There Will Be Blood, a Viscous Tale

There Will Be Blood is not really a strange film. In fact, I'm tempted to say that the film is anything but strange in that it is precisely filmic. That is, I might say something like Juno is a truly strange film because it is so literary that it's barely a film at all. Juno enjoys a familiar, linear narrative, literally in synch with the workings of predictable natural law—human gestation, the seasons, human frailty. It is a simple story with some very nice dialogue. But I'm tempted to say that it's not really a film per se but more of an illustrated story. I do not mean this as a pejorative; it's just a comment, as neutral as can be. And, as such, Juno, despite its familiarity, makes for a strange film.

There Will Be Blood, however, is not really much of a story. Is it the rise of Daniel Plainview? Kind of. But is it really interested in his rise as much as it's interested in his going, his mode of becoming? Consider the conspicuous ellipses of plot. Consider the fact that it is impossible to predict Plainview's actions; it is equally hard to explain them. His words, his actions, and his expressions do not conspire to resolve anything, explain anything. He is as multifarious as the images themselves, oozing this way and that, breathtaking and pounding. He is more an image than a man. In fact, I want to say he's not a man at all but a force of life, an inflected will to power.

This is not to say that TWBB is without plot, bereft of story. Rather, the film attempts to forge a different kind of story, a filmic story and not a literary one.

The book wants to be linear, reading from left to right. This has yielded a certain linear narrativity, one premised on cause and effect: first this happens, which makes that happen, and so on. Needless to say, any number of writers have jammed this cause/effect circuit, broken the linearity of the book—all the Oulipo games, Burroughs cut ups, Nabokov's privileging of sensual affect over meaning, over significance. But if the book's linearity asks to be broken, film was never linear to begin with. The image wants to sprawl, to belie explanation, to present the synchronous, the allatonce, the multiple.

But film need not jettison story all together. What PT Anderson gives us in TWBB is a different order of story, a filmic story, one that moves but not according to the logic of cause and affect but to the must more obscure laws of the multifarious. The story slides, thickly, like the oil that stains Plainview's hands, like the oil that stains the celluloid.

Oil, like the film, is not a liquid. It will not fill its container so readily. More insistent on itself, oil moves much more slowly than water. But nor is oil a solid; it is not set in its ways. It sprawls and oozes and occasionally spouts, violently. It does not allow for easy footing; it makes everything in its way slip and slide, turns it black, leaves its mark.

TWBB, like oil, like Daniel Day-Lewis' face, oozes this way and that. You think it's heading in one direction but then it, and you, slide another way altogether. At times, it may seem disjointed. And perhaps it is. So be it. But disjuncture is not a pejorative when it comes to film —and when it comes to filmic stories.

So what kind of story is this? It is not the story of a man. There is not first Daniel Plainview and then the camera. All there is is the filmic image, this filmic image, this forceful, viscous trajectory we call Plainview. His name is Plainview, for God's sake! It's right there in our view, plain as can be. There is no narrative backstory needed to explain his actions; what we see is what we get and what we get is a big, oozing mess of affect.

TWBB is a story that moves according to the logic of flow and force instead of cause and effect. I think it is this, this new kind of story, this filmic narrative, that interests PT Anderson. We see it in the glorious, exquisite Punch-Drunk Love, a love story that's so drunk it wobbles, dissolving into nothing but Scopotones made by someone else all together. PTA is forging a vocabulary of story telling that is properly filmic. This is perhaps his interest in Robert Altman as Altman was a great innovator in story telling, multiplying the narrative, giving us multiple overlapping, intersecting, and parallel trajectories.

But after Magnolia and Boogie Nights, clearly influenced by Altman, PTA seems to be exploring new territory all together. Now, the multiplicity is not in separate narrative paths but condensed into one face, into a plain viscous view.

Affective Films: There Will Be Blood, Band of Outsiders, Pulp Fiction

What do we want from films? How do we assess them?

There Will Be Blood is a great film. Why? Because it is relentlessly surprising, odd, and beautiful; because it never resolves but relishes its ambivalences and multivalences; because it does things with the conspiracy of sound and image that are astounding; because it presents a very odd sort of story, a story that's not really a story, a story that prefers affect to narrative; because it is a deeply affective film without ever being maudlin or sentimental; because Daniel Day Lewis does not play a role but performs a force of life.

Now take Godard's Band of Outsiders. It is a great film for many of the same reasons—the celebration of multivalence, a story that's not a story, a voice-over and soundtrack that put image and sound at impossible angles.

But clearly the two films enjoy quite different affects. PT Anderson rocks our world, puts our whole bodies on edge, tingling and aching with fear and anticipation, the title brooding over us—there will be blood, we've been warned.

Godard rocks our world, too—or at least my world—, through an affect of another sort altogether. There may be blood here but it is not the blood of bodies; it never, ever, sits heavily with the weight of humanity. On the contrary, it does nothing but skirt, tease, play, frolic, dance, wink without ever being unnecessary. Band of Outsiders performs the most elusive of affects: engaged whimsy, delightful cleverness, playful thoughtfulness.

Both films are vital, which is to say, they are each in their respective ways forces of life, not comments on life. Is there way to say one film is greater than the other? Absolutely not, for that would be to quantify qualities. TWBB's menacing tension is not more important or more essential than BoO's playfulness and whimsy.

Now take Pulp Fiction. Its title relishes its own lack of seriousness, of weight. But does this make it less vital, less important? Like Godard, Tarantino engages film with a wicked cleverness and a touch that is at once knowing and playful. I left Pulp Fiction giddy, my heart pounding, lit up by the relentlessness of the film's play, its joy, its frolic at being free of human sentimentality. This is not an easy thing to accomplish—to shun the pantheon of sentiment and still forge a vital being. In fact, I'd say it's a miraculous accomplishment. Pulp Fiction is not frivolous for frolicking.

I taught Pulp Fiction this past semester. Every time the movie was playing, you could feel the collective energy, a certain giddiness, a certain delight, everyone at the edge of their seat, poised to howl with laughter and glee. It's an exhilarating film.

Perhaps I'm simply stating the obvious. But I want to point out that a film that scathes us with blood is not more, or less, vital or great or important than a film that exhilarates us with wit and play.

In Defense of Profanity

I curse. And I curse when I teach. I've been told by a superior of mine, a well-respected and so-called radical, that my cursing "offends the moral and religious beliefs of my students."

That may be the case. But I retort twice:

1. So what? The ideas of my class surely offend their moral and religious beliefs. Is that a bad thing? I was told this by a theorist who certainly proffers beliefs, and a lifestyle, that offends most moral and religious beliefs.

2. And: Why? What is so wrong with profanity?

Every semester, I encounter some student of religious upbringing who tells me that he or she was taught that cursing is for those who lack vocabulary, that it's lazy: I curse because I can't find a better word.

Let's assess this claim. One, it assumes that language is always referential, that its first if not sole task is to mean something, refer to something. But, as I teach, meaning is only one function of words. Words, and communication, are affective; they effect people's emotions. A well placed "fuck," an aptly turned "asshole," can resonate in people's minds, hearts, and bodies and move them, persuade them. Just as ee cummings can move us to tears with nonsense, grammar thrown by the wayside, a well placed "motherfucker" can bring down the house.

In fact, I'd argue that cursing—and cursing well—is pedagogically effective; it wakes the little assholes up—just as you woke up when you read that. Cursing in the classroom affords me the opportunity to seize their attention, if only for a moment.

Now let me address the matter of laziness. First, if laziness is the crime, not cursing, then let us condemn all laziness. Let us condemn the lazy students who don't try to understand what I'm saying; let us condemn the academics who churn out the same, tired, familiar shit article after article, book after book, lecture after lecture. When I teach, I give my fucking heart and soul, all my vitality, to that hour and a half so my students can see, and experience, live thought. What about those lazy professors who deliver the same dry lecture, year after year? If laziness is the accusation, let us please purge the halls of academia of laziness.

And, second, a curse may or may not be lazy but it is by no means sufficient grounds to establish laziness. For cursing well—with the proper timing and the proper placing of syllabic emphasis—is as difficult and demanding as any creative effort. Certainly, there are those who curse lazily just as there are those who pray lazily or preach lazily or live lazily. But let us not condemn cursing just because of a few poor profaners.

United 93: Networked Information, Uncertainty, Action

I accidentally watched United 93 the other night, the film nominally about the 9/11 hijacked plane in which the passengers re-hijacked the plane, crashing it into a field, killing everyone on board but no one else. I feared it would be some banal tale of heroism, the hero in us all emerging in times of distress. What I discovered is an incredibly complex film about information, knowledge, uncertainty, and action in the age of electronic technology.

The film is narratively strange. There are no central characters; we are not privy to any intimate relationships——no lovers for whom we will weep, no reluctant heroes waiting in the wings. Rather, the camera maintains a peculiar distance, an indifference, as it follows the flow of bodies and information.

For the most part, the film does not focus on the action on the plane: it follows the flow of information that demarcates the event. This begins, more or less, at air traffic control in various cities—Cleveland, NY, and central FAA headquarters. One air traffic controller, watching a blip on a screen and speaking into a headset, gets no response from a plane. Soon, that plane—or rather, that blip—is not following its prescribed trajectory. Soon thereafter there is some mysterious sound from the errant plane's cockpit, a foreign accent, muffled words. No one is quite what's happening; tapes of the exchange are played back repeatedly in an attempt to decipher the voices.

This is how information works in a tele-electronic network: a blip on the screen in Cleveland disappears over NY where air traffic controller search their monitors and then grab binoculars to search the sky. Meanwhile, a feedback loop plays, "We have planes." There is no one person to make sense of the information, to declare, "This is what's happening." Instead, there's a series of phone calls, relays, between different individuals at different air traffic control centers, an office in the Pentagon, and rumors of phone calls from passengers on one of the planes. It's one big insane game of telephone, only there's no original message to distort: there's distortion from the get go.

The scene on the plane mimics the scene on the ground. No one passenger knows what's happening; no one passenger rallies the troops. Everyone pipes in to whomever is next to them; rumors spread; a local zone of activity emerges, based on the premise that the terrorists' bomb is not real. BUT NO ONE KNOWS.

What's impressive about the film is that it passes no judgement. There is no implicit condemnation of those who can't figure out what's happening—EVEN AFTER ONE OF THE TOWERS IS ON FIRE. There is no celebration of the passengers, no triumphant music. The camera moves, unsteady, as if it's simply another node within this network, this network without hierarchy, without certainty, this splay and spray of information.

Of course, there are some cultural prejudices at work. Few believe there's actually a hijacking and, if there is, that anything bad will happen. I kept imagining what the same scene would play like at air traffic control in Tel Aviv.

Which actually raises the question of action without certainty: the Israeli's have a certain faith, a moral certitude that allows them to act without total knowledge. In the US, it seems, we have to find a way to act when we just don't know. In United 93, we see some military officer trying to discover the ROE, the rules of engagement. No one knows what's happening and, even if they did, no one knows what to do.

And yet, as I said, the film is not bleak or judgemental. It simply, or not so simply, maps the flow of information within this cyborg vision, this conglomerate of machinic viewing and human understanding.

What a nice surprise, to find a film that takes up 9/11 free of the familiar pathos that surrounds it. That, alas, gives me hope.

The drift of Terrence Malick's The New World

I just watched The New World this morning and was about to dismiss it when I began to realize how odd a film it is. And then I realized that Terrence Malick is all about drift. That's what The New World is: a love story, historical events, but it's all drifts. These are not character who determine their own actions. And yet neither are they absolutely determined by forces that exceed them. Rather, they are at once constituent and constitutive of the forces; they are forces just as they succumb to forces. They make their worlds but not in a direct fashion; everything just sort of slides along. He is forced to go back to England: Is it against his wishes? Perhaps yes, perhaps no. He goes without a fight—his leaving is a non-climax, a fact, tragic maybe but not lingered over, not indulged; he is nudged along, putting their love quite literally adrift on the ocean. She is exiled, it seems, for choosing to love a white man. And yet she doesn't choose; neither does he; they are both at the mercy of love, of lust, pushed this way and that, pushing this way and that.

Of course, at the end, she seems to make a choice. But it is neither climactic nor anticlimactic as the narrative moves laterally away from its apogee, from its narrative consummation. Her one presumably clear choice, then, is precisely what puts the narrative, the film, firmly in the drift. She goes here, she goes there; she goes where she goes, forging a world, being forged. She is on a most unexpected path, making history just as history makes her. This is why the great artist Dan Tierney says that the drift is heroic: you make your way as you slide.

Malick's film never privileges any one moment. There is no dramaturgic rising and falling; things don't build and come to a head. But neither does the film meander. Every moment is poignant, every shot an indulgence, each as exquisite as the others—all the while the ocean's waves lap at their play, all the while, things happen. The Indians want to push the British out to the sea; the British want to move inland. It is not a battle that ever comes to a head but one that moves back and forth. This is drift: a relentless movement without a purpose but always productive, making its way.

America offers the possibility of wondrous play; England offers the possibility of wondrous play. In both places, grass grows and it is the grass that she loves, as her hands run over the blades, ever so gently, the stems of a rhizome, of a multi-centered plant that sprawls.

And yet the film returns to trees. It is in fact the final shot, the camera gazing up through the tall trees, toward the sky. But just as much as the camera and the film move upwards, aspiring for the sky, they move sideways, along the ocean, playing in the leaves of grass.

And this—this move towards a point, its inevitable lateral slide, and the heroic manner in which one stands towards this play—is drift, is Malick's film.

The Horror of the Image: On The Ring

Cujo’s a dog. The blob’s a blob. Freddy is a dream of revenge. What is the ring? The answer is strange: it’s the image. The source of terror, fear, and death is the image. The Ring is an odd and surprising film.

Why, after having viewed the tape, does the phone ring? Because the phone call is an image. The phone rips the voice from the body, leaving a spectral trace, an imitation of the person on the other end: an image. When the phone rings in The Ring, then, it is not exterior to the visual image but is the image still happening. The voice through the receiver and the visuals on the screen are part of the same image. The ring of the phone is the heralding of the image.

The Ring proffers the great paranoia of the image. It looks like us, it talks like us, it seems to have emotions. Which is to say, the image has a life of its own—but without a body. It doesn’t sleep, it doesn’t eat, it can’t converse. In what is perhaps the creepiest scene in the movie, we see the girl-image under observation, never tiring, never shifting demeanor, never responding. Or, for that matter, becoming frenzied. This particular image may seem pissed off but under the grueling conditions of interrogation it doesn’t get more pissed off. The image is not reasonable and therefore is not unreasonable. An image, it just keeps repeating itself, yielding more images, as if from nowhere, from the play of light and dark that it is.

I can see why a parent might think such a child unruly. How can one discipline an image when it won’t listen to reason, when it just keeps on repeating itself? Cut off its supply of light, send it somewhere its sound can’t be heard: drop it down a deep well and cover that well up. Think of the posters for the movie—a ring of darkness, light just making its way through. This is the horror, light emerging from darkness: the birth of the image.

This girl-image was not born of woman. But then where did it come from? It wasn’t recorded; it is not a memory or record but is itself a living force. No, it was not recorded: it was always already born, the image of the family, of mommy-daddy-baby. In this nightmare, this paranoia, this cliché-image has only one directive: not watch me, not disseminate me but copy me, copy me over and over and over again without changing a thing.

But the image is not so easily bent to the cliché needs of the bourgeois family, the triangulation of mommy-daddy-baby. Look at the video in the film: it is avant-garde cinema. It moves across various planes, horizontal and vertical. There is no triangle here; Oedipus has exploded (pace Lafia). There is no story, no transparent metaphors. In fact, these images are dense, opaque, heavy with shadow and their insistent refusal to slip into a palatable narrative.

The film hence presents two fears, two kinds of horror, the double genitive: it is both the horror we experience of the image and the image's horror of experiencing us. There is our fear of the image, of its refusal to bend to story; so lifelike yet utterly devoid of human life, the image makes a most horrific servant and an even more horrific master. And then there is the image’s fear of the narrative, of the cliché that would break it, that make it bend to clear geometric shapes. Perhaps that's why it is so angry.

Stealing and Poaching: The Matrix and Bound

With Bound and The Matrix, the Wachowskis proffer two modes of reckoning cinema, and perhaps all art and maybe even all identity: stealing and poaching.

The Matrix is a product of unabashed thievery, a pastiche of visual history, copping innumerable tropes from everything from the spaghetti western to video games. The Wachowskis take whatever they need to invent their universe, chewing up inherited images with abandon. This mastication is not interpretation. The Matrix is not a take on the video game, Street Fighter; it doesn’t interpret The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly; we don’t view the work of Sergio Leone differently after seeing the movie. This is not homage to Katheryn Bigelow’s Point Break, even if she taught us that Keanu can run and the camera can follow—closely. No, The Matrix is not homage; it is not a deferential or humble film. It is an entirely new beast born from multiple and disparate parents—a bastard hybrid, if you will. And a virile one: this mule can foal (pace WS Burroughs).

This is filmmaking as all-consuming appetite: I’ll take that and that and that, thanks very much. Images are ripped and riffed, a shameless thievery. This is mixing at the limit, the strategy of MixMaster Mike and Christian Marclay, turning the found into sound, forging one’s own territory from the fodder of others. Thievery is beyond the pale of reference just as it is beyond the reach of différance; this intertextuality does not undermine the thief. On the contrary, the thief makes the things of the world so much his own that the terms of propriety shift; the deed is passed as a new world is forged. This is a repetition without memory, a consumption so thorough that while we can perhaps see traces of former identities we can by no means say that these images belong to anyone else, that they belong anywhere else than right there.

This is in fact the very plot of the movie. The Matrix is not, as it may seem, about questioning the line between lived and virtual reality. On the contrary, the film secures the line that separates dream from reality, the virtual from the real. We believe Morpheus; we believe that there is a difference between the real and the virtual and we want to make this distinction firm again. It is not until the second film in the series that we are introduced to radical doubt as Morpheus shifts from truth-teller to fanatic, Neo’s powers work against (or is it with?) the machines and even the Oracle herself becomes a questionable source. In the second film, we are sure of nothing.

But in the first film, we witness a story of theft just as we watch a theft in motion (that is to say, the film itself). The machines steal the electricity of the humans; the humans steal the machines’ “souls” as they render machines useful, always serving human ends. Competing thieves, then, each trying to steal the other, to consume the other, to turn the other’s mode into one’s own. Isn’t this precisely what the Wachowskis do—take the production of others and put it shamelessly, gleefully, to the production of themselves? Is film machine or human? Perhaps, the Wachowskis tell us, film is the very place where man and machine meet so as to mutually and productively steal from each other: a symbiotic theft forging a new being, a cinebeing.

If The Matrix is an exercise in thievery, Bound, the Wachowskis' first feature film, is an exercise in poaching. Unlike The Matrix which is sui generis, Bound is a genre film, a rendering of noir. Here, rather than stealing images, the Wachowskis enter the image economy of an existing genre, making do from within an existing space. For Michel de Certeau, to poach is to create one’s territory within the territory of another not by stealing but by operating, by doing, by moving. Hence, the Wachowskis situate the film at the precise juncture of the economy’s conduits, the passages along which the images circulate.

As the film poaches on noir’s familiar images—desire, greed, crime, the underworld—, the camera follows the diverse paths of their circulation: down pipes, through Doppler’s rippling effect on toilet water, through walls inflected with prejudice and assumption, carried along vibration, obscured by habit. The plot turns on the ability or inability to read these signs so as to make something happen—to get rich, to survive, to love. Caesar, the mobster, is utterly oblivious to his girlfriend’s lesbianism (until it is too late); after all, she’s so feminine. Hence the ex-con tomboy lesbian, Corky, also mis-reads Violet, the moll. After all, she’s so feminine.

But Violet, like the film itself, is a poacher, inhabiting the skin of the mobster moll in order to make her own way. She even whores, a sign that, to Corky, confirms Violet’s heterosexuality. But as de Certeau claims, poaching is the strategy of those without property, of the conquered, those stripped of space of their own place. Poachers appear to be acting in a familiar way; they exhibit all the “right” signs, like the worker who sits at his computer, ever dutiful, all the while writing his novel. Poachers make use of the signs of others but in their own way, to their own ends, for their own pleasure. Violet sleeps with men as a way of making money in order to one day slip away and forge her own property. In the meantime, she operates on the territory of the known, exhibiting all the right signs even as she creates her own world from within the world of others. But it is a world that only exists in the going, in the decisions; Violet cannot make a world that is strictly speaking her own. So she makes her way through the territory of others, poaching on their signs as she pleasures herself.

Bound, like Violet, poaches on the territory of the known, on the familiar signs of noir. The film crawls into noir and kicks around with a certain perverse delight, engaging the known signs only to send them astray (but not too far; take a sign too far astray from its home and you become a thief), extending noir’s images according to its own sapphic appetite, This is quite different from The Matrix which consumes images with another kind of delight, the delight of making the world one’s own, of no longer having to tread on someone else’s territory: the delight of stealing.