Screaming crying throwing up: Reaction Film from Elizabeth Taylor to Bobitza
‘Oh she is so me.’
‘Her job is ritual suicide.’
‘She clogged the mother toilet when she was slayed.’
Mr Kuleshov is a very powerful man, whose effect on audiences is unparalleled. His suggestion that the camera can create a psychological association by cutting from an object to a character’s reaction, is the foundation for much of the cinematic form. He should be carved into Mt. Rushmore. But he never met a character like Lise. In Identikit, the 1974 adaptation of Muriel Spark’s novella The Driver’s Seat (1970), Elizabeth Taylor plays a character who defies reaction. On the search through Italy for a man who’s ‘just her type’ (that is, someone to kill her), her behaviours defy reasoned response, putting the viewer in an alienated space where questions of female and narrative agency go hand in hand. With the modern reaction video format eroding the line between visceral reactions and performative bluster, something about this film, which is often met with bemusement and claims of the maudit, seems keyed into the way that contemporary visual art is received.
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The reaction shot is a key element of film grammar, which variably instructs or suggests to viewers how to think or feel about a given character’s behaviours through the responses of others. Spark is a writer whose clipped, authoritative, narrative voice behaves as its own Kuleshov effect, a constant back and forth of action and reaction. Hers is an inherently 20th century voice through its embrace of cinematic technique. So visual as to be ambiguous, as this first description of Lise shows, ‘Her lips are slightly parted; she, whose lips are usually pressed together with the daily disapproval of the accountants’ office where she has worked continually, except for months of illness, since she was eighteen.’ Spark takes us from the present of the parted lips to the continuous past of office drudgery, to these initial references to illness. Spark’s technique has been called the ‘voice of God’, the sound/image mix of her prose presenting a single tableau over time, like Bazin’s melting vision of cinema.
Following the Cleopatra (1963) debacle, Elizabeth Taylor had searched for herself. Escaping bloated budgets and outsized financial expectations (if not tabloid interest), she embarked on a decade-plus cycle of projects for the kind of directors Andrew Sarris would categorise as short of the pantheon, the likes of Joseph ‘Far Side of Paradise’ Losey (Secret Ceremony, 1968), and John ‘Less Than Meets The Eye’ Huston (Reflections in a Golden Eye, 1967). Many of these co-starred her then-husband Richard Burton, who dragged her to Europe and the self-consciously arty film industry that came with it. Mere days after their first divorce, Taylor would begin filming Identikit for that Italian purveyor of esoteric transgression, Guiseppe Patroni Griffi, whose crude sex-Dramas such as Love Circle (1969) were filled with sensory splashes of colour and body that waft off the screen like bad perfume. Though it’s seen as a curio in Taylor’s filmography, It is the project that most fully grants her and her audience total exegesis of the star persona.
Taylor is twitchy, as though a poise applied offscreen, and taken for granted by the viewer, is due to crack whenever the camera is trained upon her. In Identikit, she takes this to a maximum expression of her persona by attempting a staging of extremis: the look is more extraordinary than ever, but the body is blank. ‘I haven’t broken down like that for years’ she says on the phone, as she excuses her sudden absconding from daily life.
This figure functions as a cinematic expression of Spark’s prose because it asks the viewer, how do we read this? This is not the beautiful-made-ugly misogy-horror of Sunset Boulevard (1950) and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane (1964), something haunted through age. Instead, Lise is presented as too much. Too much beauty, too much makeup, too much costume, too big hair. ‘Off to join the circus?’ Her landlady laughs, gesturing at the carnivalesque spectre before her. Then there are the lurid pulp books she loudly chooses for a stranger. These reactions to Lise range from disgust to disregard to the fascination shown by an English Lord (Andy Warhol). Warhol is arguably the original reaction video maker whose screen tests provide an unblinking, surveillance cam-like dedication to their subject. He had printed Taylor numerous times in the Cleopatra period, perhaps most famously in 1964 as ‘Liz’. His bored presence adds one of several meta-textual flourishes that begs the audience to react to Lise not as a character but as a figural apparition of Taylor herself. ‘How do you know he’s not my type?’ Lise repeats to many people she meets, as if the only thing worse than to be perceived, is to have that perception mediated through an aesthetic matchmaking with any of the leering men that she meets.
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In Dr Cute (2019), a 5 minute film made as part of her Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery exhibition Too Cute, Rachel Maclean explores the cuteness industrial complex. Taking a Sparkian approach to revolution against the film’s gaze, it has the form of a recorded lecture by an ‘off-brand Care Bear Professor of Sweet and Sinister Studies’ (Maclean, in a costume that’s better seen than described). As with all her work, the setting is some potentially online realm, a CGI-pink back projected space dotted with floating hearts, bow ties, and other darling signifiers. This cute aggression — a psychological compulsion to squeeze, crush, and kill — is the engine of Cinema, stroking our eyeballs with soft production design, with a catchy score, with Elizabeth Taylor. Dr Cute’s climax mirrors Identikit, as the Doc makes an effort to escape the confines of the frame, ‘Adults are becoming children while children are becoming adults. It’s a cuteness invasion!’
Indeed, cute is the main currency that drives viewing spans in the attention economy. Reaction videos are a key example of this. In their sanding down of everyday existence, the form provides an adornment, an ironic distance through which to experience narrative. The reaction video is often truncated. You can participate in Saltburn (2023) in just 10 minutes, with a drooling zoomer cracking zingers at the cum-guzzling or period fingering. This is presumably an easier way to watch and understand Emerald Fennell’s version of transgressive cinema than to sit through its full 127 minutes. But it isn’t a true, real-time rendering of the experience. Reaction videos are also often false. Titles like ‘College Students hear Steely Dan for the first time’, ‘Seniors try Elfbar’, or ‘British people react to Moneyball’ are plentiful, usually accompanied by a thumbnail image of the Band/Film/disposable vape in question, beside an outrageously OTT headshot of the reactor with their brows raised and mouth formed in a giant O (commonly referred to as ‘soyface’). Often it is clear that the participant has seen the subject in question before, and is performing a version of their initial reaction. They might play it up for the camera, but they can also play it down. Anthony Paul D’Aliesio and Luca Guerini, hosts of the NFR Podcast were roundly mocked on Reddit, Twitter, and their own comment sections for their reaction to Travis Scott’s album Utopia (2023). Their exaggerated head banging, gurning excitement at some commercial trap seen as goofily playing up to the camera. This was clearly taken on board when they reacted to a Playboi Carti track some weeks later: the nods were visibly more subdued, the facial expressions more composed and thoughtful than the sheer exuberant (if corny) pleasure of their earlier video. The demands of the genre’s desperate beg for attention shows participants whose very bodies are held down by the camera’s glare.
Decades earlier, Griffi’s mise-en-scene in Identikit accentuates this problem at each turn. When Lise buys her outfit, the empty store is dotted with mannequin faces covered by foil, like Magritte’s lovers. The camera tracks past Lise’s breasts imprisoned in a bra, revealed with gossip rag titillation and squashed by the camera movement’s reaction to its own luridness. And then admired again, because it can’t help itself. Griffi gleefully leans into Spark’s ironically dehumanising gaze. Taylor the star and Lise the character fight back against this approach, the former through her shrieking anti-sexuality, and the latter by her essential search for someone to kill her and break the control of the narrator/filmmaker.
‘I can’t stand being touched!’ Lise screams when checked over at airport security, moments before claiming her handbag is a bomb. This encroachment of a real political conflict into her reality, specifically a suggestively bubbling undercurrent of Middle Eastern conflict, is often accompanied by Lise’s most vicious outbursts. In one of the film’s wildest scenes, her stroll beside the River Tiber is interrupted when someone flings a grenade into a passing car carrying an unidentified Sheik. She runs — seemingly in escape, but — Kuleshov again! — the camera pans right to left as though towards the inferno. The next thing we know, she is writhing on the ground, arm outstretched towards the flames. Screaming, crying, throwing up. Then an Italian man swoops in to rescue her. Foiled again, by narrative justice.
The Driver’s Seat makes a spiritual and literal appearance in Radu Jude’s Do Not Expect too Much From The End of the World (2023). Facing us towards the driver’s seat in the Iranian style, Jude’s film is something of an extended reaction shot wherein the viewer is exposed to the daily indignities of late capitalism in Romania, in this case, through the dangerously long hours mandated by the film industry, in something like real time. Of course, Angela’s (Ilinca Manolache) 18+ hour shift isn’t depicted in totality, but through extended sequences on the job (Dazid Eastman’s The Plains (2022) attempts the same in a more single-minded fashion, by never giving the viewer the trick catharsis of the reverse shot). In one scene, Angela picks up a copy of Spark’s novel and pledges to read it. But when will she find the time?
I find that patronising reactions to festival films from oppressed countries or former dictatorships share these same tendencies. Jude might receive plaudits from trade publications, or win the Golden Bear at Berlinale, who in the last weeks threatened legal action against staff for posting content that criticized the festival’s alignment with German government support of the Israeli genocide in Gaza. All in a day’s work. Radu Jude’s comedy resists pity, but our reaction creates the ironic distance which in turn forces the refined Western cinephile audience reaction to create the Verfremdungseffekt. In Identikit, the unidentified Middle Eastern conflict that plays out in the film’s background raises similar notions of representation, both cinematic and transnational.
Do Not Expect too Much From The End of the World’s outbursts take the form of Bobitza, an Andrew Tate parody that Angela uses as a funnel for the ambient hatred and crushing social violence that is enacted around her, from harassment, to undermining, to the part she inadvertently plays in covering up corporate malfeasance. Bobitza is a scream into the void. Does Lise even have a void? With each juddering convulsion, each outburst, and as she inevitably, painfully, finds her type in a deranged murderer who releases her from life in the exact way she demands, it becomes clearer to the audience that this is a whodunnit where the answer is the narrator.
Angela suggests that the YouTubers can find their own Spark moment and fight against their narrator. Jude’s bravura filmmaking presents us with one potential, by spinning our reality into an unflinching fantasia of modernity that exposes in painful detail the exploitative structure of the film industry. In our current reality, in which interactions are mediated by cameras and we are our own content creators, Identikit is a warning shot. For it ends with Lise not just martyred for her agency, but her body defiled, Griffi having the last laugh as the ultimate author of her destiny. You never know how someone will react to you, after all.
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