X ostensibly keys into all the comic-book phantasies promised
by 25-cent x-ray specs. Ray Milland stars as James Xavier, the archetypal
scientific over-reacher who, frustrated with his limited perception of the wave
spectrum, self-administers the experimental Compound X. This grants him the
power to see through walls and clothes as well as the ability to assess and
intervene in risky surgical practices. So far, so good – nothing particularly
interesting here. However, once Xavier realises that Compound X is cumulative
in its effects, the film takes on an unexpected level of proto-psychedelic
intensity. He’s robbed of darkness, sleep, shelter from the glare of the sun
until finally, wandering in the desert on the outer limits of Las Vegas, he confronts the terminal horror
of the universe fully revealed.
X belongs to Corman’s subset of nihilistic, eschatological
movies, films like
The Day the World Ended (1955) and
The Last Woman on Earth (1960).
Whereas films like
It Conquered the World (1956) mirror the paranoia of
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), these films are full of Cold war fear and
loathing: not the anxiety that something awful
might happen, but the
dread and ennui that comes with having living through the
actuality of
such a disaster. Although
X doesn’t
take place on a ruined Earth, it nonetheless plots a (literally)
post-apocalyptic scenario because it shows the immolating consequences that
follow a moment of intense revelation.
Part of what
makes X interesting is its reliance
on the structure of the road movie. Xavier moves from downtown LA to the
wastelands of the desert; from urban rationality to the hysteria of an
evangelical tent-meeting and his final epiphany. Along the way he sees Los Angeles as an x-rayed
accumulation of skeletal architecture, a “city unborn, with its skin dissolved
in an acid of light […] a city of the dead”.
That Xavier is
able to perceive the scaffold that underpins the svelte exterior of Los Angeles and later, Las Vegas, gives his x-ray vision a critical
trajectory. At the start of the film, Xavier’s exploration of the wave spectrum
is epistemological. It provides a means of discovery as regards the spaces that
carry sedimentary content. Walls are seen to enclose rooms that hold private
dramas and clothes cover bodies that carry organs held in place by skeletons.
By the time of his urban excursions, Xavier’s insight has become ontological.
He is able to see that which constitutes the material – and in the film’s
closing moments the phenomenological – fabric of ‘reality’. His view of LA as
the “unborn” city “rising in the sky” full of “signs without supports”
announces a paradigmatic shift in the trajectory of his vision. An awareness of
architectural and corporeal dissimulation gives rise to a perception of these surfaces
as simulations, membranes of false plenitude that cover abysmal vacancy.
Beech draws on
this aspect of
X in her
multi-platform work
Sanity Assassin (2010). Commissioned by
Spike
Island in
Bristol,
Sanity
Assassin is a three-channel video installation that incorporates a
“sculptural
element: a spotlit mirrored plinth which displays a series of polished chainsaws situated in a custom-designed waiting area”.
The ‘showroom’ is based on the premises of the McCulloch chainsaw company in LA
and the parallel video depicts a series of cityscape scenes cut to a noise
soundtrack and a draconian editing rhythm.
Sanity Assassin offers
Los Angeles as a geographical ossification of
the neo-liberal agenda. Reality is presented a particularly violent form of
hegemonic realism whereby space, policy and capital maintain dominance (despite
inefficiency) through the projection of freedom and security as
non-contradictory utopian ideals. Mike Davis offered a similar critique of LA’s
political architecture in
City of Quartz (1990) in which he
analysed such late-capitalist symptoms as the city’s ‘fortress’ aesthetic and
its gentrifying public transport facilities.
By contrast, Beech’s work draws this critical identification of postmodern
irony into its analysis.
Sanity Assassin
works to interrogate the process of critique. Her study of LA operates as part
of a wider investigative field in which the humanistic bias of critical theory
is positioned as an agent in the production of the politics it seeks to
question: “exposing power and making it visible simply reminds us that power
exists as such”.
In
the light of this position,
Sanity
Assassin takes as its representational
modus operandi the
contingency of power:
The work explores the various
contradictions that are produced as a consequence of theorizing how to act when
there is no absolute power to target and no centre from which to operate. Most
particularly, the work attempted to explore the aestheticization and
theorization of this infinitude as the real of the political and how it informs
and shapes politics.
In
Sanity Assassin, the book that
accompanies the installation, Beech includes a series of research images that
informed the composition of the work. Amongst this montage of interiors and
monoliths there’s a small still of Milland as Xavier taken from the closing
moments of Corman’s film. Gazing with obsidian eyes into the agony of the revealed void, attempting to comprehend “the eye that watches us all”, Xavier exemplifies Beech’s project. As Marie-Anne McQuay suggests, the “horrific consequences” of Xavier’s “collision with the Real” signpost the trajectory of the project towards the interrogation and removal of the anthropomorphic subject in the work of critique.
By aligning Xavier’s vision with the Real, “the umbilical cord of the symbolic”
,
the subject of his gaze is recast not as that which is ‘beneath’ or ‘beyond’
but that which is negative; the sense of difference rather than correspondence
that normative perceptions work to exclude. What the film couches in terms of
sin and transgression is presented in
Sanity
Assassin as momentary proximity with the kind of conceptual heat that
closes Robert Aldrich’s
Kiss Me Deadly (1955).
The oscillation
in
X between the physical and the metaphysical evokes the “cult stratum”
that
Davis highlights in the rise of
Southern California as a science state. From the
mid-1920s, the California Institute of Technology in
Pasadena played host to a rolling faculty of
pioneering scientists who helped to establish “an emergent techno-structure”
that fueled a post-war science based economy.
However, in the case of
John ‘Jack’ Whiteside Parsons, this intellectual labour intersected with a dense matrix
of seemingly dissonant interests.
Parsons was a key influence in the
establishment of the Pasadena Jet propulsion Laboratory and contributed to the
development of solid rocket fuel. He was also a student of the occult and in
1942, under the guidance of Aleister Crowley, he assumed leadership of the
Agape Lodge of the
Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO). In addition, he was a
member of the Los Angeles Fantasy and Science Fiction Society where he met
Robert Heinlein and L. Ron Hubbard. His association with Heinlein gave the
latter important pointers for
Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) whilst his ill-fated connection to Hubbard
arguably informed the “amalgamation of black magic, psychotherapy and science
fiction” that Hubbard peddled as Scientology.
In Davis’
discussion, this web of connections that move across the “vast wheel of
public-private research” represent “bizarre” detours in the otherwise “seamless
continuum between the corporation, laboratory and classroom” that characterised
the economic rise of post-war Southern California. Certainly in the case of the
ascent of Dianetics and Scientology, the persistence of this distant Cal-Tech
offspring exists as a “discouraging reminder of science’s fate in the local
culture”.
For San-Franciscan film-maker
Craig Baldwinthis web is not a historical aberration but is instead representative of the
actual matter of
Southern California. The
“local culture” is entirely constituted of these spirals of conspiracy,
post-war science, espionage and ‘trash’ aesthetics.
In his film,
Mock-Up on Mu (2008) Baldwin
embarks upon a similar excavation of Southern California’s
Mock-Up on Mu is a speculative analysis of the
biographical intersections that existed between L.Ron Hubbard, Aleister
Crowley, Jack Parsons, Marjorie Cameron and Lockheed Martin. In essence, this
group symbolises the same triangle of culture, science and industry central to
Davis’ analysis. However,
Baldwin’s collage approach – the creation of a ‘documentary’ using clips from
obscure b-movies and ‘found footage’ – seeks not to pull away the veils of myth
in order to foreground ‘truth’ but instead exaggerates the imaginary lives of
the characters as a means to analyse the construction of the myth.
future as that
performed by Davis, but rather than analysing the concrete terrain of
significant structures, he explores the imaginary environment of genre cinema
and mythopoesis.
Within this
approach,
X plays a small but significant role. Corman’s film is one of
the many that
Baldwin absorbs into his cut-up
network that structures the film. In Chapter 11, ‘Desert Crossings: A fugitive
Parsons sets off a manhunt’, we see Parsons, (played by Kal Spelletich) fleeing
across the desert having been shot by Lockheed Martin (Stoney Burke) as part of
a wider Hubbard engineered plot to gain control of a solar energy device.
Parsons’ flight is inter-cut with that of Cary Grant in
North by Northwest
(1959) and Milland in
X. Over the top of this montage
Baldwin
adds a voice-over that reads from Parsons’ essay
‘Freedom is a Two-Edged Sword’ (1950):
The inertia and acquiescence which allows
the suspension of our liberties would once have been unthinkable. The present
ignorance and indifference is appalling. The little that is worthwhile in our
civilization and culture is made possible by the few who are capable of
creative thinking and independent action, grudgingly assisted by the rest. When
the majority of men surrender their freedom, barbarism is near but when the
creative minority surrender it, the Dark Age has arrived. Even the word
liberalism has now become a front for a new social form of Christian morality.
Science, that was going to save the world back in H.G. Wells' time, is
regimented, straitjacketed and scared; its universal language is diminished to
one word, security.
‘Freedom’ is
essentially a libertarian tract that posits the concept as the product of
self-ultimacy, whereby the exertion of the individual will can help cultivate
the appropriate territory in which “man” can live. However, in the quote above
its hard not to see some echoes of Beech’s project. Putting aside the implied
desire for an Ayn Randian creative oligarchy, the connection of “liberalism”
with the restrictions of “security” evokes the critique of neo-liberalism and
the security state in Sanity Assassin.
Baldwin’s use of
X is also similar.
Ostensibly the montage seeks to equate Parsons’ near death pursuit of a
Temporary Autonomous Zone with the transcendent vision of Xavier. Both appear
to willfully strive for an apprehension of a space or entity that lies beyond
normative limits. However, this Nietzschean
individualism is subverted through the proliferation that
Baldwin creates via the application of his assemblage
technique. Despite the self-assertion of Parsons’ words, at the level of the
image, ‘Parsons’ is a fluid persona, one the drifts from the actor Spelletich to
any number of substitutes: Milland, Grant and elsewhere in the film Kris
Kristopherson and
Hugh Marlowe The
character thus holds no stable subjectivity. Instead, there is only a strange
kind of dub identity, one that constantly navigates the length of a wave
spectrum from reconstructive performance to speculative association. If
X represents
the horror of the LA Real in
Sanity Assassin, in the matrix of
Mock-Up
on Mu, the stroboscopic expanse that forms the narrative of Corman’s film
offers a complimentary metaphor.
Baldwin’s
conspiratorial web gives no glimpse of an occulted ‘reality’ but offers the
networks of conspiracy as the Real that informs the symbolic structure of his
obsessive characters.
