{"id":107006,"date":"2017-01-24T11:08:31","date_gmt":"2017-01-24T16:08:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=107006"},"modified":"2017-01-24T15:13:46","modified_gmt":"2017-01-24T20:13:46","slug":"you-can-stop-believing-in-it-but-it-doesnt-go-away","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/01\/24\/you-can-stop-believing-in-it-but-it-doesnt-go-away\/","title":{"rendered":"You Can Stop Believing in It, But It Doesn\u2019t Go Away"},"content":{"rendered":"

The anality of\u00a0<\/em>Event Horizon.<\/p>\n

<\/a>

Still from Event Horizon<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Oh, God. Do I have to watch Event Horizon<\/em><\/a> again? I\u2019d rather rip my eyes out.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a children\u2019s movie. Let\u2019s get that straight right away. Most movies are children\u2019s movies.<\/p>\n

Event Horizon<\/em> (1997) is the story of a spaceship that has gone beyond our solar system. The ship aimed to get around the laws of physics and travel faster than light using an invention called a gravity drive, which folds two points together in collapsed space-time by means of a miniature black hole. It would no longer take seventeen hours to fly from Boston to New Delhi if Boston and New Delhi were, briefly, the same place.<\/p>\n

Here is the problem: when the gravity drive was activated, the ship simply disappeared.<\/p>\n

As the film begins, it is the year 2047 and the ship, called the Event Horizon<\/em>, has reappeared. It is being approached by the Lewis & Clark<\/em>, a salvage-and-rescue ship.<\/p>\n

On its surface, Event Horizon <\/em>is a haunted-house film in outer space. The ghost ship has returned from its mysterious journey both emptied and populated. \u201cThis place is a tomb,\u201d says the captain of the rescue ship, exploring the emptied body of the Event Horizon<\/em>; then, later, \u201cAre you telling me this ship is alive?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

It is conventional to refer to a ship as she.<\/em> The captain of the Lewis & Clark<\/em> asks, of the Event Horizon<\/em>, \u201cWhere has she been, Doctor?\u201d (The first words spoken in the film Event Horizon<\/em> are by the inventor of the reality-warping gravity drive, Dr. Weir, as he awakens from a nightmare of his wife\u2019s suicide, the memory of a woman he loved and lost:\u00a0he says, \u201cClaire. I miss you.\u201d)\u00a0As the rescue crew kids around, we learn their backstories and their affectionate nicknames. A technician is watching a film of her child, back home on Earth, saying, \u201cPlay horsie, Mommy. Play horsie.\u201d She is jostled and says, \u201cHey, no more ball in the house.\u201d Next is the apology: \u201cSorry about that, Mama Bear.\u201d<\/p>\n

What do we know so far? The reappearance of the ship is the rediscovery of, and reentry into, a missing \u201cshe\u201d: an absent but constantly reevoked Mommy or Mama. Just when you think you must be imagining this, or overthinking and projecting it into the movie, the rescue ship moves to connect to the body of the Event Horizon\u00a0<\/em>and its captain orders a technician to \u201cdeploy the umbilicus.\u201d<\/p>\n

What interests me is the unusual frankness with which this unsubtle movie confesses its urgent meaning: the wish to travel outside the boundaries of reality, and to accomplish the impossible: to reconnect to the body of the missing she, the absent mother, by any means necessary. Deploy the umbilicus!<\/em><\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

In order to better understand Event Horizon<\/em>, to understand a specific psychic mechanism for destroying reality and delusionally reuniting with the mother\u2019s body, we turn now to Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel\u2019s Creativity and Perversion<\/em><\/a> (1984).<\/p>\n

I should like to examine in some detail the outcome of the process that goes on in the place I have likened to the digestive tract.<\/p>\n

It is clear that, for Sade, incest is in no way connected with assuaging a deep longing for the Oedipal object, but it is linked with the abolition of \u2018children\u2019 as a category and \u2018parents\u2019 as a category. Expressed in more general terms, the pleasure connected with transgression is sustained by the fantasy that\u2014in breaking down the barriers which separate man from woman, child from adult, mother from son, daughter from father, brother from sister, the erotogenic zones from each other, and, in the case of murder, the molecules in the body from each other\u2014it has destroyed reality, thereby creating a new one, that of the anal universe where all differences are abolished<\/em><\/strong>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Emphasis mine. We don\u2019t have to reread the Marquis de Sade to understand these ideas. Only last weekend, I visited a friend whose six-year-old son handed me a picture book. \u2014\u201cYou should read this,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s a good book. It shows how grown-ups are just as stupid as kids.\u201d \u2014\u201cAre kids stupid?\u201d I said. \u2014\u201cEveryone is stupid,\u201d he said. \u2014Then he bent face-first into his bowl of oatmeal and began to eat it with no hands, as if he were a dog.<\/p>\n

Grown-ups are just as X as kids. Everyone is X. \u2014 <\/em>The boy\u2019s proposed equality of children and adults seemed plainly to be his tool to deal with the immeasurable, intolerable humiliation and frustration that accompanied increasing awareness of the enormous difference<\/em> between himself and his father. His coping mechanism was the denial of the difference between the generations, a denial of time, through an unrealistic assertion of absolute equality. \u201cIt is necesssary to grow up, to mature, to wait, whereas faeces are a production common to adult and child, woman and man,\u201d writes Chasseguet-Smirgel. \u201cAll of us are open to the perverse solution which constitutes a balm for our wounded narcissism and a means of dissipating our feelings of smallness and inadequacy.\u201d It is permissible in a six-year-old child.<\/p>\n

This, in essence, is the universe of the sacrilege. <\/em> All that is taboo, forbidden or sacred is devoured by the digestive tract, an enormous grinding machine disintegrating the molecules of the mass thus obtained in order to reduce it to excrement.<\/p>\n

This recurring theme of the changing of forms\u2014of man\u2019s ability not to annihilate things but to dissolve and metamorphose them after breaking down the molecules\u2014means that all things must revert to chaos, the original chaos that may be identified with excrement \u2026 One basic intention: to reduce the universe to faeces, or rather to annihilate the universe of differences (the genital universe) and put in its place the anal universe in which all particles are equal and interchangeable.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Seen in this beam of intense darkness\u2014the \u201cgravity drive\u201d as a sacrilege that\u00a0destroys the laws of reality by creating an anal universe, reducing space (difference in location) and time (difference in chronology) to identical excrement\u2014formerly invisible throwaway lines in a thriller like \u201cHoly shit!\u201d and \u201cMan, this shit is everywhere!\u201d become much more interesting.<\/p>\n

Event Horizon <\/em>is only a movie. It has a hero, Captain Miller of the Lewis & Clark<\/em>, and a villain, Dr. Weir, creator of the reality-destroying gravity drive.<\/em><\/p>\n

Miller<\/em>. \u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 What\u2019s in the core?
\nWeir<\/em>. \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0This is the gateway. Now, these three magnetic rings, when they align, it creates an artificial black hole, which allows the\u00a0ship to travel to any point in space.
\nMiller<\/em>. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 A black hole. The most destructive force in the universe. And you\u2019ve created one?
\nWeir<\/em>. \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Absolutely. Yes. Because we can use that immense power to bend space-time.<\/p>\n

Weir<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The ship doesn\u2019t really go faster than light. What it does is it creates a dimensional gateway to jump instantaneously from one point in the universe to another light years away \u2026 This piece of paper represents space-time, and you want to get from a<\/em>, here, to b<\/em>, there. Now, what\u2019s the shortest distance between two points? \u2026 The shortest distance between two points is zero, and that\u2019s what the gateway does. It folds space so that point a<\/em>\u00a0and point b<\/em>\u00a0coexist in the same space and time.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Let\u2019s watch that last scene again, in more detail.<\/p>\n

Weir.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/em>Imagine for a minute that this piece of paper\u2014
\nSmith.<\/em>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Uh, excuse me. That\u2019s Vanessa, and that\u2019s mine.
\nWeir.<\/em>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u2014this attractive <\/em>piece of paper represents space-time, and you want to get from point a<\/em>, here, to point b<\/em>, there. Now, what\u2019s the shortest distance between two points?
\nBaby Bear.<\/em>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0A straight line.
\nWeir. <\/em>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Wrong. The shortest distance between two points is zero.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

When I first saw Dr. Weir tear down Smitty\u2019s pinup for his demonstration\u2014when I saw him punch \u201cpoint a<\/em>\u201d through her face and \u201cpoint b<\/em>\u201d between her legs, when I watched Dr. Weir illustrate a physically impossible route into a woman\u2019s womb, and then push his pen through the hole he\u2019d made!\u2014<\/em>I laughed until the people around me thought I had gone insane. They may have had a point.<\/p>\n