Rather than following the path of social dramas as resistance pieces -- vocalizing the sufferings and alternative community
aspirations, self actualizing and seeking
to energize ( in Deleuzean terms, becoming assemblages , behaving rhizomatic,
creating planes of becoming)--- Horror under ‘ The Witch’ was appropriately
furtive: oneiric, shabby and certainly elliptical.
Despite this, it contained all the violence of intent, regardless of any
other cineaste qualities, and in the case of Bernard Rose’s 1988 Paperhouse, the transformative qualities one could hope for.
There we witness the inscrutable voiceless Real ' Beyond: half Zizek half Deleuzean ' difference in
practice, which emerges from surrealism ducking from and contesting the
Superego like the young. The unnamed can
be appropriated, but not recovered, (substantially,. ontologically) like
the underground slums whose dusty artplaces Paperhouse’s baroque
sawdust surrealism occupies.
The Paperhouse milieu -- that is, its texture and its heuristic, the topography
to which its resounding weird internal world and the ghost gestalt which glosses all the hyoles in the street
and subtexts, from the colour schemes to
the schools, the very utterly historical ‘Mum’ and ‘Dad’ and the ‘shrink’ and ‘I’ within -- is the Thatcherite
community-halls. These emerge from
assembled, and assembling ( objects that ‘become’ along lines, as well as what is, parallaxes along with lines towards
castigating the witch, or father, or dialectical materialism, or biology
catching up with your mentality) , scraps from uneven scissors in glue and the climate
and wind tunnels available to their social
circumscription, endlessly reflexive
unto themselves and then creating
simulacra of the great Ur-Mother, the Ego horror in ‘Morrisseya
nd the Exploited lyrics and Loachean ghosts
to rail against.
Paperhouse’s psychosystem is symptom, symptom without any pure Freudian
or Jungian schemata to break it down; an endless encounter with a series of Rhizomatic
rebellions but the nomadicness of the oneiric also replicates the tension of Deleuzean
-traditionally speaking-- ambivalence towards a material critique ( in its great One, rather than dialogical
analysis) and its very real appropriations to
twin ghouls of manufactured pop and the Israeli Army academy attack strategy.
Spice-post Spice and the Neocons are Thatch’s legacy, which are as rel
and as nonsubstatial, and as cunning and non-sentient, as the product of the analysis
of paperhouse and/or to the running Dream which is Paperhouse
As the product of a psyche which is singularly not fully one's own-- the
fetishization of which soleness turns into madcap laughing shreds like any Kundera laughter or your other common-lit
Existentialists -- how surprising or not is it that the figure who pursue its
own progenitor-- the metal pathogenically daughter—is Essentially pursuing
herself: Tautology, No?
Walls are not just permeable but ontologically indeterminate; are they projections
of the psyche ( they are, but not Just), places in which the psyche
exists, the product of the perception of the psyche --as a virtualization--
whose fabric in practice seeps into comingles with the self like Roquentin in La Nausea? Or
born from a concurrent Sigmund urge to kill the art or heart that made
it and them-- a twisted Elektra complex
in this case.
A Mindmovie paean for the market-systems’s curious incestuization, a
paean to the displacement, or ragged neuro-divergent ( whether before the fact, or accursed by the
personal politics of repression and marginalization
) children of Thatcher.
It evokes Ewa Hoffman’s languor
of time in its long shots of endless tunnels and childhood Ballardian dystopia
waiting—early Mcewan also at its margins--. Certainly Maggie equals a dystopian future, so far as she is
the source of meaning giving rise to the
flowers of sheet-and gravel Romance and chimerical visions here; Also pervasive in the postwar streetscapes
and the tang of reductive psychodeterminism
( divorce/sublimation) is a call to
recognize within the spirit of Arendt’s banality of evil, here in the lower-middle class milieu with
its secret, unstated perversions, rendered obliquely since the attack comes
from a language already prevaricatory and patriarchal, iddic, of a father - -or
Mother in the displacement by father (Thatcher
being both).
Each is re-simulated, or virtualized, in each nook and iteration--scenario
and mode-of -presence, by the feral-literate, native-Blakean, innocence: of the
child, and of the darkness guarding innocence of the childhood/nascent teenage
imagination here, with its floods of primordial burgeoning sublimated sexuality
and a necessary retention of the disassociative sublimatory rituals of quests and banishment.
The neo-Victorian vibes on the side of surrealism chime uneasily with
the modern specificity ; yet Thatcherism
is a grotesque erasure of historical exigency; it never shows the blood, where
the bodies are buried to bring up its few shoots of ferment in its coterie’s gardens. Everyone is an
entrepreneur; these two are individualists of their mindscape—seedy solipsists riffling
against their own isolation but utterly, like Hegel's ‘man -in history', aware of their historical exigency, even as they embrace the recurring
images i.e. Jungian Tropes.
So, like the tales of the Uncanny under other dictators, of the Iberian
or South American persuasion. Its grammar like the 'urban gibbetry' language
profusion, stemming from the unconsciousnesses from dilapidated suburban-urban class holes in modern Britain
and their associated horrors; Heartless or, less directly, the St Matthew meets
deep-dub jaja apocalypse vibes of South London MC Lionburn, or the idiomatics
of Sassenach-- Moffat ...and so on.
Thatcher here is, to steal Dumas
on De Palma, a species of the Political Invisible ( and invert that
equation), (self-allegorically) attempted to hide
inside the primitivist, emotional topographies of its own protagonist’s innocence and in the Family breakdown trauma category, like a
ragged woollen blanket over the political beast .
Also of ‘some interest’ in this regard is Dream Demon (1988) ; is all
decrepit old ‘horse’ money and displaced
Elektra dreams in a ruined London Town hall, the old order of which hies fresh-minted
demons as well as new incantations of money for old horrors, in a class subtext
of baroque and neoclassical formalism interwoven like the text and texte of Alan
Hollinghurst's Line of Beauty. The
mirror of the late Thatcherite property
owner, returned to her inheritance,
leads to ghastly virtualizations, actualized through the symbolic system of British
horror sexual repression ( the virginal Diana here, and her unseen but present
‘Daddy’ ). Or the menacing pseudo -reporters
( Jimmy Nail and stalwart Tim Spall,
playing class-awakward nightmare ala Leigh) :
with them the closeness of the person is the intrusion of the stranger, which
, as in Zizek, leads to the abyss of the Other, echoing ironically Thatcher’s
disparaging of communities and, more seriously, the class-ridden rifts and the violence their
birthed associated with the aftermath of this ideology taking form, ‘becoming’ : it’s fecund arch violence, with demons explicitly
linked to our Iron Lady and her Junta like the monsters of any good
fascist.
The demons of the consciousness
are removed responsibility- enjoyment of the repression and Symbolic
sublimation of responsibility and the violation of the good practising social
self into the obscene Id which is possible by conforming to the pure logic of
the market place; bankers buy old shacks from the trauma they have caused with their spectral
money-shifting, like ( say) De Lillo
anti-heroes pursuiving, conveyancing the damned logic of airless, weightless modern
and then being assaulted with a nameless earthy
dense Real which in De Lillo finds its correlative in the ever-further perpendicular
assemblage of postmodern terms and
solipsism but here comes out as British post-hammer ore, and in the ‘real’ that is, in our
physical and phenomenal world, hides and causes mineral disasters and
starvation, as well as providing the conditions by which crime and anomie may escalate until it forms holes
in the floor and blurred memories to hide the shame.
It’s the only horror flick that references the Falklands War, with
its heroine’s betrothed, an army buccaneer
in Reich blonde, leading up to a
near-past colonial adventurer- nightmare.
Its English London is lit in New Romantic glacial hues-- white
shimmering gloss- inviting speculation and a menacing deathly pallor as well as
the epistemic obliteration signalled by a screen of all white. Which meets a blue-shaded portal-like house; dreams of tea parties
in vortex blue, disorientation andsexulaity,
and blue like the ‘Lady’.
As too is The transferable despair of the 1982 adaptation of Brimstone and Treacle, Dennis Potter's Seventies
vision of equivocal salavation from obscenity, a Beckettian psosiras-body
mutability nightmare shifted to the new 80’s, with its own fear of the body
piolitic; slick speculators like old Martin here, and Tom the respectable dada bringing the NF
front Home like the Tory party bringing in
that scurvious little pathology into its
own jingolella broad tent; white shirts
and cleanshirt fascists alike. Collectivity
exists here, the old solidarity, but, for the antithatcherite, a mournful collection
of souls united under despair being only to witness the play/film's horror, or analogously
'be sick together' as a sacrament in the face of what seemed like implacable
harsh fate-- such collectivity in turn mediated by a medium innately discomfortable,
like the good-terrible evil 'Martin' of the play-film, was a key pathology of
the grime religion, the fatalistic bonding, which marks horror masochism and
marks Thatcher-horror’s apotheosis; it
is analogous to the moral- nihilism contradiction of Gombrowicz, as articulated
by Michael Goddard in his discussion about that writer/playwright’s 'anti-matter', his Deleuzean anti-creation,
and negation, which, despite itself affirmed as total critique the presence of
an ethical dimension, which has always present 'away from itself', created only
as virtuality rather than from the unblinkingly harsh 'matter' from which creation arises, is liable to be like Witkany or
Schultz's marionettes too.
Beyond that, we reach a pourri of
late Hammerite Portmanteau’s, indifferent slashers, and so forth. Barker's Hellraiser
and the sequel , for all their enclosed Colebroook like ‘Kingdom of inward-out”
sensuous horrible Deleuzean anti-matter,
which connects To Thatch, but , one
suspects, is as much a product of the Western
Grotesque which would have emerged and could have
emerged under Mitterrand in France, say, had Barker been transposed ( France, relatively
less freemarket shock and awed has of course its own tradition of art-body
horror, its last gestation falling under the New Extreme cinema banner, from its
Diderot/De Sadeian Enlightenment genesis of transgression as political act and intellectual enlightenment,
which Hellraiser’s ’pain as knowledge’ neo-conservative thesis, like
De Sadeian ethics of derived from Aristocratic excesses-- insisting to the ‘end’ like Zizek’s ‘ thesis carried
out to excess’ in Rand which devours its
own capitalist productive energy— turns to radicalism and repugnance against
its demonic laughter or sacred-mad insistence .
But it is in Paperhouse that we see the true apotheosis—the spell broken over the father though and reduction of trauma to the domestic unit, unfortunately an indication of Thatcher’s legacy—an end whose finally is unsatisfactory y the conditions of that which has come before, an end which has unleashed too much for the neoliberal soul to ever recuperate the garden of normality without time And crisis
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