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copying

By , on May 15th, 2005

Digital poetics has an excellent piece on The Ring and House of Leaves and nostalgia for the days of analog and its degradation:

Marshall McLuhan’s notion that any new medium takes as its content the form of the previous medium is clear here: digital media makes visible and reprocesses the very form of analogue media. Works like House of Leaves and Ringu/The Ring are, in a deeply sad and nostalgic way, about the lost and fading analogue world, where perfect and endless reproduction was still a dream, still a myth, and therefore still terrifying.

I agree that House of Leaves is a good…er…analog to The Ring, and I might also add David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest to the mix. In addition to copies of copies, we also have the trope of the unviewable, unknowable, and, in some cases, uncopiable film (or video). The same anxiety exists here about the destructive potential of the moving image, whether the film degrades or the mind of the viewer. This also helps explain the fascination around a film like Decasia, which is all about the decay of film, and is, of course, available on DVD. While digital media allows near-perfect duplication, the ever-increasing speed of format change makes me wonder how long it will be before those quaint silver discs we use today will be as valuable as AOL CDs and Betamax videos. Infinitely reproducible, yes, but still possibly impermanent.

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  • sutrix

    Yep, I’ve always wondered how different House of Leaves would be if the medium was a VCD or DVD instead of a VHS tape. It is, after all, logical to assume that someone would transfer a video to a digital format–especially a video as widely talked about as The Navidson Record. The simple answer here is that perhaps Zampano was simply unaware of digital media in general. So he failed to employ it in his fiction (of course, I don’t have any firm proof to prove that the Navidson Record was pure fiction).

    I do wonder why the Ring didn’t employ any digital storage media, though.

    As for the future of storage media, I think it’s gonna be portable hard drives. They’ve been around for a while, but it’s only now that they’ve become cheap enough.

    Once hardware movie players start offering plugin architecture via which we can upgrade them to play specific future formats (like we can install DivX on our computer and then watch ripped DVDs), limited format storage media would, according to me, simply lose their appeal.

  • Julie

    I don’t buy this in relation to House of Leaves. The central question is WHETHER the film exists, not the medium in which it exists and how it is reproduced. It is a foregone conclusion of Johnny Truant that he will never "see" the film–he doesn’t spend any time at all trying to track it down. All his research time goes into (attempting to) interview the people who purport to have seen it.

    If there is any anxiety about transmission in House of Leaves, it is about paper-based transmission of narrative, e.g., the impossibility of compiling Zampano’s work into a book, the transmission of Johnny’s story (and Zampano’s) via the web. And maybe that speaks to the author’s idea of nostalgia, but an even older nostalgia than for analogue media–it’s a nostalgia for a (pre-modernistic) time when books and narratives held their shape, reflected in the narrative fear that the house can’t hold its shape.

  • Erik

    Julie – I think HofL is about reproducibility and verifiability as much as anything else, and I think you’re right about the nostalgia for paper. Everything degrades, though, including Truant’s mind and the text itself. Taken with IJ and the Ring, you get a sort of denial of direct experience, resulting in psychosis and death. So…what you’re saying doesn’t differ too much with the original argument about degradation or "holding shape". I really need to re-read that book.

    sutrix – yeah.

    Now that I think of it, we can throw in Gibson’s <i>Pattern Recognition</i> with its unknowable, fragmented, network-distributed "film". That’s as likely a future for digital distribution as any.

  • sutrix

    Julie, I’m a bit confused about your comment. You say that Johnny never spends any time trying to track the film down, when he specifies specifically that he tried to get hold of a copy, but just couldn’t.

    Now I understand that Johnny is unreliable, and we can never take anything he says at face value (forget for a moment whether Johnny’s even a real person–in the book’s fictional boundaries, of course), but is there any specific reason why you think he doesn’t even look for the Navidson Record and assumes it’s non-existant?

    And also, what do you mean when you say Johnny Truant spends time interviewing people who have seen it? It was Zampano who did all the faux-research, didn’t he?

    Or, wait, are you of the opinion that they are both the same person?

    I’m not agreeing or disagreeing with you; just about anything about the book can be right or wrong–no, strike that; no opinion about the book is a hundred percent right or a hundred percent wrong.

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