The Powers of the False and Malkovich

As I was going over the section in Deleuze about the powers of the false a film came to mind and I couldn't shake the feeling that the writer/director had to have been at least vaguely familiar with this philosophy when creating it. The film is Being John Malkovich in which I would say the role of the forger is played by John Cusack. In the film he transcends time through a portal which takes him into the body of another man (John Malkovich) where he proceeds to experience this other man's life in fifteen minute intervals before again traveling back through time to the present and his own existence.  As the narrative progresses Cusack and others begin to interfere with Malkovich's actions and emotions all the while manipulating time and truths in both the present and the future. Deleuze's discussion of the power of the false seems more than relevant... "It is the power of the false which replaces and supersedes the form of the true, because it poses the simultaneity of incompossible presents, or the coexistence of not-necessarily true pasts" (131). Not only does Cusack's character infiltrate the body and the mind of another man but he embarks on a temporal and spatial journey that is established on a lie. He soon shares this forgery with coworkers and his wife and the forgery in  turn multiplies to others etc. and it soon becomes clear that, "the powers of the false cannot be separated from an irreducible multiplicity" (133). In this regard the forgery gains momentum (which reaches a melting point when John Malkovich enters the portal into himself) until there is a complete malfunction between the true present and the false past. Ultimately I think that Being John Malkovich has a lot do with what Deleuze is discussing (but maybe I'm thinking too literally). I know some people have expressed frustration with Deleuze's classical/outdated film references and associating his concepts with this recent film helped me to better understand what he meant in this chapter. 

Analogies of the crystal-image

From the way language works and as a learned instinct, we continually refer to a linear way of thinking and how we perceive the world around us. We are in a sense always trapped by a single, actualized second followed by another. (Time at its slowest!)
The time-image is non-linear as it relates to both the virtual and the actual. We spend too much time focusing on the present, as it entails only a fraction of the future and the past combined.

The present is at its most interesting when its potential to the future is in a flux, or just before the virtual has manifested itself in the actual.

In some respects, Synchronicity refers to why one potential of the virtual is actualized over another. The dynamic of time is not just an unfolding (linear), but an expansion as well.

What is expanding? I tried to explain this in my last class with Erin in a gift of writing to another student. And here in this class, we encounter the crystal-image and my immediate reaction to this is the model of a hologram, where every piece contains an image of the whole.

A space-structure that defies linear thinking, or that even undermines it, because the crystal-image (or the Hologram) contain both the virtual and the actual simutaneously.
This is where the fusion between the two takes place. Linear time as we know it is suspended (within the crystal-image or Hologram) and thus change can occur.

Physicist Michio Kaku (http://mkaku.org/) in his book Hyperspace, imagines how the 4th dimension would appear to us if we were thrust into it: All would appear as blobs of form/ light floating around us, perhaps passing through us, without definition. Our faculties are simply not designed to perceive in such a space. Kaku uses the analogy of pulling a carp from water, for a fish cannot perceive our three-dimensional world, and would probably see blobs of form/ light floating around it, perhaps appearing to pass through it, without definition.

Weighing the interval

Deleuze perhaps provides a means of tracing a continuum of magnitude (be it a felt duration or some measure of intensity or of weight) capable of organizing the variability of the interval. “The more the reaction ceases to be immediate and becomes truly possible action, the more the perception becomes distant and anticipatory and extracts the virtual action of things” (Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, 65). I doubt this “measure” of the interval can exhaust or encapsulate all approaches or ramifications of the interval itself, but it is useful for investigations of both cinema and thought. When Deleuze reintroduces the concept of “framing” as it relates to the interval (Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, 62), one might be tempted to find an equation or ratio that relates the delay to the amount of analysis performed, or the fundamental potential for analysis. I would not hesitate in suggesting that this relationship would be insufficiently represented in a linear fashion, more often than not. Is the notion of “diminishing returns” relevant at some point in the extending of this relationship? The time-image, as well as the conditions that accompany it or bring it into focus, might assist one in creating hypotheses.