Interlude: “You’d have to be an insipid, wretched creature not to enjoy the buzz…”
3.7 On re-seeing the 'normal' of an immolation
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.
viewer, and narrative-driven/genre-induced responsiveness. Whether the viewer’s connectivity oscillates between character-identification and narrative immersion, or one of these two
affective ‘pulls’ overpower the other, of note is that Roberts foregrounds the fact that this connection is not linear or constant, but rather that we, as viewers, “feel an ebb and flow of emotion that follows the narrative” (2003:343). Seeing emotional connection in terms of a non- constant and non-linear ‘ebb and flow’ is fundamentally different from how scholarship
traditionally characterize film affect. Film affect, traditionally, is seen as a gradual build-up of emotional connectivity (the rise and fall of Freytag’s conflict) through the myriad ways in which the director, as proxy for a whole team of creative technicians and artist-activists, ‘leads’ a viewer to catharsis; this being a clear example of the linear narrative of the movement-image correlating with filial ways of socially relating to others: less like a general leading an army, and more like a DJ curating a rave.
However, in films of the body genre, spectator identification is not so straightforward. Roberts’
ebb and flow of affective contouring correlates with Shaviro’s notion of affective response- inducing immersion, as the viewer is drawn into the emotional sphere/world of the diegesis and connects in ways that are (in terms of affect) “actually beyond us” (ibid.). Both speak to the power of the time-image to make us aware of inclusion and exclusion (not necessarily on
thematic level, but more on structural/material level). In how it traverses the porn/not-porn genre divide, the materiality of these two films also explicitly activates a sense of becoming-other.
Contours of affect, the way in which affective investment in a text modulates, shivers and contracts over time (Johnson, Stern) are, crucially, bodily ways of connecting with the narrative.
Porn activates various types of viewer in us: the prude, the sadist, the insatiable, the unsatable.
We roleplay our way through this immersion.
The intentional abject-desire proximity problematizes a reading of being as fixed and stable and suggests, rather, that ‘selves’ are products of different becomings. At various points in
LaBruce’s films, the idea of fixed identity is indeed challenged: Actors play dual roles, nested films-with-in-a-film are haphazardly introduced and discarded, the casting of Sagat blurs the line between the repulsive diegetic and explicit non-diegetic arousal (see comparative still set D), and we, as the audience, experience severe uncertainty about both the protagonists’ ontological state.
Such personal layering of contours of affect constructs national contours of affect. Various intertextual references to nationalism and nationalistic inclusion/exclusion (examples) aim to tear at the skin of the film, rhizomatic insertions (What does it mean? What does it do?) opening up literary and politically infused fissures that leak/bleed affective potentiality. The film’s
epigraph, a quote from W. Somerset Maugham’s 1944 novel, “The Razor’s Edge”, already activates the exclusion trope. It reads as follows: “The dead look so terribly dead when they are dead.” The novel, one of a number of novels featured (visually, prominently, throughout the film) about a traumatized WW1 pilot struggling to combat a sense of meaninglessness within
bourgeois conventionality after a traumatic experience during the war, resonates on a number of levels with the events of LaBruce’s film. It also offers an important intertextual key to
understanding the dissociative character of Otto, echoed in the film’s opening credit sequence, which superimposes images of the protagonist over stock news footage of dropping and exploding bombs, mushroom clouds, and, in the final, haunting image of the credit sequence, the infamous photograph of the 1963 self-immolation of Thích Quảng Đức, the Vietnamese Mahayana Buddhist monk who set his own body on fire in dissent. This scene – re-created in the secondary narrative, where Otto graphically sets himself on fire – challenges the viewer to completely let go of their identification/affective investment in the main character. To unplug out of the protagonist.
The credits sequence explicitly foregrounds the political nature of being, and of violent politics of exclusion – in addition, by using stock footage, LaBruce comments on the trite
commercialisation of (political) violence. While these mediated violences are now recognised as part of a rhizomatic engagement with global power flows, even a decade ago LaBruce's film pointed to the tautness of a (textual) skin in becoming: Images and textual forms through which the skin of the film is cut open, scarred over, grafted on: Christopher Chemin‘s charcoal
drawings; 4th-wall-breaking, straight to camera talking heads a decade before mass media punditry had become a cypher for contemporary disconnect (through global hyperconnection);
faded and scratched old film footage; intertitles; actual media footage; animated cartoons;
snippets of previous art-school films; the nested and frame narratives; and different POV scenes, characterised by jarring visuals and incongruent sound design. These different elements, as “memories of consciousness” (LaBruce, 2008), creates an affective assemblage that echo the many-headed media hydra of contemporary life; multiple potential points of entry for the viewer, many possible ways to plug into the provocative fucking machine that is
LaBruce’s work. Newspaper clippings, charcoal sketches, different film stock, the punk and gothic aesthetic – all offer differential entry points for the viewer to become immersed, so too do jump cuts, jarring intercuts, ludicrous dialogue, sharp staccato sounds all bring us back to the materiality of the film. Breaking the skin of the film – in itself also a becoming –characters move in and between representational layers of the text: They move between textual boundaries and physically enter the past’s old black and white footage; Otto becomes Thích Quảng Đức and then again un-becomes him in the penultimate scene of the film.