Interlude: “You’d have to be an insipid, wretched creature not to enjoy the buzz…”
3.8 On the urban(ity of the) abject
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.
Such more traditional models of immersion based on lack still do not allow for a full-enough comprehension of how LaBruce twins arousal and disgust. This note will pay particular attention to this intertwinement, as well as to how it moves us to re-see the normal, specifically that which surrounds in the national socius. When we align with characters on the screen, we are drawn into the emotional schema of the film and filled with emotions (arousal and repulsion, in this case) that might actually be ‘beyond us’. The queer filmic text, as a machine of desire, itself solicits desire, feeding on the desire of viewers. On the other hand, the spectators too are desiring-machines, plugging into the film, the desire it elicits, the repression it brings to the fore, the disgust it engenders, the physical discomfort it produces.
But we also 'see' political violence from a national 'here' and 'now': When I first saw the self- immolation scene at the end of the nested narrative, it activated similar visuals from the South African actuality.
Identification, though, is not straightforward and without risk. As the viewer is drawn in, a sense of self is put at risk. Regardless of what conservative pundits may argue, shrilly, about identity politics, we tend not to actively place our abjected group identities (according to race, gender, sexual orientation and the like) at the foreground of our engagement with texts, but rather it simmers in the affective stock activated by that engagement. Ellis reminds us that identification is “multiple and fractured, [due to] a sense of seeing the constituent parts of the spectator’s own psyche paraded before her or him” (1982:43). We see ourselves-as-group reflected on the screen. When as we identify through an immersive-affective responsiveness with the (fictional) bodies that/of desire on screen, q [sense of self becomes not only fragmented, but also
fictionalized]. Roberts explicitly states that even though there exists a “discrepancy between [we] feel in response to the narrative and what [we are] really like in person […] [we], if responsive, may be fictionalized by the work” (2003:343).
Responding to queer film is thus not simply a response, but has more far-reaching implications for a sense of self as it pertains to personhood and social situatedness; having an effect on how we plug into larger contours of affect of, for example, the nation, than we may realise/allow ourselves to 'see'. (This, in turn, impacts on how we see ourselves as a nationally situated subject, as citizens). It also gives us some insights into the nature of desire itself, as we shall see. After Fritz looks at himself in the shop window, and grimacing at his emaciated face, he sees a woman in a bourka walking past; afterwards Fritz and his husband meet, the copulating couple is mirrored in pristine, shiny, sterile kitchen appliances – in parody of a much-sought after (in 2008) homonormative domestic; the unknown protagonist of LAZombie and his ambulant, silent observation of the outcasts of capitalist society. Every time, ‘self’ is placed in tension with group identity, and with larger narratives of the normative. The viewer (or, rather, the viewer’s body) is more responsive to certain filmic texts – bodyhorror and pornographic genres spring to mind. In these, there exists a higher risk of a viewer being ‘fictionalised’
through a closer identification with the bodies on the screen. However, even in the most responsive cases (a bullied kid watching a horror film with a subtext on bullying, for example), there still exists an ontological difference between the bodies-in-affect on the screen/diegetic bodies, and how ‘we’ perceive (i.e., experience through our own bodies or the corporeal more generally) the cinematic bodies in an unfolding narrative. As spectators, we are acutely aware of this ontological difference: The body on the screen (them) is not the body in front of the screen (me). Political engagement as parody, pop-literature engageé as parody, and the move away from cinematic realism leads to hyper-stylised and stilted dialogue, troped kinesthetic
movements, the constant wink-wink-nudge-nudge meta-awareness as an almost-automatic response to the perceived vacuity of 'mainstream' (i.e., non-LaBruce) cinema. Having moved on from the anti-war, anti-American imperialism stance – as esthetic – of the first part of his oeuvre (the structural and thematic raging, albeit deliciously self-aware, against dominant power
structurings is still present, but now enlarged to include a crusade against dominant forms of representation in mainstream (i.e., so-called Hollywood) structuring).
Porn’s textuality is surfaced: On the level of the textual, LAZombie is simultaneously less
affected and more ridiculous than the nested porno in Otto; or, Up with dead people. The viewer is incredulous: LaBruce spends a whole movie (Otto; or, Up with dead people) showing us how ridiculously political-impotent porn (especially ‘porn with a message’) is and then, less than two years later, release LAZombie, in which the very ridiculousness of porn-with-a-message is pushed to the extreme: the posing static vacuity of it serves to comment on social issues (situating it squarely within the functionalist approach to porn studies), but the ridiculousness of it breaks the surface, the engagement falters. We cannot navigate the immersion productively in the face of such overt posturing. But porn does simply, even when its meaning is complex: It gets us to pay attention, gonzo porn being a stark example of this.
A number of years after LAZombie, LaBruce released “Refugees Welcome”, an XConfessions short that ostensibly provides social commentary on the Syrian refugee crisis. LaBruce is currently in the employ of CockyBoys studio (see posters H and I), for whom he has made four thematically related (dealing with social exclusion) porn shorts. To some extent explaining his poetical assumptions about the socialising role of porn, LaBruce writes (regarding “Refugees Welcome”): “Porn is everywhere, almost like a collective unconscious”76. Regardless of your ethical or academic stance on porn, you'd have to agree: Porn fictionalises us, tasking us to see differently.
76 See: https://filmmakermagazine.com/101770-porn-is-everywhere-almost-like-a-collective-unconscious-bruce- labruce-on-his-xconfessions-short-refugees-welcome/#.YX0Gkp5Bw2w.
This fictionalisation and fragmentary effects/affects are seen not only when we positively identify with/relate to bodies on the screen, but also when we are repulsed. When repulsed by abject bodies on the screen, we react with disgust, but also with some sense of pleasure. Adèle Nel, in an analysis of the socialised/institutionalised role of abjection in South African film (specifically films that make the abject other out to be cypher for racial other, such as District 9 – a film which arguably shows a number of correlates with LaBruce’s queerzombie films but never escapes the clutches of national-filial representation), argues that the “spectator’s confrontation with the abject body in cinema is also a border experience: a confrontation with disgust but also with a pleasure in perversity” (2013:147). This observation brings into question (at least on the
structural surface of the relation between spectator, theme, actuality) the duality of pleasure and disgust in watching certain types of film in certain places/countries, and at the same time
emphasise the role of the viewing body as placed in a certain diegetic socius. It is especially the grand societal narratives – political affiliation, aesthetics, textual function (even auteurship?) – that are brought into question through fictionalisation and the fragmentary assemblages they form part of. This, in turn, emerges a fragmented spectator – one who has to reconcile desire and disgust:
Film […] brings me compulsively, convulsively 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-conceptualisable contact. Cinema allows me and forces me to see what I cannot assimilate or grasp. (Shaviro, 2006:259)
What does it feel like to face the otherness of the zombie? Does the body recoil, or are we so deadened to the trope of abjected other (in newspapers, radio shows, daily discussions) that our
bodies cease to respond? Why, then, would seeing two zombies fucking, using wounds as orifices, upset; why does the body recoil? Why the goose bumps, the elevated heart rate, the looking away, the rubber-necking? Here the ‘normal’ is made to be other. (FN I am not equating the abjectly poor and disenfranchised other with LaBruces’ zombies; I am, from a white subject position, asking questions about selective affect.)
While Shaviro’s stated lack of agency on the part of the spectator can be contested in an atomistic age where we turn off, turn down, unlike and unfollow too easily, there is value to be found in the notion of the viewer being ‘forced to see’ that which he cannot (yet?) grasp,
compulsively and convulsively being made to look, made to see the zombies’ intimate humanity.
However, since a sense of participatory intent and awareness is still missing, we may see but not (yet) understand our own role in the abjectification process.
The more obviously abject central spatial trope in the film is graveyards, both as cemeteries and as disused social areas (like empty amusement parks) of past pleasure. These types of spaces, which Nicol (2008:10) calls “uncanny site[s] within the human fabric”, stripped of all prior
function and use, and devoid of the living, become the spatial mirror of the undead roaming;
even though they appear abject, these spaces are shown as needed for society to function:
Sites like slaughterhouses and waste management complexes – symbolising two vital functions of the human body, sustenance and excretion, which also tie in to the abject concept of an unruly and grotesquely ‘open’ body – feature prominently in the nested film-within-a-film.
Various conceptual levels of abjection can be differentiated when abject space is
filmed/represented on film. As film is already a subjective othering, and intentional arrestation of the subject (viewing) position, then the filmic representation of abject spaces implies a doubled abjectification. In LaBruce’s films, abject spaces are filmed in soundless, static shots overly
drawn out over minutes – their emptiness not able to sustain the filming techniques which hold the viewer/demands a look – unlike the choppy editing and quick cuts traditionally associated with films in the zombie genre. The porn camera’s stillness here is used to disconcerting effect.
The viewer cannot look away, oscillates between boredom and anticipation, and becomes fixated on the skin of the film itself. Our thoughts wander, arrested but freed to contemplate social inclusion and exclusion (presented by the film’s thematic surface) beyond the frame of the screen itself. We see into the static emptiness of the disused locales; imagine ourselves inside its abject stillness.
This – long takes; mid-frame; not moving away, not letting up – is the same technique LaBruce uses to film the sex scenes, so zones of similarity (in corresponding patches of filmic skin) are created between sex and abject space. Compounding this is the fact that the penetrative sex in scenes is often placed in abjectly coded mise-en-scène (and self-referential abject mise en abyme) thus further amplifying the conceptual relation/the films’ residual amalgamation of sex and the abject. When diegetic music is used, it is jarring, and connects directly to the abject- desire thematics.
The viewer views sex scenes in abject space, we listen to cheerfully morbid songs about sex and death, and through our contoured immersion navigate the continuum that has desire on one end and abject on the other. Our perceptional porousness directs our surroundings into the text, to fill in the gaps, the stillness. Our notions of how we relate to others, how we become-citizen, how we desire, are activated: empty space must be populated with people, relations,
orientations. Spaces of/for exclusion are presented as almost-empty cyphers, defamiliarised so that we need to recode them.
Spaces of refuse, abandoned pleasure spaces are troped abject and emphasises how we encounter/approach place to make it space. This is activated when LaBruce represents familiar, domestic functional spaces (the kitchen, the toilet) as en-strange-ing (in, for example, the perhaps intentionally-funny faux-domestic scenes between the nested narrative’s zombie versions of Max and Fritz – the one man, bloodied and with staccato movements, drinks tea while the other, mauled and gashed, calmly reads the newspaper. Re-seeing domestic spaces (which are almost exclusively coded as heteronormative in mainstream cinema) act as
Verfremdungtechnique. Even when in zombie state, Max and Fritz enjoy the petit pleasures of coupledom and domesticity – which in a sense humanises the undead characters, and imbues these scenes, traditionally associated with petit-bourgeois life, with a potentially subversive quality.
Making strange of that which is taken for granted, that which is, through its negation, held to be normal/natural. When is the last time a toilet was shown in mainstream cinema, apart from when the body’s plumbing’s workings are played for laughs. Re-seeing the mechanics of (daily)
abjection, through Otto’s eyes, guides the viewer to rethink the general workings of the abject.
(In a similar way to earlier scenes guiding the viewer to re-see pleasurable acts.) The abject workings of desire/pleasure/praxis is linked when Otto re-sees sexual paraphernalia, and toilet plumbing – the viewer re-sees these along with him. We recode visually and so negate
simplified ideas on representation (for example, Mulvey’s binarism) thus finally give way to an affective response-inducing contact between spectator and film. On the skin of this contact – like a sweaty veneer – lies the affective push-pull of attraction and repulsion. Even though I realize that the other (body) on the screen is not-me/not-like-me, and acutely stay aware of the ontological difference implied, I still feel a ‘violent affect’, an “ebb and flow” (Roberts, 2003:343) of fragmentary identification; it shows me (forces me to see) that which I previously thought I
‘cannot grasp’, to experience the dual affective response of disgust and pleasure at that which
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.