Photographing

Photographing the Almost-family in the Weetzie Bat Books

--Published in Expectations and Experiences, 2007.--

Yoshida Junko

The "Almost-family"

In the Weetzie Bat books, American writer Francesca Lia Block portrays unique members of what she calls the "almost-family" (Witch Baby 3). It is an unconventional and postmodern extended family that includes a gay couple and other multiethnic family members.*1 At the centre of the family there is a camera with which My Secret Agent Lover Man films his future wife, Weetzie, for his movies. Throughout the series, his concerns are represented in his films. More importantly, the protagonist Witch Baby, who is My Secret's illegitimate daughter, inherits his gift for the art of film and pursues her subjectivity through photography. She communicates with other "family" members through their respective visual agency: filming, painting and making a collage of photos. Witch Baby's pursuit of subjectivity, however, is traced over three volumes: Witch Baby (1991), Cherokee and the Goat Guys (1992), and Missing Angel Juan (1993). In this study I will focus on Witch Baby and Missing, the books that deal the most with photography and the issue of her "almost-family".

Referring to the relationship between photography and the institution of family, Susan Sontag maintains in On Photography that:

　　Through photographs, each family constructs a portrait-chronicle of itself -
　　a portable kit of images that bears witness to its connectedness . . . . Photography
　　becomes a rile of family life justwhen, in the industrializing countries of Europe
　　and America, the very institution of the family starts undergoing radical surgery. (8-9)

In other words, photography is useful in providing people with the opportunity lo reaffirm their family ties, as well as to reassure themselves of the significance of the family institution in the face of dysfunctional or disintegrated family units. And this is the case with the somewhat complicated "almost-family" into which Witch Baby is thrown as a changeling. To understand Witch Baby's position in her "almost-family", the myth of the family in the Weetzie Bat books is worth recounting:

Once, in a city called Shangd-L.A. or Hell-A or just Los Angeles, lived Weetzie Bat, the daughter
　　 of Brandy-Lynn and Charlie Bat. A genie granted Weetzie three wishes, so she wished for a Duck for
her best friend Dirk McDonald, "My Secret Agent Lover l\4an for me,' and a little house for them
　　all to live in happily ever after The wishes came true, mostly. Dirk met Duck Orake and Weetzie met
　　 My SecretAgent Lover Man and they lived together. When Weetzie wanted a baby and My Secret
　　Agent Lover Man didn't, Dirk and Duck helped her, and Cherokee was born. My Secret Agent Lover
　　Man got angry and went away. He stayed with Vixanne Wigg for a while, but he loved Weetzie so
　　 much that he returned. One day Vixanne left a basket on the porch of the house where Weetzie and
　　My Secret Agent Lover Man and the baby, Cherokee, and Dirk and Duck all lived. In the basket was
　　Witch Baby . . . . (Witch Baby 1)

Witch Baby's 'almost-family" consists of Weetzie Bat and My Secret, and their "almost-daughter' Cherokee who has three fathers, including the gay couple. Besides these six who live under the same roof, there are other "family" members: Weetzie's divorced parents, Brandy-Lynn Bat and Charlie Bat, who committed suicide by drug overdose, and her biological mother, Vixanne Wigg.

It is clear that Witch Baby is in need of finding her place among the "almost-family" members. In this context, nothing could be more appropriate and effective than photography, which involves dealing with the subject position (the photographer) and the object position (the photographed) as a means of communication. This study, then, will analyze the books focusing on Witch Baby's pursuit of her subjectivity through her agency: photography.

Pain Game

Witch Baby recounts how the protagonist, Witch Baby, shifts from an invisible to a visible being in the mind and the photographs of her 'almost-family". Witch Baby's invisibility is deeply connected with her sense of pain, which is characteristically represented in the newspaper clippings that cover her walls - "nuclear accidents, violence, poverty and disease" (9). She plays what she calls the "pain game" (Missing 7), maintaining a precarious balance between the contradictory features of photographs, which Sontag describes as texts of "objective record and personal testimony' (Photography 23). Witch Baby uses these objective records to represent her personal pain.

The plot of the novel is driven by Witch Baby's existential questions, 'What time are we upon and where do I belong?" (Witch Baby 3). Her pain derives from a deficient sense of identity because she does not know her biological parents. As Roberta Seelinger Trites points out, her invisibility is represented in the family portraits pasted onto the numbers of the family clock (Disturbing 130). Witch Baby is not included in the portraits she shoots. Also, she is not seen in a familial celebration scene because she hides in a garden shed, where she stares at herself in the mirror instead of looking outward. "She saw a messy nest of hair, a pale, skinny body, knobby, skinned knees and feet with curling toes" (Witch Baby 29). In revulsion to her own image, Witch Baby later shaves her head. Then, in her inward gaze she looks "as if she had drifted down from some other planet' (30). This "alien" is visible only to herself as a painful and miserable adolescent.

Witch Baby's boyfriend and guardian angel, Angel Juan, recognizes a connection between Witch Baby's pain and the calamitous newspaper clippings adorning her wall: "l bet you wouldn't need all these stories on your wall if you knew who you were'(69). Trites rightly maintains that "these pictures are signifiers of both world angst and Witch Baby's feelings" (Disturbing 131). In this sense, Angel Juan is significant because he sees Witch Baby's pain represented in the newspaper photos.

Quest for Identity

One of the highlights of Witch Baby's quest for identity comes when My Secret finally admits that he is her biological father. More important is My Secret's recognition of the similarity between Witch Baby and himself: their concern about pain in the world, including their own, and their fears offacing it. Like his daughter, My Secret used to play the pain game when he was a boy, always wishing he could make the world as peaceful and bright as his globe-shaped lamp (Witch Baby 6- 7). Recalling her father's story of the lamp, Witch Baby stares at a globe lamp she buys at a mysterious shop. Thus, Witch Baby finally becomes visible to her father as his daughter who shares pain with him.

Another highlight of her quest is meeting with her biological mother, Vixanne, a leader of the "Jane Mansfield Fan Club', who, instead of facing reality, indulges daily in the pleasure of eating sweets and watching Mansfield movies. Noteworthy is that Witch Baby resorts to visual interactions with Vixanne: both of them look at each other and, "without words, Witch Baby tells her mother what she has seen or imagined - families dying of radiation, old people in rest homes listening for sirens, ragged men and women barefoot through the city. . ." (103). Then Vixanne answers without speaking, "There will be no pain. Forget that there is evil in the world" (105). However, Witch Babyrefuses to be thrown into "a sea of forgetting" (103), and runs out of her mother's house leaving behind the newspaper clippings for Vixanne to look at some day.

After Vixanne, Witch Baby confirms other ties with her "almost-mother", Weetzie Bat. They both see themselves as black sheep: people who do not fit in and express the anger and pain of others (108). Weetzie recognizes Witch Baby as a kind of person who can face others' suffering. Accordingly, the two WBs finally recognize their similarity and kinship. Their affinity is best represented in a photograph Witch Baby takes and the new name she adopts; the photograph including Witch Baby is pasted onto the number twelve of the family clock, and she names herself "Witch Baby Secret Agent Black Lamb Wigg Bat" (115), inheriting all of her parents' names.

Politics of Photography

In her analysis of Witch Baby and other adolescent novels portraying photographers, Trites observed that they often deal with political relationships between subject and object, between the photographer and the photographed (Disturbing 123; Waking 37). However, in the novel Witch Baby, photography connects to Witch Baby's search for the matrix of her being: her position among her 'almost-family" members, while visualizing the pain of her invisibility. To put it another way, it seems that she is not fully aware of family and social dynamics and the politics of photography: the fluid and conflicting relationships between subject and object in the act of photography. For example, frustration over her unrequited love for Raphael leads her to photograph her family members looking their worst:

　　Witch Baby went around the cottage taking candid pictures of everyone looking their worst - My
　　Secret Agent Lover Man with a hangover, Weelzie covered with paint and glue, Dirk and Duck
　　arguing, Brandy-Lynn weeping into a martini, Cherokee and Raphael gobbling up the vegetarian
　　lasagna Weetzie was saving for dinner. (Witch Baby 28)

She repeatedly turns her photographic subjects into ugly objects, targets for her anger and other emotions.

Referring to exploitative photography, Susan Sontag argues, "Between photographer and subject, there has to be distance" (On Photography 13) because to 'photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed" (4). Despite her empowerment represented by the family portrait at the end of the novel, Witch Baby is ignorant of the power she exercises over the objectified subjects.

The political relationship between subject and object in photography is foregrounded in the fourth book of the series, Missing. The novel deals with the remaining problems affecting Witch Baby: the issue of appropriation between the photographer and the photographed, including with respect to Witch Baby's self-portrait, and reconfirmation of her ties to her almost-grandfather Charlie Bat. Photography is again utilized as the media lo solve these problems. In the beginning of the novel, unaware of her increasing desire for her lover, Witch Baby expresses her passion for Angel Juan by frequently taking his picture. But, because he cannot stand to be objectified, Angel Juan finally announces that he is leaving for New York, saying, "You're always taking pictures of me and writing songs for me but that's not me. That's who you made up" (Witch Baby 3).

The Abject

Naturally, Witch Baby's heart is broken "like a teacup covered with hairline cracks" (4) and she destroys the pictures of Angel Juan covering her walls. Again confining herself in the garden shed, she regresses into a familiar self-image, a "freaky pain-gobbling goblin" (7), and resumes the old pain game, covering her walls with newspaper clippings of others' pain. She is on the brink of destruction and indulges in brooding over destructive and abhorred self-images. At this stage Witch Baby has again become what Julia Kristeva calls the "abject".

The novel Missing prescribes a remedy for Witch Baby's pain game through her encounter with other abjected beings: the ghost of Charlie Bat and the kidnapper Cake. Kristeva suggests in Powers of Horror that art can reconstruct a self on the verge of destruction or liminality through an encounter with the abject (18). Kristova defines the abject not just as something improper and unclean, but as "what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, position, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite" (4). Witch Baby meets Charlie, an apparition, who acts as a guide to look for the missing Angel Juan in New York City, the "carnival square" where medieval people lived two-leveled and ambivalent lives (128-130), or a place where writers challenge the status quo through humor and chaos in Bakhtinian fashion.*2 He is in-between. a composite of two worlds. Meanwhile, Cake is also an ambiguous being because he is a white demon wearing white clothes who generously feeds children sweets before kidnapping and transforming them into mannequins. Witch Baby describes him: "He is tall and he has white hair and you can almost see the blood bating al his temples because his skin i! so thin and white . . . . He is probably the most gorgeous human being I have ever seen in real life and the most-nasty looking at the same time' (Missing 108). In order to stabilize the boundary between subject and object, self and other, Witch Baby needs to expel what she thinks improper and unclean as the abject.'

Also significant is the time Charlie and Cake appear: the Christmas holiday, which is a liminal period between the end of one year and the beginning of another, a time for birth and rebirth. The timing of Charlie's appearance is especially important. Abhorring her own reflection in a mirror, Witch Baby shatters the mirror wanting to disappear Shortly afterwards Charlie appears, and he can be seen only in the shattered mirror. This incident indicates that, as the abject, they are inseparable. Desire to possess beloved ones leads both Charlie and Witch Baby to become abjected beings: "pain gobbling goblin[s]" and ghosts. Noteworthy is a recurring scene in which Charlie sings a familiar song he used to sing for his beloved daughter, Weetzie. She cannot let him leave this world and forces Charlie to continue living as a ghost. Just as Charlie is Witch Baby's double, Cake is another of her doubles in that he tries to confine the souls of Angel Juan and Witch Baby in mannequins, preserving them like Egyptian mummies.

Roland Barthes' argument in Camera Lucida about the issue of photography and death may be useful for considering the ghosts in the novel. According to Barthes, photographers tend to delude themselves into thinking that photographs attest to the reality of the photographed subject/object (79). But, ironically, as Barthes points out, "[photographs] are agents of Death" (92). The person or thing photographed is a kind of eidolon, which Barthes calls "the Spectrum of the Photograph" (9). In one memorable episode Witch Baby looks at a deserted apartment through her camera. The apartment suddenly changes and is filled with Charlie's parents and his siblings. Thus, Witch Baby realizes that a photograph is, as Sontag writes, "a memento of the vanished past and the dear departed'' (Regarding the Pain of Others 21); Witch Baby recognizes that she is unable to possess the photographed. This episode demonstrates the ironic nature of photography in the way that the photographer simultaneously possesses and does not possess the photographed.

Photography-as a Remedy

Similarly, throughout the novel Witch Baby's act of photographing works as a remedy lo overcome her fear of possession, and therefore Chadie incessantly encourages her to look through her camera (Missing 67, 68, 72, 80, 82,88, 91). Including the episode of th6 haunted apartment, Witch Baby's photography falls into three categories: photographing people in the past, photographing people on the street, and photographing herself.

Let us consider an example from the second category. Witch Baby looks at two drag queens and their child through her camera. In her camera lens, she sees that they are not just queer people but beautiful people filled with love, as Witch Baby says, "Through my camera tens I see their love even more .... I also see that both the lankas are beautiful in the strong way that only real androgynous ones are" (74). In other words, they are not encoded by pain or alienation as the subjects of her pain game. In this episode, Witch Baby finally relates to the subjects of her photography. Sontag observes that using a camera is a form of participation, not intervention, in an interesting subject including others' pain or misfortune (On Photography 12,42). Instead of objectifying subjects and being obsessed with her own sense of pain, she gains perspective by recognizing the connection between the photographer and the photographed.

Now, let us consider two examples from the third category. Witch Baby takes pictures of herself dressed in various disguises an Egyptian queen, a Grecian statue, a Cupid, a Buddha, a rubber monster, and Charlie Chaplin in black top hat (Missing 102). Looking at these photos, she recognizes that all of them, including the ghost and demon, are aspects of herself.

Other examples from the third category are the pictures she takes of Cake who tries to confine her soul in a mannequin. Following Vixanne's and Charlie's advice, Witch Baby looks at Cake through her camera to confront her "own darkness" or "the part that wants to keep Angel Juan locked in [her] life' (123). These two episodes of Witch Baby's self- reflective act of photography contrast with the way she previously saw herself: her recognition of herself as an alienated and invisible being in her play of the "pain game". In other words, this type of photography provides her with new knowledge of her self (or selves) in a variety of object positions, not necessarily one fixed position (or obsessed self- image), and the concept that she may run the risk of appropriating others for herself when she stands in the subject position.

Through the act of photographing, Witch Baby stands in both the subject and obiect position and attempts to negotiate her place among her almost-family. Analogous to her almost-mother Weetzie, Witch Baby makes three wishes: for her beloved Angel Juan to be freed, for Charlie Bat to find peace, and for Cake to become who he really is (123). As Figure 1 shows, through photographing Cake, her double, Witch Baby finally finds her place in the web of her 'almost-family".

　　
　　Figure 1 : The web of "almost-family"

When Witch Baby is ready to let Angel Juan go and Cake disappears, Charlie feels that he is also ready to leave this world and confirms the ties between granddaughter and grandfather. Coincidentally, Witch Baby's enlightenment is represented in gifts from Weetzie and Vixanne: a collage of pictures in which Charlie and Witch Baby are holding hands looking like a real grandfather and granddaughter, and a painting of a girl on whose shoulders sit a white monkey and a black cat that represent Cake and Charlie, respectively.

Conclusion

At the end of the novel, Witch Baby gains knowledge of her photography: "I'll take pictures of lankas, ducks, hipsters and homeboys. When I look through my camera at them I'll see what freaks hem out and what they really jones for, what they want the most in the whole world and then I'll feel like they're not so different from me" (138). She realizes that desiring possession of the photographed is analogous to "sublimated murder", just as Cake does to his kidnapped children. Her recognition echoes Sontag's belief:

　　To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as the, never see themselves, by having
　　knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically
　　possessed. Just as the camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a sublimated
　　murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time. (On Photography 14-15)

By renouncing her possession of Angel Juan and other subjects in her photographs, she comes to view herself in social and historical contexts. She does not see herself as an isolated being but associates herself with the people on the street, and also has to find herself in the web of her almost-family, including the deceased Charlie Bat and his family. Thus, by means of her agency, photography, Witch Baby finally finds her position in the world and gains her subjectivity.

Notes

1. Various aspects of postmodernity in Block's Weetzie Bat books are discussed in Jan Susina's essay, 'The Rebirth of the Postmodern Flaneur:Notes on the Postmodern Landscaoe of Francesca Lia Block's Weetzie Bat". Also, lhe nature of postmodernity in the "almost-family" is examined from a feminist viewpoint in Yoshida Junko's article, "Postmodern Family in Weetzie Bat: A Female Fantasy".

2. According to Bakhtin, the carnival image which permeates the square has the following structural characteristics: "it strives to encompass and unite within itself both poles of becoming or both members of an antithesis: birth-death, youth-old age, top-bottom, face-backside, praise-abuse, affirmation-repudiation, tragic-comic, and so forth . . . It could be expressed this way: opposites come together, look at one another, are reflected in one another, know and understand one another' (l76).

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