LaBruce's provocation is in simultaneously arousing and repulsing the viewer—in essence, how they avoid delicacy by combining the cinematic contours of desire and the abject in scenes that are both highly sexual and also impressively abject. In LaBruce's films, this happens primarily on an individual level; in Wolf, Wolf's white-queer engagement with.
OPSOMMING
Decaying zombie bodies, dog-like anti-filial bodies & diseased bodies
One of Prinsloo's short stories, "PCP" (written between 1990 and 1992 and published in the collection Slagplaas, 1992), greatly influenced my view of LaBruce's film's abject zombies as performative. Even considering the proto-chthonic undertones of the author's work in the 1980s, such as "Bang in Botswana", 1986.).
On alloying
There is the flow of traffic, along with the regulation of highways and circulation (avoiding traffic jams), controlling and controlling speed. Particularly significant in LaBruce is the introduction of the despicable in scenes of (sexual) pleasure and desire and how these superficial notions of relational being and performativity surface.
Messy, corporeal, fragrant becoming, or: A series of questions arise
And as a kind of code: what happens, sparks, arises and remains in the space between becoming and belonging?). At first reading, Venter's oeuvre appears to be anchored on a distinctly articulated acknowledgment (several times in each novel) that his characters must become other (become an animal, become a humble offspring, fragrantly become uncertain) in order to continue to be seen. as citizens of (in their view) a disputed country: a harsh (self) evaluation of whiteness in post-.
Sectionality
As such, in the first section of the novel – On the odd reading of canid tropes in .
Toward an olfactory male intimacy
- Or towards a plural ‘belonging’
- Or, at the very least, a queering of a textuality
Similarly, the figure of the wolf/Wolfie can therefore be read as an embodied desire-repulsion sign. This is important to do – almost essential in the lived reality of the present – and in terms of how it adds to the ways Wolf, Wolf (and Venter) can be read for citizenship, belonging, civic.
Reading notes, around texturality
- On scholarly translation (titles; terms) for granularity
- On readerly lupification, or: Reading like wolves (Towards a conclusion)
Unlocking certain (language-based) codesets and frameworks of belonging in the novel is thus crucial to situating the work in an international frame of reception, especially since Wolf, Wolf is one of only four Venter long prose works to be translated into English. (to date), and thereby constitute a disproportionate part of the author's current international stature. In an attempt to circumvent this, I frame aspects of my reading of the novel as a type of readerlypification, a literary 'denning' around a Deleuze-Guattarian wolf.
Concerning the disease of lycanthropy, in which men believe themselves to be turned into wolves
- Introduction
- Bodies and pleasure: From desire as lack to messy, bodily pleasure to queer ecological embodiment
- Bodies before: Desire as lack
- Introducing the body to desire/pleasure: Clusters of biological processes &
- Abject desire on macro level: How the social body corresponds to genre (bodyhorror and porn; body genres)
- Abject (violent) viewing: Horrific porn/pornographic bodyhorror and abject/otherness made visual
- The abject/abjection as ambiguity
- Visual repudiation of abject bodies
- Making the materiality of the (abject) body visible, socially
- Desire/pleasure and social abjection
- Abject desire as a new type of spectator complicity: Look(ing) anew
- Not as migrant author nor homosexual writer nor genre-dipper: A brief review of the body of work on Wolf, Wolf
- Concluding note on a queer theoretical disposition
This process of rejection centered around the. visualization of the bodies of people caught up in the crisis. This idea of the country closet (to which we can also add a plural suffix) resonates with the way D.
Interlude: “You’d have to be an insipid, wretched creature not to enjoy the buzz…”
An introductory note
As such, situating these forms of abject actualization(s) of pleasure within existing frameworks of desire necessitates a nuanced rereading of models of desire-pleasure and of the abjects. By avoiding an analysis of the scenes – not to focus on their meaning – but rather to think recursively about what they do to the viewer, I try to say something about the viewer's own agency and complicity within assemblages of abject desire. to bring forward.
On seeing LaBruce’s films as texts of belonging
These amorous scenes, though macabre in concept, are shot in the style of traditional pornography, pacing and setting; the rhythm of the narrative that echoes Anglo-American porn from the mid-90s. In LaBruce's film, the thematic dualism between the abject and desire manifests on a structural level in various ways: in a spectatorial push and pull of the viewer's bodily reactions, manifested in alternating identification/alienation with the bodies on screen, as a textual straddling of two genres. (body horror and porn), and as a division between two.
On fear of the [extra-national] other
The zombie trope carries substantial fear of insecurities about empire building, social marginalization, the fear of the other and citizenship. In its material history, the zombie trope thus carries the virus of xenophobic and exclusionary thinking, especially of the sexual other.
On viewing a white auteur's orgy
Ancuta's (2016) analysis of the zombie trope in Thai horror films indicates how these stories are based on "foreign countries and the tensions between what is local (Thai) and what is not rely heavily on newer tropes of international racial stereotyping." The theme of the story and the structural composition of the film (Otto; or Up with dead people) speak together (and, in a sense, undermine its own project) about this ambitious form of despicable citizenship (however arrested in the childlike).
On watching films as outsiders (or, Up with Dead People)
This is vividly illustrated in the textuality—grain, sound, light, feel—of the film itself. At times, the narrative slips into audio-visual recreation (then, in 2008, still sinking in as a trope, and already too cliche) of the 'zombie's point of view', watching.
On immersion: How we navigate the ebb and flow of belonging
It is a sounding board of our character in which the themes of the soul – or at least our apparent soul – become audible to us. But reference to smell here is not only about identity delineation, but also serves to re-engage the viewer's sense of the materiality of the text.
On re-seeing the 'normal' of an immolation
Both speak to the power of the temporal image to make us aware of inclusion and exclusion (not necessarily on a .thematic level, but more on a structural/material level). Newspaper clippings, charcoal sketches, various film stock, punk and gothic aesthetics - all offer different entry points for the viewer to delve into it, as well as jump cuts, jarring interludes, funny dialogues, sharp staccato sounds bring us back to materiality. movie.
On the urban(ity of the) abject
The viewer cannot look away, fluctuates between boredom and expectation and becomes fixated on the skin of the film itself. - see the functioning of (daily). The contempt leads the viewer, through Otto's eyes, to reconsider the general workings of the contemptible.
On the 'lewd perfume' of celluloid
Instead, the viewer wants to penetrate deeper into the flesh, but the film mostly arrests our involvement at the surface level of the skin (the how, not the what), and leaves us wanting more. Cut the city's skin; effect breaks the skin of the film; the body breaks under the pressure of such.
A concluding note
This is oversimplified, but Otto; or: Up with dead people is (may) be a lyric of pleasure, LAZombie is (may be) a lyric of bliss, because of the sense of loss it acts upon. For Barthes, “[b]liss has to do with a deconstruction of the political” (ibid.:265) insofar as it “depoliticizes what appears to be political, and politicizes what appears not to be” (ibid. ).
Interlude: “met slegs 'n flikkering van ’n pols iewers binnekant” [201]
Jy knip uit die niet Met ringe om my oë As jy my soen. Jy kom van my kant Van die vonk van pyn As die heelal wil skiet Is ons al gebind.
Looking anew/askew at the construction of belonging/re-embodiment
I quote this here not only to highlight the politically subversive, destabilizing potential of such work, but also to point out one of the anti-essentialist, fundamental tenets of this approach, summed up in the plural, masculinity. This approach reframes the queer paradigm from its stagnant creative burgeoning early 1990s to a full-throated, re-embodied, academically accepted spotlight on flows and flux – ways of looking at desire by rethinking traditional (theoretical) conceptions of the erotic. – and a series of social manifestations/regulations of desire, especially male-male desire – axis.
Text and body and author as a series of sexual reflexive personas, opened up to the public
In Wolf, Wolf, however, we get to see a main character seemingly stuck in childish notions from the past: Blood River, the study of the father, Uncle Diek. Unable to escape the sign of loss, he "becomes" undead, i.e., he chooses to live in a figure symbolizing the physical loss of human life.
The language of socially regulated mechanics of male-male-plus
- The homosocial
- Heteronormativity
- Homonationalism
79 Otto; or Up with dead people's nested film, the all-male cast and the almost all-male cast of the framework narrative constitute the film itself as a homosocial space. These oppositional 'differences' are then considered the basis of social union, a union that is "mediated by concepts such as dependence and reproduction".
White fragile masculinity as/and unproductive reading
The end of the novel thus seemingly constitutes a complete stripping away not of power, place and positionality, but rather of white male centrality (financial, cultural, symbolic). In addition to the inability to adapt to new(er) images through which configurations of praxis can be entered, a related aspect of the crisis of masculinity is insecurity generated around a perceived loss of economic power, insecurities which are then projected onto violence against 'easy.
Episodic sexuality can be seen as a "model for a liberating form of sexual intimacy freed from many of the power relations that he sees as stiffening. This is surely part of the pleasure and fulfillment that episodic sexuality can provide" (Giddens, 1992 :147).
Concluding part
I wonder if it wouldn't be more productive, truer to the spirit in which the novel wanted to present itself [to add quote] if Matt realized that the only real production is that which arises from desire/pleasure. The next section (3.2) is an attempt to read against this childish dictate, to bring out fault lines in Venter's childish imagination and to bring a reading more in line with alliance, a reading perpendicular to both love and desire , which focuses on what pleasure does in the novel.
Introduction
In the final pages of the novel, Jack is killed, apparently by the new owners of the house, driven to despair by the campaign of terror. Thus, the figure of the dog, in its traditional role of human companion and symbol of relational belonging, is modulated in Venter's text.
Canid tropes and/as external manifestations of internal states
Another use of the animal, beyond its status as a mere "place-filling" cipher or functional index, is as a trope. When Deleuze writes about "the animal not as a form but as an outline" and as "a shadow that escapes from the body like an animal that shelters it," he approaches how areas in.
The shadows of men: Dogs and masculine inclusion
The instinctive patriarchal and heteronormative homosocial space of the farm is mirrored in the father's house in the city. The more erotic tones of his response shine through in the Afrikaans original's "losloperhonde," as well as in the more erotic description of the article: "The intimate space where Matt waits for his father to die is fatally invaded by a wolf-like creature."
The shadows of (other) men: Dogs and migrant exclusion
Emile is already taking the last bite of the food he just gave him, sticks his tongue in the bowl, throws the bowl and spoon aside, the dog strains on the chain against everything [..] the dog chews the plastic bowl, its head almost reached Emil's chest . Venter's use of the literary trope of the 'faithful dog' goes beyond merely constituting the ontological relationship between Emil and Diamond.
Reading tropes: Kitchens and canids
The first details the presence of Wolfie in the domestic space of his father's house (Venter 176); another shows Diamond protecting a takeaway counter when Emile, after Matt fires him, forcibly claims ownership of the business (263). Ultimately, the novel positively charts the son's life, insightfully exploring the (re)configurations of desire and pleasure that can potentially disrupt historical and culturally situated schemes of masculinity in South Africa (particularly in Afrikaner/Afrikaans culture).
Reading tropes: Resembling dogs
