Marx: The Video (A Politics of Revolting Bodies)
| September 26, 2013 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 01, Number 1, September 1990 |
|
Laura Kipnis
University of Wisconsin, Madison
A note on the mise-en-scene: There are large projections –stills, film clips, etc.–behind the action (referred to in the text as KEYS) in many scenes. There is also a Greek chorus of DRAG QUEENS (or DQs) who pop in and out of the action (or are KEYED over the action) in other scenes.
FADE UP ON:
1. MARX'S ROOM, he is
lying in bed, carbuncular,
in pain. ROLLING TEXT OVER:
Karl Marx was born in Germany in 1818, and died in
London in 1883, having been deported from numerous
European countries for revolutionary activity.
Throughout his life he suffered from chronic and
painful outbreaks of carbuncles--agonizing skin
eruptions--particularly during the years he was at work
on his magnum opus, _Capital_. His 30-year
correspondence with Frederick Engels, his friend and
collaborator, deals regularly and in great detail with
the state of his own body.
DISSOLVE TO:
2. CLIP _La Marseillaise_ King: What is it?
SUPER TITLE: 1789 Minister: Sire, the
Parisians have taken the
Bastille.
King: So, is it a revolt?
Minister: No sire, it is
revolution.
FREEZE on king
V/O: Once power resided
in the person of the King.
The people's task was
clear. Get rid of the
king.
3. CLIP: Berlin wall V/O: Once power resided
going down. in repressive state
bureaucracies. The
people's task was clear.
SUPER TITLE: 1989 Smash the state.
4. STILL dead Ceausescu V/O: At certain moments in
history power is centralized
and visible, the sites of
repression are clear and
identifiable; resistance
movements arise out of
those relations of
subordination and
antagonism.
5. STILL Postmodern V/O: At other moments the
urban landscapes task is less clear. Power
is entrenched, but
dispersed. Where does
power reside? Who are the
agents of change?
TRANSITION EFFECT going
back in time
6. STILLS: 1848 V/O: In 1848, Toqueville
uprising warned: "We are sleeping
on a volcano. A wind of
TITLE: 1848 revolution blows, the
storm is on the horizon."
That year Marx and Engels
completed The Communist
Manifesto. Jean Martin
Charcot, who would later
devote himself to the
study of hysteria, enters
medical school. The same
year, revolution swept
Europe. Students and
workers united, but three
years later the revolution
was toppled.
Time passing TRANSITION
7. STILLS Paris, May 68 V/O: France, May '68.
Students and workers
united in a three week
general strike, demanding
radical democratic
reforms. Momentarily,
revolution seemed
possible, but once again
that possibility was soon
dispelled. In the decades
following '68, like the
aftermath of 1848--the
defeat of forces of change
left traces, absences, an
unfilled place where
something is wanting.
Where is the repository of
those absences--where are
they buried, embodied,
misrecognized?
TITLE: MARX: THE VIDEO A Politics of Erupting Bodies
1848-1990
-------------------------------------------------------
8. SUPER: 1863 V/O BIOGRAPHER: Looking
over first image of back, fifteen years later,
MARX; he lies in bed to the failed revolution.
MARX: Dear Engels: One
thing is sure, the era of
revolution is now once
more fairly opened in
Europe. And the general
state of things is good.
But the comfortable
delusions and the almost
childish enthusiasms with
which we greeted the era
of revolution before
SUPER: Trotsky waving February 1848 are gone to
from a train the devil. Old comrades
are gone, others have
fallen away or decayed,
and a new generation is
not yet in sight. In
looming supers of addition, we now know what
Stalin, Lenin role stupidity plays in
revolutions and how they
are exploited by
Stalin looms over body scoundrels...Let us hope
that this time the lava
Mao looms over body pours from East to West
and not vice versa.
V/O BIOGRAPHER: He writes
with nostalgia and longing
for something thwarted,
for something that didn't
happen.
-------------------------------------------------------
9. DOCTOR KEYED over DOCTOR: His body just
examining room STILL. erupted...It became
Addresses camera like a battleground. The
only cure at the time was
arsenic. Terribly painful,
like a body trying to turn
itself into another body.
I think it started shortly
after his mother died. It
continued throughout his
life.
-------------------------------------------------------
10. STILLS, 19c. V/O NARRATOR: Marx took up
industrialization the task of exhaustively
superimposed on analyzing the historical
Marx's body moment in which he found
himself: the rise of
industrialization and the
inception of the working
class movement. He
stripped the facade off
Poster International capital to reveal what was
workingmens assoc. concealed: the labor in
STILL the commodity, the
alienation of the worker,
naked exploitation by the
capitalist. He looked to
the material foundations
zoom on worker body of the moment, he looked
worker injury photo to the body. His analysis
of capital relies on a
language of the body:
"production"
"consumption"
"reproduction" and
"circulation." For Marx,
the collective wealth of
the state is the body--the
labor--of the workers.
worker injuries Capital amputates the
worker from his own body;
he has phantom pain for
his missing limbs. But for
Marx, which bodies were
absent, unspoken,
unacknowledged?
-------------------------------------------------------
11. DRAG QUEEN 1: What's a
real body, a natural body?
It doesn't exist, there's
only a social body, the
body as theater,
the body that speaks,
unbidden. But in
whose language?
-------------------------------------------------------
12. MARX'S ROOM MARX: Dear Frederick: Two
Fade up on MARX, in hours ago I received a
foreground, writing. telegram that my mother is
In suit, suitcase at dead. Fate claimed one of
feet my family. I must go to
Trier to settle my
inheritance. I myself
stood with one foot in the
grave...
DRAG QUEEN CHORUS
supered over MARX, DQ CHORUS: His body just
all dressed as nurses erupted.
-------------------------------------------------------
13. DQ2: What a problem the
body is. Keeping it
confined to its boundaries
(like the lower classes).
Concealing anything that
BACKGROUND: comes out of it, or
CLIPS porn, slo-mo protrudes from it.
Certainly not speaking of
such things. The creation
of a meek, submissive
hygienic public body.
DQ2: His body just
erupted.
-------------------------------------------------------
14. Hygiene products, V/O NARRATOR: Capital
douche, dolls, float produces a disgusting
through blue sky body, so it can create new
regimes, new products, to
police it and make it
acceptable. Capital has
achieved historical
advances in the threshold
of delicacy, it produces
new varieties of bourgeois
disgust, then markets a
new and improved body
without byproducts,
without smells, to exist
in a public sphere that is
increasingly phobic about
the collective body, the
lower class body--the
mob--a body that might not
mind its manners.
-------------------------------------------------------
15. MARX'S ROOM, he MARX: Dear Fred: It is
writes in bed. clear that on the whole I
Dolly in know more about the
carbuncle disease than most
doctors...Here and there
I have the beginnings of
new carbuncles, which keep
on disappearing, but they
force me to keep my working
hours within limits...I
consider it my vocation to
remain in Europe to
complete the work in which
I have been engaged for so
many years but I cannot
work productively more
than a very few hours daily
without feeling the effect
physically...I think this
work I am doing is much
more important for the
working class than anything
I could do personally at a
Congress of any kind...I
would consider myself
impractical if I had
dropped dead without having
finished my book, at least
in manuscript.
Cut to second angle V/O BIOGRAPHER: Writing
on MARX with smoking Capital, his narrative of
factory, keyed in the conditions of the
background English proletariat, his
body broke out with "a
proletarian disease."
Marx was desperate to
finish his work, but
unable to. Instead of
writing, he was being
written. The revolution he
anticipated, the thwarted
revolution, was displaced
onto his own skin.
-------------------------------------------------------
16. MARX'S ROOM: high MARX: Dear Frederick: You
angle down on bed see I am still here and I
will tell you more, I am
incapable of moving about.
This is a perfidious
Christian illness. In the
meantime, I can neither
walk, nor stand, nor sit,
and even lying down is
damned hard. You see how
the wisdom of nature has
afflicted me. Would it not
have been more sensible if
instead of me it had been
consigned to try the
patience of a good
Christian? Like a true
Lazarus, I am scourged on
all sides.
DRAG QUEEN 3: His body
became sarcastic, taunting
the tasteful, discreet
body, the one that stays
politely behind the
scenes, the one that knows
its place like the servant
serving the master, like
the subject serving the
state. This wasn't a body
you could take into the
drawing room. This was an
ill-mannered body.
-------------------------------------------------------
17. MARX writing Dear Kugelmann: Cut,
at desk, bandaged lanced, etc, in
REAR SCREEN CLIPS short treated in every
Russian Revolution respect. In spite of this
the thing is continually
breaking out anew...I
hope it will end this
week, but who can
guarantee me against
another eruption?
DRAG QUEEN CHORUS V/O: Marx, writing
POPS ON Capital, imagining
Capital's overthrow. His
body living out his split
identifications--
DQ1: (the bourgeois who
champions the overthrow of
the bourgeoisie)
DQ3...the body begins to
embody another kind of
psyche, another sociality.
It desired transformation.
DQ2: He swathed his
carbuncles behind bandages
and focused his attention
on the working class.
CU Marx at BIOG V/O: As he nears
desk, bandaged completion of the first
volume, his carbuncles,
mobile, sardonic, and
insistent, break out in
ever new vicinities.
Seizing the flesh,
sculpting it into a body
bulging, protuberant, not
closed and finished, not
refined.
MARX: You have too low an
opinion of the English
doctors if you think that
they cannot diagnose
carbuncles, particularly
here in England--the
land of carbuncles, which
is actually a proletarian
illness. It is only in the
last few years that I have
been persecuted by the
thing. Before that, it was
entirely unknown to me.
-------------------------------------------------------
18. CLIP riot footage V/O BIOGRAPHER: Marx--who
KEYED onto his body would disavow the
high overhead onto opposition between the
body lying in bed social and the psychic as
mere bourgeois psychology
--was possessed of a body
whose symptoms mocked the
social order; it had
become grotesque: open,
protruding, extended,
secreting: in process,
taking on new forms,
shapes; his body the
figure of the new society
that had failed to emerge.
He was producing more and
more body--too much body
for a social order
dedicated to its
concealment.
-------------------------------------------------------
19. MARX'S ROOM Dear Engels: It was good
he writes on couch you did not come on
Saturday. My story--now
fourteen days old--had
reached the crisis point.
I could talk a little, and
it hurt even to laugh on
account of the big abscess
between nose and mouth,
which this morning has
been reduced at least to
reasonable proportions.
Also the violently swollen
lips are becoming reduced
closer to their previous
dimensions. May the head
of the devil go through
such fourteen days. All
this stops being a joke.
-------------------------------------------------------
TITLE: ELIMINATING THE BODY.
20. TEENAGE GIRL'S ROOM, I hate my body, god, it's
a number of TEENAGE so gross, look at these
GIRLS gabbing, shot thighs...It's disgusting,
documentary style I'm so fat...
-------------------------------------------------------
21. DISSOLVE TO:
BATHROOM, high shot
toilet, GIRL retching
-------------------------------------------------------
SUPER TITLE: THE AGE OF CONSUMPTION
-------------------------------------------------------
22. Map of the U.S. V/O: Anorexia, bulimia
little inserts of --epidemic in abundant
girls retching into western societies, post
toilets keyed over 1968. 10 to 20 percent
U.S. capitals of American women now have
eating disorders. A
symptomatic eruption of the
body. Let's wrest this out
of secrecy, out of the
private sphere and view it
for a moment as the social
collective act that it is.
TITLE: THINKING THROUGH THE BODY
-------------------------------------------------------
23. DRAG QUEEN 3: Like a body
trying to turn itself into
another body, like a body
trying to invent another
kind of social existence.
DRAG QUEEN 2: Women's
bodies as tablets of
social meaning, as sites
of regulation...
-------------------------------------------------------
24. Pills, laxatives, V/O: With our increasingly
diet products float phobic relation to the
through blue sky collective body, the
working class body, with
our creation of an ideal
public body without fat,
without snot or BO, with a
yearning for refinement,
we will the disappearance
of the body, the
containment of the mass,
the body politic, the
threat.
-------------------------------------------------------
25. Worker STILLS BIOGRAPHER V/O: Marx,
dissolve to writing history from
MARX body/ below: a history of wealth
dissolve to as labor, a history of the
riots body, a history of the
mass, his own body acting
out...
V/O: Stories told by the
SUPER: body--after the failed
STILLS hysterics revolutions of 1848 this
comes to be known as
"hysteria" and sweeps
Europe.
-------------------------------------------------------
TITLE: THE HYSTERIC IS SUBJECT TO MULTIPLE
IDENTIFICATIONS
-------------------------------------------------------
26. MARX ROOM, he is Dear Frederick: I would
writing at desk. REAR have written you sooner,
SCREEN workers but for approximately the
last twelve days all
reading writing and
smoking have been strictly
forbidden. I had a sort of
eye inflammation tied up
with very unpleasant
effects on the nervous
system. The thing is now
so far under control that
I can again dare to write.
In the meantime I had all
kinds of psychological
reveries, like a person
going blind or crazy.
-------------------------------------------------------
27. STILL: V/O: Marx's symptoms make
"Lecon clinique their appearance around
de Charcot" the time that Freud's
future teacher, Charcot,
is beginning to recognize
and treat a new disease,
"traumatic hysteria."
Before hysteria was
relegated to a female
disorder, it afflicted
many men as well: Charcot
began to recognize that
what is novel about
traumatic hysteria is that
in these cases what lay
behind the symptoms were
not physical disorders,
and not just nerves, but
ideas.
-------------------------------------------------------
28. CHARCOT speaks "Male hysteria is not all
that rare, and just among
us, gentlemen, if I can
judge from what I see each
day, these cases are often
unrecognized even by
distinguished doctors.
One will concede that a
young and effeminate man
might develop hysterical
findings after
experiencing significant
stress, sorrow or deep
emotions. But that a
strong and vital worker,
for instance, a railway
engineer never prone to
emotional instability
before, should become
hysteric--just as a woman
might--this seems to us
beyond imagination. And
yet it is a fact--one
which we must get used
to."
DRAG QUEEN 1: Hysteria
which entraps and speaks
the patient.
-------------------------------------------------------
29. FILM: BRITISH Dear Fred: I wanted to
MUSEUM LOCATION write you yesterday from
Marx, ill, stumbling, the British Museum, but
drops a book, camera I suddenly became so
zoom in on copy of unwell that I had to close
"Vindication of the the very interesting book
Rights of Women" that I held in my hand. A
dark veil fell over my
eyes. Then a frightful
headache and a pain in the
chest. I strolled home.
Air and light helped and
when I got home I slept
for some time. My
condition is such that I
really should give up all
working and thinking for
some time to come; but
that would be difficult,
even if I could afford it.
--------------------------------------------------------
30. STILL, male V/O: Freud recounted how
hysterics disturbed Charcot became
when the German school of
neurology resisted the
idea of male hysteria and
suggested pejoratively
that if it occurred in
males, it occurred
only in French males.
--------------------------------------------------------
31. MARX'S ROOM, he Dear Frederick: In recent
paces in the set weeks it has been
positively impossible for
me to write even two
hours a day. Apart from
pressure from without,
there are the household
headaches which always
affect my liver. I have
become sleepless again,
and have had the pleasure
of seeing two carbuncles
bloom near the penis.
Fortunately they faded
away. My illness always
comes from the head.
-------------------------------------------------------
32. STILL another V/O: Charcot related male
male hysteric hysteria to trauma. As the
industrial era progressed,
the number of unexplained
work related illnesses
increased enormously;
Charcot worked to
demonstrate how these
could be understood as
hysterical.
-------------------------------------------------------
33. DRAG QUEEN 2: There were
many who thought that the
commotion of the French
DRAG QUEEN CHORUS Revolution may have
supered over affected the nervous system
Delacroix's "Libertie of Frenchmen and Europeans
Leading the Masses" adversely.
DRAG QUEEN 1: It was an
infection by ideas, the
spread of violent
influences displaced from
social and class upheaval,
fearful ideas about
progress, new
technologies, social
transformations.
-------------------------------------------------------
34. REARSCREEN: Capital Dear Frederick: The dr. is
MARX at desk, single quite right: the excessive
lamp burning, fullscreen nightwork was the main
behind of "workday" text, cause of the relapse. The
violently moving camera most disgusting thing for me
was the interruption of my
work. But I have drudged on,
lying down, even if only
at short intervals during
the day. I could not
proceed with the purely
theoretical part, the
brain was too weak for
that. Hence I have
enlarged the historical
part on the workday, which
lay outside the original
plan.
-------------------------------------------------------
35. Keyed over Marx DRAG QUEEN 3 (as Nurse)
Like other symptomatics of
the day, he took the cure.
MARX in wheelchair,
spa backdrop BIOGRAPHER V/O: The
medical world had
devised various techniques
for palliating an
irritated and erupting
human nervous system.
Popular techniques
included warm milk and bed
rest, hydrotherapy and
sojourns at peaceful
pastoral spas. Doctors
intuitively offered
patients physical and
psychological means to
flee psycho-cultural
stress--sending patients
to the country, the sea,
the mountains. Marx tried
all of these. On doctor's
orders, he fled his work.
-------------------------------------------------------
36. MARX writing from Dear Frederick: So far I
lounge chair, spa have had two sulfur baths,
background, rushing tomorrow the third.
water noise From the bath one steps on
a raised board, in the
altogether; the bath
In bathing costume attendant uses the hose
(the size of a firehose)
the way a virtuoso does
his instrument; he
commands the movement of
the body and alternately
bombards all parts of the
corpus except the head for
three minutes, first
strongly, then weakly, up
to the legs and feet, an
always advancing
crescendo. You can see how
little desire a man has to
write here.
DRAG QUEEN KEYED OVER DRAG QUEEN 2 (as nurse):
as nurse Removing himself from his
work brought some relief.
-------------------------------------------------------
37. MARX at the spa Dear Frederick: From the
walking around, in delayed appearance of this
suit, cane letter you can see how
professionally I use
my time here. I read
nothing, write nothing.
Because of the arsenic
three times daily, one has
time only for meals and
strolling along the coast
and the neighboring
hills, there is no time
left for other things.
Evenings one is too tired
to do anything but sleep.
DRAG QUEEN KEYED OVER DRAG QUEEN 1: His symptoms
began to speak him.
-------------------------------------------------------
38. MARX, spa My dear daughter: I run
walking about the greatest part of
the day, airing myself,
going to bed at ten, reading
nothing, writing less, and
altogether working up my
mind to that state of
nothingness which Buddhism
considers the climax of
human bliss...I am
afflicted with an
inflammation of the eye,
not that there is much to
be seen of it...the eye
has taken to the vicious
habit of shedding tears on
its own account, without
the least regard to the
feelings of his master.
-------------------------------------------------------
39. MARX'S ROOM; he V/O BIOGRAPHER: The
writhes in bed carbuncles continued
to erupt, stalling the
writing of Capital,
inscribing themselves into
the text. Marx focused
doggedly on the laboring
body (while his own body
exploded into new and
ever changing configurations)
Pan to STILL of as if fearful of the
"Libertie Leading the effect of introducing the
Masses" over desk unregimented body into the
realm of the political.
DRAG QUEEN 2: But then,
dressed as Marianne, this brings other bodies
one "breast" bare into the picture--the
desiring body, the woman's
body, the undisciplined
body.
-------------------------------------------------------
TITLE: WOMEN'S BODIES
-------------------------------------------------------
40. HELENE V/O: For the 19th
century bourgeois male,
the servant provokes
social anxiety: she is the
conduit through which the
working class infiltrates
the middle class home.
Introducing the maid and
her sexuality into the
bourgeois household is
threatening in a period in
which both were linked in
the bourgeois imagination
to the discontent of a
dissatisfied working
class. But then what is
excluded socially is
desired, eroticized--the
maid becomes a figure of
transgressive desire for
the bourgeois male, a
desire produced by the
very categories that rule
the bourgeois body. Marx,
in the Communist Manifesto
mocks the bourgeois male,
with an array of women at
his disposal, not only
proletarian wives and
daughters but prostitutes
to pick up the slack. This
was written two years
before he conceived a son
with the family maid.
-------------------------------------------------------
41. 19c porn STILLS of V/O: Women in the public
maids sphere were tantamount to
prostitutes: they bring the
filth and corruption of the
market, of wage labor, into
the middle class home.
-------------------------------------------------------
TITLE: HELENE
-------------------------------------------------------
42. MARX'S ROOM, he V/O BIOGRAPHER: Marx, even
writes, HELENE enters, in the most dire poverty,
serves tea did what he could to
maintain a bourgeois
household. It was Helene
Demuth, the servant, who
marked his own separation
from the working class.
She, more than Marx,
straddles two worlds,
belonging to both the
bourgeois family and the
working class: she was the
certainly the member of
that world that Marx knew
best.
"pregnant" DRAG QUEEN DRAG QUEEN 3: The hysteric
KEYED OVER is subject to multiple
identifications.
-------------------------------------------------------
43. MARX'S ROOM, writing. Dear Laura, Some recent
PROJECTION from October, Russian publications,
on rearscreen as HELENE printed in Holy Russia,
serves tea not abroad, show the great
run of my theories in that
country. Nowhere is my
success more delightful to
me, it gives me the
satisfaction that I damage
a power, which besides
England, is the true
bulwark of the old
society.
-------------------------------------------------------
44. Looking down on tile HELENE V/O: She was ten
floor, HELENE scrubbing, years younger than Marx's
as MARX walks across wife Jenny. Lenchen, as
frame she was called, ran the
Marx household. Often
Marx was too poor to pay
her but she cast her lot
with the Marx family. She
did the cooking,
housecleaning, laundering,
dressmaking, nursing, and
everything else, including
taking the bedsheets to
the pawn shop when
eviction was threatened.
In 1851, at age 28, she
gave birth to Marx's son,
secretly.
-------------------------------------------------------
45. HELENE appears very BIOGRAPHER V/O: Marx wrote
pregnant, serving tea to Engels of a "very
tangled family situation,"
hinting at a "mystery," a
"tragicomic" mystery, in
which he, Engels, also
played a role. Marx
traveled to Manchester, to
see Engels, where the two
negotiated Lenchen's fate.
DRAG QUEEN KEYED OVER DRAG QUEEN 1: As men are
accustomed to negotiating
the fate of women's
bodies.
-------------------------------------------------------
46. CLIP: beauty HELENE V/O: Did
contest introducing a woman into
their collaborative
association disrupt it?
This triangle--did it
trouble a theory that saw
the role of women strictly
in economic terms? What
bodies aren't
acknowledged?
clip: Stalin kissing BIOGRAPHER V/O: Marx
woman; footage keyed persuaded Engels to accept
onto Helene's pregnant paternity for Lenchen's
stomach child, who was named
Frederick, after him, in
the custom of
patrilineage. Engels
accepted responsibility
for the child, binding the
two men together over
Helene's mute body, over
the body of the working
class woman.
DRAG QUEEN KEYED OVER DRAG QUEEN 3: Jenny, the
wife, was easily persuaded
that Engels was the father
as she never really
approved of his morals.
-------------------------------------------------------
TITLE: THE SECRET
-------------------------------------------------------
47. HELENE speaks I never betrayed the
directly to camera secret; I let my baby be
brought up by a working
class family. Engels
occasionally sent money.
Marx never acknowledged
Freddy as his son. He
chose not to acknowledge
paternity. After Marx's
death, I moved into
Engel's home as his
housekeeper. My son
Freddy visited regularly
once a week: however, as
an ordinary working-
man, he entered through
the kitchen. He was Marx's
only living son. He had
grown up to be a poorly
educated proletarian, his
wife had left him and run
away with his few
possessions. His life was
one of trouble, worry and
hardship.
-------------------------------------------------------
48. V/O BIOGRAPHER: "We
should, none of us, want
to meet our pasts in flesh
and blood," wrote Marx's
daughter after his death,
after discovering that
Freddy Demuth was her
father's son. These
strategies of concealment
are central to bourgeois
identity, which wishes
most of all to conceal the
crucial place of the
woman in its network of
exploitation, which wishes
most of all to conceal the
symptomatic and erupting
body and the tales it
tells.
-------------------------------------------------------
49. DRAG QUEEN CHORUS DQ 1: The pregnant body,
the unruly female body,
swollen, grotesque, must
be regulated, particularly
its appearances in the
public sphere.
DQ 3: As men are
accustomed to negotiating
the fate of women's
bodies.
-------------------------------------------------------
50. COURTROOM LOCATION NEWSCASTER: "COURT
REJECTS PLEA FOR ABORTION
BEFORE JAIL" Oct 26, 1989
A Florida county judge
has refused a woman's
request to postpone her 60
day jail sentence so she
can have an abortion
first. You want a
continuance so you can
murder your baby, is that
it?" Judge Rasmussen of
Pasco County Court asked
the 26 year old defendant
before sending her to
jail. While the prosecutor
agreed that Ms. Forney
whose third month of
pregnancy began today,
could postpone her
sentence by 10 days before
serving her term for
violating probation for
driving under the
influence of alcohol. The
violation was that she
paid only $100 of the $500
fine assessed against her.
Ms. Forney, a part time
bartender who is not
married, asked for the
additional time because,
she said, she was afraid
it might be to late for a
safe abortion when she got
out of jail. She pleaded
that she was financially
unable to care for a baby.
Judge Rasmussen suggested
that she carry the baby to
full term and then give it
up for adoption. In a jail
interview Tuesday Ms.
Forney said: I thought it
was my choice. He's
telling me I don't have a
choice. It's not right
that he can choose for
me."
------------------------------------------------------
SCENES 51-60 QUICK MONTAGE:
51. HELENE addresses He simply chose not to
camera acknowledge paternity. I
hadn't that choice.
52. Abortion rally "Get your laws off my
FOOTAGE body. Get your laws off my
body."
53. Background: DRAG QUEEN 1: Get your
Bondage STILLS laws off my body.
54. COURTROOM JUDGE: I can't define it
but I know it when I see
it.
55. Background: DRAG QUEEN 2: They want to
Bondage STILLS ban pornography because it
tells the truth.
56. TITLE: THE LINKING OF WHAT IS POLITICALLY DANGEROUS
TO FEELINGS OF SEXUAL HORROR AND FASCINATION.
57. Abortion rally "Get your laws off my
FOOTAGE body..."
58. WOMAN bent over DQ3: Desiring a body that
toilet, bathroom doesn't speak, desiring a
body that has the right
DRAG QUEEN keyed over desires, desiring a
different social being, a
different social body...
59. WOMAN bent over WOMAN: How can I live in
toilet my body? Where could I
live in my body?
-------------------------------------------------------
60. MARX'S ROOM, Marx How can I live in my body?
in bed, writhing (FIRST Where can I live in my
SYNC SOUND ON MARX) body?
-------------------------------------------------------
61. KEY text of Capital Dear Engels: I had decided
over MARX body so not to write you until I
that one seems to be could announce the
emerging from the other completion of the book
which is now the case.
Also I did not want to
bore you with the reasons
for the frequent delays,
namely carbuncles on my
posterior and in the
vicinity of the penis, the
remains of which are now
fading and which permit me
to assume a sitting (that
is, writing) position only
at great pain. I do not
take arsenic, because it
makes me too stupid and at
least for the little time
that I have when writing
is possible, I want to
have a clear head.
V/O BIOGRAPHER: Finishing
the book left his body
racked and scarred. He
was subject to increasing
outbursts with each new
translation of the book.
He continued to search for
a cure.
-------------------------------------------------------
62. MARX writing, My dear Jenny: I am
HELENE cleaning sending you today the
proofs of the French
translation of Das
Kapital. Today is the
first day that I have been
able to do anything at
all. Until now despite
baths, walking, splendid
air, careful diet, etc. my
condition has been worse
than in London. That is
also the reason why I am
postponing my return,
because it is absolutely
necessary to return in a
condition for work.
BIOGRAPHER V/O: The
eruptions of his body
weren't matched by the
social eruptions he
anticipated.
-------------------------------------------------------
63. MARX'S ROOM Dear Sorge: How did it
REARSCREEN civil happen that in the US
rights riots where relatively that is,
compared to civilized
Europe, land was
accessible to the great
masses of the people and
to a certain degree (again
relatively) still is, the
capitalist economy and the
Text emerging corresponding enslavement
from carbuncles of the working class have
developed more rapidly and
more shamelessly than in
any country?
DRAG QUEEN KEYED OVER DQ 2: His body continued
its parody. Marx came to
regard the carbuncles as
having a life of their
own, his affliction had
a theory and a practice.
-------------------------------------------------------
64. MARX'S ROOM, bed. Dear Kugelmann: After my
Riot FOOTAGE KEYED onto return, a carbuncle broke
bandages out on my right cheek
which had to be operated
on, then it had several
smaller successors, and I
think that at the present
moment I am suffering from
the last of them. For the
rest don't worry at all
about newspaper gossip;
still less answer it. I
myself allow the English
papers to announce my
death from time to time,
without giving a sign of
life.
DRAG QUEEEN KEYED OVER DQ 3: Like the
revolutionary, the
erupting, symptomatic body
displays monstrous and
unreadable forms to a
horrified society.
-------------------------------------------------------
65. HELENE clears the Dear Frederick: The doctor
table as MARX writes has opened up the pleasant
in bed prospect that I will have
to deal with this
loathsome disease until
late in January. Still
this second Frankenstein
on my hump is by far not
so fierce as was the first
in London. You can see
this from the fact that I
am able to write. If one
wants to vomit politics
out of nausea, one must
take it daily in the form
of telegraphic pills, such
as are delivered by the
newspapers.
-------------------------------------------------------
TITLE: IF ONE WANTS TO VOMIT POLITICS OUT OF NAUSEA...
-------------------------------------------------------
66. STUDIO high shot WOMAN: How can I live in
toilet, WOMAN bending my body? where can I live
over in black space in my body?
Pan to drag queen DQ1: Where is the history
riot FOOTAGE of the body written? In
KEYED behind toilet your politeness, in your
deodorant and douche,
behind the bathroom door,
in your shame and
revulsion.
Pan to next drag queen DQ2: In your symptoms.
-------------------------------------------------------
67. MARX'S ROOM Dear Frederick: I hope
in bed. Zoom into that with this, I will
bandaged carbuncle have paid my debt to
nature. In my state of ill
health, I can do little
writing, and then only by
revolutions fits and starts. At any
emerging out of rate, I hope the
carbuncles bourgeoisie will remember
my carbuncles all the rest
of their lives.
Zoom into, then
CREDITS