This week, we watched  the X-files episode, "Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose" (Winner: 1996 Prime-Time Emmy ®, Best Writing in a Dramatic Series). The episode allowed us to continue our discussion not only of film's discursive techniques (POV shots, subjective treatment, close-ups, montage, etc.) but also of the "scripted" nature of narrative. As the characters of the TNG episode "Cause and Effect" could be said to discover, narrative always already stacks the deck; narrative is never "sufficiently randomized," despite Data's claims to the contrary. This week's X-Files episode explored this characteristic of narrative. As Fox Mulder states, "if coincidences are just coincidences, why do they feel so contrived." Later, when Bruckman and the murderer finally meet, they seem to be commenting self-reflexively about the very episode in which they find themselves: the coincidences that brought them to this meeting in the narrative seem, as the murderer says, "beyond the realm of believability." Fictional narratives are, indeed, concerned with the positing of possibilities that are believable even if fictional, and yet scripted nonetheless. What makes this episode of the X-Files significant is its self-consciousness about its own narrative form. The show could thus be said to be postmodern in its relationship to fiction since postmodern works tend towards self-reflexivity and self-consciousness but often (unlike modernist works) in a playful, self-parodic way that can still succeed on the mass market. Now for the specifics of our discussion:

BEGINNINGS

CAMERA LENSES AND CRYSTAL BALLS

POSTMODERN SELF-REFLEXIVITY

Such self-reflexivity is played out in various other ways throughout the episode. Examples include: 1) Clyde Bruckman's response to Fox Mulder's name ("Am I supposed to believe that's a real name?"); 2) the fact that both the murderer and Clyde Bruckman do not feel that they are in control of their lives, that they're puppets, almost as if they were conscious of their own scriptedness, of the fact that they are not real but fictional characters that are forced to play specific parts. (The murderer finally understands why he does the things he does when Clyde Bruckman tells him: "Don't you get it? It's because you're a homicidal maniac." Earlier, Bruckman also stated that the problem with the murderer is that he feels like he's a "puppet.") Similarly, the palm reader loses her accent (falls "out of character") when threatened early in the episode, as Reid Scott pointed out; 3) In a previous version of this class, Jonas Moskowitz took this interpretation even further: what if the episode is also making a comment about us, the viewers, since we are, in fact, in the same position as the murderer, who could be said to be a spectator to his own crimes, both metephorically (he foresees the future) and literally (since we keep seeing him appear at the various crime scenes)? After all, are we not also scripted in our own ways: by the conventions we follow, by the ideologies we subscribe to, by the expectations that we fulfill, by the fact that our brains are constantly re-ordering the world we perceive in artificial ways, constantly imposing artificial meanings like narrative form itself? (Scully states, in the "white Nazi stormtrooper scene," that we are constantly imposing various meaningful structures on the otherwise heterogeneous, contingent events of reality.) 4) A question from Cleary Poore—as class was disbanding—pointed to another element that makes a comment on this juxtaposition between "reality" and perception; that is, the opening shot of a trash journal article, which points to a real-life breakdown between real life and fantasy (or not, once you're in the alien-filled diegetic universe of Men in Black or the X-Files where such facts are acceptable), a breakdown made all the more uncanny with David Duchovny’s recent confession of being a sex and/or porn addict.  We thus find the real-life actor coming to act like his character Fox Mulder, who is so in love with pornography that Clyde Bruckman suggests his own death will be the result of auto-erotic asphyxiation.  5) Derek Thein pointed out that the pixellated image in the first shot and the mise-en-abyme television screen in the last shot of the episode underscore the mediatization of the very tv episode being presented to us and the illusion that is film (itself based on nothing but a series of still photographic frames, as La jetée reminded us). 6) A similar degree of self-reflexivity occurs when the killer and Clyde Bruckman meet; here, they seem to fall out of character (by showing no emotion, despite the grave nature of their situation) and they comment on the improbable, though not impossible, nature of the plotting (as a number of you pointed out).

We also explored a number of structural issues concerned with narrative form. As I suggested, the reason these characters may not be in control of their lives is because they are being forced to follow the demands of narrative structure. That structure is underlined in various ways. Reid Scott pointed out, for example, how the narrative creates a perfect circle—with the first image (an extreme close-up of Yappi's eye) repeated as the last image of the episode (perfect really since such metaphors are aligned with death drive, according to Brooks). On the story level, we also have the fact that (as in La jetée and STTNG's "Cause and Effect"), effects continue to precede causes in the episode, a fact that is underlined in the first eye image by the fact that the word "death" is surreptitiously embedded in the newsprint. As David Thein pointed out, the opening scene's movement out from newspaper pixels to a shot of the Stupendous Yappi's eyeball also exemplifies one of the themes of the episode: not being able to see the forest for the trees, as Clyde Bruckman puts it later in the episode.

CHANTILLY LACE AND THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE

We also discussed  the ways that the episode calls our attention to the coincidence behind having "Chantilly Lace" be at once the clue that leads to the end of the narrative and the song (by the Big Bopper) that in a sense led to Clyde Bruckman's prophetic powers. As Clyde Bruckman explains, in 1959 Buddy Holly's plane crashed the night before Bruckman was supposed to see him perform on stage. As Bruckman goes on, "Actually, I was a bigger fan of the Big Bopper than Buddy Holly; 'Chantilly Lace' that was the song... The Big Bopper was not supposed to be on the plane with Buddy Holly; he won the seat from somebody else by flipping a coin for it... Imagine all the things that had to occur, not only in his life but in everybody else's, to arrange it so that on that particular night the Big Bopper would be in a position to live or die depending on a flipping coin. I became so obsessed with that idea that I gradually became capable of seeing the specifics of everybody's death." As Kara McIver pointed out, it is not a coincidence that the song "Chantilly Lace" is actually about the pleasure principle:

        Hello baby, Yeah, this is the Big Bopper speakin

        Ha ha ha ha ha, oh you sweet thing

        Do I what?

        Will I what?

        Oh baby you know what I like

        CHORUS

        Chantilly lace and a pretty face

        And a pony tail a hangin down

        That wiggle in the walk

        And giggle in the talk

        Makes the world go round

        There ain't nothin in the world

        Like a big eyed girl

        That makes me act so funny

        Make me spend my money

        Make me feel real loose like a long necked goose

What happened when Bruckman learned of the Big Bopper's death, then, is the death of what could be called the principle of the pleasure principle for Clyde (the Big Bopper), which left Bruckman with nothing but the death drive (no more "wiggle in the walk," no more wiggle in the narrative line).

   

METAPHORS AND THE DEATH DRIVE

 

There were numerous other Freudian and Brooksian interpretations over our day of discussion. After all, the entire episode is, in fact, about repetitions of its opening metaphor (with a particular focus on images of the eye and of the mind's eye). Indeed, the episode invites such Freudian interpretations even as it discounts them, as Clyde Bruckman tells Mulder before recounting his death dream:

    BRUCKMAN: You're not one of those people who read sexual symbols into everything, are you?

    MULDER: No, I'm not a Freudian

By the way, the rhetorical name for such a maneuver (saying something by denying you are saying it) is "apophasis." As Bruckman's dream, indeed, does suggest, we are here given a character who is, in a strictly Freudian sense, predominantly driven by the death drive; as a result, the only dream he ever dreams is of his own death.  Cleary Poore mentioned the highly phallic tulips in the sequence, thus illustrating how this sequence once again collapses sex and death (pleasure principle and death drive). The fact that the killer keeps repeating the same dream over and over again also underscores the repetition compulsion associated with trauma, as Jonathan Bailey explained.

   

BEYOND THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE

A Freudian interpretation also helps to explain why the killer is not able to perform sexually, as is underscored when Clyde Bruckman is brought to the scene of the tea-leaf-reader's murder. Clyde also associates himself with lack of desire. As he says when Mulder asks him what's wrong, "it just seems like everyone's having sex except for me." The best explanation for why Clyde and the killer cannot perform sexually, Kara McIver explained, is because these are two characters who are completely driven by the death drive, which in healthy individuals always works in productive tension with both the pleasure and reality principles. I tied this discussion to narrative form itself by pointing to the scene where Clyde Bruckman tells Scully that he "foresees their end... We end up in bed together." Clyde appears to be making a sexual advance here, one that, in fact, functions hermeneutically to throw us off the scent. (It's a false lead, a false clue.) We are misled even as Clyde correctly does foretell the final scene (his deathbed scene). Brooks' association of the hermeneutic code with the pleasure principle is here literalized (the false lead keeps us reading, keeps our desire to continue watching alive: i.e., it is sexual). What is also literalized here is narrative's ultimate desire for narrative closure since what Clyde is actually predicting is the closural moment of the narrative and of his own life. I also suggested why the narrative has Clyde commit suicide: what Clyde is enacting here is one of Brooks' points: "If repetition is mastery, movement from the passive to the active, and if mastery is an assertion of control over what man must in fact submit to—choice, we might say, of an imposed end—we have already a suggestive comment on the grammar of plot, where repetition, taking us back again over the same ground, could have to do with the choice of ends" (98), or, as Freud states, "the organism wishes to die only in its own fashion" (Brooks 102).

   

FOCALIZATION

 

We also explored the discursive complexity of the scene in which Clyde Bruckman sees the murderer's imagined killing of Fox Mulder. Bruckman appears here proleptically to foresee Mulder's fate at the hands of the murderer. As Derek Thein explained, the scene is incredibly complex on a structural level. What we have is an outside "objective treatment" of Mulder, Scully, and Bruckman in a room together. We then switch to the scene that Bruckman sees with his mind's eye: in technical terms "a subjective treatment"; however, we also learn from Bruckman that what he is in fact seeing is the "ravings of a lunatic," in other words yet another embedded subjective treatment from the point of view of the killer, which is in fact shot by the camera as a POV shot, as if we were seeing through the eyes of the killer himself (a favorite technique of the horror film). We thus have a POV shot within a subjective treatment (the mind's eye of the killer) within another subjective treatment (the mind's eye of Bruckman) within an objective treatment (Mulder, Scully, and Bruckman in a room in the diegetic present). The scene is thus exemplary of the narratological term, "focalization."

   

PIE THEORY AND REAL TIME

In the scene, Mulder steps in a pie and Bruckman interrupts his recounting of this chronological sequence by commenting on the flavor of pie. As Katy Weismiller pointed out, the pie interruption is also exemplary of the discursive manipulation of story—how the time of viewing rarely (except in real time) corresponds to the time of the story action. A ten-second countdown in an action film can take 10 minutes to watch since narrative is interested in dilating the narrative in order to increase suspense.

MATCH CUTS AND METAPHOR

The class pointed out a number of other interesting discursive tricks and techniques throughout the episode. We finished Wednesday’s class discussing one interesting discursive word play: the match cut from the Tarot reader's final card, "Death," to Scully's hand in a poker game with Clyde Bruckman: 3 Aces over 8s, what in poker is called the "Dead Man's Hand" (see the Primer for this episode). An alignment is thus made on a purely discursive level (through a match cut), an alignment that is analogous to the use of metaphor in language (the bringing together of two disparate things, as in "a lion is the king of the jungle," which links a king to a lion). The discursive technique of the match cut aligns the two scenes and, thus, in one sequence literalizes the major thematic juxtaposition of the episode: fate/narrative (the Tarot) vs. chance/life (poker), a metaphorical juxtaposition that, of course, we also saw in the Star Trek: TNG episode, "Cause and Effect."

REAL TIME