirit has taken flight, perhaps towards France, and now haunts the cinematic perspective of the camera lens. As the puppeteer Alexandre lures Véronique with his clues such as the recording of the sounds in a train station and the mailing of a string used to seal her music sheets, an interesting bifurcation occurs in the visual language of the film in a particular scene in which the camera seems to tilt as Véronique looks towards it in uncanny recognition of a spectral presence, perhaps to her an angel or her mother, but to the spectator the gaze of the spirit of Weronika. As we 35 In her Death 24x a Second, Mulvey also proposes two types of spectators for her concept of ‘delayed cinema’: a possessive spectator in which a “fetishistic spectator controls the image to dissolve voyeurism and reconfigure the power relation between spectator, camera and screen, as well as male and female” (Mulvey 2006, 167) and a pensive spectator “in which the process of deciphering might respond to the human mind’s long-standing interest and pleasure in solving puzzles and riddles” (191). 148 discussed, the camera has now become haunted by the specter of the doppelgänger, who looks over her double as if peering through a visor, having “the power to see without being seen” as Derrida theorizes in Specters of Marx about the ghost of Hamlet’s father to discuss how the specter of communism after 1989 haunts westernized Europe. But also, the spectator outside the diegesis becomes implicated as Irene Jacob looks at him or her as if breaking the fourth wall, just like Isabelle Adjani does in Possession. This is an instance in which the spectator falls into the cinematic abyss as he or she is placed uncomfortably the transvestite gaze of the dead Weronika (for the male spectator in a reversal of Mulvey’s male gaze from her 1975 essay “Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema”) as well as the puppeteer Kieślowski whose metafilmic doppelgänger within the film comes out to be Alexandre doing research for his latest book. The screen, here a mirror in between the actuality of Véronique and the virtuality of Weronika completely occluded to invisibility by the ‘visor effect’ of the camera, places the spectator in the position of the double looking from within the virtuality of Véronique’s intuitive thought process that brings forth a recollection-image (for the spectator for whom Weronika’s story is a memory) or a dream-image (for Véronique for whom this presence is completely disconnected from her actuality as if it were a dream or a fantasy). As we come to find out in the final moments of the film when Véronique discovers that Alexandre is prepping a puppet show that reflects the plot of the film the spectator has just watched, Alexandre has manufactured and strung up Véronique’s feelings of otherworldliness and prescient intuition in an authorial experiment – manifesting the induction of a Lacanian gaze within Kieślowski’s diegesis. According to Jacques Lacan’s “Of the Gaze as Objet Petite a” (1973), the function of the eye is to perceive ontologically through our vision, that is, to orient ourselves as present beings in a certain environment, whereas the function of the gaze that looks back at 149 us while simultaneously showing us images is to command us through the seduction of its phallic lack, making “our position” as “that of someone who does not see where [the gaze] is leading, [but just] follows” (Lacan 1998, 75). Lacan defines this phallic lack that renders the subject powerless, charged with the anxiety of castration, through an algebraic sign he calls the objet petite a, a standing for ‘autre’ (Other). It is the unattainable object of repressed desire that can be a source of both anxiety and pleasure, that ‘veiled meaning’ perhaps a trauma that is severed from the subject and belongs to the realm of the Lacanian Real. The Real, as opposed to ‘real,’ is the irreducible, undifferentiated ontological absolute that resists the Symbolic (language, representation) and hence it’s factitiously enshrouded by words, signifiers, images and is in direct opposition to the delusion of the Imaginary. Véronique’s eyes are summoned by the Lacanian gaze manufactured on a diegetic level by Alexandre just as the spectator’s eyes follow through her the induction of Kieślowski’s camera on an extradiegetic level. This cinematic manifestation of the induction of the gaze can be experienced in the sequence in which Véronique first listens to the tape recording of the sounds inside a train station that lead her to experience those sounds and their visual correspondents in the subsequent scene as she is literally summoned by the puppeteer’s machinations. Beneath the realm of the imaginary as manifested in the symbolic imagery of the film, in the split between the sonsign and the opsign as Deleuze points out about the time-image in the second stage of the talkie, lies the metareferential equivalent of the Lacanian real, not the lack which seduces the eye with its castration anxiety but the artificiality of the film as a whole as it is but a trick, an automaton controlled by the virtuosity of its filmmaker, of which the spectator (like the deceased Weronika) has no active control. This metafilmic trigger places the spectator in the circuitry of the turning crystal- image in which Weronika is the opaque seed from which the environment of the surviving 150 Véronique glows. It unhinges the signification of the film as passive puppet theater and immerses the viewer in the diegesis to generate active thinking about its own soporific, enslaving apparatus (as Baudry deploys in “The Apparatus” through his alignment of the prisoners in Plato’s cave with cinematic spectatorship), the unthought in thought through the spiritual automata as Deleuze theorizes cinema as ‘spinning thought’ from Antonin Artaud’s ‘moment’ with cinema: “The spiritual automaton is the psychic situation of the seer, who sees better and further than he can react, that is, think” (Deleuze 2005, 167,170). It is an instance in which Kieślowski manifests what Artaud might have called the ‘cinema of cruelty’ – cinema that “does not tell a story but develops a sequence of spiritual states as thought is deduced from thought” (174) – or perhaps even more accurately the emergence of Rancière’s ‘emancipated spectator’ – which combines Brechtian distanciation with Artaud’s active immersion to create a spectator-less theater where “those in attendance learn from as opposed to being seduced by images; where they become active participants as opposed to passive voyeurs” (Rancière 2009, 4). Re-Distribution of the Perceptible: Vertigo in Madrigal Following from this idea of forging a mirror image of thought in cinema through the crystallization of the spectator’s thoughts within the cinematic abyss generated by a filmmaker, this section will now discuss Fernando Pérez’ Cuban film Madrigal (2007) as it forges Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) to illustrate an instance in which duality emerges outside the diegesis to reflect the doubling of the spectator’s mental predicament as what is projected visually on the screen and generate an emancipation of thought in a Rancièrian sense that goes beyond mere passive spectatorship. In The Politics of Literature, Jacques Rancière expresses that literature’s democratic prowess “is not a matter of some irresistible social influence [but] a matter of a new 151 distribution of the perceptible” (Rancière 2011, 13). Therefore, aesthetic democracy lies in its freedom to be reconfigured by anyone who grabs its ciphers and attributes it meaning. For Jacques Lacan, image is misunderstood at the ‘mirror stage’ when a reflection of our ideal selves is placed in diametric opposition to our actual physical body creating a fantasmatic superimposition that continues to govern our adult life. If we imbricate Lacan with Rancière, a mis-identification of self-perception must undergo a new “distribution of the perceptible” in art to dislodge signifiers unto a prism of new signifieds. Hence, I want to propose a reading of Fernando Pérez’ retelling of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo in his 2007 film Madrigal in this light. The Cuban film redeploys the ultimate American narrative of phallocentric gaze struggling to exert power over an object of illusive femininity in new and polyvalent ways. Employing an oneiric logic, Pérez engages his Cuban audience with a recurring dream that on the surface evokes a fractured psyche but perhaps is invoking that which hides beneath the images and stands in opposition to the cinematic, causing a political event: the thoughts that cannot be incorporated into revolutionary consciousness – the thoughts that have no part. Can we view Madrigal’s revision of Vertigo as a re-distribution of the perceptible – an aesthetically political act that incorporates new ways of perceiving in Cuba? In his introduction to The Politics of Aesthetics, Gabriel Rockhill explains Rancière’s ‘distribution of the sensible (or perceptible, depending on the translation)’ as “the system of divisions and boundaries that define, among other things, what is invisible and audible within a particular aesthetico-political regime” (Rockhill 2004, 1). It stands for that which appears in our immediate field of vision that serves as a basis for our role in what we perceive to be our reality. Therefore, a re-distribution of the perceptible implies a transformation in what we privilege both with our eyes and ears to be prominent in our audio-visual environment. Film can thus re-distribute our sensibilities most closely since it 152 precisely relies on manipulations and isolations of sight and sound to engage its viewers in a particular aesthetic experience. Madrigal works in such a way by “hijacking the words, phrases and figures of founding texts and the dominant rhetoric” (Rancière 2011, 20) of the classical Hollywood film Vertigo and dislodging its signs from their original signifieds to attach them to new possible meanings, hence transforming the simulated audio-visual periphery of its audience unto a new perceptual system. Madrigal tells the story of a conventionally attractive aspiring actor named Javier as he falls for the not-conventionally beautiful Luisita, the sole audience member at the opening night of a play entitled “Los ciegos” of which he almost has no part. A recurring line throughout the film is the use of the popular refrain, “No todo lo que parece, es” (‘Not everything that seems, is’), calling attention to the film’s own illusion as a narrative about love. In my view, the film ‘seems’ like a romance in which Javier falls for Luisita as he learns who she ‘is’ beyond her physical appearance. But in fact, as the allusions to Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo intertextually elucidate, Madrigal plays with the delusion of a love affair with an ideal image of beauty depicted by Hitchcock to unveil a narrative that runs beneath the seduction of the images and the ‘acting’ of its players: a narrative about possession, not of people but of property. While Javier lives on the rooftop of his cousin’s apartment at the mercy of his dissatisfied wife Elvira to whom he owes months of overdue rent, Luisita owns a four-bedroom/two-bathroom apartment that she inherited from her mother who moved to Las Vegas to pursue a career doing porn. It is this type of unbalance that the Cuban revolution attempts to do without and which Madrigal tackles as its central theme – the politically repressed desire of the contemporary Cuban citizen to ‘have more’ than others. In my view, it is no coincidence that Vertigo was released the year of the culmination of the Cuban Revolution, 1958, and hence marks cinematically a rupture between Cuba and 153 the Hollywood international culture with the creation of the ICAIC (Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industrias Cinematográficos) the following year. There’s something about contemporary Cuba as depicted in Madrigal that resembles the San Francisco in the 1950s depicted in Hitchcock’s film, as if visually Havana retains a nostalgic façade of the time before the revolution, before 1959. Fernando Pérez redeploys Vertigo perhaps to refer back to that moment right before Revolutionary Life began for Cuban citizens, before the dream of communism and equal education became their everyday life, and hence before property ceased to be a private interest and became part of the common good. As Marx’s Communist manifesto delineates, “the distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property. Modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products, that is based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few” (Marx 1969, 22). Luisita’s high-ceiling spacious apartment represents the opulence of ‘bourgeois private property’ that has no part in Cuban revolutionary life. What drives Javier’s attraction to Luisita is not sexual desire or true love or even inspiration for the short story he is writing as Luisita (and us) come to believe, but the fantasy of inhabiting such a space “todas las noches” (‘every single night’), of owning it upon her untimely death as his lover Eva suggests. Madrigal is a film about the deceit not only of what we see, that is, the images as they reveal themselves in front of our eyes, but of what we believe to be true, the delusion that lies beneath self-perception as theorized by Lacan’s mirror stage. The construction of the libidinal ego during that stage where our bodies are immobile and we mistake an ideal reflection for the actual self generates a recurring co-optation of the Imaginary over the Real. Real in the sense that since it hides behind the idealized reflection it remains imperceptible and prone to the infelicities of a chronic fantasy. Such deception is at 154 the heart of the body dysmorphia that occurs in the film between eroticized images of ‘classical beauty’ as promoted not only by the cultural hegemony of Hollywood but also by our socially conspired ideals and an unrepresentable beauty that transcends the imaginary. By unmasking such deceit through its tropes, Madrigal is delineating a new distribution of the perceptible for its viewers with regards to what they trust to be the tenets behind the idealization of self-image and thus the image of others. From its onset, Javier’s spatial relationship to Luisita’s apartment mirrors the physical development of his relationship with Luisita, as if the spacious apartment where a metonym for her voluminous body. Initially, as Luisita comments, he reacts ‘as all men do’ to the size of her living quarters as if it were a reaction to the size of her waist. She subsequently resists allowing him into her bedroom as it entombs her vulnerably treasured intimacy as well as her virginity, as we come to learn. Only when she is able to possess a harp, which is what she dreams about the most, will Javier be allowed to walk into her sleeping chamber. Once he has gained her trust, by helping her find a harp and making her believe he is not interested in her apartment, she lets him come inside the bedroom as she digs through her mother’s chest for a necklace she will pawn to purchase the harp. After she tries on the ruby necklace, Javier becomes aroused by its magnificence on her neck and the two have sex for the first time. It is during this scene that the most intriguing perceptual redistribution from Vertigo develops, as Luisita’s mother’s medallion is a dead ringer for Carlotta Valdez’s necklace in Hitchcock’s film. The necklace here represents the means to purchase the capricious dream of owning the harp. It is a symbol not only of means and opportunity but also perhaps of what can only be afforded under capitalist excess: the possession of an object for the sake of owning it and not for some utilitarian purpose. After they discover from the pawn shop that the necklace has no value, Javier implies that maybe the harp was broken and therefore useless 155 to which Luisita states capriciously that the harp’s function is of no importance because “yo la quiero para mí, en mi cuarto, no es para dar conciertos” (‘I want it for myself, in my room, not to perform concerts’). Luisita’s obsession with the harp brings forth yet another allusion to Hitchcock. Interspersed throughout Bernard Herman’s score for Vertigo, eerie and dreamlike harp sounds serve as music cues to aurally conjure Carlotta Valdez’ specter in scenes where Madeline visits her tomb at the cemetery or her portrait at the museum or in which her driven-to-madness Spanish ancestor is evoked in some visual way. When describing his wife Madeline’s condition to Scotty, Gavin Elster marvels at how “someone dead can come back and take possession of a living being.” As the harp for Luisita is but a symbol of that which she can impulsively possess, fitting nicely “entre mis piernas” (‘between my legs’), the harp strings in Vertigo invoke the possession of the past upon the present as Carlotta’s madness takes hold of Madeline’s actions through subtle transformations on her physical body, such as wearing Carlotta’s jewelry or donning the twirl in her hair from the portrait. But as we come to find out, the Madeline we meet is a mere illusion, an act performed by Judy Barton and commissioned by her husband so he can fake her suicide and inherit her fortune, a scheme evoked by Eva’s suggestion to Javier to seduce Luisita so he can later have her killed and hence inherit her apartment. Both films intersect by having deceitful ploys around the usurpation of property masked as a romantic plot. On the surface, the audience perceives the film as a romantic drama but, through its uncanny intertextual references to Hitchcock’s 1958 film, a new way of reading the images emerges. As Rancière stipulates, “political activity reconfigures the distribution of the perceptible. It introduces new objects and subjects onto the common stage. It makes visible what was invisible, it makes audible as speaking beings those who were previously heard only 156 as noisy animals” (Rancière 2011, 4). The uncanny disruption effected by the emergence of Carlotta’s necklace from Vertigo out of Luisita’s old chest and how she places it around her neck while turning to Javier, who in turn is aroused not by Luisita’s naked body but by the necklace hanging on her bosom, speaks more loudly about Javier’s intentions than any word coming out of his mouth. Rancière speaks of literature as “mute stones” that can communicate better than speech, its democracy lying in its freedom to be reconfigured by anyone who grabs its ciphers and attributes it meaning: “stones, too, speak… bear in their bodies the testimonies of their history. And this testimony is more reliable than any speech offered by human mouth. It is the truth of things as opposed to the chatter and lies of orators” (14). In this scene, the intertextual ‘stone’ makes visible Javier’s invisible desire to possess that which Luisita has inherited as it shines truthfully over his chatter and lies, his illusive performance of falling in truthful-love with her. Therefore, by evoking Hitchcock’s Vertigo in his Madrigal, Pérez cinematically effects “a relationship of sign to sign” (15) to get “lifeless debris to talk” (16) against what the film is otherwise saying with its seeming romantic plot and applies “the democracy of mute things that talk better than any prince of tragedy but also than any orator of the people” (26). As Javier and the camera concurrently direct their gaze down to the possibly valuable heirloom on Luisita’s body, while he brings his hands to her cheeks to show his affection, “the mute surface of depicted signs stands in opposition to the act of ‘living speech, which is guided by the speaker towards its appropriate addressee’” (Rancière 2004, 15), the speech here being literalized in Javier’s delivery of a passionate kiss he wouldn’t otherwise deliver if his addressee did not currently possess (or where possessed by) the inheritance of property. In this double reading between what we see as intended and what we perceive to be in opposition to that intention, the film not only performs the “dialogical dimension” implied 157 by its title since “madrigals are polyphonic compositions for two or more voices” (Rodríguez 2007, 165) but also echoes Rancière’s statement about the political possibilities of a work of art: “Suitable political art would ensure, at one and the same time, the production of a double effect: the readability of a political signification and a sensible or perceptual shock caused, conversely, by the uncanny, by that which resists signification” (Rancière 2004, 63). In La double vie de Véronique, this polyphonic effect plays out in the crystal circuit of the two doubles, where the inherently political significance of Weronika’s Polish milieu seems to have been wholly subsumed into Véronique’s Western sensorium yet the uncanny disruptions of objects such as the music sheet string continue to signal a spectral haunting. In Madrigal, the signification is the unlikely affection of Javier for Luisita which the audience roots for through the deceit of the narrative’s images and words, while the perceptual shock of the necklace in its uncanny redeployment of imagery from a 1958 American film conjures uncanny feelings of anxiety that force the audience to read that signification against its grain and hence perceive its falsity. As we come to learn in a later scene, Luisita’s necklace is indeed a fake. During the climax of Vertigo, Scotty tells Judy, “you were the copy, you were the counterfeit” – such is the illusion of wealth the necklace momentarily provided for Luisita. Like the false necklace in Madrigal is a sign of Javier’s falsehood in feigning desire for Luisita to lure her into giving him her luxurious bourgeois bosom, literally the necklace on her chest and figuratively her spacious living space, Judy’s performance as Madeline is a mirror to the fictional narrative of Vertigo as a whole, the ideal image that is not real – the delusion of sight – that distortion and misunderstanding emanating from the Lacanian mirror stage to which cinema so strongly appeals. Mirroring Madeleine’s suicide off the tower at Mission Dolores, Luisita commits suicide upon realizing Javier’s deceit about pretending to love her in order to possess her 158 apartment. Before she kills herself, Javier attempts to regain her confidence by unsuccessfully pleading “¿tú no ves lo que hay dentro de mí?” (‘can’t you see what is inside of me?’) as if trusting were a matter of merely looking at the other person. Perhaps Javier underestimated his acting skills and unconvincingly delivered his part, as Luisita no longer sees in him the same thing he wants her to see. As Rancière points out about the nature of a disagreement: “It is the conflict between one who says white and another one who also says white but does not understand the same thing by it or does not understand that the other is saying the same thing in the name of whiteness” (Rancière 1999, x). She might be looking at the same face, the same image of trusting beauty Javier wants to be perceived as, but not at the same reading of that face, as Luisita now sees deceit where there once was blind trust. A disagreement in perception has emerged. The audience, on the other hand, continues to operate under the imagistic deception of the celluloid narrative, as we are compelled almost hypnotically to watch further under the spell of Javier’s illusive honesty, despite “the film always deconstructing its own reading and reminding the spectator how deceiving things can be” (Rodríguez 2007, 165). Following the structure of Vertigo beat by beat, Madrigal repeats (or internally crystallizes) its main storyline during the third act through the depiction of Javier’s short story, “La flecha rota en el carcas de Eros” (‘The Broken Arrow in Eros’ Corpse’). The science fiction narrative takes place in an erotically-charged smoke-filled ‘Empire of Eros’ in the year 2020 where “la única ley era el derecho de cada ciudadano a poseer al otro” (‘the only law was the right of each citizen to possess the other’). Not only is the setting of the film-within-the-film hinting at the medical measurement for perfect vision and hence the cure for ‘vertigo’ or unruly depth perception, but also at the green neon-lit Empire Hotel in which Judy lodges during the last sequence in Vertigo that takes place a year later. Taking its 159 redistribution of the perceptible through Hitchcockian imagery to a whole new level, the dystopian world of Eros delineates “a different sensorium… a different relationship between words and beings [that] also means a different common world and a different people” (Rancière 2011, 14). Instead of possessing things, people now have to possess each other sexually by law. In this future world, the story-within-a-story protagonist Ángel, a dysmorphic version of Javier, finds himself at a young prostitute’s shanty abode reminiscent of Javier’s rooftop alcove where he ‘illegally’ rejects her sexual favors because she “reminds him of someone” – a line that echoes Scotty’s remarks upon encountering Madeline’s doppelgänger in Judy. The young prostitute’s uncanniness is enhanced when she puts on a necklace that belonged to her mother, an exact replica of Luisita’s counterfeit medallion that was intertextually a dead ringer for Carlotta’s heirloom in Vertigo which served Judy as payment for her part in Elster’s crime to murder his wife for her fortune. As the narrative falls one more metafictional level towards the end, inserting a short-story-within-the-short-story entitled “Madrigal” possibly written by Ángel’s long lost daughter, Ángel revisits the young prostitute named Estela Maris and tells her, “Aunque te resulte difícil creerlo, hay una vida mejor que la que llevas” (‘Although you might find it hard to believe, there is a better life than the one you are leading’), as he gives her a coveted lottery ticket to set sail on the ship Barcelona. His reason for his sacrifice is once again that she ‘reminds him of someone,’ echoing Scotty’s words from Vertigo one last time. Through these spurts of dialogue and visual cues in which the film resonates as a doppelgänger for Hitchcock’s 1958 American classic, Madrigal not only enacts “a certain way of intervening in the sharing of the perceptible that defines the world we live in” (7) but also deploys “the radical democracy of the letter that anyone can grab hold of” (13), whether this 160 ‘letter’ be a line of dialogue or a prop such as jewelry. In recycling of such imagery, illusion and delusion clash through aural repetition and visual allusion with the veiled plot of the film, a story of possession of property – a thought that lies beneath the consciousness of every Cuban citizen under the revolutionary nation – unprocessed, uncounted, and transmitted here behind the images of a material dream expressed through cinematic aesthetics. Visualizing Time, Virtualizing Thought Rancière speaks of literature as archaeological “mute stones” that can communicate better than speech, its democracy lying in its freedom to be reconfigured by anyone who grabs its ciphers and attributes it meaning. As we saw in the last section, Madrigal’s redeployment of Vertigo’s audio-visual imagery is an example of an equivalent reconfiguration not of words but of aural and visual cues reinterpreted in a new narrative to communicate through uncanny crystallization the unthought in the Cuban spectator. Las meninas also seems to be engaging obliquely with this type of virtual uncanny crystallization in the painting because Velázquez, in placing vision outside the canvas, made non-visibility the subject matter of the painting, not of the object of representation nor of the subject for which it is conceived, but a virtual projection of representation itself in order to elevate his craft from one involving the dexterity of brushstrokes to one that stimulates the mind. The eyes of the observer of Las meninas as well as the image of the King and Queen might not be visible or clear as they recede to the darkened background of a reflection or escape the framework of the canvas, but the engagement of thought in artistic representation is elucidated brilliantly in the foreground. Hence, one can argue that Las meninas illuminates the role of human consciousness not only in creating art but also in thinking critically about art from a philosophical vantage point. In observing Las meninas critically and emotionally, we 161 cast our luminous eyes across time and look at a seventeenth-century canvas, perhaps using the discursive formations of the time as Foucault does, to be punctured by its complex vision of three-dimensional perspective while peeling off thick layers of possible aesthetic signifiers and redistribute them as a prefiguration of the spectator’s engagement with moving images centuries later – a moment frozen in space, a still frame of time in the process of creating enduring art. Like Las meninas, cinema can place the spectator inside a visor as he or she looks unseen unto a forged spatiotemporal existence ‘out of joint.’ In the case of both Velázquez’ painting and contemporary cinema, the viewer experiences a spectral engagement with a simulated and manipulated sense of time and space (or time in space) that has been subject to the whims of its artist puppeteer, a spatial time that exists outside of ‘time’ as we have come to define it in Modernity. In The Emergence of Cinematic Time (2002), Mary Ann Doane theorizes how Modernity generated a concept of time based on its exchange value. With the advent of Modernity, time is no longer passed but spent. It hinges on schedules, lives by the gyrations of the hand watch and the clock, and becomes commodified into a culture that thrusts forward in imaginary timelines as if it was a train entropically exhausting its energy towards eventual stillness. Doane explores attempts to quantify and divide time such as the chronophotographic experiments of Étienne-Jules Marey or the irreversibility of time as perceived through the second law of thermodynamics. However, although these modern conceptualizations of time can be aligned with Deleuze’s concept of movement-image in Cinema 1 as relationships between mobile segments occur in succession across an imaginary line at the whims of editorial cuts, they are in stark opposition to Henri Bergson’s idea of duration in which motion is a perceptual illusion and hence it is indivisible as Zeno’s paradoxes exemplify. In a Rancièrian move, redistributing the signification of time in 162 Modernity using cinema after World War II, Deleuze develops the concept of the time- image in Cinema 2 that hinges on this Bergsonian notion that time is not a lineal construct, as the entropic timeline invented by Modernity that Doane explores, but rather a coexistence of past, present and future that operates vertically in which a recollection is brought down from the theoretical plane of pure memory and is applied to the perception of matter in order to effect a future action. As theorized by Bergson, memory works to yield action and is only summoned when it is useful, otherwise it remains un-accessed in the unconscious. Cinema can simulate such access by mirroring our recollective processes and generate active conscious thought. Aligning himself with the contractions and rotations of Bergson’s inverted cone as a way to slice virtual recollections for present use, and disavowing the modern construct of the horizontality and quantification of an indivisible flow of matter into still images, Deleuze theorizes a type of time-image outside perception, recollection and dreams. He calls this the crystal-image, in which the circuit between virtual recollection and actual perception gets conflagrated in a reflexivity between the two, like two mirrors facing each other in mise-en- abyme, and one is not able to discern which image is the actual original and which image is the virtual copy. As we saw in Possession and La double vie de Véronique, it is in the crystallization of these recursive time-images that the double is born – as the copy and the original, the actual and the virtual, are not only indiscernible from each other but they depict in their dueling polymorphous mirroring pure difference contained in a single image, a diffraction of the time-image into its endless virtualities. By annihilating difference through its pure manifestation, the crystal-image not only explodes the modern concept of time as linear and entropic by paralyzing it in eternal self-reflection but it collapses Bergson’s 163 inverted cone into a cylinder as the base of pure memory becomes a duplication of the plane of pure perception on which all recollections now converge in their totality. In its three-dimensional tunneling of time, from the classical art receding in the dark background to art in the process of creation by Velázquez to art in the beholder’s consciousness in the foreground of the painting’s frame, Las meninas’ axial positioning of the spectator looking at frozen time as it deepens in front of him or her not only exposes the logic of representation as reflective (and self-reflexive) but also augurs the postwar cinema of the time-image as theorized by Deleuze. Perhaps, Las meninas prefigures a still frame of the time-image in its depiction of a crystal circuit between the spectator, the model and the artist. It redistributes Foucault’s episteme of the same from the taxonomy of juxtaposition to an episteme of difference across space, a difference hidden in a forged mirroring of thoughts on a canvas, on the silver screen, that comes to be enacted in cinema’s Derridean surrogacy of spectator’s looking through a visor into atemporal depictions of time-images that nullify time as a Modern construct. Conscious and spectral, the spectator engages with doubles within the diegesis, unseen, to face his or her own duplicated thoughts in a mirror that crystallizes a forgery of what he or she has yet to think as he or she sees time form in the illusory depth of a painted screen. 164 The Self-Reflexive Spectator The Quixotic in Horror “With all their twists and turns, Don Quixote’s adventures form the boundary: they mark the end of the old interplay between resemblance and signs and contain the beginning of new relations.” - Michel Foucault, The Order of Things Peeling the self-reflective layers of Las meninas in relation to a cinematic abyss of ghosts and doubles, we saw how film’s veiled screen can simulate spectral ubiquity and conjure uncanny thoughts for its viewers. Now, we will turn to a literary figure that embodies the self-reflexive spectator theorized in previous chapters: an avid reader drawn by the textual veil of chivalric novels to think himself a knight errant on a noble quest – Don Quixote de la Mancha. This chapter deploys Miguel de Cervantes’ seventeenth-century novel and its eponymous figure as a template from which to examine contemporary examples of horror films that engage their avid viewers beyond the tropes of the genre and usher a new way of thinking about its building-blocks through parody and self-reflection. When Cervantes began writing his two-part El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha (1605/1615), he set out to write a satirical, metafictional spin on the chivalric romance popularized by the success of Amadís de Gaula, an early modern bestseller in Spain initially published in 1508 that went on to span twelve sequels throughout the sixteenth century. Although literary scholars and artists eventually judged Don Quijote to be not only the wellspring of the modern novel but also the canonical text for narrative fiction, early modern Spanish culture saw it as merely a satire of these ‘libros de caballería.’ This chapter proposes that Cervantes’ exercise of mocking yet elevating this popular form of low-brow fiction with perspicacity is uncannily mirrored in a string of metafictional films released during the 1990s that produced a revival of the slasher horror genre by cleverly mocking and revitalizing its 165 conventions. It specifically engages the use of Quixotic techniques by contemporary filmmaker Wes Craven in his reinvention of the horror genre with films such as Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994) and the Scream series (1996-2011) to ask the following questions: what does Don Quijote’s self-reflexive narrative devices teach us about not only the significance of horror films in recent times but also the potential academic value of this culturally dismissed genre of teenage popular entertainment? If Cervantes’ metafictional chivalric romance gave birth to the modern novel, a genre that spanned four hundred years of influential literature, what kind of genre transformations might Wes Craven’s metafilmic horror films give birth to? What is the connection between the horror genre in its metafilmic turn with Cervantes’ novel? Other scholars have made similar arguments about the comparative relevance of Don Quijote to popular contemporary films, particularly postmodern examples. Will McMorran, in his comparison with the 1993 French comedy Les Visiteurs, articulates the relevance of these seemingly improbable transcultural and transhistorical comparisons: “The aim therefore is not to argue a direct chain of influence, but to explore the circumstances and manner in which a contemporary film comedy finds itself exploiting themes and representational strategies brought together by Cervantes almost four hundred years earlier” (McMorran 2008, 160). For their part, Barbara Simerka and Christopher B. Weimer make a compelling argument for how both Cervantes’ novel and Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze’s 2002 film Adaptation use narration as self-inscription to lay “bare the mechanisms through which ideas are given shape and disseminated” (Simerka and Weimer 2005, 99), redeploying the novel’s metafictional tropes to reflect an epistemological malleability present in our media-centric times that has uncanny echoes in Spain’s early modern culture. Similarly, Bruce R. Burningham in his own interdisciplinary comparisons to Disney’s animated Toy Story series, 166 the Wachowskis’ sci-fi phenomenon The Matrix and avant-garde auteur David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive posits these films’ respective central characters of Buzz Lightyear, Neo and Betty Elms as Quixotic subjects misreading reality in an attempt to conform to a “self- assigned role” (Burningham 2000, 159). Buzz Lightyear is a toy believing himself unique when he’s just a replica of a mass product, Neo is a hacker who becomes ‘the one’ as he decodes the virtual facade draped over all reality, and Betty is an aspiring actress who achieves serendipitous success upon arriving in Hollywood. These characters’ singularity depends on the delineated narrative framework as well as the eye of its beholder, much like the delusional construct of the knight errant and the damsel in distress in Don Quixote’s madness is fueled not just by the author but by the ‘readers’ within and outside the diegesis. In a comparison with contemporary road movies such as The Motorcycle Diaries and Thelma and Louise, David R. Castillo describes Cervantes as “an author-critic deeply concerned with the mass media of his time and its effects on readers and spectators” and that academics “must brush his writing against the grain of our own mass culture in order to do him ‘historical’ justice” (Castillo 2011, 32). Building on these studies, 36 I propose we brush Cervantes’ comical mad text against the unlikely grain of the horror genre through a filmmaker that seems to share Cervantes’ metageneric inclinations. In Dark Directions, Kendall P. Phillips reads Wes Craven’s cinema as a continuation of the gothic British literary tradition in an American milieu: “Wes Craven’s films have consistently worried the gothic line between reality and the fantastic and utilized the emerging nocturnal world as a mechanism to strip away layers of social veneer and pretense” (Phillips 2012, 75). Furthermore, John Kenneth Muir, in the only book fully dedicated to 36 See also Sidney Donnell 2006; Martina Allen 2015; and Antonio Carreño-Rodríguez 2009. 167 Craven’s body of work, threads three decades of the filmmaker’s seemingly incongruous oeuvre by analyzing the overarching theme of family from his directorial debut Last House on the Left (1972) to Scream 2 (1997) (Muir 1998). His argument ends up being similar to Phillips’ since ‘family’ is the central theme of most gothic novels, where heroines typically uncover secrets about their familial past by the tale’s conclusion. Therefore, it has been common to insert Craven’s horror films strictly within an Anglophone tradition. Nonetheless, Last House is a remake of Swedish auteur Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring (1960), and A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) borrows heavily from Buñuel’s surrealist aesthetics. Phillips own declaration about Craven’s work quoted above confirms the connection with Spanish surrealism, as Buñuel’s cinema also deploys dreams as the language through which to unveil desires and impulses that lie beneath society’s façade of moral decorum. Furthermore, in the audio commentary to the Blu-Ray edition of Nightmare, Craven himself states how the appearance of a lamb in the opening dream sequence of the film was an overt “tribute to Buñuel.” My reading of Craven’s 1990s meta-films as an uncanny heir to Cervantes’ literary self-reflexivity not only moves away from the gothic influences that pervade the critical approaches to his work but illuminates potential new pathways of revealing a contribution to cinema that goes beyond genre and a strictly Anglophone tradition. Just as Cervantes’ dual-volume meta- ’libro-de-caballería’ went far beyond a tradition of chivalric romances and spawned a more complex form of narrative in the modern novel, perhaps there is more to Craven’s meta- horror than just another step in the evolution of the horror film from Gothic conventions. The Connection Between Chivalric Novels and Horror Films Similar to the cultural banishment and moral censorship commonly applied to the horror film genre today, theologians as well as humanists of the early modern period critically panned chivalric novels due in part to their lack of a moral lesson (expressed 168 through sexual relations outside the confines of marriage) and a general lack of intellectual rigor. As B.W. Ife points out, the critique of fiction during Spain’s Golden Age was both clerical and intellectual: “[t]he clergy, after all, were not alone in their opposition to fiction and many of the strongest attacks came from men whose intellectual credentials and first- hand acquaintance with the dangers of reading it are beyond repute” (Ife 1985, 12). These humanists based their criticism on the tenets of classical literature as expressed in Alonso López Pinciano’s Filosofía antigua poética published in 1596. López Pinciano’s book made accessible to general readers the classical notions on the foundations of good art from Aristotle’s Poetics (335 BC), Horace’s The Art of Poetry (19 BC) and Plato’s Republic (380 BC). Aristotle posited that great art should mirror reality but in doing so “one has to opt for the impossible believable over the possible credible” (Aristotle 1982, 111); Horace articulated that great art should be didactic and entertaining in equal measure, “delighting the reader while instructing him” (Horace 1982, 137), while Plato expressed concerns about life imitating art and called for poets to be banished from the ideal republic on the basis of their possibly dangerous impact on reality. Following these precepts, chivalric romances were accused of being not logical or believable (breaking Aristotelian rules of resembling reality via verisimilitude), not intellectually stimulating (unfulfilling half of Horace’s definition of high art) and not safe for teenage consumption, arousing concerns that vulnerable youngsters would imitate that which they read (proving Plato’s fear of the danger of fiction to be true). 37 Alban K. Forcione writes: “The criticism can be broken down conveniently into two types… its untruth and its power to arouse the passions of the reader… these arguments were applied to the romances of chivalry at an early date and were repeated with 37 See E.C. Riley 1992. 169 renewed vigor by Renaissance moralists in response to the enormous popularity of the old genre in the age” (Forcione 1970, 14). Contemporary horror movies are generally judged in a similar light, deemed critically to be of poor quality (generally low budget affairs with mediocre performances), ludicrous in plot and style (characters continually make dim-witted choices that put them in peril), and imprinting on the new generation models of bad behavior. In The Horror Film, Peter Hutchings writes about “slasher films” from the late 1970s and early 1980s: “Their cheapness, crudeness and formulaic repetitiveness, along with their apparent pandering to unsophisticated teenage audiences, led to their being seen as degrading experiences” (Hutchings 2004, 193). Paralleling present day anxieties on the dangerous effects of the horror film genre on impressionable viewers in the wake of shootings such as Columbine in the 1990s 38 and more recently the Colorado theater massacre in 2012, 39 the moralists and humanists of the early modern period were concerned about what effect chivalric romances such as Amadís de Gaula could have on the unformed minds of its young readers. The possession of these books by youngsters was compared to a “knife in the hands of an angry man” (De Chaide 1588, XXXI); and there was a fear that in reading them young girls and boys would be “primed to experiment in action what they see in words” (Ortiz Lucio 1589, 3r-v). A comparison can then be drawn between the sixteenth century’s preoccupation with the 38 On April 20, 1999, two senior students attending Columbine High School in Colorado orchestrated a massacre that resulted in the death of twelve students and one teacher as well as twenty-one injured survivors. The event sparked a discussion of the influence of violent films and videogames on unstable teenagers. 39 On July 20, 2012, a mass shooting occurred during a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. Twelve people died while seventy others were injured. 170 noxious effects of chivalric novels and contemporary concerns with horror films, both influencing young viewers to stray from the moral path, leading them to engage not only in premarital sex and illegal drug use as is often depicted attractively in these films but also to imitate its violence with possibly catastrophic consequences. Furthermore, not only do Cervantes and Wes Craven share similarities in terms of the socio-historical reception of the respective genres they are repurposing, they also seem to employ comparable metafictive techniques. Both authors self-consciously alienate chivalric and horror tropes by exposing their building blocks within the diegesis while simultaneously emulating them through characters that begin to shape their own narrative in awareness of their fictive roles. Self-Generating Narrative in Don Quijote and Wes Craven’s New Nightmare In the prologue to part one of Don Quijote, Cervantes sets the stage to preempt how the book is going to be received via the trope of writing himself as a character-author that has chronicled Don Quixote’s history. Therefore, in the fabric of his fictional and recursively Quixotic universe, the Cervantes-within-Cervantes is merely a historian transcribing factual events. Plagued by a heavy case of writer’s block, the fictional version of the author in dialogue with a certain ‘friend’ alludes to books such as romances of chivalry that are “fabulosos y profanos” (Cervantes 2010, 44) and thus condemned for being unbelievable and morally noxious. The narrator, before he has even begun relating its story, pre-articulates awareness of the criticism coming its way as the book will most definitely violate those Aristotelian, Platonic and Horatian rules upheld by the clergy in its mirroring of chivalric romance conventions: “llenos de sentencias de Aristóteles, de Platón y de toda la caterva de filósofos, que admiran a los leyentes y tienen a sus autores por hombres leídos, eruditos y elocuentes” (44). On top of being immoral and implausible through its association with the ‘libros de caballeria,’ it will be unable to meet the standards of a high-brow lectureship. 171 Cervantes proceeds to show concern for the book’s lack of sonnets from famous people to praise and preface it – that external validation that would lead to a successful reading. The fictional ‘friend’ suggests that he ‘make them up’ because “no os han de cortar la mano con que los escribistes” (46) – a self-referential joke based on Cervantes’ hand injury sustained in the Battle of Lepanto. The ‘friend’ also suggests that Cervantes can justify the book’s validity through common Latin quotes and passages from the bible, or by quoting a plethora of mythical references, or just plugging in the whole catalog of another book’s references, A to Z, and forge the book’s sponsorship into existence: “El remedio que esto tiene es muy fácil, porque no habéis de hacer otra cosa que buscar un libro que los acote todos, desde la A hasta la Z, como vos decís. Pues ese mismo abecedario pondréis vos en vuestro libro” (48). Before he even writes a word (or his reader reads a word of it), Cervantes already invents acclaim, the backing it has yet to acquire, by including sonnets written instead by famous characters from the books it parodies and emulates (such as Amadís de Gaula and Orlando Furioso) to self-engender the success of the book within itself by constantly being aware of how it is built. The author implies that the rules of fiction are about to change and with this game-changer comes its own self-proclaimed publicity and self-reflexive legacy. Through this quasi-Platonic fictional dialogue with a ‘friend’ about writing the prologue, Cervantes reveals through metafiction how he came up with a way to dress his book to look legitimate – a task that reflects the fictionality of that which you are about to read. So the modern novel was essentially self-reflexive from day one: “The origins of the self-reflecting structure that governs many modern novels might well lie in that parodic intent basic to the genre as it began in Don Quixote, an intent to unmask dead conventions by challenging, by mirroring” (Hutcheon 1986, 18). One could argue that what makes it modern is precisely its ability to 172 self-create. That idea of fiction creating itself, fiction pretending to be history, is a strategy that Wes Craven has utilized for maximum effect. Beginning in the 1970s, with films such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and Wes Craven’s own debut feature Last House on the Left (1972), horror movies strived to depict the real danger in everyday life. One can argue that there was a somewhat Aristotelian concern with verisimilitude in the representation of reality, not for the sake of literary legitimacy or artistic praise, but for enhancing the entertaining and lucrative effect of vicariously experiencing real fear. These early films were met with critical acclaim. For example, renowned film critic Roger Ebert gave Craven’s film high-praise with a three-and- a-half-star review, and The Exorcist (directed with attention to gritty realism despite its supernatural themes by then documentary filmmaker William Friedkin) went on to be nominated for 10 Academy Awards in 1973. Nonetheless, the ensuing proliferation of profit-seeking sequels that followed pulled down the genre’s already tenuous pedigree. Similar to how Amadís de Gaula’s popularity birthed a dozen subsequent parts in the sixteenth century, a successful original 1970s horror film, such as John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), yielded a series of imitators and sequels throughout the 1980s that led to fans demanding a ‘legitimate’ sequel to bring closure to the story after subpar sequels that diluted the scare quotient and oversimplified characters denigrated the value of the original. Such is the case of Wes Craven’s New Nightmare where Wes Craven returns to bring closure to his wildly successful 1984 horror film A Nightmare on Elm Street, an oneiric spin on the slasher 70s genre, in very metafictional fashion (fortuitously released in 1994, ten years after the original, much like Cervantes’ sequel timeline). As we mentioned earlier when pointing out Buñuel’s influence on Craven, the original A Nightmare on Elm Street introduced surreal elements to the slasher genre by having the killer haunt the dreams of his teenage victims. 173 The film’s back-story reveals that Freddy Krueger was a child murderer who escaped prosecution on a technicality and was hunted down by the victims’ parents (residents of the titular suburban Elm street) who proceeded to burn him alive in his hideout. Years later, Freddy returns in dreams to avenge his death by killing the remaining children of Elm street, now hormone-raging teenagers. The film follows a group of friends who begin to fall prey to their deadly nightmares in which Freddy slaughters them with his knife-fingered glove – their dream death effecting their actual death in reality. The film’s ‘final girl,’ Nancy Thompson, cleverly devises a way to pull Freddy out of the dreams, where he can be killed, but ultimately destroys him through her belief that he is “not real” and therefore cannot harm her. Similar to other popular horror franchises such as Halloween and Friday the 13 th (1980), the box-office success of Craven’s film led to five sequels in which Freddy would return to haunt more teenage nightmares and continue his revenge on suburbia. The series concluded with Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991) in which the franchise, now almost a parody of itself in its predictable recycling of the same idea as well as no longer generating as much monetary success, was put to rest by the New Line Cinema, the production company. Due to creative differences (Craven wanted a positive ending where Nancy prevailed whereas New Line wanted a hook for the sequel (Wooley 2011, 105-106)) and a legal battle over his contract (he never made any money from the franchise he created (106)), Wes Craven had almost no involvement in any of the sequels. 40 But upon the tenth anniversary of 40 Craven did co-write the first draft of A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987) with Bruce Wagner, but their screenplay underwent extensive revisions done by director Chuck Russell and Frank Darabont, who are also credited. His original idea for the film was to have Freddy haunt the cast and crew of a Nightmare sequel, an idea 174 the original, and after settling financial differences, New Line gave Craven the chance to have full creative control over his own official sequel (172). A former professor of philosophy and literature (possessing an M.A. from Johns Hopkins University), Craven echoes Cervantes and makes a self-reflexive follow-up to his own film in which he’s able to express not only “his disbelief/anger/irritation with all the watering down required to feed and nourish a sequel-generating franchise” (Muir 1998, 21) but also exact his own creative ‘Freddy’ revenge by placing himself, the company, its producers and the actors of the original at the center of his metafilm. True to the possessive in the title, Wes Craven’s New Nightmare becomes the creator’s predicament not only externally in terms of the reality of having written a ‘new’ sequel ten years later but also internally as the fictional Craven deals with the pressures of delivering a successful sequel as a character within the film itself – a move reminiscent of Cervantes placing himself as a character in his prologue to part one of Don Quijote. Set in Hollywood ten years after the release of the original A Nightmare on Elm Street, literally mirroring the production of itself within itself, the film follows actress Heather Langenkamp, who played Nancy in the original, as she struggles with the pressures of being a horror icon now that she has a young son. Not unlike the apprehension of early modern culture with chivalric romance novels, she is concerned with the effects the movie she made – the original Nightmare – might have on her son’s impressionable imagination. After doing an interview with co-star Robert Englund (who plays Freddy in the films) in which she is asked “if there is going to be another sequel,” Heather gets summoned to a meeting with New Line Cinema rejected by the studio that eventually became the basis for Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (Muir 1998; Wooley 2011, 146-147). 175 CEO Robert Shaye (the producer of the original whom Craven had differences for years – playing himself) in which she is offered to reprise her role in “the definitive Nightmare” and is informed that Wes Craven is “right in the middle of the script.” Therefore, the film we are watching “shows us Hollywood total in that it eliminates the oppositions between diegetic levels and blends everything into an universal fiction…the paradox that the movie we are watching is a word-for-word reflection of the screenplay that is being scripted simultaneously in the process of the film… Fiction and reality are engaged in a continual process of reciprocal reflection as in a hall of mirrors” (Pillip 1999, 60). The script Craven is writing onscreen is literally ‘dictating’ the reality of not only Heather and her decision to play Nancy “one more time” in light of being a concerned parent but also the producer as well as everyone who will simultaneously be working on the movie while being a character in it. Hence, we are watching the finished product, the film Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, as it is being written within the fictional world of the film. While the producer tells the actress his reason for doing the sequel, that “the fans are clamoring for more,” we are reminded of the moment in the second part of Don Quijote when Don Quixote asks Sansón Carrasco about the possibility of Cide Hamete Benengeli writing a sequel to his own (his)story: - Y por ventura – dijo don Quijote -, ¿promete el autor segunda parte? - Sí promete – respondió Sansón –, pero dice que no hallado ni sabe quién la tiene, y así, estamos en duda si saldrá o no; y así por esto como porque algunos dicen: ‘Nunca segundas partes fueron buenas’, y otros: ‘De las cosas de don Quijote bastan las escritas’, se duda que no ha de haber segunda parte; aunque algunos que son más joviales que saturninos dicen: ‘Vengan más quijotadas: embista don Quijote y hable Sancho Panza, y sea lo que fuere, que con esto nos contentamos’ - Y ¿a qué se atiene el autor? - A que – respondió Sansón – , en hallando que halle la historia, que él va buscando con extraordinaria diligencias, le dará luego a la estampa, llevado más del interés que de darla se le sigue que de otra alabanza alguna. (Cervantes 2010, 570) 176 According to Sansón, the writer/historian Cide Hamete Benengeli is searching for new material, new facts on which to base his sequel, compelled by fans demanding “más quijotadas,” despite the likelihood of the sequel’s inferior quality, as well as his need to make money, which takes precedence over any desire for critical acclaim. The conflation of fiction and history in Sansón’s response to Don Quixote’s query about the potential continuation of his adventures bespeaks to both fiction’s role in shaping historical events as well as the role of historical facts in threading successful literature. A similar confluence of fiction and reality occurs in Wes Craven’s New Nightmare when Heather visits Craven in his home to demand details about the script, given that her son seems to be suffering from Freddy nightmares after her husband’s death in a car accident. Wes Craven reveals his source to be not history but dreams and tells Heather that in the script Freddy has “decided to cross over, out of films into our reality” and that she’s the only one who can defeat him. Heather says “that was Nancy not me”; to which Craven answers “but it was you who gave Nancy her strength.” Like Don Quixote’s conversation with Sansón, Heather and Wes begin by discussing the details of the ‘fictional’ script but end up like mad Quixotes confounding the movie’s reality with their present predicament as a guilt-ridden Wes reveals that he had written Heather’s husband’s death in the script before it happened. Wes and Heather walk over to Craven’s office where he tells her that the only way to ‘contain’ Freddy is to make another movie and that she’s going to have to make the choice of “whether she’s willing to play Nancy one last time.” The camera cuts to Craven’s computer screen where we see a page from the screenplay that he had already written: word-for-word the conversation they’ve just had, ending with the transition ‘Fade to black.’ The film then fades to black on cue, unfolding in front of the viewer’s eyes as he or she reads what the writer-director had already typed (and now directed). Hence, as Cervantes does in his Segunda parte through his 177 diegetic surrogate Cide Hamete Benengeli, Wes as creator preps his actress Heather in attempting a new ‘sally’ (or sequel) as his lead character Nancy to face danger and fight ancient evil in the form of the diegetically embodied Freddy Krueger: “Just as the self-made knight meticulously prepares to go forward in the world, the author rehearses his steps and self-consciously traces the outline of his design” (Friedman 2005, 650-1). Wes tells Heather he will stay by this computer and continue writing until he finishes the script as she simultaneously proceeds on to her battle with the real Freddy in the final act of the film we are watching. During the film’s final nightmare sequence where Heather as Nancy must rescue her son Dylan from the clutches of the demon Freddy, the film’s narrative drive is momentarily distracted when Heather encounters a copy of Wes Craven’s script in the middle of the hellish dreamscape – a rupture in the diegesis that recalls the infamous Quixotic freeze frame at the end of Chapter 8 in part one. As Don Quixote is about to crack open his Basque opponent with his sword, the author-narrator runs out of source material to continue his (his)story. In the following chapter, we learn how he stumbled upon a manuscript written in Arabic by Moorish historian Cide Hamete Benengeli in a market in Alcaná de Toledo that allows him to resume the battle’s climactic moment upon its translation: “When Cervantes interrupts the story of Don Quixote’s battle with the Biscayan, in a novelistic equivalent to a freeze-frame, …he is consciously destroying the illusion created by his story” (Stam 1985, 129). Once again, historical facts appear to be the kernels necessary for a successful threading of fiction and conversely the machinations of literary artifice emerge as having a key role in shaping history. In Wes Craven’s film, the appearance of the script acts as a similarly conscious disruption of the illusion of cinema as real life as well as revealing ‘real 178 life’ to be an illusion akin to cinema. Heather picks up the script, opens a random page and reads the following excerpt: HEATHER (OS) (reading) The more she read the more she realized what she had in her hands was nothing more or less than her life itself. That everything she had experienced and thought was bound within these pages. There was no movie. There was only… her… life… As Heather reads this passage from the screenplay, the film unveils not only the artifice involved in her performance, her embodiment of the fictional Nancy in the film (and in the dream), but also its capacity to mirror consciousness itself as she reads in the script the written narration of her mind’s thoughts. She literally reads in the text what she is thinking, making her conscious that the script not her mind is the source of her thoughts. She reads and thinks as one simultaneous and interchangeable act. She read-thinks and/or think-reads, and her thoughts are generated in the performance of reading them out loud from the script as a voiceover: “Whenever the script (the actual carrier of the fiction) surfaces, it acts as a freeze frame in that it puts the scene (here, Heather’s thoughts) into words and narrates the scene parallel to or supplementing the depicted events. Again this constitutes an alienating effect, as the movie literally stops to reflect on itself – in an ironic manner even denies its own fictitiousness: ‘There was no movie’ – encouraging the viewer to do the same” (Pillip 1999, 61). This recursive device is a testament to the power of the mind to create a new reality through reading (and watching) – a fiction that convincingly reflects reality itself as it is being read (or seen). After Freddy is defeated in dream and in fiction, Heather finds the final draft of the screenplay Wes Craven’s New Nightmare with a note from Wes Craven thanking her for having 179 the courage to play Nancy, as if upon the completion of the writing, the film itself reaches its final scene – the Nancy-triumphant ending Craven was denied by the studio in the original Nightmare. The film ends with Heather reading the first page of Craven’s script to her son Dylan as a kind of bedtime story, and the movie begins again in written form as this meta- script now describes the film’s opening sequence: “This spiral effect places the focus once more on the storyteller/writer/director as the creator, glorifying the art of storytelling as a wondrous act of (self-) liberation and self-actualization. In fact the writer/director withdraws into his own fiction (hence the metadiegetic title Wes Craven’s New Nightmare), which grants him infinite possibilities of self-concealment and self-expression” (Pillip 1999, 62). The circular ending re-cycles its own narrative structure, replaying its own self-generative creative process as if in a spiral loop – a mirror to how Cervantes’ exercise in meta-retooling chivalric conventions gave birth to a new form of narrative, recycling itself into a new genre that came to be known as the modern novel. So the question becomes: what is Wes Craven’s meta- horror effort transforming about the genre as it percolates in self-reflection, as it becomes aware of what it’s doing? Exploring what Cervantes alters in his meta-romance of chivalry as well as an analysis of Craven’s second foray into meta-horror – his Scream series – might provide some answers. Self-Generating Characters in Don Quijote and Scream Early modern critics were concerned with the effects of chivalric romances on the unformed minds of young or impressionable readers. Yet Cervantes writes his reality- challenged protagonist as a fifty-year-old instead of the typical virile and youthful knight errant at the center of every ‘libro de caballería’ – both an ironic cultural touch as well as an autobiographical footnote since Cervantes was roughly fifty-seven when he wrote Don 180 Quijote. 41 Robert Stam writes: “Rather than being young and rich and handsome, Quixote is old, poor, decrepit” (1985, 28). Nonetheless, precisely what the early modern clergy feared would be the effect of chivalric romances on the young is what happens to Don Quixote. He goes mad, neglects his daily duties and loses himself in the fictional realm of Amadís de Gaula. Is Cervantes, through Don Quixote, exploring the effects of fiction on himself as an aging author? Is the author asking himself ‘What if this unhealthy engagement with fantasy books took hold of my reality?’ through Don Quixote’s physical and psychological predicament: “poco dormir y mucho leer, se le secó el cerebro, de manera que vino a perder el juicio” (Cervantes 2010, 63)? One can make a connection between becoming a “caballero andante” who gains “eterno nombre y fama” (64) with Cervantes pursuit of such fame and economic gain through the madly delusional task of the writing of this novel itself, as he defies the critical reality of his time through a genre book about genre that breaks all the rules while imitating them. For instance, Cervantes the (fictional) author, or a fictional semblance of Cervantes the author, writes about Don Quixote’s original name: “Quieren decir que tenía el sobrenombre de Quijada, o Quesada, que en esto hay alguna diferencia en los autores que de este caso escriben; aunque por conjeturas verosímiles, se deja entender que se llamaba Quejana. Pero esto importa poco a nuestro cuento; basta que en la narración dél no se salga un punto de la verdad” (61-62). Therefore, Don Quixote re-christens himself, breaks with the reality of his historical origin – his surname by birth – and gives himself a new name. In 41 Coincidentally, Wes Craven was the same age when he directed the first Scream. Even Robert Englund, the actor who portrays Freddy Krueger in the Nightmare films, describes the late Craven as “Don Quixote dressed by Ralph Lauren” in interviews (Fadroski 2015). 181 essence, he writes himself a new birthright and in turn engenders a new existence. Don Quixote designs and narrates through his actions his own fabricated existence based on chivalric romances and hence reinvents himself, modeling his ‘new’ name (and identity) after the eponymous character Amadís de Gaula. In this moment when the character self- inscribes himself into a world of his own making, Don Quijote as a metafiction, a book about writing, emerges as a metaphor for the human ability to rewrite its own reality. The fictionality of Don Quijote is as self-reflexive as the mad Don Quixote writing his own ‘libro de caballería’ by literally naming himself and then going out into the world acting as a knight errant so some historian can document his deeds. This action mirrors the prologue in which Cervantes narrates metafictionally how he himself, perhaps just as madly and delusionally as his lead character, names himself a famous author by prefacing the book with acclaim from other eponymous fictional knights that give it literary legitimacy. Two years after the release Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, Wes Craven went on to achieve both financial and critical success by directing a horror film legitimized precisely by cleverly citing other successful horror films while transforming some of the tired tropes of the genre. In the late 1990s, Craven built on his initial metafilmic effort by collaborating with screenwriter Kevin Williamson in the highly successful self-reflexive Scream (1996), the most profitable horror movie franchise at that time. The now infamous opening sequence features Drew Barrymore as the quintessential blonde victim typical of the genre being attacked by a masked killer who engages her on the phone with trivia questions about horror movies. A self-referential and intertextual spin on Janet Leigh’s untimely death in the shower in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), Drew Barrymore dies within the film’s first ten minutes, punished for a wrong answer to one of the questions. In the subsequent scene we are introduced to a new kind of ‘final girl’ – the brunette and film-savvy Sidney Prescott, played by Neve 182 Campbell. Eventually becoming the Scream series’ equivalent to Nightmare’s Nancy Thompson, Sidney defies the rules of the genre by being the first non-virgin to outsmart and take down the killer in the final act. As a result, Scream becomes the first horror franchise that centers on the surviving victims and not the murderers. Instead of having a Freddy Kruger or Michael Myers returning sequel after sequel for new victims, it is the victims who return for all three sequels to fend off new anonymous killers. Therefore, in the last scene, Sidney expresses her opinion regarding the possibility of the two fame-seeking serial killers returning from the dead for one last scare (or a possible sequel) by declaring: “Not in my movie.” This awareness of genre conventions by the characters is also present in Don Quijote. In Cervantes’ novel, Don Quixote names himself a knight errant seeking fame and fortune, while his friends follow suit by acting out their part to fit the mad world of Quixote’s chivalric existence: “Don Quijote, then, is about two sets of roads: the path of Don Quixote toward renown as a knight errant and the trajectory of the narrative, as a work in progress and as a potentially publishable book” (Friedman 2005, 650). Just as Don Quixote’s supporting characters are constantly playing roles and hence ‘writing’ themselves into the Quixotic fantasy, Sidney’s friends talk in an extremely self-aware manner about what role they play in the fiction of the conventional horror movie, molding their actions to the rules of the classical 70s horror movie as exemplified by its prime incarnation Halloween. Such homage and reverence to the genre classics is also present in Cervantes’ text. Edward H. Friedman writes: “Placing his own psychoses temporarily on hold, Don Quixote replicates the madness and penance of Amadís de Gaula, in deference to the archetypal book of chivalry” (654). Like Don Quijote’s continual emulation of Amadís de Gaula (among many other chivalric romances), both in terms of the lead character and the text itself, Scream must ‘work’ as a successful horror film like Halloween as it is happening. The characters are 183 therefore ‘writing’ their parts to make it so, becoming less concerned with their survival and more willing to act out their role as such. This is a very Quixotic element as “Don Quixote appears to be less concerned about the outcome of his trials than about the means by which they will be shaped into a narrative scheme” (Friedman 2005, 651). As the spectator watches on (just as Don Quijote’s “desocupado lector” flips the pages), Sidney and her sidekick friends, much like Don Quixote and Sancho, are shaping the narrative with their actions and contributing to the making of the movie Scream from inside itself. Friedman elaborates: “The reader cannot help but notice that every aspect of the story of Don Quixote is accompanied by metacommentary on the production of the chronicle” (655). Similarly, Scream includes the horror movie fan in the diegesis by portraying the characters as fans themselves giving an ‘enhanced’ viewing experience that simulates a participatory engagement with the plot of the film. Friedman adds, “Cervantes’ main contribution to the developing novel may be to let his audience in on the process of creating the text, to make readers privy to his task and to expand and intensify theirs” (658). Through the characters’ constant self-commentary, both the devoted reader of chivalric romances and the horror movie fanatic see themselves (and their thoughts) reflected in the narrative’s self-generating behavior. Sidney and Don Quixote, as well as sidekicks like Sancho and Randy, voice and act out what the audience wants them to do because they are themselves viewers and readers of horror films and chivalric romances and hence familiar with their conventions. This creates a sort of Brechtian mirror with the audience. We are reflected in the movie, in the text, as is the spectator in the pictorial drama of Velázquez’ baroque masterpiece Las meninas and hence forced to assimilate the simulated predicament in which the artwork has placed us. In doing so, we ask to unveil fiction as a double to the veil draped over our own hidden and/or potential lines of thought. 184 The Self-Critical Sequel: Avellaneda, Don Quijote Part Two and Scream 2 In his prologue to the counterfeit sequel published in 1614 (Segundo tomo del ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha), the anonymous author using the pseudonym Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda insults Miguel de Cervantes by making sardonic comments about his old age, his useless hand (the reason why he has been unable to complete a sequel in time), his undelivered promise of a sequel (“tiene más lengua que manos” – Fernández de Avellaneda 1999, 52), and lack of ‘friends’ (a reference to the prologue of part one where Cervantes narrativizes his lack of introductory sonnets and praise from famous outside sources). Avellaneda also alludes to Cervantes’ jealousy of Lope de Vega’s fame (and love life) as a result of his recent anointment as a priest, which allows him to boast ecclesiastical approval. But in the prologue to his official sequel published in 1615, Segunda parte del ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha, Cervantes outwits Avellaneda by responding each personal and critical attack outlined in the false sequel’s prologue. Cervantes writes that with old age comes wisdom, describes his injured hand as a symbol of courage and honor in battle, and demonstrates “admiration” instead of envy for Lope de Vega. Sarcastically pretending to be civil to Avellaneda yet delivering a scathing counter-attack, Cervantes highlights the unauthorized writer’s cowardice in remaining anonymous. In the intertextual conversation carried from Cervantes’ prologue for part one through Avellaneda’s prologue for the spurious part two and back to this last prologue for the official part two, Cervantes and Avellaneda adhere to the details of the others’ writing to criticize and counter criticize the others’ work. As Robert Stam declares: “Art is not a window on the world but rather an intertextual dialogue between artists” (Stam 2005, 23). Analogous to Wes Craven’s exercise in New Nightmare to not only set the record straight with his definitive sequel but also cleverly respond within the fiction of the film to the denigrating sequelitis that followed his original 185 as a result of the studio’s greed, Cervantes deals a blow to Avellaneda by doing it within the fictive universe of Don Quixote, culminating in Chapter 72 when Don Álvaro Tarfe, a character from Avellaneda’s Segundo tomo, signs a legal affidavit confirming that he has met the real Don Quixote and that his previous acquaintance was a fraud. Cervantes gets vindication through his writing, which parallels Wes Craven getting vindication through his filmmaking from what he was previously denied by the studio: a financial stake in the franchise and the original ending where Nancy prevails over evil. In essence, both Cervantes and Craven rewrite history within their official sequels by reclaiming authorship from Avellaneda and New Line Cinema respectively. They paint in fiction a mirror to their own predicament as its creators. Therefore, after having expressed himself as a character within New Nightmare’s diegesis and upon the success of Scream, Wes Craven made sure he had final cut and first pass choice over directing the sequels. Hence, the fictional sequel about sequels determined the history of sequels to come. He ended up directing all of them with great success before passing away from brain cancer in 2015. While Scream was all about conventions and characters self-writing themselves into a stock character within the horror genre, meanwhile possessing self-awareness of these roles via the Quixotic overexposure to countless horror films, Scream 2 (1997) “transcends the original film’s interest in discussing and critiquing other texts by actively discussing and critiquing itself” (Wee 2005, 48) in an attempt to match and upgrade the value of the original text by means of self-evaluation, modification and expansion. Therefore, the sequel is about self-criticism, learning from mistakes in part one and improving on them, as a reflection of the director’s extradiegetic predicament in meeting and surpassing the expectations of the viewership. Cervantes’ Segunda parte also deals with the pressure of the first’s success and how to ‘one up’ the first part while having self-awareness of the common failure of a sequel 186 to match or surpass its original: “sequels must be like and unlike their source texts, but close enough to persuade readers that they are connected to the original and different enough to persuade readers that they offer a worthwhile addition, whether the parts are physically or only figuratively bound together” (Hinrich 2011, x). This huge pressure weighed on Cervantes so much he made it the theme of the Segunda parte. Just like the publication of Don Quijote part one occurs within and has an effect on the diegesis of part two, Scream 2 deals with the “original work” being out there in the form of a film-within-the-film called Stab, a metafilmic mise-en-abyme of the original Scream based on a book written by one of the surviving characters from the first film. 42 Stab is constantly being criticized and torn apart by the characters in the sequel as it has just been released in theaters as the film opens. Through this dynamic, the sequel’s narrative incorporates and builds on criticism of the events of Scream through its fictional representation in Stab. Scream 2 begins with a young African American couple entering a screening of Stab on opening weekend. The female spectator named Maureen Evans (played by Jada Pinkett) loudly complains to her boyfriend about the sexist and foolish behavior of the blonde victim being stalked in the opening scene – essentially a recreation of the opening of Scream with Heather Graham playing Drew Barrymore’s role. Echoing the way “Cervantes mocks the chivalric romances for their sexual exploitativeness, their predictability, and their ludicrous irreality” (Stam 2005, 28) (what theologians and humanists criticized about the genre), Craven uses 42 Stab is based on a non-fiction book called The Woodsboro Murders, written by journalist Gale Weathers (played by Courteney Cox) who survived the events of part one alongside Sidney and her friends. One can argue that Gale is Scream’s equivalent to Cide Hamete Benengeli, a character within the diegesis that serves both as its historian and fictional author. 187 this opening scene to give minority characters a stage on which to criticize part one by commenting not only on its unpardonable mistakes but also on their own exclusion from it (in criticizing Stab the characters are not only commenting on Craven’s original Scream but also the genre in general). Maureen eloquently states that “the horror genre is historical for excluding the African American element” after saying that “it’s a dumb ass white movie about some dumb ass white girls getting their white asses cut the fuck up.” Similar to the way in which Cervantes’ part two characters “act as surrogates for the reader, anticipating his various interpretative responses” since they are “readers of Part One” (Hutcheon 1986, 142), Scream 2 adds a minority opinion and critical commentary to enhance the viewing experience similar to the way in which Don Quijote’s “narrative progresses from an emphasis on reading and writing in Part 1 to an emphasis on the contingencies of reading and writing – criticism and success – in Part 2” (Friedman 2005, 668). After the African American couple’s figurative and literal onscreen death at the movie theater, the plot catches up with survivor Sidney Prescott as she copes with fame, the product of her heroic involvement in the events of Scream, while being a college student studying acting. Eerily echoing the scene in Wes Craven’s New Nightmare where Wes Craven implores Heather to become Nancy in order to fight evil in the form of Freddy and hence fulfill the plan delineated by his script, Sidney has a meeting with the director of her play, named Gus (a homophone of Wes), in which he urges her to use her pain to find strength to play the role of Cassandra, “one of the great tragic visionaries of literature.” The play-within-the-film, entitled The Fall of Troy, centers around Cassandra as a tragic heroine imbued with courage rather than a serial victim, madwoman or villainess as she’s typically portrayed. Gus directs Sidney into delivering convincingly the line “I’m a fighter” until it becomes real to her and tells her that “none of us can avoid our fate but as an artist one can honestly face it and fight it.” This is Craven’s 188 surrogate cameo in the film, where he once again bestows upon his lead actress the narrative and performative power to generate her own strength and overcome adversity. By pointing the mirror at the audience and involving the reader or viewer in the creation of itself – in that Brechtian engagement that is self-reflexive – the text or movie sequel, whether in the form of Cervantes’ Segunda parte or Craven’s Scream 2, creates an idea of what it is to reinvent yourself into a larger version of yourself that is more famous and more successful – stronger. It’s a self-generating fiction that engenders its own growth and ultimately its own legacy as it serializes the original story beyond its initial ‘ending’ to capitalize critically (and financially) on its strengths. In the final act of the film, Sidney, or actress Neve Campbell as Sidney, unmasks and shoots down the anonymous killers who jealously attempt to steal her spotlight in the same theater stage she rehearsed the role of Cassandra for her director Gus. Like Nancy in Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, she fulfills her scripted fate as a fighter and takes ownership over the narrative of her existence with the creator’s blessing. As his script says, there is no movie, only her life. By the time Scream 4 (2011) comes around, Sidney has become the best-selling author of her own story. Difference in Repetition: Scream 3, Scream 4 and Wes Craven’s New Nightmare In the second sequel Scream 3 (2000), Sidney has gone into hiding to avoid being victimized by yet another pair of serial killers as new murders begin to happen on the film set of Stab 3: Return to Woodsboro in Hollywood. In what seems like this series own Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (albeit more comedic in tone due to censorship pressures from the studio after the Columbine massacre occurred while Scream 3 was in production), the plot revolves around the making of itself within itself (or the unmaking as the production of Stab 3 comes to a halt as the body count piles on) as events (and deaths) unfold according to the script-within-the-film of the threequel. Sidney, like Heather in New Nightmare, must return to 189 accept her role within the diegesis as the heroine of not only the Scream trilogy but also its mise-en-abyme Stab series. One sequence in particular, scripted by Craven himself (as opposed to the credited screenwriter Ehren Krueger), features Sidney being attacked on set of Stab 3 which is an exact replica of her house in which most of the events of the original Scream took place. The film employs Quixotic self-reflexivity by now having actor-doubles who play the characters in the meta Stab series alongside the original characters themselves. In doing so, much like Cervantes’ diegetic critical jabs at Avellaneda in part two, Scream 3 comments on the inauthenticity of the simulacra of these films-within-the-films as being a caricature to the ‘reality’ of the Scream characters and their predicament. These actors, copies of Sidney and her friends, do not measure up to the originals when it comes to fighting the ‘real’ danger thrust upon them by the faceless knife-wielding killer. By the third act, the entire cast of Stab 3 has fulfilled their scripted role in the diegesis as victims of the anonymous killer who reveals himself to be the film-within-the-film’s director Roman. He also turns out to be Sidney’s half-brother (an homage to the very first slasher horror sequel, Halloween II (1981), in which the pale masked killer is revealed to be the surviving heroine’s brother), avenging his abandonment by their mother (a reference yet again to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, considered by many as the first slasher film). Only the ‘real’ Sidney can successfully fight off this counterfeiting killer, perhaps a young impostor of Wes Craven within the diegesis – the Avellaneda to Cervantes’ Cide Hamete Benengeli. Made ten years after Scream 3, the plot of Scream 4 mocks the conventions of the horror remake (and rebooted franchises) popularized throughout the 2000s when uninspired and flavorless remakes of horror classics abounded (with their own remade sequels), including A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010), Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003) and Halloween (2007). While on book tour for her successful autobiography Out of Darkness: A True Story of 190 Survival, Sidney makes a stop in her hometown of Woodsboro where the original Scream took place. Mayhem ensues as a pair of new generation serial killers seeks to reboot the Stab franchise by taking over Sidney’s infamous role as perennial victim. The film focuses on victimhood as the locus of fame, as opposed to serial killer celebrity in the 90s sequels, and the main perpetrator is revealed to be the new generation’s version of the ‘final girl.’ Sidney’s deranged cousin Jill (Emma Roberts) seeks to replace Sidney as the “sole survivor” and write herself into fame and fortune. As she stabs Sydney, Jill declares “let’s face it your ingénue days are over,” metafilmically referencing actress Neve Campbell’s own maturity and outdatedness. Therefore, Sidney, having grown from actress to author, from character to creator, has essentially become the Cervantes authorial figure of the series, deemed too old, too scarred (Sidney bears the marks of her previous perilous encounters on her face) and friend-less (since many have died along the way) by the Scream universe equivalent of the anonymous Avellaneda impostor seeking to take over her fame as surviving victim (and spurious author). But like Cervantes in his prologue to part two, Sidney strikes back and proves to be more resilient than her cunning cousin – her age giving her the wisdom, her scars the heroic credibility to subvert the generational usurpation attempted by Jill. As she regains control of the movie – her movie – much like she did at the end of the original Scream, Sidney states boldly upon bringing down her fake replacement: “You forgot the first rule of remakes, Jill. Don’t fuck with the original.” Given that Cervantes augured a shift in consciousness through his satirization of the chivalric, one can argue that the self-reflexive turn taken by Wes Craven’s nineties work in the horror genre mirrors a comparable shift in consciousness in contemporary culture – a shift in the struggle of women in a patriarchal world as female protagonists begin to reverse horror narratives that had typically ended in victimization. Hutchings writes: “the [early 191 1970s/1980s] slasher’s reliance on the stalking and terrorization of women led to a new charge [against the genre], that of misogyny, with the films themselves branded as violent and pernicious reactions against feminism…” (Hutchings 2004, 193). But in the late twentieth century, the helpless victims of the Gothic tradition and these initial genre efforts became action heroines like Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley in Aliens (1986), Heather Langenkamp’s Nancy in the Nightmare series and Neve Campbell’s Sidney in Scream and its sequels. Women are not just equal but perhaps stronger than the knife-wielding men they have to contend with. As horror shifts the focus from the heroic Don Quixote to the damsel-no-longer-in-distress Dulcinea, and the conventions of the genre are foregrounded in the revelation of its artifice, Wes Craven’s metafilmic cinema unmasks the emasculation of the male creator, the phallic perpetrator hiding behind the pale mask of fear, and transfers the power to transform reality to the female protagonist being chased down the hallway. In horror’s metafilmic twist, it is Sidney Prescott who becomes the successful writer of her own fictional universe, not the perpetrators who accost her seeking fame as celebrity serial killers, and it is actress Heather Langenkamp, to whom Wes Craven relinquishes creative control, who propels the narrative of his film Wes Craven’s New Nightmare forward. By the time the credits roll, it is Heather Langenkamp’s New Nightmare we are watching, her reinvention of reality, not Wes Craven or Freddy Krueger’s. 43 43 Heather Langenkamp went on to direct her own film in 2008 as part of an anthology titled Prank (2008), which consists of three horror films directed by iconic horror lead actresses. She shares her directing credit with the ‘final girls’ of two of the most successful Halloween sequels, Ellie Cornell (Halloween 4 & 5) and Danielle Harris (Halloween 4 & 5). 192 One can view the narrative of Wes Craven’s metafictional horror cinema as merely “cinema’s response to a growingly violent society that increasingly hoists its mass murderers unto pedestals of celebrity” (Tietchen 1998, 102). But when read through the lens of Cervantes’ Don Quijote, “which foregrounds the process of creation itself” (Stam 2005, 29) and “forces us to reflect on the nature of genre itself as one of the ways ‘reality’ is mediated through art” (Stam 1985, 132) as well as the power that madness and fiction can have in shaping history, Wes Craven’s New Nightmare and the Scream series “coerce [viewers] (without their noticing) to adopt a certain point of view—to accept, in other words, new coordinates for the experience of what we are calling base reality” (Egginton 2001, 218). It reverses the role of women in horror (and representation) from helpless victims, perhaps imagined Dulcineas in need of a knight errant to save them, into strong Quixotic heroines capable of ingeniously doling their own brand of justice beyond anachronistic patriarchy. Craven has done for film directing and violence what Cervantes did for writing and chivalry in Don Quijote – “to lay bare the devices of art while also exposing the mechanisms of society” (Stam 2005, 59). In doing so, Cervantes’ text marks the end of chivalry as a literary genre. Perhaps Craven’s films augur the boundary of the patriarchic oppression of signs and signal the advent of a feminine reinvention of narrative structures as the author relinquishes the control of creation, of fiction and history, to his female protagonists. 193 The Delusional Spectator Meta-film as Virtual Oneiric Simulation “In our mind past and future become intertwined with the present. The photoplay obeys the laws of the mind rather than those of the outer world.” - Hugo Munsterberg, The Photoplay The Sequel and The Cave The first volume of Miguel de Cervantes’s El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha was about a narrative self-engendering its own success, mirrored within the text as Alonso Quijano rechristens himself as knight errant Don Quixote, manifests the ideal damsel Dulcinea out of the peasant Aldonza Lorenzo and sets out on his sally to fight all sorts of hallucinations that feed his addiction to romances of chivalry. Published ten years later, the sequel seeks out to maintain that illusion forged in Don Quixote’s madness in order to keep the narrative alive in light of its fame and possible fortunes (especially for Sancho). The sequel as envisioned by Cervantes is a meta-sequel which contains both the ‘original’ 44 and the spurious ‘copy’ penned by Avellaneda in 1614. 45 He embeds not one but two mirroring “aporetic” or “specious” mise-en-abymes (Dällenbach 1989, 35-36), what Lucien Dällenbach calls a text that contains a mirror of itself within it in his realignment of Andre Gide’s 44 The first volume of Don Quijote has been published by Cervantes’ authorial double Cide Hamete Benengeli within the narrative itself and extensively read by its characters such as the duke and duchess who use their knowledge of it to try to recreate it cruelly with our protagonists. 45 Cervantes dismantles this fraudulent sequel within the story by having one of its characters Don Álvaro Tarfe sign an affidavit that he has met the true and original characters of Don Quixote and Sancho in Chapter 72. 194 conceptualization of the mise-en-abyme as a heraldic device. 46 Therefore, the sequel by including within it both the original published volume and its counterfeit sequel becomes a commentary on the first by improving on its faults, 47 repeating its strength in awareness of the fame of its characters 48 and setting itself apart from the evil doppelgängers from the fake sequel, 49 augmenting the brilliance of the original by mirroring it and setting itself apart from the dark mirror that was Avellaneda’s attempt to usurp the fame of the ‘original.’ But the illusion of the whole chivalric simulacra is in danger of collapsing after Sancho’s attempt to fool Don Quixote into believing a peasant is his damsel Dulcinea plants the seed in Don Quixote’s mind that something is amiss, that his evil enchanters are twisting his deluded perception to actually see what is there. This comes to a head in the episode inside the cave of Montesinos, where Don Quixote falls into the abyss of his own delusion. 46 In his 1977 book Le récit spéculaire: Essai sur la mise en abyme, Lucien Dällenbach deployed the term mise-en-abyme (which translates as “placed into abyss”) in reference to French author André Gide who used it to describe self-reflexivity in art. Gide borrowed the term from heraldry where it describes a coat of arms embedded as a smaller shield at the center of a larger one. As examples of its applicability to art, Gide cites Velázquez’ Las Meninas and William Shakespeare’s use of the “play within a play” in Hamlet. 47 For example, part two replaces the intercalated episodes such as ‘El curioso impertinente’ that were deemed digressive by the readers with interweaving stories that instead directly relate to our protagonists, Sancho and Don Quixote. 48 The characters must now contend with the effects of fame on what keeps their mad quest to disenchant Dulcinea in part two as to keep the delusion of knight errantry alive in Don Quixote’s mind. 49 Perhaps the doppelgängers are enchanted by Don Quixote’s mental tormentors who keep flipping his fiction with the reality outside his deluded mind. 195 After the narrator announces the chapter as being apocryphal due to its impossibility, breaking the Aristotelian rule of verisimilitude in fiction, Don Quixote tells Sancho and Basilio’s cousin to sit and pay attention as he recounts that what occurred inside the cave was in fact a dream, as opposed to a descent into the underworld typical of the Odyssey, the Aeneid and Dante himself in Inferno all of which this episode intertextually parodies. Holding his captive audience of two like the prisoners in Plato’s cave, Don Quixote narrates a story- within-the-story of how he went to sleep once in one of the crevices of the descent and awakened into a new reality rather than a dream: Despabilé los ojos, limpiémelos, y vi que no dormía, sino que realmente estaba despierto. Con todo esto, me tenté la cabeza y los pechos, por certificarme si era yo mismo el que allí estaba o alguna fantasma vana y contrahecha; pero el tacto, el sentimiento, los discursos concertados que entre mí hacía, me certificaron que yo era allí entonces el que soy aquí ahora. (Cervantes 2010, 702) He describes an embodied feeling both tactile and mental that aligns what he experienced thereafter as an uncanny inversion perhaps of the fictional draping over reality from which he suffers and to which we are accustomed as readers of the text. In this manifested oneirism, Don Quixote ushered by an enchanted Montesinos comes face to face with the peasant Dulcinea, an idea percolated into Don Quixote’s subconscious by Sancho’s deceit earlier, who asks for six ‘reales’ in exchange for a piece of clothing. Hence, given yet another duplication in Belerma’s own enchanted state as an ugly peasant, the entire dream sequence, 196 tele-transported vision 50 or narrative artifice 51 is but a mirror of the conflict of the entire second volume which revolves around the idea of Dulcinea’s disenchantment, a symbolic thread that hides the true disenchantment to come, that of Don Quixote and his madness. The spurious fact engendered by the manipulations of the duke and the duchess that her disenchantment must be bought from Sancho, as he must administer over three thousand lashings in exchange payment from his master, has its seed in this dream which in turn was set in motion by Sancho’s actions. The sequel therefore is not just about contending with the fame brought upon by the original as well as improving on its criticized faults but also about dismantling that which was constructed as illusory in the first place, as mad artifice, through a reflection of itself within itself. After exiting the cave, Don Quixote no longer sees the inn they come upon as a castle but as what it really is, an inn, perhaps as enchanted as his peasant damsel, auguring the disenchantment, the unmasking of the duplicated reality. Upon entering the narrative abyss inside his own mind, facing the uncomfortable possibility that all that he sees is but a dream, Don Quixote passes through an unmasking of his deluded senses, liberated from the 50 During one interruption, Sancho suggests that the vision might have been inserted into Don Quixote’s brain by evil Merlin: “Creo… que aquel Merlín, o aquellos encantadores que encantaron a toda la chusma que vuestra merced dice que ha visto y comunicado allá bajo le encajaron en el magín o la memoria toda esa máquina que nos ha contado y todo aquello que por contar le queda” (Cervantes 2010, 708). 51 Cide Hamete Benengeli comments in a ‘footnote’ to the Montesinos chapter on the impossibility of eponymous knight Don Quixote actually manufacturing a lie: “Pues pensar yo que don Quijote mintiese, siendo el más verdadero hidalgo y el más noble caballero de sus tiempos, no es posible, que no dijera él una mentira si le asaetearan” (Cervantes 2010, 711.) 197 enchanted delusions by which he abides and begins to see a glitch in the chivalric simulacra. Like the cinematic spectator that falls into a cinematic abyss that exposes the Deleuzian crystal as it turns, as it oscillates between the virtual and the actual, and emerges liberated from the soporific and passive subjection of the ideological apparatus, Don Quixote begins to be cured of his madness by being immersed inside the artifice of his own mind, plagued by the stories he confounds with his reality as a result of endless insomniac nights reading. 52 Don Quixote prefigures the individualism, the era where man becomes the center of scrutiny as Foucault teases in his epistemic shift in the nineteenth century in The Order of Things (who uses the text as an example of the relationship of the Same in textual representation), and thus in his oneiric metareferential journey into the constructs within his dried-up brain faces the seed of his delusion and thus begins the dissolution of what sets him apart from his environment. If we were to read Cervantes through Roger Caillois’ essay on “Mimicry and Legendary Psychastenia” (1935), Don Quixote initially depersonalizes his identity into the fictional space of the books of chivalry as he mimics the textual vestiges of a knight errant in a psychotic dissolution into the immateriality of fiction, that grey zone of words and its interstices in Borges’ fiction, the irrational cuts through which thought is spun automatically in films of the time-image as Deleuze theorizes. Meta-Film as Virtual Oneiric Simulation Christian Metz, in his 1976 essay “The Fiction Film and Its Spectator,” claimed that filmic representation cannot fully recreate the “true absurdity commonly felt before the 52 This envelopment in the diegesis brings to mind Antonin Artaud’s theater of cruelty in which the spectator when enveloped within the performance engages with the representation of a violence that is more powerful than its actualization in reality (Artaud 1958, 84-88). 198 memory of our own dreams or accounts of dreams,” as well as the unconscious dreamer’s ready acceptance of such absurdity as normal – a somewhat Quixotic predicament one might say. He defines the oneiric, meaning that which can be qualified as having truly dreamlike properties, as “that very specific, very recognizable impression wherein at once enter the internal obscurity of the elements and the confusion of their assemblage, [as well as] the suspected outcropping of a buried order and the evidence of an authentic incoherence” (Metz 1976, 88). Although Metz’s theory has subsequently been subject to intervention and revision, we can still question it productively from a contemporary viewpoint, especially since another forty years of filmmaking have occurred since he published the essay. Do we agree with him? Can a film viewer delude him or herself like Don Quixote to the point where he cannot consciously distinguish between the images in his mind and those on the screen? Can horror films in fact “create psychos” by generating a dangerous conflation between reality and fiction akin to what we see in Wes Craven’s Quixotic meta-cinema? Can a film provide the spectator a purely oneiric experience? Perhaps not entirely, but as I will argue it can simulate it most closely not when it is at its most surreal or avant-garde but at its most internally self-reflexive, like the second part of Don Quixote or Wes Craven’s New Nightmare and the Scream series. Therefore, film can be most oneiric when it simultaneously shares a metafilmic construction. Taking Metz’s statement as a point of departure, I would like to explore the convergence of the oneiric with the metafilmic in films that are self-reflexive by taking place entirely in a virtual world its protagonists inhabit as if they were dreaming it, just as Don Quixote does by waking into a dream inside the Cave of Montesinos which unravels his delusion and the artifice of the novel as a whole. First, I briefly look at the intersection between dreams, film and games as explored by Freud, Christian Metz and Gordon Calleja 199 to define the oneiric character of the filmic and the virtual. Next, I explore Alejandro Amenábar’s Abre los ojos (1997) and David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ (1999) as case studies for understanding oneiric cinematic constructions that are self-aware of their artificial construction of reality as both a film and a dream. In the section about Abre los ojos, I use Jacques Lacan’s theories on the ‘gaze’ and the ‘mirror stage’ to unpack its protagonist César’s cryogenic virtual dream state as operating under a male gaze, or more appropriately a masculine delusion, and how Amenábar’s metafilmic brush strokes simulate that dream for the spectator outside the diegesis. In the section on eXistenZ, I expand my framework to include apparatus, feminist and embodiment theories to probe how the film’s biological game virtuality centers diegetically around a feminine conception of reality, as the female protagonist’s subconscious literally manufactures the rules of the game by which the film abides, and how its metagame construction spills out into the viewing experience. Finally, we conclude with suture and cognitive theories to illustrate how virtual oneiric metafilms ultimately replicate a kind of spatiotemporal ubiquity for the spectator that is as artificial as it is transcendent. It simulates a mental mastery of the spectator’s surroundings as it occurs in virtual videogaming that could serve as the seed of an active resistance against the very restrictive conditions of film spectatorship that parallel the similarly restrictive conditions of an ideologically restrained subject as we saw in the Spanish cinema examples discussed in earlier chapters. Let’s begin by revisiting the connection between dreams and film as expressed by psychoanalysis that we explored earlier in our discussion of Carlos Saura’s La madriguera. As we saw, two characteristics of Freud’s depiction of dreams are the condensation of the dreamwork as it excludes “unnecessary detail” (Freud 2001, 17) and the repression of unfulfilled desires through the censorship applied by the dreamwork as it converts it into a 200 digestible dramatization that enables the fantasy of wish-fulfillment and thus inhibits wakefulness. Therefore, Freud speculates that dreams are “the guardian[s] of sleep” (38) much like cinema can capture its viewers’ attention using film editing to condense the storyline as well as generate subtextual nuance in acting to forge a relatable bond with the audience. For Christian Metz, Freud’s theory of dream creation helps us understand how film partly mimics a dream state in waking form since “the filmic state […] embodies in a weaker form certain economic conditions of sleep” (Metz 1976, 86) such as impaired motor functions and the absorption of illusory images. Applying Freud to cinema, Metz cautiously unpacks how both in dreams and in film spectatorship there’s some degree of awareness that paradoxically keeps the dreamer sleeping and the spectator engaged through minimal motor functions. He takes into account the restrictions embedded in the comparison since “the degree of illusion of reality is inversely proportional to that of wakefulness” (79) for the person dreaming, and a spectator fundamentally operates on “the delusion of a man awake” (80) or a paradoxical hallucination, a concept that also echoes Don Quixote’s madness. While a dreamer’s awareness dwindles the deeper he sleeps making him unable to dismiss the chimera as such, a spectator holds onto consciousness in his waking state and therefore purposefully revels in cinema’s fantastic optical illusions. One can argue that an audience’s involvement with a virtual oneiric metafilm such as Abre los ojos or eXistenZ is a willful delusion that has elements of both – a dreamer drowsing off into the dream still aware he or she is engaging with the virtuality of the dreamwork and a spectator willingly conjuring up the daydream in which he attempts to lose himself. What makes these films metafilmic is that their protagonists undergo an analogous process to the one potentially experienced by its extra-diegetic spectators – Allegra enters the game through a form of biologically induced sleep (gameplay happens either on a bed like a dreamer or a 201 chair like a film spectator) and César signs a contract to be cryogenically induced into a virtual extension of his life. Like Don Quixote in the cave of Montesinos, both protagonists knowingly fall into an artificial world as if they were dreaming, but once inside they begin to lose the ability to differentiate the virtual from their physical life, the dream from their waking life. Meanwhile, the viewer buys a box office ticket or rents a video to watch in the darkness of a theater or the comfort of their home in order to be inert and fall into the artificial reality evoked by the sounds and images onscreen, attempting perhaps to lose the capacity to separate the film from their reality. Four hundred years ago, Cervantes’ “desocupado lector” also willingly began to lose his thoughts into Don Quijote’s fiction, which begins by relating how Don Quixote lost his mind while devouring his own “libros de caballería.” Lastly, since in both films the body plays such a crucial role in the diegetic meta- engagement with the virtual space, the analogous choice to sleep or to watch a movie is also mirrored in theories of embodiment and gaming, such as the one proposed by Gordon Calleja in his argument for the term “incorporation” when describing the player’s inscription into the virtual game of the world through an avatar. For Calleja, ‘incorporation,’ as opposed to ‘immersion,’ illuminates a more productive duality: that of the player assimilating the virtual environment into his or her consciousness as part of his or her physical surroundings and that of the player being embodied into a single virtual location generated by the game through the signification purported by the avatar. Both indicate a spectator that is delusional by choice. Such is the choice of a dreamer who falls asleep, willingly succumbing to the machinations of his subconscious. To illustrate the correlation of dreams and virtual reality, Calleja conjures the image of a body plugged into a virtual reality machine in cyberpunk films, eyes twitching occasionally, and describes it as “lucid dreaming on demand, a pay-per- 202 act performance inside a virtual world so compelling it is challenging to distinguish it from reality itself” (Calleja 2011, 17). César and Allegra are these figures who are plugged into dreams of their own making that they appear to control at times, but such level of agency is but an illusion purported by the mechanisms of the game or the virtual machine. As both films develop, the viewer finds out the characters’ control is beyond their conscious selves and lies truly at the hands of a corporation, Life Extension (or its misinterpreted acronym LE) in Abre los ojos and PilgrImage (or its mise-en-abyme counterpart Antenna) in eXistenZ. Abre los ojos Abre los ojos opens with César waking up into what is later revealed to be a dream, summoned from slumber by the recorded voice of his amant du jour Nuria on his alarm clock. The spectator is introduced to the diegesis first by a female voice repeating in increasing volume “abre los ojos” eleven times as it shifts from an internal to an external aural perspective, suggesting it is initially emanating from within unconsciousness to then being a voice calling forth from outside. Then, immersed by the sound of César’s breathing as if it were our own, the film slowly fades into a first person POV shot as it goes from looking into a blue pillow to reaching over with a hand to shut off the repeating ‘abre los ojos’ voice alarm. The audiovisual construct of this opening not only places the spectator in haptic resonance with César’s body as it wakes up but also establishes the film through the use of its title as an electronic summon. The film calls for us to open our eyes to receive its images, to embark on the virtual journey it has in store for us, to live the dream it has manufactured as real. What follows is a series of 3 rd person routine shots where César wakes up, looks at himself in the mirror, takes a shower, gets dressed in front of another mirror and drives out of his darkened garage into the morning daylight to slowly realize the entire city is vacant, and he is a man alone in a vast empty avenue, La Gran Vía de Madrid. The entire sequence is 203 eerily silent, missing the typical soundtrack to which audiences are accustomed when introduced into the world of most films. Then the film cuts to black and restarts. Once again, a female voice repeats “abre los ojos” several times and the spectator experiences the same haptically resonant shot in which César shuts off the alarm. But now, the audience is treated to a voice over of César conversing with his psychiatrist, followed by an overlaid graphic that shows the title card ‘abre los ojos’ as it cues in the extradiegetic music that underscores the images in typical filmic fashion. The film then repeats the exact same shot compositions as before – César at the mirror, at the shower, getting dressed and driving into Madrid – but with the marked differences that now there are credits of the cast and crew over the images accompanied by a swelling score, as well as other characters popping in the background such as the nubile Nuria emerging in the mirror reflection on his bed and the multitude of pedestrians that now fill the once vacant streets. The opening dream within the film not only prefigures the latter twist that César is but a man alone in a world of his own making, hooked into a Virtual Reality machine, but also sets up the awareness that the spectator is watching a film by calling attention to the elements that were not there initially, such as the dramatic music and the credits of its actors and crew members. It is a dyadic de-interlacing of a film that operates as a dream, and conversely a dream that is filmic. As we saw in our discussion of Jacques Lacan’s “Of the Gaze as Objet Petite a” and La double vie de Véronique, the task of the eye is to observe ontologically through our vision, whereas the task of the gaze that stares back at us while simultaneously showing us images is to direct us through the lure of its phallic lack, making “our position in the dream” as “that of someone who does not see where [the gaze] is leading, [but just] follows” (Lacan 1998, 75). In the case of Abre los ojos, the corporation Life Extension and its virtual software to 204 which the frozen, disfigured César is hooked up in the cryogenic device generates the gaze that virtualizes César’s dreams. César, inside his own oneirically generated virtual life, reacts blindly to what the program throws his way and, like an unconscious dreamer, is propelled forward by that which he lacks. When he was awake or conscious, before the accident, he invested “much of his personal drawing power, magnetism, seduction abilities and even self- identity in the beauty of his face” and “losing his beauty in a car accident signified an immediate disempowerment, a loss of phallic power” (Fouz-Hernández 2007, 86). Lacan labels this phallic lack that leaves the subject inactive, charged with the anxiety of castration, with a symbol he calls the objet petite a, an inaccessible object of repressed desire that can be cause for both anxiety and pleasure, that ‘veiled meaning’ perhaps a trauma that is cut off from the subject and belongs to the Real (an irreducible ontological absolute that withstands the Symbolic by being factitiously enshrouded by signifiers in opposition to the delusion of the Imaginary, the empire of the dream) (Lacan 1998, 67-78). For César, the objet petite a lies not in the confusion of his ideal woman Sofia with her anamorphic evil twin Nuria but in the scars on his once attractive visage, the lack of beauty on his face, the castration of his seductive powers through disfigurement. And hence what governs his pleasure in his virtual life is the re-attainment of that image of irresistible beauty that was once the source of his control over the world. Throughout the first half of the film, César constantly checks his face in the mirror to confirm whether his reflection still possesses its ideal features, giving him the self-confidence that he has the physical attributes to seduce any woman he desires. As we saw in our discussion of Fernando Pérez’ Madrigal, the construction of the libidinal ego during Lacan’s ‘mirror stage’ not only places an image in diametric opposition to our actual physical body but also replaces it with a reflection of our ideal selves creating a fantasmatic overlay, a chronic assimilation of the Imaginary over the Real that continues to 205 preside over our adult life. Real in the sense that since it hides behind the idealized reflection it remains unrevealed and susceptible to the misunderstandings of a recurring delusion. Through César’s subsequent inability to differentiate an ideal image of his face from its physical deformity, as well as to discern the face of his true love Sofia from his obsessed lover Nuria, Amenábar engages his audience with a virtual existence that on the surface evokes a fractured psyche – literally represented in the scars on César’s face – tumbling inside a recurring nightmare but perhaps is trying to tease out that which lies beneath the images and stands in a Lacanian sense in opposition to the cinematic: the thought, perhaps shared by its audience, that cannot be incorporated into César’s consciousness – that which cannot be conceived under the delusion that is his depicted life. Not the fact that he murdered Sofia/Nuria – that is still a symbolic code for the Real trauma at the nucleus of his virtual delusion – but the crippling reality of his deformed frozen body lying asleep somewhere in a cryogenic capsule. César is at once impotently inert, unconsciously asleep and irreversibly unattractive. In the Montesinos episode in Cervantes’ novel, one can argue that Don Quixote has an encounter with the veiled trauma of his own virtual existence as the dream which he experiences as lifelike inside the cave seems to be encoding the Lacanian objet petite a that Dulcinea does not exist and hence neither does his fabricated identity as virile knight errant. Such an encounter occurs first in Belerma’s appearance as an ugly peasant, which mirrors the peasant Sancho claimed to be Dulcinea earlier, and second in her subsequent appearance in the dream asking for money. Similarly, César’s encounters with Nuria as Sofia in Amenábar’s film ultimately signal that the reality in which his face is reconstructed is virtual and his existence beyond the accident that disfigured him a mere dream. From the very beginning, the film recurs the theme of waking up to suggest 206 precisely, as Edgar Allan Poe once said, that ‘all that we see,’ or all that which the film ‘seems’ to be, is but dreams ‘within a dream.’ César is “continually waking up from dreams he has and recounting dreams, all from within his dreamed existence” (Knollmueler 2009, 212). These oneiric layers suggest not only forgotten or repressed events in César’s cryogenic delusion but also little films within the Film with capital F, those sub-sequences interspersed throughout Abre los ojos where César is woken up from dreams – all contained within the larger Dream generated by L.E.’s virtual world. Therefore, the film as a whole “functions as a cinematic dream, for through all of its twists and turns and breaches of logical editing, the viewer must cease to question or decipher the logic of the narrative” (213). The spectator through his or her identificatory relation to César as protagonist realizes that César’s “waking experiences” much like his or her own as audience member “are not veridical at all but are in fact compatible with the possibility that he is dreaming or otherwise deluded” (Laraway 2008, 71). While César watches in his mind’s eye the imagistic unfolding of his own chosen delusion, the dream where he regains his phallic power through a perfectly reconstructed face, the spectator engages with the same virtuality the film’s protagonist takes to be real. By employing visual aesthetics that are in essence cinematically conventional, Abre los ojos simulates for its viewers the dreamer’s unquestionable acceptance of a dream’s irrational and “authentic incoherence” and stages one long dream sequence “disguised through ‘realistic’ film aesthetics rather than coded as [a] dream through cloudy edges, out-of-focus photography or other conventional devices” (Knollmueler 2009, 212). Amenábar does not symbolize the dream through obvious film techniques that call attention to its artificiality but instead imagines the essence of dreams through cinema’s readily accepted “assemblage” of loose fragments stitched together into seeming consistency. Cinema’s inherent absurdity is taken for granted by its audiences, as they are accustomed to its Frankensteinean collage that 207 jumps back and forth in time at the prescribed will of the film crew’s creative process. Amenábar takes advantage of this familiarity with cinematic tropes to build a virtual capsule. Although on the surface it houses César’s psychosis as it synapses through recurring nightmares and desires, the film also simulates an oneiric experience for the spectator through a meta-reflexive cinematographic tumbler of repeated visual compositions that recur throughout. For example, César goes to the bathroom and checks his reflection on the mirror to confirm whether it’s deformed or intact a total of six times, “his countenance provid[ing] the most natural criterion available to us for distinguishing between his waking experiences and his dreams” (Laraway 2008, 72). Like the recurring dialogue, this repetition reflects both an oneiric compulsion and a metafilmic marker, as it is both a literal (for César) and figurative (for the spectator) moment of self-reflection. Through this self-reflexivity established between viewing subject and viewed object, between the extra-diegetic spectator and intra-diegetic protagonist, Amenábar “has taken all of the ambiguity, irrationality, uncertainty, wish-fulfillment and nightmarish hauntings that characterize our dream state and created a waking dream or ‘conscious hallucination’” (Knollmueler 2009, 213) to imply an infra-diegetic nucleus, hiding behind the many veils of its meta-virtualities, that reflects back to reality. Perhaps, in Amenábar’s Russian doll cinematic contraption, the Lacanian Real stands in for the real, the outside the diegesis, the realm of the spectator. When César jumps off to his virtual death at the end, he might be waking up not only into an extra-diegetic reality where he is being unfrozen from the cryogenic capsule but also into the darkness of the theater as the spectator begins to move in his seat upon the film ending. Heard over black, the final command “tránquilo, abre los ojos” appears directed both at César and perhaps at the spectator who adjusts to reality as the credits roll and the lights come on in the theater as if he or she were waking up from the oneiric simulation afforded by the film’s 208 illusion. Therefore, Amenábar has achieved what Christian Metz claimed was not possible in his proclamation that film cannot fully operate as a dream. In Abre los ojos, the spectators are virtually dreaming César’s dream with him. Such a vicarious engagement plays out in a scene where the psychiatrist hypnotizes César to recall a dream regarding his visit to the offices of L.E. The sequence begins with a POV shot through César’s plastic mask, placing the spectator inside César’s headspace (or ‘visor’) as he or she virtually experiences what he sees. Then, the camera swish pans to a clean frame, un- masking the POV shot, and César enters the frame as if he’s walking into his own field of vision. In my view, this cinematic trick reveals that all of the viewpoints of the film are César’s POV as he dreams his own extended existence, including perspectives where he is looked at. Lacan describes a dreamer’s ontology as split between the eye of the subject in the machinery of the dream and the gaze that solicits the attention of the subject, that which exerts power by invoking the subject with its ever-present look: “I see only from one point, but in my existence I am looked at from all sides” (Lacan 1998, 72). Hence, César’s multi- perspectival virtual delusion is a metonym for the viewer’s spectatorial engagement. Once the doctor injects him with a sedative and induces hypnosis, the film portrays César’s recollection as entirely 1 st person POV with the exception of quick subconscious disruptions that bookend his memory of the visit to L.E. – a brief look at an encounter with Sofia in the park and a flash of what is later revealed to be his suicide, both which are seen from a 3 rd person POV – again meshing César’s viewpoint with the outside perspective of the camera since everything we see is generated by César’s subconscious. What’s unique about this particular hypnotic hallucination is not only that it is a depiction of César’s actual visit to sign the contract at Life Extension to have himself cryogenically frozen upon his death, hence being the one Real cinematic image that hints at the obscured objet petit a hidden 209 beneath the oneiric virtuality of the film, but also that the image has a painterly effect over it that recalls the expressionist style in painting. Hence, “Amenábar chooses to confound cinematic conventions with respect to dream sequences by creating a wavy, expressionistic blur to the singular event later revealed to have been ‘real’” (Knollmueler 2009, 206). In his seminar on the gaze, Lacan claims most painterly art “invites the person to whom [the] picture is presented to lay down his gaze as one lays down one’s a weapons” (Lacan 1998, 101), what he calls dompte-regard or taming of the gaze, yet he names one style of painting “that is nevertheless in a quite direct appeal to the gaze” as an exception: Expressionism (109). For Lacan, works such as Edward Munch’s The Scream (1893) incite the viewer’s gaze and provide satisfaction to what it demands. The expressionistic distortion of César’s hypnotic recollection in Abre los ojos not only visually simulates art that incites the gaze as Lacan suggests but also haptically generates the sensation of a difficult memory, something ‘obscure’ and ‘buried’ (to use Metz adjectives) in between “the enigmatic brilliance of the zones that the wish dazzles and the dark, swarming shipwreck of the almost forgotten segments” (Metz 1976, 88) – as Metz describes the traits of dreams that film cannot emulate. Amenábar’s technique is akin to the rapidly fading images of an evanescent dream upon waking up that the brain works hard to bring back into conscious focus. Therefore, César conjures events that exist outside his entire oneiric virtual existence as if he were trying to clarify or illuminate the buried or darkened musings of a 210 dream. From inside his permanent virtuality, that is, the film as a whole, he inversely has dreams of reality, just as Don Quixote in the cave of Montesinos dreams of Dulcinea as the peasant she really is as opposed to the damsel he wishes her to be. In this regard, the film simulates the oneiric quality of existence, of self-perception, by having the dream feel real at 24 frames per second and the reality buried like a blurry dream beneath its celluloid skin. Abre los ojos draws a fictional curtain over the reality of César’s cryogenic state through the trope of its meta-oneiric narrative. In the film, dreams within dreams not only peel through layers of buried memories and possible realities but also propel the spectator to unveil its artificial construction to see the actual film buried within the film, that is the science fiction reality of 2145 where César can have his face reconstructed and “live in the future as a normal person.” In his seminar, Lacan also describes another instance in which the gaze is instigated rather than appeased by an effect in painting, as is the spectator here. He calls this ocular deception tompe l’oeil, “a triumph of the gaze over the eye” (Lacan 1998, 103) – and it refers to the deceit of painting when it appears real not by a perfect representation but by how it takes the spectator in. As an example, Lacan recounts the classical myth of Zeuxis and Parrhasius that serves as the basis for the title of this dissertation. In the story, Zeuxis paints such realistic grapes on his canvas that it attracts the birds to fly into it as if they were real, but Parrhasius “triumphs over him for having painted on the wall a veil, a veil so lifelike that Zeuxis, turning towards him said, ‘Well, and now show us what you have painted behind it’” (103). The ‘painted veil’ can be compared to the lure of a virtual oneiric metafilm as its reality is in fact a constructed illusory dream that compels us to want to see behind it, despite our awareness of its artifice – that’s why it’s more effective than a perfect simulacrum of reality, such as is the case with the grapes and the birds. As Lacan later concludes, “if one wishes to deceive a man, what one presents to 211 him is the painting of a veil, that is to say, something that incites him to ask what is behind it” (112). Hence, Abre los ojos in its entirety is a ‘veil’ – a virtual dream draped over reality – that is also ‘painted’ – since it is a film aware of its artificiality through that very construction of itself as a fabricated virtual environment – a veiled screen. eXistenZ Similar to how a veiled screen rouses a desire to unveil, dreams are propelled by a desire to finish dreaming through waking up, and hence by a desire to dissolve its illusory hold on our perception of what’s real. In the opening scene of David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ, the spectator is introduced to an audience of gamers with “slave pods” ready to test launch über-designer Allegra Geller’s latest game creation eXistenZ™, a metonym for their own engagement with the film eXistenZ. Contrary to Abre los ojos individual ‘Life Extension’ virtual experience, eXistenZ™ cannot be played alone. Since one has “to play eXistenZ™ with somebody friendly,” the game requires multiple players to “willfully indulge in [its] illusions” (Browning 2007, 174) in order to experience “an impression of reality” (Baudry 1992, 693) like the prisoners in Plato’s ‘allegory of the cave.’ Situating Plato’s cave as a prefigure of cinema, Jean-Louis Baudry’s essay “The Apparatus” (1975) concludes that “the dream itself, the visual representations which are projected upon it, would correspond to the desire to be awake” (701), implying that cinema operates on a hidden desire for its own end. Since the dream reflects our desire to unmask its material illusion and hence be released from its grip, just as Don Quixote’s dream inside the cave shows an unconscious desire to see things for what they are, cinema when viewed primarily as a subconscious relationship to the mechanisms that construct the projection instead of a conscious decoding of the depicted narrative ultimately functions on the wish to exit the cave, the dark room of the movie theater, and instead experience not the imagined conditions of existence but those 212 conditions in the flesh. In the case of the game-within-the-film eXistenZ™, that desire is expressed in the player’s drive to finish and win the game. The aim of the spectator is to get to the end of a film and wake up to ‘existence,’ freed from the film’s perceptive imprisonment. This is what eXistenZ metonymically exposes. It makes an apparatus of multiple mediated virtual gazes, the biological “meta-flesh” game pod console, into the object of its camera in order to reflexively project its simulated ubiquity of perception in the game’s spatiotemporal rules, thus illuminating a tacit construction of subjectivity embedded within the game and therefore the film itself that contains its own unmaking, its own ‘game over.’ It expresses the repression exerted by the ruling corporate ideology on its consumers through the game’s constant oppression of its player’s perspective, perhaps awakening the audience to the reality of ideological colonization within and instilling the desire to free the scope of what they see beyond the game’s parameters. As its creator declares, “eXistenZ™ is not just a game; it’s an entirely new game system.” In eXistenZ, like dreaming, the game takes “mental perceptions for perceptions of reality” (De Lauretis 2003, 699-700) yet, like cinema, it “offers an artificial psychosis without offering the dreamer the possibility of exercising any kind of immediate control” (705). In her essay “Becoming Inorganic,” Teresa De Lauretis writes that “the game of eXistenZ™[‘s] immersive interactive experience creates a kind of collective psychic reality, partially scripted but partially constructed by the players’ fantasies conscious and unconscious” (568) – as the players must abide by its collectively and subconsciously generated rules in order to remain in the game and eventually win it. The object of eXistenZ™ is to get deeper into the game in order to get out of the game entirely. As Allegra and Ted penetrate meta-levels of game reality, first plugging into Allegra’s game pod to later then insert micro-pods directly into 213 their spine, they play mini games within the capital G Game (much like César ‘dreams within the Dream’ in Abre los ojos), figuring out the rules as they playact further in order to ultimately emerge out of the whole game system (and perhaps out of the film itself). When the sleeper awakens, fulfilling the repressed desire to be awake from within the oneiric imagery generated by the subconscious, the dream dies as it is forgotten. As the final scene reveals, Allegra and Ted are not the game designer and the “PR nerd” the spectator thought them to be. Those were their game characters, much like Jennifer Jason Leigh and Jude Law are actors in the film eXistenZ. They are instead anti-gaming terrorists playing the game transCendenZ™ with the intention of executing its designer Yevgeny Nourish for the “most effective deforming of reality.” Since the game works off the collective subconscious of its players, transCendenZ™ has introjected the “theme of disease into the game” through the inclusion of a game-within-the-Game eXistenZ™ and its subsequent infection as the game dies from a disease that is extrapolated from within its virtuality. Within the logic of the game lies embedded the hidden intention of the assassins as well as the details of their plan, such as the fact that the dog will smuggle through security the guns they will use to kill the game designer. The murderous thought is the Lacanian objet petit a that is subsumed within the narrative dreamwork of the Game, reflecting Freud’s definition how ‘Repression’ obscures the object of desire through distortion in dreams: “When I conclude that the cause of the obscurity is the desire to conceal these thoughts. Thus I arrive at the conception of the dream distortion as the deed of the dream work, and of displacement serving to disguise this object” (Freud 2001, 32). The film’s distortion of Allegra and Ted’s intentions within its meta-layers of narrative therefore reflects the characters’ diegetic desire to conceal their plan from the other players within the game. With the game eXistenZ™ dead, the player Allegra wins transCendenZ™ through a figurative destruction of itself from within. This is how her 214 assassination plan is repressed by the oneiric virtual work and hence disguised in the game’s meta-distortions. Norman N. Holland in his essay “The neuroscience of metafilm” (2007) defines meta-narratives, whether they are literature or film, as “stories in which the physical medium of the story becomes part of the story” (Holland 2007, 59) and goes on to describe the effect of watching a metafilm as an amusing confusion that yields simultaneously both anxiety and humor akin to “the vertigo when something familiar suddenly seems strange and unfamiliar, like unexpectedly seeing yourself in a mirror” (63) – an image that not only recalls César’s recurring encounters with his reflection in the bathroom mirror in Abre los ojos but also conjure notions of the uncanny encounter with our libidinal ideal selves as established by Lacan’s mirror stage (as discussed earlier in our reading of Madrigal’s uncanny mirroring of Hitchcock’s Vertigo). In terms of the metagame eXistenZ™, as it operates not only within the diegetic game of transCendenZ™ but also as a mirror metonym of the metafilm eXistenZ that in turns operates within the extra-diegetic reality that is the spectator’s physical existence, the neurobiological effect of the game’s (and the movie’s) metafilmic fissures can be described as a nervous internal tingle resulting both out of confusion and recognition, as the spectator’s “brain gets two inconsistent messages: “Get ready to move” and “don’t move”” (72). According to Metz, it is in those gaps when the dreamer momentarily knows that he is dreaming “that the filmic state and the oneiric state tend to converge” (Metz 1976, 77) as a mixed message of ‘keep sleeping’ and ‘wake up’ give the dreamer both awareness and bewilderment. Consequently, as Holland suggests, it is in those moments of self- reflexivity in eXistenZ when the dialogue seems to leap out of the diegesis and resonate outside the film that the spectator confounds the fiction with his reality as the film tickles his synapses and concurrently gives him a ‘shiver down his or her spine’ – as Alison Griffiths 215 suggests with the title of her book about how immersive environments sublimely affect its spectators. Some examples of lines of dialogue with metafilmic resonance are: “I’ve been dying to play your games” or “I like your script! I want to be in it.” These instances not only “signal the fictive nature of what we are seeing” (Browning 2007, 163) by instilling aural awareness of the film as a construction but also obliquely interpellate the spectator by commenting on the ‘tompe l’oeil’ of the performances, thus giving him or her the impression of being a co-creator of the virtual world much like Allegra and Ted’s dreamworks feed the game they play with its narrative material. From the onset, eXistenZ places Allegra at its center as the designer privileging the feminine over the masculine as the lens through which we experience the game. For Laura Mulvey, cinematic pleasure has been inextricably linked with male desire/anxiety over his phallus and operates “on voyeuristic active/passive mechanisms.” She ends her famous essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975) by calling forth the avant garde “to free the look of the camera into its materiality in time and space and the look of the audience into dialectics, passionate detachment” (Mulvey 2009, 722). In essence, Mulvey wants films to be metafilmic, as it would annihilate the unquestioned pleasure inherent in cinema and create an awareness beyond pleasure, politically charged and self-referential to free the look of the unisex audience from its constant masculinization and subjection to the dominant male anxiety over his threatened phallocentric imposition. In eXistenZ, transCendenZ™ virtual- work makes Allegra fill the shoes of the goddess game designer in the metagame instead of Ted, concealing perhaps the assassination plan of the pair in “the female spectator’s phantasy of masculinization” that is “at cross-purposes with itself, restless in its transvestite clothes” (Mulvey 1981, 8). This transvestial spectatorship in which Allegra stands in for Yevgeny is not only indicative of the fact that gaming (like mainstream cinema according to 216 Mulvey) is “structured around masculine pleasure” and “the active point of view” but also that trans-sex identification for women “is a habit that very easily becomes second Nature” (4) in which they continually rediscover “that lost aspect of her sexual identity, the never fully repressed bed-rock of feminine neurosis” (3) that Freud claims remains from an early phallic stage shared by both genders. In my view, Cronenberg dramatizes Mulvey’s call for dismantling cinematic pleasure through his inversion of game metonyms. By starting the diegesis within the virtual world of transCendenz™, having the audience believe that eXistenZ™ is the real game (reinforced by the fact that the film also shares the name as its title), the director is privileging the feminine as the sole creative agent, uncomfortably exposing the phallocentric costume Allegra bears as the eponymous “game pod goddess” while portraying her counterpart Ted as emasculated, passive and vulnerable. “I have this phobia about having my body penetrated,” Ted says when explaining his lack of bioport installation. By showing an active Allegra and a passive Ted first, before revealing in the end that it is the other way around and that the designer is in fact a man, Cronenberg shows “old-fashioned masculine and feminine gender roles coexist[ing] with[in] a new gender economy” (De Lauretis 2003, 565) rather than the other way around. In the game, the bioport is essentially a cavity that is more “analogous to piercings in the ungendered prosthetic pleasure it affords,” and hence “nulls and voids all our current sexual identities” (566). As we saw in the previous chapter, Wes Craven exposes a similar gender imbalance in his meta-horror films, which he attempts to dissolve by relinquishing creative power to his female protagonists within the diegesis – a move reminiscent of Cronenberg’s veiled screen in which Allegra is the dominant creative force behind the mise-en-abyme game eXistenZ™ that drives the narrative of the film eXistenZ instead of game designer Yevgeny Nourish whose male-gaze dominant transCendenZ™ is 217 relegated to a hidden layer yet is responsible for metonymically placing Allegra in that position of power. In the world of transCendenZ™, the lack is not phallic but matrixial 53 and the imagery surrounding the game console is that of a fetus as “Allegra’s solipsistic, autoerotic relation to her own pod is figured as maternal” (565). In “The Apparatus,” Baudry describes Plato’s Cave as “a representation of the maternal womb, of the matrix into which we are supposed to return” (Baudry 1992, 697) and, hence, cinema through the lens of Cronenberg’s metagame is viewed as hosting not “an illusion cut to the measure of [male] desire” (Mulvey 2009, 721) but a virtual dream-within-a-dream in which the matrixial gaze of Allegra is in control, like a mother cradling her child. And that fragility is being threatened by phallocentric forces that want to shoot down the ‘demonized’ female in maternal control of the gamers’ perception of the world. The meta-inversion deployed by the film dephallocentrizes its representation of the virtual environment, by depicting it not as a dystopian cityscape of skyscrapers as is typical of the science fiction genre but as a “country side” where technology is all biologically manufactured. It inversely privileges the feminine over the masculine, the matrix over the phallus, and the body over the eye. The nightmarescape at the climax of Wes Craven’s New Nightmare depicts an equally feminine space, a womblike ancient Greek chamber that reflects both the corrupted ‘oikos’ (Greek word for the domestic space) from which a mother must rescue her son and the matrixial 53 I’m referring here to Bracha Ettinger’s “matrixial gaze” to which I alluded in the discussion of Bigas Luna’s Anguish in Chapter Two. It is a fragilizing supplement to Lacan’s phallic gaze (and an alternative to Mulvey’s concept of a male gaze) that uses the ‘matrix’ as a metaphorical reference to the uterus to counter Lacan’s use of male anatomy to theorize masculine power. 218 unconscious in which the actress will bring the horror narrative to a non-threatening resolution as the film’s definitive artistic force. The final girl is now a mother who cradles her child like Allegra cradles her gamepod. Similarly, Don Quixote descends into the cave of Montesinos hanging from a rope that places him in a crevice where he curls to sleep on the rope “haciendo de ella una rosca o rimero” (Cervantes 2010, 702), as if he were a baby reentering the womb with the umbilical cord and laying himself back to pre-existence in the fetal position. eXistenZ depicts the gamers’ engagement with the art of the game as corporeal, as they plug ‘umbicords’ into their spine and begin to feel virtual sensations reverberating throughout their bodies. Even within the game, there is a lot of emphasis on tactile perception, as we see Allegra caressing the walls of the Country Gas Station to confirm the haptic accuracy of the game, a moment that recalls Don Quijote’s tactile assessment of his physical presence when he wakes into the dream inside the Cave of Montesinos. For Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the body is correlative to “a work of art” (Merleau-Ponty 2004, 174) and therefore perception is not necessarily sensed through ocular sight but through the way the body uses its motor functions and its sense of touch to perceive things tactically. The effects of this corporeal perception on our subjectivity as beings of flesh precede and exceed the subsequent colonization by words to reductive analysis or restrictive meaning. In chapter 1 of Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (2002), Laura U. Marks places the erotic interplay of bodily contact in haptic perception, an inward and perhaps feminine viewing that “allows us to experience in detail, but not to take a distance from experience in order to define it” (Marks 2002, 12), against the distant observation of optical perception in which the eye beholds an object and defines it from its critically distant vantage point. Hence, haptic images are tactile in their seduction, irreducible to totalizing perception. They induce the 219 viewer to relinquish control finding themselves embodied within its closeness, brushing against its textures and engaging with an intelligence that exceeds mental processes and thought and instead works on contact, intuition and friction, an alternative to “the Lacanian psychoanalytic model that castigates the ‘overclose’ viewer for being stuck in an illusion” (18). Luce Irigaray makes this same anti-ocular argument in her book This Sex Which Is Not One (1985) by foregrounding the haptic over visuality as the proper language for female sexuality (Irigaray 1985, 23-33). Allegra’s ‘system’ subverts the oppressive critical look of the phallocentric gaze favoring instead a haptic way of perceiving that is more tactile, receptive as opposed to active, and hence feminine in that it allows the player to use the body to receive visual information through touch. After Ted and Allegra insert micropods into their spines as they play a mini-game within the game eXistenZ™, they acquire new identities that are coded to be attracted to each other and as such become sexually aroused, brushing their bodies against each other to indulge in haptic pleasure. Suddenly, Ted pulls away from Allegra and expresses concern over an unexpected “vulnerable, disembodied” feeling – “I’m very worried about my body… our real bodies” – an apprehension Allegra quickly dispels by saying “all our senses are still operating” outside of the game and hence any sign of danger would “pop” them back out if necessary. Ted’s abrupt self-awareness of his embodiment within the virtual milieu hints at a disconnect between how we think ourselves spatially in our environment and how we can perceive such an environment through senses other than seeing, since Ted’s fear springs from his lack of eyesight in reality which Allegra essentially discredits by pointing out how they can still ‘see’ through bodily sensation. In Carnal Thoughts (2004), Vivian Sobchack explores how embodiment and consciousness work together in deciphering subjectivity as we are both conscious flesh and corporeal minds that possess “an 220 embodied intelligence that opens our eyes far beyond their discrete capacity for vision [and therefore can] open the film far beyond its visible containment by the screen” (Sobchack 2004, 84). Hence, Ted’s fear comes as no surprise being the male player that sits uneasy in his transvestually embodied game character that Allegra designed for him. He is not accustomed to relinquishing the power to see and instead employ the ability to feel. Episteme of the Virtual Just as Life Extension, an “empresa Yankee” that is perhaps a metaphor for Hollywood, offers the disfigured César an alternative to his dissatisfaction with his self- perception by splicing a dream into his life that allows him a second chance, using his mind to “provide the instructions for the code that produces [the] narrative” (Perri 2008, 93-94), cinema in its most commercial classical form manufactures the illusion of a life beyond consciousness in which your wishes are fulfilled (“Mis deseos empiezan a cumplirse como en las películas”) and expands its timespan like an accordion since two hours of a movie could contain years in the life of its characters. One of the players testing transCendenZ™ says at the end during the feedback session with PilgrImage: “If you stayed your whole life in the game world then you could live to about 500 years.” And in his dream inside the cave of Montesinos, Don Quixote experiences three days what in reality was only an hour: “allá me anocheció y amaneció, y tornó a anochecer y amanecer tres veces; de modo que, a mi cuenta, tres días he estado en aquellas partes remotas y escondidas a la vista nuestra” (Cervantes 2010, 707). As Freud reminds us, wish-fulfillment and time condensation are the main characteristics of an oneiric state. Whereas the oneiric in film serves to simulate the illusion of expanded time, the play in a video game is limited by the timespan of the avatar’s survival before that eponymous Game Over signals the return of a new game attempt. Hence, wish-fulfillment lies not in a 221 sense of extension as it does in Abre los ojos but in the replay aspect of the game as it appeals instead to a desire to regain control. In his essay “Playing at Being: Psychoanalysis and the Avatar” (2003), Bob Rehak reads a player’s idealized identification with the game’s avatar as a fantasmatic simulacra of the subject’s lifelong reinsertion into the split established at the Lacanian mirror stage between observer and observed. Building on this psychoanalytic model of avatar ontology, Rehak explores how the suturing of ideology in film is replaced in the videogame by the three-dimensional concretization of Jean-Pierre Oudart’s “absent one” as it materializes in the avatar, the “present one standing in for the player” (Rehak 2003, 121). In the system of suture, a film conceals its ideological purpose by continually revealing a character with each cut in place of that absence that commands the frame. In that process, where “the meaning of a shot depends on the next shot” (Dayan 1974, 30), a film sows itself inside the skin of its own fabrication, a seemingly alive texture that the spectator believes to witness and appraise autonomously. As we mentioned in the Introduction, Daniel Dayan equates that vacancy implied by the cinematographic frame with a ghost whose ethereality is the signified of the character that comes to take its place as the next shot emerges. The ability for the avatar to recur and re-play a new game recalls this spectrality of the ‘absent one’ as the ‘ghost’ reincorporates itself back into the game with every try, much like each film cut inscribes a subject into its previously established absence. While film sutures mostly via editorial incisions that establish a serial succession that expands time through condensation, splicing one shot to the next, a virtual game such as eXistenZ™ can transition in a variety of seamless ways – as Allegra puts it, “you can get jagged, brutal cuts; slow fades, shimmering little morphs.” For example, when Ted vocally pauses the game, the table at the Chinese Restaurant acquires the soft texture of the bed at the Ski Lodge as one set piece blends into the next, showing that “the linkages between the 222 layers of embedding of the mise-en-abîme or mirror structure reflect the new, postmodern digital technology: the mode of passage from one level of the game to another is not serial but digital” (De Lauretis 2003, 564). It is, quite literally, an embedding of virtual spaces in three-dimensional form. These digitalesque transitions are part of the film’s use of style to suggest itself as a game rather than a film and also link the arrangement of disparate events via spatial relocation rather than plot development or classical narrative modes. The deployment of style over narrative not only surges the creativity of the viewer but also inspires the soul, much like music, to have an unexplainable encounter that exceeds the parameters of reality as we know it, in space and time. In his book Narrative in the Fiction Film (1985), David Bordwell defines parametric narration as a film where the style is intrinsically laid out to function under its own set of rules as opposed to serving the syuzhet (plot) arrangement of the fabula (story): “When a powerful and internally consistent style refuses conventional schemata for producing narrative meaning, we are tantalized into projecting other schemata onto it” (Bordwell 1985, 305). The opacity with which the prevalence of style infuses the film provokes a fascinating neurobiological ontology in which the viewer has an encounter with the unknown and hence must synthesize its own meaning through a multiplicitous or even random application of its creative powers. In “The Psychology of the Photoplay” (1916), Hugo Munsterberg describes the ‘photoplay’ as “the impression of the continuity of the motion result[ing] from a complex mental process by which the various pictures are held together in the unity of a higher act” (Munsterberg 1916, 69). This higher act is precisely what Bordwell describes as the crux of parametric cinema that “explores the very limits of the viewer’s capacity” (Bordwell 1985, 306) through its nonsignifying style that seems to imply an immanent connection more akin to music than narrative. Munsterberg equates the projection of the spectator’s mental processes, whether it 223 is his/her imagination of some futurity or a memory of that which he thought, with “a reality [that] has lost its own continuous connection and become shaped by the demands of our soul” (95). This atemporality is both what makes film a projection of the brain in action as opposed to a mimetic depiction of the real world and an encounter beyond logic into something that exceeds the capacity of the brain and enters into the psychic realm of a kind of eternal infinity with no temporal and spatial limitations: “In our mind past and future become intertwined with the present. The photoplay obeys the laws of the mind rather than those of the outer world” (97). Consequently, dreams also function under the neurobiological logic of our subconscious. A virtual oneiric film is parametric in that its self-referential style operates not according to the development of a narrative plot but to the “authentic incoherence” of an oneiric logic virtually guided by the “the desire to be elsewhere without actually going elsewhere” (Griffiths 2013, 286). Dream, film and game immersion all simulate “that sense of being in closer communion with something other than the here and now, something that takes us into a ‘virtual’ reality that could be defined as an interstitial space where we are never fully ‘there’ because our bodies can never fully leave the ‘here’” (285). One can prefigure the advent of games and virtual immersions in Munsterberg’s 1916 essay if one reads his concept of the ‘photoplay’ as a photogame – a ludic engagement with photorealistic images. In this light, Munsterberg agrees that film – in unison with its metonymic offspring the video game – “gives us our chance for such omnipresence” (Munsterberg 1916, 103-4) for it simulates ubiquity. It allows us to dream of a place we have never been to. As César comments about the possibilities of Life Extension with respects to immortality, “firmar la claúsula 14 es firmar por el paraíso.” Hence, all three – the virtual, the oneiric and the filmic – not only fulfill our spatial ambitions as they allow us to move without moving into spaces 224 beyond our eyes and bodies but also simulate a temporal expansion into the possibility of perpetuity in what could be a matter of minutes. Towards the end of eXistenZ, Ted describes to Allegra their experience in eXistenZ™ as “stumbling around together in this unformed world whose rules and objectives are largely unknown, seemingly undecipherable, or even possibly non-existent, always on the verge of being killed by forces that we don’t understand.” To which Allegra poignantly observes, “it is a game everyone is already playing.” We are all already immersed in a reality that is parametric and virtual by nature, as narrative logic is but a human invention that gives serial meaning to existence. As Rehak observes about the mirror stage, “we already exist in an avatarial relation to ourselves” (Rehak 2003, 123). I wonder if what Abre los ojos and eXistenZ are hinting at with their meta- dreams and meta-games is an epistemic shift in which the virtual has replaced the physical as the locus of existence. One might even call it a Quixotic episteme. Just as Velázquez’ metapainting Las meninas signals a shift from resemblance to representation that in turn augurs the advent of cinema, Cervantes’ Don Quijote perhaps prefigures the episteme of the virtual in its protagonist’s ingenious madness that insists in replacing reality with delusion. Don Quixote drapes the literary world of his ‘libros de caballería’ over the plains of La Mancha just as Allegra hides inside her game eXistenZ™ and César splices his life into a cryogenic fantasy. 225 Conclusion The Screen Unveiled “Y en esto llegaron a la venta, a tiempo que anochecía, y no sin gusto de Sancho, por ver que su señor la juzgó por verdadera venta, y no por castillo, como solía.” - Miguel de Cervantes, Segunda parte de el ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de La Mancha In his essay on ‘The uncanny,’ Freud posits an uncanny experience as occurring in two types of situations. First, when an infantile complex such as castration anxiety recurs in repressed form. Second, when a primitive belief that had been surmounted by civilized man is once again confirmed. By primitive, he refers to a concept of the ‘omnipotence of thought’ or this animistic belief in sorcery and magic as a result of a view of the world peopled by spirits, a narcissistic overevaluation of man’s mental capacities as a way to fend off manifest reality. In my view, this second emergence of the uncanny describes Don Quixote’s own delusional perception of a reality plagued by enchanters that turn giants into windmills in part one and Dulcinea into a mere peasant in part two. His primitive belief in the anachronistic institution of knight errantry as inculcated from his excessive reading of chivalric romances drapes a veil over his eyes and engages the world in what Roberto González Echevarría calls a ‘double vision,’ that perfect undiluted binocular way of reading the world as if it were one with the fictions that manifest in his mind as he reads (which González Echevarría contrasts with Ginés de Pasamonte’s cross-eyed dual-distortion and later one-eyed uni-perspectival theatrics as Maese Pedro): It is not just that Don Quijote imposes on reality a preconceived vision derived from the chivalric romances he has devoured through his eyes but also that the very act of seeing, in its psychological dimension and in terms of the new physics, made it 226 increasingly problematic to formulate a concept of what “vision” might be. (González Echevarría 2005, 221) Don Quixote merges what he imagines in his mind as he reads his fictional texts with what he perceives in front of him, hence materializing all sorts of hallucinations as part of one and the same reality. The uncanny for Don Quixote is not just a resurgence of primitive views through fiction but the very condition of his madness, a constant projection of the virtual over the actual, crystallized in a Deleuzian circuit that makes one indistinguishable from the other. Through this double lens that effaces the distinction between the imaginary and the real, Don Quixote encounters all sorts of doubles, such a Sansón Carrasco embodying his own fabricated chivalric identity as the ‘Caballero de los Espejos’ who comes to defeat him in the end. He also encounters indirectly his and Sancho’s own counterfeit doppelgängers from Avellaneda’s Segundo tomo through the ‘enchanted’ witness Don Álvaro de Tarfe who attests to their condition as unmistakable originals. But perhaps the most intriguing uncanny duplication within the text occurs during the episode of Maese Pedro’s puppet show in which Don Quixote mistakes the puppets that tell the story of Melisandre’s escape as real, reflecting in a representational medium Don Quixote’s own delusion about reality: Quisiera yo tener aquí delante en este punto todos aquellos que no creen ni quieren creer de cuánto provecho sean en el mundo los caballeros andantes. Miren, si no me hallara yo aquí presente, qué fuera del buen don Gaiferos y de la hermosa Melisendra: a buen seguro que esta fuera ya la hora que los hubieran alcanzado estos canes y les hubieran hecho algún desaguisado. En resolución, ¡viva la andante caballería sobre cuantas cosas hoy viven en la tierra! (Cervantes 2010, 731-732) He no longer just mistakes reality for fiction. He also recursively mistakes fiction for reality in a reversal of the doubling nature of the text itself. Also, the relationship that Ginés de 227 Pasamonte bears to his new identity as the puppeteer Maese Pedro and his narrating assistant reflects the same relationship Miguel de Cervantes bears to his doppelgänger within the text Cide Hamete Benengeli and his translators. There’s yet another mise-en-abyme occurring, an ‘aporetic’ duplication (to borrow Dällenbach’s typology) as the apparatus behind the play reflects the same figures deployed by Cervantes to elude his authorship within the text as to render the fiction self-sufficient. 54 Like the scripted nightmares of Wes Craven’s New Nightmare from which the actress protagonist assumes oneiric control, the virtual capsule in Amenábar’s Abre los ojos in which a VR program reacts to the film’s protagonists synaptic unconscious desires, and the game in David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ which tailors its rules according to the players hidden desires and not to the whims of a godlike designer, the narrative trajectory of Don Quixote is laid out by the characters themselves. In his essay, Freud goes on to say that the figure of the double transforms from being a figure that reflects the possibility of immortality to a harbinger of death, an omen that augurs ones replacement by a copy that embodies all that one has repressed within. One can say that a similar move occurs in Don Quijote’s many duplications in the transition from volume one to volume two. His initial rechristening of himself as a new being, from being a mere aging Alonso Quijano to famous and heroic knight Don Quixote, reflects what Nicholas Royle teases in his own ‘uncanny’ essay as “a foreign body within oneself… the experience of oneself in a foreign body” (Royle 2003, 2) or, more appropriate to this comparison, an experience of oneself as foreign. Alonso Quijano is uncanny to Don 54 Instead he appears as a side character mentioned by Ginés on an autobiographical reference to his own captivity in the battle of Lepanto. 228 Quixote, who remains repressed until the very end of both volumes, right before he dies. Hence, the return of the repressed original, the fifty-year old Quijano, comes to surface to signal Don Quixote’s demise not only as a fictional character living in a narrative adventure of his own making but also as man succumbing to his weathered and beaten body. From being a figure of immortality through fame as a result of his heroic acts, the double is defeated by the original’s reemergence as a double of the double to announce his impending death. Royle also equates the uncanny with “a compulsion to tell,” or “a compulsive storytelling” (12), which could describe not only Don Quixote’s affinity for spinning tales such as he does in the cave of Montesinos but also the novel’s own compulsive seriality as exemplified in the freeze-frame moment at the end of chapter 8 during the battle with the Basque, a moment that introduces the Arabic author-within-the-text Cide Hamete Benengeli and the quest and translation of the manuscript which contains the rest of the story. Hélène Cixous calls Freud’s essay “a strange theoretical novel” (Cixous 1976, 525) and points to its insertion of ETA Hoffman’s short story The Sandman as a mirroring mise- en-abyme 55 : “our role as readers caught in the Unheimliche is a curious double of the role of the other reader, that of the Sand-Man” (526). Don Quijote in its insertion of multiple storylines that constantly reflect back the overall narrative is not only as uncanny as Hoffman’s story is to Freud’s text but also a ‘narcissistic’ text to use Linda Hutcheon’s terminology, which privileges early modern self-reflexivity in Cervantes and Velázquez over postmodern discourses such as John Barth’s. It reflects the paradox of reader who is able to engage with a fiction he or she knows to be artificial as well as the paradox of a text that in 55 Or a simple duplication to invoke once again Dällenbach’s typology such as the play- within-the-play ‘The Mousetrap’ in Hamlet. 229 reflecting itself points outward toward the reader implicating him in the drama of its illusory addictions much like the viewer of Véronique is seduced by Kieślowski’s visual puppetry and the spectator of Velázquez’ Las meninas is invoked not only to be aware of the mimetic brilliance of the painting-within-the-painting hiding from view (yet possibly reflected by a mirror) but participate in the drama of both its representation of the moment of artistic creation as well as the unmasking of its construction as such through its draw as a ‘painted veil.’ If we imbricate the veils of self-reflection depicted in Don Quijote, Las meninas and the Spanish films discussed throughout this dissertation (a diagonally striped box and an act of eye-slashing to liberate socially repressed impulses from the veil of moral decorum in Un chien andalou, the anachronistic confinement of a modern house to instill awareness of the veiled limits imposed by dictatorial censorship in La madriguera, the blinded gaze of children as they mature into women to imagine the horrors behind the veil of a censored reality in Cría cuervos, El espíritu de la colmena, Anguish, and Tésis, the voyeuristic and virtual delusions of a masculine point of view to maintain a simulated veil over a crippling reality in Los abrazos rotos and Abre los ojos), an intermedial discourse between text, painting and moving images emerges in which art’s representative language, whether it be words, brushstrokes or celluloid, forges an uncanny mirror to the thoughts of its readers and spectators. As we also saw in this dissertation, this discourse is applicable to other cultural contexts. Reflective and self-reflexive veils that draw spectators to ask what lies beneath are embedded in films from Argentina, Cuba, Poland, France, the United States and Canada, such as the insubordinate excisions in La mujer sin cabeza to insinuate potential horrors of class violence hidden underneath the director’s veiled screen, the forgery of Hitchcock in Madrigal to unveil through uncanny duplication the politically unthinkable in communist Cuba, the replicated 230 totalitarian clones in Possession to drape a sanitized subjectivity over a debased humanity, the haunting of a spectral subsumed double in La double vie de Véronique to conjure the veiled mysteries of prescient intuition, the visor effect of a spectator veiled beneath the armor of film surrogacy in Trois Couleurs: Rouge, Lost Highway, and Being John Malkovich to simulate a spatiotemporal and spectral ubiquity, the Quixotic devices deployed to unmask the imbalance of gender dynamics in the horror genre in Wes Craven’s New Nightmare and the Scream films, and the subversion of phallocentric control by a feminist concept of embodied gaming in eXistenZ. 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Creator Rodríguez-Romaguera, Guillermo Rafael (author)

Core Title The veiled screen: uncanny crystallizations in the moving image

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Comparative Literature

Publication Date 09/25/2017

Defense Date 08/07/2017

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Alejandro Amenábar,Andrzej Zulawski,Carlos Saura,Cervantes,critical theory,David Cronenberg,dictatorship,Diego Velázquez,doppelgänger,Fernando Pérez,film theory,Gilles Deleuze,horror,Krzysztof Kieślowski,Latin American cinema,Lucrecia Martel,Luis Buñuel,meta-film,OAI-PMH Harvest,Polish cinema,post-dictatorship,psychoanalysis,Spanish cinema,spectatorship,Surrealism,uncanny,Victor Erice, Bigas Luna,Wes Craven

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Gutierrez-Albilla, Julian (committee chair), Lippit, Akira Mizuta (committee chair), Krakus, Anna (committee member), Velasco, Sherry (committee member)

Creator Email grodriqu@usc.edu,thesuicidewatch@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c40-436546

Unique identifier UC11265426

Identifier etd-RodriguezR-5770.pdf (filename),usctheses-c40-436546 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-RodriguezR-5770.pdf

Dmrecord 436546

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Rodríguez-Romaguera, Guillermo Rafael

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA