Intelligent Dasein and Final Destination 2

The entire Final Destination series is a parody of Creationism and the "proof" offered by "Intelligent Design." Death is the negative theology of Creationism. Just like "G-d" death cannot be represented or even presented, anthropomorphized, personified, or embodied. Clearly, there is only Da-sein, being there, a Heideggerian post-Christian existing toward death to be confronted in these teen pics. There is no priest figure as in A Haunting in Connecticut or The Exorcist. There's just the black guy who works at the funeral home where he creates corpses. Final Destination is the most openly parodic, starting with the TV interview of a guy who has been marginalized who finally gets a chance to talk about "death's design." The guy turns out to be psychotic, as we can see very clearly when he confuses inference with proof, and the TV interviewer calls him on his bad logic. The psychotic's account of death's design is the inverted mirror of the Creationist one. The only difference is that the plot of each film proves the psychotic right. Death always makes a come back. You can't skip over your mourning; you death is pre-planned, and all you can do is da-sein your life unto death, meaning that you are back to Kirkegaard's existentialization, as it were, of Christinaity: lay people face up living out their sickness unto death by taking a flying leap knowing will be no safety net, no safe landing, just falling.

Final Destination No. 2: Don't Ask, Don't Smell

The Final Destination 3D is the only one of the four Final Destination films to have two full on premonition sequences, one at the beginning (like the other three) and also one near the end (unlike the other three)। The fourth installment also redoes the opening title sequence, which cites death scenes form the previous three films, at the end of the film। FD 3D does not depart from the other there so much as it redoubles the uncanny repetitions already operative in the first film, Final Destination. In the first and most significant death sequence, death is liquified, revealing and then hiding itself to the audience through trick and reverse photography while leaving its victim looking like he has committed suicide? But what is the hang up? What is death's victim hung up on? Consider that the death is not a closed case. The victim's friend (who's telepathic reactions are crosscut in this death sequence) is framed as the possible murderer of what only appears to be a suicide. The first death follows from a scene before the premonition sequence, in which the victim tells the survivor visionary they should both go to the bathroom to take a dump before boarding the plane so that the girls they want to date won't smell the smelly left over in the bathroom on the airplane should they use it immediately after either guy has left it. Before they can move a move on either girl, they have to make a movement, together, in an overhead tracking shot showing them in stalls right next to each other. They fail to get the girls to move, to change seats; instead, the survivor moves his so that the girls can sit together, both in the premonition and the dream sequence. After the funeral, the two guys meet up, but the victim to go first after the plane explodes says his parents won't let him hang with his visionary buddy. Why does the friend have to be the first victim? Why do we go from dumping solids as prophylactic against death to liquid shower scene as personification and agent of death? To ask these question is already to see that Final Destination is already the second in a series yet to be, its phantom title being Final Destination No. 2. Even before being blocked by the sapphosocial girls, the possibility of heterosexual coupling in flight leads to homosocial panic attack, a need for reseating (note the later plot development involving a reinterpretation of the meaning of the seating arrangement) as we that see the death drive is a death drift, that sexuality has no telos exept for death, that sexuality cannot be differentiated and sequenced (anal to genital stage, homo to hetero, buddy to f-buddy) but only seralized in (re)in-stallments with only one explosion (the airplane) to be repeated. Final Destination squeezes out this secret just enough for a Romeo and Julian coupling become visible after the funeral and even more through the crosscutting as we see one partner reacting to the death of another partner, giving the film its alternate title, West Suicite Story. Choose either or both titles. Seat yourself. Or flush. In either case, we can see that director has prefigured the FD sequels to follows as segments rather than a series, as pieces of a tootsie roll to be cut off, excreted for theatrical consumption for audiences that already p/resists incorporating their own deaths, much less the death of others (who go unburied and unmourned). Even as it starts, the FD series has already crapped out.

"Maurice Blanchot est Mort"

Did you know that Derrida's essay "Maurice Blanchot est Mort," which he added to the 2003 reedition of Parages will not be included in the forthcoming translation of Parages (Stanford UP, 2011)? And it isn't included in The Work of Mourning either because that book came out in 2001.

The Wound of Mourning

The Wound of Mourning. That's the title that the editors of their collection of Derrida's obits and eulogies, not The Work Mourning. Perhaps The W(h)ine of mourning would work too. Or the (K)Not Working of Mourning. Anything but "work." So Protestant.

The F#@K It List

The F#@K It List. That's the title of my new trade self-help book. The Pitch: instead of making a list of the things you want to do before you kick the bucket (as in the movie The Bucket List), you're better making a "F@#K It list of the things you have been doing but didn't want to do and have managed to stop doing.Like the Book of Proverbs, my book will dispense (with) "wizdumb" in the form of totally contradictory advice. Like "hurry up and die" and "But wait! There's more. . ." By stopping yourself, you manage to grow emotionally and eventually have a better death. Chapters include "Hello, Death, Goodbye Life," "It's YOUR Funeral," "Die Right,""He Did It His Way," Wait for it . . . . ," "Downhill Racer," "Give It a Rest," and "Have a Great Death." Target Demographic: Readers 55 and older.

Quentin Tarentino's Exceptional States of Exception

Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds is a surprisingly thoughtful as well as clever film. Tarantino establishes new kinds of multiple plotting within a five act structure (the film calls them chapters). Reviews thus far have focused either on the self-conscious references to other films, regarding Basterds as more or less typical Tarantino, or its alleged anti-Semitism. In my view, the film is not anti-Semitic. It allegorizes the politics of film violence in ways that puts intense pressure on an apparent distinction between the diegetic Nazi audience viewing the war film within the film (Hitler loves it) and the audience watching the Tarantino film (us). More interestingly, Tarentino indulges and interrogates a fantasy about ending WWII by killing Hitler et al and Nazism in toto through two scenes involving what Carl Schmitt (Nazi and Catholic political theorist) called the "state of exception." During a "state of emergency," Schmitt argues in The Concept of the Political, the state could suspends the laws and treat a certain class of people as exceptions to the rule (trials and appeals were done away with people the Nazis viewed as enemies of the state--non-persons, actually). The first state of exception scene involves calculating the odds.:"999.999" probability versus "fate" offering "a hand from the pages of history." A story that seems too good to be true actually is true. The second scene closes the film. The war is now over, yet Brad Pitt leaves his trademark on the Nazi collaborator /traitor who allows Hitler et al to be killed; Pitt carves very deeply a swastika into the SS villain's forehead and saying to the one surviving American soldier, "I think this is my masterpiece." In this closing scene, the exceptional part Apache practice--continues in peace time as a masterpiece--(Pitt is part Apache and is linked early on to John Wayne through a door frame shot straight out of John Ford's Searchers --that film's plot begins soon after the Civil War has ended; Tarantino's opening scene is reminiscent of the Indian attack near the beginning of The Searchers, minus the implied rapes). The war is over, but art allows for more violence in a single case. This kind of artistic ends the film but calls the status of ending through "good" violence versus "bad" violence into question. In the scene in the movie theater when the French Jewish heroine Shoshanah comes on screen and her boyfriend ignites the silver nitrate film behind the screen, the screen image goes up in flames. The diegetic cinema screen and her image seems to go up into flames as well, even as the heroine's laughter starts to seem banshee like (her laughter makes her sound like a witch--as if the Wicked Witch in the Wizard of Oz hadn't melted.)The sequence recalls the "bad" Maria robot of Fritz Lang's Metropolis, on the one hand, and her destruction but also calls up the retaliatory fire bombing of German civilians (planned by the British since 1940) by the British and American in Dresden and other German cities. The tone of Inglourious Basterds is extremely well-callibrated--the violence is surprisingly toned down in almost even case and is done very quickly; suspense is created like in the usual (even good) war action films, and Tarantino's humor comes through in the monologues he gives some characters (the actors perform them wonderfully). But the humor is never so great that you can do more than smile. There is really no release in the film. The first violent film I found to be shockingly subdued. Tarantino has a character invoke Hamlet at one point, and QT's film indeed seems like a revenge tragedy (most of the "good" characters who die do so very abruptly). Justice and peace are seemingly impossible to combine, as we cycle past violence into the violence of the present, Nazi Germany having become much more than a specter that more than haunts the United States.

A lot of the criticism on rounds its alleged anti-semitism (american Jewish GIs act like Nazis) is based an failure to read the film's plot as well as it lessons in film history (the sequence on silver nitrate footage as explosive) and their integration. In terms of the plot, there are two conspiracies to kill Hitler and the audience. Both succeed. One includes the Jewish survivor of hte SS murder at the start of the film, who shoots the film's star (the German version of Sargeant York, according to the German solider turned star of the Nazi opposite film number, Pride of the Nation (a fictional film based Targets (dir. Peter Bogdanovich, 1968) based on the true story of the Texas Tower sniper and that ends in a drive in screening of a film starring Boris Karloff, who also stars in Targets) and then in turn is shot and killed by him though can't possibly have survived the three shots she gave him in the back, a sort of repetition of the brutal and surprisingly long scene in which the German film star (Diane Kruger) is strangled by Hans Landa, the SS villain. There's an overhead shot from the end of the climatic fight sequence from Taxi Driver here as well. As you can see, a lot of the film runs through late 60s into early 70s cinema--hence the spaghetti Western sound track themes). Nevertheless, the heroine's black lover gets her signal because it comes through her addition to the film. So her plot succeeds through film, through her film of the conspiracy, not by simple "action," and that action, of course, means using film footage as a bomb. And Hans Landa has left a bomb under Goebbels' seat which explodes before the bombs on the legs of the two GIs do. Moreover, it is Landa who lets the plot succeed. So there is a German-Jewish tension at the heart of the film's multiple plotting that cannot be resolved by equating of totally separating Nazis and Jewish civilian resistance fighters and Jewish GIs with Nazis. Moreover, the film again and again points to the centrality of film for the Nazis, much as it was central to the war effort in the U.S. Tarantino just literalizes the film as weapon metaphor, turning film itself into the explosive. Here Tarantino borrows a scene from Hitchcock's Sabotage--a film canister carried by Stevie explodes while he is on a London bus; the beginning of htis sequence appears in Tarentino's film). Just as Roosevelt had screenings of films like Olivier's Henry V and supporting Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator, so Hitler viewed various films, including, according to the film the Lives of he Bengal Lancers (in which Gary Cooper also stars, as he does in Sargeant York, as a kind of take action, engage the enemy NOW officer). The film's references to UFA, Leni Riefensthal,ad son all work to make the point that violence in film is not separate from violence outside film either for liberal democracies or fascist states; moreover, propaganda films made by the U.S. and by Germany aren't that different. Tarantino keeps drawing parallels and doubles, but mixing things up as well. The people in the two conspiracies don't know about each other and act independently, and Hans Landa only knows about one of them. The logic of action movies like the Eagle Has Landed or melodramas like Casablanca is entirely subverted by vertiginous references to historical events that were filmed and to films about history that refer to other films. So when Tarantino says that the civilian french couple who run the French cinema are like suicide bombers, it is naive to think he is drawing a simple comparison between real suicide bombers and cinematic ones. We already know, don't we, that television, the internet, and film are all central to Al-Queda? That they post videos of violence--that the Americans engage in their own psy-ops and always have? That the distinction between terrorist violence either by Israel (settlements, bulldozing, bomb dropping, gun fire) or by occupied Palestinians is not to be reduced to the same or the totally opposite? IG doesn't deny a difference between "real" history and film history but prevents any kind of interpretation in which one kind of history is read as the master of the other: the specters of victims haunting the present produced by traumas of the past can ever be exorcised or "re-membered" because the trauma itself already included always already spectral media (film, photography) which always route evidence through fantasy.

The mark of the Swastika at the end of IG is a remarking, a repetition of an earlier scene. In the first scene, we see a the end that the soldier has a swastika carved in his forehead. So we know the "masterpiece" at the end can be hidden as well. What marks Naziism is not is not an open wound or scar, but a hidden wound. Nazism did not know itself for what it is. Neither do Americans know their liberal democracy for what it is, Tarantino implies, as we are mired in Iraq and Afghanistan. We know but don't want to know about the extralegal violence the government (even under Obama) commits in the name of "state security."

Daniel Mendelsohn's reading of the film as anti-semitic: http://www.newsweek.com/id/212016/page/1 (My thanks to Jimmy Newlin for this link).

WHen Did our Government Become a COVER-nment

Thinking back to the the exposure of the White House coverup of the Watergate break in that led Nixon to resign or face impeachment, I'm forced to wonder now if it is possible to prosecute government officials like Bush, Cheney, Rumsefeld, and so on, who were not forced out of office or appointment (maybe Rumsfeld was at the lsat minute). Nixon went back to California and became a recluse. But Cheney is out there all over the place, with one of his daughters too,defending what he did and denying that it was illegal and calling for the release of CIA documents even though his was the most secretive administration ever. And now we have Senators Lieberman and Graham saying that their law making it illegal to release the still unreleased photos and video of crimes committed at Abu Gharib MUST BE PASSED or they will block ALL legislation even though they have acknowledged that the unreleased materials show even more serious acts of violence and torture than those we have seen and even though Obama has already said, wrongly, that he will not release them. Is this not an open cover up? Isn't it tantamount to legalizing obstruction of justice since Lierman and Graham acknowledge that the evidence shows that (war) crimes were committed?