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Women's Studies Quarterly (2012) - Crossing over Horror: Reincarnation and Transformation in Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Primitive

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Abstract

In a later scene, after the explosion of a car at a gas station, the camera jumps to a high aerial view above the bay, and from behind the camera, a bird drops down into view, followed by another, and then a mass of birds covers the sky. According to Zizek, we are thus made to experience the horror of looking from the vantage point of murderous agency.

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In Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (1963), the entrance of a stranger into the small coastal town of Bodega Bay, California, triggers the eruption of violent attacks from birds - seagulls, crows, unidentified others. In a posttrauma conversation among locals at a diner, one person points out that birds are prehistoric, unknowably alien, belonging to a geological time not contained within a human evolutionary narrative. Another person points out that there are also a lot more birds in the world than people are aware of - someone gives a number - and it seems clear that the significance of that number, in its day-to-day invisibility, is hard to fathom. Someone tries to make the number more dramatically graspable by speculating that if all birds were to rise up in a war against humans, they would be sure to win. The horror of the imagined scenario imbues the unfathomable birds with some sense of accountability, some sense-ability, even as this scenario of an interspecies war humanizes the attacks occurring in the town, which are far more enigmatic in nature.

The birds follow a precise but inexplicable rhythm of attack and rest. They are propelled toward the humans in a massed onslaught of speed and force with unabated intensity until they reach a point of change in rhythm. During periods of rest, the birds seem content to perch and slowly gather into a visible mass. People move slowly and safely among the birds during periods of rest, whereas energetic motion attracts the birds' attention and draws them toward people during periods of attack. Although there are deaths among birds and humans, there is no discernible narrative of murder or war, only a destructive force that obeys the rhythms of a score that we cannot hear. It is hard to see a concerted goal behind the force, much less any intentional character such as malice; there is only violence and affective rhythm. It is not the life of one species over another that is at stake. Most of the bloodshed comes from bird bodies shattering against and through windows of buildings, phone booths, car windshields. There is rather an uncanny responsiveness between bodies of birds and humans that unfolds through the film. People are able to fall into step with the rhythm of attack and rest in order to make their own escape from the besieged town. The stranger from the city, Melanie, displays taut calm, a mixture of alertness and relaxation that is crucial to her survival. In the schoolyard, she notices with shock the sudden amassing of birds behind her, yet without panic she immediately intuits that it is not about being seen but about being sensed. She moves slowly and gracefully, her face remaining tense but calm, and enters the school to warn the children. Only when she loses complete touch with the rhythm of the birds and gives in to restless urges, instead of remaining still, does she finally fall victim to a violent attack, which leaves her catatonic.

The birds thus seem to demonstrate certain qualities of the viral: invisible, too small, too many, overly mobile, movement signifying contagion, alien reminders of a world not ruled by humans. Hitchcock's film gives us an image of the viral as an image of horror. Without horror, birds remain singly or in pairs in their cages, taught to mimic human words, or bred in chicken coops and given feed. The film does not indulge in arbitrary fantasies of birds escaping into the wild or gaining human cognitive ambitions such as waging modern war. Hitchcock's birds do not present us with an image of anthropomorphic horror but of a human fear of the viral. These birds evoke horror through a play of numbers and visibility. In the scene where Melanie waits at the schoolyard, we see one bird, the...

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Una Chung, is a cultural critic, writer, and a professor in global studies at Sarah Lawrence College. She teaches courses in new media art and theory, postcolonial and Asian American literatures, East Asian film, global feminisms, and Gilles Deleuze.

Notes

  1. For more on affect, media and technology, see Massumi 2002.
  2. Also see Elsaesser 2009. Elsaesser's rationalist approach explores the implications of a technologically determined unconscious without taking up the ontological question raised by Derrida's deconstruction of "an assumed opposition between the psychical and the nonpsychical, life and death" (qtd. in Clough 2000, 40). For Elsaesser psychoanalysis gives way to media theory.
  3. Although it is beyond the scope of this essay to address directly, it should be noted that the thinking of this essay is heavily indebted to the work of Luciana Parisi. See Parisi 2004.
  4. For a provocative discussion of how therapy and art (drawing on Félix Guattari's schizoanalysis) might repair the ravages of semio capitalism, see Berardi 2009.
  5. I am referring to the 2011 installation at the New Museum in New York. There have been five installations of the multiplatform project Primitive, each of which was composed quite differently in each gallery, because of the collaboration of artist and respective curator. Previous locations include Munich, Paris, Liverpool, Mexico City, and Yokohama.
  6. Weerasethakul's Primitive installation is headed by a curatorial note that tells us, "Rather than a political history of Nabua, Primitive is meant to be experienced as a dream of reincarnation and transformation.'" Additionally, for a postcolonial critique of historiography, see Chakrabarty 2007.
  7. Weerasethakul states, "Later on, there was a popular monk twittering about the red shirt demonstration in Bangkok, saying that 'killing time is more sinful than killing people.' He indirectly urged the government to kill the demonstrators. In retrospect, I was just killing time in the village. The important thing was that we lived. That's all I care about" (qtd. in Carrion-Murayari and Gioni 2011, 12).

Works Cited

  • Berardi, Franco. 2009. Soul at Work. New York: Semiotext(e).
  • Carrion-Murayari, Gary, and Massimiliano Gioni, eds. 2011. Apichatpong Weerasethakul. New York: New Museum.
  • Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2007. "Minority Histories, Subaltern Pasts." In Provincializing Europe. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
  • Clough, Patricia. 2000. Autoaffection: Unconscious Thought in the Age of Teletechnology. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
  • Elsaesser, Thomas. 2009. "Freud as Media Theorist: Mystic Writing Pads and the Matter of Memory." Screen 50:1.
  • Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. 2008. Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  • Lynch, Lisa. 1999. "Viroid Life: Perspectives on Nietzsche and the Transhuman Condition (Review)" Configurations 7(1):119-23.
  • Massumi. 2002. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Aflea, Sensation. Durham: Duke University Press.
  • Parisi, Luciana. 2004. Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Biotechnology and the Mutations of Desire. New York: Continuum.
  • Parisi, Luciana. 2004. "Information Trading and Symbiotic Micropolitics" in Social Text 80, Vol. 22, No. 3.
  • Pearson, Keith Ansell. 1997. Viroid Life: Perspectives on Nietzsche and the Transhuman Condition. New York: Routledge.
  • Zizek, Slavoj. 2010. Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan but Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock. New York: Verso.