Joseph Cornell | Jack's Dream / 1938

jack and his ejaculating friends

by Douglas Messerli

 

Joseph Cornell (director) Jack’s Dream / 1938

 

A sleeping pet dog’s 4-minute dream, using extant images from film, reveals a very troubling vision of the male species as well as danger for his female keeper in artist Joseph Cornell’s 1938 fantasy film.

   To the sorrowful dreams of the dog Jack, Lawrence Jordan has “realized” Cornell’s early film with music by Erik Satie, Jordan using the original images and attaching the soundtrack which Cornell has evidently suggested should accompany it.

    In some senses this is a version of the “Little Red-Riding-Hood tale arriving presumably at her grandmother’s house. Only Red, who it appears does not even get the opportunity to enter the fairy-tale mansion, is soon replaced by the snoozing pooch, Jack, who provides his own version of the action, a much more complex vision of reality.

    In this world, the puppet husband and wife are witnessed cleaning up the after-dinner dishes, as Jack has a dream vision of a 19th century sailing ship sinking, where all men aboard are swallowed up by the sea. He is clearly troubled by his dream as he half-awakes, barking in distress.   

    In the next few long seconds in this very short film we catch images of sea horses moving about their underwater estate. If you recall—and of which I was coincidentally reminded of through a friendly Facebook or Instagram image just this morning*—male sea horses in their mating rituals are implanted with the semen or ejaculate of the female species in a special pouch from which, after the proper time necessary for gestation, eventually expels hundreds of tiny versions of his species from his pouch, representing a true alteration from the mammalian female births.

    A few frames later, the female housewife puppet observes what appears to be a fire-breathing dragon supping on the family’s leftovers, looking quite similar to the seahorses we have just previously observed. The “monster” attacks the mistress of the house, presumably in a rather perverse attempt to capture her ovarian eggs, as Jack, awakened by her cries for help, barks. She attempts to push the dragon/seahorse out the door, as Jack continues protesting the action of the monster against his mistress, finally sending the “monster” on his way.

      We return to the frigate, as the attack begins, a man falling to his death in gun fire. And strangely enough Jack fall’s back into sleep, as the ship again sinks into the ocean—the symbol of masculine dominance being destroyed (?) as we return to perhaps an alternative world where the masculine becomes transsexual, even transgender in order to continue the survival of the human species. The dragon proves himself to be a kind of progenitor of new possibilities, much as in Wagner’s operas, whom Siegfried must destroy in order to continue the human race. Forget Little-Red-Ridding-Hood. The wolf has been killed before Red even crosses the door of her grandmother’s house.

      The sun rises, a rooster crows. New baby chicks are presented before our eyes. The puppet couple who own their home resume their incomprehensible normative conversations.   

 

*As I have observed many times, coincidence is a major aspect of my life. That I should have quite accidentally encountered a short film about seahorse male birthings the very day that film critic Earl Jackson reminded me of this short Cornell film, which I’d previously seen but never comprehended, seems to be more than a dream, but an impossible insertion into my consciousness which obviously seeks out such intrusions. My world has long become wonderfully coincidental, where at every moment one thing leads to another.

 

Los Angeles, January 31, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2024).