Moving Pictures & Roving Eyes

‘All right Mr. De Mille. I’m ready for my close up’

Rewind. Norma Desmond, in the film Sunset Boulevard, speaks her final words as, once again, she advances inexorably on the camera. So close, the focus fails and the film ends. In effect, she meets herself finally as pure image, the boundary between body and external image dissolved. It is as if, in her insatiable need to live up to her image, or rather to live as her image, she must consume any vestige of her lived in body. She merges her look with that of the camera, evaporating into it. It’s a delicious moment, a classic scene from a classic Hollywood movie. Director Billy Wilder’s deft orchestration of image and metaphor allows for different readings but, for me, the overwhelming metaphor of the film is consumption – consumption of the self, consumption of another. Even Norma’s house can be understood as standing in for the (ageing) female body that takes in the young man and holds him there, sucks him dry and finally destroys him. She spits him out, leaving his body to float like a dry husk in that big pool of hers. [Wilder, 1950]

Why speak of this particular Hollywood film? I was brought up on a diet of television and movies and the American landscape, California in particular, has been familiar to me for as long as I can remember. Long before I ever travelled to the States, this part-imagined landscape shaped a kind of ‘neutral’ ground in which I played out my idle fantasies. So when I drove around California for the first time and experienced a kind of deja vu, I felt as if I had travelled to a place in my memory, as though what was once inside me now surrounded me. It was not so much the feeling of having been there before, rather I had stepped inside the space of my own (unspecific) fantasy. I encountered a mess of fragmented memories at each intersection, at each vista, unsure if I had actually seen these places depicted somewhere or if they were part of a conglomeration of real and imagined images that inhabit my memory. All the same, it felt as if I had stepped inside a gigantic movie, one shot in glorious Technicolor, naturally.

The feeling of being ‘inside’ memory, a memory shaped by and through fiction is a curious one. One of my strongest impressions is that my body felt more than usually visible, which means very little in itself. But the overall impression of the body feeling utterly out of place, kind of the wrong way round, led me to speculate on how much Hollywood imagery I have incorporated over the years and how, somehow, I have come to think of it in terms of being inside me, inside my body. It, the landscape, the object of my fantasy, now seemed to be looking back at me, it seemed to enfold me physically within it. Memory and vision, body and place now seemed to have no boundary, as if everything was reversible, as if I had stepped through the surface of the vision of my memory. Merleau-Ponty, in talking of the distinction between the visible and the invisible, considers the relation between the flesh and vision:

‘The superficial pellicle of the visible is only for my vision and for my body. But the depth beneath this surface contains my body and hence contains my vision. My body as a visible thing is contained within the full spectacle. But my seeing body subtends this body and all the visibles with it. There is a reciprocal insertion and intertwining of one in the other.’ [Merleau-Ponty, 1973, 138] >>