Video Essay - Lest the male gaze gaze back into you

(Narrator...?) I don't remember when I forgot how, or even what it means, to really live. ...but i dreamt i was watching my ex-girlfriend starring in a film I had made... (Slovej Zizek) -- "The problem for us is not 'Are our desires satisfied or not'" "The problem is: 'How do we know what we desire?' There is nothing spontaneous, nothing natural about human desires. Our desires are artificial -- we have to be taught how to desire. Cinema is the ultimate pervert art: it doesn't give you what you desire, it tells you HOW to desire..." (Narrator?) This morning, I woke up sick with passion ...and then realized she was gone. I spent the morning tracing her outline with my eyes -- combing out her hair, or leaning by the mantle, imagining what she'd be like if she were here... Why is it that lovely faces haunt us so? Is it possible that extraordinary flowers hide sinister roots...? (--In the background, a man on television is talking about the recent inflation of the Swiss Franc) As I go through the motions of the morning, i catch myself wondering whether such a thing as the "tragic flaw" really exists outside of books... If it does she already knows mine, all too well... A morbid longing for the picturesque... She tells me I romanticize everything ...or maybe I fetishise it. I'm not even sure I know the difference anymore, and i don't expect HER to tell me... After all, what exactly IS the perverse, anyway? I already know what SHE'd say... "To desire what is unattainable, because it is unattainable..." A french psychoanalyst once wrote that desire wants to *** its own cause: to *** that which makes it possible. Perhaps the unattainable object of desire is the very death-drive itself... Self-destructive, and suicidal... Desperate to ***, or eat, or protect, or destroy its own condition of possibility, its own grounds for existence, its very essence... (--Outside the window, a car driving by is listening to a popular song about designer clothing) By the time she returns, I'm exhausted: but i can tell she needs to talk. her features are delicate except for her eyes, which seem to nurture two forms of life: the subject matter; and its hidden implications... Her words are simple to understand: common reflections about friends, family, events; the flow of the routine universe... But there is a secondary sea-life moving deep in the iris of her eye. What does it mean? what is she really saying? ...and why does she expect me to respond in kind...? She needs me to communicate in this secondary way, with optic fluids... She'll have her suspicions confirmed, find out about me. But what suspicions does she harbor? And what is there to find out...? I begin to worry... (--On the radio, a neighbor is listening to a program about the health benefits of certain lawn care products) The american mystery deepens... (David Cronenberg) "I had a dream, a long time ago. I dreamt i was in the cinema watching a movie with an audience. And suddenly, I realized i was aging... Rapidly... Growing horribly old as I sat there. It was the movie that was doing it, I had caught some kind of disease from the movie and it was making me grow old... bringing me closer and closer to death. I woke up terrified! ...and look at me now. Look where I am now... You see? The dream is coming true..." (Narrator?) This morning, I woke up in the mood to pick a fight... I don't even have a reason why. She is mine. Completely mine. Almost slavishly so; yet it is I who am possessed... The totality of her escapes me. My love adds up like a sum: but She the "She" I seek after with hopeless passion is not divisible by one... I take her by surprise at her dresser, full of questions she's not ready to address. She can only laugh at me reminding herself bittersweet that I'll always have a harder time than other men because to dominate another doesn't interest me. That I'll always be trying to dominate myself: and the woman I love will only ever be an instrument to practice on... Then she leaves... and emotionally spent, I fold into the past. ...Hardly even realizing, I dig up an old home video tape of my first love: departed from this world, forever loved and lost. I watch it once. Then again. Then countless times over. Hitting rewind with mechanical resolve. The more I watch the tape, the deader and colder, and more heartbreaking it becomes: and yet I can't bear to stop. It sucks the air right out of my chest, But I watch it every time... Deep down, I find it hard to believe that love itself (...or at least a certain kind of love) could have even existed before videotape. Because there IS something about videotape, ...isn't there? Modern love is a love DESIGNED for random taping and immediate playing... The contemporary love story was invented together with the means of taping an event and reliving it instantly -- without a neutral interval, without a balancing space in time. Taping and playing intensifies, and condenses the event: it dangles the need to live it again... As if love itself has found its medium; or vice-versa -- an act of shadow technology, of compressed time and repeated images, stark, and clumsy, and unremarkable... By now, she's returned: and I call her in to watch the videotape with me. I study her face as the tape washes over her: dissolving in the static of her stare. There is something about her expression which frightens me, something deeper than simple discomfort: dark, and cynical, and exact... That perhaps there's a joke to be found here -- a certain cruel slapstick, beneath the pathos of the pixels. That my lost lover has become a sort of punchline a sort of silent movie stooge, classically unlucky. That she had it coming in a way for allowing himself to be caught on camera... Because once the tape starts rolling, it can only end one way. The end is built into the beginning -- this is what the context requires.