Brian Baker
I.
The film Contact (1997)
begins with a striking effects sequence. After the title, the film
begins with a shot of the Earth from low orbit, in shadow. On the
soundtrack, contemporary rock music plays. Both visual and aural signs
mark this to be ‘now’, our present day. The camera (virtually) begins to
recede, and as it does, the sound stage alters. A phrase ‘obviously a
major malfunction’ is heard, taken from the reporting of the Challenger
space shuttle disaster of 1986, and the music segues through 1980s pop
into disco. A phrase from the theme music of the long-running tv series Dallas
(1978-1991) is heard, as the Earth and then Moon shrink, in silhouette,
displaced by the brightness of the Sun. As the camera recedes from
Earth and travels outwards in the Solar System, other phrases from 20th
century America are heard: Richard Nixon saying ‘I’m not a crook’; Neil
Armstrong’s ‘one small step for man’; Martin Luther King’s ‘free at
last’. As the camera swings past Jupiter, we hear of John F. Kennedy’s
assassination, then Dean Martin singing ‘Volare’, and a member of HUAC
demanding ‘have you ever been a member of the Communist party?’; at
Saturn, the Lone Ranger calling ‘Hi-ho Silver’, and an FDR ‘fireside
chat’. All the while, the volume decreases, descending towards silence
as the intensity of broadcasts decrease, as the camera ‘travels’ further
out, leaving the Solar System then the Milky Way itself behind, then
moving ever faster away from tiny spiral galaxies disappearing into the
distance. The screen is then overcome with whiteness, the edge of the
universe; the screen then fades up from white, still ‘zooming out’, as
the camera shows the reflection of a window in a young girls’ pupil, who
we see finally at a desk, transmitting on short-wave radio: ‘This is
CQ, W-9 GFO’. She picks up a contact, receiving in Pensacola, Fla., some
thousand miles distant, ‘the furthest one yet’, as her father watches
benignly. She marks this on a map of the USA.
In
this sequence, political history (of the USA) is mixed up with musical
markers from popular culture and music, recognisable emblems of
particular eras. Space is signified by time: the further out from the
Sun we travel, the further back in time we seem to go. Earth is itself a
‘planet of sound’, a tiny mote of dust in the sky, soon lost to our
vision, but human broadcasts penetrate the vast distances of space in a
way that human beings themselves cannot. The earliest human broadcasts,
travelling at the speed of sound, may (without degradation) have reached
around 100 light years distant by the end of the first decade of the
21st century, though it would take alien intelligences to have developed
receiving equipment far beyond the tolerances and sensitivity of even
the most advances arrays on Earth to be able to hear (and later, watch)
them. Contact plays a strange double game in its opening minutes: while the opening effects sequence emphasises physical distance (the time taken for signals, at the speed of sound, to travel across space), the images of the girl at her ham radio emphasises instantaneity of ‘contact’, that distance in space
is countermanded by broadcast technologies, where a form of
tele-presence makes it seem as though someone a thousand miles distant
is sitting right next to you. The physical realities of sound, distance
and time are then subject, in Contact,
to a wider fantasy of instantaneity of contact, one that will have
increasingly metaphysical (as well as psychological/ emotional)
implications as the narrative progresses.
Despite its Anglophone and North American bias, Contact’s
opening is of particular interest because it reads contemporary history
through sound broadcast technologies: radio (wireless), in particular.
The universe itself, of course, emanates radio-frequency signals as part
of its fabric, not only from sources such as pulsars but as part of
background radiation, and the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Life program
(SETI) has used radio-telescope arrays to try to filter out possible
extra-terrestrial transmissions from the background ‘noise’ of the
universe. By focusing on radio, Contact
emphasises the fundamental contiguity between human activity (sound
broadcasts) and the universe itself, and marks human history through its
audio footprint, almost as if human life began with radio, Marconi as
Adam. Extra-terrestrial scientists, perhaps, will gauge human
‘intelligence’ (or otherwise) through its capacity to produce audio
transmissions. Paradoxically, Earth becomes visible as a ‘planet of sound’.
Radio
is one of the sound technologies which came into being in the second
half of the 19th century, which also included telegraphy, the telephone,
and recording via phonograph cylinders (principles later developed into
the gramophone/ phonograph, and audio tape). Jonathan Sterne, in The Audible Past (2003), has argued that sound recording is continuous with the 19th century’s cultures of death, in that it seeks to preserve
the voice of the dead subject and prevent decay. Sterne connects this
to the development of canning technologies in the food industry and also
to the arts of embalming. In a sense, preservation of the voice is then
a way to efface or overcome time and its depredations (allowing that
the recording technologies themselves do not degrade over time). Sterne
argues that emblematic of the reifying imperatives of what he calls
(derived from Matei Calinescu) ‘bourgeois modernity’, a way of ‘managing
time’ itself: sound recordings offer ‘repeatable time within a
carefully bounded frame’.(1)
However, Sterne goes on to suggest that ‘the scheme of permanence [...]
was essentially hyperbole, a Victorian fantasy. Repeatability from
moment to moment was not the same thing as preservation for all time’.(2) Recorded sound offered the possibility of repetition, of playback of the voice after death; however, playback itself, on cylinders or gramophone records, relies on the same technologies of material inscription
that constitute recording: the needle touches the vinyl groove, and in
touching, marks it, degrades it. Repeated playback is another slow fade
into white noise, undifferentiation, and death.
The
term ‘white noise’, which will become increasingly important to this
article, is drawn from the frequency spectrum. Within the audio range,
we hear different tones or notes when a particular frequency length
predominates. When all frequencies within the audible range are equally
present, resulting in a ‘flat’ sound spectrum , then what the human ear
hears is ‘white noise’. White noise is undifferentiated sound, deemed
‘white’ through analogy with light, where the presence of all visible
frequencies results in white light. The relation of transmission or
signal to white noise is one that that has haunted analogue sound
reproduction technologies from their inception.
Most notably, Jeffrey Sconce has investigated the history of this ‘haunting’ with regard to sound and vision technologies. In Haunted Media
(2000), Sconce outlines three recurrent ‘cultural fantasies’ that have
accompanied the development of telecommunications technologies: (1)
‘these media enable an uncanny form of disembodiment’; (2) the
imagination of a ‘sovereign electronic world’, an ‘electronic
elsewhere’; and (3) ‘the anthropomorphization of media technology’, most
visible in a fascination with androids and cyborgs.(3)
In his chapter on radio, Sconce suggests that ‘enthusiastic celebration
of the emerging medium [was accompanied and challenged by texts ]
suggesting an eerie and even sinister undercurrent to the new electronic
worlds forged by wireless’.(4) In fact, we might suggest that sound broadcast technologies enabled an uncanny form of embodiment
through tele-presence, the belief that the other was somehow present in
the room as you spoke to them via radio or telephone. In either sense,
we can ascertain that telecommunication technologies disrupted the
‘metaphysics of presence’ diagnosed by Jacques Derrida and others as
central to Western metaphysics, a privileging of speech over writing, of
the voice over text, that makes the voice the embodiment of truth and of authenticity. In this phonocentrism,
as Derrida called it, writing is seen to be derived from a pre-existing
orality, a ‘natural’ form of communication that is prior to ‘the
fateful violence of the political institution’.(5)
Derrida, of course, sought to undo this binary which privileged voice
over writing, and argued that writing preceded, and was the condition
and ground of speech. After the advent of telecommunications
technologies, voice itself becomes disembodied, no longer physically
connected to a subject who speaks. Tele-presence is at one and the same
time presence and not-presence, offering the fantasy of ‘instantaneity of contact’ but at the same time emphasising that the other speaker is not there.
When talking with Bernard Stiegler about television in Echographies of Television (2002),
Derrida asserts that technologies of the image are bound up with acts
of ‘magic’ or ‘faith’, ‘by our relation of essential incompetence to
technical operation’.(6) ‘For if we don’t know how something works’, Derrida continues,
our
knowledge is incommensurable to the immediate perception that attunes
us to technical efficacy, to the fact that “it works”; we see that “it
works”, but even if we know
this, we don’t see how it “works”; seeing and knowing are
incommensurable here. [...] And this is what makes our experience so
strange. We are spectralized by the shot, captured or possessed by
spectrality in advance. [...] What has [...] constantly haunted me in
this logic of the spectre is that it regularly exceeds all the
oppositions between visible and invisible, sensible and insensible. A
spectre is both visible and invisible, both phenomenal and
nonphenomenal.(7)
Although
Derrida uses the discourse of visibility here, his addition of
‘sensible and insensible’ crucially extends the idea of the ‘specter’ to
the frequency range of audio, in its disruption of presence. In his
attempt to situate the problematic of how telecommunication technologies
in relation to human knowledge, Derrida allows media to escape
discourses of science, the rational (or of knowledge itself) and so it
enters the numinous, the ‘electronic elsewhere’, where our relation to
it can only be uncanny (and/ or theological: we must believe
that it works, even if we don’t know how it works, a ‘technical
efficacy’ that must always elude us.) Telecommunications technologies,
broadcast media, are then spectralized, ‘haunted’, by this strangeness.
In terms of the developing communication technologies of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, both transmission and reproduction
of sound are ‘haunted’ by ghosts. Recording the voice, according to
Sterne, is part of a culture of preservation and memorialization of the
dead; Joe Banks, in ‘Rorschach Audio’, reports that ‘Edison and Marconi
both believed that radio technology might enable contact with the
afterlife’.(8)
In his short story ‘Wireless’ – analysed by Sconce and Warner – Rudyard
Kipling imagines a young man who, entering into a kind of fugue state,
becomes a kind of human ‘receiver’ (or we might say ‘medium’) for the
transmission of one of Keats’ poems, which he writes down as if
transcribing a message: a poem the young man does not consciously know.
The mystery of this act is maintained by the short story until the end:
the act of transmission itself, a kind of aetheric emanation picked by a
‘sensitive’, remains unexplained. Here we might also return to the film
Contact.
The young girl, Ellie Alloway, asks her father, if she had powerful
enough equipment, ‘Could I talk to ... the Moon?’, going on to add
‘Jupiter?’, ‘Saturn?’, and then, ‘Mom?’. When her father unexpectedly
dies, the loss of her mother is compounded, and after the father’s
funeral, immediately prior to a cut across time to the older Ellie
(played by Jodie Foster), we see the girl, once again transmitting on
her short-wave radio, calling ‘Dad, this is Ellie: come back? Dad, are
you there? Come back.’ Talking across space is twice encoded as talking
to the ‘electronic elsewhere’, hoping to hear the voices of the dead.
In the film Frequency
(2000), John Sullivan (Jim Caviziel) plays a man who lost his own
father Frank (Dennis Quaid) in a fire when he was young. It begins in a
similar way to Contact:
on the soundtrack, dislocated phrases from radio broadcasts are heard
while the visual track shows image from space, here the plumes of solar
flares that will create unusual atmospheric conditions on Earth on two
days 30 years apart, 10 October 1969 and 1999. Effects-shots of the
aurora borealis behind the Queensborough Bridge in New York emphasise
both material locatedness (this is a New York story: Frank was a fireman
while John is a detective in the NYPD) and
strangeness, the presence of the uncanny, the sky ‘haunted’ by the
lights. The bridge also symbolises the connection between the two
time-periods, as the film intercuts between them, and largely focuses on
the relationship between Frank and his young son. The technological
‘bridge’ between the time-periods is short-wave radio, and the backyard
mast is prominently displayed against the borealis several times. Frequency matches time through
space: John still lives in the house he grew up in , while his widowed
mother lives elsewhere, and the film regularly intercuts the older John
pacing around the house, himself haunting its spaces, with images of the
family life he lost upon the death of his father.(9)
The ham radio itself, discovered in the NYFD trunk of his father,
becomes an uncanny object; its old valves fail, but the receiver seems
to start into life of its own accord when Frank begins to broadcast on
it in 1969, and John receives its messages across time. When John
informs his father that he is to die in a warehouse fire on October
12th, he alters the timeline (we see direct evidence of this when
contact with his father on the radio causes his father to burn the desk
he is sitting at, the burn mark appearing under John’s hand as he
speaks): his father survives, but it is only at the end of the film
(after a long diversion into a serial-killer procedural narrative) that a
kind of wish-fulfilment of emotional restitution is enacted. John’s
final ‘new’ timeline gifts him with the family life he lost once his
father died: Frequency’s imagination of haunted radio directly undoes the trauma of loss.
Both Contact and Frequency,
although science fiction films (one a ‘first contact’ narrative, the
other a time-paradox story), can both be said to incorporate elements of
what is known as ‘EVP’, or electronic voice phenomena. This is a focus
of para-psychological research whereby it is understood that the
‘voices’ of the dead can be found imprinted upon the ambient sounds (or
‘noise’) produced when recording in an ordinary empty room. This began
in the mid-1930s with the artist Attila von Szalay, who, in his
darkroom, heard ‘the voice of his deceased brother calling his name.’(10)
After unsuccessful attempts to record these voices on a phonograph, he
was finally successful when using a reel-to-reel tape recorder in the
1950s. This technological advance is important. Around the same time,
Friedrich Jürgenson, a Swedish documentary film-maker, attempted to
record birdsong (also on tape recorder) in his garden, but found, on
playback, that he ‘heard his dead father’s voice and then the spirit of
his deceased wife calling his name’.(11) Upon publishing his findings in 1959, his book Radio Contact with the Dead was read by the Jungian psychologist and philosopher, Dr Konstantin Raudive. Raudive’s book Breakthrough
(1971) was literally that in the popular imagination, and is a curious
example of what might be termed ‘spiritualism in the age of electronic
reproduction.’ The book’s subtitle, ‘An Amazing Experiment in Electronic
Communication with the Dead’ marks its significance as a ‘scientific’
text that purports to reveal the intersection of spectrality,
life-after-death communication and analogue recording devices. In the
book, Raudive ‘hears’ or decodes voices of the dead (‘speaking’ in
English, German, and Raudive’s native Latvian) emanating from the
background hiss and rumble of recorded ambient sound: he asks questions
of an empty room and records the ‘answers’.
Raudive’s
work is a common touchstone for critics considering haunted media. For
Sconce, Raudive presents himself and the EVP project as radically
antithetical to Freudian depth-psychology:
the
Raudive voices did speak of an immortal essence that transcends
alienating models of Darwin, Freud, Sartre, and all other demystifying
assaults on the transcendental dimension of the human psyche. The
irony, of course, is that Raudive remystified the soul through the
validating authority of an electronic technology.(12)
However,
Sconce asserts a fundamental homology between Freud’s and Raudive’s
intentions: ‘At their core, both of these ‘interpretative’ sciences
shared the hope that their practices overcome the trauma of a profound loss’.(13)
Joe Banks, in ‘Rorschach Audio’, takes an extremely sceptical view,
suggesting that ‘EVP experimenters are psychologists who have
misunderstood their own work; [...] [they] are inadvertently reproducing
acoustic projection experiments’, making the analogy to Rorschach
ink-blots.(14)
Mike Kelley, in ‘An Academic Cut-Up’ also refers to Rorschach blots,
but understands Rorschach’s experiments both as technological
Spiritualism and as a way-station in the history of twentieth-century
experiments in sound, particularly in the musical avant-garde: ‘one is
hyperconscious of the fact that the distortion of the recording process
[in EVP] is the primary experience,’ he suggests.(15) My own reading of Raudive’s work would emphasise three main elements:
(1) the centrality of naming
in EVP. Von Szalay hears his brother call his name; they call Raduive
by name, over and over again: Konstantin, Koste, Kosti. Naming,
interpellation, calling into being: a crucial way of making meaning in
EVP seems to circulate around the name, the act of being identified by
EVP event, call into presence by an act of hearing/ decoding.
(2)
The centrality of trauma to the experience. Von Szalay and Jürgenson
hear the voices of dead relatives; Raudive’s recently departed mother
looms large in the catalogue of voices, and she is the first catalogued
figure to be identified in in Breakthrough; on reading transcriptions of the EVP events, Raudive ‘hears’ many dead friends.(16)
(3) Thirdly, the common technological device here is magnetic audio tape.
Where
Kittler notes the gramophone as a storage device / externalisations of
memory becomes a metaphor for a figure for human consciousness itself, tape has
different qualities: ‘tapes can execute any possible manipulation of
data because they are equipped with recording, reading, and erasing
heads, as well as with forward and reverse motion’.(17) (Kittler also notes, pace
Paul Virilio, that it is war, here the experiments by BASF and AEG used
by the Abwehr in World War Two, that accelerate magnetic tape
production, rather than steel tape, towards general or consuming usage
in the post-war period.)(18) As N. Katherine Hayles has it, in How We Became Posthuman (1999), ‘audio tape was a technology of inscription, but with the crucial difference that he admitted erasure and rewriting’:
Whereas
the phonograph produced objects that could be consumed only in the
manufactured form, magnetic tape allows the consumer to be a producer as
well. The switches activating the powerful and paradoxical
technoconceptual actors of repetition and mutation, presence and
absence, were in the hands of the masses, at least the masses who could
afford the equipment.(19)
Hayles
writes of how ‘audio tape may already be reaching old age, fading from
the marketplace as it is replaced by compact discs, computer hypermedia,
and the like’.(20)
The compact cassette is now one of Bruce Sterling’s ‘dead media’, and
its successor, the CD, is also on the way to obsolescence.(21)
However, it is the very imperfections of magnetic tape, the ‘wow’ and
‘flutter’ of the thin, flexible tape passing over the heads, which
renders it perfect as a ‘haunted’ technology. Like the ‘ghosting’ of
analogue television signals (soon also to be obsolete), the imperfection
of the analogue media artefact is part of its quality, its form. It is,
of course, it is very imperfection as a recording media – its hiss, its
rumble, its flutter – which is the very condition of possibility for
EVP. As documentary features on the DVD of White Noise
point out, without the hiss of tape – or in contemporary technology,
used by EVP experts, the noise generated generated by the hardware of
solid state Dictaphones – they can be no coalescing of the EVP ‘voice’,
no recording of the phenomenon.(22) Without noise, there physically can be no signal.
The
main association for popular research into EVP is now called the
Association Transcommunication. From the ATransC website, it is clear
that the crucial motivations for the EVP practitioner is to contact a
lost loved one: to undo trauma. One of their projects is called ‘Big
Circle’, which attempts to contact the lost loved ones who now reside in
the ‘etheric’. Its directors, Lisa and Tom Butler encourage DIY: all
you need is a tape deck (portable compact cassette recorder),
microphone, and if possible a computer with spectrum analyzers and
filters and other sound processors to enhance the listening experience,
to hear the voices.(23) As Raudive himself writes, ‘the ear cannot hear the voices without technical aids’.(24)
It is clear from the AA-EVP/ATransC work shown on the documentary that
the voice phenomena are much simpler to decode than Raudive's: the
voices of monoglot (English, in the USA) and seem much more immediately
comprehensible. (Indeed, on page 19 of Breakthrough,
it seems that the polyglot discourse is a condition of a claim to
paranormal status for a voice event: polyglot + ‘sensible meaning’ =
‘voice is paranormal’). It is the democratisation (and technologisation)
of mediumship that is so striking here – this is not a spectacular
event, complete with female medium, ectoplasm, table rapping, or other
visual spectacle: it is seemingly demystified, as simple as taping while
asking questions of an empty room.
Where, then, do these voices come from?
Kelley offers several means by which to explain the EVP phenomena. The
first is that they are indeed some kind of extra-sensible emanations,
‘the tortured voices of those in Hell, [...] the taunts of demons, or
[...] the by-products of some numbing mental process that occurs after
death’; the second, that they are psycho-acoustic patternings of
geography: ‘the haunted house, the poltergeist phenomenon, are explained
as a result of the continuing presence of traumatized spirits or stored
psychic energy, associated with a given place’.(25)
William Burroughs, in his own essay on Raudive, ‘It Belongs to the
Cucumbers’, is highly sceptical, and suggests that the voices are more
likely ‘imprinted on the tape by electromagnetic energy generated by the
unconscious minds of the researchers or people connected with
them’.(26) I find a third possibility more suggestive: that EVP
phenomena are the coming-to-attention of the human ear to the ‘planet of
sound’ around us. Kelley writes:
We
are programmed in such a way to screen out as much extraneous
information as possible; otherwise we would not be able to deal with the
amount of external stimuli that constantly bombards us. A tape recorder
does much the same thing that putting a seashell, or a simple tube, up
to our ear does – it makes us aware of the amount of white noise that
continually surrounds us.(27)
Jonathan Crary, in Suspensions of Perception (2001)
argued that the idea of attention became increasingly investigated in
the fields of both psychology and optics in the 19th century. This is
because of the perceived tendency in human beings (particularly workers,
it should be noted) towards distraction,
in what Crary calls ‘an emergent economic system that demanded
attentiveness of a subject in a wide range of new productive and
spectacular tasks, but whose internal movement was continually eroding
the basis of any disciplinary attentiveness’.(28) The conditions of a
‘modern’, industrial, increasingly consumption- as well as
production-oriented economy, pulled the human subject in two directions:
firstly, the bombardment of what Walter Benjamin has called the ‘shock’
of modern existence (urban living, machinery, speed, advertising, etc)
creates an increasingly distracted subject in an increasingly
kaleidoscopic world; and secondly, that the very economic conditions
that produce this kind of world require a working subject who is able to
maintain long periods of attentiveness to complex and repetitive tasks
(over a 10- or 12-hour working day in a factory, for instance). The
disciplining of visual attention that Crary diagnoses can be extended to the field of sound reproduction and transmission; aural
attention is required to prevent a kind of distraction of the senses
through sonic overload in a world where ‘the skies are filled with
electro-magnetic slums’, ‘aural garbage [...] aether talk [... and] dead
city radio transmissions’.(29) EVP, then, in Gothicised form, makes
this disciplining of attention itself ‘visible’: it is what we do not,
or cannot, hear. The image that is repeated continuously in Contact,
of Ellie Alloway concentrating on the sounds transmitted through her
headphones (‘no-one listens any more’ says her immediate superior) is
emblematic of the necessity of aural attention in modernity: Ellie must
shut out the very ‘planet of sound’ that the film begins with in order
to contact the ‘electronic elsewhere’.
II.
Fictional
or filmic EVP narratives are, like the phenomenon itself, organised
around overcoming ‘the trauma of a profound loss’.(30) Contact,
which, despite being about the search for extra-terrestrial
intelligence is a classical EVP narrative, expresses Ellie Alloway’s
search for transmissions explicitly as a recuperation of the loss of her
mother and father, and when she does indeed achieve ‘contact’ with
extra-terrestrials, they appear in the very physical form of her Dad. Frequency also
has at its centre the loss of a parent, where radio-transmitted EVP
phenomena become stitched into a time-paradox narrative where the trauma
of loss may not only be overcome, but undone. Both of these films concentrate upon audio transmissions, but another, better-known film that incorporates ‘spirit voices’, Tobe Hooper’s 1982 film Poltergeist,
has at its centre the ‘snow’ of a television screen after transmission
on a channel has ended (in the days of analogue signals and
‘closedown’), the audio white noise accompanied by the unsettling light
of a cathode-ray tube broadcasting no signal. The poster for the film
featured the young girl Carol Anne (Heather O’Rourke) sitting directly
in front of this television, listening intently to ‘voices’ only she
could hear. The tag-line for the film, dialogue spoken by Carol Anne,
is: ‘They’re here.’
Where Contact and Frequency concentrated upon the loss of the father-figure, the crucial triangulation in Poltergeist
is female, and maternal. While the father Steven Freeling (Craig T.
Nelson) has been morally compromised by his complicity on dubious land
deals that have sited housing developments on old Native American burial
grounds (a failure of paternal authority more common in the films of
producer Steven Spielberg), it is the daughter Carol Anne who becomes
the subject of the malign attentions of the poltergeists. When she is
taken to the ‘elsewhere’ in this film, the family call upon the services
of a team of para-psychological researchers from UC Irvine. When the
‘scientists’, with technological gear of high-end EVP experimenters
(video and audio recording, motion sensors, and so on) cannot solve the
problem of poltergeist activity, they call in the medium, Tangina
Barrons (Zelda Rubinstein). It is she who realises that the phenomena
are ‘spirits’ who have not gone into the ‘light’ of the hereafter, and
that a malign entity has captured both Carol Anne and the attention of
spirits, preventing them from ‘passing’; and it is she who sends Carol
Anne’s mother Diana (JoBeth Williams) into the ‘portal’ to retrieve her
daughter. When they emerge back into the ‘real’ of the house, mother and
daughter are covered in some kind of ectoplasm, a (re)birth-fluid that
emphasises feminine and maternal materiality. The core of Poltergeist
is the recuperation of the mother-daughter bond through the
ministrations of the female medium/ midwife, preserver of arcane
knowledge and practices that always-already escape the scientizing
discourses of the UC Irvine team (who are led by a female scientist, but
whose practices are resolutely coded as masculine: rational,
technological, and deeply flawed).
These
three films, then, can be constellated as a ‘parental’ mode of EVP
narrative, in which trauma is focused upon the parent/child relationship
and emotional dynamic. Another group of EVP narratives, which will take
up the remainder of the essay, are Orphean in nature. Orpheus has, in
the twentieth century, been a myth recurrently taken up by artists and
writers who wish to explore artistic creation and transmission, but also
the imperatives of loss and recuperation. In his Afterword to his
translation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s ‘Orpheus’ sequence of sonnets, the
poet Don Paterson writes that Rilke wrote the poems at such speed that
it seemed to Rilke as though they were being broadcast from elsewhere
(as in Kipling’s ‘Wireless’), where poetic creation took the form of an
‘enigmatic dictation’. This exogamous conception of writing leads
Paterson to propose the poet as a kind of medium:
Someone
so sensitive that they become not only a lightning rod for all the
crackling static of the culture, but also a satellite-dish, a ‘receiver’
(to use a Rilkean favourite) for things a less precisely attuned and
calibrated sensibility would never be aware of. These individuals
possess no supernatural powers, but do have abnormally strong sense of
what’s on the wind for us.(31)
Orpheus
is, of course, a mythic figure for the poet, one whose gift is bound up
with loss. Orpheus, once a priest of Dionysus, is, at the time of his
marriage, a priest of Apollo. The son of a river god (or perhaps Apollo)
and Calliope (the Muse of epic poetry), Orpheus is gifted with a
supernatural ability to play the lyre: his song charms the trees (who
uproot to come nearer the singer), softens stones, alters nature itself.
On his wedding day, his bride Eurydice, fleeing the bee-keeper
Aristaeus, treads upon a snake, is bitten, and dies. The grief-stricken
Orpheus thereby descends into the Underworld, and through song,
persuades Persephone and Hades to allow Eurydice to accompany him back
to the upper world, on one condition: that he does not look back at his
wife as they ascend. Unfortunately, as they near the upper world,
Orpheus does look back, either in fear, or anxiety, or through love of
his wife – and her shade retreats to the underworld. Despite his
efforts, she may not be released a second time. In some versions of the
myth, Orpheus then forswears the company of women and takes young male
lovers. Precipitated by this rejection, women of a Dionysian cult, in an
intoxicated frenzy, tear Orpheus to pieces; his head and lyre float
down the river, still lamenting the loss of Eurydice, until they are
washed ashore on Lesbos, while his shade is reunited with Eurydice in
the underworld. The head of Orpheus becomes an oracle until Apollo,
fearing competition with his own oracle at Delphi, silences the head and
places Orpheus among the stars.
The
figure of Orpheus has, from the Medieval period, through the
Renaissance, Romanticism and to Modern and contemporary literature, has
been re-imagined as: (a) an emblematic narrative of loss of the loved
one; (b) a figure of the transcendent power of art and poetry; and (c)
the imagination of the boundary between the real or quotidian and the
transcendent or divine. Contemporary SF, fantasy and gothic/ horror
fictions have used an Orphean narrative pattern, of a journey to an
‘underworld’, to construct narratives of anxiety, trauma and loss.
These include films such as Solaris
(2002), where a voyage to a sentient star, and thereby contact a
transcendent other, is patterned on the male protagonist’s search for
the restoration of his lost wife, horror/ SF crossover texts such as Event Horizon
(1997), where the scientist Weir’s interest in the demonic ship is
predicated on undoing the trauma of his wife's suicide; and, in
different ways, both White Noise (2005) and Frozen (2005), films I will consider in more detail shortly.
While
all these films connect EVP phenomenon with loss, there are significant
differences, which can be expressed in tabular form. (Bold indicates
video-based EVP; italics signify audio-based EVP.)
Parental Orphean
Female Poltergeist Frozen
Contact
Male White Noise
Frequency Orphée
In Jean Cocteau’s Orphée (1950),
Jean Marais plays Orpheus, a poet who fears losing his gifts, and who
suffers the loss of his wife when Orpheus’s Death (personified by Maria
Casares) falls in love with him, and deceives him by sending messages
via car radio which he then copies down and presents to the public, to
great success, as his own work. Some of these are numbers (referring to
the coded broadcasts of the BBC to French Resistance fighters in
Occupied France in World War 2), but some have a dislocated, surreal
quality: ‘A single glass of water lights up the world’; ’Jupiter
enlightens those he would destroy’. The exogenous nature of Orpheus’s
poetry – it is actually composed by his great (and deceased) young
rival, Cégeste – connects Cocteau’s Orphée
to Rilke, but also to EVP: these are disembodied voices, calling via
sound broadcast technologies, with mysterious intention. Orpheus asks
the angel Heurtebise ‘Where can they be coming from?’ It is, of course,
from the ‘electronic elsewhere’. Cocteau’s Orpheus does indeed retrieve
his Eurydice from the underworld, and although the prohibition about
looking back at his wife remains intact, this version of the narrative
does not end in disaster (and dismemberment), but in a kind of triumph
over Death, albeit mysterious and problematic.
In White Noise (2005), communication devices abound: cell phones, answer phones, TV, video, computer screens all feature heavily in the mise-en-scène.
These devices, lyres for the electronic age, allow a bridge to be
formed between quotidian and other- or under-worlds. The haunted nature
of telephonic/ telegraphic communication is figured directly as
communication with ghosts, and particularly with the spirit of a lost
wife. Michael Keaton plays Jonathan Rivers, an architect (the sign of
ratio, of Apollo) whose second wife tells him she is pregnant before she
drives into the city for a meeting. She never returns. Her car is
found by the river with a flat tyre, and her body is eventually
discovered up-river, taken there by the tide. In the protagonist’s name
and this location we find reference to the Styx/ Lethe imagery that is
much more overt in Frozen,
but also the birth imagery that Brian Jarvis notes as significant in
the J-horror variant on haunted tape and the invasion-horror narrative, Ringu. (32) (In Frozen,
Annie, the lost sister, has also recently had a child; we see the baby
with the ‘abandoned’ father.) Ultimately, the narrative descends into
both spirit-invasion horror (malignant spirit entities as in Poltergeist)
and, in a curious genre-swerve, serial killer narrative, where the
wife’s death was murder, not accidental, and is one of a sequence that
the serial-killer offers up to the malign spirit entities. Frozen makes
the same swerve when revealing, at the point of the female
protagonist’s death at his hands, that the abandoned father of his
sister’s child is in fact the murderer of both sisters.
At first, in White Noise, televisual imaging technology (home movies shown on TV) are not connected to EVP. As in the figure of John Anderton in Minority Report (2002),
whose watching of holographic images of his lost son are meant to
comfort but merely compound the trauma of loss, Rivers seeks out
videotapes of his life with his lost wife as an index of unrecuperated
trauma. The promise of all these haunted technologies is, ultimately,
the restoration of a form of life to the dead: as Terry Castle notes in The Female Thermometer,
the phantasmagoria entrepreneur/inventor Etienne-Gaspard Robertson,
when introducing the show ‘emerged, spectrelike, from the gloom, and
addressing the audience, offered to conjure up the spirits of their dead
loved ones’.(33) The bridge formed by these technologies, as we saw
with Frequency, is not only to the spirit world, but also to the past, the time in which the loved one was not lost.
This literal nostalgia, this return home to a time before loss/trauma, is indicated in the mise-en-scène of White Noise.
Rivers’ home and office are photographed with a cool, grey-blue
palette: chrome, brushed steel and glass predominate. After he moves to
an apartment following his wife’s death, this becomes still more
emphasised, the blue light of cathode ray screens reflecting from
glass-brick walls. When Rivers is approached by an EVP specialist,
Raymond Price (Ian McNeice), who tells him Rivers’ wife has contacted
him, the initially sceptical Rivers visits Price’s home. The mise-en-scène here
is markedly different: the clapboard house contains rooms lit in shades
of red and brown, the space cluttered, old rugs on the floor. Unlike
Rivers apartment, this base is homely, heimlich
perhaps, although part of the clutter is the EVP equipment itself:
tapes, video recorders, computer, and a DAT player. The room bespeaks
the past, and the technology of the past; it is as though Price has
heard voices through a crystal radio set in his front room (echoing the
ham radio activities of Ellie Alloway in Contact).
In a sense, this is exactly what he has been doing; EVP as
do-it-yourself radiophonics.(34) If Price’s house is homely, then
Rivers deliberately dislocates himself from ‘home’. He moves from a
house shared with his lost wife to a cold, modern apartment building in
the city. Perhaps the house is haunted by the memories of his wife, and
indeed it is here that Rivers is seen watching home movies; and the
move to the blank new apartment becomes an attempt to escape these
ghosts. But it is here, through tape and EVP that the ghost of his wife
manifests itself. It is the very blankness of the modern apartment
that calls forth the ghost.
This
narrative, like others mentioned above, combines Orpheus motifs,
technology and the numinous or transcendent. They place a male questing
protagonist at the centre of narrative agency. In the figures of von
Szalay, Jurgenson, Raudive, and in White Noise
Rivers and Price, EVP is represented as a male activity, the technology
perhaps inverting the paradigm of female mediumship. As Sconce and
Marina Warner note, from the Fox sisters on, there is an interesting
implication of gender in Spiritualism – a gender politics. Sconce
writes: ‘spiritualism empowered women to speak in public, often about
very controversial issues facing the nation’.(35) In spirit
photography, it is William Crookes or William Hope photographing female
mediums; and in spiritualism, the female does not speak:
she is a medium for others. The media (photography/ tape) that will
prove the scientific fact of the existence of post mortem life (spirits,
voices) is coded as male; the mediums that are the focus are female. In
White Noise,
Rivers visits a blind female seer, a medium, who cautions him against
EVP, warning him not to ‘meddle’. The conflict between the archetypal
female medium, and the technophile male EVP experimenter, bespeaks a
kind of gender problematic in these Orpheus narratives, and perhaps an
attempt to wrest the figuring of the ‘electronic elsewhere’ into the
realm of the masculine.
Frozen
(2005), on the other hand, is certainly a text which uses EVP motifs –
the imprinting of a strange image on to surveillance CCTV tape – but in
the service of a narrative which focuses on female, and sisterly, loss.
When Kath, the surviving sister (Shirley Henderson) of a disappeared
woman visits the alleyway where CCTV images of her sister were captured,
she has a vision whereupon she stands upon tidal sands, while what she
takes to be her sister walks upon a sandbank across and inlet or creek.
As the film progresses, and the number of these visions increases, the
Orpheus patterning becomes more apparent: a boat is seen, rowed by the
blind ferryman Charon, and when she discusses her visions with a
counsellor/priest (Roshan Seth) he explicitly decodes them as a
Greco-Roman underworld.(36)
The
counsellor/priest’s discourse runs directly counter to the scientific,
demystifying impulses of Raudive and other EVP experimenters. The
priest says to Kath: ‘some things are beyond understanding and we just
have to accept them as mysteries’. At the same time, when Kath shows
him a printout of the uncanny image on the CCTV tape, in return he shows
her a Rorschach ink blot, indicating that her meaning-making, of Annie
as a dead and her visions as uncanny, is faulty. Later in the film, the
image on the ‘blot’ becomes clearer, like a very slowly developing
Polaroid photograph. It is revealed to be a close up of a two-shot
taken while Annie and Kath were on a roller-coaster, their happy faces
pressed together. Whilst Kath only finds herself, not Annie, wandering
the underworld sands in her visions, this image does suggest (albeit
sentimentally) that the two sisters are reunited in death. Through
Kath’s visions, which we see as a cinematic ‘real’, the afterlife is
presented as a kind of truth or reality, just as in EVP.
Frozen
returns to the figure of the female visionary, though Kath’s mediumship
is overtly bound up with trauma and loss, and possible psychological
disintegration. Kath ends up ‘channelling’ her own death, seeing her own
face, when Jonathan Rivers in White Noise sees
the deaths of others. He does not see his own death, even though his
EVP visions become proleptic/prophetic/prophylactic in form. However,
the last image of White Noise
is Rivers, with his wife, amidst the visual snow of blank videotape
playback, looking back out of the screen at us. Where Kath and Annie
are bound up with each other, White Noise’s final visual gesture is to turn to the audience.
Why?
The film is explicitly a cautionary tale, and on-screen titles warn
that one in 12 EVP events our threatening in nature. It is also a
warning against the Orpheus narrative, of looking back over one’s
shoulder, of nostalgia. After Rivers funeral, his son, first wife and
her current husband sit in their car. The radio comes on of its own
accord, and we hear Keaton’s voice, as an EVP, say ‘I’m sorry’ to son
who, somewhat curiously, seems pleased by this event. What is striking
about certain sequences in this film is not the use of EVP, nor the
spirit-invasion narratives, but the images of the son, playing alone, on
the father, in another room, watched blank tape in a search for his
wife. In inhabiting nostalgia, in wanting to restore the past, in an
inability to overcome the trauma of loss, Rivers neglects his son, and
present time. The real locus of anxiety (and pathos) in White Noise is not the bereaved lover, but the neglectful/forgetful father.
III.
There is one film that uses EVP motifs I have deliberately refrained from mentioning so far: M. Knight Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense
(1999). There is indeed a ‘lost wife’ in this film, but, of course, the
‘twist’ in this narrative is that Dr Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis), the
psychologist who treats a traumatised child who ‘sees dead people’ (Cole
Sear, played by Haley Joel Osment) is himself dead, only a ghost. Cole
tells Crowe that the ghosts ‘only see what they want to see’, and while
this bears upon Crowe’s ongoing self-delusion as a ghost who believes
himself to be alive, it also indicates the failure of rationality and
scientific/ medical discourse to deal with the real cause of Cole’s
trauma: he really does see dead people. As the narrative nears its end,
Dr Crowe realises that the causes of his own death lie in the roots of
his rational world-view. His home invaded by a traumatised former
patient, Crowe is shot, and the film seems to take place after his
recovery, but in fact occurs after his death. Crowe ‘fails’ Vincent Grey
(Mark Wahlberg) because he can only see Vincent’s symptoms as internal
and psychological terms, whereas the truth lies externally: he, too,
contacts the dead. On playing back a tape of an interview with Grey,
Crowe hears what he has blocked out all this time, the voices that haunt
and torture Grey. The EVP manifestation finally makes clear to Crowe
the limits of his own discourse; and this way is the path not only
towards understanding his own condition (as ghost), but a form of
healing for himself and Cole, who stands in and recuperates the damage
that he could not undo with Vincent Grey. The Sixth Sense
is then another recuperative narrative, and as he leaves the film (and
Earth), Crowe is rewarded with the knowledge of his wife’s ongoing love
for him.
It
is important to note, by way of conclusion, that the films I have been
considering here are mainly grouped around the years 1997-2005, with Orphée and Poltergeist
preceding them. All the films deal with analogue technologies: radio,
audio tape, video, CCTV. These analogue technologies (excepting CCTV)
were in decline in this period, and most have now been supplanted by
digital formats: digital and web radio; vinyl records and audio tape by
cd and digital downloads; video tape by dvd and video files. (Analogue
television signals are being ‘switched over’ to digital in the UK at the
time of writing, nearing the end of a process that has taken several
years.) For audio tape especially, a nostalgia-inflected culture has
developed, around the ‘mixtape’ as a particular form of transmission and
distribution (consumer-led) of music, and vinyl has continued to be
supported by DJ and remix culture. At the end of their time as consumer
technologies of sound and visual reproduction, it seems that analogue
technologies particularly became haunted by the ‘ghosts’ of nostalgia
and by the very imperfections that rendered them unheimlich.
The degrading qualities of reproduction of audio and video tape or
vinyl records inserted them into history as material objects, and
personal history as bearers of the marks of playback (particularly
evident in the scratches on vinyl), but the associations conjured by
this entry into history and memory themselves produced ghosts.
As
I have argued in the course of this essay, it is the very properties of
these media which are the ground and condition of their ‘haunted’
phenomena, the imperfections of aural and visual reproduction. Without
noise, as I have stated, there can be no signal. Does the sonic
‘cleanness’ of digital reproduction mean that communication technologies
will no longer be uncanny? The use of digital sound recorders by
contemporary EVP experimenters suggests not: computers, hard disks or
digital cameras have their own ambient footprints. There is a difference
between analogue and digital reproduction; however, Bernard Stiegler
suggests that both can create anxiety:
Analogico-digital
technology continues and amplifies a process of suspension [that
interrupts one state of things and imposes another] that began a long
time ago, in which the analog photograph
was itself only a singular epoch. And so the process in ancient, but
the current phase of suspension – in the form of digital photography –
engenders an anxiety and a doubt which are particularly interesting, but
particularly threatening.(37)
It
is, then, perhaps sound and visual reproduction itself which is
haunted, rather than specific technologies. In digital artifacts and
glitches, we may still see ghosts.
1 Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2003), p.310.
2 Sterne, p.332.
3 Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2000), pp.8-9.
4 Sconce, p.62.
5 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (1967), trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p.36.
6 Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, Echographies of Television, trans. Jennifer Bajorek (Cambridge: Polity, 2002), p.117.
7 Derrida and Stiegler, p.117.
8 Joe Banks, ‘Rorschach Audio: Ghost Voices and Perceptual Creativity’, Leonardo Music Journal, 11: 2001, 77-83 (p.83).
9
In John Cheever’s ‘The Enormous Radio’ (1947), a radio set picks up the
conversations of other families in an apartment block, allowing the
owners of the radio to eavesdrop on others. The result of this
‘haunting’ is that the couple’s own suppressed history, its secrets ,
come to the surface once more. John Cheever, ‘The Enormous Radio’, The Enormous Radio and Other stories (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1953)
10 Sconce, p.84.
11 Sconce, p.84.
12 Sconce, p.90.
13 Sconce, p.90; p.91.
14 Banks, p.80.
15
Mike Kelley, ‘An Academic Cut-up, in Easily Digestible Paragraph-Size
Chunks; Or, the New King of Pop, Dr. Konstantin Raudive’, Grey Room 11, Spring 2003, 22-43 (p.38).
16 Konstantin Raudive, Breakthrough: An Amazing Experiment in Electronic Communication With The Dead, trans Nadia Fowler (New York: Taplinger, 1971), p.35.
17 Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1986), trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), p.108.
18 Kittler, p.106. See also Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (London: Verso, 1989)
19 N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Infomatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p.209; p.210.
20 Hayles, p.208.
21 Bruce Sterling, ‘The Life and Death of Media’, Sound Unbound: Sampling, Digital Music and Culture, ed. Paul D. Miller (Cambridge MA: MIT Press), pp.73-82.
22 ‘Hearing is Believing: Actual EVP Sessions’; ‘Making Contact: EVP Experts’; ‘Recording the Life After at Home’. White Noise dvd release, Entertainment in Video, 2005.
23
The American Association of Electronic Voice Phenomena (AA-EVP) became
ATransC, Association Transcommunication in 2010: http://atransc.org/,
accessed 13/1/2012.
24 Raudive, Breakthrough, p.108.
25 Kelley, p. 25; p.29.
26 William S. Burroughs, ‘It Belongs to the Cucumbers’, The Adding Machine: Collected Essays
(London: John Calder, 1985, pp.53-60 (p.58). A similar conception of
‘imprinting’ can be found in Nigel Kneale’s television play The Stone Tape (BBC, 1972).
27 Kelley, p.37.
28 Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2001), p.29.
29 Iain Sinclair and Chris Petit (dirs.), London Orbital (2002); David Toop, Ocean of Sound: Aether Talk, Ambient Sound and Imaginary Worlds (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1995), p.270.
30 Sconce, p.91.
31 Don Paterson, ‘Afterword’ to Orpheus: A Version of Rilke (London: Faber, 2006), pp.61-72 (p.63).
32 Brian Jarvis, ‘Anamorphic allegory in The Ring, or, seven ways of looking at a horror video’, The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies 3, November 2007. http://irishgothichorrorjournal.homestead.com/ring.html, accessed 1 July 2009.
33 Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p.147.
34
Here we find a connection to narratives of uncanny wireless, such as
Kipling’s ‘Wireless’ , Friedlander’s ‘Goethe speaks into the phonograph’
(reproduced in Kittler) and the film Frequency.
35 Sconce, Haunted Media, p.49.
36 Jayne Steel, who collaborated with the director of Juliet McKeon on the script of Frozen, has confirmed to me that narrative elements of the film are explicitly drawn from the Orpheus myth.
37 Bernard Stiegler, ‘The Discrete Image’, Echographies of Telelvision, p.149.
http://irishgothichorrorjournal.homestead.com/