Читать книгу Performance / Media / Art / Culture - Jacki Apple - Страница 18

In the opening line of Torso Hell, Allen introduces and frames the piece as “an idea for a horror movie, a treatment.” What makes Torso Hell so unique, and so profoundly disturbing as radio cinema, is that it would be almost unwatchable as the movie Allen describes, so lurid is its violence and vengeance, so painful is the nakedness of the underlying truth it reveals. We would turn away, or we would nervously laugh it off. As a parody of its genre it successfully reveals the way in which Hollywood deforms and perverts the realities of extreme violence and its psychic aftermath, and distances us from its meaning and reality. Keep in mind that in the mid-1980s everyone was following the campy melodramas of the rich in Dynasty and Dallas, or were absorbed in the yuppy angst of Thirty Something, not the dark shadowy margins of the paranormal world of The X Files and Millennium.

If we have become numb to images of suffering, terror, and degradation, Allen knows they can still get under the skin when vividly planted in the ear. As a sound work we cannot shut our eyes to the images materializing out of words and sounds in our brain. They remain immobilized at the edge of consciousness and memory, like a nightmare stuck fast in the heart of darkness. They call forth the demons in our national collective unconscious and flash them off and on like a neon sign in Las Vegas. But their true content cannot be glossed over with special effects. Allen’s radio film is an American theme park of horrors, but unlike a Disney or a Universal ride, it does not offer the catharsis of vicarious chills and thrills, the cheap escape of corporate entertainment. Instead it re-enforces the power of the mind over physical force.

Allen narrates Torso Hell in the easy familiar vernacular of everyday speech, as if he were pitching the story to a potential producer, leaving just enough open-ended possibilities in the details to allow for collaboration without altering the main thrust of the story. And the suggestions are forthcoming, embellishments that bring the film back into more recognizably Hollywood formulas, a kind of postmodern pastiche of familiar signposts — Disney-style animation with live action. Road Warrior types with southwest design art direction. Minnie and Mickey with punk music. 1960s hippie political clichés and “the kind of people you’d run into at a B-52’s concert in El Paso.” This mash-up of three decades of pop culture acts as the perfect counterpoint to the horror of the central story that is stretched beyond rational believability into the realm of unexplainable phenomena. As a radio movie we are forced to consciously navigate between these two forms of representation. As explicit as Allen’s descriptive language seems to be, it is actually the power of suggestion, the way our own imagination fills in the outline, conjuring up the gruesome details, that causes this piece to resonate in the pit of the stomach. We accept the possibility of the improbable when it is in the domain of evil, especially when such darkness of the soul so closely resembles what we have already witnessed masquerading as commonplace.

Torso Hell is a parable. The story begins in Vietnam where five young men are literally blown into pieces in an attack in the jungle. Miraculously they all survive, but the main character is a “complete quad — no arms or legs, just a torso.” When the doctors try to put the pieces back together they sew one of his limbs onto each of the other four guys. When they recover none of them know what has happened, and each thinks he is the only one still alive. The Torso recuperates in a hospital in Japan where a young nurse teaches him Eastern philosophy. After two years in a Veterans hospital the evil half-sister of his dead mother gets legal guardianship and brings him home to her boarding house in “some little shit town out in New Mexico.” As soon she and her gangbanging punker son get Torso in the van, their true nature is revealed.

What follows is a vivid description of the sadistic torture, humiliation, and sexual abuse Torso endures as a half-starved prisoner in a filthy room. Physically powerless and on the edge of madness he slowly hones his mental powers, calling out for his lost limbs. He focuses all his now-considerable mind power on bringing home his missing parts before the aunt and her son kill him. The four buddies telepathically receive the message and proceed like fully armed robots to the boarding house, killing everything in their path until they reach the Torso. His arms and legs fly off their bodies onto Torso’s. He stands as they fall, spurting blood. His body now whole again, he mentally amputates the aunt and cousin’s limbs, seals the wounds and leaves them wriggling around on the floor as torsos.

On the surface Torso has his revenge. Justice is done. The victim vanquishes the victimizer. The circle is complete. If only it were that simple. Allen doesn’t let us off that easily. Instead of the release of retribution we are left with the discomfort of doubt. At what cost is such a so-called “victory” when there are no winners? And who is the real enemy? How do we come to such a place?

In 1986 when Allen conceived this work, the Cold War was still hot and heavy, and we were crotch deep in the mud of Iran-Contra. Torso Hell is part of a much larger series of works entitled Youth in Asia (or Euthanasia, if you prefer) in which Allen deals with the whole subject of Vietnam as a paradigm not an ideological cause. Neither Oliver Stone nor John Wayne are his models. It was Allen’s generation, the boys who danced in the cotton patch to the car radio, who fought the war. Torso is one of those boys. He is all of those boys. As an artist Allen’s political alliances intentionally defy categorization; he succumbs neither to liberal self-righteousness nor conservative knee-jerk patriotism. Instead he gives us something more fittingly enigmatic — indignation and irony caught in an irreconcilable embrace. Thirty years later Vietnam still hangs over our shoulder, a not yet cold albatross, and Torso Hell as a parable is more pertinent than ever.