Lawnmower Inferno II: The Proustening

Incidentally, intrigued to see Clouzot apparently picking up on Proust's tendency to associate paranoid jealousy with optical illusions (surely not coincidental that L'Enfer's Marcel and Odette), something I've talked about here in the past...

Lawnmower Inferno

So this week Lovefilm engineered one of those unexpectedly felicitous double bills, serving up Lawnmower Man alongside Inferno, a documentary about the disastrous and abortive shooting of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s L’Enfer. What turned out to link the two was SFX, with both films using lurid colours and lysergic patterns to communicate a loss of innocence: in Lawnmower Man a holy fool becomes a megalomaniacal cyberbeing, while in L’Enfer a husband is beset by surrealistic visions of his wife’s infidelity. Seeing the two in tandem, I was struck by the fact that, effectswise, they’re essentially coming at things from opposite angles: if Lawnmower Man’s animated sequences see computers clunkily attempting to replicate organic forms, one of the most moving things about Inferno is watching Clouzot’s team inventing ingenious and laborious analogue processes that produce results now reminiscent of nothing so much as the presets available in digital playback and editing software... Ripples, meshes and mirror images, hallucinatory composites and freakish colour schemes are conjured from rotating arrays of lights, sheets of water, layers of plastic and cellophane, sequins and ungents, wires and mirrors. Determined to turn a lake blood red, but unable simply to hit cmd+i, Clouzot dickies with the colour timing, has the make-up department paint the actors a cadaverous grey-green and commissions two sets of costumes - one for each side of the colour wheel.

 In both cases, and even more than in the typical effects-led film, there’s an excessive, flagrantly artificial quality to the SFX sequences. Not content to humbly serve the story, they demand attention on their own terms, as technical achievements. As if acknowledging this, Lawnmower Man’s title screen offers the option to watch just the computer-generated bits, skipping the film that frames them altogether. With L’Enfer, meanwhile, it’s almost as if Marcel’s hallucinations (which are the only scenes that take place in colour) literally refused to be integrated into a finished film, the flimsy narrative architecture designed to support them buckling under the weight of their sensory charge. While the documentary does a decent job of interweaving a sketch of L’Enfer’s plot with the story of its production (a story climaxing with the shock resignation of leading man Paul Reggiani and Clouzot’s subsequent heart attack) these contexts start to seem irrelevant faced with the sheer charisma of the surviving footage. I found myself wishing that they’d just given us a menu of these fragments to watch in whatever order we pleased rather than subordinating them to the (albeit fascinating) history of the project - which desire led to me capping and gif-ifying the bits of it I have.

In this respect, these films also highlight the weird irony of the DVD, a storage medium that allows for random access but which (at least in the case of DVD movies) masquerades as a film strip, surrendering images in a linear sequence. You could argue, in fact, that both movies fail because they attempt to tell A-B stories about things that are inherently non-linear: if it’s no surprise that Lawnmower Man can’t turn the internet and the videogame into material for compelling non-interactive entertainment, it’s perhaps strangely apt that Clouzot couldn’t work a profusion of rushes, alternate takes and freestanding optical experiments into a viable feature film: after all, Marcel’s paranoia can itself be understood as a state of narrative crisis, whereby the proliferation of terrifyingly plausible possible pasts and futures foils any attempt to reach a definitive understanding of what has happened or might happen. Trawling tumblr suggests that both films are fated broken up and strewn, contextless, across a thousand microblogs - but maybe that’s poetic justice?

Lawnmower Man images from:

http://www.virtualworldlets.net/Worlds/Listings/LawnmowerMan/LawnmowerMan1-Falling.jpg

The Surface of the Moon

Scratched CD (image from wikipedia)

So I wanted to write something about Neil young’s Harvest Moon, a record that I’ve become peculiarly attached to over the past couple of years. I say peculiarly not because the album isn’t generally highly thought of (it is), but because I tend to have a pretty low tolerance for bluesy, folksy Americana with lyrics about Harleys, hound dogs, and prairie grass. So why do I like this LP? I think it’s because, while it initially comes across as ‘timeless’ and ‘effortless’ (or, as a more cynical listener might say, rote and generic) you can, if you listen more closely, hear Young wilfully and not always successfully struggling to divorce himself from the here and now, an effort which invests the record with a weird tension that I find both fascinating and moving. When Young claims he’s just doing what comes naturally (‘Here I am with this old guitar / Doing what I do’) he’s being at once basically truthful and deeply disingenuous, and the graft that’s gone into making everything sound assured, serene and spontaneous imbues what might otherwise have seemed like a pastiche with a King Canute-type pathos.

As wikipedia will tell you, Harvest Moon is generally considered a sequel to 1972’s Harvest, and was recorded in the early ‘90s, in the wake of a bout of tinnitus Young incurred while cementing his status as patron saint of grunge. Heard out of context, however, you’d probably think it dated from around the same time as Harvest - indeed, I’ve had conversations with people who love and have long owned the record but had no idea that it was released in 1992. For one thing, this presumably means they missed out on the superb photo of Young and band in the booklet packaged with the CD version I have (which photo I tragically can’t find online): not only is everyone looking pretty ravaged, but the preponderance of tie dyed tees and denim cut offs locates us squarely in the 1990s. For another, it suggests they haven’t listened too closely to the lyrics: opener Hank to Hendrix, for example, namedrops Madonna (‘From Marilyn to Madonna / I always loved your smile / Now we’re heading for the big divorce / California style’).

The Madge reference highlights the tension that make the album so interesting for me: is la Ciccone being conjured as avatar of all that’s wrong with contemporary culture (as she is in Roger Kimball’s adorably flustered postscript to Tenured Radicals), or is Young positing an equivalence? Does the comparison impose continuity on pop cultural history (yesterday, Marilyn; today Madonna - plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose), or is it meant to describe a trajectory from the authentic to the ersatz? Such moments highlight the contradictions inherent in adopting a reactionary stance* - the problem, for example, of reconciling the desire to believe certain things are natural and essential and will always be with the conviction that right now we’re going to hell in a handbasket - and disrupt the attempt to keep things cosily nostalgic. We become uncomfortably aware that someone probably had to invent Harley Davidsons and guitars at some point; that they used to be - ugh! - new.

Speaking of technology, later in Hank to Hendrix there’s a verse that I can only hear in terms of Young’s notorious antipathy to digital music formats (so inveterate is Young’s hatred of CD and MP3 that he’s begun touting his own file format, ‘Pono’ - named, naturally, for the Hawaiian word for “righteousness”). It goes:

Sometime it's distorted
Not clear to you
Sometimes the beauty of love
Just comes ringin' through.

The same theme’s engaged in more explicit terms in the closing track, Natural Beauty. Here which Young sings about having ‘heard a perfect echo die / into an anonymous wall of digital sound’ before asserting ‘a natural beauty should be preserved like a monument to nature.’ It’s here that the consonance between what’s happening sonically (the desire to create something hushed, pure and lilting, catalysed by tinnitus and rendered tougher by the quavering reediness of the ageing Young’s vox) and what’s happening lyrically/thematically (the desire to conjure a mythic never-never-America, compromised by Young’s inability to avoid references that locate us in the abject present) are strongest.

Ironically, what the results most remind me of is a hard disk drive - a device that, incidentally, has more in common with a ‘proper’ analogue record player than you might think. Sealed off in a hermetic container in the bowels of the computer, the HDD comprises a series of platters made from highly finished aluminium or silicon, onto which data is written in clusters comparable in size to blood cells and anthrax spores. Read by drive heads that skim micrometres above them on cushions of air, these platters are exquisitely vulnerable to smudges, scratches and faults - and in this respect they resemble Young’s artfully evoked fantasy USA. Listen carefully (as a paranoid audiophile, searching for evidence of digital signal compression, might) and a series of flaws - the catches in Young’s voice, the ‘anachronistic’ references to digital media and MTV - compromise the comforting idea it’s still 1972, tarnishing the illusion.

The effect is strangely reminiscent of Borges’ story Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote - an account of a writer who attempts not merely to translate or copy Cervantes’ masterpiece, but to recreate it ‘word for word and line for line.’ For Borges’ narrator, Menard’s 20th century Don Quixote ‘infinitely richer’ than Cervantes’ (identical) 1602 version. This is because what are, in the mouth of a seventeenth century Spaniard, mere rhetorical commonplaces, doxa and formulae, become, coming from ‘a contemporary of William James,’ audacious, ‘astounding’ conceits. Likewise, to release Harvest in 1972 is one thing, but to release Harvest Moon in 1992 is quite another. While I’m aware that championing futile acts of heroism is an activity with dubiously conservative overtones, I find I’m with Borges when it comes to which is more fascinating.




*Young’s, of course, traditionally been way too interested in and conflicted about the technologically and culturally new to be tagged as a straight up luddite (witness Trans)...

Glitch/Fart/Flash

It begins not with a bang, but with a parp: in their book On Bathos Sara Crangle and Peter Nicholls trace the dawn of modern bathos to a farting corpse in Pope’s Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus (1741). Initially, bathos simply meant something like nadir. Only in Eighteenth century England does it start to acquire the sense of, as the OED has it, ‘a ludicrous descent from the elevated to the commonplace in writing or speech; anticlimax’. As Crangle and Nicholls suggest, this descent or deflation often has to do with material things, and especially corporeal things, making themselves suddenly and shamingly obvious. In a flash - or with a flatulent toot - we switch from the sublime to the ridiculous.

I was reminded of this celebrated literary fart while playing Pippin Barr’s browser game All's Well that Ends Well. Barr presents players with a simple objective: they have to pilot their aircraft across the screen, avoiding salvos of oncoming missiles. The only problem is that there are far too many missiles, moving far too quickly, for the player to have the slightest chance of success. Eventually it becomes apparent that you can make it across, but only by dying repeatedly; each time the avatar ‘respawns’ it is, in accordance with time-honoured videogame convention, impervious for a second or so, and by exploiting this fact it's possible to inch across the screen. Do this, however, and you’re presented with another, almost identical scenario, pitting a star ship against an asteroid belt. Clear this screen (and, again, this can be done by holding down the ‘d’ key) and other, increasingly surreal versions of the same situation await - flying chair versus flying station wagons, flying station wagon versus flying giant broccoli stalks, missile versus Easter Island heads etc. When (through sheer persistence rather than skill) the player does clear a screen, their ‘success’ is qualified by the pile of wrecked avatars littering the landscape below.

As Barr notes, ‘[t]he idea is of repeated death and of memories of that death, like the corpses left behind in many other video games. But pushed to an extreme for a particular effect.’ That ‘particular effect’ is, of course, a bathos effect; the game’s overblown introductory text (‘You are the brave pilot of a high-tech spy plane... May God protect you’) is immediately undercut by the tinny pop that accompanies the plane’s first collision, which it doesn’t take much imagination to hear as a kind of fuzzy digital fart. His Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment, a suite of unwinnable minigames based on the torments of Tantalus, Sisyphus, Prometheus et al (rapidly alternate between the ‘g’ and ‘h’ keys to dislodge the eagle eating your liver, to roll a boulder uphill etc.) follows a similar trajectory. If Barr’s games mock the way that videogames tend to handle death, then they also suggest how good they are at generating bathos.

In his introduction to Christie in Love (1970), playwright Howard Brenton suggests that the play’s police officers are essentially stock characters, and to be played as such. However, very occasionally ‘they have ‘sudden lights’, unpredictable speeches beyond the confines of pastiche. As if a cardboard black and white cut-out suddenly reaches out a fully fledged hand. It’s a bathos technique... It is very cruel’. Players of videogames will be more than familiar with situations like that which Brenton describes. There are moments when AI functions adequately, and there are even moments when it can seem to have ‘sudden lights’ but there are also all those moments at which the limitations of the code ‘behind’ the AI characters become glaringly apparent.

In Skyrim (which I recently had to review and which, despite my violent aversion to the Tolkeinesque, was pretty fun - nice skies) it’s not uncommon for the illusion of a coherent world to be undercut by the redployment of a speech sample you’ve heard a thousand times before, or a character’s sudden schizoid switch in demeanour (these moments, in fact, are weirdly evocative of Hedayat’s disquieting use of repeated phrases and gestures in Blind Owl).

Then there are the weirder glitches. Just how surreal these can be is suggested by a bullet point in the notes for the game’s first patch, which besides promising to remedy framerate issues and blurred textures also claims to have

Fixed occasional issue where a guest would arrive to the player's wedding dead

In attempting to talk about downright weirdness of some of Skyrim’s glitches I kept defaulting to the idea that it was almost as if the disc was dreaming or delirious, as if we were getting a glimpse into its subconscious – kind of like sharing a bed with someone who talks in their sleep (which I do). The term brainfart (for which the OED, alas, doesn’t have a definition, though wikipedia is pretty fascinating on the subject) springs - as it were - to mind.

As Skyrim proves, glitches can be fascinating - we get a glimpse of how the game, as an assemblage of interacting systems, works, and this is often more compelling than the illusion it’s trying to sustain (Noah Wardripp Fruin calls this ‘the TaleSpin effect’, after a venerable computerised story generator that produced narratives far less interesting than the processes it used to compose them). But glitches can also be strangely shaming, as can the experience of in-game death. Both can trigger the bathetic realisation that we’ve been fooled into responding to a game as if it were something more than a simulation. This is the sort of alienation Graeme Kirkpatrick describes in his account of Resident Evil 4’s QTE sections. For him the graphic button prompts that flash up on screen ‘and the sudden quickening of events seems to conspire to produce a sense of ridiculousness. In the midst of playing the game... we are suddenly offered the spectacle of our own activity as something childish. We see ourselves pressing a brightly colored plastic button on an infantile toy’. He reads this realisation of his own absurdity through Bergson’s theory of laughter, which suggests that we laugh in order to draw attention to and censure ‘the encrustation of the mechanical upon the living’.* For Bergson, laughter is supposed to jolt us awake when we fall into automatic or quasi-mechanical behaviours (like tapping buttons in front of a screen) - an idea that has obvious ties to Pope’s comedy, rooted as it is in his anxious fascination with the possibility that we’re just digestive tracts with delusion of grandeur.
The glitch, like the flash of ‘sudden light’ or the fart that brings us crashing back down to earth, entails a rapid but profound switch in tone/scale/register. In their ‘Notes on Glitch’ Manon and Temkin emphasise ‘the momentary or punctiform nature of the initiating impulse. A glitch is a “surge,” “a sudden short-lived irregularity in behavior” (OED), whose aftereffects are at once shocking and effusive. The garish appearance and obstreperous sound of glitch art betokens its origination in this way: a tiny variance has triggered major damage.’ Perhaps games can harness both the dramatic potential Brenton sees in bathos and the thought-provoking power of glitches and interruptions?

Arguably some already do. If Silent Hill 2’s AI-controlled Maria occasionally seems a little stiff or suspiciously dopey, for example, this only adds to the impression that - like Solaris’ simulacral wife-substitute Hari, who she in so many respects resembles – she’s something between a person and a piece of code, a machine and a memory.** Hari’s repeated deaths and resurrections mirror the logic of videogames, while the sequence where, panicked at having been separated from Kelvin, she tears through a metal door is, to the gamer, more than a little evocative of AI companions’ dodgy pathfinding routines.

While we might be expected to pity Hari, pathos keeps slipping into bathos - her immortality imbues her suicide attempts with something of the existential slapstick of a Wile E. Coyote cartoon, and our emotional response is all the more complex for it.

Moreover, in Solaris as in Silent Hill 2 there is something ridiculous in the willingness of the heroes to believe they can have their wives back, despite the overwhelming proof that they are merely imperfect copies or self-induced delusions. And of course their suspension of disbelief mirrors that of the viewer/player, who as Kirkpatrick insists, is always vulnerable to having the ‘ridiculousness’ of their absorption in a fiction/simulation made bathetically clear to them.

There is then evidence that games might be uniquely suited to exploring bathos and immortality, that they could put a fresh twist on a set of tropes and figures – or, as Bogost might have it, ‘unit operations’ – that underpin everything from the myth of Sisyphus to Groundhog Day, and in so doing address their inflection by technology. There is also evidence – and this is something we mustn’t forget – that Alexander Pope was indirectly responsible for The Nutty Professor 2: The Klumps.***

* He also links this revelatory flash to Walter Benjamin’s notion of jetzeit, the implications of which for animated gifs are explored in an intriguing piece by Daniel Rourke

** It might be worth noting that Alan Wake and Shadows of the Damned both borrow this ‘haunted by repeated visions of beloved dying’ trope, and for that matter that SotD lays luridly bare the strain of fetishistic misogyny it’s bound up with

*** Though as a mitigating factor this means he can claim to have had a hand in Nothing Really Matters – for me one of Janet’s finest hours

Queering the Pitch

Been doing some film editing lately. Watching HDTV, too, which sometimes exposes editors’ having gambled on a long shot being long enough that no one – at least at standard def – would notice that the actors’ lip movements don’t in the least correspond to the words on the soundtrack. Michel Chion says we want to marry voices to their sources, to see mouths. In this respect the tricks of facial orientation filmmakers use so that any words can be synched to an image track are a bit like the rhetoric of Nuts magazine cover photography, whereby breasts are angled or draped so that the nipples remain just out of sight, as if they were something impossible and fantastic. These images are meant to inspire in viewers a desire to warp the image plane or rearrange the body so that the hidden secret would be visible - a desire that, as Linda Williams notes, porn panders to by contorting performers according not to comfort or verisimilitude but a logic of ‘maximum visibility’ (Hardcore 48).

Increasingly, cheesecake photos employ Photoshop not merely to smooth over blemishes or reproportion bodies but to combine, Zeuxis-style, elements from multiple photos, a process that is often taken to the point of defying conventional anatomy. Synthetic cubism is one reference point, but I was also reminded of these bodies in the Tate’s recent Gaugin show. One of the nice thinks about showing his carvings and ceramics alongside the paintings is that you realise the latter look not merely spatially ‘off’ but as if pictorial space was a sort of resistant material with its own obstinate grain or torque, only partially malleable into the forms Gaugin wants it to assume.

As the earliest artist yet to be exhibited at Tate II, part of the show’s remit was to argue for Gaugin’s importance to later, modern-er art. Certainly, the extent to which he allows desire to deform virtual space marks him as an ancestor of recent painters (Kilimnick, Joffe, Peyton et al) who’ve sought to reproduce the dissipated or decadent styles of attention characteristic of fan art – in which ‘good bits’ might be larger or more worked up while blurrings or disconnections, lapses in concentration and spots of boredom, sully other parts of the image/experience.

Those works (that is, both the fans’ stuff and that of the painters reflexively cribbing their style) tend, of course, to be based on prior images that, translated through fans’ desiring, variably co-ordinated or skilled bodies, come out distorted, sometimes unrecognizably. At the same moment as Gaugin was sailing to the tropics Michael Field (the alias of ‘poets & lovers’ Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper) was working on Sight & Song, a poetic ‘translation’ of some of the pair’s favourite paintings. According to Ana Parejo Vadillo the collection operates according to a ‘two-phased aesthetic’ (Passengers of Modernity 192): the poems offer ‘objective’ descriptions of the images before submitting them to subjective, often sexualized re-readings. What Vadillo doesn’t comment on is the frequency with which these re-readings involve recalibrating the spatial relationships between the bodies that the pictures represent.

Often these shifts seem dictated by the poets’ own ‘orientation’ in gender/sexuality terms: a couple of the poems (including one on Boticelli’s Primavera, of which Gaugin’s Nave Nave Mahana migh be read as a softcore remake) position us within the pictorial space occupied by female models, so that left and right are reversed (or ‘inverted’ – as Victorians said of homosexuals). Others trace sightlines that put female bodies squarely in the way of female eyes – eyes that, cued by Field, it is easy to read as harbouring an other-than-Platonic intent.

Of course, I’m probably doing unto Field what they’ve done unto Tintoretto, Giorgione et al: warping the original in the hope of teasing out a latent sexual secret. Nonetheless, their ‘two-phase’ translations of 2D canvases into space of utopian possbility remains intriguing as an instance of viewers interacting with and realigning images and bodies in order to realise multiple, competing storylines.

It might seem fanciful or trite to compare this to the process of playing a videogame, but I think its legitimate – especially in the case of games like Fez or Paper Mario, where progress often entails a form of perceptual ‘frame-shifting’, a switch between reading forms as 2D or 3D – just as, by imagining the males in Tintoretto's The Rescue occupy a different picture plane, we can choose to see the newly-liberated female captive gazing not at her (male) emancipator but at the body of the woman in the centre of the boat.

This game is a bit like looking at the duckrabbit, the famous emblem of epistemological relativism that can be seen either as a quacking duck or a windblown bunny, but not as both simultaneously (see also those images of preening coquetttes who turn into beshawled and decrepit crones). Re-reading the bit in Proust where Charlus is introduced for an upcoming book group, I was struck by the idea that there might be readers who wouldn’t yet know about the character’s (or, for that matter, the author’s) sexual orientation. Could you read (what now seemed to be) such an absurdly innuendo-saturated account of the character and come out of it blithely convinced he was straight?

Both Fez and Paper Mario have cartoony visual styles that riff on the videogame's transition from sprites to polygons, speaking to an audience old enough to have had to use their imaginations to ‘fill out’ games’ pixel-flat worlds. But there’s no reason games with similar mechanics couldn’t adopt entirely different aesthetics or communicate other messages.

The photographer Matt Stuart takes pictures that (a bit like the Elstir paintings Proust describes, also in vol. II) are angled so as to produce bizarre trompe l’oeil conjunctions. While I don’t really like his images (I’m turned of by the way they render the world wondrous and then knowable, dazzling their viewers by transforming ‘everyday’ London into a spectacular space rich with human variety, romance and humour and then flattering them by allowing them to decode and master this initially puzzling plurality) they are, in a way, games and suggestive as such of the potential for forms of visual play based on opening contingent arrangements of forms and bodies onto new meanings.

Voices Off

So my recourse, in spells of emotional turmoil, is to media occupying two opposed registers: on the one hand, macho or machinic music that denies the possibility of emotion/affect (excepting aggression, obvs); on the other, stately, hyperbolically tragical stuff – chansons, melodrama, Veronika Voss. Basically I’ve been listening to a lot of D Double E and a lot of Cale-era Nico lately. As a consequence I’ve been thinking a lot about how voices affect me.

Michel Chion differentiates three modes of listening: causal, semantic and reduced. Causal listening is the level at which we class sounds as (coming from) machines, larynxes, birds, middle-aged Latina females, grime MCs etc. (our hypotheses can be wrong, of course). Taking D Double, the level on which I ‘get’ “think you’re a big boy cos you’ve got a beard/ bullets’ll make your face look weird” is semantic, but the line works musically because of his bizarre torsion of the vowels – perceptible at the level of reduced listening. D Double E gets away with his signature line being ‘it’s me’ because no one else says me like him; he seems to have total control over the production of the sorts of sounds you’d usually associate with vexed inarticulacy. Of course, the three aren’t really separable; what I’ve deduced or supposed about a voice will inflect my interpretation of what it says. I can find this girl’s ‘R’ sounds* fascinating as the residue of a Notts accent’s all-but-totally successful erasure (with that erasure’s attendant class connotations) but also gorgeous all on their dull, frictive own. Nico’s arcane, obstructively mispronounced lyrics kind of don’t matter because they’re the occasion for her to make sounds, though their gamey magniloquence also adds something to the experience.**

Barthes’ term for the irrefutable je ne sais quoi certain singers/vocal artefacts possess is ‘grain’ (which, given my general preference for trebly and sobbing voices over husky and raspy ones, I’ve never much liked as a descriptor). Naomi Schor suggests that we can find the co-ordinates for a Barthesian aesthetics in those aspects of each medium which seem, for Barthes, to represent its irreducible – and irrecuperable – essence: the ‘punctum’ in photography, the obtuse in film, the haiku-esque mode of textual statement that ‘instead of insisting ‘we are the real’... merely announces ‘so’’ (Schor 89). ‘Grain’ – which Schor doesn’t, incidentally, mention - would seem to be the sonic equivalent.

But are these qualities always contingent and/or irrecuperable? Barthes says yes: escaping/exceeding intention and meaning, they can’t be synthesised or produced (Joss Stone signifies without possessing the granular quality proper to proper soul?). Nevertheless, once they’ve happened they command our attention – which is a very valuable commodity. In an essay I recently read (which has transformed my experience of looking at go-see polaroids – something that, as a consequence of my guilty fascination with the fashion industry, is something I actually do a fair bit of), Elizabeth Wissinger talks about fashion models’ role as amplifiers or transducers of affect.

Challenging the traditional supposition that fashion photography is about embodying culturally valorized archetypes, she suggests that the best models/images may be precisely those that mobilise confusion and irresolution, creating expressions/conjunctions that are ‘unexpected... unassimilable... beyond the borders of conventional interpretation.’ A pre-expressive attitude – a face that could be about to resolve into an expression of joy, or ire or sulkiness but is, right now, suggestively illegible – is what the fashion shoot aims to produce/record/transmit.

As such, looking totally punk, or all-American – or, for that matter, looking ‘womanly’/‘sexy’ - isn’t necessarily as lucrative, as durably recuperable, as being able to negotiate the space between definable attitudes and aesthetics (I’ve written elsewhere about how, when Chantal Joffe gets it right, her paintings suggest the proximity of sexily compelling poses/expressions to poses/expressions symptomatic of boredom, panic or foetal alcohol syndrome). The same’s arguably true of voices; while studies suggest that different accents and dialects connote different qualities, signifying for the majority of us as posh, kind, stupid, trustworthy or whatever, voices that are mongrel, or grating, unpredictable or texturally compelling have a capacity to levy attention more to do with reduced listening than with our cultural biases.

Chion uses another term – ‘MSIs’ or ‘materializing sound indices’, ‘qualities of sound that direct our attention to the physical nature of its source’ – that suggests something both about the character of sounds that move us, and the reason they do (weirdly I’m thinking here of the tiny breathless hitch with which the beardy-sounding voice of hhWickes inaugurates his pronunciation of that brand name, also of how abnormally high in the mix Elly Jackson’s vocals tend to be, and how well this serves her raw novitiate schtick); you kind of hear these sounds with your musculature and pallette as much as your brain, they act on you physically, on account of their reference back to their production. Maybe, at points where I’m not really keen on where cognition and memory tend to be taking me, its the capacity of these voices to override the semantic that’s so appealing. Certainly I’m going to give Undeniable – feat. an uncharacteristically sweet-natured D Double vocal – another spin.

*(‘uvular rhotics’, I think they’re called – interestingly Keita Takahashi just called his new company uvula because he was struck by the contrast between the (to him, meaningless) English word’s sound, and its ‘disgusting’ Japanese significance)

**Here we’re up already against the gendered sound/meaning opposition whereby women are identified with formless babble, men with syntactic sense – an opposition psychoanalytic feminism has read as a male attempt to disavow the phase when the bouncing baby boy was dependent on the instructive maternal voice. Music has repeatedly been seen as ‘dangerous’ because it subordinates the signifying function of the voice to emotive/aesthetic imperatives. Dudes finding foreign chicks’ botches cute and the quasi-toddlerish extended sibilants currently voguish among hipster girls suggest this same libidinally invested preference for female speech to be infantile/ornamental/purely sonorous – a charge the paragraph this note’s appended to could be convicted of pretty easily too.

***It also suggests the phenomenon’s similarity to the operation of MSG, which (I’m told) activates so many disparate tastebuds simultaneously that the body asks for another helping in the hope of getting a better handle on what’s going on.

Outside the Box

Making good on the early promise of Jaws 3 and that one level in Earthworm Jim 2 where you could wear threedee goggles, everyone from Pixar to Sony to Dazed and Confused is all about creating stereoscopic depth-of-field fx these days. Prizing 'immersion' and lauding fictions/characters for their 'depth' is so commonplace in discussions of books, movies, telly and games that the entertainment industry's desire to literalise those tags is understadable. Not everyone's so big on interiority and volume though; I've been reviewing a lot of gay cinema lately that taps (consciously or not) into a venerable tradition of challenging 'depth > surface' prejudices and queering spaces, whether by incorporating 2D animation & obvious green screen stuff or by peopling films with defiantly puddle-deep caricatures.

It's gotten me interested in films that think seriously about how cinema uses 2D pictures (1440 of them each minute) to create an illusion of 3D space, in stuff like La Jetee and Funeral Parade of Roses, the photo-scanning thing in Bladerunner and the hero of Blow Up trying to make sense of a space/event by pinning photos up around a white-walled open-plan studio. I just watched Herzog's Nosferatu, which - as a remake of an old film about a reanimated corpse - is all about cinema's status as (pace Laura Mulvey) 'death 24x a second.' It opens with a handheld camera moving across a line of dessicated bodies that, thanks to the organic unsteadiness of the camera operator's hand, occasionally seem uncannily vital (usage of the word 'uncanny' is, of course, advised here; the film's chock-full of phenomena Freud catalogues in his perennially-cited piece on Hoffmann and unheimlichkeit). Though I'm sure there'll be all sorts of revealing self-referentialities in upcoming 3D movies, it'll probably be a while before any film makers who're concerned with what the medium is/does can afford to use this tech - which raises a weird issue; Kojima's spent most his career as videogame designer making it clear he wanted to make movies, but it's possible film makers will discover they've a lot to learn from stuff like Goichi Suda' Killer 7 when it comes to doing 3D meaning-making and storytelling.

Of course, the people/objects that come out of the screen will only be telepresent, intangible and odourless (a recent radio ad for a teleconferencing company lists bogus stats regarding how many business people don't wash their hands, shower etc.). Although Sadako crawls out of the telly in Ringu she doesn't lay a finger on her victims, staring them to death instead. Teletactility is technically possible, but (as Vivian Sobchack's discussed) cinema induces tactile sensations in viewers already, and perhaps audiences don't want movies to be more-than-metaphorically 'touching.' I've been making a lot of pictures with chewing gum lately. It lends an ickily material and intimate dimension (and, of course, a literal dimension, a Z axis) to flat, idealised images, especially in the era of Swine flu-induced salivaphobia. It smells nice too.

(Dazed cover from here, gummed Velasquez mine, Sadako from here, M.B.V.3.D. poster here, liquidisation of circa 1960s social convention via camera here, late Dreamcast game resembling aforementioned here, dead Hatshepsut here)