Where 'Metonymic Category Jamming' Falls Short

The core of this problem surrounds the question of diegesis as it relates to metonymy. But I start, though, I should like to note two things.

First off, the definition of the word "metonymy" I'm using sticks to a pretty literal reading of the definition Carroll gave in his book. That said, I'm not here to squabble over petty BS about what "metonymy" means in some completely unrelated context. For example, unless we're talking about one of his mystery/suspense films that as such has some actual aesthetic connection to the horror genre, I don't really care about whatever Antonioni's films may or may not prove about the concept of metonymy as it relates to aesthetics, because, with reference to this topic in particular, well...Antonioni didn't make monster movies, and we're talking about the process of creating horrific monsters. The only way that example would ever come is by way of me needing a (mostly likely only briefly discussed) counterexample. Moreover, since Carroll's concept of metonymy is not meant to be tied to any kind of rhetorical analogy, we will proceed here (at least until we get to criticism #5 listed above(in another blog post)) in a way that avoids defining metonym as a type of allegorical structure.

The other potentially confusing issue could stem from the fact that here,  the term "diegesis" is always used as it would be in a discourse on film theory, no matter what medium I'm speaking about; that is, whether I'm talking about literature, film, or anything else, if I use the term "non-diegetic" or "extra-diegetic" (and the two are interchangable), what I mean is, "the concepts phenomenologically, empirically or in any other way perceptible to the characters existing in the world of the story."

For example, most narrative forms that use leit-motifs as musical devices (be they film/television scores, operas, musicals, art rock concept albums, or anything else) tend to be set up in a way that necessarily renders the musical content* of said leit-motifs as being definitively non-diegetic. This is even true of most operas by Wagner (who is widely regarded to have set the standard for the use of this concept). 

The most obvious canditate for the definitively cinematic visual non-diegetic is, of course, editing. Moreover, montage is the one aspect of cinema uniquely its own in that it doesn't borrow it's aesthetic from some previously extant art.

As previously stated, many of the structural techniques used in modern film scores tend to be derived from Wagnerian "Music Dramas". Or, as you might suggest cinematography be the starting point, but it borrows compositional structures not only from still photography, but, logically, then, the whole history of Western, 2-D visual design going back to da Vinci at least.

On the other hand, most of the techniques used by modern film and television editors were invented by individuals who, at least for the first fifty years or so, only had the brand-new concept of cinema and trial and error as reference points. This, taken together with the fact that most of the characters in the large percentage of film(s) are usually unaware of the edits makes montage the perfect place to start.

To that end, one could compare the notion of Category Jamming to the philosophical groundwork behind theories of (to use a very obvious example) Soviet Montage. After all, the notion that film is a kind of "Artistic Frankenstein" is so cliche it's boring, and, anyway, Eisenstein himself declared the true essence of cinema to be in the editing and not the story. 

These observations notwithstanding, however, the comparison between Category Jamming and dialectical montage falls flat, since Soviet cinema rarely, if ever, sought to create the affect(s) associated with the modern horror genre. Furthermore, as stated above, we are trying to avoid allegory, and soviet montage is basically to cinematic metaphorical allegory what the above mentioned Antonioni's films are to cinematic metonymic allegory. Even so, I feel it was important to clarify this idea now, because montage/editing (for our purposes here, the two are used interchangeably) and it's status as the 'uniquely cinematic art' still play a huge part in problematizing this issue, and though I will not get to that until the post following this one, I thought it would be helpful to clarify this concept early on.  That said...what are some examples of the visual non-diegetic in horror cinema?

If we wanted examples of non-diegesis in cinematic works of horror, it seems we actually have to avoid talking about montage for a moment and point to things like, for example, the color schemes in The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari or Suspiria, Kubrick's eerie use of radical symmetry in The Shining, or any of Hitchock's pioneering ideas about the nature of cinematic suspense. All of these notions are unknown to the characters in each of these respective films, therefore they are termed non-diegetic. But, these eerie/revolting/surreal/etc. visual devices still surround the character a la the way Carroll describes in his definition of metonyny. 

It is in this fact that we see the first of Carroll's short-comings: do non-diegetic surroundings count as metonymic in the way diegetic ones (like fog or vermin) surrounding the monster do? Carroll never even attempts to answer this question.    

Perhaps we could try to clear up some things by looking at examples from horror literature rather than horror film. In the interest of keeping everyone one the same page (rather than constantly referencing this or that text many will not have read or even heard of), let's make up a little story that borrows some easily understandable tropes from a well know horror author, and then use said story as the basis for a thought experiment:

Let's pretend there's a guy named 'Bob'. Bob is new to the horror genre, but he likes it a lot so far. In particular, he has recently become familiar with the works Algernon Blackwood, and is now inspired to write a prose story that, as Mike Ashely put it, seeks to emulate Blackwood's "...explor[ations of] the unseen powers of Nature." (Ashely, Mike The Mammoth Book of Short Horror Novels,  Carroll & Graf Publishers, New York, NY, 1988. Pg.103)

In Bob's story, Character 'A', a city-slicker, joins an expedition team on its way to northern Canada. Late one night, deep in the woods, he sees Character 'B', an American Indian he has yet to realize is actually some kind of malignant, supernatural forrest-geist incognito, carrying not only a tomahawk, but what also appears to be a dead body that looks identical to himself,  Character 'A'.

He runs back to base camp, where he confronts Character 'C', the expedition's leader. But, because 'A' is so sheltered from having lived in the city his whole life, he doesn't know the word 'tomahawk' and instead describes the small ax carried by 'B' as being a, 'hatchet', screaming, "I saw a man walking through the woods, carrying a hatchet!" as soon as 'C' is within ear shot.

Now, seeing anyone carrying an ax in the forrest is pretty mundane, so 'C' stops listening to 'A', because he assumes 'A' is a fucking lunatic. Thus, 'A' can't finish filling 'C' in with the other details. The end result of all of this is that the whole expedition team is massacred in a torture-porn-esque finale conducted by some kind of evil, anthropomorphized 'Will-of-the-forrest' who,  after  having shed his suit made from the flesh of dead Indian braves, then precedes to vanish into an invisible miasma of gong-like humming (or something). 

So, what we glean from the preceding example is a point about the difference between artistic forms that is actually very important here: first of all, though it may seem so obvious as to render the point unnecessary to state, it still makes a huge amount of difference that this is prose writing and not a movie, as in my earlier examples.

For example, movies are typically described as being made via a 'double-system' - that is, they are record by virtue of the fact that separate visual (the camera) and audio (the recorder) devices are made to operate together via a system like SMPTE Time Code. Comparatively speaking, then, prose fiction operates in a 'single-system' mode (that single system being written language)**. Thinking of it this way simplifies the whole-to-part relation implicit in the concept of 'metonymy' in a way that is much more conducive to Carroll's original definition of the term than otherwise might be the case, since it, for reasons to involved to explain here, allows us to compare works in different artistic mediums with relative ease. Getting back to our story,  though:

we see that Bob, who is obviously outside the world of the story, is able to describe Character 'B's ax as being both a tomahawk and a hatchet, even while Character 'A' (inside the world of the story) is completely ignorant to the existence of the concept denoted by the former of the two synonyms.

Here, we are referring to the literary element your high-school English-Lit teacher called 'tone'. To borrow a slang term used by members of my parents' generation, the tone of a piece of literature is sort of like the "vibe" the text puts out; it is the affect produced by the entirety of possible semiotic connotations, psycho-phonetic signals, etc. contained within the words and phrases used to compose the concrete visage of the text.

The "hatchet" vs. "tomahawk" discussion is a good example of this, because while the two words denote what is basically the exact same tool, a tomahawk is something that is designed specifically as a weapon of war used to scalp people. A 'hatchet', on the other hand, is, for most people, probably just a tool they'd be likely to see sitting around their garage. Thus, it can be said that a sentence that uses the word 'tomahawk' is already leaning toward a much more menacing tone than the exact same sentence written using the synonym 'hatchet'.

If Bob, as a writer, were to make use of all the conations implied by the word "tomahawk" and attempt to get them to operate with other elements of the text, he might also choose to use many other loanwords taken from American Indian languages as opposed to their English language synonyms. Thus, he would create a tone that, for example, might be described as making the already desolate image of the northern Canadian wilderness conveyed by the text feel even more 'foreign' or 'alien' to the English language reader who is probably more familiar with terms from Anglophile and Romance languages that s/he is with ones from, say, Eskimo–Aleut languages***.

And all of this relates back to our discussion of diegesis by virtue of the fact that, just like the edits or shot-compositions that form the basic elements of a film are largely unknown to the characters in that film, the character in the work of fiction cannot possibly have complete epistemological access to the form through which her fictive world is being rendered.

The, for example, 'unsettling', 'revolting', 'eerie', or 'menacing' tone of the words that are the basic building blocks of a prose horror story still "surround" the monster in that work of horror fiction in a way not dissimilar from the way in which the monster is simultaneously surrounded by the type of diegetic elements to which Carroll was referring. Following from that, it can only be said that they have to be read as performing a similar operation to the one Carroll calls "Metonymy".

So, to recap:

"Metonymy" (at least, in terms of the narrowed-down definition Carroll provides with relevance to both his and the present discussion) should be able to work in terms of both the form and the content of a work existing within the horror genre, but the way Carroll defines/problematizes it, it would appear as though this idea only applied to the content of the work exclusively. This fact, while far from showing Carroll's analyses to be bunk, merely shows them to be incomplete.

*'Musical content' being defined in almost any way you can possibly think of, (timbres, rhythms, melodies, harmonic progressions, tragic choruses, Deleuzian Refrains, The Basie Ending, The Tritone Interval, The Amen Break, The Tristan Chord, gay German disco 12"s, overrated guitar riffs, auto-tuned arm-pit fart noises, samples of that 'crashy-buzzy-explody' noise that happens whenever Sarah Palin names a baby, etc., etc.) 

**Because I want to keep all the things I talk about on this blog relevant to mass-media culture, I will tend to start from the vocabulary of film theory (as opposed to the art, theatre and/or literary that forms the basis of most film theory and modern mass media aesthetic discourses by simple virtue of the fact that those in the former category predate those in the latter historically speaking). 

***I would strongly advise against actually applying this sort of operation to a story you're writtng unless you are a part of the culture from whence said loanwords came, or you have spent a lot of time seriously studying and engaging with said culture. Otherwise, you run a real risk of reiterating potentially detrimental stereotypes on minorities too small in numbers, influence, and/or monetary prowess to effectively counteract them or do anything about it.

                

Don’t Touch my Knife: A feminist reading of Charles Laughton’s "The Night of the Hunter"

(Note: I posted this on another blog a few years ago; if you need proof I wrote it or bibliographical notes to cite this for academic purposes, please contact and I will be happy to provide them for you. - Iskander)

          In Charles Laughton’s 1955 Southern Gothic-Noir-Terror masterpiece The Night of the Hunter, gender roles are very clearly defined: grown men, whether they are viewed as protectors or predators of women, are inherently violent or otherwise useless, and grown women are viewed as inherently foolish, or wise only when they keep to their traditional role as nurturers.  This is discernible from the events of the first two scenes,  the picnic scene and the scenes toward the film’s end. Though the film’s depiction of gender roles is very traditional, its self-conscious warnings about misogynistic men  make it unique among films of its era.  The film’s principal personification of a “good woman” is Rachel Cooper and its principal personification of misogyny in men is “Preacher” Harry Powell, both of whom are introduced in the film’s opening scene.

            As Rachel Cooper reads to her orphans from the Bible, the first images of Harry Powell appear, and we hear Rachel reading Matthew 7:15 : 

“And beware false prophets who come sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves…”  

       Powell is in the middle of praying for money as he drives along. Passing a cemetery, he notes, “…not that you mind the killings, Lord.  Your book is full of killings.  But there are things you do hate, Lord.  Lacey things.  Perfume smellin’ things.  Things with curly hair.”  Cut to an image of a burlesque show.  A melodramatic horn plays a bluesy, over-the-top, drunken-sounding, Dixieland jazz melody.  Powell sits in the audience, his eyes fixed to the stage (just like all the other men around him).  He looks away for a moment, only to sneer upward at “God” and then let his hand fall into his pocket.  Now, for the first time, the tattoo on his knuckles is revealed: “H-A-T-E”.  His curled fist goes into his pocket, and a second before he is arrested, the blade of his switchblade juts up through his suit. Really, everything we as the audience need to know about Harry Powell has been shown to us at this point:  the Freudian subtext inherent in watching a switchblade tear through the man’s pants when he sees a stripper is fairly transparent, and that he is a complete sociopath is revealed in his method of survival: using his good looks and sonorous, charismatic tenor voice to marry rich widows, kill them, and make off with their fortunes.

            When we’re introduced to Ben Harper, however, a much different picture is painted: he has robbed a bank, and as he hides the money (from the audience, at this point, too, as Laughton’s camera at first stays in a close-up of Ben’s face), Ben pulls his son, John, aside to tell him to guard his little sister, Pearl, with his life and to keep the money’s location a secret, even from John’s own mother, for, “[John’s] got common sense.  She ain’t.”  So the film’s attitude that, as Rachel Cooper later puts it, “women is fools” is already revealed, since one of the, “good men” already trusts that his pre-teen son has more common sense than an adult woman.  Later, as Powell and Harper sit in a prison cell together, Ben notes that he robbed the bank because he wanted to help his wife and children and make sure they did not starve, and then asks Harry, “What religion you profess, Preacher?” to which Harry replies, “The religion the Almighty and me worked out betwixt us.”  And, indeed, while praying, knife in hand, his “L-O-V-E” knuckles now visible to the camera, he makes it apparent (even at the very moment Ben Harper is hanging)  that the core of his soul is dedicated to love money and hatred of women.   Often, the two emotions are one in same, as symbolized by the fact that two opposing forces are now interlocked in prayer.  The noble, good man who stood up for his wife and family has been hung for doing so, and the evil man is alive and well.

            The hangman who kills Ben Harper is next seen going to Harper’s wife, Willa.  She only takes up a small portion of the background of the frame, her face obscured by shadow, while he is given a larger portion of the foreground.  She expresses her grief about being left, “another widow” (read: easily victimized) while he himself is, as always, unsettled by the hanging.  Here, I should think we ought to take genuine stock of the adult male characters in the film:

1.     Ben Harper, bank robber (number of people he has killed: two),

2.     Harry Powell, fake preacher (number of people he has killed by the film’s end: 27, at least),

3.     The hangman,

4.     The judge (who sentenced Ben to hang),

5.     Uncle Bertie, the town drunkard and,

6.     Walt Spoon, spineless old goof-ball

Not  exactly what you’d call , “a great bunch of guys”. They all either do as, “real men” do—which, in this film, usually involves killing someone—or, in the case of the last two, are constantly watched over by their wives (or, at least Bertie would imagine  he is being watched over) because they are incompetent and, therefore, are assigned the role of comic relief within the structure of the plot. (This is especially true of Walt Spoon).

            “I’ve been married to my Walt for [30 years], and I swear, in all that time, I just lie there, think about my canning.”  Walt looks embraced at his wife’s public attack on his cocksmenship, but does not dare voice his opinion; “That’s somethin’ for a man.  The good Lord never meant for a decent woman to want that,  Not really want it.”  Walt’s wife is frigid.  So,  Icey Spoon’s opinions about sex are directed at Willa Harper, who has spent the entirety of the picnic scene worried about where the money was hidden and whether Harry Powell thinks she knows.  That Powell tells her it’s at the bottom of the river (thereby foreshadowing her death) only becomes significant when the money’s real hiding place is revealed: in Pearl’s doll.  Pearl’s doll is a symbol for Powell’s greed; an effigy of a young woman that is stuffed with money—an object, made to be a mere toy, but really only valuable for the money it holds.  Icey’s Spoon’s constant warnings to Willa to get married (because Willa cannot survive without a man) and her mistrust of a woman she has known for years in favor of blind faith in the lies Powell tells after Willa disappears only help to service Powell’s said greed.

            Here, I should also like to note a distinct pattern that has emerged: only the women are at all concerned with the nature of their own sexuality.  The only male characters that are on screen long enough to respond in situations where sex is mentioned are John, who is too young to consciously understand the implications of what is being said, Walt Spoon, who has been emasculated by his wife, and Harry Powell.  Powell, for instance, later accuses Willa of having turned him out of their bed on their wedding night, when in fact it was he who turned herout, giving a moral diatribe about marriage being, “…a blending of two spirits in the sight of the Lord.”  Harry is prone to using women’s lust against them.  As minor characters, Ruby’s little boyfriends toward the end of the film do the same to her. Again, it is the predatory nature of men and the foolish nature of women that is emphasized.  The only woman in the film who can be described as both strong and intelligent is Rachel Cooper, who describes herself as, “a strong tree with branches for many…” and the children at her orphanage as, “…my burden.  And I’m proud of it.”  Here, Rachel is fulfilling her role as nurturer, albeit managing to do it without any significant, adult male figure to help her.  

        And, indeed, as Harry stalked outside Rachel’s window, and the two harmonized in singing, “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms”, we are reminded of the opposite poles of Harry Powell’s hands coming together in his cynical prayer at the beginning of the film.  Those two opposite poles are what teaches John wisdom: for, even though it was Eve who lured Adam to his Fall with the Fruit of Knowledge,  by the film’s end, it is now John who hands Rachel Cooper an apple as her Christmas gift.  And Rachel responds, “…that’s the best gift a body can have.”  Not sex. Wisdom.  The Fall of [wo]man at the hands of men.

Conclusion:

          It is clear that Laughton agrees that women should away from sex because it gives men a chance to victimize them, but, apparently, women can make it on their own in the world…as long as they don’t entirely abandon their traditional roles as wives and mothers.  Like many other noir crime films, The Night of the Hunter is very cynical in its attitude toward humanity.  Men are depicted as being largely predatory, violent even  when they are not, or otherwise worthless.  Women are depicted as foolish and easily victimized unless they stay within well defined, traditional female roles.  The film begins making its point right from the first few scenes, and reiterates the point during both the picnic scene and, later, toward the end of the film.  I find it very saddening that it was also Laughton’s only work as a director.  To be sure, his mastery of photographic composition and low key lighting techniques and use of expressionistic sets, music and symbolism create an artfully rendered cinematic world that is at once enigmatic, childlike, ethereal, ominous, beautiful, atmospheric, menacing and sublime.  This capacity remains unrivaled in it to this day.