So the choice is Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo:
In the film, Jimmy Stewart plays a detective haunted by the death of his detective buddy. They're chasing a bad guy across rooftops, and after Stewart slips, his buddy falls to his death trying to help him.
Left shaken by the incident, Stewart can't be on the force any more. In the meantime, an old friend from college, now a rich industrialist, hires Stewart to follow his wife, played by Kim Novak. Stewart follows her and gradually becomes obsessed. She returns his love but ends up dying when she falls from a belltower. Stewart was unable to save her due to his vertigo.
Shaken even more, Stewart's bumming around the city when he runs into a woman who looks just like his lost love. He sets about courting her and decides to turn her into the deceased woman. He dyes her hair, buys her the woman's gray suit, etc. He walks into her apartment, and in the film's best scene, remeets his lost love, holding and kissing her as the camera spins around them, the cinema itself lost within the pleasure of the vertigo.
As it turns out though, the woman is indeed the lost love, and it turns out that she was a pawn in the rich industrialist's plan to kill his own wife.
I feel kinda bad for spoiling the plot, but seeing the film will still reveal the pleasures. The moment when Stewart remeets Madeleine is one of the finest in the cinema with Bernard Hermann's score and a green glow suffusing your senses as you're seduced the same way Stewart is, willing to leap into the obsession.
My relay to the accident is that Stewart's experience of Madeleine is, of course, a tactile but virtual experience. The figure is a simulacrum wrapped in flesh and blood, a simulacrum that still affects us and shakes us to our core. What else is the computer?
What Stewart can't do is to get over the truth behind the simulacrum, which, of course, revenges itself upon him when Madeleine/Judy dies at the end of the film.
But what sets Vertigo up as especially fascinating is that if we can see the gift as a second meeting with a lost love, then Judy becomes the donor, the one who submits herself to Stewart's desired simulacrum of Madeleine. She's both the donor and the object. She gives herself.
If anything, the ultimate problem is that Stewart can't learn to love the simulation. He can't recognize the gift offered as the donor offers itself as pure simulacrum, as pure Madeleine.
(of course, another way of looking at it is that Stewart's obsessive remaking of Judy negates any possibility for the two's happiness anyway, but the above is looking at it in terms of these narrative actants).
If our goal is to make the commodity speak, then I guess Madeleine/Judy-as-commodity (a phrase I feel a bit uncouth writing down) would say, "Remake me, I'm so dedicated to you that I'll allow it."
Don't our machines say the same? "Use me, I'm your relay to the world. And when we're done, throw me away. Send me away to lands unknown to be smashed and tortured. I want it."
As Baudrillard notes though, the object will have its revenge, and it does so with a fatal potentiality to destroy ecosystems and human life. So, I suppose this accident, that the working parts of virtuality can kill us, is the limit that we can assign the object. To take this accident to its limit then, we can see geopolitical ramifications, health, biological, and ecological consequences.
But it's still a question, I suppose, of refining my understanding of how the object's wishes become fulfilled in how it presents itself.
I'm starting to feel as though my Mac's spying on me even as I write about it and think about its senseless insides.
No comments:
Post a Comment