Film and/or TV | Yoana Pavlova
Guest Column #008
Wanna feel old? The great debate as to whether David Lynch's Twin Peaks: The Return should be considered film or TV took place between the end of 2017 and the beginning of 2018. Three years ago, it became apparent there was no consensus as to what constituted cinema. It’s been a decade since most films haven’t been shot on celluloid. As with digital TV, they are tightly packed 0s and 1s that occasionally hitch a ride into the physical world through a DCP drive.
Even so, the inertia to adhere to the once comfortable, perspicuous distinction between TV and film kept birthing lists, and lists of lists, distinguishing media on the basis of how it is distributed, promoted, consumed and awarded.
This inertia carried into 2020, when lists became somewhat more democratic by including categories such as “New To Me,” “Best Online Festival Strand,” “10 Forgotten Dystopian Movies to Vibe To,” and other curatorial hacks. The pinnacle of 19th century cinematic presentation—the so-called big screen—remained inaccessible to most for the better part of the year, and so almost all the audiovisual content we imbibed was on that 20th century invention, the small screen, and its 21st century counterpart, the mobile screen. With the presumably standardised conditions for regular public and industry screenings no longer in place to pretend there is equality in how films are perceived (disclaimer: there never has been), the individual viewing experience bordered on the solipsistic; even as the audiovisual slunk back to its moralistic and consoling origin as poppy for the masses.
So while 2020 was dominated by a single film festival, it contained a disproportionate amount of tribute sections for all the talents “Gone Too Soon,” and everyone binged differently, according to their taste and battery capacity.
Somewhere in the course of the first lockdown—shortly before the BLM protests took to the streets—a new feeling began to emerge. As we soaked our eyes 24/7 in feats of culinary prowess, cat videos, dancing teens and meme wars amid troubling global news convulsing our social media feeds like spasms, a Cronenbergian premonition took form. What if we were losing our critical distance, with subject and screen fusing into one—and not just in cognitive terms, but also sensually and emotionally? When we weren't caressing the surface of our phones, we put up tiny fourth walls in the middle of our homes and enacted functionality on Zoom and other virtual conference platforms. The storied Lumières / Méliès dichotomy could be finally put to rest, as pandemic hyperreality amalgamated the didactic and the entertainment paradigms—the roaming camera with the fixed PoV and documentary realism, with the féerie of AR filters—into One Thing.
Solving this 125-year-old dilemma didn't come without a price; namely, handing over the keys of our audiovisual realm to the algorithmic engines devising this new attentional treadmill. At the time, social media still aligned with our profiles, at least regarding who we claimed to be online, vis-à-vis our content production and contacts. But with our social, economic and romantic lives suddenly outsourced almost entirely to cyberspace, bots got down to grooming our eyeballs and fingertips for a fantasy dimension we didn't even know we hungered for.
For decades, cognitive psychology has tried to decode our thought and problem-solving processes by tracking the eye movements of chess players. It seems the research finally paid off in 2020, when the touch-move rule evolved into the gaze-yearn ordinance. Curiously enough, last year’s critical discourse was governed by a chess-themed TV show on Netflix, where idolised rationality was plated with large servings of Dickensian sentiment and garnished with a youthful swoon. But do not be distracted by the bokeh: the panopticon is now, and if you wonder which way to the tower, your smartphone would know.
You could say it wasn’t all virtual, of course: 2020 was also about revolting bodies, bodies that politically impacted the real world. Merely being outside felt nontrivial, novel, sometimes harrowing. Millennia of poeticising the mask as a means of concealment were wiped out, as face masks were instantly turned into visible (or invisible) screens on which to project our prejudice against the Other.
Yes, there were marching figures, but also stiff ones, hunched over their cells, as if the latter commanded the former: public avatars of a fractured Dasein. In the year of noli me tangere, the erotic became relegated to peripherals and haptics, the timeline transformed into an endless, dangerous flirtation with the concept of uprising. Here’s to the absence of catharsis in meaningful motion, the lack of clashing flesh, the impossible ecstasy charted a-nowhere.
The medium is the tissue and the spectacle, ourselves; except no one appears to be having much fun. The overwhelming impulse to narrate 2020 in the past tense is aimed at fableising our disturbingly shared involvement with it, that we may put it behind us. 2021 has hinted at a fresh psychosomatic crop of symptoms, though they still read like a Mexican wave in the memeplex (or perhaps it is precisely this clusterfuck synergy, in the form of allocated telos, that is a manifestation of a future yet to come).
In May 2020, William Brown and David H. Fleming published The Squid Cinema From Hell: Kinoteuthis Infernalis and the Emergence of Chthulumedia1 (the title of which paraphrases Flusser’s famous essay on the vampire squid). Following up on Donna Haraway's chthulucene and expanding on their theory of chthulucinema2, the duo plays with the idea of chthulumedia, as first intimated in their joint piece “Celebrity Headjobs: Or Oozing Squid Sex With a Framed-Up Leaky {Schar-JØ}”3:
“If the viscous, formless body is, after Weheliye, pure flesh, then in some senses it is a body without bones, and thus it cannot ossify. Being soft, it is akin to a mollusc, perhaps especially those molluscs that, like audiovisual media, change colour – namely cuttlefish, octopuses and squids.”
In 2016’s “Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene,”4 Haraway herself reminds us “tentacle comes from the Latin tentaculum, meaning ‘feeler,’ and tentare, meaning ‘to feel’ and “to try;” to then declare: “The tentacular are also nets and networks, it critters, in and out of clouds.”
Decentralized and dehierarchised may be the best way to describe the media that’s been spilling beyond our screens, into our veins, throughout the Covidian. “Capitalism,” after all, derives from the Latin word for “head,” so decapitating it will still leave one with a wriggling —ism. This is why dissolving categories, ranks and lists remains a radical, personal act and—let's admit it—among the few meaningful ones left us before, we too, surrender to the primal soup of mediated existence.
Yoana Pavlova is a Bulgarian writer, programmer and researcher based in France. The founder and editor of Festivalists.com, her work encompasses film, new media, digital culture, and alternative methods of art criticism.
https://www.e-flux.com/journal/75/67125/tentacular-thinking-anthropocene-capitalocene-chthulucene/