Mind-Erasing
Kits Gilles Deleuze's Theory of
Cinema in
Space Ghost: Coast to Coast
Space Ghost: Coast to Coast is an animated series that
aired from 1994 through 2004 on the Cartoon Network, mostly in unenviable
late-night, weekend time slots, as well as on other networks internationally and
in the United States. This ten year oeuvre consisted of a series of
episodes inconsistent with the time frame of conventional television seasons,
and ended on a permanent hiatus broken only by unannounced Space Ghost
manifestations on other shows, such as Perfect Hair Forever, and on
Cartoon Network parent company properties, such as Game Tap broadband
entertainment network. The show's basic format is a talk show parody that
willfully mashes up live action celebrity interviews and locations with
animation liberated wholesale from an uninspired 1960s Hanna-Barbera superhero
cartoon, Space Ghost and Dino Boy. Over the life span of the show,
using this simple framework as premise, creator Mike Lazzo and his team of
writers, actors, and animators pervert, distort, differentiate, transform and
mutate not only that framework, but the 'classical' movement-image as well,
producing a contemporary, critical praxis within the entertainment industry that
profoundly resonates with the taxonomy of intervals and images that Gilles
Deleuze catalogs in Cinema 1 and Cinema 2 toward the goal of
dismantling the movement-image and elevating the time-image.
Deleuze situates the crisis of the movement-image at the
fulcrum of his revised history of cinema, defining a moment in the aftermath of
World War II during which audiences cease to believe in the continuity of
narrative and become aware of the filmic techniques that create it.
Audience disillusionment with action-image cinema's irrevocable premise that
there must exist actions capable of somehow modifying, or being engendered by,
global situations begins to undermine "the linkages of situation-action,
action-reaction, excitation-response, in short, the sensory-motor links
which produced the action-image."1
Deleuze lists five characteristics of the nascent, rebellious image that emerged
with Italian neo-realism the wake of the action-image: "the dispersive
situation, the deliberately weak links, the voyage form, the consciousness of
clichés, the condemnation of plot."2Space Ghost presents all of these characteristics and more to critically
heighten our boredom with the action-image, and to nurture the birth of thought
intrinsic to this boredom.
The formulation of dispersive reality as "a series of
fragmentary, chopped up encounters"3
precisely describes Space Ghost's structure. The television
format's episodic nature is at the foundation of this structure, providing a
de-globalizing effect, especially considering the contrast of the multiplicity
of ninety or so twelve minute episodes with the narrative monolith of a feature
film. Further, each Space Ghost episode is produced through
intrinsic fragments, clips torn from celebrity interviews and from the original
1960s cartoon. These fragmentations also simultaneously prevent the show's
dissolution into series of sketches4 by
establishing consistency through the source of the animated footage and through
the celebrity interview. The celebrity interviews that reiterate the
episodic nature of the series are chopped up encounters in themselves, typically
re-edited so that the questions Space Ghost asks his guests are blatantly
disconnected from the replies that have been filmed, to confusing or humorous
effect. A moment during the Judy Tenuda interview in the early
Elevator episode particularly emphasizes this through repetition.
Tenuda tells Space Ghost that "friends are just enemies who don't have the guts
to kill you", which prompts Space Ghost to ask "Judy, are friends just enemies
who don't have the guts to kill you?", whereupon the space of the TV monitor
inhabited by guests on the show replays the same clip of Tenuda's definition of
friends.5
Space Ghost also toys with weakening the links from
event to event, displacing them with chance and indifference, just like the
examples Deleuze cites in his identification of the way the viewer moves from
action to situation6. The show's
running fixation upon intertitles to indicate technical difficulties handily
illustrates this replacement via a segment from the Sharrock
episode. Rumbling and camera shake cause Space Ghost to observe
aloud that the set seems to be under attack by one of his enemies again.
Moltar, a superheated supervillain from Space Ghost's 1960s superhero
past, press-ganged into directing the talk show to atone for his crimes,
confirms this. Moltar, Space Ghost, and the other characters on set chew
over this information with lassitude, resigned familiarity, and sarcastic
indifference. The chance attack by random, invisible, and unspecified
enemies draws viewer attention to the weakness of this event's connection to the
narrative flow of the episode. On a command from Space Ghost, Moltar uses
the lever on his directorial mainframe to cut to an 'UNDER ATTACK PLEASE STAND
BY" technical difficulties intertitle. The intertitle serves to further
pry apart the links between events in this episode, for a time entirely shutting
down visual event-to-event linkage, as well as replacing aural linkage with a
noise-rock interlude, presumably courtesy of celebrity guest Thurston Moore's
band Sonic Youth. This situation continues for two minutes, a full one
sixth of the episode's twelve-minute length, and unceremoniously ends with Space
Ghost's admission that the attack was faked, followed by a collective, obviously
false explanation of how it was staged. These explanations are permeated
by an additional indifference, arising from the fact that the viewer doesn't
know and that it simply doesn't matter whether or not the attack was real or
faked.7
That interlude and its conclusion takes the viewer through an
illustration of weakened links between events and further, into Deleuze's fourth
and fifth characteristics of the new image; the foregrounding of cliché and the
condemnation of plot, respectively. 'It was all a fake/all a dream' must
be one of the most heavily trafficked narrative paths, a groan-inducing cliché
born of the rigors of maintaining situation and action in lockstep as dictated
by the axioms of action-image structure. The vague, disconnected attack,
the irrelevance of whether it happened at all, the characters' blatant
unconcern, and finally the abandonment of plot for noise rock all mock the role
of a plot, and suggest that it is unnecessary. Space Ghost
broadcasts the idea that viewers and art practitioners, everyone, can have more
fun, more mental and emotional freedom, and yes, more noise rock, by abandoning
not only that tired old "enemy attacks superhero's base" shtick, but all plot in
general as inherently cliché . This is consistent with Deleuze's analysis
of plot after linkages between events are removed, which construes it as a
closed set of images, and "what forms the set are clichés, and nothing
else. Nothing but clichés, clichés everywhere. .
."8
The remaining manifestation of the new image emerging out of
the crisis of the action-image is a proliferation of voyages, Deleuze's third
characteristic in the identification of the crisis, as well as another recurring
obsession within the annals of Space Ghost. One literal example,
found in the late episode Whipping Post, elevates and satirizes the sonic
affection-image that takes the form of Space Ghost's anger. He flies off
on a pointless circular journey to blow off some steam, returning with anger
intact as well as with hiccups instead of the post card stamps he requested at
the convenience store. The sequence's soundtrack is Space Ghost's
continuously looped, angry scream.9
A
second example, from another late episode, In Memory of Elizabeth Reed,
is consistent with a more broadly defined voyage, derived from Deleuze and
Guattari's idea that "the schizophrenic voyage is the only kind there
is."10 Space Ghost embarks on a trip
induced by a sickle embedded in his head. He hallucinates the sickle's
absence, Moltar's sexy outfit, the problem of sinister computations in Moltar's
directorial mainframe, and the destructive solution to this
problem.11 In breaking the
"super-computer" of his trip, Space Ghost literally destroys the machine
responsible for constructing narrative on the Space Ghost set, and
therefore the composition of the action-image.
Deleuze and Space Ghost also share a concern with
montage, the fundamental machine for constructing the movement-image's
"relationship with the whole"12 of the
creative work and time, albeit indirectly. Space Ghost attacks
montage early, often, and openly, starting with Moltar's gem of a tribute to
women in the entertainment industry during the episode Girlie
Show. Hand-lettered and hand-swapped title cards identify that
"S. GOST PRESENTS" a "TRIBUTE TO WOMEN". The tribute is an accelerating
montage of shots of women from cinema and other live action found footage,
culminating in an ever more frenetic rhythm of musical noise and horrified
Hollywood scream ys; cliché. It is a brief, degenerate case of montage,
forging a simplistic relationship with a limited whole, incapable of adequately
addressing the whole represented by its purported title. Zorak, Space
Ghost's unwilling band leader and willing mantis nemesis, yawns with
exaggerated boredom, capping a sequence that foregrounds the potential vacuity
and intellectual bankruptcy within such image and narrative
composition13. This sequence also
serves as a convenient metaphor for the off-hand, totalizing gloss-over that
Deleuze applies in his sole analysis of female authorship throughout Cinema
1 and Cinema 2, in which he suggests that the house is a key cinema
theme "not simply because women 'inhabit' houses, in every sense, but because
passions 'inhabit' women".14
A similar degenerate montage also appears in the
Anniversary episode of Space Ghost. It composes climactic
action-image clips from the old 1960s cartoon into a career retrospective,
depicting Space Ghost the super hero getting beaten and zapped by a succession
of monstrous villains. Space Ghost's vanity reacts with profound disgust
for the way he is depicted, as befits a bloviating show-boat of a talk show
host. But he reacts most strongly to the idea of montage itself, which
sends him on a destructive mission to fire bomb Parisian landmarks, heedless of
collateral damage. Just like in the previous example, this montage again
forces a laughably simplistic relationship with a limited whole that
inadequately addresses the montage's supposed
subject.15
Space Ghost also foregrounds and exposes the workings
of montage from another, more subtle perspective, by enacting a cumulative type
of Kuleshov effect. Lev Kuleshov was a turn of the century Russian film
maker who used the same shot of a matinee idol's impassive face, first arranged
between shots of food, then shots of a pretty woman, and lastly shots of a
coffin, to conduct an experiment. For each unit of montage, viewers
reported that the actor looked hungry, aroused, or deeply sad, depending on
which of the three kinds of shots preceded and succeeded the shot of the
actor. The demonstration elegantly expresses that the burden of
meaning-creation falls upon the side of the montage, not upon the acting or the
content of shots. Closed shot stacked right up against closed shot, forming new
meaning via composition, links in a perpetual chain of "and then, and then, and
then." Space Ghost produces its cumulative Kuleshov effect by
using and re-using sparse, fixed image loops of the original 1960s cartoon in
episode after episode. Different quips, conversations, situations, and
plots set to the same tight loops, the same shots of Space Ghost behind the
desk, Zorak's reaction shots, shots of Moltar's lever motions on the directorial
mainframe, varied only by the clips he pulls from the feed. A sequence of
these shots from the episode Toast stands in for the multitude of
examples.16 In fact, Space Ghost mainly
consists of such shots. Since there are relatively few bits of footage
drawn from the original cartoon, their array is palpably finite to a viewer of
just a handful of episodes. These closed sets are repeated ad
infinitum to lend an optical scaffold to a variety of meanings over the
course of a ten-year time frame, and each time they repeat, they remind the
viewer of the mechanism that composes meaning, thus transcending it. As
Kierkegaard, via Deleuze, puts it, "To the eternal return as reproduction of
something always already-accomplished, is opposed the eternal return as
resurrection, a new gift of the new, of the
possible."17 Sameness, image loops
craftlessly reproduced, unmoored from their original cartoon ground, the
ultimate index of montage, as well the ultimate line of escape.
Any point between the shots of montage, on the plane of
immanence of movement-images, inherently manifests an interval, "a gap between
the action and the reaction"18 that exists
to be filled, and this is the condition of Space Ghost as well.
According to Bergson via Deleuze, this is the only precondition necessary to
produce a delay, a duration emerging between the shots, a potential novelty and
unpredictability.19Space Ghost
proves equal to the task of realizing this potential, beyond the reactionary,
beyond representation, into producing creative possibilities from the ruins of
the movement-image. Fire Ant is a rare twenty-two minute episode
meant for a half-hour time slot, and Space Ghost uses this extra time to
stage a sublime manifestation of duration. Space Ghost spends eleven
minutes of the episode, roughly all of the extra time, following a fire ant
home, setting a snail's pace through the set, the hallways of the Ghost Planet
Industries building, outside through the barren Ghost Planet itself, crawling
from the right side of the frame to the left through indeterminate Ghost Planet
landscapes. Space Ghost finally finds the fire ant's home, as well his
monstrous, over-sized parents, who promptly give chase. The last shot
suggests that the return journey to the set will be a much faster
one.20 It is as though a lever is
suddenly pulled, a crank turned, or a light casting a shadow, and time scurries
back to its corner, to what it was supposed to be doing.
The Fire Ant sequence compresses the two parallel
durational flows implicit in the movement-image, the duration of cinema time and
the duration of viewer time. This not only evokes the present and time
itself, but also the contrivance of cinema time. The visual space of the
sequence undergoes a similar compression, a stripping away. Less than a
minute in, the viewer strongly suspects that the rest of the episode will
consist of desolate, unimaginatively rendered Hanna-Barbera landscape succeeding
landscape, "strangely and terribly
flat."21 Time flows so slowly that the
viewer is thrown back into her own thoughts. It is important to note that
this is especially the case if she watched the episode as an analog stream, like
broadcast TV, as opposed to a digital, scannable stream like Tivo or
computer. The soundscape is an atmosphere of buzzing sounds and distant
wind, sometimes birds, but mostly Space Ghost humming to himself. The
soundtrack and the animation struggle toward a situation Deleuze describes as "a
purely optical or sound situation [that] becomes established in what we might
call 'any-space-whatever.'"22
According to Deleuze, any-space-whatevers give rise to a type
of character that "does not act without seeing himself acting, complicit viewer
of the role he himself is playing"23.
The characters in Space Ghost take it one step further and do not even
act, since they are a variably recurring crew of crudely realized animated
loops, cultural detritus duplicated from the past and imbued with contemporary
voices. They are a Warholian factory of reanimated superzeros, complete
with degradation, substance abuse, serpentine, gutter-bound career paths, and a
perpetual lack of money. They engage in "perverse modes of behavior which
they produce and animate".24 The images of
celebrity guests, although produced through live action footage, do not act
either, since any acting employed in filming could be neutralized and subverted
through the process of remixing the question-response pairs, and since Space
Ghost often cannot differentiate between actors and the roles they play.
Furthermore, many of the celebrities are themselves the flotsam and jetsam of
the entertainment industry. Because host and guest share this condition in
common, because Space Ghost is so self-involved, and perhaps because of the late
night talk show format, the interviews commonly turn to the topic of failed
careers. Fire Ant also provides one example of many such
self-reflexive sequences. First the gang examines a clip that appears to
be contemporary, that is, produced from the old cartoon but altered, and uses it
as evidence that the 1960s Space Ghost cartoon was not very good.
Complaints about how it ruined everyone's career
ensue.25 These characters, without
acting, are complicit viewers of the roles they play in their acting and in
cultural production at large. What's more, they are creatures of the
impulse-image, "inseparable from the perverse modes of behavior which they
produce and animate."26 In
Dreams, one of the last episodes to air as Space Ghost: Coast to
Coast, Space Ghost is hell bent on pushing the boundaries of obscenity and
offense, despite Moltar's warnings of cancellation. The level of obscenity
and the heavily self-referential text of this episode fuel continuous, unproven
speculation that the show was cancelled by the network. Space Ghost
maladroitly tries to exploit every perversity in order to raise money for his
foundation, and therefore to gain status and in turn validate his
vanity27. This complex of impulses is
typical in the derived milieu of the entertainment industry, and in the
originary world of the 1960s television cartoon.
Deleuze suggests another differentiation of the
duration that arises in the interval between the closed sets of montage, a form
"more profound than that of
movement."28 The interval is "that
which - an appropriate action being given in a point of the universe - will find
the appropriate reaction in some other point, however distant it
is."29 A few moments in the late
episode In Memory of Elizabeth Reed exemplify both humorous and
processual vectors from the given point of action to the distant point of
appropriate reaction. At the immediate beginning of the episode, amongst
the distorted Ghost Planet image of the introductory sequence, a subliminal text
and image glimmers. The text reads "Turner Production Effects &
Advanced Imaging / Zorak Desk Lip-Sync / Zorak CU Elements." The image is
the silhouette of Space Ghost's cowl and
eyes.30 Is the text a residue of the
creative process, or a deliberate interjection satirizing the show's production
values with the ridiculous notion that Zorak's lip-sync would require a special
effect? Is the image a brand watermark on the functional placeholder text,
or is it the ghost immanent in the montage machine? Either way, it is a
mental action-reaction connected by a line of process. The effect here is
also sharpened, this time into brief incomprehensibility, by an analog
reception, just like in the Fire Ant sequence.
Other moments of the episode produce other vectors, this time
with lines of humor to relate action and reaction. When Space Ghost breaks
Moltar's directorial equipment with a rock, the space of two gaps in the control
panel created by the tracks of levers dispenses
toast.31 Also, there is the recurrent
leprechaun from another dimension. He enters during the beginning of the
episode, from a portal that Space Ghost creates, and subsequently reappears at
several random, mildly inopportune
moments.32
All these Space Ghost sequences have taken us past the
dimension of the movement-image, severing the sensory-motor link and even
producing situations of pure sound and vision. As he begins Cinema
2, Deleuze delineates these situations, opsigns and sonsigns, as the first
new images to be found "beyond the movement
image"33 and on the way to a direct time
image. Now that opsigns and sonsigns are pure and unlinked from the
action-image, they may be linked with recollection-images and dream-images, but
this still cleaves to an indirect representation of time. The direct
time-image is born when "we are in the situation of an actual image and
its own virtual image, to the extent that there is no longer any linkage of the
real with the imaginary, but indiscernibility of the
two."34
Space Ghost exemplifies such a situation in the episode
Snatch, throughout which replicating pods hold the set hostage, waiting
until their prey, the gang, is asleep, in order to kill them in a gruesome and
painful manner. Space Ghost hits on the idea of ordering "one of those
mind-erasing kits" so that they can forget how sleepy they are and stay awake
forever. Moltar tells him that he already has one. A sequence of
variations on this same discussion ensue. The variations are split up by
the Law and Order-style intertitles that have been a part of the episode all
along.35 They identify the day of the week
and the time in a simple, nonsensical way, complete with the suspenseful
gravitas of the Law and Order 'cha-chung' sound effect. In tandem with the
mind-erasing kit, they open the recollection-image out onto the forking
multiplicities of time. The viewer imagines that infinities within
infinities of time could have passed in partaking of the mind-erasing kit on the
Space Ghost set, and indeed Deleuze says that the optical-sound image is
not created in recollection or attentive recognition, but in "the disturbances
of memory and the failures of
recognition"36. The episode's final
intertitle simply says "March 99:099 A6", the format of a date impossibly
distant from the other dates in the episode, distant across an uncountable
universe of forking paths.
A pure opsign communes with recollection and dream-images,
and also with its own virtual image. Deleuze calls this the opsign's
genetic element, the crystal-image. Space Ghost puts the new kind
of image to work in two late episodes, Baffler Meal and Live at the
Fillmore. In Baffler Meal, Space Ghost sells out the show to
Burger Trench for a house boat and one speaker, and the set is overrun with the
Aqua Teen Hunger Force, a trio of anthropomorphic fast food items that spout
streams of continuous Burger Trench marketing. At one point, Master Shake,
their leader, initiates a heinously unappetizing film within a film that he
refers to as hunger imagery. As the hunger imagery assaults the viewer,
Space Ghost argues with the Shake about the amount of interference the ad
contract allows him.37 With this
sequence, Space Ghost produces a crystal image that beautifully
illustrates Deleuze's idea that "cinema confronts its most internal
presupposition, money, and the movement-image makes way for the time-image in
one and the same operation."38 The film
within a film expresses this confrontation of unequal, incomparable
exchange. Hindsight provides one more facet, the historical fact of the
runaway success of the Aqua Teen Hunger Force spin-off series.
ATHF brought unprecedented amounts of money to the network, surpassed
Space Ghost's viewership by a huge margin, and launched myriad new shows
that also owe debts great and small to the path blazed by Space
Ghost. These triangulations of unequal exchange form, simultaneously
coexisting and replacing each other, form the new crystal image.
In Live at the Fillmore, Zorak and Moltar are forced
to bail Space Ghost out of jail using the show's budget. The three of them
unsuccessfully entertain a few radical cost-cutting ideas. At the jail, a
strange conversation between Zorak and Space Ghost heightens the processual
nature of the episode. Zorak speaks Space Ghost's excuses almost
simultaneously, as though he'd memorized the script, which is suggested in an
earlier shot, or as though it is a very common conversation between Space Ghost
and Zorak.39 Later on, Space Ghost
decides to interview an old episode for ideas. The film within a film that
Moltar rolls is the beginning of Live at the Fillmore itself. Space
Ghost tells the gang, "You see what they're doing in that show? We could
do that."40 The viewer watches the
show in the process of being made, a crystalline seed-image, wondering what
would appear on the screen if Moltar hit fast-forward. The sequence is an
image of constant, Bergsonian self-generation. It also resonates with
Deleuze and Guattari's reproach of psychoanalysis as "having stifled [the] order
of production, for having shunted it into
representation"41, and the reversal of
production in favor of stifling representation is a central theme of the
Space Ghost oeuvre.
It is inevitable that, sometime during the show's run, the
frame of the viewer's television would enter into a tight loop with the frame of
Space Ghost's monitor. Re-presented, recorded, and broadcast, the
film within a film would elevate the past present into virtuality, while the
characters plod along in the actual present, except that the actual and the
virtual are no different from each other, simultaneous. Space Ghost
is again confronting money, except, of course, that he can materialize on the
other side of the jail cell at will, so the loss of the budget is false, a
contrivance. In the positive, creative sense of Fellini's ambiguous
statement, "When there is no more money left, the film will be
finished,"42 this episode of the show exists
not in spite of but because it has no budget.
From the crystal image, Deleuze develops the crystalline
description, and a correspondent falsifying narration, which derives its
creative, artistic power from relinquishing any claim on
truthfulness.43 The power of the false
is another frequent thematic element in Space Ghost. The
Kentucky Nightmare episode is one example. Space Ghost appears in
Moltar's control room, demanding to know what the bear is doing on his
set. By way of explanation, Moltar shows Space Ghost a documentary on the
directorial mainframe, which Space Ghost himself narrates, spinning an
inaccurate yarn about sharks and bear. Later, Space Ghost returns to the
control room asking how his beloved pet, Ole Kentucky Shark, came to have his
head blown off. This time the documentary Moltar shows features exploding
sharks and killer bees. At the end of the episode, after the giant killer
bee attack, the gang abandon the set for the milieu of that same documentary to
discuss what went wrong with the show this time. Ole Kentucky Shark swims
to the surface of the river and drags Zorak
away.44
The documentary is incredibly lame, and blatantly designed to
suggest the false. But it is the way that this laughable falsehood
coexists and intertwines with Space Ghost's lived experience in the
episode that makes it interesting. Given the events transcribed in
episode's actual mode, the documentaries do contain a level of veracity
regarding how sharks, bears, and giant killer bees behave in the world of
Kentucky Nightmare. The documentary evokes potential truth and
falsehood coexisting simultaneously within the same image.
The Zorak episode presents a momentary gem of
falsified narration, which goes by so quickly that a viewer could miss it, and
which introduces a glimpse of a subjective author into the conventional
objectifying frame of the screen. A continuity error is manufactured and
then immediately corrected within the narrative flow of the episode. A
shot of Zorak with a blue vest on is replaced inline with a slightly different
shot of him, this time in a red vest, in response to the description of Zorak
that the guest is speaking at the
time.45 The creator of this
disjunctive moment is suddenly foregrounded, and the viewer wonders who exactly
is responsible for these sorts of continuity corrections, Moltar and his levers,
or, more likely, a manifestation of the immanent, shadowy author figure.
In this way, Space Ghost begins to bring into question
not only "the distinction between the objective and the subjective, but also
their identification."46 As the
subjective and objective become indiscernible, they give rise to a new type of
narrative construction, free indirect discourse. It is a Bergsonian form,
echoing his characterization of reality as an aggregate of equally important
images. The spectator and the screen, both images, are therefore equally
important, and Space Ghost uses this premise, as well as a proliferation
of spectators and screens, to attain free indirect discourse. On the set,
there is Moltar's directorial screen, the screen for the guests, the ever
shifting triangulation between these screens as spectators and spectacles, and
the shifts of perspective in the camera's frame as it inhabits or moves out of
those screens. There is also the example of the Momentary episode,
which replays the Kentucky Nightmare episode with the notable difference
that the audio is commentary from the moms of four of the show's writers,
actors, and animators.47
Another example can be drawn from the show's recurring use and misuse of
voice over narration, perfectly demonstrated in the episode
Jacksonville. Jacksonville establishes the voice-over
narrator in the first part of the episode, describing a segment that mimics the
'previouslies' found at the beginning of sitcoms and soap operas, which get the
viewer up to speed on plot from previous episodes. After the
'previouslies', in this case all inventions, the narrator introduces the
characters and the fictional name of the episode, and the show begins.
Space Ghost greets his audience, and at the same time as the narrator continues
his description.48 They interrupt each
other and Space Ghost dismisses the narrator. In that moment of vying for
control of the 'objective' flow of the episode, Space Ghost and the narrator pit
their varying subjectivities against each other and suggest to the viewer their
equivalence, as well as their indiscernibility from the objectivity they aspire
to. The moment establishes "the obliteration of a whole, or of a
totalization of images, in favor of an outside which is inserted between
them."49
Space Ghost himself lives outside of the whole constituted by
the collection of episodes of Space Ghosts: Coast to Coast. In the
moment of watching the show, the viewer sees Tad Ghostal ,the washed-up,
40-year-old superhero and talk show host of the present, exists simultaneously
with the vapidly glorious Space Ghost from the 1960s cartoon and with the more
recent past of his unannounced cameos and sporadic Space Ghost specials,
pasts that contain within them the possibilities of future Space Ghosts.
Space Ghost exists, like we do, in Bergsonian time, a perpetual becoming to
which even the animated detritus in the apocryphal sediments of our pop culture
are subject.
The crisis of the action-image and the new images and modes
born from it permeate the Space Ghost oeuvre. But the entire
analysis thus far has eluded an inevitable question regarding this body of
creative work. What is the importance of the Space Ghost: Coast to
Coast project's re-dismantling of the action-image in the milieu of the
entertainment industry between mid-nineties and the mid-naughts in
America? After all, this crisis has long since occurred worldwide within
cinema. At this point the movie industry has internalized many of its
consequences, and it has even passed into the canon of philosophical and
theoretical historicization, of which Deleuze's Cinema 1 and Cinema
2 are just one example.
However, Space Ghost is not cinema, and operates in
the realm of the television cartoon, traditionally relegated to the ghettos of
low art or children's entertainment, heretofore estranged from the philosophy
and theory that inform cinema and legitimize it as high art. The
significance of the Space Ghost project lies not only in its successful
connection to the theory of the moving image, but in its cultural positioning,
as an opener of spaces of possibility within the TV industry, for artistic
practices that are not complicit in the totalizing use of television as a
machine for producing desire. Space Ghost's tactics against the
action-image are supplementary, "they can make war only on the condition that
they simultaneously create something
else."50 The show inspired and paved
the way for a panoply of others, shows that move beyond the use of the
television medium as a machine for producing desire. The overall result is
an introduction of the crisis of the action-image and its attendant
philosophical shifts into mass media, making these ideas second nature to a
young, contemporary audience. Bibliography
Deleuze, Gilles, Cinema 1: the movement-image,
University of Minnesota Press, 2006. p 206
Ibid. p 210
Ibid. p 212
Ibid. p 207
Elevator, Season 1, Space Ghost: Coast to Coast, Mike
Lazzo, Big Deal Cartoons, 1994.
Deleuze, Gilles, Cinema 1: the movement-image,
University of Minnesota Press, 2006. p 207
Sharrock, Season 3, Space Ghost: Coast to Coast, Mike
Lazzo, Big Deal Cartoons, 1996.
Deleuze, Gilles, Cinema 1: the movement-image,
University of Minnesota Press, 2006. p 208
Whipping Post, Season 8, Space Ghost: Coast to Coast,
Mike Lazzo, Big Deal Cartoons, 2003.
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix, Anti-Oedipus:
Capitalism and Schizophrenia, University of Minnesota Press, 1983. p 224
In Memory of Elizabeth Reed, Season 8, Space Ghost:
Coast to Coast, Mike Lazzo, Big Deal Cartoons, 2003.
Deleuze, Gilles, Cinema 1: the movement-image,
University of Minnesota Press, 2006. p 55
Girlie Show, Season 2, Space Ghost: Coast to Coast,
Mike Lazzo, Big Deal Cartoons, 1995.
Deleuze, Gilles, Cinema 1: the movement-image,
University of Minnesota Press, 2006. p 257
Anniversary, Season 4, Space Ghost: Coast to Coast,
Mike Lazzo, Big Deal Cartoons, 1997.
Toast, Season 5, Space Ghost: Coast to Coast, Mike
Lazzo, Big Deal Cartoons, 1998.
Deleuze, Gilles, Cinema 1: the movement-image,
University of Minnesota Press, 2006. p 131
Ibid. p 61
Ibid. p 61
Fire Ant, Season 6, Space Ghost: Coast to Coast,
Mike Lazzo, Big Deal Cartoons, 1999.
Deleuze, Gilles, Cinema 1: the movement-image,
University of Minnesota Press, 2006. p 111
Deleuze, Gilles, Cinema 2: the time-image,
University of Minnesota Press, 2006. p 5
Ibid. p 6
Deleuze, Gilles, Cinema 1: the movement-image,
University of Minnesota Press, 2006. p 128
Fire Ant, Season 6, Space Ghost: Coast to Coast,
Mike Lazzo, Big Deal Cartoons, 1999.
Deleuze, Gilles, Cinema 1: the movement-image,
University of Minnesota Press, 2006. p 128
Dreams, Season 8, Space Ghost: Coast to Coast, Mike
Lazzo, Big Deal Cartoons, 2004.
Deleuze, Gilles, Cinema 1: the movement-image,
University of Minnesota Press, 2006. p 82
Ibid.
In Memory of Elizabeth Reed, Season 8, Space Ghost:
Coast to Coast, Mike Lazzo, Big Deal Cartoons, 2003.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Deleuze, Gilles, Cinema 2: the time-image,
University of Minnesota Press, 2006. p 1
Ibid. p 273
Snatch, Season 6, Space Ghost: Coast to Coast, Mike
Lazzo, Big Deal Cartoons, 1999.
Deleuze, Gilles, Cinema 2: the time-image,
University of Minnesota Press, 2006. p 55
Baffler Meal, Season 8, Space Ghost: Coast to Coast,
Mike Lazzo, Big Deal Cartoons, 2003.
Deleuze, Gilles, Cinema 2: the time-image,
University of Minnesota Press, 2006. p 78
Live at the Fillmore, Season 8, Space Ghost:
Coast to Coast, Mike Lazzo, Big Deal Cartoons, 2004.
Ibid.
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix, Anti-Oedipus:
Capitalism and Schizophrenia, University of Minnesota Press, 1983. p 296
Deleuze, Gilles, Cinema 2: the time-image,
University of Minnesota Press, 2006. p 77
Ibid. p 131
Kentucky Nightmare, Season 7, Space Ghost: Coast to
Coast, Mike Lazzo, Big Deal Cartoons, 2001.
Zorak, Season 4, Space Ghost: Coast to Coast, Mike
Lazzo, Big Deal Cartoons, 1997.
Deleuze, Gilles, Cinema 2: the time-image,
University of Minnesota Press, 2006. p 148
Momentary, Season 7, Space Ghost: Coast to Coast,
Mike Lazzo, Big Deal Cartoons, 2001.
Jacksonville, Season 3, Space Ghost: Coast to Coast,
Mike Lazzo, Big Deal Cartoons, 1996.
Deleuze, Gilles, Cinema 2: the time-image,
University of Minnesota Press, 2006. p 187
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix, A Thousand
Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, University of Minnesota Press,
1987. p 423