Utopias

It may simply be the quality of audio in the downloaded version we watched, but to my ear there’s a strange, quiet noise which pervades Marc Karlin's 1989 Utopias. A subtle hissing plays throughout various shots, almost like the uneasy background noise from David Lynch’s Eraserhead. This subtle sounds found various different contexts. It plays over a photo of steaming pipes from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. I first noticed it when the camera cuts from Marsha Marshall to a boiling kettle; we cut through other household tasks in close-up, feeding a fire and kneading bread, then suddenly to images of a demolition sight. Now it’s in the hiss is of the carnivorous machinery tearing down locally industry. (There’s something of Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames in this montage.)

Diane…

The long search for the ‘real’ Diane through this disturbing fantasy is, like much of The Return, a twisted reproduction of the logic of the original Twin Peaks. Diane does not appear in the original two series of Twin Peaks, except in the form of Agent Cooper’s tape recorder. One the many quirky Cooperisms repeated by fans and cosplayers is his frequent, chirpy commentaries on the unfolding enigma of Twin Peaks, addressed always to his unseen secretary at headquarters. A recording of Cooper’s tapes to Diane was even released so that we too could have the fun of piecing together the Agent’s running commentary. (In a sense, this release had the reverse of effect of Jennifer Lynch’s novelisation pf Laura Pamler’s diary, which gave voice the the otherwise absent subject of Twin Peak’s central mystery.)

Liquid Sky

It's not hard to grasp the concept of a faciality machine if you've ever used facetune, put on make-up, done drag. More and more we're tasked with working at our faces on a micro level day to day. We assemble our faces from a palette of faciality traits, capturing the sheen of lip gloss or the suggestive depth of our cheekbones. As Deleuze and Guattari argue, regimes of power provide faces, or least parts of them, for us; by controlling faciality in this way, power can accept and reject, control and arrange different subjects according to its needs1. Is this face a man or a woman? Old or young? Black or white?