FIRST THOUGHT BEST THOUGHT: Enter the Void

This is the first of a new series of posts which present first impressions free of belabored redraftings, research, and the like. When I was consulting a reference librarian about 19th century American pronunciation to make a minor point about Emily Dickinson for a post here, I decided that I needed a new direction for the blog if it was to be anything but a graveyard of abandoned ideas. The methodology of academia is not, I think, appropriate for one-off reviews with a limited scope and a readership of 3 people. These might be embellished over time…

It’s hard to see Enter the Void as anything but risibly absurd: the mawkish familial drama, the heavy-handed (even brass-knuckled) pop-Freudianism which transforms Kleinian psychoanalysis into silly breast fetishism, the gratuitous psychedelic interludes, and the stubborn refusal to attain even a semblance of coherence, combine to make it an often nauseating, not to mention potentially seizure-inducing, experience. And yet it is enthralling cinema, with the hallmarks of a B-movie classic: half-formed but singularly original ideas, clumsily written perfunctory dialogue delivered even more clumsily, and plenty of scenes that no self-respecting director would ever commit to film (I won’t give it away, but the film’s superlatively ridiculous coda breaks new ground in avant-garde psycho-pornography). Unfortunately, as the children of postmodernism, our omnivorousness has paradoxically brought with it the elimination of such hierarchies of taste that make the category of “B movie” an operable one. Enter the Void is only “a” movie, and it’s playing at an art-house cinema in Manhattan.

Its dependence on visual splendor to keep people from walking out brings Avatar to mind. But to me, Avatar is a very sinister film; its visual grandeur is a thinly veiled apotheosis of techno-capital, and its sentimental didacticism should be repellent to anyone capable of critical thought. But I excuse Enter the Void its masturbatory exercises in frivolous spectacularity, precisely because they are self-indulgent ends in themselves.

Yes, the technical trickery, especially the explosion of the distinction between the objective and subjective camera, is totally germane to the film’s themes of hyperreality and ego-dissolution, but the unquestionable excess of it is what stands out. Gaspar Noé has, perhaps inadvertently, hit upon the essence of the discourse of being-on-drugs, as explained by Jacques Derrida in “The Rhetoric of Drugs”: the asociality, unproductivity, and basic pointlessness of the experience. Enter the Void is a drug hit, it’s aborted reproduction, it’s an aimless spectacle exploring the boundaries of cinematic expression like a purblind Celestial prowling the corners of an opium den. If it’s a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing, it still teaches us something about spectacularity in and of itself – and it’s quite a trip.