OPSOMMING
Chapter 23: Concerning the disease of lycanthropy, in which men believe themselves to be turned into wolves
2.6 Abject desire as a new type of spectator complicity: Look(ing) anew
Though, within the act of exclusion lies the subversive potential to recognise our similarities, not only our differences – to ally, to alloy, to unnaturally affiliate, as I show in the section on alloying.
Herbst (1999:115-116) states that, although abjection works by excluding that which is different,
“[y]ou can exclude it, but you cannot erase it [...] prohibited things, abject things, have a certain revolutionary power, whether real or imagined, and as such they challenge the ordering
formation”. In the context of this study, this is especially true – or, as we'll see in the next
section, perhaps depressingly untrue – of the undead figures of LaBruce’s films. The (cinematic) undead are representations of the spectatorial viewer’s own mortality – an end that connects all humans in a relational whole; C. Townsend aptly writes that “[w]e need to understand death as a fundamental condition of being, and of culture, by which we may have some relationship to others, no matter how alien. (2008:3, original emphasis)
connectedness with the abject other, which leads to a sense of becoming (a) more equitable being-in-the-world. This notion will be expounded in the latter part of this study, where I look at how abject desire/pleasure affects our navigation of categories of belonging, with specific reference to Eben Venter’s novel, Wolf, Wolf. Suffice it to say that abject desire offers a new mode of engagement between spectator/reader/scholar and screen/novel/genre/oeuvre. Thus, by using abject desire as textual engagement – as LaBruce does in LA Zombies – he manages to do away with the supposed binary between identification and distance (desire and the abject;
attraction and repulsion) to “heighten both of these responses simultaneously” (Shaviro,
2006:162) and, in so doing, dissolves the dualistic nature of abject vs. desired through the film’s push-pull mechanisms.
Such an engagement, that partakes of “both involvement and alienation as particular subject positions or modes of implication” (Shaviro, 2006:162-163), stands in stark contrast to previous immersive theories and acts instead as a “new mode of complicity” (ibid.:163). The word
'complicity' resonates with me and with the thematics of the study, because of how it lies next to multiplicity, for the implication that readerly strategies (reads-for) have differing implications, and for what it actualises in its affective cross-over into white complicity. (If 'the nation' – in the sense I use it in this study, i.e., as ethno-Afrikanerskap projected onto a national frame – isn't a text of scavenged parts, or a feral magnum opus, then what is it?)
By not negating the alienating effect of the repulsive undead bodies on screen, LaBruce constitutes abject desire as a new way of positing a narrative towards an audience. He still works within the confines of genre, interweaving conventions of both porn and bodyhorror (and, like Venter, in large part this confining into genre is to affectively counter-balance the narrow thematic borders assigned – by its critical reception – to hedge around his oeuvre) but in order
to comment on lived corporeal reality, he turns his focus onto the body and what the visually abject body is able to convey within the constraints of these two body genres.
As stated, embodiment inside the filmic narrative (bodies on the screen) impacts on the aroused/repulsed body of the viewer (bodies in front of the screen), but this time through contours of affect. As viewer, I am still
compulsively, convulsively [brought] face to face with Otherness that I can neither incorporate nor expel. It stimulates and affects my own body, even as it abolishes the distances between my own and other bodies. Boundaries and outlines dissolve;
representation gives way to a violently affective, more-than-immediate, and non- conceptualizable contact. (ibid.:259)
Note the concepts used to describe the effect of textual engagement on the viewer:
convulsively, abolishes, dissolve, violently affective, forces me, assimilate. These concepts all point toward a renegotiation of identity, but on an affective level. Thus, this violent affective response arises from the affective capacity within us, which the auteur/director/author/scholar manipulates through an understanding of our expectation of genre and how this correlates with our schematic experience of contours of affect. Yet there remains an element that is more than the sum of its parts – that which is in excess and ruptures our expectations and boundaries. For this, we need to be responsive to our complicity with the text and allow for a suspension of disbelief/disavowal of the overarching sense of mere representation.
2.7 Alloying, but queerly, playfully forced, scattered, body-reflexive, and, above all, tongue-in-cheeks
At the start of Otto; or, Up with dead people the viewer is confronted with a minutes-long, static, black-and-white, blocked shot. Unable to look away, is forcibly made to enter into an (at least temporary) affinity with the diegetic, regardless of how mundane it appears at first.
The scene: a scene takes place in a graveyard, where Otto arises out of the earth. The mise-en- scène is overly stylized, perhaps even grotesquely Baroque. Medea’s overly dramatic direction is played for laughs even as it clearly harks back to the signature pseudo-revolutionary dialogue of LaBruce’s earlier films:
Now raise your hand out of the earth. Raise it as a protest against all the injustices purported against your kind. Raise it in solidarity with the lonely and the weak and the dispossessed of the earth. For the misfits and the sissies and the plague-ridden faggots who have been buried and forgotten by the merciless, heartless, hetero-fascist majority.
Rise. Rise!
With this, her direction to Otto in a scene where he a-rises out of the earth, it becomes clear what metaphors Medea (the stand-in caricature of the auteur, and thus, by extension, of
LaBruce) are dealing in; this might be the first of LaBruce’s works where the dialogue is pushed to such an extreme stylization, that it (almost) appears as a mocking of the director’s own oeuvre. Adding a layer of pop-cult-reference, snippets of Hitler’s speeches are strewn over the soundtrack. The viewer is dared to rise, out of mundanity, up! up!, to contour a-risible, to riff on the rising, rising ridiculousness of the scene.
I discuss this scene in terms of a broader consideration of how LaBruce's sexual economy is based on the textualisation of exclusion and inclusion, in particular how these are activated within the performatively abject (but also in abject-desire). But there's a larger point, too, about how the viewer is made very much aware of their own complicity in allowing LaBruce to get a rise out of them: As with much contemporary mass media, consumers are aware of their forced affinity with the textual. And while Halberstam's scavenger method is clearly the queer
methodology at play in this study, there's also a way in which I utilise the Deleuzian notion of alloying in manners that playfully-forces affinities. This may include, for example, the forced affinity between viewer and LaBruce’s films, between LaBruce and Venter, between the
screened wolves in Venter and the a-packing wolves in Deleuze and Guattari. It shimmers in the connection, the “really?”, the double take, in the long-lost or oft-forgotten links – via that issue of Werkwinkel/Werkswinkel – between O. Kirch, Venter, Van Schalkwyk, Koch and Zajas – and how I met Koch and Sajaz at the same ALV conference that I met M. Beukes, of whom I'll write a life’s tracing off/of, a decade later, for Stilet (Strydom, 2019b); or in the dobbering between Venter’s doubled buoys. On how one pops up in a text on the other, two decades later/before.
These are like teasers, trailers for movies (dubbed out of immediacy) to come, affective trails lifting off the page in the two seconds that I pause, while finalising the list of works cited.
In Section 1.3, on alloying, I write “In the intense olfactory orbit, we find resonances between LaBruce’s films and Wolf, Wolf, that is, between the materiality of the abject/desirable-desiring zombies on film and the novel's urgent layering of a register of male smell, both nestled within frameworks of belonging.” But these resonances aren't necessarily pleasurable, nor can we expect the abjectifying mechanisms of non-a-typical readers/viewers not to kick in when confronted by black zombie jizz, or the ripple of knowing chitter running through the movie auditorium when Otto holds up a tub of Vaseline in almost religious veneration and gratitude; or, if you haven't, halfway into Brokeback Mountain (somewhere in Edinburgh Playhouse) turned to
the complete stranger sitting next to you, and – utterly confounded at what else to do to stem the torrent of emotions gushing out of him – hugged him tightly, the joints of the cinema seat's armrest awkwardly and painfully but not entirely unpleasantly pushing into your side, the hands of those in the row behind you on your shoulders, the shame shared, flowing out of him; if you've experienced how the cinematic can temporarily be that connective joint between queers that allows for a short second's worth of dissolvement of past trauma, and thus know, deeply, how queers think about the contours of our corporeal, lived bodies within social structures, then how can we ignore the self's past textualisations when Connel heeds a “politics of social justice [that] needs to change body-reflexive practice, not by losing agency but by extending it, working through the agency of the body […]. Rather than disembodiment involved in role reform, this requires re-embodiment for men, a search for different ways of using, feeling and showing male bodies.” (1995:233). How, dear reader, can this be anything but urgent, needed, now?
This – these experiences – informs the scholarly task, and asks for a better, more inclusive way of approaching the act of scholarship, one that stays critical but moves beyond comparison.
Instead of comparison, I opt here for seeking alloying, but queerly, playfully forcefully, body- reflexively, and above all, tongue-in-cheek.
2.8 Not as migrant author nor homosexual writer nor genre-dipper: A brief review of