Space, Action & the Anterior Field - Katie Post

In his seminar “Space, Action and the Anterior Field,” Dr. Richard Smith explores the binaries of space, movement and the consequences of action through the 1945 film The Lost Weekend. In pursuing the film with Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive approach, he demonstrates the dichotomies and divisions within Don’s world and his consequent interactions with temporal uncertainty.

For Smith, The Lost Weekend is first and foremost concerned with the intent of a writer, who both struggles against and finds solace in, his action as a drinker. As Smith reiterates, Don is “a writer who forgets he’s a drinker and a drinker who remembers he’s a writer,” and Smith’s presentation also reflects the cyclical nature of Don’s experience through also assuming a circular theoretical framework to inform and guide his approach. Drunkenness and sobriety alternate, running to each other in the film like night and day in an otherwise Alaskan Winter. Instability is, therefore, ever-present in both periods regardless of their duration, where the time of wanting a drink is juxtaposed with that of having had a drink. Smith follows suit by consistently returning to this problem of identity, as a correlation between the writer and his writing, or the drinker drinking does not exist. Instead, his identity appears to be split, which is the source of the conflict that ensues through his body and body language. Smith also observes, however, that a reconciliation of opposites occurs within the space.

In the initial scenes shown from the film, Smith draws attention to the spatial context, motor habits and mental attitudes associated with Don’s actions and their interactions in Don’s pursuit of alcohol and story. In the apartment, Don is in a familiar space where his motor actions are conflicted, with hand and face relations opposing each other. Mental attitude drives these oppositions, where Smith draws a correlation between them and the Deleuzian perspective that informs the modern individual of Don. Deleuze looks to understand individuals and their values as products of their desires, and for Don, his blatant desire for the bottle and inability to fulfil his desire to write forces a clash upon his motor actions.
In an existential vein, individuality may be reckoned with but in many ways, Don is imprisoned by such conflict, which inevitably leads to a desire to end his life. The revealing of his intention to Gloria is delivered by the presence of the gun, and just as the typewriter and bottle objects organise the space relationship to Don, the object of the gun disturbs the anterior field through the action that is understood by it. These objects structure the space to make way for a cinematic realism that assumes Don’s perspective. His “gaze” becomes ours, but this gaze is for the bottle and the pleasure of intoxication, rather than its feminist origin in the fetishisation of the female body. As a consequence, the bottle assumes a femininity, boasting the persona of a femme fatale and rendering Gloria, the ‘real’ woman, obsolete as an object of desire.

Smith’s research draws on the relationship between Don, the space he exists in, the objects that govern him, and the conflicts that burden him. His condition is one of denaturalisation, with the drinking/writing dynamic spurring his action, both in light of and in spite of their individual consequences. It seems that time constraints saw Smith’s discussions only skim the surface of the theoretical discourses that are driving his research, however, and after having only mentioned a few so far, it would be very interesting to see more of his research and the theories informing it.