Keller, James. “‘Nothing That Is Not There and the Nothing That Is’: Language and the Blair Witch Phenomenon.” 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. 53-63.

When The Blair Witch Project aired in 1999, the only consistent topic for public discussion generated by the hype over the film was the hype itself. The films was a success because of its success…53

Traditionally, one could count on a movie’s remaining a self-contained whole. The audience is not generally required to supplement its experience in order to attain a satisfactory viewing. 54

The film’s intertextuality (the quality that undermines the audience’s ability to identify the primary text) was a clever effort on the part of the directors and marketing experts to create a cultural phenomenon reminiscent of the structure of the Internet. 55

The individual Web sites are organized according to categories of information that can be sampled at random. Similarly, BWP constitutes a montage of related media forms, each adding to the widening cultural experience, which so far includes the film, two “mockumentaries,” the Web site, the book, the CD (the music from the missing students’ car stereo), and the legion of reviews produced by the circulating social energy. 55

Only through the mediation of these latter productions was the environment provided for a satisfactory and meaningful viewing of the original film, and that meaning was only achieved by displacing the original film from the primary place within the process of signification. 55

This contrast is accomplished through the use of unsteady and ill-aimed camera shots as well as complete blackouts, all of which draw attention to the camera as a limited and limiting artistic medium as opposed to a window on reality. The audience becomes hyperconscious of the camera’s presence, not because of the artful, well-designed images, but because there are so few of them. 56

. . . as in BWP, where the cast is actually the crew: director, Heather Donahue; cameraman, Joshua Leonard; and sound man, Michael Williams. 57

Thus Myrick and Sanchez have achieved a sense of actuality by systematically repudiating virtually every feature of the film industry’s formula for realistic drama. They have achieved realism by rejecting realism, and by rejecting art they have created one of the most successful art films in cinematic history. 57

The idea that a text refers exclusively to other texts is consistent with the aphorism, postulated by Jacques Derrida in his seminal essay “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” that signifiers only ever refer to other signifiers, never to any materiality; the link between word and world is erased (249). Similarly, BWP is preoccupied with its own inability to signify; one might even say that the film’s inability to generate meaning is its principal meaning. 58

While Ferdinand Saussure taught modern linguistics that meaning is generated by the interplay of concepts in binary opposition, Derrida’s Of Grammatology demonstrates that the barrier between those oppositions collapses, dispersing priority and meaning altogether (27-74). For him, the meaningful distinctions between the physical/metaphysical, past/present, here/there, in/out, and even subject/object (me/you) are erased, and it is within the context of this suspension of meaning and frustration of expectations that the searchers and filmmakers try to find answers to their questions but learn nothing. 59

The most prohibitive deconstructions take place at the metadramatic and metacinematic levels of the film. The Blair Witch phenomenon defeats every expectation surround the creation and appreciation of film. 59

The premise of BWP—a documentary gone terribly awry—ruptures the common divide between the performer and the / production staff. While the presence of the crew is more likely to be obviated in a documentary than in a fictional narrative, seldom do the camera and sound people become the subject of the work itself, and even in news broadcasts where the speaker looks directly into the camera and occasionally refers to the process of attaining the images and information, the crew are not actually seen in the picture or identified by name, nor does the production schedule become a recurring subject of the dialogue as in BWP. In fact, in many ways the subject of BWP is the progressive loss of control of the cinema process: the cameraman disappears altogether, and consequently the shots become increasingly unsteady and ill-aimed; the audio track is pervaded by unsolicited and inexplicable sounds at night; the director becomes so frightened and irrational that she is unable to guide and execute the shoot; and the shooting schedule itself goes overtime and over budget and finally results in the complete disappearance of the production staff and their product. The actor/crew paradox is captured cinematically by the periodic shots of the two cameras filming each other filming. 60

However, authors are difficult to identify in the Blair Witch media—script, book, Web site. Deconstruction has dislocated the authority and meaning in the process of communication by problematizing the role of the author. 61

BWP erases its author with its unscripted dialogue and its contention that the footage is indeed the work of three student filmmakers (the original fabrication). Not only is there no single consciousness shaping the language of the film, but even the direction of the narrative is a product of the free association among the three lost players and Myrick and Sanchez hiding in the woods. 62

Each time I place a note in the text acknowledging my appropriations from A Dossier, I may be perpetuating the Blair Witch’s false pageant paraded across the American media. 62