If the study of the self, let alone narcissism, involves necessary blindness to the self, can there be a study of the self? Errol Morris may return the favor, that is, face up to these follies of self-perception with another, this conceit of his own that his method is presenting them more directly. But it's not simply a matter of measuring up to that. Failing to give a direct presentation itself gives an indirect presentation of the whole matter. Self-perception, but thus any perception, since it depends on this matter of self, necessarily involves indirection, inference, contour, analogy, suggestion. This is also why Morris shows us the device, his device of the interrotron, but the devices of film more generally, makes regressive moves to film the filming. There is no direct portrayal, no absolute adequation, borne out especially by the face to face.
This portrayal, too, involves analogy, substitution, skew, the conveyance of a sense of something by other means. The equivocation, the division, the duplicity, is there in the title, the term of the title no less than its use here as title: "First Person." It's not just a trick of this term, one that catches Morris in a trap, an error of reference or portrait, although this trap is neither avoided. The first person Morris could just as well refer to, even if he is not, even if he didn't intend it, even in spite of himself, is the one who watches, the audience, the ones these subjects eventually speak to beyond Morris, but thus this position for anyone, because of the relay of all these positions. That puts us in the position of these, no matter how abject or distinct we think they are. How else does, would, any of this go? Work? Play?
Is the folly of a serial killer -- or one who studies them -- our folly? Does the very matter of its pertienence, of its pertaining, sequester or distinguish, or does it not impose itself, internalize, generalize precisely becaue it's a pathology of externalization? Hannah Arendt's "banality of evil" comes to mind, and as if Nazi Germany didn't demonstrate the extension of this to a society, a culture, here we have the inverse sense of proportion: everyday tyrants and terrors that, according to one of Morris's subjects, have increased dramatically since the 60s.
Errol Morris's interview documentary camera device, the interrotron, becomes important not so much for quite what was intended, but in a more analogous or figurative way: facing up. And just like the interrotron's purpose of presenting the interviewee looking directly into the camera, at the interviewer, but thus into the eyes of the viewer, this is as if. As Derrida says, you cannot portray looking into the other's eyes with the camera. (Cf., Josh Harris's comment about masturbation, below, that it's the one thing you can't do in front of everyone, and the problem or limit of confessional. This is a kind of technical matter, the definition, the minimum of sense got by a circuitous path of larger or other significance.) The trick is right there already in portrayal or betrayal, before the particular focus of this device or process.
There is always the gap, the lag, the play, the mediation, the difference between perceiver and perceived, not only temporal (the belatedness of cognizance), but the structural necessity of the failure of comprehension (cf. Gödel as well as Derrida). And this is a fortiori for self-perception, because of self-perception. It's precisely the question of whether self perception, the structural impossibility of it, is logically prior, or logically forever secondary, forever deferred, forever catching up. Is self a species of a genus, of something other or greater than the self? Or is self the genus of comprehension of all else? If the very structural necessity of total comprehension is this supplementarity, this whole, this leftover point of the perception that cannot be contained in the whole of what it perceives, there can be no comprehension -- in the strict sense, utterly, accomplished -- for anything else because it cannot contain self-comprehension.
How does Morris's program dramatize this? Well, of course, how can it help it. But more particularly, and to whatever extent this was as inadvertent, as un-self-conscious or comprehensive on Morris's part, his subjects -- and the project involves this equivocation, too, the transfer and relay and agency between "subject" and object, "subject" as theme or matter or topic and thus the object of the viewing subjects -- are all curious examples of rather peculiar or extravagant projections, and thus of negotiations between ideal and real, between idealization and realization. They are thus also curious examples of exemplarity, and for being no less random samples than exemplary. No less for making use of, making exemplary, exemplarity itself. For no matter how curious, peculiar, extravagant, distinct we think these subjects are from us, from the subject that is us, we, me, I -- how distinct they are, the other is -- they, if nothing else, are among others, the others which also include me, and we are thus part of this same material, and thus of the same possibility or potential. (This is the canny and uncanny, in general, but of it, these cases, these others, why we watch, here, and would be fascinated. How is that possible? If it's not possible for me, how is it possible for the other? How is there the bridge of this gap from I to you, to him or her?)
More than that, through this agency, this ruse of Morris's of attempting, trying to portray -- but isn't this already portrayal, all portrayal? -- of pretending or making out or feigning the face to face, interlocution, of slipping this figure of interlocution into medium and process of the moving image recording portrayal already elsewise, we see the paradox of self-betrayal -- itself -- but this is the paradox of (the) "itself." And this is something like the limit or the problematic of the confession or confessional. Am I competent to testify against myself? I can do nothing but betray my own wiles, skew, conceit, "distorted" view of myself, but this necessarily subjective account of myself doesn't just render my objectivity suspect, it renders the adequacy (certainly qua adequatio) of the account, the testimony, suspect by the trick of implicating the "objectivity" of the betrayal, of all the rest, those who would judge or simply perceive the subjective account. Morris's means are as much demonstrating this as the subject-object of them, and for that it's also not a matter, strictly, of intention or adequation. In fact, however suspect or compromised we might find Morris's carriage, however kitschy or lurid, or even sensational or tilted in its own right, however subjective or inclined, would only bear this out all the more.
Morris not only offers the regress of another camera showing his interrotron, but uses at once lush and mucky cut-up tricks, over- -- or it seems more like under- -- lapping dialogue, shifting to odd angles and de-centered details. These have a specious feel to them, unfortunately because of so much trendy use of similar, largely for the reductive value of kinetic thrill and the presumption of attention deficit. Morris seems pushy with them in a more particular way, as appliqué, not only decorous but as if he feels the need to spell out for us, and it's been a trend in his recent movies, along with the music soundtracks, that makes it a trendiness of his own, as if he's relying on this too much, what makes it pat.
There is so far to go, so much in any one of these cases. But another curious theme arises across them, and makes even any of them an emblem for the rest. And it is this distance of the narcissistic projection, and even a kind of measure of it as the inverse proportion of the grandiose to the trite. It's what makes -- and perhaps unexpectedly, but as unexpected as always, as we might expect -- but this is what is, what perhaps must or ought to be, always startling about this encounter, this facing or facing up to -- a serial killer emblematic of the rest of the subjects in the series, which eventually is by extension to all the rest of us. The serial killer, which, like Ted Kaczinsky, isn't even a direct subject, but via another, the subject of another subject, presents a contrast between the triteness of conception and the horror, abjection or extreme of the result of it, the "expression," to make even a gruesome proportion, or the consequences.
Even that seems easy, conspicuous, compared to the wiles of Rick Rosner, the contestant on "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" Rosner is one of the best demonstrations I've seen of the technocratic conundrum: an information or instrumentalist capacity of intelligence completely subservient to -- conditioned, determined and ambushed by -- psychology, and precisely by the subject's own blind reliance on this instrumentalist comprehension. The more he thinks of intellect as the tool of his grasp, the more assuredly he's the tool in the grasp of this psychology, whatever knowledge or data or accumulation stacked on the most insane impulse for a premise, like Beckett's vagrant character in Molloy running through the concatenations of rotating pebbles in all his pockets because he wants to have a fresh one to suck on. Is there nowhere this projection cannot also be folly?
Autism is an extreme form of this, and the suggestion that the other pole of this distribution of mental faculty is a disproportionately social concern, at the expense of concentration, is given a special twist with Rosner. It seems with Rosner the pursuit of understanding the structure of the universe is pitted against his own bizarre obsession with an all too mundane, his own strange pitch of feeling outside and wanting to fit in: his attempts to relive senior year of high school for ten years (as outrageous that he brought it off practically as it is for its impossibility even by virtue of that -- consequences for the conception of time, indeed) and his fixation on the game show even as a means. He marvels at the chance factor of this, as a matter of the instrumentalist grasp of it, quantification, but the significance of the long dispute he had with the show is precisely that the question is the crux of the manner of knowing, the aim or use of knowing, the knowing about knowing, or the regress of knowing itself.
The man who imagines immortality: like the Chinese emperor of legend, if not actual history (see Roger Caillois for one account) who becomes an utter tryant, ruling every facet of culture, down to fashion, to make it serve the sole purpose of finding a way to make him immortal. The contradiction, or at least disproportion, of this is borne out in the man's own account of his mother wanting him to get a more reliable job, in other words, to worry about his life now rather than its preservation or revival in the future. Can there be any more blatant an extent of narcissism?
And yet, as with all these people, there is also a certain composure, a certain lucidity, a certain awareness, with each of these subjects of their own wiles, the consequences of their proclivity, perhaps no more so than in Rosner.
Josh Harris represents another bizarre extent of the trap of even this willingness for the awareness of others. His capitalizing hubris, which pinches with a kind of squalor even the mafia lawyer can't obtain, presents the inverse proportion, grandiose projection to triteness of conception, in a way that is at once more narrow or refined, perhaps simply for being less abject in the scope of effects or consequences, and more absurdly conspicuous. He transfers an identification with Gilligan of "Gilligan's Island" into the utter reality TV Internet prank of living constantly on camera, something he describes as, among other things, putting him in control of the art world. His supreme accomplishment is to realize the conceit of the personal digital zeitgeist: that you could make the utterly mundane renowned, if not quite exceptional, without at once making the exceptional utterly mundane.
Seeking refuge from seven siblings with the TV and shutting himself in the closet is the other side of the coin of posting his whole life on the web for constant gossipy reflection, which, in a gesture that shows this strange lucidity of folly and the vicious cycle involved there, he defers to as "objective." When this man who does not mind shitting (even wiping his ass, I wondered) in front of an unknown number of people (the anonymity of audience itself another curious wrinkle in this matter of narcissistic blindness) comes to the point -- down to the bone, he calls it, after exposing the rest, no other pun apparently intended -- of masturbation as too far to go, as the privacy he cannot give up -- and he produces the sort of technical definition of it -- he could jerk off before the camera, as a web broadcast, but it technically wouldn't be doing it alone -- all I could think was, well, you made your own bed. And there was the simplicity of a homily worthy of TV sitcom conception.
He says we are going to want to live under Big Brother, professing the social engineering, exploitative presumption leading to Google's large schemes and Facebook that only realizes Aldous Huxley better than Orwell. And the extent of narcissism that is this trap: self-indulgence that is not self-awareness. As Adam Curtis tries to show in his program "The Century of the Self," the self is the rope with which we hang ourselves, if made by, held by and even glady given to others. And now we want the execution for the public display.
The Denny Fitch episode seems to shift the emphasis. It's catastrophic. Turning upside down doesn't change the subject, but inverts the sense of control and mastery, to a culpability that is sacrificial. The matter of scale, colossal, is what impresses itself precisely as exceeding our impression, our imagination, even in the imagination of this scale of ourselves. Fitch's holding himself up before the accusation of murder, responsibility for death, as well as the heroism of having preserved lives -- is not this a similar scale of the extension and relation of subject to object?
The machination of effect: all the engineers and servicemen involved in creating these aircraft that can carry, in a broader sense because of the literal, and affect so many people at once. Is it perverse to see this as a domestication, a control, on the scale of mass murder, if not of mass murder itself? Like the taming of fire? The risk our society takes, takes advantage of, sublimates, all the time, every day? And it's not as if we simply do away with the bad eventuality, for there are the negative effects, of even greater mass scale, going on in order for all this to work, the exhaust, the by-product, the waste of all this.
And then there's the case of Michael Stone, who raises the bid of reflexivity of this problem with his own conceit of an exhaustive classification, and thus apprehension, of the human psyche. Is he further, exponential evidence for the self-perception problem? Or that he's in greater control of even himself? Or that it's all to easy to tinker with some gimcrack reductive system than deal with real complexity? Physician, know thyself.
It might be easy, indeed, to dismiss "First Person" by Morris's preponderance of the quackish and insular, of self-styled tinkerers of thought. But that might be as brittle and insulating a move, a kneejerk not unlike the impatience with Beckett that, if not born from the failure to see any pertinence, makes it so. Morris certainly runs the risk of becoming just another part of this tabloid circularity of media, if not culture itself. But it's worth the effort to give some account that diverts this, that somehow turns the pool of narcissism so that we can see something other than our own projection.