Mary Kate Monahan
Possible Treatment for Thesis Proposal:
Same As It Never Was
Our lives can so easily become mundane and routine. It might not be so much about who we are at times but what we do all the time that really affects who we are. Jane works as a creative video technician for Gideon's Funeral Services in Fresno California. Her job requires her to use photos and/or home video footage to put together the slideshow portion of funerals. She spends her evenings with families who she meets during the worse week of their lives. Her late nights are spent with the deceased who she gets to know through the footage and uses that to form a memorial slide and video presentation to represent their lives. By adding the right soundtrack to the right pictures or footage at exactly the correct moment, Jane forms a summary of what she sees someone was like. She finds the fact that changing one little thing in the order or the song can create a totally different feeling. Jane is friendly but not outgoing. She is insightful with the people she comes in contact with but is not a happy person. Her life has become a series of dead people and their disturbed family and friends. Between this and the fact that a lot of her time is spent alone in her house or office working, she claims to feel like a vampire.
The film begins by setting up Jane during a meeting with the wife of a man who has just passed away. Jane arrives at the house late in the evening and begins to go through photos while the man’s widow sleeps in the next room. She starts humming a slow melancholic type song when she comes across a picture of the man dressed in a white polyester suit and gold rimmed glasses. She stops and in her head, changes the song to Elton John’s Yellow Brick Road and the slide show begins as a compilation of the actual show, her going through photos at the house, and the looks on people’s faces at the ceremony. When she finishes, she attempts to leave the funeral quietly but is stopped by the widow. The conversation ends with the woman asking Jane if she’s happy doing what she does to which Jane simply replies no. Jane’s life continues on as routine. She comes home from work late, sleeps in late, and when she goes outside for grab the paper well after noon she sees her neighbor, Thomas. He is elderly and moves slowly but everywhere he goes, he has a black and white Border Collie at his heels. He comments on her getting the paper so late in the day before Jane returns to her house and work. She watches the man from his window as he throws the ball for the dog while he waters the plants in his yard by hand. She even takes a moment to snap a picture of him. A few weeks later when Thomas is rushed to the hospital leaving his companion dog Ceili outside and alone for over a day, Jane takes the dog in. Having a dog forces Jane out of her regular routine. She starts getting up early to walk or run with Ceili and she meets people on the street. Ceili begins to go anywhere Jane goes; work, grocery shopping, and even to a local bar where her new found friends force her to sing karaoke. Through the relationship with Ceili, Jane is able to break out of her shell and start joining a world of living people.
She has also taken to watering her neighbor’s plants, and keeping up his house. He has many antiques and his walls are covered with photos, yet in his absence, there are no visitors to the house. Knowing that he is ill, she decides, without meeting him that she will make a slideshow in memory of his life. She takes all the things she knows he holds near and dear to her, photographs them and for the first time gets to make a memorial of someone’s life who she actually gets to meet.
After creating the slideshow, Jane takes the DVD to Thomas in the hospital. He has no knowledge of who she is but recognizes Ceili instantly. Seeing the video makes him very emotional and he is very grateful. Jane is happy because she feels like she has finally made a difference to someone.
A few days later, Jane is watering the plants inside Thomas’s house when she is interrupted by a woman in her thirties and her husband. This woman claims to be Thomas’s daughter. Thomas passed away the day before and she is here to help get his things in order. She is a cold person and does not seem to know her father very well. When her husband refers to her as Ceili, Jane is shocked and laughs a little. The woman stares at Jane in confusion and irritation. She questions why Jane is here and requests that Jane take her dog outside. Knowing that this is a complete representation of the fact that she didn’t know her father at all, Jane offers the woman her card for the funeral home, gets snubbed, and leaves with the dog. She puts her ipod in her ears and slow melancholic music begins. She smiles, changes it to something more upbeat and runs down the street happily with Ceili.
Style/Form:
It would be impossible to create a film so centered on one particular character without adding multiple dimensions to her. Jane is a sort of media clergy for the dead and their loved ones. Performing this service deeply affects her to the point that she cannot ever feel apart from it. Applying many of Roland Bathes’ theories of the photograph to not only what she does but the effect it has on her will provide the story and the character with a broader, more human scope.
Remembering Loss:
Jane’s job forces her to search the photos for moments of meaning. She finds photographs that inspire grief, laughter, anger, etc. In these photos she finds a connection to the group she provides a presentation for. A man standing alone looking out at the ocean while the sun sets provides us all with a sense of wonder after his passing. We question his death for many reasons but the one that hits us all is the mystery of death itself. Whatever our personal beliefs are, none of us are sure about what happens when our life ends. It is that mysterious question that binds all of us to this photograph in some way. Roland Barthes would call this the studium.
“For it is by studium that I am interested in so many photographs, whether I receive them as political testimony or enjoy them as good historical scenes: for it is culturally (this connotation is present in studium) that I participate in the figures, the faces, the gestures, the settings, the actions.” [1]
By merely placing photographs of a person who has passed away on a screen, Jane can achieve this sort of emotional response. However, the guests at the funerals have a little more at stake. They know in reality that this person is gone but that doesn’t stop them from searching for connection. Jane must look deeper into the photos to find more. She uses her own personal experiences and feelings when she rummages through dusty old boxes of forgotten photographs. While she does connect to all of them through studium, there are certain pictures that really grab her attention. These pictures possess something extra. They reference something in her past or speak to her directly through the off-frame space. They touch her and she uses this personal connection to the photos to speak more personally to the friends and family of the deceased. This connection she feels is what Barthes calls punctum.
“A photographs punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).”[2]
The punctum is in the eye of the viewer. It speaks personally to the one and is not something that everybody shares. It is the portion within the photograph, possibly a minor detail, that calls up some sort of small trauma in the viewer. This creates an undetermined off-frame space for each photo. This off-frame space points to a lack which the French theorist Christian Metz has likened to the development of a fetish from Sigmund Freud’s primal scene.[3] This is the moment when a young boy, knowing only that all people possess a penis sees his mother naked for the first time. In that moment he experiences deep trauma and fear of castration. This is the lack that Metz is attaching punctum to. However, Freud then goes on to the development of the fetish from this primal scene moment. The young boy would then attach himself psychologically to something within the physical or temporal setting to replace this deep pain of the lack. This object or fixation would then become the only replacement for that pain.[4]
The loved ones of the dead treat photographs as fetishes. Sometimes they carry them around in their pockets forever, pulling out the bent and torn paper multiple times a day. Barthes references a photo like this that he has of his own mother and father. He speaks of the physical connection he has to the individual photograph and how with his death the connection will die as well; for it is his love and memory that gives the photograph its life.[5] Within this fetish for photos of the dead, though, Metz speaks of a form of catharsis. By looking at a photograph and seeing its stillness, one can actually begin to come to terms with the death. For the photograph is already a death.
“Death must be somewhere in society; if it is no longer in religion it must be elsewhere; perhaps in this image which produces Death while trying to preserve life.”[6]
Our inability to change the photograph (or at least the moment the photograph was taken) is what allows us to connect to the photograph as it is, in its stillness and death. Mourning (as Freud refers to it) can thus pass when this fetish allows the mourner to remember the dead as dead and preserve one’s life by moving forward.[7]
Towards the very end of Art Spiegelman’s Maus, A Survivor’s Tale, we see an actual photograph of Vladek in a uniform from the Concentration Camp. He is posed in a booth for the camera in a uniform that was not the one he wore but looks just like it. He took this photograph to send to his wife after the war ended as proof of his life. However, it is in his dress that we see proof of a death. The uniform represents the destruction of a life that no longer exists but that will never really die. That picture holds deep punctum for him and many others. However, the photograph itself, and the staging of it shows the death of the situation that provided the uniform in the first place. For during the war he could never have taken a photo such as this one. Within this photograph there is life an death. There is space within the frame that causes deep pain and sadness yet there is off-frame space where we know this to be a photo of a survivor; proof of life and love. Spiegelman’s addition of this photograph to his otherwise hand drawn novel is not without great notice. It is not that the book could not and would not have worked without it but with it’s incorporation we find so much more then just a picture.[8]
Remembering Life:
In 2004, Omar Naim directed a film called The Final Cut.[9] This Science Fiction thriller focused on a world where people were implanted with a camera chip at birth that recorded every moment of their lives. After one’s passing, Alan Hackman, the video editor would go through the footage to create what should be a perfect summary of their lives. However, this being a Sci-Fi thriller causes the film to take a very dark turn when the footage is altered and played with in order to create the best possible memorial for each person who dies. Alan Hackman rummaged through a person’s life from his or her point of view. By seeing and hearing what a man looked at and spent his time with most, one could understand what he loved and who he really was. But in doing this, you would never actually see the landscape of his face. You would never capture the actual person on film or in data. You would only have what he saw and did. While this may seem to bring us closer to a lost loved one, it might only promote an overwhelming state of melancholia.[10] If the daughter of a lost father where constantly engaging herself in her father’s past life through his eyes only, she might not break the cycle in her memory that he is alive. His memories, his brain, and his eyes would still be here and she could easily put herself into a deep state of denial.
Another film that references this type of pathological denial is Addicted To Love[11]. In this film, two characters (Maggie and Sam) are thrown together in a condemned building across the street from their Ex-lovers who have fallen in love with one another. Having strong skills with telescopes and such, Sam sets up a Camera Obscura[12] which allows him to watch everything that goes on inside the apartment of his lost love. He turns his back on the window (which he could also watch with less detail from) thus turning his back on the reality of the situation. He then paints the dirty neglected wall of this building white in order to see the lives of the lovers more clearly and create an artificial screen where the reality of them as a couple still lives. He obsesses over her and continues to watch her day in and out while all along perpetuating the feeling that they are still together.
The difference between these two situations, however is that in Addicted to Love, Sam and Maggie are looking at representations of the lives of their loved ones. They see their faces and are still able to manifest the idea that their counterparts are looking, talking and interacting with them. In The Final Cut, however, viewers take on the perspective of the departed. They see themselves reflected back at them. In each case, though, these are situations where instead of remembering the loss of a loved one, they are only remembering the life. While this may not seem like such a terrible idea, it can become very toxic to live in a state of believing this will be.[13] In each case, the characters are using cinema to create “a realistic guarantee for the unreal.”[14]
Remembering Life with Loss: