Symphony No. 8 was named by the stagehands of its Munich premier as “The Symphony of a Thousand,” for it mobilises a full chorus, a children’s chorus, a post-Wagnerian sized orchestra, four on-stage female voices, three on-stage male voices, one off-stage female voice, and one off-stage brass band. Such obsession of size, at first glance, seems to be a “product” out of Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk. Nonetheless, Mahler has a much more ambitious model in mind: Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (1525/26-94), the great master of polyphony, for whom the Pope was always willing to empty his treasury in order to be surrounded by the composer’s stereophonic magic: a four-dimensional fabric of human voices and trumpets, an assemblage of mathematical relationships that only the Devil Himself can reason, which offers the Pope the very illusion of reaching his ultimate transcendence.

Until today, no existing recording can truly capture the four dimensionality of Symphony No. 8, an experience to which one can only surrender, via the imperfection of one’s sensorium, as an image in time about time. The closest mimesis of this time about time, is the description of this symphony, in its fictional disguise, by Thomas Mann in Doctor Faustus (1947). In Mann’s description, language is used to re-construct the score in order to allow its readers to behold and contemplate this piece of art.

As Mann suggests, one underlying purpose of Mahler’s 8th is to “undo” Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, and the very curse that it imposed upon Mahler himself (for Mahler believed that no great symphonic composer in the Germanic tradition would be able to surpass Beethoven’s number of symphonies, though Mahler managed to sketch his Symphony No. 10, with an almost finished first movement). At first glance, the gesture almost appeared to be childish, for it seems like Mahler has merely put Symphony No. 9 in reverse by opening his own Symphony No. 8 with a magnified and majestic choral Part 1, and allows this glory to sink into a “distended,” almost “unformed” continuity of gestures in Part 2 (Faust, Part II, Act V, Scene 7), played by chamber ensembles within the orchestra, a seated chorus, and solo voices, as though the symphonic form collapsed, once and for all, and yielded itself to the mimetic art of drama.

Yes, the symphonic form did collapse, but in a much more primal and violent way than a mere reversal. Symphony No. 8 begins with a fully harmonised and magnificent invocation: “Veni, veni, creator spiritus,/mentes tuorum visita;/Imple superna gratia,/quae tu creasti pectora.” At first glance, this invocation, emphasised by a deep tonic chord played by the pipe organ and echoed by the majestic trumpets, seems to be an obscene call for God. Nevertheless, what this gesture asks for is gratia (grace/liberation) of the Artist from the “hearts which Thou didst create,” i.e. to free the Artist from all God’s creations in order for him to be free to create.

In other words, the sacred text that constitutes the invocative message in Part 1 is anything but sacred: it begs God to release the Artist from His constraints, from the chain that forever ties human beings to the burden of imitation. This “daemonic” gesture is then developed, through the obsessive fabric of polyphony (as opposed to harmony), a pure materialisation of mathematical possibilities (an act that simulates God’s creation, in Leibniz’s sense). This fabric of monstrosity, as I mentioned before, still defies the mechanical and digital technology of recording. Once flattened as pure aural event, the polyphonic and stereophonic voices of these mathematical relationships are merely assaults to the senses. However, experienced as a four-dimensional time about time, it simply pulls one out of the chronological spacetime continuum, and allows one to behold and contemplate this magnificent micro-cosmos that is germinated from the one single gesture of the beginning invocation.

“Infirma nostri corporis,/virtute firmans perpeti./Accende lumen sensibus,/Infunde amorem cordibus.” In polyphony, the composer is merely an instrument that succumbs to a series of possibilities, one opening to a finite set of others. Each passing relationship opens up a different set of senses, of affections, of longing, of hesitation, consonance, and dissonance, preparation and resolution. It is in polyphony that the composer feels closest to being the Creator, being liberated from all pre-existing creations, by holding onto the very principles of creation that pour light into the senses.

Part 2 stages the last scene of Goethe’s Faust, the triumph of the eternal feminine (eternal bliss) over the eternal masculine (eternal goal). In Mahler’s letter to his wife, Alma, written in June 1909, he finds the gendered metaphor merely an imperfect expression of what remains impossible for human beings to comprehend, and it was out of this very impossibility to comprehend that Goethe staged his final struggle. Musically, Mahler returns to the pre-classical form of the oratorio, an imperfect, two-dimensional imitation of the Passion narrative, the ultimate vulgarisation of the vulgarising trajectory of Christ, beautified by music. Nevertheless, Mahler’s music here is almost repetitive, trivial, and cyclical; in other words, it lacks the very objective (the “male” desire/drive) to reach any form of transcendence (in itself an anti-Wagnerian gesture). In fact, it is precisely because of the impossibility of transcendence, and the human incapability of reaching it, that the hetero-normative male body has to invent the feminine in order to “deliver” him from the meaninglessness of life.

Mahler parodies this human invention by materialising the Mater gloriosa as a female voice offstage (in the New York Philharmonic performance, she is put on the second tier above the left wing of the stage): “Komm! Hebe dich zu höhern Sphären! Wenn er dich ahnet, folgt er nach” (Come, rise up to higher spheres!/If he is aware of you, he will follow). Here, the Artist (Faust), “post-mortem” and absent, has long receded from this imagined struggle. In the final stanza, the orchestra suddenly bursts into an outcry, when the chorus sings: “Alles Vergängliche/Ist nur ein Gleichnis” (All that is transitory/Is but an image). On the surface of the text, the ineffable triumphs, and the Virgin delivers Faust’s soul to eternity. What the glorious trumpets (staged around the concert hall, and in the case of last night, on the right-winged second tier of the concert hall), and the seething chorus celebrate (another tribute to Palestrina), however, is the ultimate triumph of the transitory image over eternity, repeated over and over again as the symphony reaches its dazzling coda: the ultimate triumph of Art over God.

Mahler did believe that he had already been dead by the time he was finishing his 8th. In fact, in his 9th, Mahler borrows the motif from Beethoven’s “Farewell” Sonata, and refuses to resolve it not as a gesture to defy death, but a resignation to the fact that the composer had to die before he finished his last note. Perhaps Mann is “right on” when he overlaps the creative trajectories of Mahler and Schönberg together, for the glimpses of Mahler’s 10th would show, after the end of symphony, the only way for music to calve out a new path on its own is the final collapse of classical harmony and consonance, in a form that both recalls the pre-classical complexity of polyphony, and the modernist obsession with the dissonance, two poles that have already been staged and played out as an artist’s eternal struggle in the 8th Symphony—what a grand finale chosen by Lorin Maazel!

*This weekend's concerts are the final appearances of Loren Maazel as the director of the New York Philharmonic. Because of the scale of the production, Mahler's Symphony No. 8 is certainly not a frequently staged symphony. It was last performed by the New York Philharmonic (before last night) on 9 October 1976.

Despite its long association with the notion of cinematic realism from the early 1960s, This Sporting Life, as Barnaby Taylor argues, stands at the threshold between the British filmmakers’ faith in and scepticism about realism.[1] For Robin Cross, the film “was caught by the turn of the tide and left stranded like a beached whale on the sandbanks of fantasy which were to mark the changing mood in British society and cinema.”[2] In other words, these New Wave directors’ self-proclaimed representation of the working-class social reality in the industrial North at the time is, seen retrospectively, a fantasy that puts a deeper problem, personal or social, under erasure.

For Taylor, Anderson is less interested in social criticism than visualising the naivety of an individual’s ambition that is persistently confined, in every single frame of the film, by the social conditions and institutions around him. On the narrative level, Frank Machin (Harris), a miner who tries to break away from his immediate economic confines by securing a position in the City Rugby League team, finds himself limited by another set of confines. On the one hand, Machin is financially (and almost sexually) exploited by the club’s owner Gerald Weaver (Alan Badel, 1923-82), and his wife Anne (Vanda Godsell, 1922-90). On the other hand, the brute force that earns Machin success in football fails to earn him love and family with his landlady Margaret Hammonds (Rachel Roberts, 1953-80). Taylor argues that the film can be summarised by a single shot towards the end, in which Machin, having escaped from the confines of the decrepit boarding house he ends up staying, finds himself graphically limited by dark, cold, angular, and mechanical lines and shades of “nature,” and the inescapable gaze of the camera frame (figure 1).[3]

Figure 1.

If this shot is indeed the visual and semiotic motif par excellence, to what mise-en-abîme does the constellation of signs around it lead for us? As Cross suggests, we may produce a more productive reading of the film by not treating what surrounds Machin as “nature” or reality, but as a fantasy. Two-thirds of the film’s narrative is indeed organised into flashbacks, triggered by Machin’s inhaling nitrous oxide as a dentist tries to pull out six front teeth that were broken in a match. These flashbacks are therefore best understood as memories that his mind reactivated or reinvented in order to make sense of the traumatic pain he is experiencing, induced in a proto-narcotic state.[4] In other words, the film is about Machin’s attempt to locate a totalising myth that can somehow gives consistency to his trauma, but fails to do so.

This proto-narcotic state allows Machin to finally navigate these fantasies or events that he has so far refused to access. Throughout the film, Anderson represents Machin as an oversized bundle of physical nerves that lack any psychological dimension. For example, in Machin’s trial game, the film uses a series of jump cuts to concatenate corporeal impacts and dangers that Machin creates both for the opposing team and his own teammates. In fact, Machin earns himself a chance to occupy the striking position by first burying himself into a scrum, hits the striker of his own team from within, and blames it to a member from the opposing team. In the dressing room, we constantly see Machin swelling his already broad chest and asking his teammates how he looks. His oversized and well-coordinated body, however, is made clumsy by the low-ceilinged and claustrophobic house in which he lives with Hammonds, often shot with high-contrast lighting that shades whatever open space left by the clustering furniture. In the scene in which Machin coerces Hammonds to sleep with him, the camera “crouches” behind the bed, observing and magnifying from a low angle the irresistibly large body of Machin blocking and grabbing the physically and fragile body of Hammonds. By exposing the film for the interior while maintaining a high contrast ratio between the exterior and the interior, the overexposed window that opens to the external world is completely erased, making Machin’s body the only visual, and in fact sensual, dominant in the entire frame. In a repetition of this scene later on, Hammonds complains that Machin is “too big” and too “stupid.” Towards the end of the film, after Hammonds’s death, Machin punches a spider on the hospital wall, as though he could only organise the world he perceives by the physical memory of pain.

In his proto-narcotic state, however, Machin comes close to identifying a symbolic substitute for his traumatic pain: the pair of boots that belonged to the deceased Mr. Hammonds, carefully preserved and cared for by Rachel Hammonds by the fireplace, and is always isolated from the narrative continuity by close-ups. These close-ups are often followed by Machin’s sceptical, despicable, and frightened looks, as though the boots had been looking at him.[5] The threatening gaze of the boots is then tentatively disavowed after Machin and Hammonds have finally slept together and remained in good terms, as Machin discovers that Hammonds has secretly concealed those boots within a cabin. The narrative therefore seems to be organised around Machin’s attempt to substitute Hammonds’ dead husband and his failure to do so. This failure is confirmed powerfully in a bleak medium close-up of Hammonds in front of a graveyard of a church in which the wedding of Machin’s best friend Maurice Braithwaite (Colin Blakely, 1930-87) has just taken place. The telephoto lens flattens the tombstones and Hammonds’s face onto the same plane. In an equally flat manner, Hammonds tells Machin, “If you are with dirt, you are dirt. Everyone can see it.” The “dirt” here explicitly refers to Machin, who behaved “like a pig” in a high-class restaurant the evening before. Nonetheless, it can also be understood as a reference to Machin’s wish to become the dirt that covers her husband’s dead body, and that he shall remain as such without ever displacing the body.

Machin’s fantasised love for Hammonds is therefore a “classical” form of misrecognition. What does he try to disavow? One aspect of his life that he disavows has a classical Oedipal explanation. Upon meeting an old man Mr. Johnson (William Harnell, 1908-75), who agrees to give Machin a trial game and takes on a personal interest in Machin’s well being, Machin calls him “Dad.” This apparent Oedipal complex, however, is quickly denied by Machin, as Hammonds suggests that he treats Johnson as a father, a figure that seems to be missing from Machin’s life. Similarly, Machin never takes his manager (the British term for a head coach) Charles Slomer (Arthur Lowe, 1915-82) seriously as a caring father surrogate, even though Ann Weaver has once told Machin explicitly that it was Slomer who persuaded Gerald Weaver to sign Machin.

Nonetheless, the most striking scene, I argue, is a moment in a pub at which Machin holds the hands of his best friend Braithwaite tightly, and asks Braithwaite to convince him that he would never lose Hammonds, the only person who gives meaning to his life. At this moment, the film cuts to a close-up of Braithwaite and stays on his face for a long time, showing us the utterly embarrassed and shocked Braithwaite trying to look somewhere in order to escape the overwhelming gaze of the camera. What shocks and embarrasses Braithwaite is Machin’s unexpected need for same-sex intimacy, openly judged by the Gaze of the camera, unable to be sutured unless he is willing to return it (as a reverse shot). In fact, Machin’s latent homosexual desire has been manifested twice before in the film. First, in the dressing room, the camera observes Machin and Braithwaite, stark naked, wrestling in a bathing pool, technically rubbing their genitals together (the team’s masseur indeed calls them “fags”). Their homosexual pleasure, however, is concealed under the disguise of team celebration and machismo. Second, at the height of Machin’s season, in a pub, Machin walks up to Braithwaite and boxes with him playfully. At this point, Machin’s fiancée walks into the pub and tells Machin about her engagement with Braithwaite. The camera, lurking around a corner and observing carefully Machin’s face (albeit in a medium shot), captures a moment of disappointment. Machin then quickly hides his disappointment by giving the fiancée a kiss, an act that he repeats awkwardly after Braithwaite’s wedding.

This Sporting Life is therefore best understood as a queer text that is narrated under the confines of a heterosexual text, a structural tension that, one may argue, mirrors Anderson’s own sexual repression.[6] The narrative of an oversized bundle of nerves trying to make sense of his desire and death drive through the symbolic, and the social conditions that make such mediation impossible, are therefore a metaphor for the actual condition of a sexually repressed gay man of the time. Nevertheless, Anderson, who openly admires Harrison’s body, uses the camera as an observing eye to capture the actor’s need to come to terms with his latent desire for same-sex intimacy. In this sense, we may need to re-adjust our former reading of the camera as a gaze of judgment; rather, it is best comprehended as a tool for individual liberation. In this sense, in the emblematic shot that Taylor analyses (figure 1), the camera does not serve as the ultimate boundary that limits the vision of Machin; rather, Machin’s overdeveloped sentient body is always looking beyond the information that is capable of being mediated within the camera frame.

By erasing the queer text with a classical heterosexual text, This Sporting Life called for the end of an era for both cinema and football. What Anderson suggests is that cinematic realism, as believed by the Cashiers group (the dominant discourse of the time), mobilised simply as a hetero-normative device, is not real enough. Similarly, the football pitch, shaped and structured like a cinematic screen in order to satisfy the death drive of the self-proclaimed heterosexual males, will never stage a “real man-to-man” struggle until it reinvents itself to accommodate desire. In the final shot of the film, the camera, in one single take, observes Machin being hit by an opponent violently. The camera then tilts down in slow motion to show Machin panting on the ground. Machin then gets up in real time, and the camera stays on a low-angle medium shot until a spectator from behind him yells at him. The camera, in slow motion, then shows the haunting image of Machin turning his head towards the spectators in utter contempt (see the title figure). Returning to normal speed, the camera then shows Machin running away from it, and the camera pans right to show a long shot of the pitch. In the frame, Machin runs towards the rest of the team. The background of the shot uses the gloomy Victorian town as the backdrop, with two oversized nuclear reactors “inserted” in the middle (figure 2). Taylor argues that in this shot, the open field is delimited by the spectators on the one hand, and the wasteland on the other.[7] We may turn around this argument. The football field is supposed to be an organised space, a lawful opening between the disorganised and fragmented space of the city, and the spectators who behave like animals. The image of Machin marching towards an industrial wasteland signifies a call for cinema and football to be reinvented in order to confront a deeper, and possibly more disturbing, reality that we have yet to confront.

Figure 2.

From a sociological perspective, the haunting presence of the nuclear reactors as the visual dominant that haunts this Victorian town also signifies the incongruence between conflicting modes of economy. It is perhaps too easy to say that the conflict is one between Fordism and post-Fordism, for sociologists like David Landes and Martin Weiner argue that despite being the first European nation to be industrialised, “England” has never been fully industrialised, nor has it fully gone through Fordism and experienced the social transformations associated with it.[8] In this sense, Machin’s transition from the mine pit and the football pitch is best understood as a mere change of trade within the pre-Fordist mode of production.

Most important, throughout the film, Machin is unable to recognise his position in this structurally incongruent economy. For example, his insistence upon the club’s paying him £1,000 up front (a practice that foreshadows the post-Fordist football business today) without knowing why, and his use of this sum of money to purchase an oversized car (which, like his own body, looks ridiculously large in the provincial town) signify his sensitivity to, yet incomprehensibility of, an underlying economic change. In fact, the board room scene and the aftermath thematise this incongruence between pre-Fordism and post-Fordism. In the board room scene, although Machin is overjoyed after he has been told by the board of directors that he will be paid £1,000 up front, Weaver’s jocular mood and the relative ease of the decision-making process suggest that Machin could have asked for more. In fact, as he asks Johnson and Hammonds if they could guess how much he is worth, not only that the concept of estimating a footballer’s labour as a future commodity is alien to them, the incredible joy of Machin tells us that he still has no idea how his labour is being measured. Here, a misrecognition takes place. When Weaver drives Machin home, Weaver first explains to Machin that Mr. Hammonds died of an accident in Weaver’s mine, and Weaver denies compensation to Rachel Hammonds by considering the accident as a suicide. At this point, the film’s spectators are aware that Weaver’s company is evading their legal responsibility, although Machin takes Weaver’s words seriously and misconstrues that Rachel Hammonds must have known that her chronic depressive manner has driven her ex-husband to committing suicide. Machin’s incapability of comprehending his alienation is further enhanced when Weaver slaps his hand on Machin’s knee as a sexual innuendo. In other words, what Machin is worth as a future commodity is supposed to be measured not by his ability as a footballer, but by his sex appeal to the owner of the club (and his wife), a point that Machin will once again miss when he turns down Ann’s sexual offer.

In this sense, the social blockage that makes impossible the fulfilment of individual desire is Britain’s own “pre-modernity,” both economically and ideologically. What Anderson tries to suggest is not really the plight of industrialism and the psychological fragmentation that is associated with modernity; rather, the sense of psychological fragmentation and sexual repression have their roots in the spectators' very failure to recognise and articulate their pre-modernity and desire in the first place.

Notes

[1] Barnaby Taylor, The British New Wave: A Certain Tendency? (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2006), 143-63.

[2] Robin Cross, The Big Book of British Films (Bideford: Charles Herridge Ltd., 1984), 152; qtd. in Taylor, 156.

[3] Taylor, 144-63.

[4] See Jean Laplanche, “Notes on Afterwardness,” in John Fletcher, ed., Essays on Otherness (London: Routledge, 1999), 260-65.

[5] See Slvoj Žižek, “In His Bold Gaze My Ruin Is Writ Large,” in Žižek, ed., Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock) (1992; London: Verso, 1997), 247-52.

[6] See, for example, Gavin Lambert, Mainly about Lindsay Anderson (New York: Knopf, 2000).

[7] For an analysis of this last shot, see, for example, Taylor, 156-60.

[8] David Landes, Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989); Martin Weiner, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850-1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981).

(1) How can one accept that a director, who has always spoken openly his social and political criticism (and therefore had most of his internationally-acclaimed films banned by the authorities), kowtowed to the state apparatus by making what appears to be an unapologetic piece of propaganda? (2) How can one accept that a director, who has always valued the beauty and power of photographic reality, created the most incredible and phantasmagorical spectacle of computer-generated images (CGI's)? Perhaps we can work through these two levels of discomfort and see if we can come up with a new interpretation of the film.

This impression that Hero is a sellout probably comes from a straightforward reading of the film. According to such reading, four warriors, Broken Sword (Tony Leung), Flying Snow (Maggie Cheung), Sky (Donnie Yen), Moon (Zhang Ziyi) ask Nameless (Jet Li) to assassinate the King of Qin (r. 246-221 BCE; as the First Emperor, r. 221-210 BCE; Chen Daoming). Nameless hesitates at the last moment because he sees the King's potential to achieve and preserve the unity of the tianxia (empire).

Nonetheless, this “sellout” theory may become more difficult to explain as we consider the film's financial basis. The film's $30,000,000 budget was raised under the guarantee of three distributors, Beijing New Picture Film (China), EDKO Film (Hong Kong), and Miramax Films (US and UK). These distributors guaranteed, at the stage of preproduction, distribution in four major markets: China, Hong Kong, the US, and the UK. In this respect, Mark Harrison suggests that the film was perhaps one of the first instances of a piece of “national” propaganda that was backed up by a global financial market for their mutual benefit, since the continued coherence of the “Chinese nation” guanrantees the continued stability of the marketplace (See, “Zhang Yimou's Hero and the Globalisation of Propoganda,” in Millennium--Journal of International Studies, 34.2 [2006]: 569-72). According to such interpretation, the film's plot cannot be more metaphorical: global financiers, some of who might have different troubles with their imagined “China,” pay tribute to the “future emperor” in order to safeguard the integrity of the global market.

Too easy, perhaps?

Not unlike any “classical” narrative system, Hero is organised around an enigma, and in this case, an epistemological one. The narrative structure is modelled directly upon the cinematic classic Rashomon (Kurosawa Akira [1910-98], 1950), which has been known for its narrative non-linearity and unreliability. The spectators of Rashomon were therefore seduced by their curiosity of finding the truth despite the impossibility to find one. Nevertheless, the spectators of Hero today are confident enough to claim: “I can by-pass the structure of non-linearity, the questionable narrative, and even the narrative about disbelief, and reconstruct a perfectly straightforward and linear narrative that I fully believe.” The criticism against the film is therefore symptomatic of a fundamental epistemological turn: the spectators' affective responses to the cinematic image no longer give these spectators physical or intellectual knowledge about factive reality (or the narrative puzzle from which one could question this reality); rather, these responses are re-processed, re-configured, and re-assembled actively and effortlessly as pieces of information that affirm a pre-conceived notion of fictive reality. In other words, the film is merely one out of many “para-texts” (texts that put certain referential differences between them under erasure) that the spectators can browse through in order to reach a conclusion they have already expected to reach.

This spectatorial behaviour is mirrored in the film by the King of Qin, who interrogates Nameless about the “back stories” of the four warriors. The King's interrogation differs from the way it was done in Rashomon. In Rashomon, the spectators are interested to find out which testimony they should trust in order to find truth or reality. In Hero, the King of Qin has already had a preconceived notion of what reality is, and is only interested to entertain himself, and to re-confirm what he presumes as the truth. The basis of interrogation is also based on a presumed guilt: “I know that you are guilty, and I am only interested in knowing why, of all the well-known warriors, you are the chosen one.” Having been dissatisfied by Nameless's claim that he has defeated all the other warriors in order to “come so close” to the imperial seat, the King commands Nameless to tell an alternative version of the stories. As a result, this second version is best understood not as a presentation of the truth, but as a fantasy that the King desires to hear in order to reaffirm his preconceived notion of reality. Moreover, Nameless, being caught by the King in his palace and is awaiting his final execution, is merely a post-mortem abject who is kept alive by the King in order to tell stories (I borrow the term “post-mortem” from Thomas Elsaesser; see European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood [Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2005], 125; see also, Juila Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez [New York: Columbia UP], 1982).

Read in this light, Hero is, first and foremost, a parody of the position Zhang Yimou took when he decided to direct the film: a storyteller who is deprived, politically, of his agency of storytelling. Not only that, Nameless is epistemologically confined not only by the King alone, but by the thousands of physical and CGI-generated soldiers, who demand his execution of the story, and eventually, of his biological body. In this sense, the storyteller, technically, does not “propagate” the ambition of the state; rather, the spectators from across the entire political spectrum expected his story to confirm their collective ambition, of which “state power” is merely a symptom. Put it simply, Hero is not so much a propaganda that speaks for the biopolitical power of the state than a film that is about this power.

The excessive use of CGI's in Hero, though aesthetically tasteful, responds to the spectators' demand (not unlike the King of Qin's) for a collection of images that corresponds to a database of images to which they have already had access in parallel media. The way these CGI's are related to the optical images, and the way they can be re-connected with the film's position in cinema's teleology can help us understand the ethical stance it takes. Hence, let us study one of the film's sequences closely.

In a fight between Nameless and Sky, Zhang Yimou borrows from the famous martial arts novel Shujian enchou lu (Book and Sword, Jin Yong [b. 1924], 1955) a mental combat between the Qianlong Emperor (r. 1735-96) and his fictional brother Chen Jialuo over a performance of qin (zither). Shot with a mixture of black-and-white and colour footage, and the employment of physical special effects (including the use of slow motion, wires, and rain machines), this part of the sequence uses optical cinematic techniques that create an image that confirms the spectators' preconceived notion of a mental combat (i.e. a mental combat as described by a martial arts novel).

At the climax, however, the fight is supposed to turn from being mental to physical. Ironically, the cinematic device now turns from optical to digital, with computer-generated raindrops that make visible the jianqi (the chi of sword), a concept originated from the martial-arts manhua (manga) in Hong Kong, popularised by the comic artist Ma Wing-shing (b. 1961) in his manhua series Fung Wan (Wind and Cloud, 1989-; figure 1), and first referred to cinematically in the film Swordsman (King Hu and Tsui Hark, 1990). How are these CGI's edited together?

Figure 1. Ma Wing-shing, Fung Wan (Wind and Cloud).

This sequence, I argue, does not present us a cause-and-effect chain (as in a classical Hollywood sequence); rather, it is organised around affective impacts, sometimes at the expense of maintaining the illusion of spatial and temporal continuity. In this sequence, the film first cuts to a close-up of a sword modelled upon the one used by Fung Wan's protagonist Bou Keng-wan (Cloud; figure 2), whose jianqii is made visible by the circular movement of raindrops following the sword's movement in slow motion. The film then cuts to an extreme close-up of Sky's eyes (figure 3). This is followed by a close-up of Nameless passing through Sky's wall of jianqi (figure 4). The film then shows a three-quarter shot of Sky moving his sword in a circular motion, whose jianqi is made visible by the circular movement of the raindrops (figure 5). The film then cuts back to the close-up of Nameless, passing through layers of jianqi, each being represented by a “wall” of raindrops (figure 6). The film then “jump-cuts” (not strictly, but technically) to a close-up of the sword passing through Sky's jianqi (figure 7); it then cuts to a long shot over Sky's shoulder, in which we see Nameless's body piercing through the walls of jianqi, and another jump-cut into a three-quarter shot (figures 8-9). The film then cuts to a medium close-up of Sky to show the impact of the action (figure 10). Now, the film cuts back to a repetition of figure 9 (figure 11). Without any pretence to create continuity, the film cuts to an extreme close-up of Nameless cutting Sky's sword into two halves (figure 12).

Figure 2.

Figure 3.

Figure 4.

Figure 5.

Figure 6.

Figure 7.

Figure 8.

Figure 9.

Figure 10.

Figure 11.

Figure 12.

This sequence therefore concatenates a series of impacts, made visible and sensible by the CGI's and jump cuts, an organising principle not only of the martial arts film, but its immediate predecessor the martial arts novel (and its theatrical performances). Nonetheless, with its overt references to a sensorial database from its literary, manhua, and cinematic sources, these “impacts” are no longer there to induce affective responses; rather, they confirm the information that has long been deposited in the spectators' minds as cinematic and cultural memories. As a result, the sequence is not so much about mimesis; rather, it responds to the spectators' conceptual expectation: “Please re-configure our memories. Show us something that we cannot imitate, or better yet, something that Hollywood has yet to imitate.”

The interesting point here is that Zhang Yimou has planted within this sequence a subtle teleological reversal: a mental fight represented by a physical image; a physical fight represented by a digital (conceptual, non-physical) image. Is there an intersection in this seemingly oxymoronic relationship?

We need to bear in mind that in the terms of “martial arts novel philosophy,” a physical fight is merely a mimesis of the mental fight. In other words, the CGI sequence offers a mimesis of the mathematical relationships that are ontically and ontologically prior to its physical manifestation (similarly, a CGI is the product of the mathematical relationships that constitute it). Interestingly enough, the same can be said about the mental fight that is represented physically. The mental fight, manifested physically by the optical image, is in itself a mimesis of the mathematical relationships of the choreographed action.

This teleological reversal has therefore made visible the common mathematical root of the martial arts cinema, whether optical or digital. I will explain it via two historically distant, but perhaps archaeologically proximate routes.

First, an epistemological one: In Ethics, Spinoza has raised an epistemological doubt. For him, if the universe is constituted by one substance (with “God” as its origin), how can we explain, on a conceptual level, mathematical differences of the same substance (e.g. the difference between one man and two men would then be a numerical, not substantial difference)? If we push this doubt further, what is substance besides a set of numerical possibilities (Part 2, Proposition 44, Scholium, 152)? In response to this, Leibniz proposes that “God” is merely the Possibility from which mathematical relationships are generated (see Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics and Other Essays, trans. Daniel Garber and Roger Ariew [Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991], Section 9, 9). Second, an ontological one: Where shall we find martial arts and cinema in a “Chinese encyclopaedia?,” i.e. can we take Foucault's wild experiment rather literally and see what it suggests (As suggested by Foucault, Les mots et les choses [1966; Paris: Gaillimard, 1999], 7)? In the Wulin jiushi (Old Affairs of Wulin, c. 1290, written by Zhou Mi, 1232-98), a Yuan-dynasty encyclopaedic work on folk cultures in Wulin (now Hanzhou, a commercial centre during the Southern Song dynasty), martial arts and proto-cinematic arts and crafts (e.g. the shadow play, the opera, the novel and its narration, painting, [ahem ... ] even hairdressing) are, curiously enough, being categorised within the same ontological category (Zhou Mi 周密, Zengbu Wulin jiushi 《增補武林舊事》 [Enlarged and Supplemented Edition of the Old Affairs in Wulin] [c. 1290; Taipei: Shangwu yinshu guan 商務印書館, 1982], chapter 3, 10b). Their affinity is their shared interest in making sensible mathematical relationships that would otherwise remain invisible and insensible to the spectators (to this list, therefore, we may add music).

In this light, cinema may not be ontologically rooted in the mimetic arts of painting and theatre; but as our old friends Plato and Aristotle have doubted, these mimetic arts have their ontological origin in music (and mathematics). It is also in this light that we can now say that the CGI can be put side by side with the optical image as both ontologically related to the quest for the mathematical origin of the order of things. These archaeological sites neither suggests that it is “business as usual,” nor do they suggest that with the advent of the CGI, there marks an ontological shift simply because of a technological change; rather, a new teleological picture can potentially be drawn by pushing further Bazinian ontology: What ontical-ontological “origin” does cinema try to put under erasure, a teleological “movement” that has so far been manifested by the human desire to defy death? (For further references of this ontological question, see Elsaesser, “Early Film History and Multi-Media: An Archaeology of Possible Futures,” in Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Thomas Keenan, ed, New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader [London: Routeldge, 2006], 13-26).

The teleological reversal in the sequence of Hero can be understood in this light, and can be made clear in ludological terms. In the fight sequence between Nameless and Sky, the “mental fight” represents a series of predictable outcomes (in their minds) within the limitation of the physical technology (hence, the use of physical and optical special effects). The “actualised” series of events, however, is determined by the random interventions between pure strategies, and the database of pure strategies is mirrored by an equally large sample space that is made available by digital technology.

In fact, with the aid of ludological interpretations, we can open up an ethical riddle planted within the film itself. Not unlike any other martial arts film, Hero can be understood in terms of a tension between predictability and unpredictability, co-operativeness and in-coperativeness, which lay out the paths of possibilities that the game can potentially follow. Nevertheless, in this game, there is one predictable element (mathematical constant): the King ultimately wins. The lure of the game for an artist, given the poiltical confines, is therefore not so much about how close one gets to the king, but how one maintains the maximum creative space in a perpetual state of checkmate.

What Zhang Yimou implies is that the state can exercise its biopolitical power by trapping the storyteller between two deaths. Nonetheless, precisely because of the storyteller's até, the storyteller, either as a martial artist or as a filmmaker, can still assert a profound relationship with a mathematical possibility that turns around a manifest state of political totality, albeit on an abstract and individual level. As Sima Qian argues, an assassin may not be a very ethical figure, but within the rather unethical political tension, he remains loyal to his “will” (Sima Qian 司馬遷, Shi ji 《史記》 [Records of the Grand Historian], vol. 8 [Beijing: Zhonghua shuju 中華書局, 2002], chapter 26, 2538). In one register, Nameless, as an assassin, seems to carry out the “will of the people”; but more important, what the “people” fail to recognise is precisely the individual “will” of the assassin himself, which surpasses the “will of the people.” By telling fantasised accounts of what “the people” want to hear, the artist is still free to maintain her/his relationship with a Possibility that stands prior to the constitution of the “people” as a totalising community.

Maybe there were eight thousand people who needed a bike and couldn't afford to pay for one: petty crime is, like other economic activities, subject to a rational calculus. But destruction? Le Monde figures that these bikes are serving as symbolic scapegoats. “Velib', the bobo fetish,” they call it. Maybe those ranks of cheery exercise machines, so unobjectionable to me, appear as an aggressive expression of low-carbon-footprint moralism to other people. Think of the resentments stirred up by the mention of Brie, Volvos or arugala in America. I bet the symbolism of the bicycle, and the reasons for its apparently irrational destruction, would repay investigation.

Siding with a minority of the Metafilter commentators, I think the crucial split occurs at this alternative: why didn't the young couple just elope and make a life for themselves? She was sixteen, so they'd have had to go to another state to marry without parental consent-- assuming they had to be married at all (forgive me for thinking that radical thought). But none of that is impossible to imagine or perform. The amazing thing is that the girl saw no way out of her predicament short of killing her parents; she couldn't imagine a life for herself that included a life for them. What can possibly account for that failure of imagination?

I say: parental control, internalized and accepted. The NYT, reflective of its reader base of comfortably well-off and educated people who need to be told all the time what other people in their class are doing, has been publishing inspiring stories-- well-timed to coincide with the economic bust-- that say that it's all right, even beneficial, to leave your kids alone, not hire soccer coaches, piano teachers, algebra tutors, social outreach coordinators and dermatologists to manage their every waking moment. The return to autonomy-- but put in a forum and format that assures us that the parents are more dependent on the herd than even their children are. Well, I like the idea of greater autonomy. But I don't know if Americans-- at least, Americans above the poverty line-- are ever going to get with that program. For it seems that we buy all the intervention we can afford, high tech or low tech.

Is there a scale of child autonomy? Impressionistically, I would expect to find that in some societies the children are practically considered property of the parents, required to accept their every decision without contest, and in some societies a sixteen-year-old is expected to make her own decisions about what to do and whom to do it with, even where to live. I put aside as exceptional (speaking optimistically) societies where war or epidemics have left great numbers of kids to fend for themselves. Lots of autonomy there, but not how anyone would want it.

A metric for child autonomy, usable because publicly assessable and coordinated with a specific moment in the child's life course, would be the Romeo-and-Juliet scale. In the group under consideration, are marriages or other unions arranged by the parents (RJ 1), subject to parental consent (RJ 2), or entirely up to the future spouses (RJ 3)?

Arranged marriages are still exotic and, presumably, rare in the US, but the negative version of arranged marriages, that is, parental exclusion of a potential mate, seems from my Metafilter evidence to be utterly common. It's part of our ideology of courtship here-- we want to believe that unions are freely entered into-- that only when the parents specify the future mate it's considered an arranged marriage. I'd like to think about the exclusion of unacceptable mates or dates by the parents as a somewhat more diffuse example of the same thing-- not equivalent, of course, but diluted in a quantifiable way. And-- still speaking impressionistically here, with a wish for statistics but no actual stats-- I bet that would put most American social groups somewhere in the middle of our Romeo-and-Juliet scale, in the RJ 2 zone but with pulls toward 1 and 3 depending on class, milieu, education, religion and so on.

In those terms, the family in the Texas case was definitely close to RJ 1, since the parents had extremely clear ideas about what would constitute an eligible match for the daughter and no one questioned their authority to make that determination (sneaking merely avoids conflict with authority, it doesn't subvert it effectively). How “normal” were they? The churchiness quotient was high, the option to home-school betokens uncompromisingness (though the parents had subsequently allowed their kids to return to public school and take jobs). So in some ways they were not in the middle of the comparison set and not much like most of the parents I know in my middle-sized college town. But parents having, not just strong opinions, but a conceded right to say yes or no: this probably is the kind of thing that people, if you asked them, would find unworthy of admiration in others but permissible in their own case. It's considered a case of caring, and caring is considered 100% good, though if I began “caring” about everything you do you would probably call it meddling. And that's where the problem of American parenting shows up, in the assumption that more parental leadership is always good, which correlates with a lack of concern for the initiative that kids might develop on their own. I don't know what other ingredients went into the Texas case, but the fact that the kids believed that nothing short of murder could solve their Juliet problem shows me that they had accepted to live their lives under the protection of two people with the authority of gods. In that strait-laced Texas Baptist household, the fifth commandment (“Honor thy father and mother”) should not have been promoted to the level of the first (“thou shalt have no other gods before me”).

Languages and literature were what drew me on. I was good enough at them to get into advanced courses and be encouraged to major in one of those fields. My fellow students were already talking like their parents: “Major in Greek? What are you going to do with that?”

I don't remember what I answered, but I'm sure I thought it was a critical reflection on the presuppositions of their question and they thought it was obnoxiously snooty.

The majority of the Duke students of 1977-1981 were (depending on how you saw things) either still children of the 50s, seeking security and the good life through a solid professional qualification, or already Reaganites, determined to get as rich as possible and concentrating only on efforts that would achieve that goal. I say “the majority”: I don't have statistics to back this up (I guess the Alumni Office could provide them), just the subjective impression that there weren't many of us who were studying languages, literatures, philosophy, anthropology and history, heedless of the morrow and likely (with luck and persistence) to end up in front of a blackboard. It wasn't, by the way, at all the case that the artsy students came from privileged backgrounds and the business-minded ones came from the striving and starving classes. Rather the opposite. My two best college friends grew up in the kind of circumstances where a roll of paper towels was an unreasonable luxury (so kids, sitting over their hot dog and bean soup, yelled “Pass the rag!” when a napkin was needed), and they were the ones who I felt were really living the life of the mind. When I was in the company of people from the comfortable classes, like myself, I thought they deserved more honor if they were going for something less likely to yield profit, and merely rational if they were already planning to preserve or enlarge their family fortunes. But I guess the times were not so dire: whether because supply of the nice things in life was not so constrained, or because the demand for them was less voracious, being pulled towards the arts and humanities wasn't yet seen as an indication of irresponsibility or mental defect.

These days the drumbeat is hard to ignore: the papers are repeating each other's assertions that colleges need to prepare people for careers, not adorn them with the luxuries of a liberal education. When a financial paper interviews the president of an Ivy League college, the topic of how the crisis affects the institution just naturally segues into a question about whether it's time to close down the “department of French literature” (sic; to read the phrase with a knowledge of the semantic associations of American journalism, it's bad enough that it should be “French,” but “literature” on top of that!). Maybe this is the bombing that precedes the assault, an attempt to take away the talking points that would make it easier to appeal to a glorious tradition or a high purpose in defense of those fields of knowledge whose results are, yes, not immediately exchangeable for cash but more useful than a lot of other things in leading life, or national life, in a complicated world.

Suppose the humanities really are a batch of “social graces” added onto the person. Well, would it be entirely a waste of time for us to teach our children good manners? Isn't the spectacle of a person with money but no insight or curiosity or social tact one of the most uninspiring things imaginable? I would even be willing to take the rock out of the hand of the attackers of the humanities and argue that, in a large sense of “social” and a large sense of “graces,” social graces are just what we need, just what people have always needed to make decent lives for themselves and their children. It's not about different shapes of fork and how to curtsey. Another talking point: though they may not bring in the riches, the humanities and philosophy are cheap, cheap to learn and cheap to practice. Some of the best stuff in these domains comes out of countries where you won't find a lot of electricity or marble countertops. Homer and Aeschylus accepted as a matter of course diet and living conditions that would repel a modern street person.

I know this must sound like a self-interested argument. Of course I want my field to survive and prosper, and not just for the duration of my career, but well beyond. But in this case, I'm also trying to knock down a poor argument that casts humanities as indulgences, therefore things that need to be cut back now that times are tough. (The real matter at issue may be that the humanities are poorly defended within the universities themselves, and so easy targets for cutting; the “luxury” argument would then be no more than a pretext. But let's take it as a genuine argument for now.) It's not so clear that a lot of what you might learn in business school is such serious, meat-and-potatoes, bedrock, necessary stuff either. For example, all that theorizing, so well-received in the day, that assumed the rationality of markets. If there had been less of that, people would have made fewer stupid assumptions in buying stocks, in leveraging assets, in structuring businesses and portfolios, and we would be sitting in a smaller pile of dreck today. Surely an influential and erroneous economic ideology, maintained well after market behavior has questioned its validity, is a more serious luxury to have spent the rent money on. You could buy a lot of French departments for what the Chicago economics department has lost the US economy lately.

If the economic stimulus package isn't just money to burn, it should be spent on things we need: infrastructure, education (not just the B-school variety, please; see above), health care, and repairs to our environment, by which I don't just mean cleaning up Superfund sites or planting trees or thinking pious thoughts about the ozone hole, but also rebuilding our cities to make them less inequitable and more livable. To spend money on this sort of thing-- that's an investment. It would make the future a much pleasanter place to inhabit. And this would be meaningful work for lots of people who need it.

The people who were made so smug about the justification for their existence by the consensus of the Reagan years-- I'm not calling for them to be pushed aside, put on show trial or eliminated, because we're a decent polity, but perhaps we can listen to them a little less as we direct young people to think about solving the problems of the human body and belly. And we might invite the scholars of the humanities to get off the time-out chair and join in the discussion. Their time will come; it's always been their time. For it doesn't take much, just a bit of food, shelter and medicine, to equip your human being for doing the humanities: asking “why,” saying “wow,” making up a little tune.

The kind of guy who would lie down in front of a bus in order to stop it deporting illegal immigrants didn't mind incurring the wrath of Papa Doc, Baby Doc, Gérard Latortue or his own ecclesiastical superiors. He was irrepressible. Throwing him in jail just gave him a new angle on injustice (the rotten conditions and overcrowding analogized the conditions outside in the streets of Port-au-Prince).

He made trouble both in Haiti and in the United States, rather than just making trouble in Haiti from the safe haven of Miami, or with the support of so-called civil society initiatives funded from the US. He scolded Haitian politicians for ignoring the plight of starving people; he scolded American politicians for ignoring the plight of those starving people who managed to drift across three hundred miles of ocean with hopes of picking oranges or maybe, if they were really lucky, mopping floors. National frontiers were invisible to him, and rightly so, since Haitian animosities followed him wherever he went. The bizarre episode of his arrest on charges of illegal weapons possession, despite a total absence of evidence, I read as a kind of homage to the power of his unarmed voice and persistence.

Let's imagine Haiti had been snatched up from the dust and injected with 8 to 10 percent annual growth every year since the departure of the Duvaliers. And let's imagine that some political figure or party took credit for the rising standard of living, to the point of portraying any rival party as traitors and imminent murderers of the golden goose. And let's give that smug party a basis of political support. Even under those madly counterfactual conditions, I'm sure Father Gerry would still be out there with his megaphone, making noise, being unreasonable, insisting on the rights of the poor, and getting himself thrown in new, improved and possibly air-conditioned jails.

So he's a good man to remember on June 4.

Noteworthy: the difference between the new edition on good paper with a handsome cover and a grown-up preface and my 1971 paperback, promising on the cover “A Valuable Document of Inner Space” and starting off with a preface by one Mark Engel that observed, inter alia, “The psychedelics are a powerful educational tool.” (And I thought it didn't get better than overhead projectors!) This wasn't the only thing that made us feel that the world had spun on its axis a few times since this book was first published. The delightful or infuriating thing about Bateson is that he was an immensely curious guy who couldn't stop taking models or methods from one domain of knowledge and applying them in other domains-- or in the wrong domain, if you happened to be a denizen of that cubbyhole. He grew up in a naturalist's family, trained as an anthropologist, was interested in Russell's paradox and set theory, and was a member of the great interdisciplinary tag teams assembled under wartime conditions, when the need for speeded-up advances in cryptography, automatic gunnery, and ethnographically-informed intelligence (i.e., theories of the enemy) brought us information theory, systems theory, cybernetics, Norbert Wiener, John von Neumann, cognitive science, the theory of games, and the first computers. Bateson was in the middle of it all, not originating a lot of theory but making very novel applications of the things he heard. He was a seeker after big ideas, drawn by an admiration for models whose generality was such that they could be thought to unify disparate fields. He had a hospitable mind, got along with dolphins and was a natural for the sixties role of guru. (For a return to gurudom and the Big Sur of 1968, you can't do better than to check out the Batesonian II Cybernetic Frontiers by Stewart Brand, yes, him of the Whole Earth Catalog.)

After sixty years, the fields have moved on and the place where there was once a vital contact is now marked only by a ring of stones and some campfire ash. My psychiatrist friends didn't see much to applaud in the Bateson account of schizophrenia as a logical double bind, for example (“brilliant idea, but wrong” said one; “not as bad as Bettelheim, but still” said the other). The philosopher said it took him back to the days when he decided he wasn't interested in Russell or the theory of logical types (“and that's why you had to grow a beard,” said somebody; laughter was delayed and spotty). The anthropologist was leery of the wish to turn the observed detail into an example of cosmic significance, because that's not how ethnographers see their mission any more. As a group, the Gregory Bateson Fan Club we were not.

What accounts for the charm, then, that I seem to be one of the few to feel? To use a Bateson-ish word, metaphor. The guy's habit of flitting among disciplines gives him an inbuilt commitment to analogy. Every metaphor, whatever it says, implies a further optimistic claim about the making of metaphorical connections among the disciplines, whispers to us that there is a larger system of correspondences, if only we know how to discover it. And Bateson had the gift of devising metaphors that are vividly concrete and abstractly suggestive, and have many little hooks and crannies in them that you could rewardingly explore for sub-analogies. I know that my own predilection for such metaphors-- and probably, too, what small knack for crafting them I have-- can be seen as a weakness. One should knuckle down to a specialty and do intensive work only in its domain and on its terms, says Max Weber, if one is to make results that will last; and an analogy that speaks to the imagination may be only as good as the imagination is, therefore not qualified to ascend to the peaks where the air is thinner and the denotations more strictly denotative. Metaphor man is stuck in the middle, in the middle of mediation, and central only for a moment, until traffic reroutes around him.

Cautionary tale, I guess. And yet, what figures old Bateson could come up with. Here's one-- just one-- from a book abounding in them. I hope it will send you back to decide for yourself if the man is a genius of mediation or an insufferable mixer-upper of things best left plain.

Now that is a tremendous metaphor. It doesn't just establish, with a wink and a smile, the possible validity of metaphors in general, but also suggests that the relation of tenor and vehicle may be like that of truck and trailer (or trailer and trailer, and trailer, and trailer...). A friend of mine once told me, whenever he tried to conceive of Absolute Spirit he thought of making puff pastry (where you fold a sheet of dough around a pat of butter over and over until there are 1072 different layers). From now on, I'm afraid I will see a backing convoy of trailers and a tall, white-haired Englishman muttering behind the wheel in the cab of the truck.