Film II: Film Matters
Session Organizer: David M. Jones
University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire
Department of English, 414 Hibbard Hall
Eau Claire, WI 54702
jonesm@uwec.edu

"They only see what they want to see": Trick Endings and Jouissance in Shyamalan's Sixth Sense

Evoking the filmic pleasure of the duped viewer, of an audience fully surprised by a trick ending, is one popular method of making a film matter.  After all, what would the 1999 film Sixth Sense be without the ending that restructured the entire narrative, a move that sent many viewers back for seconds with the question, "what did I miss the first time?"  While M. Night Shyamalan is drawing from suspense techniques of subterfuge mastered by Hitchcock in films like Psycho and Lady Vanishes, what makes the trick ending of Sixth Sense matter in a way that others do not is the way it compels a questioning of the fantasies of dominant subjectivity.  Until the conclusion of the first viewing, the ideological assumptions of the viewer are intact as (s)he watches a film about an average psychologist with marital problems attempting to cure a mentally-troubled child who "see[s] dead people.”  But as Slavoj Zizek points out, “There is… always something comical in the way the subject is attached to the signifiers that determines his place in the symbolic structure, i.e., that 'represents him for the other signifiers.' This link is ultimately groundless, 'irrational.'”  By the film's end, the protagonist's subjective signifiers (psychologist, husband, healthy), as well as the viewer's identification of\with those signifiers, are shown to be groundless and irrational.  The importance and pleasure of the ending is best explained by theoretical conceptions of jouissance: the normative social narratives projected onto the screen by the viewer are shattered as the "reality" of death breaks through.  Sixth Sense reveals the viewer to be much like the film's ghosts, who, as the child-sage so aptly puts it, "only see what they want to see."

Michael LeBlanc
University of California, Riverside
wayworth@yahoo.com

Mulholland Drive, Saturated Characters, and 1950s American Myth

Details evocative of the American 1950s are a common thread among the films of David Lynch.  In addition to specific cultural artifacts, many of Lynch’s saturated characters in films such as Mulholland Dr. suggest a particular myth in the popular consciousness.  This mythical world that Lynch conjures up, with its one-dimensional, conservative representations, is one often presented in American culture as “the Fifties”—not the actual, historical time period, but the mythical Fifties as depicted in the television and other popular culture of the period.  The recurrence of references to the Fifties throughout Lynch’s work suggests that the era as myth holds a significant place in the Lynchian universe.  In the mythical Fifties, people have enough to get by and fit comfortably into stereotypes without any stirring of dissatisfaction.  The inhabitants of the mythical Fifties do not desire because they are already satisfied.  The Fifties myth works in American culture to mask the Real, the trauma of separation from the Other that produces desire.  However, Lynch’s use of these images is always placed in the context of spectacle or performance.  The ubiquitous red curtain in Lynch’s world works to point out the artificiality of the Fifties’ fulfillment, indicating that beyond the stage lies something unspeakable and incoherent.  The context of spectacle also means that Lynch’s representations of women, which have been criticized as harmful and and stereotyped, take on new significance as self-conscious spectacle.  Lynch's presentation of the conservative image of the female as spectacle enables the female viewer to deal with these issues not by ignoring and suppressing them but by placing them in full view.

Karline Koehler
University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire
koehlekm@uwec.edu

Regional Matters: the Construction of the State of New Mexico in The Rattlesnake: a Psychical Species

My paper, tentatively titled “Regional Matters: The Construction of the State of New Mexico in The Rattlesnake: A Psychical Species,” will examine the aesthetic and cultural significance of the little-known film The Rattlesnake, directed by Romaine Fielding in 1913.  I will adapt theories of “national” and “regional” cinemas in order to show how the film, through its narrative and formal qualities, normalized a specific identity for New Mexico.

New Mexico served as a primary location for a number of film productions and production companies in the years before Hollywood was consolidated as the singular site for filmmaking in the United States.  The work of Romaine Fielding, who operated the Southwest Division of the Lubin Film Company, contributed significantly to this regional practice.  Fielding, who was voted the most popular film performer in 1911 by Moving Picture World, made and starred in over twenty films in the area, including the little-known masterpiece The Rattlesnake.  Not only is this film of superior formal quality, but moreover, its thrilling narrative and dynamic compositional strategies formulate a regional identity that accords with the intersection of local and national discourses which led to the area’s incorporation as a state after sixty years as a territory.

In these ways, The Rattlesnake provides an excellent example of a film which can help scholars rethink how films intersect with existing political and cultural contexts.  Further, my analysis will indicate how certain films might be salvaged from historical erasure through such scholarly discourse.

Daniel Herbert
University of Southern California

Can I Check Your Bags? (The Fantasy of the World’s End in Peter Greenaway’s The Tulse Luper Suitcases)

Anna Dinerstein and Mike Neary define our historical moment as a period of “disutopia,” characterized by “not just the temporary absence of Utopia, but [by] the political celebration of the end of social dreams.” In this paper, I raise the possibility of another historical moment, following disutopia, in which we desire dystopia; we long for the apocalypse. In short, utopia and dystopia have traded places in our contemporary social imaginary, dystopia standing in for the utopia that we can no longer think. As Fredric Jameson remarked in 1991, it is easier for most people to imagine nuclear winter than to imagine the capitalist mode of production changing significantly. He neglects to add that the former might lead to the latter and therefore be a way of imagining it after all. Perhaps the world historical horizon has grown so grim over the past sixty years that nuclear winter increasingly seems like the only way out of the mess.

With this assumption in mind, I turn to Peter Greenaway’s film, The Tulse Luper Suitcases: The Moab Story as an expression of a cultural desire for an apocalypse that radically transforms human existence. What I trace through the film in this essay is a fantasy of a coming atomic or nuclear apocalypse coupled with that possibility of an end applied to the film’s form itself. In short, the film’s structure offers the impossible: a glimpse of post-apocalypse filmmaking, of filmmaking that does not emerge from capitalism and is not shaped by it. Instead, Greenaway’s film starts to think the world after capitalism.

Stacy Thompson
University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire
thompssr@uwec.edu