Identifiable Remains Conference Abstracts

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Adrift In the Mainstream: Hollywood and the Subversive Body
9:00am Friday, October 3

"Panic Space, Panic Time, Action Heroine"
Abigail Salerno, Duke University

This paper uses the recent film Panic Room (David Fincher, 2002) to consider phenomenological expressions of space, time and the body in the production of filmic suspense and, specifically, in the creation of Jodi Foster as an action heroine.

As Meg (Jodi Foster) gains control of the space of the film, and the digital technologies of vision within the film, her body and that of her daughter, become the center of the film’s suspense and Foster becomes an action heroine. Panic Room produces its suspense through spatial, technological and filmic representations of movement, including digital special effects, a particularly mobile camera, an entirely artificial and strictly bound set, and a self-reflexive use of these technologies, rather than through narrative logic. In Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s The Phenomenology of Perception, movement assumes an equally significant role, establishing and constructing the space and time of the perceiving subject. My reading of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology offers a theory of film suspense that places the body and its movement at its center. This argument begins with the concept of the body of the film, as articulated in Vivian Sobchack’s The Address of the Eye, but the emphasis on the production of film suspense specifically, modifies her more general theories. The paper also argues against the limitations Sobchack places on a feminist phenomenology.

Finally, Jodi Foster’s ability to become an action heroine depends not just on her body’s movement within the space of the film Panic Room but her presence outside the time and space of the film, her queer star persona. Foster’s star persona exists and creates a time that is transcendent, as in Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible and akin to the understanding of time articulated in Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition. Publicity, biography, fan appropriation and the trajectory of Foster’s career are reflected in Foster’s performance of Meg, a heroine who disrupts gender codes and romantic conventions, and all of Foster’s performances and personas exist in a collapse of past and present that allows for illusory projections of difference among them.

My readings of Merleau-Ponty, Sobchack and Deleuze, together with a discussion of the film’s techniques for representing and manipulating space and a survey of Foster’s career argue that bodily engagement with and participation in suspense, and a queer feminist inhabitation of space and time are the spectators’ means of accessing and experiencing the film Panic Room.

“‘Can't You See I'm Working Here?’: Mel does Marx”
Amy Johnson, University of Wisconsin-Madison

What is the relationship between money and violence? It is a question suggested by Marxism, and Payback (dir. John Helgeland)—an adaptation of Richard Stark’s novel The Hunter, also adapted into John Boorman’s Point Blank (1967)—is a Marxist working through of that question. Porter (Mel Gibson) works a heist with an acquaintance from the 'Outfit', Payback’s Mafia-like business organization. He is betrayed for his share of the cash and left for dead. The movie is ostensibly the tale of Porter’s revenge, the “payback.” But Porter’s goal is the money—the money is not a means to something else, and Porter is not interested in revenge. The use of his body in recouping his money does not represent an abstract conception of money, as it presumably does for the prostitutes in the film—i.e., money representing a “better” life filled with material comforts. Money has become a thing, both an object in itself, and a representation of the concept of what-is-right. Money does not symbolize another thing he might buy with it, but has come to embody Porter’s notion of what-is-right. Porter’s use of his own body is an enactment of that belief—the endless beatings he endures are an embodiment of who he believes he is both before and after the betrayal, emblazoned onto his body.

For Marx, the alienation that allows a money system is itself a kind of violence, and this alienation and the system it enables engender more violence, encouraging people to acts of further, conscious violence. The body is the mediator of the relationship between money and violence—one is alienated from one’s own body and violence is physically done to the body as a result of the capitalist system. This paper will explore how the film Payback presents these bodies, especially Porter’s, and their beatings in order to show what happens to bodies in a violently capitalist world.

Porter’s body is the center of the film, and he exchanges bodily violence for money. In Payback even the language attendant to business (which is most of the language there is) turns out to have a direct, sometimes literal effect on the human body—specifically Porter’s body. “The business” seems to be one of beating bodies to a pulp, from the business of rigging boxing matches to extracting information from reticent but ultimately disposable bodies. In the stylized and chronologically somewhat ambiguous world of Payback, everything has been violently commodified. At the outset of the film, we discover that Porter’s life was worth $30,000 (the price of betrayal). His love interest is a prostitute—as is the other woman in the film, Pearl. His treacherous but none-too-bright ex-partner, Val Resnick, is “useful” to the Outfit because he is an unrepentant sadist. His glee in torturing the bodies of others (Rosie, Porter) is a commodity to the Outfit. Porter is perhaps the ultimate underdog, and his only commodity appears to be his willingness to repeatedly have the shit beaten out of him—a kind of mercenary masochism.

Porter’s labor in the film consists almost entirely in getting brutally beaten up. The head-on collision Porter engineers in order to steal the money for which he is then betrayed is emblematic of this beating-as-labor. This masochism is not a result of attempting to recoup the money—having his body pummeled in exchange for cash has always been his job, as the collision-heist demonstrates.

Are the beatings Porter suffers an attempt to escape the system of violent commodification that encompasses his world, or does it merely make literal the system which is otherwise euphemized? The answer to the question seems to hinge on the representation of Porter’s body. Porter’s use of his own body is one way to stop the body representing something—of being effaced in its signification of something other—and of existing as object itself, and perhaps for itself. He is perhaps the only character in the film who employs his body directly for his own (and, arguably, its own) purposes.

"Guilty Observer: Spectatorship in Boogie Nights"
Kieryn McKay, University of Sydney

My paper argues that Paul Thomas Anderson's 1997 film Boogie Nights manipulates the traditional aesthetics and continuity editing of popular cinema to oblige the participation of the spectator in a semi--pornographic experience. It then begs the question: what is Anderson’s objective and is it commensurate with his outcome?

The paper explores the implications of the mainstream cinematic tradition to construct images of women through what Laura Mulvey brands the ‘determining male gaze’ and treats pornographic cinema as the extreme case in point. Boogie Nights is interpreted as a parody of the pornographic genre, but is also perceived to stand squarely in its defense.

The paper decodes Anderson’s conscientious disengagement with empathy and romance in order to explore the notion of the pornographic icon, the “readily available sex mistress” and investigates the consequences of the purposeful positioning of the woman’s body as the erotic, spectacular and exhibitionist ‘other.’

Understood in contrast, the paper evokes Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol as Anderson’s stylistic ancestors with regards to the fixation that is encouraged by the displaced male spectacle.

Inherent in this study are issues of spectatorship, scopophilia and voyeurism. These are examined with particular reference to Anderson’s flesh-chasing lens (and the implications of the audience’s reliance upon its function) and his intermittent documentary-style filmic techniques.

This introduces a consideration of film and reality: the inability of film to achieve “sheer representation” (in reference to Anderson as well as Jack Horner and his crew), the tension between an artist’s vision and his means for realizing it, and the affects of these limitations with reference to the body and its representation on screen.

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Outside the Norm: Explicit Bodies and Textual Perversities
10:30am Friday, October 3

"Sexual Simulacra"
Albert de Plazaola, Georgetown University

Pornography generates approximately $10 to $13 billion in revenue annually and permeates nearly every media outlet available. Many figures within the porn industry have distinguished themselves in the pop culture lexicon. None however, have been as prolific and as visible as Jenna Jameson, deemed the leading female star in pornographic history by nearly every trade publication. In the 8 years Jameson has worked in the industry, she has appeared in over 700 magazines, made over 110 films (including non-pornographic films and features), has made numerous television and promotional appearances and is chairwoman of her own company. She owns two homes, six automobiles and a restaurant in Scottsdale Arizona. Jameson is reportedly worth $15 million.

Jameson’s success is partly due to her physical appeal, but more importantly, Jameson has self-authored an image composed of cinematic aesthetics and the projected desires of her audience. Jameson’s image is a carefully crafted representation consisting of sexual simulation animated by the fantasies and desires of her loyal fans. Through tradeshows, websites, email, strip clubs and interaction via her website, Jameson is in constant dialogue with her fan base and accommodates their shifting tastes and desires. The Jameson image continuously transforms in order to sustain a commodified existence within the pornographic world and beyond. The image has become economically autonomous to the extent that there is no longer any resemblance to the signified, if there ever was a signified. The image is real only in its ability to generate capital and accommodate the sexual desires of its consumers. These desires exist indefinitely as they are never really fulfilled, and therefore generate a self perpetuating Lacanian cycle of unfulfilled plentitude – ideal for the capitalistic appetite. The Jameson image is a sexual simulacrum.

If the Jameson image is a simulacrum in the Baudrillardian tradition, it must be demonstrated how this self-authored simulation becomes a simulacrum. This presentation will demonstrate how the human cinematic representation achieves simulacrum status by traversing through, and gaining acceptance in multiple social and economic fields.
If the status of Jamesons’s image as simulacrum can be substantiated, then other discussions concerning conventional feminist theory may arise. If Jameson’s image is indeed a self-authored simulation, and is a commodity with proprietary control (by Jameson) then conventional discussions about the means of production and exploitation in the pornographic world can be challenged. If a Marxist critique is employed, it is possible to demonstrate how production and image are controlled by the same agency (Jameson) which was heretofore alienated and ultimately exploited in the worse of possible industries.

This presentation will proceed as follows. First, a brief introduction of the modern pornographic milieu will be given. Second, the presentation will address Baudrillard’s theory of simulacra in relation to the image. This will include a seven-step model describing various social and economic fields validating the image as commodity, and eventually as a commodity without a signified. These ‘social and economic fields’ will be partly defined by the postulations offered by Pierre Bourdieu concerning ‘social fields’ and those posited by Howard Becker pertaining to the art world. Third, the presentation will outline various feminist theories concerning pornography and discuss how Jameson, as a simulacrum, challenges theories of censorship, objectification and exploitation.

"Identities, Abjection, and Body Genres in Music Videos"
Abigail Sandige, Emory University

In the realm of the music video, there are a select few deemed “too hot for MTV” due to their lyrics and/or visual content. The bulk of those videos that are censored, relegated to marginal “safe harbor” hours, or go completely unaired on American music video channels deal explicitly with issues of the body and its extremes and excesses. This paper examines four such “inflammatory” clips – Madonna’s “Justify My Love,” Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer,” Prodigy’s “Smack My Bitch Up,” and Aphex Twin’s “Windowlicker” – and places them within the context of certain body genres, namely horror and pornography. Issues explored include constructions of gender, sexuality, and “the abject,” drawing on the “body genres” work of Linda Williams, Carol Clover, and Barbara Creed. I would also include a screening of these videos for my talk, as they are somewhat difficult to gain access to because of their controversial nature. Often considered a “low” form, music videos have yet to be explored within the context of “the body,” and this paper hopes to strengthen the links between videos and the cinematic body genres that influence them (and vice versa).

"The Road to Shame: Stereotypes, Images, and Postmodernity In Daytime Entertainment"
Kevin Sherman, San Francisco State University

The daytime talk show has exhibited symptoms of what may be described as a modern day "circus side show" over the last decade. "Guests" set themselves up to be publicly (on stage) and privately (within the privacy of the home viewer's dwelling) ridiculed in exchange for what seems to be limited recognition as something beyond their personal and private lives. As a result stereotypes have emerged that locate these "guests" as overweight, uneducated, poor, ignorant, and confused. Similarly they become stereotypically identified as their race, gender, or sexual preference (or a portrayal of cultural traits outside their own) identifies them as caricatures designed for the pleasure of the viewing audience. How does modern daytime entertainment influence how we view our own lives? Can daytime entertainment functions as a form of therapy that in some manner allows us to feel "better" about our own lives and what is the appeal in experiencing this phenomena? What embodies what may be referred to as the "postmodern" talk show? Has extensive sound effects, on-screen graphics, and audience participation led the way to this conception of "postmodernity" within the talk show, and has this paved the way for the recent reality television explosion?

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Bodies And Borders: Representation and Crossing Cultures
1:00pm Friday, October 3

"Screened Body/Embodied Screen: Woman's Veiled Body in Iranian Cinema"
Z. Pamela Karimi, MIT

Since the development of new institutions beginning in the late Enlightenment, the private/public spatial dichotomy in the West has broken down and as a result public and private spaces in western and westernized societies alike have acquired similar spatial characteristics and have even become enmeshed into one. In most contemporary Islamic societies, however, the division of public/private space is still perhaps one of the most important features of spatiality. Interestingly, the divisions between public and private spaces have often centered on the female body. Women’s bodies have always been central in Iranian political discourse in the construction of public space. Soon after Reza Shah came to power in the beginning of the 20th century, he embarked on his quest to give a modernized image to Iranian cities, ordering that the streets be rid of the most conspicuous sign of backwardness—the veil. In 1983 women were again obligatorily re-veiled thus signaling the creation of a strong Islamic image for post-revolutionary Iranian cities.

Unlike other Islamic countries, in Iran, the composition of the veil since the Islamic Revolution has not been the bearer of its traditional meanings. With its strong symbolic connotations, the veil became, among other things, a revolutionary emblem. Covered bodies of women came into play as ideological symbols to support the goals of the revolution.

In recent Iranian movies, woman’s body becomes, once again, an ideological emblem. However, in contrast to real life experiences, in the context of cinema this emblem contradicts the post-revolutionary definition of women’s corporealiality.

In this paper, I will look at interrelation of women’s bodies and space as it has been imaged in contemporary Iranian film. In particular, I focus on some recent movies by Jafar Panahi, Samira Makhmalbaaf, Abbas Kiarostami and Seifollah Samadian.

These filmmakers illustrate the relationship between the bodies of women and their habitats. In their movies the wrapped body in relation to its space is analogues to a repressed voice—mostly that of women—in relation to the dominant masculine political and social atmosphere.

In particular, I look at the ways in which these movies represent women’s bodies, whether in public or not, as objects that remain in the private space they are meant to dwell—the veil. In essence, in post-revolutionary Iranian movies, the screen becomes a public arena for the audience; whereas the veil turns into a secondary space to keep women’s bodies in the private. Interestingly, there are some connections between conceptions of spatiality and the veil in Iranian cultural contexts. The term chador in Persian means tent, screen, and indeed the veil. Therefore, the veil, on the one hand, functions as a portable habitat, reduced in size to the bulk of a woman’s body and, on the other hand, works as a stage set for the audience.

"Mummified Alive: Ancient Egypt, Horror and the Cinematic Experience"
Leslie Lewis, Northwestern University

As studies of Orientalism have amply demonstrated, the “exotic East” has long fascinated Western culture. But by looking at the material record it becomes evident that ideas about Ancient Egypt in particular have had an influence on the West more than any other. One of the reasons for this inspiration is the existence of a rich material record left by the Ancient Egyptian, unlike other cultures that may have been less obsessed with ensuring their preservation for the next world. However, it would seem that the interests of the modern West and its own obsession with achieving immortality have waylaid their journey to that world.

“Timelessness” is one idea that is often associated with Ancient Egypt, not only because it is one of the oldest cultures that we know anything about, but also because the Egyptian belief in an afterlife saw them looking forward to the distant future, and so they built their world to last them to that eternity. The mummy in a museum is typically thought of as a desiccated, unchanging, eternal thing from a different world -the distant past. Decay has been arrested, or at least slowed to an undetectable pace, and the body safely locked away in a golden case to be preserved for an eternity.

From the early days of cinema, filmmakers have taken up the figure of the mummy and its associations with time and the distant past. Tales that center on this figure coming to life have been told throughout the centuries, but it isn't until it appears on-screen that the power of the mummy as a filmic creature realizes its full potential. Just as film animates and brings to life the still image, the preservation of life forever gone past, it also has the power to reanimate the dead more literally. The medium itself is what allows the mummy to gain its power, allowing it to move for the first time in millennia, to make its voice heard and its will known. This image, the cinematic memory of the mummy brought back to life, has affected forever the cultural conception of the mummy.

This paper presents case studies of the mummy in both early film and in the horror genre, considering the implications of this figure coming back to life to wreak vengeance on its modern captors after centuries of being treated as a mute possession. I discuss the mummy through the framework of Noel Carroll's definition of a monster as something that crosses borders - here between life and death, preservation and decay. I then seek to expand his definition of the monster to account for the experience of the viewer by recognizing that a consideration of both the horror genre and the action of watching film allows for the characterization of viewers as transgressors who violate and cross borders simply by watching film, forcing us to rethink the viewer's relationship to the monster as one of identification by virtue of the medium. I argue that the particular anxiety of the mummy, what makes it such an effective monster, is that it evokes guilt and awareness of our own transgressions as a culture as we possess and coerce the past, trying to make it our own, transcending the barriers of time and space by ransacking a culture for our own ends.

"Chamma chamma: the all new singing and dancing Bollywood body in Moulin Rouge"
Anupama Prabhala Kapse, UC Berkeley

Does the appearance of Bollywood musical numbers in recent American films such as The Guru (2002), Ghost World (2001) and Moulin Rouge (2001) signal the increasing international visibility of the Asian/Indian body? If so, what could be the affective logic behind such a deployment of the Indian body? What transformations does this re-cast film body undergo in this trans-national process? Taking Moulin Rouge as a prime example of this new trend of cinematic cosmopolitanism, I argue in this paper that the film instrumentalizes hybridity as a signifier of a neo-liberal western self by appropriating a racialized female Indian body.

Moulin Rouge's inclusion of the Bollywood number chamma chamma (from the Hindi film China Gate, dir: Raj Kumar Santoshi, 1998) is an important feature of its brash cosmopolitanism in that it structures the film’s pastiche of cinematic styles and gestures through a spectacular “Indian” narrative borrowed from nineteenth century European theatrical traditions. This deployment projects the east, or its signifier, the Indian film body, as an uncontaminated space that can be used selectively to produce an iconic illusion of a fluid, "traveling" Asian self in a global conjuncture. But what travels in effect is the film Moulin Rouge itself. The Hindi film song or body - often used interchangeably in the film - remains bound to its location in the east.

The song sequence in Hindi cinema, often independent of its narrative, combines multiple national styles in a hybrid fashion as one of its “attractions”, a tendency that is ironically absent from Moulin Rouge’s cosmopolitan treatment of the song. In fact, the film China Gate from which it is taken is heavily influenced by the American Western and Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai. In Moulin Rouge the number chamma chamma is performed by a troupe of cancan dancers as a prelude to the performance of a play, "Spectacular, spectacular", which occurs at the end of the film. The song is choreographed to tantric sexual poses that are performed onstage by a host of extras and, unlike the original Hindi version, the song itself is not performed by the female star. Therefore, its vibrant eroticism is mobilized in Moulin Rouge only to be displaced on to lesser, insignificant female bodies. The exaggerated, high-pitched soundtrack carries out a strategic infantilization that makes chamma chamma an opaque sign of “Bollywood” to the western viewer. On the other hand, realistic continuity codes straighten out the raunchy, jerky and subversive sexual rhythm of the original song to orchestrate a smoother western aesthetic.

Essentially, this new visual economy helps to reconfigure the historical cinematic form of the Hollywood musical through a process of referral to the Bollywood song. This parasitic insertion of the Bollywood number completes its transmutation into a different performative idiom that retains just enough traces of the original textual scheme to which it belongs. Indeed, an uncritical viewer could mistake this appearance of chamma chamma in Moulin Rouge for a campy and triumphant citation of Bollywood cinema and fail to notice the shrinkage of the original semiotic system that it borrows from. Far from being a radical quotation of an older representational structure, the explicit use of saturated colors and shrill tones reifies the most obvious features of the Hindi film song, and assimilates them into a newly constituted aural-visual regime. It is now part of a globally inflected form of collective address that elides the nature of the asymmetrical cultural transaction that has taken place. Through this transfer, it is the western subject Satine who is named as "hybrid", to mark her new cosmopolitanism, whereas the hybridity of the Indian subject is made invisible.

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