Provocation | Holes in the Wall

Dissociation is a psychological defense mechanism that occurs in response to a
traumatic event. It involves an attempt to seek safety from threatening experiences by
internally detaching from your surroundings and your own thoughts, feelings, and
bodies. In a sense, dissociation is an internal escape route, away from the onslaught of
a threatening reality. Or maybe dissociation is an actual place to which you escape.
Escape to where?

Perhaps dissociation is also a form of resistance: a refusal to accept or comply with the
impossible, unacceptable world in which you exist. Barring any other way out, parts of
you flee, inward, off the grid, beyond anyone’s radar. Or perhaps dissociation is akin to
“la Résistance” – a secret organization that resides within you and resists authority.
When your body becomes an occupied country, dissociation is your own underground
movement of partisans and guerillas.

*

Sometimes, when you dissociate, you literally go underground.

*

In Coralie Fargeat’s film The Substance, an actress seeks safety from the threatening
experience of aging by taking a serum that generates a “younger, more beautiful, more
perfect” version of herself that emerges from a slit in her back. Every seven days, the
two bodies are required to exchange consciousness, while the body not in use stays
behind, in storage. Of course, something goes terribly wrong.

I should have loved The Substance. I’m a woman veering dangerously close to the age
of the film’s protagonist, Elisabeth Sparkle (portrayed by star actress Demi Moore, a
phenomenal casting choice – UA). I, too, face the ongoing threat of experiencing my
aging female body under an unforgiving gaze. I, too, seek safety. I am a voracious
consumer of body horror films. I have never not fallen in love with any female monster
that has crossed my path. Yet I left this film feeling unsatisfied.

Because I wanted to get to know Elisabeth Sparkle, beyond the harsh gaze of the
camera on her decaying skin and flesh. I wanted to get inside her, inside the slit in her
back, even for a moment. I wanted her to get inside herself, to find the one spot where
the self-destructive, internalized male gaze had not yet occupied. But throughout the
film, Elisabeth Sparkle remained a stranger to us both. She was overcome.

אבל לאורך הסרט כולו נותרה אליזבת ספארקל זרה לשתינו. היא הובסה. 

The closest I felt to Elisabeth Sparkle was during one moment in which I experienced an
unlikely “spark” of true recognition, if you will. I would like to zoom in on this one image
from the film: Sue, Elisabeth’s “younger, more beautiful, more perfect” self, has created
a secret hole in the bathroom wall in which she inserts Elisabeth’s lifeless body, where it
remains in wait, in stasis – utterly still, naked, dead-like. Dissociated. Elisabeth’s blue
eyes are wide open, unseeing. The camera zooms in on one eye. Instead of continuing
to follow bouncy Sue out in the world, I longed for the camera to zoom in even closer,
further into Elisabeth’s eye. I wanted to follow this woman deeper inside the hole in the

wall, into an alternate reality. Into a labryinth of secret rooms and passageways inside
the wall, inside her eye. Into the possibility of another kind of story.

*

It is, in fact, quite terrifying to be trapped inside a dissociative space: alive, yet frozen,
like Snow White in her glass coffin. These are spaces where, in an act of self-
preservation, you can lose your voice, your very sense of self. You become a kind of
living absence, a person erased.

Recently, I found myself returning to Dr. Avivah Zornberg’s haunting reading of Genesis
37, (The Beginning of Desire: Reflections on Genesis, New York, Schocken Books,
1995) where Joseph is “projected into emptiness”, cast into a pit by his brothers in an
attempt to erase not only his dreams and the stories he tells, but even the story of his
own being. “…(T)o be in emptiness,” she writes, “to be assigned to a hole,
discontinuous with past and future, gone from the minds of others, is to be assailed by
all the horrors with which emptiness is pregnant.” The image of the pit feels eerily
relevant today, echoing the unbearable reality of those held captive underground,
suspended outside of time.

What happens to a story that finds itself trapped inside a pit [“gone” is the word that
repeats through the Biblical narrative in Genesis 37]? Where can the story go from
here? How can it save itself from being, due to its very erasure, co-opted to serve other
narratives, “…so that any story can be fabricated to account for (its) absence (we can
say, ‘A savage beast devoured him'”); (Genesis 37:20])”? How can the hole left behind
become fertile ground for the birth of a new type of story?

*

Maybe trapped stories search, like we do, for ways of resistance. In a story, dissociation
might surface not just as a theme or a character’s state of mind. In David Lynch’s Lost
Highway, for example, a musician named Fred Madison is convicted of his wife’s
murder and sent to prison. Trapped in his cell, he begins to suffer from excruciating headaches and visions, and then, without explanation, he vanishes. In his place: Pete
Dayton, a young mechanic, an entirely different man, living an entirely different life. Like
Joseph in Genesis, Fred is “gone”, and then Pete, too, is released from prison. Like the
The Substance, Lost Highway features a character who fractures into another self.
But in this case, the story itself mirrors that rupture, echoing the dissociation in its very
structure. Almost as if an invisible trap door has opened inside the prison cell, releasing
all its inhabitants, including the story.

Dissociation functions here not only as a trauma response, but almost magically. Walls
become permeable, secret tunnels are revealed. Perhaps even miracles can occur, like
Kefitzat Haderech, the miraculous shortcut. Kefitzat Haderech, in Hebrew, means a
sudden contraction of the road, possibly through divine intervention, but it is also a
hermeneutic device, invoked in the rabbis’ biblical interpretations when a verse about a
journey does not quite add up, when something in the text jumps or skips too quickly to
make literal sense. Like a body in a state of dissociation, where the breath tightens,
grows shallow, restrained, a story in a dissociative space might also contract before it
ruptures or transforms, making room for an opening.

Invoking this kind of miracle within a story might serve as a form of resistance against
the blind, endless repetition of the narratives that entrap us, against the prisons of our
own stories. It is a way to push back against the loops that Parul Sehgal critiqued in her
widely discussed 2021 “New Yorker” essay (The Case Against the Trauma Plot, The
New Yorker, December 27, 2021), where she describes a growing trend in novels, films,
and television: trauma used as a hollow engine, a shortcut for character development or
dramatic stakes. Since her essay appeared, it seems to me as though the whole world
has been increasingly caught in a trauma plot of its own, spiraling into victimhood,
violence, ruin and repeat. To bestow a story with Kefitzat Haderech is, perhaps, to offer
it a magical shortcut out, a disruption in the pattern. A sudden escape route from the pit.

*

I keep returning to the spark of recognition I felt when glimpsing Elisabeth Sparkles’
prone body, hidden in the hole in the wall. Strange as it may sound, she seemed more
alive to me in that moment than at almost any other point in the film. Maybe I am saying this because so much of my time over the past few years has been spent if not quite
“prone”, due to chronic pain and injury, then at least prostrate, lying down. I am, in fact,
prostrate as I type these words.

But maybe I am saying this because there is another kind of resistance story that lies in
the body itself. Or: in how the body itself lies. In 1964, during the height of the Civil
Rights Movement, activist Stokely Carmichael infamously “joked” that “the only position
for women in the movement is prone.” But in the years since, women have redefined the
prone position, reclaiming it as a radical posture of resistance rather than an act of
submission or than reducing it to any of the lying-down positions so often associated
with women – in sex, in childbirth, in gender-based violence.

Take Ana Mendieta’s Silueta series, for instance, which began in 1973 with images of
the artist lying nude and prone in varied natural landscapes, her body evoking death,
embedded in and facing the earth. Over the course of a decade and more than 100
performances, sculptures, films, and drawings, she seemed to allow herself to
disappear. By 1975, her physical body had left the frame, leaving behind only ghostly
outlines, impressions in sand and soil. Perhaps her absence became the art, asking the
viewer to witness, remember, and perhaps even to take responsibility.

Or Bhanu Kapil’s book Ban en Banlieu (Nightboat Books, 2015) that centers on Ban, a
symbolic figure representing marginalized identities in the context of historical and
contemporary violence. Entwining fiction and memoir, the desire to lie down repeats like
a refrain throughout the book:
“I want to lie down in the place that I am from: on the street I am from”.
“I wanted to write a book that was like lying down.
That took some time to write, that kept forgetting something, that took a diversion: from
which it never returned”.
“I wanted to write a book about lying on the floor of England.”

The book also includes notes to actual performances that Kapil conducted to embody
Ban’s story, some of which involved her stripping down in public spaces and lying on the
earth.

Finally, in her 2016 essay Sick Woman Theory (Mask Magazine) artist and writer
Johanna Hedva asks: “…How do you throw a brick through the window of a bank if you
can’t get out of bed?” She describes lying in her bed, chronically ill, as she listens to the
sounds of the 2014 Black Lives Matter protests drifting up to her window. “Attached to
the bed,” she writes, “I rose up my sick woman fist, in solidarity.”

Of course, it may seem awkward to draw a line between the fleeting image of a white,
fictional character in a body horror film and the deeply embodied works of the artists
mentioned above, whose performances are grounded in lived experiences shaped by
race, gender, and history. Yet, as I freeze the frame on the image of Elisabeth Sparkle’s
body in the wall, I still find myself silently urging her toward a different mode of
resistance than the one she ultimately chooses: Stay there, Elisabeth Sparkle. Breathe.
Turn toward the earth. Go underground. Raise your fist in solidarity! Rest your body
inside the wall, inside the dissociative space. And maybe, just maybe, from within the
void, some small, new truth will begin to stir.

Maybe that’s how it came to me: curtains drawn, lights off, dishes crusted and piling,
phone on silent for days. I lay on the couch. I caught a glimpse of my reflection, lit by
the cold glow of the computer screen, un-showered, hair snarled, dark circles under my
eyes, lips pressed tight in a scowl. Squinting, hunched, almost feral. Almost monstrous.
I talked to no one. I waited, for no one. I wrote this essay.

In the end, though she loses her livelihood and the privileges once granted by her youth
and beauty, Elisabeth Sparkle does not remain lying down in protest. For her, there
seems to be no true escape from the prison of her body and the meanings imposed on
it by a misogynist, patriarchal, capitalist society. As if an aging woman, lying down, not
producing, not reproducing, is not deemed monstrous enough, Elisabeth Sparkle’s dissociation intensifies outwards, through escalating layers of excess and decay, until
she merges with Sue, her other self, into an increasingly grotesque being which, in its
final act, explodes and vanishes.

Perhaps here, too, we are meant to bear witness to a woman’s self-erasure – but unlike
in Mendieta’s work, when this film is over, Elisabeth Sparkle is literally wiped away
without a trace.

Interestingly, in an interview, filmmaker Coralie Fargeat recalls a scene that was cut
from the film: Elisabeth is at lunch with her boss, Harvey, who says, while firing her and
eating shrimp: “Don’t worry, now you’ll have time with your family,” to which Elisabeth
replies, “I don’t have kids” – and he is left speechless. Fargeat reflects on this moment
as a commentary on women like herself who choose different paths of creation, like
making art, as a form of legacy. She speaks to the fear faced by those whose creativity
does not take the form of motherhood: “The heroine can’t have children, and she says
that when she’s gone, everything is gone.” In The Substance, Elisabeth Sparkle is not
even offered the alternative route of creativity – Sue, the creature she “gives birth to,”
only leads Elisabeth to her demise. (I Give Birth through My Art, Kitty Grady
interviewing Coralie Fargeat for “A Rabbit’s Foot”, September 23, 2024)

*

Hedva concludes her Sick Woman Theory with a prophecy/prayer:

…Because, once we are all ill and confined to the bed, sharing our stories of therapies
and comforts, forming support groups, bearing witness to each other’s tales of trauma,
prioritizing the care and love of our sick, pained, expensive, sensitive, fantastic bodies,
and there is no one left to go to work, perhaps then, finally, capitalism will screech to its
much-needed, long-overdue, and motherfucking glorious halt.”

While talking through this essay with my friend and editor Adi, she said to me: “Maybe if
we were all confined to our beds, there would be no more wars, either.” Maybe this kind
of resistance, this form of dissociation, this lying down, on our sides, face down, is a
refusal to keep performing the same violent scripts, the ones we have been taught are inevitable. Maybe it is this very dissociative position, this pause or diversion, in the wall,
on the earth, in the street, from within the pit, and yes, also from our couches and beds,
that will allow our stories, and the trauma plot in which our world is currently entrapped,
to finally contract and release. And then, maybe, we can breathe freely again.