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shannankle · 1 year

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Queer and Crip Temporality in the Eighth Sense and Giovanni's Room

I've been thinking the last week about how The Eighth Sense represents mental health and queerness through a fractured sense of time. It got me thinking about the concepts of queer and crip time which I think the show is depicting. I've also been thinking about how the parallels between how the The Eighth Sense captures experiences of fracture and abjection in a similar way to the novel Giovanni's Room.

For reference:

Part 1: Queer and Crip Time explained

Part 2: Giovanni's Room

Part 3: The Eighth Sense

Queer time and Crip Time

Queer time is a concept that touches on the way that queer lives don't progress in the normative way that non-queer lives tend to. It's a temporal displacement from the norm that queers expectations of heteronormative progress. As a small example, think of the way that many queer folks don't experience many traditional coming of age milestones in the same form or pace as is often expected; things such as dating or going through one's desired puberty may often come much later in life.

Notions of crip time build on the notion of queer time while thinking about disability. This captures in part the way that many disabled lives run on a different time scale, much like with queerness. From the way that a flare or doctor's visits can run a person ragged, taking up their time. To the way that lying in bed, isolated from society, time expands in ways ablebodied folks rarely experience. Crip time, like forms of queer time, however, also refers to a resistant mode of thinking about disabled futures. It interrogates the ableist impulse to envision the future without disability, while opening up for thinking about what a crip future might look like.

In an important way queer and crip time, and representations of them, are both about capturing a lived experience and about imagining otherwise.

2. Queer Time and Abjection in Giovanni's Room

I want to start first by thinking about Giovanni's Room because I think both this novel and The Eighth Sense use queer time in similar ways, but are striving towards different conclusions. So I think it's useful to use Giovanni's Room as a base.

The novel by James Baldwin follows David, an American man who moves to Paris where he begins to navigate his bisexuality and internalized homophobia when he begins a relationship with an Italian bartender Giovanni. The story is told primarily as a flashback, moving between a telling of David and Giovanni's relationship and fallout and the present moment (what David calls "the night which is leading to the most terrible morning of my life") where David is passing the evening before Giovanni's execution.

While the novel structurally plays with time to tell it's story, it also embeds time into the narrative in more symbolic ways as well. Throughout the novel, Giovanni is associated with atemporality, constantly out of step with the flow of Paris life due to his poverty and queerness which require him to work the night shift at a bar. Giovanni is placed both in opposition to normative time but also dependent on it for his financial survival. He gets off work just before dawn as the rest of the city begins it's day. As a shift laborer (he works as a bartender at a gay bar) he must work within a specific schedule for survival, and his poverty and queerness force him out of step with the rhythms of normative society. In this way, atemporality is a form of abjection or social death.

At the same time, Giovanni also turns to atemporality as a form of queer refuge when he is not working particularly within the space of his room where David spends time with him. David recalls that "life in that room seemed to be occuring beneath the sea. Time flowed past indifferently above us; hours and days had no meaning." Giovanni's room becomes a space where time has no meaning, making it free from social constructs of time. All of this, importantly, is carried by the metaphor of the sea, which on the surface marks time by the movement of the tides and the moon, but deep below the surface these tides become imperceptible. And after Giovanni loses his job, David notes how he feels as if he is sinking deeper.

Unfortunately, in Giovanni's Room Baldwin depicts this queer refuge as unsustainable. Temporal norms demand that the body must labor and do so on a specific schedule or social death turns into literal death. After losing his job when his boss tries to exploit him sexually Giovanni sinks further into poverty before killing his former boss and facing execution. At the same time, conformity is also framed as death. David ultimately struggles with his attraction to men. At one point he sleeps with a woman to test his manhood noting afterwards that at this point "I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine." Baldwin sets up a tension, where the characters can neither escape the norm nor conform since both bring death.

3. Queer and Crip Time in The Eighth Sense

Like Giovanni's Room, The Eighth Sense relies on a fractured and displacement of time to convey the abject nature of queer experience, particularly through the editing style and the way this conveys JaeWon's experience. Of course, I would argue that The Eighth Sense leans towards a more optimistic resolution (at least so far) while interweaving an exploration of trauma, mental illness, and disability with queerness (in comparison to Giovanni's Room which primarily interweaves social class).

Throughout the show JaeWon faces the strain of normative time and a lingering feeling of too-lateness. He is on the cusp of graduation, like many of the seniors he is expected to take the next step soon of finding a job and entering the rhythms of the workforce. We can feel the strain of this in many ways. For example, the fact that he would like to try out a different career path (photography) but tells his therapist that he feels it is too late.

This too-lateness, of course, also ties into both his queerness and his experience with trauma. Experiencing his brother's death and feeling that he was to blame, that he was in every way too late to save a life that meant so much to him. This affects his relationship with JiHyun after the accident. Once again he failed someone close to him. And in his eyes we can see how he has given up, that in his mind it is all too late. Too late to choose the happiness JiHyun brings him, too late to remove the mask he wears around others, too late to trace a future that doesn't just repeat the past.

The stylistic way in which the show edits and chops up time shows this fracturing well, capturing the way trauma can crip time and the way non-normativity can lead to an internal sense of abjection. Much like Giovanni's Room we see the pressure of normativity and the way this fractures JeaWon, and of course the show subtly gestures to one potential end point when his therapist asks if he has been considering extreme options.

In another similarity to Giovanni's Room, the strain of normative time is contrasted with spaces that offer queer escape, where time expands and normative progression is cast aside. The ocean for him is in some ways that space. We see this most in how JiHyun becomes a safe space for JaeWon. He tells his therapist that he is "happy with him" to which she responds "I can tell that he offers you a place to rest." As @respectthepetty and others have noted, this is shown visually as JiHYun brings light to JaeWon's world.

It is also captured on their beach trip in episode 6. The dreamlike quality and temporal jumping can be read as a way of conveying the refuge of queer and crip space that throws of the shackles of normativity through a sense of atemporality. I think we might also consider the therapists office as a quasi space of crip refuge. While these scenes are still darkly lit and not so dreamlike, they similarly serve as a space where JaeWon's trauma is not fully hidden behind a mask or himself in shadow.

It is largely the ocean which centrally stands in symbolically as this space of refuge for JaeWon and of course as JiHyun comes further into his life, the two merge as JaeWon brings him to the ocean for their trip. Yet, as episode 6 closes, we see this space of refuge, much like in Giovanni's Room prove unsustainable, marked by the threat of death and loss when JiHyun is hurt and this refuge slips away in JaeWon's eyes. He is sinking deeper.

Once again we are faced with both paths leading to abjection and death. However, while the last few episodes have not aired yet, I do believe that The Eighth Sense pushes for a different conclusion than Giovanni's Room and we see this in JiHyun. Like David in Giovanni's Room he comes to find himself in the big city, but instead of internalizing homophobia, he challenges himself to be brave. He is building a network of caring people, many of whom are themselves outcasts in some way, finding new ways to think about queer futures. Even his choice to work sidesteps the grueling constraints of capitalist labor by finding a place where he is valued by his boss (note how often she assures him he doesn't have to work, it's a choice). Again, the final episodes aren't out yet, but I believe the show is building to an alternate conclusion, one where JiHyun and JaeWon can both find it in themselves to choose a future, a future that is crip and queer and not too late, but rather infinite.

#the eighth sense #meta #my posts #my analysis on giovanni is from a term paper from years ago so citing myself i guess #i love the layers in this show #I also feel like the line #to cause you trauma #takes on more nuance in this context #but that's probably for another post #i might update this after the final episodes drop #giovanni's room #the eighth sense the series #bl series #korean bl #the eighth sense meta #my meta

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