The Blair Witch Project: Technology, Repression, and the Evisceration of Mimesis

September 19, 2013 Posted by Webmaster under Volume 10, Number 1, September 1999

David Banash

Department of English
The University of Iowa
dbanash@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu

 

The Blair Witch Project.Dir. Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez. Perf. Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard, and Michael C. Williams. Artisan Entertainment, 1999.

 

Given its preposterously low budget, outsider production, and a priori cult status as ludic masterpiece, The Blair Witch Project does not seem a likely candidate to become the allegorical moment of our postmodern media-scape. In fact, the major obsession of all reviewers has been, thus far, that the film somehow by-passes technology altogether, returning us to an authentic psychological (think Hitchcock) rather than technical horror (Wes Craven). The marketing of the film exploits this fact–i.e. here is the real horror of your imagination rather than the over-produced kitsch of Freddy Kruger or Pin-head. This undisguised appeal to the authenticity of imagination is paradoxically coextensive with BWP‘s presentation and marketing of itself as a documentary. Thus, not only is the film obsessed with returning the viewer to an authentic experience of self under the sign of imagination, it simultaneously presents itself as an unmediated, even “unimaginative,” reality. However, BWP is, ironically, a deconstruction of the possibility of such authenticities in our technologically mediated culture, and the return of this knowledge is where the real horror of the film is to be found.

 

The classic horror narrative is based on the return of the repressed: From Mary Shelly’s left-for-dead monster to Candyman, the theme asserts itself as both causality and moment of terror. BWP is in this sense no exception. Written and directed by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, the film presents itself as the raw footage of three student filmmakers (director Heather Donahue, cinematographer Joshua Leonard, and sound technician Michael C. Williams). As they venture into Maryland’s Black Hills Forest in search of the legendary Blair Witch, we witness both the initial shots for their documentary project (complete with slates) and their continual filming of the strange events that ensue as they are stalked by a malicious presence. As we are told in the opening credits, the three were never seen again. The narrative, then, is the return of the Blair Witch, who, presumably, is responsible for the disappearance of the filmmakers. However, there is another way we might grasp the return of the repressed in this film, and thus explain both its popularity and power. The marketing and reception of the film are centered around its supposed ludic repression of technology and return to authenticity. Yet, within the narrative, we are left with only film cans, DAT tapes, and 8mm Video. To put this rather more pivotally, the substantive repression in our reception of the film is not that of the witch herself, but of technology’s mediating role in every aspect of our world. Yet at every turn in the narrative, and encoded into the documentary format which relies on both grainy black and white and shaky video, the technological apparatus and its inability to represent the witch are underscored. The real horror of the film is built out of the return of this knowledge–that we remember our powerlessness in a world saturated with, but immune to, a technological mimesis we can neither trust nor escape.

 

Much has been made of the BWP‘s status as a psychological horror film that relies on imagination. The consensus established in the reviews is that the omnipresence of billion dollar effects in films from The Phantom Menace to Aliens are, these days, no longer effective because they alienate the audience from its imagination. As Entertainment Weekly Online puts it, “[t]oday, when moviegoers know everything about everything (and can never unimagine, say, that ‘Alien’ monster bursting from John Hurt’s chest), the only true fear lies in what’s not shown” (Schwarzbaum). The old argument here is that films which push technology towards a total mimesis no longer frighten audiences so desensitized that they can watch any evisceration disinterestedly. However, the reason for that jaded passivity is that real horror must be the evocation of our own fears; in short, a return to and paradoxical affirmation of the self. The success of BWP, so the argument continues in the New York Times, is that everything “is left to the imagination. And the imagination works overtime watching the acuity of these talented filmmakers” (Maslin). The formula for successful horror, is then, according to Kristen Baldwin, “asking the question ‘Hey, do you want to see something really scary?’ and letting your mind provide the example.”

 

There are two moves worthy of some serious scrutiny here. First, there is an obvious backlash against over-budgeted, over-produced, studio monsters of all genres. Part of the fascination with BWP is also part of the current idolization of indie hip, and thus critics are quick to laud any successful film “whose cost, according to its makers, was about the same as a fully loaded Ford Taurus” (Brunette). However, the way BWP gets reviewed is strikingly different from say El Mariachi or In the Company of Men. These films are depicted as postmodern tales of directorial self-reliance and Horatio Alger success against late capitalist corporate culture. Such receptions are often divorced from the actual narratives of the films. In contrast, BWP is not only represented as an allegory of economic self-reliance but a more total, perhaps transcendental, affirmation of the very concept of self metonymically transformed into imagination. According to Salon, “the fact that a shoestring-budget mockumentary with no name stars, no special effects, no rivers of bloody gore and not even a musical score can be this spooky is a testament to the storytelling ability of the filmmakers, and to their trust in the audience’s imagination. It’s been a long time since a movie did so much by showing so little” (Williams). Here, reaction against studio slick is coupled with a defense of what such obviously constructed, special-effected films threaten: the very concept of self. Where the studio monster is always constructed for us, given to us in the most graphic detail, it simultaneously calls attention to the very way it is attempting to manipulate audience reactions, constantly reminding the audience that it has little control over the way in which it is being mediated. BWP is such a powerful film, so the critics conclude, because it returns the audience (think trust as empowerment) to unmediated self-hood and agency (your fears, your mind, your self).

 

But with all this emphasis on imagination, we might wonder if critics and audiences aren’t protesting just a bit too much. BWP is now famous for what it does not show. We do not see Josh’s abduction. We do not see the presumably gruesome ends of Heather or Matt. We do not see the witch. All these, it is said, are left to the imagination. But what if this is about something more than empowering the imagination? For all these moments in the narrative are coordinated by the film’s central plot: the failure of a documentary project. It is this failure that is shown in agonizing detail as the mimetic technologies (maps, compass, DAT, video, film) break down along with the collective cohesiveness of the filmmakers. Thus, what our reception itself represses is the very failure of technology as an armature and expression of a will to knowledge and, by extension, the possibility of self.

 

Throughout the film, technology is equated with power and control over the world. As the filmmakers enter the woods (a stark pre-modernism), they rely on a map and compass. However, immediately they have difficulty reading the map. These are the first really tense scenes of the film, and they introduce the longest narrative theme: being lost. We witness Josh and Mike becoming more fearful as Heather miscalculates their distance from shooting locations. This theme is developed over the course of two days in which the very validity and usefulness of the map is called into question. What is at stake is representation itself. Heather, though she has misread the map, maintains that it is an accurate representation of the territory which they can interpret if they simply take the time. Josh initially struggles with Heather, retaining faith in the map, but arguing over its interpretation. Mike, unable to read the map, maintains that either it is inaccurate or no one has the interpretive skills to read it. On the third day, the map disappears all together. Though Mike later confesses to destroying it, it remains uncertain if this is true. The map, then, is the first technology to be called into question. What the disappearance of the map dramatizes is their dependance on a technology of representation they either do not trust or cannot use, but on which they nevertheless must rely. This theme is repeated in the subsequent failure of the compass. Deciding to take a course south, they follow the compass all day but by nightfall have simply come full circle to their campsite. Even more emphatically than the map, the compass has failed. In the map and the compass the film presents a world immune to technological representation. This theme is more subtly but effectively developed in the failure of their audio/visual recording equipment.

 

Though they believe they are being stalked by a presence, and speculate that it may be the witch, they cannot capture it on film. This is hardly a problem of proximity. Whatever is shadowing them approaches their tent over the course of four nights, leaving totemic piles of rocks and bundles of sticks. Though they hear noises over the course of these nights, they cannot capture a single image and manage to record only the most muted and distorted clicks and rumbles on the DAT (despite the fact that they describe these sounds to one another as shouts, footsteps, and the cries of a baby). Just as they fail to master their navigational equipment, they are unable to mobilize their recording equipment to capture (and thus understand or contain) whatever is menacing them. It is curious that our attention is displaced from this aspect of the narrative, for the horror of confronting a world that cannot be represented is shown in chilling detail.

 

Just as they continue despite everything to rely on their map and compass, so do they continue obsessively to film their ordeal. Though when they are first lost Josh frequently argues with Heather over this, accusing her of irresponsibility given the possibility of death either from exposure or the unknown, she defends her decision and continues, as do both Josh and Mike despite their occasional protests. Yet in a tense and self-reflexive moment in the film, Josh confronts Heather. Taking her video camera, he says, “I see why you like this thing. It’s like filtered reality.” While Heather does not object to this statement, and critics and audiences have all but made a rallying cry out of it (what you can’t see on the screen is scarier), the narrative suggests something a bit darker. It is not as if Heather, or we, could simply remove our gaze from the lens. Technologies of representation are, as we know, omnipresent. Worse, they are the only possibility we have to engage the world. Yet, they are always flawed, always inadequate, always shifting and deceptive. The fact that the witch cannot be captured on the film is the horror of the film, but not because it empowers unmediated imagination. It is horrifying because it dramatizes (shows!) our total reliance on technologies that, if pushed, break, rupture, and give over to chaos. In a later scene, (perhaps the most famous of the film, in which Heather holds the camera to her face in the blackness capturing only her own image), the would-be director apologizes: “I insisted on everything [the whole project, the locations, the directions they took, etc.] I’m sorry, it was my project. I was naive.” What Heather realizes in this monologue is the position in which her own will to knowledge has placed her and her crew. Accepting the necessity of and trusting in mimetic technology, expecting that technology to adequately represent the world, she and the others have pushed it to a rupture, and death seems likely. Confronted with a world that we cannot represent/imagine (be it postmodernism itself or merely the Blair Witch), the real drama is not the empowerment of imagination but our horror in the face of our simultaneous reliance upon and critique of the technologies of representation.

 

It is curious that our initial reception of the film has been so interested in BWP‘s specious affirmation of imagination, for the other most remarkable narrative and stylistic feature is its status as documentary. Though both the legend of the witch and the disappearance of the three students are fictional, the creators of BWP have done everything they can to present their film as an actual documentary. For instance, their web-site treats the entire story as history and journalism, complete with mock historical records, time-lines, and local news-clips. This material has even been taken up and turned into a featured special, “The Curse of the Blair Witch,” on the Sci Fi cable channel. The program, treating the material as historical fact, poses the question “[i]s this century-old pattern of murders part of a complex conspiracy by a radical cult attempting to keep the threat of the Blair Witch alive?” (scifi.com). Even the film itself has the look of truth that has come to dominate, from the emergence of MTV’s The Real World to The Fox Network’s Cops, or even America’s Funniest Home Videos. In fact, in both reviews and postings to chat-groups, viewers associate much of the fright with this realism. Such realism was part of the film’s very production. The actors retained their real names, improvised almost every scene with minimal direction, and, deprived of sleep and food, made method acting an extreme sport. Yet this, more than any other feature of the film, should make us suspicious of the endless claims in favor of imagination. Consistently employing the discursive and filmic conventions of journalism and history, BWP performs the fact that all representations are incomplete constructions incapable of laying bare a god’s-eye view. And it does this with an effortless elegance, for not only has the documentary failed, it asks its audience to adopt a critical stance toward all documentary (mimetic) claims. Thus the film contains its own self-reflexive critique, dramatizing the literal end/impossibility of mimesis. To obsess over imagining the witch is to elide the horror that is on screen throughout the film; it is a reactive desire to escape the critique of mimesis, for in the supposed freedom of imagination we forget that our very psyche is as constructed, incomplete, and mediated as the film itself.

 

Jameson’s classic argument in “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture” reminds us that part of the popularity of blockbuster films (horror films in particular) is their ability to “entertain relations of repression with the fundamental social anxieties and concerns, hopes and blind spots, ideological antinomies and fantasies of disaster, which are their raw material” (141). The utopian moment of popular film, according to Jameson’s Blochian reading, is a repression of these fundamental materials through “the narrative construction of imaginary resolutions and by the projection of an optical illusion of social harmony” (141). For Jameson, popular films are popular because they tap the collective’s fears. However, the Hollywood ending always resolves these fears by transforming them into an utopian moment that underwrites the immediate social order. What is so curious about BWP is not that it taps such fears, but that it offers no such resolution. The utopian moment simply is not to be found in the narrative of this film. It has been displaced onto the plane of our reception. The raw materials of BWP are, no doubt, our fears of and insecurities with (mimetic) technologies that we can neither trust nor escape. And with its stark, bleak ending–the failure of a documentary project, the disappearance of human agents, and the inhuman survival of the tapes and film–BWP offers no consolation. But such fears are repressed and turned into a utopian affirmation of our contemporary moment through the valorization of our imagination (self) coupled with the indie myth of good old American economic self-reliance. For audiences and reviewers, the film is thus coded as a return to utopian authenticity. Yet narratively, this moment is precisely what the film denies. The rhetoric of our reception thus becomes our alibi for the masochistic pleasure we take in witnessing BWP‘s horrifying and literal evisceration of mimesis.

 

Works Cited