THE EMPORER JONES

Wooster Group

It is appropriate that the piece is a filmic representation and nearly impossible to fix in a staged space.  Occasionally we see glimpses of rafters at the edge of a projection screen, but for the most part we are presented with a video performance.  Following Baudrillard’s breakdown of the mirror stage’s objectival and spatial points of reference, we are presented, instead, with a screen (literally).   There are no anchors for the camera’s perspective.  At times Jones’ figure is seen from above, at others, the camera turns to the floor and feet, but, regardless of how the figure spins, the background appears still and fixed in a single perspective.

The distinction between surfaces has been almost completely effaced.  Interior blends into exterior and the background advances to press itself against the foreground.   Scenically, Jones appears before and within his mansion, passing through blank fields of color, a confusion of distance and dimension that culminates in a jungle that resembles an abstract expressionist painting’s pure surface where shadow and light trade places back and forth.  And this is all as much a myth as the mocked decay of the film, its sputterings and scratches recalling an old reel from the colonial period of O’Neill’s text, for this surface is not a surface, but the limitless skies of a blue screen.

Smithers floats in between the textures of positive and negative space, his voice similarly obscured and blurred at the edges.  His voice seems completely swallowed by the grain and gravel of sound, his vocal presence overshadowing speech like the visual ghost that flits about.  Herein, we face an aural superimposition as much as a visual.  He is an acousmetre (Michel Chion “The Voice in Cinema”) brought on-screen.  Likewise, the insistent rhythm of the drums and their musical counterpart, surround the off-screen space without an anchor point or origin.  They play like an unconscious of the film, or of Jones, if we can even separate the two.

Jameson’s pastiche of ethnic stereotypes (none of the characters speak “straight,” but play up their own exaggerated accent) without normative comparison, a “blank parody,” find its most cogent figuration in the transition dance where Smithers mirrors Jones’ choreography.  Both are dressed in Asiatic garb, samurai-like accents on kimonos, and the black-faced Volk suddenly appears like strange compilation of ethnographic studies.  She is the feminized Black, Asian, Male Other, leaving me to wonder whether her performance supports Baudrillard’s claim of the end of alienation and the Other in the obscene or whether, in fact, she follows Huyssen’s placement of the postmodern in precisely that Otherness.  Jones and his/her double, Smithers, dance roughly the same kabuki-style movements.  The grainy film recalls those early missionaries of the Lumiere brothers, capturing the first representations of a cultural memory.  Scoring this against the repetitive drones of a simple candy-colored electronic sample highlights the staging of a postmodern, postcultural, postglobal fabrication.   There is a wonderful moment where Jones leaves the screen and her double continues dancing behind his frame, the mirror stage’s disjunction from the subject-source confirmed in an instant.

            It seems that the audio field offers a rich alternative to the visual field for many of postmodern theory’s claims.  If we, like Sontag, are in search of erotics of the text, sound’s un-locatable intrusion into the physical person of the spectator speaks (or calls, groans, roars, etc) for a possible site of production. Here is the touch of a vibration immersing the subject and extending him or her across a bridge to its source, tying one and the other.  When the offstage/offscreen sounds wash over the text of the retreating Jones at the end of his performance, does this mark the frightening end of O’Neill’s modernist coherence, the end of his mock-sovereign and the crow(n)ing of a Baudrillardian sovereign, “a state of fascination and vertigo linked to the obscene delirium of communication”?