Interlude: “You’d have to be an insipid, wretched creature not to enjoy the buzz…”
3.5 On watching films as outsiders (or, Up with Dead People)
performances. As M. Tamboukou reminds us, they are “nomadic modes of existence […] What is critical in the experience of freedom is our movement in between, when we follow lines of flight or escape, the intermezzo, the process of becoming other” (Tamboukou 2008:361).
But if the white auteur can be linked more explicitly to capitalist, colonialist heteropatriarchy, then how these tropes correspond with material reality (the refugee; the hot Charlottesville protestors, Danie on top of an upturned police van. What are sexual zombies, what are political zombies? Why this focus on abject sexuality? What does this correlate with in reality? How are these time-images manipulated (though montage or cut-ups have an impact on the spectator – to draw the spectator into the assemblage beyond the spectacle and thus politicise the entire assemblage?
on screen, and the ‘me’ as self, between engaged viewer and autonomous self. Deleuze refers to this is as the movement-image as it implies a powerful thrust of linearity in/through the narrative, shoving fixed identities along from one static set of narrative nodes to the next; it is
‘’the linear thrust which subtends the moments of dawning consciousness” (1986:38) of the spectatorial participant. However, as bodies are always situated in a specific place and time, a certain amount of identification dissonance leaks into the spaces around the body and has an effect on how the socially situated body (of the viewer) is conceptualised within its socio-cultural and historical placement as not-film. Roos, after his reading of Derrida, describes this process as follows: “given its insistent temporality, it [the film in this instance] inevitably moves toward the future. On the other hand, this is always a future that is foreseen, that the viewer knows will come to an end within the space of a screening; its finality imposes a kind of past upon it.”
(Roos, 1997:114-115, after his reading of Derrida, 1987:289) This very much has to do with the materiality of the film itself: “the viewer knows or is told that this or that building no longer exists;
in a fictional motion picture, the viewer knows that these clothes are out of date, this actress is now dead, this actor is now old. Within the present space and present time of the motion picture, in other words, one is incessantly reminded of the past, and the past is a spectre, the past is dead” (ibid.).
In the LaBruce films, the zombies offer the living an “irksome reminder of their own mortality”
(LaBruce, 2008). This is vividly illustrated in the textuality – the grain, sound, light, feel – of the film itself. At times, the narrative slips into the (then, in 2008, still becoming engorged as trope, and by now overly clichéd) audio-visual recreation of the 'point of view of the zombie', looking at
‘us’ (both us-as-not-zombies and us-as-viewer). Otto’s droll remark that “the living all seem like the same person, and I don’t like that person very much” (LaBruce, 2008) is textualised
in/through jarring structural elements (discordant, jarring sound design, strobed lighting,
distorted music and decontextualised, distorted snippets of hysterical-historical political speeches) every time LaBruce moves into zombiePOV.
All of human history relegated to mediated remnant(s) through the materiality of the film. Apart from being a jarring dis-engaging factor, these elements spill over onto the viewer’s
engagement with the plot itself. During the emotional climax of the film, when Rudolph and Otto reunite, these elements break out of the zombie POV and partly obscures the (possibly
romantic) dialogue, dialogue which the viewer construes as containing crucial information about the reasons why Otto decided to take on the abject zombie identity. As identifying viewers, bent on knowing – itself a filial way of mastery and control over narrative – we want to know how this conflict started and how it will resolve (especially, perhaps, since it carries troped conventions of a ‘love story’ in an otherwise all-over-the-genres text). LaBruce (or, rather: the film structural composition) denies the viewer this: Engagement – in knowing – is arrested.
Such an avoidance of closure, and an embrace of unintelligibility, stands in stark contrast to dominant-conventional forms of cinematic storytelling. The conventional 'reuniting scene', usually so crucial to the resolution of loose libidinal energy of the various troped strands of the
‘romantic comedy’ narrative, moves even further away from the familiar defamiliarisation of the zomromcom (for example, the – compared to LaBruce – fairly typical of films such as Warm Bodies) into structural-nihilistic territory: Toward the end of the scene, Otto is faced with the dawning realization that he has lost Rudolph. LaBruce intentionally surfaces and then subverts the traditional conventions of the romantic comedy by overlaying loud radio static on the soundtrack, obscuring some of the dialogue and keeping the viewer from knowing. This is conceivably meant to signify thematically that Otto has become so immune to the everyday, to love, to intimacy that he cannot connect with others anymore, but the very materiality of the film stops the viewer from connecting too. This echoes the dawning realisation throughout the film
that perhaps the 'reason' is less important than the effects it had/has on Otto: embracing what Stark calls the affirmative potential of unintelligibility. We are to know only partially; we become the partially impotent viewer; By being subject to such a process of relegation, the traditional spectatorial role is placed in abject positioning. We (very temporarily) become screenmigrant, celluloidal outsider.
The textual finality of the film and the viewer’s knowledge that it will come to an end, along with the knowledge that the narrative presented on screen is not ‘here’ or ‘now’ (intimated to by Roos, above), places the fixed integrity of the social body, situated in a specific place and time, at risk. Such a sense of (affective) disruption can be seen as abjectly uncanny in the way it activates an estranging sense of (un)familiarity in the viewer. The ways in which these kinds of estranging disruptions are produced in film is what Deleuze refers to as the time-image. Unlike movement-images, time-images disrupt or trouble linear narratives and stable identities by making use of cutups and “piecemeal montage” (Deleuze 139), leading to, what I would argue, abjectifying experiences. Whereas the movement-images of normative narrative film could lead to a ‘freezing’ of the viewer in a place of fixed, stable identification, stagnation or fixation, Deleuze argues that the time-image allows
…the power of thought [to give] way, then, to an unthought in thought, to an irrational proper to thought, a point of outside beyond the outside world, but capable of restoring our belief in the world. The question is no longer: does cinema give us the illusion of the world? But: how does cinema restore our belief in the world?” (Deleuze, 1989:181-182)
Paradoxically, by negating the spectatorial role so easily assumed by the viewer (especially the white male viewer), fissures of re-identification are opened: Rudolf leaves, but not before handing back a book Otto once lent him, Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls. The book, an 1842 novel
detailing one man’s fight to survive the complacency and middle-class values of the society he lives in, is hugged close by Otto, and this marks the moment the zombie façade slowly starts breaking. The book is also a metonymic cypher for the film: apart from the self-deprecating nod to the thematics of the film itself, manifesting in Rudolph's admission that he never managed to read as it was “too depressing” (01:16:12), the intertextual relation between book and film opens up zones of interaction on questions of citizenship (and – given that these are ruminations of a gay zombie – perhaps of queer/queering citizenship), with the spectator posited as analogous filmic desire-citizen.
This allows for thinking about how notions of citizenship can be prodded, troubled, and creates a framework for affective pluggings/plug-ins. Like the viewer, Otto has a choice to either
continue as he is, a fading and disassociated undead being, or reintegrate back into society with a new understanding of his own humanity and of the humanity of those around him. Ultimately, it is the abject being’s relationship to “critical questions about real and symbolic identity, which implies a new comprehension of humanness/humanity” (Nel, 2012:547) that leads to this choice.
The viewer seemingly has an analogous choice to either be immersed in the viewing process that makes us into celluloidal abject, or to re-see ourselves as insider-outsider to the text. While traditionally “a mainstay of the impression of reality works to mask the extent of the image’s relation to mort. This relation arises from the play of mort within desire […]” (Roos, 1997:114- 115, after Derrida) In other words, cinema is willingly experienced as ‘the impression of reality’
and try to mask to what extent the image is already in mort. This correlates with a central notion in theories on the abject: abjection as always inherently negating the very process of abjection itself. But this notion ignores the role time-images that make cinema political (again) – pushes the spectator into the mort of desire. In other words, the very concepts of the abject and desire
“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.