Blog Response VII: Slavoj Žižek's "The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch's 'Lost Highway'"

Slavoj Žižek is almost without doubt the most well-known living philosopher. He made his debut in the English-speaking world with his 1989 book The Sublime Object of Ideology, in which he gave an account of political ideology through an innovative interpretation of the notion of a fetish in both Marx and Freud - arguing that both notions essentially come to the same thing.

In the 25 years since this book, Žižek has become an incredibly prolific writer and speaker. He has become especially known for being an eccentrically engaging speaker. He speaks with heavy Slovenian accent, a noticeable lisp, and frenetic gestures, explaining recondite philosophical material through a dizzying array of pop culture examples and politically incorrect jokes.

Among the works that launched his early career were a series of brilliant philosophically informed books and essays on film, including, most prominently, highly influential works on film noir and the films of Alfred Hitchcock.

In our companion essay for Lost Highway - The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch's Lost Highway - Žižek deploys psychoanalytic notions to interpret the film's relationship to film noir, and to draw connections between his reading of the film and contemporary cultural phenomena.

For a preview of the themes of the essay (and a taste of Žižek's singular speaking presence), please watch the following 5-minute excerpt from a feature-length film on Žižek's interpretations of film - The Pervert's Guide to Cinema - about Lost Highway:

Blog Response VI: David Lynch's "Lost Highway"

Please read the entry below, and answer the questions posed to you in the comments. Then, read Slavoj Žižek's essay The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch's Lost Highway, which you can find here. Note: you don't need to read the editor's introduction; Žižek's essay itself is found on pp.9-48 of the PDF. I will post an entry on Žižek's essay with questions for you within the next day.

David Lynch achieved the height of his mainstream success with the 1990-91 T.V. series Twin Peaks. Twin Peaks - a dark, surreal soap opera revolving initially around the mystery of the brutal rape and murder of a small-town homecoming queen, Laura Palmer - was explosively popular. At its inception, it was a poorly advertised mid-season replacement. However, it rapidly moved to the center of the media spotlight, in large part due to the storm of speculation about its central mystery on online message boards. Its serialized narrative prefigured the renaissance, in the last ten years, of serialized dramatic television in the U.S. And, it was one of the first examples of a pop culture phenomenon that gained currency, not through traditional media channels, but over the internet, which was still in its infancy.

However, the popular decline of the series was as rapid as its ascent. By the middle of the second season, ratings had declined precipitously. And finally, the dramatic financial and critical failure of Lynch's cinematic prequel to the series - Fire Walk With Me - transformed him overnight into an entertainment industry pariah. 

Fortunately for Lynch, he still had a three film contract with the French production company Studio Canal. Initially, because of the failure of Fire Walk With Me, Studio Canal dragged their feet on funding another Lynch film. However, in 1995 they finally funded the filming of Lost Highway.

Blog Response V: Pedro Almodóvar's "Bad Education"

Please read the document linked to below, as well the blog post that follows, and answer the questions posed to you in the comments.

Almodóvar on "Bad Education" and "Talk to Her"

Bad Education clearly announces its Hitchcockian roots from the very beginning: with a heavily Saul Bass-influenced title sequence over which plays a piece of music in the style of Hitchcock's most well-known soundtrack composer, Bernard Hermann:

Like Vertigo in particular, Bad Education self-consciously evokes the tropes of film noir: it centers around a story of crime and betrayal in which we are led to sympathize with the wrongdoers, and employs the figure of the femme fatale while at the same time re-interpreting this figure in bold new ways. Indeed, Almodóvar's film - as might be expected from a film made almost 60 years after the heyday of classic film noir - plays the noir formulas in far more radical ways than even Hitchcock was likely to have imagined. However, on reflection, much of what it accomplishes can be understood as only heightening the ways in which Hitchcock used the conventions of film noir to explore themes like feminine identity and obsessive sexual desire.

Blog Response IV: Luis Buñuel's "That Obscure Object of Desire"

Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel began his career collaborating with surrealist painter Salvador Dalí on the 16 minute short film Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog, 1928) - what Roger Ebert once called "the most famous short film ever made":

Un Chien Andalou established many of the hallmarks of Buñuel's film career. First, there are the influences of surrealism. Using a series of images that mischievously flout the conventions of realistic storytelling, Buñuel created a cinematic equivalent of the surrealist practices of 'automatic writing' and 'automatic drawing', in which one begins writing or drawing without any plan, letting the words or lines simply flow out. One of the aesthetic effects of this practice was what the 19th century writer Comte de Lautréamont once described as "the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella", or what painter Max Ernst called "a linking of two realities that by all appearances have nothing to link them, in a setting that by all appearances does not fit them." By juxtaposing things, situations, people, and events in seemingly random ways, the surrealists were able to create a unique combination of horror and hilarious absurdity that they often described on an analogy with the imagery found in dreams.

Blog Response III: Katalin Makkai's "'Vertigo' and Being Seen"

In her essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", Laura Mulvey famously argued that what drives our fascination with films is how they orchestrate, not only what we see on the screen, but how we watch what we see there - in particular, the meanings we deploy to interpret what's on the screen, and the kinds of pleasure we take in the spectacle as we've interpreted it. More specifically, Mulvey argued that a great deal of film situates the viewer as the subject of a distinctively male fantasy. In this fantasy, women are objects rather than subjects: creatures to be looked at and enjoyed; who are characterized by the absence of agency, authority, and power. The films that indulge in this fantasy characteristically place the viewer in the masculine position: the one who in this fantasy watches and enjoys rather than being watched and enjoyed; and, by association, who acts rather than being acted upon. The pleasure of the viewer is predicated on inhabiting and accepting the fantasy of woman as object rather than subject. This is often achieved by making the woman a spectacle for the viewer, while at the same time leading the viewer to identify with a male hero through whose authority over the woman that spectacle can be contained.

In Vertigo, Mulvey claims, we are led to identify with Scottie's voyeuristic gaze:

"In Vertigo, subjective camera predominates. Apart from flash-back from Judy's point of view, the narrative is woven around what Scottie sees or fails to see. The audience follows the growth of his erotic obsession and subsequent despair precisely from his point of view. Scottie's voyeurism is blatant: he falls in love with a woman he follows and spies on without speaking to. Its sadistic side is equally blatant: he has chosen (and freely chosen, for he had been a successful lawyer) to be a policeman, with all the attendant possibilities of pursuit and investigation. As a result. he follows, watches and falls in love with a perfect image of female beauty and mystery. Once he actually confronts her, his erotic drive is to break her down and force her to tell by persistent cross-questioning. Then, in the second part of the film, he re-enacts his obsessive involvement with the image he loved to watch secretly. He reconstructs Judy as Madeleine, forces her to conform in every detail to the actual physical appearance of his fetish. Her exhibitionism, her masochism, make her an ideal passive counterpart to Scottie's active sadistic voyeurism. She knows her part is to perform, and only by playing it through and then replaying it can she keep Scottie's erotic interest. But in the repetition he does break her down and succeeds in exposing her guilt. His curiosity wins through and she is punished. In Vertigo, erotic involvement with the look is disorienting: the spectator's fascination is turned against him as the narrative carries him through and entwines him with the processes that he is himself exercising. The Hitchcock hero here is firmly placed within the symbolic order, in narrative terms. He has all the attributes of the patriarchal super-ego. Hence the spectator, lulled into a false sense of security by the apparent legality of his surrogate, sees through his look and finds himself exposed as complicit, caught in the moral ambiguity of looking."

Vertigo, voyeurism, and Jean-Paul Sartre

In "Vertigo and Being Seen", Katalin Makkai also considers the significance of voyeurism in the film. But while Mulvey's main theoretical touchstone is Lacanian psychoanalysis, Makkai instead turns to Jean-Paul Sartre's discussion of voyeurism in Being and Nothingness. In doing so, she self-consciously puts herself in conversation with Laura Mulvey, but comes to different conclusions about Vertigo.

Please read "Vertigo and Being Seen", and answer the question posed to you in the comments below. You can find it on YSCEC, or by clicking on the link below:

Katalin Makkai - "Vertigo and Being Seen"

By the way, the PDF is 89 pages. But don't despair: it's just a normal, 20 page-ish essay. The PDF turned out to be so long because of a quirk of the software I used to make it into a PDF...

Blog Response II: Hitchcock's Vertigo

Vertigo is widely regarded as Alfred Hitchcock's greatest film - and by many, one of the greatest films, period.  For example, it has for 20 years been in the top 5 of Sight & Sound's famed poll of international film critics and directors for the greatest films of all time; and since the 2012 poll, it has occupied the #1 spot. Below, I provide a crash course in the film's most important and influential features, including its most well-known technical hallmarks, as well as its characters and narrative themes.

Blog Response I: Film Noir, the Femme Fatale and "Double Indemnity"

Film noir and the femme fatale

After World War II, many American film critics were enamored with European film and showed a somewhat snobby derision for movies coming out of the American studio system. But at the same time, American movies were flooding Europe, much of which had been cut off from pop culture in America during the war. In France in particular, there was an explosion of goodwill toward the U.S., who was seen as the main architect of France's liberation from Nazi occupation in 1944. Part and parcel of this was a growth of interest in American movies made during the war and after.

As they enthusiastically watched these movies with relatively fresh eyes, French film critics began detecting a dark current in certain American films. Many of these films were so-called 'B movies': movies produced by the B units that studios used for producing low-budget films designed to be filler for the second halves of double features. And yet, these critics saw them as representing the best of American cinema - a new kind of quintessentially modern film they called film noir ('black film').

Welcome

From "Double Indemnity" (Billy Wilder, 1944)

Welcome to the seminar, everyone! The four films we will watch together are all in a certain sense neo-film noir movies that are preoccupied with the figure of the femme fatale (which in French means 'fatal woman'). But so that we have some context for them, we need to get a basic grip on what film noir (French for 'black film') and the classic femme fatale character that is so central to it are. In order to get this context, you should do two things:

(1) First, read the following two short essays. You can click the links below or visit YSCEC site for PDFs:

"Towards a Definition of Film Noir" by Raymond Borde and Étienne Chaumeton

This is from near the beginning of the very first book on film noir - Borde and Chaumeton's Panorama du Film Noir Américain (1955). It was French film critics in the mid-40s that began grouping together certain American films using the term film noir, and this essay is a classic statement of why they thought these films belonged together and represented a high water mark in American cinema.

"Women in Film Noir" by Janey Place

This is from one of the most important books in the history of American film criticism: Women in Film Noir (1978), edited by E. Ann Kaplan. This book set the agenda for feminist film criticism in the 1970s, and transformed the study of film noir in particular. It's a classic examination of the character type of the femme fatale.

I'll have more to say about these essays in the Blog Response posts I'll put up after the first class meeting.

(2) After you read these essays, watch Billy Wilder's 1948 film, "Double Indemnity". This is perhaps the purest use of the femme fatale character type in classic film noir.

I've put the DVD on reserve in the UML Multimedia Center (on the 2nd floor). Alternatively, you can watch it for free at the following link:

http://putlocker.is/watch-double-indemnity-online-free-putlocker.html

If you have trouble with this link, try Googling "Watch Double Indemnity online" and following the links: it's available online on many websites. Please do yourself a favor and don't watch this movie on your phone: to do so would be like covering a gourmet meal at a Michelin star restaurant with ketchup.

When you watch the movie, try to identify the hallmarks of film noir described by Borde and Chaumeton, as well as the remarks about the femme fatale by Place.