Author: John Webster

After reading In the Shadow of No Towers, I’m questioning whether Spiegelmen’s comic is an appropriate medium for dealing with 9/11; he’s literally caricaturing these events, and I wonder if he’s doing what certain politicians – who he opposes – did in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks.  Remember how Bush told the world that they were either with us or against us?  Or when the president said that the terrorists attacked the U.S. because they hate freedom?  Bush’s characterizations were laughably simplistic; though the situations are incredibly complex, the president caricatured them for his own purposes.  When Spiegelman depicts President Bush as a cowboy, with a gun in one hand and a sword in the other, leading a band of Bible- and flag-toting reptiles and capitalist fat pigs in top hats, he’s creating humorous, though clearly exaggerated, representations of Bush and his evangelical and big business allies.  In effect, Spiegleman is doing something quite similar to what Bush and political hawks have done in previous wars:  demonizing the enemy.  On the next page Spiegelman presents Bush in a red-tinted hue with a sinister expression, suggesting the president is devilish, and in the process, reducing Bush to a laughably simplistic caricature.  To believe Bush is simply an oil-hungry, crusading imperialist is as deluded as believing Bin Laden is simply a freedom-hating psychopath.  Bin Laden may hate the Western ideal of freedom, and he may even be a psychopath, but he obviously has other motivations, which anyone seriously trying to counteract him needs to consider.  In Bush’s case, if Spiegelman wishes to counteract the president’s agenda, these demonic caricatures are for the most part unproductive; they’re only going to appeal to people who already dislike Bush.  What Spiegelman is doing is similar to what Michael Moore did in Fahrenheit 9/11.  Todd Solondz made a good point about Moore’s “documentary” in an interview in The Believer a few months ago.  Referring to the scene at the beginning in which we see former Deputy Defense Secretary (and current president of the World Bank) Paul Wolfowitz spitting on his comb and then running it through his hair, Solondz pointed out that Moore included that clip just to be mean; the scene served no useful purpose in countering Bush’s political agenda.  These caricatures of those who Spiegelman disagrees with may be cathartic for the author, but I’m not so sure they’re productive if he wishes to make effective changes in society.

For a film supposedly criticizing consumerism, Fight Club had a lot of product placement.  I noticed products from Starbucks, Jergens, Super Shuttle, Krispy Kreme, Gucci, Cadillac, Good Year, AT&T, BMW, Apple, Pepsi/Mountain Dew, Busch beer, American Airlines and Jiffy Lube.  This seems hypocritical, considering at one point Tyler says, “Advertising has us working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need.”  One of Project Mayhem’s acts of vandalism is to destroy a work of corporate art and a franchise coffee bar at the same time.  But what’s the most ubiquitous coffee franchise in the country?  Starbucks, one of the film’s product placers.  I suppose one could argue that the filmmakers were trying to make a point (such as the one Bret Easton-Ellis made in American Psycho by flooding the book with brand-name references).  But at other points in the movie, we see fake products where we could see brand name ones.  For example, when Meatloaf joins fight club, he fights in a “World’s Gym” shirt, which has a logo that is strikingly similar to “Gold’s Gym.”  Also, I don’t know much about the film industry, but it seems you need permission before you can use a product’s image in your film.  Therefore I take all the product placement in Fight Club as sheer advertising.

At one point in the film, when Tyler is going off about duvets, he complains about celebrity magazines.  This was hard to take seriously coming from Brad Pitt.  Tyler/the Narrator is also an entrepreneur with his soap business.  Can he really combat consumerism when he owns a profitable business?  Is Tyler really discouraging consumerism with his ever-changing outfits and many his cool sunglasses?  Isn’t not consuming the way to not subvert consumerism?  Yet, when the narrator quits his office space job, he keeps his salary.  If you have a salary, you’re going to spend it.  Or you’re going to put it in the bank, and they’re going to invest it.  Either way, you’re helping a capitalist economy that thrives on consumerism.  Therefore, I don’t see Fight Club as effectively criticizing consumerism.

Here’s an unofficial, but as far as I know correct, text of "The Philosophy of Time Travel":  http://www.tonystuff.co.uk/darko-time.htm

Jarrod, my take on the sister being on the plane is this: at the beginning of the film, the engine travels back in time because of a random disruption in the Primary Universe’s space-time continuum. At the end of the film, Donnie uses his super powers to send the jet engine from his mom and sister’s plane back in time from the Tangent Universe to the Primary Universe, but in doing so, he indirectly kills himself. If he is killed in the Primary Universe, Donnie won’t be alive to rip the engine off 28 days later in the repaired Primary Universe; therefore his sister’s plane will land safely…assuming there is not another random disruption in the space-time contiuum at the exact same moment in time, which I think, even for science fiction, is a statistical improbability. 

Julie, I interpreted Frank as “The Manipulated Dead” from “The Philosophy of Time Travel.” The way I saw it, the Frank in the bunny suit was not the same Frank whom Donnie’s sister dates in the Primary Universe. I interpreted the bunny-suited-Frank as Donnie’s guide in the Tangent Universe; his body was simply a puppet that the manipulator was using to lead Donnie to his destiny.

What I found interesting about the film is its Web site, www.donniedarko.com. The original version of Donnie Darko is almost indecipherable — in terms of its overall meaning — without help from outside sources, i.e., the full text of “The Philosophy” on the film’s site. I know of very few films where you most consult the Web site to fully understand it.  As one of my sources points out, Kelly uses material originally only available on the Web site (and later the DVD extras) in the film’s director’s cut (director Richard Kelly introduces scenes with images of pages from “The Philosophy”); he seems to be one of the first filmmakers to do this. One thing to note, though, is that Kelly wrote the text of “The Philosophy” during the film’s editing process. He had already filmed the movie, and in writing “The Philosophy,” he was trying to interpret his creation. Therefore, the “The Philosophy” is by no way a definitive interpretation of the film, and he explicitly states that he does not intend it to be. But it makes the most sense to me.

One of White Noise’s reoccurring themes is data.  We talked a little bit about this last class, with that You Are Where You Live Web site.  According to Amazon’s Search Inside feature, “data” appears 18 times throughout the novel.  One of the instances that stuck out most in my mind was the SIMUVAC guy’s comment to Jack, “You are the sum total of your data.  No man escapes that” (136).  It seems to comment on the way in which people are represented in the postmodern age.  We’re not people; we’re our credit histories, our Amazon.com purchases, our library recorders, etc.  This touches on the disconnectedness of postmodernism, the amassing of disparate information and voices to form a necessarily untrustworthy narrative.  It reminds me off Fight Club (the movie), which I haven’t re-watched for the class; but I remember hearing the line, “You are not the balance of your bank account,” or something along those lines.  In Fight Club, they are obviously fighting against being represented in this dehumanized way as mere data (this happens most conspicuously at the end of the film, when they destroy the credit card company headquarters); White Noise, on the other hand, seems to passively accept it.

A little later in the encounter with the SIMUVAC guy, Jack says, “It is when death is rendered graphically, is televised so to speak, that you sense an eerie separation between your condition and yourself.  A network of symbols has been introduced, an entire awesome technology wrested from the gods.  It makes you feel like a stranger in your own dying” (137).  Thus he recognizes the dehumanizing role data plays, particularly in his own death.  This also touches on the postmodern issue of the depth/surface dichotomy.  In this quote, Jack observes that, to the SIMUVAC guy and many others, he’s not a person, in the sense of being a multi-faceted, unique human being; he’s a series of symbols on a screen, a superficial rendering of his data.  For me, this relates back to Fight Club again, where Ed Norton’s job is to calculate the profitability of recalling faulty automobile equipment:  people’s lives are saved or sacrificed based on a mathematical equation.  It’s all a cold equation.

And now I’m a little paranoid and depressed so I’m going to look back at one of the humorous but consequential questions DeLillo poses:  do sheep have eye lashes? (152).

 

I think for Baudrillard, Watergate served not to purge immoral and unscrupulous officials from the government; but instead it served to maintain an intrinsically immoral and unscrupulous political/economic system. It was a symbolic ritual. The Washington Post reporters purged and then revived a “moral order, an order of truth” (173); however, the truth (or “relations of force”) in this moral order are “indifferent” and shift and reconfigure “in the moral and political consciousness of people” (173). By denouncing Watergate as morally indifferent, even though the system itself is what is morally indifferent, the reporters serve to uphold that morally indifferent system through a symbolic purge and consequent revitalization.

Baudrillard also says, “Power, too, for some time now produces nothing but signs of its resemblance” (180). While he is perhaps talking about political power, I related this “signs of power’s resemblance” to the idea of conspicuous and competitive consumption. For example, carrying around a bottled water is not only convenient for quenching your thirst, it signifies your power: you have the economic power to not only purchase goods that are available for free, but you can afford to be concerned with your health, while members of other socio-economic classes can not; you also have the educational power to know that drinking water is good for your health. This leads into the selling of brands, as opposed to products, and this blurs the line between signs and reality: are you buying the shirt or what that shirt’s designer represents?

Baudrillard keeps mentioning circuits, for example he talks about an “uninterrupted circuit” (170) and an “unreal circulation” (172). It seems that a few of the authors we’ve read have mentioned circuits, but one in particular stands out, Pynchon. In The Crying of Lot 49, he says “the ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity as the circuit card had” (14). Another connection I made was that, when describing San Narciso, Pynchon says, “like many named places in California…was less an identifiable city than a grouping of concepts – census tracts, special purpose bond issue districts, shopping nuclei, all overlaid with access roads to its own freeway” (13). Baudrillard describes Los Angeles as “nothing more than a network of endless, unreal circulation” (172). It seems that Pynchon’s world clearly corresponds to Baudrillard’s idea of the simulacra in that both sort of see reality as this abstract circuit of representations.

Zac brings up Lina’s tiger dream.  Hagedorn builds up the whole tiger scene, and it’s completely anticlimactic.  In fact, Pearce’s son says it was lame (270), one of the instances of self-reference in the novel.  However, Lina seems to be looking for some sign that “could help her make her decision.  To stay or to go?  To leave Yeye behind or take her along?…The tiger blinked its amazing eyes and roared.  As if to say, Yes, yes.  It’s about time!…Lina felt great joy” (270).  This incident seems to have guided Lina in her eventual decision to move to the U.S. and leave her daughter behind.  But other than that, I’m not sure of its symbolic significance, even though Hagedorn tells us that the tiger represents the Hindu god of destruction (263).  Also, “Tigre!  Tigre!” (270) is an allusion to the famous William Blake poem, “The Tyger”; however, once again, I’m sure of its significance.

And on the topic of dreams, I’m having trouble making sense of the novel’s title.  On a quick flip-through, I counted 12 separate mentions of dreams or nightmares throughout the book.  It seems to me that the two most important dreams are the one that Zamora describes to Rizalina about being a crucified he-goat (47), and Lina’s recurring dream about the tiger, described in detail on page 270.  However, after looking closely at these two dreams, I can’t see how they relate to the novel’s title exactly.

Ada mentions language and the fact that Hagedorn left many words untranslated.  I think this is important in relation to the Philippines.  From what I understand, Tagalog is sort of a mesh of Spanish, English and native dialects.  So I think it makes sense for Hagedorn to have her characters use a mesh of different languages.

Julie G. brings up the idea of truth or lack thereof.  Something that stood out to me was Moody’s description of the Napalm Sunset script; he sees it as “funny in a fatalistic, ironic, Filipino kind of way.  No clear-cut heroes or villains, no simplistic, black-and-white notions of justice.  Just murk and mud” (175).  I think this is an apt description of the novel itself, which was probably the intention.

OK.  Now someone fill me in on the title.   

Benjamin’s piece clearly has its flaws, but he’s also got some good points…of which I’ll discuss one.  He says that “mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.  To an even greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility.”  This means that film is radically different from most other art forms.  How much does it cost to create a painting?  Write a book?  A poem?  Take a picture?  Even the cost of buying the material to sculpt a statue pales in comparison to the cost of making a film.  (Yes, I know one must take audience into consideration if a book, poem or picture is to be published or a picture sold; but the simple act of creating a book, poem, picture or painting requires very little financial investment.)  But the filmmaker, on the other hand, must, in most cases, keep profitability in mind when creating his film (unless he’s Mel Gibson or Kim Jong Il).  Thus his film must be designed, to a significant extent, for its reproducibility if it’s to be profitable.  Before one can create a film, she needs a significant financial commitment.  Therefore the artist must almost necessarily consider profitability, which requires reproduction in film’s case, when she’s conceiving her art; this is a radical shift from art that preceded film, and it democratizes film as an art form; but, contrary to current sentiment, democracy is not always a good thing.  By requiring the filmmaker to create art that as a precondition must be received by many people, the medium of film constrains the filmmaker’s artistic imagination.  That’s not to say that truly original and creative films of artistic merit that don’t appeal to the masses can’t be created (see Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle…who the hell financed these anyway?).  But for the most part, films must appeal to a large audience – though I know “large” is subjective; this constrains the filmmaker’s imagination, creativity and abilities, and it also represents a radical departure from those art forms that preceded film.  All this could be changed, however, by the proliferation of digital video, inexpensive editing software and the internet as a platform for distribution.  But in context, Benjamin has a point.

Here’s how you cite an online posting (according to Gibaldi’s MLA Handbook, p 233):

Author’s Name.  “Title of the Document.”  Online posting.  The date when the material was posted (day month year).  The name of the forum.  The date it was accessed <website address in brackets>.

For example:

Lavagnino, John.  “OCR and Handwriting.”  Online posting.  7 May 2002.  Humanist Discussion Group.  24 May 2002 <http://list.village.virginia.edu/
lists_archive/Humanist/v16/0001.html>.

Referring to the “communication sciences,” which she claims are tools that “embody and enforce new social relations for women worldwide,” Haraway says:  “the solution to the key questions rests on a theory of language and control; the key operation is determining the rates, directions and probabilities of flow of a quantity called information….The biggest threat to such a power is interruption of communication” (164).  I immediately connected this quote to The Female Man (and perhaps I’m taking Haraway’s idea out of context, because in the article she’s referring to biotechnology), but this struck me as somewhat applicable to the overall narrative structure of Russ’ novel.  The Female Man uses what I think we can all agree is a jarring narrative technique:  Russ has essentially interrupted the flow of communication of information to the reader by presenting the story in a jumbled, incoherent way.  This idea of language as a force of domination harks back to Lacan, whom Haraway matches in a dichotomy against Freud, the former psychoanalyst representing “the informatics of domination” column (161).  (From the course reader I’m getting the impression that postmodernism is all about dichotomous columnar charts…j/k ).  It seems that feminists have embraced Lacanian theory so enthusiastically because his view of psychoanalysis is heavily dependent on language; and if sexism and patriarchy are embodied in the language we speak, then we can do something about them.  I don’t know if this “interruption” was Russ’ intention in organizing the novel the way she did, or if the effect of her narrative structure challenges our conceptions of women, feminism or gender relationships; but the novel’s presentation certainly challenged me, and this seems in step with the feminist movements–which, as I perceive them, aim to challenge traditional conceptions of women and their place in our culture, among other things.  

Mr. Pearce may be hot, but he’s a bad actor.  I’ve seen the movie about six or seven times, and his acting gradually gets worse with each viewing.  Nonetheless, I love the movie and I think Chris Nolan is an amazing director.  He splices a few split-second shots that are extremely hard to notice – especially during the first viewing – but which are very important in foreshadowing the plot.  For example, there’s a scene where Sammy Jankis is sitting in a chair at the mental institution.  At 1:29:55, the film cuts to a split-second black-and-white shot of Leonard sitting in the same chair at the mental institution and he’s in Sammy’s clothes.  This minor but meticulous detail is one of the things that makes Nolan such an awesome director…and this leads me to a book Dr. Sample talked briefly about in class.  In Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good For You (or, rather, the article excerpt I read in the NYT Magazine), he argues that movies have become more and more complex as a result of VHS and now DVDs.  Movies now have to stand up over multiple viewings, and this has induced movie-makers to create more complicated films.  I think Memento is a wonderful example, because as anyone who watches the movie more than once realizes, there are so many things one misses during the first viewing.  So, I guess this is one of the ways in which evolving media have substantially changed film as an art form.

Anyway, one of the little details in the film that I think is postmodern takes place when Leonard’s wife is reading her favorite book and he says, “I always thought the pleasure of the book was in wanting to know what happens next.”  This is a self-referential joke, obviously:  the pleasure in this particular film is in wanting to know what happened before.  This is not only a self-referential joke about the chronology used in Memento, but also to the way in which Nolan’s film challenges traditional story-telling (where "the novel" is perhaps analogous to the traditional structure of a film).  This reminds me of a scene in Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five in which Billy Pilgrim listens to a radio program where they discuss the purpose of the novel (or whether or not it’s dead; I can’t remember exactly).  Both texts – Vonnegut’s and Nolan’s – depart radically from the story-telling structure used by those texts that have preceded them, and they both joke about that departure within the text itself.

Also, not to get nitpicky, but Chris Nolan wrote and directed this movie, and he’s British.  (Guy Pearce is British/Australian, and Carrie-Anne Moss in Canadian.)  Is the text still American?  I guess it took place and was shot in America, but I’m not so sure that makes it American.

There’s debate among postcolonial theorists and writers about whether to use the colonizer’s language so as to widen the potential audience for their material (this debate is mainly among African writers, as most of them speak a native language as well as the language of the colonizing country).  If one analyzes The Intuitionist from a postcolonial perspective, Whitehead seems to be using the language (or, perhaps more accurately, the dialect) of the colonizer:  bourgeois American English.  He uses an elaborate vocabulary (I found myself consulting a dictionary more for this novel than for the two previous two) as well as a 1950s noir-ish detective style – not a genre especially popular among African Americans.  Furthermore, The Intuitionist presents an alternate universe revolving around the elevator industry; however lofty the metaphor might be, I’m willing to bet it doesn’t exactly resonate with the black youth underclass hooks talks about.  I’m inclined to agree with Jarrod.  The Intuitionist doesn’t exactly complement hooks’ call for a critical voice for underclass black youth.  hooks says, “If radical postmodernist thinking is to have a transformative impact then a critical break with the notion of ‘authority’ as ‘mastery over’ must not simply be a rhetorical device, it must be reflected in habits of being, including styles of writing as well as chosen subject matter.”  However, from what I’ve said before, it doesn’t appear that Whitehead has adopted this “habit of being” hooks calls for.

Some people have addressed the sci-fi aspect of The Lathe of Heaven. Jules begins with the caveat that she’s never really been much of a science fiction fan, as it isn’t a genre taken seriously by many critics of Literature-with-a-capital-l; and then Chris, it seems to me from his scathing critique, feels the novel is pulp sci-fi. But this raises the postmodern issue of the blurred line between high and low culture. Harvey explains that some feel “capitalism, in order to sustain its markets, has been forced to produce desire and so titillate individual sensibilities as to create a new aesthetic over and against traditional forms of high culture” (63). Chris points out the cartoon bad guy and how the hero gets the girl; and there are clearly other formulaic components present in the novel. However, it seems to me that LeGuin has co-opted a traditionally “lowbrow” form of entertainment to create a philosophically complex text, thus working against the traditional literature (and its critics) who eschew science fiction. She is using sci-fi aesthetics, but the novel’s underlying issues could certainly stimulate discussion among “highbrow” readers, if only they’d deign to read it (with an open mind).

I remember seeing an interview with Quentin Tarantino where explained that, in his films, he uses violence merely as an aesthetic; thus he’s co-opted filmic elements that have traditionally been used to satisfy “lowbrow” viewers to create some of the most influential and critically-acclaimed films of the ‘90s. As Dr. Sample pointed out in class, The Lathe of Heaven belongs to the group of books on our syllabus that one might take to the beach. Thus the novel appeals to a “lowbrow” audience, and indeed a less discriminating reader could zip through Lathe for some cheap entertainment; but the novel also addresses a variety of complex issues – from schizophrenia to environmental degradation – that a beach reader wouldn’t think twice about.

Pynchon foreshadows the novel’s ending at quite literally the middle of the book: “Oedipa wondered whether, at the end of this (if it were supposed to end), she too might not be left with only compiled memories of clues, announcements, intimations, but never the central truth itself, which must somehow be too bright for her memory to hold” (76). Indeed this is how the novel ends, although we as the reader don’t know how this whole episode in Oedipa’s life actually ends (supposing there’s a distinction). This passage points to the pastiche element of postmodernism, the “complied memories of clues, announcements, [and] intimations,” as well as to the elusiveness of central truth: if the “central truth” is too bright for Oedipa’s memory to hold, it’s also too bright for ours as the reader, because Pynchon doesn’t present the “central truth” to us either. At first I considered whether Pynchon is just posturing: is there some real “central truth” that he is just hinting at but not revealing? Or is this just a convenient and deceptive way of hiding the fact that he doesn’t have a “central truth” at all? Or, better yet, perhaps there is no “central truth” for him to have and he’s bluffing, which is the best answer I could come up with. The excerpt is a summary of Oedipa’s thoughts, not necessarily Pynchon’s or the narrator’s; therefore Pynchon isn’t necessarily suggesting there is a “central truth.” The novel, for me, draws a parallel to Camus’ The Outsider in that it seems to be saying there is no point trying to impose reason on an unreasonable universe. When Oedipa tries to discover the “central truth” behind Pierce’s business dealings, it becomes one big farce.