Category: Film

I’m currently engaged in a round-table discussion (conducted via email) with Therese Grisham, Julia Leyda, and Nicholas Rombes, concerning the two Paranormal Activities films. The entire discussion among us will be published in the online film journal La furia humana. But I thought it might be worthwhile posting here, in advance, the first part of my contribution — since it summarizes my overall sense of what is meant by the term “post-cinematic” — as I used it in my last book, Post-Cinematic Affect.

My sense of the “post-cinematic” comes first of all from media theory. Cinema is generally regarded as the dominant medium, or aesthetic form, of the twentieth century. It evidently no longer has this position in the twenty-first. So I begin by asking, what is the role or position of cinema when it is no longer what Fredric Jameson calls a “cultural dominant,” when it has been “surpassed” by digital and computer-based media? (I leave “surpassed” in quotation marks in order to guard against giving this term a teleological meaning, as if the displacement of one medium by another were always a question of logical progression, or of advancement towards an overall goal. While André Bazin’s teleological “myth of total cinema” is certainly worth considering in this regard, there are many other factors in play as well; the situation is a complexly overdetermined one).

Of course, if we are to be entirely strict about it, cinema was only dominant for the first half of the twentieth century; in the second half, it gave way to television. But for a long time, a kind of hierarchy was still in place: the “big screen” continued to dominate the “small screen” in terms of social meanings and cultural prestige — even if the latter generated more revenue, and was watched by a far greater number of people. Already in the 1950s, movies achieved a second life on television; it wasn’t until much later that anyone had the idea of doing cinematic remakes of television shows. It’s true that television news, or live broadcast, became important pretty much right away: think of Nixon’s Checkers speech (1952), the Nixon-Kennedy debates (1960), and the coverage of the Kennedy assassination (1963). But it’s only been in the last decade or two that television drama has been seen as deeper and more relevant than cinematic drama. (In the 1970s, the Godfather films and Taxi Driver were cultural landmarks; for the past decade, the similar landmarks are shows like The Sopranos and The Wire).

The movies only gradually lost their dominant role, in the wake of a whole series of electronic, and later digital, innovations. Theorists like Anne Friedberg and Lev Manovich have written about many of these: they include the growth of massively multichannel cable television, the increasing use of the infrared remote, the development of VCRs, DVDs, and DVRs, the ubiquity of personal computers, with their facilities for capturing and editing images and sounds, the increasing popularity and sophistication of computer games, and the expansion of the Internet, allowing for all sorts of uploading and downloading, the rise of sites like Hulu and YouTube, and the availability of streaming video). These developments of video (electronic) and digital technologies entirely disrupted both the movies and traditional broadcast television. They introduced an entirely new cultural dominant, or cultural-technological regime: one whose outlines aren’t entirely clear to us as of yet. We do know that the new digital technologies have made the production, editing, distribution, sampling, and remixing of audiovisual material easier and more widespread than it has ever been before; and we know that this material is now accessible in a wider range of contexts than ever before, in multiple locations and on screens ranging in size from the tiny (mobile phones) to the gigantic (IMAX). We also know that this new media environment is instrumental to, and deeply embedded within, a complex of social, economic, and political developments: globalization, financialization, post-Fordist just-in-time production and “flexible accumulation” (as David Harvey calls it), the precarization of labor, and widespread micro-surveillance. (Many of these developments are not new, in that they are intrinsic to the logic of capitalism, and were outlined by Marx a century and a half ago; but we are experiencing them in new forms, and with new degrees of intensity).

Such is the context in which I locate the “post-cinematic.” The particular question that I am trying to answer, within this much broader field, is the following: What happens to cinema when it is no longer a cultural dominant, when its core technologies of production and reception have become obsolete, or have been subsumed within radically different forces and powers? What is the role of cinema, if we have now gone beyond what Jonathan Beller calls “the cinematic mode of production”? What is the ontology of the digital, or post-cinematic, audiovisual image, and how does it relate to Bazin’s ontology of the photographic image? How do particular movies, or audiovisual works, reinvent themselves, or discover new powers of expression, precisely in a time that is no longer cinematic or cinemacentric? As Marshall McLuhan long ago pointed out, when the media environment changes, so that we experience a different “ratio of the senses” than we did before, older media forms don’t necessarily disappear; instead, they are repurposed. We still make and watch movies, just as we still broadcast on and listen to the radio, and still write and read novels; but we produce, broadcast, and write, just as we watch, listen, and read, in different ways than we did before. 

I think that the two (so far) Paranormal Activity films are powerful in the ways that they exemplify these dilemmas, and suggest possible responses to them. They are made with recent (advanced, but low-cost) digital technologies, and they also incorporate these technologies into their narratives, and explore the new formal possibilities that are afforded by these technologies. As horror films, they modulate the affect of fear through, and with direct attention to, these digital technologies, and the larger social and economic relations within which such technologies are embedded. The Paranormal Activity films in fact work through the major tropes of twentieth-century horror. First, there is the disruption of space that comes when uncanny alien forces invade the home, manifesting in the very site of domesticity, privacy, and the bourgeois-patriarchal nuclear family. And second, there is the warping (the dilation and compression) of time that comes about through rhythms of dread, anticipation, and urgency: the empty time when the characters or the audience are waiting for something to happen, or something to arrive, and the overfull time when they are so overwhelmed by an attack or an intrusion that it becomes impossible to perceive what is happening clearly and distinctly, or to separate the otherworldly intrusion from the viscerally heightened response (or inability to adequately respond). The Paranormal Activity films take up these modulations of space and time, but in novel ways, because their new technologies correspond to, or help to instantiate, new forms of spatiotemporal construction (one might think here of David Harvey’s “space-time compression,” or of Manuel Castells’ “space of flows” and “timeless time”).

I really loved Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan. It joins Splice, Toy Story 3, Scott Pilgrim, and Enter the Void as one of my favorite films of 2010. (I missed too many things this year to offer anything like a top-ten list; I still haven’t seen Inception, or True Grit, or The Social Network, for instance — just to mention some of the general-release films that other people have been talking about).

In any case, Black Swan was one of those movies that just touched and jolted me in all the right ways — I became totally entranced by it. I really need to see it again, however, before I can comment on its cinematography — which struck me as key to its effectiveness, in the way that it both drew us into, and yet distanced us from, the intimate world of its protagonist. I think that some variety of cinematic free indirect discourse was at work here (I am thinking of Pasolini’s adaptation of this literary term to describe Antonioni’s cinematography, and then Deleuze’s generalization of the term, to get at a mode of presentation that is neither subjectively expressive, nor omniscently objective, but somehow in between). There’s a crucial relation between the autonomy of the hyperactive camera (and also the horror-film-esque shock cuts, and the use of subliminal sound) and the way the tortured flesh of Natalie Portman is at the center of the film — but I will need to watch the movie again before I can hope to pin this down. In the meantime, I will try to say something more general about how, and why, the film affected me so strongly.

Black Swan could be described as either a female equivalent to Aronofsky’s previous film, The Wrestler; or else as a sort-of remake of All About Eve. Natalie Portman’s character, like Mickey Rourke’s character in The Wrestler, has made a mess of her life. But she sacrificially redeems herself through ballet, the only thing that she is good at, just as Rourke does through wrestling. In both films, brilliance in the blatant artifice of intensely embodied performance compensates for what is otherwise an inauthentic self; perfection of the work substitutes for the impossibility of perfection of the life. Both Black Swan and The Wrestler thus preach and practice what I can only call a delirious kitsch aestheticism. In saying this, I do not use the word “kitsch” pejoratively. Rather, I insist that the aestheticism must be kitsch, in order to avoid falling into the void of a high-minded and self-congratulatory elitism. 

Black Swan resembles All About Eve in being a bitchy and overheated backstage melodrama. Just as Ann Baxter manipulates her way into supplanting Bette Davis as a lead actress (and, in the final scene of the movie, is set up to be supplanted in her own turn), so Natalie Portman displaces Winona Ryder as prima ballerina (leading to Winona’s attempted suicide), and is threatened in turn with displacement by her rival (and supposed good friend) Mila Kunis. The cold cynicism displayed in All About Eve by George Sanders is mirrored in Black Swan, at least somewhat, by Vincent Cassel as the manipulative ballet director. These echoes probably have something to do with why the film has been described by some critics as being camp (or criticized, as here by Dennis Lim, for not even being successful as camp). 

However, I think that the whole camp reading of the film is wrong. In fact, Black Swan is emotionally and wrenchingly intense, in a completely unironic way. Of course, this intensity is not “high art”; it is entirely lurid and hysterical, in a way that has its roots in pulp writing, and B- or exploitation-filmmaking. And this may be why some critics have trouble in receiving it unironically; there’s the unfortunate and wrong sense that some cultural elitists have that nothing can be taken seriously unless it is, well, “serious.” I’m putting that latter word into quotation marks, precisely because it connotes an attitude that cannot take anything with pulp energies, or with the kind of dogged and even corny conviction that Black Swan manifests, except “in quotation marks.” I am suggesting, to the contrary, that Black Swan works as powerfully and beautifully as it does, not in spite of, but precisely because of, its emotional excess, and its glossy reveling in that excess.

To put this in another way: Black Swan fully fits within the categories of what the film theorist Linda Williams calls “body genres.” These are films that are aesthetically disreputable, precisely because they overtly work to incite physical responses in the viewers. Williams lists three main body genres: pornography, horror, and melodrama, which move audiences to sexual arousal, chills of fear, and bouts of weeping respectively; and Black Swan is actually all three of these. The film moves from an initial creepiness to a culminating full-blown body horror; but along the way it titillates us with the phantasmatic, faux-lesbian scene of Natalie Portman’s full-blown orgasm. This softcore scene marks both a breakthrough (an overcoming of sexual repression) and also a breakdown (as Portman’s character finally learns that she can only fulfill her quest for aesthetic perfection at the price of her own existential self-destruction), and thus provides the bridge between horror (the revulsion of bodily metamorphosis, linked with the white swan – black swan duality of the Swan Lake ballet) and melodrama (the tears of unfulfillment, tied to a utopian negation of life as it is, in which every success is also a failure). 

The first half of Black Swan powerfully expressed a sort of creepy nervousness, discomfort, emotional awkwardness, vulnerability, and embarrassment. These are all evident in Natalie Portman’s relationship both to her mother and to the ballet director, as well as in her general malaise (or sense of being ill at ease) whenever she is not dancing — when she is riding the subway to and from Lincoln Center, for instance). This is the sort of mood that I find myself exquisitely attuned to in the cinema, when it is done well. It’s almost unbearably painful, but in an oddly detached and mediated way; the pain becomes pleasure when it is right there in front of you, objectified and articulated on the screen. 

But Black Swan doesn’t stay there. In the second half of the film, everything accelerates into full-blown body horror. Things spiral completely out of control. Natalie Portman moves from a minor obsession with eczema-like wound marks on her body, to a full-fledged crisis in which she seems to be growing feathers, the better to suit her for her “black swan” role. She imagines both having sex with, and then murdering, Mila Kunis, who is trying to steal her role. The film remains ostensibly “realist” enough to suggest that this is sheer hallucination on the part of Portman’s character — e.g., Kunis shows up again unharmed and unaffected, after Portman has apparently beaten her to a bloody pulp. But to the extent that “seeing is believing,” and that — in the suspension of disbelief with which we watch movies — we cannot help accepting what is plainly and viscerally shown to us on screen, the sex and the murder and the body horror are as real to us as anything else in the film. They are continuous with, and as compellingly actual as, the feelings that provoke them: self-disgust, the drive towards an impossible perfectionism, sexual jealousy vis-a-vis Kunis and resentment and feeling-betrayed vis-a-vis the mother. By the end of the film, it is impossible to say — and meaningless even to try to decide — whether Portman’s culminating wound (menstruation? vaginal mutilation?) is real or phantasmatic. We are swept away — or, at least, I was — in the vertigo of a hallucinatory, emotion-twisting, body horror/ecstasy. (And by “hallucinatory,” I mean something like “intensified”, rather than something like “unreal”).

The emotional tonality of Black Swan combines horror with melodrama: more specifically, horror’s body panic and hysteria with melodrama’s embarrassment and overstatement and weepiness. I think that Aronofsky really knows what he is doing here. He is using horror in order to update the old Hollywood melodrama, to make it more believable for the 21st century. He is making new equivalents for the parts of melodrama that might otherwise now seem antiquated, and therefore (to some viewers) campy. In this way, he is very smartly keeping the emotional center of melodrama intact. In this way, Black Swan is a contemporary version of what used to be called the “women’s picture” in the old Hollywood. Such films were frankly oriented towards middle-class female audiences; they also often became points of identification for gay men (which, of course, is partly where the association with camp comes from).

Now, the “women’s picture” is one genre that has never gotten the degree of recognition that it deserves. Some feminist film theorists took it seriously in the 1980s and 1990s, and wrote insightful things about it; among contemporary filmmakers, Todd Haynes has shown considerable interest in it. But overall, the women’s picture has remained disreputable; it is still generally condescended to by “serious,” high-minded critics who insist on regarding it as “trash” — even when they find it to be enjoyable trash. I always think of this in terms of what I like to call the Tarantino Test. Quentin Tarantino loves to make revisionist updates of “disreputable” male-oriented genre films, by making strong female protagonists the heroes — he does this in with blaxploitation in Jackie Brown,  with martial arts films in Kill Bill, with the car-racing genre of the 1970s in Death Proof, and with the war movie in Inglorious Basterds. But I cannot quite see Tarantino ever remaking, or offering a revisionist version of, a “disreputable” female-oriented genre film (though I am still, and always, waiting for him to surprise me). Aronofsky is to be praised for fearlessly entering this territory, and for pushing it all the way, without defensive irony. 

Postscript: it’s worth noting that another one of my favorite films of the past year, Gaspar Noe’s Enter the Void, has gotten some of the same negative or reserved reactions from critics and bloggers as Black Swan, and for similar reasons. In some ways, these two films could not be more different; Enter the Void is as male-centric as Black Swan is female-centric. But they have both been regarded as somewhat chintzy, cheesy, and corny: as being too “obvious” to be accepted as Great Art. Critics of Enter the Void, in particular, have accused its mindblowing visual and sonic textures of just being coverings for an ultimate banality; they have see the film as just an empty display of technique (or of digital technologies). I think that such reactions, like the critical reactions dismissing Black Swan as glamorous trash, betray a continuing discomfort with movies in which psychophysical stimulation and affective intensity overwhelm plot and theme. To my mind, in both films, the psychophysical intensity is the point; and thematic concerns are deliberately flattened and simplified, so they do not interfere with this. (Noe is following the example of 2001, which is evidently his main cinematic reference point; Aronofsky, I think, is simply following his salutary pulp instincts). In the end, of course, it comes down to how particular, individual films affect me; but the power of both of these films reinforces my sense that a certain cinematic maximalism is a better way to go than the reserve of slow or contemplative cinema.

I just made a guest posting at Warren Ellis’ place on my strangest and/or most interesting film experiences of the last year.

The latest issue of Quarterly Review of Film and Video contains a section on films that ought to be on DVD, but currently are not. Many authors contributed short articles; I wrote about Jean Renoir’s La Chienne (1931). Since the whole issue is behind a paywall, and if you don’t have access to the journal through a university library or some such, you must pay the ridiculous fee of US$30 to get access to a single 1000-word article, I have made my contribution available for free here.

George Romero’s latest zombie film, Survival of the Dead (2009), is cogent and powerful, and fully worthy of Romero’s life work. It’s a sequel to Diary of the Dead (2007), and it bears something of the same relation to its predecessor that the much-underrated Day of the Dead (1985) bore to its predecessors (Night, from 1968, and Dawn, from 1978) in Romero’s first zombie series. Stylistically, Survival makes no concessions to the 21st century: it is defiantly old school in its editing, in its characterizations, and even in the (relative) crudity of its special effects. It is exactly the same sort of film that Romero was making thirty years ago; and I loved every minute of it. 

What makes Survival of the Dead seem relevant and contemporary, rather than merely retro, is (surprisingly, perhaps) the way it conveys a sense of exhaustion. The filmmaking doesn’t seem to me to be in the least exhausted, but the content of the film is a very pronounced sense of exhaustion and entropy. Where Diary of the Dead was a highly remediated film, commenting on 21st century networked media, Survival suggests that the communications media themselves are over and done with. In the first few minutes, we see a laptop and (woo!) an iPhone, but these disappear, or are forgotten, as the movie proceeds. Indeed, in those first few minutes, the soldiers-gone-rogue whose Sergeant leader (Alan Van Sprang) narrates the film capture and (apparently) eliminate the Net-connected filmmakers who struggled to bear witness throughout Diary. A teenage geek boy (Devon Bostick), the owner of the aforementioned iPhone, who has more or less joined the band of rogue soldiers, finds himself reduced to last-century analog technologies (like a vinyl record player).  So much for mediation and remediation; the WiFi networks have finally broken down, and we are now stuck in an interminable endgame that is no longer being televised, an ending (of the world) that itself refuses to end.

After a few misadventures, the soldiers reach an island off the Delaware coast, and therefore sheltered from the massive “unknown unknowns” of life on the mainland. Instead, they stumble into a crazy war between two patriarchs, the leaders of opposing (Irish? judging from the names and accents) families. The patriarchs have been enemies ever since childhood, we are told. They have come to blows now because one of them  — Patrick O’Flynn (Kenneth Walsh) — wants to exterminate the zombies, even if they were once family members; while the other one — Seamus Muldoon (Richard Fitzpatrick) — wants to keep them around (suitably chained and restrained) in the hopes of ultimately finding a cure, or at least training them to eat animal instead of human flesh. 

Despite (or because of) these disagreements, the patriarchs are really mirror images of one another. They are both egomaniacal despots, bitter, stubborn, and self-willed, lording it over their families, followers, and flunkies. They have both responded to the collapse of our high-tech, globalized society by reinventing an archaic social order, one that owes more to the movies than it does to the actual everyday life of pre-zombie, pre-catastrophic modern society. O’Flynn gets a bit too much pleasure out of his fights with his identical twin daughters, one of whom lives (and is sensible where he is crazy), while the other has become a zombie (both played by Kathleen Munroe); while Muldoon has chained up his zombified wife in the kitchen, where she continues to perform a simulation of the duties that she had when alive. The oppressed women of both clans contrast with the one woman in the soldier group, referred to only as “Tomboy” (Athena Karkanis), who has the same toughness, intelligence, and clear-headedness that we’ve seen in previous Romero heroines.

A recent review of the movie’s DVD and BluRay release complains that “the O’Flynns and the Muldoons are barely convincing as modern families because they dress and act in a way that feels like an awkward mix of Lorna Doone and old-school Western.” But this archaism is not a flaw in the movie; rather, it is precisely Romero’s point. He’s taking aim, precisely, at the survivalism that is a prominent strain in contemporary American ideology and culture. Think of the Tea Party today, or of Ron Paul’s Presidential run a couple of years ago. Behind the current frothing at the mouth over the alleged “socialism” of Obama’s exceedingly cautious and right-of-center reforms, there’s a hatred of multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism, and the fantasy of an earlier, white-settler America. We live in an age of “capitalist realism,” where the only alternative to neoliberal capitalism that we can imagine is outright catastrophe. But the nativist, survivalist strain in American culture actually welcomes the prospect of such catastrophe, because it fantasizes the post-catastrophic landscape as one in which “individualism” and “self-reliance” could actually flourish

Survival of the Dead actually gives us this post-catastrophic landscape. In the real world we live in, today, neoliberalism’s scorched-earth policies are in process of exterminating all forms of sociality, association,meaningfulness, and hope, leaving us only with a “marketplace” of private families and individuals locked in eternal Malthusian competition in order to survive and to consume. It isn’t too difficult to foresee the prospect that, sooner or later, these policies will end by destroying the neoliberal order itself, leaving us with nothing at all. Such is Romero’s world of the (un)dead: everything has collapsed, only we don’t realize it yet, so we continue on in our zombified state, crying out with desires for destruction and consumption that will never be satisfied, no matter how many of the still-living we consume. From the point of view of, say, Goldman Sachs, such a collapse would be the “unintended consequence” (oops!) of policies that they engaged in with no other motive than to enrich themselves. But from the point of view of the Tea Partiers and Ron Paul-style Libertarians, such a consummation is devoutly to be wished. Social implosion clears the ground for the survivalists to live their dreams.  

Survival of the Dead takes a close look at the Real behind this American fantasy: it’s monomaniacal, paranoid, autocratic, misogynistic, and utterly self-deluded in its belief that it is possible to be independent of the burdens and obligations of otherness. What the survivalists fail to understand is that they themselves are already zombies while they are still alive; because their own form of life is itself a dead archaism, which continues only because they are unable to recognize that it is, already, long dead. This is the source of the sense of exhaustion that I mentioned earlier.

Romero’s zombie films have always been more about what the stress of catastrophe and danger reveals about the living, would-be survivors, than they have been about the state of being of the zombies themselves. This tendency is pushed to an extreme in Survival. For in this movie, the zombies themselves are scarcely even a menace. Anybody with a gun and ammunition (and there seems to be no scarcity of these) is well protected, and has little or nothing to worry about. The menace comes from the living, not from the dead. Most of the people who get killed in the course of the movie are murdered by other living human beings; even the genre-requisite zombie swarm, unleashing an orgy of destruction at the end, is only the result of living-human stupidity and pointless rivalry.

Survival of the Dead has many small pleasures, and moments of affective ambivalence and intensity, that are reminiscent of Romero’s earlier zombie movies. I am thinking of the moments of hesitation, of suspension between living and dying and coming back from the dead; and the tension involved in killing oneself, or somebody else one cares for, in order to avert such a return. There’s the insuppressible longing that the undead might retain something of what they were before, and the disappointment (and often, mortal danger) when it becomes clear that, inevitably, they do not. (I am thinking, especially, of the moment when O’Flynn’s daughter is bitten by her undead identical twin, as well as of the moment when Tomboy kills the other soldier with whom she has been bantering throughout, in order to spare him zombification). What’s new in Survival is only the context in which these events occur. There is no longer anything like the well-stocked shopping malls or Dawn, or the military bunker of Day, or even the yuppie enclave of Land of the Dead; and, as I’ve already noted, the network that seemed to have survived its human users in Diary has also, for the most part, gone down. 

In retrospective comparison, Romero’s earlier zombie films had a perverse hopefulness, noticeable only in contrast to its absence here. We are left with a group of three survivors: the Sergeant, the tough woman soldier, and the teenaged nerd. They themselves concede that the prospects for any sort of affective bond or positive sociality, even among the three of them, is pretty slim. This may be contrasted to the island paradise to which the survivors escape at the end of Day of the Dead (a utopian moment, even though a heavily ironized and thoroughly precarious one), or even to the filmmakers-in-a-van collective at the end of Diary. The film ends, not with the escape of the three, but with a final long shot in which the two patriarchs, who have not exhausted their idiotic rivalry even by killing one another, shamble as zombies to yet another shootout; they ineffectually fire their empty pistols at one another, against the backdrop of an outrageously enormous (rising or setting?) moon.