Random Samples Symbol Analysis

In Surfacing, Random Samples—the experimental documentary film that the narrator’s married friend David and her lover Joe are making—represents how art can reinforce existing social hierarchies like male oppression of women and human violence against animals. When the film is first mentioned, it seems relatively benign: David, the “director” and mastermind behind the film, simply wants to record and then arrange footage of objects they encounter on their trip and has recruited Joe as his cameraperson. Yet it is telling that David recruits Joe to work the camera rather than his wife Anna or the narrator: Joe, a ceramics artist, has no experience with film, but David encourages him to teach himself by telling him that he and David are the “new Renaissance Men”—a term for all-competent, self-teaching artists that implicitly excludes women. Moreover, counter to the film’s title, the objects that David asks Joe to film aren’t random: as the novel progresses, David first wants to document the guts of a fish he caught, a log that he and Joe chopped, and a decomposing heron that someone killed and hung from a tree, all symbolic of violent human domination over nature. Then, later, he pressures Anna into stripping so that Joe can film her, and David can splice her naked body into footage of the decomposing heron. David’s desire to sandwich together film of a nude woman and a murdered animal suggests the association in his mind between human domination of nature and male domination of women. It also shows that even a supposedly random documentary film—which ought simply to catch snippets of reality—is never ideologically innocent: all art can reinforce or subvert existing social hierarchies.