The post-human is, in its networked co-existence with other node-type citizens, adjusting continuously to market conditions.

The nodal existence is pre-eminently characterized by our present consciousness being partially held in the memory of a computer we work on (the disembodiment of data) and is illustrated by Hayles with a reference to the 1980s sci-fi cinema piece ROBOCOP by Frank Miller. Peter Weller's character toggles between his remaining human consciousness and his newly robot-ized mind-set while visiting his former home following his cyborg-ion resurrection.

THE NARRATIVE
The narrative sense of The Citizen hangs by a thread. I felt compelled to establish a path through the scenes enabling anyone to proceed.

CONSEQUENCES
Are we biologically prepared to differentiate memories of what is real from mediated images - simulations of what might, conceivably, be remembered?

If not, what are we liable for? And what is our best defense against what seems so real but is in fact only series of elaborate castings of light that merely re-mind us of something we actually do know?

The fact of this confusion is easily exploited by an overpowered advertising system that drives the naive meta-narratives of our society.

Jonathon Crary's observations in "Suspensions of Perception" tell us that for 150 years, those with enough capital to arrange alternate realities in increasingly powerful media constructions dominate our attention. The specific purpose of a $375,000 television commercial must be obvious but its appearance offers few clues as to its more general objective.

According to Crary, this objective is "richly historical" and similar to what the first attention grabbing devices of the 1800s e.g. the Nickelodeon, Diorama and Zoetrope (see Crary's Techniques of the Observer) and others proposed: to get your attention (away from reality) and keep it long enough to fulfill its purpose. Such purposes have been defined in David Reisman's words as: "no longer (to) orient (one) to some social achievement but rather, used in a solipsistic way, to adjust one to one's fate and social state."

"Incredulity with Meta-narratives" - those so-often naive constructions we inhale unconsciously (and grow to expect from cinema art - but not from literature) have left me attracted to a more eternal "present" type of feel. Here I am quoting Annette Michelson from David Sterritt's book in which she imagines a technique that will "undermine narrative and situate film in a kind of perpetual present...devour or eliminate expectation as an element in cinematic experience."

Brakhage postulates a kind of cinema where the green is seen as if by a child who has never been laid in the grass. In "Screening The Beats," Sterritt writes about Kerouac's interest in a: "multidimensional narrativity," and "spontaneous insight rather than canonical wisdom," "joining the pictorial, the musical, the verbal and the physical into an orgasmic concatenation of aesthetic joy." The Citizen certainly embraces- or attempts to locate such an approach.

Scene Notes:
[Retro.mov]
The look/gaze/screen/scene/spectacle theory (Freud/Lacan) is explored and Sartre's notion of the voyeur being surrounded by "nothingness" until confronted by "the other" is exploited by another female simulacrum (now in the picture frame). "The girl" (and her "look") stimulate the basis for Joe's self-defense against the perpetrators and although his logic is flawed he makes use of the notion of and the quest for love to turn the tables on the institution of a non-human tyranny.

A thorough and very useful text on the subject of the semiotics of the cinematic image and its relationship to the ideal of love is Kaja Silverman's "The Threshold of the Visible World ."

[CocktailParty.mov]
Just a memory of childhood (mine). Thanks here to archive.org. The footage was originally from a Look Magazine production called "In the Suburbs". What struck me as remarkable about the film was how absolutely similar life in the 1950s was to our own today.

An interesting comparison of the 1950s and the early 21st century may be drawn from a reading of Robert Lindner's book, "Must You Conform?" Even this conservative publication (and review) gets the point regarding the abuse of basic liberties.

Lindner characterizes mass-man as conforming to "group-think" at every-step and tags the entity "psychopath in excelsis." Lindner coined the phrase "Rebel Without a Cause," but did not otherwise contribute to that film.

The contemporary cinema is rife with end-of-days violence; civilization-ending viruses, the living dead blood-lusting after its audience and cynicism regarding even the most important and most sacred of our natural resources. I remember when people threw up at the Exorcist and got sick at Peckinpah's graphic depiction of gun violence. Children now watch this kind of thing while eating their breakfast cereal.

All media is training media. What are we being prepared for? [home]