THE
GAME (2)
One More
Round of
Theory
To review: memory
is a facet of
consciousness that
reflects signs to us
of remembered
people, events, and
situations that we
have internalized.
But memory, when it reprojects our relation to
the object-now-sign
has another ability: to
reproduce and reproject both how we
saw the object of the
gaze as how we were
seen by it during the
internalization process.
In every memory,
we are positioned
and we are
capable of
positioning
ourselves in
relation to the
remembrance.
Memories
are iconic.
They
present
pictures.
At some
level, every
memories
pictures us
in relation to
its content.
Iconic
memory is
part of an
overwriting
process.
Mental
conception
acts like a
balloon
caption in a
comic strip.
Information writes
itself into the
image produced
from our gazing at
the object and the
object’s gazing at
us.
When we internalize the
object, we internalize the
sign of the object and its
gaze. Signs have value to us
and they are given value by
the discourse or system of
representation constructing
them.
When we internalize signs
and the over-writing
process produced by our
thoughts about these
signs, this phenomenon
can only occur within an
ideological or discursive
frame of reference.
The frame of memory
both orders meaning
attributed to the sign (by
us and by a particular
discourse) and it is
ordered by our seeing
and the image of
memory seeing us.
When we internalize the
object, we internalize
the sign of the object
and its iconic gaze.
We are over-written as
we are over-seen: that
is seen in the instant
[parole] and in the
long view of the icon’s
potential [langue].
This is how
memory sees us
into a discursive
and/or ideological
frame of reference.
The Function
of Memory in
The Game
The Signs that Memory Recalls
In The Game
memory is
connected to the
father’s suicidal
jump out of his
world into his
sons’ lives.
The Signs that Memory Recalls
That is where
the dead father
“lives”: in his
sons' relationship
to him, in their
memories of
him.
The Signs that Memory Recalls
That is his
“relational
grave,” at least,
to maintain his
“ghostly”
relation to
them.
The Signs that Memory Recalls
In the film,
performative
actions must
counteract
the power of
memory.
The Signs that Memory Recalls
The Signs that Memory Recalls
The Signs that Memory Recalls
The Signs that Memory Recalls
Performative
Time & Sequence
In the game
within The
Game the
performance
staged by
C.R.S. drives
Nicholas to
enact the act of
suicide
so that its
difference
becomes
more real to
him than the
memory of
the father’s
suicide.
The Unwise Act
The Unwise Act
The Unwise Act
The “Wisdom” of the Act!
The “Wisdom” of the Act!
The “Wisdom” of the Act!
The Transfer of Registers
Transfer of Registers
Animating the Sign
Anew
When Nicholas jumps off that Skyscraper,
he enlivens the sign,
breaths life into
the sign-becoming
as opposed to the tyranny of
the remembered
sign-of-what-was.
Animating the Sign
Anew
Nicholas’s impending death
animates the memory of his father’s act,
brings it alive, moves the signs-of-memory beyond the
register of signs
into the reality of his pseudo-death,
that is, into an event made of signs but also made of
something more than signs
– an experience of death which can’t be understood
completely even within its enactment.
Animating the Sign
Animating the Sign
Animating the Sign
Time Doubled
Only in this act
can Nicholas’
death come home
to him, in its
actuality,
and, by extension,
only through its
enactment, can life
come home to him
as well –
Time Doubled
as an event that is
different from his
memory of his
father’s death.
Only now can he see
himself as another
person, his own person,
with the prospect of a
different death, his own
death and his own life.
Timed-Out Memory
The memory of his father’s death
haunted Nicholas, wrote over his
existence, doubling the son’s
narrative with the father’s – which
was written beyond the grave. The
father’s narrative was activated at the
precise moment Von Orton got lift off
and pitched himself off the roof of his
estate for all to see.
Nicholas saw it, and from that
moment on, a part of his life was
arrested in that moment, held
hostage to that event, in that timedout memory in which the past lived
itself, enacted and reenacted in
Nicholas’s memory.
Timed-Out Memory
In that way was time
doubled!
But Nicholas doubles the
memory of “the act”
differently when he jumps
off the roof at the end of
the film.
Timed-Out Memory
In that way was time doubled
again . . .
He enacts the act and sets up a
parallel “jump time” and duplicate
“jump space” that cuts through
memory, eliminating it as the key
element of his existence.
Time Doubled
Time Doubled
Time Doubled
Time Doubled
Time Doubled
Time Doubled
Time Doubled
In his final decision, in his last
act of willed annihilation,
Nicholas turned the tide of his
existence, so that memory’s
current threatened to wash
him past the borders of its own
determination.
Time Doubled
Time Doubled
THE TWIST
THE TWIST
THE TWIST
The Search for
Signification in The
Game
The Search for Signification
The Search for Signification
The search for signification in this film is a search to pair
certain signifiers with certain signifieds.
The nature of the game demands that.
The actions of the game bring about a desire for the
“eternal question”:
The Search for Signification
“what is
the
game?”
The Search for Signification
To understand the meaning of the game, Nicolas must try to
CONNECT THE DOTS: the actions he witnesses (signifiers)
with the motivation of CRS ("Consumer Recreation Services")
to determine the real meaning of signified-action.
In the film, he is endlessly tries to pair signifier with
signified.
The Search for Signification
Only at the end of the film does he realize that the signs,
while of immense importance, are less important than the
experience produced from not knowing, from losing his
ability to connect signifier from signified, from LOSING the
ability to oversee his empire through controlling the signs
before him, from losing complete control of the narratives
that C.R.S. presented to him, and finally
The Search for Signification
of no longer
being able to
pair the
signifier-image
of his father’s
death
to the
signifiedmeaning of his
father’s death
for him.
The Search for Signification
The Game proceeds in order for him
to learn this not-knowing, which
severs signifier-memory-image from
signified-memory-meaning, so he can
cut the cord of the memory that has
buried him in his father’s grave.
Finally, the signs in
memory force him to
sever their connection
to his father’s death, so
that . . .
The Game is a game of
signification, of the
density of signs
meaning what they
don’t appear to mean.
The Search for Signification
he can reclaim his own
narrative, his own death,
and by extension, even for
a brief extended moment,
his own life.
In the Coffin,
the Breath
of Life
Von Orton, back from the Dead
Time Doubled
We see the father’s death, and so
does Nicholas.
But the scene of the son
locked in the tomb-like
darkness is every bit as eerie.
Time Doubled
Dumped in a
coffin in Mexico,
Nicholas must
live through/thru
the darkness of
the grave, in its
doubled
darkness --
-- because he
has been
entombed all
these years in
his father’s
grave and now
his own as well.
Foreshadowing:
the jump into the trash bin.
Foreshadowing
Then he is
dumped in a
coffin in Mexico.
Foreshadowing
It all culminates in
his voluntary act of
suicide off the edge
of a California
Skyscraper.
Foreshadowing
His last act not only doubles the memory of
his father’s actions, but it reads back to the
coffin and trash scenes, rearranging his
passive acceptance of events that
foreshadow the inevitability of his suicide.
A QUESTION FOR YOU: HOW MUCH OF
NICHOLAS’ BEHAVIOR CAME IN REACTION TO
C.R.S.’s PROMPTS AND HOW MUCH OF IT CAME
FROM THE MEMRORY THAT WAS LEADING TO
DEATH’S DOOR ALL THOSE YEARS?