VIII. JOUR MAL II: CRASH AESTHETICS, PART I OF IV.

For your curiosity, quote-fetish, and general interest, here is the transcript for JOUR MAL Season I, Episode II, Part I: “CRASH AESTHETICS”.

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

In Association with PHASMID PRESS

THE EMPTY SET PRESENTS: 

JOUR MAL: SERIES I-TRASH

Written, Produced, and Narrated: D.K. V-B

Additional vocals: Clementine Robertson

Outro music: “202 Blues” (edit) by Black Shoes

Graphic design: Scott McCLure

Special thanks to Rob Scher
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EPISODE TWO (IN FOUR PARTS): CRASH AESTHETICS

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EPISODE TWO, PART I

“Impossible in any other form”: The Fascinating Necerotics of Death in David Cronenberg's Crash (1996)

PART I:

“A Most Perfect Act of My Whole Heart”; or, “Have You Ever Seen a Portal?”

In The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus declares that “from the moment absurdity is recognized, it becomes a passion, the most harrowing of all. But whether or not one can live with one’s passions, whether or not one can accept their law, which is to burn the heart they simultaneously exalt—that is the whole question” (Camus 22). And yet often, I think the answer is surely us all to the question: who amongst you has gone all the way? In, through, out, over? Uber, unter? Who's been there-Elsewherenevermore? 

Or is it more a statement? Like the one that issued short bright sparks that came out the mouth of the now obscure Atlanta rapper Tree on the track “All” when he said, in his croaking, pleading timbre: “for a second it was ours, it was ours, it was ours”?...Surely the answer is us all to the question Frank asked Donnie in the empty theatre while Gretchen slept: “have you ever seen a portal?” [sample]

Are mesmerism and fascination, separately and together, something like a portal? A beautiful thing Karen Pomeroy described to Donnie as a “cellar door”? Maybe Camus would agree, saying that “there is thus a lower key of feelings, inaccessible in the heart but partially disclosed by the acts they imply and the attitudes of mind they assume” (Camus 9). You ever ask yourself why it was what it was that first brought colour to Pleasantville? Too trite, maybe. Too obvious. Yeah, that's it. 

If I'm thinking of mesmerism and fascination, then I'm always-already thinking of Lugosi. Mina rendered dumb by the Countish coordination of hand and eye, both outstretched, the angles twixt the claw steep, the beam of light across the gaze – “come...here” [sample], imperious-smooth as an inquisitor's velvet. Under the aegis of 30s standards and practices, it would seem that the vampire's hands are more mesmeric than his bite. Clara Bow, Helen Chandler, and Dwight Frye alike, all caught up in the timbre of night music. Mesmerized. Ask yourself: is your Will stronger than wolfsbane? Where does the magnetism sleep? What reverse cannon sucks you in? Palm to putrid palm, heart to ugly heart? Maybe it’s not in the eye or the mouth, but all of it in hand. [“Wind Willow” by Black Shoes – excerpt].

I'm curious as to whether hypnogogic states can reveal something of It, a shadow of a shadow? Can this mesmeric magnetism pull on those dark tides, both in the sense of ignorant impenetrability and/or mood-hue, right up to the toes of our heart, stood on the beach of our mind, to feel the temperate of soul-surf and perhaps fathom something of that See of inner sea? Hmmm. Let's ask Cronenberg.

I. Introduction: Crash and Fascination

There's all types of slime, oleaginousness, gum-thick gunk that can make you slick or make you sick. Sick to think that you've been caught in the amber of her eyes, like a musca trapped in sap. A sap of the Chandlerian order, an organ in a tub, kidney on ice, brain in a vat. Is mesmerism and the fascination that oozes out of its eyes, that gathers ankle-high then up to thighs, nothing but a trap? Existenz, Truman Show, 13th Floor, The Matrix, Possessor, Wandavision – how would you know? Hmmm. Well, maybe the Merovingian was right. Maybe as soon as It takes and takes you, why “does not matter. All that matters is the feeling” [sample].

It's funny how the Merovingian is French. He sounds, in many ways, especially in the infamous chocolate cake scene in The Matrix Reloaded, a lot like La Mettrie's Le bonheur (1748), which says: “in regard to felicity, right and wrong are quite indifferent…a person who gets greater satisfaction from doing wrong will be happier than anyone who gets less from doing good …there is a special kind of happiness which can be found in vice, and in crime itself” (qtd. in Shattuck 255). 

The fascination of sewer-gleam, dark light paradoxes, bracts and axles bobbing askance in the shallow, the illusion of deep water, bilgewater, the illusion that we'll all float down here. You swallow and think dimly about how and maybe even dimmer why its Call has claws, its look's got hooks, why it knows you so well despite going to sleep inside you with, if at all, a rough and rabid word passing between you like the dregs of bar soap, hard, quick, and intense, twixt the twitching palms of Howard Hughes. It’s fascinating how you feel strange, heady, woozy, swayed and sickly sweet, like molasses when you watch all these. Watch. Fascinated by the fact that even in those strange undulations of Cronen-Coleridge green witch-oil sea-skin, you find that there is also laughter booming through you, in you. 

The work of David Cronenberg, and his son if Possessor is anything to go by, stays with me like that. The heavy swallow of a faceless fascination. It’s in the shiny curve and wincing point of Beverley Mantle's instruments in Dead Ringers, the glistening membranousness of Max Renn's new flesh in Videodrome. It’s in Eric Packer's panting let’s-find-out in Cosmopolis, it’s in Seth Brundle's revolting reversibility in The Fly, it’s in the gurgle-coo of Allegra Geller's squelching game pods in Existenz. Yes. Yes, it’s in the pout of the scars in Crash.

Wait, wait. Last time I wouldn’t because I couldn't define sewerism. Why? Well because, as I hope to show here, the mesmeric, like the abject, trash, and the absurd “has meaning only in so far as it is not agreed to” (Camus 22). Why. Why always is there an onus of comprehensibility, of legibility, when it comes to these deep draw magnetisms? Perhaps scary, for many-most, not being able to define what it is that tugs on you from behind your naval. Makes it easier to accept those otherwise repressive and odious categories your un-tugged mind scoffs at readily. But I can't help but think of the illegibility of my blackness and the illegibility of the blackness in me. I think of Camus and Beckford, the former who asserts of Chestov's absurd god: “His greatness is his incoherence”, the latter who in Vathek states “there is nothing so pleasing as retiring to caverns” (Camus 22). 

This time, I won't because I can't describe the yen, the pull, the call of the mesmeric Thing. Albert, it feels, chides me for thinking I could, on any given day, good or bad: “I realize then that you have been reduced to poetry: I shall never know. Have I the time to become indignant? You have already changed theories. So that science that was to teach me everything ends up in a hypothesis, that lucidity founders in metaphor, that uncertainty is resolved in a work of art” (Camus 22). 

Lots of things are mesmeric. Questions. Like this one: “what dost thou want, what canst though give?” [sample]. Maybe questions are inherently mesmeric because they bind one to an answer, given, expected, or unexpected. So to the asker bound to a revelation, however large or small, of something of their imagination, their personhood, their point of view.

Latent within the term 'fascination' and its common connotations, which include immobilizing by the power of the gaze, charm, enchant, attract, enrapture, seize, capture, and/or dazzle is a power dynamic. From a psychoanalytical perspective, Sigmund Freud used the term first in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921c) to refer to what can be described as the binding properties of love, the bondage of love. Bataille would agree, claiming: “this fascination is the dominant element in eroticism” (Bataille 13).

Well, it warrants the saying of it. I acknowledge that referring to Freud and Lacan in 2021 would put me in line to at least be painted as an unfashionable atavist, at most see me dragged outside behind the chemical sheds and shot. 

So perhaps at risk, or something far less melodramatic (a splinter as opposed to a dismemberment), I'll venture a supposition, that Inherent in this description is the suggestion that love is predicated on a fascination that engenders a paralysis of critical faculties, dependence, docile submission, and jejune credulity, much in the same way fascination forms both bridge and catalyst that creates and sustains similar effects between a hypnotist and the hypnotized. 

A little bit too strong, maybe? Not stronger than Bataille's introduction to Eroticism: Death and Sensuality, where George claims that: 

Men are swayed by two simultaneous emotions: they are driven away by terror and drawn by an awed fascination. Taboo and transgression reflect these two contradictory urges. The taboo would forbid the transgression but the fascination compels it. Taboos and the divine are opposed to each other in one sense only, for the sacred aspect of the taboo is what draws men towards it and transfigures the original interdiction. The often intertwined themes of mythology spring from these factors. (Bataille 66)

Ethics and technique notwithstanding, many factions, forces, forums, fealties, and frameworks are interested in the intimated power of such states. A good example from a bad text, Sex Secrets of the Black Magicians Exposed, Ramsey Dukes states: “The technique used is called ‘post-hypnotic suggestion’. It is possible to hypnotize a person and tell him that he will obey certain commands or perform some action spontaneously after he has come round from the hypnotic trance. In this way, it is possible to confront someone with a miracle and watch his reaction” (Dukes 81). 

Maybe he'd call this befoulment, this elevated loss, this addled clarity, nothing but a dirty miracle. But miracles, to some, are not so banal. The drama critic of The New Yorker, John Lahr, for instance, puts it short and sharp as a bodkin through  a doublet: "Perversion became an act not of debasement but of discovery ... evil itself becomes a miracle” (qtd. in Shattuck 259)

Beyond the parallel drawn between subjects in a relationship of extreme devotion, being in love, and hypnagogic states, Freud explicitly links these phenomena with sexual relationships in his 1918 article “The Taboo of Virginity” in which he discussed the notion of “sexual bondage”, a state of subjugation, dependence, and willlessness experienced in a sexual relationship. Jacques Lacan would later use the term to explore the problem of the imaginary relationship between the self and the loved Other or the authority figure, whereby fascination is inextricable from the process of ego formation. 

Well, while it could be argued that an auteur can portray the physical dynamics, flows, and negotiations of power within both sexual and non-sexual contexts using either acts or symbols of power, be it sociopolitical/economic affluence as it is in Sam Taylor-Johnson's 50 Shades of Grey, or more directly through extreme impact violence as it is in Michael Winterbottom's The Killer Inside Me, I feel that it is vastly more difficult to portray the more 'ephemeral' phenomena associated with and result from such acts, as well as their psycho-physical consequences and, particularly, the role of fascination in these encounters. It can be done, though. And done well, you ask me though you didn't. David Cronenberg's Crash (1996) is, to me, an example of how Western cinema has attempted to engage with and authentically express the myriad affective subtleties involved in the relationship between fascination, and the confluence of sex and power with varying degrees of success.

Let's cast broadly and ask well, what does paraphilia mean to folk? Where does it sit in the register and roll of days? Lurid, mysterious, enervating, abject, off-putting? Well, there's the Romance of it, of course. Only think of Walter Pater's "Conclusion" in Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), which Oscar Wilde knew rote and called his “golden book”: 

Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to be seen in them by the finest senses? How can we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy? To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. Failure is to form habits. (qtd. in Shattuck 325).  

Not dissimilarity in tone, the French Ultra-Humanite writes in The Order of Things: “After Sade, violence, life and death, desire, and sexuality will extend, below the level of representation, an immense expanse of darkness, which we are now attempting to recover...in our discourse, in our freedom, in our thought” (Foucault, 211). 

Let's not get ahead of ourselves. Let's set it up properly. Let's describe the text. Crash is about the strange lure of the auto collision, provoking as it does the human fascination with death and the tendency to eroticize danger. Most motorists will slow down to stare at the scene of a collision; they may feel their pulses quickening and become aware of the fragility of their own bodies. The characters of Crash carry this awareness a step further, cherishing and nurturing it. For them, a car collision is a sexual turn-on, and a jolting life force they come to crave. After getting into a serious car accident, a TV director discovers an underground sub-culture of scarred, omnisexual car-crash victims who use car accidents and the raw sexual energy they produce to try to rejuvenate his sex life with his wife. Since a road accident left him with serious facial and bodily scarring, a former TV scientist has become obsessed by the marriage of motor-car technology with what he sees as the raw sexuality of car-crash victims. The scientist, along with a crash victim he has recently befriended, sets about performing a series of sexual acts in a variety of motor vehicles, either with other crash victims or with sex workers whom they contort into the shape of trapped corpses. Ultimately, the scientist craves a suicidal union of blood, semen, and engine coolant, a union with which he becomes dangerously obsessed. 

In many ways, Crash can inadvertently be summarised by a single Bataille quote: 

Beings which reproduce themselves are distinct from one another, and those reproduced are likewise distinct from each other, just as they are distinct from their parents. Each being is distinct from all others. His birth, his death, the events of his life may have an interest for others, but he alone is directly concerned in them. He is born alone. He dies alone. Between one being and another, there is a gulf, a discontinuity. This gulf exists, for instance, between you, listening to me, and me, speaking to you. We are attempting to communicate, but no communication between us can abolish our fundamental difference. If you die, it is not my death. You and I are discontinuous beings. But I cannot refer to this gulf which separates us without feeling that this is not the whole truth of the matter. It is a deep gulf, and I do not see how it can be done away with. Nonetheless, we can experience its dizziness together. It can hypnotise us. This gulf is death in one sense, and death is vertiginous, death is hypnotising. (Bataille 12-13)

D. K. Vida-Bekwot.