A fever dream and the distance of sickness
O Panama — James Benning, Burt Barr (1985)
New year, new films. First, something short (the film, that is). Next week, we’ll be making our way toward the ‘pink cinema’ of 1960s Japan. From illness to coolness.
— Here he is, dying. Finding himself dying (or very ill) in a room, a sort of Malone-dying-who-hasn’t died quite yet. For James Benning and Burt Barr, the subject of this not-quite-dying is a young man (played by Willem Dafoe) tonsured on his sweated-on bed in a clinically turquoise room. This is the entirety of it. But not quite. It is not a hospital.
— Fever and feverishness are proximate to a kind of psychedelia-without-wellness, affording all the visions and displacements of the mycelia-junked mind without the eroticism of transcendent discovery; a transfiguration away from euphoria and toward a kind of jarring, dissociative distance. The fever is a trip without desire. It is erratic, and it obliterates our ability to find our way out. The fever rises; somebody pats our wet little forehead. We twist and writhe between taut, elongated rage and a kind of pathetic puddle of flesh. Images creep in. A sip of water.
— Dafoe gurns. He tightens his brow. Floppingly, he hauls his wracked body out of the sheets and makes a series of unanswered phone calls on a black telephone (he is very, very sick; he is reaching out, unanswered). Between bouts of clarity and mute stupidity, a day passes. Barr and Benning’s camera isolates pieces of New York rooftop and storefronts smothered in snow (the montage does not connect his looking with our seeing them). Emerging, a cautious dialectic between frigid coolness and tropic heat.
— Key here (in theory) is not the illness but the dropsical visions it affords, the jars and jolts of some blossoming other world. We fly away from the apartment and enter a Lapsarian landscape filled with a waterfall, bushy trees, a campsite, a zebra. The zebra is chubby and squat, and shows little interest in Dafoe. Later, we see him holding a picture of it (the picture doubles exactly a shot we see later, in media res, of the animal).
—The original negative print of the film was lost to a fire in 1987. What remains is a restored version based on what survives of the 16mm distribution print. A fractured echo of an absentee experience, the obsolescence of the original version of the film echoing—perhaps this is very bait—the unrecoverable stuff of the fever itself. Between Barr and Benning, what emerges is a kind of rhapsodic rumination on illness’s rote banality and the ecstatic landscapes of the fever-ridden mind. Exit normality, Enter euphoria. So it goes.
— Is this sufficient to make us fetishize the fever (that is to say, all fevers), and to seek their disfiguration? It feels like Barr and Benning don’t reach deeply enough toward the primacy of the subconscious, refusing to offer us a ravishing and liberated Experience (that is to say, formally wild/unusual disturbances of sight and seeing sensu Brakhage or Conrad). Instead, this zoological daydream seems to exist in a realm of peculiar coherence, shot with a static camera; a not-disoriented lens. We don’t quite trust it as a dream. Odd, that.
— Counterpoint. Barr and Benning refuse to make the scenes within the apartment anything less than weighty and tender, despite all the discomfort. Meanwhile, the stillness/silence of Dafoe’s morbid malaise (the figure in the room) reverberates with a kind of internal weight not extended to the carefully choreographed scenes of man and beast (a hallucination, a memory). In its clinically conditioned visions, the world of the subconscious-fragment is not disarrayed or subject to any kind of perspectival ferment. Our own perception/self-knowledge tells us differently; of how a dream is not the sudden appearance of a zebra, but its flickering, smashed disfiguration. I felt like the fever was being subordinated to the sick bed, and was being forbidden from slipping—visually, ecstatically—away. You could come away believing that dreams are just stuff that happens in another place, a camping trip in the summertime. Wild animals out of place.
— Relying on fast cuts and fissures in time, the baseball segment of the film—explosive, unexpected—emerges as a more arousing invocation of the logic of dreams. The players (Dafoe included) leap and harass the optic of the lens, facing toward it; throwing balls into its eye (dream as aggravated blinding). Hard cuts, like billiard balls. Bodies teleport and crash, a hand rattling against the wire. This feels like the staccato recall of an actually-expired moment, unlike the dream of the zebra which is always-already made of predictably surreal dream stuff. It is almost dramaturgically demure; of a man hanging out with an out-of-place creature, the images neither degraded nor expanded.
— But I enjoyed these failings and fallings-short, in so far as they drag you repeatedly, monotonously, back to the heavy weight of the body in the bed, one that is never fully allowed to slip away from all its writhing and agonizing (like illness itself). The apartment and the baseball court become more akin to a kind of fucked-up mind palace. The clearing in the forest? Almost denatured, diluted - and ironically tranquil. You could imagine that Barr and Benning are having fun with the limitation of the language of dreams, locating their potency—instead—in the sickened body and the manipulation of shots and cuts in a city’s courtyard (things from which we cannot escape). Put another way: you can’t describe a dream, but you can embody its rhythm. The zebra becomes a kind of herring (red).
— We’re flung away from the dream world through its almost lazy Lapsarianism, trapping out foot—instead—in the cattle grate of the dreaming body, which is where all of the interstitial intrigue happens. Dafoe’s fever-dream becomes a kind of parody of what you think a fever might look like. We’re just some guy staring at a feverish figure, wondering what’s going on inside their head. It is the baseball segment that wags its finger at us, winking. And it’s certainly not like Benning has never toyed with forms of perspectival fragmentation. In Grand Opera (1978), superimposition and flicker-film techniques make-strange the sight of a woman walking through a door.
— Trapped body, figure in winter. It was Shklovsky who observed how an accumulation of minor tragedies reveals the torment of the universal. These lacerations accumulate through a being-aware of Dafoe’s sweat, his boredom, his lassitude. He’s fed up and impatient. Light trickles in through the window. And the city beyond, shot in abyssal silence; the spectre of urban anomie, of lifeless living. Desperation.
— The outside. The immediate visual field of what lies beyond your window or can be glimpsed over your fence or around the corners of walls. Leaning back, I can catch a little glimpse of the pavement and the tarmac. People cross by, their voices often preceding or trailing behind them. We are almost never permitted to witness Dafoe’s looking out (no match cutting, no linear link between ‘man gazing’ and ‘object of gaze’), always obliterated by spaces of black leader that sever the possibility of connection. It is night, there are shutters. We hear voices (submerged). The world beyond may as well not exist. We are with him, but not of him. Yet again, Barr and Benning refute the shreds of his dreams and visions. They might be stand-ins, ciphers. The work of guessing. Distance is achieved, even as we hurtle toward a moment of empathic understanding.
— Otherwise/other words, there are limitations to how far or how deeply a lens can take us into the terrain of the hallucinatory. What arises is a kind of ironic disturbance, not least through that most Benningtonian technique of hand-written script that scrolls across the screen. It is largely unreadable, undecipherable; only hinting at the root of his sickness. This is supposed to be disarrayed, fragmented. We pick out a word or two. The dream is poking fun at itself. It affords a kind of deeply simmered minimalism (the same that he’d pursue in his North of Evers [1991], a road trip movie of quixotic and quizzical ambivalence), even while it cracks apart like a dropped egg on a kitchen floor.
— His staring face, in the clearing of a forest. It is as expressionless as the face of his sickness, without the betrayal of a flicker of emotion. The sickness enters the dream, sweat dripping through. Bedroom or forest, where is the/his sickness actually located?
— Dream. Dafoe sings a patriotic American song (the national anthem, in fact). These are the only words he mutters. It’s a nice little joke. We’re brought close to the side of the sick man’s bed, but we’re also flung very far away from it; hurtling through a sequence of recursive hallucinations that constantly scupper their own significance (in so far as the forest scene is almost too perfectly ‘unreal’, too coherent, too studious). Is this a joke? Blinking, we’re back at the bedside, almost standing; observing but not seeing. Just as we cannot see Dafoe’s seeing-outside of his own windows, we cannot see inside his head. When he watches a film (we can hear it, a cowboy movie), we cannot see the screen (at first); only his face, looking - expressionless, just as is it in his bathroom, the forest clearing).
— Now. O Panama excites in the ways in which it disrupts perspective (ours), digging gulfs and trenches between memories, visions and reflections. It is a kind of negative montage, creating lapses and short-circuits in our ability to make sense of it or to bind its pieces together. In its place, we discover a kind of burdensome corporeality (our awareness of Dafoe’s boredom, his sickened body), and a strained desire to push through into the caverns of his mind. We seek the sickness (his), and find only the tatters of a tantalizing otherness. I think this is why I really like it; through my bafflement, even boredom. It is short, but it feels like days might have passed. Twenty eight minutes that wear the trousers of twenty eight days. Meanwhile, our own imaginings begin to work their way through.
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