hurting the theatre of cruelty
May 13th, 2008(Comment Me No Comments: YouTube - Johnny Cash Hurt)
OK, so there’s something reflexive about this. At my other blog, I posted for those interested in watching the videos.
This is theory, or something like it.
The Nine Inch Nails video is manifestly an attempt to do something very like Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty (as I read Derrida reading Artaud), although of course it is not the Theatre of Cruelty (for one thing, it has failed to displace the word’s priority within the song-singer structure that dictates the meaning of “music” video); it is, let us say, a very serious “artist’s representation” of a Theatre of Cruelty. The video repeatedly, in fact, draws attention to its theatrical setting–in this case, a movie theater, in which the singer appears to be the signifying presence within the screen, for our privileged consumption singing the visions we see on the screen, of which the singer seems to be a temporary part for much of the video (though he emerges as a solitary “I” to our eyes, as also the hands alone of the crowd at times appear before us). The scenes of death, destruction, decay, and decomposition on the screen are not the Cruelty of Artaud’s theatre; rather, the inability we (may) suffer with the singer, of being unable to escape the scene of our involvement, nor able to renegotiate the terms of our birth or death, nor able to avoid our decomposition among the images and elements. Of course, our comfortable YouTube distance, and the singer-song structure, significantly mitigate the cruelty and our danger. It is, in many ways, a more remarkable production than at first glance it may seem.
In fact, it is making such a video into something completely different that is the genius of Johnny Cash’s cover and video “Hurt.” Cash has translated the problems in the Nine Inch Nails version brilliantly into a comment on his relationship to Christ; he has preserved the theatricality by stagey, mannered presentation interspersed with recognizable retrospective film clips. There is a cruelty, here, but we suffer to see ourselves suffered for, too, in the only way that Artaud could have found hopeful, in the only way we may have hope; and if Artaud didn’t find it, or if the Nine Inch Nails version hints oddly at a hope which leaves us still seeing the dead, nonetheless we can see in the version by Cash a hint, no, a promise mildly hinted, of the real hope we seek.