The Leader of the Pack (Freud and The Shangri-las)

Produced by the legendary Shadow Morton, ‘Leader of the Pack’ locates Charles Darwin's dominant male in the midst of the Blackboard Jungle of an American High School in the early 1960. As Ellie Greenwich, one of the writers recalls, it is about ‘that bad guy that every girl wanted to go out with ... then there was the motorbike. Back in the sixties, when you started making money, you’d buy a motorcycle’. Just as, on the lawless plains of Africa according to Darwin, it is the biggest, baddest primate who hoards all the females, so it is the meanest, coolest guy on the fastest motorbike who ‘every girl’ wants to go out with, particularly in popular post-war High School myth. In ‘Totem and Taboo’, Freud does not argue with Darwin's evolutionary reasoning about sexual selection in The Descent of Man, but does note that human societies have always involved prohibitions, notably on murder and incest. Freud speculates that these prohibitions arose out of the violent sacrifice of the tyrannical leader, his authority becoming internalized, through shared guilt, as moral law. Freud's lesson to modernity, then, is that the death of God leads not to a liberation of enjoyment, but to a redoubling of its prohibition.

The Shangri-las reject this model. For Freud, a mythical originary act of rebellion and murder retroactively grounds law in a guilty parricide. The Shangri-las rewrite this this myth for the post-war baby boom generation, its romantic rebellion introducing a new law of consumption in place of prohibition. The Shangri-las’ myth discloses that modernity has moved into a new phase: they sing from a different position to the murderous sons and brothers, and without the strange remorse that derives, Freud speculates, from a disappointment at discovering that no man can individually occupy the dominant place, consequently prohibiting it. Their anti-oedipal tale is told from the point of view of the women, a position neglected by Freud. But not by Lacan, who suggests, in Seminar XVII, that the women would have had other ideas.

The Shangri-las' version of ‘Totem and Taboo’ is, fittingly, not a macho tale of male rivalry, violence and tragedy, but a romance in which death and melodrama are, of course, key elements. Named after an imaginary earthly paradise -- the hidden valley in J. Hilton’s Lost Horizon -- resonating with an all-too conventional promise of some feminine verdant cleft, the Shangri-las foreground the kind of utopian bliss, or Nirvana, that Freud associated with the death-drive. Though, on first hearing, 'The Leader of the Pack' seems to describe a tale of male rivalry and prohibition: the tyrannical nature of paternal law is negatively affirmed and atoned for by the sacrifice of the young biker who assumes a symbolic place in death. 'Is that Jimmie's ring you're wearing?' Jimmie reminds us of Jimmie Dean, crash dead by the time this song was a hit, and already the symbolic leader of a new rebellious generation of baby boomers. The function of the Ego-Ideal is transferred, via the crash, to the signifier in whose name rebellion is authorised, and an unspeakable jouissance promised.

But this would be to misread the song. For a start, it is clear that the romance between Betty and Jimmie has not been forbidden absolutely. In order for the paternal function to shift smoothly from father to surrogate son, the father would have had to have uttered the classic paternal prohibition: 'you will go out with that bad lad over my dead body!' Jimmie's sacrifice then guarantees the transfer of paternal authority on the father's terms. However, this is not what happens at all. While Betty's folks complain about Jimmie, are always 'putting him down', and are apparently unhappy about his background, they do not stop her riding with him on a regular basis and having a great time. All the other High School girls are jealous. She's even wearing his ring. Then, 'one day', she decides to find someone new. Her father's law is invoked, but as a law that demands novelty rather than moral judgement. He is not reported as saying 'find someone better', in a moral sense, but merely 'find someone new'. The suspicion remains, then, that Betty's invocation of paternal law is simply an alibi. While her father, no doubt slumped in front of the tube watching re-runs of 'I Love Lucy', remains vaguely disgruntled, it is Betty herself who has decided she needs a new boyfriend. As her friends say 'What do you mean when you say you better go find somebody new?' The Leader of the Pack is nonplussed: 'He stood there and asked me why?' Che vuoi?’ Poor Jimmie pathetically inquires after the desire of the Other, but is met with silence: 'All I could do was cry'. Clearly, Betty is bored and is looking for someone with a better, faster bike. At least, this is how Jimmie interprets her tears as he accelerates off in a vain and fatal attempt to go faster, to keep up the demanding pace. The song is of course about amorous rejection. Betty knows that the Leader of the Pack is no mean, bad lad: he's just a bit sad, the cause of regret and a few tears, but no great loss and easily upgradable.

The Shangri-las' 'Leader of the Pack' re-writes Freud's originary myth according to a more arbitrary and technological law of novelty, consumption and performance. 'I met him in the Candy Store'. The initial scene of the romance is set in a conventional place of conspicuous adolescent and pre-adolescent consumption of pure luxury items: the Candy Store points towards the sumptuous spectacle of the shopping mall and an abundance of choice, an excess of sweet tempting options. The relationship is no different: Betty, wearing his ring, appears as the choicest sweetmeat of the saccharine horde that he is supposed to lord over. But it is Betty who sets the standard of performance for the male subject, Jimmie, who is precisely subject to the law of the commodity himself. Ultimately, he is no better than, and as replaceable as, his technological prosthesis, his bike. And it is of course the bike, purring and growling at significant points throughout the record that is its real star and selling point. The Leader of the Pack, a potential Ego-ideal like Jimmie Dean, is dependent upon the technological processes that endlessly reproduce his image, to supplement and replace it with a host of Elvises, Marlons, Marilyns or whoever.

The motorbike is pre-eminently, in postwar America, the signifier of transgression, crossing thresholds and barriers. The result of technological innovation and a human desire for speed and thrills, the motorbike ideologically embodies the pioneering spirit of the lone rider of the West, the vehicle of the urban cowboy's 'rebellious' phallic narcissism. But the Shangri-las' 'Leader of the Pack' suggests that this narcissism is staged for the gaze of the Other who always demands more: be more daring, make it bigger, harder, faster: paternal law is secondary to the demand or imperative that seems to drive technological innovation for its own sake: keep up with the pace of the machine that is always just that bit faster, adapt to its always new horizons ... or die in the process. By becoming the very locus of material existence, by marking its threshold, technology functions as the Other: the reservoir of an Other knowledge and, at the limit of that knowledge, an Other jouissance that exceeds the phallic imaginings of the subject. This would therefore be the meaning of the crash for the subject who crashes in this epoch of the incorporated crash: that there is no relation to the crashing machine.

From Fred Botting and Scott Wilson ‘Venus in Foam’ New Formations 46 (2002): 64-84.

NEURaCINEMA and the filmy essence of consciousness

David Lynch, Memory of a Head

I do not think it is too far-fetched to compare the celluloid and waxed paper cover with the system Pcpt.-Cs [perception-consciousness] and its protective shield, the wax slab with the unconscious behind them, and the appearance and disappearance of the writing with the flickering-up and passing-away of consciousness in the process of perception.
Sigmund Freud, ‘Note on the “Mystic Writing-Pad”’ (1925).

Let us note that the depth of the Mystic Pad is simultaneously a depth without bottom, an infinite allusion, and a perfectly superficial exteriority: a stratification of surfaces each of whose relation to itself, each of whose interior, is but the implication of another similarly enclosed surface ... the pellicular essence of being, the absolute absence of any foundation.
Jacques Derrida, ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’, Writing and Difference (1966).

The first problem of consciousness is the problem of how we get a movie-in-the-brain.
Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens (2000).

We are like the spider. We weave our life and then move along in it. We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives in the dream. This is true for the entire universe.
Aitareya Upanishad

It is well-known in cognitive neuroscience that the self is an illusion in the sense of a central core of identity and agency, a homunculus sitting in a command and control centre, somewhere in the brain. Rather, according to Antonio Damasio consciousness or ‘self’-perception is an effect of layers of film or movies-in-the-brain that are projected ‘in the brain’s multiplex screens’. While it is important to note that the metaphorical movie ‘has as many sensory tracks as our nervous system has sensory portals’, his use of the term ‘image’ to describe them is no accident, consciousness is a matter of ‘stepping into the light’. Damasio’s account amounts to a photology that unfolds various layers of film.

At one level, a ‘proto-self’ is produced as the effect of neural systems that film both the organism’s encounters with its external reality and the modifications produced in the physical structure of the organism by that encounter. There is an (obscure) event and a filmed narrative comprised of movement-images that play over time, albeit in microseconds; but all this goes on at a level that is non-conscious, ‘the proto-self has no powers of perception’; there is no self-reflection, no awareness of self, just multiple films playing on multiple screens ‘that span varied orders of the nervous system’ from the brain stem to the cerebral cortex that are connected by neural pathways.

It is on the basis of these films that more neural patterns are produced that film a ‘second-order nonverbal narrative’ of mental images that enable both a working memory and consequently an awareness of ‘self’ that is brought into consciousness in and as a film. At the same time, the watcher of the brain’s movies is brought into self-perception as an effect of being filmed. But there is no subject of this film, nor any object being filmed, other than another film. Self-consciousness is the film of a film, or of multiple films, the representation of representations made by neural patterns of the state of the organism.

A further, third order of representations is necessary for the extended form of consciousness characteristic of human beings (and, no doubt, some other primates). For this to happen the movies of core consciousness need to be permanently stored as ‘dispositional memories’ that can be brought out and re-played or even re-made whenever necessary and in light of new experiences, that is, new films made at the level of core consciousness, stored, re-made and so on in a potentially infinite reflexivity that directly acts on and modifies the non-conscious state of the organism. It is the video store or DVD hard drive, upon which ‘experience of the past and an anticipated future’ can be based, that provides the material of ‘autobiographical memory’ and an ‘autobiographical self’. Leaving aside for a moment the assumed automaticity of this cinema of consciousness, there is still the question of its relation to a ‘graphical’ self that appears to be anomalous given that Damasio is insistent that consciousness is not dependent on language. Certainly the movies of core consciousness that are stored in the dispositional memories of extended consciousness can also be ‘converted’ or, somewhat paradoxically, ‘translated’ into language, but language is just a third or fourth order of representation that is not essential to consciousness or self-perception. The cinema precedes speech, something that is very well known of course to film scholars, but so also according to Derrida does writing. So can the cinema of consciousness be understood as a kind of writing before speech, in Derrida’s sense, a machine that writes with celluloid, like Freud’s Wunderblock or ‘mystic writing pad’?

In a number of ways, Damasio’s model of filmy consciousness resembles Freud’s model of the psychic apparatus, especially as deconstructed by Derrida in his essay ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’. Damasio’s scene of cinematic writing precedes both speech and language, but then so does Derridean writing where it is not of course a question of precedence, but of disclosing that neither language nor image nor any other mode of signification is possible outside of the general problematic of the graphematic trace, of the mark, its displacement, force, erasure and residue, that is bound up especially in the problem of translation and transcription. In his explication of the model of consciousness, Damasio has constant recourse to notions of ‘translating’ and ‘converting’ from one system of neural patterns to another, to the mental images of core consciousness that are re-represented in extended consciousness, and back again, in horizontal and vertical topographies traversing the space-time of the brain’s deep expanse of grey corridors, editing suites and auditoria. In Derridean terms, Damasio’s filmy brain is clearly a text, a weave of traces, differences of force and signification, ‘a text nowhere present, consisting of archives which are always already transcriptions’.

Furthermore, just as for Damasio, the ‘self’ is merely ‘the appearance of an owner and observer for the movie within the movie’ so in Freud’s psychographic machine ‘we are written only as we write ... the “subject” of writing does not exist if we mean by that some sovereign solitude of the author’. The function of self-consciousness, which for Damasio appears by means of cinematic images, is to supplement the instinct for survival of ‘the inner sanctum of life regulation’ to which it is connected and that is perpetually threatened by death, is indeed continually dying. Cinematic images are ghosts, spirits that both anticipate the death and memorialize the life of those objects whose light they refract. Ironically, the visceral, cellular and microcellular play of bodily forces (the ‘life-and-death’ struggle), which it is the function of consciousness to protect and watch over, is foreclosed from consciousness. The spirits know nothing of the body but shadows. Indeed, one might even say that through being represented, re-represented and re-re-represented in moving images the life of the organism is continually being mortified even as it is being re-animated in patterns and moving images unfolding in a different time, at different speeds and in another space. ‘Representation is death’, writes Derrida, ‘which may be immediately transformed into the following proposition: death is (only) representation’. Death only has meaning for a subject, of course, a subject that is nevertheless an effect of multiple ‘originary repetitions’, ‘a system of relations between strata: the Mystic Pad, the psyche, society, the world’. Similarly, Damasio’s system of filmy consciousness necessarily extends, as the very condition of his metaphor’s efficacy, to further levels of stratification, audio-visual machines that envelop, modify and mortify organisms, integrating them into wider machinic systems and assemblages out in the world.

Neuracinema: an assemblage of filmy surfaces without origin or end, interior and yet exterior to which moves the integral alterity denoted by ‘a’ that dis-integrates them, provides them with a point, that is to say with meaning precisely through the immanence of meaning’s flight, its dissolution in non-knowledge, the mortification and death of the organism that can only be imagined, yet around which the screens pulsate.

In an interview with Michael Guillan, David Lynch offered a quotation from a translation of Aitareya Upanishad as a way into Inland Empire (2006) and, perhaps, his oeuvre generally: ‘We are like the spider. We weave our life and then move along in it. We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives in the dream. This is true for the entire universe’. ‘Consciousness is all we have’, Lynch added, implying that his is supremely a cinema of consciousness though one that is filled with (rabbit) holes, dark corridors, portals, lost highways and multiple screens and movie theatres. As for example when Nikki (Laura Dern), in Inland Empire, walks out of a secret corridor into a movie theatre where she sees the ‘Lost Girl’ watch Nikki on a TV screen in a hotel room, somewhere else at another time, as someone else, maybe.

‘Human putrefaction’ was the phrase repeatedly used by David Lynch when asked at the New York Film Festival in 2001 to discuss Mulholland Drive (2000). Like Eraserhead (1977) and Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950), the movie upon which both of Lynch’s films are based, Mulholland Drive can be read as the dream-narrative of a corpse. Certainly, Wilder’s well-known cynicism towards Hollywood could be cited in making the suggestion that the dreams of Hollywood, Hollywood-consciousness, the movies-in-the-brain of much of the world are the film (pellicule, scum) of human putrefaction. But in Lynch’s multiple re-making of Sunset Bouelvard (Inland Empire is yet another version), the conjunction between death, squalor and the cinema of dreams conjures up scenes of great beauty such as the moment of Nikki/Sue’s (Laura Dern) movie-death that recalls both Wilder’s film and the end of Eraserhead.

‘Is nothin’, you just dyin’ is all ... I’ll show you light now, it burns forever...’

(memorably sampled by Burial at the beginning of Untrue)