THICK SKINNED? "I WANT TO SUCK YOUR WISE BLOOD".

I like the word "cinomatograph". When I say it aloud, I hear Gary Oldman as Dracular whispering it into Mina's ear, in Bram Stoker's Dracular (1992) and I feel a movement under my skin, a shiver run slowly all the way down my spine almost as if he is breathing on my neck, not Mia's.

In an article by Anne Rutheford (at Sense of Cinema) entitled Cinema and the Embodied Affect she writes that "[c]inema is not only about telling a story; it's about creating an affect, an event, a moment which lodges itself under the skin of the spectator". She goes on to say, in relation to the affectation of cinema that:

Skin is indeed a pivotal concept here, If we take the metaphor of the epidermis as our model for spectatorship, how do we understand it? Is it a container, keeping in the subject and keeping the object out, on the other side? Is the spectator thick-skinned, impervious to the vibrations set up on the screen on all but the most blatant level, or is the skin permeable, a membrane that mediates a contact with the world, a tactile being in the world, that can respond to the flux of textures, of temperatures, can glow, can bristle and tremble, can even relinquish its boundaries in an osmosis of feeling and sensation?

I quote Rutherford's article, which outlines ways to understand the physicality of the cinematic experience – "embodied affect" as she calls it – at such length, for two main reasons, one personal and one practical. Firstly, her article had a profound affect on me, as it articulated and justified in an intellectual manner, the importance of theorising subjectivity, the body and cinema all in one. And, secondly because I think that this notion of "embodied affect" is an interesting way to consider Flannery O'Connor's 1949 novel Wise Blood in relation to the 'grotesque' and, in understanding her written text as inherently 'cinematic'.

Like everyone retains their own individual fingerprint, everyone's embodied reactions to texts are vastly different. I happen to be someone whom, up until until Wise Blood, have only cried twice and been deeply disturbed once (for those of you who studied American literature two years ago, you may recall the novel which disturbed me) by reading. However, when it comes to watching films I feel my emotions and my body react in such an intense and overwhelming way more often then not. Some may argue that it is my lack of imagination when reading books that cause this, but I think there is a case to be argued for something more.

When it came to my corporeal experience of Wise Blood I felt in my bones, just like I was watching a film. From Wise Blood's opening pages (as we explored in class) one is drawn into a filmic protagonist:

Hazel Motes sat at a forward angle on a green plush train seat, looking one minute at the window as if he might want to jump out of it, and the next down the aisle at the other end of the car (p. 3).

Like in a film (without voice-over) we only have what we can see at the surface; there is no psychology, no interior dialogue, no sense of motivation of character's actions. Unlike the grand psychological novel, which we're so accustomed to analysing, O'Connor strips us of psychology and gives us action – like a film.

My body shook most of the way through Wolf Creek (2005). And like this sensation, I felt an overwhelming feeling of disturbance and anxiety from this scene in Wise Blood. O'Connor writes:

Haze stood motionless with one hand still on the bow of the glasses and the other arrested in the air at the level of his chest; his head was thrust forward as if he had to use his whole face to see it. He as about four feel from them but they seemed just under his eyes
'Ask your daddy yonder where he was running off to – sick as he is?' Sabbath said. 'Ask him isn't he going to take you and me with him?'
The hand that had been arrested in the air moved forward and plucked at the squinting face but without touching it; it reached again, slowly, and plucked at nothing and then it lunged and snatched the shriveled body and threw it against the wall. The head popped and the trash inside sprayed out in a little cloud of dust (p. 129).

When I got to the end of this bit I looked away from the pages of the book and then covered my eyes - the new jesus had exploded right before them. Like the time my friend and I watched Silence of the Lambs (1991) in early high school, and she screamed and brought her hands to her eyes – covering them so she didn't have to see the atrocities. Why did I cover my eyes after reading this passage? I think there is a case to be made here for the cinematic affectation provoked in this scene – so much so, I didn't know how else to react.

Reading this passage, I felt as Rutherford did, about a scene in Mizogunchi's film, The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums (1939); "I experience the shot in my stomach, as if my stomach turns over. It's this other, visceral dimension that, to me, an aesthetics of embodiment has to explain", she writes.

Much as been written about O'Conner and her treatment and exploration of the 'grotesque'. In Wise Blood it is the written 'grotesque' coupled with the sense the reader gets of "metonymic slippage between vision, the image, the eye and the 'I' of subjectivity" (Rutherford, italics added), which make reading her book feel like watching a rotten movie. What is meant by this "metonymic slippage" is the process by which a spectator (as opposed to a reader) of a filmic image slips in and out of identification with not only characters, but the explicitly visual environment on both an emotional and psychological level. Rutherford uses the example of an image of a cliff – when we see it, there is an emotional affectation in the sense that we are simultaneous placed at the cliff itself, as well as the physical feeling that we may get from falling of it. The instructional, descriptive, and bordering on technical way in which O'Connor writes evokes this same affectation.*

For this scene (I even find myself calling it a scene, opposed to a passage) like a film, it can only show us action, not psychology, and this is why it feels so filmic – I watch as Haze's hands move from his glass and chest, thrust forward as he grabs the new jesus by the head, I can imagine Sabbath's (Asa's) expression, and watch in slow motion as the dead body collapses into a huge cloud of dusk.

And my stomach turns.

Perhaps my skin is not very thick.

* This is not to say, that in books (or poetry for that matter) that are not 'cinematic', don't have this affected ability. If one reads the word 'cliff' it is possible to also react in this way. However, what is being argued here is about the process between the visually encompassing and embodied affect, and how this is played out in Wise Blood.

References:

Anne Rutherford, "Cinema and Embodied Affect" at, Sense of Cinema, Accessed here, Last Accessed: 11/10/2007.

Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood, London: Faber and Faber, 1985.