Sunshine Recorder

Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) is a film of oppositions and dualisms. Mirrors and reflected images (re)appear in numerous frames; we are introduced to twins, of a literal and metaphorical nature; and all of the characters are involved in bipolar relations each to the other, framed by Kubrick as interdependent husband and wife, mother and child, hunter and hunted, hero and monster.

The film’s double nature was famously recast by Bill Blakemore, in his 1987 article The Family of Man,  as an allegory that re-stages and subtly denounces the extermination of the Native Americans by Western colonial powers. Blakemore’s study suggests that most of the relations in this film (familial, spatial, spiritual) can be re-projected as a relation between these two historical agents. The Overlook Hotel becomes a metaphor for the society built by an imperial West over virgin territory, and the blood that floods its corridors symbolizes the murders and atrocities that rest below its foundations, buried but never effectively repressed.

Blakemore’s article is probably the most original and influential reading of Kubrick’s effort in the horror genre to date; the allegory of genocide has certainly become a standard referent for critical studies of the film (even when they don’t completely agree with it). Even so, I would argue that the ‘genocide’ interpretation, while valid and highly suggestive in its own right, fails to account for some symbolic layers of The Shining, which are potentially just as fertile.

Perhaps the most notable absence in Blakemore’s nuanced analysis are the occasional ‘whispers of immortality’ (to borrow TS Eliot’s expression) that are voiced by the ghosts in the Overlook Hotel. When the spirits of the twin little sisters (whose murder at the hands of their father provides the back-plot for the events taking place in the film), appear to the little boy Danny (Danny Lloyd), the words they tell him are: ‘Come play with us, Danny. Forever and ever and ever.’ Lines like these are not immediately traceable to the genocide interpretation – they may refer to a cyclical reading of history, in which the massacres repeat themselves ad infinitum, but that certainly extends the thematic scope of the film beyond the colonization of North America.

Even more incongruent are the words pronounced by Grady, the ghost of the murderer who appears to Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson). As he confronts Jack in the bathroom, he states: ‘You are the caretaker. You’ve always been the caretaker. I should know, sir. I’ve always been here.’ If Jack represents the imperialistic invader, then it’s plainly contradictory that he (or Grady) should always have been there. Blakemore’s original reading only holds in this instance if we assume that Grady is lying; Jack would then commit murder under his own delusions of legitimate conquest, believing that he is entitled to a possession that in reality does not belong to him.

What I propose is a reading in which Grady is not lying, and in which his enigmatic words can be seen as a key towards the film’s more subterranean layers of meaning (rather than as an elaborate delusion). The ‘forever and ever and ever’ of the twins points to death as the timeless condition on and from which the ghosts operate, of course; but it also refers to a dimension on which the film itself is working – the domain of myth, mythology and mythopoesis—which transcends the specific historical contingency of the Native American massacre and which accurately links The Shining to the thematic preoccupations drawn by Kubrick in his other films.

…. As one of many recent Western European and North American films to imagine the end of the world, Melancholia is a product of the “structure of feeling” that Mark Fisher calls capitalist realism. This is “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it” (Fisher 2009, 2). We have all internalized Margaret Thatcher’s dictum that “There Is No Alternative” to the reign of the so-called “free market.” Anything and everything that we can imagine is immediately recuperated by the system. It is turned into a brand, and “monetized” through financial speculation. “All that is solid melts into PR” (39). We are faced with continual novelty and innovation; and yet nothing ever really changes. Somehow, the future has been exhausted: as Fisher puts it, “the future harbors only reiteration and re-permutation… nothing new can ever happen” (3). Under such conditions, Fisher says — paraphrasing both Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek — “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism” (2).

The allure of disaster movies, in an age of capitalist realism, is that they seem to offer us a way out — indeed, the only conceivable way out. Over the past few decades, endless rounds of privatization and austerity, not to mention widespread environmental degradation, have already deprived us of a future. The world of our hopes and dreams has in fact already ended: our day-to-day existence just needs to catch up with this fact. And so our only chance for release from the continuing soft disaster of our lives is for this disaster to become truly universal. If the world ends, then at least we will be freed from the rapacity of financial institutions, and from our ever-increasing burdens of debt. The cinematic spectacle of disaster is in itself intensely gratifying, as well: we see destroyed, before our very eyes, that “immense collection of commodities” after which we have always striven, upon which we have focused all our desires, and which has always ended up disappointing us.

Melancholia inverts this scenario; it gives us the other side of capitalist realism. The film withholds spectacle and refuses sublimity. It broods, rather than screams. It presents us with a deflationary, disillusioned account, both of the existing world, and of its disappearance. Disaster no longer gives us any sense of release. In von Trier’s dysphoric vision, we get as little satisfaction from the annihilation of things as we did from their existence in the first place. Instead, set as it is among the One Percent — the white, affluent few — Melancholia affords us a truly depressing realization. It shows us that these well-to-do people would rather see the whole world come to an end, than give up even the tiniest fraction of their wealth, power, and privilege.

Von Trier’s twist on the disaster scenario of capitalist realism is to take it entirely at face value. Heliteralizes the catastrophic deadlock of a society from which all futurity has been drained away, and from whose possibilities the many have been excluded, just so that the few may carry on with their privileged ways. From a strictly social point of view, the end of the world is a metaphor: an image of all our hopes and fears, and of our inability to imagine anything better. But by taking the prospect of disaster entirely literally, von Trier drags it beyond its social limits, and gives it a fully cosmological import. Melancholia pushes us to come to grips with what the philosopher Ray Brassier calls “the truth of extinction” (Brassier 2007, 205ff).

Lectures from the course Phil 7 Existentialism in Literature and Film by Hubert Dreyfus. Copied to archive.org on closure of the UC Berkeley podcast site in order to preserve access. Note: some lectures may appear to be missing (gap in numbering). This usually means that there was a holiday or no lecture on the day the recording was due, although sometimes it does mean that the audio is not available.

In the traditional Judeo/Christian understanding, God is the ground of all meaning. At the end of the Medieval World, Descartes and Kant attempt to promote Man as an autonomous ground, taking the traditional place of God. The promotion of man undermines the authority of God, but as an autonomous ground Man turns out to be existentially insufficient. The dual failure of God and Man as ground, leaves us with the threat of nihilism. The course asks: Can we preserve the existential insight common to both traditions that life needs some kind of ground, without finding such a ground in a Supreme Being or in autonomous Man?

The answer depends upon whether one can uncover an authority other than us that, although not a Supreme Being, nevertheless serves as a ground. The course will be devoted to a series of philosophical-religious thinkers who describe just such a possibility. Pascal speaks of God as essentially hidden and makes a virtue of his hiddenness. Kierkegaard holds that after the God-man appears in the world we no longer have, nor do we need, access to God the Father. Nietzsche embraces as liberating the sheer absence of any ground. In opposition, Dostoyevsky attempts to show how one can live a meaningful life that preserves the authority of our Judeo-Christian practices without recourse to a monotheistic metaphysics.

Experimental French director died at 91 on July 29th 2012.

The essay film, a form pitched between documentary and personal reflection, exploring the subjectivity of the cinematic perspective, has now become an accepted genre. Jean-Marie Straub, Danièle Huillet,Jean-Luc Godard, Errol Morris and Michael Moore are among its main recent exponents, but Chris Marker was credited with inventing the form.

Marker’s creative use of sound, images and text in his poetic, political and philosophical documentaries made him one of the most inventive of film-makers. They looked forward to what is called “the new documentary”, but also looked back to the literary essay in the tradition of Michel de Montaigne. Marker’s interests lay in transitional societies – “life in the process of becoming history,” as he put it. How do various cultures perceive and sustain themselves and each other in the increasingly intermingled modern world?

He was born Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve, most likely in Neuilly-sur-Seine, on the outskirts of Paris, although one source gives the place of birth as Ulan Bator, the capital of Mongolia – a legend that Marker did nothing to dispel. His pseudonym is said to have been taken from the Magic Marker pen.

(Source: sunrec)