During the last couple of years, this poem has helped me as much as any:

Melies, Magic, and Aristotle

David Cook mentions, in History of Narrative Film, that Georges Melies was a magician. That may be neither here nor there when it comes to his contributions to cinema--the fade, sequencing of scenes to make a narrative, et. al.--but it does seem linked with the one illusion that his films seem to feature almost ritually, as a key element in the action--the object or character that's suddenly there, or suddenly gone.

In "The Haunted Castle," there is no castle, or a clear story beyond a series of disappearing things and characters. They are suddenly there, and suddenly gone, therefore haunting, and the setting, one room with some features that add a provisional sense of grandeur, becomes the castle. Gunning's discussion of cinema of attractions, the possibility that early film was more about the spell cast by the technology than any narrative, makes this kind of narrative seem like less of a story than a show, made to display what cinema can do. Cook's argument with Gunning, that writing of the time makes story seem like a vital part of what filmmakers, including Melies, were trying to display, suggests that the show really is the story. This makes a film like "The Haunted Castle" seem like a magician's illusion, part of that illusion being that there is a narrative for the audience to see. Melies' films existed to extend his magic into new technology, maybe.

The difference is, maybe, that magic shows are defined by hiding how they do what they do, and film effects are presented as finally unmysterious, even demystifying if they can occupy that space that illusions carried out on a stage used to. There's still that gap between knowing that they did it and knowing how they did it, but the rush may come with taking the mystery apart, instead of sitting a little apart from it, and finding some seeming inner space in sympathy with it, where an unknown-ness glows.

What makes a conduit between the magic trick and the cinematic effect, though, that Gunning points to and successive decades of effects-heavy Hollywood cinema seems to point to, is spectacle as a fundamental constituent of film, making Melies, and a lot of subsequent films and filmmakers, anti-Aristotelian in the manifestation of their priorities. For Aristotle, the spectacular can't hold an important place in the work, compared to character, plot, and action. For Melies, it's possible to say that spectacle acts as the foundation. There is no character, plot, or action in his haunted castle without this ritual spectacle--the vanishing thing, the vanishing man who must be a phantom because he is part of the vanishing act, and the characters who are haunted rather than haunting, whose only meaningful action is witnessing this illusion like us, but, unlike us, experiencing it as reality.

Bat & Man

You can now order my chapbook at finishinglinepress.com! Here is the cover, wonderfully illustrated by Mark Cudd.

It's gotten kind mentions at these places:

http://htmlgiant.com/random/reading-comics-chad-parmenters-poetics/

http://writingwithcelia.blogspot.com/2011/12/bat-poet-conversation-with-chad.html

http://lithouse.washcoll.edu/?p=2530

http://www.thethepoetry.com/2012/02/bat-man/

Poetics of the Secret Identity TV Show

I don't know how many precedents there are for shows about characters with secret lives, who seem to be family people but are something else, but "The Sopranos" has been one big example of the last decade or so, and "Mad Men" and "Dexter" two current ones. In each show, there are at least three concurrent sources of dramatic tension, all centered in the main character. There's 1) the secret life, that the character is most identified by to the audience--Tony as mob boss, Dexter as serial killer, Don Draper as identity thief and impoverished war hero, plus ad man with philandering as integral part of his corporate identity. There's 2) the domestic life, that maybe aligns the character most with tv as a cool, family medium, presenting the normative family zinging briefly away from normativity and back again by the end of most episodes. Then, there's 3) their overlap, which is repeatedly presented to the viewer, and may be the main tension-enhancing threat in each show--that the main character's secret self may be exposed to those on the domestic side. The tension surrounding this one seems to return ritually, maybe not each episode, but as the one where the music really rises, maybe, where other shows would show the main character almost dying.

It's tempting to think that there's a character-death implied by that overlap being exposed, but it gets exposed in each of these shows--Tony's kids eventually find out that he's in the mob; Don Draper's secret past gets wicked up into the light by his blood kind returning from out of it; and Dexter, who may most wholly embody that secrecy, brings someone into it each time he kills someone who recognizes him from his other life. But there's a post-metanarrativity at that point of access that gives it the excitement of watching or reading a murder mystery--having the tension be such that the performance of the text gets pushed into my own mind more overtly than with less gripping stories. In this case, the revelation that the character I am watching is only a character can happen within the storyline itself, and keep that dramatic tension, as the people that the character has kept in the dark join the audience where I am, and/or I join them, with the chance to pick at the narrative weave, but, no, to have that unravelling taken out of my hands, and put into those of the wife, the cop, and whoever else might stand for the one who can't, and has to, find out.

One character that Aristotle doesn't mention in Poetics, when he's going through examples of different characters, is Odysseus-as-old-man, when he's returned to his homeland in, not just disguise, but an acting job thorough enough to hide him as long as the narrative needs it to. It's interesting to think that he might not just have left it out because he didn't need it to demonstrate any aspects of epic that he had to discuss, but also because that is an example of the epic not ennobling the person. We could say that it shows Odysseus' genius at work again, but he's not the one who transforms himself; it's a divine event. But the maybe-implicit agency of the audience in Aristotle gets its apotheosis as metaphor in Vico's depiction of Homer, as many different voices that the poems hold together; and I like to think that it offers a figure for that mix of tension and revelation in these tv shows. I watch the character move back and forth across that line where he plays different characters for different audiences within the show, and know that somewhere, by some then-invisible network of ratings, focus group abstraction of my taste, and capital, his secret is safe with me.

Shakespeare's Epic Reliquary

The following is a part of the preparatory essay written for my comprehensive exams, exploring the conception of epic that can be applied to Shakespeare; this question seems intriguingly underexplored, with the one extensive example that I found going kind of Derridean and arguing, basically, that his use of epic is to foreground its absence. This was an enjoyable thought, but one that my own, still-brief exploration of this question argues against. It follows (and sorry for the weird lineation; it's something in the translation between Word and blog):

There are at least two senses in which Shakespeare can be considered an epic playwright: his use of techniques that Aristotle assigned to epic rather than tragedy, and his unique, reliquary way of engaging epic poems. His multiplicities of plot can be seen in the plays that comprise the Henriad, sometimes thought of together as a British historical epic. Richard II weaves the narrative of King Richard into Bullingbrook’s. Both of the Henry IV plays work against the neat
raveling together of narratives, though, since the two main threads have as their figureheads characters who don’t meet economically or in personality—Henry IV and Falstaff. The second, with its climactic fight between Harry and Hotspur, shows another epic trait that Northrop Frye sees in Shakespeare, “warfare of the Iliad: physical prowess by individual heroes fighting in pairs” (25). These loosely raveled narratives carry other subplots along with them, and pave the way for Henry V, in which an epic multiplicity of plots is prefaced with another epic convention
that also functions metadramatically, the invocation: “O for a Muse of fire . . ..” (Prologue.5). The prologue asks the audience’s pardon for the “unworthy scaffold” of the theatre (Prol.10), directing their attention to the physical theatre space. The three primary plot threads that follow, of Henry, the French court, and Henry’s
former friends, are only brought together in the fundamental figure of
disunity—war.

Hamlet , believed to have been written in the couple of years following Henry V, is one of the plays in which Shakespeare uses parts of epic texts for an effect that can be called reliquary. As a reliquary holds the remains of someone whose life testified to the divine, and in that preservation of a fragment show the eternal manifested where the present falls away rather than present decay, so Shakespeare’s distanced, fragmented presentation of epic can be seen offering a kind of allure that engages the audience with epic tradition in glints that make it seem able to be both adored and handled. This effect appears most strikingly when Hamlet, rather
than asking the Players to demonstrate their talent for visually moving work that will stir the king to show his guilt, asks for the speech “never acted, or if it was, not above once” (II.ii.435), of Aeneas’ narration to Dido how Troy fell. Hamlet has nothing to gain from the performance that follows; it is a moment sublimating Shakespeare’s mastery of plot to a scene that points to an epic past rendered present long enough, with enough power, to “have made milch the burning
eyes of heaven, / And passion in the gods” (517-18). With King Lear, the epic reliquary functions as passing but pivotal invocations of gods long gone from the play’s world, and Gloucester’s resounding condemnation, extracted from Homer and delivered from his own, Homeric blindness: “As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods, / They kill us for their sport(IV.i.36-37)."

Looking at Shakespeare's use of epic as reliquary also helps to unravel the mystery of Troilus and Cressida, which centers on whether it was actually performed; the printers of the 1609 edition began a title page saying that it had been performed, then withdrew it in favor of another claiming it as a play “never stal’d with the stage” (qtd. in Riverside Shakespeare, 477). The medieval story adapted
by Chaucer has no precedent in Homer, but Shakespeare’s version weaves that story together with the Greeks’, making Homer’s heroes some of its main characters. The play doesn’t flatter its heroes; Achilles’ vanity lets him sit the battle out, but demand “Know they not Achilles?” of the men who slight him (III.iii.70). But, if Shakespeare did distance the play enough from the public that it could only be read, making the page reliquary to his work of epic drama, then it’s also possible that its characters are flat to better point to the epic that birthed them. They are
relics of Homer’s characters, blending epic and drama in a way that puts both into the audience’s hands, quietly and in the light of print.

Why Hitchcock Might Have Wanted to be Bad

Alfred Hitchcock's later years weren't his best by most standards; there was the lull of "Torn Curtain" and the two that followed, then "Frenzy," which succeeded maybe partly by breaking away from the Hitchcockian polish of "Rear Window," reifying the Hitchcock narrative of the wrong man accused of the raw murder, but in a way that looks like late New Wave, maybe positioning itself elegiacally. By that point, Hitchcock, I think, was watching Disney movies instead of the latest thing; when Truffaut told him that "Frenzy" was a young man's movie because of its original moves, he was reflecting partly on his own past. The daring moves, though, are less toward the minimal and more toward the lyrical; the closeup in which the sound stops, and the narrative seems to fall away, is very much the kind that Belasz means when he talks about the closeup as lyric mode, and one made most for the human face.

"Family Plot," his last film, has been dismissed as lacking the power of almost any of his that came before it, but what might seem like its problems come to seem like experiments by Hitchcock out of his own mode, especially because of what he did after he made it. Nothing, except developing "The Short Night" toward the big hit that he seemed to want to end his career on. He kept on developing it, and the natural view would be that his health kept him from carrying it out, along with Alma's. But the way he stopped development, then started it again, suggests something else: he didn't finish it when he could have, and his comment, at one point, that making it wasn't "necessary," suggests a sense of his legacy that fit "Family Plot" into it, whether or not it seemed like a Hitchcock to everyone, and maybe moreso because it seemed like one to few except himself.

There are many Hitch moments in the film, including his cameo as shadow in an office door's window, the sense of domestic life laid bare to show the mechanisms of treachery, and the overall phenomenon of the everyday person drawn into a world of intrigue that he or she is uniquely poised to unravel, because of social context and ultimately skill. There's a he and a she, who are drawn into the search for a seemingly unfindable man, whose narrative runs loosely parallel with theirs until the network narrative phenomenon of coincidence puts them together. The he of the couple is played by Bruce Dern, and his own performance might seem to take the most away from the film's impact. He's nearly a Disney dad. He mugs. He gapes at the sinister, and his teeth gleam. He anticipates Jim Carrey in his face's elasticity. He is the opposite of Cary Grant. That Hitchcock made the space for him to be that way we can see in his hair, an orange mop that seems to do what it wants.

And that's the key. Hitchcock offers the part to Bruce Dern, and Bruce Dern asks why. The studio is thinking of Pacino. Hitch says that he wants Dern, because he never knows what Dern's going to do next. This cavalier sense with the actor might have roots in Hitch's focus on the mise-en-scene, and the sense that a professional actor should generally know what to do already, but it also bumps up against what's reiterated about him with just about every telling of his legend: that the film is finished in his head before it reaches the screen, and the filming is incidental, even boring for him. Bruce Dern is not in his head. Bruce Dern is himself, and is clearly kind of frightened to be there; the thought that all of this offers is that Hitch might finally, four years before his death, after spanning the century with the seldom mutable studio of his visualization, have gotten to do that thing that he must have wanted to do since he was young, and the colored lights that washed the stage near his home made a kind of screen his imagination could shape, would shape into a world of the nerves and their infinite roots: he got to make a movie and watch it at the same time.

The Long Shot, the Close-Up, and Epic Tradition

Watching "The Shining" with a friend last night, and reading Robert Polity's article about D.W. Griffith and Poe in the new American Poet a couple of nights ago, I was reminded again of the discussion of film and poetics that has most stuck with me over the last couple of years, thanks to Nancy West's wonderful cinema course: Bela Belasz's writing about the close-up as lyric. He may have said "lyrical"; over the last year or so it's blended for me into Virginia Jackson's writing about the lyric as a kind of blackout of genre, and vice versa.

But Belasz writes about the close-up as its own moment, having its own life outside of the narrative, and the coincidence of that definition with a view of the lyric poem taking place outside of time, outside of the narrative of historical context, and outside of traditions tied to genre, seems like no coincidence.

It's tempting to invert the comparison itself without looking at priority in terms of history, so that the lyric acts as close-up in a very cinematic way. But that also points, as Jackson does wonderfully, back to the absolute mercuriality of lyric as it's been discussed in the last century and a half.

"The Shining" remains, for me, the scariest movie of the twentieth century. That may show how few movies I've seen, but the sense in it is that the whole project of the movie is not to expunge fear like a slasher movie can, or take on that sense of promise of day breaking the ghosts that comes from so many other horror movies, or even to draw suspense out like Hitchcock does, with the triumph of the human spirit that he and studio pressure gave as a defining torque for his stories. Instead, the narrative's unrelenting, multiple forebodings seem tied up in the apparatus conveying them, so that the scenes and the camera framing them take on a ponderous weight extending beyond the screen. In the midst of that, Jack's Cagneyan facial contortions, the inscription of "Psycho" within the film, and the escape of Danny and Shelley at the end become humbled to a greater fear extending beyond all of the above. Kubrick seems less the relief that Hitchcock is to his own project than an extension of its ominous and empty spaces; of course he never appears in the Overlook. He is not of it, and it is not of the domestic spaces that most horror movies seem only to compromise for a little while. He shares in its grimness; he's not Stanley, but an extension of the camera. Or we sense his wish to have been that, and find less release than identification. That's not of the close-up. It's of the faraway.

It makes sense to look at faraway cinematography, and call it epic. It's not that what was close is now far away, but that the zoom back shows a context for the object, that, depending on the ingredients of the mise-en-scene, can imply lots of things that have been seen as ingredients in epic poems (that may or may not be)--the place of the human in the landscape, the backdrop of some kind of nation, and, maybe most, the presence and mandate of the machine, in this case the camera. The long shots that show Shelley Duvall as a tiny figure escaping from the window of the Overlook don't only show the huge context in which she sits, but imply that a camera is capturing it all, and a cameraman behind it. The kind of inhuman that this is might seem alien and cold in terms of only technology, but, in the epic context, the machinery producing the artwork is something even more frightening--it's divine.