@mirrorface: imminent sweat
the Other, surveillance, & paranoia with music videos & film
what do Adventure Time, Arcade Fire, Janelle Monae, Sun Ra, Maya Deren, Milla Jovovich, and Yeasayer have in common?
mirror face
when Edward Snowden flew to Hong Kong, he would help to create the conditions in which the public could understand the scope of the NSA's global surveillance system's information collecting, sparking international dialogues on privacy. it was not that society had been wholly aloof about these matters. watchdogs, whistleblowers, and informed dissidents have existed since secrets could be written down. (WikiLeaks has continued the project of relaying secret information of large institutions to the public since 2006.) Snowden's actions differ in significance to me because he provided the means of:
- confirming our suspicions that we are indeed being watched (pervasively so) and,
- we now know who it is who is watching us
is it not uncommon to question one's authenticity when one's actions betrays one's own ideology? having had my face rendered unrecognizable to myself/familiars due to an abrupt disfigurement of half my face, (yes, exactly like Two-Face, (was like Two-Face since it has healed)), and the usual coming of age body dysphoria stemming from overreacting hormones prone to visit young tweens in the dark, i had developed a sharpened sensibility that people are conditionally defined by things like circumstance, material, association, environment.
self for me has long been a site of plurality for my selves, rather than myself. #selfie #selfie #selfie
so it would go with this mindset, an affinity for Janelle Monae and the concept of afrofuturism, that upon viewing Sun Ra's Space is the Place, i would be hyper sensitive to the enigmatic hooded figure with the mirror mask found in the film.
was it a mask to begin with?
“mirror face” i would call it then.
i recognized this mirror face immediately in Janelle Monae's Tightrope music video, figures whom seemed indigenous as a concept, appearing as enigmatic imaginations of Monae's creativity. i rushed to Wikipedia.
AHA!
i returned to Youtube to view Meshes of the Afternoon.
it was mesmerizing, unsettling, a bust in the face of my sleepiness.
i returned to Wikipedia to research Meshes of the Afternoon after i had finished it.
AHA(x2)
all of these findings would lead to a Facebook posting i made in 2011 which time would leave compressed by all of the eventual postings i would make. if there was stimulus, there would be a Facebook post about it. inspite of myself, as imbedded as i was in other projects, mirror face would not leave. general feelings of guilt that i had not explored the iconography of mirror face well enough and the possessive pride i had in having the false pretense that i was the 'first' to discover this phenomena resurfaced. with more clarity on my intentions on the matter, and more time to write, i enter this dialogue on mirror face again.
where the horror genre uses masked figures like that of Ghostface, Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers, & Leather Face to produce absolute terror through the uncanny, functioning as Slavoj Zizek describes in The Pervert's Guide to Cinema, "to unite the fears and in a way trade all those fears for one fear alone", mirror face differs from these masks because:
- there exists a residual doubt that there is a face behind mirror face
- we recognize ourselves in mirror face (literally) yet are contradicted by the possession of ourselves by an other
- mirror face unlike the aforementioned masked antagonists, Guy Fawkes mask wearers and Slender Man does nothing to us- mirror face watches us. it follows us. mirror face is just there.
i had originally contextualized Wendy Morgan & John Coney's respective direction of Janelle Monae's Tightrope & Sun Ra's Space is the Place music video's as nods to Maya Deren with symbolic acknowledgment of her filming of the subconscious experience of an individual through the repetition of events, 'the personal as political', and the "conflicting tendencies of the self and the "other," through doubling, multiplication and merging" of the woman in her film.
Monae & Sun Ra's mirror face's participation in these video's make sense in light of afrofuturism's re-imagining, envisioning, and re-examination of the past/present/future and Maya Deren's filming; one oppressed group (people of color) need not look too far to find that another's (women) issues and ideas intersect with theirs. oppression though infinitely expressed and felt in a myriad of ways is understood in a common language.
what of Yeasayer & Arcade Fire's depictions? Adventure Time & Milla Jovovich's mirror face's are very much homage's.
i think mirror face has broadened from it’s symbology as the oppressor and the 'other'.
mirror face is the attempt to make visible and contain the Big Other- the pervasive, watchful, all seeing, policing, force.
mirror face does no harm to us and we do no harm to it because we inextricably are and are not it.
Michel Foucault's idea of the panopticon describes this situation with mirror face well:
"He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection" (202-203) Discipline and Punish
we, with knowledge of being visible, the possibility of discipline and punishment, police ourselves.
mirror face to me is representative of an object which polices, the 'us' which polices, and the self that does so simultaneously.
the feelings which mirror face produces differ from fear but are not excluded from it.
rather, it is paranoia of being surveilled and the dread of being surveilled created by the operative force of surveillance that is occurring when one sees mirror face in media.
i think the constant feeling of surveillance is new in that in my own life i feel the necessity to openly position myself as someone who "does not give fucks" about being surveilled in order to create. this partly explains why i opt to make my Facebook posts public, why i situate myself in a very open kind of participation on the internet, why i have intentionally chosen to do one project over another.
there is a freedom/liberation in resisting the forces which attempt to entrain one self to self-police.
i think mirror face is a symbolic touch stone for society to note.
mirror face visually in its totality fails to embody the Big Other (it seems impossible to do so) yet succeeds to enlighten us about the anxieties society experiences as a result of our inability to escape being entangled in capitalist power structures and oppressive regimes. we cannot escape being surveilled, even in fictive spaces which escape reality, they reproduce the same results- the task of facing our mirror faces.
this poses a question to us: can society exist without the Other, fear, paranoia, a benevolent lie?
