Interlude: “You’d have to be an insipid, wretched creature not to enjoy the buzz…”
3.6 On immersion: How we navigate the ebb and flow of belonging
“become distinct” and “take on an autonomous political, historical, or archaeological range”
(Deleuze 1989:118) that allows for an understanding of ourselves not as outsiders to the text, but as filmic desire-citizens.
Filmic desire-citizens are not passively made to be abject. Abjection is visual-political and the body is text (as the body is society). Pleasure at our fluid engagement with the text is an understanding of the necessary disavowal of the effect of mort: If cinema can be thought of as dead images, moving, then what makes this alive? Desire (“libidinal apparatus”) through the time-image – the time-image animates, while the movement-images arrests – not only in terms of viewer identification, but also in terms of spurring us to action.
Viewing LaBruce’s films is itself a process of making abject, but at the same time a navigation of that process – the viewer vacillates between participation and non-participation, we navigate the almost-decipherable thematics of inclusion and exclusion in these films, and the always already- mort of cinema. The next note will explore how we go about, through a navigated immersion, identifying with characters on screen, regardless of the knowledge of the already-mort of cinema, in order to traverse into/out of/from this abject positioning.
being filled with terror/desire for the undifferentiated) but also a desire, having taken pleasure in perversity, to throw up, throw out, eject the abject (from the safety of the spectator’s seat).”
There seems to be a tension between a spectator’s desire for seeing (as opposed to
experiencing) the undifferentiated – what she calls “taking pleasure in perversity” (ibid.) – and of the pleasure in knowing that the undifferentiated, the abject, is ultimately kept at bay. The last part of this quote – “from the safety of the spectator’s seat” (ibid.) – hints at a fundamentally different way of approaching the dual desire-abject in spectator’s studies: As opposed to a theoretical/corporeal/ psychological understanding of the socialised interworking of desire and the abject, manifest in our identifications with people around us, our identification with filmic bodies on screen adds specific nuance and therefore necessitates nuanced models of spectator identification. By allowing ourselves as spectators to be vulnerable, we identify with the fissures opened up in the text and thereby navigate between agency and immersion.
Roberts (2003) writes on the different ways in which a viewer can forge a connection, psychosomatically, with the characters on screen. Sometimes we “feel an ebb and flow of emotion that follows the narrative. Sometimes the emotion is sympathetic: We feel what some character is feeling. Sometimes it is straightforwardly that of spectator: We feel an anxiety or compassion for the heroine that she herself does not feel, or an outrage at the injustice or a joy at the spectacle” (2003:343). Roberts differentiates here between two modes of emotional connection; as viewers, we either align (along with identitarian identification) with a character on the screen, and/or the narrative events unfolding on the screen engender in us a feeling or psychosomatic response. In both these modes, the emotional response is nearly never
arbitrary; Roberts outlines both the role of the viewer in bringing a certain responsiveness to the text and the role of the author/director, who capitalises on the viewer's ‘stock’ of emotional responses:
Largely we bring our sensibilities, our emotional responsiveness, to the work. It is a soundboard of our character in which the themes of the soul – or at least our apparent soul – become audible to us. […] The author (sic) may change our responsiveness by trading on concerns and sensibilities already present in us to draw us into angers and compassions, shocks and amusements, joys and admirations that are actually beyond us. (ibid.)
Through reference to this type of responsive synesthesia (the ‘soul’ becoming audible), Roberts turns to affective pairings (anger and compassion; shock and amusement) – what I am terming push-pull affect pairs. That which is already in us, draws us into the affective push-pull, bringing us into contact with that which is beyond the scope of the day-to-day. We have to know how to navigate this. (Queer) film and literature allows us to affectively be different, to yield to a category of escapism based on emotional linkages between affective responses (potentially) inside us and that which might be experienced. But affect is more than emotion. The queer text cajoles (us); it pushes and pulls at our affective stock.
Some texts also solicit desire (through the time-image; for the tantalising effect of being part of, being allowed to participate in, whether it is as an audience, a circuit, a nation). Texts make us desire, partly because they necessitate an audience: Through our very engagement with them, we become part of a bigger grouping, we belong (even if it means we belong abjectly). Even more so, film, which visually engages us directly as visual beings. In Otto; or, Up with dead people, for example, we see the film stock, the celluloid, become flesh, a sexy skin covering over abject innards. If the representational aspect is the skin of the film, then the abject sex is the meat, the flesh. Like Otto, we are attracted to the city – to the “smell of human density; the smell of flesh” [from screenplay] – and to (the) film since both are imbued with the smell of relational potentiality. The smell of decay; the smell of spunk; the associative memory of the
chemical smell of celluloid and of sex in darkened adult movie theatres. In the zombie films: a rotting penis and a disused theme park; a burning monk and sweat and spunk We can also desire (through) the abject, and the abject is desirous.
Manalansan (2006:50) states that “olfaction is a political and cultural process that should be seen in terms of the visceral or the emotional which includes shame, fear, disgust and shock.”
Even though it feels like a visceral reaction, it is actually a conditioned response, it is metaphor given materiality. But smell is also the “liminal sense per excellence” (Howes, quoted in
Manalansan, 2006:42), moving between the corporeal and non-corporeal; smells’ “very intangibility allows them to maintain the essential force of continuity, to reconstitute lost or forgotten contexts, to re-present unconscious memories and hidden, unrecognised truths”
(Shulman, 2006:425). This applies to Otto, when he speaks of his slowly emerging memories of Rudolph (he can only remember he smelled like. Chlorine). Chlorine as sterility, a searing acid that eats away at dirt, but is also a cypher for affluent recreation. Redolent affect introduced by the film’s skin. But reference to smell here is not only about identity demarcation, but also serves to re-engage the viewer’s sense of the materiality of the text. Smell is of/from the body, and whilst placing you in socius, echoes the abjectification process. Smell also marks group identity: the smell of the immigrant, the smell of home. As viewers, we can’t smell how bad Otto smells – or what Rudolph’s chlorine smell was like. We have to rely on the reaction shots of others: Redolent engagement by proxy. We do what those passers-by won’t do: Theirs is a negation of the relation potential in olfactory intimacy, arresting perception of smell on the level of identity marker – a sign of otherness. We have to engage, interact, participate to make meaning. The screen doesn't smell, but it activates memories of smell.
Smell is one way in which LaBruce’s queer films cajole us. Returning to Roberts’ notion of affective immersion, it is important to not think of texts as simply autonomous machines of
desire, but rather as objects that thrive on teasing out desirous or repulsive affective stock – or, sometimes, negated/abjected affects1 deeply hidden – that were already implicitly present in the spectatorial viewer. Roberts can be read as saying that affect-response interactional alignment with the film happens along two vectors: our response echoes (or bears some relation to) the
‘how and why’ of desire in the narrative, and our response is created out of the affective reserve we bring to the film. The paired sets of affective immersion do not necessarily imply duality that needs to be broken. Rather, in queer fashion, duality shows itself intertwined and navigable.
Affect is more than emotion. What drives us sometimes is being shocked by what we feel or discover that we can feel. The queer film’s leakage (through identification fissure) onto the body.
Maybe we find we desire while being repulsed and are then repulsed by the fact that we desire what we repulse. This may be a new experience and this is what is important, as it contours reaction to the film. Affect is not only about the emotions we experience, but the ways in which desiring-machines (or assemblages) ebb and flow in their connection with objects, groupings of people, flows of money, film stock, electrical currents, colour, smell, mother tongue and
fatherland – and have the capacity to affect and be affected by all of this. Contours of affect is that which allows us to deepen our conceptualisations of belonging and by plugging in to (larger than the self) contours, also our becoming-citizen.