Banash, David. “The Blair Witch Project: Technology, Repression, and the Evisceration of Mimesis.” In Nothing That Is: Millennial Cinema and the Blair Witch Controversies. Ed. Sarah Lynn Higley and Andrew Weinstock. Contemporary film and television series. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004. 111-124.

The marketing and reception of the film are centered upon its supposed ludic repression of technology and return to authenticity. 112

Yet at every turn in the narrative, and encoded into the documentary format which relies on both grainy black-and-white and shaky video, the technological apparatus and its inability to represent the witch are underscored. The real horror of the film is built out of the return of this knowledge—that we remember our powerlessness in a world saturated with, but immune to, a technological mimesis we can neither trust nor escape. 112

The old argument here is that films which push technology toward a total mimesis no longer frighten audiences so desensitized that they can watch any evisceration disinterestedly. However, the reason for that jaded passivity is that real horror must be the evocation of our own fears—in short, a return to and paradoxical affirmation of the self. The success of BWP, so the argument continues in the New York Times, is that everything “is left to the imagination. And the imagination works overtime watching the acuity of these talented filmmakers” (Maslin). The formula for successful horror is, then, accord/ing to Kristen Baldwin, “asking the question ‘Hey, do you want to see something really scary?’ and letting your mind provide the example.” 112-113

Here, reaction against studio slick is coupled with a defense of what such obviously constructed, special—effected films threaten: the very concept of self. Where the studio monster is always constructed for us, given to us in the most graphic detail, it simultaneously calls attention to the very way it is attempting to manipulate audience reactions, constantly reminding the audience that it has little control over the way in which it is being mediated. BWP is such a powerful film, so the critics conclude, because it returns the audience (think trust as empowerment) to unmediated selfhood and agency (your fears, your mind, your self). 113

But with all this emphasis on imagination, we might wonder if critics and audiences aren’t protesting just a bit too much. BWP is now famous for what it does not show. We do not see Josh’s abduction. We do not see the presumably gruesome ends of Heather and Mike. We do not see the witch. All these, it is said, are left to the imagination. But what if this is about something more than empowering the imagination? For all these moments in the narrative are coordinated by the film’s central plot: the failure / of a documentary project. It is this failure that is shown in agonizing detail as the mimetic technologies (maps, compass, DAT, video, film) break down along with the collective cohesiveness of the filmmakers. Thus, what our reception itself represses is the very failure of technology as an armature and expression of a will to knowledge and, by extension, the possibility of self. 113-114

As the filmmakers enter the woods (a stark premodernism), they rely on a map and compass. 114

We witness Josh and Mike becoming more fearful as Heather miscalculates their distance from shooting locations. This theme is developed over the course of two days in which the very validity and usefulness of the map is called into question. What is at stake is representation itself. 114

Taking her video camera, he says, “I see why you like this thing. It’s like filtered reality.” While Heather does not object to this statement, and critics and audiences have all but made a rallying cry out of it (what you can’t see on the screen is scarier), the narrative suggests something a bit darker. It is not as if Heather, or we, could simply remove our gaze from the lens. Technologies of representation are, as we know, omnipresent. Worse, they are the only possibility we have to engage the world. Yet they are always flawed, always inadequate, always shifting and deceptive. The fact that the witch cannot be captured on the film is the horror of the film, but not because it empowers unmediated imagination. It is horrifying because it dramatizes (shows!) our total reliance on technologies that, if pushed, break, rupture, and give over to chaos. 115

Even the film itself has the look of truth that has come to dominate, from the emergence of MTV’s The Real World to Fox’s Cops or even America’s Funniest Home Videos. In fact, in both reviews and postings to chat groups, viewers associate much of the fright with this realism. 121

Consistently employing the discursive and filmic conventions of journalism and history, BWP performs the fact that all representations are incomplete constructions incapable of laying bare a god’s-eye view. And it does this with an effortless elegance, for not only has the documentary failed, but it asks its audience to adopt a critical stance toward all documentary (mimetic) claims. Thus the film contains its own self-reflexive critique, dramatizing the literal end/impossibility of mimesis. To obsess over imagining the witch is to elide the horror that is onscreen throughout the film; it is a reactive desire to escape the critique of mimesis, for in the supposed freedom of imagination we forget that our very psyche is as constructed, incomplete, and mediated as the film itself. 121

But such fears are repressed and turned into a utopian affirmation of our contemporary moment through the valorization of our imagination (self) coupled with the indie myth of good-old American economic self-reliance. 122