Thoughts From the Couch: Technologies of Solace in Pop Culture’s Mirror

In a scene from The Deerhunter (1978), a disillusioned “Nick,” played by Christopher Walken, steps onto the veranda of the hospital where he was convalescing alongside other Vietnam War soldiers. He absorbs a scene of uniformity-in-death: countless metal coffins are being stacked so that the bodies of the dead could be returned home. Nick then reaches for his wallet, seeking comfort in a black and white photograph of his girlfriend Linda, played by Meryl Streep.

This scene is striking to me for a few reasons. First, it captures how grief and its counterpart—solace—are rooted in things, material matter that resists death at the same time that it resists resurrection. We grieve bodies once their spirits have vacated; and through photographs, we wish to capture-in-time the body as containing spirit beyond time. As Han writies, “the angel of photography . . . is the angel of recollection and redemption. It lifts us above the fragility of life” (30). Nick looks at Linda’s countenance—a restoration of light amidst landscapes of darkness and decay—in order to anchor himself in the land of the living things.

But this scene is also striking because of my gut reaction. When Nick reaches towards his pocket, I initially think he’s taking out his cell phone. My viewing of this movie is marked by the knee-jerk way we, in the contemporary moment, have learned to quell discomfort: by looking at the vacant glow of our cell phones. This reaction is central to Tim Robinson’s “Barley Tonight” sketch (I Think You Should Leave), a vignette of a firebrand talk show host who isn’t afraid to look at his phone if he starts losing an argument. The discomfort of not having control within a social context requires a vacating of Barley’s spirit from his body—an only slightly hyperbolic surrender to a cultural preoccupation with non-things and non-places.

These two wildly different texts showcase how grief and solace were handled before and after the hypercultural turn. In one, a man seeks to buttress and restore his spirit in his body, reminding himself of his material tethers. In the other, a man seeks to recede his spirit from body to database, from the messiness of being a thing that resists, to the vessel-less state of being a non-thing that plays.

Now that we are beyond the time of tactile memorabilia, when grief in its global multitude streams toward us as endless digital images, bodycam feeds, and cellphone footage, we must grapple with haunting questions: (how) can we grieve in digitized spaces? Does digitality have the power to change the way we grieve—or grief itself? If so, how does this influence the ways we seek solace? Has solace finally lost its use value? (447) [JZ-10]

[Han, 2022; Cimino, 1978; Robinson, 2023]

One thought on “Thoughts From the Couch: Technologies of Solace in Pop Culture’s Mirror

  1. In class last week, as we made sense of Han’s chapter on “Selfies,” questions similar to those you pose at the end of this entry came up, and I don’t remember us arriving at especially tangible examples of what the “grief selfie” looks like (much less what it accomplishes, depending upon how it circulates), though there was some discussion of so-called funeral selfies. I don’t know much about them, but if they are, indeed, an up-trending photographic genre, perhaps the characteristics of grief and solace, too, cannot help but follow this current. Long way of saying, the questions you’re raising here are apt; they seem important, and they also seem to suggest mediating ruptures in social/public grief rituals.

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