Doctor
Dolittle
Talking To Yourself
published in Real Time No.26, Sydney,
1998
To
be surrounded by sound is one of the prime means by which
we place ourselves in the world. Next to gravity and air
pressure, the directional spread of contracting and expanding
sound waves constitutes the core phenomenological state
within which I acknowledge my presence, my essence, my existence.
Quite simply, it is in sound that I find myself centred:
not 'made centre' as in some archaic id/ego binary, but
located within and between activity that forces me to accept
that while I might be 'here', there's a whole lot of stuff
happening over there. In this sense, the sonic is a liberating
force. It takes the pressure off having to worry about the
self because the sonic activity happening around you does
not require you to be there for its existence. (So take
that corny 'if a tree falls in the woods' schtick and shove
it in your classical Euro ear hole.)
But
this calm, this pleasure is not for everyone. In fact, the
breakdown between what could be termed the 'non-happening
self' - the self that is not required for sonic activity
- and the sonic activity around one - the city, the room
next door, the truck in the street, the kid laughing as
you walk by - can induce the most severe of traumas. Schizophrenia
is currently advertised as something that can happen to
anyone at anytime. The image is of a lightning bolt. A far
more apt image would be a person trapped in a whirlpool
of sound waves. The most apparent sign of a schizophrenic
leaning is the inability to distinguish between the imaginary
location of one's inner thoughts as voiced by your aural
voice-box (a cast of thousands of voices from your vast
history of personal experience) and the acoustic location
of someone else's voice external to you. I have never experienced
this and can only imagine the destabilising effects of this.
Maybe I am already enjoying it and don't realize it, considering
how much I wish the sonic to engulf me, terrorize me, paralyse
me. But ultimately, my pursuit is intellectual, and privileged
by an ability to savour such occurrences.
For
many, the state of 'hearing voices' is uncontrollable. It
spreads from the self into an enlarged acoustic dome of
the social self. That is, the person afflicted with this
schizophrenic trait engages in an expanded sense of self
within which a multiple of selves exist, and with whom dialogue
ensues. To be precise, that person is not 'talking to him/herself',
but rather talking to his/herselves. Singularity is vanquished
in what essentially is a state wherein the self is surrounded
by selves, all of whom appear to be located outside of the
'essential self'. As medical cut-backs send more of these
people onto the street, our urban environment becomes louder,
noisier. Additional to an increase in bodies on the street,
their mass is multiplied and amplified. The noise of the
city then becomes the heightened sonorum of this mode of
sonic activity: the state within which the self is multiplied
and amplified. No amount of fey flirtation with 'big concepts'
like "The City", no amount of collaboration with architects,
urban planners and city designers, no detached fawning over
the impressive/oppressive visual cock-throbbing of Big Buildings
comes near to addressing this. Buy your inner city apartment;
do your "The City" installation-cum-performance; work with
town planners to beautify the streets with commissioned
sculptures. Schizophrenia is building yearly and drowning
out every pithy optical/conceptual moment and event you
execute from your deluded CAD blueprints.
Viewed
through the audio-visual slats of schizophrenia, the cinema
is a squirming melanoma: a mark which is surveyed to check
on its symptomatic state. If the 80s was a cinema of morphology,
corporeality, pornographs and expansive/contracted bodily
potentialities (and it was), the 90s has seen an alarming
rise in the sublimation of schizophrenic states via the
transubstantiation of the human voice into all manner and
form of oral/aural bodies. In other words, films have become
obsessed with giving vocal identity, performance and character
to things which do not speak. In particular: robots, babies
and animals. Frighteningly, they're all family movies. This
brief article cannot address the insidiousness of encouraging
children's imagination to hear/talk to the non-vocal only
to damn that freedom in adult social spheres later in life.
But a recent film is frightening enough to mark this trend
as contemporary malaise
The
doctor is in. He's Eddie Murphy - he of the long tradition
of loud-mouthed, rubber-lipped, tongue-smacking, in-your-face,
motor-mouth comic viciousness. Now he is Doctor Dolittle
- wrenching the role from Rex Harrision on a musical fantasy
island, and slam-dunking it down in San Francisco. The doctor
says a very telling line in the new DOCTOR DOLITTLE: "I'll
end up like one of those people on the streets talking to
themselves. It ain't a good look." How right he is. San
Francisco has one of the most dense concentrations of street/homeless
people in all of America. From burnt-out acid casualties
in Berkeley to the disenfranchised of the Mission district,
'street crazies' hover slowly, surely, steadily. 10 years
ago, south of Market Street was acknowledged by the tourist
trade there as being the no-go zone. North of Market and
you start heading into the business district (where people
wander around talking on mobile phone with lapel mics).
Like a rising tide, street/homeless people populate at least
5 blocks north of Market street, their increase emulating
a living multi-media demograph. In America, street/homeless
people are psychologically rendered invisible through the
more fortunate ignoring their voice. You don't make eye
contact; you don't engage in dialogue; you learn to treat
their voices as voices not directed to you, but encased
within their own 'acoustic self domes'. Visually, they blend
with the urban grime. But aurally, they can trap you into
responding. This complex audio-visual distancing is both
striking and unsettling in America's dying metropolis, in
that the ability with which its citizens can filter out
noise for the sake of their own sanity is amazing. For whenever
one hears the floating voice of schizophrenia, one is hearing
the potential reverse echo of one's own demise.
In
DOCTOR DOLITTLE, the term 'schizophrenia' is never audibly
mentioned, but it is screamed in every aural moment of the
film's soundtrack. Like a mega mix of the soundtracks to
MILO & OTIS, LOOK WHO'S TALKING and BABE, a thousand
and one wannabe comedians desperately vie for your attention
on screen and of screen with their smarmy wise-cracks. DOCTOR
DOLITTLE is like being forced to sit through a condensed,
accelerated marathon of that most desperate of all social
discourses: topical comedy. Comedians read the newspapers
(as if newspapers are meaningful and relevant) and then
say something incredibly rude and dumb about easy targets
like The Spice Girls. This form of comedy itself is a malaise
- a neurotic reflex action with no other cause except to
be topical. Listening to all those living and dead-stuffed
animals with digitally composited lip movements is like
wandering through downtown San Francisco. It is cacophonous,
pathetic, scary. It is noise at its most fundamental: the
collapse of communication through overload; the inverting
of interiority; the ultimate surrounding of sound.
DOCTOR
DOLITTLE goes as far as having Eddie Murphy interred in
a psychiatric hospital because he claims he can talk to
the animals. The film soon becomes hopelessly trapped by
its own contradictory do-gooding, for at the end of the
day, no-one is going to believe anyone can talk to the animals
and hear exactly what they say. The films throws intensely
absurd plot loops which try to mesh Cosbyesque altruisms
with a critique of America's woeful medical system while
making a cinematic fluffy white cloud. The more that urban
vocal schizophrenia takes hold of the aural metropolis,
the more we will try to deny it, and the louder its noise
will get. One must not forget the role we as 'non-crazies'
play in increasing this audible threshold. Every time we
ignore that person talking to themselves, the more we socially
enforce a cone of silence which actually allows the person
with schizophrenia to expand their 'acoustic self dome'.
They figure that our silence is an acceptance of their expanded
aural territorialisation - which is exactly what it is.
There
are people whose TV sets have additional dialogue tracks.
There are people whose radios pick up broadcast frequencies
unheard by the normal ear. There are people whose body parts
have separate and vocal consciousness. They step onto the
tram you catch and transform the aisles into a stage. They
cue up at the bank and convert the booths into recording
studios. They stand on a street corner and turn the whole
city into their own personal Walkman. We are but vague shapes
of silence in their surrounding noise. And all of them can
talk to the animals.
