Sweat Collects: Chuck Palahniuk's 'Snuff'

(Written to convince the editor of bookmunch to make me a contributor)

With ‘Snuff’, Chuck Palahniuk continues to explore a kind of post-modern macabre where all human relations descend into ridiculous and gross depravity. Porn legend, Cassie Wright, is intending to end her porn career by putting Annabel Chong to shame- having sex with six hundred men and breaking the world record. The event unfolds through the perspective of four interlocking narratives; three nameless men waiting for their turn plus Sheila, the talent wrangler who initially pitched the film to Cassie and is in charge of organising all six-hundred ‘pud-pullers’ as she calls them. The male characters range from the naïve to the disgusting- Palahniuk is fantastic at creating everyday monsters, characters whose inhumanity are never as showy or glamorous as say, Bret Easton’s Ellis’s. Instead, they are empty and cold in a dull and pathetic way and Palahniuk manages to convey this superbly in sparse and unforgiving prose. Sheila too, seems as cold and detached as anyone who has spent too long turning sex into a commodity but her cynical denouncements of the men around her and the sex industry are both humorous and astute: ‘Going to Spring break at Fort Lauderdale, getting drunk and flashing your breasts isn’t an act of personal empowerment. It’s you, so fashioned and programmed by the construct of patriarchal society that you no longer know what’s best for yourself’.

Of course, none of these characters are quite what they seem and as much as they think that they’re in control of the preceding actions, they’re not. As Mr. 600 says, ‘didn’t one of us on purpose set out to make a snuff movie’. Even the wannabe Macaveillian of the novel cannot anticipate how things end. ‘Snuff’ essentially portrays individuals who desire power but are in fact trapped- literally and figuratively- in a squalid environment. Palahniuk’s ability to invoke just how gross this environment is, is effective to the point of nausea: ‘Dudes swallowing and farting at the same time. Belching up gas bubbles of black coffee from their guts. Breathing out through wads of Juicy Fruit gum’. Human beings are nothing more than animals bathing in their own filth and Palahniuk makes sure that the reader can feel this in their own gut.

Most of the novel involves waiting. The woman all these characters are circling around does not appear until towards the end of the novel. Until then, Cassie Wright looms as a spectre over the character’s memories, her image as porn star queen continually re-circulated through the TV monitors erected in the green room. As might be expected from a porn star, she exists as a dream or a fantasy, a springboard to restart a faded career or a maternal sanctuary. But Cassie does, in fact, have her own plans for how her porn career and her final film will end and Palahniuk builds up the tension with a deft hand as the reader is drawn compellingly forth towards a culmination that has car-crash appeal. You just can’t look away. And actually, the ending is still unlike anything that was expected. It is brilliantly deranged and dark to the point of gothic. It manages to be both surprising and disturbing, an absurd and gruesome finale to a novel that begins quietly as a study on the mundane barrenness of a culture where sex is product.

Any good? The source material, detached prose and underlying nihilism will be nothing new to fans but with ‘Snuff’, Palahniuk proves that there is still plenty to found when mining this particular type of dark vein. And he still has the ability to shock.

© 2011 Emma Mould

Squirrel Thing

Connie Converse is the sound of aloneness (not loneliness) grown so familiar it has become part of the furniture. The characters she sings of, the roving women and the playboy’s of the Western world wear their separateness like a badge of honour. They can entwine themselves briefly into other people, sample them like a light snack but they know that this can only be temporary, delicious but temporary. As we wander through the grass, we can hear each other pass but we’re far apart, far apart in the dark. Love is only a masquerade and you can hear in her imperfect, detached voice that she knows this. Her voice is not beautiful, her guitar playing not particularly accomplished, but there is by turns a resigned weariness or a knowing sneer to her music which is allowed to glow malevolently from the simplicity, the nakedness of her songs. What foolish girls who look up to the sky in search of love, wishing and waiting until they die. Even their dreams will betray them. The man in the sky isn’t married yet.

She is not immune through. In ‘Talking Like You (Two Tall Mountains)', she hears some lost love everywhere. Echoes of him everywhere (I can relate). That is when you know for sure that a break-up has bruised you, infected you to the very core. It doesn't matter what you do or where you go; reminders of him follow you around like your shadow. The whole world becomes a minefield of memories. Up that tree, there's sort of a squirrel thing. Sounds just like we did when we were quarrelling. Brilliant rhyming aside, this image is cute but so very sinister in the way you can be so tied down, so trapped by someone who is no longer there. But there is a edge of defiance as well. You might think you've left me all alone but I can hear you talk without a telephone. Connie know that she has been able to capture something as well. The memories are hers. He does not get to take away what he once gave so willingly. The bravado is ironic, of course but also, sincere. Its almost like she's saying 'Fuck you, I will always own a piece of you, it's mine'. She is endlessly pragmatic even through loss. And so stoic. She sounds like an emotionally repressed person forced to talk about their feelings in family therapy.

Connie Converse recorded these songs in the 50's. In 1974, she wrote letters of farewell to her loved ones and then left, never to be seen again. Too few are the days that will hold your face. She is still missing to this day. It is hard to separate this biographical information from the songs themselves. The whole album sounds like the thoughts of someone too used to everything disappearing, who herself is not immune to disappearing. All of this is only temporary. But so delicious anyway. How sad, how lovely. How short, how sweet.

© 2011 Emma Mould

Some stuff regarding Kurt Cobain in a Dress

In 1991, Kurt Cobain appeared on ‘The Headbanger’s Ball’ wearing a ridiculous and ostentatious prom dress. This act could be seen as an example of gender performativity because of the way it complicates hetero-normative ideas of masculinity and parodies femininity. By wearing the dress, he was not destroying gender roles but rather, queering them or challenging their boundaries. His image is not somehow above or beyond gender but is a playful and insidious mixing of masculinity and femininity which is all the more effective because of his delicate physique and particularly feminine beauty. His image refers to the hetero-normative model’s concept of gender but not without subverting and destabilising its rigidity. I'm not saying he choose to wear the dress with these particular intentions in mind- probably, it was little more than a fuck-you attitude thing- but the great thing about any kind of performance is its potential to become more than it was ever expected to be.

© 2011 Emma Mould

To Be a Catfish

Does anyone still believe that the internet is a direct reflection of someone's personality? The internet is fantastic for casting us all in a generous and brilliant light, showing only our best parts, our most flattering angles. We get to put forth a perfectly controlled idealisation of ourselves. It's highly unlikely that anyone will admit on their OKCupid or Facebook profile that they can be petty or selfish or rather ugly first thing in the morning. On the internet, we never stumble over our words. We can edit them or delete them all together. We do not stutter. We conceal as much as we reveal. We get to slip into our very best selves like clothes. But that's exactly it; clothes do not make the man and the internet cannot possibly convey the real self. Where words do not always trip so easily off the tongue and when, once they are out there, you don't get to call them back. We are too far gone into the internet age to any longer believe in its transparency. And with all this known, 'Catfish' fits into our present discourse in a curious and fascinating way. It is worth seeing for that fact alone.

The question of whether this film is ‘real’ or not is beside the point. The reason the film works so well is precisely because of its ambiguity in this area. Its presenting of itself as warning of the danger of taking a readily available and oversaturation of social media as constitutive of actual reality, is deeply deeply ironic. How could it not be? With its heavy use of augmented reality, Google Earth and reality TV conventions, it becomes impossible for the audience to not wonder whether they are also being duped into believing that this all actually happened. And isn’t that the point? The brilliance of ‘Catfish’ lies in its ability to have become more than itself, to ceaselessly produce what it claims to negate. If anything, it does not demystify the strange smoke and mirrors of our internet age as it makes that smoke thicker, those mirrors even more opaque. Of course, this is nothing that fiction hasn’t been doing since the eighteenth century. But still, that doesn’t detract from the fact that ‘Catfish’ is an insidiously clever and compelling film about those bloodless internet ciphers we encounter on the internet everyday and our causal assumptions that such ghosts in the machine are absolutely duplicated in flesh and blood reality. This is why I can’t quite understand why the film-makers are so desperate to hark on about the whole thing being real. It’s annoying and patronising and it just doesn’t matter because fiction or not, the film’s importance still stands. It’s not like the fact that something is made up has ever detracted from its worth as a piece or art or a cultural product or whatever.

The discussion surrounding the film is almost as interesting as the film itself. The film produces its own discourse which has worked to its advantage. Even those reviewing the film have had to continue its mystique by being unable to really discuss the film in any way without spoilers. This can only ever add to increased curiosity and interest in the film itself. It has produced meditations on exploitation; often condemning Angela for her manipulations but also acknowledging that the film makers have also exploited her for their own means. What these discussions tend to leave out are the clear gender politics in the film which beg the question: what got Angela to the point where she was telling so many lies she could barely keep up with them? Can her acts simply be labelled as exploitative or is there a way of contextualising them to make them less so? This is what I'm going to attempt to do.

In 'Catfish', there are two primary ‘real people’: one (Nev), a good-looking New York hipster; the other (Angela), a bored housewife living in Nowhere, Michigan. What connects them both is a need to be seen, as if the only way their life can have meaning is if it is reflected back at them through social media. Except this though: one uses social media to have his life seen by others whilst the other uses social media as a way to escape and evade her reality. Why? Perhaps simply because one is a pathological liar whilst the other is a naive ingénue with a penance for falling in love with people he hasn’t even met yet. But I doubt it is as simple as this. Firstly, without wanting to sound cynical, said ingénue is a little bit too good-looking to have not done his fair share of double dealings to get what he wanted from a girl. And I’m not saying this makes him a bad person; I just don’t buy the wide-eyed innocence thing. And I don’t think it’s unfair to say that Nev would have never given Angela a second glance if she had passed him in the street. She knows this. And she is, for whatever reason, desperately in love with him. This is obvious from their interactions with each other, from the way she pays him compliments, from the way she looks at him with a yearning which has made peace with the knowledge that it will remain unrequited.

But I think that her desire goes beyond him as a person; it is also a desire for his life, for the things he has, for his freedom. After all, he is an affluent urban male who doesn’t only get to express his creativity but gets to make a living from it. She is an intelligent and talented woman who has had to stifle her creative ambitions to become a house-wife and carer to her severely mentally-disabled stepsons. It is as if 'The Feminine Mystique' never happened for this woman. Her husband unknowingly articulates her situation when he tells the camera that whenever she is in despair regarding her life, he reminds her that she 'cannot have it all'. She can have her big art career or she can have the sometimes stifling security of a husband and kids but to have both is an impossible dream. No wonder then that she fills her time- she literally spends hours each day updating a complicated and self-contained network of Facebook profiles- breathing life into these young, cool and prodigiously talented characters who encapsulate everything that does not exist in her real life. No wonder that she immerses herself so much into her creations that she disappears. Isn't that the point? Most writers of fiction identify themselves as such but then Angela doesn't simply want to show how good she is at tall tales. She wants the fiction to devour her up, swallow the banalities of her life whole, forever change everything inside and outside of her. This need is so great that she desperately produces lies and stalls for time just so she can enjoy one more minute of the fantasy-as-reality. It would be difficult to condone what she did- especially when she lies about having cancer. But I think it can be understood. What woman hasn't felt the trappings of gender? Who hasn't- male or female- wanted even for one moment to be somewhere or someone else? Angela is really just the absurd and painful result of that feeling taken much too far, allowed to sink in much too deep through the confinements of her class and gender. Because of this, I can forgive her deceiving of Nev (after all, he and his buddies got a fairly successful film out of it). I can certainly forgive her using the film's notoriety to garner an audience for her paintings. It is a sad but inescapable fact that this film is her best chance to achieve the success and artistic expression that has so long been denied her. It's an uncomfortable but necessarily pragmatic move on her part to go for a life that doesn't compel her to exist within a ghost house of fiction and lies where she can, in fact, have it all.

The seemingly inscrutable title of this documentary is explained late in the film in perhaps too shrewd and poetic a way to not be scripted: when transporting live cod from China, a couple of catfish’s were used in each barrel to fluster and annoy the cod into constant action, ensuring that they arrived at their destination fresh and alive. It is clear by now who the catfish is in this film. And it's hard and thankless work, existing only to keep others agile and lively. How sad, how lonely to be a catfish with no one snapping at your heels, no one caring enough to keep you moving.

© 2011 Emma Mould

Illyas Ahmed 'Between Two Skies'

Like the sound of the desert. At night. Whilst the echo of Sufism closes in on you. Why can't all new(ish) music be as utterly compelling as this?

More here

Dusty Grooves

Published in SMITHS magazine, 2010

Record collecting comes on like a sudden disease, like that cold you never saw coming that keeps you in bed for a week. I don’t know if anyone intends to start collecting records. It simply seems to be the inevitable consequence of not being able to get enough of new sounds, of simply not being able to stop with a Finders Keepers or Jazzman compilation which does all the digging and research for you. Offering an enticing glimpse into all that lies above and beyond, there is no way to resist delving into all those hybrid genres with hyphenated names: space-jazz, acid-folk, psychedelic-soul, sister-funk etc. Eventually, you will find yourself spending hours at record fairs, trawling through Ebay and reissue company websites and chatting to like-minded folk on record collector forums. Now, despite what mainstream films like ‘Ghost World’ and ‘High Fidelity’ suggest, record collectors are not boring. They tend to have a wide range of interests, are highly articulate and have an unforgiving sense of humour. They live and breathe their particular passion and are very generous when it comes to sharing information about music. They’re laidback. They like weird B-movies. Basically, they’re pretty good company.

And yet, as you immerse yourself in the culture, become acquainted with the language of record grading and categorisation, contentious issues start to arise. It is generally accepted that vinyl is superior to CD’s and any other formats. The reasons for this tend to come down pure visual and tactile appeal (record collectors love to fetishise that modular groove) and, somewhat predictably, the question of authenticity. To extol the virtues of vinyl is to speak to it as living history, as a product of formal classicism flying in the face of an incessant modernity. Essentially, it is implied that to exclusively own vinyl is to prove your commitment, investment and attachment to music itself. Because it pre-dates tapes, CD’s and all other formats, it engenders a sense of ownership or discovery of originality. It is perhaps not unfair to say that the obsession with rare records has everything to do with a sense of satisfaction and bragging rights as it does the actual music itself.

Of course, such arguments are not exactly new. In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin wrote any reproduction of a work of art will always lack the original ‘presence in time and space, its unique existence of the place where it happens to be...that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art’. Much later, Baudrillard defined the postmodern age as that in which the simulacrum has effectively replaced reality. The former decries reproduction; the former accepts its inevitability as ‘reality’ as we have understood it, no longer exists. It’s not hard to figure out what side most record collectors would be on. And yet, you don’t have to adopt Baudrillard’s mode of thought wholesale to offer up a counter argument. It is certainly true that records have a very particular sense of history but, as it always has done, history comes at a price. Original copies nearly always cost considerably more than reissues and reissues on CD are considerably more available than records. When it comes down to either waiting desperately for an original first pressing of excellent weird psych-folk artists like Coven or Simon Finn to show up and then paying hundreds of pounds for it or buying it a much cheaper CD copy from Amazon, I know which one my desire and bank account will go for. Perhaps there is something to be said about patience but the only way someone becomes a collector of music in the first place is because they love to listen to it. It is the listening experience and the desire for that experience that needs to come first. When all of that is placed secondary to its format, it seems that the way in which record collectors privilege vinyl is more to do with the values of collecting than the values associated with being a music lover. That is, cataloguing and assessing its monetary importance rather than sitting back and enjoying the music for what it is, in whatever format it is available in.

Let’s be clear: I’m not at all suggesting that record collectors do not care about or appreciate the music. Nor am I endorsing bad quality music, illegally bootlegged and given away for free on the internet. Nor do I have anything against vinyl. I own vinyl. I also own CD’s and MP3 copies of super rare records that I will probably never have the opportunity to own (kindly sent to me by the record’s original owners). My point only has to do with those occasional moments in record collector culture when it seems that it’s possible to lose the wood for the trees. Records are not like antique figurines or dolls, destined to collect dust inside a glass cabinet and look pretty. Yes, they do look pretty but the privilege of owning them should lie squarely in the fact that that attractive modular groove produces all manners of interesting and exciting sounds. And maybe sometimes, its lack of ‘aura’ needs to be forgiven. Beside, regardless of its format, music is always so much more than a mechanical reproduction.

© 2010 Emma Mould

'Nothing to Say': 'Black Skin, White Masks' and Gender

Excerpt from academic essay entitled 'Dismantling The Master's House: Strategies of Resistance in Post-Colonial Feminist Writing', 2010

Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks is an excellent example of a powerful critique of colonisation which nonetheless replicates the rigid colonial attitude in his negating of gender differences. In the chapter entitled ‘The Woman of Colour and the White Man’, Fanon uses his criticism of Capecia to generalise about all women of colour. Unlike his careful consideration of the psychology of the native man, he is resolutely rigid and simplistic regarding that of the native women: ‘It is because the Negress feels inferior that she aspires to win admittance into the white world’.[1] There is a dogmatic fatalism to this statement which suggests that, for Fanon, native women cannot transcend either their inferiority or their desire to assimilate. It must be compared to the native man who, whilst also under great pressure to assimilate into the white world, can produce modes of resistance:

If the white man challenges my humanity, I will impose my whole weight as a man on his life and show him that I am not that “sho’ good eatin’” that he persists in imagining (my emphasis).[2]

It should be noted here that my analysis does not aim to re-inscribe Capecia’s particular dialectic as a feminist one, ‘immortalised as the lamb at Fanon’s sacrificial altar rather than victim of the sexploitive, anti-black colonial condition’.[3] However, it is the way Fanon uses her position as indicative of all women of colour that I deem highly problematic. It seems that he cannot help but use the insufficiencies he finds in Capecia’s texts to make a universal statement on women of colour: ‘For, in a word, the race must be whitened; every women in Martinique knows this, says it, repeats it’ (emphasis mine).[4] By refusing to problematise his use of Capecia as representative, Fanon not only bypasses any discussion regarding how gender differences operate within the psychology of colonisation but also subsumes that very difference into what he calls his ‘concentrat[ion] on the psychic alienation of the black man’.[5]

Indeed, Fanon’s consideration of the native women is understood ultimately as nothing more than either a barrier or an aid towards the native man’s struggle towards agency. The idea that native women would have their own particular struggle towards agency- other than desiring to become white- is foreclosed. When writing on Fanon, Bhabha’s relegates this issue to a short note at the end of his essay. Anne McClintock argues that this choice defers women ‘to a nowhere land, beyond time and place, outside theory’.[6] More specifically, in regards to Fanon’s work, Bhabha’s ‘note’ has the effect of implicitly legitimising Fanon’s sexism by explaining it away as a desire for locating ‘a shared origin’[7] between sexual and cultural differences. As I have argued above, the way in which Fanon disregards the native female is far less innocent than this. Ultimately, there is no shared origin because the issue of gender is simply not as pressing for Fanon as the liberation of the colonised man. In fact, it is seen as almost entirely irrelevant to his decolonising project. Furthermore, Bhabha’s curious insistence that a discussion of gender in Fanon ‘goes well beyond the scope of my foreword’[8] only further reveals an acceptance of the patriarchal terms of Fanon’s dialectic. Here, Bhabha also perpetuates Fanon’s disregard for gender by implying that gender is not important enough to be included in his foreword aside from a brief note. By suggesting that any charge of sexism would be ‘facile’, he mimics Fanon in his avoidance of gender and how it impacts the native’s identity formation. Essentially, his comprehensive discussion of Fanon does not view gender as integral to any project of decolonisation. He either fails or simply refuses to highlight that such a glaring omission can only hinder the liberating effects of Fanon’s work. As bell hooks crucially points out, ‘there can be no freedom for black men as long as they advocate subjugation of black women. There can be no freedom for patriarchal men of all races as long as they advocate subjugation of women.’[9]

In fact, Bhabha’s praise for Fanon takes on far more resonance when applied to colonised women: ‘the colonial subject is always “overdetermined from without”, Fanon writes. It is through image and fantasy- those orders that figure transgressively on the borders of history and the unconscious- that Fanon most profoundly evokes the colonial condition’.[1] Under the Spivakian double-bind, it is clear that no one has been more ‘overdetermined from without’ than the native female. As well as the Manichean discourse of the colonisers, they also find themselves codified within the patriarchal discourse of native men, whether through the nationalist trope of mother-land or decolonising projects like Fanon’s that, whilst denouncing Manichean colonisation, continues to perpetuate its own binary logic in regard to gender. Moreover, some work by Western feminists on ‘third-world women’ has had the unfortunate effect of employing ‘various analytical categories and even strategies which codify their relationship to the Other in implicitly hierarchical terms’.[2] In these cases, western feminist discourse is also guilty of homogenising native woman, establishing themselves as the normative referent and continuing a binary didactic. It becomes self-evident then that native women are positioned within a matrix of intersecting power structures.

© 2010 Emma Mould

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[1]Fanon, Frantz, Black Skin, White Masks (London: Pluto Press, 2008), p. 42

[2] Ibid., p. 178

[3] Sharpley-Whiting, T. Deanean, ‘Engaging Fanon to reread Capecia’ in Fanon: A Critical Reader ed. by Lewis Gordon, T. Deanean Sharpley-Whiting and Renee T. White (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 1996), p. 161

[4] Fanon, p. 33

[5] Ibid., p. 34j

[6] McClintock, Anne, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 363

[7] Bhaba, Homi, ‘Remembering Fanon’ in Colonial Discourse and Post-colonial Theory, ed. by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994) , pp. 123

[8] As above, pp. 123

[9] hooks, bell, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (London: Pluto Press, 1982), p. 117

[10] Bhabha, pp. 115

[11] Bulbeck, Chilla, Re-Orientating Western Feminisms: Women’s Diversity in a Postcolonial World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 15