From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
The Glitch as Hermeneutic Necessity—Incompletion and the Surplus Observer in Beach Surgery
First published in Phenomenologia Contemporânea 44(2). Cited in ██ 's 2022 symposium and ████ 's comparative study of narrative incompleteness.
A foundational theoretical study arguing that the glitch—the irreparable structural fault between the two halves of Beach Surgery—is not a compositional failure but a *hermeneutic necessity*: the precise mark of consciousness itself as an observer paradox.
Drawing on C. W. Smith's essay on ontological incompleteness, Santos proposes that incompletion is not incidental but constitutive. The "gap" (the Möbius seam where Leif and Katita pass from city to desert and back without narrative causality) mirrors the irreducible split in subjectivity: the "I" that observes the world and the "I" that experiences it can never be unified. Adaptations attempt to resolve the glitch, but the attempts themselves—the contradictions *between* them—are where the franchise's real meaning lies: in the **surplus of the seen**, the excess interpretations that accumulate precisely because the core work refuses completion.
Santos traces parallels to Cinema Novo and Brazilian phenomenologists (notably Vilém Flusser). Her method examines Leif and Katita not as characters but as operators of an ontological gap: their recurrence across Smith's works stages the subject's perpetual non-coincidence with itself.