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Persona and personal meaning

So I was discussing Persona with Ieri the other day. Persona, despite or because of its nihilism, feels like a natural progression from Bergman's earnestly angsty The Seventh Seal and humanistic Wild Strawberries. As we explored our radically different interpretations of Persona, I realized the futility of trying to extract the meaning of it all. Naturally viewers will start a film with the notion that there is a "true" meaning encoded in the mechanics of the film, and that its mechanics dictates the one "real" meaning. This is quite an extreme statement, but I have never been fond of the kind of lunatic interpretive freedom employed by today's intellectually lazy literature and film analysts. Surely even unwatchable tripe like Toy Story can encapsulate metanarratives on Freudian sexuality, capitalism and deconstructionism, but until the film analyst employs at least quasi-scientific methods to back up such claims, he has stated nothing but vagaries. We are irrational by nature, trained by evolution to discover patterns and make deductions based on them. This innocuous irrational bent curbs the spirit of scientific inquiry, the means of obtaining any meaningful conclusion. Hence, my distrust of a deconstructionist reading of text or film.



Ieri proposed that subjective readings were still useful if you directed them at yourself, because one of the best representations of ourselves is painted by our perception of art. Where he saw a film about nothingness, I saw a very luminous exposition on psychological vampirism and violence, and about the dreary banality of communication. Our perceptions say more about us than about the film itself.

Ieri's interpretation: Bergman attempted to expose the hypocrisy of the film script, and through the final burning of the film left a Parthian shot at the viewership's status as the receiving end of an exercise in hypocrisy. It is somewhat shocking when instead of merging smoothly into rolling credits, the film leaves us to witness the destruction of what occupied us for the last hour and half. I agree and disagree; the opening fast cuts of random images (he said he caught a glimpse of Buñuel) shows a Bergman reveling in the artistic freedom of filmmaking, a Bergman who probably wouldn't think of painting artistic communication with the broad brush of hypocrisy. Rather I feel that his intention was to beat communication as a concept with the stick of communication as a medium. The futility of presenting dysfunctional communication is not itself the message. It only serves to hint at the expiration of all hope of connection. Rather than ruminating on the hypocrisy perpetrated by the talking faces on the screen, rather than tsk-tsking at the words uttered during the film, we have to scratch our collective head at everything we ourselves have said so far.

"We are engaged in a struggle with language."

                                     - Wittgenstein

We now go from the freely-interpreting natural habitat of the mind, to our rule-based languages. Rules create meaning, and not vice versa. And since rules are fixed at any time by universal consensus, language - what is essentially the mode of thought - is regimented and not free to interpretation. I wonder to what extent this brings into question the solipsistic nature of deconstructionism and the subjective reading of text.

There is hope yet. The rules of language are in flux, affording us some relativism with respect to the intransigent monolith of language and providing historical insight into semantic transformations. Similarly, in the reading of text and art, à la Derrida, unbeknownst to the writer, the text reveals subconscious narratives on the collective history and culture that had played an invisible hand in its writing. Maybe our collective irrational impulses at interpretation are simply pointing to a greater meaning that surpasses the understanding of any single reader or of the writer himself.

Day 3: I am the card player

MoMA
WTC
Movie at AMC

Day 3 was spent in the wonderful Museum of Modern Art where waves of people moved from room to room and eddied around like a slow-moving hurricane. The initial awe quickly merged into a peaceful familiarity as I encountered simulacra upon simulacra - real ones - of famous images seen on a computer once upon a time. Over here Chirico's Great Metaphysical Interior opening up an expansive interior within an interior, there Giacometti's Le Chien and beyond the corner a roomful of Pollock. Oppenheim's Teacup sent tingles rushing up to the back of my neck, and several rooms down Picasso's Card Player moved me to tears. In the last minutes before the closing of the museum, I scoured the top two floors looking for the Card Player in vain; it was as if, after granting me one privileged viewing this illusive painting had vanished into thin air.

After being kicked out of MoMA, which closes at the strangely early hour of 5:30pm, I visited the WTC ground half expecting to see a large crater. It was cordoned off by tall steel meshes, and by what I could make out looked like a construction site. I walked around listlessly among straggling groups of visitors, most of whom were taking pictures in front of a background of nothing. And as I circled the ground, I tried to not think of how imposing the towers would have seemed from where I stood now and how deafening must have been the sound of a thousand cries.



We sat in a small clearing within a neighboring skyscraper complex in the fading light of the evening. I don't remember what we spoke about sitting in the lengthening shadows. Did we even speak or did we simply eat our fast-food dinners and ruminate on heuristically-best subway routes back to the hotel? I don't remember anymore. I do, however, remember watching a movie at an AMC that evening, an otherwise ordinary experience colored wonderful by awareness of the New York outside the theater walls, and then taking my last walk through Times Square to a suitable subway stop.