Conjunctions 65: Sleights of Hand

by Sleights of Hand- The Deception Issue (retail) (epub)

  “And how do you know that, I might ask.”

  “I still don’t really see the importance of events that happened. I mean, for one thing, it’s not like they could have been any different.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, I mean they happened in the past. You can’t change the past. So, since we can’t change the past, and they did happen already, it isn’t like we can talk about how things would have been if Germany hadn’t invaded Poland.”

  “That’s kind of fatalistic, huh? Two more? Two more.” Raises two fingers.

  “And besides: ‘fear itself’? That was 1933. FDR’s inauguration. He was talking about the Depression, or whatever.”

  “But, see? But 1933 was the same year Hitler came to power in Germany. OK? ‘Fear itself’? FDR was more right than he knew. Hitler was ‘fear itself’ or one of the like manifestations of the same.”

  “Manifestations of fear itself?”

  “Exactly. That’s the other part of what came out of double-you-double-you-two: We learned the great and terrible evil we were capable of.”

  “You mean Nazis were capable of.”

  “No. No, I don’t. I mean, we all, humans, people. Germany was one of the greatest civilizations of the modern Western world, and it resulted in an unimaginable horror. That’s what we saw: That is the result of all our human genius; we turn everything into terror and destruction and murder and cruelty. That’s our will. We can’t do otherwise. That’s why so many men came home from what they’d seen and clung to their wives, new women, formed families, sought order, pursued a stable, quiet, suburban dream, made copious babies. To stave off fear itself.”

  SEPTEMBER 26, 1989

  As a part of his ongoing Scranton-area film series, Hos Si Vis Videre, Korl Oades decided to honor the obscure birthdate of Ivan Ilyich Mozzhukhin by showing a marathon of his films, including Surrender, as well as the brief but unforgettable Kuleshov Effect, choosing, in fact (Oades did), to show this multiple times to the audience, in between other films, hoping to achieve the point the effect is famed for, that is of illustrating the impact of editing, letting the audience see how their perceptions are alterable, manipulable, contingent. The experiment included three separate pairings of uninflected images: Mozzhukhin’s painted face staring straight ahead, with great intensity and perhaps the slightest hint of a labial expression (smirk? grimace?*), variously paired (vis-à-vis jump cuts) with a bowl of soup, a little girl in a wooden coffin, and a woman draped across a sofa, part of her robe slipping down across her chest. The original audience lauded Mozzhukhin’s ability to convey pleasure and hunger as he stared at the soup he was about to taste, pained sorrow and deep dismay as he looked over the open coffin of the young girl, and the salacious lust that burned from his eyes and his smile/smirk/grimace as his look turned to the woman. The experiment’s secret was that these seemingly separate images were in fact all the same image of Mozzhukhin’s face, replayed with no change other than the image that succeeded it. Putting these disconnected images side by side had caused the audience to reinterpret what they were seeing, to invest new meaning in the same flat image, making it now one of hunger, now sadness, now lust. This experiment was made by Russian director and leader of the montage movement Lev Kuleshov, giving it the name. Kuleshov’s ideas inspired other directors, including Sergei Eisenstein (Battleship Potemkin and, with Grigori Aleksandrov, October, which, although both are propaganda films, display the montagist sensibility that got Eisenstein rebuked for formalism) and Dziga Vertov (Man with a Movie Camera).

  But tonight, on the smaller second screen, as the images of the Kuleshov Effect play through for a second time, the audience does not see what Korl or Kuleshov intended them to see. In fact, none of the audiences up to this point has really been impressed, time being what it is and technology moving so quickly (vita nostra brevis est / brevi finietur); they saw simply the silent face of an outdated medium, the jump cuts giving them little but the vaguest sense that this flipbook of images is meant to be a narrative, a sensibility. Instead, most of them watched it without engagement, including the older members of the crowd, who possibly were alive at the time not of Kuleshov’s Effect but perhaps of its immediate ancestors. Though it is often forgotten now, the brilliant montage section (often viewed as a stand-alone short film) of The Parallax View clearly comes from the basic premise of the Kuleshov Effect. Many modern and postmodern works used the concept—including works in literature, art, and even music. One could make the argument that John Cage’s empty 4'33" is a similar experiment in that it attempts to make the audience realize their own role in the art, just as Kuleshov wished to illustrate the importance of both editing and the viewer’s automatic causal connection forming, assuming that because two things are near one another, follow or proceed one another, then they must mean something together.

  But the section in The Parallax View—a film of deep, accretive paranoia—involves images juxtaposed in varying tempo and with varying banners: Mother, Father, Country, Love, Enemy, God, Me, etc., set to what starts out as a quaint Nilsson-esque ballad but builds with the tempo of the juxtapositions and, toward the middle, pushes into the psyche of the viewer, whom the film is supposedly testing for sufficient sociopathic responses and tendencies such that he or she could be a fit for the secret corporation that creates Oswald-style lone-wolf assassins—the basic premise of a big part of the film’s mystery. But often enough the images stay the same but come in new contexts, under new banners, near new images. Enemy moves from an initial shot of Hitler to an image of Kennedy followed by an image of Hitler. Throughout there is a contextless face of raw terror, blurred features, a mouth agape, teeth exaggerated into near fangs. Images of sex, nakedness, and intimacy evolve from the opening’s open natural treatment to later suggestions and connections of longing, lust, abuse, etc. But the images are often the same. The buildup of repeated images creates in the viewer a unique subjective narrative, a meaning individual to each individual viewer. It’s like a filmic Rorschach test, though with a specific I-others-society-God-country-family aim. Korl found the short montage to push the viewer toward notions of an antisocial nature, they seemed tendentious and intentional, crafted, but he then had to realize the power of the montage: It made no narrative. His sense that it was biased, manipulated, intentional was—or so the argument goes—only true for him. Another viewer could easily see its emphasis on more wholesome notions of love, country, God, and family. Someone else could easily watch it and find the occasionally startling juxtapositions and shocking images—of people being beaten, dead bodies, lynchings, the KKK, Hitler, juxtaposed with a father chasing his son down a long hall, a long-shot view of a man curled fetally into a small bed, etc.—as negatively underscoring the positive values the film is meant to convey. You are meant to feel revulsion and shock at the images, to be displeased with the (you can’t help but notice) Tim-Curry-in-The-Rocky-Horror-Picture-Show-looking transvestites, to feel disconnect and even maybe anger at the antipatriotic images, and if you do not, if for some reason you feel the film is advancing an anti-American asocial perspective, clearly that is your own personal interpretation, which tells more about you than it does about the images or the film, a more or less stochastic assemblage of parts, cantilevered out into nothingness, with only the added elements of self and psychological vantage point to complete the arch, to bring the bridge to ground.

  But tonight, that is, as the images play through for the second time, the audience sees not the original montage, but, across the face of Mozzhukhin, right across his flat brow, above and below his lips—in disorderly block letters, ransom l
etterlike—the lines

  HURRY UP

  PLEASE

  IT’S TIME

  Then, again, on the robe of the seductive woman, appears HURRY UP, back to Mozzhukhin, and then back to the soup with PLEASE and then to Mozzhukhin, and then to the child in the coffin overwritten with IT’S TIME, then—unexpected, even to Korl—the experiment cycles through again, once more back to Mozzhukhin, this time the graffitist having blacked out all but his eyes, making them intense, haunting, fierce, terrible, back to the woman, then to Mozzhukhin, his cheeks blazing with graffitied rouge, eyes lined with radiant sky blue, long, mascaraed lashes extending toward either temple, lips gaudily red, then once more to the soup, this time its surface—recalling the label of Campbell’s alphabet soup—covered with drawn-on dollar signs, then back to Mozzhukhin, whose face is now covered with various sizes of corporate logos, a McDonald’s arch, an Amoco torch, a Nike swoosh, etc., the eyes blazing through it all, their irises an irradiated green, again dollar signs marring the eyes’ centers, then once more back to the child in the coffin, this time her hollowed face exaggerated Edvard Munch–like and the single word AMERICA laid across her body, and finally again back to Mozzhukhin, this time only for amoment, again his face covered with HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME and, but then the images repeat faster, the texts changing places as the film continues to filter through the still images like cards shuffled in a deck, a parallax movement, or whatever, and Korl can’t get the film to stop, can’t figure out who has messed with it and what is happening, the graffiti moving through the images until there start to be superimpositions of the images, Mozzhukhin’s face staring out from the bowl of soup, the little girl’s head in the soup, Mozzhukhin’s face haunting through the image of the girl in the coffin, the girl in the coffin rising up through the crepe de chine of the seductive woman, the banality of the soup leaching through into the thanotic and erotic images, each corrupting each, and finally the film freezes permanently on the image of Mozzhukhin, across whose brow now reads I LIED and the film won’t unfreeze and finally Korl offers to refund the audience’s money and just unplugs the projector.

  OCTOBER 11, 1988

  The unique scale of The Waste Land graffiti started to show when not only the media but also the public at large became endlessly fascinated with the emergence of new tags, messages, what were now more commonly being referred to as Toynbees. Graffiti in Scranton was on the rise, from the artful and political to the offensive and self-congratulatory and talentless. Tags tried for some time to compete with the Toynbee artist—or vandal, or poet, depending on whom you asked. There were biblical quotes, movie quotes, pieces of text from obscure literature and philosophy, from psychology, science, world politics, history. Some clever wag defaced the statue of John Mitchell, filling the stone arch above his bronze head with, “Howl, howl, howl, howl! O! you are men of stones: Had I your tongues and eyes, I’d use them so that heaven’s vaults should crack. She’s gone forever!” An apartment building’s crumbling wall read, “Imperious Caesar, dead and turn’d to clay, Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.”

  There were, as well, the standard crude drawings of red-eyed humanoid mushrooms, of Alice choosing between the one pill that would make her larger and the other to make her smaller, bongs with faces, nuns with bongs, depictions of salacious women, salacious female demons and aliens, humanoid animals having sex. Stores and businesses were almost completely overcome by the new affront to their alley sides and backs and, occasionally, front windows. In one prominent instance, perhaps following the Toynbee allusions to The Waste Land or just the extreme popularity of Cats, the musical, a graffitist whitewashed the upper portion of a wall—accessed by the roof—of a local synagogue and then painted the area in calico stripes and—in dripping script—wrote, “He looked to the sky and he gave a great leap.” Worries about antisemitism abounded in the days and weeks after the incident, though none were sure of the meaning of the graffiti.

  Around this time, “Will Robinson” continued quietly to work out his thesis regarding Lost in Space and contemporary life and “The Toynbee Convector” and his brief and perhaps misguided application of The Waste Land to his own dissatisfied existence.

  The number of arrests during this likewise rose; the police had their hands full with mostly teens who themselves were caught with paint all over their fingers, covering their clothes, the aerosol smell suffused deep in their clothes, their hair, in their skin. It was now not even exciting to roll up on a crew of kids defacing a building, two keeping watch—scattering as the headlights lit them up—one other holding a halogen light connected to an extension cord, the last tagging whatever surface they’d chosen. Sometimes they were on a roof, out of easy reach; sometimes they all ran, tried to run. Once, some kid threw a can of spray paint at Dimley, missing him but chipping a noticeable dent in the hood of his cruiser.

  The overwhelming amount of text and image overwriting the surfaces of Scranton went beyond the usual sense of urban decay: It had become a paroxysm of raw color, screaming lines written wherever secretive artists could place them, block letters in tiles stuck to pavement, sidewalks; little silhouettes on every street sign, on mail boxes. The weird thing, almost everyone agreed as they set up to shoot, Hegda quietly holding her position in front of the almost unreal lettering behind her—it had the font characteristic of a ransom note, very cleanly rendered across a diagonal spanning from lowest part of the wall at themouth of the alley to a fire escape on the third floor—was that the outpouring of graffiti didn’t take away from the rare occasions of the “original” Toynbees.

  A curious “original” of this period was first spotted on September 30, and read:

  TOYNBEE: THE CRUELEST MONTH

  “WHERE WE GONNA FIND SHADE

  OUT HERE IN THE DESERT?”

  THE LOST CIVILIZATION 1:28

  TOYNBEE: A HEAP OF BROKEN IMAGES

  “WHERE EMOTION IS INVOLVED

  EVIDENCE IS NOT REQUIRED

  ONLY THE RIGHT WORD

  IN THE RIGHT EAR

  AT THE RIGHT TIME”

  THE SKY IS FALLING 1:11

  SEPTEMBER 19, 1926

  After graduating college in 1926, B. F. (Burrhus Frederic) Skinner moved back in with his parents in Scranton and spent a year there, cloistered in his dark bedroom and hardly sleeping while trying to develop as a writer of fiction. Increasingly depressed, dissatisfied, lonely, and frustrated with his own lack of literary talent, Skinner ultimately gave up fiction, coming to the conclusion that he lacked sufficient life experience and had quote no strong personal perspective unquote from which to write. During this time, while still living at home, a period Skinner later called the quote dark year unquote, he read Bertrand Russell’s An Outline of Philosophy, and was particularly struck by Russell’s discussion of the behaviorist philosophy of psychiatrist John B. Watson. This led Skinner to start taking a more acute interest in the behaviors of those around him and he essayed several quote psychological unquote short stories. Still depressed with his lack of progression, and increasingly intrigued by the behaviors of others and the ideas he’d been reading, he left Scranton to study psychology at Harvard, where, as a graduate student, he invented the operant conditioning chamber (also known as the Skinner Box) and cumulative recorder, developed the rate of response as a critical dependent variable in psychological research, and developed a powerful, inductive, data-driven method of experimental research.

  But while alone in his attic room in Scranton, Burrhus first conceived of the utopian world he would later flesh out in Walden Two, the metaphorical articulation of his theories of radical
behaviorism, and the idealistic portrait of the civilization he thought would be humanity’s greatest achievement. He spent hours on what became unfinished pages, fragments, describing these alternate histories, available futures, lateral dimensional existences, indexical societies, modal realities. He ruled out factors of consciousness and human will, leaving only room for behavioral principles, government of actions and interactions—even so early, long before he’d begun his formal study. These worlds were sometimes populated by humanoid figures of varied descent, of alternate forms, but often enough they were like those he’d grown up with, his classmates at Hamilton College, the rowdier boys who’d indulged at frat parties and the grand spectacle of football games. He couldn’t understand these other young men and women, what it was they wanted or why they behaved as they did. It seemed clear enough that competition bred war, violence, hatred, that at its simplest level it brought on anxieties and anger responses in the fans as they watched, or rages of joy, complicated emotional behaviors all in the name of play, in the name of sport. The world that was created by the sexual predation and the layers of constant competition—and all that negative stimuli and response!—was everywhere you looked. It was a hostile place, vacillating constantly, filled with uncertainty and ill intention. He didn’t have the full clarity he would later bring to bear on Walden Two, but he did sit in that darkened room, speaking aloud as he wrote, feverish little sketches of civilizations that never had been or ever would be, little utopias in which everyone was regularized, orderly, where the actions of all members were in harmony and were governed by positive responses and an avoidance of ideas of ownership, possession, competition, any unpleasantness.

  In one of his sketches, dated 9/19/26, the utopian ideal he sensed but was far from articulating was worked through a reductio ad absurdum–style inversion: He created a world filled with heroes, competition, violence, sexual possession, and closed relationships, rewards for some and losses and pain for the rest. A place of scarcity ruled by fear and animal lashings out among the members of the society. It was only a matter of a couple of scribbled pages, but as he worked through the early hours of one particular night crafting this anticivilization, this America filled with greed and violence and force and viciousness and competition over everything, where the goal was to consume and to hoard and to seek limitless pleasure at the cost of all others and the risk of finding endless pain, he felt filled with a great and wordless terror, the first ill shiver of a depression he had never known could exist, the type of deep, perilous falling feeling he envisioned radical behaviorism obviating and eradicating altogether by prescribing just how everyone should be and act and live to maximize their productivity, their sense of living a life of purpose, of having a balance between work and leisure, but this particular night—and there were many others, sadly, before he abandoned his science fiction and devoted himself to studying how behavior could be modified and left off the bleaker thoughts that it never could, the fatalistic panic crept over him that there was no saving any of us, that no matter what this greed and striving and selfishness and purposeless competition, these were part of human nature, these were the inescapable truths of our very existence. He recalled lines from Horace then and thought to have them etched into his story, his other reality, “for Diana does not free chaste Hippolytus from the shadows, and Theseus is not strong enough to break the chains of Lethe from his dear Pirithous.” No one can be saved from his fate, from Lethe, forgetfulness, oblivion, death.