Phillips/Perec/Miike

Today I read the next fifty pages of Jayne Anne Phillips’ Quiet Dell. Harry Powers (going under the pseudonym of Cornelius) finally enters the narrative and when he does it’s quite suspenseful. But then I realized that the reason it’s suspenseful is that I know the Powers case backwards and forwards and so I know what’s going to happen, just like I can appreciate the gap between the seemingly harmless Cornelius and the brutal reality of Powers. What would someone get out of this novel who knows nothing about the Powers case? Not very much. Could one say the same of Capote’s In Cold Blood? I don’t think so. Capote’s book has transcended the case upon which it’s based to the extent that the memory of the case only lives on in the public memory at all thanks to Capote. Could Phillips’ book lead to a revival of interest in Harry Powers? Hard to say, but my guess would be no.

I also read the next fifty pages of Georges Perec’s Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. This covers the following sections of the title piece: the street, the neighborhood, the town, the country, countries, Europe, and the World. It would be fascinating to compare what Perec says about the country with Raymond Williams’ The Country and the City. Whereas Williams sees these two spaces as intimately/dialectically interconnected, Perec’s emphasis is on a separation between the two: “The country is a foreign land. It shouldn’t be, yet it is…It’s far too late to change anything.” I was also struck by the following passage in the section on the street: “Do you know how to see what’s worthy of note? Is there anything that strikes you? Nothing strikes you. You don’t know how to see. You have to set about it more slowly, almost stupidly. Force yourself to write down what is of no interest, what is most obvious, most common, most colorless.” This passage not only sheds light on why Perec is so obsessed with the ordinary, but also on how he approaches his subject. Perec defamiliarizes and estranges the ordinary by submerging himself in it, not just impressionistically, but also with discipline and method.

I also watched Takashi Miike’s 2003 One Missed Call. I’m working with a student at the moment who’s writing his thesis on Japanese horror film, and so of course I recommended Miike, who’s one of my very favorite horror directors. This student is writing specifically about the relationship between technology and the supernatural in JHorror, so One Missed Call was an obvious choice. It tells the story of a series of murders in which the victims all receive calls on their cell phones from themselves shortly in the future in which they can hear themselves dying. The film’s protagonist, after seeing a number of her friends die in this way, receives a call herself and then it’s a race against time to see if she can solve the mystery and save her life. One Missed Call doesn’t have the intensity of Miike’s Audition or the sheer weirdness of his Visitor Q, but it is atmospheric and creepy, with a wonderful abandoned hospital set toward the end of the movie and some really thoughtful things to say about mother/daughter relations that put it in the same category as Hideo Nakata’s Dark Water (2002).