The Prestige and Kierkegaard

Recently I was at an Indian potluck and Christopher Nolan came up as a topic of conversation. Probably something related to The Dark Knight. Anyhow, the conversation eventually moved to The Prestige and I remembered a thought I had had on the film, but had forgotten about until that afternoon.

One potential way of reading the film would be through a Kierkegaardian lens, which I think shines some light on the trinity used within the film. Hence, we can think of Kierkegaard’s Christian existentialist trinity of the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious as roughly equivalent to the pledge, the turn, and the prestige.

The aesthetic and the pledge are essentially the same: it involves something of a pact, but crucially adorned in a baroque manner (the importance of masks, titles, and theatrics in the film and magic itself). Think of any magic show you have ever seen as well: there is always something of a glam theatric that surrounds the entire performance. We might also parallel it to Lacan’s imaginary order, the order of ego adornment and spectral identification.

The ethical, then, is roughly equivalent to the turn: in it, the object disappears from our sight, as if by magic. But the “as if” here is crucial, because in our heart of hearts we must unconsciously believe that the trick is merely an illusion, even if we consciously wish it to be something more: if we were to fully accept it as something truly mystical, our entire basis of reality would disintegrate. Here the Lacanian connection would be to the symbolic, the stable foundation of language that sutures the wound of the void, as well as what introduces the dimension of the non-all to being: as soon as there is the Word, something can both “appear” and “disappear” (similar to Freud’s Fort-Da game).

Finally we arrive at the religious, which is equivalent to the prestige, when the object returns from “inner space.” It might be helpful to think of it in terms of the Lacanian Real, the point at which we encounter the traumatic kernel at the core of the illusion: on the one hand, we can conceive of it in terms of the violence underlying the illusion, such as the killing of the bird in the disappearing bird trick or the violence the magicians inflict upon one another. Yet it’s also something more: it’s when magic truly happens, when the “illusion” is actually that the trick is merely an “illusion”: it’s the mystical that exceeds and destroys the foundation of our entire reality. It must therefore appear as something evil and monstrous, like the diabolical cloning machine that Nikola Tesla builds for Mr. Angier.

On a final note, one might argue that the truly magical kernel masked by the “mere illusion” is l’objet petit a in its purest form, the object-cause-of-desire, the “lack, the remainder of the real that sets in motion the symbolic movement of interpretation, a hole at the center of the symbolic order, the mere appearance of some secret to be explained, interpreted, etc.”

—Bryan Klausmeyer

The Big Parallax

I recently watched Alan J. Pakula’s The Parallax View, starring Warren Beatty as the pertinacious reporter Joe Frady who begins to unravel a conspiracy surrounding the deaths of several people who, like himself, had witnessed the assassination of a popular RFK-esque politician three years prior. His inquiry takes him far down the rabbit’s hole, so to speak, where he finds the nebulous, but no doubt sinister, deeds of the Parallax Corporation, a corporation ostensibly designed to seek out and hire maladjusted individuals whose psychological profiles earn them the unique privilege of carrying out high-profile assassinations.

The film is undoubtedly steeped in the post-Watergate zeitgeist of conspiracy, scandal, and suspicion, comparable in many ways to Sydney Pollack’s Three Days of the Condor, although I prefer Parallax for a number of reasons. But it would be wrong to not give due weight to the tumultuous events of the 1960s as well, which indelibly leave their mark on the film in the form of retrospection, subtly cued by the time-jump employed by the director. Thus, rather than immersing the viewer in the chaos of assassination, the film creates a “temporal parallax” by re-reading, as it were, the milieu of the 1960s from the frame of the 1970s: the “parallax gap,” produced by the minimal difference between the event as it was experienced and as it appears in retrospect, creates the effect of a stain, that of an unsolved crime, left upon the lap of hapless Joe.

What drew me to the film originally was the fact that it happened to share the same name of Slavoj Zizek’s “magnum opus,” but which conspicuously and, most likely, intentionally bears no mention of Pakula’s film. In Zizek’s Parallax View, “parallax” is defined as

the apparent displacement of an object (the shift of its position against a background), caused by a change in observational position that provides a new line of sight. The philosophical twist to be added, of course, is that the observed difference is not simply “subjective,” due to the fact that the same object which exists “out there” is seen from two different stations, or points of view. It is rather that, as Hegel would have put it, subject and object are inherently “mediated,” so that an “epistemological” shift in the subject’s point of view always reflects an “ontological” shift in the object itself. Or, to put it in Lacanese, the subject’s gaze is always-already inscribed into the perceived object itself, in the guise of its “blind spot,” that which is “in the object more than object itself,” the point from which the object itself returns the gaze.¹

So where in the film do we get “parallax”? Perhaps by breaking the film down into its various constituent elements gives us a clear idea. There are three main actors: Joe Frady, the Parallax Corporation and the Senate. The object of inquiry, of course, is the assassination. At first glance, then, it would appear that the parallax is produced by the two antagonists of the film, Joe and the Parallax corporation, yet this doesn’t produce any change in the object, nor does it imply any sort of mediation between subject and object. Perhaps, then, parallax designates the very refraction of each of the various constituent elements in the film. First, there is the case of the Parallax corporation itself: when Joe visits Parallax, it does not appear ominous at all, neither from the outside nor from within, at least any more so than a typical corporation. It is only the fact that Joe approaches Parallax as Joe qua potential assassin that the truly sinister dimension of Parallax emerges. In this instance, the object itself is the Parallax Corporation, and its ontological status is affected by Joe’s change in subjective position. There is also the obvious parallax produced by Joe prior to his knowledge of the conspiracy and Joe after he becomes aware of its true nature: in the case of the former, the assassination appears to be just a disparate act of a crazy man, but afterwards it becomes clear that the assassination is part of a much wider conspiracy involving the Parallax corporation.

Yet these solutions don’t potentially tell us anything new about the film. A far more interesting effect is produced by comparing Joe as he apprehends his activity as an investigator to his concrete activity after his undertaking the Parallax indoctrination montage.

Joe thinks he is a journalist trying to uncover the mystery of the Parallax corporation, a kind of noumenal entity that seems to exist outside the boundaries of normal everyday society, reflected in the eerie darkness of their video-viewing room. Yet, in striking similarity to Glenn Ford’s character in Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat, Joe’s concrete actions in pursuing his investigation produce the desired consequences of the Parallax corporation itself. In a strangely Hegelian way, he carries out the very mission he intended to prevent and expose, and thus the parallax object is Joe himself, Joe as fractured by Joe qua his subjective stance and his objective status as an agent of the Parallax corporation thinking he is simply acting in a duplicitous manner. This may explain why, after his viewing of the indoctrination montage, we no longer receive much, if any, dialogue from Joe.

Yet one variable remains unaccounted for: the Senate. The Senate appears twice in the film, each time marking an assassination: once at the beginning and once at the end. The Senate is clearly the dimension of the big Other, the symbolic Law that quilts a given signifying chain in establishing knowledge as subordinate to the Master. The Senate qua big Other decide what the events “meant,” thereby lending them a certain fixity acquired through the propagation of Master-Signifiers. After the assassination, numerous stories are told about what happened, how and why: perhaps it was an inside job, or maybe it was perpetrated by a foreign country, or maybe it was simply a freak accident. All of these stories have the potential of acquiring the status of “knowledge,” but only insofar as they are subordinated to a Master-Signifier that secures the stability of their meaning: this is the job of the Senate qua big Other.

The bureaucratic stamp that provides knowledge with its ontological status, on the one hand, appears at first to be totalizing, but is in fact barred, incomplete, and marked by a certain lack that appears as a distortion. This appearance of distortion, however, is inherent to the parallax object itself: while the Master’s knowledge gives the illusion of fixity and stability to meaning, there is always the shadowy double, the “dark side of the Moon,” so to speak, that resists signification. This is the angle from which Joe proceeds in his inquiry, but gets caught up in the game and is eventually duped by the Parallax corporation as a result of not taking into account his own subjective position.

The uncanny effect produced by the disjunction between Joe’s unrelenting quest to uncover the truth against the Master’s Law and its shadowy, obscene counterpart in the frightening libidinal space of the Parallax corporation, echoes the aesthetics of classic film noir and its predecessor, German Expressionism. What gives The Parallax View its unique flavor, one that, not without coincidence, marks the historical-cinematic break between the era of classic and neo-film noir, is the undermining of Joe’s very subjective position. Moreover, Pakula’s use of negative shots (a hallmark of film noir), particularly of Joe in his apartment after he has faked his own death and is “officially” no longer among “the living”—shots which evoke those of Madeleine in Hitchcock’s Vertigo—, depict nothing other than the formal emptiness of the Cartesian cogito, the overwhelming excess and mad doubting that expels everything from the interiority of its being. Pakula’s depiction of this constant doubting, this “night of the world” inherent to the subject, marks the film’s truly radical dimension.

1. Slavoj Zizek, The Parallax View. Available online here via Lacan.com. ↩

—Bryan Klausmeyer

Splendor in the Darkness: Von Trier as a Sadist

I just finished watching Lars von Trier’s third film, Dancer in the Dark, starring Björk, Catherine Deneuve and Peter Stormare. It’s about a Czech woman who comes to America in the hopes of raising enough money to have her son’s vision repaired before he, like her, eventually goes blind, but things don’t go quite as planned. After having seen only Dogville out of von Trier’s oeuvre, I have to say he might possibly be one of my favorite directors, if solely for the fact that he manages to provoke within the viewer a true sense of horror. His directing is similar to the Sadean boudoir, and his torturous probing goes to the very end, to the point where you almost can’t bear it. At the same time, von Trier’s heroines, like Sade’s victims, radiate with splendor, to borrow a phrase from Lacan in his analysis of Sophicles’ Antigone, under the most excruciating of circumstances.

In this way I think von Trier’s films are able to touch the core of tragedy, while abandoning any pretension or orthodoxies that he may or may not be accused of. Even if his visions don’t always succeed to their fullest potential, he cannot be accused of not being radical in the experimental sense. It’s through this that his films retain a thoroughly auteur quality that most contemporary cinema lacks (some exceptions off the top of my head would be Lynch, Kieslowski and Herzog).

The musical numbers in Dancer clearly contain a self-deprecating dimension that could be called Brechtian, but I think, more importantly, they serve as a reminder as to what the essence of film is by rendering palpable the fantasms that haunt reality, akin in many respects to the stifling libidinal space of the Lynchian mise-en-scène.

Needless to say, I really enjoyed this movie. But it was torture to watch.

Oh, and if you’re curious about von Trier, check out the dogme!

—Bryan Klausmeyer