THE REALM OF THE EXPERIENTIAL: DAY NIGHT DAY NIGHT

Just last week I watched Julia Loktev’s “Day Night Day Night.” This is a film about one ambiguous 19-year old girl in preparation to become a suicide bomber. Like anther film I recommend “Paradise Now” the lack of dialogue, or much of any semiological framework for that matter left me in total mental disarray, a feeling I’ve grown to be more comfortable with especially when reading ethnographies for my “Gender, Nationalisms, and the State” class. Like the unknown content of the purloined letter, these texts resist an objective semiological analysis. Rather, each positions the subjective experience of ‘women and resistance’ above more salient representational frameworks, disrupting signifying practices in a way that incurs a Lacanian fragmentation of the self and differentiated self.

For a modern thriller, “Day Night Day Night” affixes an inordinate amount of time on the most basic objects of study—the human face. It is mostly a 94-minute emotional flipbook featuring Luisa William’s brooding features. Throughout the film her face maintains an emotional gravity, yet the emotional register is dynamic, obscuring any hint of motive or identity. A mash-up between documentary and emotional thriller, the film toys with the notion of the role of cinema in reproducing a form of reality. Not only is there no plot besides what the audience brings to the idea of a young girl preparing for the bombing of Times Square, there is almost no dialogue— admittedly I almost lost all tolerance for the kind of ‘mind-game’ that the film plays on.

For example, five minutes is spent on the girl brushing her teeth, clipping her toenails, packing, unpacking, and repacking her few belongings. These banal, subjective human activities take on significance because they are performed in a ritualized manner. They refer to what Lacan might interpret as metaphoric substitutes that displace interpretation, in the same way that language only displays the latent connection between signifier and signified. Unlike the kind of thriller I was expecting, the minimalist focus on this woman’s lived experience—clipping her toenails!—elicits a slightly uncanny repositioning of the viewer to the latent content of Luisa’s mind. In fact, with this cinematic fixation, the viewer is forced to empathize with Luisa, and for me, well I found myself hoping she would succeed—solidying the Lacanian fragmentation of self (comfort of the gaze) and the differentiated self (suicide bomber).

Why is this? I think Freud’s concept of the ‘uncanny’ and Lacanian notion of ‘the mirror stage’ both provide insight into the formation of cinematic introspective relationships. But I wish to locate my experience in the larger framework which the film’s director clearly draws upon. For example, the horrific backlog associated with the word ‘terrorism’ and ‘terrorist.’ The word’s origins refer to the ‘terror’ and upheaval after the French Revolution, but it is now used to morally delineate between opposing state and non-state sanctioned ideologies.

The kind of ‘terror’ drawn upon in this movie is particularly salient to the question of women and resistance movements. In my class, “Gender, Nationaliisms, and the State”, I’ve learned from reading multiple ethnographies that even the most basic concepts—are constructed in infinitely diverse positionalities. Many of these texts rely on the Lacanian notion that language conceals feminine realities—especially reflected during times of cultural crisis or displacement. This is a notion which brings to light the complicity usually covered by a nationalist discourse. The terms “motherland” “empowerment” “liberation” “political” “terrorism” and “feminism” are words defined by the binary nature of language. “Motherland” for instance evokes a kind of Freudian security of the mother’s womb for the infantilized/oppressed nation, and in separation, the necessity of its citizens to defend ‘her’ from external threats. “Terrorism,” on the other hand, is understood as an internal threat—an attack on ‘innocent’ women and children—and therefore a double attack on the self through the mother/self.

The limitation of conceptualizing of female ‘martyrs’ without resorting to the word ‘terrorist’ is difficult in modern English discourse—resulting from the compression of diverse, subjective experiences to the simplistic nature of the sign. This moralistic framework demarcates violence on the basis of gender. Think of the term “friendly fire” that is so often used in the media to describe the military occupation of Iraq. For me, I think of little boys playing toy guns. Yet, some words incur a moral judgment based not on any reality, but on the arbitrary nature of the sign on any given period in time.

However, films like “Day Night Day Night” are refreshing insofar as they blur the line between subjective experience and imagined ‘universal reality.’ Instead, they provoke sliding of signifiers triggering new forms of representation and introspection.