celestial intervention

I was happy to bump into Louise D’Arcens at Writing Across Cultures.* Louise was one of my teachers twelve years ago, and taught a course about medieval women writers. I think she was the first person to introduce me to Deleuze and Guattari, and was also the best dressed person on campus — a funk fetish vampire diva. We all worshipped her, of course. (Funny: we’re chatting about escaping the master-disciple dynamic of postgrad supervision, and she says, “I don’t think I could be anyone’s master,” and I’m thinking incredulously, did you SEE how you dressed in the 20th Century?) I remember turning up to half of her classes, and then handing in what purported to be an essay about medieval women mystics’ visions of Christ and other divine beings, but which was somehow ended up being about the corporeal rapture of alien abduction narratives…

This brings me to Gregg Araki’s stunning Mysterious Skin, which I saw at the Sydney Film Festival a few weeks ago. There are lots of interesting things I could say about the film’s refusal to trot out any kind of “positive”, normative model of (homo)sexuality in the face of its concerns with the aftermath of paedophilia, and then there’s always Michelle Trachtenberg’s small role to consider. But right now, I’m most interested in the character of Brian, who constructs a lifelong obsession with alien abduction as a way of interfacing with his memories of sexual abuse. He places his slippery recollections of being inappropriately probed in an appropriately shlock-technoscientific narrative. But within the framework of the film’s “reality”, his family really does seem to be visited by a UFO, shortly after his experiences of sexual abuse. Whether this is the point at which the coherence of the film’s reality-effect deliberately breaks down is open to question, but the idea that these experiences can be placed in parallel as having a valid kinship is really interesting.

I can’t really take this any further without working through an event from my past: when I was a child, I, too, saw a UFO. There. I will ponder this a while, and get back to you about its significance. Just to assure you, it’s probably not the same as Brian’s.

And it’s not without reason that throughout this long train of thought, I’ve been obsessively listening to the Eurythmics’ “There Must Be An Angel”, the single greatest exception to my hatred of melistastic vocals, perhaps because Annie Lennox is so over the top about it: “I walk into an empty roo-oo-oo-oom / and suddenly my heart goes boo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oom”. It’s a beautiful, cold rapture. And underneath the cheery gospel literality of it all, there’s an awfulness — the edginess of awe. And Stevie Wonder!

The past couple of weeks have also been spent curling up in front of Angels In America. In the middle of extremity, we are visited by terrible beauty.

What does any of this mean?

(I spent more than a week chewing on this post, but decided to let it out unfinished.)

* It was strange. Despite a very significant engagement with postcolonial theory and politics, there was something troublingly “national” and “literary” about the conference that obviously lay deep in its longterm institutional investments — it was, after all, an Australian Literature conference. It was as if postcoloniality was met and arranged within markers that shouldn’t really remain tenable, but yet tellingly still remain. Of course, attempts were made to push those markers — Gail Jones delivered an unimaginably sexy keynote about heterotopic denationalisation, spectrality, the radical ethics of generosity, and memory escaping the project of the coherent reconstruction of (national) identity. Imagine if Kate Bush was an academic — that’s Gail Jones. Multiple swoonings! Perhaps any attempts to recognise the postcolonial in such a disciplinary framework are doomed to narcissism, simply because those rhetorical attempts are not material enough, but I’d take Gail Jones’ speculative “narcissism” over any one else’s, since too many other presentations stayed at the unambitious level of show and tell.

[ tags: aids, aliens, angels, angels-in-america, divinity, eurythmics, gail-jones, gregg-araki, michelle-trachtenberg, mysterious-skin, paedophilia, rapture, ufo ]