Digital Poetics

The Torture Memos and Michel Foucault

Back in graduate school, everybody read the French philosopher/theorist Michel Foucault. The most interesting, relevant parts of his book Discipline and Punish for our postmodern era seemed to be the parts about the panopticon, which we took to be a symbol for our age of surveillance, where, under the gaze of so many cameras connected to so many networks, it appeared that we willingly regulated and policed ourselves. Foucault's great insight was to suggest that power worked most efficiently when it was both everywhere and invisible: there is no need for old-fashioned torture in the post-modern West because we regulate ourselves by publicizing our own privacy: Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter. We create databases of ourselves so that the State, the Sovereign, doesn't have to. 

In grad school, we largely ignored the parts of the book about actual, physical torture in the 17th and 18th centuries. Why? Well, it just seemed sort of irrelevant to our era. Here, Foucault quotes from earlier sources regarding the execution of Robert-Francois Damiens, in 1757:

"Bouton, an officer of the watch, left us his account: 'The sulphur was lit, but the flame was so poor that only the top skin of the hand was burnt, and that only slightly. Then the executioner, his sleeves rolled up, took the steel pincers, which had been especially made for the occasion, and which were about a foot and a half long, and pulled first at the calf of the right leg, then at the thigh, and from there at the two fleshy parts of the right arm; then at the breasts. Though a strong, sturdy fellow, this executioner found it so difficult to tear away the pieces of flesh that he set about the same spot two or three times, twisting the pincers as he did so, and what he took away formed at each part a wound about the size of a six-pound crown piece.

'After these tearings with the pincers, Damiens, who cried out profusely, though without swearing, raised his head and looked at himself; the same executioner dipped an iron spoon in the pot containing the boiling potion, which he poured liberally over each wound. Then the ropes that were to be harnessed to the horses were attached with cords to the patient's body; the horses were then harnessed and placed alongside the arms and legs, one at each limb.'"

The contemporary torture memos are widely available online. Here are C.I.A. guidelines for interrogators. And here is the previously classified C.I.A. inspector general's report. What's striking is the clinical, dispassionate language and tone, as well as the fact that the torturers themselves are being watched, monitored, surveilled by doctors, psychologists, and others. 

But who watches the watchmen?

The Operatic Glory of Inglourious Basterds

I was glad to see that the New Yorker's David Denby dismissed Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds as "ridiculous and appallingly insensitive" (as if insensitivity is a criterion for dismissing a movie), and as "shallow" and as morally "callous," while tossing in that Tarantino has become an "embarrassment" etc. Denby, the Minister behind the "Minister's Black Veil," is really good at moralizing. Damn good, as Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt might say).

I was relieved that Denby disliked it because almost everything Denby dislikes about the movie is what makes it a great film, and of late Denby has rejected the best, most daring cinema in favor of the most bland. 

Why is Inglourious Basterds a great film? Mostly, this: it's the first clearly defined widely released post-postmodern American movie. (There's got to be a better name than post-postmodern for the slow cultural drift that began after 9-11.) There are lots of reasons why, but the most telling is this: the movie's open acknowledgment of the seductiveness of movies is not "ironic" or surface-ly self-conscious, but rather deeply woven into the very texture of the film itself. It's as if we awoke, one day, to realize that history itself can be the target of revenge. The revenge of the present, which cannot undo the past, but which can mis-align it just enough to change the future. In this regard, Inglourious Basterds is a resoundingly humanistic film, sort of like a Lionel Trilling or Joan Didion essay in a visual form. 

What of the operatic glory? Well, the reds are so red you reconsider your previous understanding of the very nature of the color. The slow parts in the middle are so long and slow you shift in your seat and, for the first time, take a good look around at the audience, which seems caught momentarily in cobwebs. The massacre of the Nazi high-command is probably the most audacious scene in any American movie since the gun-pointed-at-the-audience scene in Edwin S. Porter's 1903 film "The Great Train Robbery." For all that, the film's style is remarkably restrained, with very little unmotivated camera movement or editing. Much of the burden of cutting is shifted to the audience. Great stretches of the film are strangely quiet, full of slow-paced conversation. It's mot naturalism, exactly, but close.

As I write this, a photo of my grandfather is thumb-tacked to the wall beside me. I've taken it down to scan it for this post, front and back. It speaks for itself, so I'll just say this: he served in the U.S. Navy as a Specialist X First Class Petty Officer, whose job was to create propaganda posters (he was an artist). He is the man in the center in this picture, and his dream-gag was fulfilled, 66 years later, in a film I just saw tonight.

Getting the Book to Pynchon: Failed Attempt #1

So I struck out the first time. I'm trying to get A Cultural Dictionary of Punk into the hands of Thomas Pynchon, not for a blurb or anything like that, but simply because I realized--only after the fact--how much his writing has meant to me and, for better or for worse, how much the deep paranoia, humor, and fuzzy-edged sense of reality inspired the more outrageous portions of CDoP. 

So: the book came back today: "Return to Sender." What a depressing thing. But the markings on the envelope were strangely appropriate: "ATTEMPTED, NOT KNOWN."

Exactly.

Attempt #2 takes place tomorrow. I have better information, more reliable sources. By hook or by crook, Thomas Ruggles Pynchon will see this book (if he hasn't already...but that's another story), and what happens after that, I don't care.

Why Inherent Vice is a Better Movie than Most Movies

The trailer for Thomas Pynchon's novel Inherent Vice is a better movie than most movies because it is suggestive. Cinema today is burdened by expectations of coherence, of unified meaning, of measurable character outcomes and resolutions. Like the United States education system, movies are evermore assessment driven, with every last bit of ambient incoherence eeked out of them. 

"If you're driving south from L.A. International . . ." Pynchon-himself voices over, and from there on out everything is hypothetical. If this, or if that, or if you, or back then, or someday. Maybe because book trailers are a new genre, they are unburdened by the anxiety of influence: there are no rules to follow because there are no rules. Part movie trailer, part short film, part promo, part book flap blurb, part author performance, the Inherent Vice movie cuts and mixes together image, music, and voice like a new weapon.

It's a shame, really, that Inherent Vice the movie, clocking in at just over 2 1/2 minutes, is better than anything nominated for an "Academy Award" last year. Full of humor and menace and nostalgia and exhaustion, the movie is also full of gaps large enough for the viewer to fall into, to become lost in.

Stop for a moment. Shut your eyes: do you remember the pleasure of being lost?

The Beauty of Things Falling Apart

Some nice words from Alex over at Flaming Pablum about the entry on Amos Poe's strange and wonderful punk-era film The Foreigner (1978), which I write about in the Cultural Dictionary of Punk book. In fact, one of the real joys of writing the book involved looking at many films from the punk era, some of which were directly and self-consciously made in the same DIY aesthetic that characterized punk, and some of which just happened to share the joyfully absurd, anarchic spirit of the era. There are entries in the book on several punk-era films and film movements, including Pink Flamingos (John Waters, 1972), Kentucky Fried Movie (John Landis, 1977), Who Killed Bambi? (never completed; was to have been directed by Russ Meyer with script by Roger Ebert and Malcom McClaren, 1977), Black Box (Beth B and Scott B, 1978), Radio On (Chris Petit, 1979), Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains (Lou Adler, 1981), The Decline of Western Civilization (Penelope Spheeris, 1981), Suburbia (Penelope Spheeris, 1984), Repo Man (Alex Cox, 1984) and the work of Nick Zedd and others in an entry on "para-punk" cinema.

What links most of these films together is that, at some point, they fall apart, either on the level of plot, or story, or aesthetic coherence. There is a freedom in that, is there not? A trueness to life itself, which is brutal and comic and horrifying and absurd and full of meaning and and full of meaningless and dull and staggering and shocking and predictable and full of love and full of hate and full of indifference all at the same time.

Here are a few images from or related to some of the movies:

Blondie, in The Foreigner:

A screen-grab from Fabulous Stains:

A poster for Kentucky Fried Movie:

"We must trust the voice of our conscience." Thoughts on Iran.

Thoughts turn again, again, again to Iran. Even now more so now as it is fading from the news. Is there not trouble, oppression, injustice elsewhere in the world, as well as in these United States? Yes, of course. And yet it is the singularity--and in that singularity the universal--which today calls forth these words. July 21, 2009. The brutality of Iran's theocratic-military state now known and documented to the world, and in spite of the consequences, brave men and women and children risking everything for the simple desire to express their free human will. Once again, Vaclav Havel, from his 1984 essay "Politics and Conscience":

"It seems to me that all of us, East and West, face one fundamental task from which all else should follow. That task in one of resisting vigilantly, thoughtfully and attentively, but at the same time with total dedication, at every step and everywhere, the irrational momentum of anonymous, impersonal and inhuman power--the power of ideologies, systems, apparat, bureaucracy, artificial languages and political slogans. We must resist their complex and wholly alienating pressure. . . . We must trust the voice of our conscience more than that of all abstract speculations and not invent other responsibilities than the one to which the voice calls us. We must not be ashamed that we are capable of love, friendship, solidarity, sympathy and tolerance."

Again, the Michigan night settles over the forest trees and grass. The first locusts come out. The grass smells wet. You are far away and shielded from tear gas and batons and bullets. You have not earned the right, clearly, to speak and write about things half a world away. After all, you barely understand the workings of your own born-into system. And yet you know and feel truth when you see it, in the faces of of the men and women risking more than you will will ever risk.

The chanting of voices in sympathy in the Iranian night, from rooftops. Voices that--despite the myriad deconstructions of the postmodern West--ring out in truth.

Sputnik, Moon Landing

In October 1957, my grandfather Robert S. Parsil, was working as the political cartoonist at the Toledo Blade. He had had a remarkable life and career up to this point--which included serving as Art Director at Libbey Glass (some of his designed pieces are in the Toledo Museum of Art) and creating amazing propaganda posters during World War II in the Navy as a Specialist X designated officer at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center in Illinois.

His political cartoon--simply titled "What's That?"--ran in the Sunday edition, and was soon picked up and reprinted by many newspapers across the country. It captured the dazed spirit of the West caught off guard. A few years later, Kennedy would say it as if it were fact: we are going to send a man to the moon and back. To walk on the moon. To touch it. Sputnik also impacted the culture of higher education in the U.S., as the sciences took on a renewed prominence. In 1961, in his essay "On the Teaching of Modern Literature." Lionel Trilling wrote about "the disenchantment of our culture with culture itself." In a way, the humanities have never fully recovered from the crisis of confidence signified by Sputnik. What value, culture, when it's hard to see how "culture" can put a satellite into space?

My admiration for my grandfather transcends my respect for his work. He was a man who defied the "culture" / "rationality" divide. He was workmanlike in his creative life. He was a boxer. A Navy man. An artist. He created because he needed to create. 

My grandfather was imagining, creating until the end of his life. In 1990, he sketched out several pages of ideas and initial drawings for "Walking Trees," a children's story he imagined. As always, his idea for the story is humane and generous and unexpected. 

Iran Verite #2: Parallel Culture

Borrowing a term here used by Vaclav Havel, in Iran, perhaps, we are witnessing the visibility of a "parallel culture" which has emerged in relation to the "official culture" (i.e., those who sanction and direct the violence against the reformers and protesters). Here is what Havel wrote, in 1984, in "Six Asides About Culture":

"What exactly is a 'parallel culture'? Nothing more and nothing less than a culture which for various reasons will not, cannot reach out to the public through the media which fall under state control. . . . Even though the 'second' or 'parallel' culture represents an important fertile ground, a catalytic agent, and often even the sole bearer of the spiritual continuity of our cultural life, like it or not, it is the 'first' culture that remains the decisive sphere. . . . It will be in the 'first' culture that the decision will be made about the future climate of our lives; through it our citizens will have the first genuine, wide-scale chance to stand up straight and and liberate themselves."

Is Have'ls notion of parallel culture helpful in understanding the current crisis in Iran? I beliecve so. One difference is that, as the images and video below demonstrate, the parallel culture does indeed have access to the media, via cellphones, twitter, and other social networking tools that can never be completely controlled by the State. One of the features of digital culture is that it is insecure, with new holes, gaps, security breakdowns, and broken codes emerging all the time. It is not stable, and therefore is exploitable.

The video below, purportedly shot on July 9, shows bravery of an even different order from the early peaceful protests. For now the demonstrators know of the terrible fate that awaits them at the hands of the security apparatus. Here is the footage, followed by three screen grabs of human beings whose names I do not and will never know, but whose images haunt me in the deep and unfairly peaceful darkness of Michigan nights:

Iran Panopticon

As the NY Times puts it, the "withering gaze" in Iran, crushing the free human spirit by making it so self-conscious, so paranoid, that it polices itself. it seems as if, unfortunately, Michel Foucault's notion of the Panopticon is just as relevant as ever. Their eyes are watching. Will we forget?

The Mystery of the World

Despite reservations, I am obligated to post this latest communique from Ephraim P. Noble.

Logic be damned.

The Real Power of Digital Video

Iran: the power of digital video. But please remember, even beyond the images, which are disappearing in the face of atrocities by the theocratic tyrants who rule Iran and suppress those who dare to question their "divinely" sanctioned authority:

Public Enemies: The Four Failures

As a fan of many Michael Mann movies, as well as the Crime Story series, I wanted to like Public Enemies. Any of the FourFailures below could, in fact, be strengths, in another movie. So these are not meant to suggest that all movies with these features are failures, but rather they are failures in this particular movie:

1. The Expected. The movie is full of the Expected, but doesn't seem aware of it. Tough to overcome the fact that at some point the audience ceases to be forgiving of the so many piled-up re-worked set-pieces just because it's a Johnny Depp, etc. etc. At some point, truth will out. The movie must stand or fall on its own merits, not because it's a Michael Mann film, or a Johnny Depp picture. Worst instance: the race in Florida, where Dillinger's girlfriend Billie gets mad because she has been reminded Dillinger might die, and he simply says something to her like "Don't worry baby, the world's ours, I'm lookin' to the future" (I only saw it once and didn't take notes so that's not a real quote) and then suddenly she's happy again and seems suddenly to have forgotten that just a few seconds ago she was REALLY UPSET that he might die because he's the FBI's most wanted, etc. etc. etc.

2. Digital. Why digital, which is still a technology that calls attention to itself as a technology? It is not yet "invisible" and so still is loaded and over-coded with meanings that will, someday, be shed as the technology replaces analog as natural, inevitable. The choice--like the film--is incoherent. At times, it seems as if Mann is going for a sort of raw, Dogme 95 look, with the shaky camera, the occasional fast zoom. But these are sporadic, and mostly unmotivated. 

3. Too many characters. This criticism seems as absurd as Emperor Joseph's criticism of Mozart in Amadeus for writing music with "too many notes." On its face, this is a silly criticism. But at some point, the movie becomes not much more than groups of pasty-faced guys running around shooting each other, with little dramatic effect. There are simply TOO MANY of them. 

4. The Non-Angle: What is the movie about? What angle does it take? What is its general stance toward the subject matter? Some incoherent movies (thank you Robin Wood) are amazingly good, such as Taxi Driver or Dressed to Kill. But not Public Enemies (and who can deny that this is a very dull name for a film?) It doesn't really seem to be about Dillinger, who comes across as no more talented, brave, psychotic, greedy, maladjusted, or bored with conventional life as any of the other characters (with the exception of Baby Face Nelson). It doesn't seem to be about the so-called "fine line" between the good guys and the bad guys (a tired old approach to crime movies if ever there was one). It doesn't seem to be about how the Depression created the atmosphere for a sort of criminal that by-passed Capitalism and Communism and Fascism to accumulate wealth and fame. The movie sort of seems to be about Celebrity, but only in a few scenes. And it sort of seems to be the coming irrelevance of bank robbery in a era of electronic communication, but again, only in a few underdeveloped scenes.

I had to write this fairly quickly, before I completely forgot about this movie.

"Oh, honey"

Funny how things come around. Life confirms fiction. Fiction confirms life. Back to the Future. 1985. I'm a sophomore in college, my wife a freshman. We are young young young, and know what we want to do in a really big sense, but not a vocational sense. My wife loves numbers. I love words. I don't remember where we first saw Back to the Future, but I do remember the tremendous thrill of optimism it held. Even more, I never forgot the scene where the "happy" McFly opens the box with copies of his book inside. 

Yes, I thought, that is happiness. Of course it was just a movie. Several years later, in graduate school, I was taught to distrust all forms of narrative as ideological. I became suspicious of my own instincts, and temporarily disavowed "authorship." I think this was a good thing. And while I came to eventually reject the strident and thrilling militancy of graduate school, the deep skepticism remains with me today.

And today, a box came. Much like the box that came for McFly. Full of copies of my book. For a moment, unexpectedly, that scene from Back to the Future rushed into my head. A Cultural Dictionary of Punk turned out beautifully. A nice, thick, heavy volume, full of words sure to infuriate. 

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Biff enters with a box.

Biff: Mr McFly, Mr McFly, this just arrived! (to Marty) Oh hi Marty! (to George) I think it's your new book!

The box is opened. It is a book - A Match Made In Space by George McFly. On the cover are two teens, who look a bit like young George and Lorraine, and a spaceman who looks like Marty with his radiation suit on.

Lorraine: Oh honey, your first novel.

George: Like I always told you, if you put your mind to it you could accomplish anything.

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Iran: "The Power of the Powerless"

"The smaller a dictatorship and the less stratified by modernization under it, the more directly the will of the dictator can be exercised. In other words, the dictator can employ more or less naked discipline, avoiding the complex processes of relating to the world and of self-justification which ideology involves. But the more complex the mechanisms of power become, and the larger they have operated historically, the more individuals must be connected to them from the outside, and the greater the importance attached to the ideological excuse. 

It acts as a kind of bridge between the regime and the people, across which the regime approaches the people and the people approach the regime. This explains why ideology plays such an important role in the post-totalitarian system: that complex machinery of units, hierarchies, transmission belts, and indirect instruments of manipulation which ensure in countless ways the integrity of the regime, leaving nothing to chance, would be quite simply unthinkable without ideology acting as its all-embracing excuse and as the excuse for each of its parts."

--Vaclav Havel, "The Power of the Powerless," 1978

Cinema in the Digital Age review

Just learned from Wallflower Press of a very nice (four-star) review of Cinema in the Digital Age from the UK film magazine TOTAL Film:

"US academic Rombes syncs style and substance in his attempt to 'humanise' digital cinema. His pitch is that old-school film 'haunts the digital' via the teasing of imperfection and error into potentially over-slick images. INLAND EMPIRE and Planet Terror are presented as proof, the point being to open up the 'perfection' of digital to 'something intimate and human.' Rombes involvcs his reader too, scrambling linear structure in favor of alphabetically ordered themes so you can pause, skip and shuffle."--Kevin Harley

The review appears (for now) in the print version of the magazine.

Iran Vέritέ

Harry's comment (in the previous post) about the cinέma vέritέ elements of so much of the footage coming out of Iran is true, even as there is nothing intentionally cinematic about the videos. They of course are tragically real: sheer vέritέ, and to speak about them as belonging to the history of moving images is in no way intended to diminish the terrible human destruction they document.

Three frames from the video in the previous post. For me, the most haunting and unforgettable sequence occurs when a woman picks up a few pieces of concrete and hands then to the men walking bravely toward the sound of gunfire. If we watch until the end, we know there will be blood:

The whole world is watching.

Drag Me to Hell / Disfigured Realism

Not sure if disfigured realism is the best term: I also like avant-guard realism and CGI surrealism. But at the end of the day, disfigured realism captures best the profoundly disorienting images in films like Sam Raimi's recent Drag Me to Hell.

1. The Blazing Saddles Experience: I went to see Drag Me to Hell with my daughter the other evening, and we were running late, and so I had her bypass the ticket counter and go directly to the concessions counter. I followed (I'm slower) and stood in line by myself and said, "Two tickets to Drag Me to Hell." It was only later, upon returning home, when I showed the ticket stub to my wife (it's an old habit we have: whenever we talk about movies we've seen on the big screen we do so while holding forth with ticket stubs in our hand) that she realized that it said "student." Student! I immediately thought of that deeply funny and humanistic scene where Harvey Korman, near the end of both movies (the one we are watching, Blazing Saddles, and the one he is going to watch, Blazing Saddles) tries to buy a ticket as a student, and the smarmy ticket-lady looks at him and says, "Student? Are you kidding?" I didn't even have to fake it!

2. Disfigured Realism: This is tougher. There were only 7 or 8 other people in the audience, and that was a tremendous help in knowing when it was appropriate to laugh. My daughter had never seen a Sam Raimi movie, and was a little unprepared for the preposterous vitality of the whole enterprise, the elaborately over-extended mayhem sequences, the swelling and grandiose music. If there is one compelling reason why movies deserved to be seen on big screens with strangers, its name is Sam Raimi. 

But back to disfigured realism, which I've been avoiding. The talking goat sequence, let's take that. Really, in a different context, it's as radical as something out of a Bunuel film. Everything in Raimi's film is reality distended to its most extreme possibility. If this could happen, here is how it might look. And there is an uncanny terror in that. In fact, the most disturbing scene in the film for my daughter was not some CGI-horror scene, but the scene of the guy floating and dancing above the table near the end, like some puppet. Afterwards, she said that the guy looked obviously like he was on a harness. And he did. It was an old-school effect. He looked awkward, not smoothed out by CGI. And in his awkwardness--the disfigured realism of a guy really floating--was a source of dread mixed with humor. 

The dread of the real, that's it. Maybe that's why movies like the new Terminator never lodge in the brain: deep down, we don't believe any of it was real, in the sense of a camera actually capturing reality as it unfolds, rather than creating a model of reality in post-production.

This is brief, incomplete, flawed. More later.

In the meantime, I've tried to give my ticket stub away, as a gift, but no one will take it.

Well, here it is, for you: