The result of such extended waking, and in the film, the long, repeating shots, is a surplus of time where time itself degrades in value, life in diminishing return, toward death, and in the wake of death a slowly tapering hallway wherein the space between death and life itself, and waking states and artificial measures, seems deforming, making copies of an act held not quite right. “Seeing everybody so up all the time made me think that sleep was becoming pretty obsolete,” Warhol predicted, “so I decided I’d better quickly do a movie of a person sleeping.”154 The underlying projection herein being that with such repeating mass and endless feeding, one day there might become among our minds a state in which we can no longer differentiate between sleeping and waking, between the doppelgänger and that from which it has been cast. The film Sleep itself, now almost fifty years in the past, in retro-viewing seems already somehow alien, controlled — even at times blurry, more like moonscapes or mannequins than something ours. It seems to suggest that the nature of our sleep itself each night is shifting right beneath us without notice, each day becoming something else, more ruined and malformed, alien even from this body spread in silence not so long ago, on screen. “I don’t know where the artificial stops and the real starts,” said Warhol.155
Even in the most benign of objects, in days fleshing, there are map notes toward potential holes between the extant and the perceived. There is a bigger body made up of the bodies, hulking in night of light and light of night, and which, when strung together, might open wide enough to enter, as in its affect of seeming sleeping without sleeping, insomnia might begin to wear around you as a house inside the house — a second, sheltered skin above the skin you’re in and beneath the ceiling or the sky, both holding out and holding in. In this way all houses could be the same house, connected in all the films and all the books, all of one air: the hotel in The Shining, in which no characters are pictured sleeping, whose walls and carpets lead the visitor through and through them, among the residue of who has been inside them all those years; the ballet school in Suspiria, where two students realize the instructors leave at night not by walking to the left, where the doors make exits, but to the right, heading deeper on into the house — a discovery which, after making an aural mental map of the building by counting footsteps, one girl is murdered in a room full of white wire, and the other, center figure (after pouring the sleep-inducing food she’s being fed into the toilet) finds not only a confluence of witches, but a door into the mouth of hell.
In these films, the fictional locations serving as settings must be channeled by actual locations, in human light. Some rooms are constructed out of soundstage walls and boxes — defined space designated for years of shape-shifting architectures, innards, and air, as well as the bodies brought into them, representing other bodies, and their posited languages supplied by someone else, played out often in replication with minor variation in pursuit of uncovering the scene to be replicated in another way, on film. This history of our creation has gone on as long as all our lives in one queue, and each day appended to in clicking, filming, named. In each, there is the brainspace and sleep lost over the anticipation of the next — the filmmaker’s years and years of manipulating mirrors and other bodies, toward the credits, in want of approaching further toward the one; the years of study of the painter, to get one stroke right, to perhaps, throughout a life, render one length and width that distinctly helps awake the thrall; something unnameable, unspoken in the fixture of a curious node inside a whitened room; holy spaces; unholy spaces; a mesh of the internal mind with the external, as with ghost sightings, ESP, séance behavior, black lights, pyramids, mob violence, installation art, computer glitches, online forums, out-of-body experience, comic books, dream interpretation, conductivity, and so on; of the common ground between these: a continuum of unheard sound — a sleeping of no sleeping, or sleeping outside sleeping, or eating outside eating, a silent floor. And among the flood of it, again, the errors: the queue of holes in continuity and imperfect rendering of form, the errors and the overlap of bodies, wrecked brain matter, hours, aligning into further wake, as it is in the human that the door must be found, and for which the door exists. A game of days. A calm embracing of no nowhere in some somewhere. A lick of houses, walking, light. “Out of the totality of the images, out of a metamorphosis of elements,” wrote Antonin Artaud, “an anorganic language develops which enters our consciousness by osmosis and needs no translation into words.” Words, false models, stacked in albums, lined in faces, clinging hard to time to make time beyond go beyond time, which as it continues, must continue to deform the shape of the face in its wake, to keep it hidden, as the flesh and word and photo replication-body grows, fed by the living in restless output to amass around the dead.
Further filmic settings absorb their aura from translated air in unique human space, such as the weird-light-surrounded entity of Poltergeist—beyond its legendary death curse, based in the knowledge that four cast members died within six years of the release. The film was shot in Simi Valley, California, on a Roxbury Street, which was lined with new homes, surrounded by undeveloped land. The houses had no lawns. Location scouts, under the guise of making a B-movie, offered residents free landscaping for their homes in exchange for allowing their premises to appear on film. In certain shots, one can see that the first house on the street — an eerie copy of the home of the film’s central Freeling family, and a house that was unoccupied at the time — has no landscaping, unlike the others. Production wires can be seen running from the lamps of the Freelings’ home. These are small details, burps in the contained air, that again here in context echo in the waking space to some other light — something rattled in the film stock — minor errors connecting from dot to dot the camera accidents and light poles and shadows, stutters — a fabric made of glitch. There is Descartes’ reminder, also, that waking up from a dream can be a part of the dream as well, and thus the discontinuity of waking, and distrust of rationale — never knowing where the body has been really, or where it is going, or the words. When The Shining was translated to be dubbed for foreign broadcast, certain language became changed. The iconic phrase All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy became “No matter how early you get up, you can’t make the sun rise any sooner” (Spanish), “The morning has gold in its mouth” (Italian), “What you have is worth much more than what you’ll have” (French), further iterations on the words crammed into the words already there, the words that inside the film, never change, despite how they are read — each a layer placed into the text inside the image regardless of one’s awareness of it, as the thing itself goes on — the film existing copied in countless surrounding houses, like the Bible, strewing flesh of media between unseen doors. “A photograph is a secret about a secret,” said Diane Arbus, who later killed herself by slitting her wrists and eating pills. “The more it tells you the less you know.”