Throughout this semester, I’ve felt that everything we’ve read had themes, symbols, or ideas that could be connected to another author’s writings. After reading Walter Benjamin’s On Hashish, I believe he has captured what it feels like to stand between two mirrors and see the infinite array of lives within that space. Thus, my short film “Bumping Against the Ceiling” depicts the hashish experience as it is told in On Hashish. As Marcus Boon writes in the introduction, the “protocols” in Benjamin’s book can be thought of as “a montage of quotes from other authors,” making it “increasingly difficult to remember who is writing and who is being written about” (8). My film mirrors this confusion by interlacing overlapping themes from Charles Baudelaire, Edgar Allen Poe, and Théophile Gautier. This montage of writers symbolizes Benjamin’s overarching theme that one can “read from [any particular space that they’re occupying] the whole of world history” (31), “simultaneously perceiv[ing] all the events that might conceivably have taken place [t]here” (28). My film distills this process of becoming aware of the interception and interweaving of lives by exploring Benjamin’s themes of parallels, mirrors, ascension and descension, and time.

My film’s structure reflects the parallels of birth and death (the birds are flying in the first scene, then the birds are dying in the last). There are, however, some birds flying in the last scene, symbolizing the paradox that life still exists when there is death. These birds showcase the uncertainty that one of Benjamin’s friends, referred to as “B,” feels about whether parallels meet or don’t meet. While on hashish, B states, “‘Parallels meet in infinity—yes, one sees that,’” but then Benjamin notes that B feels “lively doubt as to whether they meet or don’t meet” (39). Rather than thinking about parallels as opposites, or only meeting at a fixed point (which wouldn’t be a parallel), parallels, Benjamin appears to suggest, can be seen to overlay each other. The theme of overlaying parallels is shown throughout my film, not only in how birds are still flying in the last scene but also in how images are superimposed onto the characters. Every parallel depicted in my film communicates Benjamin’s idea that “the world always remains the same (that all events could have taken place in the same space” (29), showing that all ideas and beings overlap each other, existing together with a certain degree of “sameness” (53).

The body of my film, then, can be thought of as being “station[ed] between the double panes of [a] window,” or rather between birth and death (37). In my film, characters are observed through glass after they take hashish, reflecting how they are stuck between the two parallels of birth and death. By taking into account Benjamin’s themes of mirrors, alternately referred to as “looking glasses,” and their cultural significance as portals for lives to come and go, I’ve scrutinized each mention of glass in On Hashish. Collapsing the symbol of the mirror with that of the glass, it seems that glass is a material that provides an outlet for magic to occur. Thus, after describing how people and things appear magical, Benjamin states, “…when the glass is rubbed, [people and things] become electrically charged and fall at every movement into the most unusual relationships” (55). Whenever there is a scene in my film that shows glass or mirrors, the audience may feel that they are being transported into “the most unusual relationships,” where the “recurrence of the past and geographical remoteness compete or combine with each other” (43). In order for an individual to be transported into the past, or to see “the whole of world history,” time and distance must “compete or combine with each other.”

As described by Benjamin, the disorienting effects of hashish allow for the individual to be transported to multiple lives and settings, where they “Can see everything in this room” (31). For example, the scene where the two women are drinking from cups with baby faces on them symbolizes the theme of being reborn, which is captured in Poe’s short story “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains.” This scene also shows Benjamin’s “feeling of,” as he proclaims at one moment, “understanding Poe much better now” (20). Additionally, my use of kaleidoscopic imagery and the colors blue and red in my film relate to Gautier’s descriptions in “Club des Haschischins” and “Hashish,” further overwhelming the audience with “the whole of world history.”

Finally, Baudelaire’s poems “Jewels” and “Against Her Levity” are reenacted in the film, with mirrors transporting the main character into these poems. The last scene in the body of the film shows a man kissing the woman, with the man intended to symbolize the speaker in “Against Her Levity,” who “injects / [his] venom into [the woman]” (Baudelaire, 73). Following this scene of the man kissing the woman, the next act in the film begins with a scene of a dead bird. By seeing the dead bird after the woman is kissed, the audience may sense that the woman feels the man’s touch as a “violation of [her] aura” and dies (27). However, Benjamin notes that an important part of any ascension is descension, stating, “Death lies between me and my intoxication” (25). Thus, in the final act of the film, the dead birds may be seen to represent her death, and the clouds imply that she has ascended. She is no longer “station[ed] between the double panes of [a] window” (37). She has “bump[ed] against the ceiling, which is exceedingly thin,” with death being her “spur to wakefulness” that has allowed her to depart from herself through her intoxication into a heavenly aura (34).