Wet Dreams with Joseph Cornell

I watched Rose Hobart cross-legged on dirty sheets on YouTube on a lap top. In Frye's thinking (at the risk of smart-alecry), that's like watching Rose within a box within a box within a box. It was a Tuesday and I watched alone, with headphones on, the big expensive kind.

He must have been fixated on her, Cornell. It is as if the camera lens is a man with a poetic infatuation and a rather more impolite erection who cannot take his eyes off her. It is as though he didn't see East of Borneo at all, but only her in it.

I send myself to sleep with a similar fixation. It comes in the form of a little movie that plays over in my head, something which I invented during the wistful, pubescent days of Being Twelve, and which is now stuck there like a broken record. No matter what else I try to think of - where else I try to put the object (a glorious green-eyed male who even has a name), who else I want the object to be - this same little image sequence insists upon itself, and inevitably soothes me to sleep, until it becomes a sequence-image [1]:

Once upon a time a girl (me, but prettier) knocks on the door of an apartment. Her hair is disheveled and her cheeks are flushed. She wears white crochet and yellow and her navel is bare. She has a suitcase that she has lugged up the stairs. With one hand she knocks on the door. Now we see through her eyes. The door opens. A boy is before her, smiling. His face is indistinct - let me only say that his face is as mesmerising as Rose's.

Fast forward, skip skip. Him again, through her eyes. Him sitting down, FF, patting a dog, FF, laughing, FF, eating breakfast, FF, dinner, FF, almost walking in on her in the nude (almost). Each time, a more pressing desire is building. The more nothing happens, the more furiously, privately they yearn. Suspense.

Then eventually, (have I not fallen asleep by now), comes the finale: in the kitchen which has black and white tiles and whose window faces some brilliant flush of verdure through which the sun is filtered prettily into the room. She is cooking breakfast and he has just woken up. He moves into the kitchen wordlessly and stands behind her. She rests a spatula on the bench, and she is so controlled that when all at once they come together it looks almost violent. Roll credits.

Still not asleep? Rewind. Again and again, until the shapes become hazy, and it is a fight to keep the narrative in order, a fight to keep other figures, shapes, objects out, the light different (bluish, maybe?) and all at once I know I am now dreaming and there is a split second of pleasure in the fact before I am gone.

Rose Hobart reminds me of those final dreamy moments of this nightly replayed "movie" of mine, which exist on the cusp of conscious fantasy and the surreal state of the dream. The initial, linear "Hollywood" narrative of my "movie" becomes skewed in the pleasurable moments between consciousness and dreaming, and the narrative sheds all linearity in favour of a boy with a mesmerising face edited by my sleepy brain into a worshipful collage of only him, which is all my mind desires as the lights go down.

My experience of Rose Hobart felt much like this: the hypnosis of sleep, when your mind is towed in directions it does not expect or plan.

It sort of resonates with me, therefore, that Salvadore Dali had his little tanty over Rose Hobart, claiming it had been stolen from some private recess of his brain. For the same reason as everybody becomes all "I'm funny like that" and while retelling their dreams, assuming with this sudden self-fondness that everybody actually cares, watching Cornell's film is a reminder that however quirky and unusual we believe our unconscious minds to be, there is a certain uniformity to the randomness of the dream logic. Cornell, experimenting with film before postmodernism and the VCR rendered his "collage" idea somewhat passe, still manages to articulate this universally understood dream logic better than I have ever seen it done. I know this because I woke up soon after seeing Rose Hobart with the strange, utterly nondescript and yet in the logic of the film somehow awfully meaningful soundtrack playing along in my head. And it's been lodged there ever since, to the aggravation of those who I live with (as sometimes I absently sing it aloud... doodoodoo doooooo...).

The manipulation of East of Borneo by Cornell is the same thing that I do with my "movie". It is a generic Hollywood love story in which I star, and nothing more, in the same way as Borneo is a generic jungle film, and nothing more. I, like Joseph Cornell, therefore produce what Burgin calls an “invention of the recalcitrant”, whose “viewing customs customise industrially produced pleasures.” [2] We turn a stock character into our own lover, a transformation which occurs, Burgin tells us, in the " space formed from all the many places of transition between cinema and other images in and of everyday life." [3]

Therefore, the collective cinematic experience is taken by the individual imagination to produce something personal, and Cornell has done the soul-bearing thing of representing his experience of East of Borneo on screen. Our minds are editing software that have two setting; the conscious mind functions like a Hollywood film; the subconscious or sleeping mind functions like a surrealist film. It is the sleepy setting that interests me most here, because Cornell demonstrates the ability of the surreal film to articulate the otherwise invisible and indescribable domain of the dream.

Thus rendering our delusions of possessing wildly creative subconsciouses disappointed.

Works cited:

[1] Victor Burgin, The Remembered Film, London: Reaktion Books, 2004, p. 14.

[2] Ibid, p. 10.[3] Ibid, p. 10.
Brian Frye's article, "Rose Hobart" can be accessed here.