The Frame

Welcome to My Study: Halloween Edition

You’re always welcome to enjoy the things that I’ve found. This weekend’s Halloween Movie Marathon [late post]:

1. Repulsion

One detail made this film great: the skinned rabbit rotting on a plate in the salon. Like in Rosemary’s Baby (probably my favorite scary movie), it’s subtle but it creeps you out long term. 

But unfortunately there are more differences than similarities between the two films. Rosemary Baby tapped into a fear and anxiety that you already unconsciously hold - the fear of what neighbors do in their private lives. And after watching Rosemary’s, you can’t help but wonder about your neighbors. Its mood lingered. But in Repulsion, the fear is not internal, but it’s outside you and belongs only to the main girl in the film. We don’t share it. It’s the symptom of a psychiatric ailment. This made the film less scary to me than Rosemary’s. I guess you could say it’s a little easier to digest. Speaking of digest, I was just happy that at some point the girl didn’t bite into the rotting rabbit. 

2. The Exorcist

This was my first time seeing it - and my wife’s 600th. I heard the writer, a humble and likable guy, on the radio Saturday morning and he said, “I’m not being cute. I really wasn’t trying to scare anyone with this book. It’s a story about faith.” After seeing it, I realized he was right. It really was about faith and love. Good movie, but not really the satanic horror movie that everybody makes it out to be. Yes, a possessed girl masturbates with a cross. But besides that…

I was a little disappointed. To be fair, I realize the effects aged poorly and that scenes that were probably mind-blowing in the 70’s now looked silly. I also realize that my viewing experience was doomed from the start by all of the ridiculous parodies I’ve seen of this movie. But I just didn’t expect it to wrap up so neatly. A good scary movie, in my opinion, should leave you unsettled. This movie wrapped itself up so nicely, you’d think it was a full house episode. Yes, the priest dies. But he dies so nobly. Oops, spoiler alert. 

3. Don’t Look Now

I was really expecting big things from this one. While the film had a nice circular structure to it, it left too much unexplained. Basically a couple loses a daughter and moves to Venice. Then they encounter a couple of seers and the wife starts freaking out  and returns home to England to check on her son. The husband starts seeing things, including his wife, who was supposed to have left Venice. I won’t spoil the rest. 

I was loving the creepy vibe the husband was getting from everybody in Venice as he tried to track down his wife, but it never developed into anything. The film did not age well at all - the clothes (actually, she looked modern, while he, mustachioed and afroed, looked ridiculous) and the crazy 70s zooms were loony. And the sex scene was awwwkwardly long.

4. Eraserhead

“In heaven, everything’s all right…”

The first 30 minutes of this film was awesome. It got a little tedious after that. I loved the scene in the family room where the main character joined his girlfriend’s family for dinner and the man started shouting, “Look at my knees,” and they served those little disgusting oozing chickens. It reminded me how film is the perfectly suited medium for the surreal.

Agency in Duras’ The Ravishing of Lol Stein

2.

In class we talked about how in Modernist texts, thoughts do not carry the same privileged status that they carried in previous works. This is because Modernism treats thoughts not as voluntary actions, but things that merely happen. In Modernist texts, characters do not think and then act, but rather think and act. Thought and action are not necessarily linked. Perceiving thought and action this way leads to a revised understanding of agency as well. Acknowledging this tenuous relationship between thought and action, Modernist works portray agency as a problematic concept, and often suggest that agency is an illusion.

I found this class discussion helpful in my understanding of The Ravishing of Lol Stein. While reading the novel, I wondered about Lol’s passiveness in marrying John Beford, for example. At one point in the novel, Lol explains that she felt she “never had a chance to choose [her] life.” Just as the novel describes thoughts as things that happen, Lol’s life seems to be something that happened to her.

Our discussion in class did not, however, illuminate another question I had been thinking about: why Jack describes love as a form of “possess[ion]” (82), and “control” (97). Jack equates having an affair with Lol to becoming “bent to her will” and “consumed” (97). He also talks about wanting to “possess [Tatiana] completely” (82). Making love appears to consist of taking or offering one’s agency to another. How does this conception of love relate to our discussion of agency? (I understand that this is supposed to be a weekly essay, not question, but how does one write anything pertaining to Duras that doesn’t end in a question mark?)

Words and Facts in Duras’ The Ravishing of Lol Stein

1.

One of the most interesting pages, for me, in The Ravishing of Lol Stein is page 106. On this page, Jack and Lol speak for the first time in privacy, and Lol reveals herself to have watched Jack and Tatiana make love. Lol, describing the scene between Jack and Tatiana, states that “Tatiana was naked beneath her dark hair.” This sentence affects Jack profoundly. He describes it “explod[ing],” and “blow[ing] the meaning apart.” He describes himself as “no longer understanding that it means nothing.”

I am interested in Jack’s reaction to this sentence because in some ways it resembles my own reaction to this novel. At times while reading the novel, I “failed to understand” the sentences—specifically the sentences where Tatiana or Lol seemed to suddenly appear in Jack’s presence, even though these appearances do not make logical sense within the novel. Such sentences “blow the meaning apart,” on a logical level, but also suggest something profound: that a linear narrative cannot capture memory, identity or reality.

I find it interesting how the articulation of Tatiana’s nakedness seems to change the “fact” of her nakedness. Jack is taken aback by the “intensity of the sentence,” not by the intensity of the fact. The words have the effect of “transform[ing]” the fact; the words place Tatiana “between Lol Stein and [Jack].” Somehow the words have altered the fact, as Jack describes, “the fact no longer contains the fact.”

Before I write something stupid (if I haven’t done so already), I need to admit that I don’t know what to make of this last line. Like Jack, I find this sentence “impossible to make any sense whatsoever out of it.” If I had to, I would guess that he is getting at the point that words fail to capture meaning; words do not function as neat and tidy signifiers, but become their own “facts.” Lol is not merely describing Tatiana naked, but bringing her “between” them; by describing Tatiana naked, Lol has initiated a new relationship between the three of them. If Jack is suggesting that words are not merely signifiers but their own facts, that would explain the baffling sentences throughout the novel; I am expecting them to signify something, to be representational, but they are merely facts in themselves that may not fit neatly with the other facts.