Time Magazine online has filed this report of 13 pictures giving us the gist of the E-Waste issue.
This format is actually pretty similar to the Museum exhibition and thus may give us an inroad to the target.
The previous post and this do some work toward conceptualizing the accident visually, but the main difference between this approach and our approach is that none of these neutral images can get us into that state of vertigo, that state of falling into the object-as-commodity reflecting ourselves in itself.
There's a scene in Sam Raimi's first Evil Dead film where the young Bruce Campbell, having managed to fend off two of the four friends that have turned into Kandarian demons, looks at himself in a mirror. He reaches his hand out to touch it, and suddenly, the mirror has turned to liquid, which his hand goes into. He wrenches his hand back and issues a high-pitched scream.
This is the response we're looking for. To have someone looking into a mirror that exposes itself, to have them dip their hand into it and recoil, as though they have seen their own death or, perhaps, tapped into some sort of universal subjectivity.
I am now realizing that this scene may have been adapted in the Matrix, where a liquid mirror like substance encompasses neo, eventually forcing it down his throat in one long scream that is both human and inhuman (a robotic like voice) at the same time:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2MSF35IxVE
Around minute 1:28. I wonder if they got this from evil dead. I am thinking that the sort of cyberpunk image of the first Matrix may be more useful when discussing e-waste than Evil Dead, but I could be wrong.
Eh, Zizek already did The Matrix, and I think the Evil Dead mirror is better because of Bruce Campbell's seemingly genuine look of pure terror.
ReplyDeleteI do remember that scene from Matrix pretty well though. The shot when Keanu lifts up his fingers with the drippy mirror and stars at them confused (standard Keanu) is pretty good and might refer more to the fascination.
There's another mirror scene in Evil Dead 2: Dead By Dawn that has Ash's image jumping out of the mirror and grabbing his shoulders. The doppelganger says something like, "You think this is normal? We just cut up our [zombie] girlfriend with a chainsaw..." That'd actually work pretty well with the whole doubling we see in the commodity.