"Are you saying I was attacked by a ghost?"

Michelle Pfeiffer in What Lies Beneath

"The phrase, the world wants to be deceived, has become truer than had ever been intended. People are not only, as the saying goes, falling for the swindle; if it guarantees them even the most fleeting gratification, they desire a deception which is nonetheless transparent to them."

Robert Musil from The Man Without Qualities

It's always oddly satisfying in a synchronistic sort of way when you have two movie titles of the sort above. Reams could be written on the titles alone.

Both movies deal with the relations with the visible and the invisible, paranoia, and communication with the dead. (In the case of The Hollow Man, he must first be experimented on and essentially made dead, unavailable to the living, a veritable avatar of alienation with the concomitant dementia ). And of course we mustn't forget the ever-present association of trauma and the uncanny, with the MOST traumatic events in human life centered around death first and then transfiguration. Both involve the making visible of the invisible (the uncanny) or the making invisible of the visible (the sublime). At any rate, they oscillate chiasmatically back and forth, into and out of each other.

I was reminded that the director of What Lies Beneath, Robert Zemeckis, had also directed Contact, a story about a lonely woman (like Michelle Pheiffer in WLB) who makes contact with the invisible. During a microsecond of the operation of an experimental device, time expands and Jodie foster travels across the universe and makes contact with an alien who is masquerading as her father. Of course no one believes her when she comes back-since to the onlookers she apparently (visibly) never left.

In WLB Michelle Pfeiffer plays the lonely wife of Harrison Ford, a well-respected genetics researcher who is haunted by the reputation of his famous dead father, also a scientist.

Through a series of misperceptions, Pfeiffer's character triangulates on the academic couple next door to their Vermont home (former home of famous big scientist daddy of Ford) and, as we later find out, is projecting her own repressed knowledge of her husband's affair and subsequent murder of the girl onto them, acting as a red herring for the audience in the first part of the film.

At one point in the film, Pfeiffer obtains a Quija board to make contact with the dead girl. Experimenting with this apparatus is enough to open the doors to the dead sufficiently so that all manner of weird events begin to happen--including the trauma of her husband's affair and his murder of his girlfriend. (Attention feminists: I believe I will start a sub-genre of film studies called 'dead-girls-floating-underwater' and will include commercials as well. It's a pretty effect and all but I would suppose that it also brings all sort of associational imagery to the fore: angels, medusa, a sort of vengeful timelessness, an extraverted uterine existence, analog to our presumed imagery of the place of the dead.)

There is a pivotal scene in the movie when Pfeiffer drops by a small bar called Adamant, where a friend of hers saw the husband trysting the night away with the girlfriend. (When her friend first told her about her husband's assignation in the bar, I thought she said it was called 'In animate' but of course she was saying 'in Adamant'. Webster's claims 'adamant' as ' a stone of unbreakable hardness' or too hard to be broken. I would claim that the inanimate IS pretty damn adamant...as is the invisible world, so much so that it is easier to claim that it doesn't exist. The ontology of those invisibilities is always adamant, impervious to inspection; it's the 'evidence' of its presumed intrusions and the apparatuses and detection systems that admit or deny the evidence that is of concern. No wonder that psychoanalysis took over the science of the dead. And the highest media tech is the reservoir of those hauntings: -"The spirit-world is as large as the storage and transmission possibilities of a civilization," Fredrich Kittler in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. see also: http://www.pd.org/~zeug/DEAD/razedead.html)

But the pivotal moment in the movie happens in the little gift shop next door called.... Let Sleeping Dogs Lie. There, Pfiffer finds a box that looks just like the one she saw under water, as she was possessed by Ford's dead girlfriend. She retrieves the box in a less somnambulistic state and discovers that the key she found in her husband's possession fits the box and contains aspects of the dead girlfriend. Then of course bad things start to happen and Ford goes off the deep end again, changing character into some murderous psychotic weirdo, chasing Pfeiffer around, paralyzing her, getting hit in the head, coming back to life, getting banged around by Pfeiffer, coming back to life, Pfeiffer tries to escape, they both wind up in the drink, where the floating dead girlfriend comes to reclaim her hollow victory.

The end.

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"Let's just hope we're not making a snuff film."

Character in 'The Hollow Man'

"The phrase, the world wants to be deceived, has become truer than had ever been intended. People are not only, as the saying goes, falling for the swindle; if it guarantees them even the most fleeting gratification they desire a deception which is nonetheless transparent to them."

robert musil

"The triumph of advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel compelled to buy and use its products even though they see through them." theodor adorno

(Should have a quote here from Jean baudrillard but you can go pick one from The Transparency of Evil)

O.K. let's just say right off that "The Hollow Man" sucks, and is formulaic and grimly juvenile in many of its antics. You may remember director Paul Verhoeven's more lustrous efforts in the dark humor visions of 'Starship Troopers' and 'Robocop' as well as the salacious 'Showgirls'.

In a certain way, H.M. is a truly obscene film, if by that we mean showing the reverse side of the scene. It gives the old porno term 'show pink' a whole new expressive platform. Now, we are not content apparently to merely see labia pulled back, we have to see the various insides of the body, diving through like some perverse slasher film except that we have given our scientists (and their proxies, the multimedia artists) permission to take us apart and reformat us. All well and good, but does it have to be so CONSISTENTLY on the level of those old catalogs in the back of comic books: x-ray specs of young boys looking through women's clothing and mirrors affixed to the end of shoes?

Perhaps Verhoeven has in mind some sort of critique of masculinity and its enforced allegiance to visibility at all costs (should be the motto of the old Enlightenment program...anybody remember that? Check the quotes above...)

It's not even necessary to fully lay out the plot, since it's the standard Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde approach: the experimental protocol brings the possibility of fame, fortune, and power to the grand vizier of experimentation, said experiment goes sour. In this case, invisibility is what gives access to power but, like power itself, it SEEMS invisible and everywhere (it is to power's advantage to make it seem so) but is in fact grounded in a very particular person's body and psyche. Evidently regression in the service of invisibility is no vice. (But once power becomes 'invisible' it might as well become omnipresent since it becomes known through its traces and evidence or a statistical apprehension. And the invisibility of power can extend its visible effects beyond its 'actual' power by means of mechanisms of projection, paranoia, and the manipulation of the predictable reactions to intimations of conspiracy (which, let us not forget, is the belief in invisible regimes of power and control; once a certain oppositional structure is set up, it becomes easy to push buttons by indirection and innuendo, even to point in the opposite direction from which one wants to go. and the work of the structure carries out a certain program, REGARDLESS of the purported though inaccessible truth or partial truths of the conspiracies.

At that point we are firmly in the realm of the Foucaultian biopower episteme, a certain form of postmodernism (and you thought that had gone away!...Nope, only invisible). It is easy to see how a distributed invisibility, an invisibleness which seems at times as a haunting of the austere mansions of modernism, can come to be equated with the colorless and odorless abstractions of capitalism itself.

The Hollow Man curiously fractilizes and recourses these relations between power, the experimental impulse and its necessary collusion with capital intensive efforts and the resultant dementia, re-embedding each within the other; just as the movie industry now continues at times to be a pure reflection of it's own technological prowess and the workings of a technological environment on human subjectivity.

Too bad that the movie itself takes such a dreary predictable path in getting there.

Both The Hollow Man and What Lies Beneath continue to extrapolate the issues of 'das unheimlich' or the uncanny as the haunting of matter by a technological imperative, much as the human can be said to be simultaneously formed and haunted by the genetic. The speculative playing out of these collisions in film in the coming years should continue to make for some interesting figures passing through the smoke of 'history and techne'.

Robert Cheatham

August 2000

Atlanta