The question of healing transformations and the (Black) experience: “My Third Eye” by Nova Scott-James

(Disclaimer: I am not Black, have never been a teenager girl, and have not been a victim of familial sexual abuse; but I believe art is for everyone, film is for those capable of seeing and learning to see, and I consider it important with films like this that people in my demographic also understand and enjoy it, as I think those who see it will.  And I wish I did not think that disclaimers like this need to be written).

The work of an emerging filmmaker to watch, Nova Scott-James’s short “My Third Eye,” which premiered in May 2017 at the New York African Film Festival, makes use of the trope of “magic” that the director has used elsewhere, along with various means and metaphors of spiritual healing and transformation, to explore how her African-American characters are able to deal with their experiences and the opportunities and risks this involves.   She does this using motifs and narrative and filmic structuring devices that give her films broad potential appeal, as in the end, her films are as much as anything exploring certain ideas of experience and redemption that are universal.  Fond of “spiritual” notions and devices, both thematic and formal, her treatment of them is singular in balancing projects of desire and hope that are certainly indispensable, and the ironies that various available means of realizing them may present.   (In contrast to, for instance, the outsider’s almost cynically parodic approach to the “New Age” projects of spiritual redemption engaged in by certain middle-class white people in some of the films of Jane Campion, or in Todd Haynes’s “Safe”).  At the same time, Ms. Scott-James’s films are a welcome addition to the recent and current wave or renaissance of African-American-themed cinema.  They are thought-provoking enough to deserve wider viewing.

“My Third Eye” is sufficiently remarkable that some words on it are in order.  Few narrative films make such a powerful use of silence.  It is the unsilence of the unsayable.  While it’s hard to escape the sense that this wordless (though not without music) film is full of pregnant ambiguities (could it be an allegory of other power relationships often modeled on familial ones, like that of the state in many post-colonial societies for instance?), its essentially visual figuration of the relationship between the two characters (a black girl of 12-13 in a plaid schoolgirl dress and a middle aged man we presume to be her father) and the girl’s manipulations of the doll as a depiction of the feeling of being destroyed as integral by being (a bit Voodoo-like) taken apart to powerful convey the feeling of coping with the familial sexual assault that is the most obvious (and intended) “reading.”  This may be suggested by the camera’s lingering momentarily on the father’s body, decapitated by the camera, and with its crotch at the center, beneath a newspaper spread like a shield, as it scans his clothed body as if he too were a set of parts. But mostly the menace represented by the father is conveyed in his imposing relative size (he’s also bald and bit chunky) and the commanding assurance of the way he is seated in the comfortable living room chair in their rather nice living room with a painting on the wall, gaze-lessly facing her below on the floor.  And it is the same position of superiority that enables her to seek to be comforted by him at the end, even if she also needs first to discover some mental or “spiritual” power of her own. This is a power of illumination that lies within the doll’s fragmented body, and that may enable her, as she sets aside the now dismembered toy black girl, to place a closure on the now clearly recognized figural self-destruction.  Though the father is a figure of terror, again all the more terrifying for his silence, underneath this is the potentially neutral or ambivalent quality of power (usually), and, indeed, part of what makes intergenerational incest as traumatizing as it is is the confusing mixture of care and violence and the use of a natural superiority in both.  Note too that while no one speaks in this vignette, the dominated victim character acts in a series of ways, and it is she who initiates the closing embrace.  

For the point is what to do, or what many people do manage to do, in such situations.  Tearing the doll apart is of course the girl’s way of expressing that she feels torn apart.  The silence of the context inscribes the possibility of speaking within the logic of the power dynamic, and leaves us with the (very cinematic) construction and deconstruction of the visible (with the song as commentary).  To the girl’s credit, she brings about the reconciling embrace with the father after finding and applying to her temple the elicited elixir.  (Atonement is often the work of victims, or occurs on their initiative, and can be empowering for them because of its agency).  

Note how this happens.  She goes into the bathroom as soon as he gets up, because she needs a space of her own to repair and reassemble a fractured and hurt self.  Immediately the light changes and a dull sound comes in, like in the space of a trance.  It is realistic and unreal at the same time; this seems to be one of the director’s signature devices.  This is perfectly fitting here since a “positive” derealization can be therapeutic.  The girl takes the now decapitated doll which, in a suggestively recuperative metaphor of her own defloration as loss of mind and agency, is bleeding profusely, but in the blood is a tiny shiny object like a little diamond that, while looking at herself in the bathroom mirror, she affixes to her temple: the third eye.  She does this while he in his own bathroom shows his self-assured power and sense of luxury by pouring a drink with cubes from the kind of ice bucket most common at dinner parties (and in Hollywood movies as old as the Ella Fitzgerald recording he then puts on the (vinyl) record player, perhaps meant to suggest that the film’s point of view is the girl looking back many years later). 

Now, observing herself dancing before a wall-panel mirror in the living room to the  Fitzgerald recording of Rogers and Hart’s “Wait till you see him,” a song of romantic longing marked by the irony of the beloved’s absence, and remarking on the incompletely seen character of all that actually is known, which is a vague association with “painters of paintings, writers of books” ("who, me?").  The song sings of “him” while she looks at herself, for of course this situation is one of incest (signified as display of power and discovery of a self in pieces)
and she herself is the principal desired object; and, she needs to work through for herself questions of identity and difference. It is thus she herself who has been in question, as the secular voodoo of her arm-twisting struggle with the (straight- and long-haired but dark-skinned female) doll at the outset makes clear.  The magical device of the third eye has of course just the meaning she gives it and the fact of her finding it (which she does as if knowing she would).  The magic of this soul-key is that it is the identification of the transformative thing and moment, which is also empowering by allowing the healing process to come into a focus that is a bit like a naming.   The film ends with a gesture of reconciliation as ambiguous as everything else we have seen: the girl approaches the father, and he comforts her in his lap, while she looks aside towards the viewer.  (Unfortunately, perhaps, the power of reconciliation often lies principally with victims, and can indeed be empowering for them, perhaps especially when love and violence are confused in the ambivalence that is all too common and all too often badly faced).   

This film is a deeply moving and powerful depiction of moments in a relationship that has become for one party at least troublingly injurious, including a suggestion of how resilient weaker victims can discover inner powers of mind, and even make use of them to initiate tentative gestures of reconciliation.  For the privilege of the victim is understanding, and in that  lie the powers of healing and transformation.