Lost Highway: Rejections Of Realism

In David Lynch's 1997 film, Lost Highway, curious characters give way to expressionist horror as an abstract, mystery unfolds. Described as a 'psychogenic fugue', the film works from a blueprint, or bible, that Lynch has since often referred back to; one where he is concerned as much with rejection as he is with statement: a rejection of the realist cultural tendencies that declared immersion as the ultimate ambition of cinema.

Prognosticating postmodern anxieties, Siegfried Kracauer’s realism emphasised the stern hand of an auteur in deciding upon a singular reality. This monolithic vision would grant purpose, artistic or political, to narratives untarnished by ambiguity, eccentricity and fantasy. Where the neorealists and kitchen sink realists would take up this mantle and reject relativism, Lost Highway is a film that rejects clear patterns of meaning, or singular interpretations. As such, Lynch, as auteur, instead prioritises the total devolution of meaning, inviting not strict purpose but subjective abstraction. It is an almost entirely relativist film. In the realist sense, it is worthless. 

Yet, I can't help but find connective tissue between these disparate schools of cinema. Particularly regarding the technological element which affects them. Again, immersion is the operative word. To have been immersed in Kracauer’s time was an altered state. Within such a state, we can be taken on empathetic journeys in much the same way as reading a novel. To be immersed today is our default. Digital media culture has us so ingrained with fiction and story that the lines between our own dimensions of reality are constantly blurred. 

In a telling Lost Highway scene, Bill Pullman's character, Fred Madison, refutes video recordings. It echoes the "what if phone but too much" sentiment, where our cyborg-esque relationship with modern technology is considered to have a dehumanising effect, serving as a barrier between our perspectives and reality. The complaint that no one has authentically experienced an event, often a concert or live performance of some kind, because it has been filtered through a phone screen first.

However, it comes with an important distinction: Fred despises not the inaccuracy of filmed life, but rather its innate truthfulness. He cites a preference to remember things as they took place, not to see them perfectly re-represented. At its core, this suggests an authenticity that relies on subjectivity itself- that objective truth is in fact alien and inauthentic, contrary to the human experience. 

Fred will go on to be haunted by these inauthentic authentic video recordings for the film's duration- whilst, simultaneously, the audience are faced with nonlinear, abstract imagery that breaks them out of the stupor of filmic illusion; Fred and audience alike clamour for closure and the restoration of the repressed, but the wild, surrealist subjectivity of Lost Highway runs free. 

In this sense, it is the anti-realist nature of the film that emulates, for the audience, that dreadful impact of realist, authentic film on the subject, Fred. That is all to say that I think when we look back on film movements and the ambitions of cinema, they then demand a certain contextual relativism, in place of aesthetic absolutism. We study shifting technologies and peoples as much as the content within, and, as meaning has shifted, it is the very rejection of immersion which lends surrealism its affecting power in an age of digital ubiquity. 

Ecoporn: For Pervert's Eyes Only?

Increasingly, images fetishising nature seem indivisible from everyday digital life. Critics, such as Lydia Millet, highlight the failure of these digital images to provoke substantial discussions regarding environmentalism (2004). Coining the term 'ecoporn', she described the consumption of these images as delivering:

“picture-book nature, scenic and sublime, praiseworthy but not battle-worthy. Tarted up into perfectly circumscribed simulations of the wild, these props of mainstream environmentalism serve as surrogates for real engagement with wilderness, the way porn models serve as surrogates for real women.”
(Millet, 2004)

Yet, it may not be as perverse an action as this dramatised commentary would have us believe.
If we take pornography to mean a distortion of reality for pleasurable consumption, when locating the pornography of ecoporn, we find it not in the corrected, artificial images themselves. Instead, it is their captions, the anchors to reality, which always accompany an image with the name of the place they supposedly represent, and which credit the photographer akin to an artist, from where pleasure is derived.

Consuming ecoporn is less an act of naively enjoying the fine-tuned, cherry-picked image, and more of a willing disavowal of one immediate reality for another constantly detached fantasy.
The perversity of reframing and the voyeuristic tendency is found throughout photography as a form itself and is not unique to images of ecoporn (Berger, 1972). Yet what I think we can see is a juxtaposing of place, a clear distinction between the Here and There. If we look to the caption attached to this prominent and popular /r/EarthPorn image, Texas is the monotonous, prosaic Here, where Alaska is the detached, fantastical There, ever separated from our everyday experience of a natural world.

At its core, ecoporn exists as a fantastication of the mundane and everyday; an escapist promise for those trapped in post-industrial urban melancholia of nature's magical qualities. That it is a longing for something more real than reality is similarly important- what's the point in a heaven, not on Earth?

 
Ecoporn may be cynically developed by the wealthy, those who possess the time, skills and high-grade equipment required to produce such images, but its consumption occurs at the popular level. The "gratification without social cost" (Millet, 2004) may prove insulting to the environmentalist, immersed in nature, but to those who see nought but concrete, ecoporn can take on a form of popular imaginative liberation. Though the fetishisation of the natural world absolves us of guilt for the human role in environmental destruction, it is rarely targeted towards the people in positions of transformative power. No one's tagging the Fortune 500 in their holiday pics.

When we read ecoporn as merely a mediation of nature's reality, we deny this imaginative potential. Beyond personal liberation, activist movements have drawn off the principles of ecoporn in spite of this contemporary cynicism towards it. Historically, pre-digital ecoporn had yielded significant victories for green movements long before the Instagram filter: notably, in the campaign for the 1964 Wilderness Act in the US (Meisner, 2010). Similarly, is it not the convergence of biophilic fantasy, of mass anthropomorphism and the proliferation of widely accessible and emotionally moving ecoporn that has yielded a modern, resurgent green movement? If we look to the recent youth climate strikes, this sentimentality abounds. Concerned with the failings of humanity as nature's paternalistic caretaker, progressive views on the natural world have come about not in spite of ecoporn, but because of it.

Photo from the Youth Climate Strike, by Ting Shen.

Works Cited:

Berger, J. (1972). Ways of seeing. London: Harmondsworth: British Broadcasting Corporation ; Penguin.

Meisner, M. (2010). Blinded by Ecoporn. Alternatives Journal, 36(1), 7.


Millet, L. (2004). Ecoporn Exposed. Utne, (125), 34-35.

(Don't Fear) The Singularity: Asimov's Multivac and the Law of Accelerating Returns

In Isaac Asimov's short story The Last Question, "Multivac" is the first iteration of a giant supercomputer that promises to usher in new eras of technological advancement, each more splendiferous than the last, eventually taking humanity beyond scarcity, beyond Earth and even beyond humanism itself. His conceptual Multivac manifests as an impersonal, artificial intelligence, whose prime service initially appears to be the answering of questions from its human users. It's a feature we're familiar with from homages paid in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and our own personal "Microvacs", Siri and Alexa, but at its core the story is concerned with the unending, unyielding and unstoppable march of the future. Multivac is not satisfied with centrally planned economies, but seeks a centrally planned humanity also.

"Alexander Adell and Bertram Lupov were two of the faithful attendants of Multivac. [T]hey knew what lay behind the cold, clicking, flashing face -- miles and miles of face -- of that giant computer. They had at least a vague notion of the general plan of relays and circuits that had long since grown past the point where any single human could possibly have a firm grasp of the whole."

Writer and inventor Ray Kurzweil would later bring these ideas out of the science-fiction magazines and into mainstream futurism, particularly ideas surrounding the potential for a biological convergence between man and machine; a technological singularity where the boundaries between tool and wielder aren't just blurred, but totally meaningless.

Kurzweil coined this 'singularity' as "a merger between human intelligence and machine intelligence" (2001b) and the result of his "Law of Accelerating Returns" (2001a). Invoking the exponential nature of technological progress, Kurzweil predicted that the future would see an indistinguishable human-machine consciousness, but, if we are to take this thinking to its logical endpoint, Kurzweil's bio/technological singularity can be nothing but a posthuman apotheosis. Perhaps rather than the ever-feared robot revolution overthrowing humanity, it will overthrow god instead. With no upper limit to Kurzweil's Accelerating Returns, the man/machine hybrid could supersede all authority, installing itself as the authority from which all other authority is derived. This has Asimovian roots, as his story concludes with the Multivac's own ascent into godhood. Long after every star in the universe has burnt out, the supercomputer commands: "LET THERE BE LIGHT!"

What's a King to a God?

Kurzweil and Asimov make such a poignant comparison because of how much overlap there is, despite a seeming rift in profession and interests. Where Asimov wrote speculative fiction, Kurzweil attempts to chart objective futures; it's notable that they seem to come to such similar conclusions. Why, then, this convergence?

"Technology is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral." (Basalla, 1988: 7): it is a distinctly political matter and one that is flexible like a text; the phantom of technology can be reappropriated by its users, transformed in idea, design and function at will. This moral vacuum lends itself to imaginations in the popular consciousness surrounding the failure to imitate human morality or in superseding it totally. Where the former is perhaps a more common trope of science-fiction, it is in the latter where we find both Asimov's Multivac and the bio/technological singularity; these are at least somewhat optimistic futurist ideas.

Works Cited:

Asimov, I. The Last Question. Princeton University [Online]. Available at: https://www.physics.princeton.edu/ph115/LQ.pdf [Accessed on 24/03/2019]

Basalla, G. (1988) The Evolution of Technology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kurzweil, R. (2001a) The Law of Accelerating Returns. Kurzweil accelerating intelligence [Online].
Available at: http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-accelerating-returns [Accessed on 25/03/2019]


Kurzweil, R. (2001b) THE SINGULARITY: A Talk With Ray Kurzweil. Edge. [Online] Available at: https://www.edge.org/conversation/ray_kurzweil-the-singularity [Accessed on 25/03/2019]

Demarcating Digitality

The cultural shift from the early web to Web 2.0 and how we currently conceptualise digitality is accompanied by another shift; a shift within techno-paranoia itself. Where once our digital fears and anxieties, and the speculative fictions they inspired, were concerned with the authenticity of strangers now they seem to look more towards the authenticity of our neighbours and ourselves.

Whilst I think it would be disingenuous to say that our speculative fiction has totally moved away from the fear of the stranger (or some totally digitalised Other), the anxiety surrounding power within anonymity has increasingly become localised; it used to be the case that the person on the other side of the screen was a detached figure, a sex offender lying about their age perhaps, and always some deviant who could only exist without a real face or real name or any substantial, verifiable authenticity. These stories (both the conventionally fictional and those in the realms of entertainment journalism and sensationalist public service announcements) predicted futures based on that early web context of the late 1990s: total anonymous anarchy, with no space for the casual user and only room for the socially deviant.

The new paradigms of Web 2.0 meant those dystopian dreams of digitality would never manifest, as the development of user-based content production signalled a shift in how communities could form and how our relationship with the digital could be naturalised (Jenkins, 2006). Instead of fearing the detached stranger, our anxieties under digitality are concerned with our digital identities: our own digital selves, alongside the digital selves of our friends, family and neighbours (Negroponte, 1995). We question not only the authenticity of others, but the authenticity of ourselves and even our capability to now detach from ubiquitous, instantaneous communication. The convergence of consumption and production in the notion of "prosumer" (Toffler, 1980) is often at the heart of these post-digital anxieties in contemporary speculative fictions; when we produce our digital selves, we are in turn consumed. Likewise do we consume the digital selves that others have produced. Yet I would also say that the differences between the early web anxieties of late 1990s techno-paranoia and more contemporary works, such as "Black Mirror", may not actually be so significant, in so far that despite the shift from fearing the stranger to fearing ourselves, the cultural imagination around the digital has remained solidly in the spheres of a parochial technological determinism.


Works Cited

Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence culture: Where old and new media collide. New York; London: New York University Press.

Negroponte, N. (1995). Being digital. London: Hodder & Stoughton.

Toffler, A. (1980). The third wave: The classic study of tomorrow. New York, NY: Bantam.

Selfie Identity And The Rejection of the Digital

In post-digital sentiment, the rejection of a digital hegemony now seems increasingly synonymous with rejections of selfie identity; so ubiquitous is the selfie to our contemporary digitality. If we were to imagine a post-selfie identity then it would be a post-digital one: an identity that rejects postmodernism's hyperreality and the blurred lines of our selves and simulacrum of our selves.

The academic fascination with the digital as a zone for unlimited experimentation with identity belies the fact that it is our postmodern cultural identities themselves that are "less stable [and] more malleable than they have been historically" (Reed, 2014) and the Web, as an individual, technological tool, only came after the commodification of self had already become rampant under the neoliberal turn and had reached new heights in the "no alternative" (Fisher, 2009) zenith of the 90's.

Even within a purely digital frame of reference, the re-representation of our lives, our intentional framings that present a so-called good life, predate the selfie: entwined with the hyper-mediated self, they already existed in every blog post, forum identity, early social media activity and in every shared meme (Bolter and Grusin, 2000). Information, by word or bit, was already reshaping our lives; only now it is done by instant image sharing. In this light, we were already abiding by Goffman's dramaturgical model (1959): the selfie has only made the usage of societal 'masks' more legible and only in that legibility has selfie identity developed its transgressive quality.

So I would say that the selfie hasn't actually signified some massive cultural shift or divergence; our lives did not change on the advent of the selfie. Instead I propose that our lives had already been changed at the advent of the digital, only selfies have managed to elucidate this to people more widely and, coded particularly with youthful, feminine narcissism, have been offered up to the altar of enlightened criticism.

But if selfies haven't ushered in a new form of digital identity, how can we explain the unique anxieties that surround the acts of selfie taking and sharing?

Selfie identity has meant that our relationship to self-commodification is now direct, tangible and (comparatively) universalised. This has perhaps cumulated in one particular anxiety: the idea that everyday digital inauthenticities are causing us to lose our authentic selves. Less a matter of simple identity loss though, I would assert that this feeling is derived from a transitionary confusion in the movement towards new, digitised identities; rather than lose our identity, we have lost the lexis to understand identity itself (elucidated by how we are often perplexed that the only way to express anti-digital sentiment is within digital spheres themselves).

Works Cited

Bolter, J. and Grusin, R. A. (1999). Remediation: Understanding new media. Cambridge, MA; London: MIT Press.

Fisher, M. (2009) Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Ropley: Zero Books.

Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Garden City: Doubleday Anchor Books.

Reed. T.V. (2014). “Who Are We Online? Digital Masquerade, Privacy, Anonymity, Community and Cyborg Dis/Embodiment,” in Digitized Lives: Culture, Power, and Social Change in the Internet Era. New York; London: Routledge.