The Hole

The House was caving in an hour before we heard the sound. It was a deafening roar that I will never forget. It sounded like a lion. I was dead then.

Her sister was the first cheerleader on the squad to have her period. It was a disgusting mess that Mr. Hartsfield, the science teacher, described as a “healthy flow.” Donald the misanthropic boyfriend had nothing to say.

Who will ever forget the afternoon that Nancy’s house caved in? It was like a flaw in the structural foundation or something because the way I see it, it’s the cities fault really, I mean come on, you know? Who should we blame here? Who’s to blame?

Seventeen devout Christians were hiking in the woods when they stumbled across a patch of golden grass. After measuring with some curiosity the Christians discovered the dimensions to be exactly 3.14 by 3.14 feet down to the exact blade.

“My friends, devout friends, followers, I would even call you disciples,” John Merryweather joked to his employees at the Burger Barn, “I stand before you, a happily married man.”

Nancy yawns. She hates this. She hates her job. Her life. Everything she did from the moment she woke up into this world and everything she is planning on doing until she checks out from eternity. It’s an endless cycle with a promised end goal that never comes. The more you think about it the farther you feel. Like literally the more you read this sentence the farther you are away from the top of the page. Where I die.

The seventeen devout Christians pondered what to do with their divine discovery in the woods. At first they felt they should leave the grass be in its natural god given state- but after one Christian quickly realized the grass’s hallucinatory benefits, the seventeen Christians decided to smoke the grass as a way to speak with their Lord and Saviour. Most, if not all of the Christians have no recollection of that afternoon.
I was standing in my backyard yelling at my husband, Harold, he always plants from the front of the garden backwards eventually trapping himself in the corner next to the garage, he always does this, so I was yelling at him and then I heard this loud scream… Like a shrill, glass under your fingernails kind of feeling, then I heard the earth give out from the neighbours yard and then I looked over to see the hole.

Corporeal Forms

            In the beginning of it all I had unprotected sex with a woman who was not barren and we had a… kid, and we named him after the woman’s dead father and he grew up to be a shithead that nobody including myself particularly liked, so we have been having meetings six to seven-thirty, every Thursday night with the neighbours and teachers and friends (?) and parents of friends (?), to discuss the behaviour of my shithead kid and I’m just sitting here between a teacher and a parent, 6-7:30, Thurs., blanking on the name of my own shithead kid.

            “Well?” Mrs. Something says, just staring at me, waiting for a respo- oh right.

            “What was the question?” I ask.

            “Your son, Dennis  set-

            “Dennis,” phew, “The name of my son.”

            “Fire to Mr. Knight’s Car on the weekend,” Mrs. Something finished.

            “Oh shit.”

            “Yes,” A Parent of a Friend (?) stands from like the other side of the room, now this guys name I can’t seem to remember, but his walk seems familiar somehow, “And it gets worse than that! Last week I had  had a falling out with my stepson, Drimsley, so it took us all until today to reconcile our differences and for him to tell me that, Drimsley did, that Old Father Richmond, excommunicated from the holy heavenly hallowed house of hollow halos, had been secretly living in Mr. Knight’s car every night since we shut down the church and built a fish hatchery, so that would explain where Father Richmond disappeared to last week.”

            “And that would explain the smell of burning hair and flesh that soaked into the neighbourhood for days after,” Now this woman’s name started with a P or something.

            “I wasn’t allowed to say anything until just this very moment,” said the Police Chief whose name is on the tip of my tongue, “But that would explain the smouldering remains of human ooze we found in the charred hull of Mr. Knight’s car.”

            "My son Dennis did this?”

Across the room, unbeknownst to me, for the sake of time let’s call her Florence, a small twig of a woman, began an elongated tea sip at a tone so amusing it captured the attention of all thirty-eight members in the room for the entirety of exactly five seconds before a hulk of a man stepped forward, whose name I will get back to you about.

            “If Father Richmond is dead,” The hulking man sobbed, “Then so is my family.”

            “What do you mean?”

            “Out with it!”

            “I’d welcome the truth for a change!”

            “Well, for the three days leading up to Father Richmond’s disappearance he had my family kidnapped and was withholding their whereabouts for a ransom of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. He put me through several life or death trials that tested my will to live, only to go missing after I accomplished the final trial of cutting off my left hand.”

            “I was wondering where that went.”

            ”Father Richmond was the only person who knew the whereabouts of my family and your son, Dennis, killed him when he set Mr. Knight’s car on fire!”

            “Wasn’t your wife expecting?”

            “Twins.”

            “Could you remind me what your name is, I have this condition-“

            “And do you have any idea who the wife of this man was? Is? Sorry Peter.”

            “No, she would have wanted you to use the proper tense.”

            When I try and think of the hulking man’s wife I see a green triangle and I have absolutely no idea beyond that.

            The man in the wheelchair, who has taken on the burden of explaining to me that the wife of the hulking man was the last of the sacred bloodline known as the Glim Remratti and only the descendants of the line were entrusted with knowing the fate of every human on the planet and that all the members of the town were promised by the hulking man’s wife to heal all the sick and wounded and tell them all of their fortunes in exchange for sanctuary in their quiet sleepy little town, rolls over my foot on his way to the coffee table to grab some nibbles. “Sorry.”

            “The Protectors will be furious.”

            “They will no doubt take corporeal forms from out of the forest and slaughter us all in our sleep.”

            “But not before erasing our brains, making us replay the same moment again and again.”

            “It’s refreshing to finally get some clarity for a change.”

            

Stranger On the Third Floor: A Premonition of The Hard Boiled 40’s & 50’s

“Film noir is a language, it’s deep shadows, strong angles, behavior over dialogue…”

-Newton Thomas Sigel, Cinematographer, The Usual Suspects

“Shoot up, shoot down. It’s a way of attacking space because harmonic space is your enemy…”

-Paul Schrader, Screenwriter, Taxi Driver

Film Noir has become an elusive concept for its audience as younger generations move further from the historic era. Fortunately filmmakers since the 1950’s have continued to represent the style using the Noir blueprints in contemporary cinema. Going as far back as Jean Luc Godard’s Breathless, 1960, Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, 1974, Lawrence Kasdan’s Body Heat, 1981, and David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, 2001, filmmakers contemporized the Noir style as a sub-genre known as Neo-Noir: an ongoing representation and rejuvenation of the cinematic style that originated in the 1940’s. However, as generations move further from the 40’s, the representation aspect is creating a ‘telephone effect’ on our understanding of the original style. This essay is an attempt to create a focused illustration of the significance of Film Noir as a representation of the American psyche during and post World War II, examining what many believe to be the first Film Noir movie, Boris Ingster’s 1940’s Stranger On The Third Floor, as a prophecy for a decade long cinematic style and by doing so I hope to bring clarity to the Film Noir Era.

Boris Ingster’s low budget B-movie Stranger On The Third Floor starts in the bright and bustling boom of what appears to be New York City. It is common to have a nameless city in a film, a technique originating in Noir, as it could stand for all cities and therefore exist as a believable reality in the imaginations of its audience. This was a time when Warner Studios was pumping out Hollywood fairy tales to keep people distracted during the great depression. Although here, we are gliding through a busy sidewalk in the last happy day before a two-decade long night.

Michael Ward, played by John McGuire, meets with Margaret Tallichet’s Jane at a cafe and pitches to her the idea of starting a nuclear family and what is essentially the American dream. He explains he just received a raise for an article he recently wrote on the Joe Briggs murder investigation.

We follow the narrative of the investigation to the police station where officers weigh the likelihood of Briggs committing the crime, having not seen the crime, they can’t know if Briggs actually did it. Ward enters to appear as an eyewitness, establishing him as the lynchpin of the moral dilemma.

In the stuffy courtroom filled with monochrome men, an audience hanging on to every word of Michael Ward’s recollection of the murder, Ward can be taken as a symbol of the psychology of the times, America playing witness to a growing violence in Europe, and it was the following year, after the attack on Pearl Harbour, did it eventually join the second World War.

In Ingster’s Strangers, the jury unanimously finds Briggs guilty of murder in the first degree and he is sentenced to death. It was Michael’s unflinching confidence that wins over the jury, a confidence that is tested throughout the rest of the film as it begins to crumble, and a much more cynical and jaded personality takes its place.

It is historically believed that Boris Ingster’s Strangers On The Third Floor was the beginning of a period of American cinema so psychologically dark and complex, Eddie Muller, Author of Dark City: The Lost World Of Film Noir, calls it The Black Tide, “there was a huge wave of these crime movies, that washed over Hollywood in the post-world war II years,” (Muller, Bringing Darkness To Light).

The studios were looking for B-movies. Cheap, fast and gritty stories similar to the pulp novels to fill the lower bill of a double-bill movie night. Films like Boris Ingster’s Strangers In Love, and also films like Edward Dmytrik’s The Devil’s Command (1941), and Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People (1942) were financed cheap and the filmmakers had free reign. Editor Carol Littleton underlines her theory in the 2006 documentary Bringing Darkness To Light, “in a strange way, [film noir] was a creation of the distribution system in America.”

These highly imaginative styles of cinematography, performance and writing were the product of necessity by directors given little to no budget to produce their films. Their work stayed under the radar with such a small budget so they had free reign to shoot and invent what they wanted. Sharp shadows and unbalanced angles were both a function of style and a means to hide or eliminate unwanted scenery. It was Michael Curtiz, a “forerunner of German Expressionism” that approached the Warner studios with these cinematic sensibilities, examines Novelist James Ellroy,(L.A. Confidential), whose conclusion prophesied a much grander design in the Hollywood system, “these classic gangster films, and classic g-man films at Warner Brothers, it’s a dry run for Noir,” (BDTL).

Comic Novelist Frank Miller, (Sin City, 1991-2000) disassociates Noir from Crime Fiction, saying that Crime Fiction is “realistic; it tends to be the here and now, and it tends to strive to shock you with just how gritty and real it is.” he continues to say that he finds crime fiction very “literal and often quite boring, and generally rather ugly to look at, where as noir is gorgeous, it’s all style, but it’s the emotional realism is what you’re after,” (BDTL).

In Ingster’s Strangers, After the trail, Michael Ward finds himself standing alone in the courtroom. He just got off the phone with Jane who is riddled with guilt over the fate of Briggs. As Michael stands in the hollow chamber he hears echoes of Briggs’ plea of innocence. Michael asks himself in a voice over, another technique used frequently in Noir, “What’s the matter with me, I’m getting soft… He did it, of course he did.” The use of the voice over in Ingster’s film allows the audience to play witness to the protagonist’s inner thoughts, his demons, and the clever design in this particular case, his doubts.

Michael makes his way through a bustling crowd, his cynicism growing as he weaves in and around the pedestrian foot traffic. Michael as a character is in character metamorphosis, what  BBC host Matthew Sweet of The Rules Of Film Noir recognizes as the “guy who drinks too much, smoke too much, earn too little, and struggle under the weight of their cynicism,” The Film Noir protagonist.

The makers of this new type of detective film seemed to recognize that if they were going to create a new cinematic view of the world, they also would have to create a completely new hero to exist in that world. Yet, they did not all create the same type of hero, nor did the film noir hero remain static during his entire run. Instead, the hard-boiled detective films of the 1940s supplied a surprisingly diverse set of heroes, each offering a variation on the common theme of crime and detection in the dark urban scene.

John J. Blaser and Stephanie L.M. Blaser (2008)

During the Great Depression, a number of writers that were in the peak of their careers, Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep, 1939), James M. Cain (Double Indemnity, 1943) and the grandfather of Noir Dashiell Hammett- whose Pinkerton National Detective past gave him the experience necessary to create the formula for the hard-boiled protagonist persona as seen in his earliest work Red Harvest, (1929)- were growing pessimistic when their countries response to the depression was joining in the war. Their writing began to represent the jaded cynicism that America was reeling from, and they projected it in men “whose innocence ha[d] become so tarnished as to be no longer visible,” (Lee Horsley, 2002). Film Editor Glenn Erikson explains, “because of the situation at the end of World War Two, the themes of these movies tend to be dark, cynical, and pessimistic about human nature,” (BDTL).

In Ingster’s Stranger’s, we watch as Michael Ward’s cynicism grows out of a guilty anxiety, the aggravating flashbacks about petty squabbles with landlords, into full flown paranoia at the sight of the titular Stranger on the third floor. Michael doesn’t understand why he is afraid of this man, or why he has the agency to chase the Stranger out of the apartment complex, from what he has seen up to this point there is no evidence of a greater threat. Michael struggles to justify his paranoia in his head, and we as an audience are meant to decipher the cryptic character of the Stranger.

Peter Lorre’s impressionistic Stranger is hauntingly familiar in his behavior, and how he looks, to the German silent film character Nosferatu (1922). Lorre, like many immigrants propelled from their homes and countries by the war, headed westward to Hollywood and with them they brought the German Expressionist style that had many advantages in B-movie Hollywood. These sensibilities established the  “formal systems for film noir. Lighting schemes, staging, as well as subject matter because German Expressionism was dealing with men who are coming apart,”(Drew Caspar, BDTL). Filmmakers like Edgar G. Ulmer (Detour, 1945), Billy Wilder (Double Indemnity, 1944), and Fritz Lang (Moontide, 1942), brought their abstract and fractured experiences of relocation to a jaded American cinema, “these people saw a lot of death, and they saw the mechanisms of fate, and what people do in times of war that make them inhuman.” George Pelecanos (The Rules Of Film Noir, 2009). It was in 1946, a French critic by the name of Nino Frank who began reviewing these films for their psychological and existential themes, began to label them as Film Noir, meaning quite literally: Black Film.

The term Film Noir has come to represent a lot throughout the years of researching and analyzing the 40’s and 50’s hard boiled American cinematic movement. Many have come to the assumption that it is in fact a film genre when, unlike most genres, film noir can also behave as a convention of style. That is because film noir is product of two factors behaving in film simultaneously. It is both the characteristics of the subject matter, i.e. the storylines of detectives and femme fatales and betrayal that we can deduce as a characteristic of film noir, and also the style in which the subject matter is told/shown, i.e. the seductive way characters talk and behave, the subjective impressionistic reality, and the symbolic visuals. Film noir, unlike racing movies or crime movies that are narratives predicated on the subject of their genre, “film noir,” critic and editor Glenn Erikson offers, “is not a genre, it’s a style that crosses many genres,” (The Rules Of Film Noir, 2009).

In Stranger On the Third Floor Michael Ward meets with Charles Waldron, the District Attorney. In a clever bit of banter the two character’s muse about killing his condescending neighbour Albert Meng (Charles Halton),

Ward: He’s no man, he’s a worm. The kind you ought to jump on with heavy boots.

Waldron: You’ll have to do an awful lot of jumping because the whole place is covered with them.

The scene uses wordplay as a means to get around the Hays Code established in 1930 (the precursor to the MPAA film rating system), that forbid vulgarity, graphic violence and sex in motion pictures. This limitation is famously known for having an opposite and more inspiring effect for Hammett, Chandler, and Cain, in Hollywood during the 40’s and 50’s. These hard boiled rebels began using innuendo to hide their irreverence on the page and understanding the context actors well enough to create the most engaging and discretionary subtextual dialogue ever seen on screen.

In Strangers, Michael remembers earlier in the week to when he brought Jane to his place. The sexual tension between these characters is undeniably present without any literal reference to their attraction. When inside, Jane sits on Michael’s bed and reveals to him a scandalous thought she has had:

Jane: I’ve always wanted to see your room, to know where you sit when you’re tired, and where you sleep. Do you talk in your sleep?

As innocent as it reads, the implication Margaret Tallichet gives to Jane’s character suggests she imagines what it is like to sleep with Michael. Michael responds in kind with his own subtextual joust:

Michael: Darling, your shoes are soaking wet, you’ll catch a cold. Your stockings too. You better take them off, I’ll get you something to dry them with.  

The rigid censorship from 1934 to 1954 was considered by Production Code Administration standards as the Breen Era, named after prudish Roman Catholic and head of the PCA, Joseph Breen. Several famous examples of the Breen censorship influencing the creation of Film Noir include, “Alfred Hitchcock’s 1946 film Notorious, where he worked around the rule of three-second-kissing only by having the two actors break off every three seconds,” (McGilligan, p.376),  and an article published at the University of Virginia illuminates how Michael Curtiz’ 1942 film Casablanca, was re-written after the Hays office objected to the amorality of the script, and re-edited because of the adulterous behavior between characters Rick and Ilsa, (Alderman Library, Censored Film and Television I).

While the writers of Hollywood were developing the tool of innuendo to work around rigid censorship codes, filmmakers that were now coming back from the war were adopting new techniques of their craft that rebelled against the studios tight budgets. By the 1950’s the war had been over for five years and America had entered the Atomic Age. Filmmakers who had participated in the war effort were shooting on hand-held, black and white, 16mm, Bolex cameras which improved maneuverability and was quickly adopted by the low budget Hollywood community. These improvements meant that they no longer had to build sets, but now filmmakers could bring their lights and cameras outside in the streets. These films are what Matthew Sweet in The Rules of Film Noir calls, “streetsmart” and “immediate” products of their times. The war brought with it the development of profound documentary technology including high speed lenses and faster film stocks. by the end of the war the technology was completely engrained as a standard of Hollywood cinema.

At the midpoint of Boris Ingster’s Strangers, Michael Ward’s premonition of the Albert Meng’s murder serves as a rightful place to conclude. Michael Ward’s nightmarish premonitions demand that he correct the verdict of Joe Briggs before they hang him. The way these dreams are conveyed in the movie, silky montages, fading from one to the next serves as both a device to convey Ward’s premonition as well as a grander premonition of the coming German Expressionist movement in American cinema known as Film Noir. Ward is able to convince the district attorney that the Stranger is the real criminal before the Stranger can seek his next victim, Jane. The film concludes as it had begun, with Michael and Jane together in the daylight, the nightmare is over.

During the advent of Film Noir was the simultaneous advent of the television, a modern little box that could connect you and everyone on your block to regular scheduled programming. It’s popularity ran parallel to Film Noir from the 1940’s to its mass popularity of the color television in 1955, America had begun a psychological shift from punishing itself with brooding jaded cinema to the perpetual euphoric distraction of regular scheduled television. It was with television that color was reintroduced into the American psyche after a two-decade long exploration into darkness. It also concluded a style of filmmaking that can only be remodelled with the attitudes of its contemporary society, therefore rendering it elusive and impossible to adapt completely.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Stranger On The Third Floor. USA: RKO Radio Pictures, 1940. Film.

Film Noir: Bringing Darkness To Light. USA: Warner Home Video, 2006. DVD.

The Rules Of Film Noir. Performed by Matthew Sweet. UK: British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 2009. Film.

Blaser, John J., and Stephanie L.M. Blaser. "FILM NOIR AND THE HARD-BOILED DETECTIVE HERO." Film Noir Studies. January 1, 2008. Accessed January 1, 2015. http://www.filmnoirstudies.com/essays/detective_hero.asp.

Horsley, Lee. "American Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction, 1920s-1940s." Crime Culture. January 1, 2009. Accessed January 1, 2015. http://www.crimeculture.com/Contents/Hard-Boiled.html.

McGilligan, Patrick. Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light. New York: Harper Perennial, 2004. 376.978-0-06-098827-2, p. 376

"Censored Films and Television I." Censored: Wielding the Red Pen. Virginia: Alderman Library.

THE LIVER

Do you ever wonder what it’s like to be him? I can only describe it if you stop believing you are your eyes and that your eyes are television screens. Now imagine you are sitting far away and conducting many screens.

That’s what it feels like to be him.

And who are we? Opticular sensory nerve endings connected to a larger socially conscious behaviour with ant-like eco-conservative duties to maintain the structural/hygienic integrity of our known planet, because without said planet the self-titled miracle of the self-aware and the ponderous would be forever lost in the vacuum of space thus assumably damaging the structural integrity of our known solar(vascular) system, a webbed network of light pouring in veins, heating a molecule not dissimilar to Adenosine Tri Phosphate, floating momentarily in the swell, a source of fuel for larger things all located in his liver.

Martini Blisters

Six friends had gathered in Bill Hawthorne's room at the Algonquin to throw themselves a party. Madeline brought a man she had met earlier that evening at a social club on Worth street and Donna had brought her cousin who was backpacking upstate and was in the Big Apple for the weekend. So in total eight had attended Bill Hawthorne's party, including Bill himself, who brought nothing but green fairy, a deck of cards, and a clear baggie of ecstasy that he always kept in his jacket for nights like these. 
Barton Loweman, Bill's best friend and high school sweetheart, made it his job to keep the record player "spinning to the good stuff all night," and it seemed clear that only he knew what the good stuff was. Everyone at the party including the stranger Madeline brought and Donna's cousin knew Barton as simply "Loweman" and it was only Bill Hawthorne who got to call him "Barty". "Billy" and "Barty" were their names for each other and on nights like tonight they would tend to show off their tattoos of the other's face and name. It was only to the rest of the world that they were Hawthorne and Loweman.
Edna had always resented the pairing because ever since she first met them she found both to be particularly attractive. She slept with Loweman twice before at hotel parties similar to this one, but she knew it was because both times Loweman did cocaine and would have fucked the bed had she not been there. She had never slept with Hawthorne though, she always found him too intimidating a presence. She had always wanted too, though. "Hawthorne was a dark, strong type that clung to loose-canon Loweman," she would say, "with his rolled up t-shirt sleeves and mustache, Hawthorne gives off that labourers look. It drives me crazy."
The last person at the party that night was Tom Belamy, a photographer from Minnesota who engaged himself to Donna a year and a half earlier and had come in his own car. He did black and whites and would often snap portraits of the gang which he hoped to eventually publish the series. Donna loved Tom's work but hated his profession, on account that there was no money to be made on spec. She was an assistant at an accounting firm and wished he would sell his camera and find a better paying job. Tom made no effort to appease this wish. He would eventually go on to publish his series and make a more than substantial career for himself in photos. 
The party had begun at two thirty in the afternoon when Madeline had come back from her morning in the city. Drinks were poured, and that was that.

A Novel Idea

CHAPTER: THE SECOND

   Pushing all common sense and reason to the back of his mind, Darlous Quip began to write what seemed to be the beginnings of a book. This act, although attempted several times throughout his life, was completely irrational, for Darlous had not the faintest idea what this book would be about nor did he know how to write a book at all for that matter. He merely sat himself behind his typewriter and began typing the first thing that came to his head. What materialized where the words that you see before you, in their exact order and condition from when Darlous first typed them. They have not been altered.
    Darlous devoted precisely twenty-two seconds to this attempt before he realized that this work was no better than the others that he had tried and failed to complete through a mist of momentary inspiration. Like the others, Darlous realized that this beginning had no substance, no tracks leading it towards an end goal. All that he had written within those twenty-two seconds was bland exposition about the actions of his protagonist.
    So in an effort to salvage those seconds past, Darlous took to deepening his introduction by cleverly lengthening the majority of the sentences used thus far in order to make his writing more attractive to a literate audience. Darlous had always found that long sentences usually indicate that the writer was well educated in the field of writing, and the reader would then feel that they are in good hands. Charles Dickens would often use exceptionally long sentences which usually made for long paragraphs which in turn made for long, complete books. This tactic was the first of three maneuvers Darlous took to ease his mind into thinking that what he was doing was worth the now fifty-eight seconds spent.
    The second maneuver used by Darlous was the act of name-dropping important writers that had come before him in order to fabricate a connection within the reader's mind between these authors' works and his own. This maneuver was a rather intelligent illusion which, if used with the proper amount of finesse, could subconsciously persuade readers into believing that the words they read before them are on par with those of Hemmingway, Steinbeck, or Tolstoy.
    Interestingly though, for reasons beyond him, Darlous Quip chose not too use his real name within the pages of the book but rather chose to invent a pseudonym. The choice came late in the writing process, five paragraphs in to be specific, which once again made Darlous go back through all that he had written and change the protagonist’s name to something that rolled off the tongue more easily than his real name. Also in a lame effort to once again promote the authenticity of the writer’s image, Darlous removed any mention of modern technology in favor of more beloved imagery such as that of the typewriter. Darlous understood what the concept of a lonesome alcoholic beating his thoughts into such a barbaric machine justified to the common reader: brilliance, no doubt.
    The third and final maneuver that Darlous used was the technique of listing for the sake of bulking up what now appeared to be a gratifying opening chapter to his book. The technique is actually quite simple. It is just a matter of coming up with a various number of items to discuss, then in well formulated paragraphs neatly explain each of their relevance. For Darlous, this gave him a focused direction to write towards, a track leading towards an end goal. The technique of listing also allows for the reader to follow coherently the trajectory of the events, for they are given in a simple formulated fashion. Darlous used this in order to manipulate the impression that he was aware of what he was doing, in the easiest way fashionable.
    Having abused the privileges that these three maneuvers can offer the proper writer, Darlous summed up the introductory chapter of his book with a well integrated closing sentence, typed from the keys of his typewriter, and in one final half-hearted attempt to allude to attractively larger concepts for the sake of sounding profound, Darlous ended on philosophy.

What is ‘Meta’ For? A Look at the Relevency of Self-Reflexivity and What it Communicates.

We currently live within a world where technical advancements are aimed to simulate ‘reality’ as best it can, specifically within the arts and entertainment industry. In a current interview at CinemaCon, James Cameron (director of the 1991 film Titanic, and 2010 Avatar) states that “the future of digital cinema is in 60FPS (frames per second),” as oppose to the conventional 24FPS which has been the standard for film and video since movies began, (Billington). Cameron, being already a huge advocate for the technological advancement of 3D cinema, explains that, “if watching 3D in cinemas is like looking through a window, making the jump to 60FPS was removing that window” (Billington). This concept of the ‘window’ that Cameron describes is the medium itself being hid as far from view as possible in order for it not to hinder the world of the experience. We intentionally trick ourselves into believing the experience we are given for the benefit of entertainment. We do this not only with films, but also with books and through the Internet, by cellphones, skype, texting, television, etc. It seems that we demand devices and mediums that draw do not draw any attention to themselves, which therefore creates a more beneficial experience using that device. In this essay, I have chosen to research and investigate an opposing school of thought, dedicated in embellishing self-reference and termed ‘meta’. Within this paper I will explain the concept of ‘meta’ and how it is relevant in works throughout history. In forming an understanding of the concept I wish to focus my attention to two relevant artists who use ‘meta’ heavily within their works counteracting the idea of “removing the window”. I will looks at the works of Irish novelist Flann O’Brien, specificialy his debut novel At Swim-Two-Birds, making adjacent comparisons to modern screenwriter and director Charlie Kaufman. In both cases we have artist that create works that do not hide from the medium in which they exist, but rather communicate the technical aspects employed by the medium itself, creating an even more relevant form of communicating realism. This concept greatly coincides with the communication philosophies of Marshall Mcluhan to which I will connect the concept of ‘meta’ as a further extension to his philosophy “the medium is the message,” from his book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964). Understanding the importance of ‘meta’ within the works of relevant artists allows for a thorough look into how self-reflexivity communicates the medium to the audience. This form of communication, opposite to the “hidden window” technique that Cameron expresses and is over abundantly beholden in current technological society, creates a more realistic and expressive relationship between the audience and the medium.

As unconventional as the term ‘meta’ sounds, its existence as a form of communication has been around since Aristotle, though not in the same context as it is today. The term itself comes from the Greek word μετά meaning: “after”, “beyond”, “with”, “adjacent”, “self”. The contemporary understanding of the concept comes from the last definition: “self”, and when used as a prefix such as in “metafiction” it would indicate that it is about its own category, in this case fiction that would self reference the devices of fiction, within itself (Oxford). This contemporary understanding first came into place under the study of Willard Van Orman Quine, and American philosopher and logician who, in 1937, devised the word “metatheorem” which explained that meta was “an X about X”(Quine, pg. 145-152). From Quine, spawned various reputable figures who often turned to meta forms within their works such as Douglas Hofstadter, an American academic whose column in the Scientific American Magazine entitled Magical Themas drew on heavy influences of Quine’s meta concept. One column in particular Hofstadter created a book, which he titled “A Review of This Book”, a self-referential concept and paradoxical one. Hofstadter explains the concept of this work:

“…Reviews of This Book, is just a fantasy of mine. I would love to see a book consisting of nothing but a collection of reviews of it that appeared (after its publication, of course) in major newspapers and magazines. It sounds paradoxical, but it could be arranged with a lot of planning and hard work. First, a group of major journals would all have to agree to run reviews of the book by the various contributors to the book. Then all the reviewers would begin writing. But they would have to mail off their various drafts to all the other reviewers very regularly so that all the reviews could evolve together, and thus eventually reach a stable state of a kind known in physics as a “Hartree-Fock self-consistent solution”. Then the book could be published, after which its reviews would come out in their respective journals, as per arrangement.”

                                    (Jenner)

            Apart from its perplexing forms in science and mathematics, the meta concept grew as an application used greatly in literature.  As I addressed earlier in the paragraph, the concept of “metafiction” elucidates itself within itself, stating to its reader that they are reading a work of fiction. Examples of this run as early as Homer’s Odyssey and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, both stories that have the writer within the story telling the story.  Other contemporary works that exercise concepts of metafiction include James Joyce’s  A Portrait of a Young Man as an Artist (1916), most of the works of American novelist Paul Auster, Anthony Burgess’ 1962 novella A Clockwork Orange, many of Stephen King’s work including Misery (1987), Secret Window, Secret Garden (one of four novella’s in Four Past Midnight in 1990), and various books from his Dark Tower series, to name a few. With each of these works, there begs the question as to how self-reference effects the work, and what does it communicate to the audience reading. To properly examine this idea, I have chosen to narrow my focus to the specific works of a single author whose writing has delved deep into the metafiction concepts addressed by many of these other authors.

  The author in particular, which I have chosen to look at specifically, is Irish novelist and satirist Flan O’brien (pen name for Brian O’Nolan), whose body of work deal greatly in metafiction concepts. O’brien’s first novel, At Swim-Two-Birds (1939), was hailed by writers such as Graham Greene, James Joyce, and Anthony Burgess for it’s “self-awareness” and it’s depictions of “literary traditions” (Hopper, pg. 54).  Michael Cronin looked specifically at the metafictional concepts of At Swim in his article “Mental Ludo: Ludic Elements in At Swim-Two-Birds", stating, “Contrary to what Benstock argues, what post-independence Ireland needed was not less but more of the type of playful, self-aware writing being proposed by Flann O'Brien in At Swim-Two-Birds. ... We would all be very much poorer without Mad O'Brien's narrative chessmen,” elucidating both his relevancy amongst post-modern writers and his craft for metafictional storytelling (Cronin, pg. 51). The story itself is a Menippean satire, which follows an unnamed writer who creates a web of fictitious plots and characters throughout the story, equal to the story that he is placed in. As we read the story, O’brien uses the concept of the ‘story within the story’ to keep the audience in realization that even the plot of the writer (our central character) is fictitious. On top of this, O’Brien breaks the fourth wall constantly by using omniscient italicized heading to either navigate through different plots, or to footnote words, thoughts, or actions of the characters used comically as such: “I was compelled to secrete my suite beneath the mattress because it was offensive to at least two of the senses and bore an explanation of my illness contrary to that already advanced. Two sense referred to: Vision, smell.” (O’Brien, 23). No longer is the framework of the narrative disguised but rather used as a point of the story in allowance of a further investigation of the work. O’Brien promotes the ideals of metafiction by allowing the reader to not only understand the plot and themes of the story, but communicates to them the art and technique of the medium as well. Furthermore, O’brien deconstructs conventional narrative time-lines using his metafictional devices as justification. Whereas, in conventional fiction we are slated to the current chapter and everything that has happened in previous chapters is considered ‘past events’ within the narrative and everything in the rest of the book is considered ‘future events’. Because At Swim is specifically about a writer and the majority of the book consist fictional plots that he is currently writing, the linearity of conventional narratives does not exist. For example, on page 43, in a plot line created by the main character is a scene that involves a trial of one of his fictitious characters named Dermot Trellis. Dermot Trellis is also a writer and in this trial he is being accused (among other things) of not supplying his characters with enough self-awareness to sustain themselves. Mr. Trellis is asked why he did not use any sort of “magical” literary device to appear before his character to at least give the character his name and identity. Mr. Trellis responds “I do not know,” and “I suppose I fell asleep”. Later, however, on page 50, we are shown the scene in which the character that Mr. Trellis created, named John Furriskey, comes to life and questions his own identity. In this plot, an omniscient apparition does appear and gives Furriskey his name, (we are to conclude that it was Mr. Trellis). As it would seem at this point in the novel (the ‘trial of Mr. Trellis’ does explain itself in the second half) that O’Brien has created two alternate realities: one where Mr. Trellis does communicate to his creation and another where he does not. This is not the case, however. O’Brien is using his own “magical” literary devices to show the reader the revisability of writing within the written work itself. By doing this the medium itself, in this example the written work, becomes the subject of discussion. As we follow the book we witness events that we would expect to be ‘past events’ become revised and turned into new events. This is justified because within the technical world of writing a novel, revisions can and do happen. O’Brien is therefore allowing us to focus on how the medium (in his case written fiction) distorts reality and by using (and I would even go as far to say abusing) the devices within said medium communicating the differences with actual reality.

Marshall Mcluhan, in his book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Mcluhan discusses in great detail the unique distortions that each medium creates on the message it is transmitting and that the focus of study should look at such distortions. Mcluhan takes a look at print, comics, the printed word, photographs, the press, telegraph, the typewriter, the telephone, the phonograph, movies, radio, and television (to name a few), and looks at the ramifications of transmitting a message through each medium creates. Similar to the meta concept, and dissimilar to Cameron’s “hidden window”, Mcluhan understood the message must be viewed within the context of how it is transmitted through the medium it is transmitted by, in order to be fully aware of the message you are receiving. Such as the case in O’Brien’s At Swim, O’Brien uses the narrative of the story to disclose the ‘distortions’ or devices used to create the story, thus making the medium the message. The fact that O’Brien has the ability to write, erase and revise is the subject of distortion and commentary that O’Brien is making. We as an audience should be aware that though we are following a linear narrative, there was much at work; many revisions and expulsions, required in making this narrative, so therefore, O’Brien makes them the point of focus. By Mcluhan’s theory, had At Swim been a radio play, or a movie, O’Brien would have manufactured a different commentary on its media form. Such is the case with screenwriter and director Charlie Kaufman who uses the meta concept to comment on film as a medium.

Similar to O’Brien, Kaufman is not the first use meta within his works; the subject of ‘breaking the fourth wall’ had been a matter of discussion since the beginnings of filmmaking itself. During the time of the Lumiere brothers, films most often identified their audience through the film because film at the time was a spectacle of technological innovation. It wasn’t until the development of continuity and editing that film began to hide the fact that they were films. Come 1910, the earliest precursor to Cameron’s “hidden window” mentality took hold. Though throughout various era’s of film history came artists who chose to ‘break the forth wall’ and reconnect the audience to the idea that what they are watching is a work of technical innovation. Jean Luc-Godard communicated this idea in many of his films including Breathless (1960) and Pierrot Le Fou (1965), many of the works of Agnes Varda, amongst others. The reason I chose to make Kaufman my focus is because he is the most recent of the ‘meta school of thought’ and concentrates all of his films on the subject. In his 2002 film Adaptation, Kaufman puts himself within the story to show the struggles of writing the script the eventually becomes the film that we are watching. In the story, Charlie Kaufman is given a novel in which he must adapt into a screenplay. We watch as he utters his ideals at the beginning of the film, “I just don’t want to ruin it by making it a Hollywood thing. I don’t want to cram in sex, or guns, or car chases, or characters overcoming obstacles and succeed in the end,” then watch as the script “tragically” (in Kaufman’s own words), succumbs to the conventions of a Hollywood narrative. Kaufman’s commentary is on the medium of film bottle-necking the creation of the story, or as said earlier, ‘distorting’ the message: Kaufman’s script. With all artists who take to using the meta concept within their works, their commentary is that the audience must be aware of the medium in which they choose to transmit their message, thus the audience has a better understanding of the conclusions the artist is making. This even goes beyond that of the arts and entertainment world. As Marshall Mcluhan philosophized, the medium in every form distorts the message, whether it be on the internet, through your cellphone, etc. We now live in a world where information is being transmitted to us in every way and form. In Mcluhan view, “the purpose of media studies is to make visible what is invisible: the effects of media technologies themselves, rather than simply the messages they convey. Media studies therefore, ideally, seeks to identify patterns within a medium and in its interactions with other media.” (Mcluhan). From his argument in New Media, Mcluhan states, “technologies are to words as the surrounding culture is to a poem: the former derive their meaning from the context formed by the latter.” (Mcluhan). The ‘meta’ concept is the device, which allows us to view the medium within the framework of the message gathering a more complete image then without.

In conclusion, I would like to reiterate the importance ‘meta’ has within the technological world we live in today. Lance Strate, in his essay The Medium is the Memory states, “Over the long history of our species, we have extended our collective memory in a variety of ways: through language and art, through oral tradition and mnemonics, through writing, typography, photography, film, audio and video recording, and through digital media,” realizing the weight that technology carries in properly transcribing and archiving our existence (Strate). If we follow Cameron’s “hidden window” concept, and hide our technology for the benefit of making the experience “more real” than we are neglecting the distortion factors that these technologies have on the message we are receiving. No longer will these technologies be ways to transmit a message, truthfully, but rather distort the message to a degree that we would no longer care to know. The ‘meta’ concept, used first by Aristotle, then broadened to all various forms of media outlets, allows the audience to view the message without forgetting the medium in which the message is being transmitted. This, in essence, allows the message to reach its audience clearly and allow the audience to experience a truer reality than that offered by hiding technology.

Work Citation

Billington, Alex. “CinemaCon: James Cameron Demos the Future of Cinema at 60 FPS.” Firstshowing.net. First Showing LLC, 04,04, 2011. Web. 4 Apr 2011

Definition of “Meta” found at: http://oxforddictionaries.com/view/entry/m_en_gb0514040#m_en_gb0514040

Quine, Willard Van Orman. “Logic Based on Inclusion and Abstraction.” The Journal of Symbolic Logic, Vol. 2, No. 4. December 1937, pp. 145–152

Jenner, Andrew. “Reviews of “Reviews of This Book” An Unusual Book.” Reenigne Blog (np): n. pag, Web. 22 Mar 2011 <http://reenigne.org/blog/review/>/

Cronin, Anthony (1989), No Laughing Matter: The Life and Times of Flann O'Brien, New York, pg. 51.

Hopper, Keith. Flann O'Brien: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Post-Modernist, (1995), Cork: Cork University Press. Pg. 54.

O’Brien, Flann. At Swim-Two-Birds. 2^nd ed. London, England: Penguin Classics, 1967. Print.

“The Medium is the Message,” by Marshall Mcluhan, reprinted from Understanding Media: The Extension of Man (1964), MIT Press.

“Marshall McLuhan: The Modern Janus,” by James C. Morrison, reprinted from Perspectives on Culture, Technology and Communication (2006), Hampton Press, Inc

McLuhan, Marshall. "Introduction," Explorations in Communication,edited by Edmund Carpenter and Marshall McLuhan (Boston: Beacon Press, 1960)

McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962)

Strate, Lance. “The Medium is the Memory.” Library and Archives Canada (2007): n. pag, Web. 1 Apr 2011

Babe, Robert. “Mcluhan and the Electronic Archives.” Library and Archives Canada (2007): n. pag, Web. 1 Apr 2011

“An Alternative Current in Surveillance and Control,” by Aaron Doyle, reprinted from The New Politics of Surveillance and Visibility, edited by Kevin D. Haggerty and Richard V. Ericson (2006), University of Toronto Press.

“The Culture of Surveillance,” by Vincent P. Pecora, reprinted from Quantitative Sociology 25, no. 3 (2002), Human Sciences Press.