THE GAME (2)

THE DOUBLE-TIMED SEARCH FOR MEANING

One Mor

e Round of

TheoryTHE DOUBLE-TIMED SEARCH FOR MEANING

To review: memory is a facet of

consciousness that reflects signs

to us of remembered

people, events, and situations that we have internalized.

But memory, when it re-projects our relation to

the object-now-sign has another ability: to

reproduce and re-project both how we saw the object of the gaze as how we were seen by it during the

internalization process.

In every memory, we are positioned

and we are capable of positioning ourselves in

relation to the remembrance.

Memories are iconic. They

present pictures.

At some level, every

memories pictures us in relation to its

content.

Iconic memory is part of an overwriting

process.

Mental conception acts like a

balloon caption in a comic

strip.

Information writes itself into the

image produced from our gazing at the object and the object’s gazing at

us.

When we internalize the object, we internalize the sign of the object and its

gaze. Signs have value to us and they are given value by the discourse or system

of representation constructing them.

When we internalize signs and the over-writing

process produced by our thoughts about these

signs, this phenomenon can only occur within an ideological or discursive

frame of reference.

The frame of memory both orders meaning attributed to the sign (by us and by a particular discourse) and it

is ordered by our seeing and the image of memory

seeing us.

When we internalize the

object, we internalize the sign of the object and its iconic gaze.

We are over-written as we are over-seen:

that is seen in the instant [parole] and in the long view of the icon’s potential

[langue].

This is how memory sees us into a

discursive and/or ideological frame of

reference.

The Function of Memory in The

Game

THE DOUBLE-TIMED SEARCH FOR MEANING

The Signs that Memory Recalls

In The Game memory is

connected to the father’s suicidal jump out of his

world into his sons’ lives.

The Signs that Memory Recalls

That is where the dead father

“lives”: in his sons' relationship to him, in their

memories of him.

The Signs that Memory Recalls

That is his “relational grave,”

at least, to maintain his

“ghostly” relation to them.

The Signs that Memory Recalls

In the film, performative actions must

counteract the power of memory.

The Signs that Memory Recalls

In the film, wisdom is a performative action that puts

into the movement of an event

The Signs that Memory Recalls

– the act of suicide –

The Signs that Memory Recalls

as a way of releasing from memory the

father’s hold on his son’s life.

The Signs that Memory Recalls

The enactment of the pseudo-

suicidal event is the

strange wisdom of

performative enactment in The Game.

Performative Time

& Sequence

In the game within The Game the

performance staged by

C.R.S. drives Nicholas to

enact the act of suicide

so that its difference becomes

more real to him than the memory of the father’s

suicide.

The Unwise Act

While the act of

suicide offers

nothing worthwhil

e,

The Unwise Act

nothing

worth repeati

ng

The Unwise Act

for most peopl

e,

The “Wisdom” of the Act!

the film would

have us believe

that

The “Wisdom” of the Act!

it is benefici

al to Nicholas

Von Orton.

The “Wisdom” of the Act!

In this film, wisdom is the act performed, the

act of suicide in its actuality when Nicolas

Von Orton jumps off the skyscraper to his re-experienced “death.”

The performative act has the power to

trump memory – to separate him from his father’s enactment of suicide all those years

before.

The Transfer of Registers

The performative act also separates

him from something else: memory itself as the predominate

site of his life, simply because he has spent his

life trying to avoid memories of his

father.

Transfer of Registers

Now memory itself is transcribed into a different register,

into the transcription of memory as

secondary.

The memory of his father’s suicide as

secondary to lived experience.

Animating the Sign Anew

When Nicholas jumps off that Skyscraper, he enlivens the sign,

breaths life into the sign-becoming

as opposed to the tyranny of the rememberedsign-of-what-was.

Animating the Sign Anew

Nicholas’s impending death animates the memory of his father’s act,

brings it alive, moves the signs-of-memory beyond the register of signs

into the reality of his pseudo-death, that is, into an event made of signs but also made of

something more than signs – an experience of death which can’t be understood

completely even within its enactment.

Animating the Sign

The sign of his father’s death was the memory that

helps push Nicholas to his

edge.

For a very long time, this set of

sequenced signs held the power to

organize, transform, and constitute the

field of consciousness.

Animating the Sign

His father’s jump into obscurity was there as a memory of an

event-structure.

Whose “force relations” could aid C.R.S. in pushing him to his

edge – the literal edge of that high precipice he sought in “dumb”

recognition.

Animating the Sign

Ironically, when he jumps, he leaps past

the positioning of reflexive memory – past any memory’s ability to structure

his life.

After all, if he dies, there can be no

reflexive retrospective analysis on his part of the meaning of the act

of jumping into the who-knows-where?

Time DoubledOnly in this act can Nicholas’ death come

home to him, in its actuality,

and, by extension, only

through its enactment, can life come home to him as well –

Time Doubledas an event that is different from his memory of

his father’s death.

Only now can he see himself as another

person, his own person, with the

prospect of a different death, his own death and his

own life.

Timed-Out Memory

The memory of his father’s death haunted Nicholas, wrote over his existence,

doubling the son’s narrative with the father’s – which was written beyond the

grave. The father’s narrative was activated at the precise moment Von

Orton got lift off and pitched himself off the roof of his

estate for all to see.

Nicholas saw it, and from that moment on, a part of his life was arrested in that moment, held hostage to

that event, in that timed-out memory in which the past lived itself, enacted and reenacted in Nicholas’s

memory.

Timed-Out Memory

In that way was time doubled!

But Nicholas doubles the memory of “the act”

differently when he jumps off the roof at the end of the

film.

Timed-Out Memory

In that way was time doubled again . . .

He enacts the act and sets up a parallel “jump time”

and duplicate “jump space” that cuts through memory,

eliminating it as the key element of his existence.

Time Doubled

In this way is time doubled differently.

Time Doubled

Time Doubled

A FUTURE CONTINGENCY

Time Doubled

Until that point, there was always a future

contingency that was derailing him, the

contingency of ending his life in the way that his

father did.

Time Doubled

Until that point, his future was always moving towards him in a certain

determinacy.

Time Doubled

Remember, when the game ended, and Nicholas had been

stripped of everything (money, power, dignity,

even his brother), he chooses to end his life precisely as he father

did all those years ago.

Time Doubled

Time Doubled

Time Doubled

and out of his father’s narrative as well, for

this last “scene” reduplicated his

father’s act, son-like-father, but the

“identical” was both identical and different!

THE TWIST

The act whose promised memory all these years did not

deliver.The act of reduplication

was the last act of a script written many

years hence.But something

happened on the way down . . .

THE TWIST

HIS PAST MEET HIS FUTURE IN THE PRESENT

OF LIVED CONFUSION.

THE TWIST

He DIED his own death in all its

vivid presence, and that LIVING

DEATH BECOME LIFE AGAIN

became a means of separation.

The Search for Signification in The Game

The Search for Signification

The Search for Signification

The search for signification in this film is a search to pair certain signifiers with certain signifieds.

The nature of the game demands that.

The actions of the game bring about a desire for the “eternal question”:

The Search for Signification

“what is the game?”

The Search for Signification

To understand the meaning of the game, Nicolas must try to CONNECT THE DOTS: the actions he witnesses (signifiers) with the motivation of CRS ("Consumer Recreation Services") to determine the real meaning of signified-action.

In the film, he is endlessly tries to pair signifier with signified.

The Search for Signification

Only at the end of the film does he realize that the signs, while of immense importance, are less important than the experience produced from not knowing, from losing his ability to connect signifier from signified, from LOSING the ability to oversee his empire through controlling the signs before him, from losing complete control of the narratives that C.R.S. presented to him, and finally

The Search for Signification

to the signified-meaning of his father’s death for

him.

The Search for SignificationThe Game

proceeds in order for him to learn this

not-knowing, which severs

signifier-memory-

image from signified-memory-

meaning, so he can cut the

cord of the memory that

has buried him in his father’s

grave.

The Game is a game of signification, of the

density of signs meaning what they

don’t appear to mean.

Finally, the signs in memory force him to

sever their connection to his father’s death,

so that . . .

The Search for Signification

he can

reclaim his own narrative, his

own deat

h, and by

extension, even for a brief extended

moment, his

own life.

In the Coffin, the Breath of Life

Von Orton, back from the Dead

Time Doubled

We see the father’s death, and so does

Nicholas.

But the scene of the son locked in

the tomb-like darkness is every

bit as eerie.

Time Doubled

Dumped in a coffin in Mexico, Nicholas must

live through/thru the darkness of the grave, in its doubled darkness

--

-- because he has been entombed all these years in his father’s

grave and now his own as well.

Foreshadowing: the jump into the trash bin.

Foreshadowing

Foreshadowing

Foreshadowing

A QUESTION FOR YOU: HOW MUCH OF NICHOLAS’ BEHAVIOR CAME IN REACTION TO C.R.S.’s PROMPTS AND HOW MUCH OF IT CAME FROM THE MEMRORY THAT WAS LEADING

TO DEATH’S DOOR ALL THOSE YEARS?