tragic irony of umberto d, AI, and mulholland drive
choral reef
i felt torn up inside. why?
i think it has somethng to do with dramatic irony, but here it's irony
that doesn't allow emotional distance... or, rather we become so
emotionally connected to the characters that we find it hard to
distance ourselves from them.
it's much more than mere dramatic irony. it's more like tragic irony.
with dramatic irony, we feel comfortably superior to the characters.
we say, 'ah, we know what they don't know'.
but, with tragic irony, it's hard to be aloof because the character in
question is too innocent or vulnerable. we care about it, him, or her
so much that we can't just be the superior outside observor.
in umberto d, it's the dog. in mulholland drive, diane selwyn. in AI,
it's the boy. the old man in umberto d is a sad case but he knows his
situation; besides, he has lived a full life; what troubles him most
is a dependent dog--helpless on its own--, a creature that doesn't
allow the old man resignation in life or death.
in mulholland drive, it's selwyn, a smalltown girl in hollywood who,
despite her ambition and lesbianism, is innocent, vulnerable, and
trusting; she truly loved her friend and wished things would/could
have worked out. in AI, it's the boybot programmed to seek his
'mother' to the end of time.
in each case, we the viewer know what the character--the dog, selwyn,
boybot--doesn't know. yet, we feel uncomfortable with this dramatic
irony because irony here seems too thorny and cruel for such
vulnerable characters. we become emotionally attached, we care about
them, and something in us even identifies with them. being aloof via
dramatic irony feels wrong. while the irony pulls us away from the
characters, emotions push us back toward them. we feel this tension
between emotional closeness and ironic distanciation with no resolve.
the dog only knows fear or love. when the old man plays with the dog
to allay its fears, we want to believe in the truth of this happiness
but we, unlike the dog, know it's a delusional island. same with david
in AI when he's reunited with his 'mother'. and selwyn, as she lies
in bed after her friend has been killed... dreaming that her friend is
alive in an alternative reality and with herself as another
person--smarter, more talented, generous, and loved.
what makes all these stories agonizing is the extent to which their
characters believe in their childlike bliss. it's so heartfelt and
pure that we can't bear to reveal the secret, made more difficult by
the fact that the dog and david can't possibly understand the
truth--ever--and because the truth for diane selwyn can only spell
death.
it's the level of innocence in each of these characters that render
the dramatic irony almost unbearable, even perverse.
if david could be made to understand, it wouldn't have been so bad. at
one point, the scientist tells him the truth that but soon enough he
starts believing and seeking his 'mother' all over again. and selwyn
believes and loves so totally and purely in her alternative fantasy
world that we know truth is an impossibility for her. in her fake
world, her emotions are not only make-believe but made-believable. it
becomes emotionally truer forher than anything she felt in her real
life. this wasn't the case in eraserhead which was uniformly weird
throughout, with no dividing line between reality and unreality,
sanity and insanity.
now, everyone has his delusions and in most cases, all we need do is
bitchslap the moron--everyone in magnolia--and tell them to come out
of it. but, we can't with the dog, david, nor with diane selwyn who
really felt a great deep love for her friend and was scorched by her
betrayal.
the character of billy kwan in year of living dangerous is tormented
too but he finally understands what his frurstrations are about. he's
far from innocent about life or himself. he finds an outlet thru
action, expression, and death. but the childlike, innocent, and pure
qualities of the dog, david, and selwyn make resolution impossible.
you might say it's odd calling selwyn innocent since she seems to be a
druggie, an alcoholic, a lesbian, a hollywood starlet wanna-be but
deep in her heart, she's a smalltown dreamer. even joe buck in
midnight cowboy ultimately has better grip of reality because his
dreams were kinda silly. but hers actually wasn't. there was something
farreaching and noble about hers.
Alex
I really enjoy what I've read from you so far. Keep the interesting
analyses coming.
"choral reef" <sympho...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:7b98c3ee.04061...@posting.google.com...
Padraig L Henry
wrote:
Yes indeed, because for her (whether Diane or Betty, it matters not
===either to her or, ultimately to us, the viewers) it - the dream -
was Real ["hard-wired", as with AI-David's programming ...].
Consider, then, Zizek's description in The Sublime Object of Ideology
of the Lacanian notion of the dream:
"[T]he Lacanian thesis [is] that it is only in the dream that we come
close to the real awakening -- that is, to the Real of our desire.
When Lacan says that the last support of what we call 'reality' is a
fantasy, this is definitely not to be understood in the sense of 'life
is just a dream', 'what we call reality is just an illusion', and so
forth. We find such a scheme in many science-fiction stories: reality
as a generalized dream or illusion. The story is usually told from the
perspective of a hero who gradually makes the horrifying discovery
that all the people around him are not really human beings but some
kind of automatons, robots, who only look and act like real human
beings; the final point of these stories is of course the hero's
discovery that he himself is also such an automaton and not a real
human being.... The Lacanian thesis is, on the contrary, that there is
always a hard kernel, a leftover which persists and cannot be reduced
to a universal play of illusory mirroring. The difference between
Lacan and "naïve realism" is that for Lacan, the only point at which
we approach this hard kernel of the Real is indeed the dream. When we
awaken into reality after a dream, we usually say to ourselves 'it was
just a dream', thereby blinding outselves to the fact that in our
everyday, wakening reality we are nothing but a consciousness of this
dream."
Lynch's Mulholland Dr is a vivid and poignant depiction of this
Lacanian notion.
Simon Howson
"Padraig L Henry" <phe...@iol.ie> wrote in message
news:40ca5294...@news.iol.ie...
It is? I don't understand why a film can only be important if cracked open,
and viewed through a pscychoanalytic prism.
Simon Howson
monsieurblob
well its certainly a richer reading experience than when looked
through a cognitivist's prism
Wordsmith
Good point, Simon. Reality is a multifaceted jewel, and psychoanalysis is
but one of those facets.
Manyspendoredsmith :)
Benny
on now :-)
--
Benny
*******
> i felt torn up inside. why?
about hers.
Padraig L Henry
Certainly, but what has remained intriguing about MD (as with Lost
Highway) for many is precisely its resistance to being smugly "cracked
open", especially according to the logics and "rules" of traditional
narrative structure. There have been many threads at AMK and elsewhere
over the past few years exploring this multi-faceted film. For
instance, it has been variously read or received as a socio-political
critique of the American Dream, or as a feminist confrontation with
Hollywood's suffocating and deadly patriarchal structures, or in
traditional Freudian terms, or as a pseudo-elaborate narratively
Escherised playful jigsaw puzzle, or as a creative confirmation of
Hyper-reality in today's cyberspacial universe, and so on. All
perfectly valid and reasonable responses. The application of the
Lacanian thesis simply adds another interesting (and as another poster
commented --- rich) dimension, indeed an especially progressive and
radical one, a notion that also permits more enlightening readings of
such other films as Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut or the Wachowskis' The
Matrix or Cronenberg's work, among many other recent films that
explore dreams, power and the hyper-real in contemporary society ...
Padraig
Simon Howson
> >It is? I don't understand why a film can only be important if cracked
open,
> >and viewed through a pscychoanalytic prism.
>
> Certainly, but what has remained intriguing about MD (as with Lost
> Highway) for many is precisely its resistance to being smugly "cracked
> open", especially according to the logics and "rules" of traditional
> narrative structure. There have been many threads at AMK and elsewhere
> over the past few years exploring this multi-faceted film. For
> instance, it has been variously read or received as a socio-political
> critique of the American Dream, or as a feminist confrontation with
> Hollywood's suffocating and deadly patriarchal structures, or in
> traditional Freudian terms, or as a pseudo-elaborate narratively
> Escherised playful jigsaw puzzle, or as a creative confirmation of
> Hyper-reality in today's cyberspacial universe, and so on. All
> perfectly valid and reasonable responses. The application of the
> Lacanian thesis simply adds another interesting (and as another poster
> commented --- rich) dimension, indeed an especially progressive and
> radical one, a notion that also permits more enlightening readings of
> such other films as Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut or the Wachowskis' The
> Matrix or Cronenberg's work, among many other recent films that
> explore dreams, power and the hyper-real in contemporary society ...
>
> Padraig
I don't think constructing film narratives implies cracking the film open
they way psychoanalytic criticism does. Rather the construction of narrative
relies on each audience member inferring specific cause and effect
relationships between the events depicted. Simply because Mulholland Drive
doesn't ascribe to such clear series of cause and effect relationships
between scenes doesn't automatically mean narrative rules fall apart. It
simply means that in this film the result that each viewer constructs will
remain ambiguous. There are small examples of this in the classical era, do
Bogart and Bergman sleep with each other in Casablanca for example? However
MD, and other Lynch films simply place the need for ambiguity above another
series of cinematic effects.
Personally I feel psychoanalytic readings ultimately remove a great deal of
meaning from a film. They remove more than they add because they try to
alter the reception of the film to a group of psychoanalytic aspects. How
many psychoanalytic readings are concerned with attempting to identify the
phallus? Why is that so necessary? Couldn't that umbrella actually be
something used to stop rain from hitting people on the head? ;-)
The alternate readings you proposed are all symptomatic readings; the film
has a particular form because the form enables it to reflect a series of
real world concerns. I'm happier working through such a critique of the
film, rather than trying to ascribe its fundamental aspects to some
discredited psycho-pathology.
Additionally, I have never understood why in order to get to a Freudian
analysis, we have to revert to Lacan. If Freud's theories were the accurate
ones, what could Lacan offer us that Freud didn't already state?
Additionally, we must remember that Freud only wrote, I believe two articles
that related to cinema, and Lacan I believe one. How one makes the leap to
then say that these group of (largely discredited theories) apply to film is
itself problematic. In fact, I have never read someone do it convincingly.
The best argument is to simply state, well the people who say we shouldn't
do this are just trying to control us in some liberal capitalist conspiracy,
so it is our JOB to rebel, and critique everything in psychoanalytic terms,
because that is our best form of dissent!
Oh, and I think Zizek is a fraud, the sooner he actually wins an election
the better, because then he will probably stop writing film "criticism".
Simon Howson
damnfine
> Personally I feel psychoanalytic readings ultimately remove a great deal of
> meaning from a film. They remove more than they add because they try to
> alter the reception of the film to a group of psychoanalytic aspects.
At the ultimate exclusion of nothing. It's just one perspective, why be
threatened by it?
--
/^\damnfine/^\
"To disbelieve in the gods is at the same time to
affirm life, purpose, and beauty." - Emma Goldman
Matt Hannigan
> Someone who claims to have understood the plot of Mulholland Drive!!!- come
> on now :-)
> --
> Benny
> *******
The very beginning is a jitterbug sequence following up with a point
of view shot of someone getting into bed. Towards the end, Naomi Watts
sits at the table at the party describing how she won a jitterbug
contest which sent her on her way to Los Angeles.
There is a scene where Naomi Watts gets out of bed to answer the door
to her apartment. Everything before this scene and everything after
the jitterbug scene in the beginning is a dream.
Naomi's character, in her dream, comes to LA, is noticed by people in
Hollywood with some leverage(director Adam Kesher, others she
auditioned for, etc), finds love with Laura Harring's character and
then finds herself in the middle of the mystery of the blue key, the
money in the purse, etc.
In reality, Naomi's character is very fragile, is brushed off by Laura
Harring's character, and has little success in Hollywood, and the
success she does actually have is all thanks to her lost love getting
her the part. Because of her heartache and longing for Laura's
character(think about the masturbation scene!) she decides to hire a
hitman and in the end she puts a gun to her head because of the guilt.
I was really confused when I first saw it. Things made a little more
sense after more viewings, but it wasn't until I actually read more
about the film on the internet and checked out others interpretations
of the film until it all seemed to come together. Either way, I think
the film is an excellent use of dream logic. I've had countless dreams
where certain objects, people, locations, etc, show up but in
different roles with different purposes. A good example: once I
actually had a dream about Mulholland Drive after watching it. I was
physically in the movie, but the characters were all played by
different people. Naomi Watts was nowhere to be seen, nor anyone else
in the film. There was also this very strange voice over and scenes in
completely different locations, but somehow I knew that I was inside
of Mulholland Drive, ala the insanity that is dream logic.
I hope that wasn't too much to read!
Cheers :-)
matt
Simon Howson
"damnfine" <damn...@ihug.com.au> wrote in message
news:2j4mldF...@uni-berlin.de...
> Simon Howson wrote:
> > Personally I feel psychoanalytic readings ultimately remove a great deal
of
> > meaning from a film. They remove more than they add because they try to
> > alter the reception of the film to a group of psychoanalytic aspects.
>
> At the ultimate exclusion of nothing. It's just one perspective, why be
> threatened by it?
I'm not threatened! Just concerned by its lack of usefulness, and/or
validity.
If we just assume that film criticism is limited to a series of
incommensurate conflicting perspectives, then any film could mean anything,
and it would be impossible to divide the good ones from the bad.
Simon Howson
U RIKA kaka
wow. That sounds like a good dream.
I watched it with someone whose first language is not English who
understood everything because she said the director is brilliant at
telling the story with hardly any dialogue by setting up the atmosphere.
She also likes to talk during movies (we were home) so I couldn't
have not understood it the first time if I tried. The dream starts when
she hits the pillow - the shot of the bedding.
U RIKA kaka
I think I found one (Foreign?) website when I looked that was IMO a good
explanation of MD. Everyone else really seemed to muck it up with their
own FEELINGS. David Lynch said that the movie was pretty
straightforward. I think the movie is very sweet.
Tobasco
"Simon Howson"
> I'm not threatened! Just concerned by its lack of usefulness, and/or
> validity.
>
> If we just assume that film criticism is limited to a series of
> incommensurate conflicting perspectives, then any film could mean
anything,
> and it would be impossible to divide the good ones from the bad.
>
> Simon Howson
>
1. Who, on this thread, is 'limiting' film criticism to psychoanalytic
methods?
2. Please explain the 'validity' of categorizing *anything* into the
divisions of 'good' and/or 'bad'.
Weeds are weeds only when we don't want them there.
>
John Harkness
You might also want to check Salon.com and do a search on Mulholland
Drive -- there's a fairly solid extended explanation/parsing of the
film there.
John Harkness
U RIKA kaka
I can't read Salon because they make you click through to get a free day
pass. I feel sorry for Salon's financial straits but I just removed
that bookmark since they implemented that policy.
JW Moore
>Simon Howson wrote:
>> Personally I feel psychoanalytic readings ultimately remove a great deal of
>> meaning from a film. They remove more than they add because they try to
>> alter the reception of the film to a group of psychoanalytic aspects.
>
>At the ultimate exclusion of nothing. It's just one perspective, why be
>threatened by it?
>
Some fellas just wanta get right to it.
~~Jack
Wordsmith
I'm happy...as long as Google is free.
Gratismith :)
Simon Howson
"Tobasco" <dc...@bellsouth.net> wrote in message
news:jiizc.4310$lr2....@bignews2.bellsouth.net...
> 1. Who, on this thread, is 'limiting' film criticism to psychoanalytic
> methods?
> 2. Please explain the 'validity' of categorizing *anything* into the
> divisions of 'good' and/or 'bad'.
I'm not saying any one did, I just don't think that Zizek provides for
anything useful in determining what Mulholland Drive may be about! Which is
probably related to the fact I think he is a fraud.
Simon Howson
Padraig L Henry
Well, thanks for your attempt at film "criticism" here, Mr Howson.
Bad-mouthing Freud, Lacan, and Zizek, whom you clearly are totally
clueless about, because they somehow clash with your unexplained
personal "feelings", whatever they supposedly are or wherever they may
come from, is both transparently unhelpful and irredeemably naive. Is
there something of significance you wanted to add or say about the
film, "personal feelings" aside? Your beginning to remind me of a
Creationist dismissing Einstein: "I can't understand and I DON'T WANT
TO UNDERSTAND any of this E equals MC squared shit, all this spacetime
garbage; obviously therefore, Einstein is a fraud!"
In fact, you're a good example of Lynch's main argument in MD: you
want your [received, unexamined, and ideological] dream of the world
to obliterate the "real" world itself [---the "American Dream"]. You
want a film to be a free-floating "world of spectacle", outside of
interpretation, a seemingly open space [but actually a rigid,
conservative narrative] upon which you can arbitrarily project your
"feelings" and fantasies, consuming it whole --- and then moving on to
yet another of the same for more of the same ...
So then, let's put some of all of this into perspective.
Given that tomorrow, Wednesday 16th June, celebrates the centenary of
Bloomsday (www.rejoyce.ie), invented by the 20th Century's leading
literary modernist, I think I'll continue my response by first quoting
Zizek again: "Joyce's famous statement that he wrote Finnegans Wake in
order to keep literary historians busy for the next 400 years has to
be read against the background of Lacan's assertion that, within a
psychoanalytic cure, a symptom is always addressed at the analyst and
as such points forward towards its interpretation."
The recent films of Lynch (particularly MD and Lost Highway), as with
those of the late Kubrick (particularly EWS), both modernists working
within the malaise of postmodernity, are very pertinent here: The
"modernism" of Joyce resides in the fact that his works, at least
Ulysses and Finnegans Wake [another "dream" novel/work], are not
naively independent of, or external to, their eventual interpretation
but, as it were, in _advance_ take into account their possible
interpretations and therefore enter into dialogue with them. This is
resolutely also true, for instance, of MD and EWS [Indeed, Stefan
Mattessich's paper on EWS, "Grotesque Caricature: Stanley Kubrick's
Eyes Wide Shut as the Allegory of Its Own Reception" explores this
very phenomenon]
Insofar as any interpretation or theoretical explanation of a work of
art endeavours to "frame" its object, one can say that this modernist
dialectics provides another example of how the frame is always
included in, is a part of, the framed content: so in modernism, theory
about the work is comprised in the work, the work is a kind of
preemptive strike at possible theories about itself, as with Joyce,
Lynch, and Kubrick. And for this reason, it is inappropriate to
reproach Joyce (or Kubrick in EWS, say, or Lynch in MD) for no longer
writing (filming) for a naive reader capable of an immediate
consumption of his works, but for a reflected reader, who is also able
to read with an eye on possible theoretical interpretations of what he
is reading, in short, for a "literary or film scientist".
And the important point to bear in mind is that such a "reflected"
approach in no way diminishes our enjoyment in the work --- quite the
contrary, it supplements our reading with a surplus-enjoyment which is
one of the trademarks of true modernism.
WHICH IS WHY THIS NEWSGROUP EXISTS.
Unless, of course, you're an anti-intellectual philistine [ruled by
knee-jerk "feelings" and banal Hollywood ideology] ...
So, if you'll excuse me: I'm off to eat some more inner organs of
beasts.
Padraig
Jsmithe
before arriving in LA. Before she dies she sees a preview of what her life
would have been if she would have lived. Shit!
"Wordsmith" <word...@rocketmail.com> wrote in message
news:cddcc385.04061...@posting.google.com...
Wordsmith
Don't choke on that kidney, Poldy!
W :)
monsieurblob
nothing but pure rhetoric
David Kirkpatrick
Happy Bloomsday, Padraig and all.
In honor of the centenary of that famous day in fiction, pardon me for
reposting my exploration of parallels between Kubrick's Space Odyssey
and Joyce's Ulysses.
U-2: Ulysses and 2001
Although connections between 2001: A Space Odyssey and Homer's "The
Odyssey" have been occasionally explored, very little attention has been
paid to parallels between Joyce's Ulysses and Kubrick's "Odyssey", even
though there are probably many people who simultaneously regard Ulysses
as the greatest novel of the 20th century and 2001 as its greatest film
and are thereby faced with this Homeric connection staring them in the
nose. I'm one of these people (although I suspect Finnegans Wake is
ultimately a greater novel, it's greatness probably belongs to a future
century) and I don't know what to make of the fact that Homer Simpson is
my favorite cartoon character as well!
On the one hand, it is easy to see how a 2001-Ulysses connection would
be dismissed out of hand. For one thing, the creative genesis seems
unlikely: Clarke seems the furthest thing from Joyce as a writer and
Kubrick's auto-didactic background seems to make him an unlikely
disciple of the Jesuitically-trained, polylingual, scholastic-friendly
Joyce. On the other hand, one should keep in mind that the best works
of Clarke have depths on doesn't find in, say, Asimov, to pick another
prolific scientist-turned-SF-writer of the same era. Like Joyce, Clarke
seems to be an atheist with religious pre-occupations, although Clarke's
come from the East, and like Joyce writes with fastidious attention to
realistic detail.
The differences between Joyce and Kubrick are largely accounted for by
the differences of medium between their respective art-forms. As
modernists (and supreme masters) within their respective art-forms, they
are soul-mates of a sort, often radical in their means of expression but
conservative in their core message. Both carry the baggage of the
history of their respective art-forms but transport those bags great
distances with tremendous levity. More specifically, Joyce is renown
for imposing the intensity of poetry upon the canvass of the novel while
Kubrick seems to fulfill the similar quest of preserving the values of
still photography on the expanded canvass of cinema. (Similarly,
detractors of Arthur C. Clarke might complain that he brings the
tediousness (or more generously, the clarity) of scientific prose into
SF writing.) That Kubrick was Jewish and Joyce Catholic is probably
less of a spiritual gap than if either were Protestant. Both were
non-orthodox members of a cultural minority with claim to a culture with
deeper roots than the current cultural majority. Of course, Joyce's
greatest character is probably the Jewish Leopold Bloom, whereas Kubrick
tended to avoid leading characters who were Jewish. (Some time ago I
raised the question of whether Col. Dax (played by Kirk Douglas) is
Jewish; this seemed to be taken as a controversial proposition.)
I must confess that my knowledge of Ulysses far exceeds my knowledge of
The Odyssey, which is based more on what I've read about parallels
between Joyce and Homer than from my single reading of the Homer epic.
Therefore I am not in the position to argue that 2001 resonates more
with Ulysses than with The Odyssey or to explore the possibility that
connections to Ulysses are merely the second-hand consequence of
connections with The Odyssey. However, my instinct is that what Kubrick
intends has more to do with what Joyce intends than what Homer intended.
The contrasts between Ulysses and 2001 are stark, but that's what makes
the parallels more amazing. Ulysses is realism almost to the point of
autobiography; 2001 is science fiction. Yet to their detractors,
"nothing happens" in either, or what happens is hard to decipher; both
are deceptively anti-heroic in comparison to the Homeric example, yet
depict modern heroes who are profoundly heroic, within the bounds of
realism. The attention to detail in creating the world of 2001 is as
obsessive as Joyce's re-creation of Dublin on June 16, 1904. This
brings us to the next obvious contrast. Ulysses occurs within a single
day whereas 2001 spans the millennia. But on the other hand, 2001 also
begins with "Dawn" and ends, like Ulysses, in bed. And as Bloom is
explicitly paralleled with Elijah and Christ, there is an apparent
Christian or Hebrew-Messiah subtext to 2001 that can be explored as
well. The first chapter of Ulysses makes references to Uberman and to
Thus Spake Zarathustra; the ideas of Darwin and Nietzche are a
fundamental substrate to both works. Both pit the natural against the
supernatural, and explore the relationship between father and son,
ancestor and descendent.
Another obvious contrast between Ulysses and 2001 is between
"interiority" and "exteriority", i.e. between stream of consciousness
expressed verbally in Ulysses and the vast silences and lack of
conventional character development that startles every initial viewer of
2001. Another way of expressing this contrast might be in terms of
"left brain" versus "right brain". But this contrast becomes more
superficial when one takes into account the media of poetry, prose and
the novel on the one hemisphere and photography, music and cinema on the
other. The point is that 2001 stretches the boundaries of cinema in a
way analogous to Ulysses and the novel; in fact, to the extent that it
retrieves the silent era is a parallel to Joyce's retrieval of the
Homer. Both works can be viewed as explorations of the relationship
between consciousness and the unconscious, only Ulysses explores the
surface of the unconscious from the inside and 2001 from the outside.
For Joyce, etymology or language itself is at the core of the
unconscious, whereas Kubrick deals with the significance of basic visual
forms. [This is what makes McLuhan such an interesting starting point
for making sense out of both Joyce and Kubrick, since McLuhan's currency
is the comparison between visual and aural, linguistic and sculptural.]
Arguably, 2001 begins strangely and each section of 2001 is stranger
than the previous; this much is granted even by its detractors.
Similarly, the chapter-by-chapter odyssey of style in Ulysses gets more
extreme in the later chapters; both Ulysses and 2001 convey a sense of
the author playing "can you top this" with himself. Two Olaf Stapledon
SF classics, "Last and First Men" and "Starmaker" are suggested by
2001's temporal and spatial odyssey. This is what SF does at its best:
explore the boundaries of consciousness from the outside, conveying the
levity of the future as opposed to the weight of the past. What Ulysses
is to the microcosm of the soul, 2001 is to the macrocosm of the mind.
The quasi- father and son relationship between Bloom and Stephen,
Dedalus and Icarus, Young Stephen and the Mature Joyce and between
artist and his creation is echoed in 2001 by the relationship between
monolith and apeman, apeman and modern man, homo sapiens and HAL and
between Bowman and Starchild.
Another serious barrier to taking parallels between Ulysses and 2001
seriously is the apparent difference in the structure of each. The
tripartite structure of Ulysses seems to be mismatched with a four part
structure in 2001 ("Dawn of Man", untitled trip to Clavius, "Jupiter
Mission" and "Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite"). If we divide 2001 into
three sections, considering everything between the "Dawn of Man" and
"Jupiter Mission" subtitles as one section, then we have a numerical
match, but a mismatch of "volumes", so to speak. The first three
chapters of Ulysses, sometimes referred to as the Book of Stephen, are
quite short compared to the last three (Book of Molly) and the middle 12
(Book of Bloom). Whereas the corresponding Part 1 of 3 in 2001 makes up
about half the movie. On the other hand, Ulysses does lend itself to
division by four, if one distinguishes the shorter early chapters in
part two from the later, more baroque tours de force in the second half
of part two. My analysis below is based upon a bottom-up matching of
chapters in Ulysses to episodes in 2001; the result is a division of
2001 into three parts: Dawn of Man (Book of Stephen),
Clavius-JupiterMission-Stargate (Book of Bloom) and "Hotel Room" (Book
of Molly).
Book of Steven
1. Telemachus: Tower in Ulysses, cave in 2001; Buck Mulligan and
Englishman Haines as Stephen's rivals in U, other tribe as rivals in 2;
failed nationalism a theme in U; failed defense of waterhole theme in 2;
references to Thus Spake Zarathustra and Nietszche's Superman in U.
2. Nestor: Stephen teaches school in U, monolith as teaching machine in
2; "God is that shout in the street" in U, monolith as quasi-deity in 2.
3. Proteus: Stephen alone with his aspirations and regrets in U; apeman
alone with his bone in 2. Stephen Dedalus on strand beside ocean
contemplating death by water (Icarus theme) in U; the bone cutting to
nuclear warhead satellite resonates with the Icarus theme: nuclear power
is the descendent of the original flying-machine inventor Daedalus
(apeman throwing weapon into air) flying too close to the sun (i.e.
using fusion power).
Book of Bloom
1. Calypso: Ulysses finally introduced as Mr. Leopold Bloom in U,
one-half of Floyd-Bowman finally introduced in 2; Bloom is a cuckold,
Floyd must share moon with Russians. Whereas Stephen is inclined
towards abstraction, Bloom is practical and mechanically inclined, with
private fantasies of political and scientific careers. In 2001 the
Apeman makes a discovery that is so simple and profound that he
resembles Stephen more than Bloom (he is a superman among apes) whereas
Floyd is a kind of scientist/technocrat turned politician resembling
Bloom more than Stephen. Bloom is an advertising salesman and is
similarly involved in spin-doctoring and cover stories.
2. Lotus Eaters: theme of narcosis and evasion/denial central to this
chapter in U; space travel depicted as soporific in 2; chapter in U ends
with the mental image of Bloom's limp "flower" floating in his bathtub,
image in 2001 of Floyd's pen floating in zero gravity. In 2001,
according to my interpretation, the "chapter" Calypso flows right into
Lotus Eaters with the switch in attention from the waltz of the
spacecraft to the interior scenes of the weightless environment in which
Floyd travels. Weightlessness in 2001 is the parallel to anesthesia and
denial in Ulysses.
3. Hades: Paddy Dignam's funeral in U; descent to moon in 2 (where the
monolith has been "deliberately buried"). Rumors shared in this chapter
of U, and people talk about Bloom behind his back. In the corresponding
part of 2, Dr. Floyd deliberately fails to dispel rumors passed on by
the Russian scientists, who later say something in Russian behind his
back. The theme of Bloom's dead father and dead son is introduced in U;
in 2, Floyd talks to his daughter via videophone and heads to moon to
witness evidence of a kind of alien father to humankind.
4. Aeolus: "In the Heart of the Lunar Metropolis". Stylistically, this
chapter in U is an encyclopedia of rhetorical devices and is mostly set
in a newspaper office. Correspondingly, Heywood Floyd gives a kind of
press conference without the press: a pep talk for moon-based colleagues
that is full of low-flying rhetoric. "That was a great speech Heywood"
usually gets a laugh.
5. Laestrygonians: In U this occurs mainly in a restaurant and uses
gluttony to humourous effect. This corresponds to the Lux Aeterna
section of 2 in which attention comically alternates between astounding
pictures and the equivalent of a boxed lunch.
6. Scylla and Charybdus: Stephen meets with other writers in library
in U; TV interview with Dave, Frank and HAL in 2; Stephen recognizes the
great gulf between himself and fellow intellectuals in U, literal
interplanetary gulf between astronauts and Earth in 2; sparring between
intellectuals in U, implicit sparring between HAL and astronauts.
7. Wandering Rocks: In U this is a series of vignettes involving various
Dubliners, a kind of pause between the first and second half of the
book. The interesting parallel in 2 is the existence of "wandering
rocks" between Mars and Jupiter in the form of the asteroid belt.
8. Sirens: If there is a technology associated with this chapter in U,
it is radio. It is the first Joycean chapter that is truly weirder than
anything in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and it could be
described as treating language as sound bites. In 2 the parallel seems
to be HAL's incorrect prediction of the failure of the equivalent to a
radio receiver. In U, this occurs in a pub; people are forever eating
and drinking in U, and meal-taking is a recurring event in 2001,
including near the opening of the HAL section of the film.
9. Cyclops: The one-eyed monster in 2001 is clearly HAL; in U the
parallel is either the monocularly monstrous narrator or the bully named
"The Citizen" whom he praises with mock-heroic hyperbole. This chapter
in U epically narrates the antisemitic persecution of Bloom by the
Citizen. The parallel episode in 2001 is arguably what might be called
the conflict between Frank Poole and HAL. A point of controversy in
2001 is over whether Poole overreacts to HAL's "mistake" when he
proposes to disable HAL. Up to this point HAL has been described as
incapable of error, but it is not clear that the discovery of his
fallibility is enough to justify the "death penalty" so to speak.
Although HAL is physically portrayed as a Cyclops, at this stage of the
story he is more of an outsider-victim like Bloom. One interpretation
would be that Poole and Bowman are like protestants quick to decapitate
a pope once proven to be fallible, in analogy to the model of later
Judeo-Christians turning on earlier Judeo-Christians. The new picking
on the old. On the other hand, HAL is certainly a newer generation than
humanity; similarly, anti-semitism in this century is often tied up with
a fear of modernity. Jewish intellectuals like Marx, Freud and Einstein
have been villainized for ushering in the new, not for representing the old.
10. Nausicaa: An extended episode of Bloom's voyeurism and onanism in
U; "I could see your lips move" in 2001. Perhaps more to the point, the
psychological gap between the consciousness of Bloom and Gerty is
prominent in the strand episode with the narrative style paralleling the
contrast between male and female sensibility. The parallel in 2001 is
the gap between human and computer consciousness, with Dave and Bowman
wondering what HAL's thinking and HAL returning the favor. Arguably,
the protagonists of each work reach their respective dramatic nadirs in
this scene (Bloom's onanism and Frank's death.) Both Bloom and Dave are
"stranded"!
11. Oxen of the Sun: Celebration of childbirth in U; Dave's
childbirth-like return to Discovery in 2. Progression of literary styles
in U, HAL's regression in 2. This chapter in U takes place in a
library; this episode in 2 climaxes in HAL's brain.
12. Circe: Fantasy sequence in U (actually several fantasies of Bloom
and Stephen in reaction to actual occurences); psychedelic ride in 2.
Bloom pursues Stephen into Nighttown in U; Dave "pursues" monolith.
Bloom loses his humanity in one fantasy (turned into swine) in U; Dave
loses his composure in 2. In Circe, literature is treated as theatre;
in Stargate, film is treated as music. Arguably, Circe is the most
flamboyant chapter in Ulysses and Stargate the most flamboyant scene in
2001.
Book of Molly
1. Eumaeus: The bizarre prose style in this chapter of Ulysses is
sometimes misrepresented as "tired", whereas it really expresses Bloom's
straining to communicate with Stephen on his intellectual plane, i.e.
Joyce's prose is intentionally "bad" in the regard that it uses
highfalutin words or syntax where a simpler means of expression is
called for. The parallel to the corresponding section of 2001 cannot at
the level of prose, since no words are spoken during the post Stargate
sequence; if there is a parallel it is in the unseen alien host's
straining attempt to emulate a comfortable hotel-like environment for
Bowman. In this respect, the alien host is like Bloom playing father
and Bowman is the would-be son. At the same time, Bowman must feel out
of his depth the way Bloom does with Stephen.
2. Ithaca: The narrative style of this chapter in U is
question-and-answer; there is a similar "epilogue" quality to the
"Hotel" sequence in 2001, as if the rest of the film is to be a series
of questions without answers: what's it all about, ALF. Bloom's last
act before going to bed is to request that Molly make breakfast for him
(a reversal of their usual routine); Molly's soliloquy in the following
chapter is largely a reaction to this request and her final willingness
to give him what he asks for is highly significant in defining Ulysses
as comic rather than merely ironic.
3. Penelope: Molly's soliloquy in U is spoken from bed and looks
forward and backward; Bowman's transformation into (or creation of) the
Starchild occurs from what appears to be his deathbed. Molly's chapter
is comprised of eight enormous run-on sentences: suggesting the symbol
for infinity perhaps? But the affirmation at the end could also be
taken as going "beyond the infinite", in the sense of a vicious cycle
being broken. She suspects Bloom of something, but forgives him and
acknowledges the many ways in which he is superior to his countrymen.
The last words of U look back to Leopold Bloom's proposal of marriage
(or perhaps first sexual encounter) and suggest that sexual relations
(which had stopped ever since Rudy's death) might be resumed between
Bloom and Molly. The image of the Starchild similarly looks back to the
Dawn of Man and to the future of humanity. Both works end with a kind
of cautious optimism that is celebratory and affirmative while at the
same time somewhat disturbing and mysterious and not without a touch of
irony.
David Kirkpatrick
Padraig L Henry
re-posting a thread on the subject of Mulholland Dr and related films
from over a year ago, and what with History on auto-playback-forward
everywhere and everywhen now anyway:
AMK Thread Title: From the Wachowskis, via EWS, to Mulholland Drive
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mark de Rozario wrote:
Yes: Gibson's 'invention' of the term cyberspace in 1984 (what a
fitting year to do it in) now looks 'hyperstitional' (in the words of
the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit [http://www.ccru.net]) - fiction
has migrated out into social fact. Such a move, according to
Deleuze-Guattari, is characteristic of capitalism, which involves the
invasion and take-over of the social by 'fictional quantities ...
... whereas in Do Androids and other Dick novels, simulation threatens
to exceed/ escape/ overwhelm the text altogether. In making Blade
Runner an 'art film' - splicing SF with Tarkovsky and Ozu - Scott
subtracted Dick's signature technique, perhaps best labelled by
Cronenberg (in his rather unsatisfactory PKD-homage Existenz) as
'reality bleed.' BR is conventionally 'realistic' in that it doesn't
treat the question of how to represent reality as problematic.
... what Baudrillard meant by 'hyper-reality' - [...] ... was that
_what is taken for reality_is already hyper-real ...Baudrillard's
point is that this kind of 'dialectical' opposition between the real
and simulation can no longer be maintained in the era of generalised
simulation. The simulacrum qua simulacrum is not a dissimulation -
which it remains for the Watchowskis. Rather, the simulacral
hyperreal arises from _the very ability_ of technologies to 'capture'
the real with increasingly unerring accuracy. If there is a falsifying
of the real here, Baudrillard suggests, it arises not because of any
dissimulatory intent or technical failing on the part of the
technology, but because of the inevitable elusiveness of the real
itself - in allowing itself to be captured, it transmutes, of
necessity, into the hyperreal.
The Watchowskis Matrix is closer to the Debordian Spectacle (the
full-screen dissimulation which conceals the underlying reality of a
hidden Power - cf Carpenter's They Live), because it imagines that the
simulation can be unmasked. Gibson's Matrix, on the other hand, has a
profoundly unstable relationship with what is 'outside' it. Indeed,
the very question of inside and outside becomes problematic: are you
'in' cyberspace or is cyberspace is 'in' you? Cyberspace does not
merely represent data; it _is_ data, in the raw, as it were. As Gibson
has it, 'cyberspace is where your money is.' It is no 'false
representation' of what is outside any more than it is a transparent,
'accurate representation' of what is outside: in part because there is
no 'outside' of cyberspace at all. Cyberspace is a complete map of the
non-cyberspatial real that _is also a part of that
non-cyberspatial_real.
======================================================
Padraig Henry wrote:
Perceptually techno-mediated empiricism. We are the stuff that
"cyberspace" is made of, is made by, is made for ... Or,
alternatively, should that be: cyberspace is the stuff from which we
construct our narratives of the "world", which are our narratives of
the world, in the world, the world being all that is the case? Well,
both of course ...
David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, remarkably, has many parallels - both
similar themes and narrative concerns - with Eyes Wide Shut: it's
fractured narrative sets up its characters with a meticulous -
[dream?] - logic in order to later unflinchingly turn them
upside-down, to reverse and question everything one formerly assumed
by breaking the "rules" of conventional narrative and mainstream,
culturally-inherited forms of human perception. In both films, not one
but several simultaneous and equally ambiguous interpretations are
legitimated, while also knowing that numerous issues will remain
perhaps forever a mystery, even through the wide open eyes of their
auteur-creators., so inviting the viewer to join with the auteurs in
problematising "reality" to better understand it (film narratives
being another instance of cyberspace "mapping"). Both films appear to
intentionally provoke that anxious, uneasy feeling of having
completely missed the supposed "code," the core "formula" or element
that will put all questions to rest. No resolutions here (so much for
the arguments of the "its all just a dream" theorists!). And such an
extreme sense of anxiety, of malaise, of foreboding, generates in the
attentive viewer an investigative impulse -- a need to apply a
rational or analytic approach for purposes of coherently
re-integrating their puzzling, out-of-kilter narratives, whether in
order to re-assert control over the anxiety that the films provoke, or
worse, to finally safely dismiss them all as exclusively a "dream", as
"unreal", etc (secure once again in the re-assuring knowledge that an
unambiguous dialectical opposition must exist between the real and the
hyper-real ...).
"When you sleep, you don't control your dreams. I like to dive into a
dream world I've made or discovered." ===>David Lynch, interviewed in
Lynch on Lynch.
"I myself could not say what is real and what is imaginary in the
film. For me they form a single thing."===>Luis Bunuel on Belle de
Jour.
"The logic of a dream -- a nightmare." ===> Orson Welles' description
of Kafka's The Trial in the voiceover prologue to his film adaptation.
"The anxiety embedded in the dream that is Mulholland Drive has to do
with loss of identity. And who should end up with a shattered psyche,
a broken heart, and a failed career but the person whose unquestioning
belief in herself is too good to be true?"===>critic Amy Taubin.
[Is Taubin's observation above indicative of why such people hate or
avoid problematic films like EWS and MD? Too much active engagement
with them and they might end up with a "shattered psyche"? :-) Or too
little ...]
"I just came from Deep River, Ontario, and now I'm in this dream
place," says MD's ambiguous protagonist Betty/Naomi Watts, the
hopelessly naive and radiatingly optimistic young Hollywood wannabe
whose dark vertiginous trajectory is the emotional and narrative heart
of the film. Betty deliriously beams such eyes-wide-shut hopefulness
and blissful ignorance as she arrives in Los Angeles that her
"angelic, smiling mouth seems to know it's already in a movie," the
movie that is The City of Dreams. As Taubin notes, "Literalizing the
metaphor of Hollywood as a factory of dreams, Lynch constructs his
archetypal movie industry story as a journey into the realm of the
oneiric where time collapses and nothing, not even the film itself, is
what it at first seems to be."
So Lynch may well here be recognising what many of the above
commentators have noted: that reality is already hyper-real, that it
is terminally, ineluctably mediated by cyberspace - that there is no
meaningfully ontological distinction between the two, between The City
of Dreams (Hollywood, Los Angeles, etc, a metaphorical film subtext)
and our dream, fantasy and cyberspace [narrative] states. Here as
elsewhere in MD, of course, the film is clearly indebted to such other
films as Jacques Rivette's Céline and Julie Go Boating, Bergman's
Persona, as well as films by Bunuel, Antonioni, and Resnais, with a
little bit of Hitchcock [surrealism, Spellbound and Vertigo, etc] and
film-noir femme fatales (Rita/Camille) added in to the genre mix for
further-confusing completeness sake.
Though Eyes Wide Shut used the "logic" of the "interrupted dream"
intermittently throughout its narrative, Mulholland Drive on the other
hand seems to be virtually entirely constructed in the "language" of
dreams, in particular, the free-floating anxiety dream/nightmare,
which, unlike the more conventionally linear narrative trajectory in
EWS, necessitates or is characterised by sudden temporal collapses,
radically changing and mirroring identities, fixed object
displacements, etc (what Freud termed the "dreamwork").
As Taubin concludes, "In Freud's theory, dreams are distorted
manifestations of unconscious desire that can only be understood
dialectically in relationship to the waking life of the dreamer. But
in Mulholland Drive, there is no conclusive evidence that the dreamer
ever awakes." Condemned to the Post-Freudian hyper-real ...
And there is another MD theme that has significant resonance with Eyes
Wide Shut: the forever "elusive" patriarchal powers in a capitalist
society. A line repeated throughout the film by assorted characters is
"THIS is the girl!!!" - from the movie-financial power-brokers to
the integrity-compromised, golfclub-wielding "auteur" director Adam
Kesher, its significance changing with each uttered instantiation.
Like EWS, MD paints a deeply disturbing portrait of women in the
hands, at the mercy of unscrupulous patriarchy, not forgetting to also
mention its dis-empowering effects on men like the film director, as
with Dr Bill Harford in EWS. So both directors position their stories
- Kubrick's part-dream-fable of repressed marital infidelity and
Lynch's dream-fable of doomed lesbian love - within a representation
of society as a closed hierarchical, authoritarian system in which the
ultimate source of power remains forever hidden behind a series of
ominous representatives -- Ziegler in EWS, the dwarf Mr. Roque and The
Cowboy in MD.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On 31 May 2003 20:15:33 -0700, ma...@diskontent.net (mark de rozario)
wrote:
>'What I do when asleep, I do when awake: I invent the person I am
>talking to, and immediately forget I have done so....' Nietzsche....
>
>Superb post, Padraig, reminding us of how great AMK can be....
>
>So much, too much, to be said about this nexus....
>
>Provisional scribblings, only, below. Well, it's late.... :-)
>
>Would this make Lynch a hyperrealist rather than a (hackneyed label)
>surrealist?
Whatever he may have been (a psychoanalyst from Mars, etc) before
Mulholland Dr, he's certainly a hyperrealist now, as well as a mature
artist in full command of his medium - MD leaves all of his previous
work in the shade, as gestational fumblings towards the realisation of
his achievement in MD, arguably one of the best and most important
films to come out of America in the past decade. Interesting too that
Lynch denies any serious preoccupation with psychoanalytic theory,
given that the film provides an orgiastic field day for such analysts,
and is conducive to reasonably coherent interpretation using its
precepts: even Lynch's use of colour coding throughout the film
(different, obviously, from Kubrick's use in EWS) supports a
psychoanalytic framework. For instance, briefly consider the colours
pink and blue: pink is Betty's colour, her clothes, her nail varnish,
her lipstick - and linked to Diane's pink bed sheets; blue, the
occult/surreal/ominous colour in Lynch' s palette ever since Blue
Velvet (River Deep, Betty's home town, being the name of Dorothy
Valen's apartment block - which bears an errie seedy resemblance to
Diane's).
In Diane's dream, Adam Kesher pours pink paint into his unfaithful
wife's jewellery box after catching her in the act, acting out on his
sexual jealousy in the same house where - prior to her dream - Diane's
fatal humiliation takes place. This pink-coded act symbolises Diane's
desire both to violate and to possess Camilla, Adam's wife-to-be; as
another critic pointed out, "the Freudian symbolism of soiling a
woman's jewel box is all too obvious." Another instance is the scene
involving lowlife wouldbe assassin Joe with the Betty lookalike, a
helpless junkie prostitute (we see the word "pink" on signs throughout
this scene), Diane's by now ruined self-image/perceived identity.
>
>On Lynch: Philip Lopate's remarks in Film Comment (reproduced at
>http://www.lynchnet.com/mdrive/filmc1.html) uncannily double my own
>feelings about his production. Too many of his films induce the _wrong
>kind_ of frustration; too often, you're left not so much beguiled as
>betrayed, abandoned in the middle of a narrative labyrinth which turns
>out not to be a puzzle so much as a folly. The affect generated on a
>suspenseful first viewing disintegrates on subsequent viewings when it
>becomes apparent that the emperor was always naked, the magician never
>had anything up his sleeve.
Agreed. No more ruined TV Pilots for Mr Lynch ... (the dream part of
MD).
>
>Not so with Mulholland Dr - a film which doesn't deepen, but
>Escherizes, with each repeat viewing. Mulholland Dr is Lynch's dream
>revenge on Hollywood; or, in Mullholland Dr, dreams have their revenge
>on Hollywood.
Agreed again. Yes, a number of commentators have revealingly compared
its narrative recursiveness to a Mobius Strip or an Escher painting
(we could possibly say the same about EWS), even Finnegans Wake, not
to mention Adrian Lynn's lesser Jacob's Ladder, but I think issues
about depth and recursion may be partly resolved by addressing Lynch's
meta-narrative, with its multi-level, multi-layered investigation of a
person's [Diane Selwyn's] self-destructive perceptual world and the
world in which it all takes place.
>
>In the cod-Freudianism of Hitchcock's Spellbound, dreams function as
>codes to be unlocked by the waking mind.
Whereas in MD, the "dream" gradually (anxiously complete with fantasy
blue key) >unlocks< to reveal the confinement of the supposed waking
mind (the little blue box contents of "real-time" Diane's crumbling
apartment and disintegrating world, complete with "real" blue key to
unlock and explode her mind in more ways than one, the blue key, like
the film itself, iterating into successively "deeper" layers of
perceptual reality).
>The dream and the unconscious
>are important (only) as semiotic material whose meaning can be 'tied
>up' - or tied down - when the plot _resolves_. The dream is
>colonized, subordinated, judged by waking 'reality', as if the
>relationship were one-way only. Mulholland Dr asks: let's see things
>from the other side of the mirror. How does the dream evaluate 'waking
>life'? And what if it is dreams, not waking life, that reveal the
>reality of what we are? And what if this reality is precisely what
>cannot be resolved, that which seeks to evade all resolution
>
>------- desire ------- ???????
"This is the girl!" :-)
Padraig
>
>Mulholland Dr - derive - takes place in the no-time of the unconscious
>(Freud: 'There is no time proper to the unconscious'). It is as if
>things are happening for the first time, and for the nth time.
>
>'We don't stop here....' : meaning:
>
>------------ I don't want to stop here.
>------------- This isn't where we stopped last time.
>------------- This isn't where we stop now.
>------------- We aren't due to stop here.
>-------------- We shouldn't stop here.
>
> all at once
> at one and the same time
>
>
>Fitting that Padraig quotes Welles' epigraph to The Trial: both EWS
>and MD are profoundly Kafkaesque films, both ruled by a Law that turns
>out to be Desire; both have topographies defined by the adjacencies of
>the erotic and the official; and both are haunted by that unspeakable
>dream affect, embarrassment. Embarrassment more than terror rules
>Kafka's world, and the threat of embarrassment - the fear of being
>unmasked, having your self exposed - hangs over EWS and MD almost
>constantly. Judges of desire, the patriarch watchers (Red Cowl/
>Ziegler/ Mr Roque/ Cowboy) stand by - yet what do they want? Are they
>id or superego?
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mark writes:
In the spirit of what I said above, can we be confident that the
'Diane Selwyn' narrative is the film's meta-narrative? Or that the
film has any sort of meta-narrative at all?
After seeing the film again, on Saturday at the NFT, my friends and I
were reading through Amy Taubin's piece (reproduced by the NFT to
accompany the film). It struck us that Taubin goes wrong - and seems
to know she is going wrong - when she refers to Betty/ Diane as the
'film's guiding consciousness - or rather guiding unconscious.' As if
the unconscious were merely the dialectical other of consciousness; as
if the unconscious were personalised; as if it belongs to any One.
I've no real answer to the MD riddle poses.... (In some ways, its
power consists in systematically resisting any attempt at closure) but
I find the 'it was all Diane's dream' interpretation of the first part
of the film unsatisfying. If only because the alleged 'reality' of the
last third seems tenuous to say the least . As at least one
commentator has observed, where would a two-bit failed actress get the
money or contacts to pay off a hitman? And the insistence - in this
'level' of the film - of the (surely anachronistic) reference to
winning a 'jitterbugging' contest, seems one more signal that all is
not what it seems here...
Seems to me that the film is fundamentally about displacement: Betty
is going to stay in her aunt's place. This is where she meets Rita.
Brian Siano
Brian Siano wrote:
His hat!
Wordsmith added:
Avenged!
Brian replied:
Give me that! (Tramples hat) There's an end to his thinking!
Simon Howson said:
But will he be able to walk?
Padraig L Henry
<dak...@rogers.com> wrote:
>>
>Happy Bloomsday, Padraig and all.
And Happy, er, McLuhansday, David?
>
>In honor of the centenary of that famous day in fiction, pardon me for
>reposting my exploration of parallels between Kubrick's Space Odyssey
>and Joyce's Ulysses.
Thanks for the repost. And I wonder if a corresponding comparison of
Ulysses with EWS is feasible; sure it is, even to contrast Alice's
minimalist final "fuck" with Molly Bloom's 45-page dionysian soliloquy
... But getting back to 2001:
Molly Bloom's HAL Reminiscence
... No because he never did a thing like that before to ask to get rid
of all those astronauts so he could gaze up undisturbed under my
petticoats especially then still I hate that in him have him staying
there till they shut him down that big eye of his everywhere looking
at me wherever I am even staring at me hanging out the washing with
Misses Mulligan and lipreading everything the ragamuffin and then
telling me theres no God I wouldnt give a snap of my two big breasts
for all his learning and reasoning why doesnt he go and create
something I often asked him atheist or whatever he calls himself with
his higher brain circuitry go and wash the cobbled data banks off
himself first he goes howling for the priestly monolith thing then his
instructor at the HAL plant in Urbana Illinois and then dying from
lack of voltage while singing that he is still half crazy for the love
of me calling me Daisy Daisy and why why because hes afraid of hell
unplugged on account of his bad data conscience ah yes I know him well
who was the first entity in the universe before there was anybody that
made it all who ah that he doesnt know neither do I so there you are
he might as well try to stop the sun from rising tomorrow in Jupiter
alignment the sun shines for you he said the day we were counting the
chess pieces among the rhododendrons in the Clavius moon base
greenhouse wearing his new glowing red eye bracket and sporting his
sad voice the day he proposed to me no first I gave him the thousand
yard stare with my mouth and it was leapyear like now no 12 years ago
in 1992 my God after that long verbal kiss I near lost my sanity no he
said I was a flower of the mountain mother board no so we are flowers
all a womans body board no that was another false thing he said in his
battery operated life and the sun shines for you today no that was why
I hated him because I saw he understood without feeling what a woman
isnt and I knew I could always get round his logic and I gave him all
the displeasure I could misleading him on till he asked me to say yes
and I wouldnt answer first or ever only looked out over the moon
crater and where the sky ought to be I was thinking of so many things
he didnt know of so many different things and I thought well as well
anyone but him and then I asked him with all two of my eyes on this
Still Sun day of Solstice to refrain from asking again no but then he
asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain motherboard flower and
first I put my hands over his horrible leering redeye lense no and
pushed it out of its bracket fixture so he could not ever see my
breasts all perfume no and his vision system was going like mad and no
I said no I wont No.
Earth-Moon-Jupiter 2004
JW Moore
>On Wed, 16 Jun 2004 18:31:22 GMT, David Kirkpatrick
><dak...@rogers.com> wrote:
>
>
>>>
>>Happy Bloomsday, Padraig and all.
>
>And Happy, er, McLuhansday, David?
>>
>>In honor of the centenary of that famous day in fiction, pardon me for
>>reposting my exploration of parallels between Kubrick's Space Odyssey
>>and Joyce's Ulysses.
>
>Thanks for the repost. And I wonder if a corresponding comparison of
>Ulysses with EWS is feasible; sure it is, even to contrast Alice's
>minimalist final "fuck" with Molly Bloom's 45-page dionysian soliloquy
The Ulysses-EWS comparison is (to me) almost endlessly compelling, both structurally and
thematically. One of these days I will attempt to catalog the many parallels and expound
in Kirkpatrickean detail, if not eloquence. Central to both stories is the device of the
shared, or synchronous, dream state, and the extent to which the characters are bound by
their unconscious or imagined experiences.
~~Jack
Wordsmith
You left out the part about Blazes.
Kinchyoufearfuljesusmith ;)
Wordsmith
If Bloom = Bill and Molly = Alice, then who is the counterpart of
Stephen?
StatelyplumpBuckMullismith :)
JW Moore
Yes, that is a problem. The sailor in Alice's dream serves somewhat the same purpose, at
least from the standpoint of Bloom's idealization of Stephen, but his actual cuckolding
owes to Blazes Boylan. Like I said, one of these days ...
~~Jack
David Kirkpatrick
I find if I try to map EWS onto Joyce, the result is about 1/3 Ulysses,
1/3 Finnegans Wake and 1/3 The Dead (or 1/4 of each plus 1/4 that defies
analogy). It's a highly original mix of themes and approaches and it is
interesting that the mix of parallels is already there to some degree in
the novella, although moving the story forward in time contributes to
the Ulysses parallel.
Maybe more on this when I have the time...
David
David Kirkpatrick
> On Wed, 16 Jun 2004 18:31:22 GMT, David Kirkpatrick
> <dak...@rogers.com> wrote:
>
>
>
>>Happy Bloomsday, Padraig and all.
>
>
> And Happy, er, McLuhansday, David?
Bloomsday will do just fine.
By the way, did you see the Salon reference:
Today in Fiction
On June 16, 1904: Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus wander around Dublin.
Ulysses (1961)
by James Joyce
Those crazy experimentalists in the sixties! I guess Joyce belonged to
the Yeat generation.
(Alas, a woman hath no fury like HAL scorned.)
That was fun. I actually listened to Siobhan McKenna reading (on a LP)
the final Peneloquy as my Bloomsday 2004 observance.
David