As Johnny's response makes clear, these embodied, nonconscious, practically autonomous processes confer the feeling of reality on mediated experience: "No doubt about that," he adds with wry irony, "My fear's gotten worse" (179, note 211).
This correlation between the house's spatial mutations and the singularity of experience finds an apt emblem in the figure of the Labyrinth. "In order to consider how distances within the Navidson house are radically distorted," Zampanò notes at the beginning of Chapter IX, we must address the more complex ideation of convolution, interference, confusion, and even decentric ideas of design and construction. In other words the concept of a labyrinth" (109). Citing Penelope Reed Doob's The Idea of the Labyrinth from Classical Antiquity through the Middle Ages, Zampanò notes how the distinction between those who are inside the labyrinth and those who view it from the outside breaks down in considering Navidson's house, "simply because no one ever sees that labyrinth in its entirety." As a result, "comprehension of its intricacies must always be derived from within"—that is, through the singular experience of those inside it (114).
If this is true for the film as well, it is because the film is also an unsolvable labyrinth: there simply is no transition possible from the continually devolving discourse" of the film—a discourse that promises discovery "while all along dissolving into chaotic ambiguities too blurry to ever completely comprehend"—to an embodied navigation of the house it mediates (114). In a now familiar pattern, this brush with the limits of technical orthography almost immediately shades into an account of the house as a figure for the digital. This house, Zampanò notes, defies the traditional means of escaping a labyrinth—for example, by keeping one hand on a wall and walking in one direction—because it would probably require an infinite amount of time and resources" to be solved (115). This house, in other words, is a labyrinth of unprecedented impossibility: it presents truly irresolvable obstacles, rendering futile any "permanent"—that is, objectively mappable—solution: "Due to the wall-shifts and extraordinary size, any way out remains singular and applicable only to those on that path at that particular time. All solutions then are necessarily personal" (115).
BODIES IN CODE
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