Brian Holmes
Why would an audacious underground filmmaker choose the year 2007 to release a highly personal work about the missing memoirs of a nineteenth-century rural anarchist woman and the compulsive diggings of a Korean war veteran obsessed with hidden treasure? Where’s the relation between this allegorical tale and the author’s earlier work with satellite TV? And what’s really buried beneath the tranquil fields of southern Missouri? These are the questions that come to mind upon viewing Brian Springer’s new film, The Disappointment: Or, the Force of Credulity.
Until today, Springer was known in media-activist circles for one great intervention: the pirate documentary Spin (1995). What he did was to purchase a satellite dish and an off-the-shelf decoder, allowing him to record broadcasts from the emerging corporate sector of orbital TV. In the early 1990s, major news channels had just adopted a networked mode of production, sending live feeds of interviews and eyewitness reports across the microwave spectrum for editing at distant studios, without applying any kind of signal encryption. Average consumers stuck to existing channels and ignored these uncensored frequencies, but Springer was able to capture some 500 hours of raw news feeds, full of candid gestures during the make-up sessions and commercial breaks, as well as shocking declarations that were never intended for the public ear. Televisual decorum – the overcode of spectacular politics – was shattered by its primary exponents, allowing a media activist without much funding to construct an astonishing documentary of the 1992 Clinton-Bush campaign from between rather than behind the scenes. Along with Ujica and Farocki’s Videograms of a Revolution (1992), Spin became a touchstone for a generation of tactical media practitioners trying to open up the broadcast system, both to expose official manipulations and to develop new kinds of informed expression.(1)
Fast-forward to 2007, now infamous as the year in which the overblown American real-estate market began to collapse. Springer releases a very different, semi-autobiographical film called The Disappointment: Or, the Force of Credulity.(2) The film takes its name from the earliest American ballad-opera, written in 1767 as a satire on the twin colonial crazes of treasure-hunting and spiritism. But the 2007 version opens with a close-up on a strange syncretic sculpture, a “creature” at once insect, reptile, amphibian and mammal. A halting, faintly British-accented female voice, clearly synthesized by a computer, reads a database entry on this mysterious stone artifact. Switching to the first person, the creature’s electronic voice then explains: “I have been lost for a very long time…”
The hybrid creature, a narrator of its own legend, introduces us to the Springer family: the mother, Doris; the father, C.W.; and the two sons, Larry and Brian. Their story is a search for a Spanish explorer’s golden treasure and personal diary, supposedly buried in the limestone caves beneath a Missouri farm. But there is another main character: Kate Austin, a friend of Emma Goldman and an unsung heroine of American anarchism, who lived on that same farm in the late nineteenth century. Her personal papers disappeared at her death, leaving an aura of uncertainty around this rare bird, a rural woman anarchist. A satellite image of the Missouri countryside becomes a treasure map. A red dot on the site of the Austin farm connects to three others: the limestone cave, a mysterious hieroglyph carved into a rock, and the spot where the hybrid creature was found in the 1880s, before archaeologists declared it a fake and it was “lost by the institutions of history.” With that, all the elements are in place for a plunge into a very personal story, and an excavation of the national unconscious.
Amid reflections from Emma Goldman on the willingness of patriots to drop bombs from flying machines and recollections of Ben Franklin’s fears that the craze for treasure-hunting might ruin the country’s fledgling economy, what gradually emerges is the tale of an average man, C.W. Springer, who left the United States for one of America’s most thoroughly forgotten wars, the “Korean conflict.” His job was to operate in advance of the front lines, directing the extensive napalm bombing that killed hundreds of thousands and reduced much of the country to violet ash. Upon return from the war he could not speak for weeks; but he gradually came back to life and, as we learn from the distant, almost disbelieving voice of the electronic narrator, he “rose into the middle class, and purchased a home in eastern Kansas.” Years later he would teach the Springer family how to see ghosts, by staring at an image and then brusquely closing your eyes. In the early 1970s, they found that the strongest afterglow was produced by TV news anchors reporting on Vietnam… But then rumors about buried treasure led C.W. and his family to Church Hollow in Missouri, the site of the Austin farm. The traumatic memories of Korea faded away into a seemingly endless quest to find the buried gold.
It will speak a secret language and leave behind documents not of edification but of paradox.
Hugo Ball, Flight out of Time
The film reaches its enigmatic center with re-enactments of the automatic writing seances of Springer’s mother, Doris. She feels that her hand has been mysteriously injured, before realizing that what she can and must do with it is trace out the diaries of a Spanish priest who was killed by Indians in the cave, with the gold of an earlier empire in his possession. This “channeled” diary (the spiritist equivalent of spurious campaign promises?) is described by Springer as “a repressed retelling of her husband’s experience with wartime atrocity.” It becomes the blueprint for an endless, futile and increasingly dangerous quest in the cave, which the movie appears to be trying to exorcise on several levels. But what never does come to light are Kate Austin’s vanished writings: a possible signpost to another future, outside the nightmare of imperial war and domestic expropriation from which millions of credulous Americans are now struggling to wake up in disbelief.
In 1995, Spin pointed to the open window of technological and organizational change at a moment when the scramble for globalized markets left gaping holes in all kinds of security systems. Soon afterwards, activists in disguise like the Yes Men would step through those gaps and create their own public twists on world events, relying on a knowledge of complex networking processes that the corporate powers did not yet fully control. In 2007 when that openness had become ancient history, the same filmmaker who looked upward at the stars began peering down into the networks of delusion beneath our feet, even as an occupying army tried to secure dinosaur wealth beneath the desert sands of Iraq and the subprime mortgage debacle swept away the average man’s home-owning dreams.
To define the “apparatus of capture,” A Thousand Plateaus explores two opposed ideas: the legalistic concept of mutuum, the medium of exchange, involving freely drawn and freely severed contracts; and the hierarchical concept of nexum, the bond, the knot, the social tie of obedience and submission. The latter is the symbolic domain of the “fearsome magician-emperor” found under multiple guises in Georges Dumézil’s studies of Indo-European mythology. We have seen the sobering return of that figure in the United States over the last decade; and now it appears quite mistaken to suppose that a borderless flux of mutual exchange represents the definitive overcoming of the old territorializing claims of sovereign power. For the two concepts mark the opposite poles of a single economic relation, as Dumézil makes clear: “Mutuum is, literally, (aes) mutuum, ‛the money borrowed,’ and also ‛borrowing.’ Nexum is the state of the nexus, of the insolvent debtor who was, very literally, bound and subjugated by the creditor.”(3)
Springer’s film explores the same issues in material and embodied forms. The quest for release from wage labor (through buried treasure, real estate, the stock market...) opens up a darker morass of ancient debts, where sensations of promise and entrapment become inseparable. There are vital clues here for a future cultural activism that will have to deal not only with advanced technological communications but also with more obscure human motivations, and with the archaeology of an economic order that threatens to collapse into the myriad holes, blind tunnels and architectures of bluff that comprise its very foundations. The Disappointment taps a formidable underground vein – the kind that pulses with buried life, and that you can only mine deeply, at your own risk.
In his Schizoanalytic Cartographies, Guattari associates the territory not only with openness to deterritorialization but also with the threat of a “black hole”: the loss of the outside, the inability to think, to feel, to see anything except a near environment which has become so close that it merges with your own skin. Groups working experimentally at a territorial level, at grips with the aesthetics of everyday life, try to open a horizon after recognizing and exploring the common pitfalls where the languages of power become rooted in the generations. In the industrial democracies, the link between Fordist mass production, consumer desire and faraway war – underwritten by colonial racism – remains the bedrock of symbolic politics, overcoded in our time by the sophisticated and yet violent financial nexus. Under pressure, every country becomes an enigma, crying out to be deciphered. To open up a mobile territory at this level of societal paralysis is to create a break in the psychic decor, to offer the uncertain crowd an exit at the moment of greatest tension.
For Springer amid the industrial ruins of the Midwest, the feminist anarchism of Emma Goldman’s unknown rural friend is a diagram of possibilities yet unrealized, a free rhizome. Following its imagined and desired pathways, the narrator, a local sphinx with an electronically frozen voice, could emerge into the daylight and speak with the others.
Notes
* A previous version of this text was published in Decipher the Future
(1) Spin is distributed by the Illegal Art website
(2) The Disappointment is distributed by the Video Data Bank in Chicago
(3) Georges Dumézil, Mitra-Varuna: An Essay on Two Indo-European Representations of Sovereignty (New York: Zone Books, 1988), p. 99.
Other articles in this chapter
The Potential Estate website • www.potentialestate.org • Confirm your interest here!