Prometheus Bound, Part 2: Body Horror & The Sublime

So yes, Prometheus is in many ways a huge disappointment. Yet I find it stays with me in potent ways, and not just through the cheap horror thrills. (I call them cheap because they are presented outside any coherent psychological frame; in a word, they are gratuitous. That doesn’t make them any less powerful, especially for someone as squeamish as I am). The disappointment stems, I think, from its really being two movies – the first, a compelling story about the extraterrestrial origins of life on earth and the radical dethroning of human exceptionalism; the second, also an origin story, but really just an excuse for a gory schlock-fest that awkwardly attempts to shoehorn into the first narrative a shallow justification for rebooting the Alien franchise. Basically an exercise in brand promotion, this second storyline makes it clear that the real hero of the film is the alien itself. As it rises from the corpse/incubator of the Engineer in the film’s ending, Scott can’t resist investing it with a Gotterdammerung-like pretentiousness. Hail the conquering beast! Or, as a friend waggishly put it: “I have a mouth inside a mouth inside another mouth…” The implication of this story arc carries an ersatz resonance – humans and the monster carry strands of the same DNA.

(I’ll just note here that my knowledge of the whole series is rather spotty. Scott’s inauguration of the franchise was a slickly crafted, if cynical, film – and yes, it scared the shit out of me when I saw it. The third installment was forgettable and of the fourth I profess total ignorance. The true gem in the series is the second, directed by Cameron. That said, Stephen Mulhall, a British philosopher who writes on Heidegger, has done an excellent job of thinking through the Alien Quartet and the questions it raises in his compact and excellent book, On Film).

Mixed into the murk of Prometheus – its insulting violations of verisimilitude, its shabby internal consistency and logic, its weak characterizations and dialogue (just a collection of attitudes, really), and its cynical exploitation of the audience – are some truly stunning moments of spectacle: images that linger on after the queasy creature fest has faded. Though the film overall is emotionally dissonant, the scenes of wonder that punctuate it go a considerable ways toward saving it from collapsing under the weight of its own morbidity.

But before I go into that angle, a few words about horror.

In her essay, “Reading Like an Alien” (in Posthuman Bodies), my old professor Kelly Hurley smartly dissects the first two films in terms of the rise of so-called “body horror” films in the 80s (a response to AIDS, among other cultural anxieties?). Body horror is all about revulsion – about the polymorphously perverse desecration of the human body and finally, as she writes, about an utter lack of investment in nostalgia for the human as “a discrete and stable category.” This is a kind of Lovecraftian gnostic horror, in which the scale of the universe is not only older and vaster than we can conceive, but more significantly, where the human is dwarfed by biomorphic monstrosities, hybrid organisms whose shapes alter with the environment and whose logic is either that of the hive, or something even further outside mammalian social structures. It’s as though human bodies were designed to be penetrated, suborned and consumed by alien life forms; and indeed, this horror seems like an extension of what we currently know about our own bodies – that they are not truly ours, in the sense of sole proprietorship, but are always already colonized by millions of bacteria. The real horror in body horror comes from the way the body is shredded, not of the body, but the very idea of identity itself.

All the same, Prometheus stages wonder in powerful ways. Despite its title, it’s really a film about the past. Its gorgeous opening sequence – gorgeous, but problematic, because it immediately represents creaton in terms of religious rituals of self-sacrfice, makes this an archaeological detective story, which is another way of saying, it’s a ghost story. And the ghosts do show up. First, in the marvelous hologrammic sequences where we see the Engineers fleeing from something unseen (of course it’s unseen). And then when the final Engineer implacably implausibly arises from his crypt after a 2000-year nap and bemusedly tears the head off David, the android (who is the liveliest character in the whole motley crew, stealing every scene he’s in) the way a child might twist off a doll’s head.

The centerpiece of wonder – which we know from Suvin, Clute, et al. is the trope of tropes in SF – occurs when David presses “Play,” as it were, in the Engineers’ cockpit and the whole space lights up with an orrery. But as with so much else, perhaps everything, really, in this film, the scene of writing is contaminated from the get-go.

Side-note: the hologram display in the cockpit of the Prometheus is pretty fancy, too, revealing the interior of the pyramid, and eventually, the buried starship. It's both prelude and lesser companion to the Engineers' orrery, a bit of foreshadowing or paralleism. But this raises another one of those annoying questions that drags down the film, the way its script is outpaced by its fx. These Engineers have been around for millions of years, right? And they're still using what, given the scale of time involved, seems like primitive technology. Visually awesome, for sure -- and therefore, necessary for a movie. But why are they still mucking around with their toys at this stage, their squids and bipeds and so forth? Seems like they would have engineered themselves to some new level Quite Beyond Us and left all that in the dust, rather the way elder races in Iain Banks' Culture novels grow weary of matter and go Sublime. Or maybe they're just bored.

For the orrery is not merely a chart that connects the now with the then, the life of humans on Earth with its moment of inception, an overview of Creation itself. It is also a blueprint for corporate management, the scene of wonder as filtered through the map of conquest. The orrery is a kind of speculum – a mirror in which we think we discern our true and original design; almost Wordsworthian, in a way. Except that poor William’s been upstaged or outflanked by HPL.

Wonder in this scene is signaled by several things: by scale and recognition; by circular camera movement; by the abstract becoming tangible (the glowing sphere of the earth hangs like a luminous fruit to be plucked, as it is), and by David the android’s complete rapture with the entire tableau. This kind of visual cueing is effective, but dishonest. As David responds so the audience responds – with a gaze of fixity and a slight smile. Whence this smile? This is perhaps the most sneakily uncanny moment in the whole film since David’s silky responses, we can presume, are in line with our own engineering of him, designed to make humans feel assured, even if the android itself is incapable of real emotion. And indeed, the script plays this angle up quite smartly with its “we made you because we could” line.

But that orrery – it’s not just a map. It’s a special effect that represents what Scott Bukatman calls "the artificial infinite," a vista that dethrones human exceptionalism. And while we marvel at it, because it induces a sense of awe mixed with vertigo (there's a center, yes, but the camera keeps spinning, keeping us off balance) it also gives us, or should, a deep interstellar shiver. As in, Stephen Hawking's gloomy pronouncements on nasty ETs, AKA the Fermi Paradox (elaborated on in Greg Bear's diptych, Forge of God and Anvil of Stars). Or maybe it comes down to Herzog's remark in Grizzly Man: nature is totally indifferent to us.

Prometheus Bound

Ridley Scott’s new SF extravaganza cleverly updates the premise of 1979’s Alien. Instead of the action unfolding on a haunted space ship, it takes place on a haunted planet. There’s not much difference, though. Scott has always been a filmmaker with extraordinary visual gifts, a cold eye for humanity and a flair for theatrics. Unfortunately, he has scarcely an actual idea to his credit. A highbrow vulgarian, his films often produce admiration, but they’re incapable of inspiring love. He’s a visionary without a vision, someone in search of a sentiment, as the quip goes, to match his vocabulary.

Prometheus is a very uneven and finally quite disappointing mix of sublime grandeur and crass, cynical manipulation. Despite the film’s dazzling spectacle and powerful sense of scale (eons and light-years are spanned), its obsessions finally come down to a set of stale horror tropes involving bodily penetration and disgust. I’ve never cared much for this mixture of SF and horror. To me, the latter dilutes and impoverishes the former, reducing its potential for transcendence and strangeness to self-indulgent japeries of the grotesque. SF is primarily about invoking a sense of wonder and functions as a potent expression of secular theology – see my earlier blogs on postmodern space opera and Solaris. If horror is about the betrayal of the body – its decay and failure – SF is about transforming it into an avatar of the technological sublime.

Scott’s chief concern seems to be with trying to out-revulse revulsion by topping the chest-popper scene from Alien. The scene is gripping enough in itself, but nothing, including Noomi Rapace’s dogged efforts otherwise, can ever surpass the rude surprise of that moment. What the gruesome auto-Caesarian does make plain, though, is Scott’s utter contempt for the female body, turning natural reproduction into demonic possession. Haven’t we seen this movie before? Scott’s logic here is of a brutalist Darwinian order – nature, on the interstellar scale, is nothing but a series of fanged and tentacled paroxysms. Yet there’s no real logic to these scenes or to the theological baiting and red herrings the film pretends to offer in good faith. They exist purely to generate huge, bowel-wrenching shocks in the audience. These shocks are symptomatic of the film’s larger failure, which is the absence of a coherent moral point of view.

The film fails on two other levels. One is dramatic; the other conceptual. Dramatically, Rapace’s character is a dull, humorless hump. With her crucifix the sign less of devotion than a daddy complex, she plods through the film with the grim determination of a Zoombot. There are no edges to her character, no wit, nothing to make us root for her, and not the remotest trace of moral complexity or growth. She never once doubts herself. She seems to be a bystander in every scene, passively reacting, rather than initiating action. Even the climax doesn’t place her in serious jeopardy. Instead it stages a grim duke-out between the Giant Engineer and his erstwhile pet, the Land Squid cum vagina dentata (I’m still trying to cleanse that image from my brain).

The conceptual failure is more intriguing. As Norman Finkelstein has noted (on FB), Prometheus is something of a Gnostic creation story. The callous indifference and outright malevolence of the Engineers makes them Archons of bio-tech design. I only wish they’d been more indifferent and less malign, since the latter reduces them to the scale of puny vindictiveness. But the film’s skirting of alien motive doesn’t render their motives more alien, that is, more truly gnostic; it only makes them over into ridiculous figures of cartoonish villainy. The filmmakers propose something colossal, then squander the opportunity it presents them with to imagine alien otherness, the kind of alterity that tests our anthropocentric bias with the limits of the commensurable.

Threshold Songs

At the threshold of this intense, visionary book, stands an epigraph from Beckett’s homage to his father, Company, like a lean solitary dolmen marking the descent to the underworld: “A voice comes to one in the dark. Imagine.” To stand at a threshold, to hover in its precincts, on the verge, at the cusp, means to invite a certain kind of transmission; a certain porousness. It is to place oneself in between, belonging neither to one place nor another, but committed to the more difficult site of unease; an unease between self and other, nearness and distance, present and past, the dead and the living, logos and its ghosts. To write at the threshold is to consent to Stevens’ assertion that in the poem “we live in a place that is not our own.”

Part of the reason Peter Gizzi’s remarkable new poems, his most powerful yet, have stirred such unease in the form of back-handed praise by reviewers like Dan Chiasson (who smugly labels Gizzi “a lunch pail mystic”) is that they dare to inhabit a psychic and spiritual terrain where language confronts with stark, uncompromising honesty the threshold of song as it pushes against the enigma of loss, the place where the acknowledgement of language’s finitude is, finally, the horizon of our exile and belonging.

What is so startling about these haunting poems is the ecstatic charge they give to this recognition. The pathos of desolation is harrowing, but also renewing. For if the trauma of loss rends us, out of this gash a strange gnosis may emerge. It’s as if Orpheus, after losing Eurydice, began to speak in her voice. Gizzi is not merely elegizing here; he is rethinking the very basis for lyric, testing it continually against its subjective limits by making the experience of the irretrievable the core of the lyric voice. "Pinocchio’s Gnosis" is a case in point: a tour de force, yes, but calling it that suggests it’s merely a display of ludic virtuosity. Here the poet enters a vertiginous free fall. The catastrophe of loss threatens all signification. Yet the poem also reminds us, as Rilke says of Trakl, that “falling is the pretext for an inexorable ascension.”

"Funny how being dead troubles the word. I am trying to untie this sentence, to untidy the rooms where we live. No words in the soup, no soup in this sky, no more history written onto onionskin, peeling onion skins …with a magical broom, the wind sang sweep, like an oar in air we ascend. We power the instrument and apply a salve, uncover the ghost behind fig. Mistake it for an omen then quiet the cloud, the cloud just there seen through a cataract.”

And in a magnificent riff on Hamlet’s “quintessence of dust” speech, the poem asks:

"What is a man but a paper miscellany, a bio furnace blowing coal, a waste treatment plant manufacturing bluster, an open signal full of seawater, a dark stranger turning over the dark next to you."

Threshold Songs attends to this miscellany, the messiness of contingency, with a grave and urgent nuance, a careful listening for where syntax can reach into affect. Reading these poems is like being overtaken by the uncanny feeling that, as Gizzi writes in “The Growing Edge,” “it’s Sunday in deep space.” To claim, as one reviewer does, that they foreclose discovery, is to deeply misread the cognitive work they do, which is undertaken as the pursuit of the limits of elegy and its weak messianic power to intervene.

Lyric is typically understood as the consoling affirmation of voice. These poems drive beyond that. In Adorno’s words, they “sound forth in language until language itself acquires a voice.” Undertaken not as attempts at closure, but a witness to the impossible crux of song’s burden, they sustain the power of the threshold between mourning and melancholy, striving to metabolize traumatic loss without dissolving that loss entirely. To paraphrase Kierkegaard on anxiety: “whoever has learned to live with loss in the right way has learned the ultimate.” To assimilate loss completely would be to falsify its meaning.

Consolation – the thing we go to the poem for – is here, but in a different key: dissonant, refractory, circled uneasily, sometimes nearer, sometimes only felt from a distance. The loss persists, reverberating, expanding to encompass a larger measure of the world and how the self undergoes even its own dissolution. The music derives from the acuteness of this weird, humbling pitch. It penetrates everything without quite destroying it so that it becomes its own form of consolation. As in the opening of “Analemma”:

"That I came back to live
in the region both
my parents died into
that I will die into
if I have nothing else
I have this and
it’s not morbid
to think this way
to see things in time
to understand I’ll be gone
that the future is already
somewhere
I’m in that somewhere
and what of it"

Or the plangent imperative which closes “History is Made at Night” (a nod to Frank Borzage’s exquisite 1937 melodrama):

"A kind of vow like poetry
burning the candle down.
Bring back the haloed reverie.
Music, retake the haughty
night sky. Its storied rays
its creak and croak
its raven’s wing tonality."

The short lines compress anguish into a flat plain voice, the syntax bending the argument with loss into something else, lifting loss against the walls of song where language strains but doesn’t quite break. In poems like this one, and "True Discourse on Power" (“Because a sound a poor man/uttered/reached my ear I fell into song”), the real task Gizzi takes up is how we know and experience our categories for knowing, which are, finally, categories for tabulating and confronting loss. Death challenges epistemology at the most fundamental level. The result is a poetry of relentless, even excruciating, inquiry, tempered by a tenderness for what is broken or hurt or incomplete. A kind of nakedness emerges – a laying open after history – that is complex, rather than simple, and utterly necessary.

Threshold Songs has been misread by reviewers because the contemporary critical vocabulary for understanding a genuinely spiritual poetics is so impoverished. Written under the sign of Beckett, whose complex sense of failure endows the via negativa with a comically forlorn sense of hope, a difficult gnosis of unknowing permeates Gizzi’s defiantly open, questioningly elegiac tone. These poems achieve a lived sense of finitude that is at once anchored in the body and dispersed by spiritual longing, a desolate hunger for intimacy which is ratified by its own search.

“Bewilderment,” Fanny Howe tells us, “is an enchantment that follows a complete collapse of reference and reconciliability.” Or, as Gizzi writes in an earlier poem, “The Outernationale”: “Start from nothing, and be/long to it.” To sing at the threshold is to suffer the shipwreck of that enjambment, then stand in bewilderment at how far a song might go.

Ron Slate's "On The Seawall"

Ron Slate's annual spring poetry feature -- 17 poets on 17 poets -- is now up on his excellent site The Great Wall.

My own contribution is on Peter Gizzi's powerful new collection, Threshold Songs. Also included; Elizabeth Robinson on David Mutschlecner and Tyrone Williams on Judith Goldman.

Quote of the Day (and The Low, Dishonest Decade)

From John Lancaster's "Marx at 193," in the new London Review of Books:

"The financial system in its current condition poses an existential threat to Western democracy far exceeding any terrorist threat. No democracy has ever been destabilised by terrorism, but if the cashpoints stopped giving out money, it would be an event on a scale that would put the currently constituted democratic states at risk of collapse. And yet governments act as if there is very little they can do about it. They have the legal power to conscript us and send us to war, but they can’t address any fundamentals of the economic order."

Adorno, Shoah, and The New Yorker

Richard Brody is one of my favorite film critics. His squibs in the “Now Playing” section of The New Yorker are masterpieces of poetic sensibility and compression (like the current one on Children of Paradise) and often the best things in any given issue, while his book on Godard, Everything is Cinema, is masterful. So it’s disappointing to see him resort to the usual tiresome cliché about Adorno on art after Auschwitz in his otherwise moving and perceptive review of the life and work of Claude Lanzmann, director of Shoah.

As Brody tells it, Lanzmann’s desire to make Shoah a beautiful as well as a morally forceful film – in Lanzmann’s eloquent phrase, “to make the unbearable bearable” – provides “a resounding response to Adorno’s assertion that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” For response here, read "refutation."

It’s easy to misread Adorno. Understanding him means reading him alongside his friend Walter Benjamin’s definitive statement of dialectical thinking: “There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” By saying that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” Adorno was not condemning the power of art. He was saying that the culture that produced the poetry of Goethe and Rilke also produced the language of the Final Solution: culture itself is the problem. It’s impossible to think the two apart from one another, as though civilization was safely walled off from barbarism. Surely Abu Ghraib is the nearest reminder of that.

As a kind of shorthand for a profound resignation about the fate of culture, the phrase “poetry after Auschwitz” needs to be viewed in the wider context of Adorno’s critique of the Enlightenment, which as he observes in 1947, had “aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty,” only to culminate as “disaster triumphant.” As Adorno and Max Horkheimer elaborate in Dialectic of Enlightenment, “the human being’s mastery of itself, on which the self is founded, practically always involves the annihilation of the subject in whose service that mastery is maintained … self-preservation destroys the very thing which is to be preserved.”

In other words, events like the Shoah are not aberrations, not psychotic breaks from social reality. Rather, they exemplify the logic of technocratic culture at its most extreme. Adorno’s concern is with not succumbing to the collective amnesia and repressions of the fate of the Jews in post-Auschwitz culture, as described in the brilliant epilogue to Tony Judt’s magisterial Postwar, "From the House of the Dead."

Here’s Adorno’s full quote, more or less, from “Cultural Criticism” (1949):

“The more total society becomes, the greater the reification of the mind and the more paradoxical its effort to escape reification on its own. Even the most extreme consciousness of doom threatens to degenerate into idle chatter. Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today. Absolute reification, which presupposed intellectual progress as one of its elements, is now preparing to absorb the mind entirely. Critical intelligence cannot be equal to this challenge as long as it confines itself to self-satisfied contemplation.”

As Michael Rothberg helpfully points out in Traumatic Realism, the phrase “poetry after Auschwitz” is perhaps rendered with greater clarity (but less urgency) if translated into “poetry after reification.” Reification is the agent of poetry’s impossibility, for, as he explains, “the barbarism or irrationality of ‘poetry after Auschwitz’ is that, against its implicit intentions, it cannot produce knowledge of its own impossible social status … this impossibility is neither technical nor even moral … it results instead from an objective and objectifying social process that tends toward the liquidation of the individual,” or what Adorno elsewhere calls the totally administered world, the society of "radical evil”.

Language’s complicity in the catastrophe of the modern means that poetry itself is vulnerable to reification. Poetry that does not acknowledge its own barbarism, then, its tendency to valorize subjective experience as though it floated free of its larger ideological framework, will do nothing to resist the cultural conditions that make an Auschwitz possible. Making it pretty just don’t cut it anymore.

To write poetry after Auschwitz means rejecting traditional aesthetic values like harmony, consonance, and even beauty. These values aim at reconciling tension and thus, for Adorno, can only corrupt the poem. As he writes in Aesthetic Theory:

“Art is true to the extent to which it is discordant and antagonistic in its language and in its whole essence, provided that it synthesizes those diremptions, thus making them determinate in their irreconcilability. Its paradoxical task is to attest to the lack of concord while at the same time working to abolish discordance.”

All critiques of culture, Adorno insists, must begin by implicating themselves in the wreckage they are sifting. This is why the understanding that poetry after Auschwitz has become barbaric is endangered, he warns, of being confused with a merely punitive or reductionist gesture banning all aesthetic expression. If lyric poetry is also a critique of culture – a point he makes strongly in his 1957 essay “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” where he writes “that the lyric work is always the subjective expression of a social antagonism” – then it, too, is always already fully a part of the aporia of culture.

This does not mean that subjective suffering has no right to express itself. Even if, as Adorno claims in the famous conclusion to Negative Dialectics, “all culture after Auschwitz, including the urgent critique of it, is garbage,” “perennial suffering still has as much right to expression as the martyr has to cry out.” The aporia of cultural failure does not mean the collapse of culture into total barbarism, neither does it signal the end of dialectics.

Instead, Adorno tells us in Minima Moralia, it compels seeing things from “the standpoint of redemption,” an act that requires the construction of perspectives that “displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear on day in the messianic light. To gain such perspectives without velleity or violence, entirely from felt contact with objects – this alone is the task of thought.” That such a redemptive stance is to be achieved solely through “felt contact with objects” might seem at first glance a strange claim to make. Yet what Adorno is advocating here is a non-idealist move that, while reducible to vulgar materialism, seeks a return to things, not as essences, but as fragments whose integrity is guaranteed by their loss of wholeness. Located through a micrological sifting of the ruins, these fragments possess the ability to form new constellations of meaning.

Lyn Hejinian offers a nuanced reading of Adorno, suggesting that his maxim “has to be taken as true in two ways.” “First, because what happened at Auschwitz … [rendered] all possibilities for meaning … suspended or crushed.” And second, and more importantly, because the event of the disaster enjoins poets “not to speak the same language as Auschwitz … poetry after Auschwitz must indeed by barbarian; it must be foreign to the cultures that produce atrocities. As a result, the poet must assume a barbarian position, taking a creative, analytic and often oppositional stance, occupying (and being occupied) by foreignness—by the barbarism of strangeness.”

Adorno was never opposed to the power of art to register the Shoah. His essay on Beckett’s Endgame provide ample evidence of that. Indeed, the whole of Aesthetic Theory, his final work, is devoted to working out this intractable problem. But the clearest statement he issued comes near the end of Negative Dialectics:

“A new categorical imperative has been imposed by Hitler on unfree mankind: to arrange their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen.”

Best Poetry Lines Ever, with Special Reference to Edwin Rolfe

As Eileen Simpson recounts in her marvelous book Poets in Their Youth, Berryman and Lowell used to play a game where they challenged each other to name the three best lines in English. Berryman's, as I recall, were from Yeats' "The Wild Swans at Coole."

For a long time mine were from Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale":

"But here there is no light
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous gloom and winding mossy ways."

Later, it was Pound, in the late Cantos:

"Do not move.
Let the wind speak
that is paradise."

I won't say that the two lines below, from Edwin Rolfe's "First Love," have replaced either Keats or Pound for me. But they're certainly worth quoting.

"and always I think of my friend who amid the apparition of bombs
saw on the lyric lake the single perfect swan."