Interlude: “You’d have to be an insipid, wretched creature not to enjoy the buzz…”
3.9 On the 'lewd perfume' of celluloid
was, up to that point, perhaps ‘beyond me’, so to plug into new systems of representation and circuits of (abject) pleasure. It forces me to become-spectator, to oscillate between the turning away from, and toward, the materiality of the film. The viewing body is caught in the vectors, riffing with our contours of affect.
temporarily), as the “constituent parts of the spectator’s own psyche paraded before her or him”
(Ellis, 1982:43) on the screen, appears to be a radical, subversive and active decision to identify with the possible (abject) identities on the screen, embracing the very relational nature of it all, and thus potentially leading to jouissance. (Or, conversely, giving in to textual bliss – even momentarily – relieves the self of having to act in control, in-power.) But, again: desiring- machines are never passive. This is inherently not possible, even when we think we are, because desire is in the pre-personal flows, in the movement from desire to pleasure
(jouissance). Through the immersive positionality of the push-pull response, we go from virtual desire to extensive or actualised pleasure. But that itself is a socially abjectifying process:
untying the different strands of affective vectoring that make up 'a viewer', the responses and goosebumps and blushing that make 'a spectator'.
The relationship between experiencing a text for the bliss of it, and subverting power-based modes are clearly articulated by Barthes, and, if we situate it within the movement from desire to pleasure, we see how some texts open flow into ever-bigger alliances, others channel flow into the filial, while still others attempt to arrest flow. For Barthes, however there are two main
distinctive ways of finding various degrees of (subversive) pleasure in interactions with texts: He offers a “sort of critical anatomy of pleasure in reading and he distinguishes between two sorts of pleasure: pleasure of the ‘comfortable’ sort and pleasure of a more disturbing and subversive kind” (Bennet & Royle, 2004:264). Barthes differentiates between texts of pleasure and texts of bliss (jouissance):
Text of pleasure: the text that contents, fills, grants euphoria; the text that comes from culture and does not break with it, is linked to a comfortable practice of reading. Text of bliss: the text that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts […], unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes,
values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language. (Barthes, 1973:14, quoted in Bennet & Royle, 2004:264)
Two different types of texts, then: one that confronts and one that conforms. This dichotomy clearly has a socially situated and relational aspect, specifically within the South African
actuality. Watching the queerzombie films asks us to re-see our filial relation to film, to visuality itself, leading to a sense of a decolonial intimacy (between viewer and text): Texts of pleasure do not “break with culture but rather reinforces traditional or comfortable notions of meaning, society, ideology” (Bennet & Royle, 2004:265), while blissful texts are texts which impose a loss of self, and unsettle ontological categories. This echoes both Neale’s fragmentation of identity and Kristeva’s notion of the abject: but within a colonial spectatorship which defines itself on fixed, static, hierarchical notions of textual engagement, possibly (if even only temporarily) identifying with the abject other would, surely, feel disruptive, unsettling, like a potentiality?
LaBruce delights in confronting the viewer with the post-coital time-image. The over-the-top (even by LaBruce’s standards) stylisation satirising horror trope and sly dig at homophobic ideas which correlate gay sex and death. Blood is virility, lineage, filial, patriotism, bloed van die/my vaders, Bloedrivier, but also: viral, virality, life, contaminating alliance. Blood on the walls of the hook-up’s apartment echo the graffiti written on the skin of the city: graffiti (‘Up with dead people’ – see stills sequence K) as revolutionary sloganism – comment on vapid and vacuous political sloganeerism prevalent in contemporary politics (especially in identity politics that act oppositionally, in filial categories of resistance to, in opposition to).
Otto is reminded time after time that “[t]he world is meat; we are meat. [...] The lewd perfume”
(57:30). The abject notes of “[t]he sewage symphony”. The spectator is not merely a seeing- feeling subject any longer: An unusual olfactory experience lies under the surface, breaks
through the surface. The filmic city of Berlin is cut open by abject planning and plumbing and smells of waste, its wounds are garbage dumps and sewers and landfills and slaughterhouses.
We see Otto in longshot, dwarfed by the sheer volume of rubbish, dwarfed by the sheer volume of the nested narrative’s trite tirade against oppression. The sound-diegetic is filled with new narratives of our abjectifying relationship with the earth, with endangered species, with the dirtying oceans, with refugees, with immigrants, with one another. Refracted back to us, is Otto's question: What is our part in all this abjectifying? So much libidinal energy directed at the
screen. So little of that same energy – that potentiality for change – is directed at suffering and violation and shaming.
Instead, the viewer wishes to penetrate deeper into the flesh, but for the most part the film arrests our engagement on the superficial level of the skin (the how, not the what), leaving us wanting more. Sudden, violent intercuts (00:44:30, 00:58:30, 01:02:59, 01:03:30; 01:14:07;
01:21:00, 01:21:16, 01:21:27, 01:21:47) of shots of butchered meat (in the sanitised sense of the butchery, perhaps – not that of butchered – which is still a violent affect) confront us with – are jarring reminders of – not only of our own fleshy mortality, but also of the flesh of the film (Look, LaBruce says, how easy it is to perforate the film reel!) and the flesh(iness) of others.
Surfacing these assemblages of desire (in the sense of bringing to the surface, but also of bringing onto the surface of the film) shows us the complexity of us as desiring-machine- spectator – navigating the continuum of desire and disgust, in our engagement with LaBruce's abject-desirous world.
When we bring desire and disgust to the film’s surface, we activate past experience. Cutting the city’s skin; affect breaks the skin of the film; the body breaks under the pressure of such
affective weight, of a past filled with such (social) injustice, such (ecological) wrongdoing. The city – Berlin, Johannesburg, Cape Town, Soweto, Potchefstroom – is a congregation of flesh, a
smelly mosh of human fleshiness and desire and pleasure and hate. And queer people. We watch as citizens who have smelled violence on our skin, in the pinpricks of fear and
exhilaration and anger of raised hairs at the nape of our backs. Our skin ripples at the memory, hot flushes in electric waves bristle up and down our exposed flanks, blood rushing to my dick carries the memories of past bashings, of corrective rape (such a cowardly phrase); my cheeks burn in unrighteous anger, inflamed skin, corrective fucking, short-circuiting fleshy layers.
Lovers can feel the heat of indignation on my burning cheeks, the hairs in the small of my back bristle with aroused anger – my citizenry bursts forth in zealous shouts: What makes a people abject? Or: What makes an abject people? How can queer theory, and a queer approach to text, help us understand the way we’ve been regulated into citizenry? These films show us how (sexual) self is constituted as relational citizen, it opens open spaces for a re-awareness, and then a potentiality for a re-negotiation, of citizenship. Space for potentially seeing ourselves as filmic desire-citizens.