Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

You Can't Go Home Again

2024; Duke University Press; Volume: 11; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/23289252-11131767

2328-9260

Joshua Bastian Cole-Kurz,

Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, and Politics

Months before beginning this piece, I found a photograph of my father doing an impersonation (he is a few generations too old for "cosplay") of Walter Pidgeon's iconic Dr. Morbius from the classic sci-fi film Forbidden Planet (dir. Fred M. Wilcox, 1956) (fig. 1). I framed the photograph and placed it on a pile of books, and as I drew closer to putting words to this essay, I moved the photograph to my desk. At this moment, the framed photo is angled toward me, and it evokes a multitude of feelings. For one thing, I was rather unceremoniously forced into participating in my father's eccentric iteration of "home movies." These projects were in fact parodies in homage to his favorite things, B films and pulps of the 1950s and 1960s, that featured bumpy, string-maneuvered miniature flying saucers or clumsy, handmade, full-body Robby the Robot suits (figs. 2 and 3), things that were entirely uninteresting to a ten-year-old in 1990 who was all too ready for James Cameron's streamlined, excessively smooth digital effects as seen in The Abyss (1989) and Terminator 2 (1991).But my dad wasn't just playing around. He took his little films very seriously, and he named our family "production company" GGAGGVAP (Greenberg Greenberg and Greenberg Greenberg Video Agency Productions) (fig. 4). A photographer who trained at art school but didn't finish, my dad, to this day, feels fate dealt him a poor hand; had he graduated art school, he could and should have become Steven Spielberg. He was the 'berg by whom Hollywood should have been charmed. But, even in the midst of leaving school, he was already doing stylistic impersonations. Only days after turning twenty-one years old, my dad wrote a letter to his friends, dated September 16, 1963. His school friend, Bob, sent me a copy of this letter while I was in college, explaining that it might provide insight into my father at that age. The letter was a "report," as if in the voice of a foreign correspondent, obviously doing an adaptation of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's 1855 epic poem "The Song of Hiawatha."As I grew up, my brother and I witnessed (and forcibly participated in) my dad's impersonations and parodies. These include, but are not limited to, Bert from Mary Poppins (dir. Robert Stevenson, 1964), George Lucas's eponymous THX 1138 (1971) (figs. 5 and 6), Indiana Jones (from the beginning of the series: Raiders of the Lost Ark, Temple of Doom, and Last Crusade, respectively, 1981, 1984, 1989) (fig. 7), Quint from Spielberg's Jaws (1975) (fig. 8), and Don Lockwood from Singin' in the Rain (dirs. Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, 1952) (fig. 9). For the last scene, my dad built a full sidewalk, lamppost, and functional rain system, all in our backyard. Though not a dancer, he even practiced the actual choreography. His personal favorite impersonation, though, was Zacherle (a weird 1950s late-night television horror-movie host, the likes of which all Halloween-store vampires may have been modeled on). My dad did invent some of his own characters, such as a shtick-y rabbi in thinly veiled Jew-face, but his most coherent productions involved his impersonations and replications, of both scenes and scenery, which continued to at least 2012 when I was sent a video letter "by owl" from Professor Dumbledore (fig. 10).Some of my dad's videos were incredibly ambitious, utilizing self-taught green-screen technology (fig. 11). When he lost our house to foreclosure in 2015, his production studio, aka our living room, went with it. Along with these enterprises and his regret over never making it to the big time, my dad also had and continues to suffer from hoarding anxiety disorder, which only ever amplified. Over the course of my childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood, my dad slowly filled the house with detritus that he rationalized as someday being useful as a prop for his many future films. Most of these plans never came to be, and now never will, because he lost the space in which to produce them.I learned quite a bit from my dad, even if mostly unwillingly. As a child, I didn't have the patience for repeated takes or consideration for line delivery and hitting marks. I learned professionalism through my dad's attention to detail in his replicas, but I also witnessed the art of mimicry. My dad was scrupulous in every element. As I grew up, I realized I was drawn toward replica and imitation as well. I also inherited an inclination toward objects—a tendency that verges on the irrational compulsion of hoarding. However, as I will assert in this essay, valuing replicated objects is a distinction that predicates on and works in resistance to cissexism. But, not only did I move toward the imitation of mediated images, but I also realize now that I have always modeled my gender on observation (as do we all). I continue to learn from models as I replicate them closely, which I suggest is a more trans than cis behavior.In the current landscape of attempted legislated trans eradication under the false premise of "newness," cisgender is reappearing as a false neutral. One need only squint in the direction of Judith Butler to acknowledge that gender is "performative" for more than just queer or trans people, but transgender has emerged into the public post–tipping point light (and taken center stage in political debate for approaching presidential campaigns). The right-wing has become increasingly threatened, as if transness will extinguish cisness and therefore heteroreproduction. One could wax poetic about the radical Right's hypocritical distinctions of "grooming" when so many baby onesies are plastered with enforced cisheterosexism; online communities certainly have responded through memes mocking drag bans. Of course, cisgender is reconstructed and reperformed to remain coherent as itself. The difference is that straight cis people get so upset when asked to recognize their reperformance as social construction and not natural states of being. They reperform ignorantly and yet obsessively, trying always to be the same as the norm out of fear for being potentially perceived as anything "other."They do what we do, but in a grossly sexist, sexualized, and subliminal way, to ensure all roles and bodies are visible and distinguishable per status quo. Trans people, however, observe with a self-aware intent to replicate as praxis. As the late trans photographer Loren Cameron voiced, "We watch men a lot. We practice, watching the signifiers" (Cram 1997). My dad, he's cis, and he copies other men on purpose, too, with his own spin on it. His "Indiana Jones" was instead "Rockaway Joe." Trans men copy deliberately, and though sometimes male fragility also becomes duplicated, I am optimistic that, on a broad scale, trans men are at least somewhat cautious when it comes to electing which behaviors to emulate. We're all a bit "Rockaway Joe."Even more than twenty years posttransition, I still look at cis men to observe, learn, and replicate. It is a repeated performance of gender, and in some cases, it is performance in the more traditional sense: onstage in front of an audience. I learned a solo to perform with the Ithaca Gay Men's Chorus, "Run Away with Me" from Kait Kerrigan and Bree Lowdermilk's Mad Ones. By carefully rehearsing Michael Arden's version of it, the song made sense for me only because my gender mapped easily onto Arden's. However, the practice of gender impersonation was less conscious than it might normally be when I watch men because it was only afterward, watching the video of my rendition, that I saw how closely I mapped the rehearsed imitation.Although these were unintended lessons, handed down accidentally from a hoarder whose creativity shone only in the replication of others' works, I learned that objects hold value, even if that value is not calculable to another observer, and mimicking is a method of desire. My dad wants to be Spielberg, and I want to be Arden. Although it was outside our knowledge at the time we made home movies in a New Jersey suburb, I learned that close duplication is itself a valid art form, one that is perhaps more valuable through lenses of queer, and specifically trans, time and space. My dad was separated from his hoard out of financial necessity following the home foreclosure in 2015. My childhood home no longer belongs to the Greenbergs and the GGAGGVAP production company. Like a 1990s home movie parody of a 1950s B film, displaced in time and space, I can't go home again.These reminiscences lead me to a relationship that evokes that of father and son. Mimicry is reproduction and distinctly reflective. The relation holds a familial resemblance. Beyond being both of us copiers, my father and I share anxieties bound to valuation of objects, otherwise perceived as irrational. It is inherent in both of us to make comparisons between things considered original and things that exist only as reproductions. We both identify the elements necessary to be rendered viable as a variation of, but definitively identical to, the original thing. The mimic reproduces value and artistry as he reflects; he paradoxically creates the unoriginal.Reproductions and remakes don't work in isolation. Each replication relies on preexisting knowledge of the text to which it refers in order to generate the affects of nostalgia—the melancholic desire to return home and feel something comforting again. There must be a comparison across and between texts. Whether or not the original is supposedly discernible by sight, a mirroring interchange occurs. Mirrors notoriously trouble the ontological distinction of real versus image, and the ambiguity of the mirror's disturbance generates an uncanny anxiety, which is why it so often appears in science fiction, horror, and suspense.The king of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock, prominently used mirrors as both narrative and visual device to thematically represent division in Psycho (1960). Though Hitchcock utilized mirrors and doubling throughout his oeuvre, Psycho is particularly representative of a combined trans/mirror aesthetic theme. Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) steps through Hitchcock's looking glass into the mad world of the Bates Motel, and the film's logic, as Mark Osteen (2017: 230) describes, is "communicated through metonymy and synecdoche: stuffed birds, automobiles, mirrors." While mirroring is a Hitchcockian theme and device broadly, as George Toles (2004: 134) has noted, "almost every interior scene [in Psycho] prominently features a mirror that doubles as a character's image, but that no one turns to face." Psycho has been well rehearsed as being an inescapably trans film, given that its leading protagonist, Norman (Anthony Perkins), shares his time in the identity of a woman (his mother, Norma, for whom he is named). Because Norman's transness is paralleled with mental illness so severe that it only plausibly exhibits as extreme violence (within the thriller genre), Psycho is "the original model of the mentally disturbed cross-dressed murderer" (Phillips 2006: 87). This equation can be reconsidered, though. Rather than simply duplicity::transness::derangement, there is something else at work in which the mirror provides an alternate world.Marion's life was not a sufficient one, leading her to take criminal action, and although she is punished for seeking change, her crime is aligned with Norman's depravity. Needing an alternative to the status quo is, in cis expectations, simply excessive. There is no sufficient trans explanation for wanting what you don't have that cisness can appreciate. A similar attitude appears with the distaste for prosthetics when they are considered unnecessary, normativizing, ableist costume pieces for hiding shame in the pursuit of passing as nondisabled. The mirror represents and reflects that trans and disabled divisive tension, made especially effective when the images do not equate, like Norman and Norma. In the many mirror shots in Psycho, Hitchcock carefully constructs mismatched reflections. Like a remake, these shots produce identical reflections to a degree, but something within the images is slightly askew: a door interrupting the frame or an extra body reflected. The unexpected strangeness adds a subtle disturbance bubbling just below the surface.In 1998, Gus Van Sant's experimental replica of Hitchcock's Psycho revealed a similar off-ness. The critical responses to the film experiment tended to agree that an unchanged original is more valuable than a replication. This sentiment, an audience affect tied to ciscentrism and transphobia, oddly mirrors Norman who simultaneously disturbs and is disturbed. In the reactions to Van Sant's film, the original Hitchcock is considered a masterpiece in its structural elegance (Maslin 1998). Some critics found the duplicate simply redundant, gratuitous, futile, and even masturbatory: a forgery hiding its plagiarism in plain sight (Varndell 2014: 28). More than twenty years after its release, Van Sant's Psycho remains an often-derided curiosity. With few exceptions, everything in the new Psycho is largely faithful. Fascinatingly scrupulous, the replica restages Hitchcock not only on-screen but behind it as well. Although shot in color rather than black and white, Van Sant used the same script and the same camera angles, shot on the same Universal Studios lot, kept to the original's brisk six-week schedule, and maintained Bernard Herrmann's score, rerecorded by Danny Elfman. But to repeat another artist's work troubled critics who found it crossing a line into thievery, a counterfeit Hitchcock (Svetkey 1998), a shot-for-shot remake. To the resounding critical reaction, "Why?" Van Sant quipped, "Why not?" (Evangelista 2017).In some critical responses, like Roger Ebert's (1998), an identical copy adds nothing, but only evokes that tried-and-true trans antagonism: "the real thing." Other critics, however, found the endeavor's perplexing curiosity quite radical and appropriately eerie—the similarity between the original and the copy provides an uncanniness, pertinent to the thriller genre. Van Sant, in essence, "[crawls] inside the stylistic skin of another" (Cheshire 1998). Echoing Norman Bates's extraordinary drag act, "Van Sant disguises himself as Hitchcock," proposing something "stranger than just a remake" (Romney 1999). The Guardian's critic reiterates Marvin Carlson's (2011) theorizing on the hauntedness of acting, stating that Van Sant's performers seem "as if repeating the actions of ghosts" (Romney 1999). However, this Psycho is not a simple exercise in duplication, but a mechanical exploration of repetition and the uncanny. As its very point was not to change the source, it became "a provocative inquiry into the nature of cinematic originality" (Romney 1999). Surprising even himself, Van Sant states, "We wound up with a very strange-looking copy" (Evangelista 2017). When we watch the 1998 Psycho, we are meant to be familiar with what we're seeing and know exactly how it should look, "but it's somehow different" (Evangelista 2017).Understanding the trans properties of mirrors can help us understand how Van Sant's film operates through a logic with which trans viewers are especially primed to engage. Van Sant's Psycho affects the body of the original like transness does on cisness (and like cisness does on cisness). The attentive constructed replica allows us to see the cognitive gap of intentional replication that cisness requires us to ignore. And because Psycho must be about transness, with Norman taking on the identity of Norma, a trans spectator might therefore make more than a cis spectator of not only Hitchcockian mirror effects but also Van Sant's meta-mirror of Hitchcock. Van Sant's homage to the original produces "a strange-looking copy," and though technically recrafted, it is not at all the anticipated exact replica. The original always harnessed a consciously queer and an unconsciously trans aesthetic imaginary. Since the 1960 original release, Norman's sexuality has been repeatedly psycho-analyzed as gay because he cross-dressed and because he was insane. But beyond these character elements that align sexual and gender deviance, psychopathy, and queerness, the film is also visually mediated by the many disjointed mirrors and glass reflections in the frame. Van Sant's replica mirrors the concept of a dysphoric mismatched reflection (the classic trans "mirror trope"), intra- and extradiegetically.If Van Sant's Psycho is "an exacting mirror of the old" (Gleiberman 1998), it is because it meticulously re-creates the original as a duplicated copy, but outrage and confusion about this duplication's purpose were widely expressed. Boycotts were called with accusations that Van Sant had defiled a beloved classic. Cinema historians and aficionados feel quite possessive over this particular text, considered an industrial landmark. The contentions broadly presume that Van Sant simply plagiarized Hitchcock with no rationale or outcome other than diminishing the value of the original. The new version was evaluated and dismissed only as a degraded copy (Verevis 2005: 58). Universal claimed Van Sant's Psycho was a line-by-line, shot-by-shot duplication of Hitchcock's—except for unavoidable differences in casting and color. However, there were indeed many differences, even in so painstaking an imitation (Zanger 2006: 16).The shooting script was only about 90 percent the same as Hitchcock's, and Van Sant chose not to correct a small timing error in the score—a choice that drastically changes one of the most iconic moments in cinematic history even while duplicating it. As Daniel Varndell (2014) observes, in the remake of the shower scene, Herrmann's famous shrieking violins arrive at least five seconds late, causing a perceptible delay. In the original, the violins coincide with the moment the curtain is wrenched open to reveal "Mother," Norman dressed as Norma and brandishing a carving knife. The timing error that Van Sant chose to keep brings the violins late, shrieking as the knife is perceived to penetrate Marion's flesh, but not actually shown onscreen. So, according to Varndell, the point of Van Sant's film lies not in its resemblance to the original, but in the differences. In a shot-for-shot remake, Varndell argues that the key is "to move something ever so slightly out of place" (30–31). We don't watch a remake for the story; we already know it. We watch with the desire to re-view the same story and feel the pleasure of its realization, and we watch to see how close the new version can get (Zanger 2006: 17; Varndell 2014: 21–22). The replica may not be Psycho, and yet, radically, insistently, trans-ly, it is Psycho. We watch Van Sant desire to be Hitchcock. This reading of "remake as trans method" gives us a way into how to value something that, like Van Sant's Psycho and transness itself, according to our critics, seemingly lacks a reason to exist.The vast majority of critical accounts of remaking consider the process a one-way path from authenticity to imitation in the form of a superior original to "the debased resemblance of the copy" (Verevis 2005: 58). Remakes are consistently discussed as being unnecessary or lacking in some respect. A remake can even perhaps embody the opposite of a privileged source for being, essentially, un-original and inauthentic (Herbert 2017: 56). This bias produces a dialectical opposition between original and copy that invites comparison, but in the widely accepted evocation of the parasitical, the remake is summarily dismissed in "serious" film criticism (Forrest and Koos 2002: 3).Some resistance to remakes is anchored on the mistaken belief that they have the capacity to take something away from the experience of the original and, thereby, jeopardize a staunch fan's relationship with an earlier source, even without having seen the latter (Rosewarne 2020: 107). Feeling betrayed by remakes, devotees claim their memories of an original are ruined (Sepinwall 2013: 244, 268–69). Betrayal is also the aggressively cissexist affect that results from feeling, absurdly, hoodwinked by passing trans people. Violent to different degrees, the same panic undergirds possessive anxiety over what counts as "the real thing," the original (anatomical or textual) body.The trans man and the remake both endure the cultishness of the real thing (in this case, the real "thing"). Even the most perfect reproduction lacks Walter Benjamin's ritualistic aura and creates new, radical possibilities. As Sandy Stone (1995) has speculated, technological extensions in the forms of instrumentalized prosthetics break down the boundaries—the edges between person and prosthetic—while channeling human agency, and such permeation displaces time and space. Technological reproducibility emancipates artworks from their auras, just as technologically reproduced prosthetic packers emancipate external genitalia from the realm of the "real man." This is a kind of male liberation that therefore troubles realness against what Stone might call "virtual" trans media, or the contemporary shift in the relationship between the sense of self and the body as realized in the computer age. As Tom Hickman (2013: 159–60) describes items for cis male sexual assistance, such as implants and other devices similar to packers (neglecting the possibility of the packer itself), "bio-hydraulic sex really isn't like the real thing." None of our materials survive cisgender scrutiny informed by the antiquated yet shockingly pervasive ableist and trans-antagonistic attitude that "natural" bodies have no need for technological intervention.Remakes share a trans potential to undermine this assumed ownership over authenticity, as the process violates the sanctity of the original, or the supposed "natural" (Forrest and Koos 2002: 20). The process of remaking is actually quite complex, or what Constantine Verevis (2005: vii) calls "elastic," and can indeed become its own category of authorship. Remaking can reflect a director's desire to revisit and expand, to reveal a different auteur aesthetic. Or it can illustrate or even highlight changing sociohistorical perspectives and audience expectations regarding the depictions of class, race, disability, gender, and sexuality. Remakes can also demonstrate expanded genre dynamics or the evolution of visual effects technology (Forrest and Koos 2002: 5). Scorned as mere formulaic copies, lacking creative inspiration or artistic value, remakes can offer the creative opportunity to reimagine (Lukas and Marmysz 2009: 1). What the remake reveals, in its differences from an original, produces a tension that Anat Zanger (2006: 16) believes is the secret to its "eternal charm." Indeed, it is not solely repetition but also variation that lures and excites audiences time and again; as Daniel Herbert (2017: 121–25) notes, "Remakes can be a lot of fun." Remakes are not necessarily "worse" than the films on which they are based, as some demonstrate innovation while borrowing. Such innovations, the choices and changes made between original and copy, the repetition and differentiation, qualify remaking as a significant art form all its own (Forrest and Koos 2002: 3–5; Zanger 2006: 9).Part of the backlash to remaking has to do with the idea of fidelity, but the elasticity to which Verevis refers acknowledges a complex citationality, a relational, reflexive interplay of intertext. Very trans-like, remakes dialectically encapsulate "before/after" or "desire/fulfillment" (Zanger 2006: 9), and the pleasurable aesthetic enjoyment of viewing remakes (the reason they are so often commercial successes if not critical ones) has to do with a different way of watching that sees both old and new at once. Indeed, grounded by what Gérard Genette (1992) called, fittingly to my purposes, "transtextuality," connection between texts becomes an important aspect of media consumption. According to Amanda Ann Klein and R. Barton Palmer (2016), remakes are indelibly marked by difference. The volatility between "old" and "new," considered distinct categories, destabilizes the concept of the original "by announcing that there is 'more' that the urtext does not contain and likely does not anticipate [and revealing] that there is a desire for continuation or repetition that the original cannot satisfy" (3–4). Here narratives can extend as the audience desires novelty within a familiar frame (Herbert 2017: 39). Extended narratives prostheticize the remake, in the specific sense of the Greek term prosthenos, as Stone (1995) translates its literal meaning, "extension." But also according to Stone, prosthetics are extensions of one's will. Echoing Mel Chen's (2012: 137) articulation of phallic transference, which is "sometimes prostheticized through other accoutrements," just as these extensions manage to merge the new with the old, the original in this relationship becomes a foundation on which "modern accoutrements can be adhered" (Rosewarne 2020: 104).The process is not, as it is so often critiqued, unnecessary. Rather, there is productive reworking involved in the expansion. At the same time, there's a soothing ritualism to the repetition of familiar, well-loved material. Recollection like this has a backward-looking movement while moving forward in active repetition and re-creation. The prefix re- calls for a return, to bring one back to an original place, to do something again. As Scott A. Lukas and John Marmysz (2009: 10–12) articulate, re- suggests that something will happen "again" and "anew," a condition in which past and present are juxtaposed. The remake starts fresh and resets to a (new) beginning, redefining a text in some basic way (Herbert 2017: 12, 39). The re- in the repetition signals a movement in time as the remake re-turns and re-writes, which involves looking back at what existed before with a reliance on the time gap itself between old and new in order to update (Zanger 2006: 17). Remakes raise critical questions regarding what elements besides a movie title is, or should be, maintained in order for a text to constitute itself as a remake (as opposed to an independent property with allusions or references used as devices only for commercially valuable nostalgia (Gil 2014: 22), for example Stranger Things (dir. Duffer Brothers, 2016–22).Reactionary complaints to modernized and diversified remakes are interchangeable with a wider conceptual adherence to original-as-superior that is also, I argue, inescapably cissexist. As Verevis (2005: 2) points out, critical accounts of remakes risk essentialism in their privileging of the original over the remake or measuring the success of the remake according to its ability to realize what are taken to be the essential elements of a source text. Chris Holmlund (1998: 217–24) has asked "how far, and in what ways, can the boundaries of 'remake' be stretched, 'made over' before a new 'original' emerges?" She wonders what definitively distinguishes remake from original, arguing that remakes mark a troubling, radical blurring of those dyadic boundaries. Remakes transgressively alter the shape of the original, with transsexual-like chops, stitches, implants, injections, amputations, and grafts. Ultimately, Holmlund states, the more serious question is not whether there are essential elements or just "spare parts," but who asks such questions, how, and why (231). Similarly, Herbert (2017: 122) states that "we have to wonder how and by whom a remake's quality gets assessed and what the motivations and consequences are for the critics and audiences who make such judgments."To wonder about who is asking such a question, it's pertinent to sit with the chiasmatic pull of the remake that audiences find equally troubling and entertaining. There is a certain impossibility to the project of remaking. Just as directors pursue remaking a known image, so do trans men with idealized self-images that are often (though not always) based in proximity to, if not a one-to-one (shot-for-shot) relation with, cis maleness. This is, of course, also true of cis men, as all of us are reproducing the coherence of maleness. The process of imitation is, however, hidden by the very accusation of transness as masquerade and as less-than-real, a concealment of natural truth.While TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) rhetoric has referred to trans self-affirming action as "crude transformations" deluded by fantasy (Grosz 1994: 207), transness necessarily incurs practices of mimetic imitation. What Jay Prosser (1998: 88–91) calls surgical prosthesis is a marker of bodily nostalgia, "a memory of the somatype that should have been that allows for assimilation," and that thus allows legibility into the familiar, the recognizable, already-known experience. For some, that self-aware process of assimilation is livable or even self-consciously performative, and for some, the distance from "real" experience only perpetuates traumatic dysphoria. As Varndell (2014: 9) explains, a remake cannot be the "same" film as the text to which it refers, no matter how similar, or even identical to the point of indecipherability. This indecipherability can be radically Benjaminian or trans-antagonistically Groszian. As viewers of remakes, we desire to re-experience the already known, but this desire is accompanied by the knowledge that the same experience will never be repeated (Zanger 2006: 121). Trans people replicate biological phenomena but redefine the definitive features of those sensations through mechanical reproduction based on identical simulacra. The result is not the same, but a different experience of the same physical event, which is legible by its proximity to both knowledge of and yearning for what came before.The remake shares these affects and is inherently bound to the concept of nostalgia, which is more complicated than a simple pining for the past. Svetlana Boym described this