102: lines of containment

THIS WEEK: Michelle Santiago Cortés watches post-apocalyptic babes and thinks about what limits aren't

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• RAFTM Nick Armstrong writes a great newsletter on film, Writing With The Enemy, and I loved this month’s on Cameron Crowe¹

• One more time for the people in the back: Substack tells me that there are quite a few people subscribing to this newsletter now (reading is a different story) and because I love to talk about myself, I thought people might be interested in a little Q&A. If there’s a question that you’d like to ask me, feel free to leave a comment or reply to this email. You can ask me questions about genuinely anything! If there’s sufficient interest, I will share answers soon and if not, pretend I never mentioned this.

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Michelle Santiago Cortés is a writer, zinemaker, and friend to me. I met Michelle last summer at a Brian Dillon book event² and we quickly became friends. What I find so striking about Michelle’s writing, and what makes it so enjoyable to read, is how clear it is to see what a curious and engaged person she is. Michelle does not cite to cite—she is purposeful in who she evokes, demonstrating years-long engagement with a critic or theorist’s body of work. She is an investigator of the first-degree, constantly asking questions and going on deep dives, never satisfied with an easy answer. I also appreciate how much the material—paper, hardware, blood—informs her work. When I opened my copy of her recent zine, Cut & Paste, I felt breathless. Her attention to texture (of the paper, of the yarn that holds the pages together) and rhythm (the slight band of paper you have to slip off to open the zine, the arrangement of the sections) is incredible. For her dispatch today, Michelle thinks about borders and containment, mutation and permeability, and seasons of transition:

This is a transition week for me. After living in New York for about five years I’m halfway committed to moving back home (to San Juan, Puerto Rico) to recover my financial bearings after four months into the worst year of my freelance writing career. My plan is to be in PR for a year, and then return to New York to attend grad school. I am in Puerto Rico now, for most of April, for reasons entirely unrelated to my Big Move. But this month-long “trial” certainly helps with the transition.

Because this week includes the end of a month and the beginning of a new one, the last days of winter and the first inklings of spring, the transitions multiply. I am typically very strict with my “consumption habits.” When it comes to produce and culture, I do my best to consume things seasonally. I assign myself a theme and I read, listen, and eat with the seasons. In my idiosyncratic way, this helps me feel attuned with my surroundings. Aesthetic coherence helps regulate my inexhaustible hungers.

For the last days of winter in New York City: The first radishes of the season, Rohmer³, Truffaut, rose milk, books about art or writing, chrysanthemum tea, the small amount of fiction I read in any given year, the last of the all-wool outfits, Enya and Mitski. (The Real Housewives franchise is a year-round constant).  

These last days of March have been cold and rainy, the early buds of spring an almost neon shade of green against the wet world around them. I follow suit: Miso soup with too much scallion, the “Lord of the Rings” trilogies, frequent face masks and excess moisturizer. For music: Mort Garson’s Plantasia and Dorothy Ashby’s In A Minor Groove. Everything had to be green, fantastical, yet grounded.

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A strict program like mine makes changes all the more remarkable. For example: On Sunday, I impulsively watched Barb Wire (1996) from the Criterion Channel’s playlist on the Razzie’s, the anti-Oscars that rewards movies like Showgirls or Prince’s Under the Cherry Moon for their catastrophic lack of taste. Because there are two of my favorite movies, I’m not at all surprised by the fact that I absolutely love Barb Wire. 

For the opening credits, Pamela Anderson wears black latex. She’s on stage, stripping in front of  a firehose. It’s graphic, gratuitous, and excessive in all the best ways. The film is set in a Mad Max-esque post-apocalyptic landscape where water and diesel are in short supply and sex and guns are in abundance. Through the steamy throes of these opening credits, I make a mental list of Post-apocalyptic Babe Flicks: Barb Wire (1996), Tank Girl (1995), Fifth Sense (1997)? Not enough babes. Hackers (1996)? Not post-apocalyptic enough. “Aeon Flux”? Definitely.

A heckler from the crowd tells Barb to take it all off. Barb Wire unbuckles her shoe. Cut: A pleaser heel flies across the room and stabs him between the eyes. Cut: Two feet, one in the black Pleaser and the other tiptoeing barefoot beside it. As these feet make their way offstage we hear a voice-over: “If one more person calls me babe…” (Post-apocalyptic Babe Flicks: Barb Wire, 1996)

Barb Wire the character is a version of Pamela Anderson the celebrity, is a version of Pamela Anderson the actor. What comes to mind when we see Pamela Anderson as Barb Wire, does half of the work of telling us who Barb Wire is. In the script, the line “If one more person calls me babe” is (presumably) assigned to Barb Wire. We assume that, as the actress portraying Wire, the line is performed by Anderson, just as we suspect as the feet we see hobbling offstage belong to Anderson/Wire. But what if we didn’t assume or suspect anything?

Later in the week I finished reading a book about figurative analysis in film called On The Figure In General and the Body in Particular by Nicole Brenez. From Brenez I learned that the feet, the voice, and the boobs (it’s likely there were several pairs as I suspect a double stepped in for Pamela Anderson for the topless shots), can be more than just mere components of a singular character.  Brenez explains that “cinema can redirect but also reopen all the notions and divisions with which we perceive the phenomena of presence, identity, and difference.” So she challenges us to “refrain from presuming coherence” of any kind.

We often judge movies for their abilities to produce credible illusions of what we call real-life. In the nineties, our culture decided that Pamela Anderson does not represent a desirable version of real life (she was surely seen as desirable, but not as realistic). Barb Wire won a Razzie, because, like Showgirls and Under the Cherry Moon, it trades in excesses that overflow into, what was judged to be, sloppy plot inconsistencies and unrealistic characterizations. But Brenez writes that “narrative is merely a component and no longer an end” and that we should consider “figurative styles that do not make individuation the motor of their writing.” 

If you count the stunt doubles from the action scenes, it takes more than one body to portray Barb Wire. Sometimes it only takes a voice or a foot. “A body,” Brenez writes, is “the result of interwoven connections…stitched together via continuity errors with other psychologies or models, its own parts or its singular movement.” Excesses or inconsistencies don’t have to be faults.  Writing these essays in the 1990s, Brenez notes that “if body, individual, and person have become an increasingly tighter network of identities in the real world, there is no reason this must be brought into film.” 

I can’t think of less interesting criteria for judging a film (or any work of art, actually) than characterization or realism. The real world exists outside of words and images, why force it into film and languages?

It often seems to be the movies that are accused of excess—sentimentality, sexuality, and violence, specifically—that are often charged for being Bad Movies. But overt sexuality foregrounds the fact that characters (and real-life people) are made for communion and permeability. Violence, with all its blood-spewing, bullet-holes, and blade-slicing does the same. So do corniness and oversentimentality. Excess is proof that containment is just an illusion.

***

After Barb Wire on Sunday I itched for more Post-Apocalyptic Babes, so I decided to rewatch Aeon Flux for the first time. Aeon Flux is a series of animated shorts-turned one-season series that originally aired on MTV in the early 1990s. It was part of the network’s experimental animation showcase called Liquid Television, known for also introducing the world to Beavis and Butthead. It was created by Peter Chung, who went on to create the pilot and opening sequence of Nickelodeon's Rugrats.

This is the part where I would introduce you to the plots and characters, but Aeon Flux is remarkable for how little that information matters to the actual substance of the show. There is a post-apocalyptic future set in a dystopian surveillance state, but sometimes it’s in a desert, or a jungle, or another planet, or any number of semi-abandoned post-industrial settings. There is Aeon Flux, wearing skimpy black fetish wear, sometimes she’s a guerilla warrior for the Monicans, who are fighting against the Bregnan regime. But sometimes she’s a double-agent, or a freelancer, or just some lady. There is Trevor Goodchild, her main nemesis, but also her lover, also a mad scientist, and frequently the evil dictator of Bregna.

In early versions of the show, Aeon Flux fails every mission (which sometimes seem self-assigned or aimless) and dies. If you insist on finding a unifying theory that connects the entire series, there are technically endless copies of Aeon Flux—some Goodchild created because he’s obsessed with her and others that are made in an assembly-line that funnels Aeon copies into porn centerfolds and foot-fetish cams.

Where there is “too much sex” I see an opportunity to read a film differently. Everyone in Aeon Flux is fucking. Sexual contact is omnidirectional and the bodies are endlessly remixable and permeable: In one episode, Trevor Goodchild overthrows the governor, turns his body into a cave that leads to a lovenest where he has a dress and bed waiting for Aeon. In another episode dueling parties fight and lust over majestic half-bird beings. At any moment, a shoot-out could riddle these bodies with holes. Most of them are half-naked, wearing only fetishwear. Nightvision, X-ray vision, video surveillance footage are just some of the technologies that probe these bodies to render them transparent.

These stories of permeability and messy spillages of all kinds, can only be told through animation. The show’s linework is its story. The bodies are both skeletal and muscular in anatomically impossible ways. Sometimes Aeon has a long face, other times it's heart-shaped. Sometimes she has narrow eyes, others they’re more doll-like. Trevor’s head morphs from egg-shaped, to fully oblong, with the occasional Chad-like jawline. As if the same hand refused to commit to a definitive version of her face and only takes us as far as suggesting what anyone might look like.

No care was put into maintaining an illusion that these figures existed beyond a singular frame. They are drawn anew each time, designed all over again, frame to frame. The “plot” follows this pattern, the main plot of warring states is often abandoned in favor of dead-end storylines about individual characters' kinks or sexual fantasies. 

Everything becomes more impressionistic as the show evolves. A reverse-progression, A devolution. A move towards discontinuity. An alternate fluidity. It heads Brenez’s call to curb our “reflexes concerning singularity, presence and sovereignty.”

***

At this point, it might come to absolute no surprise that this was the month I also finished my second Clarice Lispector book: The Passion According to G.H. In various states of mystical ecstasy and undress, the titular G.H. spends the whole of the novel in an empty room in her apartment. She tells the story of “my great dilation” and I see in The Passion a parallel undoing of the self. Brenez argues for the undoing of fixed entities in film analysis. Aeon Flux refuses to so much as draw a single consistent line, much less “characters” or “storylines.” In the words of G.H., this all makes room for the “hellish grandeur of life.”

G.H. continues: “Since not even my body delimits me, mercy does not let my body delimit me.” It’s all very morbid and, at times, frustrating to read and watch. But it also feels like spring, threateningly fertile. The one-true fact that there is no one-true, continuous, delimited self. Nor should there be. “Since there is not just one way of entering into contact with life,” G.H. explains. “There are even negative ways! Even painful ones! Even almost impossible ones.”

***

I’m in two minds about moving back home: There is plenty to celebrate and look forward to while there are also some things to mourn. I dread the cost of storage for a whole year. But it feels glamorous to move back and forth, NY ← → PR. 

For now, I’ll enjoy the excitement of setting my media agenda for the month. Books I’m packing for my trip home to Puerto Rico: An anthology of Puerto Rican science fiction writing, Christopher Michlig’s File Under: Slime, and Andreas Malm’s Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency. I’m done hibernating and I’m packing an exfoliator to expose as much of my skin as possible when I’m in the humid air. The weather will be perfect to stay indoors and binge Juzo Itami and Yasujirō Ozu movies. The stickier and steamier sounds of Italian soundtrack music and Anri’s Heaven Beach will replace the cooler sounds of Ashby’s harp or Plantasia’s synths. And if I make it to the beach, I’ll come back home, shower, and fall asleep while I rewatch Jean Painlevé’s science documentary shorts. 

Thanks for reading! You can find Michelle on Instagram and Twitter, and more of her writing on her website. Copies of her zine are sold out but maybe she’ll do another run if people are interested!

Past guests: Harry Cepka - Emma Cohen - Kyle Curry - Rachel Davies - Tavi Gevinson - Aisha Gelb - Tia Glista - Hunter Harris - Jessica Kasiama - Sonja Katanic - Blake Mancini - CaseyMQ - Terry Nguyen - Tiana Reid - Winnie Wang - Tony Zelenka - Hannah Ziegler

1. RAFTM = Reader and Friend to Me; credit to Rachel Tashjian

2. Where a woman raised her hand during the Q&A and without pretext declared, “David Bowie was a Satanist”

3. Ed. note: Rohmer is one of the things that Michelle and I bond over.