Forgetting Sarah Marshall, or, What a Girl Ought To Do With A Naked, Pudgy Man

Clearly the wrong course of action.

The correct option, according to the film.

I kept wondering if Rachel was a figment of Peter's imagination.  To Peter she isn't an other at all.  Her otherness falls along the contours of his fantasies and insecurities.  And his psychology is written following a lazy cliche of masculinity: he feels inadequate, and to get the girl he must become a man, he must prove his manliness (by jumping off a cliff after her, by heroically purloining a naked photo of her from the bathroom wall, by being productive and self-sufficient).  She is completely circumscribed by and accessible via his poorly written conception of the other.  She is the phallus and nothing more.  What dull excrement.

The Marathon Not Taken

Sometimes, inspired by Philip Sandifer's slog through mediocrity, I want to pick a really lengthy, terrible cookbook, cook every recipe in it one by one, and write about them.  I have one in mind in particular, which, because it is in a language I don't entirely understand, would provide even more work and need to research.   (Well, actually I don't sometimes want to do this--I only did once, just ten minutes ago before writing this entry.)

If the creative and/or productive aspect is taken away, the extended adherence to the sequence of some content might be referred to as a marathon.  For instance one (or more ideally more than one) could have a Star Trek marathon, or a Doctor Who marathon.  Without specifying, respectively, which show, or which series, a marathon of either of those television shows would be a massive undertaking.  But, unlike my scrapped plan to go through an entire cookbook filled with some seventeen thousand mostly unremarkable recipes, the undertaking is normally driven on by an already held devotion to the show.  In fact, it is likely that such a marathon would be largely comprised of repeat viewings, because you just can't get enough of it.  In a marathon, however, the viewer also subjects himself to the worst episodes, to the episodes he would otherwise probably not watch.  My cookbook task would be almost entirely of this sort of recipe, the ones I would never otherwise bother cooking.  There would really be nothing to keep me on that track, it would be an entirely contrived task.  It would be an endeavor that the Doctor would never commit himself to.

In fact he has never encountered his most feared enemy: drudgery.  Yes, he has faced Daleks and nearly lost hope in the process, but even as the human race teeters on the edge of pan-dimensional extinction and he could by all accounts die at any moment, he is never threatened.  Because even if he did die, I mean die die, his being would remain intact: he would have never been removed from the moment of heroism.  He is what he does.  He stumbles into some corner of Time, stumbles into a problem, fixes it, then leaves.  (It is, I must say, a perfect paradigm for a television show.)  He defies linearity not because he's some hipster postmodernist, but because he abhors boredom.  He hops around Time to evade anything that doesn't fit into narrative convention.

My account of what he has never encountered may prove somewhat heretical, as I have only watched the most recent five series.  In fact my viewership of the show is precisely not a marathon.  The first episodes I watched were those that my friend deemed I needed to watch, and after that I just jumped around looking for the ones worth watching.  You probably already know where I'm going with this: I watched Doctor Who just like the Doctor would,  jumping around in search for the best stories.  Except of course the Doctor is in plenty of shlock episodes.  He is not so much in search of the best stories, but in search of a story, his story.  He's looking for someone in distress--although it is likely they don't know it until he shows them.

At this point in my viewing, I seem to have run out of palatable episodes.  The last few I tried to watch I didn't even finish.  I knew where they were going, I had already been there.  And this...

The Cruel Optimism of Civilization

Let's see how badly I can mangle Lauren Berlant's concept (and future book title) of cruel optimism.

I have a lot of unfinished Civilization games.  Most of the games I start, actually, I never finish.  Often I rationalize this as the tendency of the game to become "boring" when it becomes too easy, when there is no question of victory, only the future tedium of getting there.  But I also stop playing when it becomes obvious that I cannot win.  I don't think, then, that it's victory or excitement that I'm looking for, but room for optimism.  I play the game to work toward some end, sometimes defined, sometimes not, that I will not want to actually materialize when it does.  At the beginning of a game so much is possible.

One thing that I convince myself bothers me about playing Civilization is the pacing of technologies.  Even at Civilization IV's "Marathon" pace, I feel that eras go by far too quickly.  Very suddenly it becomes the medieval era and all I've had time to do is build a few cities and explore half the map.  I want it all to slow down, to have hundreds of turns before anyone can even build swordsman.  I want to get lost in the minutiae of the ancient era before my workers can do much of anything.  I want to understand, somehow, what each technology does, how it affects gameplay, and what it makes possible.  But if any of that were possible I am sure I really would become bored.  Rather than subjected to time going by too fast, if my fleeting attachment were held in a near stand-still, it surely would fade even more easily.

There is another level of optimism, and another level of my wishes regarding time: as much as I tell myself otherwise, I believe that playing Civilization will somehow give rise to some accomplishment outside of the game, and I believe it will temporarily remove me from the stream of time's passage.  The problem with the latter is embedded in its semantics: one cannot "temporarily" stop time, as there would be no time to count how long time stops.  Eventually it becomes apparent that while I play the game time is "lost" in a way opposite to what I had hoped: the hours of playing really did pass outside the game.

If these optimisms were cruel, however, would I stop playing?  Not exactly.  Attachments are not continuous, no matter how much I tell myself they are.  Periodic dissatisfaction that keeps me coming back for more is how I imagine cruel optimism plays out--in waves.  Yet I will go back, even with a cynical attitude, to the escape that is not an escape, wanting to hover around the possibility of victory.  Or maybe not even victory.

An Inverted Snapshot

Another artifact of my past that I never knew had been lost has been recently recovered: a photo taken at my high school graduation, I think by my father.  As with the gum diary, I don't remember this photo being taken.  But I can imagine my father taking it, as he is always trying to get his sons to pose for a photograph, which inevitably annoys them.  As a result there are a lot of photos of us (my brother and I) looking ruffled yet smiling anyway in front of a Place.  The potential events of these photos are almost entirely drowned by his act of taking them.  There is little else recorded but the fact that he recorded us at a particular time in a particular place.  But some little gem of accidence always slips out.

This photo is bursting with accidence; what he intended to photograph is so negligible that it almost seems to not be there.  There is a deadlock of gazes between the photographer and his intended subjects, but the photo's frame does not end there, revealing another interplay of gazes that point alluringly away from the photo's field of vision.

The appearance of an inside and an outside within the photo is an effect also of color.  The graduation ceremony dictated that boys wear red robes and girls wear white robes.  In the center of the photo is the large red mass of three male friends (4, 6, 7) and I (5), who were my father's subjects, smiling to the camera.  On either side of us are girls in white robes (1, 2, 3, 9, 10), and one boy (8) whose robe, despite being in the background, coheres with the uninterrupted redness of the four subjects.

All of those incidentally photographed, in the background, were acquaintances then.  One of them I know much more now than I did then.  In fact we were in a relationship only a few months after this photo was taken.  She (9) is in profile, looking off frame, directly away from us in the photo's two dimensions, but it looks as if she could be straining her neck to look sidelong at the photographer.  But perhaps she is looking at someone not pictured, far out of frame.  Behind her, her boyfriend (8) looks solemnly at the ground.  Next to her, someone many of us came to dislike even more than we did then is nearly cut out of frame, half of her head (10) looking inward at something or someone behind the red mass.  On the other side of the photo, one of her best friends (1) looks out of the photo.

What is of interest to me in this photo is what could not possibly have been of interest to me at the time of the photo.  It is a cast of characters of relationships that at the time of the photo were yet to be.

Snapshots are generally taken by pointing the camera directly at the subject, as such, the edges are neglected as pesky corners.  While this is exactly how the photographer took this photo, for the viewer it is a snapshot with an inverted gradient of interest; it is a photograph of a void surrounded by interests interested in what the photo cannot show.  Radiating outward from a visible nothing, it draws the eye to what cannot be seen.

Gum Day

Sometime in elementary school, I think it was third grade, the whole class was assigned to write a diary each school day.  I had completely forgotten this (which is a funny phrasing, seeming to imply that I carry around a set of things remembered that the forgotten thing is missing from--when really I didn't know I had forgotten until I came upon the external knowledge that there was something to forget).  In fact this diary almost seems to be written by someone else.  Which is not so strange really, as everything written is in a sense written by someone else.  But I kept several journals throughout my adolescence, and rereading these years later always triggers memories that are not explicit in the text.  This diary, on the other hand, triggers no memory.  I do have memories from that year, and I find myself recounting these, trying to find one that relates to what's written in the diary.  It's as if I lived two parallel lives during that year, one that I remember, and one that I wrote about.

What did this other I write about?  The diary is a record of exuberant greed for a few kinds of pleasure.  He writes about wanting, anticipating, and receiving.  He's both adorable and creepy, but possibly only creepy because I know that I was once him, and yet I cannot find in him a glimmer of the internality I identify as myself.  The objects in circulation for him are toys, social events with friends, Magic cards, food, and most notably, gum.

The school I attended had a gum policy that in retrospect is an awfully silly example of the productive power of prohibition.  I don't know whether to call the policy idiotic or diabolic: gum was not allowed, except on Friday, "gum day."  The rationale for prohibiting gum was ostensibly, I think, to prevent sticky masses from accumulating under desks and elsewhere.  But then on Friday it was deemed okay, during recess.  To appease the whining kids who, rarely considering gum before, now wanted it passionately?

So of course certain kids, including my friends and I, fetishized gum day into an orgy of maximum maceration.  If the diary is evidence of anything, it is of the extremity of our fetish.  Every Friday is an entry in which this polite hedonist that was once me either laments that he forgot to buy gum and vows to remember to do so next time, or declares triumphantly that it is gum day and (behold!) he has gum.  For something so fervently desired, it is incredible how often he forgot to buy gum.  Was he hiding something?  Was there some embarrassing circumstance that prevented him from buying gum that he didn't want to divulge?

When he wasn't registering the two states of remembered (having) and forgotten (not having) he cataloged the amounts and types of gum that he got or planned to get.  Sometimes he even wrote their prices, included in neat little tables:

.25 | 1 strawbery 10pack
.50 | 2 burst- sour
.50 | 2 bursts strvmbary
.25 | 1 other

totel $1.50

Imagine chewing this much gum in one day.  Keep in mind that even on gum day, it could only be chewed on recesses.  I don't think I actually remember doing this, but I imagine I must have been stuffing my mouth with gum as fast as possible, spitting each piece out when the sweet flavor just barely began to fade.

How can this child seem so happy, so uncomplicated?  Is it merely (I hope) by virtue of his limited knowledge of language?  I would say that he seems contented, but no, each record of satisfaction is immediately followed by the anticipation of another pleasure.  This might mean that he is "happy," in that he doesn't appear to dwell on his fleeting grasp of pleasure.  Because he cannot experience and write about his pleasure at the same time, the diary is always at a remove in time from what is posited as the presence of what he wants.  In an oddly melodramatic entry, he puts the anticipatory part of this equation rather cogently:

february 23 9:19 AM. today I forgot to bring money for gum day I hope to go shopping today because I need gum, by tomorow morning!  All I can do is hope.

They insisted that she be rained to earn a living.

It's a library book, yet for three pages it is fouled by underlining in red ink.  Attempting to make sense of the marks, it at first seems to me that the underliner was pointing out typos.  Maybe he or she even had a kind of helpful purpose in mind: to tell future readers with red ink "look, this word isn't what it's supposed to be!"  The obvious typo is "processions" where "professions" should be.  Not just typos, but grammatical errors are underlined: "has" where "have" should be, for instance.  The oddest word underlined is "rained" in this sentence: "[they] insisted that she be rained to earn a living."  What word ought that to be?  This and the rest I can't make sense out of, exactly.  "On" in "whirling on her mind": should it properly be "in," or something?  This just seems like nitpicking.  And finally there's "pennant."I don't know what's wrong with it.  Is it spelled wrong?  The "pennant" in the next paragraph isn't underlined.  But then, by that page the underliner seems to have given up.  Too many errors to correct.  The book of course must be full of them.

It does leave me rather haunted.  What am I reading?  What else, unaided by red ink, is "wrong"?  But it's a mild haunting, as the underlined errors are not particularly grave, and don't much threaten the coherence of the novel's narrative.  "[they] insisted that she be rained to earn a living" does indeed sound like nonsense, but I move on.  It doesn't matter really; the sentence may as well say "[they] insisted that she earn a living."  It is interesting, though, to imagine how many other "rained"s we elide to read, whether they're words, phrases, sentences, themes, characters, or anything else that we ignore.

That sort of elision of unresolved words in order concatenate a coherent narrative, argument, or whatever is the semantic analogue of what depressives often become stuck on.  Unconvinced by the signified, someone depressed revisits the signifier over and over.    Or at least that's how Julia Kristeva has it.  ("Concatenate" is her phraseology in Black Sun).  When this position is taken up not regarding a forgettably nonsensical word in a novel, but regarding the most glaring failures of signifying apparatuses (death being the quintessential example and metaphor here), it raises some important questions.  What happens to the unsignifyable?  How can they be held onto and how can they be dropped?  Neither seems quite possible.  However felicitously signified, they remain not quite entirely captured.  However seamlessly elided, they continue to haunt.  However rigorously maintained as a pure void, this too is a symbol.  If not, what is there maintained?  And finally, this is not a special category; no signifier is strictly signifyable--thus the distinction.  Don't think about it too much.

Baby, I'm Desiring

The Anjulie song “Rain” goes, unfortunately, like this:

What do I do with this
power inside of me?
Always been you baby
I’m desiring.

What caught my ear was the tone of one phrase from this, taken completely out of context.  I heard

baby, I’m desiring

as a kind of dismissive aside, like she’s telling her lover “not now baby, i’m busy”--busy with desiring.  In my mislistening, desiring is an occupation that your attention cannot be detracted from.  To desire, in this case, is to ambivalently ignore the object of your attachment, turning your gaze upon perhaps no object in particular.

But instead, disappointingly, the song has a much less Deleuzian form of desire: the “baby” she addresses is not dismissed in favor of the occupation of desiring, but is (and always has been) the object of her desire.

Widelands

On a long, tensely silent drive with my father and brother on a minor highway, my mind wanders and it occurs to me that Settlers II is giving rise for me to a peculiar view of capitalism.  The game's annoying road system, in which production facilities must be connected meticulously by road to the headquarters of your empire, illustrates the idea that power (to accumulate wealth) resides not in any single mean of production, but in the medium through which products travel.  In Settlers II, your empire consists in the interconnectivity of the spaces in between nodes of harvesting, production, and storage; its might is the bandwidth of its network of roads.  Settlers III does away with this reification of movement: without roads your serfs merely walk freely along the shortest paths between buildings.  It seems a shame to rid the game of the nitpicking of road-building and its visualization of the mechanism of the economy.

Significantly, Widelands is not an open-source mimic of Settlers III, but of Settlers and Settlers II.  I have never played Settlers or Settlers II, or any other game in the Settlers franchise for that matter--only Widelands.  But playing Widelands is a sort of retrospective discovery for me, as certain of my friends in middle school were, I remember now, enthusiastically obsessed with Settlers, like it was a kind of arcane calling.  I guess I can see why.

Their cultish adherence to that game had something to do, I imagine, with its absurdly steep learning curve.  Your economy depends upon some forty "wares," each with its own tiny icon, specific purpose, and way to produce.  To this end there are as many buildings, the most effective quantity, placement, and order of which is sure to elude mastery for some time.  After experimenting for a week the computer opponent still effortlessly squashes me, but I might maybe sort of understand how the game works.

The mastery of Widelands, like many other real-time strategy games, illuminates the nature of agency with an eerily hopeless light.  Here the Symbolic swallows the Imaginary whole.  What you learn as you progress toward mastery, toward exerting your will in the game is an increasing certainty of what must be done in order to win.  When you have learned the game, your moves in the game amount to a carrying out of an instruction list.  Once you know how to realize your will to win, playing the game is not to "play" at all, but rather to be an interchangeable executor of commands.  You become a computer processor and your subjectivity is only excess to the game.  Now able to exert your will, you have no will in the sense that you have the one and only will possible, and the means to achieve it are completely determined.

Your workers, too, are reduced to pure function.  They are pure active principles, merely extensions of your direction.  You cannot displease them and they have no needs other than food, although oddly, they sometimes don't act how you expect them to.  They do not riot or resist but the algorithms of the game sometimes cause them to clog your roads with unnecessary wares.  There are four kinds of workers: those that carry wares, those that work to harvest resources or construct buildings, those that fight, and those that mark the locations of resources.  Those that carry wares wait eternally along the roads, walking from point A to point B when necessary, apparently never sleeping.  None of them have any residences, there are only places to work and places in which they are stored until needed, like the wares they toil to produce.

In such a bare conception of civilization, it is perhaps no surprise that there is no trade in Widelands, or any other kind of interaction with other "tribes" besides war.  You may glimpse the other across the pickets of your territory, its workers walking around like ants just as yours do, but this is it: you and the other can only watch your soldiers face off two by two, politely swinging their weapons until one's health bar is reduced to nil and therefore dies.  This is no Civilzation (an oddly less complicated game), there will be no diplomacy, no currying of favor, no treaties, no trade, and certainly no diplomatic victory.  You create to destroy or to be destroyed.

But I keep coming back to try again, foolishly believing there is something to experience between beginning and end.  There is somehow possibility to bask in here: as trees shimmer in the wind and pastoral sound effects report, I watch my workers move wares serenely across my roads and I imagine we're on our way to something better.

(It's true, this post is inspired by and often badly tries to mimic The Nintendo Project.)

It Volunteered

Last night I began watching the latest series of Doctor Who.  It's a show that my friend has only exposed me to a few scattered episodes of, so it isn’t yet steeped in comforting familiarity for me.  Anne Carson might call this point of intriguing unfamiliarity, like meeting a stranger, “pure anthropology.”

Anyway, my god, it’s the kitschiest show ever.  Not that that’s news to anyone.

The second episode in this series, “The Beast Below,” has our alien yet unmistakably English hero getting down and dirty in the bowels of the enormous spaceship that is the UK (minus Scotland) several centuries in the future.

The ship’s exploitative “police state” is a compelling yet comically overdrawn metaphor for nationalism: its citizens are kept under the thrall of “smilers” who surveil them, becoming angry enforcers if they veer towards discovering the secret that an enormous, endangered alien beast is being tortured to propel their ship to the promised land of a new home world.

The state, we are to understand, has constructed in its citizenry the sense that they voluntarily chose to keep this a secret from themselves.  Everyone has been to the “voting booth” in which one is shown a video of the horrific way that their ship is really kept running, and votes to “forget,” or “protest.”  Voting to protest of course sends you down the the garbage chute to be eaten by the alien beast.

 
(As a male-female duo, there is something between The Doctor and Amy Pond akin to but very different from the Mulder-Scully dynamic of “The X Files.”  In “The X-Files,” Scully is set up as the rational, scientific sitting duck who is almost always wrong.  The show of course needs Mulder to have a foil to vindicate his belief in the paranormal, a postfeminist woman to play sidekick and ostensibly temper his wild intuitions.  In the show they both repeat as a kind of mantra this logic of needing Scully’s scientific rationality.  Amy Pond on the other hand is more or less as kooky as the Doctor, albeit in different ways.  There is a similar avowed logic of necessity,: she provides the humanity to his beyond-human viewpoint.  She is a different kind of foil for the Doctor. Without her, he would have no one to expound zany shit to.)

The Doctor of course, postrational stand-in for divine authority that he is, must intervene, and therefore is faced with an agonizing ethical decision: either let the alien beast continue in excruciating pain, or release it and in doing so tear apart the ship and its inhabitants.  He chooses not quite either, instead opting to zap the beast’s brain into that of an unfeeling vegetable.

But no, his female, human counterpart Amy Pond announces, after a bracing montage of intuitional logic rivaling the Doctor’s, that they have simply framed the problem wrong.  It turns out, Amy explains, that the beast didn’t have to be tortured at all to move the Starship UK along.  It would have helped them anyway.  It just "couldn’t stand all those children crying."  The happy ending falls somewhat flat, as the problem has not been resolved so much as blissfully discovered to be nonexistent.  No, the city is not maintained via violent dominion over the natural world.  No, the Symbolic order is not held together with pain.  No, the nation’s continuing existence is not owed to innumerable unspeakable acts.  The beast, she says, volunteered.