[Arsenal Pulp Press; 2024]

There’s a scene in Woody Allen’s 1977 movie where Allen and his date, played by Diane Keaton, are waiting in line and eavesdropping on a chatty professor mansplaining Marshall McLuhan to his date. Allen starts an argument with him, walks out of frame and comes back with McLuhan. “You know nothing of my work,” he says to the professor. “How you got to teach a course in anything is utterly amazing.”

In his lifetime, McLuhan was something of a celebrity intellectual. His theories on television inspired movies, books, and television. Without his ideas of hot and cold media, it’s unlikely we would have had the flashy panache of early MTV, the visceral horror of Videodrome, or the cool ironic detachment of David Letterman. “McLuhan died on December 31, 1980,” writes author Chase Joynt at the beginning of his new memoir Vantage Points. “Six months before I was born, twenty-six years before I transitioned, and thirty-eight years before I would start writing him into our family history.” The book ties together these threads: transition, media studies, familial history, and exploring archives.

As much a memoir as an experiment in text, Joynt’s Vantage Points is a fragmentary book that mixes bursts of found paperwork (letters, telegrams, marginalia) and lines with sparse writing. It’s a book that’s visually interesting and a curious mix of reflection and commentary on male privilege and abuse. Joynt frames these through the theories of Marshall McLuhan, someone who fascinates him both as an academic and as a distant relative.

As a filmmaker, Joynt is a visual artist by trade. His documentary Chasing Agnes went deep into the UCLA archives to question how trans people tell their stories. Similarly, Vantage Points goes into his own history to reframe how he tells his own. As a child he was sexually abused by a family member he refers to as X: an uncle who would run his hands along Joynt’s body before abusing him. These sessions left gaps in Joynt’s memory as he disassociated; blank spots where only brief bursts of images remain.

These lapses and jagged memories are framed by words bending and twisting around the prose, bracketed by pages of blown-up reproductions of telegrams and letters. Throughout the book, lines appear out of nowhere and pages are filled with black space. He reminds one of Roland Barthes or Hervé Guibert, writing short and elliptical little chapters that flit between ideas and time periods, leaving little space for a linear progression. Vantage Points is an uncompromising look at the cisgender gaze, of how abusers can mark out and take advantage of people uncomfortable in their bodies. For example, Joynt writes about how his abuser was able to isolate him from his peers and then use that isolation to create a scene where X held all the cards: a basement apartment with no easy escape route, the knowledge a gun was in X’s possession and hidden just out of sight.

But Joynt’s book is not just a memoir. Elsewhere in these pages, Joynt shows himself as sympathetic to McLuhan’s analysis of media—both towards its strengths and weaknesses. But this book lives and dies by the reader’s opinions of McLuhan: If one thinks of him as a media prophet, Joynt’s reading is insightful and nuanced, particularly when he subverts McLuhan’s theories to expose their white male privilege: McLuhan’s theories on TV are used to explain why X was racist, theories of mechanization are used to explain how men like X are able to act without consequence. But if one thinks that McLuhan’s work is dated or simply wrong, Joynt’s book loses much of its momentum.

Some sixty years ago Dwight Macdonald took McLuhan to task: “If I have inadvertently suggested that Understanding Media is pure nonsense,” he wrote, “let me correct that impression. It is impure nonsense—nonsense adulterated by sense.” Macdonald found him to be a man who could think up big ideas and theories, but failed to stick the landing, instead getting lost in a maze of data and factoids. More recently, McLuhan’s been called out for casual racism and sexist beliefs. His ideas of people as uncontaminated by culture are crude stereotypes of rural Africans listening to the BBC without understanding English; his reading of the Narcissus myth overlooks Echo’s role in the tale. To his credit, Joynt repeatedly points this out, quoting scholars like Wendy Hui Kyong Chun in their own words. But he is not able to get McLuhan fully out of his head either, casually tying the thinker to his personal history: He contrasts a picture of him and his abuser to McLuhan’s writing on photos, or hazy memories of watching Gulf War coverage with X to McLuhan’s theories of why people watch TV.

It’s interesting to contrast Vantage Points with Steacy Easton’s 2023 memoir Daddy Lessons, a similarly themed book about childhood abuse and growing up trans, and also one with one foot in academic theory. But where Joynt leans on McLuhan, Easton name-checks Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick; where Joynt pushes his text into the avant-garde, Easton shuffles through time and looks inward. While Vantage Points is a more visually exciting book to flip through, Easton’s book relies more on their strengths as a writer: It makes readers wonder if relying on visual tricks and typography experiments is a way for Joynt to cover for a sparse narrative.

At the same time, Vantage Points wisely avoids the trappings of the trans memoir: There are no scenes of crossing dressing in private or of wanting to be somebody you’re pretending to just want. Instead they offer brief glimpses: smoking cigarettes outside school, accessing hormones in San Francisco. By skipping over the over-exposed parts, Joynt subverts a cis expectation that trans lives are filled with dread or anxiety, and instead directs attention to his family’s history and to McLuhan’s theories.

While Joynt shows himself as someone who can draw both attention and emotion out of readers through a cut-and-paste approach to memoir, it also feels like you’re reading a book that moves too fast to catch and hang onto. For something that’s over two hundred pages long, there’s just a few moments that linger in the reader’s mind afterwards. But the way it juxtaposes the text with photographs adds context to the words, showing telegrams alluded to and stark white-on-black text to emphasize a particular point, like how he wants to get revenge on X or the proximity between him and his abuser.

When it works, Vantage Points is thoughtful in the way it mixes personal history with theory and a close reading of McLuhan. But when it doesn’t it just leaves you wanting something to grasp onto as the words, photos, and symbols fly by. On balance it’s an effective mix of memoir and theory, not too far from Guy Debord’s Panegyric, but it might prove too elusive for some.

Roz Milner is a freelance writer and critic who lives just north of Toronto. Her writing has appeared in the Toronto Star, Lambda Literary, PRISM International, Broken Pencil, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a book of short fiction.


 
 
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