5. Nathalie Léger

“I have heard that the GPS is altering our perception of our position in space and the way we travel from place to place. The very notion of an itinerary is problematic nowadays.” -Nathalie Léger (trans. by Natasha Lehrer and Cécile Menon)

            Nathalie Léger is on a journey and to get to her destination the GPS won’t help. This is both a simple fact and a metaphor. Tasked with writing a straightforward encyclopedia entry on Barbara Loden and her film Wanda, Léger has wandered very far afield, specifically to rural Central Pennsylvania. More specifically—in the instance that causes her to reflect upon, and eventually to turn off her direction-assisting device—she is headed to the ghost town of Centralia, beneath whose ground fires have continually burned for some 50 years.

            For Léger, the simple synthesis of available facts that constitutes the encyclopedist’s easy methodology won’t do. To get to the heart of her subject—the actress and director Loden who directed a single legendary feature film about a woman who, economic circumstances aside, was not too dissimilar from her creator—Léger must dig deeper. So, she pores through the Barbara Loden archive, she visits the area where the film was shot, and she even, in a somewhat hallucinatory scene that must surely be fictional, pops in at the Harry Houdini museum in Scranton, Pennsylvania (the city where the movie’s climactic scene unfolds) to talk Proust with Mickey Mantle. She forges her own chartless path, searching for revelations that might never happen.

            But to get to Centralia, she must first grapple with the cursed GPS system. To start with, she follows the directions—albeit with the sound off—allowing herself to be taken in by the “marvelous, illusory continuity” that the unspooling electronic line provides. But she is only taken in so far and, while she allows the system to serve its literal purpose, she reflects on what humanity has lost in turning its basic functions over to robots. “It seems to be becoming increasingly difficult,” she writes, in her dryly acidic prose, “to accept that we don’t always know exactly where we are, and by extension it is becoming increasingly difficult to know exactly where we are.”

            It is, Léger suggests, a real diminishment of our sense of ourselves as humans to so trust technology that we don’t have a good sense of where we are in the world. We think we know exactly where we stand at all times, but because we don’t really know, because we only know by consulting an outside device, we are constantly lost. And this has implications far beyond the merely practical (i.e. what if my phone suddenly runs out of power and I can’t find my way back?) How can we expect to meaningfully interact with the world around us if we can’t mentally situate ourselves in our greater environment? How can we exist as part of a community when “everything, including time and emotion can,” as Léger puts it, “be localized” within ourselves?

            “It is not on any map,” runs the famous Melville quote from Moby-Dick, “true places never are.” As Léger shows, these unmappable places continue to be the ones worth seeking out, even if their truths are often horrific. When she finally reaches Centralia—after, at last, giving up on the “magic box” affixed to her dashboard—she finds a town emptied out but well-preserved, a place whose hellishness is not in its outwards signs of decay but in its sense of erasure. For Léger, though, this sense of erasure, one that also characterizes Barbara Loden’s historical standing, is far worse. And as our mental pathways become increasingly controlled by conformity-inducing technology, it will only get harder and harder to avoid this forgetting. In our moment, the influx of information is encouraged; knowing how to process that information, how to think with it, how to preserve it, is not. Now, then, is the time to shut off the GPS.