Steve’s Stuff

This book is not what one would hope. Beyond the frequent factual mistakes (dates, chronology, plot, etc.), there is a deeper issue. Mikita Brottman claims to be helping us understand the importance of these films by showing us hidden qualities that redeem them from their exploitation roots. However, her prejudices are obvious - she is unable to engage these films as worthy of study without demonstrating that she is academically and intellectually superior.

Granted, Herschel Gordon Lewis was not a cinematic genius (although he does have a PhD in English or literature), but he wasn’t the simple-minded idiot Brottman describes him as. She ignores one of the most interesting aspects of his career: he was able to put the stamp of his personal vision on each of his films, independent of the financial forces that typically control directors and drive them to make derivative junk.

In describing the films she claims to redeem, she ends up contributing to the negative hype surrounding them by describing them as “so sick, depraved, and unwatchable that the view becomes physically ill.” Seriously - Blood Feast is nothing compared to some more contemporary films. It may have been shocking at one time, but now I seriously doubt its ability to make someone physically ill. It’s just so cheesy and unintentionally hilarious that I don’t think anyone is watching it in the way that Brottman seems to think they are. I don’t know anyone who put the DVD in, watched, and became horrified. On the other hand, I DO know many people who watched the film for its comic value. From this perspective, I believe many of her arguments are weak.

She makes a few statements that really makes one question just how many times she watched some of these films. There are plenty of mistakes in the chapter on “Texas Chainsaw Massacre”, but the most disturbing is that she falls victim to the same trap that many critics succumbed to: namely, the amount of gore in the film. She describes the film as using (amongst other things), advanced special effects. This is absolutely untrue. They intentionally *avoided* gore both because it would be difficult to pass the censorship board and because they weren’t interested in exploitation. Many people learned from “Psycho” that you don’t need blood to terrify. Carpenter’s “Halloween” has almost no blood, nor does Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Tobe Hooper focused on suspense and a horrifying environment of terror rather than the cheap, visceral effect of blood and guts. From Brottman’s comments, we can see that she will never be guilty of a thorough understanding of “Texas Chainsaw Massacre”, as she sees fit to completely misunderstand the filmmakers intentions (probably a result of her elitist need to marginalize the director).

My final criticism is that her idea of art is much different from mine. She sees directors like Jorg Buttergeit (the Nekromantic series and Schramm) as art-house directors while seeing Gaspar Noe (Irreversible) as exploitation masters in the style of David Freidman and Herschel Gordon Lewis. Just compare “Irreversible” with “Nekromantic”: Irreversible has a real visual style, a message, and creatively explores the medium of the teleological narrative. Nekromantic is an exercise in invoking the taboo taken to pointlessly nauseating levels. And for what point? To show that necrophiliacs are people too? I’d rather deal with a serious and skillfully portrayed meditation on the base instincts of the human condition rather than watching a necrophiliac make love to a cheesy fake body.

Brottman is entitled to her opinion and if she doesn’t want to see Noe as an artistic director, that’s her right. However, it shows me that I don’t agree with her on fundamental issues and therefore, I cannot accept many of her points. There ARE some nice sections and the writing style is readable. It’s not elegant by any stretch, but it’s not as dry as some scholarly texts. If you’re a big fan of exploitation film or the so-called “low culture”, you’ll probably find some interesting ideas in this book, as I did. However, they are buried and you’ll have to make a number of allowances for Brottman’s mistakes and odd opinions. What a shame - it could have been so much better.

Emerging from Jameson’s dense prose, I find the message: video art provides a “total flow” of meaning (meaning in a very qualified, postmodern sense) where signifiers are constantly in flux, constantly redefined, constantly re-contextualized, and where the only referent possible is that of indisputable historical fact, or in other words, the Lacanian Real. Thus, video is, as Jameson concludes, the ideal medium of transmission of postmodern thought. Over the course of the article, Jameson uses a particular video work, AlienNATION , to demonstrate his points. Jameson refrains from offering any sort of aesthetic judgment, preferring to describe video as a medium, to analyze interesting features, and to explore a variety of interpretive methodologies.

Jameson makes an important phenomenological distinction between video and film because where film (even art film) has a lengthy history of concept and technique, video is (at the time of his essay) slightly over twenty years old and thus doesn’t have the same foundations or expectations.

Although Jameson seems as neutral as possible, he has what appears to be a pessimistic view of the possibilities of postmodern textual manipulation. When he writes, “we are left with that pure and random play of signifiers . . . which no longer produces monumental works of the modernist type but ceaselessly reshuffles the fragments of preexistent texts, the building blocks of older cultural and social production”, he is presenting the situation as if postmodern works are doomed to randomly repeat segments of the past without any sort of intelligent design. While it’s true that, as Derrida shows us, we cannot reasonably assume any sort of logocentricity, if there was no possibility of, say, ironic juxtaposition, there would be no point in making postmodern works—they would just be meaningless jumbles of infinitely meaningful (and thus meaningless) signifiers.

In Intertextual Irony and Levels of Reading, Eco shows how he uses this freedom of signification to generate a surplus of meaning within his literature. Similarly, Tarantino’s cinema is filled with intertextual elements such as the briefcase scene in Pulp Fiction, where the viewer is reminded of the myth of Pandora’s box, the final scene in Repo Man, as well as Raiders of the Lost Arc. The briefcase scene generates at least three specific and purposeful meanings, hardly the random jumble that Jameson describes.

While Jameson may have a dim view of postmodernity in art, he does an excellent job explaining why other forms of interpretation fail to say anything useful about postmodern works. He writes that if the “ephemeral” and “disposable” text is the building block of postmodern art, then there can be little gleaned from an analysis of any one fragment. Similarly, no video work can be viewed in isolation from the whole of the video art world. He goes on to contend that though one may attempt to “sort the material out into thematic blocks and rhythms and repunctuate it with beginnings and endings, with graphs of rising and falling emotivity, climaxes, dead passages, transitions, recapitulations, and the like”, the result will be different upon every viewing.

Insofar as that is a true statement, is it necessarily a positive or negative characteristic of postmodern art? There must be a certain value to a work that allows one to return over and over again for a completely new experience. Again, Jameson language is telling: phrases such as “____ is reduced to” indicate that he doesn’t see this potential for varied readings as a positive characteristic because if the author cannot control the message, there must be no message and therefore no art in creation. I see the potential for multiple and diverse readings as an intriguing characteristic of postmodern art. Furthermore, this whole notion of interpretive impossibility is specious. Again referring to Eco, the author creatively engages multiple levels of signification and though there are always already infinite readings, certain readings make a lot more sense. Even if one cannot definitively state the “correct” reading of a text, one can find a range of readings that generate the most coherent and meaningful interpretation. Jameson is correct to poke fun at the standard interpretive question—“what does it mean?”—because this assumes a single “correct” reading, but just because there is no definitive reading, it doesn’t necessarily mean that there are no readings that are better than others.

The scope of Jameson’s article is, perhaps, its best feature. It’s fascinating how he manages to describe such a wide range of postmodernity in art while talking only about video art. If I take issue with certain points, it doesn’t mean that the article on the whole is flawed. Simply, everyone will approach the concepts of postmodernism from a different perspective and now I’ve presented mine.