Reading Laura Mulvey’s Late Style Essay on Vertigo in the Light of Covid-19
She says that film is death
in its each frame, moving
life into motion by light
so artifice plays on reality,
arousing automatons,
those herky-jerky objects
we desire to own, infuse
with fake breath, because
to dominate the unreal
is what only gods, artists,
do. In Vertigo Madelaine
is memory, crossed twice,
a favourite bridge, she’s
ordinary spouse refused,
credit card declined, turned
as in Pygmalion into goddess;
she falls doubly, is a double
image and the pain is fetishes
are never again what they once
were in the possessing hand;
you play, let go, released
the toy breaks on the rocks
below. Freud, Adorno, the one
who died at the Swiss border
and loved unpacking books,
Benjamin, the master theorist
of machinations and creation;
the late style is, Deleuze or Said
both knew, an outcropping
of what’s placed behind us,
the time before the mastery;
the backdrop replacing actual
smashing waves with fashion;
how we make up and dress
plain Mom to become Marilyn
Monroe. One blonde icon falls
into another one, Russian dolls
as German ghosts in American
films as desired by French eyes;
there’s no meprise only error
and decline. In the silent streets
of London now no Ripper stalks,
no Hitchcock strangler taking
lives; the obsession is ours
with disease, invisible so pictured
in disguise as national trauma,
the dream of attacked glories
remembered as any sex sin is;
not since the war... rationing,
sacrifice, Nightingales... images
respliced to fit a new purpose,
until we almost find it beautiful,
this still distant strange alien
world we’re woven back into -
reborn into the uncanny made
definition of sci-fi terror –
the 1950s when Touch of Evil
and all the saucer flicks appeared;
invasions, panic, fear, control -
only icy command, medical poise
will save us from our own urge
to lean far from our towers, girls
flung to fanciful destructions
by going out with someone twice
our age or more than our families;
wash hands, avoid touch, reality
kills. In seclusion, we’re reborn
as robots that can survive on air,
eat only news. We’re movies,
silent, stilled, with the projector
temporarily broken, as is society.
2 April, 2020
London
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