Strawberry Bondage and Disabling Discipline in a New Series of Cyborg Video Sonnets

In the emphatically noir world of The Cyborg Jillian Weise’s video poetry, Maya Deren meets Walerian Borowczyk. Pier Paolo Pasolini, whose memorable 1965 essay “Il ‘cinema di poesia’” defined the theoretical discourse on poetry and cinema, is watching from the sidelines.

It has been a while since someone dared to cine-sign something this formidable within such tight confines. Were these sonnets cut for the TikTok platform? Does it matter that the video editor is also a poet who has stolen the volta from the ableist tradition to verse disability anew?

At first glance, it seems that the cut is the operative mechanism here. As soon as you think you get a hold of this cyborg’s story, she cuts the emerging (and comforting) integrative flow and disables your human-centric, and very normative, desires. In film theory this truculent mode is called “monstration”—the shocking disruption brought on by the spectacular that tears the narrative apart to tantalize the viewer with the shameless energy of exhibition.

And much is exhibited here. We see body parts (cut up in close-up), mannequins in gas masks, a water fountain erection, a series of strawberries sliced and bound, and a blasé dominatrix royally unimpressed by the tribute gift. There are also plenty of windows and frames. The foregrounded work of geometric composition, the constant framing and reframing, the slicing and splicing are the disciplinary methods that the sonnets enact on the viewer.

You find yourself having to rewatch the sonnets multiple times to recalibrate your cognitive apparatus in order to engage. But even after you have adjusted and blinked away the discomfort, you understand that the gaze employed here is intentionally dislocative and defamiliarizing.

Writing in 1923, in his manifesto titled “Kinoks: A Revolution,” Dziga Vertov, one of the Soviet Montage filmmakers inspired by Marxism, Futurism, and Russian Formalism, identified this cyborg gaze as one cast by the kino-glaz (cinema-eye), a hybrid formation of the mechanical camera vision and the human editing agency.

The kino-glaz, Vertov anticipated, would provide an autonomous vantage point and “a fresh perception of the world,” something akin to what Viktor Shklovsky, a key player of Russian Formalism, called ostranenie (estrangement). Shklovsky, who studied the avant-garde poetry of Anna Akhmatova, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Sergei Tretyakov, formulated a theory of the poetic language that was based in the art’s power to defamiliarize and thus produce a heightened state of perception. For the Soviet Montage filmmakers like Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein (the latter a close friend of Shklovsky), the operation of defamiliarization was critical in moving away from the normative bourgeois approach of much of the narrative filmmaking of the time. The cyborg gaze of the revolutionary cinema, a hybrid of the human and technological, facilitated the new world view, and with it a political change.

Weise’s video sonnets, which use the alienating gaze strategically, continue the art experiment in cyborg vision and, once again, bring into focus the intricate connection between poetry and cinema by showcasing the often-shocking operations of cutting and suturing of the mechanical and the organic.

The fourth sonnet, “The Origins of Love,” unfolds as footage of the surreal surgery, where strawberries are cut and bound back together. In isolation, and without the context of Weise’s work as a disability rights activist, one can view this sequence as a BDSM montage, which may or may not reference the queer forms of desire via Aristophanes’s story about the origin of love, as told by Plato in his Symposium and more recently retold by John Cameron Mitchell in Hedwig and the Angry Inch. I choose to view the strawberry surgery as also reminiscent of the sort of bioengineering experiences that led to the development of a cyborg disability formation that Weise wrote about in her earlier essays published by the New York Times: “Going Cyborg” and “The Dawn of the Tryborg.”

More emphatically than the other sonnets in the set, “The Origins of Love” addresses the violent yet generative energy of the cut and the new interface that inadvertently emerges from the cut’s finality. I find this energy common to poetry, cinema, and cyborg disability. The BDSM aura that is present in the sonnets draws my attention to the cut that sets the Subject apart from the Object. This, in turn, makes me curious about the cyborg’s subjectivity and its reliance on the material objects.

Objects are important here (as they are in word poetry, I guess). I traced Borg4Borg, the production company behind the videos, to an Etsy storefront, where Weise, working in mixed media, sells her body parts (a former prosthetic leg), disability art jewelry, cyborg curios, poetic and erotic play implements, and Lacan-inspired sculptures. When interviewed about these creations, Weise patiently explains how, of course, a cyborg forms a complex libidinal connection with the hardware that is her body, and by extension all things. A machine leg is a leg until it’s not, and it becomes a dildo, a vibrator, or even a disciplining implement.

The erotic energy invested in material objects saturates the video sonnets and puts me in a playful mood. When, after the credits, I finally see the Borg4Borg Productions’ logo, I feel a strong sense of scholarly satisfaction. The logo contains an image of Countess Báthory from Walerian Borowczyk’s Immoral Tales (1973). This makes sense as Borowczyk was one of those filmmakers who devoted much energy to crafting a cinematic representation of the desire that binds us with objects. As I watch these sonnets, I also wonder about cyborg love and how it must reject the biological basis of sexuality, how its object-oriented desire must inadvertently decenter the human idea of sex.

The cinematic references in the sonnets are many and source both lowbrow and highbrow registers. The first sonnet, titled “Color Study in Blue,” is a nod to Derek Jarman’s 1993 film experiment Blue, made when Jarman was losing his sight and dying of AIDS. Perhaps there is also a nod to Andy Warhol’s Blue Movie (1969). This sonnet briefly quotes from James Cameron’s Titanic (1997). In “Romantic Gesture,” a volta is achieved with a snippet from Warhol’s interminable Kiss (1963). Dario Argento’s artsy Giallo film, The Stendhal Syndrome (1996), makes the briefest of appearances in “The Origins of Love,” which, as discussed above, may also contain an indirect reference to the cult musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001), especially the film version’s beloved animation sequence, which illustrates Aristophanes’s story.

The sonnets’ soundscape works to contemporize and politicize Weise’s visual mapping. The score includes music by indie rap artists A.D. Carson and Tiny Jag. We also hear Evelyn Glennie, the deaf percussionist from Scotland, and collander (Alli Yates), a musician who does creative and activist work in disability justice.

When encountering the blend of disability and BDSM eroticism here, one may think of pleasure activism and some of the performances by Sins Invalid. One may also remember Best and Most Beautiful Things, the 2016 documentary about a disabled teenager who is exploring kink, a film that was one of the first forays into disability and BDSM in the mainstream screen culture.

In their micro scale that brings out the process of poetic making, Weise’s flash video sonnets forge an inimitable sensibility where power, disability, technology, eroticism, and material culture coalesce in compositions that may appeal to intersectional audiences and challenge other poets who run transmedia experiments in bodies and things. As a disabled film scholar, who has recently transitioned into a cyborg identity, I welcome Weise’s attempt to crip the visual medium by using the TikTok format that stumbles, jerks around, shoots off, and slices. This visuality I share on most days of the week. Continuity editing is a fiction and I’m tired of the Marvel universe where super abilities are afforded to undeserving heroes by cinema’s old tricks so they can achieve transcendence. What are they transcending anyway?