Movie Review: ENNUI by Charles Doran

In Los Angeles filmmaker Charles Doran's nineteen-minute short Ennui, a transfigurative elision of interpellative erotism, the problematic of the matrix of cultural fictions that constitute and are constituted by the contemporary art scene of Los Angeles -- indeed, of any city -- suffers a subversive inversion, an humiliating expose of its pietistic grammatology, as seen through the eyes of a mid-twenties privileged white female artist who resents her privilege, her race, and her entire society.

Playing with Foucault's trope of Power as an infinite, sheer yet unbreakable rhizomic web inescapably encompassing all social relations, Doran explores the nature of privilege and the futility of the deconstructed and nonrecognitive subject's attempt to escape its enfleshment. Destined to be remembered as an eloquent chiaroscuro memoir of a Los Angeles whose nostalgic gravity overpowers Ennui's main character, known [ironically (?)] only as "the victim," we see that there is no one Los Angeles, but a perpetually generative multitude, as the world's first postmodern city plays a coercive cat-and-mouse with a posthuman subject who, wielding camera and eyeglasses, can only see herself, by means of an elusive illusion of inalienable and nonevolutive specificity, everywhere she goes, in every shop-window and self-filmed photograph in an ideographic Lacanian mirror-stage gone awry.

No matter how many transsubstantive metaphorical pictures The Victim draws, no matter how many boyfriends she disposes of, no matter how many strange little movies she films as talismanic pharmaka -- of which Ennui itself may be one -- she cannot escape the speculum-prison of her own nostalgic Desire, of that Deleuzian will-to-power that purblindly, arationally seeks to make the world in its own image, its own langue. The "effusive genera" of the conversativity of desire and of the scopic regime is relegated to a Benthamian panopticon, to an almost sub-Barthesian, retro-Nietzschean eradicative Will in which, as one reviewer puts it, Judith Butler meets Medea.

Shot in black and white film and with an original score by Los Angeles industrial ensemble Eckancore, Ennui's reprisive grammatic persiflage configures a feminist restoral of agency, the infinitesimalism of the unyielding Subject, and the simultaneity of the postmodern metanarrative of glossematic colonization of the heterologic resistive act of differential signification. Her shocking act -- a discovered, affirmed, and only secretly identifiable sign -- ruptures the Cartesian split and through its interpellative interplay of repeating signifiers ultimately violates the articulative theory of the designatory bond of authoritative (re)presentation.

(For more of this kind of horseshit -- which, if you have half a brain, which I know you do, you have clearly realized the above essay is, although the movie described is real and was made by my brother -- consult http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo)