Can we even think of the interior scene as a narrative already in progress, in the middle when we join it? The living participants that we are introduced to in the film are, in order of appearance: a monkey, a cat, some larvae and a cockroach. Does the idea of a plot occur to them, and if not, should it occur to us? You could argue, of course, given what we saw at the beginning, that these creatures are somehow in the middle of the biggest narrative plot since Genesis. But presumably the magnitude of this escapes each of them. Or they just don't give a shit. For the monkey, nothing seems to discommode – she just streels around and does her thing. With the cat, not much bother there either. I read somewhere that monkeys, like cats, sometimes play easy to get, hoping to get something in return. As for the cockroach and larvae, a motley parade, who can say?
Humans are always in the middle of things, a temporal point that has no significance whatsoever. We are quite simply in the middle of our extinction, a point between an origin and an end. Frank Kermode said that if we are always expecting the apocalypse, we make our middle time special. In other words, our lives can have meaning if we glimpse the end – imagine it, factor it in.18 All of us are living in the shadow of the end; it draws closer and closer, eventually becoming overwhelming, an accelerant. Philip Larkin put it succinctly in his last great poem, ‘Aubade’ (1980), where (killing himself with drink) he reflects with a mix of terror and intense curiosity on his own impending end: ‘Most things may never happen: this one will.’ 19 An ‘aubade’ is a poem or piece of music appropriate for daybreak, a love song, for instance, to complement lovers parting at dawn, just before the morning hardens and becomes full of ordinary things. Larkin's is a beautiful poem, full of melancholy and wonder, and it speaks to the vital fear of death that can consume anyone facing their end. Based on the average extinction span of an evolved mammal – about half a million years, apparently – the human race is now in its early teen years.20 This might go a long way towards explaining the manic recklessness of the last couple of thousand years. It also could present us with a serious warning for the older teenage years to come. Larkin again:
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.21
The interior filming starts all coy, with fifty seconds of shots that tease and mislead, about a girl or very young woman in the restaurant. Perhaps a ‘left behind’ or the last person alive. The camera and the careful editing are playing with us, creating mystery, waiting to surprise us. We expect the curious figure soon to disappear into recognition. Before that can happen, we notice, or are startled by, the white mask that covers the figure's face. Juxtaposed with all the signifiers of Japan in the film, you might assume this to be a Noh mask. Confronted also with the careful lighting and everything else besides, you might think you are watching a performance of juvenescence. But it's all an illusion. Soon we see hairy, skinny little arms attached to prehensile hands. It feels suddenly uncanny, this little girl who is also an animal. Monkeys are usually represented as childlike. When I was a child, I loved Curious George, and I read all the stories in turn to my children. When I look at those books now, though, I'm troubled by things I never noticed before: that George is uncivilised and childlike despite his age; that despite saving the day hundreds of times he rarely earns the respect of the bland white males that define his world. Most of all, even though George seems to understand everything, he is deprived of language, of the symbolic. As June Cummings notes, George's escapades are seen as ‘rascality’, the name given to the behaviour of the enslaved when things got broken or mistreated.22 The monkey becomes a stand-in or metaphor for all discriminated against and colonised peoples treated as children by white citizens and settlers.
There is at least one cultural monkey that does have language: the Signifying Monkey of African folklore, a monkey in a tree who uses language to trick a predatory lion lying in wait. Henry Louis Gates, Jr describes how this powerfully clever character lived on in the oral traditions of the enslaved in North America who, through irony and tricksterism, subverted the oppressive language of their enslavers.23 Gates describes how a radical tradition of African American literature drew some of its authority and strength from the use of the Signifying Monkey in oral traditions. While I learned about this only very recently, and can detect no clear or obvious reference to it in Untitled (Human Mask), I can no longer look at any representation of monkeys without pondering these things.
If you accept what you are watching is a film and not ‘things themselves’, then anything your eye gets glued to, that strikes a thought in you, or has a likeness with something you have seen before, is a prop. In Untitled (Human Mask), the country of Japan is a prop, represented in turn by a series of smaller props – placed significantly, brought to close attention. For instance, a maneki-neko (beckoning cat) sits on a shelf next to a fax machine, its one arm moving back and forth. There is a series of tightly framed, extreme close-ups of this possibly porcelain (more likely plastic) feline effigy. They follow, consecutively, a medium shot of the live cat, a medium shot of the monkey looking down and a close-up of the monkey's swinging leg. Here, two different kinds of things are presented as like each other: a swinging leg and a swinging arm; a real cat and a cat made from plastic (possibly porcelain). Traditionally, a maneki-neko brings good luck: the right paw waves good fortune to its owners; the left greets new customers.
The maneki-neko and the mask are in a geomantic orbit of special props. There is a cut back to a wide shot of the cat in the middle ground with the monkey, his mask and her swinging leg behind. Just in case we failed to bring it all together. The prop is a deus ex machina – therefore it's a cheat – but it confuses more than it resolves. Our attention is drawn to things that over-signify, that have too much cultural significance. Props have less to do with what they are in themselves than the desire to make use of them. Here, they seem to raise more questions than they answer.
Another prop is the monkey's dress. Thorstein Veblen, the late nineteenth-/early twentieth-century radical economist and cultural theorist, argued that dresses and skirts ‘incapacitate[d] [women] for all useful exertion’.24 A dress declared that the wearer could either afford to wear something extravagant that had little utility for work, or it enforced the idea the wearer of such an inconvenience was incapable of serious activity, thus rendering them second-class, dependent. Why is this monkey wearing a dress? What kind of extravagance is it advertising, or what kind of dependence is it underlining? The dress hides the monkey's sex, but at the same time reminds us that there is something underneath. The dress sexualises her, not for what it shows, but for what it hides. A dress is a very interesting prop indeed. And is she wearing a diaper? Monkeys in captivity are apparently notorious shit throwers. Their aim is remarkably accurate and they hit their human spectators more often than not. In the wild, they don't throw their shit so much. In the wild, they smell each other's poop to detect parasites and disease among their barrel. To help keep themselves safe and healthy. Throwing shit is reserved for humans. I'm just saying…