Issue #344: MCMAP and Lacanian Google Searches
Issue #344: MCMAP and Lacanian Google Searches
Last week, I bragged about how I had a 100% acceptance rate for academic abstracts. While this remains true for the moment, I did neglect to mention another writing submission statistic. My acceptance rate for freelance writing submissions is a miraculous 0%. That’s right. While I don’t pitch writing that often, I have never had one accepted. Part of the reason this newsletter exists is because I don’t have a regular byline. And I write about stuff nobody would ever want in their publication. But, if you’re the nobody I am looking for, I would love to write for you. I’m always looking for leads regarding opportunities to work for an editor or, perhaps, get paid? You can also just subscribe to the letter.
Paradox Newsletter Event Calendar September (and October) 2024
Events that should be of interest to my readers, especially local ones. Sequel to May’s Event Calendar.
September 8th — Le Deuxième Souffle (1966) in 35mm @ Harvard Film Archive
This already happened, so why is it on the event calendar? I don’t know. The movie was good. I think it was one of the first screenings in the HFA’s Melville et Cie. series of which I will be attending many. But Le Deuxième Souffle was actually my first ever Melville film. People are really surprised when they hear that. It won’t be my last.
September 14th — Un Flic (1972) in 35mm @ Harvard Film Archive
“Un flic” means “A cop,” which is a really good name for a movie.
September 17th — The 39 Steps (1935) and The Lady Vanishes (1938) @ The Somerville Theater
This is the beginning of another film series, A Bit of Hitch, and the Somerville Theater. This is the only British Hitchcock they are showing. For my money, The 39 Steps is one of his best. The Lady Vanishes is also excellent, but I think of it as paling in comparison. I’ll be interested to see how I feel watching them both back to back.
September 20th — The Silence of the Sea (1949) in 35mm @ Harvard Film Archive
I don’t know anything about this movie. The HFA website says something about it being difficult to adapt. But what is really difficult is sitting in the HFA chairs. They are exceptionally uncomfortable. It’s a fair exchange, however, for the darkest cinema experience you’ll have in your life. The only light pollution in there is from a mandated emergency exit sign.
September 22nd — Army of Shadows (1969) @ Harvard Film Archive
September 24th — Strangers on a Train (1951) in 35mm and Dial M for Murder (1954) in 35mm @ The Somerville Theater
This is another ridiculously lopsided duo of movies. There are days when I think Strangers on a Train is Hitchcock’s best movie. It is almost assuredly his most epic, perhaps the most resembling a modern blockbuster, other than North by Northwest. Dial M for Murder is, by contrast, a taut, dialogue heavy chamber piece. It is one of the more maligned, I think, of Hitchcock’s films. And even though Strangers on a Train is better, I think of Dial M as underrated. I’ve only seen it once, right before teaching Hitchcock, viewed sub-optimally on my mother’s living room TV. It shone even then.
September 27th — Le Samouraï (1967) in 35mm @ Harvard Film Archive
The only showing of Le Samouraï, among many HFA is putting on as part of the series, that will run on film.
September 28th — Burning Lord record release @ The Middle East Upstairs
One time, while I was watching Burning Lord play at the Elks Lodge in Brighton, my friend Dave Murphy turned to me and said “hardcore is in good shape when the bands sound like this.”
September 29th — Le Cercle Rouge (1970) in 35mm @ Harvard Film Archive
This is another 35mm screening that will run earlier in the month in a DCP restoration, on September 15th, so you can pick your poison. But I always go with film.
October 1st — Shadow of a Doubt (1943) 4K Restoration @ The Somerville Theater
It’s a great idea to run this one right as October is getting underway. I wrote about it two years ago:
October 3rd — The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) in 35mm @ The Somerville Theater
Another showstopper filed under blockbuster Hitchcock.
October 4th — Citizens Arrest @ The Vault Performing Arts Center in New Bedford, MA
Citizens Arrest is one of my favorite bands of all time, so I take every opportunity I can get to see them.
October 8th — Rear Window (1954) in 35mm @ The Somerville Theater
October 10th — The Birds (1963) in 35mm @ The Somerville Theater
October 15th — Marnie (1964) in 35mm @ The Somerville Theater
October 17th — Frenzy (1972) New 4K Restoration @ The Somerville Theater
October 21st-23rd — North by Northwest (1959) in 70mm @ The Somerville Theater
This is Christmas.
November 1st-3rd — Vertigo (1958) in 70mm @ The Somerville Theater
This is also Christmas.
Google Searches, Acronyms, and Knowledge in Rebel Ridge
Google searches in movies are funny. My friend Alois inspired me to think more deeply about the function of the search scene in a horror movie or thriller, where usually some hidden knowledge is encased in the fiberoptic library of the so-called “information super highway.” What I recall Alois asking me about at one point was to consider scenes where the online search in a film not only does not return the desired result, but actually returns no result whatsoever — a total deficit of knowledge that comes across as absurd. Even the most obscure google searches tend to have a few tenuous results. Alois writes in his dissertation, Search Results (2021):
Todd McGowan posits that the lesson of psychoanalysis is that “rather than desiring to know, the subject desires not to know and organizes its existence around the avoidance of knowledge” (Enjoying What We Don’t Have 17). This knowledge threatens to implicate the subject’s enjoyment in not attaining the object, in forever moving toward the secret of the system, forever researching. This knowledge cannot be googled, since McGowan writes how paradoxically “one can access it only when not seeking it” (18). The conscious subject will do everything they can to avoid encountering the structure of their desire, to stay moving through desire. Rather than the drive to know, Google captures the drive not to know, luring users pleasurably into a labyrinth with no exit. (10-11)
Rebel Ridge (2024) is a paradigmatic example of how the google searches of contemporary thriller films support Alois’s assertion here. After a protracted conflict between former Marine Terry Richmond (Aaron Pierre) and a corrupt small town police department led by Sandy Burnne (Don Johnson), Burnne consults Richmond’s file to find his designation as a MCMAP instructor. Because Richmond was never deployed into combat, and because of a literal reading of the “map” in MCMAP, Burnne and his subordinate Steve Lann (Emory Cohen) conclude Richmond isn’t threatening.
However, they instruct another police officer, Jessica Sims (Zsané Jhé) to “google that.”
In a hokey, but theoretically intriguing, turn of events, Sims’ google search is interrupted by a faulty internet connection. She can’t reset the router soon enough to discover that MCMAP stands for “Marine Corps Martial Arts Program,” with the slogan “one mind, any weapon.”
Sims can’t find the knowledge soon enough, and it comes too little, too late to change the course of action for the police force antagonizing Richardson. Knowing his martial prowess might have been a sufficient disincentive to the police’s predation, but in the moment Sims conducts her search, the die is already cast.
The search into Richardson’s background comes too late, and even later still because of the failure of the internet connection. This evinces another dimension of how “Google captures the drive not to know.” The presence of supposedly endless information serves to both prohibit one from knowing what they seek by the perception of it being readily accessible and fails to aid the one who searches in determining what they actually need to know. In this case, even the proficiency of Richardson as a MCMAP instructor elides the reality, one conveyed by yet another acronym.
In Burnne’s confrontation with him, Richardson explains the truly relevant acronym: PACE. Richardson says:
The acronym you need to worry about right now is PACE. P-A-C-E … So the P is for “primary,” that’s me riding into town with my bag of money. A is for “alternate.” That’s the deal we apparently never made. C is my “contingency.” That’s the restaurant owner you put out of business this morning … Anyway, you got me burning through all these letters. And after this conversation, we already on E. You know what that stands for?
Though Richardson never says it, the meaning of the E is obvious: “emergency.”
The function of MCMAP, by way of the google search, and PACE, are similar as devices for Rebel Ridge’s thriller machinery. The acronyms have obscured meaning, and the means to uncover what each letter stands for, such as google, commensurately impair the subject from apprehending their signification. In the film, the words that correspond to the acronym are revealed in a drip feed. For MCMAP, it’s the faulty internet (and, by extension, the symbol of the google search itself) that serves to prohibit learning what it stands for. In the case of PACE, it’s Richardson himself who describes the meaning of each letter in sequence. Both questions, in the film, are sources of dramatic tension. The revelation of their meaning communicates the same thing to the viewer: Richardson is about to kick Burnne’s ass.
This isn’t the only way Rebel Ridge deploys the acronym, though. It also serves to codify an idea into something systematic, as is the case with the discussion of “less-lethal” weapons and the political optics of police enforcement: EOF, NLE: “escalation of force, non-lethal effects.”
The question of weaponry, combat, and its lethality is of key interest to Rebel Ridge. Not for nothing, Richardson’s MMA pulverizing of endless corrupt cops never kills anyone. This is a potent question, but for the purposes of this brief analysis, I am more interested in these acronyms and their function as impediments to knowledge, in the case of the google search example, and guarantors of meaning, in the case of the discussion of “non-lethal” weapons.
An acronym functions different from a word as a signifier, and different still from a sentence or utterance. In Seminar XX (1975), Lacan writes:
A letter is something that is read. It even seems to be designed as a sort of extension of the word. It is read and literally at that. But it is not the same thing to read a letter as it is to read. (26)
One might read a letter, and must read each letter (more or less, though often less than more) to determine the word, but the word itself means something different from the discrete parts. Even at the phonetic level, in English, this is true: letters sound differently depending on what precedes and follows them.
Acronyms, as signifiers, are more dissimilar from words than they are similar. Unlike with a word, one must have every letter in the proper place for the acronym to function. Likewise, the discrete parts are each representations of a word rather than parts of a greater whole. In an acronym, there is also rarely a question of phonetic ambiguity, although in Rebel Ridge “M-C-M-A-P” instead becomes “McMap,” read as if it’s a word meaning the map inside a McDonalds restaurant.
This is yet another dimension of reading from what Lacan describes in the quotation. In the dyad of letter and word, in the context of analysis, the analyst “read[s] beyond what [they] have incited the subject to say” (Seminar XX 26). The gulf into which the analyst reads is that which is opened up by the word-as-signifier:
Linguistics introduces into speech a dissociation thanks to which the distinction between signifier and signified is grounded. It divides up what seems to be self-evident, which is that when one speaks, one’s speech signifies, bringing with it the signified, and, still further, is only based, up to a certain point, on the function of signification. (Seminar XX 29)
It is thanks to such a gulf or dissociation, as Lacan calls it, that this very reading can take place — evidently not intended by the film itself. An acronym, however, has no such gulf. There is no ambiguity between the word and its signification, each letter corresponds exactly to a word, introducing a mediating level between or putting off the potential ambiguity each discrete word within an acronym may carry with it.
In that sense, an acronym is comforting in the way it relates to meaning. But, as is the case in Rebel Ridge, the acronym’s determinate meaning falls short of conveying the necessary knowledge in the same way as the desirous labyrinth of the google search. The film sublimates the violence of the Law — which is on the side of Richardson, rather than the police — with the superheroic “non-lethal” effects of NLE. Likewise, it sublimates the ambiguity of signification to the determinate acronym. However, in this act of sublimation, the acronym which may be secure in its meaning is unmooring to knowledge.
Brimfield Scene Report
Brimfield is a fascinating institution. As enduring at it is, it feels fragile. It has a website, naming it the “Brimfield Antique Flea Market,” but really it is a bunch of separate fields with a tenuous (seeming… to me… with minimal corroboration of this feeling) agreement to open at the same times, three times a year.
I’ve gone at least once a year for the last seven years, finding all manner of furniture, t-shirts, and ephemera. What did I find this year? A few things, though I bought nothing.
This The Flash issue with some eye-catching cover art served as the inspiration for a Paradox Newsletter flyer I am not gonna post online, but you can receive in your online order maybe. I also found some nice shirts:
All way overpriced.
I found some buttons:
The first one, reading “Ronnie,” doesn’t mean anything to me but inadvertently refers to my friend Ronnie who plays drums in a bunch of great bands. I didn’t buy the pin, though, since the pin itself wouldn’t fit in the shell and protruded dangerously.
These sick fold-out chairs were probably the thing I came closest to buying:
But the lesson of Brimfield this year was sometimes you can just look at the cool thing, you don’t have to buy the cool thing. I enjoyed some pretty good food while I was there, too. Faddy’s is a must visit for apple cider donuts. I guess they have a spot in Connecticut, but I’ve never been.
Weekly Reading List
https://paradoxnewsletter.bigcartel.com/ — I know I have advertised the Shining Life fanzine compilation quite a few times, but someone brought to my attention after I published last week that this compilation is sold out everywhere. Shining Life will not be reprinting it and I have five copies left. So, if you want one, cop now or forever hold your peace.
Along those lines, I’m also down to one teal Paradox Newsletter hat. The color has also been discontinued by the manufacturer. If you own one, you own something that nobody else is gonna be able to get ever.
Yet another publication I’ve recommended in the past, this week Sami Reiss has written the post to end all posts about raw milk. I learned a lot reading this. Not that I didn’t expect to learn something, but Sami lays out the history of industrial milk production, the difference between raw milk “made for people” and industrial produced milk before pasteurization, and approaches to conquering lactose sensitivities (ymmv). Sami also does this in a way that is compulsively readable.
He is a writer's writer. He is timely, writing about the things people want to know about. His style is steeped in the tradition of the 19th century American authors and the New Journalists of the 20th century. Unlike my punishing, meandering sentences, his are short. At times, incomplete. But punchy. And his range of allusions (in the linked article, The Icemen, Proust, Kevin Gates) demonstrate an absurd level of cultural literacy.
With Snake Super Health, he is producing the most intellectually nutrient dense writing about popular health.
I’m recommending the two videos above for one reason: they are about competition. If you have read this newsletter for a while, you probably know high level competition is an area of fascination for me. Beyond the levels of watching it (which I do) or doing it (which I did in both the mediums of Magic: the Gathering and fighting games). I think there are some more important questions about why one would compete at all or what the value of competitive aspirations are. What’s so interesting about these videos considered as a pair is where they overlap. For instance, Reid Duke and Steve "LordKnight" Barthelemy both discuss reasonable goal setting while progressing in each hobby. It might seem intuitive, but there’s a good chance you haven’t thought about it the way they’re thinking about it.
Reid’s videos are a series that deal more and more granularly with different elements of competitive Magic. For LordKnight, this is just a one of, but it’s pretty great.
Until next time.