Moi aussi, Paul.
Caden Cotard: I will be dying and so will you, and so will everyone here. That’s what I want to explore. We’re all hurtling towards death, yet here we are for the moment, alive. Each of us knowing we’re going to die, each of us secretly believing we won’t
I’ve mentioned a couple times on here before that I’m afraid I’ve read a lethal text and don’t know it yet, that I’m either teetering on the brink of something very, very deep – or even worse, that I’m already in free-fall and just haven’t been able to make out the signs of the ground rushing up at me yet. I’m watching Contempt and thinking about death. The night didn’t start out this way – I blame Charlie fucking Kaufman and Synecdoche, NY, which has been sapping my will to live totally, tenderly, tragically for the last few hours. I’m not sure how to respond to it right now – I think I get some of the various levels it’s trying to work at, and I do love me some Philip Seymour, but I sometimes feel like Kaufman abandons formalistic concerns in order to pursue this swirling panoply of meta-theater. I think the intention he has is an alienating or cleaving affect, to point out flaws in and undermine structures of representations that make us feel like we have friends or futures or lives or meaning, but the length of it, the sheer tedium of listening to PSH (whether it’s done by him or one of the many, many actors who plays him in the film) drone on about his impending death makes it impossible to stay with the alienation for long. Human brains are egosyntonic, they’re pretty good at squaring circles and filling in gaps, and the degree of psychic distress that Kaufman tries to generate with the dialogue eventually just turns into this bizarre pathology of aging and decay that makes me feel somewhat disgusted and somewhat sympathetic with Hoffman’s character. At some point, the film reclaims the very meaning which it seeks to deny and makes dying into an existential act.
Contempt, though. Whoo. Godard writes in one of his essays that cinema should show moments of loving and dying, that it should split the human condition wide open. Part of the reason that Godard is so effective at breaking you like he does in Contempt is that he never overplays his hand like Kaufman does – tragedy comes a half second at a time, in a glance or a jerk that lasts 5 frames before the story continues. This is what I mean with Bardot’s brief “moi aussi, Paul” in response to his confession of love – the whole scene works like a fucking game of Jenga. First, just when Bardot naked starts to seem like the intro to some B-level porno, Godard switches filters on the camera and makes you aware of the desire, at whatever level, embodied in looking at Bardot on screen, the voyeurism inherent in gazing upon bodies in our society and more specifically women’s bodies… and makes you feel repulsed with yourself. The dialogue continues, and as Paul tells Bardot of his love for her, Bardot responds “me too, Paul”, leaving entirely ambiguous (and deliberately so) whether she loves him back, or if she’s just echoing his love for her. It’s a totally self-absorbed act, but the way Godard pairs it with the filter shifts, you can’t help but transfer the loathing for Bardot back on to yourself. As Paul eventually demonstrates himself to also be a fairly self-absorbed character, the realization slowly shifts from “I’m sick, he’s sick, she’s sick” to “we’re all infected with something,” which transforms in turn to the realization that the infection is the illusion that we ever were more than slightly more advanced primates to begin with. That’s what Godard does – they’re half-second jolts that slam your consciousness out of whatever comfortable walls and borders and barriers you’ve built up around it, and in those brief instants before you can recover control, the ugliness of it all, when deprived of the deadening, secularizing forces of Habit settles like a lead fucking stone in your stomach.
I’ve been having these weird experiences lately where I become forced to confront things that normally don’t intrude into every day experience, the sort of stuff that your brain squashes down and vacuum packs into storage boxes in whatever cerebral cellar is hardest to get access to. Today, I was watching someone walk across the street in front of me, and suddenly legs just seemed like the weirdest fucking body-part – which they are, to be objective; there’s no real reason that legs should look anymore natural or beautiful or human than harlequin babies or chicken drumsticks. It was this odd act of self-alienation; the subtle every-day sexual pleasures of looking at other humans suddenly becomes proof that everything which seems appealing or just or worst of all true is a learned response, the output of a system which takes place in approximately a half square foot of cerebellum. I’ve been reading this book about Subaltern histories by Dipesh Chakrabarty, and he makes the off-handed comment that most societies haven’t really engaged with history or economics or linear time for any longer than 300 years, but these seem now like fundamental, constitutive elements of not only national belonging, but human activity. But precisely why they feel so intuitive is that they aren’t at all – they’re the result of a very systematic process of expelling, suppressing, or ignoring beliefs that countermand them. There’s a very elaborate process of memory and forgetting that goes into justifying national communities, to let you believe that individuals in America really do have something in common, and what’s more that it’s something which justifies killing someone you’ve never met to preserve ideals you only ever thought you had.
What sort of deeper sleight-of-hand is at work in my epistemology? I’ve been reading Foucault’s Order of Things, and he makes the comment about Don Quixote that he is trying to turn reality into a sign, to make the world he sees match up with the books he read. This precipitated a series of chain-reactions in which I tried to evaluate critically or objectively everything I thought I knew. Consider the justice system – what’s the basis for the majority of our decisions? Property rights, which are perceived to be naturally originating. You have a right to control of your own body and your own abstract self. Thus, murder is the worst crime we can conceive of, because it utterly violates everything we thought we knew about who our bodies belonged to and who had the rights to interact with them.
But a thousand years ago? Why is blasphemy not the worst crime conceivable today? Surely we can imagine a world in which human affairs are relatively minor compared to greater celestial truths; were that the case, then murder, robbery, and rape would be minor blips on your permanent (in the actual sense) record, whereas peeing on a church or saying Goddammit would be a capital crime, not to mention the unspeakable heresy in denying god. You know what the Biblical punishment for rape is? You have to pay 50 shekels and marry the girl. I realized, as I was thinking about this, the arbitrariness of the intricate relationships that I possess to various truths, be they political, moral, personal, etc. and they all started to crumble. I felt nauseated, it was like being Neo and waking up in the fucking goo in the Matrix.
Aren’t we really repulsive animals, when you think about it? Every time I get worried about America bombing poor people all over the world or that we’re destroying the Ozone layer or that I buy books with money that could feed starving people, I finger the (metaphorical) zipper on my Human suit and remind myself that these things we call Truth and Beauty and the Good are collective delusions; that someday, this planet will be dust and I will be nothing but a faint intimation upon its surface, that it really was all that short and pointless and that that’s OK. Someone asked Zizek in an interview what he disliked the most about his physical appearance, and he said “That it shows me as I really am.”
But while alive, you wait in vain, wasting years, for a phone call or a letter or a look from someone or something to make it all right. And it never comes or it seems to but it doesn’t really. And so you spend your time in vague regret or vaguer hope that something good will come along. Something to make you feel connected, something to make you feel whole, something to make you feel loved. And the truth is I feel so angry, and the truth is I feel so fucking sad, and the truth is I’ve felt so fucking hurt for so fucking long and for just as long I’ve been pretending I’m OK, just to get along, just for, I don’t know why, maybe because no one wants to hear about my misery, because they have their own. Well, fuck everybody. Amen.
