John Menick Blog

The following short piece was written as part of the screening series “Goddammed Films” at Petra gallery, February 6, 2010. Follow the link for screening times and films. The series is part of SITAC happening this week in Mexico City.

A guerrilla raid on the nature of reality. That’s how the director billed it. Whose reality, and the whether the mission was a success, I don’t know. I haven’t seen Maidstone, Norman Mailer’s 1970 film. For enthusiasts of artistic infamy, the film is a fetish. It has screened a few times recently in New York, and I could say I never got around to buying the tickets because other plans intervened. But I’m probably not being honest with myself. I didn’t see it because I didn’t want to. To see it would be to ruin it. I read about Maidstone and had described to me the film’s hipster pretensions, the on-set sexual domination, the broken jaw, the narrative incoherence, the casting for the brothel, the dropped acid, smoked weed, botched leftism, the improvised idiocy. In short, I knew its infamy, and infamy survives best when hidden from view.

The origin of that infamy is, of course, Norman Mailer. But this isn’t about him. I’m interested in what has surfaced into the public consciousness about this film. After Maidstone enjoyed a short and successful run at the Whitney Museum in 1971, Mailer tried to rent a more public theater to show his deformed creation to the general public. They stayed away. The film disappeared. Decades later Maidstone resurfaced on the Internet as a dozen dirty fragments. Most of those fragments have also disappeared, but one remained: the concluding scene, where Rip Torn, stoned and crazed, tries to kill Mailer with a hammer. And with this clip somehow the film took on a second life. Like Mauss says in his study of magic, in the practice of black magic, the part becomes the whole, helps us know and overcome it. A lock of hair becomes the person. Lizard eyes become blindness. And for most of us, this scene, for better or worse, becomes Maidstone.

But what are we watching? Are Mailer and Torn pretending to kill each other? Or is this something worse? Is this the near-snuff video it purports to be? Let’s agree with the common reconstruction: the scene was planned as an fictional assassination attempt on Mailer’s character, Kingsley, but Rip Torn went the extra measure. He really hit Mailer with the hammer when he was supposed to only fake it. I want to kill your character, Kingsley, not you, Mailer, Torn says. The assassin Torn enters from the edge and takes the author out in one blow. Torn took Mailer at his word: a guerrilla raid on the nature of reality. It’s the actor, Torn, who understood the tactics needed to do so. Torn was the filmmaker, and most likely Torn was the true madman.

One last point: the film was shot like a cinéma vérité documentary. Pennebaker and Leacock and others provided all of reality’s tropes: handheld cameras, quick zooms, fitful focus, unstable framing. But that’s not what this footage gives us. It presents another reality, something the filmmakers couldn’t have understood. It shows us a moment in a culture that took a turn for the worse – the sad machismo, the cosmic pretensions, the grim willingness to kill – qualities as foreign to contemporary counterculture as a Victorian drama. The filmmakers wanted a siege on reality, but time has done it for us. Give a film enough time and the fiction falls away, and all that’s left is an unexpected and troubling reality.

Seventeenth century plan for a perpetual motion machine.

For a long time now I’ve wanted to see an exhibition devoted to discredited scientific theories. Most science museums focus on what science got right; I care more about what science got wrong. Ideally, this exhibition would include all kinds of missteps, failed experiments, and insane quackery; but most importantly, it would highlight theories scientists thought previously untouchable or unthinkable. (Lavoisier once disproved the existence of meteorites, despite the protests of witnesses.) What qualifies as a “scientific idea” is an open question, but I hope the exhibition would include Martian canals, Ptolemy’s astronomy, phrenology, hollow earth theory, and lots of alchemy.

It’s also hard to say what’s been completely disproven — Freudian unconscious? Extraterrestrial intelligence? — so I’ll leave those questions to my fictional curators who are infallible on these matters. However, if the exhibition proves impossible, and the curators resign in protest, I would gladly settle for a backup plan: a collection of alien portraits, in oils, watercolors and acrylics, painted by U.F.O. abductees. Which exhibition is less truthful, I don’t know.

Still from La sindrome di Stendhal (1996) Dir. Dario Argento.

While researching my forthcoming short film, Paris Syndrome, I took a detour into a related obscure syndrome: “Stendhal Syndrome.” The latter syndrome has entered the public consciousness to some degree, having graced the screen in the form of a Dario Argento horror film, and having been name-checked in various novels and art reviews. The syndrome is a psychosomatic illness resulting from viewing too much art; in specific viewing too much art in Florence. I’ve never really been clear on what happens to suffers; but as I understand it, they may pass out, get dizzy, or have a nervous breakdown. They may even hallucinate.

But why name a syndrome with roots in Italy after the French author of The Red and the Black? Before he was known as “Stendhal,” the young Henri Beyle travelled to Italy, and during his stay in Florence he visited the Santa Croce Basilica. In his 1826 travelogue, Rome, Naples, Florence, we can read of his reactions to one of the paintings he saw there:

Absorbed in the contemplation of sublime beauty, I could perceive its very essence close at hand; I could, as it were, feel the stuff of it beneath my fingertips. I had attained to that supreme degree of sensibility where the divine intentions of art merge with the impassioned sensuality of emotion. As I emerged from the porch of the Santa Croce, I was seized with a fierce palpitation of the heart (the same symptom which, in Berlin, is referred to as an attack of the nerves); the well-spring of life was dried up within me, and I walked in constant fear of falling to the ground. (Emphasis Stendhal’s. From the 1959 translation. p. 302)

The Italian psychiatrist Graziella Magherini was the first to make a connection between Stendhal’s “attack of the nerves” and similar disturbances experienced by tourists in Florence. In 1991, she published La sindrome di Stendhal and an exotic syndrome was born.

I was due to interview Dr. Magherini for Paris Syndrome, but because of time constraints while shooting, I wasn’t able to schedule a meeting. Most of the Stendhal material has been cut from the final edit, but one question remained: the event Stendhal wrote about — the massive reaction to the Santa Croce paintings — did it even happen?

Stendhal published Rome, Naples, Florence in 1826. However, Stendhal took his trip in 1811, during which time he kept a diary. The novelist Julian Barnes notes the fifteen-year gap in his book on death and agnosticism, Nothing to Be Frightened Of. As he points out, other than the fact Stendhal went to Florence, the diary and the travelogue agree on very little.

Barnes first questions the veracity of Stendhal’s story by pointing out an obvious problem: in the travelogue the author approaches Florence during the day and raves about the beauty of Brunelleschi’s dome glinting in the sun. In the diary, Stendhal arrives at five in the morning, exhausted. He would not have been able to see the dome in the dark.

Barnes continues. In the 1826 book, Stendhal arrives in January. In the diary, it’s September. In 1826, he gushes about being in Florence, but in 1811, he made immediate plans to depart the day after he arrived. It seems a delay in transportation services to Rome was the sole reason he stayed three days, not an overwhelming love for the city.

In Paris Syndrome, I wanted to show the actual paintings that brought on Stendhal’s palpitations. Several sources mention that Stendhal fell into ecstasy over Giotto’s murals. However, Stendhal makes no mention of Giotto in his journals or the travelogue. Instead, Stendhal viewed paintings by Bronzino and Volterrano. The former he mistook for Guernico, and although he eventually tears up over the Bronzino anyway, the confusion leaves him “annoyed.”

But it was the Volterranos in the Santa Croce’s Niccolini Chapel that supposedly worked their magic on Stendhal. So I looked for images of them in two libraries and online, and much to my own annoyance, I could not locate a reproduction. There were those Giottos Stendhal should have looked at (in our own modern estimations), but the Volterranos were absent. History had demoted the painter to the fine print.

But what did Stendhal write of the Volterranos in 1811? He makes little mention of them. What about the “attack of the nerves?” Here’s the passage, quoted by Barnes, instead speaking of the Bronzinos:

I was dead tired, my feet swollen and pinched in new boots — a little sensation which would prevent God from being admired in all His glory, but I overlooked it in front of the picture of limbo. Mon Dieu, how beautiful it is!

If the diaries are to be believed (more on this below), almost nothing happened in the manner told by Stendhal’s travelogue. (At least in its Florence passages.) Then why the difference? And what about the supposed syndrome? Is it based on something that never happened?

I can think of several explanations. First, perhaps Beyle did have the experience, and simply omitted it from the diary. The diary’s tone is more reserved than the later book, but his near fainting still seems to be the most personally significant thing to happen to him while in Florence. Why leave it out?

Or maybe the experience did not happen and Stendhal consciously added it as an embellishment to his travelogue. He is a novelist after all, and it does make for a better story. But why change dates and other minor details?

Then again, the diaries could be a fabrication too. At first I thought this was out of the question, but one footnote indicated the theory wasn’t so farfetched. In the English translation of the diaries, there is a note from the editor after the following sentence by Beyle: “Florence was the limit of my travels in Italy in my early youth; I went there with General Michaud as his aide-de-camp.” The note reads: “There is no record of a trip to Florence during Beyle’s first stay in Italy, and it difficult to see when such a visit could have been made.”

But there is a final, more interesting possibility: maybe Stendhal really did believe that he was overtaken by the work he saw fifteen years before. Barnes eliminates the possibility of a “false memory,” but I think he does so too quickly. After all, aren’t most trips dressed up and reedited by our memories? Aren’t most retrospective travelogues a kind of embellishment of a journey’s actual tedium, disappointments and missed opportunities?

If so, I would like to recast Stendhal Syndrome. Rather than understand it as a psychosomatic reaction to the sublime, maybe we should understand it as an unconscious rewriting of our past journeys. The symptoms? Twelve-hour plane rides are justified to friends in glowing terms. Thousands of dollars of debt are explained by several hours on a depopulated beach. Teary-eyed testimonies of how we were really, really moved by seeing the actual Mona Lisa from several dozen yards away. We are like Stendhal in our recollections, but like Beyle in our experiences. That, perhaps, is the madness Stendhal gave us. Travel almost never lives up to our expectations, and neither does the past.

A quick update on the previous post: Subliminal Projection Company is now available on CreateSpace. Links to each CD are available on the project page. SPC will be included in the general Amazon catalog within the next month.

I’m participating in a group show at Bitforms gallery opening Thursday, July 16, 6-8pm. I’m showing a new work, Subliminal Projection Company — part of a series of works dealing with brainwashing and subliminal messages. The show is curated by Mireille Bourgeois and Anaïs Lellouche also features Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay, Roee Rosen, Thomson & Craighead, and Brina Thurston. Hope you get a chance to see it.