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The measure of a man’s greatness would be in terms of what his work cost him.
Wittgenstein once told someone.
(David Markson, The Last Novel)
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The guilty. may flee when no one pursues.
(Dick, Scanner)
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I myself, I am not a character in this novel; I am the novel.
(Dick’s Author’s Note, Scanner)
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Scottie: If I could just find the key, the beginning, and put it together.
Madeleine: To explain it away.
(01:04:23)
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It’s too late, there’s something I must do.
(01:14:37)
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Elster assumes Scottie will not follow Madeleine up the steps. He knows Scottie’s medical history. He knows of Scottie’s phobia. But what if Scottie follows Madeleine up the steps? As difficult as it would be, it isn’t impossible. What if he makes it to the top? In the novel, there is a physical barrier, a locked door. Flavierès (the novel’s Scottie) would have to climb out a window and then around the outside of the tower to get to Madeleine. In the movie, there is only Scottie’s fear to stop him.
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There is a scene (is this the right word?) in the game Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask in which the player’s avatar is first doubled, then trebled, then quadrupled, playing one, two, three, and then four instruments at once, in four different forms. One of the conceits of the game is that there are masks that not only disguise the player but actually give him a different form altogether, transforming him into a different creature with extrahuman abilities (to breathe underwater, fly in the air, or walk through lava), and here, in this scene, all four forms are in play at the same time. Once the player has completed all four transformations and played the song in its entirety, the reward is, perhaps unsurprisingly, yet another mask, a mask that resembles exactly the original bearer of the mask, a character named Gorman, who gives the player the “Gorman Mask.” Putting the mask on, the player becomes Gorman. Why, one wonders, would someone carry a mask that looked exactly like himself? What advantage could that possibly give him? And yet, playing this section of the game, I was reminded that I had once asked for just such a thing from my wife, seeing it advertised by a company in Japan that made masks from photographs. My wife would not buy it for me, because, she told me, it would be frightening, and disturbing. Why would I want such a thing, she asked. It would not look like me, even though (because?) it would be designed to look like me.
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So much of being a writer is, I think, about identity.
(Zambreno, Heroines)
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In Adolfo Bioy Casares’s The Invention of Morel, the scientist Morel says, “Until recently science had been able to satisfy only the senses of sight and hearing, to compensate for spatial and temporal absences.” This idea, that recordings can “compensate” for “absences,” is one that originated with Thomas Edison, inventor of both the phonograph and the Kinetoscope. Edison designed the phonograph with the idea that it would be a kind of alternative to a live performance. It was not supposed to be a historical record of that performance, it was supposed to be a new performance itself — a phonograph of a trumpet, for instance, would stand in for that trumpet in a concert, the rest of the orchestra playing their parts and the phonograph playing its. But recordings are not compensations for absence. They can’t be. They’re something else. They are things. To see a recording as a compensation for absence makes the whole project seem noble, in a way: Even when its subjects have gone, the recording persists as though they hadn’t. Edison was trying to invent immortality. He intended his phonograph not as a method of archiving or disseminating sound but of producing it; the recording was the person whose voice it rendered. The idea is flawed at its core, and Edison eventually abandoned it, but it persisted nonetheless.
Even now, our technologies pretend to speak to us, to act out lives in front of us. In a strange way, it isn’t what they do but what they don’t that damns them to artificiality. They talk over us; they listen only when not in use. If you call your bank and interrupt the recorded voice, the recording will simply stop, as though the person on the other end had been struck by lightning. A recording can’t compensate for a person for the simple reason that we are trained from birth to recognize other people as people by how they respond to us. Our parents scold us or hold us when we complain; our toys lie deathly still no matter how much we scream at them.
People made famous by recordings are thus rendered unreal, people with whom we would never — could never — interact. That is, people become celebrities because they cease to be people. They become famous by being captured (the coinage is no mistake) on film or on vinyl. The people onscreen are not people even when we spot them on the street. Isn’t that the function of the entourage, the publicist, the photo op? Once a person has been transmuted by an appearance in recorded media, they can never again truly inhabit the same world their spectators do. They move in a parallel world, the world of objects, the world of things. These technologies make compensations of their subjects. They destroy them through making them absences.
And still people try to join in conversation with them. They put themselves onscreen, talk back to people who otherwise can’t be talked to. Doesn’t this help to explain the popularity of “reality television,” of “first-person” camerawork (as in The Blair Witch Project or Cloverfield), of sites like YouTube (where the bulk of the “original programming” is, not coincidentally, reviews or commentaries on already-existing work), of social media, of memoir, blogs, “selfies”? What if these trends aren’t a new kind of narcissism, but, instead, an attempt to remedy the imbalance the previous century created with its new media? The audience attempts to have its voice heard by removing itself from the audience, by making of itself a compensation. Maybe it’s doomed to failure, but when has that ever stopped anybody?
And perhaps these failures, the fact that none of these new or rediscovered modes achieve true conversation in any traditional sense of the word — the fact that they are more of the same — perhaps this only reveals that we don’t after all crave conversation or dialogue so much as we simply wish to be heard. Maybe we even prefer to be heard in a way that limits what or how others can reply to us; we like to pretend that we are absent; we don’t mind that a recording is unaware of our presence, that we can become witnesses without fear of becoming participants, that a recording’s subjects, its compensations, have, in the act of being recorded, reduced themselves in some way, devolved from people to things, that we want to become things ourselves out of some desire to reduce ourselves to ghosts. But why?
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Moreclass="underline" “When Madeleine existed for the senses of sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch, Madeleine herself was actually there.”
(Adolfo Bioy Casares, The Invention of Morel)
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Adolfo Bioy Casares’s The Invention of Morel is the story of a man, a fugitive — from what crime or persecution, we are not told, though he does tell us that he was “accused of duplicity” and has been imprisoned — who finds himself marooned on an uninhabited island when his boat breaks up on the reef surrounding it. He has been told to go to this island because no one ever stops there; he will never be found. The island’s previous inhabitants were all found dead, adrift on a boat, “skinless, hairless, without nails on their fingers or toes.” There is a “museum” on the island, a chapel, and a swimming pool. As the fugitive discovers, there are also people, or what appear to be people, on what appears to be a vacation or holiday of some sort. But it turns out that these people are really recordings made by a man named Morel who has invented a device that projects not just images but (it seems) physical, tactile being — these projections are solid, can speak, smell, their sun gives off heat, their tides wash the shore. The only thing that makes them different from the reality the fugitive would be living in without the projections is that their every action is preordained, is only a repetition of a past action, has been recorded by Morel’s invention.