The Incompetent Investigator

I once tried to watch ‘Reservoir Dogs’ but when it came to that scene with the ear I had to shut my eyes and scramble for the off button. I think I was unsettled by the contextualization of violence within a witty, cool moment; the funky soundtrack and the actor’s improvised ‘dad-dancing’ somehow mis-aligned the horror, making it all the worse to bear. Tarantino wasn’t the first director to re-figure brutality – I recall a similar failure when I first tried to watch ‘A Clockwork Orange’. 

By propelling an antagonist within an exaggerated plot, making him/her party to contrary or extreme perspectives, good story-tellers can powerfully present the breadth of their own imaginary world, so that the rest of us can come close to imagining it too. Optimally, by acknowledging something on the fringes of consciousness, or that which is just outside the usual levels of tolerance, we can achieve some kind of return on our investment. It is hoped that afterwards (assuming we haven’t scrambled for the off button) we will have discovered a different version of the world and the stuff encountered there. We might consider ourselves changed, educated, even culturally enriched; our imaginations expanded.

I read somewhere that children (contrary to popular belief) have little or no imagination, because imagination is nourished entirely by what we already know of the world. Children have less experience to draw on, so it follows they would be less able to speculate. A child doesn’t fear a strange noise in the dark because s/he is able to imagine the monster in all its gory details; that child’s fear is down to an abyss of ignorance, of simply just not knowing enough. The vulnerability of being unable to consider a plausible explanation is where true terror lies. No matter how obscure our fantasies seem and whatever strangeness we think we dream, our imagination is rooted in, and built up around, what we have already witnessed and have already processed. 

By collecting evidence for how things seem and by using this to build our own sensible world, we are free of the abyss; free to imagine rational explanation, and likely outcomes. Such theories of the world in our heads can pre-suppose the wonderful, the thrilling and the sensuous too… there’s no need to anticipate just the horror. This seems like a way to function, to get by. 

So, we are continually gathering the information we need to construct a world to believe in, something concrete, our story, our ‘lot’. Isn’t it the greatest story ever told? Doesn’t the plot blow your mind? It’s a Wonderful Life …but wait, doesn’t something slightly niggle off the page? …from behind the camera? 

Tarantino and Kubrick exposed my incompetence; I failed to collect. I failed to admit something outside my levels of tolerance, but am I the only one to switch off and cook dinner? There is an even greater sense of failure in not collecting evidence for what seems ultimately unknowable and infinitely unimaginable: the truth about deep pain and death. On this, I am a child again, fearing strange noises in the dark. 

An unsatisfactory outcome for any investigation I make of the world is inevitable because I have to look outside of myself for what I seek. I must endeavour to understand what is ‘other’ to myself, when everything that is ‘other’ to myself must be sensed and directed back into me. The ‘other’ must be processed by me. Must I depend for revelation on such a flawed method? 

I am obliged to not present the world to myself, but to re-present it to myself. Whatever I eventually get is a world so heavily cloaked with my own consciousness that it is surely rendered inscrutable; fiction.

On a good day I might get a reasonable copy of ‘reality’. On a bad day? …how wrong can things go?  

‘The Incompetent Investigator’by Della Gooden for the catalogue of the exhibition The Secret Life of Stuff at Arthouse1 Gallery, London.