BECOMING VISIONARY Brian De Palmas Cinematic Education of the Senses Eyal Peretz STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS STANFORD, CALIFORNIA Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2008 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Peretz, Eyal, 1968- Becoming visionary : Brian De Palmas cinematic education of the senses / Eyal Peretz. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-I3: 978-0-8047-5684-6 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-8047-5685-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. De Palma, Brian—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PN1998.3.D4P47 2008 791.43'0233092~dc22 2007019354 To my teachers—Shoshana, Stanley, and had Contents Foreword: On EyalPeretz's Becoming Visionary by Stanley Cavell xi Introduction: The Realm of the Senses and the Vision of the Beyond—Toward a New Thinking of the Image i 1. Carrie—Film and the Wounding of Representation 23 2. Between Paranoia and Passion— Questioning the Frame and the Screen in The Fury 47 3. Film and the Memory of the Outside: Or, Cinema as Technology, Cinema as Pornography, Cinema as Scream—Blow. Out 83 Coda: For a New Enlightenment: Femme Fatale, A Paradoxical Happy Ending; or, The Idea of a Future 157 Notes Index 165 221 ii 8 Chapter 3 I on the other hand, the apparatus participates, and most powerfully, in the pornographic desire to trap the unreflected and to close the haunting by technological means, to capture the ghost in the machine. The technological apparatus functions here in another way as a compensatory device for the horror discovered in the opening scene, and this within the order of the narrative, by means of effecting a paranoid suturing of the type discussed in the previous chapter. If in the opening segment, we are exposed to a haunting we want to exorcise, then in this segment, we immediately receive a narrative answer to our horror, for the blank holes that addressed us are now paranoically sutured and explained away through our exposure to a machinery operating behind the scenes. If there is something behind the scenes, a figure of a master pulling the strings and a machine that can explain the fragmentation, then our anxieties are resolved; there is an answer to our haunting. Let us now continue to examine Terry's trajectory, the trajectory of he who is both our emissary, the double in charge of getting us that which we don't know that we want, and our stand-in, the one who activates, within the world of the movie, a trajectory in many ways parallel to our own, a trajectory of those discovering at their heart a blank haunting. Splitting the Screen Following the opening scene, in which the director dispatches Terry to find a good scream, as well as to record some other sound effects, we see Terry in his sound lab, busy editing. Leaving his editing desk, where he is working standing up, for a short break, Terry goes to another part of the room (geometrically occupying precisely another half of the screen, closer to the viewers), where he sits down for a moment as if fatigued, turns on a TV set, takes a smoke, and watches the evening news, the subject of which happens to be the upcoming presidential election. A certain governor is so popular that he seems likely to beat the president. Sitting as he does watching the TV, the film screen is no longer divided into two equal halves but is now mainly occupied by the part of the room dominated by the TV, which seems to draw Terry's full attention. However, in a small space on the left Film and the Memory of the Outside 119 hand of the screen, the editing area is still visible, as if Terry, while trying to focus his attention on one thing, is nevertheless exposed to another activity, which, though occupying only a peripheral status at the moment, is nevertheless constantly present.64 The president's campaign manager is interviewed and is asked about the likelihood of the president's defeat. He mentions the improvements the president is about to introduce and feels assured of a quick economic recovery, which gives him the confidence in the president's reelection. As he watches the interview, Terry suddenly hears the beeping sound of his editing machines from the other side of the room, only a small section of which is still shown, indicating that he needs to get back to work. As he looks into the space off screen, having to change the center of his focus and lose sight of the TV, he heats the voice of the campaign manager, whom he no longer sees: "A lot can happen between now and then" (that is, Election Day). As Terry gets back to work, the screen is again symmetrically divided, and he is occupying the left half of the screen while the right half shows the TV as the news continues. As the news anchorman speculates that the governor will soon announce his candidacy and "throw his hat into the ring"-— using a signifier with an auditory (and romantic) dimension—the screen is split in two, and following this split, the anchorman immediately addresses a question to, and opens a dialogue with, an anchorwoman, who wasn't seen before and with whom he now shares (half of) the screen. The screen itself, following the split, is occupied henceforth by two half screens sepa-tated by a small dark gap between them, the one following Terry's actions, the other occupied with the news report. The left half screen shows Terry operating the tape recording machine and cataloguing various sounds— footsteps, glass, shot, body fall—while the right half screen shows a report of the governor's ball. The main interpretative problem of the scene, what mainly calls for our attention, is the problem of the logic dictating the device of splitting the screen, first in the context of this scene, but also more generally. What is it that calls for this device, used so frequently in De Palma's films, constituting one of his paradigmatic cinematic gestures,65 a gesture marking his most succinct demonstration of the birth of the cinematic image, his most elegant presentation of the structure of human subjectivity, and standing perhaps, in its simple and precise economy, for everything he is trying to 120 Chapter^ Film and the Memory of the Outside 121 do in cinema?66 Starting with a somewhat formal analysis of this device, we can say that it basically involves three moments: (1) an act or event of splitting, a fragmentation or breaking, of the whole image; (2) the simultaneous and autonomous existence of two framed surfaces between which there is a (practically invisible) gap, thus a breaking of the screen constitutes a complete single frame; and yet (3) a breaking in two that nevertheless maintains an essential tension with, perhaps under the domination of, and as an inescapable desire for, the one screen (or more precisely for the unification of the screen) shared by the two frames.67 Going slighdy beyond this formal analysis, but remaining for the moment focused on structure, and trying to inquire into the conceptual and logical significance of the split screen for our context, we may ask: Is there a more remarkable cinematic device for introducing, quite "literally," the outside into the inside? Probably not. For what is the split introduced into the frame, into the heart of the cinematic image, if not the cutting separation that usually takes place between successive images or frames, in an edit for example, and that is thus understood as external to each of the frames, limiting them but not affecting their interiors? We may thus view the split, to begin with, as an interior or internal edit/limit, and it marks that which usually separates one frame from the next as operating at the heart of the frame and separating now the framed image from itself rather than from simply another frame.68 Through the blank gap traced by the split in its interior, the framed image becomes other than itself, and the split thus transforms the question of the Other to the frame to become the very question of the frames relation to itself, for the frame now has to relate to itself through its alienation, its becoming other, and does so through the mediation of this outside that intervenes in it, this Other to the frame that becomes part of it, that is folded into its heart, marking a hole in it. The split is thus neither exactly internal to (in the sense of part of) the cinematic frame, nor exactly external (in the sense of separate from) but is an external interior, or what we called a haunting. The split-interior edit is the haunting of the image by the absolute outside, making it differ from itself and relate to itself. This interior edit, which effects a relating of the frame to itself through the mediation of an Other by which it is haunted, is a non- (fully) reflective relation of the self (the frame) to itself and is equivalent, from the point of view of our discussion of the mirror, to a self relating to itself without eliminating the haunting phantom that is the mirror's condition, that is, relat- ing to itself obliquely, by passing through the Other or phantom of which it becomes a slice, and on which it becomes a perspective. The split screen thus resembles a mirrored reflection with the blank gap of the split marking the trace of the nonreflective haunting of the Other, and the frame / self becomes a self-relation through an Other, which incorporates the Other as an excess it cannot completely internalize and that cannot be reflected, but nevertheless constitutes the possibility of its inferiority and self-relation or reflection. Thus, if we consider the frame as standing for an image, or a model, of subjectivity, we might say that the split screen is the cinematic equivalent to Arthur Rimbaud's famous formula " T is an other." Through this haunting traced by the split at its heart, the frame thus discovers an excessive, absolute outside through which it has to pass in order to relate to itself and thus become itself ("become who you are"), that is, to become a frame, a fragmentary perspective on an Other, and not a totality or a whole.69 But this discovery of its own being as a frame exposed to an Other that exceeds it, this discovery of its split from itself, involves a simultaneous discovery—that there is and must by definition be more than one frame, more than one perspective. There are at least two frames or perspectives. The moment the frame relates to itself as an Other is thus also the moment that it must relate to another frame, and the split screen is therefore both a self-relation of the frame as well as of the simultaneity of two distinct frames. But because there are at least two fragments or perspectives, meaning two perspectives on an Other, it follows that the basic unit of articulation (in cinematic and in general terms), the basic unit defining the split screen involves three terms—two frames and an Other between them that exceeds them both, and makes them relate to themselves and to each other through it. By the term basic unit of articulation, I mean the originary structure of that movement we call the movement of sense or meaning. It is shown by the split screen to be a movement between at least two simultaneous fragments that transmit to each other their own fragmentarity, that is, their own exposure to an Other that exceeds them, which signifies their incompleteness, and which they share in not having (as part of them). Transmitting to each other their incompleteness, they also transmit a certain experience of loss, a loss of wholeness (which never existed but is projected backward as having been70), and they look to each other for a solution to this loss revealed by their fragmentary nature, trying to exorcise the phantom of the Other that constitutes each of them, and 122 Chapter 3 make the other (the second fragment) cover up their originary hole, close the split in the screen, thus completing them and establishing them as a unity, or a totality with no outside. Their discovery of their own nature as a fragment/frame thus immediately produces the illusion that they are what we called the first type of frame, standing in telation to a preexisting totality of which they are a glimpse and which can be reconstituted through another frame/fragment with which they will unite to form a whole. The split screen as the basic unit of articulation thus corresponds to the original Greek concept of the sign, the Symbolon, or symbol, that object broken in two parts whose desire it is to reunite, and, we might add, not realizing that the two broken parts are broken parts with no unity preceding them.71 We might therefore say that the activity of splitting the screen is already on its own a full cinematic statement and can be viewed as the minimal event of a complete film, for it is the discovery of the frame as frame, thus as a fragment relating to itself through a haunting Other, having essentially as well a second frame in relation to which it constitutes a signifying event, which always leaves an excess of the abyssal Other, the absolute outside by which the viewers are addressed and haunted beyond theit identification with any single frame. All these aspects of the split screen constituting, we might say, its structural mattix are always activated in the many split screens in De Palma's films, but each time this basic structure is illuminated in relation to a different set of conceptual and thematic concerns. Let us examine, then, the set of more specific issues raised by the split screen in the sound lab scene we are discussing, both from Terry's point of view as well as that of the viewers. The event of splitting in this scene involves four types: It is a splitting of attention, of the center of focus, Terry's as well as the viewers', because the screen is split precisely when Terry's attention is divided between the news report and his editing work; it is a splitting between the senses, between hearing and seeing, because the screen is split between what Terry sees and what he hears; it is a splitting (operating less importantly in this scene, but very importantly in the film in general) between the sexes, because the split is related to the moment when the single voice of the male reporter dominating the news suddenly loses its mastery and has to relate to another voice, that of the female reporter; and finally it is a split in meaning, or in the sense, of the situation, because the situation will be dominated by two Film and the Memory of the Outside 123 centers of meaning that will vie for centrality, the sound editing on which Terry is working and the news report. The centers of focus, the centers of meaning and interpretation, the senses, and the sexes thus all split and fragment simultaneously in this virtuosic use of the split screen, revealing between them an Other, an internal outside traced in the blank gap of the split itself. Let us start with the question of attention. Most immediately, the split in this scene—this enigmatic intrusion of a disturbing dimension of invisibility, of the nonsensical nothing of a cut, into the previously unified visual field—occurs as a disturbance that splits Terry's (and our) attention, divided as it is henceforth between the television news he continues to hear but no longer sees and the editing of sounds he is working on (which are themselves split because they are sounds with titles written on the film material), a division of attention that becomes a division into two centers of focus, two units, as well as a division between what Tetry sees and what he hears. But what does it mean to say that the attention is split, and why does it have to do with the device of splitting the screen into two simultaneous frames?72 According to the main conceptual opposition dominating this chapter, the opposition between the two types of frame, one relating to a hierarchical logic of continuity and totality, the other to a fragmentary and creative logic of incompleteness, we can say that there are also two concepts of attention. The first, what we might call the metaphysical notion of attention, is related to the first conception of the frame. According to this conception, attention implies a stabilizing order of existence, a unifying rhythm (time to work and time to play, and so forth), a hierarchical distribution between a center of focus and expanding peripheries, as well as a framing mechanism of interpretation. That is, in paying attention, one has to isolate from a certain originary experience of multiplicity that vies for our attention a center of focus understood to be the most significant aspect of a certain situation, or of the whole world, of existence, a center that then hierarchically dominates all the other components of a situation that have to be understood in relation to it and are distributed according to their contribution to its prominence, that is, to its being able to maintain a position of centrality.73 As such, this center becomes a center of meaning and sense, a center in relation to which everything else is oriented and in telation to which everything receives its significance, its place in a unified and hierarchically ordered whole. This center is essentially 124 Chapter^ Film and the Memory of the Outside 125 related to the concept of the frame in that its powers of centralizing, of establishing a hierarchy in an ordered totality, depend on two powers held by the frame, both relating to the frame as that which holds the power to order the division between inside and outside. Based on this power, the frame74 embodies first the decision about what fits inside a situation (and the center uses this power to have inside only that which can enhance the centers prominence) and what remains outside (that which disturbs the center and does not fit with its powers, henceforth counted as insignificant or nonexistent).75 Based on its power to create an inside and an irrelevant outside the frame also becomes a hierarchizing power marking the order of existence based on the distance from the center of the frame, marking a gradual decrease of power the more one is distanced from the center and brought closer to the peripheries, where one approaches being relegated to the complete insignificance of the (relative) outside.76 But what happens when more than one center claims our attention, more than one focus, and thus more than one frame, for the "same" situation and at the "same" time? In other words, what happens when there is more than one frame for the "same" screen? An experience sets in of that which is not of the order of the frame and that is in excess of its powets, and thus it is discovered that the frame, being haunted by an Other external-internal to it rather than completely possessing the power of decision upon an irrelevant outside from the position of an essential inside, involves an essential fragmentation, a split, as we saw, both from itself and from other fragments with which it cannot form a whole. This fragmentation also signifies that the frame/ screen/time was never the "same," was never "one," but, as we saw, was from the beginning different from itself, or Other from itself. This discovery of the frame's Other and thus of an essential, nonorganic multiplicity also signifies the loss of the thought of the center and of metaphysical attention because it means that the frames cannot be unified again, haunted as they are by the Other discovered in the split that is in excess of them and cannot be covered over.77 Attention will henceforth not be directed toward the location of a center dominating a given totality but the slicing of a perspective that, by definition, must always relate to other perspectives, other centers of attention challenging each other as a perspective on the Other and unable to be reunited around a single center. This loss of metaphysical attention and center occurring in the splitting of the screen introduces an anxiety: the horror of disorientation and of a disintegration of a certain experience of reality, the collapse of the experience of reality as it was classically defined as that which has, in principle, only one center, and is thus unified, or constitutes a unity of direction and meaning, be it even teleologically defined, in relation to a regulative idea, or a vanishing point in the future. In short, this loss implies the collapse of what has been termed the metaphysics of representation, which culminated with the birth of the Cartesian subject (the center) of representation, the one presupposed in advance in any decision about meaning and in relation to which, as a dependency on its powers, every event has to be thought.78 The splitting of the screen thus implies the pain of disintegration of this imperative for unity; a pain more forcefully felt standing as it does constantly under the imperative of, and the desire for, the one-sczeen-one-frame equation, thus the desire to constantly integrate again that which has split.79 Terry, and we the viewers, are caught, through this act of splitting, not by any of the separate frames but rather, precisely by their disjunction, that is, by the blank and invisible gaping wound between the frames that signifies a "hole" (or a scarred trace of the haunting Other) in each of the frames' completeness (that is, in their ability to dictate or announce a whole order), thus signifies their fragmentarity, their exposure to, their secret and bleeding communication with, each other. Put another way, we are caught in this (invisible, non-) place, the border, where the impossible demand of translation between the frames—of bringing to each what the other says and means, that is usually reduced to the effort of relating them both to a single order of meaning, thus erasing the split and restoring the single frame/ screen—is heard.80 This gap, then, addresses Terry as well as the viewers, implicates them in the disintegration of their identity (identity being undetstood both as a demand for a unity and the preexistence of a center in relation to which everything that arrives receives its meaning), and exposes them, makes them passive to, a dimension of the Other as an excess of sense (in all senses of the term), implied by the blank gap.81 The Excess of Sense What is the significance here of the concept of excess, and what is its relation to the question of sense? Excess in this context should not be understood as a numerical or quantitative category but, rather, as a main 126 Chapter^ Film and the Memory of the Outside 127 category of what we are trying to elaborate as "new thinking," this thinking of an immanent outside. Excess designates, in the context of this thinking, the very being of the outside in the inside as a haunting it cannot contain (for the outside is a no-thing and therefore cannot be contained), which keeps it open, preventing it from closing in upon itself, and in relation to which it is passive; excess therefore, as we saw, immediately implies a thinking of fragments with no whole where each fragment both essentially differs from itself and is more and other than itself, in excess of itself, an internal difference that simultaneously implies a thinking of "more-than-oneness" or of an essential multiplicity of fragments. This thinking of excess immediately implies as well a new thinking of sense. If the senses were traditionally understood according to the metaphysical division of an inside world of the senses and a non-sensual, intelligible outside from which the world of the senses received its significance and in relation to which it was a pale copy, then in the new, fragmentary thinking of excess where the outside is introduced inro the inside as a non-substantial haunting, we discover that we need to consider the senses in a completely different way. If the logic of excess, of the introduction of the outside into the inside, is to apply to the senses, this has to mean, we realize, two things: First, it means that each sense is its own difference from itself, in excess of itself, because of its haunting by the internal-external Other, and second, it means there are essentially, that there have to be, several senses or fragments. That is, if there is to be sense at all when the outside is introduced into the inside, into what used to be called the world of the senses, then there has to be an essential multiplicity of senses or fragments. It cannot make sense to talk about a unique sense, one sense encompassing all, once the outside is introduced into the inside. Here too an essential shift is introduced into the second significance of the term sense, that is, sense as meaning. For what is metaphysical meaning if not the attempt to reunite the multiplicity announced by the world of the senses under a single, non-sensual center? But once this centet is lost because of the new discovery of an essential fragmentarity implied in the thought of the immanent outside, meaning itself cannot function as it did metaphysically, that is, as a power of oneness (the metaphysical outside) that dominates and gives justification for the (non-essential) plurality of the inside. Meaning now ceases to be this domination of the many by the one and becomes the bleeding communication happening in between the essential multiplicity of fragments/senses that cannot be unified. Meaning does not justify or give meaning to the senses but is the non-sensual event happening in between them as a communication of their fragmentariness to each other, a communication of their hauntedness, and it is itself never one, but also essentially multiple, always different, in excess of itself.82 This logic of the excess of sense is brilliantly worked out in the split screen we are discussing, and I would like to briefly show how its two main aspects, of the senses and of meaning, operate in this scene. Let us start with the question of meaning. The excess of sense as meaning activated by the split screen implies that it is constitutively impossible to assign a meaning to the situation by which we are confronted—meaning being understood as a unifying identity or identification that gives every element in the situation a justification, a place in an ordered whole—an impossibility first experienced as the competition among several centers, or frames, of interpretation for the domination of the meaning of the situation. Thus, in our scene, the question is which frame will dominate the screens meaning: Will it be the news report about the presidential race, or will it be the sound editing process? Deciding upon a dominant frame would mean that the two activities would stand in a comptehensible relation to each other, in which one would explain and justify the other. Is the sound editing part of a vast political story or is the political story an element in a vast experiment of sound editing? This is one of the constitutive tensions dominating Blow Out. Making this decision will mean, precisely, that the painful blank gap will be closed, covered over so as to give the screen back its unity, covering it over with a single frame, the (dream of the) frame of all frames, which is therefore no frame at all. This desire—to close the gap and to unify the frame/screen by deciding that one of its two frames is dominant and gives justification to the other—allows us to say that one possible reading of Blow Out's narrative following the scene we are discussing—a scene that ends, precisely, with the dissolution of the split screen and a resumption of the storyline in which Terry goes to the bridge where he will record the accident—is as a phantasmic construction of a coherent narrative (narrative being a unifying operation which gives events a causal order in a whole) that will make the two frames come together.83 That is, Terry's ensuing adventure can be seen as his paranoid or phantasmic84 attempt to cohere the split—between 128 Chapter 3 the TV news and the sound editing, between eye and eat, and more profoundly, he seeks to eliminate the very horror of separation discovered in this split—to make the political story cohere with the sounds of bodies falling, wind blowing, and so on.85 I must now stress, by way of repeating some of our previous points, two things in relation to this notion of excess discovered through the vying with each other of several interpretative frames for the "same" situation. And both these points have to do with the nonquantitative nature of the notion of excess: First, excess does not have to do simply with the fact that there is a plurality of meanings or frames, a plurality of ways to unify (the operation of the metaphysical concept of meaning) a situation but, rather, with an essential multiplicity of fragments/frames, discovered as an essential failure of meaning understood as unification, and its transformation into that which communicates in between fragments that cannot form a whole. A second point, implied by the demands of the first, is that the relations between the multiplicity of frames of interpretation cannot be grasped as a numerical accumulation, as if saying, this frame is valid, and this frame is valid as well, and so forth. Trying to achieve this conciliatory stance of seeing together many interpretations and points of view as equally valid and even as simply enriching, through numerical variety, the accumulated meaning of a situation or of a work, would mean following again the dream of the frame of all frames, a richer, plural frame. It would mean that there is a sense of talking about the same situation to which all these various frames refer, a situation as if external to them, existing on its own. Rather, the feeling of excess here has to do with the experience of a constitutive and irreducible heterogeneity and multiplicity of the various frames/fragments/perspectives on the excessive Other. It is the discovery of an essential, unbridgeable, and unconciliatory difference between an irreducible multiplicity of positions exposed to, that is contested by (and inevitably so because having another center means, by definition, being exposed to that which undermines the center's unifying authority) each other, and the threat of annihilation of one center/frame/point of view by another, discovered through the exposure to the gap, experienced as address in between the frames. The second main dimension of the excess of sense in our split screen scene in the sound lab, as I mentioned, has to do with the raising of the question of the senses, with the way in which the splitting into Film and the Memory of the Outside 129 two frames involves a disjunction between two senses, the sense of sight and that of sound. The logic of an originary splitting or multiplicity of meanings / frames / points of view discovered in the blank gap in between the frames turns out at the same time to involve, this scene seems to suggest, an essential demand to think the question of the senses under the problematics of a no less originary splitting between them (hearing and seeing, in our case). It is as if the very notion of a bodily sense is truly discovered for the first time once the metaphysical thought of the center collapses and the logic of a nonorganic fragmentation or essential multiplicity of frames implied by the introduction of the concept of an immanent outside comes to the fore. It would now seem that each of the senses is to be thought of as constituting a particular framing or perspective that is not simply complemented by the other senses participating, but is actually contested by them. It is as if the existence of each additional sense, such as hearing in addition to seeing the situation, contests the other sense's claim to give us the whole, unified picture, and thus the accumulation of senses in the "same" situation does not (simply) give us a fuller experience of it, but, strangely, introduces a hole at its heart, indicating to us that there is no whole picture, and that a situation is the communication between fragments that cannot form a whole. Each additional sense incompletes the others, we might say, destroys the illusion of unity that each wants to give, rathet than completes them into a fuller picture.86 But it is precisely this quality of the senses that opens them up to each other (because they are exposed to each other, discover something that does not originate in them); that is, that makes them communicate with each other, and teach each other, for communication can occur only between a multiplicity in between which an essential, and irreducible, contestation is discovered. If the eye listens, as Paul Claudel famously said, it is not because the two senses somehow complement each other but, rather, because the disjunction from the ear signals a hole in the eye, destroying its autonomy, a hole that makes the eye turn to the ear, or touch the ear, in the vocabulary I used in my discussion of The FuryF In between the senses, a blank gap opens,88 a gap that means, to repeat what I argued earlier, both that each sense is different from itself, contains a haunting limiting it from the inside,89 and that, in an essential mannet, thete has to be more than one sense for there to be sense at all90— because the demand of sense, the demand of a thought of excess beyond 130 Chapter 3 Film and the Memory of the Outside 131 the unifying center, seems to indicate that sense never be complete, that it never be one, and this is only possible, logically, if there is an briginary dimension comprising a multiplicity of points of view on the "same" situation contesting each other.91 Therefore we can say that what De Palma shows us in a scene such as this one, a scene of the splitting of the screen, is that if cinema, the art of film, is the art that so essentially has to be thought in relation to the old dream of the total work of art, a work bringing together, unifying all the various arts and senses into one work, then film arrives not as the fulfillment of this dream but as its most devastating critique. The various arts— and senses—come together in film not to achieve one complete work but to expose the irreducible and essential tension among the arts, the essential and irreducible contestation of one art or sense by another, as well as to bring about their touching communication with each other over an abyss.92 The Bridge and the Abyss Jack Terry, the man in charge of bringing the scream that will fit the film-within-the-film, is thus a man, as this scene elucidates, caught in the split (between the senses, the sexes, and frames of interpretation), exposed to the horror opening in between fragments. He is also the man desiring the closure of this horror and the covering over, the bridging of, the abyss of the split. Terry's next scene, the scene on the bridge where he goes to record the wind and ends up witnessing an accident, expands the thematic and conceptual problematic opened in the sound lab scene, but also con-stitutes its repetition. Immediately following Terry's exit from the sound lab, the next scene opens with a view of a forest at night; it is almost completely dark and strong winds are blowing. Into this natural environment, free from human traces (with the possible exception of some flickering electric lights in the background, although it isn't clear whether there are indeed lights there), a strange, metallic, elongated object, unrecognized and out of focus, enters from the bottom of the screen. Slowly penetrating the "virginal" natural setting (the only such setting in Blow Out and one of very few in De Palmas work) from outside the frame, in a gesture echoing the famous pen- etration of the spaceship into the frame in Kubrick's 2001, this metallic and elongated object, which finally traverses the whole screen and comes into focus, appears to be a microphone. After a brief moment, the microphone exits the screen, leaving it completely dark for a few seconds until the next human intervention. Slowly entering from the bottom right of the screen, a human face appears, at first unrecognizable and slowly, and then because of the eyes that enter the frame we start seeing Terry, whose face finally occupies most of the screen. As the face turns a bit, we notice the ears covered with headphones. Looking a bit to the left and right, Terry lowers his head, and as the camera moves down, we see his hand laid over a large recording machine now occupying most of the screen. A first cut, from the close-up of the recorder to a medium shot of Terry standing with one hand in the air holding the microphone (which we don't see). He looks up and then, in a series of three more violent and noticeable editing cuts, each giving us a long shot of Terry from vantage points of greater distance whose justification isn't clear (for we don't know who is looking, but wc know that he is exposed to some view), we see a tinier and tinier Terry (and the camera watches him from behind, not from the side of his face) standing on a bridge with his recording machine and microphone—a fragile human exposed to a menacing gaze standing on a bridge and recording. Yet when we see Terry's face again, occupied as he is in recording, manipulating the microphone that again occupies much of the screen, he seems to be secure, master of his environment, standing firmly on the bridge and surveying the scene like an owner, with the ruling scepter that is his microphone, the property at his disposal. Suddenly we hear voices (articulating recognizable words) whose source is unseen: a couple (a man and woman) are talking. In a repeated series of cuts, now four of them, we once again are placed farther and farther away from Terry, whose fragility seems to grow. In the first two cuts, we see Terry without seeing the source of the voices. In the next two cuts, we do see the source of the voices, the last cut bringing us to a close-up of the couple, as the woman (repeating the gesture of the woman in the opening scene complaining about somebody out there) notices Terry looking at them and is troubled while the man calms her down, saying, "Who cares." As if finally mastering the source of the voice, visually conveyed by the close-up we have of the couple, the film cuts back to Terry, smiling condescendingly, once more the master, superior again to his environment, looking amused at the helpless 202 Notes to Chapter3 6z. This quality of the emissary—the one responsible for giving us that which we don't know that we want—dictates a logic governing many of De Palma's movies (most fully developed perhaps in his Raising Cain), the logic of the double, a logic which in Blow Out dictates, beyond the viewers relationship to Travolta's character, a relationship we will examine later, the one between Jack Terry and the murderer. That is, the double in De Palma's films (from his Sisters—a film about Siamese twins—onward) is always thought of as that figure occupying, or standing in for, this horrifying, blank non-place that opens at the heatt of the de-framed and haunted subject, and occupies it as the phantasmic figute that can both get for the subject that which he or she unknowingly wants, do it in a way that the figute will not be willing to acknowledge as her or his own, because of the destruction it always demands, and also function as a rival for the desired objecr, that is, the one who, when they get the object, possesses ptecisely what the un-acknowledging subject desites most of all. And the paradigmatic case of the double (although this is not always the case) is the identical, mirrored double, the one who looks and seems to be exacdy like the haunted subject, with the small difference that he of she possesses what the subject, unconsciously, desires, the object that will exorcise his or her phantom. We might say that doubling is the mechanism that tries to reduce and eliminate the horrifying discovery of the phantom at the heart of the experience of the mirror and, thus, tries to create a perfect mirror with no gaps, by creating a figure, the double that incotporates the phantom into the mirrored image as a possession. The double is thus the mirrored image but possesses as an object the unreflectcd phantom (scream) that opens between one and one's mirrored image. (For a helpful discussion of the question of the double that elaborates some of these issues see Mladen Dolar's "At First Sight" in Renata Salecl and Slavoj Zizek editors, Gaze and Voice as Love Objects [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996]). Terry in Blow Out thus occupies precisely this position in relation to the viewers, and we will see that the mufdetei occupies precisely this position in relation to Teiry. 63. For this reason the phone becomes such a major device ro introduce the haunting outside in this film in particular as well as in all De Palmas films. For what is the phone if not this bizatre apparatus that manages to technologically separate the ear, to fragment it, from the othet senses and expose the listener to the dimension of the Other discovered in the disjunction between the senses? 64. The concept of the focus, and the activity of focusing, is one of the major questions of Blow Out—invoked in many of its scenes in which a characrer has to shift his or her gaze (either actual gaze, or metaphorical gaze, the gaze of interpreting meanings) between two centers, one of which necessarily remains blurred— and plays an essential role in De Palma's interrogation of the categories of framing. We will return to the question of focus later, but for now, I can say that the category of focus is one of the main concepts, in Blow Out, with which to articulate the activity of framing. Notes to Chapter 3 203 The frame, in its attempts to constitute a unified field of meaning, demands a center of focus and constitutes itself by relegating to an external position, even repressing, that which does not fit this demand for unity. The interesting question, of course, when confronting the tension between two centets of focus, is to examine what it is that passes between the two centers, rather than attempting to look for a third center that will incorporate the previous two, as Terry is in the habit of doing. That is, it is a question of understanding the focus not simply as a limitation that can be tesolved if one finds a different, mote inclusive, perspective but, father, as a constitutive categoiy of meaning and of framing that is inescapable, and the attempt to think another logic to the frame / focus will thus involve thinking the blank gap in-between various centers. The murder, in Blow Out, passes between the centers, caused by a desire for the ultimate focus. 65. And it is the only cinematic gesture (alongside his use of slow motion perhaps) through which he seems to want to distinguish in interviews his own use and understanding of cinematic grammar from that of Hitchcock's. A small difference perhaps, but one that makes all the difference. 66. A device used by De Palma as early as 1969 in his documentation of an avant-garde theatrical production of Euripides' Baccbae, Dionysus in 69, a film that marks from very early on De Palmas Nietzschean heritage. And De Palma is, I suggest, alongside Orson Welles perhaps, the most Nietzschean of (at least American) directors. 67. It is the act of fragmentation of a unity, as well as the essential relations and tension between the multiplicity of frames, or of framing effects, and the one screen I frame remaining as a desire, that distinguishes this De Palmian device of the split screen both from its paintetly precursors, the diptych and the triptych, and from its cinematic precursor, the simultaneous use of multiple screens, as famously used by Abel Gance in his Napoleon. De Palma is not the inventor of the device of the split screen, nor its only significant practitioner, but he is undoubtedly, at least in mainstream cinema, its most profound and philosophical interpreter, the one who understands the vety existence of the art of film as tied to it. 68. And Tetry himself is editing sounds at the moment of the split. 69. I don't want to anthropomorphize the frame but, rather, to show how it enacts a certain event of subjectivity that stands as well for the event of the viewers themselves who, by first identifying with the frame and then undetgoing its difference from itself, repeat this discovery of the haunting. 70. Mote precisely, we can say that there are two kinds of loss: (1) an absolute loss, an originary mourning, which has to do with the nature of the phantomal Other as a potentiality that always exceeds its actualization, and which causes the fragment to be haunted, to have at it heart, an originary loss, of that which was nevet actualized but exists only as a ghost; (2) a second loss, the loss of an imagined wholeness that the fragment, discovering its fragmentary nature, projects 204 Notes to Chapter j backward as having been there at its origin before its having become a fragment, and is a loss projected backwards with the function of covering the originary loss discovered in the phantomal heart. 71. We can see that this complex adventure and logic of the split screen— where the fragments discover their own fragmentarity that they transmit to each other but that they also want to resolve—is the exact parallel, the cinematic formalization, of the scene on the staircase I examined in the last chapter where Gillian, touching the doctors bleeding hand, becomes the instrument of the horrifying discovery of this painful originary fragmentation, and of the type of communication that exists between two fragments, a communication of and through the abyss of the blank Other that they share in not having. What The Fury thus called touch, the communication between fragments of the blankness that both connects and separates them, is precisely what happens in the split screen, in the gap separating and connecting the two frames, which thus touch each other. 72. I would like to stress that the concept of attention is not introduced here arbitrarily and is not imposed by me on the film. The question of attention is constantly present, on many different levels, during the movie, usually with regard to Terry's way of relating to the reality surrounding him as he pays attention to certain frameworks of interpretation while, tragically, he ignores others: from his not paying attention to much of what Sally tells him to his neglect of the news reports about the serial murders, which he does not regard as integral to the conspiracy he is following at the moment. The question of attention is closely related in the movie to the question of focusing, again, mainly through Terry's frequent confrontation with simultaneous centers of focus between which he needs to choose. 73. But the question is, obviously, how is one to understand multiplicity? We can say that there are two main ways to understand it; the one we may call organic, the other nonorganic. According to the organic conception, the multiplicity is multiplicity of parts in an ordered whole in which the parts share a unified purpose and thus relate to a center (the head, for example, in the classical organic conception of the body) that gives them their significance. The nonorganic conception has precisely to do with the collapse of this organic conception, thus with a decapitation (see the end of The Fury), and with the discovery of a multiplicity of fragments that do not cooperate to form a whole but that rather signify the impossibility of the idea of the whole. It is an essential multiplicity in that it has precisely to do with the loss of power of the one through the discovery, made through the haunting of the Other and the discovery of an essential fragmentation I discussed earlier in relation to the split screen, that there are essentially more than one fragment in between which there is a haunting, a haunting signifying that they can never complete each other and form a unity. Thus, the desire of what I call metaphysical attention has to do with the attempt to turn the discovery of an essential fragmentary multiplicity into an organic one that can reinstate unity. Notes to Chapter 5 205 74. We are talking about a frame that attempts to erase its haunting by the absolute outside by trying to become itself the power deciding upon a—now relative, not absolute-outside, thus exorcising an originary haunting. 75. For a succinct formulation of the problematics of the center, see Jacques Derrida, "Structure, Sign, and Play, in the Discourse of the Human Sciences" in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Roudedge, 2001). j6. Why is the center the most powerful locus in the whole frame? Precisely because, geometrically, it is the most distant point from the mafgins, thus from the irrelevant outside. A whole classification can be made between the way various directors use this powei of the frame to decide on a center, between directors who are more intetested in examining what it means to hold the center of a frame (for example, Welles, the director most interested in examining the powers of sovereignty) and directors interested in examining the powers of the frame to present marginal and abandoned characters, always on the border of the image (for example, Yasujiro Ozu), or directors interested in an even distribution of characters- having them move between center and margins so as to eliminate any permanent hierarchy (Robert Altman). There are many ways to occupy the center, even by supposedly marginal characters who stand close to the limit of the frame but actually manipulate the center, going behind its back and occupying its place while pretending not to occupy it. Of course, this whole configuration between the center and the margins changes when a character, for example (and this happens in many of De Palma's films), is presented in one of the margins of the frame but is actually partly outside the frame, only fragmentary inside. Such a character immediately changes the name of the game because all of a sudden this place seems to hold a stronger power even than that of the frame's center, and this is the power of the haunting, absolute outside, that suddenly penetrates the reality of the framed world—through this character neithet completely inside nor totally outside—and annihilates the power of the center to control the division (a device used in many paranoid film noirs, such as John Frankenheimer s The Manchurian Candidate) 77. The other great contemporary American director who most rigorously, though with very different methods, attempts to undermine, through the means of cinema, the domination of the thought of the center is Robert Altman, with his bfinging into film the discovery of a nonhierarchical, improvisational multiplicity of voices, of worlds, and of stories, where one doesn't know who to listen to among all the simultaneously speaking characters in his films, the various storylines, and the various worlds they bring into contact with each other. It is always in-between these multiplicities, in the very inability to centralize, that a horror is discovered in his films, usually as a murder. This decentralizing proliferation of voices and perspectives happens not only within each of his films, but also between his films, which all seem to constitute a vast, polyphonic world or worlds without center or 206 Notes to Chapter3 Notes to Chapter 3 207 peripheries, almost indistinguishable from each other as separated works, but constituting a vast human comedy of cinematic fragmentation. 78. For a helpful articulation of the various conceptual implications of the subject of representation see Martin Heidegger "The Age of the World Picture" (in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays [New York: Harper Torch-books, 1977]). 79. And pain is the splitting of the one, or more correcdy, it is the discovery of an originary multiplicity without a one at its origin, a discovery in relation to which the desire for unity arises as the desire to repress the pain. Why pain, we might ask? For pain, we can say, is the relation to an excess, the excess of the Other, that cannot be contained, and thus haunts the frame marking its point of suffering, of passivity and of passion toward the Other that exceeds it and haunts its inside. It is also more specifically a question of pain because, as I tried to show in the previous chapter, this discovery of an originary multiplicity is also the discovery of the opening of relation in the transmission of a wound. The body, the body of touch and sense that is, opens as a wounding relation to another, and the demand for unity attempts to overcome this originary pain. 80. De Palma's main interrogation of this figure of the split as an invisible linguistic border where the demand of translation is forcefully felt is worked out in his Vietnam War movie, Casualties of War. 81. To some extent to say that they are passive to an excess is redundant, excess meaning, to begin with, in that we are dealing with a dimension not originating with the center, external to it, and which is thus felt as excessive from the centers point of view and in relation to which the center is destroyed to a certain extent, has to open itself, to subject itself, to that which originates from an enigmatic nowhere. 82. In relation to this thinking of excess as the thinking that announces the collapse of the thought of the center and thus also the collapse of what I called metaphysical attention, we can briefly examine an influential, and problematic, recent treatment of the concept of attention. Jonathan Crary, in his well-known book Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), has quite exhaustively and helpfully elaborated the significance of the problem of attention for modernity, mainly from the second half of the nineteenth centuty onward, in various fields of investigation, from experimental psychology to philosophy to painting. Arguing for the centrality of the interest in the concept of attention arising against the background of increasing distractedness and the "sensory impact" of modern life, Crary convincingly shows the emphasis on attention as often implying a growing need to develop disciplinary strategies of domination in resistance to the lack of control modern distractedness brings with it. A dream of modernity is ro establish a rigid fixity of focus freed from change and difference implied in this distract- edness, in which the past is nostalgically and erroneously viewed as containing some kind of pure attentiveness without distraction. He also argues for a need to rethink the concept of attention not simply in opposition to growing distraction, often understood as some sort of contamination of an originary purity of attention, but more subtly in an immanent manner ro distraction itself, which has always haunted attentiveness as part of its very constitution, as blindness haunts vision, as he suggests in one of his quotations from Emile Dürkheim. Crary thus sees attention and distraction not as opposing or as essentially different but rather as existing, in his words, on a single continuum. "I argue," he writes, "that attention and distraction cannot be thought outside of a continuum in which the two ceaselessly flow into one another, as part of a social field in which the same imperatives and forces incite one and the other" (p. 51 [my italics]). He thus also sees attention as always "haunted by the possibility of its own excess" and as containing "within itself the conditions for its own disintegration" (p. 47). Though willingly accepting Crary's call for a new thinking of attention, haunted by the possibility of its own excess, which integrates a positive thought of distraction and "sensory excess," I think that his project nevertheless involves an essential conceptual misdirection having to do, precisely, with his lack of conceptualization of excess and his insistence on thinking attention and its excess on a continuum. For excess, as we saw, being a concept of the absolute outside in the inside, has to do precisely with the discovery of a dimension of absolute discontinuity between the inside and the outside. If excess or distraction is the absolute outside of attention (frame), the pairing cannot be viewed as a continuity but precisely as the collapse of the thinking of continuity belonging to the metaphysical thinking of the continuous frame, a thinking of the line. This misconception of excess allows Crary to talk about so-called sensory excess and growing • sensory impact, both still completely metaphysical or empirical notions implying some sort of quantitative overload that is simply too much to grasp for the poor empirical subject of modern life. But, as we saw, the relation of the concept of sense to the concept of excess is not to be understood quantitatively but as a change of logic from the metaphysical division between empirical senses, or the senses of the immanent woild versus the intelligible world, to new thinking. It is thus not a question of too much sense (which, in principal, could be received by some superior subject or center with greater sensory-motor capacities), but of the collapse of the concept of empirical sense and the'discovery within the senses of a haunting external or internal to them, which makes the senses discover both their excess beyond themselves, their difference from themselves, as well as an essential plurality of the senses. Thus, the discovery of modern distraction is not to be empirically understood as simply the growing amount of stimuli that becomes too much for the subject but, rather, as the discovery of this essential dimension of haunting of the senses and the loss of the possibility of center that 208 Notes to Chapter3 results from this new discovery, or growing experience, in modermC side in the inside. 83. Deleuze, in his book on Francis Bacon, Francis Bacons sation, analyzes the significance of Bacons use of the triptych,; triptych is undoubtedly the form in which the following demand i precisely: there must be a relationship between the separate parts, bu tionship must be neither narrative nor logical. The triptych does not imply a'1 gression, and it does not tell a story" (Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon, The Ll of Sensation [University of Minnesota Press, 2005], p. 58). Without elaboratin on Deleuze's discussion of Bacons triptychs, which nevertheless seems to rWe highly relevant to De Palmas use of the split screen (and I suggest more geneM ally that Bacon, another great artist of the scream and of pain, is an artistic kinsman to De Palma), we can say that in Blow Out as well the split screen uncovers a logic of momentary non-narration, where the two frames, by suspending the domination of the single frame, release the tense mechanism of competing interpretations, of address by the gap in between the frames, and of a nonnarrative relation between the frames, or what I call the secret and bleeding communication between fragments with no whole. However, this suspension of narrativiza-tion effected by the split is always thought; in Blow Out as well as in many other De Palma films, in relation to the painfidact of separation itself. Thus he thinks, probably as Bacon did as well, about the question of the split screen in relation to an economy of pain, as well as in relation to a fantasmatic attempt to cover over the splitting pain. As such, the return ro narrative in De Palmas films, as, for example, the ensuing narrative in Blow Out, is already thought of in relation to a logic of fantasy, a logic that attempts to reconstitute the one, meaning also one frame / center / focus / meaning. As such, narrative is one of the main devices of restoration of the one frame / center, of exorcising the phantom of the Other because it hierarchically distributes the multiple parts through a causal logic. Because De Palmas narratives are thus never simply and naively narratives, but always have to do with a fantasmatic attempt to smooth over the gap opening in between the frames, they always leave strange traces where the act of smoothing over somehow fails, traces appearing as illogical and unreasonable gaps in the narratives itself, thus always having the quality of a dream, or nightmare, which tries to arrange something coherently, yet nevei really does so successfully. Freud, in his investigations of dream logic, named this mechanism of smoothing over "secondary revision." We can therefore say that De Palmas films almost always investigate a mechanism, the mechanism of myth, famously analyzed by Freud in Moses and Monotheism (2nd edition, London: Hogarth Press, 1939), whereby a culture, the Jews, tries to construct a smooth and coherent narrative of its history precisely to cover over a gap, the gap of the murder of a father figure, that is, in our terms, the gap revealed by the collapse of the frame / father. Thus, when crit- Notes to Chapter 5 209 ics denigrate De Palmas films as incoherent and ridiculous, they are missing precisely the most important aspect of these films—their being guided by a complex investigation of the fantasmatic logic of attempting to restore the split frame. As a general rule, De Palmas films are always to be read according to a logic of fantasy rather than according to a logic of narrative and causality. That is, every scene is aki-^s to \>