[DOWNLOAD] "Trauma and Becoming-Art in Gregg Araki's Mysterious Skin and Asia Argento's the Heart is Deceitful Above All Things (Critical Essay)" by Tom O'Connor ~ eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Trauma and Becoming-Art in Gregg Araki's Mysterious Skin and Asia Argento's the Heart is Deceitful Above All Things (Critical Essay)
- Author : Tom O'Connor
- Release Date : January 01, 2011
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 133 KB
Description
IN HER ANALYSIS OF THE SEXUAL ABUSE AT THE HEART OF MARK FROST AND David Lynch's surrealistic Twin Peaks (1990-91), Diane Stevenson convincingly argues that our typical tendency is to disown the reality of abuse (as well as incest) in everyday family life. In a culture where denial is the norm, the effects of sexual trauma are not easily integrated into our everyday forms of communication. Rather, they can be imbued with fantastic meanings or resonances. In this way, fantastic phenomena exist "where the inner meets the outer" because they produce "a confusion of realms" as well as a "transgression of [rational] limits" (78). Mired in the ambiguities of the fantastic, an abuse survivor like Laura Palmer can even perceive the negative side of her abuser as a completely separate person--and this impossible fusion of her father Leland and the sexual predator Bob becomes a fundamental aspect of Twin Peaks' narrative. As I will explore below, Gilles Deleuze's theory of becoming-art, because it offers a more empowered view of both conscious and unconscious forces, is a more effective method for analyzing the significance as well as overcoming the effects of trauma than Freudian/Lacanian psychoanalysis--the dominant theoretical paradigm utilized in trauma studies. More specifically, this article will analyze how Deleuze's becoming-art, which is not solely fantasy or illusion but a consciousness-transforming, problem-solving operation, can be a more useful and clarifying analytical tool in trauma studies than the psychoanalytic concepts of sublimation, catharsis, and testimonial resolution. Gregg Araki's 2004 Mysterious Skin (based on Scott Heim's 1995 novel of the same name) and Asia Argento's 2004 The Heart Is Deceitful above All Things (based on the 2001 mock-autobiography by J. T. LeRoy/Laura Albert) are two recent independent films that hearken to becoming-art's ability to mold the fantastic effects of trauma into productive narratives of becoming (or what Deleuze calls "transcendental empiricism" [Difference 68]). Because these particular films can be read as challenging the fundamental assumptions inherent in a psychoanalytic approach to trauma studies, they provide an alternative way of understanding the bodily and psychic effects of trauma, as well as a potentially more thorough means of transforming them in a real-world context.