UNLIMITED FREAKOUT IS LOVE

2020, marked by post-Trump politics, post-truths, and COVID-19 omnipresence, felt like the nadir year to top all nadirs. In Aotearoa, we were still grappling with the trauma of white supremacist terrorism in Ōtautahi (Christchurch), and public discontent with the rolling lockdowns and social distancing soon surfaced in events like N.Z's Parliamentary occupation, as it did overseas with the U.S. Capitol riot of January 6th. This is a rewrite of an old media studies paper on superheroes from that time, which had good bones, albeit over-earnest ones.  The American news cycle seemed transfixed by the Black Lives Matter movement, as nationwide protests erupted across the States at the police murder of George Floyd. As a spectator to these events, I began reflecting on the superhero I felt best reflected the present historical conditions. Judge Dredd, a granite-jawed enforcer in the post-apocalyptic urban chaos of Mega-City One—emerged as the perfect candidate. When I first encountered D...

I originally wrote this piece drawing heavily from Žižeks books Looking Awry and Violence , the Everything you always wanted to know about Lacan, but were afraid to ask Hitchcock compendium (particularly Bonitzers’ Hitchcockian Suspense ), McGowans’ The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan , and Lacans’ own Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis . With this revision, I am introducing ideas drawn from reading Joan Copjecs’ The Orthopsychic Subject: Film theory and the reception of Lacan , which challenged some of the assumptions of my earlier draft, prompting me to revise some of my original assertions. I wrote this for a second year sociology paper, and despite my best intentions, I always felt that my articulation of the gaze, the mirror and the objet petit `a missed a trick somewhere. So this posting is a gesture toward bridging that gap and perhaps producing a more satisfying synthesis. A woman gazes at herself in a bathroom mirror. She inserts a tiny probe into her skull, attac...

I’m using this post to explore ideas about the cyborg, cybernetics and post-humanism and the ontological theory attached to these fields through the lens of science fiction cinema. To do this, I’m going to look at four science fiction films: Upgrade , Hardware , Tetsuo the Iron Man and Videodrome which exploit ideas of a technologically de-centered humanity in order to provoke unease. These films all share a technologised mise-en-scene, depicting antagonistic machine/human oppositions, and images of bodies disturbed or ruptured by metal. Takes such as these often reify technological augmentation or interdependence as intimately intertwined with either capitalism, tyranny, or both. Science fiction cinema frequently mediates the Cyborg avatar - a posthuman answer to the dilemma of our aging, unreliable biology, as oppositional. Indeed, science fiction commonly represents the cyborg in iconographic relation to the horror film, whereas post-human theory celebrates the emancipating potent...

A struggling writer, with his wife and son in tow, accepts an off-season position as a caretaker at a palatial Hotel in Colorados’ remote Rocky Mountains, an elite playground overshadowed by a history of violent and horrific acts. In rural Lancashire, England, a team of scientists and technicians convene at an ancient estate to research and develop innovative methods of recording technology, only to discover that the ancient foundations appear to have ‘recorded’ the trauma of the buildings past, manifesting in the tragic spectre of a serving girl. At first glance, Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 cinematic treatment of The Shining and Nigel Kneale’s 1979 BBC teleplay The Stone Tape bear little correlation to each other, beyond the common trope of the ghost story. However, closer scrutiny reveals that both texts share a common fascination with not only the Freudian concept of the Uncanny, but also of the liminality and innate permeability of such haunted spaces. Kubrick and Kneale’s work is lin...