"The spirit-world is as large as the storage and transmission possiblities of a civilization."

Fredrich Kittler/Grammophone, Film, Typewriter

-- J. D. Peters / Speaking Into Air: A History of the Idea of Communication

"The past is a funny thing."

Frank Sullivan in Frequency

(This is getting a little ridiculous, he thinks to himself, or at least, as they say in philosophy, w-a-a-a-y ovedetermined. He had started a series of thoughts -- which turned to pixels -- a detecting motif running through high tech western culture and which seemed to be perfectly, if somewhat 'unconsciously' and inchoately, expressing itself in that cuture's methods of representation.

But he now realized that all the detecting adventures on film he had attempted to point to, were all subtended by -- Death. And that the panoptic Copworld we found ourselves in was intimately connected with this Region of the Shades somehow.

In fact, he was beginning to feel a little uncomfortable with the 'revelations' he seemed to be stumbling across. He was sure that some folks were beginning to look askance at him --'does this guy really believe all this garbage he's getting from some 2-bit (well, 8 and a half bits now he supposed what with inflation) movie?!'. Afterall 'entertainment' and gaming were the driving forces behind most pleasurable activity now. And in fact the Copworld and gaming had a salvic, no, let's say even MESSIANIC mission now, as he believed was readily apparent in the movie he had just walked out of. And what a closed salvational circuit this movie made! A father firefighter and a son cop. the SON bootstrapping the father into present day existence....and into the calm trans-temporal game of baseball on a Sunday afternoon.

And as occasionally happens, he was beset with...um perhaps epiphany was the right word--after coming out of some of these movies. And I will tell you this only because he has whispered it to me in strictest confidence (--but given the nature of the epiphany I now realize that that confidence means little) . He is struck by the mask-like nature of reality as he moves into the bright outside, beyond the shadows on the cave of the theater and that we small creatures of flux seem sometimes the endpoints of vaster pyramids of flux which open into everything else, tremendous reservoirs of energy. There are times when I'm a little ashamed of these mytical vertigoes of his, they seem so archaic, so out of step with the New Materialism [which, granted, seems really to be a form of immaterialism an"""""d impermanence as LEAST as severe as any so-called 'spiritualism'.]. These epiphanies seemed to hint at some form of inhumanism, something which only used the human face when convenient or necessary, a contingent refurbishing of matter, as it were, to let it see itself.

But no matter: no amount of shaming seems sufficient to dissuade him from his current obsession with messianic materialism. So let's just watch him ramble and see how tightly he can stretch the rope after he jumps off the limb.)

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john Sullivan in Frequency

Let's state this as baldly and straightforwardly as possible right at the beginning of this broken record: the protagonist of Frequency,John Sullivan, is a cop and more particularly, yes yes of course, a detective. If we have learned anything from this whole series of reviews (well, I have anyway) it is that the Copworld is all-pervasive and in some sort of deep structuralist way; that is, being a detector, or a cop, is a position that exists for each of us, waiting to be filled in some way. Copping this position ione s simultaneously a 'probehead' as Deleuze and Guatari called such explorations, and a border patrol, always on the lookout for foreign particles, for breaks and holes in the borders of a the community. (In fact, the jewish religious community has formalized this border phenomena with the 'eruv', going so far as to actually mark out the boundaries of the community, with regular patrols every week to assure the integrity of the perimeter.)

So it would seem to me that concerns with 'perimeter integrity' is some sort of fundamental activity which involves a janus-faced positionality (a facing outward, which simultaneously acts to contain inwardly, the mythological figuration of such beiing Hermes) whether the physical borders of the self, tribe, nation, family etc. The military though the millennia has always been the exemplar of such 'exploratory policing'. i think we can consider the 'police' to be a domestic subset of such.

So this movie opens with a melancholic cop (which reminds me: it used to be that the melancholic figures in earlier literary representations were artists; not so with film and video, where artists -- of any stripe -- are most often seen as buffoons or worse. In film the paradigmatic melancholic is most often the cop, the one we see most acceptable as an interface between the unknown and the known -- and frankly the figure which most closely resembles the cinematic appartus itself. Melancholia itself has always been seen as a suffering from an extreme spatio-temporal disjunction, first embodied in the shaman, then in the artist, now in the cop-detective. Two things to keep in mind concerning melancholia: (1) according to freud, melancholia is associated with mourning and a regressive narcissism and (2) and that, even so, in melancholia not only is it unclear what object has been lost [in order for there to be mourning something must be lost]...or even that there has been a loss! As one author puts it, it is the paradox of an intention to mourn that precedes and anticipates the loss of the object. Time travel if you will.)

From this troubling temporal disjunction (let's remember also that trauma is the result of a severe temporal lag in regard to event and its aftermath) comes a certain relationship to realitiy ... and perhaps more importantly 'unreality' or the phantasmagoric. Perhaps we can begin to see why 'special effects' (aka unreality) has such a special relationship to the cinematic appartus and also a peculiar relationship to trauma and also, in a sideways step, melancholia. And why, now that the stroke between reality/unreality seems to becoming more porous (and frightening) simply as a matter of daily activity to a much larger number of participants than simply the artist and his or her sycophants, that a policing structure has now come to seem more of an avatar and a Hermes-like gateway to the 'Supreme Realities' -- hey, let's face it, most of us don't want anything to do with 'Supreme Realities' (i.e. birth and death)...it interferes with our afternoon latte.

But just one more comment on this melancholia business and we'll be done with it for now. The following quote from Agamben speaks perfectly well to this movie: "In the space opened by [the melancholic's] obstinate phantasmagoric tendency originates the unceasing alchemical effort of human culture to appropriate to itself death and the negative and to shape the maximum reality seizing on the maximum unreality.'

Wow, does that EVER speak to this movie! Here's the deal in VERY brief terms: one evening a cop begins to get messages on an old, supposedly broken ham radio. The messages turn out to be from...his father in the year 1969, the year the father, a firefighter, dies in a fire. (Apparently this uncanny connection is caused, so the movie implies, by a plethora of sunspot activity, the epiphany of which is the aurora borialis; at one point in the movie in the beginning there is a television program on in the background mentioning string theory and the many-worlds hypothesis of quantum mechanics -- as if that were to explain anything)

So pop and son strike up a conversation, find out what the situation is, are incredulous, get past their incredulity, then, like good pragmatic Americans, decide to use this loophole in Natural law to good advantage, to wit, catching the bad guy serial killer (after some misadventures along the way) who started his career in evil in 1969 and was never caught (I won't tell you who it is in case you see the movie).

It's amazing what a little info will do, since this transtemporal duo find a way to transfer stuff from the past to the future (well, of course that usually happens anyway).

It occurs to me that one can consider this movie a paen to a kind of middle class postmodern messianism....and concommitant regressive narcisssism, since the only thing that's needed to provide the saving grace is a little electrical storm and a little bit of data flow (to drive this point home YAHOO ---that's right the search engine portal very pricey item on the STOCK EXCAHNGE---figures prominently....who needs Natural Law when you got stock options??!) and---bingo bango! up pops all sorts of things from the great Holding Tank of the past...just think --- the long arm of the law could not only get you in your living room...it could get you before you were born!

Well, I sometimes think it's not a bad idea --although Christ had the idea first or one of his pals anyway --go back in time and rescue EVERYBODY (as opposed to this movie where just your family gets rescued). In this movie we got machines --information machines, which we usually call computers but which in this movie is called a ham rig--that'll do this for us.

Just think: the past would become endless --- even as our future disappeared.

Of course what this means is the return of the Eternal Return, along with all that implies. (In fact one could make the point that this endless melancholic mourning for the Absent Object is a mourning for these lost gods and the tyrannies and ecstasies they require and induce, something to give one more than a shivering pause for thought. What Lost Object does a Metaphysical Cop mourn for? A Perfect Order? Hermetically sealed borders of every possible kind? extending to the very ends of time and space? ['cause that's the only way it could happen])

One could even make the fanciful point that all the evocation of 'turning' with fans, blades, etc. in various genres of film (primarily horror and science fiction but I expect we will see it spread) is an inchoate awareness of this eternal return of the mythic grounding, the 'widening gyre' of Yeats.

And now we have the dubious honor of having our machines able to fold us into this New Order, saving our bacon by killing our pig so to speak.

ok, you're getting tired and I'm getting tired of your getting tired but I know you must be wondering what Nietzsche has to do with this, even though you also must know that he considered the Eternal Return to be his greatest revelation. So in closing here is a tiny thing he had to say on it all centering on what he called the greatest burden, that is, the conduct of one's life (and death, although both terms start to get a little porous and wishy washy here) conducted into eternity:

"What if a demon crept after thee into thy loneliest loneliness some day or night, and said to thee: "This life, as thou livest it at present,

and hast lived it, thou must live it once more, and also innumerable times; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought

and every sigh, and all the unspeakably small and great in thy life must come to thee again, and all in the same series and sequence-and similarly this spider

and this moonlight among the trees, and similarly this moment, and I myself. The eternal sand-glass of existence will ever be turned once more, and thou with

it, thou speck of dust!"- Wouldst thou not throw thyself down and gnash thy teeth, and curse the demon that so spake? Or hast thou once experienced a

tremendous moment in which thou wouldst answer him: "Thou art a God, and never did I hear anything so divine! "If that thought acquired power over thee

as thou art, it would transform thee, and perhaps crush thee; the question with regard to all and everything: "Dost thou want this once more, and also for

innumerable times?" would lie as the heaviest burden upon thy activity! Or, how wouldst thou have to become favorably inclined to thyself and to life, so as to

long for nothing more ardently than for this last eternal sanctioning and sealing?"