Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles – Summary
“The journey through the evidence is more exciting than the crime itself.”
– Norman M. Klein
Bleeding Through is a multidisciplinary project which encompasses a book with both a novella by Norman Klein and essays on the project, and a DVD ROM. The material on the DVD ROM is organized by Tiers. Tier I is comprised of seven chapters based on the protagonist Molly’s seven memories before her near-death. The seven memories serve as a skeleton of text for which the remainder is formed as, “…a kind of modern novel on a screen with hundreds of photos and Norman (the author) as narrator.” Tier II is composed of photos and newspaper clippings with chapters headings such as: 1916 -1930 Crawling Home Before Sunrise: While Molly Sleeps Like a Cat. It provides additional text and images to fill in the gaps in Molly’s story; the gaps left open by the narrator in the first Tier. The third tier is considered the back story of the narrative, the information that is lost when movie or novel is made legible. It consists of maps, brainstorm diagrams, and material used by the writers in the conception of the story. All three tiers provide anecdotal data such as archival photos and videos from the time of Molly’s story (1920s to 1986). These include newspaper clippings and images about prohibition, or the mostly female textile workers in Los Angeles in the 1920s. The intention of the black and white photos, and clippings of the times, to provide a backdrop both visually and historically, for the viewer as they engage with Molly’s story.
Norman Klein makes an astute observation about the point of entry for this digital media project. As with any novel, the reader begins on the first page, and moves linearly through the space constructed by the author. Whether or not there is multiple histories, “flashbacks”, or characters existing at different time intervals, the narrative unfolds in the direction of the pages turning, and the physical act of reading from cover to cover. Klein believes that, in the media economy we have come to inhabit (from the burgeoning of the internet and new technologies), we enter the story at a point before the first page of a novel. That is, we encounter the data, and the evolutionary process that a writer undertakes to make manifest his or her story: we see the photographs, get the impressions of people and places through short videos, hear a narrator weaving parts of the story together, and develop a sense of place and thought as these elements occur simultaneously, and at our discretion. We generate the drama and action along with the documentary, and are immersed in the field of construction. Klein makes reference to the anecdote as a formative device utilized by authors for developing characters or settings, or perhaps by method actors who attempt to “get into character” by immersing themselves in the lives of the characters they will portray. In Bleeding Through, the anecdote provides a lexicon of data from which to assemble or construct the identities of characters and possible narrative elements.
This theoretical position exerts that the viewer’s own attention span sets the pace for their adventure through the media, and that when one becomes bored of a given text or screen, they are in command of navigating away from that page to another point of interest. The structure of Bleeding Through affords the viewer the time they find appropriate to the project.
Inversely, if there is a part of the media that captures your attention, you can spend as much time as you want with it. You can replay moments of film you find interesting in and of themselves. Your search is inevitably reflective of your own desires and interests, which paradoxically, allows you to construct the narrative your way, but also denies potentially more conflicting material from presenting its challenge to you.
The contradicting forces of absence (the holes in the story) and presence (Molly’s story) in Bleeding Through is the ‘Aporia’. For Klein, the structure (or lack there of), is the source of this ‘aporia’. Aporia as defined by Marsha Kinder in her essay “Bleeding Through Database Fictions” is, “…the pleasure derived from absence (the absence of the story) and from losing track of the pathway.” Klein intends for viewers to lose their way as the accompanying text by the author divulges, the ancient Greeks intentionally, “…lost track of the road itself, to be baffled… [and] trained themselves to give the wrong answer to the wrong question.”
The notion behind aporia in Bleeding Through seems to be centered around a kind of discovery wherein the participant is disoriented, or detached from an overall logic that assembles the themes, characters, and narrative of the story. The participant/viewer is forced to retrieve data to investigate ways to produce narrative and resolve conflicts and details of the story. This shifts the power from the master narrator to the viewer, creating particular tales, unique to the participant and differing from traditional storytelling genres. This new format gives rise to what the essays accompanying Bleeding Through deem as a multitudinous simultaneity and forms from, “…stream of consciousness, interactive, bricolage, documentary, overlaying a fictionalized story based on a real person.”
Although Bleeding Through offers a unique scenario for narrative completion, one in which the participant formulates a distinct relationship to the variables presented in the data, it is a product of early internet experiments in immersive technologies. Its limitations are within the DVD ROM format, which provides only a limited database selected by the author for use in the creation of the content.
Questions:
What are the implications of shifting the power from the master narrator to the viewer/participant in Bleeeding Through?
How is ‘aporia’ or the ‘getting lost’ in Bleeding Through a pleasurable experience? If not, why?