A Vociferous End of History

In Blood Zero, playwright, actor and filmmaker Doyle Avant accosts with a dizzying weave of words and images. The 90-minute film churns a global televisual memory and brings afloat a world history that is unmoored, unhinged, and flattened: Saddam Hussein, Robert Kennedy, Sirhan Sirhan, 9/11, the detonation of the Beirut harbor, the U.S marines in Vietnam, bossa nova karaoke, dramaturgical pathos, sex, drugs, all delivered with a cabaret-like excess, witty repartee, campy extravagance, and glib mannerism. The manifest narrative that seems to gather the myriad threads, and the master of ceremony (who periodically appears to explain, incite, palliate, or participate in this sensory flamboyance), don’t give a clue as to the purpose of this show. History is in a hotel, or rather in a purgatorial space; it awaits a prompt that never sounds and an exit that never opens unless one begins to approach this history out-of-whack through the one image that is persistently replayed: The assassination of Robert Kennedy by the Palestinian Sirhan Sirhan on 5 June 1968. If so, then the film come forth as the fall-out spectacle of signifiers after the end of history which, in the construction of the film, is marked by the assassination of the younger Kennedy. The purgatorial space, or history in the film’s 'famed Ambassador hotel', is comprised of gratuitous pathos, images of disasters without urgency, a scrambling of chronologies. It is a huis-clos inside of which (or is it behind which) events are without consequence and therefore are inevitably replayed or rather performed without direction.

If premised on a short-circuited history expedited by the collision of hope (R. Kennedy) and zeal (Sirhan Sirhan), then the film lays a thick presumptive U.S. imperial cloak over the world and sees in its many variegated events nothing but the sorry aftermath of an expansive American foreign policy gone amuck after the assassination of the second great white hope of the 1960s. This is not to say that the film is blind to its imperialist conceptual structure, rather, the film’s foremost contribution is the staging and casting of Empire’s casualties. That the dead and the deadened landscape of empire speak only in hyperboles and can only act waywardly is an exploration that the film initiates but does not pursue. For in as much as the film replays the end of history it also laments that same end and remains beholden to its resurrection. Rather than a second act in which the affects, gestures, and voices of the tenants of this purgatorial Ambassador hotel are perhaps allowed to thicken, build substance, and begin to describe possible lives outside the Imperial telos of ends and beginnings, the film recklessly attempts a restart of history. In a surprising move, a sort of textual Deus ex machina, the hotel’s master of ceremony announces that the dead sea scrolls are in fact empty, a tabula rasa, waiting for us to write our story.

How can this be done? How is it even possible to exit this purgatory of floating signifiers and become historical subjects is a question left unaddressed and therefore appears more as a conceit or a last despairing gesture rather than a possibility that is gradually and surreptitiously built into the details of the film. Then again, perhaps it is this reviewer that is seeking an exit and perhaps should consider that the promise of a tabula rasa appearing in the congested and vociferous salons of purgatory is a simulacrum, an image neither true nor false, referring to nothing but itself.