My Darling Muse

I’ve always loved the exaggerated excesses of slapstick comedy – the overblown gesture, the perfectly timed execution of a physical gag, the disruptive violence of the outcome provoking belly laughs at the expense of the protagonist.

Last week, my eldest daughter fell down a steep set of concrete stairs leading to a viewpoint at Howick Falls, SA., rivalling the waterfall in terms of spectacle. Frozen to the spot, I watched, helplessly, as she tumbled, limbs flailing, at every step thinking: “She will stop now. She will stop now.” But she continued to fall as if in cartoon slow motion, right to the very bottom of the stairs. The audience (all heads turned from The Falls to The Fall) watched in stunned disbelief, caught in a state of suspended animation, before rushing over to where she lay in a heap, all of us arriving on the scene too late. My daughter, though shocked by her fall was miraculously unhurt, save for a large bruise on her right shin. 

(Unsurprisingly, upon googling images of Howick Falls, I found no photos of the concrete stairs leading to the viewpoint.)

Then we laughed and laughed, big, loud guffaws at the absurdity of the episode. The location and timing could not have been more perfect.

M. has a very rare genetic syndrome that causes heart problems, hearing loss and plays havoc with the body’s connective tissue system. As a result of this, her body feels much more loosely strung together than the clinical norm* – she is more fluid than solid. While, obviously, I am subjectively invested in her care, objectively, I find her condition fascinating – most particularly her body’s peculiar behaviours as a result of its proprioceptive impairment. 

When I brush my younger daughter’s hair she naturally offers a resistance that equally offsets my action. When I brush M’s hair, her entire head, neck and upper back bend backwards, following the direction of my stroke – her body does not intuitively attempt to counter the pull. She needs to be instructed to act against the force. When I brush M’s hair there’s a lot of: “Aw, jeez, M. just offer me a bit of resistance, will you?”, quickly tempered with: “Not THAT much!” as she offers an extreme response in the opposite direction. 

The Matrix Neo Moves Fast | Movie Clip

Objectively speaking, it’s very, very funny.

As her body does not naturally calibrate this measure, she has to cognitively intervene – she has to actively learn how to physically react to applied forces. It is the same when she is the one applying the active force. She is now ten years old and has learned to better moderate her actions and reactions – but she does so very consciously – when she is tired her assessments still go awry and we get, what I refer to as ‘the jellyfish’, or its diametric opposite, ‘the vice’ effect. I will attempt to illuminate these terms:  sometimes when I hold her hand it feels boneless and lacking any sense of solidity – she is holding my hand but there is no sensation of my hand being held – hence, ‘the jellyfish’. On other occasions she will hold my hand in a bone-crushing grip, hence, ‘the vice’. When she is not thinking in the background, ‘how much force is required here?’ she delivers either one extreme or the other and we must remind her to consciously mediate. She is an accomplished little gymnast and trains intensively. This training, supplemented by her regular physiotherapy, provides her with the information her body requires to understand its position in space. When she is not training regularly she loses a sense of physical feedback and her quirky proprioceptive responses resurface.

Preparatory Studies V(a): Melt.

It’s slapstick all over – responses disproportionately too large or too little (fortunately, in her case, mostly stopping just short of injury) tending toward the cartoonish.

Difficult though her condition is, there’s a lot of laughter involved.

All of which brings me back to Michael Snow’s treatment of the actors in The Living Room and its encompassing movie, Corpus Callosum.  With early access to Houdini software, Snow gave his actors a post-production slapstick treatment: violently stretching, twisting, flattening, inflating, exploding, multiplying and making them disappear and reappear on a different plane. As Snow’s characters lack the dimensionality of ‘character’ – they are compositionally as vital as any object in any given scene, but lack a sense of agency; they fill a space, but not with ‘character’ – there’s something quite unsettling about this form of slapstick. In Stunts, Pratfalls and Cartoon Violence. [Part 2] I’ll be looking at this uneasy form of slapstick in the context of The Plexiglass Dollhouse. Stay (Looney)Tuned Folks!

*In attempting to describe her experiential differences, I use the word “normal” in the sense of what is considered the clinical norm to differentiate between M’s experience and that of the general population. 

 

Ciara Finnegan.