1. THE GAME (2)

2. One More Round of Theory

3. To review: memory is a facet of consciousness that reflects signs to us of remembered people, events, and situations that we have internalized.

4. But memory, when it re- projects our relation to the object-now-sign has another ability: to reproduce and re- project both how we saw the object of the gaze as how we were seen by it during the internalization process.

5. In every memory, we are positioned and we are capable of positioning ourselves in relation to the remembrance.

6. Memories are iconic. They present pictures.

7. At some level, every memories pictures us in relation to its content.

8. Iconic memory is part of an overwriting process.

9. Mental conception acts like a balloon caption in a comic strip.

10. Information writes itself into the image produced from our gazing at the object and the object’s gazing at us.

11. When we internalize the object, we internalize the sign of the object and its gaze. Signs have value to us and they are given value by the discourse or system of representation constructing them.

12. When we internalize signs and the over-writing process produced by our thoughts about these signs, this phenomenon can only occur within an ideological or discursive frame of reference.

13. The frame of memory both orders meaning attributed to the sign (by us and by a particular discourse) and it is ordered by our seeing and the image of memory seeing us.

14. When we internalize the object, we internalize the sign of the object and its iconic gaze.

15. We are over-written as we are over-seen: that is seen in the instant [parole] and in the long view of the icon’s potential [langue].

16. This is how memory sees us into a discursive and/or ideological frame of reference.

17. The Function of Memory in The Game

18. The Signs that Memory Recalls In The Game memory is connected to the father’s suicidal jump out of his world into his sons’ lives.

19. The Signs that Memory Recalls That is where the dead father “lives”: in his sons' relationship to him, in their memories of him.

20. The Signs that Memory Recalls That is his “relational grave,” at least, to maintain his “ghostly” relation to them.

21. The Signs that Memory Recalls In the film, performative actions must counteract the power of memory.

22. The Signs that Memory Recalls

26. Performative Time & Sequence In the game within The Game the performance staged by C.R.S. drives Nicholas to enact the act of suicide so that its difference becomes more real to him than the memory of the father’s suicide.

27. The Unwise Act

30. The “Wisdom” of the Act!

33. The Transfer of Registers

34. Transfer of Registers

35. Animating the Sign Anew When Nicholas jumps off that Skyscraper, he enlivens the sign, breaths life into the sign-becoming as opposed to the tyranny of the remembered sign-of-what-was. When Nicholas jumps off that Skyscraper, he enlivens the sign, breaths life into the sign-becoming as opposed to the tyranny of the remembered sign-of-what-was.

36. Animating the Sign Anew Nicholas’s impending death animates the memory of his father’s act, brings it alive, moves the signs-of-memory beyond the register of signs into the reality of his pseudo-death, that is, into an event made of signs but also made of something more than signs – an experience of death which can’t be understood completely even within its enactment. Nicholas’s impending death animates the memory of his father’s act, brings it alive, moves the signs-of-memory beyond the register of signs into the reality of his pseudo-death, that is, into an event made of signs but also made of something more than signs – an experience of death which can’t be understood completely even within its enactment.

37. Animating the Sign

41. Time Doubled Only in this act can Nicholas’ death come home to him, in its actuality, and, by extension, only through its enactment, can life come home to him as well –

42. Time Doubled as an event that is different from his memory of his father’s death. Only now can he see himself as another person, his own person, with the prospect of a different death, his own death and his own life.

43. Timed-Out Memory The memory of his father’s death haunted Nicholas, wrote over his existence, doubling the son’s narrative with the father’s – which was written beyond the grave. The father’s narrative was activated at the precise moment Von Orton got lift off and pitched himself off the roof of his estate for all to see. Nicholas saw it, and from that moment on, a part of his life was arrested in that moment, held hostage to that event, in that timed- out memory in which the past lived itself, enacted and reenacted in Nicholas’s memory.

44. Timed-Out Memory In that way was time doubled! But Nicholas doubles the memory of “the act” differently when he jumps off the roof at the end of the film.

45. Timed-Out Memory In that way was time doubled again... He enacts the act and sets up a parallel “jump time” and duplicate “jump space” that cuts through memory, eliminating it as the key element of his existence.

46. Time Doubled

52. In his final decision, in his last act of willed annihilation, Nicholas turned the tide of his existence, so that memory’s current threatened to wash him past the borders of its own determination.

53. Time Doubled

55. THE TWIST

58. The Search for Signification in The Game

59. The Search for Signification

60. The search for signification in this film is a search to pair certain signifiers with certain signifieds. The nature of the game demands that. The actions of the game bring about a desire for the “eternal question”:

61. The Search for Signification “what is the game?”

62. The Search for Signification To understand the meaning of the game, Nicolas must try to CONNECT THE DOTS: the actions he witnesses (signifiers) with the motivation of CRS ("Consumer Recreation Services") to determine the real meaning of signified-action. In the film, he is endlessly tries to pair signifier with signified.

63. The Search for Signification Only at the end of the film does he realize that the signs, while of immense importance, are less important than the experience produced from not knowing, from losing his ability to connect signifier from signified, from LOSING the ability to oversee his empire through controlling the signs before him, from losing complete control of the narratives that C.R.S. presented to him, and finally

64. The Search for Signification of no longer being able to pair the signifier- image of his father’s death to the signified- meaning of his father’s death for him.

65. The Search for Signification The Game proceeds in order for him to learn this not-knowing, which severs signifier-memory- image from signified-memory-meaning, so he can cut the cord of the memory that has buried him in his father’s grave. The Game is a game of signification, of the density of signs meaning what they don’t appear to mean. Finally, the signs in memory force him to sever their connection to his father’s death, so that...

66. The Search for Signification he can reclaim his own narrative, his own death, and by extension, even for a brief extended moment, his own life.

67. In the Coffin, the Breath of Life

68. Von Orton, back from the Dead

69. Time Doubled We see the father’s death, and so does Nicholas. But the scene of the son locked in the tomb-like darkness is every bit as eerie.

70. Time Doubled Dumped in a coffin in Mexico, Nicholas must live through/thru the darkness of the grave, in its doubled darkness -- -- because he has been entombed all these years in his father’s grave and now his own as well.

71. Foreshadowing: the jump into the trash bin.

72. Foreshadowing Then he is dumped in a coffin in Mexico.

73. Foreshadowing It all culminates in his voluntary act of suicide off the edge of a California Skyscraper.

74. Foreshadowing His last act not only doubles the memory of his father’s actions, but it reads back to the coffin and trash scenes, rearranging his passive acceptance of events that foreshadow the inevitability of his suicide.

75. A QUESTION FOR YOU: HOW MUCH OF NICHOLAS’ BEHAVIOR CAME IN REACTION TO C.R.S.’s PROMPTS AND HOW MUCH OF IT CAME FROM THE MEMRORY THAT WAS LEADING TO DEATH’S DOOR ALL THOSE YEARS?