mad bad and dangerous to know

Cormac McCarthy - The Road

incipit:

When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he’d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world.

submitted by byronic

Žižek on the Hitchcockian Synthom 2/2

“Vertigo is of a special interest, insofar as, in it, the same sinthom of the spiral that draws us into its abyssal depth repeats itself and resonates at a multitude of levels: first as a purely formal motif of the abstract form emerging out of the close-up of the eye in the credits sequence; then as the curl of Carlotta Valdes’ hair in her portrait, repeated in Madeleine’s haircut; then as the abyssal circle of the staircase of the church tower; and, finally, in the famous 360 degrees shot around Scottie and Judy-Madeleine who are passionately embracing in the decrepit hotel room, and during which the background changes to the stable of the Juan Batista Mission and then back to the hotel room; perhaps, this last shot offers the key to the temporal dimension of “vertigo”- the self-enclosed temporal loop in which past and present are condensed into the two aspects of the same endlessly repeated circular movement. It is this multiple resonance of surfaces that generates the specific density, the “depth” of the film’s texture.

Here we have a set of (visual, formal, material) motives which “remain the same” across different contexts of meaning. How are we to read such persisting gestures or motifs? One should resist the temptation to treat them as Jungian archetypes with a deep meaning - the raising hand in Wagner expressing threat of the dead person to the living; or the person clinging by another’s hand expressing the tension between spiritual fall and salvation… We are dealing here with the level of material signs which resists meaning and establishes connections which are not grounded in narrative symbolic structures: they just relate in a kind of pre-symbolic cross-resonance. They are not signifiers, neither the famous Hitchcockian stains, but elements of what, a decade or two ago, one would have called cinematic writing, ecriture. In the last years of his teaching, Jacques Lacan established the difference between symptom and sinthom: in contrast to symptom which is a cipher of some repressed meaning, sinthom has no determinate meaning - it just gives body, in its repetitive pattern, to some elementary matrix of jouissance, of excessive enjoyment - although sinthoms do not have sense, they do radiate jouis-sense /enjoy-meant/.³ “

(from Lacanian Ink)

Žižek on the Hitchcockian Synthom 1/2

from Lacanian Ink:

[…] In Hitchcock’s films, we also find the same visual or other motif that insists, imposing itself through an uncanny compulsion and repeating itself from one film to another, in totally different narrative contexts. Best-known is the motif of what Freud called Niederkommenlassen, “letting /oneself/ fall down,” with all the undertones of melancholic suicidal fall² - a person desperately clinging by his hand onto another person’s hand:

the Nazi saboteur clinging from the good American hero’s hand from the torch of the Statue of Liberty in Saboteur; in the final confrontation of The Rear Window, the crippled James Stewart hanging from the window, trying to grab the hand of his pursuer who, instead of helping him, tries to make him fall; in The Man Who Knew Too Much (remake, 1955), on the sunny Casablanca market, the dying Western agent, dressed as an Arab, stretches his hand towards the innocent American tourist (James Stewart) and pulling him down towards himself; the finally unmasked thief clinging from Cary Grant’s hand in To Catch a Thief; James Stewart clinging from the roof funnel and desperately trying to grasp the policeman’s hand stretching towards him at the very beginning of Vertigo; Eva Marie-Saint clinging from Cary Grant’s hand at the edge of the precipice (with the immediate jump to her clinging to his hand in the sleeping car’s berth at the end of North by Northwest). Upon a closer look, we become aware that Hitchcock’s films are full of such motifs. There is the motif of a car on the border of a precipice in Suspicion and in North by Northwest - in each of the two films, there is a scene with the same actor (Cary Grant) driving a car and dangerously approaching a precipice; although the films are separated by almost 20 years, the scene is shot in the same way, including a subjective shot of the actor casting a glance into the precipice. (In Hitchcock’s last film, The Family Plot, this motif explodes in a long sequence of the car that rushes down the hill, since its breaks were meddled with by the villains.)