Re: <documenta X><blast> visual commodity
Morgan Garwood (mgarwood@inch.com)
Sat, 12 Jul 1997 14:26:07 -0400
Andrei Tarkovski, the soviet? russian ? director whose work and ideas,
ideas about the problems of being in the totalized environment, responses
to the psychology of totalism, are now being absorbed and reflected in the
west.
The West as a philosophical region; the end point of some great chains
of being that have become the Western Now.
I had gone to the movies to see John Travolta and Nicholas Cage in the
newly released *About Face* which is part Sam Peckinpah On Mescaline does a
Hong Kong splattercrime morality play excess-o-ganza, part Philip K Dick
epistemological identity quiz, part Hegelian historical dialectics, i.e.
the Cage character "play" a sinful, drug sotted "80's" (hey, lets get
medieval here...attack of the Hairy Allegories) while the Travolta
characted "plays" the sober, suburban, buckled up "90's"
Comes as little surprise that they are fated to shoot it out in church
while the crucified Christ looks on in agony (struggle for the soul of
mankind... about as subtle as a tapdancing elephant... but c'mon, las
peliculas, y'konw)
Except, earlier in the movie John and Nicholas have had their faces
sucked off by a big surgical vacuum cleaner and reattached to the other
one, so Cage is Travolta, and Travolta is Cage, except they get confused
and slip'n'slide back and forth in each other's identities, almost blow up
the world, crash lots of real expensive mode-of-transportation toys; having
fun and living the dream...
Is Culture saying something here ? What do get for out troubles of
decoding this movie... which can be mentally watched "zipped" i.e. a wild
and crazy action movie, or "unzipped" a meditation on the dialectics of
identity in the post narrative world... chains of being, narrative
structure continuously funnel back and forth... the cultural arena of the
"80's" a soho-like art/crime loft shifts back and forth to the modest
surburban home full of family snapshots, depending on who owns whose face
at that moment....
All of which brings me back to Tarkovski's most lyical work "Stalker";
the russian meaning of a stalker here being totally different than the
tabloid use of the term for an obsessive psycopath... the russian concept
seems to embody both the idea of the hunter (for food, nourishment) and the
seeker (pilgrim, supplicant)... The man who we only are to know as the
stalker takes people who might be described as spiritual tourists into a
region where innermost intentions and reality interfold, known as The Zone.
As one approaches the central sanctuary of The Zone, a place called The
Room, mind and reality become increasingly unified. There are traces of
corpses along the way, who I presume were obliterated when their innerness
became actualized into outerness.
So you see, The Zone is both Heaven and Hell, Paradiso and Inferno, and
this collapse of being-space is modulated by what exists at the core of
your being... do it yourself Dante, one could say.
Thus, there I sat in the theatre, watching the movie previews (now they
are starting to show several minutes of advertizing before the previews
even, which has the effect of violating the "sanctity" of the movie
experience, so the audience gets its revenge by talking out loud about the
ads while they play)
and.... no...this cannot be... I simultaneouly want to laugh and throw my
shoe at the screen.... coming this August.... a schlocky sci-fi movie
obviously (no public acknowledgement, of course) based on Tarkovski's
*Solaris*.... and the "hook" of this movie? Surprise, surprise.... one'
innermost ideas become actualized... they've cleverly replaced the planet
Solaris with a black hole so they can have some fun with space-time warps
along the Schwartzchild radius.... but, really people, I'd take Natalia
Bondarchuk any day over that creepy mindroid female mind-form manifestation
of a bunch of nutrinos mashed together in humanesque form.... is nothing
sacred ? Another Collapse.... Tarkovski eventually got pulled into the film
industry vacuum-warp too... and meditations on the responsibilities of
*being* have fused with the commercial imperative... like Castor and
Pollux, perhaps ?...