This essay is in our Media Club series, an ongoing series of essays on visual media. More details here.
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Blow Me Away
John Haskell
(This essay is reprinted from John's new book, Trying To Be, recently published by FC2. Order it here.)
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At the end of the last century an orator named F. M. Alexander codified a way of understanding, or at least thinking about, the body. It’s called the Alexander Technique, and it’s about aligning the body, or realigning it, taking it apart and thinking about how it might fit back together. The problem he found with the body was the way we imagine it. Or really the way we fail to imagine it, letting our bodies adapt to habits we don’t even know we have. We tell our bodies to disregard imbalance. If there’s pain, we say, ignore it, turn away, which leads to what Alexander called debauched kinesthetics, or erroneous perception, the idea that we have certain sensations—the information we get from the eyes, nose, muscles, et cetera—and then there’s perception, what the mind does with those sensations. Let’s say that when I stand, with my feet on the ground and my eyes facing forward, the right side of my body is slightly shorter than the left, as if I’m holding a weighted bag in my hand and the weight of the bag is pulling me down, curving me over. Instead of standing with the verticality of a plumb line, there’s a slight arc to my torso. And however I came to this posture, via trauma or repetition or necessity, over time I’ve made it my history. It’s how I perceive who I am, and the longer I live like this, holding the weight, the more the curve gets embedded in my flesh, memorized by the fibers of my mind and muscle, and more than a habit, it gets like a fact, and it is a fact, a fact of my body. The imbalance, caused by the weight in my hand, works its way up my arm to the muscles of my shoulder, my scapula pulling my neck, my neck pulling my clavicle, my clavicle pulling my ribs; and then my spine has to compensate. As does my mind, normalizing itself by convincing me that I’m standing as straight as an arrow. And even if I release the weight and allow my shoulder girdle to reposition itself, letting my psoas relax and my rib cage realign, although I might be standing verifiably upright, it feels weird. I’d painstakingly built this posture and now, being used to it, even without the weight in my hand, my body keeps holding the tension of holding the weight. Which is why Alexander looked at himself in mirrors, to see his body as if from outside, as if from God’s eye, as if God had an eye, and he did it because he didn’t trust what his body was telling him.
The movie Blow-Up was made in 1966, and like any movie, it’s partly about the time it was made, about the attitudes and assumptions that existed then, and were normal then, and now it’s like a documentary, showing how people used to live, how they stood and walked, and how they tried to be with other people. It begins with two wannabe fashion models knocking on the door of a famous photographer. They’re wearing outfits popular at the time, bright sleeveless dresses, hot-pink pantyhose, long bangs, wide eyes, and because it’s 1966 they’ve been reading Tiger Beat, watching Ready, Steady, Go! And wannabe wasn’t a word back then but what they want to be is clear. They want to be seen. That’s why they knock on the door of the photographer, and that’s why they audition for him. In the movie he sits in a big leather chair, twirling a coin between his fingers, not really paying attention to them and that’s when they notice, behind them, a rack of clothes, the latest styles from Paris and Milan, and suddenly they feel giddy. Are we allowed to try them on? Giddy literally means possessed by a god, and when they slide their arms into the silky material it’s hard to tell if the feeling they have is excitement or anxiety. Or confusion. Or all three. Later, the talkative one will get famous for singing songs in French with a Frenchman, Serge Gainsbourg, but now the younger version of who she’s going to become is still learning the ropes. That’s what they call the rules of the game, and in 1966 people talked about changing the rules, about shedding inhibitions, which is why she unzips her brightly printed dress, letting it fall to the floor, letting her half-naked body be pulled to the room where she tries to follow his directions, trying to hear what he wants her to do but the music is loud and he seems to want something sexual, for her to be sexual. Orgy, the word, meant something different back then, implying not debauchery but liberation, and self-determination, and during the scene he takes out his camera to capture her, posing her in front of a colorful roll of unfurled paper they used to call seamless, a neutral background that had no context but now she can see what the context is. Power. Who has it, who wants it, and who can you trust with your body. I’ve always felt that my body, being distinct from other bodies, separated me from other people, and protected me. My body is here, and other people have other bodies, in other locations, and the idea that bodies can live together is something I’m still getting used to. That’s why, watching Blow-Up, I identify with the model, Jane Birkin. I see myself, not quite naked, but standing in front of the neutral background and letting myself be photographed, letting myself be told what to do, how to stand, how to be, and later, looking at the photographs, I can see what’s happened to my body. My shoulders. They aren’t completely level. One side is slightly higher than the other, the one holding the bag, and the bag is the same bag I’ve carried my entire life, the one the photographer called diabolical, and although he meant stylistically, it makes me think about what a bag like that can do to a person, and did do, to me.
The screenplay for Blow-Up was written by Edward Bond. He was an English writer for the theatre and years ago, when I was an actor, I played a part in one of his early plays. Saved. It’s about a group of young men, a gang, who end up killing a small child, a baby in a pram. The cause is partly accidental but also, according to Bond, aggression is a natural outcome of an unjust society. Violence is a response to the fact that some people have power and privilege, and some people don’t. His early plays were famously violent. I was living in London when I saw his play Lear. I was staying in Hammersmith, camping out in a derelict factory, and the story is based on Shakespeare, about a king who spends his capital building a wall, what he imagines will be a force for order and goodness. And when it becomes the opposite, he tries to tear it down. But it’s too late. And the tragedy of the play is the question left unanswered. How do you tear down what you’ve painstakingly built? The version I saw was produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company, and the night I saw it, when I got back to my hovel by the river, apparently, while I was gone, thieves had come, ransacked my carefully concealed hiding place, stolen my rucksack and my sleeping bag, and I remember the king in the play, mad with grief, talking to his dead daughter. She’d been lost, and now she was dead, killed for fighting injustice. Her body was lying on a long wooden table, center stage, and from where I sat in the audience I couldn’t see the wound they’d made in her belly but I remember the actor playing Lear, like a surgeon, dipping his hands into the middle of her being, into the bowl between her ribcage and her pubic bone, and although it took a few days, that image eventually lodged itself in my body. Since I didn’t have a place to stay I spent my time wandering London, stopping at bookstores, and in one of them I found a copy of the text of the play. It was a blue paperback with a photo of Bond on the back cover. I read the play, then read his introduction to the play, then I found his essays about his other plays, and about writing, and socialism, and he seemed to be someone who felt the effects of injustice, who saw how power deforms our social interactions, turns them violent, and instead of running away he pointed it out to the rest of us. My tendency was to turn away, to run from what I didn’t like, whatever felt uncomfortable or dangerous, and he seemed to say that running away is fine, if that’s what you want, but it isn’t necessary. When you are frighted of the dark you do not make it go away by shutting your eyes. In his writing about theater, Bond often used the word rational like someone else might use the word fair or just or common sense. It’s commonsensical to open our eyes and see that we don’t have to hurt each other. That’s what I took him to mean, and what I wanted to ask him wasn’t rhetorical. I really wanted to know. How do you acknowledge a corrupted history and still have pity on the people who carry that history in our bodies?
