Walker, Joseph S. “Mom and the Blair Witch: Narrative, Form, and the Feminine.” 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. 163-180.

By the end of 1999, the Internet Movie Database had already recognized a dozen features directly spoofing Myrick and Sanchez’s film, and many more have appeared since. 163

In fact, like any number of earlier, similarly startling assaults on dominant Hollywood style, BWP is “superficially radical, [but] internally conservative” (Ray 296). Although the film continually disrupts the conventionalizing forces of linear storytelling and seamless technical presentation, it ultimately does so only in the service of a deeply / reactionary restoration and defense of the most conservative form of patriarchal power. 164

Despite its position in the clearly fantastic tradition of the horror genre, the film is convincing enough in its realistic guise (aided, as I discuss below, by various auxiliary texts) that, for several months after the film’s release, Burkittsville, the town in which its opening sequences are set, regularly received visitors and callers volunteering to join search parties looking for the missing students. 164

The one gap in this series of calculated revelations, the tool the film cannot entirely account for, is editing. The film is taken from two separate cameras, and there is a clear implication within the world of the narrative that there are many hours of footage. BWP itself, then, was stitched together by someone for some purpose, and it represents only one possible view of the embedded narrative. This alone stands as internal evidence of a narrative authority outside the scope of the film itself—as evidence, in other words, of the fic/tionality of the entire work. 164-165

It might reasonably be objected at this point that there is, in fact, nothing “historical” about The Blair Witch Project. The “legend” was created for the film, the people who appear on screen are actors, and the scenarios they act out are predetermined and without real consequence. To gain the perspective necessary for such an observation, however, we must remove ourselves from the immediate narrative frame of the film as an autonomous text and enter the more complicated and even contradictory web of multitextual frames that surround it. Most prominently, of course, there are the auxiliary texts which I discuss below, and which extend and deepen the story told within the film itself: the Web site, the television special, the book, and so on. Beyond these, however, are texts (primarily interviews and news stories) that immediately acknowledge that the film is fiction and then go on to discuss the mechanics of its production. These stories provide the widely disseminated details of how Donahue, Leonard, and Williams actually camped in the woods for several days, filmed their experiences themselves, endured isolation, cold, hunger, and exhaustion, knew only the broad outlines of the story, and were frequently surprised / as the unseen filmmakers brought some new element into the scenario. A story by Josh Wolk in Entertainment Weekly, for example, reveals that the actors did not know that they would encounter the stickmen, that Leonard would be “taken” from the group, or that they were being guided toward an abandoned house for the film’s climax. The purpose of subjecting the actors to these ordeals, of course , was to ensure the authenticity of the footage, to guarantee that “the actors were legitimately frightened by the filmmakers’ stunts” (Wolk). 166

Essentially, the experiences we witness on the screen are real, are historical. Whether we see them as Heather, Josh, and Mike being pursued by a witch or as Donahue, Leonard, and Williams responding to the calculated torments of the filmmakers becomes a matter of preference rather than necessity, and the more deeply the viewer is immersed in the multiple planes of narrative, the more individual moments seem to mark ambiguous points of intersection between them. The two narratives (or, more accurately, the two narrative frames) cannot be cleanly distinguished from each other or organized into a simple hierarchical model. In this, too, BWP echoes experiments in literary fiction. Brian Richardson points out that any number of “nonmimetic narratives regularly—even typically—point to, problematize, or violate the principles of framing that must be adhered to in all mimetic or nonfictional narratives,” and he laments the fact that narrative theory, with its nostalgic preference for linear, traditional texts, has developed no language to address such complications or contaminations (35). 166

This generates multiple obstacles for discussions of The Blair Witch Project. Not only do the contaminations and cross-pollinations of the various narrative structures make it difficult to address the film as a distinct entity, but we have no rigorous method for mapping and dissecting such intricate intertextual intersections. Thus we have what I am calling the Blair Witch metatext: a complex interweaving of at least three levels of narrative “reality” (the film itself, the auxiliary fictional texts, the production and reception history of the film), each further fragmented by multiple perspectives, none of which can claim ultimate authority or primacy. There is no center and no predetermined point of entry. It is a heteroglossic space, a multimedia version of collaborative hyptertext. It is fitting that the film has been very successful on DVD, a format that allows entry at any point of the text (unlike necessarily linear tape) and which equally showcases the film itself and wide variety of the supplementary material). 166

In postmodernism, “no narrative can be a natural ‘master’ narrative: there are no natural hierarchies; there are only those we construct” (Hutcheon 13). Contemporary theory has generated any number of images for this tendency to erase—or at least render incomprehensible—centralized authority and organization. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, for example, propose the spreading rhizome as a replacement for the rigidly ordered tree as the preferred model of knowledge: “the rhizome is an acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying system without a General and without an organizing memory or central automaton, defined solely by a circulation of states” (21). Similarly, Fredric Jameson identifies the decentered and disorienting Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles as an emblem of postmodern space, “transcending the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself” in conjunction with the “breakdown of all previous narrative paradigms” (44). These metaphors foreshadow the dominant contemporary version of excessive, chaotic knowledge, the endless, formless Internet, and it is, again, only fitting that the Blair Witch has such a successful presence in that medium. In fact, there is no “underlying” narrative to The Blair Witch Project or to the Blair Witch metatext as a whole. Every answer only leads to more questions; every explanation is subject to contestation; “narrative continuity is threatened, is both used and abused, inscribed and subverted” (Hutcheon 59). Again, while there is nothing radical about this in terms of contemporary literature or theory, it is surprising for such an exploded / narrative to be so eagerly accepted by the mass American film industry and audience. 169-170.

Heather’s increasingly irrational dependence on her cameras, then, is ultimately the counterpoint to the persistently mysterious nature of the Blair Witch threat. Just as the witch resists explanation, Heather undercuts her own chances of comprehension in her need to believe that the world can be meaningfully reduced to a filmic image (or, for that matter, that the territory they wander can be meaningfully reduced to the map, a belief that reduces her to hysteria when the clearly useless map is lost). On both sides, the real stubbornly refuses to be collapsed into a stable formation. 170

In the end, if there must be an end, we can either embrace the ambiguity and multiplicity of the narrative (as postmodern theory would ask us to do) or simply accept that a supernatural power is at work, one that utterly controls both reality and our perception of it and which is beyond comprehension. 172

Indeed, it is my sense that the film is evidence of a generally widening acceptance in popular cinema of playfully nontraditional forms. Other recent examples of this trend might include Run, Lola, Run (1998), Sliding Doors (1998), The Limey(1999), Being John Malkovich (1999), Memento (2000), or, going back a bit further, The Usual Suspects (1995). While none of these films achieved quite the success of BWP, particularly in terms of cultural visibility, all exhibit a similarly playful attitude toward representation and framing, and all have been accepted by the mass audience. 172

It is worth asking, however, whether this willingness on the part of both producers and audience to experiment with form is matched by similarly daring content. On the evidence of BWP, there is little reason to think so. 172

Instead, it is my contention that the Blair Witch metatext as a whole cannot avoid replicating elements and patterns of repression and limitation, and that the apparently extreme openness of the film only masks these more reactionary aspects within it—aspects we have become accustomed to discovering in more conformist texts. It may well be that as the form of the Blair Witch metatext becomes more radical, it becomes more vital to detect the presence of conservative tendencies and moments within it. Specifically, I am troubled by traces of a deep misogyny in the narrative field, a distrust of the feminine and celebration of the patriarchal that is most visible in elements of the film’s auxiliary texts. 173

While it is certainly commonplace for contemporary Hollywood productions to be accompanied by a raft of promotional and marketing tools, BWP is virtually unprecedented in its organization and coordination of this material. 173

None of these materials simply reproduces the narrative events of the film itself, or even of each other, Instead, they duplicate its speculative and purportedly documentary tone, offering fragmentary evidence from multiple, frequently conflicting perspectives of either the search for the filmmakers or the origins and manifestations of the legend itself. 173

The marketing and merchandising of the film thus becomes indistinguishable from the narrative of the film itself, and while this may open up creative possibilities for the playful (de)construction of narrative, we should not forget that the profit motive is never far from the surface. 174

It has been a decade and a half since Robin Wood identified the restoration of the father as “the dominant project, ad infinitum and post nauseam, of the contemporary Hollywood cinema” (172). / It is disheartening, if not surprising, to discover such a conservative cliché concealed beneath such a novel surface, but the discovery is nonetheless valuable for its reminder that subversive form does not necessarily indicate similarly subversive content. 179