screening shock

Music: Shirley Horn: I Remember Miles On Monday Nicole Kidman begins production on a new film project titled The Visiting by German director Oliver Hirschbiegel. Hirschbiegel landed the gig after filming the impressive The Downfall, a film about the last days of Hitler's life. The film is a contemporary remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, trading out the focus on strange, vine-covered pod-plants for a deadly pathogen/viral scenario that will, unquestionably, trade on Hollywood's relentless "state of exception fever."

From the details that have been revealed about the film, it is the Jungian, maternal shadow (viz., the animus) of Spielburg's War of the Worlds in more ways that one (I mean, how else can you read two sci-fi films about the same damn crisis with each half of what was once the most powerful and beautiful couple in the world?). In remaking of Well's classic, Spielburg spun a "crisis of the sovereign" tale in which phallo(go)centric authority is challenged and reasserted at the level of (fragmented) family. The scene for asserting the Law of the Father was predictably individualistic (e.g., when the goodly President can't save you from terrorists, its up to daddy). It appears The Visiting will trade in daddy for the matriarch (e.g., "for the Love of Mother")--only this isn't the castrating prosthetic mother of Star Trek First Contact, nor is it the dominatrix-cum-passive virgin a la Trinity in the Matrix fils. This is the classic "power woman" finding her motherhood and the retreat into the consoling bosom and womb-of-secret-knowledge sort of role (you know, the Sally Field sort of thing). Kidman plays a psychiatrist who discovers the key to an epidemic illness is extra terrestrial (and, as we all know, these green meanies from outer space zombify the public into not-so-mindless drones when they fall to sleep), and apparently she loses her son to the aliens, and then, must work to get him back to obtain said key. Sounds like the 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers meets The Golden Child while Sally Field looks on from a comfortable yet stiff chair in a waiting room kind of movie.

That the filming script is caught up in the same imaginary that scripted Kidman and Cruise's lives is almost uncanny, if you've seen clips of the press conference for The Visiting. I say almost uncanny because what Kidman says is also laughable. Apparently in the film script Kidman plays a psychiatrist (which is male in the serialized novel), and inevitably she was asked to comment on her ex-husband's rant against psychiatry some months ago:

I have a father who is a psychologist, so my life has been research [presumably for the role]. Yeah, of course [psychiatry is worthwhile]. I think all sorts of things do, in terms of Buddhism, in terms of therapy. I think people choose things that they need that are going to help them. And obviously, I've seen my father do some magnificent work.

All of this is quite curious, representing a conscious attempt to frame filmic fantasy in terms of public controversy (otherwise, why the hell have a highly publicized press conference before shooting begins?). Folks will see the film for the Anima/Animus drama as much as they will the safe feeling of abjection/horror.

What is truly perverse, however, is the traumatic gap around which these fantasies swirl and serve to protect: At the same conference Kidman made it a point to say that news coverage of the tragic flooding of New Orleans caused pangs of identification, because the her role involved a traumatic separation from her child, like the thousands of families separated by Katrina . . . . Aliens, Terrorists, Katrina . . . earthquake?

Have we truly become accustomed to the fantasy that our lives are thoroughly scripted? Kidman is basically Tom Cruise here, the crisis is still one of the fragmented family, and self-consciousness is only possible these days (at least mass self consciousness) with bigger and bigger, jaw-dropping impossibilities.

It seems sonority (particularly what my buddy Mirko calls "dialectical sonority) is the only thing these days that can cut through the imagery of atrocity, the Real SHOCK of pained voices and barbaric screams.

Walter Benjamin, we need you now more than ever.