I Certify That the Thesis Entitled Twisted Things
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I certify that the thesis entitled Twisted Things: Playing with Time submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy is the result of my own work and that where reference is made to the work of others, due acknowledgment is given. I also certify that any material in the thesis which has been accepted for a degree or diploma by any university or institution is identified in the text. ʹI certify that I am the student named below and that the information provided in the form is correctʹ Full Name: Virginia Stewart Murray Signed ..................................................................................…….… Date .................................................................................…….…… Twisted Things: Playing with Time by Virginia Stewart Murray (BA Dip Ed) Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Deakin University January 2012 Table of Contents Volume One Creative Component Introduction to Thesis 1 Preface: Neither Fish nor Fowl 3 TWISTED THINGS 7 Volume Two Exegesis Playing with time: an exegesis in three chapters Introduction 127 Chapter One: On the Beach: A Contextual History Part 1 141 Part II 158 Chapter 2: Glamour and Celebrity: 1950s Australian Style 172 Chapter 3: The Role of the Unconscious: Playing with Time in Film 236 Camera Consciousness and Reterritorialisation in 12 Monkeys 249 Sheets of the Past in Jacob’s Ladder 257 Incompossible Worlds in Donnie Darko 264 Suddenly Thirty and the Peaks of the Present 269 Conclusion 280 Works Cited 287 Filmography 299 Works Consulted 308 Exegesis Playing with Time 127 INTRODUCTION Any time is completely present Only present exists The Stoic theory of time (Gioli) Whether if soul (mind) did not exist, time would exist or not, is a question that may be fairly asked; for if there cannot be someone to count there cannot be anything that can be counted… Aristotle Physics, chapter 14 In the early part of my research for this thesis I travelled to Canadian Bay, about an hour from Melbourne, to see the location of the beach sequences of Stanley Kramer’s 1959 film On the Beach. I had been to the State Library of Victoria in search of ‘traces’ of the film and had seen slides taken during the filming showing Ava Gardner in a white bathrobe, ‘stand‐ins‘ on racing yachts, and a shirtless film crew wrestling an arc light through what must have been blistering sand. And in every background shot and at the edge of every frame spectators jostled for a better view. It was winter now and I wasn’t expecting any crowds but the thick white fog that 128 reduced visibility to a foot at most created a different landscape which was unsettling and yet at the same time thrilling. Surrounded by whiteness I was completely lost and I realised that when I lost my physical bearings I lost my sense of time too. I had no idea how long I’d been there. Like my experience at Canadian Bay, much of my research has been without a reality checkpoint and perhaps because of this it’s been a search for connections that lead to other connections rather than a destination. As I felt my way first through my screenplay and then the exegesis, I found myself increasingly concerned with time and how we might show the movements between the past, the present and even the future through cinema. I found it curious how my reading on the philosophy and theory of time found its way between my creative and theoretical work in a continual back and forth process. We all feel we know time, but we agree we cannot explain it. The measurement of physical time has always preoccupied mathematicians, while philosophers and artists have been more inclined to consider psychological time. St Augustine in the 4th century AD identified three times: ‘… a present of things past, a present of things present and a present of things future. The present of things past is memory, the present of things present is sight and the present of things future, expectation’ (Augustine, Humanistic texts, accessed 5/12/11, <http://www.humanistictexts.org/augustine.htm>). Augustine concluded that the existence of time depended on an intelligent being who was able to comprehend past, present and future, 129 thus paving the way for Kant. In the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Kant suggests our minds structure our perceptions a priori so that we experience time like a mathematical line. He argued that time is a conscious experience and we must already have a sense of time in order to experience this. The predilection of humans to see the world subjectively and reduce the world to measurable quantities is reflected in the way we contemplate time, history and art. The relationship between art and history is particularly relevant to my project, which is a creative exploration of the past employing fictive and non‐fictive elements in a screenplay. My project is a ‘timeslip’ story that alternates between contemporary Melbourne and the Melbourne of 1959. Questions of how to realise time, how history might be appropriated and the relationships between art and history were uppermost in my mind. Further, the relations between history and literary art are not the same as those between history and cinema. Both concerned me, as my creative work is a screenplay that is literary art in the process of becoming cinematic art. Hayden White’s essay The Historical Text as Literary Artifact was valuable here. It problematised the relationship between history and art in terms of the limitations of subjectivity and a priori knowledge that are relevant to both literary and cinematic art. White’s essay appeared in 1978 and provides a useful summary of the narrative tradition of history and the problems raised by narrative subjectivity. He begins by questioning the authority of historical narratives as they are ‘verbal fictions, the contents of which are as much invented as found and the forms of which have more in common with their 130 counterparts in literature than they have with those in the sciences’ (White, 1978: 82). White, a modernist concerned with form, pointed out that the same historical event could be plotted satirically, comically or tragically depending on the historian’s viewpoint and the type of language used. Further, and in order to make the unfamiliar familiar to the audience, the historical narrative needs to point the reader towards a particular pregeneric plot structure, tragedy or comedy, for instance (1978: 86, 88). This decision rests with the historian, who may or may not be conscious of the language choices he makes to direct his readers in this or that direction. White wanted to find ways of indicating to the audience ‘what is fictive in all putatively realistic representations of the world and what is realistic in all manifestly fictive ones’ (1978: 88). Initially he suggests encoding and recoding historical narratives modally (say as comedy, or tragedy) to reveal what the ‘true nature of events consists of’, but concludes that this tells us more about the relationships between modalities than the events themselves (1978: 97). One of White’s final arguments suggests that if history were to draw ‘nearer to its origins in literary sensibility we should be able to identify the ideological, because it is the fictive element in our own discourse’ (1978: 99). The ‘we’ here refers to historians but surely the readership need also to be aware of the fictive nature of historiography. White’s suggestion of recasting the same historical elements in different modes would be illuminating but is unlikely to be realised in a written text that would reach any kind of large‐scale audience. White’s thesis on the fictive elements of historical narrative is, however, powerfully realised 131 cinematically in Oliver Stone’s film Nixon (1995). In his analysis of Nixon, Marc Singer argues that one of the purposes of the film is to reveal how mutable historical narrative is. The character of Nixon, always conscious of how he will be viewed by the press and history, reshapes and represses historical narrative to serve Nixon himself. Stone goes further than White by fabricating real events, and, by portraying the Kennedy assassination as a theatrical spectacle, hints ‘that history as well as narrative events can be plotted’ (Singer, 2008:191). Throughout the film, Stone uses a number of techniques to alert viewers that they are watching a ‘historical fabrication’. Well‐known actors are cast in cameo roles to remind audiences they are watching Hollywood celebrities rather than historical figures. Characters engaged in emplotment are instantly recognisable referents to other movies and television shows such as Dr Strangelove and Dallas. Seen this way any audience would become suspicious of accepting historical narrative at face value, which is surely one of White’s aims. Returning to White’s essay, it is striking to note the effects of postmodernism now on White’s arguments. White never questions the overall explanatory power of narrative history. He does suggest such narratives may be told in different modes, but all within the phenomenological sense of ‘lived’ human sense and experience of Western civilisation. What might White have made of Foucault’s arguments that the idea of the narrator (i.e. humanity) may vary, as does the way the narrated time and space is experienced? (Foucault, 1972: 187) White’s acceptance of humanity as the narrator of history and the existence of cultural a priori knowledge, such as pregeneric plot structures 132 and time as linear progression that explanatory historical narrative requires is not questioned by him. White writes: We experience the ‘fictionalisation’ of history as an ‘explanation’ for the same reason we experience great fiction as an illumination of a world that we inhabit along with the author.