MAGNOLIA

"I always answer the questions but I don't want to anymore."

We seem to have found, at least temporarily, an apotheosis in our little story on the detecting of 'detecting' and its imbrication in the structures of western ontology and techné.

The current movie 'Magnolia' indeed brings to a head in a most forceful and determined yet subtle fashioning many of our present concerns. Indeed, the opening title sequence unfolds in a graphic manner the course of the movie's concerns. Hortus Third, the botanical dictionary of standarized plant """descriptions, describes the magnolia flower thusly: "large, solitary, terminal, often very showy, sepals 3, petals 6-23, white, pink, purple, or yellow; formed of many separate carpels congested into a "cone," seeds often red or orrange, suspended at maturity by a slender thread."

To hammer this nail home: what could be a more precariously poignant description of current male sexuality (let's keep in mind the director's previous movie 'Boogie Nights') than "large, solitary, terminal....suspended at maturity by a slender thread."

The title sequence itself takes the flower from prime condition into a livid wound, a deep bruised purple, redolent of some conditon deep within the flower itself, since the bloom remains 'intact' while still radiating trauma.

So far so good. But where is the 'detecting,' that omnipresent, all-seeing hermeneutic (and invariably male) eye, that panoptic eye which INVARIABLY wears a blue uniform and 'walks a beat,' on the lookout for clues to crimes which have yet to be committed. (as a side bar here--but is it really?--we mustn't forget Freud's formulation that paranoia--surely some form of hermeneusis in extremis--was connected to homosexuality, or the conjunction of ability/desire to detect only clues of 'sameness' ...).

So, if you've seen the movie, you know where I'm going with this: Jim the cop, Jim the slightly SUSPECT cop in some fashion (by his fellow cops). We the audience know that his detecting skills are not in question; the sheer, raw epistemology of detecting, the condition of his panoptic eye is not in question. We are given ample examples of his ability, even eyes in the back of his head as he detects Donnie the Former Brain, climbing a pole in the middle of a rain of frogs. At a certain point in the film, Jim the cop's perpetual questing for evidence is dropped as 'love' and 'desire' enter the picture (he even loses his gun, fer god's sake, what more do you want?!!) and goes into confessional mode (always the other side of detecting let's not forget, interrogating/confessing/detecting being different sides of the same, er, triangulated coin...and in a way, 'detecting' is doomed to NEVER get off the Freudian couch--if and when it does it invariably goes into Police State mode).

Just one more thing for your consideration in this jim thread: the penultimate detecting moment -- and here's let's connect it up with the Bone Collector which started this whole damn thing--is a textual one again and one which, for lack of time, I can only allude to here: Jim the cop bursts into his coked-out Object of Desire's apartment and as the camera does a medium pace sweep of the apartment, and a bookcase in the apartment what do we see but a very large yellow volume with the name of BARTHES in large black letters. Given the speed of the pan, it is the only book we can make out. It is almost as a punctuation to Jim the cop's career, that we see the name of Roland Barthes, one of the master detector/semioticians of the twentieth century, a whole set of discourses which act, even, to displace discourse -- just as Jim the cop's career is being affirmed yet subly displaced by his coked-out Object of Desire.

But let's leave Jim the cop, lest you think i'm jimmying up the works here, stacking the deck so that I can detect what I want (desire?). In fact, the movie makes clear from the start with its bit of Forteana that chance, circumstance, fortuity, dare we say even 'fate', as improbable as such events are, (well, perhaps even BECAUSE of their improbability which means, yep, you got it, the ESCAPING of events from a cop laden schema of detection) that it forms the generative matrix (the Khora as Plato called it) from which the gratuitous absurditites of everyday life emerge and ALSO the escape mechanism in some obscure and even ridiculous way. (Nevertheless: although this reliance on 'coincidence' seems to be a questing away from a deity-inflected examination of 'original sin,' guilt, redemption and the whole nine religious yards, we in fact seem to be uncannily thrown back to more archaic modes even if, or even BECAUSE, it is filtered through a more contemporary 'quantum uncertainty principle'. As regards the possibility of an ur-trauma being involved, no matter WHAT detection scheme we use (or attempt to foil) I'm fond of this quote by Roberto Calasso: "For we live surrounded, in the invisible air, by wandering avengers who never forget the 'acient contaminations.')

Oh, we have so much further to go, and so little time, so excuse us for getting a tad bit telegraphic (maybe, hopefully, even telepathic, ie, 'coincidence' formed very purposefully).

Let's not forget the other thread, the quiz show called "What Do Children Know?"...ladies of germs of the jury, really now, how much more straight forward can you be concerning trauma and its (hidden) effects??! There is poor little Brain Stanley pissing his poor little heart out (we've already seen what a career of faux-detecting, of information-overload has done for former boy wonder, Donnie the Brain, getting his teeth knocked out, climbing poles, getting slimed with circumstantial frogs, falling in love with bartenders in braces -- 'frogs raineth on the righeous and the heathen alike' sayeth the good book, that is, Charles Fort's [and remember that last name!] The Book of The Damned)....and it is then that he delivers his Bartleby Statement (of increasing importance nowadays, I'm led to think--Melville was really onto something when he let that damn whale go--but of course like what's-his-name, oh yeah, gregory peck, who was taken down by the big Dick into the watery depths, SAYING and DOING are two very different things...whch, now that I think about it, perhaps only come together in, no, not detecting, but ...coincidence and chance--- but I digress...)

So Stanley says, and it really is a defining moment of the film, (that and another statement that Jimmy Gator [I always want to put a 'the' in between there, turning him into a bookie, Jimmie the Gator, purveyor of odds, racketeering behind the scenes, aka molestor of daughters, 'I'll take my chances' Jimmy the G.], a statement that he makes later on that we will get to), so Stanley the male boy in training brings us this little missive, wrapped up in piss: "I always answer the question and I don't want to anymore."

ooo... fatal for quiz shows AND for detecting shows, ie, what 'culture', 'society' and 'life' is turning into: a big TEST---"do you know the answer, hot shot or don't you? which in turn is based on the big Dick, Moby, going down for the last time--or is it going down ON for the last time...at any rate, Stanley has had enough and says what many people think now but can't bring themselves to do--or not-do--that is, not answer the fuckin' queston. (And then again there are people now who just want to 'blow shit up'. Let's not forget though that 'acting out' is, psychoanalytically speaking, a kind of running in place, a Bartlebyization of action as it were)

Ok, quickly now. Poor Jimmy the Gator. Jimmy has not been able to break the odds, in fact he's dying from cancer, he has become a host in more ways than one, and in fact is literally breaking down under the interrogation of a more primal disruption, an 'ancient contamination' indeed. Whatever 'coincidental' moral judgement is there on the life of Jimmy the Gator I leave to the viewer to discern. So then, what more appropriate statement can Jimmy G. utter than "We may be through with the past but the past ain't through with us." Invisible, ancient contaminations. And of course Donnie the Brain makes that statement also...and how can he not ? He is riven, pierced to the heart with the past. (A fate which young Brain Stanley is TRYING to avoid by trying to avoid the question--but really, we don't like that non-answer do we? How can our children ['our children! protect the children!'] make a living/survive if they don't ANSWER THE QUESTION!! TAKE THE TEST! GET IN LINE!) I mean, answer truthfully now...yes, maybe you see now, the vertiginous abyss that detecting leads us to, it's necessity and our downfall.)

But of course we have left the centerpiece of the film for last, the Seduce and Destroy' program of Frank the d.j., spinning a complicated homosocial web for us, which is detected by the point probe of the all detecting eye of

the televison interviewer who rides the big Dick, Moby, of Frank's down down down having evidenced for us, the audience, that Big Dick Jockey Frank is not what he appears, that what he REALLY thinks about men is what he lets slip out to his audience of men trying to act out their OWN shit, that he says to them : "Men are shit!" (but lets not forget that Frank ALSO 'Refuses to Answer the Question', thereby complicating Stanley's little barteleby act--cause, really, don't we think Frank SHOULD answer?? I mean, we think he's a bad boy and should be called to an accountiing by 'answering the questions'--right?); Frank is a momma's boy after all, playing out the old fort/da spindle trick of freud -- 'Hey, ma's gone and left me! oh, there she is..'--except of course, the film puts it onto the Old Man of the Bed, traumatically orchestrating events still just like he produced 'What do Children Know?' (just as we all produce that particular show) from his death bed and even beyond and so Frank's sobbing expression of that stumbling male gracelessness under traumatic pressure to his dying father is "Don't go away you fucking asshole".

well, we could go on but let's just end the questioning for right now. Evidence, Trauma, Epistemology--and certain questions of gender--under an uncertain sky of falling frogs. But then, like all modern cinematic solutions--and let's forestall any questions outside that loop for now--out of the bruise we get a smile at the end, as forensics turns to love. Or at least some coincidental approximation of such.

So many questions, so little time.