House of Leaves (33 page)

Also in 1990, Associated Press executive, Vincent Alabiso, acknowledged the power of digital technology and condemned its use to falsify images:

“The electronic darkroom is a highly sophisticated photo editing tool. It takes us out of a chemical darkroom where subtle printing techniques such as burning and dodging have long been accepted as journalistically sound. Today these terms are replaced by ‘image manipulation’ and ‘enhancement.’ In a time when such broad terms could be misconstrued we need to set limits and restate some basic tenets.

“The content of photographs will NEVER be changed or manipulated in any way.”

A year later, the NPPA (National Press Photographers Association) also recognized the power of electronic imaging techniques:

“As journalists we believe the guiding principle of our profession is accuracy: therefore, we believe it is wrong to alter the content of a photograph in a way that deceives the public.

“As photojournalists, we have the responsibility to document society and to preserve its images as a matter of historical record. It is clear that the emerging electronic technologies provide new challenges to the integrity of photographic images. The technology enables the manipulation of the content of an image in such a way that the change is virtually undetectable. In light of this, we, the National Press Photographers Association, reaffirm the basis of our ethics: Accurate representation is the benchmark of our profession.” [185—See Chapter 20 in Howard Chapnick’s
Truth Needs No Ally: Inside Photojournalism
(University of Missouri Press, 1994.)

Then in 1992, MIT professor William J. Mitchell offered this powerful summation:

“Protagonists of the institutions of journalism, with their interest in being trusted, of the legal system, with their need for provably reliable evidence, and of science, with their foundational faith in the recording instrument, may well fight hard to maintain the hegemony of the standard photographic image—but others will see the emergence of digital imaging as a welcome opportunity to expose the aporias in photography’s construction of the visual world, to deconstruct the very ideas of photographic objectivity and closure, and to resist what has become an increasingly sclerotic pictorial tradition.” [
^W
—William J. Mitchell’s
The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth In The Post-Photographic E
ra (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1994), p. 8.]

Ironically, the very technology that instructs us to mistrust the image also creates the means by which to accredit it.

As author Murphy Gruner once remarked:

“Just as is true with Chandler’s Marlowe, the viewer is won over simply because the shirts are rumpled, the soles are worn, and there’s that ever present hat. These days nothing deserves our faith less than the slick and expensive. Which is how video and film technology comes to us: rumpled or slick.

“Rumpled Technology—capital M for Marlowe—hails from Good Guys, Radio Shack or Fry’s Electronics. It is cheap, available and very dangerous. One needs only to consider
The George Holliday Rodney King Video
to recognize the power of such low- end technology. Furthermore, as the recording time for tapes and digital disks increases, as battery life is extended, and as camera size is reduced, the larger the window will grow for capturing events as they occur.

“Slick Technology — capital S for Slick— is the opposite: expensive, cumbersome, and time consuming. But it too is also very powerful. Digital manipulation allows for the creation of almost anything the imagination can come up with, all in the safe confines of an editing suite, equipped with 24 hour catering and an on site masseuse.”
[1
86
—Murphy Gruner’s
Document Detectives
(New York: Pantheon, 1995), p. 37. [187—
One can imagine a group of Documentary Detectives whose sole purpose is to uphold Truth & Truth
[Or TNT. Truth And Truth therefore becoming another name for the nitrating of toluene or C
₇
H
₅
N
₃
O
₆
— not to be confused with C
₁₆
H
₁₀
N
₂
O
₂
—in other words one word: trinitrotoluene. TNT
[188—Which also stands for Technological Neural Transmitters
(TNT) [189—Or what as Lude once pointed out also means Tits And Tail. i.e. also explosive. i.e. orgasmic. i.e. a sudden procreating pun which turns everything into something entirely else, which now as I catch up with myself, where I’ve gone and where I haven’t gone and what I better get back to, may very well have not been a pun at all but plain and simple just the bifurcation of truth, with an ampersand tossed in for unity. A sperm twixt another form of similar unity, and look there’s an echo at hand. The articulation of conflict may very well be a better thing upon which to stand—Truth & Truth ‘z all, after all, or not at all. In other words, just as
Zampanô
wrote it.]
196
another pun and another story altogether.]
telegraphing a weird coalition of sense. On one hand transcendent and lasting and on the other violent and extremely flammable.]
by guaranteeing the authenticity of all works. Their seal of approval would create a sense of public faith which could only be maintained if said Documentary Detectives were as fierce as pit bulls and as scrupulous as saints. Of course, this is more the kind of thing a novelist or playwright would deal with, and as I am pointedly not a novelist or playwright I will leave that tale to someone else
.]

As Grundberg, Alabiso and Mitchell contend, this impressive ability to manipulate images must someday permanently deracinate film and video from its now sacrosanct position as “eyewitness.” The perversion of image will make
The Rodney King Video
inadmissible in a court of law
.
Incredible as it may seem, Los Angele s Mayor Bradley’s statement— “Our eyes did not deceive us. We saw what we saw and what we saw was a crime.”—will seem ludicrous. Truth will once again revert to the shady territories of the word and humanity’s abilities to judge its peculiar modalities. Nor is this a particularly original prediction Anything from Michael Crichton’s
Rising Sun,
to Delgado’s
Card Tricks,
or Lisa Mane “Slit Slit” Bader’s
Confession of a Porn Star
delve into the increasingly protean nature of a d
igital universe.
In his article “True Grit”, Anthony Lane at
The New Yorker
claims “grittiness is the most difficult element to construct and will always elude the finest studio magician. Grit, however, does not elude Navidson.” Consider the savage scene captured on grainy 16mm film of a tourist eaten alive by lions in a wildlife preserve in Angola
(Traces of Death
)
and compare it to the ridiculous and costly comedy
Eraser
in which several villains are dismembered by alligators.
[190—Jennifer Kale told me she’d visited
Zampanô
around seven times: ‘Me liked me to teach him filmic words. You know, film crit kind of stuff. Straight out of Christian Metz and the rest
of
that crew.
He also
liked me to read him some of the jokes I’d gotten on the Internet. Mostly though I just described movies I’d recently seen.’
Eraser
was one of them.]

William J. Mitchell offers an alternate description of “grit” when he highlights Barthe’s observation that reality incorporates “seemingly functionless detail ‘because it is there’ to signal that ‘this is indeed an unfiltered sample of the real.
[
191—Roland Barthes’ “The Reality Effect,” in
French Literary Theory Today
ed. Tzvetan Todorov (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 11-17.] [192—William J. Mitchell’s
The Reconfigured Eye:
Visual Truth In The Post-Photographic Era, p.
27.] Kenneth Turan, however, disagrees with Lane’s conclusion: “Navidson has still relied on FIX. Don’t fool yourself into thinking any of this stuff’s true. Grit’s just grit, and the room stretching is all care of Industrial Light & Magic.”

Ella Taylor, Charles Champlin, Todd McCarthy, Annette Insdort G. 0. Pilfer, and Janet Maslin, all sidestep the issue with a sentence or two. However, even serious aficionados of documentaries or “live-footage,” despite expressing wonder over the numerous details suggesting the veracity of
The Navidson Record
,
cannot get past the absolute physical absurdity of the house.

As Sonny Beauregard quipped: “Were it not for the fact that this is a supreme gothic tale, we’d have bought the whole thing hook-line-and-sinker” [193—Sonny Beauregard’s “Worst of Times”
The San Francisco Chronicle,
July 4, 1995. C-7, column 2. Difficult to ignore here is the matter of that recent and most disturbing piece of work
La
Belle
Nicoise et Le Beau
Chien.
As many already know, the film portrayed the murder of a little girl in such comic reality it was instantly hailed as the belle of the ball in the palace of the grotesque, receiving awards at Sundance and Cannes, earning international distribution deals, and enjoying the canonical company of David Lynch, Luis Bufluel, Hieronymus Bosch, Charles Baudelaire, and even the Marquis De Sade, until of course it was discovered that there really was such a little Lithuanian girl and she really was murdered and by none other than the wealthy filmmaker himself. It was a slickly produced snuff film sold as an art house flick. Emir Kusturica’s
Underground
finally replaced
Nicoise
as the winner of the Cannes Palm d’Or; an equally absurd and terrifying film though gratefully fictive. About Yugoslavia.

The Navidson Record
looks like a gritty, shoestring documentary
La
Belle
Nicoise et Le Beau Chien
looks like a lushly executed piece of cinema. Both pieces are similar in one way: what one could believe one doubts,
Nicoise
because one depends upon the moral sense of the filmmaker,
The Navidson Record
because one depends upon the moral sense of the world. Both are assumptions neither film deserves. As Murphy Gruner might have observed: “Rumpled
vs. Slick. Your choice.”]

Perhaps the best argument for the authenticity of
The Navidson Record
does not come from film critics, university scholars, or festival panel members but rather from the I.R.S. Even a cursory glance at Will Navidson’s tax statements or for that matter Karen’s, Tom’s or Billy Reston’s, proves the impossibility of digital manipulation. [194—The records were made public in the Phillip Newharte article “The House The I.R.S. Didn’t Build” published in
Seattle Photo Zine
v.12,
118, p.92-156.]

They just never had enough money.

Sonny Beauregard conservatively estimates the special effects in
The Navidson Record
would cost a minimum of six and a half million dollars. Taking into account the total received for the Guggenheim Fellowship, the NEA Grant, everyone’s credit limit on Visa, Mastercard, Amex etc., etc., not to mention savings and equity, Navidson comes up five and a half million dollars short. Beauregard again: “Considering the cost of special effects these days, it is inconceivable how Navidson could have created his house”

Strangely then, the best argument
for
fact is the absolute unaffordability of fiction. Thus it would appear the ghost haunting
The Navidson Record
,
continually bashing against the door, is none other than the recurring threat of its own reality.
[195—Despite claiming in Chapter One that the more interesting material dwells exclusively on the interpretation of events within the film, Zampanô has still wandered into his own discussion of “the antinomies of fact or fiction, representation or artifice, document or prank” within
The Navidson Record
.
I have no idea whether it’s on purpose or not. Sometimes I’m certain it
is.
Other times I’m sure
it’s
just one big fucking train wreck.]

[196—195 (cont.) Which, in case you didn’t realize, has everything to do with the story of Connaught B. N. S. Cape who observed four asses winnow the air … for as we know there can only be one conclusion, no matter the labor, the lasting trace, the letters or even the faith—no daytime, no starlight, not even a flashlight to the rescue—just, that’s it, so long folks, one grand kerplunk, even if Mr. Cape really did come across four donkeys winnowing the air with their hooves…

Thoughts blazing through my mind while I was walking the aisles at the Virgin Megastore, trying to remember a tune to some words, changing my mind to open the door instead, some door, I don’t know which one either except maybe one of the ones inside me, which was when I found Hailey, disturbed face, incredible body, only eighteen, smoking like a steel mill, breath like the homeless but eyes bright and pure and she had an incredible body and I said hello and on a whim invited her over to my place to listen to some of the CD’s I’d just bought, convinced she’d decline, surprised when she accepted, so over she came, and we put on the music and smoked a bowl and called Pink Dot though they didn’t arrive with our sandwiches and beer until we were already out of our clothes and under the covers and coming like judgment day (i.e. for the second time) and then we ate and drank and Hailey smiled and her face seemed less disturbed and her smile was naked and gentle and peaceful and as I felt myself drift off next to her, I wanted her to fall asleep next to me, but Hailey didn’t understand and for some reason when I woke up a little later, she was already gone, leaving neither a note nor a number.

A few days later, I heard her on KROQ’s Love Line, this time drenched in purple rain, describing to Doctor Drew and Adam Carolla how I—“this guy in a real stale studio with books and writing everywhere,
evervwhere!
and weird drawings all over his walls too, all in black. I couldn’t unde
rstand any of it.”—had dozed of
f only to start screaming and yelling terrible things in his sleep, about blood and mutilations and other crazy %&*, which had scared her and had it been wrong of her to leave even though when he’d been awake he’d seemed alright?

An ugly shiver ripped up my back then. All this time I’d believed the cavorting and drinking and sex had done away with that terrible onslaught of fear. Clearly I was wrong. I’d only pushed it off into another place. My stomach turned. Screaming things was bad enough, but the thought that I’d also frightened someone I felt only tenderness for made it far worse.

Did I scream every night? What did I say? And why in the hell couldn’t I remember any of it in the morning?

I checked to make sure my door was locked. Returned a second later to put on the chain. I need more locks. My heart started hammering. I retreated to the corner of my room but that didn’t help. Puck, fuck, fuck—wasn’t helping either. Better go to the bathroom, try some water on the face, try anything. Only I couldn’t budge. Something was approaching. I could hear it outside. I could feel the vibrations. It was about to splinter its way through the Hall door, my door, Walker in Darkness, from whose face earth and heaven long ago fled.

Then the walls crack.

All my windows shatter.

A terrible roar.

More like a howl more like a shriek.

My eardrums strain and split.

The chain
snaps.

I’m desperately trying to crawl away, but it’s too late. Nothing can be done now.

That awful stench returns and with it comes a scene, filling my place, painting it all anew, but with what? And what kind of brushes are being used? What sort of paint? And why that smell?

Oh no.

How do I know this?

I cannot know this.

The floor beneath me fails into a void.

Except before I fall what’s happening now only reverts to what was supposed to have happened which in the end never happened at all. The walls have remained, the glass has held and the only thing that vanished was my own horror, subsiding in that chaotic wake always left by even the most rational things.

Here then was the darker side of whim.

I tried to relax.

I tried to forget.

I imagined some world-weary travelers camped on the side of some desolate road, in some desolate land, telling a story to allay their doubts, encircle their fears with distraction, laughter and song, a collective illusion of vision spun above their portable hearth of tinder & wood, their eyes gleaming with divine magic, born where perspective lines finally collude, or so they think. Except those stars are never born on such far away horizons as that. The light in fact comes from their own gathering and their own conversation, surrounding and sustaining the fire they have built and kept alive through the night, until inevitably, come morning, cold and dull, the songs are all sung, the stories lost or taken, soup eaten, embers dark. Not even the seeds of one pun are left to capriciously turn the mind aside and
tropos
is at the center of ‘trope’ and it means ‘turn.’

Though here’s a song they might of sung:

Mad woman on another tour;

Everything she is she spits on the floor.

An old man tells me she’s sicker than the rest.

God I’ve never been afraid like this.

Heart may still be the fire in hearth but I’m suddenly too cold to continue, and besides, there’s no hearth here anyway and it’s the end of June. Thursday. Almost noon. And all the buttons on my corduroy coat are gone. I don’t know why. I’m sorry Hailey.
[197—Following the release of the first edition over the Internet, several responses were received by e-mail including this one:

I think Johnny was a little off here. I wanted to write and tell you about It. We actually had a pretty rad time (though his screams were really weird and definately scarred me.) He was very sweet and really gentle and kinda crude too but we
still
had a lot of fun. It did
hurt
my feelings the
part
about my breath. Tell him lye been brushing my teeth more and trying to quit smoking. But
one part he
didn’t mention. He said the nicest
things
about my wrists. I was sorry to hear he disappeared. Do you know what happened to him?

—
Hailey. February 13, 1999.

—Ed.]

I don’t know what to do.

The locks may have held, the chain too, but my room still stinks of gore, a flood of entrails spread from wall to wall, the hacked remains of hooves and hands, matted hair and bone, used to paint the ceiling, drench the floor. The chopping must have gone on for days to leave only this. Not even the flies settle for long. Connaught B. N. S. Cape has been murdered along with his donkeys but nobody knows by whom.

For as we know, there cannot be an escape.

I’m too far from here to know anything or anyone anymore.

I don’t even know myself.

Eventually
Jed tries again to carry Wax toward what he hopes is home. He also attempts periodically to signal Navidson on the radio though never gets a response. Regrettably very little footage exists from this part of the voyage. Battery levels are running low and there is not much desire on Jed’s part to exert any energy towards memorializing what seems more and more like a trek toward his own end.

The penultimate clip finds Jed huddled next to Wax in a very small room. Wax is silent, Jed completely exhausted. It is remarkable how faced with his own death, Jed still refuses to leave his friend. He tells the camera he will go no further, even though the growl seems to be closing in around them.

In the final shot, Jed focuses the camera on the door. Something is on the other side, hammering against it, over and over again. Whatever comes for those who are never seen again has come from
[198—Typo Should read “for”.]
him, and Jed can do nothing but focus the camera on the hinges as the door slowly begins to give way.
[No punctuation point should appear here) See also Saul Steinberg’s
The
Labyrinth
(New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960).]