A.I. - Kubrick and Spielberg

Like many who love cinema, I was devastated when Stanley Kubrick unexpectedly died in March of 1999.   

 

Kubrick is known for his highly calculated approach to filmmaking - both in terms of narrative and aesthetics.  The preciseness of the Kubrick's approach to cinema sugges that his movies as being cold and vapid, which is, for example, evident in his symmetrical photography. At the same time, there is also an argument to be made that Kubrick's films are very much about what makes us human.

A theme that repeats itself in Kubrick films are the dangers of systems such as war, computers or even the family.  And Kubrick likes to show the consequences when human emotions circulate within these systems. For example, when a character expresses an emotion, it tends to feel strange or out of a place. A notable example is Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) over-acting or melodramatic conversation with Brady the bartender in The Shining. Or, even better, the scene where Jack and Wendy (Shelley Duvall) debate over the state of their son Danny.

Or, probably the best example is the computer Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey, who seems to have more emotions than the humans that created him. 

These scenes suggests that when one goes against the system, whether it is a haunted hotel, the family or futuristic computers, it creates an abstract or surreal disruption within the narrative.

Another oddity of Kubrick is how he was able to meld his modernistic vision of cinema within the framework of pop culture.  Take for example how A Clockwork Orange and Dr. StrangeLove has been parodied in popular television show such as The Simpsons. Or, the famously quoted dialogue from Full Metal Jacket: "Let me see your war face" or "Here's Johnny!" from The Shining.

This brings me to Spielberg's A.I., which tells the story of a robot named David (Haley joel osment) who is programmed with real emotions. A.I. was suppose to be Kubrick's final film.  It had been reported that Kubrick decided to film Eyes Wide Shut first, so the digital technology would catch up to his futuristic vision of artificial intelligence.  Kubrick had been working with Spielberg on developing A.I. At one point, Kubrick and his brother-in-law/partner Jan Harlan were even considering Spielberg to direct. But when Kubrick died in 1999, Jan Harlan reached out to Spielberg to make A.I. in honor of Kubrick.

My experience of seeing A.I. in the summer of 2001 was quite disappointing because I was expecting to see Kubrick's dystopic futuristic vision. I mean, I had been hearing about this film since the early 1990s!  I admit now that I did not like the film because it was too close to Kubrick's death.  But after speaking with a friend, he recommended I see the film again. And then hearing that A.O. Scott from the New York Times picked A.I. as one of the best films of the decade, I decided to revisit the film.  And glad I did.

A.I. is a frightening, yet beautiful film about a robot who goes on journey to to find the Blue Fairy who will transform him into a real boy.  The imagery and special effects are fascinating.  A notable sequence is when David and the other deformed robots escape from Lord Johnson-Johnson (Brendon Gleason) who runs the Flesh-Fair, a ceremony that destroys robots for public spectacle. Lord Johnson-Johnson's moon balloon hovercraft that seeks out the robot is a strange melding of E.T. and Orwell's 1984.

 

Most points of tension on A.I. center on its bizarre ending.  I am not going to say much about it, in case you have not seen it.  One can certainly add that the end tends to fit with Spielberg's sensibility and probably not Kubrick's.  Though, we will never truly know how Kubrick would have handled the materials for A.I.  But above all, it should not block one from seeing, arguably, one of Spielberg's best movies.

The Pleasure of the Text - Video Essay

The purpose of this video essay is to apply Roland Barthes theory of text of pleasure and text of bliss to the realm of visual and performative arts. 

 

 A question I pose is what emotional effects do these sounds and images produce for the viewer?  And do they reflect the textual effects Barthes describes in The Pleasure of the Text?

The first part of the video examines Barthes distinguishing between the text of pleasure and the text of bliss (which is also referred to as the readerly and writerly text). Barthes argues that the text of pleasure is a closed text because it situates the reader in a comfortable and pleasurable position.   For example, a majority of Hollywood films would fall under the text of pleasure, because they aim to situate the viewer as if they are right in the middle of the action without drawing attention to the production of the image unfolding on screen.

The text of bliss disrupts one’s readership—revealing gaps, ruptures and disturbances within the text.  Barthes postulates that the text of bliss is jouissance (pure enjoyment) because it breaks down the unity of the signifying chain.   Another way to put it is that the text of bliss attempts to go beyond meaning.  As Barthes notes, “it unsettles the reader's historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language” (14).  The text of bliss finds itself in close association with the surrealism and avant-garde art. 

The last part of the video explores Barthes’ final concept in The Pleasure of Text, which he describes as the “grain the voice.” Barthes states that the “grain of the voice, which is an erotic mixture of timbre and language, can therefore also be, along with diction, the substance of art of guiding one's body…. [T]he language aligned with the flesh [is] a text where we can hear the grain of the throat” (66). For Barthes, the grain of the voice is not the language that speaks the body, but the body that speaks the language.

I found the grain of the voice concept breaking away from the binaries of the text of pleasure and text of bliss.  The grain of the voice demonstrates how text of pleasure can register moments of abstraction or bliss or even transcendence.  I believe the last clip on Ian Curtis from the post-punk new wave group Joy Division performing “Transmission” exemplifies how his passionate singing captures the grain of the voice—how Curtis’ body language attempts to go beyond meaning within the realm of pop culture.

Victor Turner - The Anthropology of Performance

In Victor Turner's essay "The Anthropology of Performance," he argues that change involves a re-adjustment, and that this re-adjustment is ceremonial, what he sees as being theatre or performance. 

 

Turner breaks down four phases of public action:  Breach, Crisis, Redressive Action and Reintergration. For Turner, change within a culture occurs when a threshold has been crossed.  As he notes, "From the standpoint of relatively well-regulated, more or less accurately operational, methodical, orderly social life, social dramas have a 'Iiminal' or 'threshold' character. The latter term is derived from a Germanic base which means 'thrash'  'thresh,' a place where grain is beaten out from its husk, where what has been hidden is thus manifested" (92)

This passage from Turner is very similar to Roland Barthes' notion of the grain of the voice.  For Barthes, the grain of the voice, which he argues in "The Pleasure of the Text," (which happens to be the subject of my video essay) is when the voice aligns itself with the flesh or body. It is at point where meaning is shifted to the energy of the performer. It is when the body becomes the voice.   

Musicologist such as Simon Frith and Richard Middleton have tuned into Barthes' notion of the grain of the voice for its political implications in music. For example, Frith interprets Elvis Presley's body and hip shakes in his early performance on television in the 1950s disturbing and disrupting the status quo. Here, Turner's conception of performance fits well with Barthes' grain of the voice. Elvis' transgressive body language shook up the way we think of the performer and performance.

Twin Peaks

I started watching the Twin Peaks television show - can't believe I never watched this when I was in High School. I've seen almost all of Lynch's work accept for this. Lynch is great at subtly interjecting the strange, surreal, and even the supernatural into the narrative while, at the same time, balancing the realm of everyday life. 

Like the mysterious ear Jeffrey Beaumont finds in Blue Velvet, the death of Laura Palmer has disrupted the safe and peaceful rural world of Twin Peaks. What we find in Twin Peaks is bizarre entities occupying the corporeal world. But this is not like the Star Trek episode "Return to Tomorrow" where Spock and Kirk find a planet of intellectual minds stored in sphere balls and are looking for bodies to temporally occupy in order to construct artificial bodies they will soon house. 

In Twin Peaks, the spirit of Bob, (the Frank Booth of the series) is to move from body to body in order to continue his serial killer like wrath. I guess that's all I can say...because I have not finish watching the series. Twin Peaks, in many ways, reminds me of how great of a TV show Mulholland Drive could have been.