‘The Horror, The Horror’:
Uninvited Guests’ Schlock as Cultural Traumatology
Presentation by Paul Clarke
PARIP 2005 International Conference
Introduction
I will present Schlock as the outcome of a multimodal research enquiry that has
employed ‘theoretical practices’ and collaborative modes of knowing, which were
informed by discourse and historical research (around artistic precedents,
particularly within film and theatre). The outcomes produced and disseminated
have taken the form of both practical, embodied ‘know-how’ and the
theoretical/textual knowledge Dwight Conquergood (2002) calls ‘knowing that’ or
about. It is hoped that this case study will blur the distinction between the ‘theory
of performance’ and the ‘performance of theory’ (See Susan Melrose), and
between the reflective processes of a professional arts practitioner and academic
practice as research.
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This presentation follows on from the paper I gave at last year’s PARIP
conference, which put an argument for performance itself as research, for
knowledge being disseminated experientially, in and through collaborative
performance and practices of spectating.
(See http://www.bris.ac.uk/parip/clarke.htm)
‘The Horror, The Horror’ will speak around my own recent research practice,
which has been developed predominantly through professional performance, in
collaboration with Uninvited Guests. Rather than offering a meta-discursive paper
that problematises the traditional opposition between ways of knowing, I will
consider the discursive arguments articulated practically in Schlock. The
performance presentation will enable me to frame Schlock as applied research,
describe the work’s practical propositions and open aspects of the project up for
critical-analytic discussion and peer review. The video documentation will enable
experiential exchange to take place during the presentation; rather than simply
illustrating the arguments of the framing discourse, the audio-visual aspects will
do what the paper says, will enunciate their own performative statements.
The field of practice is located predominantly within theatre, but involves
interdisciplinary collaboration with a sound artist and reflects critically through
performance on film and television, particularly drawing on visual material from,
and writings on, the horror genre and hospital drama. The project provides a
model of a particular approach to an arts practice as a critically reflexive enquiry.
In relation to this project, knowledge exchange can be located in a number of
forms and was articulated in different ways at various stages of the process; a felt
enquiry for performers during the collaborative devising process, which led to
embodied understandings; new ‘know-how’ around interactive possibilities and
live interfaces between performance and digital sound; experiential exchanges
for audiences nationally in the event of performance; critical-theoretical writings
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disseminated through an accompanying programme; post-show discussion and
framing presentations; workshops in which the company’s devising praxes were
exchanged in and through practice. This case study will open up meta-discursive
and epistemological questions around the validity of arts practice itself as
research and touring theatre as an appropriate mode of disseminating new
knowledges and ‘know-how’.
As with previous works by Uninvited Guests, the performance project began with
documentary interviews that formed the empirical research. The interviewees’
responses and related critical-theoretical readings were explored experientially
by thinking through performance and somatic praxes. Research focused around
two questions: What are the affects of reproducing traumatic effects, whether as
visual representations or documentary descriptions? What is the relationship
between real experiences of violence and the visceral pleasures of schlock horror
movies? The paper also considers the ethical problematics of such a project.
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Some of what I will say draws on contextual research carried out during the
development phase of Schlock, other readings were triggered by my attempt to
figure what the work does after the event. This paper proposes possible criticaltheoretical frames, which might work alongside Schlock. We will “try out” a
number of theoretical models, through which you or I might re-view the
performance-as-viewed and its affects.
The Real and Really Fake
Each Uninvited Guests’ project is part of an ongoing enquiry that Simon Jones
(2001) called an attempt ‘to map the condition and mood of the Real’, in which
virtual interactions, TV, or film are as much part of our lived experience as
intimate encounters with friends and lovers. Uninvited Guests’ work explores
possible interfaces between the live and the mediated, both in terms of
integrating technologies into performance and exploring the visceral reality of the
virtual or televisual. Following the practical reasoning of our argument, it makes a
certain sense to turn to violent events, death and indeterminate accidents, to
attempting to represent the reality of occurrences that are unknowable, senseless
and beyond the limit of our consciousness or play.
Schlock collides the real with the really fake. Personal experiences of bodily
trauma, and fears about accidents or violent attacks, encounter the erotics of TV
hospital dramas and the pornographic excess of horror-flicks. The result is a
‘tissue of quotations’ (Barthes 1977:146), in which documentary confession
becomes confused with B-movie melodrama, real acts of violence are indicated
by pints of fake blood. Schlock asks, ‘What is it in horror that holds us and makes
us stare obsessively at accidents as we drive-by’? The show explores our desire
to look and to look away, to see and to cover our eyes from the unwatchable,
which gazes at us.
(View Schlock Trailer, included on DVD)
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Audio-Visual Screening
The scenography of Schlock draws clearly on the operating theatre and hospital
drama, with its observation screen and the sound artists’ crash trolley. The
spectator’s experience is mediated aurally and visually by a transparent
polycarbonate wall, which also protects them from the splatter of fake blood. As
in Richard Foreman’s What Did He See? (1988), Schlock actualises and
objectifies the fourth wall. The screen also represents that of the cinema, onto
which cultural desires are projected.
The performers’ voices are seldom heard immediately, but are miked and mixed
by the sound designer, Duncan Speakman, live on stage. Sensors taped to the
performers’ bodies enable them to effect each others’ voices through physical
contact, and to pitch-shift their sampled heartbeats to impossible rates. The live
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soundtrack is produced - using custom-built software – by processing internal
noises, sampled with a stethoscope from the performers’ bodies, sounds from
contact mikes applied to the set/objects and a Foley-miked cabbage.
There is a connection here with the ‘ruined body’ (70) in hospital dramas,
described by Jason Jacobs (2003) in Body Trauma TV as ‘extended and
technologised, as a crucial part of the mise en scene’; ‘the heartbeat becomes
the sound of the EKG monitor’ (69), its pace soundtracking the ebb and flow of
dramatic tension. In Schlock the performers’ voices and bodily noises are
mediated by microphones and dislocated from their bodies, heard coming-from
speakers in front of the screen. As we will see, this enacts a spatial metaphor for
the distancing and screening that takes place for the traumatised subject. In the
sound design, the body is opened-up and the ‘border between inside and
outside’ collapses (Kristeva 1982:53). Amplified, the performers’ inaudible
internal body-sounds engulf the listeners, producing visceral affects upon these
other bodies.
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Body Trauma TV (See Dovey 2001)
In Shattered Anatomies (1997), Adrian Heathfield has clearly described the
theatricality of his experience of treatment for critical illness. He recalls ‘giving
over to objecthood’ as his body became the property of science; subjected to
tests, ‘the failing body is acted on’. Remembering the curtain around his bed
being swept back for an examination by a group of staring specialists, he initially
equates this experience with ‘being on stage’, but then proposed that his ‘body
had become the stage: the scenic object of a professional audience’. He
connects this giving over of his body to their scrutinising vision with the study of a
cadaver in an anatomy theatre.
Richard Dufty’s naked body lies on a hospital gurney in Schlock. He/it is turned
over roughly by Speakman; his subjectivity is overturned as he is treated as an
instrument, an object that is acted-upon and subjected to intrusive sampling.
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Jacobs (2003) notes that hospital dramas absorbed some of the stylistic modes
of reality TV shows, like The World’s Most Shocking Medical Videos (Fox, 1999),
which screened ‘explicit uncut’ trauma-room footage ‘for public consumption’
(57). Shows like ER acknowledged viewers’ voyeuristic desires for ‘more
immediate reality’ (56), by incorporating ‘graphic depictions of serious injury’ (54)
and ‘explicit visualisation[s] of emergency treatment’. ER borrowed from ‘nonfiction “documentary”’ (55), introducing a ‘televisual space’ that was not
‘necessarily narrativised’ and highly mobile shots, that were ‘expressive of the
attempt to catch up with events as they happened’ (55). As Jacobs notes, speedy
editing and framing, in which events do not appear staged for the camera,
contribute to a sense that the viewer is discovering contingent reality.
In a Sunday Times article, ‘Fatal Attractions’, Jim Shelley (1992) argues that
Casualty represents the hospital drama version of Driller Killer (Abel Ferrara,
1979). Jacobs likewise suggests that ‘we are offered the [spectacular] body
horror traditionally associated with the horror film genre, in the context of medical
care’ (69). We see ‘invasion and exploration of the body cavity’, as in films like
The Thing (1982), but the ‘patient’s body is subjected to various forms of trauma
in order to heal it’ (70). As Jacobs points out, ‘in horror genre narrative,
depictions of wounding, bleeding and injury constitute the spectacular payoff’,
disturbing ‘reward[s] for suspense and fear’ (69). In hospital drama the injury is
the dramatic starting point of the unfolding narrative and suspense is instead
generated around the possibility of healing the already ‘ruined body’ (70). At the
same time, despite being somewhat stylised and glamorized for mainstream
consumption, the violent care staged in hospital dramas (positive ‘butchery’), still
maintains the ‘underlying aesthetic ‘kick’ of the visceral’ (69).
Like Schlock, hospital drama provides a site in which the modalities of
documentary encounter the spectacle and affect of the horror genre: confusion
takes place in the viewer, who may misrecognise the simulacrum as
documentary real, or the primetime drama as gore.
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A Cultural Traumatology or Contemporary Grand Guignol
As was so well expressed by one of the officials of the [Situationist,] Festival du
Film Fantastique d’Avoriaz, “At last death will have replaced sex and the serial
killer the Latin lover!”
Television – […] “a tunnel of death” - has gradually transformed itself into a kind
of altar of human sacrifice, using and abusing the terrorist scene and serial
massacres; it now plays more on repulsion than on seduction (Virilio 2003:62).
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In Unknown Quantity, Paul Virilio describes how last century, ‘the public stage of
the theatre of origins gives way to the public screen, where the “acts of the
people” are played out’ (44). He writes of the liturgy of accidents, catastrophes
and violent events that are incessantly repeated and overexposed on-screen,
calling television both ‘”a museum of horrors”’ (62) and ‘the oracle announcing
horrors yet to come’ (44). For Virilio, in Debord’s “society of spectacle”, real-life
events are transformed into cinematic scenarios, ‘organized around sexuality and
violence’ (62), and likewise, scenes circulate from film and TV into reality,
becoming played-out live.
Schlock is a cultural traumatology, a performance-as-archive or living memorial,
in which the fictional and real orders collide, due to arbitrary associations within
the structure. Like a pornographic video or a reality show, compiled from found
footage, there is little narrative, only a montage of explicit imagery and
descriptions; just the bloody rewards, with little anticipation.
In The Art of Fear, Virilio (2003) notes the obliteration of ‘the senses of the
human body’ (4), which he relates to the proliferation of pornographic
‘hyperviolence and an excessively and peculiarly sexless pornography’. He
critiques the growth of a ‘merciless art of presentation’ across art-forms, which
produces the appearance of unmediated reality. Virilio points to the distribution of
‘live TV images of genuine torment and aggression’ (4) and the high cultural
value of pitiless or abhorrent images. He states that apparently unaestheticised
‘cinematic images’ have significant reality effects; they ‘saturate human
consciousness and are more damaging than often recognised’ (8).
Doctor Richard Restak (2004) states, 'I'm convinced that constant exposure to
visual depictions of suffering, conflict and violence creates dysfunctional circuits
within areas of the brain that mediate emotion.' The result, he says, is 'various
forms of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD); desensitisation; feelings of
unreality and detachment that cause one to respond to real tragedy as if it were a
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film'. Restak, drawing on research with those who viewed the continuous replaying of the September 11 attack, but knew no-one killed in the twin towers,
says there is evidence that violent images on TV can be 'equally effective' in
producing PTSD as real experience. PTSD causes the sufferer to have 'recurrent
and intrusive distressing recollections' in the form of dreams or flashbacks. The
traumatic event (whether real or represented) is in excess of your understanding,
and hence repeatedly returns to haunt you because of your desire to
comprehend.
At 2004’s Internationale Sommerakademie, Mousonturm, Adrian Heathfield
answered questions publicly that Tim Etchells had addressed to him on video.
Responding immediately to Etchells on-screen, he stated that a theatre audience
knows that what they are watching is pretended, performed for their benefit and
has little consequence in the real. In Schlock they have witnessed the scene’s
construction; the ob-scene “special effects” and careful making-up are staged
before your very eyes. Yet for Heathfield, this knowledge does not protect, the
images still affect you and as such it is impossible to think the real and the
theatrical as oppositional, instead they are intertwined, witnessing performance
events is connected to actual trauma.
Whilst interviewing people during the research process for Schlock, Uninvited
Guests found that in order to cope with witnessing or experiencing accidents, or
violent acts, people objectified themselves and questioned the reality of such
events. They described what took place as though they were seeing it happen to
someone else, as if it were being played-out across a ‘distant cinema screen’.
For example:
The bike slipped sideways and he and the girl who was with him were flung off it
and you could see them kind of bouncing down the road and then the bike burst
into flames. The intensity of the flames coming out of the bike made it all
Technicolor. It was a very vivid kind of moment because you could see all of it
happening in front of you, almost like a distant cinema screen. But you couldn’t do
anything about it and you had this sense of, ‘Is this real? Am I really watching it?’
and ‘If I am really watching it, God I ought to do something’. You know, ‘Am I
watching someone die?’ You talk about it later and wonder, ‘could it actually have
happened?’ It just seems strangely like it happened to somebody else, or it’s
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something you saw on film or television, something that wasn’t real and yet you
knew it was incredibly real in the moment of it (Alice Hynes, interviewee).
In order to comprehend and then describe events that seem qualitatively the
most “real”, we tend to distance ourselves, or liken them to the spectacle of film.
In moments that are apparently the most actual, the shocked subject’s excessive
sensory experience is screened, filtered and mediated, in order to limit the
potential for trauma. Uninvited Guests’ Schlock considers the way in which our
memories and experiences of media, which are part of our psychic economy and
symbolic order, frame even the most seemingly sublime, real events.
The polycarbonate screen that comes between audience and performers literally
figures Lacan’s (1978) perceptual screen, the ‘locus of mediation’ (107). The
screen represents the cultural reserve, which as Hal Foster (1986) notes,
‘mediates the object-gaze for the subject, but also protects the subject from this
object-gaze’ (140). In The Return of the Real, he goes on to suggest that to see
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without the screen would be to be blinded by the gaze, or touched by the
‘traumatic real’ (138).
Michael Fried (1987) remarks that as painting approaches realism, it creates a
wounding of seeing. The traumatic realism of horror movie gore, explicit hospital
drama, or documentary operations, is ‘painful to look at (so piercingly does it
threaten our visual defenses)’ (65). Such realism has an ‘almost impossible’
resemblance to the unrepresentable and is ‘hence [also] painful to look away
from’, as our craving is so keen to see the obscene insides of the body or the
event of death.
In the climactic moments of Schlock the screen, like the shop front in Paul
McCarthy’s Whipping a Wall and a Window with Paint (1974), is aggressively
splattered. The residue is both painterly and signifies some other terrible act of
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violence, beyond what has been shown. Viewing from outside, we can no longer
apprehend the whole of what is presented to us: the screen is obscured,
wounded, such that what we see is ‘incomplete, partial, painful’ (Phelan
1997:36). At this point, due to a lighting change, the Polycarbonate widescreen
becomes a mirror. The spectators’ watching is exposed within the frame and they
see themselves looking. We will return to this final moment below.
Schlock addresses the repetition of violence across TV and movie screens.
These representations can be seen as curative attempts to integrate such events
into our cultural psyche. At the same time, they may produce their own traumatic
affects. As Hal Foster writes, citing Freud, the subject repeats ‘a traumatic event
(in actions, in dreams, in images) in order to integrate it into a psychic economy,
a symbolic order’ (131). In Looking Awry, !i"ek (1991) also writes of ‘traumatic
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encounters’ that produce ‘a surplus of the real that propels us to narrate [them]
again and again’ (133), to screen them repeatedly. Referring to Warhol’s Death in
America series Foster states that the repetitions ‘not only reproduce traumatic
effects; they also produce them’ (132).
In Schlock, attempts to represent culturally traumatic events both ward away
‘traumatic significance’ and affect, and open the temporary community of
performers and spectators up to it. In Schlock we attempt to ‘return traumatic
encounters with the real’ to the present, like victims of (communal, cultural)
shock, ‘who in recurrent nightmares prepare for disasters/violent events that have
already come’.
Heathfield (2004) discussed the productive presentation of the event of trauma in
Chris Burden and Franko B’s work, which enables spectators to deal with their
own traumatic encounters. He described reiterating the trauma of others as a
profoundly ethical situation. He told an anecdote about a lover who cut himself
whilst his partner was in hospital, as an act of identification, an attempt to
experience the place of the other, to know and share their pain.
Schlock projects past cultural trauma onto the performers’ bodies: the
exteriorisation of an internal world, comprised of real and televisual memories of
violence and horror. The repeated rehearsals of different attitudes to violence,
attempts to show the unrepresentable, death, injury and the accident, produce a
visual and imaginative pleasure mixed with pain. Here ‘a pleasure that comes
from [fake] pain’ (203) - to pervert Lyotard’s (1989) quote on the sublime, which
has often been cited in relation to practices of cutting in performance.
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Foster notes that in Greek “trauma” means “wound”. Schlock attempts to probe
the wounds of cultural trauma, to touch the obscene. The work explores ‘the
mysterious eroticism of [fake] wounds’ (Vaughan in Ballard’s Crash, 1995) and of
the body opened-up in hospital dramas, both the enthralling and repellent effects
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of voluptuous TV, or film excess. Schlock draws on the horror genre to push at
the limits of aesthetic taste, to question the ethics of the pleasure we take in both
documentary reports and movie violence – the cultural commodification of injury
and death. The performers perform fake suffering on behalf of their audience,
atoning for the fetishisation of images of pain, the perverse scopic pleasures we
take collectively in accidents and violent acts.
As Foster suggests of disaster scenes, the climactic moments of Schlock may
‘evoke the body turned inside out’ (149), a formlessness in which ‘the distinction
between figure and ground’, between performer and the fake-bloody surface of
the floor become indistinguishable. In these moments of real risk, slipping and
falling and unplanned unravelling, it is as if there was no screen, no frame of
representation to contain what happens. When the real interrupts the illusionism,
the spectators may touch the obscene, without a screen for projection.
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The performers attempt to reproduce a sequence, which collages motifs from
Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974), The Addiction (Abel Ferrara,
1995) and Carrie (Brian de Palma, 1976); the lino becomes so slippery with fake
blood that the choreography becomes impossible and they inevitably fall. The
frame here is fragile, in some shows the performers literally broke the screen,
and it came apart. There is an overproximity in space and time between
performers
and
audience.
There
are
other
real
interruptions
of
the
representational frame; love bites that leave teeth marks and improvised
statements of escalating violence, invented competitively in the event. The
distance that has enabled a pornographic voyeurism collapses and fear and/or
laughter are produced.
Out of this bloody atonement the performers pull through. By repeatedly
summoning unspeakable acts and unnameable persons to appear, they attempt
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to ‘make a friend of horror’ (Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola, 1979) and,
cleansed by its excess deliver themselves and the audience into some fake
redemption.
Voicing Others’ Troubling Words
The structure of Schlock shifts rhythmically from pornographic representations of
violence - which are supposed to ‘reveal all there is to reveal’ (!i"ek 1991:109),
to offer all to our view - to the equivalent of the erotic. The reality effect and the
substance of fear is potentially lost from explicit representations of horror, in
which nothing remains hidden, which go all the way but miss and fail to
encounter the subject. Partial representation (perhaps solely using the signifying
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system of spoken text), in which the violence remains concealed, indicated or
interrupted, is potentially more productive of the reality of imagination, and thus of
fear.
As Andy Smith wrote in a review, ‘perhaps they’re ghosts, perhaps angels [...]
They are mediators’. The performers speak as mediums, through whom a litany
of horrors pass and are voiced. Schlock does violent things with words;
aggressive “speech acts“ (See J.L.Austin 1962) are directed at one another and
the audience. Freud (1926) proposes that words are deeds, which ‘can do
unspeakable good and cause terrible wounds’ (187-8). Words are magical acts,
which conjure images to appear in our consciousness. In The Uncanny, Nicholas
Royle (2003), addressing cannibalism in psychoanalysis, questions the difference
between the wish and the act, noting that in Freud’s reading the unconscious
recognises no distinction. Freud states that ‘there are no indications of reality in
the unconscious’ (Cited in Royle, 207).
In a form of linguistic sadomasochism, subject and object become confused,
active and passive, male and female roles are exchanged. The subject of the
performers’ sentences is unstable, the pronouns and tenses used shift fluidly
from “she” to “you” to “I”, from past to present to future. The audience are
referred to as “you”, but their role changes, “standing in” in the events described
for; witness, voyeur of obscene violence, victim, and perpetrator.
The performers are ‘meeting point[s]’, nodes in a network of appropriated
‘language’, which Tim Etchells (1999) states, ‘flows into and flows out of’ (102)
them. Through the channels of the performers’ voices, collisions and confusions
take place between B-movie horror and real events, spoken verbatim. Speaking
others’ words as though the performers’ own, whether sourced from documentary
interviews or online, is a methodology that links all of Uninvited Guests’ works.
Stephen Connor, in his cultural history of ventriloquism, states that ‘I produce my
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voice’, it ‘comes from me […] in a bodily sense. […] Giving voice […] produces
myself’ (3). In Schlock, Dufty speaks the words of a “true-life” Japanese cannibal.
The interiorisation through memorising, then speaking and listening to himself
voice these words, enables him to ‘measure the distance’ (Etchells, 57) between
himself and another’s marginal experiences. His voice goes out from him and
through speakers, such that he can hear with more objectivity. Connor writes,
‘listen says a voice: some being is giving voice’ (4). Yet here his body speaks an
absent being’s words that are not immediate, which come from some radically
other subjectivity in another time and place. Yet he addresses the audience
directly, gazes back at them ‘right in the eyes’ (See Barthes 1985:239),
appearing to reveal himself whilst arresting them with an “evil eye”.
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Speaking is here ‘a kind of trying on of other people’s clothes’ (Etchells, 101), a
linguistic vampirism. In Schlock speaking the words of victims, perpetrators and
witnesses and “standing in” for them physically, playing injured and playing dead,
brings the performers closer to comprehending such extreme events, acts, or
desires. There is a collective responsibility, for performers and their collaborating
audience, to measure the gap between their subjectivities and the otherness of
the experiences voiced or presented to them.
In the role of witness in this event, which attempts to repeat past traumatic
events, the spectator is implicated through seeing and hearing and must take an
attitude towards what is perceived. In Certain Fragments, Etchells quotes
Vietnam War reporter, Michael Herr saying that one has ‘responsibility for events
only seen’ (20). An ethical positioning takes place for the performers and
audience, both have identified and been identified with murderers and victims of
accidents and attacks. Social responsibility is taken and shared by this temporary
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community, for these (fictional and real) events having taken place in our culture
and in our times, and for the perversity of their/our fascination.
In relation to the ethics of this project I will quote Andy Smith’s critical response,
at length. He wrote:
Both during and after the work has played out, I am reminded of recent
philosophical and critical thought on the nature of the real and the virtual: !i"ek
and Baudrillard both come to mind. Their speculations on the reality of the virtual,
and the potential real of the imagination support strongly the visceral response
one has to this performance, this is because of (perhaps even in spite of) the
exposure of its condition. By the company’s admittance of the construction of this
virtuality (fake blood, fake scars, expressions of pain, are seen and heard
throughout), through this work we explore further sociological and political
positions: in relation to “current” global politics and events, as well as in relation
to our imagined role in our very own disaster or horror movie, our own eventual
hospital drama. These two become intertwined.
By (in their words) colliding the real with the really fake Uninvited Guests give
themselves and us a chance to look and see something very present. They
achieve this through an exploration of horror, a horror that through the medium of
breaking television news and Hollywood movies we are told and encouraged
constantly to experience. A horror that we are told we can and possibly will
experience, and it scares and fascinates us. By exposing and exploring these
themes Schlock doesn’t distance us further (like television news), but brings
these things up close, allowing exploration through the exposure, not of others,
but of us and of ourselves.
He Wants You to See Everything
He takes this Sellotape with four or five needles attached and sticks it onto her
eyelids. He shows her these needles, one of which has blood on it already, in a
mirror, and explains that he wants her to see everything and that if she closes her
eyes she’ll cut them, she’ll rip them apart (Interviewee describing scene from
Dario Argento’s Opera, 1987).
Uninvited Guests’ interest in Dario Argento’s giallo horror stems from the way his
‘films systematically sublimate their narratives to [violent] mise en scène, whose
escalating complexity is characterized […] by a series of baroque stylistic
devices’ (McDonagh 1991:14). These set-pieces interrupt the narrative flow like
explicit sex scenes, drawing attention to themselves. The voluptuous excess of
Argento’s horrific tableaux falls outside conventional filmic systems and offends
sensibilities formed by Hollywood.
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I will analyse a scene in detail, what it does and how it might be received, which
exceeds the communication of a singular message and resists the simple
illustration of a discursive proposition. It would not have been possible to predict
the critical frames through which to re-view these moments; they call on
theoretical models to be applied in conjunction, in order to approach the complex
reality of the (real and theatrical) event. I will try out a couple of approaches.
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Frame One
In Opera (Terror at the Opera, USA), the murderer, absent from our
representation, ties up the victim and sadistically forces her to watch as he stabs
her boyfriend through the throat. He presents the killing of the object of her desire
for her pleasure, murdering on behalf of the victim/voyeur. In Schlock the text
above is transposed into second person: as spectator you are cast into the
scenario, playing the female victim. The performer, Richard Dufty says, he wants
‘you to see everything and that if you close your eyes you’ll cut them’. He both
narrates and stands in for your boyfriend in the text he speaks. Your position in
the scene is unstable though, as your gaze coincides with that of the killer, as
represented by Argento’s camera.
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As !i"ek states, ‘there is something extremely unpleasant and obscene in this
experience of our gaze as already the gaze of the other’ (108), here the victim
and/or perpetrator of extreme violence. For Lacan ‘such a coincidence of gazes
defines the position of the pervert’ (cited in !i"ek). The object of your gaze
represents his body’s violent demise for your/his pleasure: as in pornography,
you are placed in a perverse position. The performer, the object of your gazing,
subjectively presents his abject body, to rouse your libidinal fascination. In so
doing, the spectators are ‘reduced to a paralyzed object-gaze’ (110) and laugh
hysterically.
Dufty’s performance identity is split, as he represents the event of the
interviewee’s description and both identifies himself masochistically with the
objectified boyfriend-victim and murderer-sadist. Perhaps he is also the
instrument of your collective sadistic wishes for more; more violent utterances
and horrifying mimesis, more blood, more ketchup and more actual debasement.
Frame Two
I will rewind, reveal some of the gory details and approach again. During this
scene, Jessica Hoffmann force-feeds Dufty ketchup, in order to stop him
expressing horrors, but masochistically he takes over, becoming the subject of
his own abjection. He walks forward, naked with trousers round his ankles,
speaking through ketchup and spitting this substance, which – as in Paul
McCarthy’s work - is simultaneously recognised as ketchup and stands for the
bodily fluid, blood. Regurgitated and splattering the screen, congealing between
you and the action, this sweet and sticky matter begins to obscure your vision
(and your hearing).
This moment produces disgust. As Sianne Ngai (2002) states, ‘disgust:
repugnance, abhorrence, revulsion, repulsion, lies outside the realms of both
desire and the law’. You do not ‘move toward the object, either to possess it or be
possessed by it’. Instead many audience members exclaimed, “yuck”, covered
27
their mouths in displeasure, laughed hysterically or looked away. At the same
time, there is a ‘social inclusion in the experience of disgust’, others stared at it
together, ‘compelled to, fascinated in spite of’ themselves.
Dufty attempts to find a linguistic form to transmit the visceral, sensory excesses
of Argento’s set-piece and the unpresentable, death. The performer seems to
point disgustedly at his own expression and representation: ‘language’s raw
matter (flow, gush, out-poring; inarticulate sounds […] pure affect or noise),
overwhelms its representational value’. The voice, which Regis Durand calls ‘one
of the body’s emissions’ (1977), is represented by a gush of ketchup: inseparable
28
from the body, this communication ceases to transmit information and tends
towards noisy inarticulacy. Like the screaming in the following scene, he
produces ‘formless utterances’, expressing his being rendered inarticulate.
Ngai proposes that the negative, formless utterance and pointed presentation of
the disgusting can be read as an ‘exaggerated gesture of refusal’. The very act of
representing the object of horror or performing disgust, ‘paradoxically becomes a
means of repudiating it – a potentially political gesture of exclusion’, a refusal of
its cultural validity.
Through the repetitive representation of violent events, which resemble one
another closely, their original distinctiveness is erased and they become
equivalent, whether real or fictional, resulting in surface wounds or extreme gore.
As in Warhol’s repeated attempts to copy death scenes through screen-prints,
the litany of traumas eventually becomes emptied-out of meaning and affect, no
longer mattering but being perceived as a formal device, producing rhythmic
patterns or motifs. Overwhelming fascination and horror, excesses of pleasure
and pain, perhaps they are eventually coped-with through disaffected ennui. As
Lyn Gardner wrote in The Guardian, maybe at this moment in the performance,
the ethical act is no longer to watch and witness, but rather to, ‘Stand up and say,
“that’s
enough”’.
Uninvited
Guests’
intention
was
that the
excess
of
representations would be “too much” and that the spectators’ voyeuristic
appetites would be more than satiated. Simultaneous attraction and repulsion
might have productively given way to abhorrence. Still, no one was pushed to
rise and state, “enough”. Audience members made inarticulate sounds, hid their
eyes or mouths with their hands and moved, discomforted in their seats, but
remained passively in their place. Some did turn away or lowered their eyes,
expressing their disgust (at the ongoing spectacle, their own pleasure in it or their
disaffection), refusing the integration of any more such images into their personal
memories, or their shared cultural psyche.
29
Having remained to the end of the performance you are reflected in the screen,
which has been before you throughout, revealing all. Your own mirror images
appear, to veil the gory, fake blood-soaked scene and the ketchup-spattered
bodies. Finally you confront yourself gazing and also witness others. Perhaps
you are disgusted and turn your head, refusing to catch your own eyes. In doing
so you gesture publicly to your scopophilia, you exclude your watching violence
as obscene.
Vampires and the Obscenity of Death
In Un-knowing and Rebellion, George Bataille (1952) notes that death is obscene
because it exceeds any attempt to fix it through representation. As Andrew Quick
(2004) states, ‘death is always off stage, out of sight and always beyond, yet
disturbing our consciousness’ (139). ‘Death generates feelings of terror and
horror’ due to our ‘non-knowledge’ and its ‘excess’. ‘Death is the impossible limit
30
of play, because it can only ever be played’. Schlock presents repeated attempts
to play dead and represent unpredictable accidents; it enacts our impossible
desire to bring death centre stage, into the place where things are seen.
Edmund Burke (1844) notes that fear is an apprehension of pain or death and
that ‘it operates in a manner that resembles actual pain’ (101). The astonishment
of attempting to grasp the unknowable, a sight that fills or exceeds the mind,
produces horror. As Burke goes on, ‘whatever therefore is terrible, with regard to
sight, is sublime too’. There is pleasure and pain in these representations, which
attempt to understand - to put in its place - death. Facing the Other, we stage an
encounter with a fundamentally threatening alterity.
The cannibal and the vampire are recurrent tropes in Schlock, as the performers
play death after death for your pleasure. Jalal Tufic (1993) points out, in
(Vampires): An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film, that only the vampire
knows death and returns, to be resurrected repeatedly. The performers make
repeated attempts to rehearse (literally) dying on stage, thus exploring the limits
31
of play. Unlike the vampires they perform, they cannot be dead or understand the
event of dying through experience and remain live, to represent this knowledge
again or pass it on to others.
Like vampires, whose image is not visible in a mirror, part present, part absent,
like the living dead, the performers are mediated by screen and microphone and
thus ‘partially removed’ (Smith). As Gareth Evans (The Stage) noted in his
review, ‘the recurrent motifs of the vampire and cannibal, are telling for their
associations with both sexual desire and consumption’ and point to our cultures’
‘pornographic, mediatised obsession with violent acts’. In Royle’s (2003) reading
of Freud, ‘in the act of devouring’ (207), the cannibal ‘accomplishes identification
with the other, the fulfilment of desire for [sexual] possession’. Likewise the
vampire ‘acquires a portion of the others’ strength’. In Schlock, both performers
and spectators identify or are identified with the otherness of cannibals,
murderers and victims and desire to possess, through sight, the obscenity of
death and explicit violence.
My final quotation returns us to the quote from one of our interviewees, cited
above. It is taken from Tufic’s (Vampires), from a chapter titled ‘Arriving Too Late
For Resurrection’:
Once he, a photographer, was present during the slaughter of someone. He had
hurriedly taken out his small camera from his bag and snapped several
photographs. Later, he could not stand the fact that he had witnessed that event
without interfering to save the man’s life, indeed that what had most preoccupied
him then was instead whether there was enough light and, given that he did not
have enough time to focus, whether the resultant photographs would be blurred.
For a long time after that, he stopped taking photographs. Then one day he was
asked by a relative to bring the camera with him to the funeral of a kinsman to
take a photograph of the deceased. After some hesitation, he complied. From
that day and for some time, he just photographed corpses: it was the best way to
avoid a repeat of the emergency that had made him temporarily stop
photographing (1).
32
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Jones, S. (2001) review of Film by Uninvited Guests, Live Art Magazine, January.
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Freud, Sigmund (1926) ‘The Question of Lay Analysis’, SE 20, pp.179-258.
Fried, M. (1987) Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen
Crane, London: University of Chicago Press.
Heathfield, A. (1997) ‘Facing the Other: the Performance Encounter and Death’,
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Performance, Bristol: Arnolfini Live, n.p.
33
--- and T. Etchells (2004), Internationale Sommerakademie, Mousonturm.
Jacobs, J. (2003) Body Trauma TV: The New Hospital Dramas, London: BFI.
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Argento, London: Sun Tavern Fields.
Ngai, S. (2002) ‘Raw Matter: A Poetics of Disgust’, in Telling It Slant: AvantGarde Poetics of the 1990s, M. Wallace and S. Marks, eds., London and
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For further discussion of Uninvited Guests’ Schlock, and other work by the
company see: http://www.uninvited-guests.net/Symposium/default.html
34
Photographs by Johnny Bates , Shelley Hastings, Benedict
Phillips and Manuel Vason.
35
Performance Credits
Uninvited Guests’ (2004) Schlock was devised and performed by Neil Callaghan,
Richard Dufty, Jessica Hoffmann and Duncan Speakman. Directed by Paul
Clarke, Sound Design by Duncan Speakman and Lighting Design by Tom Kovar.
Co-commissioned by Leeds Met Studio Theatre and Hull Time Based Arts.
Funded by Arts Council England. Supported by Dartington College of Arts. Video
filmed by Anna Lucas. Trailer edited by Duncan Speakman. Thanks to Hannah
Chiswell, Richard Taylor, Mark Leahy, Simon Jones and Richard Dufty for
conversations around this discursive response.
Uninvited Guests
Uninvited Guests have produced six touring works for studio theatres, Guest
House (1999), Film (2001), Offline (2002-3), Schlock (2004), It Is Like It Ought To
Be: A Pastoral (2006) and Love Letters Straight From Your Heart (2007). The
company have questioned the boundaries between art-forms, producing an
interactive CD-Rom and installation (Guest House CD-Rom, 2000), durational
performances for galleries, (Durational Offline, 2003 and Aftermath, 2005), a
streamed performance for on and offline social spaces (Live Chat, 2003) and a
collaboration with photographer Manuel Vason. Works have toured extensively in
the UK and have been distributed to Australia, Germany, Spain, Portugal,
Austria, Switzerland, Denmark and Slovenia. www.uninvited-guests.net
36