Revolver, Revolving, Revolution

Turn off your mind relax and float down stream
It is not dying, it is not dying

Lay down all thoughts, surrender to the void,
It is shining, it is shining.

Yet you may see the meaning of within
It is being, it is being

Love is all and love is everyone
It is knowing, it is knowing

And ignorance and hate mourn the dead
It is believing, it is believing

But listen to the colour of your dreams
It is not leaving, it is not leaving

So play the game “Existence” to the end
Of the beginning, of the beginning

—The Beatles, Tomorrow Never Knows off of Revolver

I watched the Guy Ritchie film Revolver for the second time last night. As film making goes, holistically speaking it is not Ritchie’s best film, but I do think it is his most thoughtful and imaginative. At times the film meanders into vignettes that lack coherence and become self-absorbed with their aesthetic. There are worse ways to drift in filmmaking.

The film meditates through melodrama and action on the nature of consciousness and the destructive nature of ego. Using character constructs that represent the Id and the dynamics of desire and greed, Revolver is a persistent revolving door of interior dialogue that manifests itself as exterior drama. Jake Green (Jason Statham) is centered between Avi (André Benjamin) and Zach (Vincent Pastore) as a character bent on revenge who discovers the emptiness of that proposition and realizes the center of all of our battles is our own Ego. We are always fighting ourselves — desire, greed, love, hate, fear.

Kabbalahistic references aside (Ritchie was married to Madonna and became immersed in her nutty religious gravity) the film reminded me of a very simple premise, that the frame of our lives is our own. We own it. Not to be a reductionist, but it begins with the glass is either half full or half empty. Of course the glass is also neither and if we stretch our imaginations the glass is only there because we decide it is there at all. Materiality is dependent on consciousness. A film which does a far superior job of digging into this, dumbed-down dialogue aside, is Inception. The dynamics of parallel contingencies that persist within the mind can be unravelled in much greater detail in a longer essay. For a snippet of the philosophy of transgression in Lacanian terms you should read Zizek’s essay on Casablanca. Essentially, Zizek posit that the lost piece of film two-thirds through Casablanca where the cut away suggests either carnal or spiritual passion is a classic example of our own minds filling in the blanks of materiality. Of course when we enjoy cinema, we are removed yet again from the stages of reality, because mentally we become the omnipresent but invisible participant in the virtual reality of the film itself.

Films ability as a medium to fragment time/space gives us access to ideas on consciousness that are more difficult to access in other art forms. Francis Bacon’s referencing of Muybridge and Braque and Picasso’s invention of Cubism are just two examples of painting’s effort to do the same, but in this digital age where time is compressed by the persistence of moving images, film still holds greatest frame for the play of consciousness. The revolution that Revolver touches upon, is the liberation of the mind from ego. In reality the imposition is much subtler and complicated where we find ourselves balancing our consciousness between what Lacan described as ‘imaginary order’ and ‘symbolic order’, the former being the fantasy image of ourselves and our desires and the latter referring to the global constructs of linguistics, communication, ideology and law. Many a student of aesthetics has been bound up in unraveling collective consciousness as it relates to that tenuous space called beauty and the sublime. The symbolic attachments to the above photo of the non-speaking Lollie character that holds a brief cameo in the film tells all. Ritchie’s failing in Revolver is either his own intellectual weakness or his assumption that intellectual density and popularity are irreconcilable. At times the film using a blunt instrument to telegraph teleology. It’s too bad, because at other times it approaches the sublime. In this scene, Ritchie meditates on the nature of beauty and desire, which is often a driving force in counter point to our fears.

The ability to sit still with our feelings can provide us with a bandwidth that is nearly infinite. I like to think of the ego in parallel to gravity. It is a weak force but the one that inherently ties the universe together through its invisibility. Just because reality is ultimately immeasurable doesn’t mean it isn’t a son of a bitch. Stepping away from the metaphors of our minds if only for a brief moment, can give us the perspective necessary to allow us a humble fascination. Beauty is not a destructive angel if you realize it is simply a part of the complex mechanics of our minds.

I often think that I end up watching films at exactly the right time I need to see that particular perspective. Of course, that in and of itself is an invention of my own ‘imaginary order’ but the lie serves its purpose, to remind me to sit still.

Instagram, Nostalgia and Fascism

“There’s a rule of thumb you can count on in each succeeding version of the web 2.0 movement: the more radical and online social experiment is claimed to be, the more conservative, nostalgic, and familiar the result will actually be.”

—Jaron Lanier, from You Are Not A Gadget

I’ve been thinking lately why it is I don’t like Instagram (or Hipstamatic). On its face it is a simple photography app that allows you to share the photo’s you take from your smartphone to a larger social network. Recently the founders of the company, Kevin Systrom, 28 and Mike Krieger, 25 sold Instragram to Facebook for $1bn. In two short years the two managed to take the idea from zero to 30 million users.

Instagram by Jennifer Bergen

Rather than delve into the history of photography and its social relevance or our connection to gadgetry I thought I would simply touch upon the overarching issues that I find unsettling with the adoption of an app like Instagram.

1. Second-order expression. In Lanier’s brilliant manifesto quoted above he talks about the two forms of expression. Primary expression is a singular idea (obviously formed through the artist/inventor’s relation to society and culture) producing a unique set of ideas. Secondary expression on the other hand, is a riff on the former. Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey is a clear example of first order expression, along with Arthur C. Clark’s book (and whom consulted on the making of the film). Second-order expression is the Apple commercial referencing Kubrick’s original film.   It is an ironic gesture that inverts artificial intelligence as a mechanism that is suggested to be inherent in an Apple computer in the positive. The original film of course, is a conversation on ontology, not reliability. Second order expressions undermine not only their original references but the meaningfulness of expression as a whole, because they cheapen the act and force all first order expressions into ironic loops.
2. Nostalgia. The word has roots in the Greek but was originally coined by the 1688 doctor Johannes Hofer in his medical dissertation. Nostalgia was not born of the poetic but the medical and was created to describe an affliction. Patients suffering from nostalgia were said to produce “erroneous representations” and acquired a “lifeless and haggard countenance” and “indifference toward everything.” Today, by some estimates, half of all the bits carried across the internet reference Television. Photography is as Susan Sontage said, memento mori in and of itself. Why is it necessary then to flavor it immediately with the countenance of the past? Is the present so objectionable in its presence that we must immediately stain it with a faux historical tint? Aren’t smartphones supposed to provide us access to greater insight in order to advance ourselves as a culture, as human beings? Instead they’ve become sophisticated toys that serve as tools for further distancing ourselves from the problems and challenges of our present being. What is Hipstamatic adding to the conversation?
3. Fascism. Some will undoubtedly find it extreme that I am bringing politics and especially fascism into play when talking about a simple phone app, but I don’t find it so. Fascism as a socio-political dynamic has a way of creeping up on us. It doesn’t just jump out of the woodwork and assert itself. Our particular brand of soft-fascism lacks allegiance to a particular ideology and instead supports a deeply flawed consumer spending based form of unbalanced capitalism. Instagram is a particular celebration of this as it simultaneously emphasizes the accumulation of wealth (in the founders receiving $1bn) and the reinforcement of an idealized past (various Instagram filters). The multiplying effect comes in its immediate social connectivity and broadcast across a global communications platform, the internet. In Lawrence Britt’s 14 Characteristics of Fascism, the eleventh is: “Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts…Free expression in the arts is openly attacked, and governments often refuse to fund the arts.” I don’t think it is a stretch, especially in light of Jared Lanier’s book, to suggest that Instagram undermines free expression and creates an anti-intellectual skew on art production. All you have to do is apply x filter to y photograph, and boom, instant art all of your friends who comment on it as beautiful, lovely and awesome. Instagram in broad strokes reinforces amateurism in art-making. Schlock replaces fine art.

At the end of the day I don’t like Instagram (or Hipstamatic) because it undermines my own life’s work — art making. This is not to say I think those of you who use Instagram are fascists or hate art. Obviously I’m in a minority here and many people I hold dear use the app. On the contrary. What I think is, we’ve all become artistically lazy. The experience of our daily lives is so manufactured it is hard to see beyond that which is prepackaged and neatly delivered to us. The artist Lucas Samaras began ‘breaking’ Polaroid cameras in the 70’s in order to force unexpected results with the photographs those cameras made. The results are often stunning. Someone needs to start ‘breaking’ Facebook, Instagram and other social mechanisms as a way of regaining our creativity and our real sense of identity. We must learn to program so that we can participate in the design of the world in which we currently live rather than remain passive participants in someone else’s design, often in the service of a profit based enterprise. We should not fall victims to “indifference toward everything” and the immediacy of candy-coated pretty photographs.