Laurie Anderson's Heart of a Dog Interview/Review by Gary Kramer

Laurie Anderson's Heart of a Dog

Laurie Anderson’s wistful, elegiac film, Heart of a Dog, uses animation, video, home movie clips, and dream sequences to chronicle not just her life with Lolabelle, her rat terrier, but more generally how humans and animals communicate, their shared sense of companionship, and our processes of death, grief, and coping with trauma.

A Clip from Youtube of Heart of a Dog

GMK You once described language as a virus from outer space. You get political in Heart of a Dog when you discuss the homeland security advisement, “If you see something, say something. Hopefully, it’s nothing.” You also talk about Lolabelle understanding 500 words and the speech a vet gives when he suggests putting an animal down. Then there’s mention of Wittgenstein’s notion that “language has the power to create the world.” What are your thoughts on the power of language, which has been such an important theme in your work and in this film?

LA I think it’s never very satisfying to share your dreams with someone else. In fact, when somebody goes, “I had this dream…” I go, “Oh please, don’t tell me your dream, please!” No! It’s not a film you saw! It’s something like a hallucination that only you have a code for. Now that is a wonderful thing—stories only you appreciate, only you value, and only you understand. That is a really underrated thing in our culture. You have this wonderful dream world that’s only for you. Let’s keep it that way. Don’t try to tell other people what’s going on. It’s like when only you think something is funny. That’s really great. But why do we share stories? Because otherwise, life is too lonely, you know? 

GMK I interpret it such that you are telling these things to me. It’s episodic, and therefore it doesn’t feel like a monologue. As a viewer, you get into some stories, and sometimes you just watch, but I made all these connections and took it all in. I could see the film again and have a totally different response.

LA I think I was exploring this idea: Does language help you in a situation like that? The Tibetans would say it does, because they wrote a whole book about it. They are expressions of grief. The no crying thing is about trying to understand what is going on not with your own emotions, but to pay attention to what’s going on with the drama of the person who is dying and dead. Their idea is to focus on their transition, which will also be used when you die. But it’s to focus on their death, not your reaction to it.

GMK You mention in the film about your mother loving you unconditionally. When did you love Lolabelle unconditionally?

LA It’s different with a dog or an animal. They don’t have the same conditions that humans do. They have a default mode of unconditional love. I don’t know why they love us—we are sources of food, and we are alphas, and to some extent we protect them and give them rides in cars. Cats do not want rides in cars. That’s a really fundamental difference! I think that using an animal to talk about love is a different kind of relationship. For me, dogs represent a kind of purity that isn’t often found in human relationship, which are more complicated. Very few people will have the joy that dogs do when running to the door to say hello. They’re very openhearted.

Heart of a Dog is currently playing at Film Forum in New York through November 3, 2015.

Gary M. Kramer is the author of Independent Queer Cinema: Reviews and Interviews and the co-editor of Directory of World Cinema: Argentina.

Excerpts from Gary Kramer's Interview/Review of Heart of a Dog. I know I shall love it.

DIVERGENT REVIEW on Nietzsche's INSCRIPTION OF THE BODY (Baudrillard, Deleuze,Foucault)

Tris sees Four's tattoo for the first time right after she has been in Four's Fearscape - and so do we

We have seen Marcus come at Four with his leather belt to beat him in multiple selves - a nice wave to The Matrix. We now know that Marcus has beaten Tobias/Four since a young child and Four is paralyzed with fear of him as he regresses to a young child when confronted by him in his Fearscape - (my new word for it.) 

We are not told any more details, but the scene is allowed to resonate in our minds.When you are beaten your body/mind is inscribed as the two are inseparable, in a relation with each other.

We know Tobias's back was beaten because the welts and wounds would not be visible there.The tattoo is announcing the beatings to the world if the world sees.The beatings are revealed and concealed.The belt sliced around to his arms where the tattoo becomes stripes.

A tattoo such as this INSCRIBES the body/mind again. The MEMORY of the constant beatings is inscribed. The memory produces CONSCIOUSNESS of the original inscription. As repetition reinforced the memory of the pain, the tattoo reinforces the memory of what it emotionally and mentally means to you. 

Tris begins to touch the tattoo

The understanding and resonance of touch. Abnegation foregoes touch except in rather indifferent ways. Tris is taught that touch means something. By experiencing the lack of touch, the desire for it and its importance to you increases your awareness of it. Tris is aware of every time Four has touched her in coaching her. His touch is indifferent. Her reception of it is eroticized. She touches Four's tattoo with great tenderness and curiosity. Why all of the factions?

Because Four does not just want to be one person but all of them. We can imagine the child wanting to be imaginative, intelligent, brave, honest, happy and selfless and being beaten for showing any of those indications. His will to knowledge/power has been stifled with beatings. Tris's will to knowledge/power has been snuffed out by her family and her love for them, also an effective way to drive them underground. To repress them in the Inscription of the Body. And Tris's Body/Mind has been reinscribed at Dauntless to be sure. Abnegation, just as all of the other factions, is about Obedience. Staying inside the Dominating Discourse.

For Tris to touch Four with such awe and tenderness is the awakening of eroticism for Four. He turns and kisses her and touches her wanting more. It is then Tris stops him and says, "I don't want to go too fast."

Woman is not equal to man except in the Order of Production. In the Symbolic Order of Seduction, woman is OTHER. Tris does not have a fear of intimacy. That is a clinical term that belongs in the Order of Production. We know she is a virgin and has had Four in her imagination since she met him at the net. She has been unknowingly seducing him. SEDUCTION cannot be produced. It does not figure in the Order of Production - Baudrillard.

Reading through Lacan DESIRE/LACK is a relation. Tris wants to experience desire, not sexual satisfaction. And she wants Four to experience desire. Does she know this? Doubtful. But intuitively she does. This is where that philosophical term the unknown/knowns intercedes, that term Rumsfeld so befuddled himself with. It means that there are knowns you know which you are unaware that you know. Without Lack, there is no Desire.

By going slower Tris will experience longing, desire, waiting, and contemplation of the beloved object and the deepening of self-awareness. Badiou says that love is a challenge, a risk, a jump into the unknown. This is Tris turned into a lovely metaphor. This was Twilight. This is not Hunger Games.

But by going slower Four will also experience these deeper feelings. This is where Four resonates with Dante and his beloved Beatrice, his lifetime muse, whom he only saw once or twice on the street and whom he never knew. An apparition sort of who guided him through the circles of hell. Four's Beatrice will rescue Four from the dungeons of hell.

Step back: the pattern in the tapestry

won’t tell itself till more of it is made.

Although it’s eighty-seven in the shade,

we have to work this hard making the hist-

ory we need till, trusting it, we’re free

to kiss each other better than when we

imagined kissing when we hadn’t kissed.

Marilyn Hacker in Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons 

I would say the same is true on waiting to experience sex.

WHITE PALACE, LOVE and The SCREEN GAZE

Witness to Love

October 25, 2013

James Spader and Susan Sarandon, White Palace, Universal Pictures, 1990

by Masha Tupitsyn

Seeing love on people’s faces.

When these screen lovers see each other again… When any screen lovers see each other again…

Do we see (have) these kinds of moments of seeing in real life or do they happen only in camera space? In the fiction of movies. Is the face of the lover loving and seeing the lover restricted tomise-en-scène? Is the lover’s face just another visual trope? Two visual tropes = Love. Seeing the seeing. It’s true, love is also a reaction shot. But who is witness to the reaction shot off-screen? And what is our reaction to love off-screen? In real life there is maybe only the diegetic. No one sees what you are living through. Certainly not what it looks like for you to live through it. Certainly no one sees your face looking at another face. This is why we have literature. And pictures. This is the engine of cinema, where the human face is always an action hero. But by the time art is made of it — of love — it is something else entirely. What is it exactly that we need for others to see that they can’t see? Love needs witnesses (Old English witnes, “attestation of fact, event, etc., from personal knowledge”), as that is precisely one of the things that love is: seeing and being seen.

Footnote:

The story is (told to me a couple of years ago by a reliable source) that these two had an intense affair while making White Palace. Susan Sarandon wanted to leave Tim Robbins for James Spader. Of course we never saw any of this.

---

About the Author:

Masha Tupitsyn is a writer, cultural critic, and multi-media artist. She is the author of Love Dog(Penny-Ante Editions, 2013), LACONIA: 1,200 Tweets on Film (ZerO Books, 2011), Beauty Talk & Monsters, a collection of film-based stories (Semiotext(e) Press, 2007), and co-editor of the anthology Life As We Show It: Writing on Film (City Lights, 2009). Her fiction and criticism has appeared or is forthcoming in the anthologies Women in Clothes (Penguin, 2014), The Force of What’s Possible (Nightboat Books, 2014), The American Tetralogy (Blackjack Editions, 2013), Occupy Wall Street Poetry Anthology (2012), The Encyclopedia Project Volume 2 (F-K)(2010) and Volume 3 (L-Z) (2014), and Wreckage of Reason: XXperimental Women Writers Writing in the 21st Century (Spuyten Duyvil, 2008), with additional works published by The White Review, The New Inquiry, Fence, Bookforum, The Rumpus, Boing Boing, Indiewire’s Press Play, Animal Shelter, the Shepparton Art Museum, and Ryberg Curated Video.

_____________________________

Kristen Stewart and Rob Pattinson Eclipse Premiere

REVIEW:Don Jon:Reading Through Baudrillard - Welcome to the Desert of the Real

DO NOT MISS THIS FILM

And Starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt

Neo had this book in his desk drawer in THE MATRIX

Don Jon is a movie on how we get to THE MATRIX.

It takes awhile but you have fun doing it.

Dirty Sexy Dancing.

Scarlett is hot, hot hot and she won't put out. At least not until she gets what she wants first.
Him.
Into her interfaced fantasy.

Happy Ending Romantic Fantasy

Dirty Sexy Laptop

JGL has been sensitizing himself to feel erotic looking at porno. He is becoming Pavlov's dog, salivating to the bell, - whoops, the nekkid bod and ass of the porno queen of the moment. He jerks off thus reinforcing himself for his gaze on the porno queen - or princess. His sexual responses are conditioned to the Barbie porn videos, not a real life Barbie. Just a simulacrum in Simulated Reality, and he goddamn well prefers her or her Barbie sisters. And his responses are now Hullian prepotent responses. 

Joseph Wolpe, M.D. Father of Behavior Therapy.

See any theory can be used against you.

Mark Tansey - Still Life 
Aside here: Mark Tansey is giving us the GREAT 21st century Foucauldian CUT in art history
Still Life is a painting of this movie without a happy ending.

Fuck real life. Gimme the simulacrum willya.

The Wondrous Julianne Moore
Enter Julianne Moore, a REAL woman. Who wants real?
Who wants intimacy?
Gimme that porn star willya.

No victim's body,no criminal, no crime scene,no capture,no punishment
The Perfect Crime
What Baudrillard is saying here is that our reality is stolen from us in homeopathic doses. That way we will not notice it so infinitesimal will those doses be. And we will never know when the boundary blurs, when we lose reality, when we are in Simulated Reality, and when we can't get back. As Jon learns when he can no longer close his eyes, masturbate to his own fantasies, make them up. His imagination has been stolen from him. His ability to contemplate has been stolen from him (Walter Benjamin folks.) His mind has been stolen from him. His life has been stolen from him. And he doesn't even know it.
The Perfect Crime

Jean Baudrillard, the Bear and the Screen

This embracing of Simulated Reality is our greatest danger according to Baudrillard. When Simulated Reality is total then we will be in Virtual Reality. Think Hunger Games here: The Districts are Reality, The capitol Panem is Simulated Reality, The Games are Virtual Reality. So who the hell wants reality. Gale didn't. Katniss does but then she really had her fill, an excess, didn't she. 

We are all interfaced with the media of our culture. How we fall in love, the courtship, the rituals, the wedding, they marriage, the children, the dog, the house, the mortgage, and so it goes as Vonnegut would say. We are no more free than our pet dogs. We have been conditioned to want what they want us to want. And conditioned to get it the way they want us to get it. How we fuck has been conditioned recently by porn. So we now fuck like porn stars. (Did I do OK honey? Did you get off? Performance anxiety eh.)  So we do. We obey them. To do this we Inscribe our bodies (Nietzsche's Inscription of the Body) to fit the template of normality, we think the way we have been taught to think, we do not even have the words to free ourselves from this. Sex is empowered to do this to us. We got rid of repression -  we thought so anyway -  but what is this? And we are embracing it as fast as we can learn how. 

Who will intercede? Who will give us the intervention we need? Who will be our Julianne Moore? And our prepotent responses will undergo spontaneous recovery in the future. Pavlov again, the great one.

Welcome to the Desert of the Real! - Morpheus quotes Zizek

Here's what Joseph Gordon Levitt said about his movie Don Jon:

I wanted to talk about how the media influences people's expectations, Gordon Levitt says. Pornography is a huge, huge part of our media culture. The message Don Jon is trying to bring to light - and make fun of - is reducing people, especially women, to nothing but sex objects. It happens in music videos, TV shows, movies, and magazines, and so many commercials. Whether it's rated X or approved by the FCC to sell Doritos, the message is the same.

Entertainment October 4, 2013 #1279

___________________________________________________________________________

Let me tell you it is so much more than what he thinks it is. It is a fictionalized account of Jean Baudrillard's The Perfect Crime

The title is taken from a short story by 
Jorge Luis Borges.
wiki on Borges

It was almost all map for Jon.

I am going right over to hitRECord.org to tell him so.

REVIEW: Blackfish

Tilikum In His Bath Tub-Jacuzzi Size for Him?

For a conventional informative review click on this LINK.

nice review http://journalstar.com/entertainment/movies/review-blackfish-is-compelling-documentary-about-killer-whales-in-captivity/article_b508e0f4-f113-5a68-a0fa-7fe4955ba5bf.html

Now that the literal is out of the way what else is going on?

The movie is shocking. It does not resort to violence porn as it so easily could have done. Tilikum kills a number of people, his trainers, especially Dawn who is the most expert and aware, the trainer who trains the trainers. And we watch him do it.

He pulls her down by the foot, then she swims up, gasps for breath, is pulled down again, comes up again, and each time she is getting weaker and more desperate. He has grabbed her foot at the side when she wasn't looking. This is not part of the act. This was an impulsive movement on Tilikum's part. 

And we watch as we watch a kitten playing with its first mouse, or grasshopper, etc. At what point does play turn into kill. Does the object of play become prey? 

Dawn has been the one to train Tilikum, teach him tricks, reward him with fish and petting, establishing what she thinks is an attachment bond with him.

Is this the way Tilikum perceives her?

There is complicity between the master/slave, between the captive/hostage and Baudrillard has written extensively on this. What is the complicity here?

The afternoon this happens the show was a disaster. None of them did the tricks they were supposed to do. So Dawn tries to save the performance with ever reliable and big star Tilikum who always turns in a good performance. 

After it is over when Dawn is not aware, Tilikum grabs her foot as she walks by and Tilikum's game begins.

Now we are going to play a game MY way!

Each pod in the wild has a separate language. I guess we could think of the pod as a tribe?

They are captured and taken from it, put in with others from different pods/tribes and they have no common language anymore.

But what if the orcas are evolving linguistically while in captivity?

What if they are secretly, subversively ruining their performances. Killing a trainer who is the closest they can get to a human to do it.

We know there are killer elephants. Rogue elephants they are called. Thomas Edison even designed an electric chair with outrageous electric current to perform a death sentence on an elephant in his chair which he wanted to popularize. It took even more current than anticipated to kill that elephant who had probably been tortured beyond its endurance. I remind you of the recent book and movie Water For Elephants.

We also watch Tilikum playing HIS game with a male trainer who remains cool even under his potential death sentence while an audience, probably thrilled, is watching.

It reminds me of the time I saw Ringling Bros and watched Wallenda ride a bike across the rope each time going across and adding another member of the troupe - his family - until they are balancing on his shoulders, just piled on and there is some slack in the rope in the middle and the bike begins to stall.

He backpedals, goes forward, backs up again, all the time to keep moving and the entire audience in Philadelphia in 1949 is hushed into silence. It is awful.

The clowns come out for distraction but I cannot take my eyes off the rope. And I see how mesmerizing it is to watch what may be a terrible death. There is no net. And even with one the bodies would crush each other.

It is this fascination which makes one slow at a road wreck, to see dead bodies, mutilated bodies. Horror as obscenity.

And SeaWorld knows this well.

The male trainer cools it and pulls it off making for the barrier as fast as he can swim with Tilikum right after him. They give him oxygen. He is bloody.He smiles and laughs for the camera.

But we have watched and seen how close, how very very close it was for him. We are not fooled the way the audience is fooled. The way the media has tried to fool us once again. The newspapers. The TV. We have seen and we are not tourists at SeaWorld enjoying ourselves and willing to go into denial to continue having a great time.

After all, it is a great job, and he doesn't want to lose it, does he. 

The sickening part is that the trainers who care the most for the orcas and Tilikum are the most complicit and the most vulnerable. The ones who care the most are the ones at risk. 

But the ones who care the most, who obtain the most incredible performances from Tilikum, are the ones responsible for keeping the exploitation ongoing. A circle eating its own tail. The Eternal Return of Nietzsche.

In the movie ex trainers are interviewed and discuss how they lied for the camera and the audience, how they denied, how they rationalized until they couldn't anymore. They have come clean for us.

We see the court case against SeaWorld and the attractive blond lawyer for SeaWorld who is appealing the court's demand for barriers and no in the water participation with the orcas. (Never hurts to have a sexy lawyer does it?)

We need a new definition of love.

Here's Badiou:

At the heart of love à la française lies the idea of 

freedom. To love truly is to want the other free, and this 

includes the freedom to walk away. Love is not about 

possession or property. Love is no prison where two 

people are each other’s slaves. Love is not a commodity, 

either. Love is not capitalist, it is revolutionary. If 

anything, true love shows you the way to selflessness.

Here's Masha Tupitsyn quoting Toni Morrison in her book  Love Dog:

In The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison writes (and I have quoted this many times), “Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly. There is no gift for the beloved. The lover alone possesses his gift of love.”

Here's Judith Butler:

“Love is not a state, a feeling, a disposition, but an exchange, uneven, fraught with history, with ghosts, with longings that are more or less legible to those who try to see one another with their own faulty vision.” - Judith Butler

These trainers who loved Tilikum loved stupidly. All they did was make billions for SeaWorld. They were captives and exploited as much as Tilikum. Which is why it took them so long to wake up. 

SeaWorld is now breeding their own orcas. To watch Tilikum being pumped of semen to artificially impregnate females is one of the saddest things I have ever seen. 

I could feel no sympathy for the humans Tilikum killed. He is a David against Goliath.

John Lilly

Lilly was a researcher who worked with dolphins. Dissecting their brains as a neuro-physiologist he came to see the horror of his work even when he began to study their behavior while alive and let them all go. He advocated this from then on. They should not be in captivity.