Freud, of course, makes me reel and contort as his penchant for what appear to me to be extreme conclusions, not to mention the utterly bizarre aspects of his own personality and psyche. Especially interesting and I believe problematic is his way of analyzing his grandson's game of Fort-da, in which he assumes that the game revolves around a delayed gratification and a kind of masochistic action to bring about future pleasure. I think that one might very reasonably argue that the child is simply exploring the physical potential of his body and the objects with which he interacts. Freud needs it be specific kind of thing, I believe and finds ways of interpreting the behaviors to coincide with his previous arguments.
Tisseron's "All Writing is Drawing" made me think about how I write my screenplays and how gesture is so important to film performance. For instance, a scene in the last film I made, was built around two people standing with their backs to each other while they placed or removed things in/from lockers. This culminated in a moment where their hair (both having long blond hair) collided and by way of static electricity and friction their hair seemed to hold on to the strands of the other, creating a gesture that might be read as a kind of longing for intimacy or need for contact. And especially as a person who loves minimal dialogue in films, I'm interested in gesture or internal emotional experience, which I believe film is so good at expressing in spite of the fact that so few filmmakers are
Bennett's discussion of agency in non-human objects brought up a script I had written and have been considering making for my thesis about 2 geneticists (both women) who create a human male via genetic design. They then lose control of the project and the person they co-created and one of the central conflicts revolves around questions of exterior and specifically corporate influence on identity and agency. While the script does not examine non-human agency so much as examine the definition of human, I am very interested in a kind of ethical discussion about characters in films. That is to say I want to be looking at how we treat characters in films and whether there is an ethical component to it. Is it OK to torture a character? Is their suffering of no import since they are not real? Does the character's position as proxy or surrogate for the audience change the ethical implications, i.e. can a filmmaker be cruel to the antagonist in ways they could not be to the protagonist? Eventually, this must lead to questions of OTHERNESS, dehumanization and disassociation and the role of images in social constructions of compassion and communal thinking.
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Deleuze and Guattari's interpretation of fort/da has to do with singing...fort/da as the refrain of a song. So, they don't see it as a traumatic moment, like Freud does, but as a creative act.
ReplyDeleteWith regards to your discussion of the treatment of characters, that's a really interesting issue. I've always found the treatment of antagonistic characters in TV series to be problematic (especially how they end up). It might relate to this issue of othering...I never thought of it that way. But it might be that by othering someone, that gives you the right to treat them in more extreme ways. And, yes, I think there are ethical implications to this.
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