Cinema, Technologies of Visibility, and the Reanimation of Desire

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CINEMA, TECHNOLOGIES OF VISIBILITY, AND THE REANIMATION OF DESIRE

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Cinema, Technologies of Visibility, and the Reanimation of Desire Vincent J. Hausmann

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CINEMA, TECHNOLOGIES OF VISIBILITY, AND THE REANIMATION OF DESIRE

Copyright © Vincent J. Hausmann, 2011. All rights reserved. First published in 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–11092–2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hausmann, Vincent J. Cinema, technologies of visibility, and the reanimation of desire / Vincent J. Hausmann. p. cm. ISBN 978–0–230–11092–2 (alk. paper) 1. Motion pictures—Psychological aspects. I. Title. PN1995.H3945 2011 791.43⬘653—dc22

2010040664

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: April 2011 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

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For my mother, Mary Hausmann

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Contents

List of Illustrations

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

1 2

Introduction: Cinema, Technologies of Visibility, and the Reanimation of Desire Envisioning the (W)hole World “Behind Things” in Sam Mendes’s American Beauty

1 13

3 Burning Transmission: Stilling Psychic Space in Gore Verbinski’s The Ring

49

4 “Turning into Another Thing” in David Lynch’s The Elephant Man

105

5 Inscribing the Dream of Otherness in Wim Wenders’s Until the End of the World

157

6 Conclusion: Up with Dead People?

199

Notes

205

Selected Bibliography

219

Index

223

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Illustrations

2.1–2.2

American Beauty’s insistence that what the colonel and film viewers see barely conceals our identifications, repressions, and aggressions 2.3–2.5 Tracking American Beauty’s ambivalent reading of its killing shot 3.1 Mother (Rachel) and son (Adan), incestuously bound, reproducing copies of Samara’s deathly tape 3.2 Captures that summon conventional cinematic genealogies 3.3–3.4 The cinema in the eye of the Photomat’s window 3.5 With her singular, avenging eye, Samara functions as a double for the protocinematic lighthouse 4.1 The animated still photograph: Merrick’s mother coming to three-dimensional life 4.2 Moving across the sky depicted at the pantomime, the locket-like image of a horse 4.3 As a vehicle for examining cinema’s relation to still photography, Merrick is here tracked as he rushes alongside unfolding frames of a (protocinematic) train 4.4 The camera’s uneasy stitching of frames serves to derail cinema’s arrival as a blank screen 4.5 Tracking an animating return

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23 32 70 71 73 98 122 130

132 133 154

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Acknowledgments

I

am truly grateful to many people who made this book possible: Elaine Zickler, at the Psychoanalytic Center in Philadelphia, who offered generous, pointed critiques of early versions of two chapters, and whose gifts in traversing the worlds of clinic, theory, and artistic practice continually inspire; J.D. Trout, at Loyola University in Chicago, who helped sharpen the book’s argument as well as my thinking (throughout the years); and the late Diane Garforth, whose intelligence and love are still cherished and, I hope, visible in these pages. The distinctive qualities of each of these friends seem more apparent and stirring as they yet unfold in other ways, places, and times. Special thanks to my mentors and co-editors at Bryn Mawr Review of Comparative Literature, Carol Bernstein and Azade Seyhan. I am particularly grateful for the chance to continue to work with scholars who have shaped my thinking and whose formidable depth and range of knowledge continue to challenge and dazzle. I owe a great debt of gratitude to other members of the Bryn Mawr set—Ruth Anolik, Kristin Lindgren, and Alex Pearson, as well as Sabina Sawhney and Simona Sawhney—for their encouragement and friendship, and to the late Phillip Kent and Eleanor Salotto, both of whom exhibited an eye for and a way of being in the world that are deeply missed. I am indebted to Brigitte Shull, Lee Norton, Samantha Hasey, Heather Faulls, and Joanna Roberts at Palgrave Macmillan, as well as to the readers and copyeditors of the manuscript, for their fine, insightful, and helpful work toward the completion of this project. An early version of chapter 2 appeared in Camera Obscura Vol. 55 (January 2004). I am grateful to Duke University Press for their permission to reprint this material. I would also like to thank colleagues at Furman University: Rich Letteri, Christina Buckley, Shelly Matthews, Chris Douglas, and Stan Crowe, who offered helpful comments on the project at its inception; John Beckford, Dean of Faculty, for generous release time that

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ACK NOW LEDGMENT S

enabled me to revise the manuscript; Nick Radel for his friendship and his witty discussions of literature and theory over the years; Srdjan Smajic for his generous advice; and to those students who offer illumination in dark times and places. Thanks as well to Cort Haldaman (the most patient Academic Computing Specialist), Meagan Weaver, and the expert staff at the Center for Teaching and Learning for help with image retrieval. Most especially, sincere thanks to Terri Bright in the Art Department, whose photographic work solicits new ways of seeing the world (and photography, painting, and film) and whose steady encouragement and gift of friendship have been sustaining. Finally, special thanks to my family, my sister, Valerie, and my cherished friends: Mary Leonard for her endless encouragement, her joy, and her artistic eye; and to Debra and Bill Jewell, for their creativity, unflagging support, and friendship.

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Chapter 1

Introduction: Cinema, Technologies of Visibility, and the Reanimation of Desire

W

hen, at the outset of Sam Mendes’s American Beauty (1999), the disembodied voice of a dead Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey) declares “I’m already dead,” he is, in fact, directing film spectators to review with him images of the psychically numb life he led while he was alive. But if Lester is livelier in death than in life, it is because in the moment before his murder he recognizes how to avoid remaining the double of a figure he jokes about—the undead star of the science fiction comedy Re-animator (dir. Stuart Gordon, 1985); that is, Lester must forgo the chance to act on his fantasy of sleeping with his daughter’s teenage friend, Angela (Mena Suvari). He must accept, in the words of Mendes, “what it means to be a father again.”1 Lester’s refusal to sleep with Angela, his restoration as a father, coincides with his embrace of the vision of the videographer, Ricky (Wes Bentley). He eschews the superficial image of beauty that long guided Lester, what—according to Mendes’s film—in part reflects and induces his psychic numbing. Instead, Ricky remains enthralled by the enigmatic life that pulses “behind” and through the visible world. Although he first appears as a voyeur seeking the protective distance we might imagine his portable high-definition camera can grant, Ricky, in fact, utilizes video to unsettle the prepackaged visions and ways of looking that have seduced Lester; more fundamentally, video becomes the means whereby the teen attempts to see from a less stable position so as to more fully solicit the provisional or the emergent in himself, in others, and in “things.” American Beauty and the films I explore in Cinema, Technologies of Visibility, and the Reanimation of Desire understand an endorsement of the injunction against incest in terms we might characterize

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2

C I N E M A , V I S I B I L I T Y, A N D D E S I R E

as broadly psychoanalytic. That is to say, they join critical and theoretical works that trace the condition of affectless, dead/alive figures such as Lester to their repudiation of the “paternal function,” to their attempt to deny the positive effects of Symbolic castration. These figures in effect resist acknowledging that a fundamental Otherness both founds the speaking subject or self and continues to productively perturb its ostensibly fixed contours. Such filmic and critical work insists that reviving and maintaining psychic and social life require not only taking seriously the human need for meaning and affective relations, but also doing so mindful of the Freudian discovery of the unconscious and its challenge to any simple understanding of the subject in/of language. Despite significant differences among theorists such as Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, Judith Feher-Gurewich, and Teresa de Lauretis, 2 each persistently underscores the continued importance of this radical discovery and, albeit with particular inflections, argues that this entails, as Tim Dean notes, recognizing how “the alterity of language” situates the subject in relation to Otherness, “a degree of subjective alienation that no amount of therapeutic empathy or intersubjective validation can overcome. . . . By taking the strangeness of the unconscious as foundational . . . Lacan [for instance] proposes that our relation to other persons—others with a lowercase o—depends on our relation to language and what is beyond it—the Big Other, the Other with a capital O.”3 Thinkers such as Dean and Kelly Oliver, moreover, stress the importance of such insights for a radical ethics that would undergird a more responsive and responsible politics. As Oliver writes, “Only when we believe that we are not transparent to ourselves will we also believe that our bodies and behaviors demand incessant interpretation, . . . resis[t] any one interpretation” and hence challenge defensive, projective refusals of others in the name of quelling a profound Otherness experienced as within.4 In the terms of a substantive and growing body of psychoanalytic theory and critical work that sustains Lacan’s insight but at the same time redresses (among other issues) his neglect of affect, repudiating Symbolic or linguistic mediation amounts to an effort to short-circuit the continued, dynamic exchange between affect (and drives) and meaning that works to maintain a vital psychic life.5 For the culturally informed psychoanalytic approaches of figures such as Feher-Gurewich and Kristeva and for the films I engage, the effort to encourage Symbolic mediation, to support the paternal function, remains quite difficult given the conditions of “the ruined family unit, where [not only] the father’s absence or his diminished authority [presents itself, but] goes along with the unavailability of the mother,

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INTRODUCTION

3

if not her depression.”6 Kristeva’s recent work situates this “ruined family unit” within a broader culture that exacerbates the difficulty of upholding the paternal function (however it is assumed—by a man, a woman, or an idea in the mother’s mind of something beyond the child) by sanctioning, indeed institutionalizing, the repudiation of a generative Otherness. Taken together, such filmic and critical work point, to varying degrees, to a nexus of cultural causes that threaten the vitality of psychic life, including the “new world order’s” propagation of a false, “virtual scripture” of “banking capitals” (RSS, 32–33); religious fundamentalism that appears as a kindred effort to substitute an “artificial soul” for the “amputated subjectivity” produced by consumerism, and which increasingly enshrines totalizing meaning and war;7 and the “automated and computerized work that prevents affective interaction with other people” (RSS, 32). What in part links films as diverse as American Beauty, Gore Verbinski’s The Ring (2002), David Lynch’s The Elephant Man (1980), and Wim Wenders’s Until the End of the World (1991) is that each extends and nuances this mounting critique. The Ring’s depiction of numbly absorbed people who watch media screens in a glowing isolation, for instance, reiterates the particular concern that the dead and deadening circumstance of many contemporary subjects remains exacerbated by a mass media that often aims to standardize expression and to proffer the image as a way to automatically “take on . . . [ultimately productive] anxieties and desires . . . and to suspend their meaning” (NMS, 8). Nearly a decade before Verbinski’s and Mendes’s films were released, Wenders’s futuristic film not only presciently anticipates challenges facing Verbinski’s and Mendes’s protagonists but also depicts the crisis as more pervasive than does American Beauty or The Ring. Wenders’s protagonists, Sam (William Hurt) and Claire (Solveig Dommartin), in encountering the manifestations of what the film’s narrator, Eugene (Sam Neil), terms a deadening “disease of images” in most of the eight countries through which the couple treks, in effect survey what today seems nearly to have come to pass: a globalization of the renunciation of Symbolic elaboration. Taken together, the cultural causes and effects elaborated by such films and critical work are seen to forestall the generative translations between bodily drives and language, to “bloc[k], inhibi[t], and [nearly] destro[y]” psychic life (NMS, 8). In the chapters that follow, I chart the filmic elaboration of that spectacular reduction of psychic life and consider the calls for shoring up psychic/social spaces that support the transfer of bodily drives to language and thereby work to reanimate desire. I do so, specifically,

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by examining films that explore—in the wake of the emergence of new visual arts and technologies—the act and the representational means of looking, especially within the context of conceptions of relations among the arts/technologies. But although each of the films, in part, decries the deadening effects of a media-dominated culture that often aims to flatten expression, to “normalize discourse” and to proffer the image as a way to arrest generative anxieties and desires (NMS, 8), none dismisses the visual tout court. Each instead offers an understanding of vision and visual art/technology that strives to intervene in reductive habits of framing and perceiving the world. In terms illuminated by American Beauty (with its mantra, “look closer”), moving beyond the superficial and frenetic looking that reflects and induces psychic numbing entails looking more deliberately (especially at the discarded), as well as regarding what cannot be directly or simply glimpsed. Mendes’s film, like the others I take up, insists that to look closer is to encounter the possibilities as well as the limits of looking: such an act can palpably “awaken an echo” in the body of the dynamic interchange between the enigma of the visible and the enigma of the body.8 But if it reminds us that such an act registers the exigencies of the visible both within and beyond the subject, American Beauty also marks how such looking can also provoke aggression, and Mendes exposes and challenges the subject’s and the cinema’s at times totalizing investments in trying to secure an inviolable, absolute integrity for itself by seeking a monological truth or stable object fixed beyond perspective. However progressive such a filmic/critical project remains, my primary purpose is not only to demonstrate how each of the films I explore aims to intervene in numbing structures and habits of looking, but also to examine concomitant, retrograde denials as they emerge in otherwise progressive films and critical practices. In focusing on filmic conceptions of vision and alterity, I especially seek to avoid reducing arts/technologies to static objects that merely serve to illustrate theoretical bodies of knowledge, since doing so risks reproducing the kind of fixity such works explicitly critique. My study endeavors to depart from a contemporary critical practice that often, as Tim Dean avers, “accept[s] the impossibility of fully mastering the enigmas of other persons and other cultures [and] yet seem[s] unable to accept the impossibility of fully mastering the enigmas of the aesthetic domain.” “It is as if art needed to come from an alien culture,” Dean notes, “before we could concede that some aspect of it remains untranslatable into meaning.” 9 If the human subject is perpetually “in process,” then it stands to reason that the systems, discourses, and

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INTRODUCTION

5

artifacts that he/she produces also resist such reductive, final translation. Insisting on a respect for the play of the radically enigmatic within art—by neither reifying nor erasing art’s progressive particularity—remains an ethical as well as a critical imperative. Indeed, although the films I examine work to reimagine looking in order to sustain the vitality of psychic life, attending to figurings of disciplinary relations among traditional and new forms of art/ technology (including painting, and analog as well as digital forms of photography, cinema, and video) often subtly discloses retrograde moves in realms that appear far removed from the ostensibly rarified aesthetic domain. Within the films taken up in my study, foreclosures on a persistent Otherness in psychic/social life are frequently displaced and repeatedly emerge, embedded, in narratives of relations among the arts/technologies. Such narratives reflect a rearguard effort to contain desire and stabilize meaning. They mark a retreat from the explicit critique of attempts to secure a fixed and fixing image in the field of vision by seeking to recover such finality through an arrested image or conception of a field or fields of vision. Like many films and theorists of the cinema and its origins from the time of its emergence, the films I explore appear driven to investigate and replay the notion of a fixed point or origin of/for cinema. They bring that investigation, moreover, to the scene of the relation between the still and the moving image, and in this sense the exploration of what reanimates desire for these works hinges on what is taken to animate motion in cinema, specifically on what constitutes the relation between still and moving images. As I demonstrate, the question of what motivates and ensures the successive movement of frames on screen gets played out within the context of conceptions of relations among the arts/technologies. Of the films I examine here, those that evince a troubling turn against the play of Otherness in psychic/social life aim to repress the utterly discrete and to elide the gap between frames (what resists the teleological march toward stable meaning and yet cannot be passed over as devoid of significance) by in turn seeking to establish and draw upon a seamless, teleologically driven genealogy of the visual arts. Such a turn against difference in the aesthetic domain’s conception of the origin of, and relations among, the arts/technologies spells a retreat from the embrace of the play between affect and language that such films elsewhere deem crucial for galvanizing psychic life. With respect to American Beauty, attending to the film’s view of looking as it obtains in cinema and in other arts, especially when Mendes envisions videographer Ricky’s desire (for his father), indicates that although American Beauty

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endorses the important, mediating effects of Otherness in the father/ daughter plot, in heterosexual relations, the film does not uphold the value of Symbolic castration in homoerotic and same-sex relations. With regard to the father/son relation, Mendes attempts to reclaim a direct, unmediated access to a fixed paternal origin, a move that refuses the triangulation of desire the film otherwise champions. American Beauty seeks to underwrite this refusal by mobilizing a specious notion of cinematic origins and, in turn, by forging a troubling relation among the visual arts/technologies. Staking out photography as the ostensibly pure, stabilizing origin of cinema, Mendes’s film aims to graft these qualities onto the paternal, to render it a likewise fixed, unmediated origin. The film imagines that photography’s presumed inviolability can in turn give birth to a seamless, teleological relation among photography, cinema, and digital video. Charting the narrative of relations among the visual arts that American Beauty labors to advance betrays the film’s effort to strip same-sex relations of a mediating, animating Otherness. Although, like American Beauty, other films in my study will, in the face of the challenge posed by the digital, call on the presumably assuring mark of the indexical in photography (and in other arts/ technologies), still other films will help mark how the photograph, despite claims of its individuating yield of a material trace, was experienced as less stable in the nineteenth century than it now seems to emerge, retroactively, through a critical lens that, in registering the formidable challenge posed by the digital, at times nearly occludes that more complex history.10 Films such as The Elephant Man also help broaden the understanding of the effects of analog arts such as photography and cinema beyond restricting their work to the concept of the literal trace of what André Bazin famously likened to a fingerprint. Such films move beyond conventional understandings of what constitutes the materiality of art and shift the ground of the discussion to consider the palpable impact that affective encounters with images leave on the body of the observer. Whether analog or digital, and regardless of the medium or system in which they are delivered, images evoke and leave their mark—albeit an ambiguous one—within the body and psyche.11 Just as a number of films that I consider understand the emergence of the digital to contest a rigid disciplinarity thought to be exclusive to modernism, films such as The Elephant Man and Until the End of the World will also in part work against the equally problematic assimilationist understanding of relations among the arts/ technologies that American Beauty ultimately invokes. Until the End

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INTRODUCTION

7

of the World, for instance, sights in its mise-en-scène and takes up thematically an increasingly proliferating field of arts/technologies; though the film does not imply that their traditions and practices or languages are deterministically and singularly, hermetically tethered to them, Wenders’s film at the same time seeks not to erase but to attend to the particular in each of these arts/technologies. The film propounds a view of relations among the arts/technologies that— like Wenders’s conception of the relation between still and moving image, and between self and other—underscores how all relations are in some sense “intimate and incommensurable,” to use the terms that Bill Readings and Stephen Melville employ to conceptualize relations between and among the disciplines, both old and new.12 In this regard, Cinema, Technologies of Visibility, and the Reanimation of Desire responds to reductive examinations of disciplinary relations that—even when they do not quarantine the aesthetic from the political, or problematically turn to visual art/technology as a presumably transparent mirror for magnifying other bodies and forms of knowledge, or even when they expressly grant an “intimate and incommensurable” relation among arts/technologies—nonetheless recycle rigid modernist notions of disciplines as impervious to Otherness. The critical practice, for instance, of taking up, in isolation, how a single film may relate to, or engage with, a single art (for example, Hitchcock and painting or Antonioni and photography) risks missing that even a film whose narrative of disciplinary relations may evince troubling foreclosures on difference still invariably places a single art within a network of relations to other arts/technologies. Although, for example, The Ring trains its eye predominantly on video, the film cannot underwrite broader claims for difference and desire in psychic/social space without summoning video’s, and in turn film’s, relation to photography as well as to a host of other arts/ technologies. The films I examine make plain that to assess manifestly progressive calls for granting the desire-sustaining play between drives and meaning, one must not only consider how these calls cannot be separated from conceptions of artistic practice and arts/technologies but also attend to the network of arts/technologies summoned in such films. Accordingly, my study seeks to develop accounts in the fields of cinema studies and art history that contest both the notion that the arts/technologies are self-commissioned, self-contained entities and the coterminous move to rigidly discipline or, alternately, to ground their relations to each other on their presumed absolute sameness or affinity; for such critical work, either move marks but a variation that yet indicates an ultimate turn against difference.

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If assessing contemporary threats to sustaining the life of desire requires addressing questions as to the constitutive status of cinema in an age of new and expanding digital arts and technologies, films such as The Ring, The Elephant Man, and Until the End of the World argue that such assessments need, concomitantly, to adopt a dynamic understanding of cinema’s history and of the range of its early, complex relations to arts/technologies. Verbinski’s, Lynch’s, and Wenders’s films encourage us to broaden accounts of cinema’s historical lineage to include the medical and scientific visual culture—forms of imaging the interior of the body that Lisa Cartwright’s Screening the Body shows can no longer be thought peripheral to cinema’s past and present.13 Albeit in distinctive ways, these films not only recapitulate scientific investigations of cinema’s ability to image the body’s exterior, as in Eadweard Muybridge’s observable animal locomotion studies, around which seminal accounts of cinema and its relation to the photograph often pivot. But given their respective investments in the body’s interior, these films’ conceptions of artistic genealogies also relate directly to Etienne-Jules Marey and J. B. A. Chauveau’s physiological studies of interior body movement, which were less concerned with the body’s surface or with pictorial likeness. The Ring, for instance, summons arts and technologies linked to the X-ray so as to contest the elision of Otherness that can inform notions of technologies/arts (both analog and digital) and their history. Here Verbinski’s film sustains the challenge that, as Akira Mizuta Lippit shows, the X-ray’s appearance at the end of the nineteenth century posed to the Enlightenment’s totalizing aim to ensure a “master” observer safely preserved and stabilized as a “disinterested” outsider: The X-ray’s penetration of the surface, far from illuminating and securing a ground for affirming a rational stable subject, threatened to “envelo[p] [the subject] in a searing light,” producing, paradoxically, “a blindness,” a sense of the insufficiency of perception.14 In The Ring, the X-ray-like images of Samara’s body, taken as the origin of the disturbing visions the dead/alive girl telepathically “burns inside” of others, in part serve to confound psychologists who expect them to yield a masterly knowledge. Wenders’s film also probes interiors of bodies, envisioning a dystopic millennium in which its protagonist, Farber, comes to deploy a camera—originally invented to deliver images to his blind wife—ultimately to record, indeed colonize, the unconscious of his dreaming subjects. Verbinski and Wenders derail moves to locate either the body’s interior or its surface as a ground for rendering fixed and transparently visible not only the object of investigation but also the art/technology through which it is tracked.

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INTRODUCTION

9

They thus offer a timely critique of positivist investments in new, comparable technologies and their yields in the present, namely imaging techniques such as MRI and PET scanning, increasingly employed not merely to screen for and diagnose illness, but to buttress reductive claims for the origin and nature of subjectivity. These films in turn also expose how recent readings of the digital’s challenge to the indexicality of the sign as exclusive and without precedent, in fact, elide the ways in which photography from its inception bequeathed an unstable legacy to its heirs. The Elephant Man, an exploration of the life of John (born Joseph) Merrick (1862–90) who suffered in part from the disfiguring effects of neurofibromatosis, considers the physiological studies of interior body movement that principally occupy nineteenth-century physiology and pointedly registers how other technologies/arts of the inside, similar to the X-ray, left an avisual taint on photography—or merely made more apparent—that photography as well as other technologies/arts of the visible could not deliver on a triumphalist Enlightenment model of the unalloyed power of vision. Even if American Beauty, The Ring, and Until the End of the World at times retreat from their powerful challenges to stabilizing notions of vision, even if each intermittently labors to construct narratives of artistic relations that deny the very play of Otherness that each deems crucial for psychic life, it is a principal task of this volume to recover or reanimate the exigencies of desire at the limits of the visible, to contest efforts to re-find (in this context) the indexical as a source for finalizing meaning. Although each chapter of my study poses a similar series of issues and questions, each foregrounds a precarious engagement with a particular other. Yet, whether such narratives of the histories and technologies of visibility are in part solicited to undergird the idealization of same-sex desire in American Beauty (the subject of Chapter Two); or to try to still the body of the mother and in turn settle the persistent question of sexual difference in The Ring (explored in Chapter Three); or to position, as in Until the End of the World, Aboriginal culture beyond the generative exigencies of being (dis)placed in language (taken up in Chapter Five), each of the intermittent attempts of these films to re-call the ostensibly reifying effects of the indexical ultimately runs aground. At the same time that each chapter foregrounds a negotiation with a particular “other,” just as a single art/technology remains entwined in a network of arts/technologies, so too the figuring of, for instance, Aboriginal difference in Until the End of the World cannot remain cordoned off from conceptions of other differences, in this case,

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gender and the maternal. And, in representative ways, even when a film such as Wenders’s turns to an art/technology to retreat from its nuanced vision of cultural and/or gender difference, the film’s concern with the threat of atomic fallout, for example, cannot avoid recalling the avisual taint that the X-ray left or made more apparent within photography and other technologies of visibility; nor can the film avoid bequeathing disruptive traces of cultural memories associated with the peoples engaged in World War II. (Tracking such residual transmissions of histories of peoples and of technologies in Wenders’s film also helps throw into relief the intertwined legacies of Japanese and Americans lives, including Japanese Americans, that remain nearly buried in The Ring.) Just as important, even if the discussion of each film offers a frame on a particular, imbricated series of differences that consistently widens over the course of the book, each chapter persistently discloses how those differences stand in relation to manifestations of the positively estranging effects of encounters with a fundamental alterity, with the subject’s relation to language and what is beyond it—a point sounded by the recurring turn and return (extant across all of the films I consider here) to representative, overdetermined figures for cinematic motion. The Elephant Man consolidates and extends the primary issues explored in the pages that follow, for Lynch’s film makes particularly salient the stakes of the relation between the animating and the animal character of desire. The film presents the response to Merrick’s disfigured body as related to a fundamental, disfiguring Otherness that cannot be confined to him or to his deformity, much less resolved. Merrick, that is, becomes a lightning rod for the continued, unlocalizable and fearful—but also transformative—power of archaic affect and desire. The Elephant Man summons the seminal protocinematic figure of the imposing, fearful train, in part, to lay bare how the supposed seamlessness of cinematic projection relates to psychological projection, in particular how the scapegoating of Merrick reflects an attempted abjection of an internal strangeness that he comes to emblematize for his celebrators and tormentors alike. But Lynch’s film also marks how early cinema was drawn to the figure of the animal, often in an effort to manage the fundamental unknowing provoked by animal death. The Elephant Man, that is, serves to show how the refusals of the radical ambiguity that emerge at the site of Merrick’s body pertain to the broader Victorian (and contemporary) anxiety over the body as both a vital machine and a vital animal. Lynch’s film remains open to intense, affective forms of inexpression, forms that register, in part, an opacity and an unpredictability

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INTRODUCTION

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often repressed in Victorian and contemporary discourse and that may serve to destabilize the social order and to test the certainty of metaphysical categories of human/animal/machine. More than this, Lynch’s consideration of the potentially deadening effects of machines on both literal bodies and on their affective lives does not amount to an outright dismissal of industry or the machine, visual or otherwise. The uncertainty of its affective registers make it difficult to cast, let alone dismiss, technologies of visibility as simply either numbing or galvanizing, in effect stymieing efforts to harness fields of vision to any discourse that would situate them beyond the unpredictable play of desire. The Elephant Man’s enlivening conception of body and being contrasts some of the anxious, related moves in contemporary film and culture to ultimately sound as transparent and fixed the surface and/or the interior of the body, especially as those sites come to be associated with an archaic ambiguity that both subtends and unsettles the field(s) of vision. For all the refusals that Merrick’s vital machine-like, animal-like body elicits, his struggle to engage with the strangeness of his body and being, to say nothing of his attempt to endure the brutal responses directed at him, nonetheless contrasts the deadening repudiations of uncertainty exhibited by many around Merrick, repudiations that the films I consider urge us, if at times intermittently and insufficiently, to struggle against.

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Chapter 2

Envisioning the (W)hole World “Behind Things” in Sam Mendes’s American Beauty

S

am Mendes’s American Beauty (1999) explicitly affirms the importance of upholding the prohibition against incest. In his DVD commentary on the film, Mendes himself sees his work as the tale of a man, Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey), who becomes “a father again” by forgoing the chance to act on his fantasy—to sleep with his daughter’s teenage friend, Angela (Mena Suvari).1 The film understands this endorsement of the injunction against incest broadly and in terms we might characterize as Lacanian. Indeed, Lester’s gesture summons Lacan’s well-known account of the subject in/of language. The restoration of Lester as a father—his choice to sustain the paternal function—comes with his acceptance of Symbolic law or castration, with his own acknowledgment of the exigencies of being (dis)placed in language. That is to say, Lester’s refusal to sleep with Angela coincides with a recognition that the intimations of Otherness that compel and position the film’s celebrated videographer, Ricky Fitts (Wes Bentley), pertain to him as well. Ricky looks not to the superficial image of beauty that has driven Lester and that appears to yield a transparent access to self and other, but rather to remnants (even waste) that often point to an unseen world, a whole “life behind things.” Through his gesture of restraint, Lester comes to see and accept, however tenuously, that such remnants, like the Lacanian Symbolic, also place him in a world, even as they impress on him a sense of being displaced from himself. According to Judith Feher-Gurewich, American Beauty affirms the role of Symbolic castration and underscores the need to acknowledge

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a radical Otherness that persistently perturbs the contours of the subject. Such an acknowledgment importantly serves to maintain a “phantasmatic” realm, a realm beyond human grasp that works to sustain desire. Feher-Gurewich goes so far as to see in American Beauty a welcome attempt to locate a new space that will embrace the positive effects of castration, despite the significant resistance this effort currently faces within the social sphere. For her, the film illuminates what such resistance fails to appreciate: “that the Symbolic is what protects us, what sustains desire and fantasy, as opposed to preventing us from doing what we want.”2 Yet if we move beyond an exclusive focus on how American Beauty figures father/daughter and heterosexual relations, it becomes difficult to conclude that the film affirms the importance of Symbolic mediation. Indeed, when we consider American Beauty’s explicit and implicit view of incest in the father/son relation (an interest of the film that critics ignore), as well as the implications of such a view for imaginings of same-sex desire, we can discern that although American Beauty endorses the importance of maintaining the mediating effects of Otherness in the father/daughter plot and for heterosexual relations, the film refuses to uphold the value of Symbolic castration for homoerotic and same-sex relations. Specifically, with respect to the father/son relation, the film attempts to reclaim a direct, unmediated access to a fixed paternal origin, an aim that pointedly refuses the triangulation of desire. This refusal of a mediation by Otherness (at the origin) seeks to underwrite the idealizing, though no less troubling, view that gay men ultimately can exceed Symbolic law or the exigencies of being in language. American Beauty’s effort to deny the work of Symbolic mediation in homoerotic and same-sex relations becomes salient also when theoretical work considers the particularities of film and avoids looking to the medium as a transparent mirror in which to find settling, sustaining reflections. Attending to the particularities of film language in American Beauty is especially pressing, given that the film’s urging (reproduced in studio publicity)—to “look closer,” to move beyond the superficial looking that the film argues reflects and induces psychic numbing—remains encoded in a striking visual vocabulary. Through conspicuous motifs of framing, American Beauty subtly examines the act and the representational means of looking, especially in cinema. On the one hand, the film will quite consciously insist that despite the ways in which contemporary culture aims to block affective encounters—in part by “standardiz[ing]” discourse and by proffering the image as a way to siphon off ultimately productive anxieties

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S A M M E N D E S ’ S AM ER I CAN B EAUT Y

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and desires (NMS 8)—looking more closely can arouse the subject’s affective encounters with bodies and things in the field(s) of vision; looking more closely can palpably “awaken an echo” in the body of the dynamic interchange between the enigma of the visible and the enigma of the body (POP, 164). To look more closely, Mendes’s film insists, is to encounter the possibilities as well as the limits of looking. But if such an act drives home the generative exigencies of the visible, both within and beyond the subject, it can also provoke aggression, and Mendes’s film pointedly exposes and challenges the subject’s and the cinema’s at times totalizing investments in aiming to secure an inviolable and absolute integrity for itself by seeking a monological truth or stable object fixed beyond perspective. On the other hand, when we scrutinize the images of looking that American Beauty unconsciously deploys—especially to inscribe the desire of the videographer, Ricky—a decidedly retrograde move presents itself. When envisioning Ricky’s desire (namely, for his father), Mendes’s film retreats from its critique of the fantasy of total vision, seeking instead to mute the challenge that Otherness poses to any totalizing desire; American Beauty thus seeks the kind of closure and fixity of meaning associated with the very ideologies the film explicitly submits to critique. American Beauty’s retrograde effort manifests itself in the narrative of formal relations embedded within the film’s images of looking. In short, the film seeks to underwrite its refusal of Symbolic castration by staking out a specious notion of cinematic origins and, in turn, attempting to mobilize a problematic relation among visual arts/technologies. American Beauty eyes photography as an ostensibly pure, stabilizing origin of the cinema and aims to graft such putative qualities onto the paternal. Mendes’s film imagines that photography’s presumed status as cinema’s inviolable origin can in turn give birth to a seamless, teleological relation between photography and other technologies of visibility; however, at the same time that the film solicits, it anxiously works to dismiss photography—as well as video—as absolutely foreign to cinema. When we attend to the dense narrative of contestatory relations among the visual arts/ technologies that American Beauty labors to advance, we can recognize as well that for the film’s ends, such relations themselves remain insufficient. American Beauty subsequently turns to the maternal to supplement its effort to secure a stultifying narrative of formal relations. It is as if the film’s ordering of a history of relations among the arts/technologies requires the maternal as the putatively more primitive ground for attempting to anchor its teleological claims and

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for consolidating its finalizing moves to strip same-sex relations of a mediating Otherness. We can begin to chart American Beauty’s view that homoerotic and same-sex relations can somehow transcend Symbolic mediation by contrasting the fundamentally differing responses that emerge when the film explores the issue of incest and the paternal in two related yet discrete relationships: that between father and daughter (the explicit interest of the film and critics) and that between father and son (the critically ignored, implicit interest of the film). The film’s opening scene, an outtake presented in sequence later in the film, first frames the issue in terms of the former relation. In grainy, handheld shots videotaped by her boyfriend, Ricky Fitts, we see Jane (Thora Birch), Lester’s teenage daughter, accepting Ricky’s offer to kill her father: “Would you?” she asks. We later learn that she is not serious, yet her words do reflect her anger and hurt that her father’s desire for her cheerleader friend Angela starkly contrasts with his lack of attention to his daughter. And although she may not be fully aware of how much she desires her father’s attention, Jane senses that her father’s interest places him incestuously close to her. Her ambivalent wish for his death and her rant against him—“I need a father who’s a role model, not some horny geek boy who’s gonna spray his shorts every time I bring a girlfriend home”—indicate that Jane wants Lester to be more of a father and that she experiences his flagrant interest in her friend as a transgression of the incest taboo, a threat to upholding the paternal function. Jane’s anger over her father’s weakness raises the broader, widely explored issue of masculinity in crisis, a fact critics acknowledge when they group American Beauty with David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999), Neil Labute’s In the Company of Men (1997), Mary Harron’s American Psycho (2000), and Kimberly Peirce’s Boys Don’t Cry (1999).3 Taken together, these films appear to suggest that Kaja Silverman’s wish “that the typical male subject, like his female counterpart, might learn to live with lack”—namely, the “lack of being”4 (MSAM, 65) that remains “the irreducible condition of subjectivity”—has not yet been fulfilled (MSAM, 20). In depicting an explosive rage to shore up heterosexual male identity against threats posed by war, by consumerism, and by feminist and queer challenges to heteronormative notions of masculinity, these films indicate that there remains a need to focus on, even privilege, representations of masculinities deemed “deviant” for their “acknowledgment” and “embrace” of an “intimate relation” (MSAM, 55) with a fundamental alterity that was often projected exclusively onto women (MSAM, 3).

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Jane’s objections to her father’s actions can join those voiced by these films, indicating likewise that many men still appear unwilling to tolerate lack. Like a number of the male characters’ actions in these recent films, Lester’s regressive behavior (not limited to pursuing Angela) aims to signal that he, and not the woman, has borne the brunt of lack. Lester will no longer remain the ineffectual husband, emasculated by his wife Carolyn (Annette Bening); for him, finding what he “has lost” means getting rid of the lack that now seems exclusively his lot, and no longer the woman’s. He charges that Carolyn has kept his genitals “locked up in a mason jar beneath the sink.” American Beauty, however, diverges from a film such as Fight Club because Lester’s effort to strengthen traditional masculinity also threatens the ability to uphold the paternal function, as Jane herself perceives. What is more, while American Beauty applauds Lester’s becoming a father again, he hardly turns out to be the hypermasculine figure implicitly celebrated in films such as Fight Club. Although American Beauty argues that men need to learn to live with lack, it also casts Lester’s incestuous pursuit of Angela as a misguided but nearly necessary step toward his becoming a father again. Before Lester sees Angela’s initially unattainable image, viewers can barely tell the difference between the disembodied Lester, who hovers as a deceased voice above his Robin Hood Trail home early in the film (beginning a replay that guides film viewers through the last year of his life), and the fleshy man below. Lester is often framed reiterating rituals that hardly please him: mechanically masturbating behind the glass of his shower at home; confined daily and nearly crossed out within the reflections and bar graphs that appear on his computer screen at work. It is not until he meets and shares a joint with an uncannily familiar Ricky Fitts that Lester embarks on the course that so threatens Jane. Presented in thresholds darker than those in which Angela appears, Ricky is also decidedly less visibly animated than the cheerleader. And yet this son of a repressed gay colonel (Chris Cooper) and a traumatized mother (Alison Janney) exhibits an attractive, profound confidence, as Jane later observes. He also inspires Lester to surmise that Angela may be within reach but, more important, that in order to remain awake—to no longer resemble the figure the two men joke about, the undead star of the science fiction comedy Re-animator (dir. Stuart Gordon, 1985)—Lester needs to learn that he must also question his banal, numbingly materialist suburban existence. Galvanized by Ricky, Lester quits his job, blackmailing his male boss (with the threat of a sexual harassment lawsuit) into providing a generous severance package; he confronts Carolyn

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over their lack of intimacy and her own superficial investments in others; he aims to regain a voice in a home that has from his perspective only respected the voices of mother and daughter; and he takes a job at Mr. Smiley’s, a fast-food chain whose name signals the false happiness that Lester would escape, but since it spells a return to the kind of easy job he had when he was Ricky’s age, when he was happy for being able to see his whole life ahead of him, it will suffice. American Beauty may take Lester’s incestuous pursuit of Angela as a misguided but nearly requisite step toward his becoming a father again, yet Mendes’s film nonetheless joins culturally informed psychoanalytic work that remains troubled by the contemporary social sphere’s wider, nearly systemic opposition to maintaining psychic space, that “solid introspective inside” that Julia Kristeva argues constitutes not a fixed, essentialist ground for a masterful subject, but the still necessary locus for the dynamic, continued transfer of drives and affect to meaning.5 While the nexus of varied and complex cultural causes that intensify the difficulty in sustaining such a transfer—what the paternal function, in fact, seeks to guarantee—are many and extend beyond the sphere of the family, Kristeva’s worry, for instance, that the “new world order’s” propagation of a false, “virtual scripture” of “banking capitals” (RSS, 32–33), which often seems uncritically digested by nearly evacuated, consumerist-minded followers, and her concern regarding the state of “modern human isolation” in which “automated and computerized work prevents affective interaction with other people” (RSS, 32–33) find particular resonance in Mendes’s depictions of the deadening effects of the standardizing, consumerist discourse that, though refined within, is nonetheless replicated far beyond the confines of corporate cubicle cultures like the advertising firm Lester finally quits. And even though, compared to Lester’s alienation, the colonel’s psychic malaise stems less from materialism and more from a repression of desire, his repressive response to self and others (especially his son) exhibits the kind of turn to monological or fundamentalist thinking that Kristeva traces to consumerism’s “amputat[ion] of subjectivity” (NMS, 7); moreover, the institutional response to Ricky’s breakdown and the reactions of Angela and others, who immediately recommend medication for “weird” or merely alternative thinking and behavior, attest to a wider repression, a comparable, pharmacological effort to stave off the difficult but ultimately generative work of reflection and analysis (NMS, 8), what encourages the perpetual renewal of psychic life. American Beauty presents Ricky as a figure for the return of the youthful vitality that Lester has struggled to repress. Although the

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film suggests that Lester needs to behave as he did when he was younger, to act out, before he can rediscover a sense that the present and future hold something for him and before he can commit to being a father, it takes particular aim at Lester’s approach to reclaiming his adolescent exuberance. The film argues that if he is to summon this repressed other within himself, Lester has much to learn from Ricky. For instance, even in rebelling against Carolyn and in pursuing Angela, Lester invests in a spectacularized vision of women. He cannot yet comprehend the beauty that moves Ricky who, for all his frighteningly still demeanor and dedication to videotaping, nonetheless remains compelled to mark the beauty of the discarded. Unlike the Playboy and Seventeen images of women that guide Angela’s view of herself and that repeatedly screen within Lester’s head, Ricky’s paean to beauty finds expression as a grainy video of an empty plastic bag dancing in the wind, a homage not only to the castoff and the overlooked but to a beauty that cannot be directly, or at least not simply, glimpsed: the “whole life behind things,” as Ricky explains to Jane. To be sure, Mendes’s critique of Lester’s investment in a superficial view of beauty and, more broadly, in spectacle dovetails with Kristeva’s assessment that proffering the image as a way to automatically harness ultimately productive “anxieties and desires, to take on their intensity and to suspend their meaning” (NMS, 7) contributes to the “spectacular reduction of private life” (NMS, 8). At the same time, however, Mendes resists the “anti-ocular” strain that at times informs Kristeva’s assessment and, as Martin Jay has shown, other modern and contemporary French discourse.6 Ricky clearly functions to complicate witting and unwitting blanket dismissals of the visible and of technologies of visibility as inherently deadening, distancing, or totalizing. The film, for example, makes clear that Ricky’s investment in videotaping aims at and in turn works to provoke a dynamic, expansive encounter with the world and self. Jane at first mistakenly takes Ricky as a voyeur seeking shelter behind his portable high-definition video camera, but it soon becomes apparent that Ricky makes no effort to conceal his filming of Jane, and such work positions him both literally and figuratively as seen by and seeing with others. Despite his troubled past and the film’s indication that Ricky’s videotaping a dead, frozen woman, for instance, responds to his living in the traumatic wake of his mother’s startling psychic withdrawal, the boy’s videos not only constitute a means of working through this inheritance of retreat and despair, a way of placing buried affect in a dialogic relation with the Symbolic (language) via artistic

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representation (as opposed to aiming for a suffocating dyadic relation, an endless, sealed loop of that family history). More than this, the teen turns to video also because he remains, despite his inheritance, genuinely interested in others. As he says to Jane, who first expresses disgust at his filming of her, “I’m not obsessing. . . . I’m just curious.” In addition to the grainy style of his video and the marginal subjects he eyes, Ricky’s own thoughts about his work and his placement in liminal spaces throughout the film’s mise-en-scène signify that, unlike the recycled images in which Lester traffics, videographic images for Ricky become a way not only to unsettle prepackaged visions but also to struggle to see from a less stable position and hence discover the provisional or the emergent in himself, in others, and in “things.” With regard to Ricky’s video of the plastic bag, what remains for him the most beautiful “thing” he has ever seen (what he likens to a “kid just begging me to play with it”), although we might read his assertion that the image points to a “benevolent force behind things” as a romantic, if understandable, desire for psychological protection, Ricky’s implicit conception of the relation between seer and seen and his artistic practice still welcomes and places him in an enigmatic network of things beyond himself. Given that Ricky repeatedly looks more intently for having a video camera in his hand, his confession to Jane that “video helps me remember; I need to remember” signals that his art aims to do more than memorialize a moment that passes too quickly before his eyes; more subtly, video marks an effort to recall or reawaken (as well as preserve) the enigmatic, reverberating shock of a kind of primal seeing. “Vision,” as Merleau-Ponty remarks, “happens among, or is caught up in, things—in that place where something visible [here Ricky’s body] undertakes to see, becomes visible for itself by virtue of the sight of things” (POP, 163). What Merleau-Ponty alternatively describes as an “intertwining,” an “overlapping” (162), or the “spark that is lit between the sensing and the sensible” (163), attests less to the notion of a disembodied subject, removed and hidden from the field of vision, who, if choosing, can transparently look at the world and ecstatically come to encounter (and record) him/ herself and the world in unmediated fashion. Instead, Ricky’s art helps underscore that the visible can generate a productive recognition that the subject, within a complex, shifting field of vision, comes to itself only as other, and in a visceral, hardly static manner. Since the “visible” “world is made up of the same stuff as the body” (163), and since the visible world trembles with a force that unsettles and animates sensation, the encounter with the visual remnant of the plastic bag (itself incomplete, penetrated—indeed sustained—by a wind that

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cannot be directly glimpsed) gets registered on and in the body as a shock. The air sustaining the bag, declares Ricky, is “electric” and shatters the putatively rigid borders between inside and outside, self and other, seen and unseen. As Ricky says, “Sometimes there’s so much beauty in the world, I feel like I can’t take it, and my heart is just going to cave in.” If American Beauty echoes Jane’s sense that Lester’s pursuit of Angela flouts the paternal injunction against incest and thus signifies his failure as a father, and if it suggests that Lester has a long way to go before he can appreciate, as Jane does, Ricky’s (notion of) vision, the film not only diverges from Jane’s position in suggesting that such flouting may be necessary for a time but also resolutely rejects her view that Ricky’s father, Colonel Fitts—a man who at first seems hardly to refuse the paternal role—offers a viable alternative. Only from a distance can Jane imagine that the discipline the colonel exercises in raising his son can be “the fucking discipline” she claims Lester must adopt to become a father again. Such aggression seems to be an extreme endorsement of paternal law but, in fact, the colonel’s parenting barely disguises his desire to be “fuck [ing Ricky through] discipline.” The colonel’s surveillance and sexualized physical abuse of Ricky betray an intense, unacknowledged erotic investment in his own son. Fitts keeps an especially watchful eye on Ricky, regularly searching his room and screening urine samples for drugs; when he suspects his son has broken into his cabinet to pawn a gun or a collectible dish, the colonel beats him up. Although American Beauty locates the repression of Fitts’s homosexuality as the source not only of his response to his son but of the colonel’s subsequent murder of Lester, vividly demonstrating the cost that compulsory heterosexuality exacts on Fitts and others, the film also argues that his aggression stems in no small measure from the way that the very heterosexual masculinity in which he seeks shelter itself remains precarious. The colonel’s hyperinvestment in the heteronormative masculinity of military life long after his tour of duty in Vietnam not only bespeaks a denial of his sexuality but is also an effort to shore up the ostensible inviolability of heterosexual masculinity, to protect it from the lack conventionally confined to the woman and the gay man. Although coming out as a gay man during or after a tour of duty entails great risk, the mockery and silent bemusement that alternately greet the colonel’s recitations of his military rank (to Lester and others with whom he passes as straight) suggest that coming home as a straight veteran of a discredited war poses continued and even greater trials than those experienced by

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World War II veterans. The colonel’s nostalgic turn to films on that “good” war represses the kind of traumas that, as Silverman shows, were visible in many of those films. His turn appears prompted by and seeks to redress this post-Vietnam deflation of traditional heterosexual masculinity’s currency, and, for Fitts, such films yield a particular pleasure. In fact, one of the few laughs we hear from the dour colonel occurs as he watches a scene from one of these films. As he touches his toes while exercising, an army recruit (Ronald Reagan) responds to his approaching sergeant with a warning to fellow soldiers: “Bend all the way down; here comes the bull of the woods [the sergeant].” We can understand why the scene delights the repressed Fitts. The recruit must bend over, assuming a sexual position typically associated by heterosexual culture with a challenge to heterosexual masculinity, yet he is absolved from the guilt that may accompany the pleasure he may take from such training since it is forced, and its completion will allow him to become a straight recruit, as it were. Such a representation appeals to the repressed Fitts, for it works to prop up a putatively unassailable notion of heterosexual masculinity through a sanctioned homosocial pleasure that would construct itself on the back, as it were, of same-sex desire. American Beauty works to make the question of incest and the paternal, raised in the Burnham home, ultimately reverberate, albeit with a difference, in the Fitts home as well. And we can begin to see American Beauty’s finally problematic take on the status of the paternal and the question of incest when the film joins the Burnhams and the Fitts—more specifically, Lester and the colonel—with respect to a climactic act of looking. After earlier witnessing Lester’s signal for Ricky to call him, Fitts searches Ricky’s room for drugs but finds instead his son’s videotape, one that inadvertently captured a naked Lester in his garage beginning the physical regime that he hopes will win Angela. In light of the colonel’s earlier diatribe against gay men, viewers have been prepared to understand that such an image would disturb him. His subsequent actions reveal that he suspects his son is gay. When Ricky visits Lester later that evening, the colonel stations himself in the window of a darkened room in his home, a vantage point that yields a view of the two parallel windows of Lester’s garage retreat. Fitts observes what appears to be an appalling but fascinating confirmation: through a point-of-view shot, we are made to see that the colonel believes himself to be witnessing his son fellating Lester. Actually, Fitts can reach this conclusion only by connecting the two discrete window frames, which remain separated by a gap or space of brick between them: the reclining Lester appears in one window frame, the image of a kneeling

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Ricky in the other. The point at which the two men may be making the contact that the colonel imagines actually remains obscured by the space between the parallel windows. Although the sequence delineates Fitts’s point of view, his misreading is interrupted at the beginning and end of the sequence with cutaway shots that reveal to viewers, but not to the colonel, that Ricky is not fellating Lester, but rather rolling a joint for him (see figures 2.1 and 2.2). The scene marks American Beauty’s insistence that vision and desire remain inextricably bound, that what we see barely conceals our own identifications and repressions. By unsettling the voyeuristic (as

Figures 2.1–2.2 American Beauty’s insistence that what the colonel and film viewers see barely conceals our identifications, repressions, and aggressions.

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compared to his son’s) ambitions, by puncturing the colonel’s fantasy of a protected seeing, the film reminds us that the field of vision or of looking relations remains anything but certain, static, or unidirectional. Here American Beauty registers that “the enigma is that [the] body simultaneously sees and is seen” (POP, 162). But while Ricky recognizes that he cannot “appropriate what he sees” and, in fact, continually aims to “ope[n] himself to the world” (162), the beyond without and within him, Mendes emphasizes that the experience of looking, the encounter that drives home the exigencies of the visible, can also provoke aggression. American Beauty does not imagine that its critique of an effort at instrumental mastery of the visible categorically precludes the film from exhibiting such a response. Indeed, Mendes’s film insists that the colonel, who kills Lester at the end of the film, is not the only one with a potentially murderous eye. The film argues that all looking, in particular cinematic viewing, risks a measure of violence: the film’s obsessive motifs of framings here conspicuously come to underscore the potential violence of the cinema effect. That is, Fitts’s misreading of the sequence of images, his forging a connection between the two parallel frames, references a reading of how the cinematic illusion itself depends on the phi-effect—on the way that single, still frames presented in succession and at regular intervals appear to the eye of the film viewer as seamlessly connected. The reference to such work as a violent potential within cinematic projection suggests that Fitts’s way of looking, his projection of his unsettling desire as exclusive to others (and, more broadly implied, as particular to the field of vision, from which he imagines he can extricate himself), cannot easily be separated from the vision and desire of film viewers. As this closer look at looking intimates, not killing someone does not automatically absolve viewers from exhibiting a totalizing refusal of Otherness that informs the effort both to repress the utterly discrete and to elide the gap (between frames)—what resists the teleological march toward stable meaning and yet cannot easily be passed over as devoid of significance. The film indicates that film viewers, like the colonel, cannot be categorically free of the urge to deny the particular and read over incontrovertible gaps in order to forge a single, uninterrupted, narrative of fixed identity. The finalizing urge motivating the quest for an identity that might remain fixed and impervious to Otherness finds a frightening echo in the anti-Semitic texts of Louis Ferdinand Céline, and Mendes, like Kristeva, turns to extreme figures precisely because they illuminate the dangerous desire encountered by each speaking subject: the less-than-“innocent” desire to “reassure” oneself of a fixed

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“image” and “identity.”7 For Kristeva, such a risk has archaic roots, stemming from the preverbal child’s encounters with the unnameable, the threateningly unsignifiable that thwarts the child’s quest for integrity. Such encounters, however, do not remain confined to the early moments in the formation of the subject’s identity; rather, they continually perturb the more fully formed speaking subject, contesting his or her ostensibly secure borders with a radical strangeness. For Kristeva, such a trial is permanent and perpetually risks provoking the search for a final meaning or image that would shore up the subject’s borders. Kristeva traces Céline’s loathing of “the Jew” to his unsettling encounter with this radical strangeness. For Céline, the Jew became the figure for such a strangeness, an other whose extermination would putatively ward off threats posed by the more perturbing radical Otherness that both founds the subject and places him or her permanently “on trial” or “in process” (RPL, 22).8 It is not only, then, Kristeva’s refusal to cordon off the desire of figures such as Céline from those of all speaking subjects that Mendes’s film may be said to recapitulate; but when it reveals the colonel’s private collection of Nazi memorabilia, American Beauty can be also taken to mark how the investment in the fascist ideology of sameness that so attracts figures such as the repressed colonel can be traced to the subject’s reaction against confrontations with a fundamental strangeness experienced as within the subject. Yet if we hold to Kristeva’s refusal to categorically absolve any interpretive act from oppressive intentions, then even Mendes’s scrutiny of the cinema’s and the spectator’s potential investments in shoring up the self against desire and uncertainty as they emerge in and through the field of vision cannot be placed beyond critique. However important Mendes’s critique of the finalizing desires that can inform the act of looking may be, the very scene that so powerfully articulates the film’s subtle look at looking also ultimately extends in troubling ways the film’s meditation on incest and the paternal. It is, in fact, here, when American Beauty joins Lester and Colonel Fitts in this scene of looking, that the film begins to disclose its efforts to mute the challenge that a radical strangeness poses to its conception of desire between men. This problematic emerges when we focus on how the film comes to deploy Ricky in this scene. Ricky’s delivering the joint serves to bring the two fathers together: it initiates Fitts’s act of looking, which in turn provokes the colonel’s visit to Lester’s garage. His delivery brings two scenes together as well, for it recalls the first time that Ricky shared a joint with Lester. Echoes of the conversation that occurred during that first meeting also sound here, albeit

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in condensed form: the colonel’s mistaking his son’s joint rolling for fellating Lester summons the figure of the walking corpse from Reanimator, who “gives head” (literally and figuratively) to his “babe” by removing his head from his torso so that the head can go down on the woman, an image that Ricky relayed to Lester when they first shared a joint. The allusion to Re-animator emphasizes how Ricky functions to relate both Lester and the colonel to the concern we have been considering in American Beauty—how to reanimate desire. As he has for Lester, Ricky comes to serve for his father as a figure for the return of a vitalizing repressed desire. And even if neither father recognizes this uncanny intimacy that binds them, when the colonel crosses over to the other side of the screen, as it were, when he enters Lester’s garage and attempts to kiss him, it is clear that, just as Lester finds Ricky to be a more vital version of the self he could still become, the colonel sees in Ricky’s actions the expression of, and the chance to recover, a revivifying desire. Fitts’s embrace of Lester, his momentary relaxing of a repressed desire, not only exhibits a warmth that makes him less the domineering father that Jane imagines she requires, but it also situates Fitts (perhaps more explicitly than does his sexualized abuse of his son) in an incestuous role that she fears her father has assumed. In aiming to be next to Lester, the man who has ostensibly been with his son, the colonel reveals his incestuous desire for Ricky. The allusion to Re-animator echoes here as well: Fitts enters the garage exhibiting a somnambulant stare, emerging from the driving rain and lightning as a kind of galvanized corpse; his attempted coupling with Lester after he imagines that he has just seen his son go down on the man registers as an effort to be with his child, to give head to his “babe.” If this “incestuous” embrace of Lester is no less troubling than the colonel’s sexualized disciplining of Ricky, the film nonetheless elicits a measure of sympathy for the colonel and places him at a threshold: for a moment it seems as if Fitts might be able to begin to work through a life of living death. In terms of their relation to Ricky, both Lester and Fitts are cast by the film as more alive to the extent that they openly flirt with the incest taboo, to the degree that they seem to forgo the paternal role for a time. Although his subsequent murder of Lester reflects Fitts’s continued struggle with accepting his desire for men, it also signals his retreat from openly acknowledging his incestuous longings. It is as if the killing that would return him to the closet coterminously aims to allow him to resume the covert pursuit or sexualized disciplining of his son. (In this light, Fitts’s murder of Lester can be seen

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also as an effort to prevent Ricky from pursuing an object other than his father.) When placed beside American Beauty’s praise for Lester’s eventual decision to uphold the paternal injunction, Fitts’s act of killing appears designed not only to deny his sexuality (to himself and to others), but also to deny that his sexualized disciplining of Ricky constitutes an incestuous desire. The colonel who emerges as a result appears frighteningly to parody his earlier brutality, but in the end he seems even less a father who could uphold injunctions than he did when he embraced Lester. By contrast, the film gives us to understand that Lester’s being openly less of a father for a time has offered a way toward becoming, in Mendes’s words, a “father again.” Lester reassumes the paternal role with a difference when, faced with the opportunity to fulfill his fantasy of sleeping with Angela and realizing that she is a virgin, he “unselfishly,” in scriptwriter Alan Ball’s view, decides instead to offer her food and consoling words. For Ball, the choice not to sleep with Angela “redeems him [Lester] because [he recognizes that] she’s not the goal, she’s the knock on the door.” 9 As he is about to sleep with Angela, Lester describes her as “the most beautiful thing” he has ever seen, a phrase that echoes Ricky’s term for the floating plastic bag and thus marks the pronounced contrast between Ricky’s and Lester’s notions of beauty. Yet in changing his mind, Lester recognizes the superficial vision of beauty he has been pursuing, and his coincident restoration as a father now brings him closer to Ricky’s vision. The film presents Lester as crossing a threshold (not merely poised at one, like the colonel); Lester is able to see beyond Angela, is closer to understanding Angela’s—as well as his own—investments in superficial beauty and his likewise shallow understanding of what Ricky represents. For Judith Feher-Gurewich, Lester’s appreciation for Ricky’s vision of beauty (and more broadly his vision of vision) signals not merely a recognition that American culture prizes the superficial as opposed to, and in order to avoid, a complex world behind appearances. Just as important, as Feher-Gurewich reminds us, Lester has come to recognize what Ricky knows: that the sense that there is something behind things, the intimation that creates and sustains desire, amounts to a liberatory linguistic effect. The awareness that makes Lester a father again can be understood in part as yielding a “freedom” that comes when the subject recognizes the value of castration. Lester’s refusal to sleep with Angela and the renewed desire it produces can indicate that he comprehends, as Feher-Gurewich notes in a different context, that “the wish for ‘incest’ stands for the . . . desire to annul the very

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division [castration] that has brought desire into being” (POI, 89). Although both Freud and Lacan stress the need to acknowledge castration, in the context of our reading of American Beauty, it is important to note—as Feher-Gurewich does throughout her work and in her analysis of Mendes’s film—that Lacan diverges from Freud’s notion of primary repression and incest. For Lacan, it is not, as it is for Freud, “a paternal injunction that forces underground the incestuous or Oedipal fantasy. Rather, the Oedipal fantasy is created as an effect of Symbolic castration” (POI, 88; emphasis added). For the subject who accedes to language (the Symbolic), the threat of castration is not in the offing; it has already occurred: “The fantasy of incest is not the cause of primary repression” but is instead “produced after the formation of the unconscious” (POI, 88). Moreover, “castration is not a law that forbids access to something that could be obtained if permitted”; rather, “castration allows for the fantasy of its transgression and condemnation” (89). As Feher-Gurewich reiterates, “what has become inaccessible thanks to castration returns as the most desirable of all objects” (POI, 88). Castration functions, then, as a kind of veil that creates what it purports to hide and that “spare[s] rather than den[ies] fulfillment,” to use Walter Benjamin’s phrase.10 “It is not that we are forbidden access to what we want most, but rather that we are protected from finding out what is beyond the reach of the signifier. Human desire is saved from extinction because the phantasmatic object that is sought is a mirage of the signifier” (POI, 88). In her reading of the film, Feher-Gurewich asserts that Lester’s relation to Ricky provokes an encounter with the “limit of fantasy itself,” the place where the “arbitrary function of meaning is more visible”; this encounter also triggers a recognition that, without the acceptance of castration, “desire itself is lost” (“Maculine Mystique”; emphasis added). Though Feher-Gurewich seems nostalgic—if not for a fixed notion of sexual difference, then for its former ability to readily mark the difference between the Real and the Symbolic (to uphold, that is, the veil that maintains desire)—she nevertheless argues that Ricky’s vision indicates that something other than sexual difference can inscribe the alterity that would sustain desire. If we look more closely at American Beauty’s imagining of Ricky’s desire, however, and how this matters for relations between men, we can actually mark a retrograde view. To discern how American Beauty envisions that desire, we need to scrutinize images and scenes that extend the film’s self-referential look at looking, especially in the context of cinema and its relation to technologies of visibility, for these scenes and images persistently and unconsciously inscribe Ricky’s desire. Such a closer

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look not only directs attention to the film’s figuring of desire for and between men but also discloses how, far from affirming the value of castration, American Beauty speciously seeks to mobilize a notion of cinematic origins and of the relations among the arts/technologies that would deny the play of Otherness in relations between men. Scriptwriter Alan Ball’s discussion of how his father’s apparent homosexuality relates to his own homosexuality (and how this influenced his writing of American Beauty) can provoke us to examine more carefully the film’s constructions of same-sex and homoerotic desire. Ball relates that his conception of the colonel stems from trying to fathom his own father’s sadness, a state that Ball traces to a repression of desire for men. Colonel Fitts’s character was based, Ball says, on his father, “a deeply unhappy” man.11 When Ball came out to his mother, he discloses that she “blame[d] [his] father for this,” since she felt that “he [her husband] was that way too” (WCL, 92). Though unsure whether his father was gay, Ball reports that this question “led to the notion of a man [Fitts] who gave up the chance to be himself by denying his true sexuality, then seeing his son possibly making that choice for himself and being freaked out by that” (WCL, 92). For Ball, writing Fitts’s character reflects an effort to imagine how his father may have responded to his own and to his son’s homosexuality. Although those wedded to a strict identity politics may read Ball’s writing of Ricky as straight (he is only mistaken as gay) as a sign of Ball’s own conflicted stance toward same-sex desire, this writing and his further comments indicate that homosexuality and heterosexuality not only remain imbricated in the story that he tells about his script and in the one the film portrays but also, and more to the point, underscore a problematic that a slavish adherence to identity politics risks missing. Consider Ball’s comments on his script revisions. Because it lessened suspense by “tipp[ing] too much,” Ball says he delayed revealing the colonel’s homosexuality, striking an initial draft flashback in which, early in the film, the colonel is “seen entwined in the anus of a man, who then dies at the hands of the Vietcong” (WCL, 92). “He saw this person die . . . and felt like he was being punished because being gay was a sin” (IWB, 34). During the writing and revision process, Ball explains, “what comes out . . . ends up being subtext, but you have to write it, so you know what it is. The thing that people don’t know is that he [Colonel Fitts] named Ricky after that boy” (IWB, 34). In linking the terms of “coming out” to an act of revealing and concealing designed to sustain suspense and desire in narrative, Ball (wittingly or not) implies that at stake for him is the broader question

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of maintaining desire in same-sex relations. But while Ball’s meditation on suspense marks an effort to represent the perspective of the father, it may lead us to assume not only that his imagining of his father (or the colonel) remains unproblematic but also that Ball’s perspective of himself, specifically of his investment in this imagining of the father, is not at issue. Ball so consistently maintains that his script portrays the father’s or the colonel’s perspective that we may lose sight of how Ball’s own desire affects that portrait. What interests me most is his claim that viewers do not know that Ricky is named after Fitts’s dead lover. Although the film does not reveal the name’s origin, it seems curious, given the sexualized abuse of Ricky and the colonel’s placing himself in the garage in the position that he imagined his son took with Lester, that we should need this naming to recognize the father’s incestuous desire. Perhaps Ball does not see such naming as bespeaking an incestuous investment, but I suspect that Ball’s comments, when taken with his claim that this secret naming can remain so even in the telling, reflect anxiety over revealing his own incestuous desire for his father. Ball’s writing himself through a heterosexual (Ricky) may suggest less a concealment that might reflect a conflicted response toward his own sexuality than an avoidance of confronting an incestuous desire for his father. If Ball did acknowledge such desire, he may have interrogated both his own potential and that of all subjects, including those who identify themselves as gay, to deny the castratory cut that gives birth to desire. At any rate, Ball’s comments not only redirect our attention to how American Beauty represents the son’s or Ricky’s desire for the father, or to how heterosexual and same-sex desire remain imbricated in this representation, but also urge us to consider the portrait and the problems that surface when the film figures homoerotic relations between men and does not at the same time confront the issue of incestuous desire. We can detect American Beauty’s effort to advance its problematic take on male relations by examining the overdetermined scene depicting Colonel Fitts’s murder of Lester. The film presents this scene as redemptive, if calamitous: through a final act of looking, Lester absorbs the lessons of Ricky’s vision. Indeed, the colonel shoots an entranced Lester, just as Lester completes a deliberate look at a still photograph depicting a happy time experienced with Carolyn and Jane at an amusement park. We are made to understand that, much as Ricky deploys video, Lester here looks to the photograph: to help him see and remember more deeply. It is not, though, merely a memoriam to a vitalizing moment that passed (long ago) before his eyes, but more subtly also an effort by Lester to echo and ritualize the strange, reverberating force

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of the kind of primary seeing he has just experienced. Lester turns to the photograph after deciding not to sleep with Angela, suggesting that reinvesting in the paternal provokes a renewed desire in, as well as a more nuanced understanding of, seeing. He comes to the old photo, that is, with the residue of a positively estranging encounter with Angela and thus sees the snapshot in a new way; Lester’s seeing Angela otherwise also makes the family snapshot a memorial to an unsettling, animating encounter not solely confined to what is framed in the photo, but rather experienced more broadly within the field of vision. The film presents Ricky’s reading of the last sight/site of Lester to signify, ultimately, the intimate correspondence between the two men. When the gunshot prompts Ricky and Jane’s discovery of Lester’s dead body (a medium shot focuses on Lester’s head, his open eyes mirrored in a pool of blood), it is Ricky who cranes his head to meet Lester’s gaze, a stilling but vitalizing stare that echoes the intense gaze Ricky assumes when he faces and begins videotaping a scene of beauty. Ricky’s hushed but ecstatic response (“Wow”) recalls his reaction to videotaped scenes of the discarded objects that he recounts and/or screens for Jane— those of a floating plastic bag or of the dead, frozen homeless woman. Such scenes, Ricky relays, point to a whole “life behind things.” As he says of the frozen woman, “When you see something like that, it’s like God is looking right at you just for a second, and if you’re careful, you can look right back . . . [and see] beauty.” In its representation of the colonel’s murder of Lester in the throes of a final, transformative act of looking, American Beauty extends its earlier critique of the totalizing impulse that can inform but cannot be confined to the colonel’s way of seeing. The film renders the killing shot that Fitts delivers to the back of Lester’s head so that it signifies Fitts’s effort both to reinstall the force of his earlier reading—his splicing the two window frames together to spell out his son’s affair with Lester—and to cast and cast out same-sex as well as incestuous desire as exclusively confined to an other. For instance, as Lester, in medium close-up, is seen in profile staring longingly at the framed photo of Carolyn and Jane (held at eye level in front of him), viewers spot the colonel’s gun enter at screen right. (We see only the gun and the hand here and learn in the next scene that they belong to Fitts.) As the trigger is cocked, the camera begins tracking left, more slowly mimicking the trajectory that the bullet will take as it subsequently blows out Lester’s brains. The sequence ends with Lester’s brains splattered across the white wall in front of him (positioned behind the photo that Lester held in front of his eyes), a wall now more closely spotted, as it were, by the camera as it comes to the end of its trek (see figures 2.3–2.5).

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Figures 2.3–2.5 Tracking American Beauty’s ambivalent reading of its killing shot: a sequence that reflects the film’s effort to disclose the inherent violence of the attempt to forge a seamless narrative of vision and identity. At the same time the narrative of cinematic origins implicit in the sequence looks to the photo to anchor the film’s effort to generate seamless illusion and, ultimately, to strip relations between men of a mediating Otherness.

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The sequence thus insists not only on Fitts’s violent psychological projection but, as in the earlier scene of his misreading, also on his concomitant forging together parallel window frames. American Beauty self-reflexively emphasizes that the colonel’s totalizing aims cannot be cordoned off from the potentially repressive, violent work of the cinema or the viewer. By tracking and joining the trajectory of the bullet, the camera underlines the violence of the cinematic shot, or, more precisely, of the cinematic effect that depends on repressing the fact that discrete frames form anything but a final, unfettered, coherent, sequential vision on screen. As such, the scene suggests that spectators and the cinema cannot necessarily be absolved of what motivates the colonel: the search for a final meaning to mute a discordant Otherness within the subject by projecting the horror at such fundamental strangeness outward, here onto the white wall functioning self-referentially as a version of the film screen. To return to American Beauty’s privileged seer, Ricky, and the allusions his reading of Lester’s death invokes is to ascertain how the film aims to advance its disturbing take on desire and alterity as they pertain to relations between men. Ricky’s response to Lester’s dead visage suggests that Ricky looks “right back” at what he describes as the “beauty behind things,” affirming the vision the two men share. A more literal reading, though, would suggest that when he looks behind Lester, Ricky sees traces of his father. The colonel is literally the man behind the crime: from behind Lester, the colonel fires the killing shot to the back of the head. What is more, if the frozen visage of Lester that captivates Ricky visually registers Lester’s response to his “entire life passing before [his] eyes” as he lies dying (what Lester later says when he again becomes the disembodied narrator and reveals what went through his mind’s eye during these last moments), then the scene also recalls an earlier one: when Lester, exhausted from jogging with Jim and Jim (the gay couple next door), used the same phrase, “passing before [his] eyes.” Then, Lester uttered the phrase as he came upon an image similar to Lester’s dead visage: colonel Fitts staring at his own image in the rear of the car that he is shining. The allusions thus render Lester’s dead image as a double for the colonel’s gleaming reflection, reiterating that, when staring at the dead Lester, Ricky in effect tries to glimpse what remains behind his father’s impenetrable facade. In one sense, Ricky’s gesture poignantly reads as a call to recover a lost history, to find the good father behind the one who is, in part, produced by a repressive homophobia. Just as significant, whether we take Ricky as a screen for a gay screenwriter or as straight, by

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suggesting that Ricky, straight or gay, feels the need to think back through his own desire for—in this case—his gay father, the film implies the persistence of the homoerotic in all relations between men, thereby unsettling rigid distinctions between gay and straight. At the same time, if we scrutinize these relations in the film, a troubling figuration emerges, one that we may glean by taking into account yet another sense in which the murder scene and the scene of the colonel regarding his reflection in his car unwittingly disclose the film’s notion of what it means for Ricky and for viewers to see the “whole life behind things.” When we note that the colonel’s coming behind Lester with a gun barely conceals his desire to enter Lester sexually from behind, and when we consider that this image reverses the picture that the colonel saw coming from behind him as he stared at his image in the rear of the car—Lester and the two Jims jogging (what the then-closeted colonel dubs a “fucking gay pride parade”)—it is difficult not to grant that Ricky’s, and more broadly American Beauty’s, interest in seeing, or even in establishing something to be seen behind things (the phantasmatic effect that would sustain desire), is bound up with a reading of anality. What is more, just as in Lester and Jane’s relationship, the issue of incest and the paternal is at stake in Ricky’s reading back through Lester to find what remains behind his father. We may recall that at the moment when Jane, complaining of her father’s flagrant weakness, dubs him an “asshole,” the (albeit clenched) ass that Mendes’s camera focuses on is Ricky’s, suggesting again how the film entwines its exploration of incest between daughter and father with that of incest between son and father. Lee Edelman’s examination of how cinematic figurings of the phantasmatic, “the before and beyond of desire,” are bound up with responses to anality offers a way of looking at the constructions that American Beauty will present in this regard.12 For Edelman, bringing the “behind” from “behind the scenes” (RWG, 73), as he argues Alfred Hitchcock anxiously does in Rear Window (1954), amounts to considering the Lacanian Real as it relates to the field of vision. Such a critical gesture unsettles, for it provokes the “question of what stands behind the Symbolic order” (RWG, 91), and foregrounds the subject’s and the Symbolic’s continual confrontations with the threateningly unsignifiable, the Real that perturbs a narrative of stable identity and vision. Exposing the anus as, figurally, the “hole from which—around which, against which—Symbolic reality takes shape” (RWG, 79) serves especially to undermine “a clear-cut definition of sexed human characters invested with sexual identities,” for such a gesture points to the “mess and obscurity out of which [the Symbolic

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parceling of genital difference] emerges” (RWG, 77). Hitchcock’s “taking [viewers] back to the anal compulsion that gives birth, paradoxically, to Symbolic meaning through the narrative of sexual difference” (RWG, 91) cannot help but continually threaten the Symbolic, the subject, and even critical interventions with archaic perturbations. Indeed, for Edelman, early feminist film theory’s insistence on finding the woman in classical Hollywood cinema as the exclusive bearer of castration hardly betters Rear Window protagonist Jeffries’s (James Stewart) anxious response to anal erotics, for such theory instances a similar, albeit tenuous, defense against what Hitchcock’s film cannot help but register: namely, that we would quickly turn from back (the anal opening) to front (genital sexuality), from “rupture” or gap to the promise of “reproduction,” that we seek, in short, to “posit” “older [anal desire] as always already behind” us by “deposit[ing] it in, and as, the woman’s front” (RWG, 81). If Mendes’s film signals, then, how constructions of the phantasmatic, of the “whole life behind things,” turn on figurings of anality, of the “(w)hole behind things,” tracing such figurings in American Beauty also illuminates the particular way that the film struggles to negotiate its investment in, and disturbing turn from, such a site. To be sure, in representing Ricky’s effort to recover the father behind things or to penetrate the facade that the colonel struggles to maintain, Mendes’s film undermines efforts to bracket the homoerotic from the heterosexual. Here, the film joins Edelman who, in turning to a site often privileged in relations between gay men (the anus), shows how such a site cannot, in fact, remain confined to or essentially define gay men or, of course, remain particular to men. Yet when we examine how Mendes’s film figures the behind, as it were, behind the father, when we look closely at the film’s figurings of anality in the father/son relation, we do not see an insistence that traces of a radical Otherness emerge in figurings of archaic relations and in turn challenge problematic, idealized claims that relations between men can transcend Symbolic mediation. Instead, we note a disturbing displacement that offers a message pointedly different from the one that Mendes’s film delivered when it worked to have Lester, through lessons learned from Ricky’s vision and video, acknowledge and sublimate incestuous longing so as to become a father again. By contrast, when it figures Ricky’s desire for his father, American Beauty aims to mobilize a specious narrative of cinematic origins, one that, far from affirming the value of Symbolic castration, in fact, seeks to mute archaic perturbations and to consolidate an effort to strip relations between men of a mediating Otherness.

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We can discern how this narrative of cinematic origins strives to mute persistently discordant, archaic perturbations by returning to a scene given to Ricky, the film’s favored seer. Recall that American Beauty presented the killing shot that Fitts delivers to the back of Lester’s head to underline Fitts’s finalizing efforts to forge a seamless series of relations between discrete film frames, a splicing that strives to elide the threatening gap between frames; we now see that this gap relates to the disruption of stable meaning posed by drives and registers associated in part with anality. Yet by examining the formal relations between the arts/technologies also mobilized in this scene, we can note how Mendes’s film aims to recoup the troubling notion of a fixed origin and to summon the totalizing teleological moves that the film has submitted to critique. This recuperative effort that proceeds in the very wake of the film’s critique becomes manifest in the account of the birth of the cinema (and of the relations among the arts/technologies that it seeks to authorize), an account condensed in the film’s self-reflexive look at the murderous trajectory of the shot delivered by Fitts’s gun. In the shot that splatters Lester’s brains on the white wall or screen in front of his line of vision and that mimics Mendes’s tracking camera, the bullet/camera marches toward its target at the moment when Lester drops the still photo of Carolyn and Jane that he holds before him. In effect, such a sequence implies that the photograph gives birth to and anchors the moving image, liberating a specious narrative of the relations between photography and cinema that remains prevalent in film and critical discourse. In Mendes’s rendering, the moving image literally grows out of, even as it would ultimately leave behind, the photo. By attempting to fix photography as the kernel that the film camera and its ability to represent movement can pick up and carry into the future, American Beauty fallaciously insists on a direct, causal relation between the arts/technologies, as if, through ordering and disciplining them, the film could uncritically recover the notion of an uninterrupted, teleological sequence that it scrutinized when it addressed the colonel’s drive to stitch one discrete film frame seamlessly into the next. By casting the photograph as a fixed, localizable origin for the cinema, American Beauty denies an Otherness within photography; the film does so, moreover, to claim its own imperviousness to Otherness. In this regard, even though it asserts that Lester turns to the photograph to see and to mark his newfound ability to glimpse the invisible and the uncertain within and behind the visible world, American Beauty here echoes early films such as The Story the Biograph Told (dir.

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McCutcheon & Weed, 1903), which, in deploying the photo as “reliable evidence” for uncovering disguised identities, similarly betrayed the cinema’s embrace of photography as a forerunner of its own putative ability to present the visible as an unmediated, verifiable, and stable reality.13 This turn to a static notion of the photograph spells a retreat from the film’s nuanced, dynamic take on looking relations and signals an attempt to secure a fixed and fixing image in the field of vision by seeking to recover such finality through an arrested image or conception of a field (or fields) of vision. At the same time, the flashback sequence that returns viewers to the scene of Lester’s holding the photo marks the film’s ambivalence toward situating photography as its origin. Here, American Beauty expresses something akin to early cinema’s desire to not only invoke but also “exorcise” photography, to “wrest authority from the still picture” (BH, 78). That the film’s take on these matters relates to its claim to the unfettered becomes clearer when we note that the photo Lester clutches as he is shot depicts his family beside an amusement ride whose motion blurs the distinctions or gaps between one circular spinning car and the next. When the film presents this image (of a protocinematic machine) as a flashback passing before the mind’s eye of the dying Lester, significantly it does so as a film image (here, focusing on Carolyn spinning on the ride), as if the still photo could not in the end truly mark the psychically reanimated, albeit physically dying, Lester unless the putative stasis of photography were itself abandoned, surpassed by the animating or moving image.14 A similar view of the relations between photography and cinema emerges in an early scene in the film that includes three successive shots of photos: the camera cuts from a shot of photos of Jane that adorn a table, to a shot of more photos of her on another table, to a shot of a posed photographic portrait of the Burnhams, before finally cutting to a “film” image of one of the carefully composed and lifeless Burnham family dinners. This sequence implies that, if the family seems dead, it is because they have adopted the putatively deadening form of the photograph. These accounts of cinematic origins and the relations between the arts/technologies come without a critique of teleological progress and, far from granting an “intimate and incommensurable” relation between the arts, imply instead that one art or technology can easily incorporate and surpass an other (VT, 20). In Mendes’s film, moreover, it is not only photography that the cinema anxiously eyes. When it summons Ricky to confirm Lester’s ability finally to respond to the galvanizing force of the enigmatic within and behind the visible world, the film can

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also be seen as working to situate the technology that it most associates with the boy—video—in the teleological sequence of formal relations staked out in the scene, an effort to secure a future for this teleological narrative of the history of the arts/technologies of visibility (photography, film, video) and their relation to producing both seamless illusion and history. The scene at hand is not the only indication that American Beauty brings video to the site of the photo/film relation. The first time viewers see Ricky videotaping in the film (from outside the Burnham kitchen, he tapes Lester and Jane), the sequence ends with a close-up of the amusement park photo that Lester holds as he is shot. A second instance occurs when Ricky, stationed across the way in his bedroom window, videotapes Jane in her bedroom. (At the time, Jane is staring into a mirror edged with still photos, and she is talking on the phone with Angela, whose room—as we see in a cutaway shot—remains entirely postered with fashion photos.) A third linking of photography and video occurs when Carolyn slaps Jane in the face for refusing to have what Jane dubs a “Kodak moment” with her mother. As Jane stares into her mirror nursing her bruise, she turns to see Ricky videotaping her from his bedroom window. The sequence ends with a suturing of these two scenes of woundings, with Ricky staring into his own mirror and tending to the cut his father’s fist has opened on his face. Typically, the future that American Beauty envisions for video aims, in modernist fashion, to absorb absolutely or to render absolutely other the newer form of representation, though an ambivalence points to the film’s supplemental appeal to the other art/technology (video). We can hear such an ambivalent response to video from Mendes himself. On the one hand, video threatens to usurp cinema and needs to be distinguished rigorously from the older art forms. As Mendes reports in his DVD commentary on the film, the digital video camera used by Ricky generated such high-quality images that they were not readily distinguishable from those produced by 35mm film. As a result, Mendes and his cinematographer (the renowned Conrad Hall) degraded these images, so that they would be clearly demarcated from 35mm film images. On the other hand, we can see how much Mendes the filmmaker identifies with Ricky and with video, not only in the privileging of the videographer’s vision in the film but, as reported by Mendes in his commentary, in some behind-thescenes sleights of hand as well. For instance, Mendes discloses that he used his own hand to substitute for what film viewers are meant to take as Ricky’s hand in the scene when the boy passes the threshold

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of the kitchen to gaze at Lester’s dead image. (Mendes refers to this moment as “his only appearance in the film,” as if he constituted something akin to the momentary glimpse that for Ricky often opens to the beauty gleaned “behind things.”) The coterminous denigrating and privileging of video gives way to the film’s ultimate effort to cast cinema as able to absorb and master video. We can detect this effort in the conclusion of the film, where the final moments of Lester’s life are replayed. Here the film confirms the transformative, albeit tragically late, power of these moments in an elaborate tracking shot that weaves together scenes of the images that screened through Lester’s head as he lies dying with scenes of people in the Burnham house reacting to the sound of the colonel’s gunshot. Significantly, the tracking shot in this instance differs from those I have examined in that we now see things from above, from Lester’s disembodied point of view, as if Lester (or perhaps Spacey, the man behind the character fulfilling the letter of his name) is summoned to assume for the cinema a mobile, aerial gaze beyond the resources of video. Since Lester in this instance repeats the words that the videographer Ricky uttered when he screened his video of the floating plastic bag (which we see again here, this time from Lester’s point of view, and linked, by a dissolve, with the flashback image of Carolyn suspended in the air on an amusement park ride), American Beauty implies not only that Ricky (as a form of the repressed) was always present to Lester but also that video itself was somehow always present to cinema in its infancy. Rather than acknowledging the impurity of the origin (the difficulty of locating one art/technology at or as an origin), these moves seek to subdue the repressed from within by attempting to absorb and master the “foreign,” by constructing a history of the technologies of vision that retrospectively aims to recover and colonize that which constitutes a new shock to the subject, or, in this case, the new shock that video still poses to established cinema. In this teleological take on relations among the arts/technologies, film would not only reanimate (as it leaves behind) photography, but if film absorbs the lessons of a vitalizing video, then the implication is that this lesson was merely a matter of listening more closely to what was already there in the first place, in what putatively belonged fully to film before video. In its efforts, then, both to other photography in order to elide a fundamental difference at the origin of cinema and to other arts/ technologies such as video, which emerge after its birth, American Beauty may be said to exhibit the kind of totalizing desire that, for the subject, can emerge both at the origin and throughout its history

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in the face of encounters with a perturbing strangeness. It is difficult to read the film’s efforts at privileging a single art/technology (in this case, film) and at shoring up the borders between disciplines as unrelated to the guarding of borders and the urge toward establishing a single, final meaning that the subject continually risks, especially since American Beauty invokes this fallacious narrative of formal relations at the same time and in the same scene, we remember, as it forges a static story of the relation between son and father. Ricky’s gaze into Lester’s eyes leads back to Fitts, the man behind the dead visage, and in turn marks the desire to discover what exists behind the embattled colonel. Staking the photograph as the putatively static, if subsequently disavowed, origin of the moving image in this scene is calculated to fix the father as a stable source recoverable in an act of seeing. In casting Ricky’s vision of Lester’s visage as one drawing on an account of cinema’s birth that itself aims to dispel a disruptive Otherness from the origin, American Beauty seeks to supplement its troubling perspective on the paternal, a take that would (re)claim, for the father/son relation, the denial of Otherness that the film effectively challenges in the father/daughter (heterosexual) narrative. Far from remaining only a figure who bespeaks American Beauty’s endorsement of the need for a desire-sustaining enigma, one that would delineate the Real from the Symbolic and permanently trouble fixed accounts of desire in/and the field of vision, Ricky is also summoned by the film as part of a disturbing effort to find in photography a fixed, originary, and finalizing presence and to ensure a future for such an aim. This account of the cinema’s birth and its relations to other arts/ technologies, one that the film mobilizes in order to sanction an avoidance of Symbolic castration for homoerotic relations between father and son, also bears directly on conceptions of relations between gay men. The film signals as much when it extends the account forged at the scene of the father/son relation to those between gay men. The occlusion of Otherness at an originary or archaic scene of a parent/ child relation often strives to anchor such occlusions beyond such scenes, and gay men are not strangers to the way that this account has been used to sanction readings of same-sex desire as inherently regressive and hostile to difference. As Tim Dean notes, the notion that homosexuality constitutes an inherent rejection of Otherness, a desire to find in the same sex a narcissistic echo of one’s own self, a “love of the same,” is problematically still extant in many heterosexual and homosexual constructions of homosexual desire (HPO, 123). As Dean remarks, “homosexual relations are no more guilty of

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[attempting to] exclud[e] Otherness than are the heterosexual kind” (HPO, 132). At the same time, Dean’s comments serve to remind us that imagining that same-sex relations (and Mendes and Balls’s film) are beyond such attempted occlusions remains just as troubling an effort to idealize gay men. We can note how American Beauty tries to extend its denial of alterity for homoerotic desire between father and son to relations between gay men by attending to the film’s visual repetitions, specifically to the two remaining horizontal tracking shots that the film deploys. One such shot occurs when Lester, eager for a severance package, threatens his boss with a false sexual harassment suit. In depicting Lester’s quitting a numbing job and in raising the issue of the appearance of being gay, the scene recalls the one in which the colonel mistakes his son’s joint rolling (in the space between Lester’s garage windows) for fellating Lester. Here, Lester threatens to accuse his boss so as to have him pay for the same favor that the colonel “sees” his son perform. The scene ends with Mendes’s camera tracking, from left to right, an obscured image of Lester walking behind a series of tinted glass frames and emerging from behind the glass strip (at the end of his and the camera’s trek) with a liberal severance package in hand. This patently self-reflexive cinematic shot nonetheless proceeds without the critique of the urge to deny the discrete gaps between frames that the film levels (in the later echoing scene) at the colonel and marks as a potential within viewers. (In his DVD commentary on the film, Mendes relates that the idea of shooting Lester behind the glass strip, in fact, solved the problem of how to maintain an uninterrupted flow between one scene and another.) It is as if portraying Lester’s patently false charge requires no concomitant cinematic selfscrutiny, as if at this scene the cinema always knows what it is seeing or making visible.15 More telling than how the formal properties of this scene of an alleged gay relation betray the film’s efforts to deny the play of Otherness with respect to same-sex desire is a scene that occurs early in the film and that offers yet another tracking shot, this time in a segment involving gay men—Lester’s neighbors Jim and Jim. As Lester, stationed behind his living room window, narrates (in voiceover) the film’s introduction both to Carolyn and to the gay couple, the camera tracks from right to left across the picket fence until the couple’s dog, Bitsy, appears in the next shot from behind the fence to receive a scolding for barking. Though played for laughs, the scene raises issues that the film elsewhere treats seriously: the parent/child relation surfaces (the scolding that the men give the dog suggests

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that the animal functions as a sort of substitute child), and the film’s concern with glimpsing something of the world behind things is expressed here too, as it is in the scene with Lester and his boss, for the dog emerges from behind a series of adjoining frames (in this case, the fence posts), just like Lester appears from behind a series of glass frames. And, as Bitsy’s name implies, the dog appears as a fragment or remainder, another instance of what Ricky and eventually Lester search for in their attempt to capture or discern a fleeting beauty. Like the previously noted scene, this one also proceeds without critiquing the suturing that aims to read over the discrete in order to forge a fixed, single, seamless narrative. One may object that the film’s portrayal of the two Jims offers precisely the complex rendering of gay men that Dean calls for. Though happy and represented as not hiding the kind of chaos barely hidden beneath the Burnhams’ pristine lawn, Jim and Jim, as their names imply, are not, by virtue of their being gay, beyond investing in the numbing sameness that the film excoriates when such investments surface in heterosexual relations. Yet we must ask why Mendes forgoes directly relating the problematic in the lives of the two men to the nuanced reading of looking in cinema, especially when the film here uses the very kinds of tracking shots employed in those other scenes (at least initially) to refuse to categorically bracket the colonel’s misreading and killing from the like potential within cinema and film spectators. As much as American Beauty stakes its effort to strip male relations of a mediating Otherness on disciplining visual arts/technologies and on retreating from the kind of trenchant critique of totalizing visions (and of a totalizing understanding of vision) that it advances in the heterosexual plot, for the film such moves, in the end, remain insufficient. Indeed, the film increasingly calls on the woman, particularly the maternal figure, to underwrite and idealize the finalizing narrative of father/son relations that it labors to develop. If that narrative aims to “plug the hole in the Real” (“Masculine Mystique”), which FeherGurewich argues is more pressing in today’s social formation, then, employing Edelman’s terms, we might say that American Beauty calls on the maternal to plug the hole in the rear (the figure for the unsignifiability attributed to the Real). American Beauty places the maternal behind the father in order to maintain the denial of Otherness staked out at the site of the father/son relation. The maternal is looked to less as offering up front the guarantee that, for instance, Jeff sought in Rear Window—namely, that older anal desires are “always already behind him” to the extent that they are “deposit[ed] in, and as, the

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woman’s front” (RWG, 81). Rather, American Beauty summons the maternal to prop up and purify its disturbingly final reading of the unsignifiable as it manifests itself in relations between men. This is evident in the film’s portrayal of Ricky’s mother, Mrs. Fitts. She is consistently framed throughout American Beauty as a silent, painterly still life, as she is, for instance, when the camera cuts from Ricky describing his video of the frozen homeless woman to a scene in which Mrs. Fitts sits alone, motionless beneath a door frame that echoes a frame in the room immediately behind it. Her near total silence and her framing here suggest that she remains in an infinitely regressive, nearly preverbal space. Though the film offers this image to throw into relief Mrs. Fitts’s traumatized response to her husband, within the context of the narrative of familial and formal relations among the arts/technologies that American Beauty struggles to develop, the appeal to a fixed maternal figure appears calculated to further solidify a view of paternal and/or erotic relations between men as free of castration and difference. In effect, the film aims to remove such relations from the archaic, disruptive anal drives invoked at the very anal site to which it repeatedly returns. It is as if the film’s ordering of a history of relations among photography, cinema, and video requires the maternal as the putatively more primitive ground for anchoring the film’s teleological claims. By casting the maternal as “articulately inarticulate,” as Mendes describes Mrs. Fitts in his DVD commentary, American Beauty aims to expel the heterogeneous from the archaic moments in the subject’s history. The maternal is appealed to as a stable, structuring absence, an originary figure that would mute the archaic perturbations that challenge the presumably fixed contours of the subject and the Symbolic in the field of vision. Whereas the father often assumes the role of the separator, facilitating the child’s and the mother’s separation from each other as the child enters the Symbolic, the mother (whose own role in facilitating separation and in provoking the turn to language is hardly as inconsequential as it appears in Lacanian theory) is rendered in American Beauty—especially at the level of representation—as sanctioning a regressive relationship between father and son. The last image of the mother presented in American Beauty suggests as much. Here, her placement as a stable, purified ground undergirding the film’s account of the father/son relation at the same time also evidences the film’s continued retreat from its critique of a totalizing effort to stabilize the self in and through the field of vision. The context for understanding the film’s use of this image can be gleaned in a scene that appears, however, to signal the film’s return to

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its critique of finalizing visions, a critique, moreover, that could prove useful in assessing aims to find new modes to reinscribe the phantasmatic and hence sustain desire. When, for instance, Ricky breaks into his father’s cabinet to show Jane a plate that contains a Nazi swastika embossed on the back, he refers to this object as the “one thing” his father has, an embarrassed effort to distinguish his father from what he deems “the (w)hole subculture” that collects “this Nazi shit.” That Mendes cuts from this scene to Ricky’s video of the plastic bag, the bit of waste that signifies the most beautiful “thing” he has ever seen and that intimates the “(w)hole world that exists behind things” (emphases mine), seems to suggest that American Beauty does not remove even Ricky (and his construction of the beauty that would ostensibly sustain desire) from the finalizing moves visible behind the father and his plate. The film appears, then, to insist that not only totalitarian ideology but also all necessary delineations of the relation between the unsignifiable (the Real) and the Symbolic, all efforts to ground the speaking and desiring subject, risk an enchantment with a final solution. Yet when we return to the film’s last sight of Mrs. Fitts, in the scene in which Ricky says goodbye to her (telling her, too, to care for his father), she is once again stilled in a painterly light, taking her place as the most archaic supplement that would enable the stifling relay between father and son. Significantly, the camera spots her clutching a plate, the back of which is made clearly visible for son and film audience to see. Given the role that the film has charted for her, more seems to be at stake here than merely revealing that Mrs. Fitts does not share her husband’s taste in china. Rather, the film turns to her to clean up the mess, to remove any trace of the “Nazi shit” that may remain in the film’s own imagining of the beyond it would situate behind the seen/scene that it labors to construct for relations between men. At the same time, the turn to the mother to supplement the power of the photograph in an effort to consolidate the film’s moves against Symbolic mediation betrays the unfinished work of such finalizing projects. The appeal to the supplement not only discloses photography’s inability to fix the beyond imagined behind the seen/scene, but the film’s final moments in effect undercut the presumed ability of video to maintain the smooth surface of the seen/scene. Although American Beauty’s concluding tracking shot focuses on video—namely, of the plastic bag—in order to master the technology’s power and enlist it in an effort to generate a seamless cinematic reel of motion, one of the cherished, last flashes of life that stretch

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before Lester’s dying eyes alludes to another of Ricky’s videos, one whose subject more resolutely resists a move toward easy absorption and an affirmation of an unperturbed visible world. When, as a voice in the clouds, the dying/enlivened Lester remembers the joy at the “first time [he] saw [his] cousin[’s] . . . brand-new Firebird,” viewers may recall an earlier scene when Ricky, shot from a low angle and framed against the sky with an airplane above and behind him, videotapes and plays back images of a dead bird, the first series of images he shows to Jane. Although, as we will see, Gore Verbinski’s The Ring and David Lynch’s The Elephant Man will make more of such cinematic subjects, American Beauty cannot but indicate that self-reflexive takes on what impels motion and stirs desire in cinema invariably summon more than machines such as the amusement park ride, the train, or the automobile. Eadweard Muybridge’s famous protocinematic studies of the frame-by-frame sequence of stills of observable locomotion included, of course, not only human subjects, but also animals—the celebrated horses to be sure, but also many species of birds as well as other animals (camels, elephants), to say nothing of humans riding animals. It is not merely that the history of cinema and that of the animal remain parallel and intertwined—“the rapid proliferation of zoological parks and fairs in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries coincided with industrialization and the advent of the cinema”16 —or that the machine of the cinema and the animal both remained, together and separate, attractions at the fairground; more than this, as Hervé Aubron contends, because the animal was cinema’s “first model,” “the animal inevitably questions the origins of cinema.”17 For writers such as Aubron and Akira Lippit, as we shall see, filming the animal presents traces of the singular and the ambiguous that thwart moves to effect endless film loops claiming to hermetically join cinema and other technologies of visibility, cinema and animal, as well as human and animal. American Beauty’s summoning birds and Firebirds as the dying Lester Burnham’s passion for the world is reignited recalls cinema’s putative claim, from its inception, to directly document or capture, and to be able to endlessly replay, a primal life as it dissipates, the implication being that cinema’s own vital power draws from, or is renewed by, the animal. American Beauty’s rearguard efforts to claim for cinema the power to so directly and exclusively reproduce, to bring to life and deliver, its subjects as transparently visible, however, reflect a pointed turn against the very fundamental ambiguity emblematized by animal life and animal death, what constitutes a manifestation of the kind of Otherness (which

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cannot be tamed or from which one cannot easily part) that the film elsewhere argues must be acknowledged in order to reanimate desire and sustain a dynamic psychic life. Yet the absorption with/of the dead bird, whose spirit quickens the videographer Ricky and appears to have passed into or at least inspired the plane flying above the teen, and the corresponding incorporation by a reawakened Lester (as he hovers in the sky) of the brand new Firebird (another machine that draws inspiration from a bird), also evinces a less stabilizing understanding of the turn to, and return of, the animal on screen. What surfaces in such scenes is the ghostly persistence of the difficulty of cinematically depicting—as transparent, finally verifiable, and stable—a host of subjects: animal life and death, the relation between the animal and the human, between the animal and the machine, and between film and other technologies of visibility. Such scenes suggest that the animal hovers or flickers in the machine as well as in the human and does so through relays that pass unsteadily across the eye.18 Although the earlier tracking shot of Bitsy (cast as the two Jims’s substitute child) emerging from behind a series of adjoining frames of fence posts proceeded without a critique of the stitching that seeks to forge a narrative of motion unimpeded by the discrete and the indeterminate, the dog, as in part a resistant remainder of the animal beyond and within the human, likewise cannot be so easily passed over or domesticated. Even if, when imagining relations between men, American Beauty retreats from its effort to illuminate the troubling repression of what resists the teleological march toward stable meaning and yet cannot simply be dismissed as void of significance, the film’s final tracking shot founders not only on the ambiguous difference (posed by photography or video or by the animal) that often returns between or at the edge of frames, but also by an ambiguous difference that surfaces in the center of the shots across which Mendes’s camera would glide. The images of Lester’s animating memories are made to appear effortlessly joined, and the interruptions or delays of the camera’s forward trek by characters’ reaction shots to the sound of the gunshot or the awareness of Lester’s death are similarly smoothed over by dissolves, fades, Lester’s voice-over, and the perfect alignment of these principle figures in the center of each frame. The overlay of two similar images of Jane (synchronized with Lester’s repetition of her name), the second depicting her as a child dressed in an angel costume at the threshold of the Burnham home, though, offers more than an emphatic, affirming repetition. While these shots of Jane recapitulate the film’s turn to the vitality of the child and of teens such as Ricky in

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order to ultimately mute the ambiguous force they, in fact, pose, just the same, the flickering wand or sparkler in Jane’s hand, designed to be of a piece with the burning images summoned to depict Lester’s psychic renewal, not only evokes the phoenix and a perpetual cycle of death and return but also depicts, like the indeterminate and ghostly animality of the firebird, the kind of light that cannot simply be read as transparently illuminative or easily directed to illuminate ensuring hermetic returns. The flickering at the center of the carefully aligned frames, as much as it appears to solder figures across time and space, simultaneously burns or introduces an excess, an unsteady light at the center of the frame. This flickering, even against Mendes’s film’s manifest wishes, unsettles the film’s ultimate claims to reproducing the visible as transparent, instantiating the exigencies that the film elsewhere signals work to galvanize desire. It is here, too, at the conclusion of a film keen to absorb or master video and at the same time keep it at a distance, where the means of attempting to guarantee such an untouched touching of the technology—degrading the surface of the videographic image lest it come too close to being taken for 35 filmstock—actually deliver the screen that film viewers see as less singular and self-contained than the film earlier imagines. Even as the final replay of Ricky’s grainy video of the plastic bag remains bracketed as videographic—marked as quoted or carried along on the surface of Mendes’s film screen— because spectators are less able to readily distinguish the two technologies in this, the film’s final, scene, the graininess of the image, like the flickering of the wand, presents the visible world of cinema as unsteady and unfolding. At such moments, it remains difficult to tell whether the surface of the film screen is dissolving or coming into being.

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Chapter 3

Burning Transmission: Stilling Psychic Space in Gore Verbinski’s The Ring

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ike American Beauty, Gore Verbinski’s The Ring (2002), a remake of Ringu (1998), Hideo Nakata’s adaptation of Koji Suzuki’s novel Ring (2004),1 dramatizes how incest functions as a predominant, though not exclusive, mark of the refusal to embrace a fundamental alterity that productively forms and deforms the contours of the subject and in turn helps sustain psychic life. Although specifically focusing on the troubling, varying maternal response to the profoundly Other in psychic life, Verbinski’s film never loses sight of how this response evinces a relation to a broader understanding of the paternal. It is precisely the rejection of the so-called paternal function— understood as the exclusive province of neither the mother nor the father—that binds the estranged couple, Rachel (Naomi Watts) and Noah (Martin Henderson), to their son, Adan (David Dorfman), and brings the couple’s stance close to Lester’s problematic refusal, until late in his life, to acknowledge Symbolic castration and accept the exigencies of being (dis)placed in language. The repudiation of the paternal function appears more pronounced, though, in The Ring than in Mendes’s film, and video itself emerges as a less seductive form for representing such a crisis. Although not a videographer like Ricky, Samara (Daveigh Chase) still employs video, like her counterpart, to rouse the psychically numb. Yet, it is as a perturbed, avenging embodiment of the undead and it is from a more threatening world behind and through things than American Beauty countenances that Samara transmits her call: her video testifies, not, like Ricky’s, to the stirring effects of an enigmatic, nearly unbearable beauty, but instead to an infinite sorrow, an “unclaimed” traumatic experience of having been entombed by her mother. What is more,

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Samara’s video does not always lead others to see their way to something beyond the wish for a narcissistically confined space but instead threatens viewers, leaving them frantically looking—literally dying to see how, within seven days, they can decode its mysteries so as to escape its final death sentence. If Samara’s video does not point directly to the solution that would shore up the rituals that might help revitalize psychic and social life, the girl’s call still functions to locate the continued crisis in endorsing the paternal function in part in the misguided belief that such a function remains synonymous with an invincibility presumably secured by remaining impervious to difference and to others. Although operating more as a dangerous demand than an invitation, Samara’s video still productively stirs the benumbed. Indeed, in an effort to discover for themselves and their son an antidote to the viral-like infection spread by the cryptic, fragmented images on Samara’s videotape, Rachel and Noah eventually address their psychic malaise by moving beyond themselves and work to become parents again. The Ring looks to an extensive range of arts/technologies in order to represent the deleterious effects that ensue from repudiating the paternal function. Although Verbinski chooses video as the primary vehicle for delivering Samara’s ominous message, the mark that the art/technology leaves on spectators within the film cannot be discerned by the unaided eye and necessitates a turn to a host of visual arts/technologies: film, still photography, and digital and surveillance video produce a visible record of/for those who have screened Samara’s videotape, revealing distorted visages prefiguring the face of death exhibited by those who cannot find a cure. Less directly, but no less prominently, a frenzied form of drawing constitutes an automatic writing dictated (remotely) by Samara and subsequently helps decode the video’s enigmatic message. Samara also transmits messages that are experienced as burning images within their addressees and, when reproduced for others to see, appear as X-ray-like stills. Just as significant as invoking so wide a range of arts/technologies in order to amplify what it understands as a formidable crisis is the fact that The Ring does not offer immediate solutions. Both Adan’s and Samara’s parents fail to find a wholly satisfactory cure for their infection: in the aftermath of Noah’s death, Rachel and Adan must remain incestuously bound, reproducing the videotape as a technological offspring, a gesture that risks other lives so that mother and son can live, but one that ritualizes a dyadic refusal of difference and Symbolic elaboration. And yet, presenting a vision of a crisis so

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pronounced that it resists a simple solution may signify the distinctive importance of The Ring. Despite the demand for a lack of resolution that a horror film looking to an afterlife of sequels must heed, Verbinski’s film forgoes the typical route of sequel-minded films. The Ring does not proffer a child blooming with life or reeking of a death that might occasion the simple end of mourning or the triumphal restitution of a hermetically preserved, glowing nuclear family. Moreover in its insistence that the witnessing and telling of Samara’s trauma does not cause the undead girl to rest and does not in itself provide the means of easily working through the catastrophe, The Ring marks a timely pause at a cultural moment when claims to closure for individual and collective traumas are often championed as the progressive norm. Although The Ring indicts Samara for representing an incestuous, difference-denying form of reproduction, the film covertly advances a retrograde agenda, one embedded in its narrative of relations among the arts/technologies. To put this differently, the refusal of Symbolic mediation that the film comes to read as ultimately mandated by Samara would be less problematic if the narrative of formal relations The Ring advances did not come to recapitulate the mark of the deadening refusal of difference that Verbinski indicts the girl, in the end, for embodying. To be sure, on the one hand, The Ring deploys Samara and her story to critique cinema’s own potential investments in muting difference. Likewise, Samara’s ability to transmit her enigmatic call at a distance and across so many arts/technologies—often without a direct physical conduit or indexical record—can serve as a corresponding means of challenging any modernist claim for the purity or absolute fixity and presence of any art form, a differencedenying claim that often coincides with an effort to absolutely partition the arts/technologies. The Ring marks the emergence of the digital and the so-called loss of the indexical sign (associated most often with conventional photography) to challenge such rigid disciplinary border guarding, though at the same time the film does not suggest that spectators emerge from an encounter with still and moving digital images without a trace—albeit an ambiguous one—within the body and psyche. The Ring’s turn to the origins of the cinema operates, at least manifestly, to challenge efforts at steadying alterity. For instance, Verbinski’s film appeals to thermography, a technology linked to the X-ray (and associated in the film with video), to represent, and to underscore the difficulty of, the move against Otherness that can inform conceptions of technologies/arts and their history. In this

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regard, the film recapitulates the work that, as Akira Mizuta Lippit has shown, the X-ray’s appearance at the end of the nineteenth century performed—the confounding of the Enlightenment’s totalizing project of ensuring a “master” observer preserved and stabilized as a “disinterested” outsider: “For the x-ray image, with its simultaneous view of the inside and outside, turned the vantage of the spectatorsubject inside-out” and “forced” the subject “to concede the limits of the body, erasing the limit against which it claimed to be outside” (PS, 34). The Ring in part deploys the thermographic, X-ray-like images of Samara’s body, taken to locate the origin of the disturbing visions that the girl experiences and in turn compulsively transmits to others, to confound psychologists who look to them for evidence that will yield a masterly knowledge. What is more, The Ring cannily links this confounding of inside and outside to the crisis over sustaining the paternal function. It is as if the threat posed by the X-ray were retrospectively understood by the film to not only signify the challenge to the dream of mastery, but also to sound the crisis of maintaining a psychic space, that “solid introspective inside” that remains not a fixed, essentialist ground for an imperial subject, but the still necessary space that the paternal function, in fact, seeks to guarantee (NMS, 29). For Kristeva, such a space is more at risk, however, in an era where, in part, the globalization of a numbing field of images threatens to short-circuit the fraught but generative interplay between drives and meaning that vitalizes psychic life. On the other hand, although Verbinski’s film consciously works against forging a retrograde conception of the relation between the arts/technologies, The Ring unconsciously echoes—indeed extends—the attempted disciplining of the arts/technologies that we chart in Mendes’s film. To search, though, for what seem surer originary fixtures than the photograph, The Ring looks further back and beyond: namely, to drawing, an art conceived as bearing the touch of the hand on which the presumably secure, indexical-bearing photograph traced its own mechanical penciling of nature; and to thermography, a technology that, in fact, reproduces an image through heat, bypassing the light of the photograph. But if Mendes invokes the maternal to try to supplement the tenuous fixity offered by the photograph, The Ring trains its eye on drawing and thermography not only to try to sustain a teleological, difference-eliding narrative of the history of the visual arts/technologies, but to supplement the maternal as well. One gleans that the response to representing an archaic, threateningly enigmatic maternity is at issue, since it is at

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the site of the interior of the mother’s body and around the question of the daughter, Samara’s, burning thermographic messages therein that Verbinski’s film will struggle most to resolve the paternal crisis it elsewhere so effectively diagnoses and depicts. Certainly, The Ring’s appeal to thermography graphically serves to represent the crisis stemming from undervaluing the paternal function. Instead of productively representing this crisis as a persistent question, however, The Ring seeks to abject the figure of Samara, and in turn inscribe the body of the mother as the receptacle for arts/technologies presumed not so much to give the inside or psychic space a motility borne of the perpetual interplay between drives and meaning, as to aim to render it sterile and immobile. The Ring looks both to thermography’s use of the body’s own heat—specifically not the light of the photograph or the X-ray—and to a kind of frenzied, heated drawing as forms that putatively remain direct and immediate, in an effort ultimately to short-circuit the work of Symbolic mediation that the film manifestly supports. Unlike American Beauty, this effort, though, does not focus on or confine itself to the domain of same-sex relations. The Ring’s retrograde moves respond, ultimately, to the question of sexual difference, or more precisely, to the notion of maintaining sexual difference as a persistent question, as Judith Feher-Gurewich and Judith Butler from very different perspectives argue for.2 Just as the ghost of the X-ray haunts Verbinski’s film, so, too, do traces of Samara’s status as a hermaphrodite, what Suzuki’s novel makes much of and what the American adaptation from the outset and in the end labors to efface. Drawing the Family Circle We can begin to chart The Ring’s focus on the troubling maternal response to the profoundly Other in psychic life by marking the film’s take on the logic informing Noah’s refusal of fatherhood. Critics often read the viral-like replication of Samara’s video as an exclusive symptom of the fear of an endlessly reproductive, overwhelming technology pervading twenty-first-century life and yet ignore how the film persistently connects the fear of dehumanizing technological contagion to another dread: of transmitting the perceived weakness of the paternal function to a new generation. As much as Samara’s video serves to warn of the deadening effects of overinvestment in technology and threatens to punish such overinvestment with imminent death, The Ring also employs Samara and her tape to drive home the dangers of perpetuating what such excessive, myopic investment

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signifies: a refusal of the triangulation of desire. While Samara’s possession of Adan constitutes an invasion that The Ring hardly countenances, the words she speaks through the boy serve to confront his estranged father, dubbing the bind Noah finds himself in a “conundrum,” the very term used to describe Samara’s enigmatic video message. Responding to an Adan frenetically drawing in the back seat of the car, Noah confesses that he has not assumed his role as father for fear that the weakness he was exposed to from his own father will, like a virus, infect Adan. The confrontation helps expose Noah’s dubious belief that invincibility and inviolability constitute the power of the paternal function and that distance and repudiation can somehow shore up or reclaim such power. In fact, Noah’s effort to maintain such inviolability through having renounced his claim to fatherhood, however unwittingly, extends a truly poisonous cycle of refusing to confront and embody a generative Otherness for the boy. The Ring recognizes the ways in which the roles assigned to or assumed by both father and mother remain intertwined in any refusal of, or call to sustain, the positive effects of Symbolic castration. What becomes pronounced, especially as Rachel and Noah confront Samara and her videotape, is that the film’s perspective joins a culturally informed psychoanalytic emphasis on the importance and distribution of the “paternal” function. Kristeva, for instance, notes that conventionally the “mother takes care of the child [and] the father is farther away [and as such in part] represents the [S]ymbolic moment of separation” (TPK, 376), but she is quick to note that the role of separator or “third party” could fall to the female.3 The separator “comforts the mother in order to permit her to take her role in hand.” More to the point, at the same time, this third party, however it is assumed, “is always structurally necessary to separate the child from the fusional dyad with the mother, to map out [its] primary identifications and stake out [the] entry into the realm of the [S]ymbolic” (RSS, 78) or language “understood as nomination, sign, and syntax” (DIL, 136). This entry coincides with the repression of the “semiotic,” the realm of archaic drives—“appropriation/rejection, orality/ anality, love/hate, life/death” (DIL, 136). Kristeva’s emphasis on the restraint of syntax implies a complex, dialectical conception of the subject. In short, the syntax that marks the control of the semiotic also guarantees its continued, resounding eruptions, its persistent unsettling of the ostensibly fixed contours of the post-oedipal or speaking subject. The Symbolic and the semiotic are, in fact, inseparable, “comprising modalities of the same signifying process that constitutes language” (RPL, 34), and as such always remain in tension.

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Such a dialectic disrupts efforts to fix the more fully formed speaking subject as a transcendental subject of “understanding” (RPL, 27), rendering the subject instead permanently “on trial,” perpetually “in process” (RPL, 27), a condition that constitutes and encourages the very dynamism of psychic life. As early as 1984, Kristeva read the increasing preponderance of “helping institutions for . . . school children” to indicate the predominant effort to “replace a nonexistent father” (TPK, 377); the need for such support signals the “underestimation of the paternal function” (TPK, 377). Of course, Noah’s abandonment of Adan hardly counts as a Kristevan or Verbinskian understanding of the kind of separation required to endorse Symbolic law or language for their capacity to signify something beyond the child—what the mother and father themselves must affirm if the child is to have a vital “development” (TPK, 377). But The Ring and Kristeva’s recent work argue that the potential to inscribe the paternal function becomes quite difficult “in the ruined family unit, where [not only] the father’s absence or his diminished authority” presents itself but “goes along with the unavailability of the mother, if not her depression” (RSS, 32–33). Careful not to join reactionary, sweeping dismissals of single working mothers,4 Verbinski’s film nonetheless insists that if Noah assumes that a difference-denying inviolability will ensure his son’s development, the single journalist Rachel, so adept at attending to details in, and tracking down leads for, a story, often remains emotionally distant from her son, unaware of clues that disclose his internal life. Although she cares for Adan, Rachel appears emotionally removed from the boy and even more so from the indirect means by which he expresses himself. For instance, as she arrives late to pick up Adan from school, cell phone in hand, gathering evidence that she hopes will rule out the cryptic videotape as the cause of her niece Katie’s death, Rachel, expecting to be chided by Adan’s teacher for not having arranged alternative daycare, is instead informed that the troubled boy has been “expressing himself in other ways”—specifically through drawing. As his teacher says, “Just because he’s quiet doesn’t mean he has nothing to say.” Although Rachel assures herself that Adan’s drawings of an entombed figure reflect a child’s way of handling the particular grief over his babysitter’s death, the teacher informs her that Adan completed the drawings before Katie was killed. This information, designed to startle viewers with the child’s prescience, at the same time suggests that even before the trauma of losing his babysitter, Adan turned to these “other” forms of releasing affect— that is, even before the preoccupation Katie’s death demands from

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Rachel, these other forms and Adan’s psychic life appear not to have consistently registered on her. Rachel’s emotional distance from Adan seems a counterpart to the stance that the estranged Noah adopts toward the boy, but at the same time her distance also distinctly functions to screen or sanction her too close psychological proximity to—indeed her violation of—the boy. The Ring underlines how Adan typically refers to his mother not as “mom” but as “Rachel,” as in a scene when she discusses his fearful drawings with him. In another instance, as a late-running Rachel asks Adan where she might find the dress she intends to wear to her niece’s funeral, viewers see the boy standing tall on a chair, calmly knotting his tie before a mirror, having already placed her dress on the couch. Even before the trauma of Katie’s death has had time to emerge, Adan has become accustomed to feeding and clothing himself. More than this, his ability to anticipate his mother’s thoughts via his increasing, near possession by the clairvoyant-like Samara merely throws into relief that Rachel, like the dead and deathly girl, has come to invade his interior life. Adan has not only been asked to parent himself, but he has also been seduced into attempting to parent Rachel. She does little to encourage the boy to adopt the kind of generative play that bespeaks Symbolic elaboration or reflects the productive interplay between the semiotic and the Symbolic. Instead, the boy has been made to address a regressive desire: that he replace his mother’s distant partner and that together Rachel and Adan find sanctuary in what the film illuminates as a suffocating mother/child dyad. In this regard The Ring, as much as it indicts Noah for remaining an absent father, does not imagine that the unwillingness to embrace an intimate relation with an irreducible Otherness remains particular to him or to men. As is apparent in the linked motif of the boy’s drawing—in the scene in the classroom and in the car, where Adan confronts his reluctant, confounded father—The Ring joins Noah and Rachel in their mutual investment in a denial of a fundamental difference: whether retreating to produce an ostensibly inviolable future for the boy or invading the child’s interior life and forestalling a generative Symbolic play, Noah and Rachel’s respective stances render Adan at times fairly affectless or force affect nearly underground, or at least in places where neither parent seems to have looked closely—namely, in sketches depicting buried children. The Ring clearly situates this “ruined family unit” within a broader culture that exacerbates the difficulty of sustaining the paternal function. One of the film’s many self-referential scenes of looking

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elucidates this difficulty. In a sequence (reminiscent of Hitchcock or Antonioni) in which she tries both to convince Noah that her having viewed Samara’s tape means that she has only seven days to solve its mystery and to solicit his expertise in video and visual technology in order to do so and stay alive, Rachel asks the skeptical Noah to watch the infecting tape. While he views the tape, Adan finishes preparing his own lunch and leaves for school, unnoticed by either parent. As Rachel retreats to the balcony of her high-rise apartment building, with Noah’s back and the television screen he watches framed behind her, Verbinski’s camera tracks her as she peers into the windows of the duplicate high rise across the street. In each window frame or “screen” in front of her Rachel marks variations of the framed image of Noah watching the video behind her: individuals in their apartments enraptured with large screen televisions illuminating a blue, glowing isolation. In one framed window, a man on a phone converses distractedly as he watches his screen; another frame reveals a woman vacuuming in front of her television; and, in a direct reference to Rear Window, even the framed window to Rachel’s or anyone else’s apartment across the way is not enough to compete with the framed television screen within, as the occupant, wheelchair bound with a broken leg like Hitchcock’s protagonist Jeffries, never meets, let alone flinches from, Rachel’s gaze outside but instead peers exclusively into his television within. The final image Rachel takes in doubles her even more directly and drives home the uncanniness of the encounter: a woman, smoking a cigarette on her balcony and watching from behind a glass door as her child watches cartoons inside, turns to spot Rachel staring at her from across the way. Verbinski’s self-referential scene ends with Noah emerging from behind Rachel, declaring “roll credits.” Both the videotape he has watched and the scene Rachel and viewers have taken in have ended, but the message lingers after the credits have rolled: the image of Noah watching the literally death-inducing tape behind Rachel cannot fundamentally be distinguished from the scene that has unfolded in front of her. Each frame in the apartment across the way merely replicates the kind of numbly absorbed, isolated viewers that Rachel suspects Noah and she have become; little appears to separate the “living” viewers from those who have watched Samara’s tape and will likely die. The final image of the woman watching the child watching television, with its hint of the television employed as babysitter, also speaks directly to Rachel’s sense that her own parenting poses a threat to Adan and may produce an Adan who might take his place with her among the benumbed. The Ring opens on a similar note, with Katie, Adan’s babysitter, and her friend Becka,

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home alone, together joking about how television and telephones destabilize the “molecules in people’s heads,” just before Katie dies from having viewed Samara’s video. Tellingly, a parent and Samara are conflated in the scene when a joke played by Becka just before Katie dies tricks her into thinking that the incoming phone call that signals impending death by videotape is from the killer Samara when, in fact, it is Katie’s mother at the end of the line. Such scenes underscore the reverberating refusals of Symbolic difference within both the “ruined family unit” and a broader culture that underwrites such repudiations. For The Ring, then, just as Noah’s physical distance from Adan does not constitute the inscription of difference that allows the child access to “elements of human culture,” so, too, the emotional distance assumed by Rachel and the woman who doubles her on the balcony does little to help shape, and endorse the importance of, Symbolic space for a child. It is with regard to The Ring’s depiction of this contemporary, alienating isolation and a mass media that together have nearly hollowed out the selves of its apartment dwellers that Verbinski’s film may be said to echo Kristeva’s most recent work. To be sure, the varied and complex cultural causes that intensify the difficulty in sustaining the paternal function are many, extending beyond the “ruined family unit.” For Kristeva, the pressures exerted on accepting a fundamental alterity within the subject include the following: the “new world order’s” propagation of a false, “virtual scripture” of “banking capitals” (RSS, 32–33) that, more often, seems uncritically digested by nearly evacuated, consumerist-minded followers; the increasing turn to religious fundamentalism that appears as a kindred effort to substitute an “artificial soul” for the “amputated subjectivity” produced by consumerism and that increasingly enshrines monological or totalizing meaning (NMS, 7); the overinvestment in exclusively pharmacological solutions to psychic suffering as a means of staving off the difficult work of reflection and analysis (NMS, 8); and the state of “modern human isolation” in which “automated and computerized work prevents affective interaction with other people” (RSS, 32–33). Kristeva’s work most clearly joins and can help extend the specific critique condensed in Verbinski’s balcony-viewing sequence and developed throughout The Ring, though, when she elaborates the threatening effects of a mass media that help produce the kind of isolated apartment dwellers who populate Verbinski’s film. Worrying that mass media’s efforts to “standardize” expression, to “normalize” “discourse,” proceed in part by proffering the image as a way to automatically “harness . . . [ultimately productive] anxieties and

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desires, to take on their intensity and to suspend their meaning” (NMS, 8), Kristeva maintains that such efforts—what amount to increasing pressures on the paternal function’s support for granting a generative, perturbing alterity both within and beyond the subject— contribute to a situation in which “psychic life is blocked, inhibited, and destroyed” (NMS, 8). Before considering how Samara’s video on one level remains frighteningly aggressive and psychologically regressive, how it aims to perform and sustain some of the refusals of a fundamental difference in part critiqued by The Ring, we need to examine more fully The Ring’s deployment of Samara and her video—with its encrypted history of traumatic experience—in order to illuminate Rachel and Noah’s troubling responses to Otherness and, in turn, to mark how the girl and her tape ultimately provoke stances that are decidedly different, namely vitalizing, from those of Rachel and Noah. Rachel becomes fascinated and frightened by Samara’s tape— particularly by the clues that the fragmented images offer about Anna Morgan and her relationship to her adoptive daughter, Samara. Rachel’s attempt to solve the tape’s mystery stems first from a desire to save her own life. Yet The Ring presents Rachel’s fascination with Anna and the girl to indicate not only Rachel’s powerful identification with the two but also the intimate relation that exists between the strangers. If Lester’s relationship with the newcomer Ricky in American Beauty incites him to discover a new way of seeing, a view to becoming “a father again,” the encounter with Samara’s tape provokes Rachel, however unwittingly at first, to act in ways that spell out The Ring’s meditation on what it would mean for her to be a mother again. From the outset of Rachel’s research, The Ring establishes an uncanny affinity between the viewer and the viewed, the recognition of which constitutes the kind of encounter with a strangeness experienced as within that appears necessary before moving to accept strangeness experienced as arising from without. The assistant who sets Rachel up in a video-viewing station articulates this affinity when she asks Rachel whether the tape is her “home movie.” Indeed, Rachel’s determined investigation of the traumatic history buried within the video images draws her to question what remains close to home. Rachel’s initial identifications with the tape, though, are not with its creator, Samara, but with Anna Morgan, the woman Rachel mistakenly assumes “authored” the tape. Rachel’s research—which includes interviewing, library work, and even noting the arresting dream and waking images that seem transmitted to her in order to

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recall and amplify the video’s images—accentuates her investments in Anna and the parallels between the two. In edited, telescoped sequences in which Rachel screens, photocopies, and prints images from collections of old newspapers, websites, books, and from the videotape itself, a series of text and images reveals a happy, renowned horse breeder and champion rider: The Ring presents flashing stills of news photos of Anna hosting and performing in horse shows, collecting trophies, confidently posing with her horse and her husband and with members of a women’s group of riders in front of a lighthouse on the family’s Moesko Island home. Although Anna travels in circles far from those a city reporter is habituated to, Rachel’s research uncovers the story of a confident career woman with whom she can (or could once) readily identify. Just as quickly, however, a sequence of unearthed images of newspaper headlines and photos eclipse images of a radiant woman, portraying Anna confronting an unexplainable virus that afflicts her horses, breeds her own madness, and finally drives her to suicide. This despondent Anna approximates Rachel’s present condition, not only in the sense that Rachel remains herself suddenly afflicted with an incomprehensible illness. When we hear a sympathetic and frightened Rachel subsequently declare (over dissolves of this vision of an internally devastated Anna) that the “shelter” of a career and a husband had been “shattered,” extinguishing the “light” within Anna, we are made to understand that solving the mystery of this woman’s sudden eclipse seems for Rachel to be a way as much toward alleviating a living death for herself as toward staving off her imminent physical demise. To be sure, Rachel’s encounter with the tape and Noah’s increasing responsiveness to her urgent calls rouse the two to embrace something beyond themselves, manifested in part in their resolve to become parents again. The Ring even reunites the estranged couple and locates their generative turn around the newly infected Adan. After waking up from a nightmare in which she coughs up electrodes, Rachel finds Adan watching the tape. As she screams “leave him alone” into the phone that she assumes carries a voice (Samara’s) informing her that Adan has seven days to live, Rachel instead hears, and viewers see, Noah, driving a car with a dashboard full of the blurred snapshots of himself that signify his own infection and admitting to Rachel that she was right to insist on the tape’s threat. The coterminous infection of the son and Noah’s affirmation of belief in Rachel provoke her first articulation of a mutual investment in the boy: As Rachel says to Noah, “our son” “watched the tape.” The articulation occasions the parents’ arrangement of Adan’s first formal meeting with his father,

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who, as noted, confessed to his son a fear of passing on the weakness, the “disappointment,” that Noah experienced with his own father. Yet the confession also marks Noah’s effort to renounce his misguided form of vaccination, and the scene ends with Noah joining Rachel in her journey to Moesko Island to continue the research that might save Adan. The boy presents, at his father’s request, a drawing of mother, father, and child to Rachel that the film offers as a sign of this effort to restore the “ruined family unit.” The Ring also enlists Rachel’s encounter with the tape and with Anna’s relation to Samara, however, both to illuminate more fully Rachel’s earlier denial of the importance of the “third party” or separator function and, just as crucial, to elaborate the continued, if more subtle, denial of Otherness that emerges even during Rachel’s renewed relation to Adan and Noah. For instance, the nightmare in which Rachel vomits the electrodes that were futilely used to diagnose Samara’s psychological state delineates the source of Rachel’s continued turns against the separator function and the formidable challenge entailed in contesting such investments in the presumed inviolability of origins and the ostensible sanctuary of the imaginary mother/child dyad. The nightmare emphasizes that at stake here are archaic, vexing bonds between mother and child from which neither can easily part and which threaten both with near dissolution, for as much as the reappearance of the electrodes signal Samara’s repetitive, undigested traumatic experience—as if even after and perhaps through death the girl must continually emit her call because it has not been heard or worked through—the image of Rachel expelling the electrodes (chords and all) intimates that the difficulty in marking the border between inside and out, self and other, in the early moments of the mother/child relation, is at issue for Rachel as well as for Samara. During Rachel’s research of, and identification with, Anna, Samara has also been speaking through or behind the image of the mother, Anna, and inside of Rachel, as the expelled electrodes signal. It is not simply Samara who replays her relation to one mother, Anna, through another, Rachel. In dreaming through Rachel and in speaking or rather drawing through Adan, the girl also forces Rachel to revisit her own early relation to her son. Even while The Ring underscores Rachel’s attempt to move beyond herself, the film indicates her formidable resistance to doing so when it exposes how quickly Rachel exchanges one troubling, grandiose vision of the mother/child relation with another. Although, as in her nightmare, she shifts her identifications from mother (Anna) to child (Samara), Rachel still seeks to remain within a suffocating imaginary

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dyad. For instance, during interviews with Richard Morgan and with Anna and Samara’s doctor, Rachel assumes that the worst intentions motivated efforts to create a Symbolic separation between Anna and Samara. Both Richard, albeit cryptically, and the doctor, quite directly in the end, disclose that there was a need to create such space between Anna and Samara. But Rachel just phones Adan, who remains under her sister’s care, to ask about his recent “prescient” drawings in order to confirm her suspicion that Richard has murdered Anna and Samara. That is, Rachel turns to the boy only when she assumes he will corroborate a view of the father as a threatening interloper in Anna and Samara’s lives. These scenes prompt us to ask whether Rachel’s appeal to Noah was undertaken only when her narcissistic ties to Adan were at risk. When, during her visit with the Dr. Grasnick, Rachel learns of Anna’s own turn to the doctor to alleviate the “suffering” she endured “from [the] visions” sent to her by the newly adopted Samara, Rachel identifies exclusively with a hermetic vision of the mother/daughter relation. The doctor’s description of the visions as having been “burned inside” Anna recalls both the drawings Adan feverishly produces at the unseen girl’s dictation and Rachel’s nightmare of vomiting electrodes, a dream that ends with her waking up to Samara’s handprint burned onto her arm. Rachel ignores the doctor’s view that there are “limits” to what a parent can endure from a child and dismisses the notion that the island community regained its stability when Samara left its shores. The narcissistic circle Rachel aims to reestablish remains designed to guard against the father or other helping institutions, cast by her either as maliciously jealous (Richard Morgan) of the mother/child bond or as ineffective (the doctor) at pinpointing the source of trouble in the relation. It makes sense to consider Richard a suspect in the deaths of Anna and Samara, especially given that while surreptitiously entering Morgan’s house and screening a tape of Samara’s psychiatric hospital examination, Rachel is struck by the man. But even if such a blow makes Rachel’s suspicion plausible, Richard’s spectacular suicide in front of her and his complaint that this act remains the only solution to escaping Samara’s burning transmissions (images) are, again, not enough to persuade Rachel to consider that he might not have been the cause of those visions. Richard’s penultimate words—that Rachel herself constitutes a relentless, Samara-like emanation—recall the film’s early suggestion that Rachel too seeks to invade psychic space, to arrest the play between affect (and drive) and language deemed necessary for psychic development.

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The Ring reveals details of the Morgan family history precisely to mark how the hermetic, grandiose vision of the mother/child relation, in its effort to disavow the aggressive drives of both mother and child and to project such aggression exclusively onto the paternal figure, significantly threatens the child’s development. When, for instance, Samara telepathically moves a television from behind Rachel and knocks her down the well in which Samara’s unhappy spirit resides, the dead girl reaches from below the water and, with a burning hand, transmits into Rachel’s body a visual flashback that illuminates the film’s view of such grandiose investments. Richard actually separated Samara and Anna not, as Rachel imagines, to banish Samara for eclipsing him in his wife’s affection, but to protect Samara from Anna and to shelter his wife from the child. The image of Anna as the independent rider and horse breeder whose light was extinguished, according to Rachel, by an inability to have a child and by the subsequent loss of the adopted Samara yields to a darker vision: a woman who pursued a career simply as a placeholder before assuming a fulltime life not so much as a mother but, more troublingly, as only a mother. Richard’s efforts to separate Anna and Samara now read as his desperate attempts to rouse Anna from a depression that did not originate solely from repeated miscarriages or even the subsequent death of Samara at Richard’s hands, as Rachel mistakenly assumed. Instead, the depression stemmed from the inability of Samara—the longed for, living object—to fulfill her mother’s desire exclusively: to be all, and only, for her. The film conveys as much in the moment from the embodied flashback when Anna, coming from behind Samara, declares, “All I ever wanted was you,” and suddenly attempts to suffocate the child before throwing her down a well where she dies seven days later. As much as the child’s inability to be all for the mother and exclusively so provokes Anna’s depression, infanticide, and subsequent suicide, the film, however, insists that these horrific acts are also borne of the equally impossible demand the child places on the mother. To Anna, infanticide and suicide appear preferable to suffering the burning visions that Samara transmits, for, in plaguing her with the inability to figure out what the child wants (“What do you want from me?”, an anguished Anna cries before murdering the child), such visions force a recognition, unbearable to Anna, that as much as she may want to be, she cannot be all for the child either. Just as important as critiquing the closed circle of desire that Anna and Samara would draw around each other, by implying that Anna might act otherwise, The Ring reminds us that even at the pre-oedipal

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stage the father is not the sole figure responsible for sustaining the paternal function. The mother herself, a subject in/of language, must play a significant part in gesturing toward this Symbolic realm, in registering an intimation of Otherness in order to encourage the child to move beyond the dyadic relation. As such, The Ring may be said to imply that the semiotic (the realm of affect and drives) and the Symbolic (the realm of language, syntax) are not modalities parceled rigidly or chronologically along pre- and post-oedipal (or maternal and paternal) lines respectively. As Kristeva notes, “the father is the guarantor of this [S]ymbolic function but there is still the maternal—let’s call it a semiotic—function. It prepares the future subject for its initiation [a ‘leap into psychic representation’]” (RSS, 80). Kristeva’s shorthand linking of the semiotic function exclusively with the maternal is nuanced when she spells out the Symbolic work associated with the semiotic modality—that is, when she delineates the “preparatory,” structuring role that the mother plays even for the pre-oedipal child. Such a role acknowledges, as does The Ring but not Anna and Rachel, the status of the mother, like that of the father, not only as a subject who lacks and desires and as such remains insufficient unto herself, displaced or rendered otherwise in language, but also as a subject who serves as a catalyst for the child’s ultimate recognition of remaining other as a speaking subject. “My conception of a mother,” Kristeva goes on to specify, is in terms of a woman essentialized as tenderness but also as a lover who desires, and they’re both fundamental aspects of the “second birth,” i.e. the birth of the child as subject. The father gives birth, it’s true, but in a pretty metaphorical sense: he ensures the “paternal metaphor,” finishing with the transfer of drives to meaning that the mother tirelessly prepares for. (RSS, 80; emphasis added)

The Ring sounds the dangers of inhibiting the paternal “metaphor” or function, of forestalling both the mother’s and the father’s attempt to transfer drives to meaning, albeit differently, at the early stages of the formative “second birth” of the subject as well as during the life of the more fully formed speaking subject, emphasizing how the refusal of Otherness both at the origin and beyond nearly condemns the subject to stultifying, often aggressive repetition. Of course, Samara is not a preverbal or pre-oedipal child when Anna kills her; however, the troubled circumstances of Samara’s early life endlessly recur, albeit with some differences, throughout her life with the Morgans, nearly ensuring that such early repetitive moves toward closure will not abate.

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Although Richard aims to offer the kind of paternal authority that Samara apparently did not have (we learn nothing of her birth father), Anna, if not literally dead to Samara, alternately presents as both overinvested and ultimately as the kind of depressive “dead mother” André Green speaks of. Such a mother, by her sudden withdrawal, may provoke “a premature disillusionment that carries in its wake, besides the loss of love, the loss of meaning, for the baby disposes of no explication to account” for the catastrophe,5 which can subsequently invite “a negative identification . . . with the hole left by the [mother’s] inexplicable withdrawal” (DMC, 168). Although The Ring grants the formidable difficulties of separation from the mother, especially for the daughter, the film nonetheless insists that the desire to construct the maternal/ child enclave as a bulwark against loss or as a compensation for primary losses, in fact, condemns the subject to a more profound paucity. Kristeva’s comments regarding her depressive patients resonate with respect to Anna—whose own response to Samara no doubt instances a reenactment of early separations from her own primary objects—as well as with regard to Samara and, in turn, Rachel, who identifies with the pair: “The depressive does not want to lose [her/his] object and prefers it to be ‘untouchable’. By refusing to lose it, [however, she/he] refuses to gain it in words. The object is buried, so to speak, and thus dominated by jealously guarded, unnamable affects” (IR, 23). The Ring dramatizes the pronounced dangers that such refusals to submit affect to language pose to maintaining the vitality of psychic or “interior” life. With regard to Samara, The Ring’s troubled and troubling figure, when, for instance, she explains to her hospital psychiatrist why she continues to transmit debilitating visions to Anna, the child’s response betrays an aggression that instances the kind of “new maladies of the soul” that Kristeva detects in contemporary life and that Verbinski’s film remains so adept at presenting, maladies that, again, reflect a “spectacular reduction of private [or psychic] life” (NMS, 8): Doctor: How do you come to make these pictures [thermographic imprints of messages transmitted to or burned inside of Anna]? Samara: I don’t make them. I see them and then they just are. Doctor: You love your mommy . . . You don’t want to hurt her anymore . . . Samara: But I do want to hurt her, and it won’t stop.

It remains difficult not to count Samara among those Kristeva diagnoses as suffering less from repression or inhibiting prohibitions

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than from a lack of reference points, such that the psychic apparatus has not really established itself: [Such individuals are] having difficulty representing their internal or external conflicts. If ultimately the point of the psychic apparatus is to make a camera obscura inside which these internal and external aggressions are inscribed, verbalized and symbolized, so as to defend the subject against attacks, well then, with the new patients, this defense is down. When psychic representation is in default, it takes the form of psychosomatic illnesses . . . or acting out . . . from botched actions to perverse violence. . . . What can’t be represented is abreacted in a violent act or else goes deep down inside where eventually everything selfdestructs—organs, self-awareness and life itself. (RSS, 32)

Samara’s response to doctors (who themselves, startlingly, urge a repression of her aggressive thoughts) indicates that she, in nearly psychotic fashion, can barely discern inside from outside. The thermographic visions are not so much a representation of an inside that remains in dialogue with an outside or broader social space, but more a spontaneously produced, direct transmission of a phenomenon she can locate only as emanating from outside of her. At the very least, the violent transmissions that signal her inability to defend against her own aggression are quickly disavowed by the girl, projected as relentlessly authoring her violent acting out. The shock of hearing Samara speak aloud late in the film in this hospital video recorded by her doctors before her murder serves also to remind viewers that, by contrast, a distinguishing feature of her viral videotape, made by the dead Samara and intended for future viewers, is its absolute lack of speech. The closest that viewers of this tape—including viewers of Verbinski’s film—get to this silent Samara occurs during an encounter with her killing gaze that immediately precedes the death of those infected. As much as this deathly tape counts for the film as a childlike expression on par in kind, if not in degree, with Adan’s drawings, and as much as the video provokes Rachel and Noah’s turn toward others, The Ring suggests that such “silent” expression acquires a violent force to the extent that its history remains buried, an internment that in the end aims to bypass representation in verbal (Symbolic) form. Samara’s tape constitutes a fragmented collection of affects and transmits—even performs—the violence that can arise from the refusal “to give meaning to suffering and [thus] begin the associative speech that will transform malady and death into a narrative of life, a new life” (IR, 24).

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In The Ring, Samara’s tape thus exposes in others, albeit aggressively, even as it performs, the move to repudiate Otherness. What begins with the question of what does the other want of me (the mother’s question of the child, the child’s question of the mother), the question that in part helps inaugurate and in turn sustain desire, ends, especially in Samara’s case, with an effort to arrest questions, an attempt to forestall the generative interplay between the semiotic and the Symbolic that spells a limitless, productive interrogation, one constituting not a nihilistic revolt but a perpetual challenge, a “transformative creativity” (RSS, 101). Samara’s deathly tape in part reflects a refusal to symbolize unimaginable trauma (more so the trauma of separation from the mother than that of even being murdered by her). The tape invests endlessly in replaying the primary loss at stake in Symbolic life and assumes that death—and not a Symbolic representation of death or loss—counts as the only means of addressing such trauma. Samara aims to abject onto her viewers a radically enigmatic, archaic question. But perhaps more disturbing, by endeavoring to mute the fundamental difference that initiates and inheres in psychic life, the tape would affirm as an answer to that enigmatic question a singularly monological, even totalizing, reply: namely, death or the end of questioning, even the end of representation. Still, The Ring enlists Samara’s video not only as a means of illuminating the significant repudiations of Otherness that Rachel and Noah continue to exhibit, but also as a catalyst for working against such refusals in the family and the culture. Certainly, the kind of intimate identification with strangers occasioned by the tape functions at first to set both Rachel and Noah and Anna and Richard in strong relief. In the end, though, the distinctions between both couples seem to collapse. When Richard first meets Rachel and discovers that she seeks to unearth the story of his adoptive daughter and wife, he fears that her reporting aims, in viral fashion, for what Samara seeks through videotape thermography. Setting the stage for his subsequent claim that Rachel is merely another manifestation of the terrible burning visions Samara transmitted to his wife, Richard’s early conversation with the journalist ends with his opining that “reporters force the world to experience tragedy like poison. They take one person’s tragedy and spread it like a sickness.” His words remind us that Rachel appears, at least at this early point in the film, closer to Samara in moving toward an aggressive, a-Symbolic form of embodying loss. When juxtaposed with Rachel and Noah’s response upon her rescue from the well, however, Richard’s words cannot help but denote

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just how much Rachel and Noah have absorbed the film’s lesson on the dangers of foreclosing on a fundamental difference. When Rachel speaks of her encounter with Samara’s spirit in the well, The Ring casts the newly animated couple as now closer to embracing the effort to sustain the paternal function exhibited in Richard’s early interventions with his wife and child and more generally championed in the film’s insistence on the need to figure traumatic loss in Symbolic form, and not in a deathly and literalized form. When, for example, Noah helps rescue Rachel from the well, she is moved to attempt to “give meaning to [Samara’s] suffering,” to submit affect to language. In her telling, in the effort to witness and to memorialize Samara’s death at the very site of the child’s murder, Rachel recognizes, moreover, an other scene within her own life. She comes to understand that Anna’s incomprehensible violence exists as a potential within her as well and that such a response remains, moreover, intimately bound up with an encounter with the radically incomprehensible as it emerges in other ways.6 Namely, after wondering aloud “How could she [Anna] have done that” (murder the child) since Samara “just wanted to be heard,” Rachel repeats and understands more fully what Adan’s teacher meant by suggesting that Rachel had not registered that her son expressed himself in “other ways.” As she says to Noah, “Sometimes children yell or cry or draw pictures.” The insight provokes Rachel’s rededication to being a mother. The sequence ends with Adan in the back of Noah’s car as the boy witnesses his parents joining hands in the front seat, expressing their mutual desire to recognize each other and him—the image to which he falls asleep. Just the same, the effects of Noah and Rachel’s having absorbed the cautionary lesson embodied by Richard’s paternal stance can hardly be distinguished from those produced by the couple’s earlier repudiations. The last image Rachel sees of Richard presents him orchestrating his own death. Having harnessed himself in a horse’s bridle, Richard connects himself to a television screen positioned as the ultimate receptacle for his spectacular burning, a ritualistic electrocution in a water-filled bathtub offering to his mind an escape that now seems, as he admits in his last words to Rachel, to deliver to Samara the only answer to the burning question that she never stops transmitting. If earlier Richard scorns those who think to represent trauma only by infecting others in an all too literal and aggressive way, his violent turn inward, his refusal to live and his effort to end the generation of either the story of the family trauma or creative offspring (children or horses), hardly constitutes a ringing endorsement of the efficacy of the paternal function. Despite his earlier

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warning against the viral spread of tragedy, Richard’s last actions demonstrate that in the end he adopts the very poisonous “cure”— namely repudiation—that Noah at first embraced when faced with the conundrum of transmitting to his son the infection, or his idea of the perceived weakness, of paternity. One could contain the challenge to The Ring’s broader support of the paternal function, posed by Richard’s retreat and Samara’s psychotic acting out, had the crisis extant in the Morgan plot, the Noah/Rachel/Adan plot, and within the broader social sphere not returned to plague Noah, Rachel, and Adan with greater force after the family reunites. Even if Rachel emerges from the well newly cognizant of the aggressive potential of the mother to look to the child as a means of denying the exigencies of being placed within the field of the Other, even if Rachel articulates the child’s speaking otherwise and registers the need to discern and sustain the play between drive/ affect and Symbolic expression, when Rachel returns home she learns from Adan not only that Samara (and by extension the child in general) is no ideal being incapable of murderous drives, but also that giving voice to or witnessing Samara’s traumatic experience does little to arrest the aggression that proliferates in its wake. Waking up with Adan at home and resolving to forgo work so as to spend more time with her son, Rachel is horrified to learn how ineffectual she has been over the past seven days. As Adan relates, Rachel should not have freed Samara’s spirit from its tomb. “She never stops,” he informs her, and what quickly follows is a manifestation of Samara’s renewed, apparently limitless aggression: From her deadly videotape that spontaneously reappears on the television in Noah’s apartment, Samara literally crosses through the screen, stalking and killing Noah with her gaze. This, despite his having newly embraced the role of loving father so extolled by the film. The last image that The Ring presents of Rachel and Adan is of mother and son, in the aftermath of Noah’s death, incestuously reproducing the deadly tape. Having gleaned that being spared stems not from witnessing and representing Samara’s story but from unwittingly duplicating the girl’s video during the course of research, Rachel hopes to save her son with another copy, despite his objection that such reproduction will ensure as well that another viewer will be infected, to say nothing of the continued life given to what the tape embodies: the very turn against representation. Even if the goal of embracing Otherness remains laudable for the film, the final scene suggests that the broader acceptance or availability of rituals within the social sphere appears to make such a goal quite difficult to sustain (see figure 3.1).

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Figure 3.1 Mother (Rachel) and son (Adan), incestuously bound, reproducing copies of Samara's deathly tape—a ritualistic refusal of Symbolic elaboration

“I think it has something to do with horses.” We can discern how The Ring’s indictment of the refusal of representation embodied in the figure of Samara coincides with the film’s own retrograde moves by returning to earlier scenes of technological reproduction: those depicted during the course of Rachel’s analysis of Samara’s video. Here we need to focus on The Ring’s view of Rachel’s frame-by-frame analysis, her duplication of specific, stilled scenes from the video and from other research sources linked with the tape. What emerges during these scenes is the film’s attempt to fix cinematic origins and to stake out a genealogy among the arts/technologies, moves that betray the very effort to ward off an Otherness for which The Ring indicts Samara. The Ring’s specious account of the origins of cinema and its relation to other arts/technologies is condensed in a scene in which Rachel turns to an older, more accommodating videotape facility in order to capture and print a series of stills from Samara’s video. Earlier, with Noah’s equipment, Rachel had little trouble isolating the image that beguiled her—a still of Anna’s reflection contained in a mirror, framed in medium close-up to appear almost locket-like. Another image that remained obscured by tracking problems on the tape (this image appeared caught between two frames), however, would not read on Noah’s newer machine. The assistant at the audiovisual facility assures Rachel that the more primitive, “totally analog” machine “will read to the edge of the tape,” and, in fact, the older equipment allows Rachel to print Anna’s mirror-framed reflection,

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and to stretch the edge of the successive frame of an image of drowned horses washed ashore such that a clear view emerges of an object—a lighthouse—that suddenly appears as if behind or at the edge of the frame just when a successive frame threatens to efface it. Before her efforts to capture the image overtax the equipment, Rachel prints it and the image of Anna on a series of videographic strips resembling snapshot printouts emitted from commercial photo booths. The successive video stills—photograph-like, locket-like image of Anna’s ref lection, the dead horses, and the lighthouse—succinctly set the stage for The Ring’s rehearsal of a version of cinematic origins that, similar to the one traced in American Beauty, implies that the photograph gives birth to or anchors the moving image (see figure 3.2). Verbinski here summons and relates two figures central to traditional accounts of cinematic origins. The still of the horse that recalls Eadweard Muybridge’s protocinematic studies of the frame-by-frame sequence of photographic stills of animal locomotion need only await, The Ring implies, the illumination and projection of the moving pictures, associated with the image of the lighthouse whose mobile, beam-like light, in its ability to penetrate and create a field of vision, became for Christian Metz a pivotal figure for illuminating the specificity of the cinematic apparatus.7 Repeatedly, Verbinski’s focus on the relation between frames— not only those located within Samara’s video but also those within

Figure 3.2 Captures that summon conventional cinematic genealogies: a print-out of the video captures of the locket and of a dead horse, positioned beneath a textbook photograph of a lighthouse

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the film’s wider mise-en-scène—aims to produce a specious account of cinematic origins and relations among the arts/technologies. For instance, as Rachel enters The Seattle Post’s standard audiovisual room, Verbinski’s camera tracks her in right profile as she walks from screen left to right (video in hand) behind a series of glass frames that function as a newsroom dividing wall. Visible to the left of Rachel’s profile is a series of still photographs, each framed and spotted through one of the successive glass panes of the office wall across which the camera tracks; the tracking shot in effect produces a double of a cinematic film strip. Another, earlier scene even more directly links the still photograph with the fixed point or single frame that the presumably animating motion of the film camera can not only pick up and track but also carry forward into the future. When, for example, Rachel exits the Photomat where she retrieves the last digital photos that her niece did not live to pick up, Verbinski focuses on the moving window frames of a train—that other seminal emblem of cinematic motion and industrial horse power8 —as these frames are reflected within the Photomat’s storefront window. The scene intimates, again, that the kernel of cinema is quite literally already contained within the reflection or eye, as it were, of the photograph. Verbinski’s camera begins its trek on the street outside the store, charting Rachel’s walk and the regard she pays each of the still photos in the packet. Ordered chronologically, the photos unfold the story of the teens’ arrival, and the effects of viewing Samara’s videotape, at the Shelter mountain cottage built above the well where the dead girl’s spirit was interred. As Rachel flips through them, film viewers see another elevated train, this time appearing not as a reflection in the Photomat window but directly above Rachel’s shoulder. Aligning Rachel’s walking through the street and, as it were, through the series of photos in her hand with the successive movement of the train windows references a reading of how cinematic illusion depends upon the phi-effect—the way that single still frames presented in succession and at regular intervals appear to the slower, film viewer’s eye as seamlessly connected. Such an alignment once more indicates The Ring’s persistent positing of an uninterrupted link between the photograph and the moving cinematic image it putatively spawns (see figures 3.3–3.4). American Beauty turned to self-reflexive sequences of framing to expose the violence of a cinematic effect that sought to uncritically rely on repressing the discrete difference between frames so as to forge a seamless, coherent, sequential vision of the world on screen. Mendes’s film, however, ultimately returned to such sequences in order to retreat from just such a critique. By disciplining photography, film,

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Figures 3.3–3.4 The cinema in the eye of the Photomat’s window: outside the Photomat, Rachel’s “walk” through posthumously developed photos of the infected is aligned with the passing frames of an elevated train (positioned above her)

and video, by attending less to the “intimate and incommensurable” (VT, 20) relation among them and seeking instead to establish a relation that would liberate an uninterrupted, fixed genealogy of the cinema, Mendes’s film sought to recover the notion of seamless illusion and teleological history that it elsewhere contested when framing or reflecting upon looking in/at the cinema. Although less concerned with the specific violence of the move from one frame to another, The Ring’s diagnosis of the refusal of Otherness as a central problem

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related to psychic and physical violence and trauma sits uneasily next to sequences such as those of Rachel walking and of her researching Samara’s tape, both of which reproduce the alignment and framing of arts/technologies that Mendes’s and Verbinski’s films, in the end, problematically invest. Mendes’s and Verbinski’s constructions of fictive, if persuasively “naturalized,” genealogies and relations among arts/technologies remain more than mere aesthetic concerns, for, as we have seen in American Beauty, the disciplining of arts/technologies in ways that seek to mute a fundamental difference—extant both within the putatively self-contained, self-authorizing single art and amid the relations between arts/technologies—is often subtly enacted to contain difference in realms that appear removed from the supposed rarified one of aesthetics.9 However, the challenges to establishing these seamless formal histories and relations are more considerable in Verbinski’s film than in American Beauty. To begin to measure the extent of these challenges to The Ring’s retrograde turn against Symbolic mediation, recall that the photographic remnants or, more precisely, the photograph as remnant in Lester’s dead eyes is itself galvanized at the end of Mendes’s film, where a flashback of the series of images that passed before the dying Lester’s eyes endeavors to memorialize his transformative psychic reanimation at last sight. But the very terms of this memoriam would instantiate a deadening refusal of difference, for, at the same time, the flashback sequence aims to underwrite the film’s reading of first, formal sights, to fix the photo as an absolute origin, and in turn to claim a mobile gaze as distinctly cinematic. Such a gaze not only supposedly reanimates the photograph but also seeks to liberate a finalizing account of the past and future of the arts. In this rendering, the difference represented by both the old (photography) and the new (video) can be thoroughly absorbed and contained by a triumphant, monolithically conceived notion of cinema. Mendes’s film looks to such an account to supplement a broader move against a fundamental difference in the father/son relation and more broadly in relations between men. The Ring likewise brings its fallacious account of cinematic origins and a concomitant alignment of photography, cinema, and video to scenes of the parent/child relation. In Verbinski’s film, the lighthouse, associated with the mother Anna and conventionally linked with cinematic projection and sequential movement, like the protocinematic amusement park ride that appears at the end of American Beauty, similarly reflects the impulse to effect and claim for cinematic

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movement the individuating, smooth-circling skirting of the discrete difference between frames. Yet in Verbinski such a formal narrative remains more difficult to sustain. For instance, after Rachel concludes her preliminary research of the tape, a still photo of Anna is once again paired with the emblem of the putatively animating cinema, but the relay between the photograph and the cinema appears stalled. As she flips through a scrapbook trying to fathom Anna’s psychic collapse, Rachel turns from a photocopied snapshot of that emblem, the lighthouse, to consider a new photo of Anna’s face. Rachel’s remarks help underscore how the particular menace to Anna’s psychic life (and to psychic life in general) gets registered in The Ring as a threat to film’s narrative life, to the inheritance the film claims from its photographic predecessor and works to carry into the future: “You could almost draw a line through her [Anna’s] life. On one side there’s this happy woman . . . riding horses. . . . Her face—there’s light; there’s pride. And then one day. . . . she takes this hard corner and the light goes out.” The Ring argues that a turn against difference in the parent/child relation accounts for Anna’s eclipse, and the film signals this eclipse here at the level of representation, embodying Anna’s diminishment in the failed relay between photography and cinema. However, at the same time, by conventionally casting the narrative line that filmic movement presumably establishes as dependent on the putatively direct, unbroken lineage that photography passes on to a cinematic heir, Verbinski’s film maintains that granting a difference within a genealogy of the arts/technologies, between predecessor and heir, in fact, threatens to extinguish an informing or vitalizing cinematic light, a decidedly different response to the generative power of difference Verbinski’s film elsewhere extols. Attending to direct and indirect references summoned by Rachel’s further premonition about Anna’s sudden collapse—“I think it has something to do with horses,” she tells Noah—demonstrates Verbinski’s considerably more pressured efforts at constructing such formal histories as defenses against a fundamental difference in psychic and social life. On the one hand, both Mendes’s and Verbinski’s films look to the photograph, as did early cinema, as reputed evidence for cinema’s inherited ability to uncover disguised identities. American Beauty cited the photograph as a forerunner of its own supposed skill at revealing what Ricky’s digital video itself aims for and also, albeit less effectively according to Mendes, yields access to: a whole life behind things. As Rachel’s above remarks and the audiovisual research sequences demonstrate, references to the horse in The Ring are often grouped with the still photograph and with

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the “cinematic” lighthouse; these references to an animal whose life was suspended and animated in Muybridge’s photographic motion studies are in Verbinski also associated with video. Together, both the photograph and video in The Ring seem privileged, able to reveal what remains in between or at the edge of things. Yet the particular role that The Ring reserves for video becomes apparent when we consider that the assistant who offered Rachel the more primitive, “totally analog” equipment enabling access to the lighthouse image on Samara’s tape also dubbed the machine an “old warhorse.” The assistant’s words not only claim the analog video equipment as more able than its digital counterpart to read murky visual clues but also link the more primitive video machine with the horse or figure of photographic (protocinematic) locomotion, similarly marked as analog or indexical. Consider, too, that while the digital photos Rachel flips through as she walks beneath the moving train disclose the deathly effects of Katie and her friends having viewed Samara’s video—each of the teen’s faces appears as a stain or blur as if already fading from view—these images await the “warhorse” of analog video technology to distend the videotaped source and thus trace the cause of such blighted visages. American Beauty is less anxious about its ability to keep the digital in line than is The Ring. In Verbinski’s film the digital clearly points to a more serious threat to conventional cinema and in turn discloses the film’s particular strategies for attempting to arrest the play of Otherness. When video is aligned with the photograph in The Ring, both are decidedly marked as analog and together pitted against not only digital video but also the digital photograph, more broadly against the very idea of the digital. One could go so far as to say that analog video in The Ring nearly assumes the anchoring, originary place that the indexical photograph was called on to assume in American Beauty. In Verbinski’s film the threat that arises at the site of the digital appears to necessitate backdating video’s emergence—that is, moving video’s “discovery” closer in a historical line to the place photography presumably occupies in conventional accounts of its birth. Although in 2002, the date of The Ring’s theatrical release, DVD had nearly replaced video as the preferred home-viewing format for the afterlife of first-run films (digital film and projection had already entered the Cineplex), the aging or distressing of the video sequences in Verbinski’s film is nonetheless extreme, suggesting its overdetermined role in the film’s narrative representation of the relations between the arts/technologies. Samara’s video is not merely rendered as grainy black and

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white stock embedded “within” a color film and made to evoke the style of 1930s surrealist film experiments of Salvador Dali and Luis Buñuel, but images of figures contained within the tape—especially of Anna, whose death is given at 1978—appear to arrive from another century entirely. Even more than Anna’s appearance in the locket-like form that recalls the early vogue of photographic mementos, the long dresses and hairstyle she dons in film sequences culling images (which themselves repeat and echo Samara’s videotape images) from newspaper archives of her horse riding and her fundraising efforts to refurbish the Moesko Island lighthouse signify something beyond conservative aristocratic style and its relish of the timeless or bygone: namely, the image of the very Victorian “angel in the house” that Virginia Woolf’s “journey” to the lighthouse, as it were, sought to exorcize.10 These sequences imply that video nearly supplants photography’s presumed ability to uncover the evidence that film will in turn claim also allows it to access and render the hidden as visible, to present it as verifiable reality. Such sequences, moreover, indicate that The Ring is at pains to assert that video remains uniquely poised to unearth not simply the hidden but also the long buried—especially when it appears within the archive of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century origins of cinema. More to the point, video seems placed nearly at the start, or even before, or at least at the very birth of the photograph. It is in The Ring’s further rereading of video’s relation to the power conventionally reserved for the photograph that we can appreciate the density and the stakes of Verbinski’s imagining and privileging of analog forms, as against digital video, digital photography, and even analog photography, as we shall see. On the one hand, the sign of exposure to Samara’s video—the distorted, fading faces that appear in Katie’s digital photos—evokes Walter Benjamin’s well-known work on photography, specifically the notion of the “optical unconscious,” the idea, in part, that “a different nature opens itself to the camera than opens to the naked eye—if only because an unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for the space consciously explored by man.”11 But, as Marianne Hirsch reminds us, Benjamin’s ultimate concern is not merely with the camera’s ability to capture that which the slowness of the unaided eye may not detect, but rather with the camera’s analogous psychoanalytic work: For Benjamin, “the camera can reveal what we see without realizing that we do, just as psychoanalysis [through ‘technique’] can uncover what we know without knowing that we do: what is stored in the unconscious.”12 Although Benjamin famously feared the mimetic impulses of photography or, more broadly, photorealism, as destructive of the distinguishing “aura” of authentic art,

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for Hirsch, such “technical advances. . . . at least hint at the invisible behind and inside the transparently visible, not just the unseen but that which is unavailable to sight” (FF, 119; emphasis added). Such hints, Hirsch argues, bespeak “a profound inability to represent” and thus paradoxically constitute a bulwark against claims for the direct, final yield that increasingly refined visual technologies, whose eyes may remain obsessively trained on an uncomplicated notion of the mimetic, aim to produce. And yet, within the context of the video/photo relation that The Ring would stage, it matters that the film only grants photography the startling power to capture “what we know without knowing that we do,” what Benjamin saw as particular, though not exclusive, to traditional photography, after a subject’s exposure to Samara’s video. In other words, The Ring implies that if one were not exposed to the video that transmits a particular traumatic history with the force of an infectious shock—one that occasions the individual’s quite imminent fading—either the subject would bear no trace whatsoever of fading, imminent or otherwise, to say nothing of bearing the trace of an unconscious; that is, the ability to record what appears as invisible to the unaided eye, let alone what is resolutely unavailable to sight, remains beyond the power of the photograph, whether analog or digital. Indeed, photography’s indirect witness to the subject’s traumatic encounter with a video (itself comprised of traumatic affects) stands in contrast to forms of representation—especially drawing—that The Ring deems more capable than photography of (if not directly infecting others as can video) helping more clearly parse Samara’s video message. For The Ring, drawing, unlike photography, does not merely reveal that someone has screened Samara’s video, it does not simply wait to register the effects of video’s powerful imprint on the unconscious. Drawing becomes, moreover, a direct conduit for Samara, a form in which characters such as Adan—even before he has been infected by the videotape—will take her dictation. But while Hirsch and others conventionally link Muybridge’s motion studies of horses with photography, The Ring unwittingly serves to delineate that, as Amy Lawrence has recently emphasized (and as Constance Penley did before her), Muybridge’s protocinematic photos were, in fact, drawings. Film scholars, argues Lawrence, often erroneously trace an “unmediated line from Muybridge’s analytic photography to motion pictures” by “assum[ing] that ‘moving pictures’ mean moving photographs.”13 Instead, the zoopraxiscope that Muybridge employed in his motion studies relies on photographs only “at a (crucial) remove. [The device] uses—animates—drawings

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based on photographs.” For Lawrence, this “tracing of live-action images” amounts to the animation of drawings and should more precisely be described as “rotoscoping,” a process employed “to ensure the ‘life-like’ movement of animated drawings” (CM, 19).14 Indeed, in the scene in which Rachel looks to the horses for clues as to the cause of Anna’s sudden eclipse—a condition I have suggested the film registers as a threat to cinema’s ability to sustain the uninterrupted relay between the photo and the moving pictures or cinema—extinguished light gets figured as an interrupted, drawn line. The emphasis on drawing in The Ring is quite pronounced. In the cluster that includes the photo of Anna and the lighthouse, the film actually links the photo of the horse with drawing to amplify the significance of a form it deems, in the scene that immediately precedes this one, especially adept at marking a commitment to moving beyond the confines of the self to embrace a generative Otherness. That scene, recall, is the privileged one in which Rachel and Noah’s renewed commitment to being parents is signified by Adan’s drawing, at his father’s request, a picture to present to Rachel as she prepares to journey to the lighthouse in order to solve the tape’s mystery and save her family’s life. Yet another scene of technological reproduction can finally indicate that The Ring’s patent investment in drawing and the film’s increasing alignment of drawing with video as against conventional and digital photography in order ultimately to claim a direct inheritance for the cinema respond to a much broader, more extensive shock than that posed by the appearance of the photograph. Consider first that the scene in which Rachel photocopies the very archival news photos and stories from the Seattle Post that prompt her to suspect that the horses will unlock the mystery of Anna’s demise itself foregrounds the cinematic process. A series of cuts and dissolves—made to coincide with the photocopying of photos and stories, such that one image effaces another—suggests the work of cinematic suturing. As Rachel begins photocopying, the camera focuses on her staring at the reproductions and circling the newspaper photo of Anna staring at the dead horses on shore. While concentrating on Rachel’s face as she intently reads through clippings detailing Anna’s breakdown and suicide, Verbinski intermittently cuts to close-ups of Rachel’s drawing hand, which has been moving unbeknownst to her. When Rachel finally notices its frenzied movement, she and viewers see that her hand has nearly effaced another image—the locket-like photo of Anna earlier captured and printed from Samara’s video. This particular form of near effacement summons not only those scratched-out photos of faces

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from magazines that Rachel spots in her niece’s scrapbook, but also the blotted out faces of the dead teen’s digital photos. Although the frenzied, unknowing drawing or writing over the image of Anna, a gesture that recalls the form and frenzy Samara’s dictation assumes at Adan’s hand, may signify the girl’s role in her mother’s death, and although we might read this near effacement of the photographic image as a literal mark of the triumph of drawing over photography, we need to consider, more precisely, that the same gesture that almost effaces Anna’s image also reveals a Samara-like figure: the jagged pen marks scrawled over the photo of Anna’s face resemble the strewn hair that repeatedly appears on and obscures Samara’s video visage. Instead of scraping and revealing something behind the image surface, Rachel’s guided, automatic writing or drawing reveals something else—not what remains beneath the photograph per se but something on its surface, visible within its contours. This form of writing or drawing that conflates the obscured and the revealed, the inside and the outside, that overwrites but in the process also discloses the trace of something extant but previously unregistered constitutes an implicit and explicit motif in The Ring. This pattern betokens what Lippit, following Michel Frizot, characterizes as a broader twentieth-century “epistemology of the inside” (PS, 37) and also relates to what helped produce this episteme: the Enlightenment drive to encounter the “interior as interiority” (PS, 33). This form of writing in The Ring gestures, more specifically, to the work of the X-ray, what for Lippit appears to be, if not the culminating “figure” of such an Enlightenment drive, then the means by which this drive paradoxically becomes checked in the afterglow of a technology/art that punctures the very confidence that a direct encounter with the visible could produce a stability and direct mastery for the subject. It is not only at the scene of Rachel’s unwitting drawing on Anna’s photo that The Ring evokes the phenomenon of the X-ray, pointing to its power to “simultaneously expose the inside and outside of a thing, to retain the object’s surface even while probing its depths” (PS, 39). The circling marks that begin Rachel’s drawing on images of Anna (the first of which depicts her placement amid the dead horses) echoes a more direct reference to the X-ray, one heard at the start of The Ring when Becka relays to her friend Katie that those who have screened Samara’s tape will “see the ring” “before [they] die.” (This ultimate “ring” is an image of an ecliptic, outlined circle, produced when a stone cover, effectively interring the dying Samara at the bottom of a well, blocks all but the edges of the sun.) Becka brings up the video

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and the warning in response to Katie’s anxiety that the magnetic ray emissions from televisions and telephones invade our bodies, destabilizing the “molecules in our heads.” Becka’s mention of the video, though, is prompted by Katie’s specific reference to “electro rays,” the form of radiation delivered by the X-ray. And, indeed, the power Becka attributes to the video recalls the tremendous invisible seeing that Wilhelm Rontgen’s discovery of the X-ray disclosed: invisible electromagnetic rays of “a shorter wavelength (and thus a higher frequency) than visible light, which allowed it to penetrate and illuminate solid matter” (PS, 35). Not only does the video with its electro-ray effect directly penetrate and transcribe an unconscious emanation (“like somebody’s nightmare,” says Becka), but also Samara, like an invisible electromagnetic ray herself, silently traverses borders from a distance and passes through solid objects: As Becka warns, “She sees you through the screen . . . knows that you’ve watched it” and phones with a message that “you will die in seven days.” The image of Rachel’s circling hand that evokes the curse uttered at the start of The Ring also calls forth an image beyond the film that echoes within it and indicates the kind of interiority at stake in the film. The image of the “ring,” the sign that the death-dealing blow caused by screening the video is imminent, was, in its manifestation as a piece of jewelry, also an early, widely circulated visible sign of the X-ray’s ominous power. Like the strands of hair generated on the surface of Anna’s photograph, the ring, one of the first photographic images of the X-ray that Rontgen published, remains visible in the X-ray as something that resists the easy division of interior and exterior. Rontgen’s published image was of his wife Berthe’s hand, replete with a wedding ring “that hovers on the surface, lacerating it from the outside” (PS, 35). The “trace of exteriority that Berthe’s ring imposes on the interior dimension revealed the uncanny nature of the new medium” and conveyed, moreover, to Berthe and to readers a “vague premonition of death” (PS, 35). Just as important, as Lisa Cartwright relates, “the image of women’s interiority [here of the woman’s hand] gained enormous popularity [in 1895], becoming an icon of female sexuality and death” (cited in PS, 35). But The Ring does not only rely on references to drawing and video as forms that evoke or produce X-ray-like effects that are, moreover, similarly directed in Verbinski’s film predominantly toward the interior of a woman’s body, ultimately of the mother’s body. The visions that Samara is said by Anna to have “burned inside of” her are literalized in the film as images directly recalling photographic X-rays in a scene made to parallel that of Rachel’s research work at

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stilling, capturing, and printing the photographic, locket-like image of Anna and the image of the (cinematic) lighthouse at the video lab. When, for instance, Noah breaks into the archives of the Eola Psychiatric Institute and opens Samara’s medical file, the sight of the X-ray-like photographs that fall from her records induces a nosebleed, the same reaction that Rachel experienced when stilling the video images of Anna and the lighthouse in the lab. These physical symptoms, too, point to the X-ray, recalling the “pathogenic” effects eventually understood to be caused by radiation exposure; they join other evocations of the X-ray’s “destructive capacities” itemized by Lippit (PS, 36), symptoms produced in Verbinski’s film when characters merely look at either the X-ray-like medical photos or the photos and video images related to Samara and her family history: physical burns (on Rachel’s and Adan’s arms), nausea (Rachel’s dream of vomiting the electrodes used during the medical videotaping and treatment of Samara), the loss of nails (the images of punctured nails and fingers in Samara’s video), the “scaling of the skin” (the condition of the skin of the dead alive Samara as she emerges from the well and from Noah’s television screen). If The Ring may be said to recapitulate the Enlightenment drive to experience the “interior as interiority,” the film also betrays what Lippit has shown the X-ray’s appearance at the end of the nineteenth century constituted: a challenge to the Enlightenment’s totalizing project of ensuring a “master” observer safely preserved as “disinterested” outsider. The confounding of inside and outside, and the fear of such, throughout the sequences we have examined, far from extending the range of a powerful gaze and capitalizing the investment in vision and the verifiable, come to jeopardize, as the X-ray did, the exalted place of the spectator by means of a light that not only did not yield a final, fixed, or transparent essence but also threatened to dissolve or destroy everything in its wake. The allegedly assuring notion of vision and the stable subject it might in turn reflect was challenged by the loss of a limit: “For the x-ray, with its simultaneous view of the inside and outside, turned the vantage of the spectatorsubject inside-out” and “forced” the subject “to concede the limits of the body, erasing the limit against which it claimed to be outside” (PS, 34). The X-ray’s penetration of the surface, far from advancing the Enlightenment dream of illuminating and securing a ground for affirming a rational stable subject, threatened to “envelop the subject in a searing light” (PS, 34). The subject finds itself, amid the afterglow of the X-ray, a part of the “spectacle,” but such a condition produced, paradoxically, “a blindness” (PS, 34). Rontgen’s X-rays “clearly

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established the inadequacy of human sense perception and raised fundamental questions about the nature of matter itself.”15 Lisa Cartwright’s work helps extend Lippit’s documenting of the X-ray’s unsettling of Enlightenment notions of vision and of a stable relation between observer and observed, inside and outside. The critical histories Lippit and Cartwright present intersect and resonate in a scene from The Ring where the medical imaging technologies deployed to display the interior of bodies and objects stymie efforts to sound the transparency and depth that might reproduce an illumined subject, impervious to a profound difference. The scene occurs late in the film when Rachel stealthily enters Richard’s house and discovers records of Samara’s birth, adoption, and stay at the psychiatric institute. Rachel finds and screens a videotape documenting medical surveillance of, and a therapeutic session with, the girl. During one session, film viewers hear the psychiatrist’s questions and comments, just as his hands, visible at the edge of the frame, flip through the X-ray-like images in Samara’s file. These images, which Samara is said to have “burned inside of” others, are in turn produced thermographically (through a process that measures heat emissions from objects and bodies) and depict a rocking horse on water, a buried doll punctured with nails and syringes, a tree and its shadow, and a small and large toy dinosaur placed side by side with a toy jack resting between them. During the interview, Samara, seated on a chair, occupies center frame, though she appears, in medium long shot, some distance from the doctor seated behind his desk, while a live feed and simultaneous recording of her responses to his questions appear on a small video monitor on the doctor’s desk at screen right, functioning for film viewers as a close-up of the girl. The thermographic photographs are not reproductions of Samara’s body but rather remnants of images burned inside the bodies of others; the X-ray-like photos depict mental images that Samara reports come to her and that she compulsively transmits to others, foremost Anna. The psychiatrist turns to these documents to help diagnose Samara’s illness. Although the doctor assumes that Samara’s claim to their spontaneous generation remains a puzzling evasion or a delusion to be diagnosed, in and of themselves the flat, shadowy outlines of the inside and outside of objects that the medical images deliver remain perplexing. These function, as X-rays do, “to simultaneously evok[e] and complicat[e] the metaphysics of topology in which the exterior signifies deceptive surfaces and appearances, while the interior situates truths and essences” (PS, 39). If these medical documents (including that of the buried doll) can be read as archival

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material—and, as Lippit suggests, “the x-ray image . . . at once buried and revealed, invok[es] the archaeological” (PS, 39)—they nonetheless frustrate the promise that excavation presumably will uncover a stable object whose origin and identity can be disclosed. As “living remnants” or “phantoms” (PS, 39), X-rays instead uncannily check the promise of a transparent, fixed find or yield. Other forms of inscribing interior processes of the body that produced something akin to the remnants delivered by the X-ray include radiography, as practiced within the laboratory culture of nineteenthcentury physiology. For Cartwright, the work of the Scottish doctor John Macintyre offered a representative instance of the kind of flat, shadowy outlines generated by the X-ray and the thermographic remnants of Samara’s transmissions. Macintyre’s work, though, indicated that this “graphic” quality of radiography was exhibited not only in other experimental techniques such as kymography and microscopy, with which radiography was often used in concert, but also in a cinematography putatively exclusively concerned, in conventional histories of the popular medium, with pictorial likeness and depth. In 1897, Macintyre “took a rapid succession of X-ray photographs of the movement of a frog’s leg, rephotographed this series onto a strip of motion picture film and loop-projected this film on a cinematograph” (STB, 20). Although this image of a joint in the frog’s leg was made to move, those who saw the “film” in the lab and at the Ladies’ Night at the Glasgow Philosophical Society encountered a moving radiographic image rendered as a “flat, schematic, and linear silhouette. . . . closer to a kymographic trace than to a photograph” (STB, 22). We might better describe this work “not [as] a moving picture” (STB, 23), but as a “graphic register of change over time” (STB, 22). This turn to the graphic, even if indicating that “the augmentation of sight, and imaging as such, may not have been the central agendas in modernist science’s optical invasion of the body’s interior space” (STB, 23), nonetheless challenges Enlightenment confidence by instancing “an antivisual and graphic tendency in medical imaging” (24; emphasis added), for, in the drive to “render visible parts of the living body . . . previously considered too interiorized, too minute, or too private to be seen by the researcher’s unaided eye. . . . cinematography supplanted or replaced [and thereby underscored the insufficiency of] sensory perception” (STB, 23; emphasis added). In The Ring’s examination scene, though, X-rays are not the only “graphic” artifacts summoned to challenge the exclusive confidence in sensory perception. Doctors attach electrodes to Samara’s wrist and ankle, and while the film does not specify whether these devices

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monitor bioelectrical impulses or other physiological shifts, the form of data produced even more decidedly marks the turn toward “graphic inscription as a means of recording interior processes” (STB, 24). This form of data, in addition, indicates significantly that the turn toward the antivisual still aims to recover from the X-ray’s blow to the Enlightenment drive toward visual mastery of the interior. The Ring strikingly echoes one such representative shift toward graphic inscription (the antivisual) that Cartwright describes but significantly does so in an apparent refusal of its own increasingly retrograde turns against Otherness: namely, the film challenges the kind of sensory recovery sought through the graphic artifact. If, as Rachel surmised, the search for the origin of the infection caused by Samara’s video has to do with horses, then the representative experiment Cartwright recounts has the advantage of reminding us that there was more than one approach to examining the animal that figures so prominently in accounts of cinematic origins. Cartwright highlights the scientific research of Etienne-Jules Marey and J. B. A. Chauveau, conducted to measure not the visible external, anatomical serial motion of the horse, the focus of Muybridge’s studies of animal locomotion, but instead to collect “detailed physiological information—data regarding function, process, and movement of the heart [of a horse] during life” (STB, 24). Marey and Chauveau’s experiment proceeded by placing “air-filled ampules into the chambers of the horse’s beating heart” (STB, 24). The ampules (via tubing) were then connected to a “kymograph, which registered a cardiographic trace of pressure changes in each chamber. This linear record of the movement of each chamber was inscribed by a stylus onto a roll of graphite-coated paper mounted onto a slowly rotating cylinder” (STB, 24). The experiment “mark[ed] a dual shift in [physiological] methodology: a shift toward movement as a characteristic state of the body, and . . . toward graphic inscription as a means of recording interior processes” (STB, 24). Equally important, Marey and Chauveau’s horse’s heart experiment directly implants technology within the body not only to measure and record, but here “technology and the life form it interrogated were made into a[n] . . . interdependent system” (STB, 24–26). By deploying a device (the kymograph) that can be powered by the very object (the horse’s body) it was designed to measure, “kymographic inscription reconfigured the conception of the living body from within, rendering it an ordered living system . . . best represented by graphical, temporal forms like the calibrated kymographic line or the incremental cinematic image, for example” (STB, 26).

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At the same time, however, the turn toward “graphic” indices announces, even as it attempts to compensate for, losses of Enlightenment confidence in the senses, especially sight. Marey and Chauveau’s experiment cannot help but contest the scientist’s investment in sight and in sense data, since the “ ‘observed’ is not the phenomenon but an encoded inscription of an activity functioning beyond sensory thresholds, or an activity whose life can be measured only against its physiological condition of death” (STB, 27). The graphic digitally “encoded image” points to a lost referent and aims to “fil[l] the vacuum in signification produced by the failure of sensory observation” (STB, 27). To be sure, the psychiatrists who examine Samara may look beyond the physiological to diagnose her illness, yet the physiological data and the forms of imaging in her examination scene take their place among other “noninvasive diagnostic imaging techniques,” from echocardiography and endoscopy to “ultrasound technologies” that, like MRI and PET scanning, are being increasingly used today to study and diagnose mental illness, often in remarkably reductive ways.16 These forms of medical imaging, Cartwright shows, find precedent in Marey’s techniques and in their “paradoxical” turn to “antivisual” forms of inscription. Moreover, although the symbiotic system employed in the Marey/Chauveau experiment finds expression in The Ring’s examination scene, importantly the scene functions explicitly to mark the failure of an “enlightened” turn, as it were, to graphic signification as a compensatory supplement to “the failure of sensory observation.” Such a turn, the examination scene makes clear, does not offer a means of remastering the resistantly enigmatic and avisual status of the body’s interior. When, for instance, doctors attach electrodes to Samara, touching her body interrupts the visual field, a sign of the perplexing body she presents for diagnosis. The video monitor used to record the psychiatric session exhibits an excess static that registers as a break in the recorded diagnostic image. The measuring electrodes are also affixed to a Samara who sits so close to an electrical receptacle that she seems plugged into the outlet. Samara’s body, then, not only appears capable of emitting an electrical magnetic field that would power, like the horse, the kind of scientific measuring instruments deployed in the Marey/Chauveau horse heart experiment, but she herself appears as a device, a conductor of some invisible current. More to the point, whether hooked up to and powering the apparatus, or understood as an apparatus in its own right, Samara’s body yields graphic indices that not only mark the shift away from the pictorial and indicate the

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failure of sense observations to yield transparent knowledge of the body’s interior but also render precarious a compensatory investment in such graphic data. These excess static breaks, graphic marks, or scratches on the surface of the image recall the very tracking problems that emerged on Samara’s video. But they also appear as breaks within the wider visual field of Verbinski’s film, even when it is not replaying Samara’s video or offering “film” images that summon or quote those on her tape. In retrospect, these static breaks conflate Samara’s deadly video with Verbinski’s entire film. Placing the spectacular ritualistic suicide of Richard Morgan, another scene in which a body appears to power an apparatus and to offer an inscription for a receiving screen, within the broader turn and response to the X-ray and the graphic sounding of interior space is to comprehend, too, how Verbinski on one level refuses to look to compensatory spectacles to try to supplement the “failure of sensory observation” posed by the graphic (the avisual). Cartwright reads the famous Edison Manufacturing film Electrocuting an Elephant (1903), a document of the public execution of a Coney Island elephant, Topsy—“accused” of killing her handlers—not only for the way that “physiology and its drive to regulate life and death had become a part of public culture by the turn of the century” (STB, 18), but also for the specific, laboratory-like participatory pleasures that amusement park and film spectators sought in “conducting visual analysis and thereby vicariously exerting control over a living being’s life and death” (STB, 17). What for us remains most germane among the complex issues that Topsy’s execution raises (such as its relation to the colonial enterprise) is how the “popular cultural ritual” cannot be removed from the rituals of repeated viewing in the “cinematic study of living beings,” namely the studies conducted in the physiological experiments we have reviewed. Indeed, Electrocuting an Elephant represents the enactment of “a fantasy of . . . corporal punishment through observation—an exercise of disciplinary authority through sight that is no longer viable [as the Marey/Chauveau and Macintyre experiments demonstrate] by the turn of the century” (STB, 46; emphasis added). Richard Morgan’s ritualistic electrocution, his taking on the reigns of the horse and presenting his immolation as an address to the television screen, signifies, as I have argued, his violent turn inward and away from any cycle of generation; this turn, more broadly, challenges the efficacy of sustaining the paternal function. But situated within the historical context Cartwright provides, Richard’s actions mark more clearly how The Ring also refuses to look to the

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spectacular animal scientific sacrifice for any compensatory relief from the graphic challenge to sensory observation that emerges in the physiological cinematic study of the human interior. The Ring returns that turn-of-the-century fantasy to its precarious “source,” the human body, and offers Richard as an electric(uted) horseman who can only ritually signify the failure of spectacular sight, its inability to grant anything like authoritative mastery for the subject. Such fantasies of mastery, of course, in their moves toward closure and finality precisely work to occlude the fundamental Otherness that both displaces the subject from itself and sustains the generative vitality of psychic life. The scene of Richard’s electrocution indicates, therefore, that neither the animal as proxy for the human nor the human sacrificing itself in ritualistic performance as an animal can regenerate the observed or recorded sight as the vehicle for recovering what was lost via an encounter with charting the interior of the body. And so even if the scene of Richard’s electrocution underlines the crisis in the paternal function, The Ring—in this instance at least—seems not to take refuge in forms of closure and repudiation of the enigmatic as a retrograde defense against the difficulty in sustaining that function. Richard’s anti-spectacular end as an electrocuted horseman, the emblem of animal locomotion so central to The Ring’s and to historical accounts of cinematic origins, together with the scene in which Samara’s body confounds transparent readings of graphic indices of interior states, consequently, underscores the film’s turn from finding in fevered drawing or sketching (as graphic forms of signification) a means of overcoming the broader failure of sensory observation to yield an individuating mastery. As such, The Ring’s earlier efforts at aligning drawing with video as against both digital and analog photography as forms that can cede or pass on to film exclusive access to representing the hidden and verifiable between, at the edge of, or behind things appear, in turn, submitted to a significant challenge. To envision such an inheritance, the film seems now forced to concede, is to attempt to find in a genealogical line of the arts/technologies what Noah first sought in refusing a paternal line: an inviolability designed to defend against the psychic motility that the paternal function seeks to sustain. That The Ring first turned to drawing in order to bypass digital and analog photography can be taken to register the broader shock that the X-ray presented to understandings of what the so-called indexical arts that preceded it were themselves capable of delivering. It is not just that the X-ray constitutes a distinctive, particularly effective

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emblem for challenging Enlightenment drives toward transparency and mastery: as Lippit notes, the X-ray promises or offers a “semblance of total penetration and absolute lucidity” but nonetheless “require[s] a form of mediation” (PS, 40). But for Lippit, the X-ray also throws into relief how arts/technologies that predate its appearance never really offered the ability to short-circuit difference or preclude the need to read in the first place. Just as The Ring comes to grant that drawing cannot serve as some older, more originary means of bypassing difference, for those who, in searching for first arts, think only as far back as the analog photograph and today increasingly romanticize its presence-producing capacities in the wake of the digital, Lippit can help explain why The Ring had good reason to suspect analog photograph’s inadequacy as a source for generating a fixed and fixing origin in the first place. The “rhetorical tension between nature (the signifier of the real) and the photographic referent” (PS, 40), extant even in the early discourse surrounding photography’s emergence, was “unresolvable” (PS, 40). Even associating photography with drawing could not offer an indexical hand or, more precisely, could not proffer the indexical as the hand that could erase the trace of writing and difference that attends the photographic event. From William Henry Fox Talbot’s conception of photography as “the pencil of nature” and its practice as “photogenic drawing” to François Dagognet’s understanding of Etienne-Jules Marey’s “project” as a “biogrammatology” (PS, 40), the discourse of photography from the outset “blend[s] [the] scientific and aesthetic terminology” that in effect underscores photography’s status as a form of writing, understood here in the Derridean sense as producing that which would disrupt the subject’s effort to establish an art or itself in an other art as a transparent, reproducible presence. But the appearance of the X-ray helps us mark not only the mimetic desires of photography but also its “drives” to make the “invisible visible,” and to do so in such a way as to inaugurate something of an absolute origin: “something that had no empirical precedent. Something never before seen” (AL, 93). And yet the X-ray, in “fusing” itself to photography (X-rays were printed in formats that evoke the photograph), again generated a product that frustrates the desire for a stable, visible origin: “an image of the human body as other, irreducibly foreign, and in its photographic materiality, invisible. Tearing through the opaque materiality of bodies, X-rays transformed photography from an exercise in realism—the production of indexical images—into an allegory of avisuality” (AL, 93; emphasis added).

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Burning Correspondences If the failure of investing in drawing (as against photography) or of tethering drawing to the warhorse of analog video—in order to supplement and thus try to reclaim for film a presumed, exclusive access to representing the hidden, verifiable, fixing essence between or behind things—undermines The Ring’s efforts to consolidate its moves against Otherness, Verbinski’s film nevertheless continues to aim for the closure it struggles to achieve or that it elsewhere critiques. We can glean the terms for such a renewed retrograde effort by considering what literally remains behind the horse, the figure Rachel believes will yield an explanation for the eclipse of Anna’s internal light, the selfsame figure around which film history and Verbinski repeatedly circle. In a scene that quickly follows Richard’s suicide, Rachel and Noah, using the drawing Samara dictated to Adan, locate and break into the Morgan barn. The couple discovers the makeshift room where Richard placed Samara during Anna’s breakdown. Amid a space filled with objects, toys, and furniture that recall images from either Samara’s video or the X-ray-like stills of her thermographic transmissions, Noah notices a bloody gap under the wallpaper—itself decorated with patterns of horse’s heads. The couple removes the paper to reveal the figure of a red maple tree, the same image that appeared in Samara’s video and in one of her projected thermographic prints. The film privileges Rachel’s nuancing of Noah’s reading of the tree’s form and the means by which it was authored. When he declares the figure to be “etched into the wood,” Rachel raises her arm to match the mark that earlier appeared to be the emblazoned handprint left by Samara during a dream visitation but that now more clearly corresponds with a tree branch that Rachel insists has been likewise “burned” onto the wood behind the horse-patterned wallpaper. When she remarks that she’s “seen this tree before” and Noah confirms its appearance in Samara’s video, Rachel corrects him, revealing that she’s “been there before.” The tape of the tree and the tree correspond—the tree itself appeared at Shelter Mountain, where Rachel first screened it on video. The distinction given to Rachel matters to the film and summons a network of burning correspondences, each of which signals that if The Ring turns from casting drawing or photography as a predecessor that can bequeath to video and ultimately to film the inheritance for sounding the depths of a verifiable, static interior space, then it is because Verbinski’s film relies on presumably surer means in the wake

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of arts that the X-ray exposed as insufficient for such soundings. The figure of the maple tree burned into the wood behind the wallpaper images of the (protocinematic) horses is associated with a luminous, irradiating form of burning. Rachel recounts that during her first screening of the tape “the sun came through the leaves . . . lit them up like it was on fire.” The videotape itself, we are made to understand, is the product of transmissions that likewise burn through matter. The film’s production notes suggest as much: “Clues to those terrible events [the Morgan family history] are buried in the haunting images burned into the mysterious videotape” (emphasis added). When Rachel first brings the tape to Noah to track down its origin, his remarks, moreover, emphasize the video’s unknown and untraceable source. Because the “screwed-up control counter” or garbled numbers on the tape are missing, it is impossible to tell where the tape came from. As Noah says, “The makeup of the tracks is like a signature for whatever did the recording, like a camcorder, VCR . . . so the control track can tell . . . where it came from. To not have one is like being born without fingerprints.” The remotely, spontaneously generated, signature-less tape seems to bypass not only a medium-specific art or technology but also the mediation associated with a still or moving camera, a mediation that constitutes a signature, a form of writing that challenges, via a trace of difference, any discourse enthralled with the notion of producing a self-contained, self-authorizing presence. When Noah and Rachel return to inspect the tape, freeze framing the image of Anna combing her hair in the locket-like mirror, Noah remarks that the straight-on angle of vision should reveal a camera’s reflection in the mirror, but none appears, suggesting that the tape originates via a remote branding, an untouched touching of the magnetic video surface. This claim to the remote, spontaneous, unmediated, and burning authoring of the video, of course, links it to images that Samara burns inside of others, especially Anna, the remnants of which appear as projected thermographic X-ray-like photos. But while thermography relies on the photographic print and evokes the logic of the X-ray with its challenge to a mastery secured through observable sight, the specificities of thermography, as distinct from those of photography, drawing, and even the X-ray, bear further comment, especially since The Ring, in an effort to secure the mastery and stasis that the film elsewhere deems troubling, will invest in these specificities to defend against the X-ray’s exposure. The term “thermography” was first used in the 1840s to “distinguish” the technology from photography. At the time thermography

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was also referred to as “heat drawing,” and the latter designation signals the grounds on which The Ring stakes its claim for the greater indexical quality, as compared to conventional drawing or sketching, of this form of imaging. With thermography the body heat itself can spontaneously (without a hand, as it were) produce a print. Unlike conventional or even infrared photography, the camera’s light, as mediating eye, is bypassed in the process, as Noah’s explanation of the signature-less origins of the videotape implies.17 Thermography’s distinctive method involves photographing the body or object, specifically temperature differences therein, without the means of light, instead using the heat generated by the body or object itself. The subject or object is literally photographed by means of its own body heat; the emissions that constitute measurements produce the reading. These heat emissions are themselves invisible to the naked eye. Thermography works “by scanning the infrared wave lengths of the electromagnetic spectrum . . . [thereby allowing] a heat temperature [to] be recognized and measured. Since the infrared section of the spectrum occurs at significantly lower speed than visible light, it cannot be seen with the human eye.”18 Historically, as well as contemporaneously, thermography has been used in ways that The Ring likewise tasks the technology. Like Samara’s invisible, burning transmissions, thermography and other techniques such as ultrasound were often deployed alone or in tandem or competition with X-ray mammography to target or image the interior of the woman’s body (STB, 166–67). Thermography’s uses for remote sensing likewise resonate with The Ring’s emphasis on capturing transmissions emitted from a distance and from behind or beneath opaque material. Thermography’s conventional use for sensing what may be smoldering beneath the surface of the earth (the presence of burning coal, for instance) reminds us that it is from beneath a well that Samara’s burning thoughts emanate. And although there is no allusion in The Ring to contemporary Supreme Court cases involving the thermographic detection of remote heat emissions (produced by high-intensity lamps used to grow marijuana), the use of the term “heat signatures” (PTI, 7) in such cases neatly echoes the film’s similar efforts to individuate such emissions from a distance, to trace them to a distinct, reproducible autograph. In this sense, then, the notion of the heat signature differs from the signature understood, in Derridean terms, to mark an endlessly disseminating difference. The Ring draws on thermography’s ability to produce a supposedly unmediated “heat signature,” despite the fact that this move against the notion of the signature or writing as difference is precisely the kind

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of refusal of mediation that the film reads as deathly when manifested in Samara’s turn against Symbolic representation. We can recognize how Verbinski’s film imagines thermography as an impregnable origin, a presence that can singly and spontaneously generate a bulwark against difference, by first considering the reverberating point of origin or burning family tree, as it were, that Verbinski’s own film eyes. The red maple tree as a figure in, and associated with, the particular thermographic generation of Samara’s video and the projected thermographic stills of the images she transmits, the tree as the figure placed behind the wallpaper embossed with protocinematic horses, also functions as an extratextual marker within The Ring, signifying that Verbinski’s film sees itself as a copy that nevertheless remains anchored by its kindred Japanese predecessor. As the film production notes spell out, “the red maple was one of the [production] designer’s [Tom Duffield] homages to the story’s Japanese origins [Hideo Nakata’s film, Ringu].” The tree’s “fiery red” color was chosen to isolate it amid the overall “subdued color scheme” of the majority of The Ring’s scenes. As Duffield says, “the tree is a focal point of the movie. It . . . unifies the different elements—everything always seems to come back to that tree” (emphasis added). Foremost among the elements within The Ring that latently “come back to that tree” are narrative threads that strive to realign and suture the relations among the arts/technologies in the wake of the challenge posed by the avisual. When placed within the context of Rachel’s reinscription of the fiery tree as not an “etched” but a “burned” drawing that the film equates with a projected thermographic emission, such threads indicate that Verbinski looks to rebound from the avisual challenge to colonizing the interior of the body by pointedly mobilizing this fiery, “unif[ying]” source as a fixed origin. Thermography appears able, as drawing or photography alone cannot, to liberate a static, teleologically driven genealogy of the visual arts/technologies that seeks to underwrite the film’s finalizing turn to its putative origin. Scenes depicting the relation between the still and the moving frame or sequence between frames disclose how The Ring positions Samara’s video and its increasing association with the burning, thermographic tree as the fulcrum around which the film would reconfigure and reestablish a teleological alignment of arts/technologies that spells a retreat from the embrace of the generative play between affect and language elsewhere deemed crucial for galvanizing psychic life. Consider again the sequencing of frames reflected in the storefront window of the Photomat from which Rachel emerges, subsequently

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walking and flipping through photos beneath successive window frames of a moving train. Similar sequences appear at the scene of Katie’s death by videotape. Here the reflected image of successive frames is contained in the screen of a television where Samara’s video reappears. The source of the reflection Katie sees on the unplugged screen is a series of shutter frames atop the room divider behind her; and it is the wavelike, horizontal movement across the frames of the reflected image on the empty screen that provokes Katie to look back in fear of the threatening source of motion. The film later reveals Samara as the origin of the blurred movement behind Katie and confirms the teen’s fearful premonition when, just after fleeing upstairs, Katie is killed by the return of Samara’s deadly video, this time presented as a rapid-fire, condensed, chronological succession of the entire tape’s images, transmitted from the single eye of the gazing dead/alive girl. Verbinski cuts from the video images that kill Katie to an extreme close-up of a white surface that seems yet another blank screen, closely followed by the circling hand of Adan drawing a ring of a sun on what is, in fact, white paper. The camera tracks back to capture the shadow of Rachel walking behind panes of smoked glass, like those behind Katie. Rachel emerges from behind the series of panes to see Adan’s teacher, who goes on to report her assessment that Adan has been increasingly speaking through drawing. The cut from the reflections of a series of frames from behind Katie’s television screen to a series of glass panes behind which Rachel walks once again recalls the film’s early coupling of video and drawing: From the ring on Samara’s tape to the ring in the boy’s sketchbook, both video and drawing appear as privileged means of transmitting and receiving Samara’s message. Early in the film, drawing alternates with photography as the forms that Verbinski’s camera associates with video or places literally behind those spectators who screen Samara’s tape. For instance, at Katie’s wake, Adan retraces the teen’s last steps, gazes into the empty television screen in her bedroom where she saw the killing video only to see, as Katie herself did before she died, the reflection of a wavelike pattern of movement across a series of frames, this time given, as the boy turns to locate the source of the moving reflections behind him, as two framed photographs, themselves subsequently positioned behind Rachel as she walks into Katie’s room and, stationed behind the boy, consoles him. The scene suggests that Samara’s spirit constitutes a wavelike emission that spontaneously impels and projects the horizontal movement between frames on screen. The Ring renders these successions of uninterrupted rushing images projected from behind

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the spectator and reflected on a screen in order to evoke the invisible means by which Samara generates and impels images, delineating her ability to telepathically imprint them on analog video. Moreover, in linking the unseen spirit of Samara with the photographs fixed behind Rachel, who in turn remains behind her son Adan, the film implies that the still photograph gives birth to the moving image, in this case, the videographic variety. Yet, as The Ring proceeds, increasingly the cuts from Samara’s video are to thermographic representations, suggesting that Samara’s video is to be more properly understood as a form of projected thermographic motion, not merely a sequence of sutured moving analog images that pick up, as it were, the photograph and effect a future of and for motion pictures. In order to generate an unbroken sequence of moving frames, the photograph or drawing alone appears insufficient. Two paired scenes elaborate The Ring’s inheritance claims, its increasing solicitation of burning transmissions, specifically the burning tree as a figure for a form of heat drawing or thermography that the film invokes as the privileged, impelling, and stabilizing source behind and between things. Returning to a scene that illustrates Rachel’s overlooking the importance of Adan’s affect-saturated drawing, consider how the camera cuts, as the boy departs for school, from one of Adan’s drawings to Rachel, seated in bed holding a copy of Samara’s video. Centered in Verbinski’s camera, video in hand, Rachel remains in front and between the space separating two framed drawings of branches of a maple tree hung on the wall behind her. Later, the scene is repeated with a difference. The two framed drawings of maple leaves behind Rachel’s bed are now figuratively ignited, illumined by and as burning images, when, awaking from Samara’s dream visitation and coughing up the electrodes used to measure the girl’s internal states, Rachel is photographed by Verbinski in the same position that spectators saw her in when Adan left for school. Only now, though, she holds her arm, emblazoned with the mark of Samara’s hand. The film registers this correspondence between the mark and the burning drawings by so intensifying the red hues of the leaves that they visibly rhyme the imprint on Rachel’s arm. What is more, the film fixes this imprint in the same place that Samara’s video found itself when held in Rachel’s hand in the earlier scene—in the space between those two framed drawings of maples behind Rachel’s head. The Ring thereby suggests that even before Rachel uncovers the thermographic tree behind the wallpaper in the Morgan barn, one sees not only that Samara’s video emanates from a source figured behind the spectator, but also that

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that source is increasingly associated with more than a simple photograph or drawing: it is linked, in fact, with “ignited” sketches or stills. In this way The Ring (re)claims video as itself a sum of projected, successive heat drawings, positioned both behind and between things. In the film’s configuration, then, thermographic stills constitute a form of representation capable of anchoring, impelling, fusing, and passing on a motion that would putatively underwrite a direct, seamless view of vision and history. In the wake of the challenge posed by the avisual, the latter third of The Ring increasingly turns to a thermography relished for its reputed, closed-circuit production—to in turn liberate a troubling take on cinematic origins and relations among arts/technologies. Here the reverberating alignments of formal and familial genealogies that “come back to the burning tree” are more directly associated with the figure of the lighthouse, what has served for the film as an emblem for the moving cinematic image. Consider once more the scene in which Rachel enters the Morgan’s house and discovers the video of Samara’s psychiatric treatment. Once inside, Rachel finds herself framed in the locket-like mirror depicted in the still video capture of Anna; a parallel mirror frame, one that viewers saw within Samara’s video, contains Samara’s hair-obscured face. Within the mirror-framed visage of Rachel, viewers spot the reflection of the constant, circling beam of the island’s lighthouse, positioned behind and moving across and through two window frames visible behind Rachel’s head. Just a few moments before, the lighthouse illuminates the interior of the Morgan home, highlighting objects that, as the production notes indicate, gesture to the original Japanese source (Ringu) for Verbinski’s film: a Japanese-style “sliding luminous door” and “a Japanese wall hanging” appear among the photographic and drawn images of horses and riding trophies on display. The wall hanging, a sketch that includes winding tree branches, evokes the Japanese maple tree, which takes its place in the particular alignments of arts/technologies established in the scene of Samara’s burning dream visitation. When she turns to watch the video of Samara’s psychiatric examination, Rachel is framed in profile in Verbinski’s camera, her face aligned in front of the illumined television/video screen so that she again assumes a position in the center and in front of two parallel frames, here windows. What remains behind Rachel’s head, however, is the lighthouse beam. And, as the psychiatrist’s voice on the medical video on screen details the origins of Samara’s transmissions (and her file of “projected thermographic stills” is visible on screen), it is that beam that passes behind Rachel and sweeps across the video screen in

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front of her. As in the respective scenes of Katie and Adan staring at a video screen, The Ring associates the emanations of Samara behind the spectator not only with the fiery source of the Japanese drawing, but increasingly also with the protocinematic lighthouse beam. It matters that a film that wittingly and unwittingly appears driven to investigate and replay the notion of a fixed point or origin—of the moment of death registered on the still faces of spectators whose hearts have stopped when they succumb to the infection of Samara’s tape and whose visages while alive are shown to have blurred when captured in other forms of representation; it matters that The Ring repeatedly brings that investigation to the scene of the relation between the still and the moving image. Like so many theorists of the cinema and its origins from the time of the medium’s emergence, Verbinski’s film thinks this relation and what expressly motivates and ensures successive movement on screen within the context of a consideration of the relations among arts/technologies (here drawing, photography, and video). It matters as well that the content of the thermographic prints on the medical video itself recapitulates the relation between the still and moving image and raises the question of the image’s ability to visually capture the surface and the interior of the body or object. Consider some of the “thermographic projections” the doctors question Samara about on the video Rachel screens: the rocking horse depicts the animal that most patently bears the weight of readings of cinema’s relation both to observable locomotion (Muybridge) and—in its form as thermographic, X-ray-like print in the medical scene here—to the movement of the unseen or avisual within the body (Etienne-Jules Marey); Samara’s thermographic transmission of the dinosaur not only conjures an animal that often tracked its prey via the infrared spectrum associated with the X-ray and thermography but also signals how Verbinski’s film associates the life of the child and thermography with prehistory. Perhaps most crucial for our discussion, it is via thermography and the figure of a child, Samara and in turn Adan, that access to registers beyond visible thresholds is granted; and of course the thermographic print of the Japanese maple tree, the last X-ray-like image we see in the hands of the doctor on the video screen, harkens to Nakata’s Ringu, the Japanese origins repeatedly cited in The Ring’s mise-en-scène. Although The Ring brands the deadly transmissions in the medical video as symptoms of Samara’s embodiment of a mortifying refusal of representation, and although this medical video relaying the imaging of the interior of the body functions as a scene that

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in effect works to underscore the challenge that the graphic or the avisual poses to securing diagnostic mastery through vision, at the level of representation sequences like those in which Rachel watches the medical video also betray the means by which The Ring seeks to consolidate its own refusal of difference. For instance, the image of the lighthouse, linked with the stilled or extinguished Anna, who in part signified the refusal of thirdness that the film applauded Rachel and Noah for coming to understand as a troubling impulse within themselves, that image now is increasingly coupled, as in the sequence of Rachel viewing the medical video, with the burning Samara, the figure who embodies the refusal of difference the film excoriates. Even before being directly linked to the lighthouse in sequences aligning spectators with arts/technologies in the last third of the film, Samara’s body and her gaze rendered her a double for the protocinematic emblem. Indeed, when associated with her deadly video, Samara is presented as a body with a rigid form and a singular, avenging eye: her hair, which typically covers both eyes, is not, however, visible over the single eye that she uses when transmitting to the viewer the rapid-fire, condensed, chronological sequence—a fast forward flash—of her entire deadly video (see figure 3.5). The Ring’s substitution of a burning Samara for an extinguished Anna, one might counter, merely marks Verbinski’s dramatizing the dangers of the stifling exchanges that will recur between mother and child when efforts to occlude thirdness in such a relation go unabated. Yet, when we place The Ring’s substitution

Figure 3.5 With her singular, avenging eye, Samara functions as a double for the protocinematic lighthouse

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of Anna with Samara within the context of the film’s effort to rehabilitate a notion of cinematic origins and relations among the arts/ technologies that would deny at the level of representation the very difference ruled vital for psychic reanimation, such substitutions appear merely as attempts to ritualize a denial that the film has been systematically preparing for all along. With respect to those artistic relations, the lighthouse, when associated with Anna, signaled an extinguished light that marked the failed relay that would impel the photo toward its presumed destiny in the seamless future of sequentially moving or cinematic images. When The Ring turns to capitalize on Samara as a lighthouse that illuminates the screen of the medical video Rachel watches, however, it is precisely when that beam has been (re)cast as an ostensibly unmediated, thermographic impression on screen. If, within the familial context, the film’s replacing Anna with Samara as a figure for the lighthouse embodies a cautionary tale of the dangers of the deadening relay against Otherness that bind mother and daughter together, then at the level of representation Verbinski’s film—behind the scenes and behind the seen, as it were—by aiming to supplant a failed photography with thermographic video, retreats from its warning over the dangers of repudiating Otherness and instead prepares the way for an effort to solidify its claims for propagating a regenerated cinema in the wake of the threats of the digital and the avisual. As much as The Ring would ward off the threat of the avisual by investing in a hermetically-sealed account of cinematic origins and relations among the technologies of visibility, the very burning correspondence Verbinski eyes in order to mobilize such an account challenges its viability. If everything always seems to come back to that [fiery red] tree,” the Verbinskian homage to Nakata’s Ringu, then that “focal point” or sign of an origin, especially as it transmits a trace of Japanese history and cinema, appears both less stabilizing a source and activates some similarly unsettling traces of difference already at work in Verbinski’s film. The image of the “sun that came through the leaves” of the maple tree and “lit them up like it was on fire” calls to mind a more troubling—because less fixing—type of burning or branding, namely the atomic blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Indeed, Rachel’s descriptions of the “fiery tree” and her subsequent (temporary) internment in a dark well by a ring of stone uncannily recall the effects unleashed by the bomb—the tremendous heat and fire that produced, albeit to an unimaginable degree, similarly ecliptic conditions, an unfathomable admixture of thick, fog-like dust and tremendous light that itself often appeared blinding to, when if did not in fact blind, eyewitnesses.

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As Shuntaro Hida, a doctor present at Hiroshima on the day of the atomic blast, relates: [A]t that . . . moment a tremendous flash struck my face and a penetrating light entered my eyes. . . . There was a great fire ring floating over the city. . . . Everything was obscured with a sand-like dust as if we were in a fog. Above the hazy scene the bright August still shone. The giant [mushroom] cloud . . . was expanding upwards and outwards into the heavens above . . . as if intended to totally blot out the clear brightness of the sky.19

Far from arresting origins and generating the burning thermographic transmission that would undergird The Ring’s claims that film can re-present an essence between or behind things, Nakata’s tree, with its specific historic (including cinematic), atomic residue, as it were, gestures precisely to that from which Verbinski’s film persistently seeks shelter: the avisual threat that the X-ray represents. As Lippit writes, “[w]hat was intimated in the radioactive culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries erupted at full force in Hiroshima and Nagasaki” (AL, 93–94). The atomic blasts made more decisive the blow that the X-ray already delivered to the Enlightenment dream of vision. Albeit on a massive scale, the blasts, that is, again testify not only to the destructive power that light or radiation could wield over bodies and objects but also to the “destruction of light” (AL, 92), the ruination of vision’s ability to penetrate depths and in turn yield a visible, verifiable ground to stabilize the spectator/subject: “At Hiroshima . . . and . . . Nagasaki, a blinding flash vaporized entire bodies . . . [but] [t]he initial destruction was followed by waves of invisible radiation, which infiltrated the survivors’ bodies imperceptibly. What began as a spectacular attack ended as a form of violent invisibility” (AL, 86). If by penetrating the opaque body, the X-ray rendered realist photography an “allegory of avisuality” (AL, 93), as a “precursor” to the specific “effects of atomic radiation” the X-ray only more forcefully registers that fundamental “invisibility contained within the depths of the human body” (AL, 93). Even without the historical referent that Verbinski’s allusion to Ringu unwittingly summons, the figure of the X-ray would alone, then, evoke the radiation that remains a particular part of Japanese history. But the fiery tree is not the only allusion to a radiation that cannot be absolutely sheltered from the residue of the atomic blasts and that in turn contests The Ring’s investment in the allegedly immediacy of thermographic transmission or representation. More

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direct atomic references surface in The Ring and, since they are often localized, also underscore that the horrific history of radioactive destruction cannot of course be confined to Japanese soil, even if the massive suffering remains particular to those victims of the blast. In “Eola,” the name given to the psychiatric institute in The Ring, for instance, we can hear an echo of “Enola Gay,” the U.S. warplane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. It is at the Eola Institute, too, that Noah’s nosebleed can now also be seen as linked to the particular U.S. atomic bombing, for, the buzzing fly that appears on the thermographic stills that cause Noah’s bleeding, functions in this wartime context (as Lippit shows the figure likewise did in postwar Japanese films like Murayama Mitsuo’s The Invisible Man Meets the Fly [1957]), to signify the deadly plane over Hiroshima that appeared to “strik[e] from nowhere, perceptible only by the buzzing sound . . . emit[ed] while in flight” (AL, 95). What is more, many scenes depicting the characters’ journeys to the Eola Institute and to and from Shelter Mountain are set and filmed in the Pacific Northwest, the port of entry for many Japanese immigrants and also the predominant site of the U.S. military aircraft industry or “Military Zone Number One, an area covering the western half of the states of Washington, Oregon and California, and the southern portion of Arizona”20 from which, “[u]nder the authority of Executive Order 9066, the army removed more than 100,000 Japanese Americans . . . during Spring 1942,” sending them “under armed custody” to internment or concentration camps in the interior of the country.21 Even if the fiery tree’s summoning of the wartime history of the U.S. and Japan remains a more deliberate than unwitting gesture by the film, it is difficult not to read Verbinski’s choice of Washington state as a shooting locale, and The Ring’s particular rendering of that locale, as an effort, albeit failed, to evoke such history only in order to contain or erase it. When, for example, Verbinski and his cinematographer, Bojan Bazelli, discuss “[t]he Pacific Northwest winter’s . . . seemingly perpetual overcast and . . . gloomy weather,” for them it is designed not only to indicate a contrast with the red tree but also to facilitate “the soft light and lack of shadows.” As Bazelli explains, “In lighting the sets and the actors, we tried to eliminate all the shadows cast by the actors, which is meant to subconsciously alter the viewer’s sense of perception and add a heightened sense of ambiguity” (Production Notes to The Ring; emphasis added). But if this banishing of shadows in the mise-en-scène throws the fiery tree into sharper relief, the atomic associations evoked by the tree point to the memory, and the effects, of the particular kind of shadow the

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film seems invested in eliminating, marking both The Ring’s effort and its inability to keep at bay a more profoundly ambiguous vision of burning or, as it were, a burning of vision. Shadows appeared in the wake of the atomic blasts: “Seared organic and nonorganic matter left dark stains, opaque artifacts of once vital bodies, on the pavements and other surfaces” at Hiroshima and Nagasaki (AL, 94). But unlike the claims for immediacy and visual verifiability that The Ring makes for thermographic transmission at/in the site of the fiery tree, the Japanese context reminds us that atomic shadows represent something less literal, something other—even in their horrifying materiality and in their seemingly direct and immediate authoring or branding. If “the atomic blasts and the blackened skies [over Hiroshima and Nagasaki] can be thought of as massive cameras, then the victims of this dark atomic room can be seen as photographic effects. . . . The ‘shadows,’ as they were called, are actually photograms, images formed by the direct exposure of objects on photographic surfaces. . . . True photographs, more photographic than photographic images” (AL, 94). But crucially, as against The Ring’s tapping the figure of the fiery tree to mine claims to an unmediated form of thermographic transmission, the direct, instantaneous atomic shadows that the burning tree cannot help but summon and that the absence of locale shadows in its wake nonetheless gestures toward, register the direct and immediate precisely as signs of an avisual difference: “the atomic bombings produced symbols—as opposed to images of war—which drove the representation of atomic warfare from fact to figure, toward the threshold of art” (AL, 92; emphasis added). As terrifyingly real as such shadows remain, they do not eliminate the need for representation or reading; they do not speak directly for themselves, even as they test the very limits of representation. “There can be no authentic photography of atomic war because the bombings were themselves a form of total photography that exceeded . . . representation, testing the very visibility of the visual” (AL, 95). As Lippit continues, “[o] nly a negative photography is possible in the atomic arena . . . a shadow photography. The shadow of photography” (AL, 95). There is another instance that marks both The Ring’s effort and its failure to allay one of the particular threats that the avisual presents to the notion of a fixed origin. It is not only that the author of the thermographic transmissions, Samara, who emerges from the well as a living, rotting corpse, seems, as a decomposing figure, to exhibit the very effects of overexposure to radiation and, in so doing, discloses even in her thermo/videographic form the radiated body’s “uncanny resemblance to photographic processes” (AL, 93), its subjection to

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the mediated light that The Ring’s discourse on thermography aims to occlude. More than this, while The Ring may turn selectively to the fiery tree as the originary sign of a direct correspondence with Nakata’s Ringu, Samara’s decomposing appearance, in the fallout, as it were, of the radioactive historical referents from Nakata’s film and from Verbinski’s locales can remind us that a particular manifestation of the avisual threat posed by radiation is, again, its confounding of the visible markers or, more precisely, of the visible as the final marker of all sorts of differences. With regard to the atomic associations that emerge in this context, the account of Shuntaro Hida, the doctor present at Hiroshima on the day of the blast, relays the horror of not being able to clearly mark a host of distinctions: “What I took to be rags were in fact pieces of human skin and the water drops were human blood. I could not distinguish between male and female, soldier or citizen” (TDHD, 418–19). The early history of the X-ray raised similar fears of the loss of surface markers, especially of gender as a distinction visible on the surface of the body and as a category that in turn would serve to maintain a broader distinction between surface and depth. For instance, the X-ray motion pictures produced in 1950s U.S. laboratory culture reflect an effort to recover from the still X-ray’s challenge to securing the surface as a visible, fixing referent. Such films, that is, are at pains to “preserve[e] rather than stri[p] away [as the still X-ray did] signs of sexual difference” (STB, 139). In one such film, a “woman . . . stands before a mirror, but her task is to apply a contrast medium ‘makeup’ in a process that renders her face fully visible in X ray” (STB, 139). In another research film, “signs of sexual difference” (a compact and tube of lipstick) are included in the image of a woman putting on makeup in front of a mirror (STB, 139). We can glean that it is the division between surface and depth that gender in particular has often been tasked to maintain that is at issue in The Ring, especially when we consider that the presentation of a decomposing body that recalls fiction and nonfiction accounts of the horror over losing stable surface markers of difference in the wake of radiation exposure coincides with a significant change to the original rendering of Samara’s body. Unlike Verbinski’s film, Koji Suzuki’s novel, and Hideo Nakata’s film adaptation of it present Samara as a hermaphrodite. In and of itself, changing Samara from intersexed to female might not be troubling, but in the context of the avisual threats posed by radiation and the putatively scientific (STB, 139) filmic attempts to manage them, it remains difficult not to read Verbinski’s recasting Samara from hermaphrodite to female

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as a similarly anxious response to an irradiated body that destabilizes meaning. To be sure, unlike the U.S. scientific research films of the 1950s, Verbinski’s remaking Samara as female does not amount to adding signs of sexual difference to an original image that presented no such visible signs whatsoever. Just the same, though, one could say that the surface of the intersexed body, by presenting gender precisely as a question, constitutes perhaps an even more formidable threat for The Ring. In this regard, the attempt to arrest such a question cannot remove the film from exhibiting what it would confine Samara to representing: the very effort to mute the fundamental difference that initiates and inheres in psychic life.

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Chapter 4

“Turning into Another Thing” in David Lynch’s The Elephant Man

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avid Lynch’s The Elephant Man (1980), like American Beauty and The Ring, demonstrates that critical consideration of the call for sustaining the play of Otherness in psychic life cannot be thought apart from conceptions of art/technology. Yet Lynch’s critique of denials of Symbolic mediation as they emerge in specious disciplinary genealogies remains distinctively thoroughgoing. Although, like American Beauty and The Ring, The Elephant Man challenges dismissals of visual arts/technologies as inherently deadening, Lynch’s film contests the coterminous idealizations of arts/technologies discernible in Mendes’s and Verbinski’s films, in effect deeming these moves equally static efforts to arrest the vitalizing transfer of drives to meaning. Lynch’s film also expands analyses of cinema’s history to include its relation to clinical and scientific arts/technologies and emphasizes how these cannot be removed from the exigencies of desire or from popular and subcultural knowledges of the body (STB, 3–4). And while The Elephant Man, like American Beauty and conventional accounts of cinema’s origin and its relation to other technologies of visibility, directly engages Eadweard Muybridge’s observable animal locomotion studies, Lynch’s film also considers the physiological studies of interior body movement that principally occupy The Ring. The Elephant Man exposes the Enlightenment notions informing the use of both scientific traditions, unsettling moves to, respectively, locate either the body’s surface or its interior as a ground for rendering fixed and transparently visible not only the object of investigation but also the art/technology through which it is tracked. Although The Elephant Man, a study of John (born Joseph) Merrick (1862–90) who suffered the disfiguring effects of neurofibromatosis,

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does not find in Victorian England the particular (and the pronounced degree of) contemporary threats to the life of desire charted in Mendes’s and Verbinski’s films, Lynch’s film still recalls a historical moment in which social and cultural upheavals pressured the generative exchange between drives and meaning. Merrick’s body and being seemed to stop desire, if not fascination, in its tracks. Frederick Treves, the eminent surgeon who treated Merrick, claimed that he exhibited “the loathing insinuation of a man being changed into an animal.”1 In Articulating the Elephant Man (1992), Peter Graham and Fritz Oehlschlaeger note the Darwinian-inspired anxiety about human origins informing Treves’s and public astonishment at Merrick and group the widespread interest in him with the Victorian “passion” for zoos; such passion, as Graham and Oehlschlaeger maintain, also renders both forms of attraction and responses as colonialist efforts to mark at the home front the conquest of the foreign.2 Yet it is not simply the legacy of colonialism and the renewed contemporary questioning as to what constitutes the human that indicate affinities between nineteenth-century and contemporary anxieties. Merrick’s case also raised concerns that echo present-day fears of the standardizing effects of automated and computerized work and mass media. In Lynch’s elucidation, the similar sources that, for Victorians, drive both the animal body and the machine in turn link Merrick to the fear that the machine and machine culture would, in Thomas Carlyle’s words, “regulat[e]” not only “our modes of action alone, but our modes of thought and feeling. Men are grown mechanical in head and heart, as well as in hand.”3 This chapter draws on two historical sources—primarily Treves’s 1923 account of treating Merrick and, to a lesser extent, the anthropologist/anatomist Ashley Montagu’s The Elephant Man: A Study in Human Dignity (1971), an analysis of Treves’s work and a case study of the mother/child relation. The Elephant Man remains, I show, not an adaptation of these sources, but a critique of the alternately reifying images of the maternal common to, and extant within, both the Victorian culture the film engages as well as, in varied ways, contemporary discourse. Lynch’s film helps us see that Dr. Treves’s denigrating Merrick’s mother as inhuman for abandoning him (contrary to the record) is, in Treves’s logic, required to humanize John and forms part of a strategy for reconstituting an idealized, but no less static, image of the mother. It seems incontestable that Treves’s vision strives to shore up the border between human and animal: denigrating Merrick’s mother aims to preserve the notion of a mother pure of the taint of having birthed the inhuman or monstrous. However, it

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has not been stressed that Treves’s response also remains imbricated with a move to protect the ideal mother from becoming less fixedly other—not merely animal or non-English but, more frighteningly, a being, like Merrick, who literally appears, in the words of Treves, to be in the process of “being changed into” something other (TEM, 13). In this sense, the response to Merrick’s body relates to a more fundamental and persistently disfiguring alterity that cannot be confined to him or to his deformity, much less resolved. In short, Merrick evokes the Kristevan notion of the “abject,” not a “lack of . . . health . . . but what disturbs identity, system, order. . . . The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite” (POH, 4). Rather than reading Lynch’s portrayal of anxiety over Merrick’s ability to procreate, for instance, as an exclusive, emblematic sign of a dread of the return and propagation of a primitive human past, I take the film to be exploring how Merrick ultimately functions as a lightning rod for the continued unlocalizable and fearful—but also transformative—power of archaic affect and drives. What is more, I attend to how Lynch persistently links the responses to Merrick not only to troubling views of the maternal origin but also to figurings of technologies of visibility that labor to advance a static understanding of Otherness and the field(s) of vision.4 As we will see, Lynch’s film discloses how notions of arts and technologies matter when assessing visions of originary Otherness. The Elephant Man registers not only that Treves’s and Montagu’s static accounts of Merrick and his origins strikingly pivot on an image of the photograph of the mother, but also that the cinema, too, often locates photography as a fixed, transparent source for the moving image. Lynch scrutinizes this version of cinema’s origins for the way it frequently aims to authorize rigid, teleological notions of vision and history. To engage The Elephant Man’s discourse on photography—cited throughout the film’s mise-en-scène and embodied in the film’s use of Merrick’s black cape and white hood that, with its single opening for the eye, fashions him as a double for the still camera—is to discern Lynch’s disruption of the place photography assumes in conventional cinematic genealogies. Unlike Verbinski and Mendes, Lynch marks the “intimate and incommensurable” relations between film frames as well as those between arts/technologies such as photography and cinema. Rather than cast the photograph as reliable evidence for uncovering disguised identities and as a forerunner of cinema’s own presumed ability to present the visible as direct, verifiable reality, Merrick serves to gesture toward photography’s threat to the stability of the external visible world and to the subject who might seek

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a position in that field. Moreover, the film’s forays into the bodies of Merrick and others refuse to proffer the interior of the body as a static, invisible, and ultimately compensatory ground for echoing a predictable, untroubled, or masterful observer/subject. I. Graham and Oehschlaeger’s Articulating the Elephant Man: Joseph Merrick and His Interpreters remains an indispensable examination of the earliest accounts of Joseph Carey Merrick (1862–90), including The Autobiography of Joseph Carey Merrick,5 a pamphlet that his sideshow exhibitors (Sam Torr and J. Ellis) issued, and the influential recollection The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences (1923), penned by the surgeon and anatomist Frederick Treves (1853–1923), who treated Merrick. Graham and Oehschlaeger chart the many representations of Merrick in the texts of medicine and social science, in fiction and nonfiction throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including anatomist/anthropologist Ashley Montagu’s The Elephant Man: A Study in Human Dignity,6 and Lynch’s film, which (in its opening credits) lists Treves’s and Montagu’s works as sources. Graham and Oehschlaeger remind readers of the “mediated” (AEM, 30) nature of all of these accounts of Merrick, illuminating how the particular “purpose[s],” “generic demands,” and “distinctive audience” for such accounts inflect their construction and reception (AEM, 30). Merrick’s Autobiography, for instance, whether understood as penned by him or his exhibitors (or taken as a collaborative effort), assumes the generic form of a fairy tale (AEM, 13). The pamphlet, that is, sensationalizes and sentimentalizes Merrick’s admittedly formidable ordeal in living with extreme physical disabilities: what Treves, in his presentation of a “case of congenital deformity” to the Pathological Society of London on December 2, 1884, clinically itemizes (in part) as “massive distortion of the head”; “papillomatous growths” and “pendulous masses” (on the pectoral region and buttocks) of “subcutaneous cellular tissues” and skin tumors; and deformity of facial and cranial bones and limbs. All of these disabilities became exacerbated with age (TEM, 104). For Graham and Oehschlaeger, though, Merrick’s Autobiography indicates that Merrick was “the first to recognize” that his deformed body constituted a commodity. The phrase Merrick uses in his work—“So thought I I’ll get my living by being exhibited about the country”—“perfectly captures the blend of agency and dependence that was to characterize Merrick’s subsequent existence. [His]

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actual or impersonated voice here claims for him the resourcefulness and dignity of a free agent” (AEM, 14), though, of course, “for [Merrick] agency involves choosing on whom he will depend” (AEM, 14). In underscoring some of the various roles (in addition to sideshow “attraction”) constructed for Merrick—a “cheerful accept[or] of fate [and] an ideal object of charity” (as figured in the writings of observers such as F. C. Carr Gomm, the chair of London hospital’s management committee); a “scientific curiosity,” as propounded by the medical establishment—Graham and Oehschlaeger show how Merrick himself nonetheless emerges, in the interstices of these myriad but often static cultural versions of his physical and “existential” plight, as something more complex (AEM, 31). We cannot, of course, extricate the events of Merrick’s life from mediating lenses such as genre and perspective; yet the Autobiography, as well as other records, indicates that Merrick was born (1862) to Joseph Rockley Merrick, a warehouseman, later an engine driver at a cotton factory and still later a proprietor at a haberdashery shop, managed by his wife, Mary Jane Merrick. The family lived in Leicester, England. Contrary to some accounts (notably Treves’s), Mary Jane Merrick did not abandon Joseph but, in fact, cared for him until her death in 1873. He was eleven at that time and had two siblings. Merrick lived with his father until his early teens (contrary to Treves’s and Montagu’s accounts). The father remarried after Mary Jane’s death (Joseph was in school until age twelve); Joseph worked in a cigar factory until he developed more severe arm problems. His father pressured him to leave home and live with an uncle and aunt but helped him secure a peddler’s license, and for a time Merrick peddled his father’s goods door to door. In 1879, Joseph presented himself as unable to work and entered the workhouse. In 1884, he signed himself out of the workhouse and began work in exhibiting halls, eventually moving to London, but social tolerance for freak shows was diminishing and local authorities increasingly opposed such shows (AEM, 13–18). Joseph met Treves of London Hospital in 1884, and in 1886 established more permanent contact with him and the hospital where he was given a residence until his death in 1890 (AEM, 19–20). In addition to working as a surgeon, teaching anatomy at the London College Medical Hospital, and playing his role as “surgeon extraordinary” to Queen Victoria, Treves was a writer. He published not only medical writings (his specialty was appendicitis) but also accounts of his travel (for instance, The Other Side of the Lantern: An Account of a Commonplace Tour round the World [1905], Uganda

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for Holiday [1910]). In 1923 he returned to his early encounter with Merrick. If the record of that early encounter assumed (in his presentation of Merrick to the London Pathological Society [1884] and in his published account of Merrick’s illness in 1885) the form of the clinical case study, Treves’s return to Merrick’s “case,” The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences (1923), “occup[ies] an interesting middle ground between reportage and fiction,” reflecting both Treves’s “professional expertise” and “understanding [of] events and characters” and his “shaping [of] them for artistic effect” (AEM, 35). As Graham and Oehschlaeger argue, The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences exhibits the very conventions of romance that Treves as doctor would disavow. But if Treves’s later record of his engagement with Merrick can remind us, retrospectively, of both the phantasmatic investments at stake in the clinical arena (to say nothing of productively complicating the line between established medicine and popular knowledges of the body), The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences can also be understood as distinctive, it has not been emphasized, for how it serves to make clear that an encounter that foregrounded questions of origin perturbed and continues to perturb not only because it muddies for the subject (Treves) the border between ostensibly desire-free medical fact and fantastic imaginative fiction. Treves’s recollection of the significance of Merrick’s disfigured body traces an encounter with the particularities of Merrick’s condition and its relation to his being, as well as to a host of other “others” (the colonized, the woman, the working class). More than this, The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences reads as the reminiscence of an encounter with a fundamental and persistently disfiguring alterity that cannot be confined to Merrick or to his deformity, or to any of these others, much less settled. Merrick’s presentation as a spectacle and Treves’s reminiscence regarding his initial and subsequent responses to Merrick both at the sideshow and (as his patient) at the London hospital suggest, as Susan Stewart in On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection notes, that those who are displayed in Victorian freak shows and, more generally, in spectacles, who find themselves framed, rendered as isolable, distant, and contained objects, meet such a fate because either wittingly or unwittingly they do not respect borders. Whether contesting the divide between male and female (the hermaphrodite), between animal and human (wild men, feral children), or between one body and another (conjoined or so-called Siamese twins, an example that reminds us that the “freak” is also often linked to the cultural other), the “spectacle of the grotesque”

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presents such border crossings as dangerously transgressive and hence requiring a form of arrest.7 (In this regard, spectacle’s response differs markedly from the “celebration” of the “productive and reproductive capacities of the body,” an instance of the “misrule” characteristic of the “carnivalesque” [OL, 105–06].) To protect the audience from such cross-contamination, as it were, spectacle aims to effect a gap between the viewer and the viewed, often by multiple, simultaneously deployed means: spatial distance between audience and object; clearly delineated lighting that spotlights or blinds the “object” on display, offering protective cover for the audience’s unfettered gaze; sound and/or music, or the voice of the pitchman’s bark that distributes psychological armor for the audience to don and thus safely observe the object on display (OL, 107–08). As Stewart notes, such distancing betrays the “cultural” work required to produce the spectacular aberration of “nature,” work that coterminously betrays its aim to establish the viewer of spectacle as “normal” (OL, 109). The curtain that covers the Mill End Road shop in London where Merrick was housed and displayed announces specifically what it is about the so-called Elephant Man that needs to be avoided: a body that transgresses the border between animal and human, that is positioned in between, and, worse, appears to be in the very process of becoming something else. Treves recalls, Painted on the canvas in primitive colors was a life-size portrait of the Elephant Man. . . . It was the figure of a man with the characteristics of an elephant. The transfiguration was not far advanced. There was still more of man than of the beast. This fact—that it was still human—was the most repellant attribute of the creature. . . . the loathing insinuation of a man being changed into an animal. (TEM, 13; emphasis added)

When he secures a private viewing of Merrick, Treves notes the difference in size between the image of Merrick on the canvas curtain outside the abandoned shop window and the smaller man he finds within, but the severity of Merrick’s deformities—even to a doctor who reports he has seen many “lamentable” ones (TEM, 14)—is still registered as portending a frightening collapse of a number of borders, especially that between human and animal. The collapse appears more horrifying at close range because it seems to sound the apparently infinitely regressive origins of life on the planet: The massive growths that cover extensive parts of Merrick’s body and his enormous head—the circumference of which is said to be the same as that of a “man’s waist”—provoke Treves to label Merrick “disgusting,”

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the most “degraded or perverted version of a human being” he had met (TEM, 14). It is not just that Merrick’s body violates borders and, moreover, suggests a reassemblage, an inversion of the classical, accepted hierarchical presentation of the body from head to foot; and it is not simply that distinctions between body parts waver or are indicated only by their absence (the nose on Merrick’s face was “a lump of flesh . . . recognizable . . . [only] from its position” [TEM, 15]). More disturbing for Treves is the fact that Merrick’s other features so test the border between human and animal that Merrick appears amphibious and reptilian, nearly prehistoric. The hand of his severely deformed right arm does not yield a distinction between palm and back and is likened by Treves to a “fin or paddle” (TEM, 15). Treves compares the “bag of . . . repulsive flesh” that hung from Merrick’s neck to the “dewlap that hung from the neck of a lizard” (TEM, 16). In addition to the Darwinian-inspired anxiety about human origins that occasions Treves’s and the broader public response to Merrick, Graham and Oehlschlaeger remark on the colonial context summoned by the exhibition of Merrick, emphasizing how Treves and sideshow advertisements often locate the origin or proper place of Merrick’s primitive, regressive body in the “jungle” (AEM, 13). The authors link this form of fear and fascination with the “Elephant Man” to the wider Victorian “passion” for zoos. Drawing on the work of John Berger, they read these intertwined, anxious fascinations specifically as symbolic efforts to represent and tame at the home front figures that are foreign and hence threatening (the nations imperial Britain seeks to civilize [AEM, 25]). In Stewart’s terms, the “body of the cultural other,” cast as “freak” (OL, 109), betrays a colonizing effort to “nam[e]” the “frontier,” to assert “that the wilderness, the outside, is now territory” (OL, 110). To be sure, Treves associates Merrick’s deformities with cultural and racial differences that appear to require a restoration or management from within the bounds of the nation. When first recounting the difficulty in comprehending Merrick’s speech, Treves describes it as “so maimed that he [Merrick] might as well have spoken in Arabic” (TEM, 20). Establishing Merrick as coherent (a quality presumed synonymous with English) seems tantamount to initiating a process to contain a cultural and/or racial or ethnic difference. Most pronounced about Treves’s recollections, though, are the ways in which they place Merrick and his body’s troubling invocations of the colonized and of primitive human origins beside equally troubling views of two others who figure prominently in Treves’s reminiscences: the woman and the maternal. When, for example, he turns from Merrick’s “amphibious”

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arm to consider his “other arm,” Treves notes that it “was remarkable by contrast. It was not only normal but was, moreover, a delicately shaped limb covered with fine skin and provided with a beautiful hand which any woman might have envied” (TEM, 15–16). Treves indicates that what makes the threatened collapse between animal and human, and colonized and colonizer, all the more disturbing is the commingling of the sign of the beautiful woman at these already contested borders. Treves’s recollections ultimately reflect an attempt to recover and to frame a sufficiently stable image of the woman— even more fundamentally of the maternal—that Merrick’s body and tale unsettle. What repeatedly confounds Treves, as he confronts the question of Merrick’s origins and comes to treat and to realize that Merrick is more than an “imbecile,” is what likewise seems “strange” to Merrick himself: How can that which evokes disgust originate in the figure of the beautiful woman/mother? As Treves writes, “Once, when referring to his own appearance, [Merrick] said: ‘It is very strange, for, you see, mother was so beautiful’ ” (TEM, 23). Treves’s response to this strangeness is instructive: It was a favorite belief of his [Merrick] that his mother was beautiful. The fiction was, I am aware, one of his own making, but it was a great joy to him. His mother, lovely as she may have been, basely deserted him when he was very small, so small that his earliest clear memories were of the workhouse to which he had been taken. Worthless and inhuman as this mother was, he spoke of her with pride and even with reverence. (TEM, 23; emphasis added)

Treves considers Merrick’s belief a consoling fantasy, but the doctor’s report contradicts what we know Merrick conveyed to others: his mother died when he was twelve; he then went to live with his father and stepmother, before entering the workhouse. In analyzing Treves’s revisionist history, Graham and Oehschlaeger suggest that “unlike Treves, Merrick must not have an English mother (especially a beautiful one) to rear him with kindness and make him a person with a history instead of a phenomenon to be discovered” (AEM, 54). Such lineage would diminish the novelty of the doctor’s find as well as his claim to a singular, transformative influence over Merrick. Given the context that casts Merrick’s deformities as originating in a primitive elsewhere (colonial Africa), maintaining an absolute distinction between a “degraded version of a man” (Merrick) and an English mother aims as well to guard against the danger of miscegenation,

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as Graham and Oehlschlaeger contend. Treves traces the origins of Merrick’s “fantasy” of maternal beauty to the fanciful tales of idealized mothers encountered by a Merrick whose putative inability to distinguish fantasy from reality (TEM, 34) evidences, for Treves, a “primitive” mentality long incubated by isolation. As he writes, the Merrick who conjures such romantic visions seems to “have spent the twenty-three years of his life immured in a cave” (TEM, 22). Although he bemoans the “shadow” (TEM, 32) of Merrick’s romanticizing, Treves himself exhibits more than a passing interest in the romantic. His romanticizing is pronounced and aimed at reconstituting an even more idealized notion of the maternal than the one he claims Merrick clings to. Although assuming the inverse form of the debased, “inhuman” mother (embodied, for Treves, in Merrick’s mother), Treves’s idealized vision of the maternal origin traffics in a similarly fixing currency. Just as important, when we consider the specific ways in which Merrick’s body and early memories become the site for such recuperative work, it remains apparent that it is the inhuman—because radically uncertain—attributes of the ideal English mother against which Treves feels compelled to defend. Casting Merrick’s mother as radically inhuman is but the beginning—not the effective end—of Treves’s defense against the shock presented by Merrick’s body and being. Assuming such an initial defense to be successful risks blinding readers to the unwitting, more formidable troubling of categories that emerges in Treves’s reminiscences. Treves’s figuring and staging of Merrick’s body, including his pronounced feminizing of him, makes plain that Treves’s effort to fashion a pure, idealized vision of the proper English mother, although related to the eruption of troubles on many borders, bespeaks a response to a more archaic, “maternal” ambiguity, one that the attempted guarding of these other tenuous borders, in fact, seeks to manage. That Treves’s invocation of species, cultural, racial, and gender differences yields to a more continuing return to the maternal as it relates to Merrick reminds us not only that it is Merrick’s body’s invocation of the “abject,” the in-between (as opposed to his lack of health), that so perturbs. More than this, Treves’s continual return to the question of the maternal corroborates Kristeva’s view that the abject, “what disturbs identity, system, order” (POH, 4), ultimately relates to the earliest, indeed pre-relational, encounters between a not-yet subject and what properly speaking is a not-yet object, the archaic mother. The abject, Kristeva writes, “confronts us . . . within our personal archaeology, with our earliest attempts to release the hold of a maternal entity even before existing outside of her” (POH,

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13). The encounter with Merrick as a figure who summons the “inbetween, the ambiguous, the composite” (POH, 4) relates, that is, to the pre-oedipal or infans’s primary (both fascinating and frightening) experience with making borders, when it is confronted with the radically tenuous distinctions between its not-yet self and what Kristeva writes is “above all [maternal] ambiguity” (POH, 9). As we have noted regarding Kristeva’s account of the dialectical interplay between the semiotic (the realm of archaic drives—“appropriation/rejection, orality/anality, love/hate, life/death”) and the Symbolic (“understood as nomination, sign, and syntax” [DIL, 136]), even amid such archaic, tumultuous, and provisional moments in the infans’s history, the mother, as a desiring being in language, aids in laying the ground for the more violent but necessary turn to language, for the postoedipal child’s engagement with what Kristeva here describes as “the autonomy of language” (POH, 14). But if separation and border making are aided by an endorsement of language, and of what signifies a beyond (what a “third party” beyond mother and child helps to effect and ritualize), Kristeva underscores, especially in Powers of Horror, that the formal process of abjection, that which prepares for a primary break or turn toward language, also helps “preserve what existed in the archaism of the pre-objectal relation, in the immemorial violence with which a body becomes separated from another body in order to be—maintaining that night in which the outline of the signified thing vanishes and where only the imponderable affect is carried out” (POH, 10). Kristeva’s dialectical conception of the subject in/of language, hence, disrupts efforts to fix the more fully formed speaking (post-oedipal) subject as a transcendental subject of “understanding” (RPL, 27), rendering him/her instead permanently “on trial” (RPL, 27), perturbed by the imponderable. The dialectic between the semiotic and the Symbolic works to constitute the very vitality of psychic life just as it underscores that life’s fragility in the face of a persistent eruption of unnameable affects. In its making palpable the very process of “being changed into” something other, Merrick’s body, in Treves’s rhetoric, evokes, therefore, the continued primary legacy of what threatens identity, of what renders the subject perpetually “in process” (RPL, 27). Treves responds to the primary legacy provoked for him by Merrick’s body and being by attempting to reconstruct a static, idealized conception of that archaic history. Treves’s efforts at defending against an abject or archaic maternal ambiguity surface, especially in overdetermined moments when Treves avoids directly naming remnants of Merrick’s early history. Although Treves expressly rewrites

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Merrick’s past by casting his mother as inhuman for allegedly abandoning her son, the doctor avoids directly mentioning the locket that, as most authoritative sources (including Carr Gomm in his 1886 Letter to the Times) reported, Merrick continually carried with him, a memento containing an image of his mother (TEM, 111). Although Treves disparages Merrick’s idealizing of his mother and of her beauty (goodness), when the doctor describes Merrick—especially when he engages and collects photographs of women—the terms the doctor employs exhibit the idealizing investments he earlier dismissed when attributed to Merrick. The terms mark, that is, a displaced encounter with that unnamed maternal image, one that in Treves’s rhetoric comes to stand for unnameable, imponderable affects. Treves recalls how a number of Victorian women (of “high degree” [TEM, 28]) sent Merrick photographs and painted portraits of themselves that he displayed in his room. Although he considers a familiar strain of romanticism to account for Merrick’s response to these, Treves elaborates that response in more than the generic terms claimed by commentators. Specifically, Merrick’s investments in the photographs and objects often render him, for Treves, as more than merely “child”-like or infantile (AEM, 57). When, for example, Merrick asks Treves for a dressing case for Christmas, Merrick’s response to the gift recalls, according to Treves, the play acting of a young girl: “Just as a small girl with a tinsel coronet and a window curtain for a train will realize the conception of a countess on her way to court, so Merrick loved to imagine himself a dandy” (TEM, 30–31). Treves decries Merrick’s fantasizing and his intense, protective attachments to mementos, especially photographs and artifacts, that, Treves implies, appear to readily submit to the desire for sustaining romance. “On one occasion,” Treves relates, Merrick “was quite overcome” when he received a signed photograph of Alexandra, princess of Wales. “He regarded it as a sacred object and would hardly allow me to touch it” (TEM, 29). It remains difficult not to take Treves here as a jealous fan longing to touch or own such a souvenir, but the rhetoric of the sacred, of the untouchable photograph of Alexandra, when placed within the context of the invocations of the unnamed photograph of Merrick’s mother, suggests that it is, more precisely, an untouched touching or covert protection of such a romantic ideal that Treves desires, a protective distance from an idealized object. It is not only Treves’s accounts of Merrick’s photographs of women (actresses, royalty, admirers) that double the diminutive image or appearance of the unnamed mother framed in Merrick’s locket, but so also does the moral Treves derives

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from Merrick’s story: that, as an ideal, a woman should aspire to be diminutive, to become a model of selfless humility. For Treves, Merrick’s fascination with the photographs of women, however fanciful and psychologically primitive, comes to embody the proper waning of the animal in him, an analysis that one might consider part of the broader “taming” of Merrick that critics regard as evidence of a “medical paternalism” (AEM, 52–54). Yet Treves’s depictions also seek to restore the power of the woman to tame (in this instance to civilize the primitive child, Merrick), part of the conventional role reserved for the Victorian woman as the “angel in the house” in Virginia Woolf’s critical assessment. More than this, Treves’s visions seek to tame the model woman who, despite being framed or contained as the ideal in the displayed images Merrick receives from his admirers, remains potentially transgressive because [an] ambiguous still. That Merrick’s play acting can be cast as feminine and that women of high degree seek Merrick out indicate an affinity, despite important differences, between a disfigured working class man and a beautiful upper class woman and bring home the notion that the ideal woman may not only traverse borders but may also be a hybridic figure herself. When he implies that Merrick’s case serves as an object lesson for all women, Treves marks the fear of the inhuman not as it surfaces exclusively in Merrick’s mother, but more generally as it emerges amid the ideal, as embodied in the photographic menagerie of proper English women who have not abandoned Merrick but rather come to console him and are displayed in his new “home,” the hospital room converted to his permanent residence and overseen by Treves. Earlier, when he relates how Merrick’s suffering startlingly did not shape him into a malevolent being, Treves again not only feminizes Merrick but also indicates that suffering or the willingness to endure suffering serves as a prescription for ensuring the development of kindness and contentment in all women: “He had passed through the fire . . . He showed himself to be a gentle, affectionate, and lovable creature, as amiable as a happy woman” (TEM, 24). Treves’s most elaborate defensive efforts at recuperative stagings involving Merrick and the unnamed photograph of his mother make clear that the radical (abject) ambiguity that Merrick represents for Treves increasingly manifests itself as a threat to the putative certainty available within the broader field of vision itself. “ ‘It is very strange, for, you see, mother was so beautiful’ ” (TEM, 23), declares Merrick. The strangeness that perturbs Treves—not merely the inability to account for beauty producing the so-called monstrous but also the

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difficulty in distinguishing the image of the ideal from the image of the inhuman mother—comes to infect the broader domain of looking relations, a domain in which the anatomist Treves stakes much of his professional life and identity.8 However brutal and unwanted, the fire of suffering Merrick “passes through,” which Treves imagines produces a “lovable creature, as happy as an amiable woman,” contrasts markedly with the work of a flame that Treves conveys at his first sight of the “creature”: The showman pulled back the curtain and revealed a bent figure [Merrick] . . . covered by a brown blanket. In front of it, on a tripod, was a large brick heated by a Bunsen burner. Over this the creature was huddled to warm itself. It never moved when the curtain was drawn back. . . . It might have been a captive in a cavern or a wizard watching for unholy manifestations in the ghostly flame. (TEM, 14)

One might argue that any claim to finding a substantive difference between the vision of Merrick presented in Treves’s first encounter and the later feminized image of the “creature” purified through the work of fire could be sustained only by imagining that Treves sees the Merrick who comes to reside in London Hospital as closer to the prescient wizard than the unwilling captive revealed behind the curtain of the Mill End Road shop. But even if the Merrick of the Mill End Road viewing was not the demonic gleaner of signs that surface unpredictably in a ghostly or flickeringly indeterminate visual field but was instead, as Treves comes to insist, one who, from the start, was forced to seek in the flames a necessary source of warmth, the indeterminate fire still fixed its captive’s attention. As Treves remarks of this first sight of Merrick: “It [Merrick] never moved when the curtain was drawn back” but remained huddled over the flame (TEM, 14). Even if the Mill End Road spectacle traffics in alternately fixed versions of the exotic—the absolutely passive, unknowing captive or, inversely, the reader who has access to signs and wonders absolutely beyond the grasp of the primitive prisoner or the audience—the delay in Merrick’s turn toward the audience does not appear, in Treves’s remembrance, to create a suspense that ensures a comforting distance between the viewer and the viewed but instead interrupts a monological view of looking relations in spectacle. Merrick’s hesitation, that is, makes him available not only for the audience’s unfettered access. Merrick’s delay brings to the fore what displays itself here as well: a man who looks, one who looks even before the audience arrives and will likely do so after the show as well; a man who, moreover,

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introduces the possibility that he sees something other, what may be neither fully beyond nor fully available to him or to the spectator. Although Treves contends that Merrick’s suffering has transformed him—not from a wizard who gleans much from shape-shifting flames but rather from a primitive prisoner—into someone who comes to resemble a figure as gentle as a woman, the method of Treves’s heightened efforts to reanimate Merrick, “to bring him . . . to life once more” (TEM, 26), implies that Merrick still threateningly embodies the more mobile and ambiguous looking relations that the doctor associates predominantly with the far less docile figure of the magician and that ultimately relate to a fundamental (maternal) ambiguity. Treves’s efforts at reanimating Merrick suggest as much, since they assume the principal form of stage managing—through the selective use of women—foundational scenes of looking. Although Treves’s overall response to Merrick evinces, as critics contend, a medical paternalism, his project to galvanize Merrick through orchestrating specific scenes of looking decidedly does not seek to inscribe an Otherness that would signal the endorsement of the paternal function; instead, through Merrick, Treves aims to secure, especially for himself, a fantasy of looking relations that would elide the play of Otherness in the field of vision. One of the fears that Treves diagnoses as inhibiting Merrick’s progress is his apprehension over being seen. According to Treves, if Merrick is to awaken and become human again he must let go of the fantasy he confesses to the doctor: namely, of moving to “a blind asylum or to a lighthouse” (TEM, 25). (Merrick saw a photograph of the Eddystone lighthouse.) Treves reads this fantasy of seeing without being seen as a response to the fact that in his secure hospital residence “it . . . seemed . . . as if the gaze of the world followed him still” (TEM, 25). Nonetheless, to be fully vital, in Treves’s diagnosis, Merrick must abandon his desire for isolation and risk living more directly among a community, even if a small one confined largely to those visitors supervised by Treves and hospital staff. Treves mentions Merrick’s fantasy again when he is critically regarding Merrick’s “romantic” view of women: “I fancy when he talked of life among the blind [the asylum] there was a half-formed idea in his mind that he might be able to win the affection of a woman if only she were without eyes to see” (TEM, 32). To encourage Merrick to relinquish the fantasy of seeing and not being seen, especially as it relates to women, the doctor first arranges for a number of women to visit Merrick, a strategy that transforms him over time, claims Treves, from a “hunted thing into a man” (TEM, 28).

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But while he extols the virtues of interactions for Merrick, Treves remains sympathetic to the real difficulties Merrick faces—of being looked at, unprotected (though covered by a hood and cape), in public even after newspaper accounts of his plight provoke an outpouring of public support. One elaborate attempt to grant him respite, one that recalls the looking relations that would ostensibly obtain at the island lighthouse, occurs when Treves arranges for Merrick to attend a pantomime at a London’s Drury Lane Theater. Here Merrick’s opportunity to look without at the same time enduring “the gaze of the world” occurs not in an isolated island-like locale but in a cordoned-off space within a crowded public venue. The scene must be described as a literal staging in the audience, since Treves seeks to manage the conditions of spectatorship by “begg[ing] three of the hospital sisters to don evening dress and to sit in the front row in order to ‘dress’ the [theater] box, on the one hand, and to form a screen for Merrick on the other” (TEM, 33–34). As he relates, “Merrick and I occupied the back of the box which was kept in shadow” (TEM, 34; emphasis added). Treves’s stage managing his and Merrick’s reception of the pantomime evokes Merrick’s lighthouse fantasy in another way as well if we recall the descriptions Treves gives of Merrick’s body and the cloak and hood he wore. Treves casts Merrick’s cloak as “theatrical” (TEM, 17). And he likens the hat Merrick donned (on top of his hood) to “a yachting cap,” the sign of a sailor’s adventurous spirit. It is not only the yachting cap, though, that recalls the sea. The hood Merrick wore beneath the cap, with only one opening reserved for seeing, also fashions him as a double for the lighthouse, with its one putatively all-seeing eye. (Even without a hood, “the osseous growth” on Merrick’s forehead, according to Treves, “almost occluded one eye” [TEM, 15].) Given the cluster of associations summoned in the staged scene of Treves in the audience with Merrick, together looking in shadow, it remains difficult to conclude that Treves’s reanimation project does not aim to yield as much or perhaps more for himself than it would afford Merrick. It is not simply that Treves’s figurings of the “Venetian cape” (TEM, 17), and his use of a term (“shadow”) earlier employed to mark Merrick’s phantasmatic investments in women, betray the doctor’s own romantic flourishes. The allusiveness of the passage indicates, moreover, that Treves’s theatricalizing Merrick (in and beyond the theater) discloses an extensive effort to recover from an abject ambiguity, here manifest in the field of vision. To begin with, the adventuresome, seafaring costume that fashions him as a double for the lighthouse earlier troubled Treves with the notion that he himself could be seen by his hooded patient without

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at the same time accessing the sight of Merrick (TEM, 17); as such, a desire for protected looking, cordoned off from the sight of others, cannot be confined to Merrick. The figure of the lighthouse, of course, also became for Christian Metz a pivotal one for illuminating looking relations, specifically those pertaining to the cinematic apparatus.9 Although the move from the image of the Eddystone lighthouse to Drury Lane is from a world represented in a still photo to a realm of moving images on the live theater stage as opposed to those on a film screen, at stake nonetheless is a conception of looking relations that obtains, albeit with significant particularities, when engaging live and filmic forms of representation. The defensive response to looking relations at the site of, and in response to, the photograph reveals a dynamic that makes palpable what Metz’s theory in the end, however unwittingly, also sought to avoid: that the individual in the field of vision remains, as Constance Penley reminds us, more “seen than seeing,” even when alone in the darkened cinema or in the shadowed enclave Treves constructs for himself and Merrick at the pantomime.10 The scenario at the theater where Treves and Merrick together appear able to mobilize a powerful, private, unidirectional gaze clearly seeks to contain the threat of the incomprehensible and the indeterminate that Merrick and his costume even earlier than his first medical examination—namely at the London sideshow—posed for its spectator. Treves’s efforts at stage managing the broader field of spectatorial relations solicit a number of perturbing others: Merrick’s theatrical cap, in recalling seafaring adventures, summons colonial enterprises, just as positioning the hospital sisters as both a “dress[ing]” for the theater box and a “screen” recalls the decorative ideal often reserved for Victorian women. At the same time, though, Treves’s effort to secure stable relations in the field of vision cannot keep “in shadow” its address to a more foundational, abject ambiguity, one that cannot be confined to cultural or gender difference or be permanently settled. “And it appeared to him [Merrick],” that the photo of the Eddystone lighthouse, “this lonely column of stone in the waste of the sea[,] was such a home as he had longed for” (TEM, 26; emphasis added), Treves writes. Although he imagines that his theatrical excursion with Merrick presents an alternative to the inviolability promised by the island fortress and works to endorse, for Merrick, a move beyond the self, the scene of Merrick and Treves shrouded behind women’s skirts discloses Treves’s desire for the singular and the sure in what registers as the waist/waste of the sea. Put differently, Treves’s elaborate stagings suggest not only that Merrick, beneath his hood, has seen the uncovered Treves, but also that Treves’s looking

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at Merrick (veiled and unveiled) has not only revealed something to Treves about himself that he did not know but also provoked a more formidable uncertainty in the field of vision. Why else would Treves cloak himself with/as Merrick, seek to place himself not only in the position Merrick assumed as a hooded patient who saw Treves but was not seen, but also behind an ostensibly more powerful veil— skirts that both conceal viewers and reveal that which is viewed—that appears to fashion a voyeuristic gaze as transcendent and masterful? Stated differently, this staging reflects Treves’s desire for a kind of stiflingly dyadic primal relation, one that imagines the creation of an impervious border or fortress (a powerful, transcendent lighthouse) at the scene of greatest border contestation (beneath or behind skirts) when, in its earliest attempt to make borders, the subject is confronted with the radically tenuous distinctions between its not-yet self and what is “above all [maternal] ambiguity” (POH, 9). Treves’s staging recalls one that Jane Campion elucidates in The Piano (1999) when she presents a comparable scene in which parent and child (mother and daughter), silently play acting on a beach beneath a skirt transformed into an illuminated tent, imagine they have fashioned a certain refuge from the world. For Campion, this scene signals a decidedly regressive effort to retreat to a pre-oedipal space reimagined as itself skirting a fundamental difference. Even if Treves’s theatrical adventure seems, in his account, to feed and renew Merrick’s love for theater and to render him no longer “lifeless,” the terms of Treves’s fantasy bespeak

Figure 4.1 The animated still photograph: Merrick’s mother coming to threedimensional life, looking through and between elephant bodies rendered as both a mask and eyeglasses

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an effort to diminish the play of Otherness that would sustain psychic animation, marking a search for a “lonely column of stone in a waste of a sea,” a bulwark that aims to establish sight as being able to proceed, as it were, unseen. But this seeing through translucent skirts that yet screen or shadow Treves and Merrick, as much as it marks a deadeningly monological and fixed conception of looking relations, also betrays more. When Treves imagines that he and Merrick remain unseen, protected against desire in the field of vision, readers may see Treves as far from being in control of himself or the field of vision; indeed, at these very moments, Treves’s phantasmatic investments in Merrick appear to emerge most strongly.11 II. David Lynch’s The Elephant Man begins with an image of beginnings, with a representation of the mythic origins of Merrick’s conception and birth. Lynch’s camera pans down an extreme close-up of a photograph of Merrick’s mother,12 focusing on her nose and lips before cutting to a medium shot of the square-framed, circular photograph. The photograph of Merrick’s mother returns to three-dimensional life, reanimated to reenact the tale of Merrick’s origins that circulates throughout the film. The surrealistic account, a sequence interrupted throughout by fadeouts, presents a side view of a line of lumbering elephants whose images come to be superimposed over a close-up of a reappearing (three-dimensional) image of Merrick’s mother’s face; the left eye of one elephant and the hind quarters of a second are superimposed, respectively, over her left and right eye, such that she appears to be looking between and through two creatures that constitute (in this dissolve) both a mask and a pair of glasses through which she stares into Lynch’s camera (see figure 4.1). After a short fadeout, the elephants take her place, charge the camera, and subsequently strike her from behind. In an unlocatable space illuminated by a movie set spotlight, the slow-motion depiction of the elephants charging the fallen woman renders the scene a horrifying rape. After a fade to black, the sequence concludes with a puff of white smoke and the audible cries that, the film implies, belong to the newborn produced by the attack. The first verbal articulation of this myth of Merrick’s origins, uttered during a private showing of Merrick (John Hurt) that Treves (Anthony Hopkins) arranges with Merrick’s self-described “owner,” sideshow barker Bytes (Freddie Jones), spells out the familiar tale that seeks to explain Merrick’s strange origins. When he announces

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to Treves, stunned and moved to tears (and subsequently to vomit) at the unveiling of Merrick, that “this poor creature’s mother” was “struck down in the fourth month of her maternal condition by a wild elephant . . . on an uncharted African isle,” Bytes recycles a tale that implies that it is only through rape by, or exposure to, an animal located in a colonial elsewhere that the ideal English woman could generate such “monstrous” offspring. Lynch’s film serves less as an adaptation than as a critique of this and other related conceptions extant in Treves’s and Montagu’s published accounts. The Elephant Man scrutinizes this static myth of the maternal origin and of Victorian womanhood, whether in its idealized form (present in Treves’s and Montagu’s accounts) or in its denigrated version (also present in Treves’s remembrance), underscoring how such a consoling vision is anxiously, precariously manufactured to shore up troubling oppositions (such as human versus animal; colonizer versus colonized). A dream sequence that echoes and expands the film’s opening clarifies the detrimental effects of these as well as a host of other related oppositions that cluster around the image of the idealized maternal figure. The sequence includes three iterations of the maternal: the photograph of Merrick’s mother; a nurse (Wendy Hiller) whose official title, Mothershead, evokes that photograph; and Treves’s wife, Anne (Hannah Gordon). The sequence begins with Merrick, visiting with guests in his hospital room, trying to calm them by confessing that he too remains frightened by the imponderable, specifically by the fact that his beautiful mother gave birth to him, a disfigured son. As he says, “People are frightened by what they don’t understand, and it is hard to understand even for me because my mother . . . was so very beautiful.” The camera returns to a close-up of the photograph, reversing the opening panning shot’s direction, and moves from lips to nose before resting on her eyes. Lynch then cuts to the back of Mrs. Mothershead as she debates with Treves. Her challenge to the doctor reiterates the film’s questioning of the putative division between the exploitative logic of Bytes’s sideshow display of Merrick and Treves’s medical exhibition of him. Mothershead remains troubled by Treves’s encouraging of visitors, such as the wealthy and famous, who, in her view, meet with Merrick only “to impress their friends” (now that Merrick has become a celebrity); for her, however well intentioned he may be, Treves has once again turned Merrick into a spectacular commodity, albeit in a more refined and legitimizing venue. As she concludes her sharp exchange, “if you ask me, he’s only being stared at all over again.”

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Treves dismisses Mothershead’s concerns, and the scene gives way to a fitfully sleeping Merrick and a depiction of his nightmare. The camera pans across his head to enter the single opening of his hood and tracks the hallway of pipes in the hospital basement. (Sounds emitted from the pipes register as the amplified, labored breathing of the bronchitis-afflicted Merrick.) Recurring images of Merrick’s mother’s rape stop the camera’s forward trek and yield to images of men operating industrial machines, the laborers’ rhythmic movements metronomically synchronized to the industrial sounds now recognizable as the dense aural mix first heard during the film’s initial depiction of the rape. Amid fades and superimpositions of scenes (including Merrick framed as a stationary then animated figure in a mirror and his being beaten by sideshow handlers), the nightmare ends in a cloud of smoke and dissolves to an image of Treves’s wife, Anne, who seems to be descending from the sky. Actually, she is walking downstairs in her white nightgown to find Treves in their living room pondering Mothershead’s charge and confessing: “I’m beginning to believe that Mr. Bytes and I are very much alike. . . . It seems as if I’ve made Mr. Merrick into a curiosity all over again, this time in a hospital.” He concludes by asking, “Am I a good man or a bad man?” Reassuring Treves throughout, Anne at one point insists, “Merrick is happier and more fulfilled” now and this “is completely due to you.” Even if the film remains sympathetic to Merrick’s idealization of the mother (“She had the face of an angel,” he tells Anne), the sequence nonetheless encapsulates the film’s view of how pernicious such an idealization remains. The cut from Merrick’s dream, with its images of dehumanizing and monotonous labor, to an awakened Anne descending (as the dissolve suggests, from what appear to be clouds) down the stairs of her home underscores that this vision of a waking woman emerging from the sky is not just phantasmatic but pointedly manufactured to effect a rigid division that aims to cover a host of brutalities. If the charge of the practical Mothershead provokes Treves to question his intentions with respect to Merrick (characteristically he frames these in stark terms—“Am I a good man or a bad man?”), the decorous Anne glides down the stairs to absolve him of blame. The Anne who reassures Treves that he shares nothing in common with Bytes and that Merrick’s happiness is solely due to Treves functions more broadly to maintain an absolute division between private and public, to remove the personal from any significant relation to economic, political, and cultural systems. As an emblem of what Woolf described as the Victorian “angel in the house,” a pure, bodiless, confined being, Anne is not only expected

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to sacrifice herself for family and home but also tasked with absolving Treves and an entire social class of a relation to, and responsibility for, injustices perpetuated beyond the pristine, if deadening, confines of the domestic sphere. By linking the very steam that engulfs the oppressed factory workers in Merrick’s dream to the clouds that encircle the ministering Anne (rendering her a double for the photograph of Merrick’s mother, itself enshrouded in smoke), Lynch demonstrates the violence that produces such a figure and the violence that in turn such a figure is summoned to efface. Here Lynch echoes Joel Pfister who, with regard to the nineteenth- and twentieth-century American context, demonstrates that the figure of the angel in the house, “as [an] ico[n] of purity and order,” helped to “whitewash the ideological presence of the factory” and the ravages of capitalism.13 In Lynch, those ravages include the exploitation of labor and the despoliation of nature at home and, given the colonial context evoked by the figure of the African elephant, abroad. By linking the rebellious colonial subject with the brutalized worker, Lynch illuminates what the figure of the woman in the broader Victorian culture is also charged with suppressing—the rage and potential rebellion of the colonized and the working class; yet the sequence also exposes the nascent transgressive power of the angelic woman and mother framed in the images implicitly or explicitly cherished by, respectively, the Treves of the published reminiscences and the filmic Treves. Indeed, the scene that precedes that of Mothershead’s indictment of Treves unleashes just such rage: two women, bloodied from fighting each other, renew their attack in the hospital waiting room. Although reminding us that even when such rage escapes its bounds, its containment is often sought by other means—pitting one other against an other—the scene nonetheless mines a discontent putatively far removed from the angelic ideal. As the dream sequence, with its melding of the unconscious of Merrick and what reads as a collective Victorian fantasy, and these related scenes of others make clear, then, the attempt to mobilize a reified image of the woman or the mother responds to the threat of a more radical, archaic ambiguity that cannot be confined to one of these “others” or exclusively located outside the subject. The abject, as “the in-between, the ambiguous, the composite” (POH, 4), also menaces from within. Returns of the repressed—such as the fighting rage that sullies the pure image of the domestic woman, or the fear that causes Treves to wonder whether he is an intimate of the brutal, “singularly unattractive” Bytes (as Carr Gomm dubs him)—contest efforts to find in an image of the woman or of the working class, or

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in an absolute difference between and among such others, a fixed border that could permanently allay a fundamental Otherness that founds and continues to perturb the subject. As Kristeva writes, “the more or less beautiful image in which I behold myself or recognize myself rests upon an abjection that sunders it as soon as repression, the constant watchman, is relaxed” (POH, 13). By continually making the juxtaposed image of the “beastly” Merrick and the beautiful photograph of the mother the fulcrum around which the individual and collective consoling fantasies of fixed images of others circulate, Lynch reminds us, too, that the earliest pre-relational encounters between a not-yet subject (the infans) and a not-yet object (maternal ambiguity) relate to and parallel broader cultural efforts to establish notions of human as against animal identity. “The abject,” argues Kristeva, “confronts us, on the one hand, with those fragile states where man strays on the territories of animal. Thus, by way of abjection, primitive societies have marked out a precise area of their culture in order to remove it from the threatening world of animals or animalism” (POH, 12–13). On the other hand, the archaic mother (ambiguity) against which the (not-yet) individual seeks to shore up its borders has herself been linked with the world of animals such that she comes to represent the nature against which culture must move to establish itself (POH, 12–13). While neither Montagu nor the historical Treves directly reflects on the form and investments in presenting Merrick’s story, Lynch’s film turns the critical lens it trains on their work to examine its own (and more broadly) cinema’s interest in representing figures such as Merrick. Each of the scenes in which Lynch’s film discloses the shared spectacular investments informing low (sideshow) and high (medical) displays of Merrick includes a concomitant critique of cinema’s potential impulse toward violent closure. When, for example, Treves conducts his first medical examination of Merrick, the doctor moves behind his frightened, silent patient and, as he removes Merrick’s hood, the cut to the scene of the Pathological Society presentation of Merrick’s case matches the single opening on Merrick’s hood with the projector lens whose light, used to illuminate Merrick for Society members, flares Lynch’s own camera. As the cut suggests, Merrick also comes under the gaze of a film camera’s eye, but the light emitted from the projector lens does not always make things “plain to see,” as Bytes’s earlier pitch promises and as Treves the anatomist believes his professional expertise affords. Instead, the glare obscures the easy first sight of Merrick for both Society members and film spectators. Lynch’s keeping Merrick hidden—he is stationed behind a

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screen that serves as a backdrop for Society members’ observation of him and not revealed to film viewers until nearly twenty minutes into the film—disabuses film spectators of the notion that their interest in Merrick remains categorically different from that of curious Society members and sideshow spectators and also allows Lynch to look more closely at audiences (as he tracks, here, across the faces of shocked doctors), to examine looking relations as they obtain in filmic as well as medical and sideshow arenas. Lynch’s film, in fact, properly begins by acknowledging cinema’s early affinities with sideshow spectacle. The opening surrealistic rendering of the myth of Merrick’s birth yields to an image of Treves staring fixedly at a pinwheel at the London fairground where Merrick assumes a place in the “freak show.” Lynch cuts from a puff of smoke, synchronized with the cries of the unseen newborn (Merrick), to the fanning flames and smoke above the head of Treves, whose back remains to the film camera. Treves’s abrupt turn from the sparking, hypnotic pinwheel to stare directly into Lynch’s lens coincides with the camera’s sudden move, a tracking back and left across the fairground. Cinema, the scene suggests, literally found its early life alongside fairground attractions. The match cut from the opening in Merrick’s hood to the lens of the projector at the Pathological Society not only presents Merrick as an object tracked by visual apparatus in medical and cinematic venues but also suggests that he becomes a figure for the film camera itself. Yet if casting Merrick as a camera underscores that cinema does not merely purvey attractions but also takes its place as an attraction, thus becoming, especially at the turn of the century, the predominant celebrated subject of early film scenarios,14 then, as the scene of a mesmerized Treves turning from pinwheel to camera begins to specify, Lynch’s take on looking in general and at the cinema in particular departs from the masterly view to which Treves of the Reminiscences clings. The fairground scene, that is, does not aim to inoculate viewers against the play of desire in the field of vision but demonstrates that Treves (or the cinema spectator) can be seized—and seen—by an object of vision. Lynch’s representation of Treves’s account of the Drury Lane pantomime elaborates a view of the field of vision that Treves of the Reminiscences and of Lynch’s film expressly would guard against. In Lynch’s film, as depicted in the published account, Merrick and Treves at the theater appear shrouded, albeit less so, by women, including Princess Alexandra, who, in the terms of Treves’s Reminiscences, “dress the box,” offering an ostensibly protective yet translucent

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“screen” (33–34) to help secure the conditions for seeing without being seen. Lynch’s scene begins with the angelic Alexandra handing Merrick opera glasses, and while he actively surveys his surrounds, tellingly Mothershead in the seat behind him looks askance at the proceedings, recalling for film viewers her suspicion that Merrick is often framed in high places in terms that duplicate his display in sideshow. Merrick can never remain simply a part of an audience. In response to the company’s dedication of their performance to him at evening’s end, Treves urges Merrick to “stand up” and acknowledge his applause, as if the pantomime were the prelude and he the main attraction. Nevertheless, the theater scene complicates a notion of unidirectional looking relations, even in rigidly framed spectacles. If we recall that Treves’s looking behind Merrick, as he remains captivated by the stage performance, doubles the position earlier assumed when he was set to examine Merrick, then the Merrick or camera through which Treves once again looks foregrounds what Treves’s published account labors to repress: the act of looking remains anything but singular. At the pantomime Treves stares at and through a Merrick who is not only a camera but also a kind of horizontal split screen, a surface whereby film viewers can see superimposed on his face the unfolding pantomime he sees on stage as well as his rapturous reactions; more to the point, the shot marks how Merrick’s face also functions as a screen that does not cover but instead reflects the projections or desires directed toward him by Treves and London society. Far from securing sight unseen for himself or his patient, Treves’s pronounced interest in looking through Merrick discloses how vision and desire remain inextricably bound and that what captivates viewers barely conceals their own identifications and repressions. III. It is not only Treves and Montagu who suffer from reminiscences. The cinema repeatedly returns to investigate and replay the notion of its origins. Lynch brings his critique of fixed conceptions of archaic maternal origins (as they relate to the broader field of vision) not only to scenes of looking in cinema but also to conventional filmic/ critical accounts of cinema’s history. The specific terms of that critique begin to emerge in the image of horses moving across the sky at the pantomime; the images, framed in a circular locket and surrounded by smoke, return viewers to the locket-like photograph of Merrick’s mother that opens the film, the photograph that comes to life, as it were, to assume its part in reenacting the mythic tale

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Figure 4.2 Moving across the sky depicted at the pantomime, the locket-like image of a horse, a figure associated with the birth of moving pictures

of Merrick’s violent origins (see figure 4.2). The first tracking shot deployed in the film (initiated when Treves turns from the hypnotic pinwheel to Lynch’s camera) summons, as in the figure of the moving horse, accounts of the inauguration of cinematic motion. The pinwheel, a protocinematic toy, recapitulates narratives of how unfettered movement remains an illusion that depends upon the slowness of the eye and the elision of gaps between a series of static images; given that the cut to the toy follows the opening shot of the (subsequently animated) photograph of Merrick’s mother, we are here again offered a condensed version of accounts that take photography as the origin of cinema or moving pictures. When we consider that the cut preceding another stylized tracking shot (across stunned faces of Pathological Society doctors), one that matches the single (eye) opening on Merrick’s hood with the lens of the Society projector, is from a Merrick whose black robe and white hood evoke the costume that enshrouded the turn-of-the-century still photographer as he/she prepared to shoot, we discern, moreover, that Merrick himself functions here, as he will throughout The Elephant Man, as a vehicle for thinking through cinema’s specific relation to photography. A scene midway through The Elephant Man lays bare the notion of photography’s relation to cinema that Lynch unsettles. The scene begins with London Hospital nurses reading a newspaper account of Merrick’s celebrity, including a mention of the autographed photograph that the actress Mrs. Kendall presented to Merrick in the preceding scene. (Merrick tells Kendall that the image will assume

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“a place of honor next to [the photograph of] my mother.”) Lynch cuts from the discussion of the news item to track across a series of discrete photographs of women and visitors Merrick displays on his mantle. Lynch’s portrayal of this relation between frames in these and related scenes indicates that the imagining of an inviolable, static origin (the photograph) for cinema often aims to endorse a denial of violence and foundational difference in representing subsequent history. When, for example, Merrick is later kidnapped by Bytes and displayed in a ragtag sideshow on the continent, the scene in which Merrick collapses not only signals the inherent danger of spectacle to reverse terms (the crowd, more clearly witnessing the pathos of Merrick and feeling shamed, spit at Bytes and the show abruptly ends), but also, with Lynch again employing a tracking shot at a fairground, marks how the cinema as an attraction likewise depends on a violent refusal of the imponderable, what challenges sequential narratives that depend on cause and effect. Lynch tracks across a series of the ragtag operation’s framed spectacles: dwarves and giants, conjoined twins, a strong man, a blood-letting Japanese man presented by traditionally dressed Japanese women, each housed in a framed car of a caravan, each with its own barker. The camera stops in its tracks when it reaches Merrick at the end of the line. Lynch, however, foregrounds each of the gaps between framed figures that the camera crosses by startling film viewers with a lightning flash each time the camera tries to proceed, unencumbered, across each gap. Despite the parallel fates of the framed figures in the caravan line, these flashes or breaks derail any universalizing insistence on fusing each into an abused and marginalized “family of man.” In addition to underlining the violence of the cinematic effect that depends on repressing the discrete between frames, the scene’s use of a flash that evokes the explosive take that occasions a shot by the early generation still camera disrupts photography’s willing compliance or absorption in cinema’s history. The scene thus suggests that spectators and the cinema (and its historians) cannot be categorically absolved of what motivates those captivated by medical, sideshow, and theatrical spectacles: the effort to mute a discordant Otherness within the spectator/subject by projecting that horror outward (onto the object on display) and by overwriting the gaps that constitute traces of alterity in time, vision, or history. One of the most direct sequences that contests the conventional role that cinematic genealogies often reserve for photography occurs when Merrick escapes from the continent and arrives by train at the London station, only to be hounded first by children and then by an adult mob. Merrick’s frenetic effort to escape—he gasps for air as he

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flees the station platform—is matched with the shrieking sounds of a locomotive. The train, of course, has long fascinated filmmakers, including some of the earliest, the Lumière Brothers. Lynch himself participated in an homage to the Lumières, whose pioneering work included a short of a train entering a station—what Bertrand Tavernier calls the first “horror film.”15 Indeed, the train was itself viewed as a protocinematic machine, taken to underscore some of the conditions of film spectating. Early “filmmakers sensed an affinity between the landscape that unfolds before the gaze of the train passenger and the sequence of moving images presented to the spectator in the [movie] theater” (II, 79). When Lynch brings Merrick as an emblem of the film camera, more particularly as a vehicle for thinking through cinema’s relation to photography as origin, to a site so charged in cinema’s history, unlike Verbinski and Mendes, he drives home the violence that marks the production of a seamless cinematic vision on screen as well as the generation of a static, uninterrupted narrative of cinema’s history. When, through increased momentum and through off-screen sound (of a chuffing train), a frightened Merrick becomes a kind of mobile still camera or imposing, runaway locomotive struggling to escape the tormenting boys, he is framed, moving, against successive frames. As the camera spots Merrick first leaving the train, Lynch presents a close-up of the hooded Merrick such that the single aperture reserved for his sight journeys sidelong against the successive windows/frames of the train (see figure 4.3). The camera continues

Figure 4.3 As a vehicle for examining cinema's relation to still photography, Merrick is here tracked as he rushes alongside unfolding frames of a (protocinematic) train

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to position Merrick alongside strips of frames when, tracking him from behind as he struggles up stairs, viewers see on Merrick’s right a series of white panels, each divided by bars that again lay bare cinema’s illusory stitching. When a boy on Merrick’s left starts shooting darts at Merrick’s head and yells “Why is your head so big?”, what comes into view among the succession of blank white panels is an advertisement featuring an image of a woman’s head (whose coiffure rhymes the shape of Merrick’s hood). When Merrick, still hounded by the boy, reaches the top of the stairs, from a reverse angle viewers see Merrick charging toward Lynch’s camera. Positioned behind and above his head is a blank advertisement space that appears as a kind of panoramic cinema screen (see figure 4.4). As the scene indicates, only through such violent refusals of gaps between frames and of Merrick’s difference could one both forge an uninterrupted succession of frames on a cinema screen and at the same time generate a tale of cinema’s founding that presents a vision of its arrival (a pristine panoramic blank screen) that appears to settle if not erase the trace of photography from that history of succession, to say nothing of effacing the particularity or difference photography continues to pose to cinema’s present. Lynch’s take on the history of cinema and its relation to photography reminds us that a filmic and critical discourse that eyes the photograph as its stable origin risks, no less than the stilling of the mother or woman as angelic ideal, ignoring or sanctioning all sorts of violent erasures of the discrete

Figure 4.4 The camera’s uneasy stitching of frames (along the stair rail) serves to derail cinema's arrival as a blank screen (above Merrick’s head), as a figure pristinely free of the disruptive traces of photography

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and particular at the origin as well as between and among frames, and between and among arts/technologies taken to emerge in the wake of this (conception of an) origin. If the advertisement of the woman’s head, rhymed with the moving emblem of still photography and its relation to cinema (Merrick), can be taken to allude also to the photograph of Merrick’s mother, Merrick’s descent down the station stairs makes plainer that Lynch’s interrogation of photography’s putative status as a stable origin of the cinema coincides with a more direct questioning of the angelic ideal so central to the culture’s as well as Merrick’s own imaginings of his beginnings. By forcing the fleeing Merrick to increase his pace, the hounding boy serves to drive Merrick to the end of the line, as it were, and back to the start. Not only does the action, that is, cause Merrick to unwittingly trample a small girl on the station platform (inciting a crowd to join chase, capture, and unveil the hooded Merrick), but also the movements and screams of the stricken girl recall nothing so much as those of Merrick’s mother when she was said to have conceived him while being trampled during an elephant attack. On the one hand, Lynch highlights the tremendous power of cultural myths, especially those pertaining to origins, for, regardless of content, narratives that seek to account for enigmatic beginnings, in appearing before and beyond the subject and subsequently coming to exert a forcefully foreign and intimate relation to him/her, share affinities with the structure of traumatic encounters. The entrance into language for all subjects remains traumatic in that such an experience—as Freud and Caruth emphasize with regard to trauma encountered by more fully formed, conscious, post-oedipal subjects—constitutes an indirect, opaque encounter for a subject who seems both there and not there, who witnesses an event (the entrance into language) that, because it arrives too soon and too overwhelmingly, appears to “defy” direct apprehension. The traumatic event occurs only belatedly—as if for the first time—in another place and time and affords the subject at best a tenuous claim to what in the end remains radically enigmatic (UE, 4–5). The subject, often haunted by having missed the very event he/she seemed present for, can remain at pains to account for this kind of psychological impact of a radically resistant unknowing (UE, 16–17). (Caruth recounts Freud’s analysis of traumatic force and latency as it unfolds in his discussion of a train collision, what Nicholas Daly has marked as a pronounced site for Victorian engagements with the accident as it relates to the unconscious.)16 Merrick’s unwitting return to a traumatic scene he seems nearly doomed to reenact can be taken to indicate the need for him to

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attempt to make some sense of what has exerted so formidable a grip on him. But the scene also makes plain that the very cultural tale that would explain Merrick’s imponderable origins remains particular and particularly problematic, for, as a response by others to the force of the enigmatic that confronts all subjects positioned in the Symbolic, the cultural tale, instead of acknowledging a radical strangeness at the heart of psychic life, brutally locates the violence of the imponderable exclusively in Merrick. In aiming to foreclose on the trace of the abject, what Merrick’s body and being raise for others and himself, of the radically ambiguous that persists for all both at the outset and throughout Symbolic life, the tale absolves others of any responsibility in producing or sustaining the maiming consequences that so destructive and deadening a tale sanctions. (The brutality against Merrick and his difference results in literally trampling the girl, a point lost on the avenging crowd.) On the other hand, the scene also compels Merrick and viewers to confront not merely the problematic way that the myth casts him as an exclusively inhuman beast/machine but also the insidious force that such a myth derives from coterminously casting the mother as a pure, idealized being. Whether the conflation of mother and child in the trampling scene suggests that Merrick confronts the mother as a child (before she conceived him) or as the child that yet remains in the mother who bore him, aside from challenging teleological sequencing by intimating that the original is not the source that comes before the derivative, the image also implies that Merrick’s encounter with this primal scene, what Freud understood as the fantasy of the parents’ sexual relations, amounts to a confrontation with a fantasy of Merrick’s that, while it may be cultural, remains cherished by him. Although Merrick more forcefully contests the element of the myth that sanctions a reading of him as singularly a beast or machine, his double take (he looks back at the fallen girl as he flees) can remind us of his own difficulty in leaving behind the idealized image of the maternal. Importantly, that idealized image helps propagate the element of the tale—Merrick as merely and exclusively a beast—that he rightly refuses. That is to say, as Freud understood it, whether witnessed or inferred by the child, the scene of sexual relations between the parents is often interpreted retroactively and, like the reductive cultural myth of Merrick’s origins (critiqued by the film and rejected by Merrick), the primal scene fantasy not only imagines the act of sexual relations as violent (perpetuated by the father, according to Freud) but also casts that violence as exclusive to him.

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Despite the insistence of the cultural myth of his origin, Merrick can no more be the sole embodiment of violence and the inhuman than his father could remain such an exclusive, brutalizing force in life or in Merrick’s personal memory. His unwitting, exclusive assignment of that role to the father appears to blind Merrick to how he may come to inherit that confining conception of the role, and his never mentioning his father may imply a desire for an exclusive relation with the mother. Granting a more dynamic role for, and relation to, the subjects positioned at, or in the wake of, such an originary scene, however, does not render it any less confounding or unstable. That the turn to Merrick’s mother or the maternal in general occurs so insistently within the context of a scene in which not only the trauma of Merrick’s abuse but also the eruption of the intriguing but frightening industrial machine (the train) comes to the fore suggests that Lynch’s understanding of repetition and the encounter with the imponderable dovetails with Laplanche and Pontalis’s emphasis on what is, again, the similarly traumatic structure of the Freudian primal scene: “Over and above the discussion of the respective dosages of phantasy and reality in the primal scene, what Freud . . . wants to uphold . . . is the idea that this scene belongs to the (ontogenetic or phylogenetic) past of the individual and that it constitutes a happening which may be of the order of myth but which is already given prior to any meaning which is attributed to it after the fact.”17 In short, as important as submitting traumatic experience to language remains, the film, like Caruth and Laplanche and Pontalis, resists claims to complete or final comprehension and mastery of such experience. We cannot forget, though, that Lynch’s elaboration of how the structure of traumatic encounters bears on general and particular cultural accounts of the origins of the subject and of psychic life coincides with unsettling photography as a stable origin that would undergird narratives of cinema’s history and way of working, narratives that not only run along parallel lines, as it were, but in turn are often also solicited to supplement retrograde reinscriptions of a deadening move against the play of Otherness in psychic and social life. The shock of the first film of the train, Tavernier’s aptly dubbed “first horror film,” even as it reminds us of cinema as itself an overwhelming industrial machine, should not obscure the no less formidable shock with which photography affronted consciousness. The flash Lynch deploys at the sideshow on the continent not only announces the explosive force of photography and signals its refusal to be fully absorbed by cinema or cinematic history but also emblematizes the paradoxical blindness produced and disclosed by an art/technology

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that seemed at first only too ready to fall in line with the advancing Enlightenment project to deliver and ensure the stability of the visible world and the viewer situated within it.18 Yet, as Marianne Hirsch emphasizes, photography became, for a figure such as Walter Benjamin, not only a reminder of what escapes the slow, naked eye, but also a means of driving home a radical sense of unknowing that works against the mastering impulses informing a predominant strain of Enlightenment thinking. The notion of photography as not merely supplementing the slowness of the eye, but as able to provoke another way of looking and even to reveal what we may have experienced but have not claimed (and to insist, moreover, that such cannot be fully owned), is corroborated by Lynch’s bringing emblems of photography to scenes that resist transparent and final understanding, as well as by the director’s report of his increasing involvement, at the time of shooting The Elephant Man, with photography. As he remarks, One of the things I like about photography is the machine of the camera. It’s really a fantastic thing. Everyone who’s ever taken a picture gets a thrill when it comes back from the lab. It forces you to see that moment but in a different way. . . . You’re not completely . . . in control. . . . I like these processes, because there are more opportunities for accidents. (LOL, 109)

It cannot escape notice that Merrick becomes an emblem of a photography understood as a fantastic machine. When, for instance, Carr Gomm chides Treves for hiding Merrick (before his unveiling to the Pathological Society), the governor’s remark that “spiriting hooded figures in the hall is apt to cause comment” serves to underscore both that the world of clinical observation and diagnosis cannot be removed from the subcultural interest in, and display of, the astounding variations of the body at the fairground, and that photography itself, far from capitalizing on Enlightenment drives to map a stable surface of the visible body and world, unexpectedly yielded, and came to be seen as a repository of, the fantastic. As Tom Gunning, in his study of spirit photography, magic, and trick films, remarks, if photography emerged as the material support for a new positivism, it was also experienced as an uncanny phenomenon, one which seemed to undermine the unique identity of objects and people, endlessly reproducing the appearances of objects, creating a parallel world of phanstasmatic doubles alongside the concrete world of the senses verified by positivism.19

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Rather than deliver the photograph as reliable evidence for uncovering disguised identities and as a forerunner of cinema’s own presumed ability to present the visible as direct, verifiable reality, Merrick marks the avisual status of still photography and its unsteady role as an origin for cinema. Like him, photography remains in process and challenges fixed, inviolable notions of/for vision. IV. Lynch evokes the visible external, anatomical serial motion of the horse, the subject of Muybridge’s studies of animal locomotion, in order to disclose what the anatomist Treves (as well as many a film) often has difficulty fully confronting: the challenges to the assuring notion of a “master” observer safely preserved as a “disinterested” outsider. The failure of sensory observation, the complexity and excess of visual phenomena, and the exigencies of desire all fail to deliver a transparent, steady image of the body and the world and in turn deny the stability the doctor or viewer might find for him/herself in the field of vision. Although, by covering a time period that ends five years before the X-ray’s appearance in 1895, The Elephant Man does not directly represent the formidable shock that the technology posed to Enlightenment confidence in vision, Lynch’s meditation on how photography and cinema relate to rendering the visible surface of bodies and beings nonetheless marks what for Akira Lippit the appearance of the X-ray made even more palpable: not only photography’s positivist aims to make things plain to see, but also its “drives”—and its ultimate inability—to make the “invisible visible” (AL, 93). For the Victorians and for Lynch’s consideration of the status of photography in history and in the present, even before the appearance of the X-ray, analog photography cut a ghostly figure, destabilizing the individuating identity of object and things and marking in Benjamin-like fashion a “technical advanc[e] that. . . . hint[s] at the invisible behind and inside the transparently visible, not just the unseen but that which is unavailable to sight” (FF, 119; emphasis added). Even if The Elephant Man does not directly cite the X-ray and Etienne-Jules Marey and J. B. A. Chauveau’s investigations of the interior of a body as opposed to its visible surface, in pivotal scenes Lynch’s camera moves inside the body. Lynch’s forays into the body highlight how cinema, like the X-ray and physiological research at the turn of the century, stymies attempts to sound the interior of the body as a transparent, stable depth that could, in the terms Cartwright uses

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to describe the compensatory aims of Marey and Chauveau’s experiment, “fil[l] the vacuum in signification produced by the failure of sensory observation” (STB, 27). We can return to the sequence in which Lynch’s camera moves inside the aperture of the hood of a sleeping Merrick, this time to delineate how it contests the border between inside and outside. One might have expected Lynch, in attempting to portray Merrick’s interior life—his unconscious one at that (his nightmare)—to have bypassed the aperture of Merrick’s hood, a cover behind which he spends so much time, especially since the sleeping Merrick is not wearing the garment. But just as Lynch’s choice to move away from Merrick’s sleeping body and instead enter his empty hood suggests that a public surface or cover remains a repository for depth, the unfolding private images of Merrick’s own nightmare in turn emphasize that they are culled from a store of very public, visible images of the surfaces of bodies and objects. Recall, too, that the depiction of Merrick’s nightmare (which the tracking shot through the hood initiates) analogizes the sounds emitted from the machinery in the hospital’s basement to the amplified, labored breathing of the bronchitis-afflicted Merrick. In this context, the analogy calls attention to how the building’s sounds seem inside him. Yet the hospital walls also appear as an expanded surface for the interior of a body that extends beyond its fleshy container. Even if we interpret this relaxing of the body’s borders as particular to dream (such that material and immaterial objects seem screens for, or depositories of, psychic images of the self), such scenes make comparable ones of smoking furnaces and steaming pipes that are not expressly linked to the states of either sleeping or conscious individuals appear as animate, to pulse with the afterlife of other bodies and objects.20 Finally, the dissolves and superimpositions in the dream sequence, in offering ghostly composite images, imply that the surface of the body can be penetrated. What emerges as inside or beneath the body, however, is shifting and hybridic, hardly a ground that might yield a compensatory fixed point for a surface that both popular and scientific laboratory film culture had revealed as unstable. Indeed, the film’s opening composite image of Merrick’s mother looking through and between elephant bodies that seem to be both eyeglasses and masks not only troubles the border between human and animal but also presents something akin to the “simultaneous view of the inside and outside” that X-rays present, a view that turned the vantage of the “spectator-subject inside-out” and “forced” the subject “to concede the limits of the body, erasing the limit against which it claimed to be outside” (PS, 34).

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A scene that similarly challenges the divide between inside and outside and refuses to offer up the interior as a fixed, invisible ground that would undergird a visible surface occurs early in The Elephant Man. If the representation of the interior psychic space of a dreaming Merrick in part scattered the body in the machinery of the hospital (reminding us of the extensions of psychic space), Lynch’s depiction of Treves operating on an accident victim considers the literal remains of the machine within the body. Although the scene does not imagine the unconscious of the anesthetized patient, its presentation of the literal machine and its residue within the body comparably unsettles the border between interior and exterior, gesturing toward the dynamic interchange that thwarts attempts to read the body’s interior as a ground for sustaining deadening conceptions of psychic space. The operation scene occurs shortly after Bytes has been told by London authorities that the exhibit of Merrick has been banned as “monstrous.” The scene begins when the camera cuts from an image of Bytes (breaking the news to an unseen Merrick positioned behind a curtain) to an extreme close-up of a flame. In a reverse move from the camera’s entrance into the aperture on Merrick’s hood, Lynch tracks out of the opening of a furnace; the sounds of the crackling flame and smoke seem alive, commingling as they do with human moans, the source of which we only subsequently see, as the camera pulls back further, is a distressed patient on an operating table being given a follow-up dose of anesthesia. Treves describes the man’s body as a “mess” (parts of his chest cavity are exposed and shot through with chunks of metal), declaring to his surgical team, “We’ll be seeing a lot more of these machine accidents. Abominable things these machines. You can’t reason with them.” As Treves cauterizes a wound, the scene ends with smoke rising above his patient’s chest. The cut from the veiled, “monstrous” Merrick to the “abominable” industrial machine that has found its way inside Treves’s patient implies that although it is not Merrick on the operating table, at stake is the relation between not only human and machine but also animal (the so-called Elephant Man) and machine. Yet even at this early juncture in the film, Treves’s complaint about unreasonable machines— with its implication that reason remains a supremely individuating sign of the human—is called into question. Whether indifferent or brutally exploitative, the public responses to Merrick’s plight, as they are traced alternately to an increasing industrialization and to an animallike instinct within humans, muddy the conventionally understood

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borders thought to define the human. Despite the fact that Lynch targets the exploitation of industrial workers—their unsafe, monotonous, and dehumanizing working conditions as well as a discourse that would underwrite such exploitation by forging a rigid distinction between public and private or domestic life—the film’s confounding of steady oppositions between and among human, machine, and animal was quite subtle and anticipated recent reconsiderations of such oppositions in Victorian medicine, social criticism, natural history, and literature. In ways that strikingly illuminate Lynch’s corresponding work, Tamara Ketabgian’s “ ‘Melancholy Mad Elephants’: Affect and Animal Machine in Hard Times” argues for a “more porous” understanding of Victorian views of the relations among human nature, industrial technology, and animal nature (MME, 650). As against the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Descartian notion of the machine as lifeless automata, Ketabgian cites early Victorian thinkers for whom the “paradigmatic machine” was one that possessed its own power source. Moreover, the Victorian view of the source and nature of such power sounded an affinity between animal and machine. Scenes such as those in which Lynch parallels the flight of the so-called Elephant Man to the chuffing motion of the steam engine locomotive accord with the Victorian view that “similar, if not identical” forces drive steam engines and animal bodies (MME, 652). Drawing in part on David Channel’s The Vital Machine (1991), Ketabgian reports that the human body was itself often cast by Victorians as a living machine, and machines in turn were seen as vital animals: “Whereas engines ran on forms of energy that resembled living animal heat, animal bodies not only harbored mechanical instincts, but also were viewed as themselves organic machines” (MME, 652). In his capacity as editor of Household Words, Dickens commissioned an article (based on Michael Faraday’s “The Laboratory in the Chest” [1850]) that, in likening “digestion and respiration to the process of slow combustion,” can serve to gloss scenes in Lynch’s film where bodies work in smokeand steam-filled factories, dream bodies seem dispersed in industrial space, and fragments of factory machines appear embedded in bodies. The Household Words article concludes that the “human body [is] ‘a wonderful factory,’ in which ‘the lungs are concerned in cooling us as well as heating us, like a sort of regulating furnace’ ” (cited in MME, 653). Lynch, while working on The Elephant Man, draws attention to his film’s view of the human body as factory (possessing a power of its own), an analogy that Merrick’s extreme physical condition makes

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only more apparent and that Lynch confessed galvanized his own imagination: You see pictures of . . . big explosions [referring to industrial accidents]— they always reminded me of the papillomatous growths on John Merrick’s body. They were like slow explosions . . . I’m not sure what started the explosions, but even the bones were exploding. . . . so the idea of the smoke and soot and industry next to the flesh was also a thing that got me going. Human beings are like little factories. They turn out so many little products. (LOL, 103)

If Lynch emphasizes the heretofore underrepresented Victorian wonderment over the factory-like productions of human and animal bodies, his film, in expressing concern over the potential of industrialization and machine culture to forestall the generative interchange between affect and language, also joins more rehearsed readings of some pronounced Victorian viewpoints. As Ketabgian recalls, Thomas Carlyle’s essay “Sign of the Times” (1828), like Lynch, in part decries “the machine—and its associated philosophy—as colonizing the inner reaches of the soul” (MME, 654). However, Ketabgian nuances the view that takes Carlyle and, more broadly, Victorian thought to dismiss the machine-like workings of the human soul as de facto nonfeelings: “Undoubtedly critical of mechanism, [Carlyle] still views mechanical impulses as forms of affect” (MME, 654–55). Such feelings are subsequently cast as “vulgar, inhuman, and physically intense” by Carlyle and others, including Dickens, but Ketabgian, focusing especially on contemporary medical treatises on melancholy, demonstrates that Carlyle’s, Dickens’s, and the broader Victorian denigration of such affects stems from their threat of impenetrability and unpredictability, qualities that Lynch’s film works to create space for. George Man Burrows’s Commentaries on the Causes, Forms, Symptoms, and Treatment, Moral and Medical, of Insanity (1828), for example, in diagnosing the melancholic, elucidates a condition that presents the doctor with a patient whose seeming lack of emotion challenges readability; at the same time, though, the melancholic’s apparent lack of emotion often alternates with “rage” (263; cited in MME, 658), “great fury,” and “excitation” (592; cited in Ketabgian MME, 658) and thus also contests investments in predictability (of behavior). “For Burrows and other medical contemporaries the muted physical features of melancholy,” far from signaling a lack of affect, constitute “intense forms of inexpression [and] convey aggressive and powerfully charged forces, present

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both in melancholy and mania . . . [if] represented by each in different ways” (MME, 659). Ketabgian charts the wider Victorian fear and disgust at affect’s “opacity,” its “impenetrability,” and its “hidden energies” (MME, 656–57), especially when expressed in “routine animal and mechanical actions”—such as the “composed faces and regulated actions” (56; cited in MME, 660) of the Coketown factory workers who appear in Dickens’s Hard Times. Far from ratifying “untroubled” idealizations of the self-controlled and controlling powers of “British industry” (for which the steam engine was the “main-spring” and model), the metaphorics of Dickens’s novel, as it figures such mechanical regularity in terms of the elephant, “an exotic hybrid of beast and machine” (MME, 650; emphasis added), renders “repetitive . . . mechanical labor[ings]” not as models of “rationality” and self-control but as signs of a potentially threatening “excess” of feeling, an ineffectively stored sadness or a precariously housed and “disordered” madness (both anger and irrationality) (MME, 657). Although “Dickens shows how bestial instinct and mechanical reflex underlie even the deepest and seemingly most human feelings” (MME, 651), “with its blend of docile regularity and violent unpredictability, the elephant profoundly challenged interpretive assumptions,” including those of Dickens (MME, 663). “Consequently, when Hard Times likens its [factory] engines to these creatures, it mobilizes an active cultural subtext, which allied . . . [the melancholy mad elephants] not only with industrial labor and imperial power but also with related anxieties about mechanical behavior and inhuman forms of feeling” and how to manage them (MME, 663). According to Ketabgian, such an inscrutability and nascent unpredictability are, in Dickens’s novel, as we have seen they are in Lynch’s film, associated with “others”: workers, colonized subjects, and women. But while Dickens and Victorian culture often struggle to repress unreadable and unpredictable affects as they are linked with these others, Lynch creates space for the transgressive power of the affect that seems barely contained in the still and stilling figure of the angel (the woman/mother), the beaten or docile Merrick, and the beaten down industrial laborers. Ketabgian helps throw into relief, hence, how Lynch’s film remains open to “intense,” affective “forms of inexpression,” forms that register, in part, an opacity and an unpredictability that may work not only to destabilize the social order but also, in their manifestation in humans as well as in animals and machines, to test the certainty of metaphysical orderings that rely on absolute or consoling distinctions between and among the categories of human, animal, and machine.

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More than this, Lynch’s consideration of the potentially deadening effects of machines both on literal bodies and on their affective lives does not amount to an outright dismissal of industry or the machine. The uncertainty of its affective registers makes it difficult to cast technology as either good or bad; the machine’s potential for generating “fascinating” products is, after all, likened by Lynch to the body’s own mysterious and inspiring (if also unsettling) output. For all the refusals of the radical ambiguity that Merrick’s vital machine-like/ animal-like body elicits, his struggle to engage with the strangeness of his body and being, to say nothing of his attempt to endure the brutal responses directed at him, nonetheless underscores the deadening refusals of uncertainty of those around Merrick as well as his contrastingly more vital psychic life. Lynch figures photography and cinema likewise as machines that cannot be cast as inherently or exclusively deadening or enlivening. With respect to their use in scientific and popular entertainment culture, visual apparatus can be deployed to violently try to contain all sorts of differences, to make little space for the uncertain that pulses through inexpressive as well as patently expressive life. At the same time, though, photography, “the machine of the camera,” can, for Lynch, function as a “fantastic” thing, not only as an analogue for thinking through nonverbal, potentially generative, affective forms of inexpression, but also as a tool that can provoke, more profoundly and urgently, Symbolic exchange. Photography, that is, can work to submit affect to language and thus encourage an embrace of the play of alterity in the field of vision. Photography presents the possibility of a machine accident that breaks down rigidity in perception. The technology can serve to drive home the notion that not all is transparently available to sight and that the illusion of seeing without being seen, of constructing a bulwark against others and Otherness, remains difficult to permanently sustain. Although acknowledging the certain and uncertain registers of intense and charged forms of inexpression, The Elephant Man does not valorize or see their potentially transgressive force (both productive and destructive) as negated by submitting such affects to language. Even though Merrick frequently remains silent, especially in public or in the presence of strangers, his reasons often stem from concern to preserve himself as opposed to a sanctified silence or inexpressible affect. As he explains to Treves, who had earlier assumed Merrick’s silence was the mark of an “imbecile” who could not speak: “I was afraid to speak.” The implication, in part, is that Merrick’s earlier life in a sideshow, even though capitalizing on his crossing

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the border between animal and human, forbade his speech since it might make such crossing seem even more dangerous. To be sure, even when Merrick, without veil, speaks, his words appear eclipsed by the papillomatous growths that register as intense and, moreover, confounding affective forms of inexpression.21 The gestural immobility of his face suggests a lack of interest or waning of affect, but the growths on his face (and body) confront the viewer with what seems a somatic excess; such a contradictory combination of affects is only less palpable when Merrick speaks in patently lively or excited tones (which he often does when deeply moved), since the contradictory mix posed by his facial expression seems (at first) to direct attention away from the content of his words or even their animated tones. On those occasions when the expression of intense irreconcilable bodily gestures may be downplayed—as when, taken aback by an unexpected kindness, Merrick’s “quiet” tears (unaccompanied by words or sobs) focus attention on a deep sadness in his eyes—an excess of (albeit noncontradictory) affect is nonetheless indicated: such scenes, that is, are often shot in close-up and punctuated by a swell of nondiegetic music. These melodramatic conventions often serve, as they do here, to underscore the entrapment of individuals who, unable to easily grasp the causes of their plights or the social conditions and discourses that speak through them, thus frequently encounter difficulty articulating their desires in language or speech. As generated by and associated (diegetically and nondiegetically) with Merrick, such excess of affect underscores the social sphere’s refusal of these registers and contrasts Merrick with the often deadening people around him, who, when not aiming to have him parrot their words (as Treves does when he first tries to impress Carr Gomm) or attempting to speak for or through him, seem themselves unable to embrace a dialectic interplay between affect and language that might enliven them, people whose speech is more welcomed than Merrick’s. At the same time that social conditions appear to present Merrick only as a figure who most often seems to seek protective cover in silence and the inexpressible, Merrick is not beyond succumbing to the lure of a melancholic investment in a suffocating maternal/child dyad. Merrick clings to the idealized image of the lost mother, worshiping her photograph, placing it beside his bed and at times under his pillow as he sleeps. “Lost objects,” as Christian Metz remarks, “are the only ones one is afraid to lose” (TIS, 80). Although Merrick permits others to touch that image and even speaks of his mother (“If only I could find her, do you think she could love me as I am?” he asks a sobbing Anne Treves), in such instances he seems unwilling to submit

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his longing to critical reflection and thus resembles Rachel, Anna, and Samara in Verbinski’s The Ring, depressives who, “by refusing to lose” the lost object, “refus[e] to gain it in words.” For the depressive, as Kristeva writes, “the object is buried, so to speak, and thus dominated by jealously guarded, unnamable affects” (IR, 23). It must be said that Merrick’s investment in the memento of his mother has much to do with the brutal and indifferent responses he receives from others. Merrick’s engagement with other photographs does appear more dynamic. When, for instance, just before being abused by the Nightwatchman and his paying crowd, Merrick is seen speaking with a photograph as if it were a person, we appreciate the severity of Merrick’s nighttime isolation. Such scenes say more about the world’s refusal to intimately engage Merrick than about his unwillingness to engage a world beyond him. At the same time, the film forces Merrick to confront that his clinging to an idealized image of the mother works to underwrite his abuse and perhaps encourages a masochistic investment in its perpetuation (as if, being deserving of punishment and hence punished might prevent the more painful possibility that the mother has left for reasons other than Merrick’s physical condition). After trampling the girl at the station, a traumatic repetition that compels Merrick’s attempt to make sense of his relation to originary objects, Merrick challenges the logic of such an image and its discourse. When eventually cornered by the mob and rendered as waste in a train station urinal, he stands and angrily insists, for the first time, that he is a human being. What is more, throughout The Elephant Man, Lynch depicts Merrick attempting to make sense of his experience not only through speech but also through other ways that bespeak the generative embrace of Symbolic elaboration. Most notably, Merrick’s construction of a model cathedral underlines the importance of psychic representation, of the attempt “to give meaning to suffering and [thus] begin the associative speech that will transform malady and death into a narrative of life, a new life” (IR, 24). Merrick’s comments to a nurse inquiring about his artistic methods are instructive: “You see, I have had to rely upon my imagination for what I cannot see.” From his limited vantage, that is, Merrick cannot see the cathedral’s base (obscured as it is by adjoining buildings). His work from such a vantage and distance, though, does not betray a refusal to directly welcome a wider world beyond his window frame but rather indicates the wider culture’s refusal to tolerate his unveiled (or veiled) visage, unmanaged, beyond his room. More than this, Merrick’s art and his words convey the broader message and method of Lynch’s film, which

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continually gestures toward the invisible and the unknown within and beyond the visual field by giving space for those realms in and through Symbolic elaboration.22 If Treves’s response (and that of the film and the Reminiscences) to the profound ambiguity that Merrick’s body and being come to represent can be indicted for neither fully endorsing the inscription of Otherness in psychic and social life, nor appreciating how the artistic process might support the paternal function, Lynch attributes such failures to the deadening cultural discourses (especially regarding vision) that speak through Treves as much as they do through Merrick. The turn against Otherness embodied in the tale of Merrick’s origins remains embedded in and undergirded by stultifying conceptions of visual apparatus and of vision. For Lynch, technologies of vision resist being harnessed to any discourse that would situate them beyond the exigencies of desire and the accident. Indeed, The Elephant Man, as we have seen, challenges the narrative that divides inside from outside and underscores photography’s destabilization of the surface and interiors of bodies. Lynch’s comments on the factory-like production of the body’s interior are of a piece with his earlier remarks on the body’s surface productions and can serve as a coda that underscores how The Elephant Man’s enlivening conception of body and being contrasts those anxious moves of Verbinski as well as Treves to sound as transparent and fixed the interior of the body, especially as associated with the archaic mother. Each, in his distinctive ways, seeks to block the persistent perturbations of archaic disturbances, embodied for Treves in the sight of a “loathing insinuation of a man [Merrick] being changed into” another thing. Contrast so horrified a response to the body and being in process to Lynch’s welcoming of the body as factory, perpetually in the act of producing and becoming: “They [bodies] turn out so many little products,” Lynch writes. “The idea of something growing inside, and all these fluids, and timings and changes . . . coming out and splitting off and turning into another thing . . . it’s unbelievable” (LOL, 103; emphasis added). Lynch’s unsettling of a static conception of and relation to (and between) human (or familial) and artistic/technological origins finds nuanced reiteration in the final scene of The Elephant Man, itself a return, albeit with a difference, to the opening portrayal of Merrick’s conception and birth. The final scene depicts Merrick’s suicide, an act offered not to indicate his rejecting life but to signal his savoring, near life’s end, his having been loved. As he tells Treves when they return from the pantomime: “I am happy because I know that I am loved.” When he lies back in bed (the weight of his head induces

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suffocation), Merrick expires and appears as or through an inspiriting breath to be reunited with his worshiped mother in the heavens. Indeed, her photograph, framed in the deep space of the universe, is reanimated and appears as an irradiated, solar eclipse. Here the closeup of Merrick’s mother is accompanied by her reciting stanzas from Tennyson’s “Nothing Will Die” (1830), and the film ends with an extreme close-up of her eyes as she repeats one of the poem’s closing lines, “Nothing will die.”23 Although Lynch does not deny Merrick the consolation of attempting to find a peaceful death, the scene summons pronounced critical motifs and contexts to indicate that The Elephant Man does not retreat from critiquing the imbricated, static imaginings of the child’s relation to the maternal origin and cinema’s relation to its beginnings in the photograph. Another way of discerning how the conclusion resists the false solace promised by deadening foreclosures on difference at the origin and between and among subjects and between and among arts/technologies would be to first consider that in the Victorian imaginary the elephant was not only joined to the steam engine—the Victorian protocinematic figure evoked in Lynch—but also in its own right directly bound up with cinema’s origins. In addition to the train, animals were among the first sights eyed by early cinema and, of course, cinema itself was first sighted and jostled for attention with animals on display at the fairground. Even if implicitly, the cinema solicited the elephant in particular and the animal in general in order to stake out a view of its own beginnings. As Lippit, quoting Hervé Aubron, relates “the animal inevitably questions the origins of cinema because the animal was its first model. But also because cinema was fused with animals in its earliest stages” (DOA, 12). “The rapid proliferation of zoological parks and fairs in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries coincided with industrialization and the advent of cinema” (DOA, 12). Much as Lynch drew upon the figure of the imposing, fearful train in part to lay bare how the ostensible seamlessness of cinematic projection, the violent repression of discrete gaps between window/film frames, relates to psychological projection, in particular, to the scapegoating of Merrick (the attempted abjection of an internal strangeness that he comes to emblematize for his celebrators and tormentors alike), Lippit finds that early cinema was often drawn to the animal to disavow and screen over fundamental gaps in knowing and seeing, especially as they were provoked by animal death. “From its inception,” cinema’s projection was both “filmic and psychic” (DOA, 12). It “projected life and vitality—the principle of animation—and

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assumed from early on the role of a fantastic technological zoo” (DOA, 12). Lippit is quick to delineate, though, how such animation and reanimation often constituted a deadening refusal of the kind of radical ambiguity that Lynch’s film endorses as crucial for psychic/social life. The perpetual animation and reanimation of animals, in fact, sought to conceal what cannot be known or revealed—the “impossible spectacle” of animal death. “Against the impossibility of capturing the moment of the animal’s death” or of fully fathoming either the creature’s particularity or its complex relation to the human, “cinema provides artificial life, anima, animation, and the possibility of reanimation. . . . It multiplies and repeats each unique death until its singularity has been erased, its beginning and end fused into a spectral loop” (DOA, 12; emphasis added). Lippit focuses on the infamous Thomas Edison 1903 actuality Electrocuting an Elephant, a film document of the public execution of a Coney Island elephant, Topsy—“accused” of killing her handlers (see chapter 3). Despite efforts to produce a seamless reel of spectacular animal death, traces of the singular and the ambiguous intrude in the Edison actuality, thwarting moves to erase such “spectral” exigencies and maintain representational closure. For instance, Lippit notes a break, an apparent “jump cut” that betrays where the camera stopped and resumed filming. “When the scene of the dying elephant resumes, a human figure returns with it, fading into the background behind the lifeless elephant’s body” (DOA, 13). Likening the unintended appearance of “the ghost-like man” to “a Méliès [magic] trick,” Lippit reads the figure (as he departs at film’s end) as provid[ing] a haunting relief, as if the elephant’s life had lept . . . into this human form . . . —a form of elephant survival. It is as if the human being is there to accompany the elephant to the other world. . . . Or, [it is as if] the spirit of the elephant appears to transfer to the man. The human figure hovers on the surface of the shot, never fully absorbed. . . . Edison’s current, his electrical charge, destroys and reanimates the elephant. (DOA, 13)

Merrick is not an animal and Lynch’s depiction of Merrick’s death as chosen and peaceful hardly counts as an execution; yet Lippit’s reading of Electrocuting an Elephant helps highlight how the conclusion of The Elephant Man does not retreat from Lynch’s persistent critique of violent moves against particularity and (abject) ambiguity. On the one hand, if we recall Lynch’s concomitant questioning of the borders of the human, then Merrick, even when treated with the human

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dignity he should not have to demand, cannot (as can no human) be understood as radically distinct from the animal. (The dismissal of Merrick as purely animal, of course, aims to underwrite the unethical treatment of him as well as of animals.) One might say, then, that just as Topsy, not only by being personified as a human criminal but also by unwittingly appearing to provoke a ghostly human return, continues to trouble such borders, neither can Merrick nor the representation of his death be made to avoid summoning, or to settle, the anxious question of the animal/human relation. Still, if in charting how the transmission of Merrick’s spirit returns to and reanimates the photograph, Lynch may be said to be pointedly echoing Edison and cinema’s putative ability to draw from animality a vitalizing power to animate and reanimate not only its subject but also cinema’s own life, The Elephant Man may indeed appear to be more than a little invested in producing, in Lippit’s terms, “artificial” life—in repressing the spectral exigencies that resist being “fused into an endless loop.” Lynch’s return, in the final scene, to the film’s beginning, in fact, seems to literalize and authorize an untroubled and reverberating celestial suture. It is not merely animal and human difference that seem elided in this inspired spectral loop, but also the particularity of photography as it relates to cinema, as well as of the child as it relates to the maternal origin. In this regard, Merrick’s spirited return to an ecliptic, encircled image of his mother brings the film uncannily and troublingly close to The Ring. Albeit replacing the offspring of video with cinema, the scene of the melancholic “elephant man” sentimentally falling back or dissolving into the body of the mother appears to echo the depiction of Rachel and Adan who, in the aftermath of the father’s death, remain incestuously bound, foreclosing on Symbolic elaboration and reproducing Samara’s deadly videotape as a technological progeny, a token of a ritual, dyadic refusal of Otherness. The marked filmic qualities of The Elephant Man’s final scene specify, however, that Lynch acknowledges the spectral exigencies that work against presenting Merrick’s peaceful death as a ringing endorsement of or memoriam to a regressive fantasy of living death. After Merrick smoothes out his bed covers, relishing his remaining moments of life, and lies down to die, there is an abrupt cut to a close-up of the now dead Merrick. Not only does the cut indicate the impossibility of representing the actual moment of death on screen, but also when the camera appears literally galvanized by Merrick’s spirit to again make a move that we have repeatedly charted throughout Lynch’s film—a trek across a series of photographs (here those of Mrs. Kendall and of Merrick’s mother) on his nightstand—a reading

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that would take such a tracking shot to underline an immediate, uninterrupted relay between mother and son and to secure a direct photographic inheritance for the cinema runs aground on the image of Merrick’s model cathedral. That work, although not refusing the call to sense making and Symbolic elaboration, nonetheless makes space for the inexpressible and the unseen, for the play of alterity that both disrupts and vitalizes meaning. Merrick’s signature, which he affixes to the model before he takes to his bed, also foregrounds a dialectical interplay that contests an unimpeded march toward transparent meaning and relation, refusing to erase what resists meaning but cannot be dismissed as devoid of significance. Instead of finalizing a conventional notion of immediate and direct transmission (between artist and work, and audience and work), the appearance of the artist’s signature, of the letter on a film screen, functions, as Tom Conley has noted in a different context, to signify the complexity of cinematic writing, understood in a Derridean sense as challenging stabilizing notions of transparent signification. As Conley writes, “The image connotes timeless abstraction in its pictural form, while the literal shape of writing [here Merrick’s signature], when inserted into the field of the image, denies any stable presence of meaning. The shape of the line enhances it image, but its meanings distort it.”24 For Conley, screen script and (moving) image remain neither absolutely separate nor fully conjoined; they are “together, within each other, in various degrees of tension that cannot be resolved” (FH, ix). By conceiving the letter that is inserted into the moving image as itself neither absolutely invested in a linear march toward progressive iterability nor totally devoid of significance, Conley seeks to disclose the activity of a “writing” that, though not reducible to the appearance of script on screen, nonetheless, with regard to the panning shot in Lynch’s final scene, derails smooth tracks across the screen letter, or a concomitant claim to seamless treks across the series of photographs on Merrick’s nightstand. In short, Lynch breaks any implicit promise to generate and deliver a final, triumphal transparency at the end of the line. Just as important, as the camera passes above the model cathedral, crosses the threshold of the curtained window, and appears to transmit the dying breath of Merrick that reanimates the photographic image of mother in the night sky, the steam that circulates throughout Lynch’s film returns. The billowing smoke is reminiscent of the puff of white smoke that viewers spotted at the film’s outset where it joined audible cries of the newborn Merrick. But, as noted, Lynch associates smoke with the image of the angelic mother to disclose

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how the fantasy of the idealized woman is violently produced and aims to sanctify rigid oppositions that help sustain the inequities of the status quo and that, more fundamentally, seek to arrest an abject ambiguity. Even if the smoke at the scene of Merrick’s passing does not directly invoke the smoke that surfaced in Edison’s actuality as Topsy was being electrocuted, it does recall a comparable violence that Lynch associates with the fairground spectacle, namely at the ragtag production where smoke traces (linked with the camera-like flash of lightning) signified the attempt to stitch a series of frames of “freaks” on display (and to suture the still photograph and the cinema) into an unbroken universalizing loop. Lynch uses smoke to indicate the brutality of the production of such fantasies, not to imply that fantasy per se is or could be banished, even less to dismiss industry or technology outright, but rather to decry fantasies that extol stasis and rigid orderings. Smoke’s unsettling appearance at the moment Merrick’s breath crosses the threshold of the window beyond the cathedral provides an apt illustration of Lynch’s general comments that smoke is “so active, never standing still” and “subject to any little breeze, so it’s always changing” (LOL, 221). Even if we were to consider the series of panning and tracking shots in the final scene (and throughout The Elephant Man) apart from their work in pointedly refusing the consolation promised by deadening foreclosures against Otherness, even if we were, that is, to focus exclusively on the repetitive moves of the machine of the camera apart from the objects it tracks, such ordered movements could still not be made to exclusively represent a consoling labor; for, as repetitive machine affects, they not only signify rationality, order, or self-control, but also, like the laborings of the machines in the dream sequence and in Dickens’s Hard Times, gesture toward a potentially threatening “excess” of feeling, an ineffectively contained sadness or a precariously housed and “disordered” madness (MME, 657). Such a potentially threatening excess, when considered within the context of the scene of Merrick’s death, unsettles domestications of Merrick’s melancholy and can help reframe as less assuring a reading that might take Merrick’s desire to sleep like normal people (as his suicide implies) to be endorsing the quiet internalization of a normalizing discourse, even if Merrick himself did, in fact, long to be like the ostensibly able sleeper he spots in the engraving on his bedroom wall. It is possible, too, to read the repetition of camera moves (tracking in to the image through the window as opposed to the horizontal pans we have examined in the final scene) as more patently registering the alternating mania of the melancholic, not

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only because of the increased speed with which the camera moves, but also because it is combined with what appears to be a simultaneous tracking in and zooming out shot, an effect/affect that points to the inability of film viewers to distinguish between moving forward and backward in time. It matters, too, that just as we imagine Merrick’s spirit to have galvanized and become one with the maternal image, the vertiginous camera work brings into view a frame in the form of a corona (or edge of circular light) that calls to mind a solar eclipse. Lynch here not only emphasizes a mediated view of Merrick’s reunion with his mother but also foregrounds the paradox of an intense light that blinds rather than enables clear vision and thus complicates claims for transparent returns. The billowing smoke associated with Merrick’s birth returns, but this time it appears to emanate from the interior of the framed image, to come from the interior of the reanimated mother, thus adding the confounding of the interior and exterior of the body to the uncertainties of directional movement established in the scene. The smoke momentarily effaces the image, but Merrick’s mother returns (not as a still but as a moving film image, as it were) to recite lines from the opening stanza of Tennyson’s poem “Nothing Will Die,” excerpts of which we have been hearing in voice-over during the closing moments of the final scene. It is difficult not to read these concluding moments as avisual assaults on the “enlightened” move charted in The Ring—notably, its effort to still or fix the enigmatic interior of the maternal body as compensatory supplement for the failure of sensory observation. Indeed, the billowing smoke that now joins Merrick and his mother, as we have seen, has been persistently associated with the explosiveness of continual growth and change on the body’s surface as well as its interior. Michel Chion’s description of the smoke associated with Merrick’s birth (smoke that returns here as if from the interior of the mother’s body) as “a mushroom cloud”25 helps underscore the traces of atomic light or shadow optics that Lippit elaborates (see figure 4.5). Although, of course, the atomic blasts within the timeline of Lynch’s tale had not yet come, they nonetheless made more apparent what was already “intimated in the radioactive [and photographic] culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries” (AL, 93–94). The atomic blasts, that is, made more decisive the kind of blows already delivered to the Enlightenment dream of vision, blows registered in and by Lynch’s film. Albeit on a massive scale, the blasts, that is, again testify not only to the destructive power that light or radiation could wield over bodies and objects but also to the “destruction of

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Figure 4.5 Tracking an animating return: as if inspirited by Merrick’s breath, Lynch’s camera makes its fractured trek across the photos of mother and actress; past his signed rendering of the cathedral; and through the curtained window into deep space, where the photographic image of the mother (with which the film began) returns to a three-dimensional life, as it were, albeit framed with a difference—amid smoke and ecliptic light.

light” (AL, 92), the ruination of vision’s ability to penetrate depths and in turn yield a visible, verifiable ground to stabilize the spectator/ subject. Lynch’s destabilization of ends and beginnings, his embrace of Otherness at the origin and beyond, is reiterated by lines less attended to in the Tennyson poem Merrick’s mother recites. The final line she utters, “nothing will die,” also appears earlier in the poem, not as a statement that comforts but as an exclamation—“Never, oh! never, nothing will die”—and follows questions that cannot be ruled out as indicating an amazement that “clouds” and the “heart” would not seek rest from a continual movement, would not want to end a movement that seems wearying. This broader context makes more radically ambiguous the poem’s final line such that we are not sure whether the line promises an eternal life of consoling peace or the continuation of an infinite sorrow, or of the uncertainty that might occasion such sorrow. Far from endorsing false consolations of a life imagined in opposition to Otherness, the poem, with its refusal to offer the assurance of an originary moment of the world’s appearance or disappearance, instances the kind of radical ambiguity from which The Elephant Man does not retreat, whether imagining the beginnings or endings of its

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subject’s history or of the arts/technologies with which it remains intimately and vitally, if also strangely, enmeshed. Chion’s claim for the peaceful ending of The Elephant Man notwithstanding, his comments on the endings of the four films Lynch completed before The Elephant Man (DL, 46) seem, in light of the specific context and work we have traced here, to capture something of The Elephant Man’s distinctive refusal of finality: “They [Lynch’s early films] lead us,” Chion writes, “into a beyond which is clearly designated (and it cannot be helped if this seems a truism) as a place where one never dies. Is this perspective exalting or, on the contrary, terrifying? . . . It is Lynch’s strength that he does not allow us to decide between these two alternatives” (DL, 46).

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Chapter 5

Inscribing the Dream of Otherness in Wim Wenders’s Until the End of the World

L

ooking back, especially with The Ring and American Beauty in mind, at Wim Wenders’s 1991 futuristic tale of Sam Farber (William Hurt) and Claire Tourneur’s (Solveig Dommartin) end-of-themillennium trek across the globe can remind us how presciently Wenders traced the contours of the mounting threat to psychic life posed (in part) by mass media’s efforts to proffer the image as a way to automatically “take on . . . [ultimately generative] anxieties and desires . . . and to suspend their meaning” (NMS, 8). Sam and Claire often appear only slightly less numb than the many affectless people whom they meet, people whose distinct cultures are joined, at times leveled, by a surfeit of screens charged with reproducing a glowing sameness in isolation that passes for life and community but remains closer to living death. What is more, even if the formidable obstacles facing Claire and Sam as they attempt to move beyond themselves and a psychic deadening are compounded by the flouting of the paternal function extant in their social sphere, the extent of the crisis for Wenders is more pervasive than in Mendes or even Verbinski, simply because, in encountering its manifestations in most of the eight countries through which they travel, Claire and Sam chart a globalized repudiation of Symbolic elaboration. Although their journey across the planet is inspired by a laudable, memorializing effort—to avoid bounty hunters who, working for a totalitarian U.S. government, aim to confiscate the invention of Sam’s father, a camera that enables Sam and Claire to record images that his blind mother can see—in the very process of archiving as opposed to disposing of images, and doing so in an enclave removed from their frenetic lives, they nonetheless

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become addicted to a particular approach to images that Wenders elsewhere deems “a virus.”1 It was not simply the desire to look ahead, but more to adopt a complex relation to the history of image making that made Wenders as prescient in the late 1970s and 1980s as he appears to be today, working as he did to point to affinities between contemporary culture and fascist and totalitarian ideology. For Thomas Elsaesser, New German Cinema filmmakers such as Wenders, Hans-Jūrgen Syberberg, and especially Rainer Werner Fassbinder returned to a pre-Nazi past not (as in their earlier work) to search for idealized, “good” fathers who, because they emigrated before or during the Nazi period, could replace their own culpable ones, but to rejoin a Weimar tradition that took “cinema, photography, and radio [among other media] . . . as interconnected and interdependent phenomena,” and that critiqued their concerted deployment, in the words of Ernst Junger, as “parts of modern warfare.”2 As Elsaesser argued, this body of cinema made clear that it no longer took the massive resources of a war to bring together the press, radio, and cinema for an even more powerful (and coercive) mobilization of public opinion (HI, 300). The best work of the New German Cinema confronted “the warlike mobilization of which the screens [cinema but especially television] are capable” (HI, 305), illuminating how their increasing invasion of consciousness jeopardized the vitality of the private sphere. Until the End of the World extends this critique and makes clear that spectacularly reducing psychic life within a postwar German context that often refused to confront its Nazi past renders even more difficult a critically and historically informed work of memory (HI, 296). The elder Farbers’s at times suspended animation reflects the continued legacy of, as well as the complex strategies employed to address, that difficulty, as we shall see. That is, being forced by U.S. spies to flee their home in Europe and subsequently in the United States only makes more apparent the position they assumed before their most recent exile, what reassessments of New German Cinema filmmakers (such as Wenders who continues to work from a base in Germany) underscore: that those who took an oppositional stance toward the Nazi inheritance of postwar Germany, by engaging in an “inner migration,” a form of internal resistance, were situated in some sense not only outside time or suspended in it, grappling as they were with the legacy of personal and cultural traumatic memory, but also outside the nation. Until the End of the World emphasizes this point by placing the Farbers, “internal exiles” abroad, in relation to Aboriginals who occupy a particular position as outsiders within

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Australia, struggling in the aftermath of attempts to exterminate and exclude them. One of the achievements of filmmakers such as Wenders, Werner Herzog, and Fassbinder (of their work in the late 1970s and 1980s), according to Inga Scharf, is that by making public a form of that strategic “inner emigration,” by creating “films about existential ‘homelessness’ in West Germany and programmatically positioning themselves outside of the national hegemonic realm,” they “exposed” the “Nazi inheritance of post-war Germany” and replaced “silent” struggle with “new narratives” that began, at the very least, to “openly tal[k] about ongoing processes of victimisation within the realm of the national.”3 The speed and global dissemination of the image (especially of a stance toward the image) in Wenders’s film, though, indicates that those who expressly take up or are placed in the position of the Farbers and the Aboriginal community—who remain outside (within) their respective nations—need not even meet for their paths to cross. “Under the aegis of globalization, flexible and fast-paced streams of commodities, investments, political directives, human bodies, technologies, symbolic practices, and aesthetic meanings increasingly traverse dissimilar spaces without recognizing the boundaries of the nation state as a defining limit.”4 As much as Wenders’s film worries over the leveling of cultural difference and the short-circuiting of memory work, internal exiles from different parts of the globe may be said to find each other and some solidarity through the very technologies that have increased the speed and range of delivering images; moreover, the escalating, widespread questioning of the boundaries of the nation as an individuating mark of identification need not inevitably lead to deathly homogeneity. Indeed, a figure such as Claire, who ultimately works through her narcissistic addiction to a debased approach to the image and becomes the subject of Eugene’s novel Dance around the Planet, suggests something of the figure of the cosmopolitan that Stephen Schindler and Lutz Koepnick find in the contemporary work of Hamburg-born filmmaker Fatih Akin, whose characters (in films such as Head On [2004]), although of Turkish descent, “rather than recognizing the nation’s boundaries as the constitutive markers of individual and collective identities, explore the globe as symbolic topography in which local, national, ethnic, religious, and transnational traditions penetrate, amalgamate, and contest each other in shifting configurations” (TCS, 13). A “cosmopolitan perspective refuses to read identity formation as a mere antagonism between clearly defined friends and enemies, as a [simple] give and take between [absolute or rigidly conceived notions of] self and other” (TCS, 13).

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Although Until the End of the World does not decry globalization per se or express nostalgia for the nation state, the film underestimates neither the potentially deadening effects of attempts to deploy the image to forestall the dialectical exchange between drives and meaning, nor the particular, brutalizing ways such attempts can inform cross-cultural encounters between individuals who, though their histories may intersect, nonetheless stand, in their distinct ways, in a particular relation to a particular traumatic past.5 Even if Wenders’s film will argue, like Caruth, that trauma remains intimately bound up with an encounter with the radically incomprehensible as it emerges in other ways—at other times, in other places, and with others—and even if the film sympathizes with a figure such as Dr. Farber (Max von Sydow) who has endured multiple exiles, Until the End of the World demonstrates that individuals like Farber can, in the wake of trauma, invest in the inviolability ostensibly promised by the image and pointedly do so at the expense of others—in this instance, his wife and the Aboriginal community who offer him refuge. That Farber subsequently deploys the camera he originally invented to deliver images to his blind wife (Jeanne Moreau) to record his subject’s dreams makes clear that he seeks to facilitate, like the broader culture he opposes, the colonization of the unconscious; he would stake out the unconscious of subjects who themselves have endured a violent legacy of colonialism. As Maisie (Justine Saunders), a member of the Aboriginal community who works with Dr. Farber, says to him, “[With this device] you could exhibit our people’s secrets, the inside of our heads, our dreamings and all of our secret knowledge. You could exhibit our people’s dreamings instead of their paintings.” Wenders focuses on how the conception of the interior of the woman’s body (specifically, Edith’s brain) relates to imaginings of cultural difference in order to target the kind of troubling agenda that The Ring labors to advance behind the scenes. Farber’s effort, like Verbinski’s film, to still the interior of the woman’s body and ultimately to colonize the unconscious, may be read as a frightened, compensatory response to a traumatic encounter that drives home the enigma at the heart of psychic life, but whereas The Ring aims to efface the legacy of Japanese and Japanese American lives during World War II, Wenders insists that the traumatic encounters of the Farbers remain entwined with the lives and legacies of others from other cultures and, importantly, cannot be thought apart from art/ technology and its complex inheritance. The threat of atomic fallout that looms in Until the End of the World cannot avoid evoking the avisual inheritance of radiation and the X-ray. But unlike The Ring’s

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investments in the burning thermographic messages directed at the mother’s body, Wenders critiques the Verbinski-like work of Farber’s fantasies of colonizing and stilling the interior of the body, coding the “burning transmissions” that Farber’s camera enables as events, consistently conceiving them not as fixed but rather as productively unstable and as generated in, and submitted to, a series of dialogic interchanges. Like the other films we have examined, Until the End of the World situates its concerns for maintaining space for the play of Otherness in psychic/social life within the context of conceptions of relations among not only arts/technologies such as still photography, analog video, and digital arts/technologies, but “older” arts as well, namely painting and literature. The director’s concern with what the writer/narrator Eugene (Sam Neill) diagnoses as the “disease of images” finds him championing, in part, the storyteller’s words as a cure for psychic malaise. Although Wenders’s view reflects an apparently startling turn from earlier assertions of the productively disruptive power of the “image,” those critics who emphasize his tendency to parcel “story” to literary art and “image” to film ignore how cinema, for the director, remains a site where the struggle between image and story should be maintained.6 Although his films attend to the particular in each of the arts/ technologies they engage, Wenders’s claims that the struggle between story and image obtains across mediums thus aligns his work with progressive conceptions of disciplinary relations that, like Wenders’s notion of the relation between still and moving image, and between self and other, underscores how all such relations are in some sense “intimate and incommensurable” (VT, 20). Wenders’s filmic/critical work conceptualizes both the visible world and the forms through which subjects encounter it as dynamic. Such encounters remain capable of making palpable the likewise vibrant interplay between the enigma of the visible and the enigma of the body (POP, 164). At the same time, however, tracing Until the End of the World’s conception of relations among the arts/technologies indicates that, as important as Wenders’s view of how (conceptions of) vision and technologies of visibility matter for resisting a social sphere that often seeks to dampen psychic life, the film ultimately appeals to a notion of art (especially painting) and Aboriginal culture as primitive analogues that aim to reinscribe the work of cinema as fixed and fixing. Wenders’s film attempts to mobilize a conception of relations among the arts/technologies to underwrite the idealizing, but no less problematic, view that Aboriginal culture remains static, situated beyond Symbolic mediation.

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I. In extensive writings and throughout Until the End of the World, Wenders attributes the “violent change” that affected and continues to affect “seeing” (TOI, 57) in part to the speed and proliferation or “overdose of images” (TOI, 47), the result being that “each image has to contain less of the truth” (TOI, 47) than it might have had in the past. The image, though, need not inherently work to block affective relations or to suspend generative, dialogic interchange between self and self, self and other, and self and world. Actually, Wenders often suggests that thinking and abstraction may pose the most formidable threat of “los[ing] yourself” or “touch with the world.” “For me,” writes Wenders, “seeing is immersing myself in the world, while thinking is distancing myself from it. . . . [S]eeing is my way of receiving impressions and of expressing myself” (TOI, 46). Seeing, according to Wenders, can reflect and provoke an engagement with the world. Yet while the speed and proliferation of images present significant challenges to sustaining an immersive interchange—via the image— with the world, placing Wenders’s films of the 1970s and 1980s and his commentary next to his more recent films and critical writing can again remind us that the rapidity and surfeit of images are not the only means of inhibiting affective relations with the particularity of the image and thus with the world. In “Impossible Stories” (1982), Wenders asserted that narrative and storytelling also pose violent challenges to receiving the impressions that images, in their particularity, can express and invite: In films—at least in my films— . . . images don’t necessarily lead to anything else. . . . I think a picture stands on its own more readily, whereas a word tends to seek the context of a story. For me, images don’t automatically lend themselves to be a part of a story. If they’re to function in the way that words and sentences do, they have to be “forced”—that is, I have to manipulate them. . . . Narrative involves forcing the images in some way. Sometimes this manipulation becomes narrative art, but not necessarily. Often enough, the result is only abused pictures. (IS, 53)

Wenders even more directly associated story with deanimation, when he cast it as a “vampire” that powerfully seeks to “suck all the blood from the image” (IS, 53), thereby threatening cinema’s vitalizing power. Although he has in mind conventional Hollywood filmmaking, it is clear that it is not so much speed but the tendency to press the image into the service of recovering the “booming voice”

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of an old cinema, one that, by repeating a familiar, illusory, grand, and singular narrative, sanctions a numbing stance toward image and world.7 Although Wenders’s early films targeted the slick, seamless unfolding of quick-paced images in contemporaneous mainstream films, the director also utilized techniques beyond slow pacing to incite affective engagement with the image. For Tim Corrigan, films such as The American Friend (1977) and Kings of the Road (1976) deployed “unusual silences” in order to suspend the “potential [and prepackaged] significance” promised by mainstream filmmaking, and Wenders frequently presented stark landscapes, not as static, immediate presences, but as “regularly deflected off of . . . mirrors and windshields” precisely to diffuse an imperial quest for securing a static relation to the world, a clear, predictable path and triumphal endpoint for a subject’s journey in the world.8 Against linear Hollywood narratives, the road trip of Bruno and Robert in Kings, for example, “takes the shape of something between a circle and a number of directionless segments, [and] thus parallel[s] a [film] medium whose circular, unrolling motion is nonetheless a series of separate frames” (NGF, 36). Still, by the time Until the End of the World was released (1991), the speed and proliferation of images posed increasingly daunting obstacles for maintaining the vitality of psychic life. Wenders’s portrayal of those threats, however, left critics wondering whether his films could escape some of the deleterious effects of the violent change in seeing they sought to resist. Until the End of the World’s frenetic pace, its densely packed frames, and its concern with the weight of a number of events—a runaway nuclear satellite, espionage, and flights across the globe—represent a decided departure from earlier seemingly storyless road movies that exhibited a “reverence for still panoramic landscapes and painterly interiors,” as well as a penchant for “habitual long, silent takes.”9 Some feared Wenders’s style of filmmaking, so adept at soliciting a tactile relation to image and world, had become another casualty of the age. No doubt this claim would seem less defensible had the recently released, five-hour, as opposed to the two-and-a-half-hour, version of the film screened in theaters, but Wenders’s approach, at least in the first two-thirds of both theatrical and director’s versions, nonetheless signals a difference from earlier work, albeit one that need not be understood as retreating from agitating for a complex relation to the image and a nuanced notion of visual art/technology.10 The pace in part reflects an effort to convey the changing landscape that has affected the state of seeing, and although not retreating from underscoring the mounting challenges

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to intervening in an increasingly numbing social sphere, one in which forms of visual technology are multiple, pervasive, and yet often tasked with maintaining or extending social control, Wenders’s film also resists deterministic conceptions that might dampen imaginative interventions, especially in and through the field(s) of vision. When Until the End of the World opens, everything appears to have fallen or be about to fall. The film takes place in “Fall of 1999” and begins by juxtaposing two other, seemingly distinct kinds of falls. During a series of shots of earth taken from space, the novelist Eugene, in voice-over, warns of the imminent crash of the runaway Indian nuclear satellite. When the camera descends to rest on Claire, it catches her awaking in terror from the latest recurring dream of her own fall, a nightmare of her rapid descent over an unknown land. Her private agony overshadows the satellite’s threat: “The whole world was alarmed. Claire couldn’t care less. She was living her own nightmare,” Eugene tells us. Claire’s unconscious replaying of her fall into what one of the film’s many songs, “It Takes Time,” describes as the unsolvable problem of the “division of the senses” seeps into her waking hours. When she gets up to try to find herself amid the video screens of a “strange” party, Claire walks in front of one of these screens, each of which plays the same music video, The Talking Heads’ “Sax and Violins,” one that picks up where her nightmare leaves off: “Falling, falling through the atmosphere,” intones the spinning, disembodied head of the group’s lead singer, David Byrne. Byrne’s talking head indicates, too, that a source of Claire’s nighttime descents rests in the primary objects of such dreams: “Mom and Pop . . . they will fuck you up.” Claire’s dreaming and preoccupation with her waking nightmare, though related to the satellite, have more to do with the threat that it will maintain its flight. As part of a global network of communication and spy satellites, it marks one instance of the choreographed deployment of visual technologies to try to manage conscious and unconscious responses to the world. Even if Claire is not fixed to screens synchronized around the world and focused on the satellite’s impending fall, the globalized spectacle of the potential disaster alternates throughout Until the End of the World with other simulcast events, indicating that the film takes one of the violent changes to seeing as but a refined form of the warlike force of mass-producing public culture, the roots of which can be traced to fascism. In this regard, Wenders continues the work Fassbinder inaugurated with Lili Marlene (1980), a film that understood “fascism as the first self-consciously political organization of mass entertainment,” that

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“wanted to push furthest [the] deconstruction of cinema as a concentrated power potential, not unlike fascism” (HI, 301), and that saw television, by itself and in concert with the cinema and other media, as allowing for a more powerfully instantaneous—that is, continuous— means of effecting what could have previously been achieved only during wartime: mass producing a public culture (HI, 304–05). Such spectacles as the blockbuster film (and its support by television) and the televising of global sports events (the Olympics) help constitute media reality, Elsaesser claims, as a “totalitarian invocation of presence” (HI, 304–05). Even when the sheer number of arts/technologies in Wenders’s film—including cinema, video, videophones, computer games, television, and high-definition television—are not simultaneously trained to broadcasting a single event, the potential richness and diversity of the fields of images and any promise of their encouraging multiple, sustained, and dialogic immersions in the world appear diminished given that each image, no matter the means of delivery, no matter the place or venue in the world, often conveys a similar message. As the scene of Claire’s waking in the nightclub also suggests, entertainment media culture is tasked with suspending anxieties provoked on channels that serve up this packaged version of disaster, deflecting engagement with the world and troublingly implying the futility of individual or group resistance against the status quo.11 Until the End of the World makes plain that the refinements and coordinations of visual technology have been sponsored and exploited by governments in an effort to survey and control flows and responses to information as well as populations. Global tracking networks, the smooth automated voices heard, for instance, in the cars of Claire and Sam—corralling people in specific directions and urging compliance—demonstrate that even when not watching a screen, individuals’ grand and small gestures are subject to tracking and discipline. More ominously, as the reverberating parallels between the dream (of falling) and the waking order in the nightclub scene signifies, the messages that technology mobilizes during the day are seen to have invaded the unconscious and to leave their mark on the space the subject experiences as “inner.” The U.S. spies who seek Sam’s father’s camera do not wish merely to tap its potential to restore the sight of the blind to improve efforts to more fully hail and order them (via visible signs), but to even more directly try to colonize the unconscious of all subjects.12 Although a delayed reaction to the threat of nuclear accident, Claire’s decision to set out on the road without map or destination

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and to ignore the car’s audible and text warnings reflects an intention to abandon her earlier preference for distance and solipsism. While her turn is also provoked by an accident—a bottle thrown from a car of bank thieves smashes her window—when we watch her emerge from behind the wheel, framed by the empty windshield, and remove glass from her face, she continues her initial questioning of a culture that extols disembodied, affectless framings of experience. Later, when she again meets Sam, in an auto repair shop (she first encounters him at a videophone booth), Claire agrees to help him avoid bounty hunters, and she drives away, this time with a new windshield, itself framed by a wet, bubbling glue, an image that conveys her welcoming of a more tenuous, provisional frame for engaging the world. To be sure, even when not played out through or on flickering screens, Claire’s early pursuit of Sam and her profession of love, despite knowing little about him, despite his “borrowing” money from her and abandoning her as he flees spies and bounty hunters, reflects an obsessive, narcissistic investment that leaves little space for Sam. Her near missionizing zeal to save him also barely disguises the effect of a psychic malaise that she only begins to feel and often still would keep at bay. For his part, Sam’s archiving images on the machine that will temporarily restore his mother’s sight—as much as this project challenges the broader culture’s effort to speed over and dispose of images—nonetheless presents as a displaced atonement for his having abandoned his wife and child. As we will see when considering Dr. Farber’s transmission of Sam’s archive to Edith, as haunted and haunting a figure as Sam remains—having lived in the wake of the traumatic memories of his parents—Wenders dramatizes the effects of Sam’s refusing to confront the impact that his parents’ traumatic experiences have had on him (and others) and worries that, even before he joins in his father’s troubling effort to use the new camera to attempt to colonize the unconscious, Sam’s project to compensate for his mother’s sorrow nearly condemns him to retracing an incestuous circle that leaves little room for others. Although the speed and proliferation of the image and the broader social sphere often work against embracing the exigencies of desire that help sustain the dynamism of psychic/social life, Wenders illuminates how attempts to enlist the image in an effort to short-circuit the generative play between affect and language occurred and still can occur when subjects engage conventional arts, which do not simply fade away, even amid what Until the End of the World charts as an ever-expanding field of new digital arts and image delivery systems. In highlighting how the character of Travis in Paris, Texas (1984)

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faltered by not “see[ing] the other person any more, only the image [he had] . . . of . . . her” (TOI, 58), Wenders can remind us that, like Travis, Sam often turns to the image, specifically an analog photograph of his child, to forestall engaging with an other. Wenders considers such an approach to the image as “the obverse of a love story” (TOI, 58) and elsewhere describes Until the End of the World as a film “that sought to bring together the three ideas of ‘love’, ‘images’, and ‘seeing’,” which he found was movingly examined in Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse (AS, 19). Wenders’s encouraging a dialogic love of the other and of the Otherness palpable in and through the image, a love that opens oneself up to immersive interchanges, recalls Kristeva’s understanding of love as a moment in the life of a speaking being who, all the while caught in the body, opens oneself up to the [S]ymbolic dimension. . . . This can take place through an imaginary fusion with this outer body, but if it is experienced not in a merely narcissistic way but as a governing principle of my whole subsequent existence, what I call love is openness to the other, and it is what gives me my human dimension, my cultural and historical dimension. (TPK, 381)

Through film and extensive critical writing and lecturing, Wenders tirelessly advocates for this openness to others and insists on the power of visual art, especially cinema, to effect just such a dynamic interplay between the bodily drives and language. Although he continues to recognize the need to interrogate the cinema as an “even[t]” or “forc[e]”, as a “historical agent” that does not remain “transparent . . . or autonomous” (HI, 293), that directly participates in rather than merely reflects a history “that always happens elsewhere” (HI, 292), and though he remains wary of how narrative or story can abuse images (IS, 53), careful analysis of Until the End of the World and Wenders’s early and recent statements on visual art/technology makes clear that although he relishes the particular image that appears to stand alone, just as he does not, as we have seen some films do, romanticize the still photograph as against the field of moving (cinematic) images, Wenders works against casting the single image in a series of film frames as delivering a static object outside of time and history. His films, moreover, contest cinematic moves to deny the discrete, the gap that emerges between frames and destablilizes teleological drives toward fixed meaning. By the same token, the director’s recent emphasis on the importance of the single image within the field of moving images does not, in

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fact, spell a rejection of sequence or narrative: “If you give each image the right to be there for itself and tell its own story [you] can . . . hope to be given the right by each image to place it in a sequence and make it part of some bigger whole” (TOI, 46). In spite of the inflation of images that increasingly concerns him in the late 1990s and thereafter, Wenders underlines how giving proper space for the singular within and against a series performs—and can reawaken—an agonistic struggle that provokes dialogic exchange. Cinema, as a site where it proves difficult to obtain each individual image, is precisely the place to preserve the vitality of the image: Cinema “is a kind of last stronghold for the [dialectical] sense of an image I spoke of earlier” when he discussed earning the right to place an individual image in sequence (TOI, 46). Careful not to claim that cinema or art that encourages a kind of embedded seeing can instantaneously offer an easy way out of the current impasse, Wenders yet maintains the importance of attempting to effect change even in the face of the social sphere’s repudiation of such dialectical work. Those who emphasize Wenders’s tendency to parcel “story” to literary art and “image” to film, as opposed to granting that even an early essay such as “Impossible Stories” grants that the struggle between story and image obtains for these and many arts/technologies, just as importantly ignore that “Impossible Stories” establishes film as a site where the “opposition” between image and story not only cannot be dissolved but also should be sustained. Insisting on a “mutual incompatibility, a mutual undermining” (IS, 52) between the images and the stories that would make them stand in some “continuous discourse” within a film, Wenders already registers in this 1982 essay his later, presumably inaugural investment in narrative. Although granting that the first half of “Impossible Stories” appears to banish story as the “enemy” for the way that it threatens to reduce the “inexplicable complexity” of events by presenting as connected what remain resistantly “individual” and “unrelated” images, Wenders affirms the meaning sought by stories: “People’s primary requirement is that some kind of coherence be provided” (IS, 53–54). It is not simply that “film stories” make life “bearable” by positing a relation between discrete events, but that such stories allow the particular to be seen amid a superabundance of phenomena. Stories “become your roads in a strange land, where but for them, you might go to a thousand places without ever arriving anywhere” (IS, 54). “Stories are impossible but it is impossible to live without them” (IS, 59). This notion of a dialectical tension between story and image in literary and visual arts/technologies that seek to represent what

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Wenders experiences as the discrete and “inexplicable complexity of events around” him (IS, 54) recalls Kristeva’s account of the subject and representational practice. Wenders’s alignment of the image with what resists meaning, with what meanders or does not necessarily lead to anything else, corresponds to Kristeva’s conception of the “semiotic” as a modality whose eruptions remain “unfettered, irreducible to intelligible verbal translation” (RPL, 29). Likewise, Wenders’s association of story and the welcome reception it can receive in the material of literary art—“words want to form sentences” that in turn “want to stand in some continuous discourse” (IS, 53)—recalls Kristeva’s notion of the “Symbolic” (“language understood as nomination, sign, and syntax” [DIL, 136]). Wenders’s stress on the “mutual incompatibility” and “mutual undermining” of both story and image, too, approximates the dialectical view that the syntax that marks the control of the semiotic, guaranteeing the post-oedipal subject’s accession to meaning and coherence, also ensures the continued disruption of that subject’s presumably fixed contours (RPL, 27), a disruption that productively helps sustain psychic life. Wenders’s acknowledgment that the irreconcilable tension between image and story cuts across disciplinary borders reminds us as well that disciplines or artistic practices constitute “different modes of articulation of the semiotic and [S]ymbolic” (RPL, 24). “Because the subject is always both semiotic and [S]ymbolic, no signifying system he produces can be either ‘exclusively’ semiotic or ‘exclusively’ [S]ymbolic, and is instead necessarily marked by an indebtedness to both” (RPL, 24). Until the End of the World makes even more salient than “Impossible Stories” that all signifying practices reflect this irreconcilable tension between semiotic and Symbolic modalities. Here Wenders’s fascination with music, for instance, extends beyond considering it a model for a style of filmmaking that should likewise aim to bring the viewer to the point where indeed something does become indescribable.13 Instead, Wenders’s film suggests that the semiotic, a space Kristeva elaborates as “musical” and “rhythmic” (RPL, 29) and associates with affect and archaic drives, remains perceptible in all artistic practices. Recall the scene in which Claire awakes from her dream of falling and walks in front of multiple screens, each playing “Sax and Violins.” That scene identified the “interior” space of the sleeping and waking individual as a primary target of concerted efforts to produce a reverberatingly deadening and compliant mass culture. This time consider that near the bottom of the video of the spinning, disembodied talking head of David Byrne, Wenders adds visible or graphic script to accompany Byrne’s lyric.

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The issue of script on screen, as noted in our discussion of the graphic letter as it is figured in The Elephant Man, serves, for critics such as Tom Conley (and for Miriam Hansen and Marie-Claire Ropars), to challenge the notion that cinema can present itself and the spectator, in Hansen’s formulation, “as possessing a[n] [absolutely] unique and singular” reality.14 Although Conley notes that such “graphic writing is never the film itself” and cannot be taken as the beginning or end of any film’s challenge to quests for the static and singular, the appearance of “alphabetical and iconic writing within the field of the moving image” constitutes one form of a Derridean-inspired cinécriture or film writing aimed at challenging the phonocentric model of the sign. Image and screen script remain neither absolutely separate nor fully conjoined: they are “together, within each other, in various degrees of tension that cannot be resolved” (FH, ix). The screen letter calls for a contradictory gloss on the image—a simultaneously “linear” and “nondiscursive” reading of the film image; “the shape of the lines of the letter on screen enhance its image, but its meanings distort it” (FH, ix–x). By conceiving the letter that is inserted into the moving image as itself neither absolutely invested in a linear march toward progressive iterability nor totally devoid of significance, Conley and Hansen register the continual need for derailing efforts to capitalize on sound cinema’s ostensible promise, when conceived as a cinematic form of speech, to restore what writing allegedly stole from utterance: direct, immediate expression, a means of attempting to ensure a perpetually fixed and fixing return to lost, putatively stable origins for cinema and for spectators. Wenders has long exhibited an interest in the graphic property of the letter as it appears in a number of visual arts—Walker Evans’s photographs of the Depression-era American West, for instance, inspired Kings of the Road, a film that eyes numerous sites for inscriptions, such as neon signs, billboards, cinema facades. Wenders takes this “presence of written inscriptions in the landscape” as a particularly advanced Western “graphic tradition”15 worth echoing within film. Lightning over Water (1980), his film and video diary of the dying director Nicholas Ray, includes superimpositions of Ray’s handwriting on the surface of the video and filmic image. Letters appear on the screen of Until the End of the World and are pointedly sighted on video screens, computer terminals, videophones, photographs, and, of course, novels. The Talking Heads’ music video instances the very graphic challenge to what Claire and the majority of those in Wenders’s film often problematically want from video and many other arts/technologies: a

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means of breaking the fall, with more refined and often violent forms of attempting to capture the immediacy and fixity presumed to have been lost in the descent from primary objects into language. These attempts tend to imagine each “new” visual art/technology as a better means of making good on an earlier art’s failure to deliver a kind of visible (presumably full) speech, as a way of perfecting a mirror for the subject to reestablish a lost, resounding self-correspondence. For the film, such attempts remain deadening, whether pursued by individuals such as Claire and Sam or propagated by the social sphere. The Talking Heads video illustrates, even as it resists, the specific means by which such a finalizing correspondence would be secured in a number of different arts/technologies throughout Until the End of the World: by forging a seamless link between sound and image. Superimposing visible script on the multiple video images of lead singer Byrne’s head activates the tension between script and image that taints efforts to deploy video as a clear, acoustic mirror for the subject. As Michel Chion points out, the characteristic “visual fluttering” in music videos and video games renders such images “unstable surface[s]” that often attain the speed of “text” and “utterance”: This “visual fluttering” is “visible stuff to listen to, to decode, like an utterance.”16 Although such speed distinguishes videographic from slower film images, this form of utterance still registers a disruption that often provokes an effort to control; sound, for instance, is characteristically deployed in video and video games, as it often is in film, to steady the video image—typically by adding “background music” or “voice” (AV, 163). Chion’s reading of the written word on rap video screens as disrupting efforts to stabilize meaning echoes challenges presented by graphic script on the cinema screen: The “word written on [the video] screen is also heard. It wanders freely alive, between the written and the oral, abolishing the rigid barriers of the audiovisual” (AV, 163). By superimposing the talking head of Byrne over the closed mouths of the four rotating heads of him in the video’s background, though, Wenders isolates a particular, interior site that increases the discord between sung lyric, image, and visible script. That is to say, Until the End of the World not only marks this interior of the subject as a space where the rigid barriers of the audiovisual would be most strictly reinforced by culture but also focuses in particular on unuttered or internal auditory registers that cling to the graphic letter and yet remain irreducible to speech or to diegetic or nondiegetic soundtrack music. One pronounced, as it were, site where the film stakes out a challenge to managing an internal difference experienced as within the subject is

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the scene of “silent” “textual soundings” of script on screen, moments that foreground the “continually returning challenges of sound to sense.”17 As Garrett Stewart avers (albeit with regard to encountering words on a page), a “silent” reading of letters may not be “oral,” but it remains “aural,” and it ultimately frustrates the search for rigid meanings: “In the passive airing of . . . an unvoiced articulation, in the space between evoked but unactivated breath and the writing that incites it, emerges an air that may . . . thaw the iced fixity of scripted lexemes” (RV, 5). Wenders persistently focuses on this play between music and a so-called silent visible script, on the internal sounds or rhythms generated by such script, internal registers that cannot merely be consigned to a future, presumably fuller life of sound, or speech. Jim Dawson notes the director’s unconventional use of subtitles in his earlier films, a use that anticipates Wenders’s more explicit concern with the auditory registers that attach themselves to the varied inscriptions of letters present in each of the visual arts/technologies cited within Until the End of the World’s mise-en-scène. In Kings of the Road as well as The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (1972) subtitles “are further removed from what you’re seeing on screen than they are in most people’s [films]. . . . The relationship of the words is different; and having them printed on the image makes them more prominent.”18 Wenders initially feared that films so “full of text” (IWW, 12), even if translating dialogue far removed from what occurs in the image, might still overwhelm or punctuate the image as a mere variation of speech. Yet he concurs with Dawson and finds a still more specific condition in which the disruptive effects of these subtitled scenes obtain: “That gives me the idea that foreigners can appreciate my films even better than I do” (IWW, 12). Such an audience would, of course, hear the sound as opposed to the sense of the spoken word in its play against the image. Wenders, however, implies that this audience—and even one comprised of native speakers—would register the sound, as opposed to the sense, of speech as it likewise works against the image of the letter on screen. The remarks that prompt this discussion suggest that the sound of incomprehensible speech that Wenders sees as attached to the screen letter relates to the challenge he heard as a child when he listened to the sense of the audible word as it was set against music: “For me [as a child with a weak command of English] rock and roll always used to be pure form. I often realized that American or English people could [also] listen to it really without realizing what the words were.” Though frightened by such “nonsense,” Wenders welcomed this “language” for its “liberating effects”: “There were certainly words,

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but there was no message. It was justice.” Rock music was a way of communicating, “but not on the level of meaning” (IWW, 12). Wenders links the “foreignness” registered in the sound of instrumental music against lyric, and speech pitted against subtitle, to the notion of identity as “foreign,” persistently destabilized: Things have to become insecure . . . to become secure in a different way. . . . Foreignness [is] a way of losing the old notion of selfevidence. Crossing a frontier or being someplace else I never was before, gives me . . . a more intense sense of what I’m doing. . . . I think everybody’s senses are more aware when they’re travelling and in a new situation. Crossing frontiers gives you a feeling of losing preconceptions. (IWW, 12)

We can observe this impulse to regulate internal sound and moving image in order to underwrite a specious teleological narrative for the subject (to internalize) by focusing on another scene of Claire’s dreaming and waking, this time as she waits for Sam at an airport. The densely composed mise-en-scène recalls previous shots in which Claire is positioned behind the frames of glass in and among moving cars and trains. In this sense, the scene offers Wenders the opportunity to challenge a cinema that would, through a series of seamlessly linked frames, deny the play of the discrete that pulses in and through a sequence, in order to offer itself to spectators as an emblem of continually unfolding, progressively accruing coherence. The scene includes a vertically driven script (here German) positioned at the upper edge of the frame that contrasts that of the horizontally moving, illuminated projections that figure prominently on the wall. These projections are of a series of clocks, each moving regularly, as if in synch with the motion of a rotating globe nearby, and each matching a city to its corresponding time (zone). Claire watches these images while listening to a cellist playing from a sheet of musical notation. The images of illumined globes and the illumined visible print of the names of the city beneath them are made to move in time with the sound of the cello. It is as if there were a felt need by the organizers/ designers of the public space to overlay the internal sound generated by the graphic image of the letter, to overwrite it with a regularized, audible musical score. This manner of targeting and disciplining the internal rhythm of the reader or viewer is further underscored, as it were, by the placement of the illumined letters on the glowing lines reserved for musical notation. We can discern, too, that the scene marks these letters as invoking archaic registers, since the following

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shot presents Claire, asleep beneath the globes and letters that move in time across the scales, waking up with the steady, measured sound of the cellist’s music in her head. The suggestion is that such music is deployed—as we have seen with other forms of visual art/technology, and in other scenes of waking and dreaming—to try to regulate inner space, to transmute a potentially discordant site (the unconscious), one that drives home a fundamental strangeness or foreignness experienced as within the subject. Although Gilles Deleuze might lead us to conclude that the letter on screen (at the site of moving machines and subjects) remains the sole property of cinema and encourage us to perhaps gloss over its appearance in Until the End of the World on the screens of video and computers and on the pages of literary texts, he suggestively notes Wenders’s pronounced interest in the train and other motion machines as analogues for thinking through cinema’s relation to movement and sequence. For Deleuze, Kings of the Road and Alice in the Cities reveal the “equivalence” Wenders makes between the “mobile camera” and “all the means of locomotion that it shows” (such as planes, bikes, cars, the act of walking, trains) “or that it makes use of.”19 Further, Deleuze argues that “the essence of the cinematographic movement-image lies in extracting from vehicles or bodies that which is their common substance, or extracting from movements the mobility which is their essence” (CMI, 22–23). As he does in the scene of Claire sleeping and waking at the airport, though, Wenders offers a concomitant critique of claims that might look to the letter on screen as sustaining a conventional reading that takes cinematic movement to re-sound an alphabetic or teleological notion of relation and history. For instance, when Claire and Sam try to avoid a bounty hunter, their dash into the street positions them between two cable cars moving in opposite directions. The viewer of the scene loses the couple momentarily, and the script of advertisements emblazoned on the trams comes into sharper focus. The prominence of signs advertising a “radio” station signals that the viewer’s “silent” reading of the script relates to the transmission of audible sound and music, but again the graphic letter is not reduced to speech nor is it stabilized when Wenders sets it in motion. The passing cable car in the foreground of the image effects a random and fragmented spelling of the letters on the car it passes in front of: Some letters are isolated, others bifurcated, by the series of passing window frames. The tram’s sweep across these letters challenges any assumption of the letter’s forward march to meaning. In short, the move from one framed letter to another cannot ground a claim for

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advancing cinematic movement—specifically, of image and/or internal sound provoked in the face of it—as alphabetic, as a sign of seamless, sequential, or teleological progress. As Conley describes, the jostling between sense and meaning provoked by the graphic letter presents a radical challenge to the viewer’s faith in stable syntax: “letters can be splayed and recombined. The viewer is free to see writing as compositional design that has everything as well as nothing to do with what is meant” (FH, xi–xii). II. For Scott Spector, the frenetic pace and seemingly disjointed scenes of the first half of Wenders’s film are eventually “domesticated within the frame of a family narrative”; that is, they become, at the site of the recordings that Sam and Claire make for Edith (with Dr. Farber’s camera), “a historical vision in the sense that it is the place in which these disparate images of the present/future become disciplined into a narrative.”20 Spector’s suggestion that, through what we might term a live or embodied letter to Edith, the film comes to contain the more disruptive effects of the stylistic excess as well as the challenges to gender binaries, however, elides the film’s deployment of scenes of recording and subsequent transmission not only to render more complex the relation between the personal and the public, but also to unsettle efforts to manage the act of seeing and remembering, especially as it relates to narratives of the visible (the surface) and the interior of the body, including that of the woman. Scenes of recording and transmitting images with Dr. Farber’s invention reflect Until the End of the World’s most sustained presentation of how the act of seeing (in this instance, via cinema and technologies of vision) remains a textual event. Although refusing to bracket the endeavor to allow Edith to see from a potential impulse to try to arrest and transmute a discordant Otherness, Wenders nonetheless insists that such memory work can promote dynamic interchanges between affect and language, and self and other. Fearing that the device for recording and transmitting images will be used for violent industrial and military purposes, Farber requests Sam to flee the site of the camera’s invention, a research lab at Palo Alto. That site, with its history as a nuclear development and testing ground, reminds us that Wenders’s film does not cordon off Sam and Claire’s altruistic work (or the work of cinema) from the wartime use of nuclear power or from the more subtle forms of control that nuclear energy enables, as part of satellite communication and surveillance technologies; nor

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does the film elide how radiation technology, before its having been weaponized, was and continues to be deployed to fathom the interior of the body in the medical/scientific arena. Instead of enlisting Farber’s invention, a device that melds image recognition technology with noninvasive diagnostic imaging techniques (such as ultrasound and MRI and PET scanning), to experience the “interior as interiority,” Wenders illumines the challenge that such technologies and their predecessors posed and continue to pose to Enlightenment drives to secure a “master” observer safely preserved and stabilized as a “disinterested” outsider (PS, 33). Far from extending the range of a powerful gaze and capitalizing static investments in vision and the verifiable, in Until the End of the World the interior of the body confounds efforts to sound the kind of transparency and depth that putatively reproduces an illumined subject impervious to Otherness. With regard to the first stage of work with Farber’s camera, viewers see Sam and Claire record an image of Edith’s daughter (whom she has not been with for years) and her granddaughter (whom she has never met). Claire takes over for an ailing Sam, and the film presents her as a camerawoman whose goggles (part of Farber’s camera) reveal to film spectators the coming into focus of what she sees through them—Edith’s daughter and granddaughter, as their images are being simultaneously recorded on the high-definition video stock the device utilizes. The film delineates how what appears like an objective recording of the surface of other bodies is actually mediated—not only by the camerawoman’s choice of setting, distance, angle, etcetera, but also by the role of the camerawoman, who serves as a significant intermediary, here a vehicle through which Edith’s daughter’s message passes to her absent mother. Moreover, as Sam explains to Claire, the device “records what you see but also how your brain reacts to what it sees— the biochemical event of seeing.” That is, during the act of filming, Claire herself is being seen, in part not only by Edith’s family who are in the room on the other side of the camera lens/goggles, but also by the device itself, which, though not recording the surface of Claire’s body, is recording how her brain responds to what she sees while filming. As Wenders notes of his conception of Farber’s camera, “It’s not enough just to come up with the ‘objective image’ [here, of Edith’s family]. On the same bit of [high definition] tape . . . an extra bit will be recorded, some parallel information: the brain activity of the cameraman. . . . A huge number of electrodes to register . . . the electromagnetic impulses in the visual centre of the seeing person, to record, so to speak, the Act of Seeing itself” (AS, 21). Wenders highlights how what may seem both solitary and purely mechanical or biochemical

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is not only collaborative, the product of, and submitted to, a dialogic (Symbolic) interchange, but also dependent upon affective and emotional investments: “The more precision, concentration and emotional involvement the . . . camerawoman brings to the ‘objective’ image, the more complex and many-layered and accurate the subjective image will become” (AS, 22). Unlike some neuroscientific claims that assert the biochemical brain response to be transparent or able to bypass the activity of a reading informed by perspective and the exigencies of desire, Wenders codes the biochemical data as textual or Symbolic: it remains tinged with meaning that seeks an audience or other. He implies that drive and affect are “a pivot between soma and psyche, biology and representation. . . . Drives and energy . . . are always already a ‘carrier of meaning’ and a ‘relation’ to another person, even though this person may be yourself” (NMS, 30). Eugene’s voice-over reiterates how the delivery and reception of the recordings for Edith constitute a dialogic, textual event. “It wasn’t as simple as just putting in a tape and playing it back [for Edith]. Whoever had initially recorded the images had to see them again. The first time the computer recorded the act of seeing. Now it was recording the act of remembering.” The process of remembering and relaying, like that of recording, depends upon and places the transmitter in relation to others, both to the self that recorded the images in another place and time and to the receiver Edith, who now appears in the same location as the transmitter (Claire) and whose impressions in turn affect Claire as she rereads/rescreens the data from her initial recording. The act of remembering and replaying, like recording, not only remains mediated by others at both ends of the exchange but also does not yield a direct representation of a transparent image of the body’s exterior or interior, in this instance, the brain. The film emphasizes that the visions Edith can now see are simulations by superimposing graphic letters, numbers, and grids over the final product; in other moments, textual material (such as Thoreau’s Walden) edges screens and monitors, whose speakers replay the initial soundtracks of Claire and Sam’s recordings. The requirements for successful transmission address, too, what the film pinpoints as one of the more deleterious effects of the violent changes in seeing that have taken place at the end of the twentieth century. The process works not only to slow down the speed of the image and the act of seeing and reading it, but also to incite a bond between transmitter and receiver that unsettles atomized, isolated seeing.21 At the same time that this memory project contrasts with the pervasive debasement of the image in the broader social sphere, the film

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does not romanticize the device or its use, does not imagine that it automatically guards against retrograde moves to defend against the play of Otherness in psychic and social life. To be sure, Until the End of the World sympathizes with the Farbers’s plight and elaborates the particular challenges faced by Sam, whose project to make his mother see reflects, more precisely, the struggle of those engaging a traumatic “postmemory,” a condition that Hirsch illuminates as the effects of spoken and unspoken stories and references of devastation transmitted from one generation—in this instance, Holocaust survivors—to the next. (As teens, Edith and her husband fled from the Nazis.) Although the experience, even before their second exile to Australia, of Edith (whose father is German and whose mother is French) and Henry Farber (whose parents are German), as holocaust survivors who have been removed from “a world that had ceased to exist, that has been violently erased” (FF, 243), stands in a particular relation to trauma and cultural memory, their experience nonetheless also exerts a powerful and particular hold on the second generation, a hold that can be devastating in its own way. For figures such as Sam, who was born and grew up far from the physical site of Germany and appears in the wake of his parent’s history, Hirsch maintains not only that the transmissions through words and images of a “culture irrevocably destroyed” (FF, 241) still “acquir[e] a materiality” (FF, 242), but also that the Farbers’ transmission of their particular condition of exile, of the memory of the destruction of their home, has “the power to displace and derealize” the childhood of figures such as Sam (FF, 241). Wenders’s film presents Sam as foundering in the wake of his parents’ catastrophic experience, uncannily linked to a past that is not his own, but one, moreover, permeated by gaps and absences. For Hirsch, Nadine Fresco conveys the particular “diasporic aesthetics of temporal and spatial exile” that inform postmemory (FF, 245) when she writes that it is “as though those who were born after could do nothing but wander, prey to a longing forever disenfranchised” (“La Diaspora des cendres” 211; quoted in FF, 245–46). A figure such as Sam must attempt not only to work through his experience of that transmitted legacy of devastation and absence but also to “re-member, to re-build, to re-incarnate, to replace, and to repair” (FF, 243). Even before Sam reunites with his parents, his approach to aiding them and to working through his experience of postmemory exacerbates his psychic displacement and reflects a turn against Symbolic mediation. Although Until the End of the World traces Sam’s failure as a husband and father to his not having fully confronted the legacy of the experiences that his parents have bequeathed to him,

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the film presents his manic quest and his belief that the device can offer a full restoration of the mother’s loss as reflective of his effort both to deny the radical incomprehensibility at the heart of traumatic experience (for first generation survivors) and to guard his own secondary traumatic experience from the exigencies of Symbolic elaboration. Wenders suggests as much by highlighting the damage that the recording device causes to Sam’s eyes—he risks blindness. That is, however well-intentioned, Sam nearly assumes he must become blind like his mother in order to give meaning to her, and in turn to his, suffering. By presuming that a literal manifestation of devastation might be the only effective commemoration, Sam in effect refuses to symbolize suffering. His restoration project leaves little space for productively inscribing the impossibility of fully understanding traumatic memory or postmemory and defends against the kind of limitless questioning that constitutes not a nihilistic revolt but a perpetual, “transformative creativity” (RSS, 101), a memory work that seeks to create new and provisional meaning out of suffering. The relief that the film offers for Sam’s eyes reiterates that a cure for his psychic malaise may lie in recognizing an internal difference within himself, his experience, and its representations. For instance, in an effort to address Sam’s impending blindness, Claire urges him to consult Mr. Mori, a Japanese doctor, who counsels that “the eye does not see the same as the heart.” That Claire must take over for Sam during one recording session suggests, too, how despite his altruistic intent to help his mother see, his effort to occlude his emotional responses from this work accounts for his inability to receive impressions; the ensuing blockage stems from refusing to submit affect to Symbolic (here visual) representation. Mori’s treatment of Sam is of a piece with the film’s use of the graphic letter to signal that the internal space of the subject is shot through with a fundamental difference. The herbs that Mori gives Claire to apply to Sam’s eyes are each contained within a series of bags inscribed with hieroglyphic signs. As opposed to those moments when the audible overlay of sound or speech would gloss over or regulate the difference associated with the internal sound of the graphic letter, Wenders here marks the internal spelling of a letter without seeking to usher it toward fixed meaning. III. By directly focusing, in the last third of his film, on the particular challenges that arise when, in the face of globalized media efforts to colonize consciousness, memory and postmemory work occurs at the

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site of a cross-cultural encounter, Wenders in part answers critics such as bell hooks who found films like Wings of Desire (1987) troubling for their failure to take up the issue of racial and cultural difference within Germany and, more broadly, on European soil. Although the cross-cultural encounter—between the Farbers and their Aboriginal colleagues—occurs in Australia, the Europe cited in Until the End of the World is not the homogeneous one seen in Wings of Desire; more to the point, Until the End of the World’s imagining of the future can perhaps, in retrospect, be more clearly seen as an early effort to theorize a transnational or cosmopolitan perspective that complicates the understanding of the nation not only as a homogenized entity but also as a marker of collective and individual identities. This latter complication remains especially relevant when the two communities engaging each other, in distinct ways, stand in an exilic relation to their respective nation of birth (Germany, Australia).22 Wenders’s critique of Dr. Farber’s efforts warns that the witting and unwitting ways in which oppositional memory/postmemory works by/between two marginalized groups may repeat the deadening efforts of the dominant social sphere. Moreover, in its representation of the abusive effects upon an Aboriginal community that has endured, and continues to confront, a violent legacy of colonialism, the film in effect critiques a significant tendency of New German Cinema’s casting other countries as mere staging grounds for working out Germany’s anxious relations to its past. Just as important, Wenders’s film serves to warn how, despite the transnational contestation of fixed boundaries and singular national identities, communities outside (within) the nation at the present time can nonetheless seek to reimagine and solidify rigid notions of cultural and national difference at the expense of others. By the time Sam and Claire arrive in Australia, the world may have ended. The detonation (or crash) of the nuclear satellite interrupts all computerized and electrical forms of communication, so they and the film audience do not know for sure. For Henry and Sam, this uncertainty makes all the more pressing their transmission of the archival high-definition images to the blind Edith. The film’s understanding of this uncertainty and of the Farbers’ responses to catastrophic events past, present, and impending reflects a willingness to engage the complexities and dense reverberations of intersecting traumatic experiences. The suggestion that the details of the event and its after effects (beyond the interruption of communication) are yet unknown, have been so and could still be missed, sustains Caruth’s notion that a catastrophe, by arriving overwhelmingly and too soon for the

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subject to assimilate, cannot be experienced directly or immediately but can be claimed only belatedly, in another place and time, in dialogue with others, and as an experience inscribed as profoundly enigmatic. Although the uncertainty of the effects of the potential nuclear catastrophe may hasten the Farbers’s efforts, as well as those of the Aboriginal community, to commemorate experience before they may die (the memorial painting of some members of that community is likened to the “pushing out [of] eggs like a dying mother”), it is likely that the significance of this most recent trauma will surface in delayed and belated ways and that the threat of a nuclear disaster provokes a return of, or at the very least remains imbricated with, earlier traumas experienced in the individual and cultural memories of both of these embattled communities. The film sympathizes with Farbers’s project, but Wenders elaborates the doctor’s drive and approach to restore his wife’s vision as a more extreme form of the global culture’s diseased approach to images. Although Sam confesses to Claire that he has become as obsessive as his father, this does not derail or nuance Sam’s execution of the project, and the joint efforts of father and son are presented as abusive, not to mention gendered. As Maisie, one of the Aboriginal workers at Farber’s lab, says, “This is men’s business,” and in a later, direct confrontation with Henry, she declares, “You use your wife and your son and my people.” Despite warnings by Maise that his wife remains fragile, that is, in effect she will be overwhelmed by a torrent of images—of friends and relatives who seem to age fifty years in a second (she lost her vision at eight, four years before fleeing Germany) and of scenes of global degradation that appear even more horrific when weighed against her memory of her childhood vision of them—Henry persists, and the surfeit of images hastens Edith’s death. It is not simply the speed with which Edith encounters the images transmitted to her by the Farber men that mimics the broader culture’s debased stance both toward the image and its placement within a series or narrative; just as problematic is how this kind of memory work, in fact, attempts to foreclose both on an immersive interchange with the image (for Edith and hence indirectly for father and son), as well as on her witnessing and expressing grief. In the wake of the viewing, Edith experiences a profound sorrow that she fears she cannot express, less it puncture her husband and son’s wellintended but misguided fantasy. In imagining, too, that the most meaningful memorial to her experience of exile and loss must coincide with allowing Edith to simultaneously see and hear archived testimonies of loved ones, the Farber men invest in forging a fixed link

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between sound and image that, for the film, has instanced a denial of a generative discord experienced as within the subject. The scenes of Sam and Henry’s project to restore Edith’s sight indicate an incestuous turn whereby Edith’s body becomes a means of attempting to secure a stultifying solidarity between those living in the wake of traumatic memory and, for Sam, postmemory. After Edith’s death, Sam merely continues his search for a closed, dyadic relation, evident when he and his father position Claire in a role similar to the one Edith assumed—as an intermediary who functions not as a third party pointing to the mediated quality of relations and championing a move beyond the self, but as a screen for an incestuous father/son relation. Henry and Sam’s moves, their effort to record the unconscious—the dream images of Claire and eventually themselves—and the claims they make for that archive, make plain that from within their physical and psychological enclave, Henry and Sam in effect refine the broader cultural moves to repudiate a foundational Otherness. As in a scene when he and Claire voyeuristically watch Sam’s dream projected on screen, the film frames Henry’s claims for this “advance” in terms that signal that the turn against a persistently unsettling archaic ambiguity often manifests as an effort to transmute the indeterminacy of rhythmic (semiotic) registers, to insist that they do not mark an internal, generative gap within the subject, but instead re-sound a self-sufficiency and impregnability that the film deems destructive and deadening. As Farber declares to Claire as they screen Sam’s dream, “You’re now looking at the human soul, singing to itself, to its own God . . . to the God within us. If I were Sam, this would make me feel like humming the music of the spheres. It [the dream image] needs nothing.” Against Farber’s claims, Until the End of the World insists on the non-self-sufficient, mediated quality of these images, not only when Claire responds to Henry that the projected dream of Sam instead needs “everything,” but also when signs earlier used to contest denials of difference are redeployed to reflect Farber’s aims and his view of the dream: the projected dream images of Sam and Claire appear on screens marked with text, codes, and grids, and graphic titles of books edge the video monitors on which the dream is viewed in remote stations at the lab. When such script appears in a video monitor labeled “primary image,” we are reminded of Wenders’s use of the graphic quality of the letter to undercut the Farbers’s claims for locating originary scenes beyond the exigencies of desire in language. Until the End of the World also indicts the Farbers’s project for the deleterious threats it poses to those beyond his family. Even though,

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as exiles from war-torn Europe, from postwar Germany, and later from the United States, the Farbers share much with the Aboriginal community who occupy an exilic status within the Australian nation, Farbers’s use of his device to colonize the unconscious threatens to enable a more insidious and total assault on a community that still feels the effects of, and continues to be threatened by, colonialist and neo-colonialist incursions. As Maisie complains to Dr. Farber, “[With your device] you could exhibit our people’s secrets, the inside of our heads, our dreamings and all of our secret knowledge. You could exhibit our people’s dreamings instead of their paintings.” In this regard, Until the End of the World functions to expose films such as Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo (1982) that, in purporting to target a kind of European megalomania, end up literally turning to the spaces of other cultures as staging grounds for evading or working through a traumatic or conflicted past. Yet Wenders’s film refuses to place beyond critique those like the Farbers who have suffered in ways that the characters of Fitzcarraldo have not. More precisely, Wenders shows how the Farbers’s responses, affected by the trauma of the threat of extermination, of exiles, and of the brutalizing work of the social sphere, ultimately prove especially harmful for those who like themselves also suffer, albeit in particular ways. Just as important, by underscoring how Henry, whose relationship with the Aboriginal community is cast as familial and often genuinely aims at the reciprocal, quickly invokes rigid racial and ethnic categories of identification and notions of heritage when it serves his purpose, Wenders signals how, despite the transnational contestation of fixed boundaries and singular national identities, communities outside (within) the nation at the present time can nonetheless still seek to reimagine and solidify rigid notions of cultural and national difference at the expense of others. After Edith’s traditional Aboriginal burial, Eugene relates how, in justifying his moves to forgo the rituals of mourning and to violate the Aboriginal taboo on accessing and displaying images of dreaming, Dr. Farber defends his actions to those Aboriginals he has thought of (and who have thought of him) as family by claiming that as “a white man,” he remains subject to different laws and social codes. Wenders contrasts the approach to the image and to representation that informs Henry’s rituals of mourning Edith and his (and Sam’s) attempts to memorialize the legacy of their diasporic exile with an Aboriginal notion of memory and memory work. While en route to reuniting with his parents, Sam, for example, answers Claire’s question about an Aboriginal elder’s song. “He’s singing the country,” declares Sam. “It’s like their Bible—everything is part of the story;

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the tree is Jonah; the rock is the whale. And so everything is part of the story. He’s a custodian of this part of the story. If he doesn’t keep it alive by telling it, it will die.” Even if Sam has great difficulty approaching such a form of singing, he parses what for the film is the ritual’s abiding significance. Despite the threat of devastating loss posed by impending catastrophe or its after effects, and in the wake of historical and contemporary aggressions, the Aboriginal community maintains a respect not for an atomistic singing to the self in a stultifying effort to echo an ostensible inviolability and distance from the world and others, but rather for an acknowledgment of how the landscape solicits and remains part of an interanimating, dialogic relation with others. The country is not something that the elder Aboriginal man owns, but something he remains obliged to care for through a commemorative work, a Symbolic elaboration in the present for what is and continues to unfold. Like Wenders’s notion of the world that can become more (recognizably) palpable and less abstract via the language of immersive images, this singing vitalizes the world and the singer and, while placing him in relation to other parts of a larger narrative, fosters a reverence for the “part” that thus can take its proper place in that larger, dynamic story. When Sam and Claire fall even further from this conception of commemoration, the figure of the writer, Eugene, embodies the terms of this “singing.” In a moment that he deems a pivotal turn from the acquisitive stance he himself had adopted in his relationship to others, the world, and to his art, Eugene rehearses and performs with Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians and the French robber (earlier responsible for breaking Claire’s windshield). Together, through the language of a music that strives to incorporate without denying the particularities of each of the intersecting traditions, Eugene relishes (even amid the uncertainty over the satellite’s potential devastation) “the music . . . that bloom[s] here,” what he terms “a prayer for the wounded planet.” The film charts the fruits of Eugene’s experiences within the Aboriginal community, extolling its informing influence on him and his novel The Dance around the Planet, and in turn his text’s animating antidote to the diseased approach to images that plagues Claire and Sam. The couple remains enthralled with Farber’s dreamrecording machine and begin, in Eugene’s words, “to live for their dreams,” to nearly “drow[n] in their own nocturnal imagery.” “They had arrived at the island of dreams together,” relates Eugene, “but in a short time they were oceans apart.” A good portion of the last section of the film presents Sam and Claire, each alone and huddled

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over a screen, embodying the broader, deadening endorsement of a narcissistic turn, effected by and through a debased stance toward the image. Eugene intervenes, refusing to provide Claire with the batteries for her portable video device, insisting that perhaps “if she sweats . . . out all those false images she had absorbed” she might surface from the “deep well of narcissism.” As Eugene’s words convey, encounters with images, whether analog or digital, indexical or otherwise, whether debased or soliciting of the dialogic, leave a physical trace within the psyche. As such, Wenders’s film moves beyond conventional understandings of what constitutes the materiality of art and shifts the ground of the debate to consider the affective impact on the observer. Claire’s near absorption of images that are debased, because they seek to withdraw from a dialogic relation with the world and with others, has rendered her, as she comes to recognize, a figure of the living dead: As she wails, “I’m dead. My heart is dead.” Eugene rekindles in Claire a desire for a dynamic engagement with the world, through words, specifically through presenting to her as a gift his novel that takes its cue from the kind of music and aesthetic approach that he has come to learn while in Australia. The film parallels his effort with attempts by Aboriginal men to cure Sam of his similar addiction. Like Eugene, the men confiscate Sam’s dream videos, but, as part of an Aboriginal custom, the antidote they administer entails sleeping beside him. A tribe member (from Utopia, Western Australia) who worked on the film told Wenders, “If someone is out of himself we know how to put him back into himself. We would have him sleep between two old men who are strong enough to cope with his dream.”23 In the director’s version, when Sam awakes, we see him resting in the landscape drawing beside a rock, a parallel to Claire’s quiet reading of Eugene’s novel in the landscape. Through direct and indirect cross-cultural encounters, then, the film champions more humble, provisional forms of bearing witness to the enigma of the self’s and the other’s experience, especially of suffering. To Claire, Eugene presents his novel, what Wenders describes as “a mirror made out of words, not images” (TOI, 59), not, it seems, as an acoustic mirror that aims to resound the reverberating mark of self-enclosure, but as one that aspires to a musical aesthetic that imagines the rhythmic as a sign of an embodied interchange with the self, others, and the world. (Claire awakens to find the novel under the ear, as it were, of a seashell.) Eugene’s hope is that his perspective on Claire’s experience will initiate and affirm a move beyond stifling enclaves. His “testimony” and his insistence that Claire must at the same time discover, through this gift, a cure for herself echoes

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the silent witnessing of the elders who sleep beside Sam and encourage his engagements with a palpable, interanimating world. Together these rituals present a striking contrast with those that have guided Claire and the Farbers. In its presentation of these commemorative rituals and exchanges, Until the End of the World gestures toward the complex understanding of cross-cultural encounters between people who bear a relation to specific individual and cultural traumatic memories that Caruth finds in Marguerite Duras and Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour (1959). That tale of a French woman and a Japanese man, both of whom remain haunted by having missed respective traumatic events (she, the moment of her German lover’s death despite the presence of his dying body on top of her; he, the atomic blast that killed his family while he was away from Hiroshima), is noteworthy, according to Caruth, because although both figures remain together in the sense that the missing of a particular trauma has left its enigmatic mark on each, the claim to listening to each other, to bearing witness, is not founded on some absolute knowing of the self or of the other’s experience (even though their lives intersect through historical events—the atomic bomb that “ends” the war for the Allies marks the beginning of the traumatic suffering of the Japanese man and of the Frenchwoman, whose German lover is killed after the cessation of hostilities; she is also publicly scorned for having slept “with the enemy.”) Instead, as Caruth argues, the intimate relationship that develops between them, while the Frenchwoman works on a film about Hiroshima being shot in Japan, instances one in which both survivors are neither absolutely joined nor absolutely isolated from each other in their mutual listening and bearing witness to each other’s past sufferings: “It is indeed the enigmatic language of untold stories—of experiences not yet completely grasped—that resonates . . . within the dialogue between the French woman and the Japanese man, and that allows them to communicate, across the gap between their cultures and their experiences, precisely through what they do not comprehend” (UE, 56). Caruth finds here the basis of an ethical exchange that does not rely on an absolute affinity between self and other or self and self. (The call to ethics is made precisely when one cannot find a common, stable, knowing ground with the other.) The moving, enigmatic exchange between two individuals is, just as important, based on each individual’s encounter with a strangeness within the self: “Their ability to speak and to listen . . . [to each other] does not rely . . . on what they simply know of one another but on what [each] do[es] not fully know in [his/her] own traumatic pasts” (UE, 56).

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In its presentation of Eugene’s gift to Claire and of the Aboriginal men’s sleeping beside Sam, Until the End of the World aims for the contiguous relation to traumatic experience that Caruth elaborates in her analysis of two people who, across cultures, are placed in relation through the intertwined legacies of historical catastrophe. Although the elders’ relation to the landscape remains distinct from the one that Sam has lost and seeks to regain, they bring with them and place beside him and his family’s diasporic experience not only a history that has sought to displace and exterminate them but also a relation to the world that, even if it stresses the importance of a dialogic interplay between parties, does not deny the particularity or the enigmatic aspect of the self or the world with which it engages, much less the ways in which self and world assume a complex position within a larger story that remains in process. In this sense, then, the film intimates that although, as Wenders says, “stories are impossible”—they emerge from an “impossible place,” from the point that marks the inability to fully possess or master the enigma of particular experience—it remains “impossible to live without them,” especially those that bear witness to encounters with the unknowable, those that “def[y]” but nonetheless “deman[d]” witness (UE, 5). In one of the few critical readings to grant the dialectical relation that Wenders’s film establishes between story and image (especially as it relates to the issue of memory), a reading that further underscores how such a dialectic aims to create space for the enigmatic, Jeff Malpas has recently argued that the character/narrator of Eugene can help us understand that although his storytelling assumes the form of the novel, according to Wenders the kind of filmic storytelling that seeks to intervene in a culture that would exclusively purvey a debased approach to images does not assign image exclusively to film or storytelling to literature and, with regard to film, grants not only that the particular image itself contains a story but also that only “in and through the narrated image” does what we have been referring to as Wenders’s concern for the particularity of the single image become “properly meaningful.”24 Only “in and through the narrated image” can the particular image “carr[y] the fullness and the opacity that makes it something other than a flattened-out ‘representation’ ” (WWTRM, 158), Malpas writes. As he goes on to say, “the images of memory themselves have such fullness, and such opacity, precisely because of the narrational character that they also carry with them” and because “they are stories that still remain to be told” (WWTRM, 158). This formulation echoes the singing of the Aboriginal elder and, broadly, remains attuned to Wenders’s encouragement of an

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immersive, proximic relation to image, world, and other. Malpas rightly emphasizes what becomes even more apparent in the director’s version of Until the End of the World: that Wenders’s antidote for Claire and Sam and the culture of the proliferating, debased approach to the image is, in part, an insistence on a narrational strategy that “allows the image to remain connected to the place, and to the world,” that, in short, eschews the “merely reproducible but rather opens out into the uniqueness of the place, and of that which is present, in all the ambiguity of that presence, in the place” (WWTRM, 158; emphasis added). At the same time, Malpas’s Benjaminian- and Heideggerianinspired exposition of the importance that Wenders assigns to the narrated image in or of place does not engage the specific Aboriginal sites and peoples photographed in the film; although Until the End of the World does not aim to elide the particularities of the place in which it is filmed or the people who live there, just as Caruth’s reading of Hiroshima, mon amour may be less attentive to how the Japanese man is more often deployed in the film to magnify the experience of the French woman’s testimony, Wenders’s film, as much as it moves away from troublesome invocations of cultural difference in the New German Cinema and cautions against returns of rigid readings of national identity, nonetheless risks similarly positioning its Aboriginal characters such that the particularity of their relation to place (apart from their relation to the Farbers) is, in significant ways, nearly eclipsed. Even if we consider the many images of Aboriginal characters that were cut from the film’s theatrical version—images such as Maisie, in despair over Dr. Farber’s use of his camera, sitting amid a labyrinthian network of wires in a lab and ritually pouring dirt from the earth over her head; or of Aboriginal Australians situated in the landscape—it is not simply the lack of dialogue in such scenes that, when placed alongside conventional filmic representations of indigenous people as inherently silently or nonverbally attuned to the land, gives pause. More than this, although Maise and the Aboriginal scientists clearly assist with Farber’s project and are figured as facile with technology, given that we do not see Maise and members of her community apart from the Farbers and at the same time in scenes in which they exhibit their distinctly different approach to the image (via technology), the film implies that if the Farbers themselves did not introduce technology to an ostensibly pre-technological Aboriginal community, then Maise and her community would function in the narrative only to illumine the failed approach to the image and memory work adopted

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by the Farbers. For filmmakers and critics concerned with place, not noting the particular ways in which visual technology were being used by indigenous peoples is problematic. Even in the decade before Wenders shot his film, Aboriginal people in Australia were turning to television and satellite technology, as opposed to the impression the film leaves us with—that Farber’s project not only delivered technology to the Aboriginal community but also now provokes not merely a (justifiable) abandonment of Farber’s lab but a questionable distance from visual technology altogether. In the mid-1980s Aboriginal Australians were using media not simply to facilitate Western memory projects, and they were not necessarily gauging their response to that technology on the success or failures of the kinds of uses exhibited by those like the Farbers. As Faye Ginsburg notes, progressive state policy, indigenous activists, an independent and alternative film culture, and remote and urban Aboriginal people all became interested—sometimes for different reasons—in how these media could be indigenized formally and substantively to give objective form to efforts for the expression of cultural identity, the preservation of language and ritual, and the telling of indigenous histories.25

By contrast to the particulars of this use of technology by Aboriginal Australians before and during the filming of Until the End of the World (1991), the only forms of memory work that pertain to the legacy of Aboriginal trauma and the contemporary struggle for preservation and life are resolutely cast by the film as non-technological and thereby more vital and generative. In these moments (as well as others, as we shall see), the film comes close, however unwittingly, to participating in what Toby Miller sees as a resurgence of the kind of thinking that informed much of nineteenth- and twentieth-century discourse, such as the anthropological work of Lévi-Strauss and Clifford Geertz who “took Aboriginal notions of human classification, duty, and social organization as keys to their own [Western] humanness, which had been submerged through the sweeping changes of industrialization, urbanism, representative democracy, and production-line culture” that had “weakened affective bonds of the social, in favor of intense individuation.”26 In both American Beauty and The Ring, the effort to position an other (be it the woman, gay man, or mother) in the static terms in which the figure of the Aboriginal Australian is at times rendered in Until the End of the World relates to an attempt to arrest the play of a radical Otherness in psychic/social life. As we have seen, too, such

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retrograde retreats in films that endorse the importance of sustaining that play often emerge latently, embedded in narratives of artistic relations. Like Mendes’s and Verbinski’s films, Until the End of the World explicitly undermines the notion of a fixed point or origin and concomitantly contests static accounts of cinema’s origins, especially as they emerge in scenes that imply a conception of the relation between the still and the moving image. As I have argued, the question of what motivates and ensures the successive movements of frames on screen gets played out within the context of conceptions of relations among arts/technologies. And such a turn against difference in the aesthetic domain’s conception of the origin of, and relations among, the arts spelled a retreat from the embrace of the generative play between affect and language that such films elsewhere deem crucial for galvanizing psychic life. Wenders’s filmic and critical work, of course, offer some of the most considered thinking on the more than aesthetic—indeed ethical—relation between the still and the moving or narrated image encountered in my study. Moreover, we have marked how the use of the graphic letter in Until the End of the World—in addition to challenging claims that any art can deliver the fixed and unmediated—by being positioned on all of the many arts/technologies sighted in the film, concomitantly works against a rigid disciplining of arts/technologies. Two brief scenes can further underscore Until the End of the World’s challenge to rigid notions of disciplinarity. Just as Until the End of the World deployed the graphic letter in scenes of Claire waking and dreaming to contest claims for presenting cinematic movement—specifically of images and internal sound—as alphabetic, as a sign of seamless, sequential progress, the film consistently marks the division of shots with a graphic label that literally and/or metaphorically underscores a hieroglyphic conception of the sign and its relation to other signs and sign systems. Typically, the graphic mark will appear when a transition from one shot to another or from one scene to another is made to coincide with a shift in the form of representation used to present an image on the cinema screen. The most common instance of marking moves from one form of art/ technology to another in the film occurs in the shift from the graininess and speed of the video image to the slower and more pristine 35 mm film stock. For instance, before Claire and Sam reach Australia, when they are on a train together, Claire, increasingly involved with making a “home movie,” holds her video camera out of the window, and we see, as if through her lens, the rush of moving images. The shift in scene is marked by Wenders’s camera, which appears at first to

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have picked up where the video camera left off; however, the slower, more stable film image of what seems to be the same telegraph wires glimpsed in the previous video image are, in fact, revealed to be situated in a different geographic location. In this way, Wenders reminds us of the desire and the inability to effortlessly weave the two views in distinct geographic locales as well as the two different forms of art/technology used to capture these respective views. The edit challenges a view of reading relations between shots (and between arts/ technologies) as seamlessly carrying the subject in a linear move forward. This scene is immediately followed by one in which Eugene and Winter, the bumbling detective associated with computer searches and surveillance screens, walk toward each other. Film spectators see their images reflected, each in a single half of a conjoined (surveillance) mirror that sits atop a street pole. Just as the mirror image of each man approaches the other, raising the expectation that the two images (and perhaps the form of representation with which each is associated) will resolve into a single image (or art), the camera fixes on hieroglyphic script inscribed on the street pole. The appeal to the graphic letter challenges the view that the two men or their two arts/ technologies might somehow find an unmediated reflection in the other or be smoothly absorbed or assimilated in the other. In “High Definition: Can HDTV Make Creators’ Dreams Come True?” a talk delivered at a round table discussion among developers of new image technology in Tokyo in 1990, Wenders confessed that his early dismissal of video and high-definition technology for exhibiting an inability to see very “well” (HD, 74) was wrongheaded, guided by his fear that electronic and digital mediums would replicate the visual grammar preferred by the low-definition technology of television and analog video culture. That culture, by wedding itself to the language of advertisement—that is, by eschewing the “panoramic view” or “gentle pace” of cinema—had not only committed a profound “injustice” to previous (cinematic) “image culture” but had also “terrorist[ically] contributed to an inhuman, amoral culture of seeing” (HD, 76). In the talk, Wenders pays attention to the particularities of forms of art/technology, but, in imagining that the traditions and practices of these forms are not deterministically and exclusively particular to them, he reflects a view of disciplinary relations that, like his conception of the relation between still and moving image and between self and other, drives home “the intimate and incommensurable” relations between and among disciplines. Wenders urges the developers of the then new HDTV technology to avoid imagining video technology as simply a double for television and

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to capitalize on ways of using a technology of electronic and digital images that is “already [dangerously] an abstraction of reality”—one that no longer depends upon “looking through the eye of a camera” at the world that appears in its lens (HD, 77). In short, developers should address the disappearance of the “permanent and palpable image” (HD, 77), a “serious affliction for [a] civilization” with the “virus” of the “loss of reality,” by balancing that loss of reality with what high-definition technology can increasingly produce: “a gain in image resolution” (HD, 77).27 Much to the consternation of the Japanese media corporation NHK who saw in Wenders’s film a chance to promote their product, Wenders blurs the high-definition images used to represent the dreams of Claire, Sam, and Henry. As Hideichi Tamegaya relates, “Wenders became fascinated by the grain artifacts that appear on the screen when HDTV tape is fast-forwarded or rewound at high speed on digital recorders. I tell him this is not an actual effect, this is noise. But he thought it was very good.”28 As Wenders explained to developers at the round table discussion (who had not yet seen the then unfinished film), in the new technology—as much as it is used in Until the End of the World to represent what should not be represented (the dream images), and as much as Wenders urges users of new electronic and digital technologies to produce high-resolution images— the noisy, grainy look of the dream images accords with Wenders’s concern to address the flight from reality encouraged by many uses of art and technology. Wenders relayed to the group that he aimed to devise a “new language” with the new tools/arts at his disposal in order to render the dream more realistically than it had been portrayed in cinema where “not one of them looked like a dream.” As he notes, “some of our High Vision dream images consist of as many as a hundred different layers, one image superimposed over another, in a way that . . . would be impossible with film” (HD, 78). This fidelity—in this instance, to representing the “interior” or space of unconscious work—is to a site whose expression, according to the film, is decidedly not transparent, one that must be endlessly read. The layers that create the dream palimpsest that Wenders describes are joined in the film with images of graphic letters. Together these two techniques (both “noisy” in their own ways) remind us of the rebuslike quality of the dream and of secondary re-vision and illuminate the resistance the film offers to Henry’s claim for the self-sufficiency of the dream images he reproduces. At the time of the film’s release some critics compared these dream images to Fauvist paintings. More recently, Brigitte Peucker

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suggestively likens them to “moving versions of Andy Warhol’s silk screen photo portraits, with each image in a series variously colored.”29 For Peucker, these Warholian-like dream images also exhibit their “ambiguous status between the photographic and the painterly,” by remaining “at once photographic in origin, mass-produced, and hand tinted” (TMA, 46). As with Wenders, for her such effects are realistic efforts at depicting the look of dreams insufficiently captured in most cinematic renderings; as in the film’s conception of the camera that produces them, the dream images are, in Peucker’s terms, “marked as neurological, anchored in the real” (TMA, 46; emphasis added). The dream image sequences in the film suggest, for Peucker, Wenders’s attempt to compete with Vermeer, a painter he long admired and quotes in the film. Wenders aims to “compete with Vermeer on his own territory,” Peucker writes, especially given that “Dutch realism [was also] understood to be produced by the recording of optical effects within representation” (TMA, 46). But if the palimpsestic layering of these digital images effects what Peucker describes as a “spatialization of the moving image” (TMA, 47), the “material density” they acquire ironically renders these new digitally produced images “painterly” (TMA, 45–46). In their painterliness, they can also productively complicate claims that the digital (as opposed to the indexical) leaves no trace, a significant point given the importance Until the End of the World places on the viewer’s affective response to the image. In the closing moments of Until the End of the World, however, the scenes of cross-cultural witnessing and healing through ritual and art/ technology repeatedly link the dream images to more than the work of Vermeer—indeed to a notion of an Aboriginal painting and drawing conceived, in fact, as far removed from the technological (or a complex understanding of its relation to the real or its provoking of affective, consequential registers in the viewer), especially as it connotes mediation. These links in effect aim to reclaim the indexical fingerprint as the privileged ground for constructing what the film imagines is a dialogic relation to the image but remains in the end much more monological than it seems willing to countenance. Wenders’s comments on these scenes recapitulate the film’s representing the Aboriginal scientists in Farber’s lab as inherently removed from or not at home with a technology that increasingly gets read problematically as, in and of itself, alienating. As Wenders notes, the effects of the help that the Aboriginal elders provided to Sam included his being “healed by images”: “He sat and drew rocks and blades of grass . . . got back to a very simple atavistic and untechnological art form” (TOI, 77).

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It is difficult to read this conception of drawing and of the Aboriginal painting with which it is linked as sustaining the importance that Wenders reserves for the tangible or the “present in all its ambiguity,” as Malpas contends. Rather, the film’s final moves aim to position Aboriginal culture and art (drawing and painting) as persisting in a static, immediate relation to a world that Sam has lost, but one that he might recover. That world or place is itself cast not only as unambiguous and preserved outside of time and history, but also as unalloyed, as if the Aboriginal place is not shot through with the legacy of material effects of encounters with others both on that soil and, even if obliquely, through transnational technological streams that would not only bring others to the site but also help expose any tangible “originary” place as itself bearing the traces of more than a singular history, even if of a people somehow conceived as singularly pure, as themselves alone. Although drawing and painting appear noisy or tactile, they are solicited in the film’s closing moments as originary arts whose fixity might quell an archaic Otherness that throughout Until the End of the World has been associated with a discordant rhythm that spells anything but the immediate and transparent. One may, moreover, hazard that the painterly quality of the high-definition dream images (many of which echo the drawings on the Aboriginal caves in which Sam and Claire screen these dream images) and their being likened to the sacred Aboriginal paintings that should remain unseen provide a way for Wenders’s film to protect the claim that its cinematic rendering of these dream images (in a medium [high-definition video] that more dangerously risks the loss of the palpable, according to Wenders), like the “primitive” arts of painting or drawing, testifies to the touch of the hand on which the presumably secure, indexical-bearing photography and analogue cinema traced their own mechanical penciling of nature or place. In this sense, the claim to preserve the sacred from sight seems a slight of hand that, however idealizing, appears designed to short-circuit the play of difference that cannot be removed from conceptions of the work of drawing or analog photography, as we have seen in our discussions of The Ring, The Elephant Man, and American Beauty. Just as the final scenes aim to situate painting and drawing beyond the exigencies of time and difference in order to recast cinema’s relation to a radical ambiguity, Until the End of the World likewise struggles to rewrite its conception of the cure (parallel to painting and drawing) that it offers as an antidote for the diseased approach to images—Eugene’s novel Dance around the Planet. Wenders describes Eugene’s novel not only as an analogue for the kind of storytelling

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he was after in his film, but also as a form that for him appears, like Aboriginal drawing, as similarly “atavistic” (TOI, 60), as a “simpler art-form” (TOI, 59). These comments, taken along with the film’s view of the novel’s means of production, also move to retreat from conceiving the novel’s work as fracturing a deadeningly closed acoustic mirror. Unlike the radio advertisement in the cable car scene, one in which the graphic letter marked a disseminating, decidedly non-self immediate and self-authenticating auditory presence, the abandoned radio station in which Eugene lives now appears as the site in which his composing is in effect reconceived by the film so as to aim to transmute ambiguity into something more final. Much is made in the film of the virtue of the nuclear satellite’s interruption of the work of portable computers not only because Eugene’s less worthwhile draft of his novel was lost as a result, but also because the interruption allowed him to begin anew on an old-fashioned typewriter. The film implies that this form of composing somehow remains analogous to drawing, as if the striking of the keys and their branding or leaving a mark on paper were a move toward returning writing to its presumably more indexical and self-authenticating roots. Just as the film turns to the figure of the Aboriginal to authenticate painting and drawing, Eugene receives the machine (that, of course, in the past would itself have been taken to threaten writing’s claim to the ostensible immediacy of voice and speech) from Aboriginal scientists. The occasion when Eugene receives the typewriter—when the scientists are still committed to helping Farber perfect the machine that will allow Edith to see—seems relevant. Considering that they abandon Farber’s lab and that the film consistently comes to read technology as foreign to Aboriginal life, the implication is that they should not have abandoned the more primitive machine, that Farber had somehow separated the Aboriginal community from more indexical and presumably more palpable arts. At the very least, at the level of narrative, the Aboriginal scientist’s association with the typewriter implies both a kind of backdating of the technology (relegating it to the preindustrial because pre-digital) and a reading of this machine as a form that more directly descends from and maintains the originary spirit of drawing. It remains difficult not to read this move to render writing as a kind of naturalized script on the order of drawing as bespeaking an effort to arrest the play of ambiguity that the film insists the broader culture perpetuates through its encouragement of a debased relation to the image. Taken together, the parallel imaginings of drawing/painting and literature as analogues for the work of what the finalizing moves of

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the film struggle to produce—a deadening conception of cinema— suggest less an appeal to the kind of specific ordering of a history of the arts (as in photography gives birth to cinema that in turn spawns video) that American Beauty, for example, labors to advance. Instead, Wenders’s film imagines that a number of arts can each discretely summon an originary ground that would ensure the transmission of the direct, pure touch of the teleological. (Literature can look back on its own to painting and drawing, as can cinema, as can video.) Just as important, with some, albeit significant, modifications, Wenders’s formulation in the end comes close to the imagining of Aboriginal culture adopted by Jean Baudrillard, a figure he might find a strange bedfellow, and one whom Miller counts among those wittingly or unwittingly struggling to revive the view that the figure of the Aboriginal provides the key to regaining an affective past lost in industrialized and digital life. Indeed, placed beside the closing moments of Wenders’s film, Miller’s assessment that Baudrillard’s Cool Memories 30 has nominated Australia “as a kind of spaceship” that ties “the telepathic ecosystem of Aborigines” to the “hypermodern, hyperreal future”31 not only frustratingly reminds us of the static conceptions of others and Otherness that remain part of significant filmic and critical efforts to challenge broader repudiations of the Symbolic dimension but also suggests how such efforts are often subtended by moves to fix the present and its relation to the past and future. Some of the retreats from the openness to others and Otherness in Until the End of the World seem to corroborate Wenders’s naive statements about the Aboriginal culture he engaged in the film: “They have no notion of future tense. They just don’t have the grammar for it” (SAS, 9), especially if we take his comments on syntax as a mark of a refusal of a Symbolic dimension that encourages a dynamic relation between affect (and drive) and language. The closing moments of Wenders’s film aim to dampen a dialectic conception of exchange understood as neither wholly unfixed or wholly fixed. In writing of an image of herself as a child, Kristeva exhibits the more complex sense of others and Otherness that Wenders’s film intermittently gestures toward, but from which it, at significant moments, retreats. Kristeva describes the photograph of herself as a child (along with a series of photographs of her taken over the course of her life) as memories “of an ever-present underground life, not a past, but a malleable immanence that never stops developing, however secretly.” For Kristeva, the photos “point to this immanence” and “revive” the “very passions that created them.”32 Here we are offered an emblem of the more dialogic kinds of exchanges that Until the End of the

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World often imagines and for which it seeks space. Kristeva places the photograph in dialogue with another art (the images are reproduced within the text of interview transcripts and of her own writing), and despite the valid fears of photographs or visual art (analog or digital) effectively effacing the memory of an event, here the remnant, however its material status is conceived, nonetheless produces an effect/ affect. What is more, although that underground life may be secret and the psychic marks “within” that space remain ambiguous and opaque, unlike the place and role imagined for drawing and painting in the closing moments of Wenders’s film, that underground life is always developing behind the scene/seen, and the effects of that development find a life in and through what (merely) appears transparently visible, indeed such effects both sustain and perturb that field of vision. In the way that the artifact of the photograph both gestures toward and reanimates passions, it recalls and encourages encounters with others and an Otherness experienced as both beyond and within the subject.

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Chapter 6

Conclusion: Up with Dead People?

A

lthough they have, of course, been with cinema from the start and remain remarkably resilient, the living dead have recently insinuated themselves more frequently in domains that extend beyond conventional and unconventional horror films. They have found portals, too, in other long-established as well as new technologies of visibility, pathways closely tracked in contemporary film, with its eye intensely trained on an inheritance rendered, or merely more clearly revealed as, unstable in the face of an uncertain present and future for cinema. In many of the films I have explored, the figure of the living dead registers less the complaint of being improperly mourned than of having “had” an earthly life that never really began or that substantively differed from the lifeless, somnambulant condition some films have imagined the dead endure. Lester in American Beauty, livelier in his last moments and in death than during much of his time on earth, finds company with the many dead who, in films such as Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s startling Pulse (2001), return from the grave in part to illumine the relatively more vital, if still troubled, existence they have found away from the corporate cubicles and computer, television, video, and phone screens to which those left behind, like so many in Until the End of the World and The Ring, seem tethered. To be sure, although The Ring’s Samara, vengefully emerging from a well and, in turn, perpetually from a video screen, seems more alive than the living Lester and the apparently affectless Noah and Rachel and even functions, albeit violently, to stir the benumbed couple to abandon their stifling psychic enclaves, the girl also serves to caution against proclaiming the ease with which one might find in the afterlife or in life a way to work through a living death. Samara in death differs in degree, not kind, from the girl whose troubled life was cut short, for the rituals that fail to offer her spirit rest merely replicate

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those that failed to truly vitalize her earthly life. At the same time, the apparently stark contrast between numb, screen-absorbed, isolated apartment dwellers such as Rachel and the destructive Samara, when placed within the context, not of the nostalgic conception of nineteenth-century photography first summoned by Verbinski, but of that century’s medical discourse (as evoked in The Elephant Man), helps underscore, as George Man Burrows discerned with regard to the melancholic, that those (like Rachel) who present with a seeming lack of emotion, although thwarting easy readability, are not wanting in emotion or affect but often signal a potentially threatening “excess” of feeling, an ineffectively stored sadness or a precariously housed madness (MME, 657); in fact, the melancholic’s apparent withdrawal repeatedly alternates with pronounced “excitation,” even “great fury” (263; cited in MME, 658). A century later, in elaborating the “new maladies of the soul” that she detects in contemporary life and that the films I have examined grapple with and elucidate, Kristeva reminds us not only that the lack of emotion may be only apparent, but also that its manifestation as fury—exhibited, to varying degrees, by both Rachel and Samara, as well as Colonel Fitts and others—can be directed externally in a “violent act” or internally, “where eventually everything self-destructs—organs, self-awareness and life itself” (RSS, 32). Theoretical and clinical work by Kristeva, Feher-Gurewich, and others, the continued critical explorations of affect, emotion, and sensation, and the films I have taken up contend that making space for opacity—more precisely, encouraging a perpetual exchange between drives (and affect) and meaning—helps reanimate psychic/social life. Such work, however, also charts the mounting threats to such an exchange posed by consumerism, fundamentalism, and related assaults on non-standardized thought and expression, affective relations with others, and unsettling anxieties and desires. Just the same, this body of filmic/critical work often insists that such anxieties remain productively perturbing and can be engaged in and through film and acts of seeing that solicit an immersive interchange between the enigma of the visible and the enigma of the body, one that effects a strange, unsettling, yet generative, encounter. Even if Kristeva at times privileges literature over film for offering light or a vitalizing way of “connecting thought to [the body or] being” in “dark times,”1 it is clear that visual forms of representation such as the films considered here can seek ways to stir the living that resist the absolutism or fixity often mistaken as the prescription for sustaining the paternal function. But if the form of violent acting

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out, the turn against others and representation, exhibited by figures such as Samara, Colonel Fitts, and Dr. Farber, and those who denigrate John Merrick, is of a piece with the broader political/religious violence that increasingly confronts the world, then, for Kristeva, this should not necessarily surprise us. If “wars of religions,” for instance, have in part “become the release mechanism of the death drive,” this may have something to do with the reluctance or failure of the humanities to seriously engage the desire for “meaning” and “transcendence” (TDT, 13, 15), to “construct” a “theoretical discourse in response to [fundamentalism as well as] developments in the human and social sciences” (17). (For Kristeva, fundamentalism’s “flip side” [16] is, in fact, nihilism.) In order to confront this murderous violence and “the new barbarisms of automatization, without seeking recourse in the safeguards upheld by infantilizing conservatism, free of the short-term idealism with which a mortifying rationalism deludes itself,” such a discourse must seek, as each of the films considered here do, to make space for “the irrational,” for that which resists stable meaning and yet cannot easily be dismissed as devoid of significance. Although mindful of the need for such space to counter either a rigid “rationalism” or a “romanticized spirituality,” Kristeva, nevertheless, emphasizes the coterminus importance that the “paternal function” and “maternal passion” play “as the child’s sensorial and prelinguistic [structuring] support” (TDT, 16–17). Welcoming Symbolic law, in fact, guarantees the resounding eruptions that perpetually and dynamically unsettle the seemingly fixed contours of the subject. Such support encourages the subject to remain open to “unforeseen ties” (15) and finds expression in figures such as American Beauty’s Ricky, who, even if the film would dampen his embodied vitality, cannot contain or remain unmoved by his use of video: as a way to see from a less stable position and so remain receptive to the new, the provisional, or the emergent in himself, in others, and in “things.” Although Otto; Or, Up with Dead People (2008), 2 the recent film manifesto by Bruce LaBruce, could not be more different in style than the films I have examined, this darkly comic film so departs from sardonic treatments of the zombie that it proves difficult to place. What sets it apart is not merely its self-reflexive depiction of Otto—a “real” gay teen zombie who wanders the streets of Berlin and lands a part in an “epic political-porno art zombie movie” being shot within the film (at one site of cinema’s origins, an abandoned amusement park). Nor is it simply that, in mocking the pretensions of the director of the zombie “art film,” LaBruce’s tale recalls how

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the low-budget horror film has not merely depicted but persistently elucidated historical trauma thought to be the exclusive reserve of art film. More to the point, in figuring Otto as a zombie looking not to devour flesh but to find love, and in framing that search within the context of what the art film within the film, if too abstractly for LaBruce, nonetheless tries to grapple with—namely, the near globalization of a psychic numbness—Otto; Or, Up with Dead People echoes much of what I have explored in my study. For instance, in assessing the current assaults on psychic life and the challenges to making space for a dynamism that seeks to encourage, on both the personal and political level, an oppositional, “transformative creativity” (RSS, 101), LaBruce declares, “I think we live in very dark and cynical times. Corporate entities control our lives, and a militarized police force clamps down on any protest or dissent, while advanced capitalism, with all its technological diversions, endlessly distracts children from what’s really going on in the world. I think we all suffer from it, but today’s youth really have never known any other, more autonomous reality.”3 Even more strongly than some of the filmic and critical discourse I have explored, LaBruce suggests that the drive to try to experience the interior of the body as interiority marks a failed effort at mastery; more than this, the failure seems not to deter newer refinements that evince a literalizing, deathlyturn from representation and threaten to suspend, if not extinguish, desire: “You could probably market Savanna Samson’s colonoscopy video as porn these days,” notes LaBruce. “On ‘tasteful’ prime-time TV, things are more necrophile: The dead body has become the site of voyeuristic fascination. People are obsessed with TV shows that display all the minutiae of murder, medical procedures, pathology examinations, autopsies— with a creepy, sly sexual component” (SDP, 54). Despite what seems a fatalistic assessment (certainly his statement on “dark and cynical times” implies that resistance may be ineffectual), LaBruce clearly takes violence, as it manifests in physical form and in artistic representation, to indicate a failure in our ability or our willingness to encounter the crisis in meaning. If Kristeva looks to literature and LaBruce to film, they both urge us, as do the films I have taken up, to look again. Even if the colonoscopy video instances the near end of the line for the kind of visual, technological incursions inside the body that we have charted, even if it bespeaks an even more determined effort to deny Symbolic castration by trying to find in the material body or indexical image of it (or the technology in which it is tracked) not the tangible in its radical ambiguity but instead a

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fixed mortifying presence, LaBruce’s take on this necrophilic turn still remains attuned to its call for something Other. His reading of Ottos’s apparent lack of affect summons, for instance, Lynch’s understanding of intense, affective forms of inexpression. Such registers, in part, present an opacity and unpredictability that may work not only to destabilize the social order or to test the certainty of metaphysical orderings that rely on absolute or consoling distinctions, between observer and observed and among the categories of human, animal, and machine, but may also present as responses that seek shelter not in but from deadening refusals of uncertainty. As LaBruce notes, “Characters [such as Otto] who are disenfranchised, ugly, or marginal often have a strong sense of the romantic: It’s all they have. Otto is so sensitive to the cruelty of the modern, corporate-controlled world that he has literally deadened himself to it. There’s something very tragic and romantic about that” (SDP, 54). While LaBruce’s take on Otto evokes the stance that figures such as Ricky and Merrick at times adopt in the face of a deadening world, it also invites us to look again at aggressively defensive figures such as Colonel Fitts and Samara, to say nothing of the defensive moves extant in some of the films I have considered. Although Merrick’s struggle to engage with the strangeness of his body and being and to endure the brutal responses directed at him contrasts the deadening refusals of uncertainty exhibited by many around him, LaBruce provokes us, further, to limn even these brutal repudiations, for they too bear traces of ambivalence and ambiguity, what can provoke a reanimating desire.

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Notes

1

Introduction: Cinema, Technologies of Visibility, and the Reanimation of Desire

1. Sam Mendes, “Commentary,” American Beauty, Awards Edition DVD, directed by Sam Mendes (2000: Los Angeles, CA: Universal Studios, 2003). 2. See, as representative examples, Tim Dean, Beyond Sexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004); Teresa de Lauretis, Freud’s Drive: Psychoanalysis, Literature and Film (Basingstoke UK; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Jonathan Lear, Open Minded: Working Out the Logic of the Soul (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). 3. Tim Dean, “Homosexuality and the Problem of Otherness,” in Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis, ed. Tim Dean and Christopher Lane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 132 (hereafter cited as HPO). 4. Kelly Oliver, The Colonization of Psychic Space: A Psychoanalytic Social Theory of Oppression (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), xxii. 5. Figures such as Kristeva and André Green, by offering a more dynamic conception of the pre-oedipal phase, by attending to the Symbolic elements of, and structuring role required at, a phase thought to be exclusively dominated by affect and drive, in turn help attune us to the persistence of affect and drive in the life of the more fully formed speaking subject. Just as important, this substantial body of work has, one might say, by taking Lacan at his word, illumined the ways in which his project, by concentrating so exclusively on the father and on the realm of speech (the Symbolic) in which he holds an admittedly tenuous sway, effectively risked literalizing the metaphoric quality of the paternal function, reducing it from an effect of the system of language that exceeds the individual by nearly delegating its endorsement solely to the man or father. 6. Revolt, She Said. An Interview by Philippe Petit, trans. Sylvere Lotringer (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 32–33 (hereafter abbreviated as RSS).

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7. Julia Kristeva, New Maladies of the Soul, trans. Ross Guberman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 7 (hereafter cited as NMS). 8. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” in The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics, ed. James M. Edie (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 164 (hereafter cited as POP). 9. Tim Dean, “Art as Symptom: Zizek and the Ethics of Psychoanalytic Criticism.” Diacritics 32.2 (Summer 2002): 16 (hereafter cited as AAS). 10. Tom Gunning’s work remains exemplary for refusing to ignore the complexities of cinema’s history and its continuous reworkings in the present. Gunning’s “Moving away from the Index: Cinema and the Impression of Reality,” Differences 18, no. 1 (2007): 29–52 offers a recent example. Resisting “either celebration or paranoia at the prospect of the new media environment” that for some portend the “disappear[ance]” of cinema “into the maw of undefined and undifferentiated image media” (36), Gunning reminds us that cinema’s current situation becomes an occasion in part for recalling the “dynamic” process of cinema and its relations at work throughout its history: namely cinema’s “interaction with other competing media, with mutual borrowings, absorptions and transformation among them” (36). “Cinema has never been one thing,” declares Gunning. “It has always been a point of intersection, a braiding together of diverse strands,” including that of the telephone and telegraph, the photograph, etc. (36). Gunning not only questions the presumed status that nineteenth-century thinkers afforded to the indexical, but argues that “the photographic process” is not the only aspect of cinema that can be thought of as indexical, especially if we think about “the term more broadly than as just a trace or impression” (34). Gunning focuses on the depiction of movement on the cinema screen as having a pronounced effect on spectators who, for him, are “embodied beings” and respond to motion on screen not simply emotionally, but affectively: “we feel it in our guts or throughout our bodies” (39; emphasis added). 11. For a trenchant reading of these changes and the continuing relevance of film theory as a frame of reference for negotiating encounters with the aesthetic and philosophical issues emerging amid the proliferation of the digital arts and technologies, see D. N. Rodowick’s The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2007). 12. Stephen Melville and Bill Readings, ed., Vision and Textuality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 20 (hereafter cited as VT). 13. Lisa Cartwright, Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995); hereafter abbreviated as STB. 14. Akira Mizuta Lippit, “Phenomenologies of the Surface: RadiationBody-Image.” Qui Parle 9, no. 2 (1996): 34 (hereafter cited as PS).

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2 Envisioning the (W)hole World “Behind Things” in Sam Mendes’s American Beauty 1. Sam Mendes, Commentary, American Beauty, Awards Edition DVD. 2. In her analysis of Mendes’s film and throughout her recent work, FeherGurewich stresses the need to think through the consequences of the social sphere’s parody of sexual difference—what had constituted the desire-generating “enigma at the heart of psychic life.” See especially “Is the Prohibition of Incest a Law?,” Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society 5, no. 1 (2000): 86–90 (hereafter cited as POI). In “Masculine Mystique,” Feher-Gurewich considers American Beauty in light of what she terms the new “masculine mystique” that the social imaginary now offers to heterosexual women: the fantasy that the gay male has access to pleasure that an avoidance of Otherness can purchase, a pleasure that remains, as the fantasy would have it, intriguingly off-limits to heterosexuals. 3. See, for instance, Paul Arthur’s review of American Beauty in Cinéaste 25, no. 2 (2000): 51; and Gary Hentzi’s review in Film Quarterly 54, no. 2 (2000): 46. 4. Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York: Routledge, 1992), 65 (hereafter cited as MSAM). 5. For Kristeva, “the psychic realm may be the place where somatic symptoms and delirious fantasies can be worked through and thus eliminated: as long as we avoid becoming trapped inside it, the psychic realm protects us. Yet we must transform it through linguistic activity into a form of sublimation or into intellectual, interpretive, or transformational activity. At the same time, we must conceive of the ‘psychic realm’ as a speech act, that is, neither an acting-out nor a psychological rumination within an imaginary crypt, but the link between this inevitable and necessary rumination and its potential for verbal expression” (NMS, 29). 6. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: the Denigration of Vision in TwentiethCentury French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 7. Julia Kristeva, “Psychoanalysis and the Polis,” in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 304. 8. For Kristeva’s extended reading of Céline’s work, see Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982); hereafter cited as POH. In American Beauty, Carolyn and Buddy frequent a restaurant called “Céline’s.” 9. Peter N. Chumo, “American Beauty: An Interview with Alan Ball,” Creative Screenwriting 7, no. 1 (January–February, 2000), 33 (hereafter cited as IWB). 10. Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1968): 155–200 (hereafter cited as I). 11. Gregg Kilday, “Worth a Closer Look,” Advocate (January 2008), 18 (hereafter cited as WCL).

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12. Lee Edelman, “Rear Window’s Glasshole,” in Out Takes: Essays on Queer Theory and Film, ed. Ellis Hanson (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 93 (hereafter cited as RWG). 13. Alan Trachtenberg, Photography/Cinema,” in Before Hollywood: Turn of the Century Film from the Archives, ed. Charles Musser (New York: American Federation of the Arts, 1986), 76 (hereafter cited as BH). 14. American Beauty’s linking of cinematic and amusement park attractions invokes a similar scene depicted in François Truffaut’s Les quatre cents coups [The four hundred blows] (1959), one in which the protagonist, Antoine (Jean-Pierre Léaud), enters a “hellhole,” a ride whose circular centrifugal force spins and pins patrons to a wall as the floor drops from beneath them. Unlike American Beauty’s treatment of a similar, putatively protocinematic amusement ride, however, Truffaut’s impression interrupts the illusion of motion that would blur bodies into an allegory of cinema’s production of seamless cinematic frames, stripping film of this claim to linear coherence by positioning Antoine as the lone horizontal body that fractures the smooth line of vision produced by the vertically upright riders spinning around on either side of him. 15. In leaving behind, with respect to the straight Lester, the critique it levels at the gay colonel, the film seems to offer further evidence to those who may see the colonel’s character as a throwback to the stereotypical scapegoating of the homosexual (yet another repressed murderer on the loose). Yet given the persistent rumors regarding Spacey’s own alleged closeted or not fully or publicly acknowledged homosexuality, the scene under consideration here can also leave audiences wondering whether Lester’s accusation of his boss’s desire for men constitutes a projection that would remove that desire from Spacey the actor; if such a reading obtains, Spacey appears closer to the character of the gay colonel who kills him. Indeed, if Fitts, in shooting Lester, initiates his screening of the life that “passes before his eyes,” the colonel may in another sense be said to allow Spacey to pass for straight right before the audience’s eyes. 16. Akira Mizuta Lippit, “The Death of an Animal,” Film Quarterly 56, no. 1 (Fall 2002), 12 (hereafter cited as DOA). 17. Hervé Aubron, “L’espoir inconnu de l’escargot,” in Vertigo 19 (1999). Quoted in Lippit, DOA, 12. 18. I draw here on Lippit’s reading of animal death (“Death of an Animal”) and develop this argument more fully in chapters 3 and 4.

3

Burning Transmission: Stilling Psychic Space in Gore Verbinski’s The Ring

1. The Ring, DVD, directed by Gore Verbinski (2002; Universal City, CA: Dreamworks Video, 2003); Ringu, DVD, directed by Hideo Nakata.

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2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

209

(1998; Universal City, CA: Dreamworks Video, 2003). Koji Suzuki, Ring, trans. Robert Rohmer, Glynne Walley (New York: Vertical, 2004). See Judith Feher-Gurewich’s “Lacan and American Feminism: Who Is the Analyst?,” in Beyond French Feminisms: Debates on Women, Politics, and Culture in France, 1981–2001, ed. Roger Célestin, Eliane dal Molin, Isabelle de Courtivron (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006): 239–46; and Judith Butler’s “The End of Sexual Difference,” in Feminist Consequences, Theories for a New Century, ed. Elisabeth Bronfen and Misha Kavka (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000): 414–34. Julia Kristeva, “Interview with Elaine Hoffman Baruch,” in The Portable Kristeva, ed. Kelly Oliver (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 376 (hereafter cited as TPK). For a dissenting view, see John Lewis, “ ‘Mother Oh God Mother . . .’: Analyzing the ‘Horror’ of Single Mothers in Contemporary Hollywood Horror,” Scope no. 2 (June 2005), http://www.scope.nottingham.ac.uk/ article.php?id=68&issue=2. André Green, “The Dead Mother Complex,” in Parent-Infant Psychodynamics: Wild Things, Mirrors, and Ghosts, ed. Joan RaphaelLeff (Philadelphia: Whurr Publishers, 2003): 162–74 (hereafter cited as DMC). I draw here on Cathy Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); hereafter cited at UE. For Metz’s seminal theory of how the specificities of viewing relate to the apparatus (understood as a social machine), see The Imaginary Signifier (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986); hereafter cited as TIS. The work of the artist Tacita Dean comes to mind in this context, especially “The Sea with a Ship; afterwards, an Island.” The 1999 exhibition in part explored figures of the lighthouse in the context of cinematic perspectives and seriality and ran concurrently (at the Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA) with Steven Pippin’s “Laundromat/Locomotion,” a contemporary take on Muybridge’s locomotion studies. Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007) offers a recent example of the persistent linking of the lighthouse and cinema. The protagonist, Jean-Dominique Bauby (Mathieu Amalric), paralyzed and unable to communicate except through the blink of a single eye, is himself cast as a double for the lighthouse, a structure we hear him describe (through his inner voice) as “my favorite.” Bauby informs viewers of his cherished symbol immediately after describing the terrace (from which he gazes at the structure), as something rolled out of the Cinecittà studio. As Brigitte Peucker notes in Incorporating Images (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), early “filmmakers sensed an affinity between the landscape that unfolds before the gaze of the train passenger and the sequence of moving images presented to the spectator in the [movie] theater” (79).

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9. As Dean argues in AAS, “Progressive critics claim to accept the impossibility of fully mastering the enigmas of other persons and other cultures, yet seem unable to accept the impossibility of fully mastering the enigmas of the aesthetic domain. . . . It is as if art needed to come from an alien culture before we could concede that some aspect of it remains untranslatable into meaning” (16). 10. See Virginia Woolf’s “Professions for Women,” in Collected Essays, vol. 2 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1967). 11. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, 236–37, quoted in Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 117. 12. Hirsch, Family Frames, 118 (hereafter cited in text as FF). 13. Amy Lawrence, “Counterfeit Motion: The Animated Films of Eadweard Muybridge,” Film Quarterly 57, no. 2 (Winter 2003–04): 19 (hereafter cited as CM). 14. As Lawrence writes, “Moving step by step further from their photographic source, [Muybridge’s] drawings—done by Edwin Faber— substantially modify and transform the photographs upon which they are based.” For instance, the figures are “cosmetically enhanced with color,” cut from their background, and the “figures [depicted] are intentionally distorted, elongated, so that the image will appear ‘natural’ when projected” (19). The elision of drawing in accounts of Muybridge’s work matters, since for Lawrence, such a move aims to produce a fixed origin and a seamless teleology: Muybridge’s “series of photographic studies laid out on grids on a page” are read as “point[ing] toward a time when the series will be reconstituted as a loop; each loop will document a single visual gesture; and the ‘meaning’ (which is motion) will come not only from the photographs and their order but from the blank spaces in between” (15). As we will see with regard to The Ring, the notion of drawing can itself be looked to as an indexical sign more privileged than the photograph that putatively replaced it. See also Constance Penley’s “The Imaginary of the Photograph,” reprinted in The Cinematic, ed. David Campany (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007): 114–18. 15. “X-Rays and the Quest for Invisible Reality in the Art of Kupka, Duchamp, and the Cubists,” Art Journal 47, no. 4 (Winter 1988), 324, quoted in PS, 36. 16. See especially The Visible Woman: Imaging Technologies, Gender, and Science, ed. Paula Treichler, Lisa Cartwright, Constance Penley (New York: New York University Press, 1997). On the persistence of the need for reading MRI, even when detecting illnesses such as cancer, see Amit Prasad’s “Making Images/Making Bodies: Visibility and Disciplining through Magnetic Resonance Imaging,” Science, Technology, and Human Values 30, no. 2 (2005): 291–316. 17. R. Bowling Barnes, “Thermography of the Human Body,” Science, 140 no. 3569 (May 24, 1963): 870–77.

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18. Douglas Kash, “Prewarrant Thermal Imaging as a Fourth Amendment Violation in the Making,” Albany Law Review 60, no. 4 (Summer 1997): 1296. Thermal readings are often “ ‘converted’ to a computer which generates several types of displays including still, video, or real time pictures” (1296); hereafter abbreviated as PTI. 19. Shuntaro Hida, “The Day Hiroshima Disappeared,” in Hiroshima’s Shadow, ed. Kai Bird and Lawrence Lifshultz (Stony Creek, CT: Pamphleteer’s Press, 1998), 417–18 (hereafter cited as TDHD). 20. Brian Masaru Hayashi, Democratizing the Enemy: The Japanese American Internment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 86. 21. Greg Robinson, By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 4.

4

“Turning into Another Thing” in David Lynch’s The Elephant Man

1. Frederick Treves, “The Elephant Man” in Ashley Montagu, The Elephant Man: A Study in Human Dignity (New York: Dutton, 1971), 13 (hereafter cited as TEM). 2. Peter W. Graham and Fritz Oehlschlaeger, Articulating the Elephant Man: Joseph Merrick and His Interpreters (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 25–26 (hereafter cited as AEM). 3. Thomas Carlyle, “Sign of the Times,” in Thomas Carlyle: Selected Writings, ed. Alan Shelston (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England, 1971), 67; hereafter cited as SOT. 4. For a reading of Merrick’s story, as it was shaped, especially in Bernard Pomerance’s play and Lynch’s film, see William E. Holladay and Stephen Watt’s “Viewing the Elephant Man,” PMLA 104, no. 5 (1989): 868–81. 5. Joseph Carey Merrick, “The Autobiography of Joseph Carey Merrick,” reprinted in Michael Howell and Peter Ford, The True History of the Elephant Man (London and New York: Alison and Busby, 1980): 168–69. 6. Ashley Montagu, The Elephant Man: A Study in Human Dignity (New York: Dutton, 1971); hereafter cited as TEM. 7. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 108–09; hereafter cited as OL. 8. Andrew Smith argues that Merrick’s deformities expose the limits of medical language. For Smith, Treves turns to compensatory literary (namely gothic) discourses that, while marking Merrick as monstrous, nonetheless unwittingly foreground his dangerous sexuality and “urges” (47). See “Pathologising the Gothic: the Elephant Man, the Hysteric, the Indian and the Doctor,” in Victorian Demons: Medicine,

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9. 10.

11.

12.

NOTES

Masculinity and the Gothic at the fin de siècle (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2004): 45–66. For a view that dissents from my argument about Lynch’s treatment of Merrick’s body and being, see Paul Arthur Darke’s “The Elephant Man: An Analysis from a Disabled Perspective,” Disability and Society 9, no. 3: 327–42. See Metz, The Imaginary Signifier. Constance Penley, “Feminism, Film Theory, and the Bachelor Machines,” in Constance Penley, The Future of an Illusion: Film, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 65. Graham and Oehlschlaeger deploy the metaphor of “stage managing” to describe Treves’s attempts to bring Merrick back to life, though they focus more specifically on the carefully controlled visits of women to Merrick’s residence that Treves “scripts.” Although the critics suggestively argue that these efforts to cast women as static “mirrors” to prop up Merrick constitute Treves’s response to “a crisis in his . . . understanding caused by his confrontation with the ambiguously human in Merrick” (AEM, 56), the contention that Treves’s identification with Merrick as against a female Other during such visits (in order to lay claim to an unalloyed gender integrity) ignores the more fundamental archaic ambiguities that the doctor would confine to the pre-oedipal stage, ambiguities that profoundly unsettle gender categories. The identifications that Treves makes with Merrick do not always end in ways that the doctor thinks they will, but neither do they begin with the fixed notion of gender identification that Graham and Oehlschlaeger imply. The anatomist and anthropologist Ashley Montagu’s (1905–1999) The Elephant Man: A Study in Human Dignity (1971) not only draws attention to the historical record of Merrick’s life (including the photograph of the mother Merrick possessed), but takes seriously Merrick’s mother’s presence in his life and, more broadly, underscores the importance of maternal love in a child’s development. Montagu’s case study seeks to explain how someone as brutalized and challenged as Merrick could nonetheless emerge as courageous and contented. At the same time, however, Montagu risks ignoring the complexity of the mother/child relation. His claim, for instance, that Merrick and children in general would not “carry portraits of their mothers about with them” if they had not likely received “a great deal of love” (63) from their mothers precludes the defensive idealizations that can motivate those deprived of love. However laudatory Merrick and his response to his oppression remains, he too emerges as an idealized, transcendental subject positioned nearly outside of time and space. With maternal love, Montagu contends, Merrick was able “no matter how mistreated by others, no matter what the menace of the years . . . to remain master of . . . [his] kingdom” (57). Montagu’s idealization of Merrick’s mother functions as the structural obverse of Treves’s denigration of her. Both visions of the maternal—and of the photograph—traffic in a similarly static currency.

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13. Joel Pfister, The Production of Personal Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 118 (hereafter abbreviated as POPL). 14. Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator, and the Avant-Garde,” Wide Angle 8, no. 3–4 (1986): 63–70. 15. Lumière and Company, DVD, directed by David Lynch, Patrice Leconte, Wim Wenders et al. (New York: Fox Lorber, 1997). 16. Nicholas Daly, Literature, Technology, and Modernity (1860–2000) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 17. Jean Laplanche and J.-B Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: W.W. Norton, 1973), 335–36. 18. Ulrich Baer’s Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2002) parallels trauma (understood in Caruthian terms) to the lack of relation photography presents with respect to a referent. The referent remains “severed from the time in which [the photograph was] shot,” thus registering an absence and an excess that cannot be contained by simple appeals to the “contexts established by individual and collective forms of consciousness” (11). Baer’s formidable reading of Charcot’s famous photographs of hysterics (Chapter 1) in part elaborates the function of the “flash” in ways that correspond to Lynch’s use of the lightning flash in the ragtag spectacle scene. 19. Tom Gunning, “Phantom Images and Modern Manifestations: Spirit Photography, Magic Theater, and Photography’s Uncanny,” in Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video, ed. Patrice Petro (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995), 42–43 (hereafter cited as PIMM). 20. Lynch’s influence on The Brothers Quay seems profound in this regard. See “Institute Benjamenta: An Olfactory View,” Laura Marks’s discussion of the vibrating world of material culture in the Quays’s Institute Benjamenta, or This Dream People Call Human Life (1995), in Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002): 127–40. 21. On Lynch’s challenge to conventional cinematic presentations of the human face, see Joe Kember’s “David Lynch and the Mug Shot: Facework in The Elephant Man and The Straight Story,” in The Cinema of David Lynch: American Dreams, Nightmare Visions, ed. Erica Sheen and Annette Davison (London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2004): 19–34. 22. Lynch’s refusal to position Merrick beyond a relation to a foundational Otherness seems comparable to some subtle representations of filmic characters with “sensory impairment” (in postwar American cinema) that Lisa Cartwright’s Moral Spectatorship (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008) examines. Drawing as she does on figures such as André Green, Cartwright does not imagine such impairment to remove the subject from the work of Symbolic mediation, but she also redresses dismissals of impairment by attending to filmic “sites where the production of human subjects occurs in ways that vary from the norms,

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NOTES

[sites that pointedly do not] . . . regar[d] representations of impairment as ciphers of lack or absence of human subjectivity, signification, and meaning” (57). 23. “Nothing Will Die,” in The Poems of Tennyson in Three Volumes, vol. 1, ed. Christopher Ricks (Harlow, Essex: Longman, 1987), 247–48. 24. Tom Conley, Film Hieroglyphics: Ruptures in Classical Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), ix–x (hereafter cited as FH). In response to a question about his second short feature, The Alphabet [1968], Lynch expressed his interest in the graphic quality of letters in film and painting, in the “shapes” and “texture” of words that point to the complex play of nonsense or more than sense within referential meaning [LOL, 22]). 25. Michel Chion, David Lynch, trans. Robert Julian (London: BFI, 1995), 53 (hereafter cited as DL).

5

Inscribing the Dream of Otherness in Wim Wenders’s Until the End of the World

1. Wim Wenders, “High Definition: Can HDTV Make Creators’s Dreams Come True?,” in The Act of Seeing: Essays and Conversations, trans. Michael Hofman (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1992), 77 (hereafter cited as HD). 2. Thomas Elsaesser, “The New German Cinema’s Historical Imaginary,” in The Historiography of German Cinema and Television, ed. Bruce Murray and Christopher Wickham (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992), 295 (hereafter cited as HI). 3. Inga Scharf, Nation and Identity in the New German Cinema: Homelessness at Home (New York: Routledge, 2008), 35. 4. Stephan K. Schindler and Lutz Koepnick, “Against the Wall? The Global Imaginary of German Cinema,” in The Cosmopolitan Screen, ed. Stephan K. Schindler and Lutz Koepnick (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 11 (hereafter cited as TCS). For a provocative reading of Wings of Desire and the “legacies” of traumatic events as they relate to the subject’s “engagement” with urban space (161), see Barry Langford’s “Strangers (to) Themselves: Cityscapes and Mindscapes in 1980s European Cinema,” in Urban Mindscapes of Europe, ed. Godela WeissSussex, Franco Bianchini (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006): 147–62. 5. For a view that focuses on Wenders’s public statements (more than his films) as evidence of the director’s nostalgic turn, see Gerd Gumünden’s “Nostaglia for the Nation: Intellectuals and National Identity in Unified Germany,” in Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present, ed. Mieke Ball, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo Spitzer (Hanover and London: University Press of New England): 120–33.

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NOTES

215

6. Wim Wenders, “Impossible Stories,” in The Logic of Images, trans. Michael Hoffman (London: Faber and Faber, 1991), 52 (hereafter cited as IS). 7. Wim Wenders, “Goodbye to the Booming Voice of the Old Cinema,” in The Logic of Images, trans. Michael Hoffman (London: Faber and Faber, 1991): 39–50. 8. Timothy Corrigan, New German Film: The Displaced Image (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983), 32 (hereafter cited as NGF). 9. Shawn Levi, “Wim Wenders’s Dance around the Planet,” American Film 17 (January–February 1992), 52 (hereafter cited as DA). 10. Wim Wenders, Bi sans Ende der Welt. DVD Director’s Cut (Wim Wenders edition) (Germany: Kinowelt, 2007). 11. Wenders’s critique finds an echo in Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster (New York: Viking, 2009). 12. On the strategies of artists and filmmakers, namely Hartmut Bitomsky and Harun Farocki, who offer powerful interventions against the global culture of surveillance and against deterministic theories that unwittingly reproduce passivity in the face of such culture, see Nora Alter’s “Addressing the Global in Recent Nonfiction Film Production,” in The Cosmopolitan Screen, 253–68. 13. See Wim Wenders, “Van Morrison,” in Emotion Pictures, trans. Sean Whiteside (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1989): 52–54. 14. Miriam Hansen, Babel & Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991): 192. See also MarieClaire Ropars-Wuilleumier’s “The Graphic in Filmic Writing: A bout de soufflé or The Erratic Alphabet,” Enclitic 5, no. 2/6, no. 1 (Spring 1982): 147–61. 15. Alan Bergala, “A Photographer’s Viewpoint,” in The Courier (UNESCO) 41 (1988): 6. 16. Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, ed. and trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press 1994), 163; hereafter cited as AV. 17. Garrett Stewart, Reading Voices: Literature and the Phonotext (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 1, 25 (hereafter cited as RV). 18. Jim Dawson, “Interview with Wim Wenders,” in Wim Wenders, trans. Carla Wartenburg (New York: Zoetrope, 1976), 12 (hereafter cited as IWW). 19. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 22–23 (hereafter cited as CMI). 20. Scott Spector, “Wenders’ Genders: From the End of the Wall to the End of the World,” in Triangulated Visions: Women in Recent German Cinema, ed. Ingeborg Majer O’Sickey and Ingeborg von Zadow (Albany: SUNY Press, 1998), 223.

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NOTES

21. For a reading of the recording and transmitting process that stresses the textual nature of memory work, see Assenka Oksiloff’s “Eden is Burning: Wim Wenders’s Techniques of Synaesthesia,” The German Quarterly 69, no. 1 (Winter 1996): 32–47. 22. For a powerful analysis of such a dynamic, see Azade Seyhan’s “Germanic Academics in Exile: Translation as the Bildung of the Other,” in Nation, Language and the Ethics of Translation, ed. Sandra Bermann, Michael Wood (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). 23. Walter Donahue, “Interview with Wim Wenders.” Sight and Sound (April 1992), 10 (hereafter cited as SAS). 24. Jeff Malpas, “Wim Wenders: the Role of Memory,” in Cinematic Thinking: Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema, ed. James Phillips (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 158 (hereafter cited as WWTRM). 25. Faye Ginsburg, “Screen Memories and Entangled Technologies: Resignifying Indigenous Lives,” in Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality, and Transnational Media, ed. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam (New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 93 (hereafter cited as MPTM.) As part of the broader move to situate indigenous people beyond the technological, Ginsburg marks how Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922) “obscures” the very Inuit expertise with sound and film recording technologies relied upon during production by casting its indigenous characters as befuddled by technologies (MPTM, 80–86). 26. Toby Miller, “A Certain Disservice,” Anthropology Quarterly 75, no. 3 (Summer 2002), 611 (hereafter cited as ACD). 27. For a subtle, less pessimistic reading of the status of memory in the face of proliferating audio-visual images, see Thomas Elsaesser’s “One Train May be Hiding Another: History, Memory, Identity, and the Visual Image,” in Topologies of Trauma: Essays on the Limit of Knowledge and Memory, ed. Linda Belau and Petar Ramadanovic (New York: The Other Press, 2002): 61–71. Employing the image of the train as one that can mark the need to avoid erasures, Elsaesser writes, “there may . . . be reason to trust our audio-visual reality, which means to work at it, and work with it, so that one truth can not only cover another but also be recovered by another. A train may indeed hide another, as one image hides another, but alert to the histories and identities each carries with it, neither television nor cinema need to be the train that runs us over” (71). 28. Howard Rodman, “Anatomy of a Wizard.” American Film 16 (Nov.– Dec. 1991), 39. 29. Brigitte Peucker, The Material Image: Art and the Real in Film (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007); hereafter cited as TMA. 30. Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories, trans. Chris Turner (London and New York: Verso, 1990).

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31. Baudrillard, Cool Memories, 161–62, 164; quoted in ACD, 613. 32. Julia Kristeva Interviews, ed. Ross Mitchell Guberman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 135.

6

Conclusion: Up with Dead People?

1. Julia Kristeva, “Thinking in Dark Times,” Profession (2006): 14 (hereafter cited as TDT). 2. Otto; Or, Up with Dead People, DVD, directed by Bruce LaBruce (2008: Los Angeles, CA: Strand Releasing Studios, 2009). 3. Mark Simpson, “He Sees Dead People,” The Advocate, November 18, 2008, 55 (hereafter cited as SDP).

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Selected Bibliography

Agamben, Giorgio. The Open: Man and Animal. Translated by Kevin Attell. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004. Andrew, Dudley. “The ‘Three Ages’ of Cinema Studies and the Age to Come.” PMLA 115, no. 3 (May 2000): 341–51. Appadurai, Arjun. “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks (revised edition). Edited by Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas Kellner, 584–603. Malden, MA and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006. Armstrong, Philip, Lisbon, Laura, and Stephen Melville. As Painting: Division and Displacement. Columbus, OH: Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio State University; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001. Barthes, Roland. Image, Music, Text. Edited and Translated by Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. Belton, John. “Digital Cinema: A False Revolution.” October 100 (Spring 2002): 98–114. Bersani, Leo and Adam Phillips. Intimacies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Bogen, James. “Functional Imaging Evidence: Some Epistemic Hot Spots,” Theory and Method in the Neurosciences. Edited by Peter Machamer, Rick Grush, Peter MacLaughlin, 173–99. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001. Brennan, Teresa. The Transmission of Affect. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004. Channell, David F. The Vital Machine: A Study of Technology and Organic Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Cherchi Usai, Paolo. The Death of Cinema: History, Cultural Memory, and the Digital Age. London: British Film Institute, 2001. Chion, Michel. The Voice in Cinema. Edited and Translated by Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Copjec, Joan. Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. Cvetkovich, Ann. An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.

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220

SELEC T ED BIBLIOGR A PH Y

Dagognet, François. Etienne-Jules Marey: A Passion for the Trace. Translated by Robert Galeta with Jeanine Herman. New York: Zone Books; Cambridge, MA: Distributed by the MIT Press, 1992. Darley, Andrew. Visual Culture: Surface, Play, and Spectacle in New Media Genres. New York: Routledge, 2000. Davidson, John E. Deterritorializing the New German Cinema. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Doane, Mary Ann. The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Everett, Anna and John C. Caldwell. New Media: Theories and Practices of Digitextuality. New York and London: Routledge, 2003. Ezra, Elizabeth and Terry Rowden. Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Feher-Gurewich, Judith. “Psychoanalysis and Social Identity; or, The Pyrrhic Victory of Hysteria.” Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society, 1, no. 1 (1996): 73–76. Fine, Cordelia. Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference. New York: Norton, 2010. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon Books, 1977. Fuchs, Nan Kathyrn. “Thermography: Mammography’s Partner,” Women’s Health Letter 4, no. 1 (April, 2002). Gledhill, Christine and Linda Williams, eds. Reinventing Film Studies. London: Arnold; New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Graf, Alexander. The Cinema of Wim Wenders: The Celluloid Highway. London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2002. Green, André. The Fabric of Affect in the Psychoanalytic Discourse. Translated by Alan Sheridan. London and New York: Routledge, 1999. Hayward, Philip, ed. Culture, Technology and Creativity in the Late Twentieth Century. London: John Liberty, 1990. Hayward, Philip and Tana Wollen, eds. Future Visions: New Technologies of the Screen. London: British Film Institute, 1993. Hui Kyong Chun, Wendy, ed. and intro. Joyrich, Lynne (ed. and preface) “Race and/as Technology,” Camera Obscura 24, no. 1, 70 (2009): 1–35. Ketabgian, Tamara. “ ‘Melancholy Mad Elephants’: Affect and the Animal Machine in Hard Times,” Victorian Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Social, Political, and Cultural Studies, 45, no.4 (Summer 2003): 649–76. Klinger, Barbara. Beyond the Multiplex: Cinema, New Technologies, and the Home. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Krauss, Rosalind E. A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the PostMedium Condition. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2000. Kristeva, Julia. This Incredible Need to Believe. Translated by Beverley Bie Brahic. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. ———. The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt. Translated by Jeanine Herman. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.

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Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller; Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1981. Laplanche, Jean. Essays on Otherness. Edited by John Fletcher. London and New York: Routledge, 1999. Lawrence, Amy. The Films of Peter Greenaway. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible, followed by working notes. Edited by Claude Lefort. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968. Mizuta Lippit, Akira. Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Mulvey, Laura. Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image. London: Reaktion Books, 2006. Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. Rodowick, D. N. The Virtual Life of Film. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2007. Rogers, Lesley. Sexing the Brain. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. Rosen, Philip. Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Seyhan, Azade. Writing Outside the Nation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. Shapiro, Jerome F. Atomic Bomb Cinema: The Apocalyptic Imagination on Film. New York: Routledge, 2002. Shohat, Ella and Robert Stam. Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality, and Transnational Media. New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press, 2003. Silverman, Kaja. Flesh of My Flesh. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009. Solnit, Rebecca. River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West. New York: Viking, 2003. Virilio, Paul. War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception. Translated by Patrick Camiller. London and New York: Verso, 1989. Willis, Sharon. “Disputed Territories: Masculinity and Social Space.” In Male Trouble, edited by Constance Penley and Sharon Willis, 263–81. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Ziarek, Krzysztof. The Force of Art. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004.

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Index

Aboriginal Australians, 9, 158–61, 180–1, 183–5, 187–9, 193–6 Adan (character) (The Ring), 49–50, 54–8, 60–2, 66, 68–9, 78–80, 82, 90, 94–7, 150 affect, 2–6, 10–11, 14–15, 19, 30, 55–8, 62–9, 78, 93–5, 115–16, 141–6, 152–3, 157, 162–3, 166, 169, 175–9, 185, 189–90, 193, 196–203, 205n5, 206n10 Akin, Fatih, 159 Alice in the Cities (Wenders) (1974), 174 American Beauty (1999) (Mendes), 1, 3–6, 9, 13–47, 49, 53, 59, 71–2, 74–6, 105, 157, 189, 194, 196, 199, 201, 207n2, 208n14 arts/technologies, 15, 29, 36–43 and borders, 21, 25, 40 and enigmatic life, 14, 19–21, 27, 31, 33, 37, 39, 42, 44, 49 homeless woman, 19, 31, 43 homoeroticism, 6, 14, 16, 29–30, 34–5, 40–1 homosexuality, 14, 17, 21–2, 29–30, 33–5, 40–2 and identity, 16, 24–5, 29, 32, 34, 37 and incest, 13–18, 21–2, 25–8, 30–1, 34–5 and “look closer,” 4, 14–15, 24, 28–9, 31, 35, 38–9, 47 and masculinity, 16–17, 21–2

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and mother, 17–19, 29, 31–3, 38, 42–4 and Otherness, 13–16, 24–5, 29, 32–3, 35–6, 40–2, 45 and paternal function, 13–18, 21, 25–35, 40–1, 49–50 and photography, 15, 30, 36–40, 43–4, 46 plastic bag, 19–20, 27, 31, 39, 44, 47 and same-sex relations, 14–16, 22, 25–31, 40–1 and superficial beauty, 13, 19, 27 35mm film, 38, 47 and video, 15, 19–20, 30, 38–9, 43–6 American Beauty characters. See Angela; Carolyn; Colonel Fitts; Jane; Jim and Jim; Lester Burnham; Mrs. Fitts; Ricky Fitts The American Friend (1977) (Wenders), 163 American Psycho (2000), 16 “angel in the house,” 77, 117, 125–6 Angela (character) (American Beauty), 1, 13, 16–19, 21–2, 27, 31, 38 animal-human continuum, 10–11, 41–2, 45–6, 106–7, 111–13, 117–19, 124–7, 135–6, 140–50, 203

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224

INDEX

animal-human-machine continuum, 11, 140–4, 203 Anna Morgan (character) (The Ring), 59–65, 67–8, 70–1, 74–5, 77, 79–83, 90–1, 96, 98–9, 124, 146 Anne Treves (character) (The Elephant Man), 124–6, 145 anti-Semitism, 24–5 Articulating the Elephant Man: Joseph Merrick and His Interpreters (Graham and Oehschlaeger), 108 arts/technology, 4–10, 15, 29, 36–43, 50–3, 70, 72, 74–6, 80, 88–9, 93, 96–9, 105, 107, 134, 148, 155, 161, 165, 168, 170–2, 190–1 Aubron, Hervé, 45, 148 The Autobiography of Joseph Carey Merrick (Merrick) (Torr and Ellis), 108 Ball, Alan, 27, 29–30, 41 Barthes, Roland, 167 Baudrillard, Jean, 196 Bazelli, Bojan, 101 Bazin, André, 6 beauty, 1, 13, 19, 27, 31, 33, 39, 42, 44, 49, 114, 116–17 See also enigmatic life/beauty; maternal beauty; superficial beauty Becka (character) (The Ring), 57–8, 80–1 being seen, 119–24, 127–9, 144, 176 Belau, Linda, 216n27 Bening, Annette, 17 Benjamin, Walter, 28, 77–8, 137, 188 Bentley, Wes, 1, 13 Berger, John, 112 Birch, Thora, 16 Bitomsky, Hartmut, 215n12 Boys Don’t Cry (1999), 16

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Buñuel, Luis, 77 Burrows, George Man, 142, 200 Butler, Judith, 53 Byrne, David, 164, 169, 171 Bytes (character) (The Elephant Man), 123–7, 131, 140 Campion, Jane, 122 Carlyle, Thomas, 106, 142 Carolyn (character) (American Beauty), 17–19 Carr Gomm, F. C., 109, 116, 126, 137, 145 Cartwright, Lisa, 8, 81, 83–7, 138–9 Caruth, Cathy, 134, 136, 160, 180–1, 186–8 castration, 2, 6, 13–15, 27–30, 35, 40, 43, 49, 54, 202 catastrophe, 180–1 Céline, Louis Ferdinand, 24–5 Channel, David, 141 Chase, Daveigh, 49 Chauveau, J. B. A., 8, 85–7, 138–9 Chion, Michel, 153, 155, 171 Claire Tourneur (character) (Until the End of the World), 3, 157, 159, 164–6, 169–71, 173–7, 179–88, 190, 192, 194 Colonel Fitts (character), 13, 21–7, 29–31, 33, 36, 40, 200–1, 203, 208n15 colonialism, 87, 106, 112–13, 121, 124, 126, 160, 180, 183 Commentaries on the Causes, Forms, Symptoms, and Treatment, Moral and Medical, of Insanity (1828) (Burrows), 142 Conley, Tom, 151, 170, 175 consumerism, 3, 16, 18, 58, 200 Cool Memories (Baudrillard), 196 Corrigan, Tim, 163 Dagognet, François, 89 Dali, Salvador, 77 Daly, Nicholas, 134–5

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INDEX

Dance around the Planet, 159, 184, 194 Darwin, Charles, 106, 112 de Lauretis, Teresa, 2 Dean, Tim, 2, 4, 40–2 Deleuze, Gilles, 174 depressives, 145–6 Derrida, Jacques, 89, 92, 151, 170 Dickens, Charles, 141–3, 152 digital, 5–9, 38, 50–1, 72, 75–80, 86, 88–9, 99, 161, 166, 185, 191–7, 206n11 Dr. Henry Farber (character) (Until the End of the World), 158, 160, 165–6, 175, 178, 180–3, 188, 192, 201 Dommartin, Solveig, 3, 157 Dorfman, David, 49 Duffield, Tom, 93 Duras, Marguerite, 186 Edelman, Lee, 34–5, 42 Edison, Thomas, 87, 149–50, 152 Edison Manufacturing, 87 Edith Farber, 157–8, 160, 165–6, 175–8, 180–3, 195 Electrocuting an Elephant (1903), 87, 149 The Elephant Man (1980) (Lynch), 3, 6, 8–11, 45, 105–55, 170, 194, 200, 211n8, 212n12 and animal-human continuum, 106–7, 111–13, 117–19, 124–7, 135–6, 140–50 and “being seen,” 124, 127–9, 146–7 and the father, 136 and film camera’s eye, 127–8 and interior of the body, 105, 108, 138–40, 147, 153 and the mother, 106–7, 123–31, 133–6, 143, 145–55 and Otherness, 105, 107–10, 119, 123, 127, 131, 136, 144, 147, 150, 152, 154

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225

and photography, 107–8, 129–31, 133–9, 144–7, 150–2 and procreation, 107 and rape, 123–5 and sideshows, 123–9, 131, 136, 140, 144, 152 and speech, 144–5 and trains, 10, 131–6, 146 and trauma, 134 and women, 123–8, 143, 151–2 and X-ray, 138–9 The Elephant Man (Lynch) characters. See Anne Treves; Bytes; Merrick; Mothershead; Treves The Elephant Man: A Study in Human Dignity (Montagu) (1971), 106, 108 The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences (Treves) (1923), 108–10, 128, 147 Ellis, J., 108 Elsaesser, Thomas, 158, 165 enigmatic life/beauty, 19–21, 27, 31, 33, 37, 39, 42, 44, 49 Enlightenment, 8–9, 52, 80, 82–9, 100, 105, 137–8, 153, 176 Enola Gay (airplane), 101 Eugene (character) (Until the End of the World), 3, 159, 161, 164, 177, 183–5, 187, 191, 194–5 Dance around the Planet, 159, 184, 194–5 Evans, Walker, 170 family unit, ruined, 2–3, 55–8, 61 Faraday, Michael, 141 Farber, Sam. See Sam Farber Farocki, Harun, 215n12 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, 158–9, 164 father, 1–3, 5–6, 13–19, 21, 25–7, 29–30, 33–5, 38, 40–4, 49–50, 52–6, 58–9, 64, 68–9, 87–8, 119, 147, 157, 200–1, 205n5 See also paternal function

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226

INDEX

Faye Ginsburg, 189 Feher-Gurewich, Judith, 2, 13–14, 27–8, 42, 53, 200, 207n2 Fight Club (1999), 16–17 Fincher, David, 16–17 Fitzcarraldo (1982) (Herzog), 183 “foreignness,” 39, 89, 106, 112, 134, 172–4 “freakshows.” See sideshows Fresco, Nadine, 178 Freud, Sigmund, 2, 28, 134–6 Frizot, Michel, 80 Geertz, Clifford, 189 Glasgow Philosophical Society, 84 globalization, 3, 52, 157, 159–60, 164–5, 179, 181, 202, 215n12 The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (1972), 172 Gordon, Hannah, 124 Gordon, Stuart, 1, 17 Graham, Peter, 106, 108–10, 112–14 Gunning, Tom, 137, 206n10 Hall, Conrad, 38 Hansen, Miriam, 170 Hard Times (Dickens), 141, 143, 152 Harron, Mary, 16 HDTV technology, 191–2 Head On (2004) (Akin), 159 Heidegger, Martin, 188 Henderson, Martin, 49 hermaphrodite, 53, 103, 110 Herzog, Werner, 159, 183 Hida, Shuntaro, 100, 103 “High Definition: Can HDTV Make Creators’ Dreams Come True?” (lecture) (Wenders), 191 Hiller, Wendy, 124 Hiroshima, atomic bombing of (1945), 99–103, 186, 188 Hiroshima mon amour (1959), 186 Hirsch, Marianne, 77–8, 137, 178 Hitchcock, Alfred, 7, 34–5, 57

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Holocaust, 178 homoeroticism, 6, 14, 16, 29–30, 34–5, 40–1 homophobia, 33 homosexuality, 6, 14, 17, 21–2, 29–30, 33–5, 40–2, 189, 201, 207n2, 208n15 See also Colonel Fitts; Jim and Jim Hopkins, Anthony, 123 Household Words (Dickens) (1850s), 141 Hurt, John, 123 Hurt, William, 3, 157 “Impossible Stories” (1982) (Wenders), 162 In the Company of Men (1997), 16 incest, 1–2, 13–14, 16–18, 21–2, 25–8, 30–1, 34–5, 49–51, 69, 150, 166, 182 interior of the body, 8–11, 53, 56, 65, 80–8, 90, 92–3, 96–7, 105, 108, 138–40, 147, 153, 160–3, 169, 171, 175–7, 192, 202 See also X-ray The Invisible Man Meets the Fly (1957), 101 Jane (character) (American Beauty), 16–17, 19–21, 26, 30–1, 34, 36–8, 44–7 Japanese culture, 10, 93, 96–7, 99–102, 131, 160, 179, 186, 188, 192 Jay, Martin, 19 Jeffries (character) (Rear Window), 35, 57 Jim and Jim (characters) (American Beauty), 33–4, 41–2, 46 Jones, Freddie, 123 Junger, Ernst, 158 Katie (character) (The Ring), 55–8, 76–7, 80–1, 94, 97 Ketabgian, Tamara, 141–3

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INDEX

Kings of the Road (1976) (Wenders), 163, 170, 172, 174 Koepnick, Lutz, 159, 214n4 Kristeva, Julia, 2–3, 18–19, 24–5, 52, 54–5, 58–9, 64–5, 107, 114–15, 127, 167, 169, 196–7, 200–2, 205n5, 207n5 Kurosawa, Kiyoshi, 199 “The Laboratory in the Chest” (1850) (Faraday), 141 LaBruce, Bruce, 201–3 Labute, Neil, 16 Lacan, Jacques, 2, 13, 28, 34, 43, 205n5 language, 2–5, 7, 9, 13–14, 19, 28, 43, 49, 54–5, 62, 64–5, 68, 93, 115, 134, 136, 142, 144–5, 166–7, 169, 171–5, 182, 184, 186, 189–92, 196, 205n5, 211n8 Laplanche, Jean, 136 Lawrence, Amy, 78–9 Lester Burnham (character) (American Beauty), 1–2, 13, 16–27, 30–42, 45–6, 199 murder of, 21, 24, 26, 30–6, 40 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 189 lighthouse, 60, 71, 74–7, 79, 82, 96–9, 119–20 Lightning over Water (1980) (Wenders), 170 Lili Marlene (1980), 164 Lippit, Akira Mizuta, 45, 52, 80, 82–4, 89, 100–2, 138, 148–50, 153 A Lover’s Discourse (Barthes), 167 Lumière Brothers, 132 Lynch, David, 3, 8, 10–11, 45, 105–55, 203, 213n18, 20, 22, 214n24 See also The Elephant Man Macintyre, John, 84 magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), 9, 86, 176, 210n16

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Maisie (character) (Until the End of the World), 160, 181, 183, 188 Malpas, Jeff, 187–8, 194 Marey, Etienne-Jules, 8, 85–7, 89, 97, 138–9 mass media, 3–4, 58, 106, 157–8, 165, 179–80, 189, 192, 206n10 maternal beauty, 113–17 meaning, 2–5, 7, 9, 15, 18–19, 24–5, 28, 33, 35–6, 40, 46, 52–3, 58–9, 64–6, 69, 104, 105–6, 136, 146, 151, 157, 159–60, 167–79, 181, 187, 200–2, 210n9, 14, 22, 214n24 “‘Melancholy Mad Elephants’: Affect and Animal Machine in Hard Times” (Ketabgian), 141 Melville, Stephen, 7 Mendes, Sam, 1, 3–6, 13–47, 49, 52, 72–5, 105–7, 132, 157, 190 See also American Beauty Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 20 Merrick (character) (The Elephant Man), 123–54 inception of, 123–4, 135–6 suicide of, 147–55 trampling of the girl, 132–5, 146 Merrick, John (Joseph) (1862–90), 9–11, 105–23, 201, 203 and “being seen,” 119–23 biography of, 109 body as commodity, 108–9 and border crossing, 110–11, 115, 122 deformities of, 111–13 disabilities of, 108–9 and lighthouse, 119–20 and his mother, 112–19, 122, 212n12 and photographs of women, 116–18 as sideshow “freak” 110–11 and woman, 112–19, 122 Merrick, Joseph Rockley, 109 Merrick, Mary Jane, 109

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228

INDEX

Metz, Christian, 71, 121, 145, 209n7 Mill End Road shop (London), 111, 118 Miller, Toby, 189, 196 miscegenation, 113–14 Mitsuo, Murayama, 101 Mizuta Lippit, Akira, 8, 52 Montagu, Ashley, 106–9, 124, 127, 129 Moreau, Jeanne, 160 Morgan family (characters) (The Ring), 63–4, 69, 90–1, 95–6 See also Anna; Richard; Samara mother, 2–3, 9, 17–19, 29, 38, 43–4, 49–50, 53–6, 58–9, 61–5, 67–9, 74, 80–1, 98–9, 106–7, 113–18, 123–31, 133–6, 143, 145–55, 157, 161, 166, 176, 178–9, 181, 189, 209n4, 212n12 Mothershead (character) (The Elephant Man), 124–6, 129 Mr. Mori (character) (Until the End of the World), 179 Mrs. Fitts (character) (American Beauty), 43–4 Muybridge, Eadweard, 8, 45, 71, 76, 78, 85, 97, 105, 138, 209n7, 210n14 Nagasaki, atomic bombing of (1945), 99–100, 102 Nakata, Hideo, 49, 93, 97, 99–100, 103 Nazism, 25, 44, 158–9, 178 Neil, Sam, 3, 161 neurofibromatosis, 105–6 New German Cinema, 158, 180, 188 Noah (character) (The Ring), 49–50, 53–62, 66–70, 75, 79, 82, 88, 90–2, 98, 101, 199 “Nothing Will Die” (Tennyson), 148, 153–4

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numbing, 1, 3–4, 11, 14, 17, 41–2, 49–52, 57, 157, 163–4, 199–203 Oedipal phase, 28, 54, 63–4, 115, 122, 134, 169, 205n5, 212n11 Oehlschlaeger, Fritz, 106, 108–10, 112–14 Oliver, Dean, 2 Oliver, Kelly, 2 On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Stewart), 110 “optical unconscious,” 77–8 The Other Side of the Lantern: An Account of a Commonplace Tour round the World (1905) (Treves), 109 Otherness, 2–3, 5–10, 13–16, 24–5, 29, 32–3, 35–6, 40–2, 45, 49, 51, 53–4, 56, 59, 61, 64, 67, 69–70, 73–4, 76, 79, 84–5, 88, 90, 99, 105, 107–10, 119, 123, 127, 131, 136, 144, 147, 150, 152, 154, 157, 161, 167, 175–6, 178, 182, 189, 194, 196–7, 203, 207n2, 212n11, 213n22 Otto; Or, Up with Dead People (2008) (LaBruce), 201 Otto (character) (Up with Dead People), 201–3 Paris, Texas (1984), 167–8 paternal function, 1–3, 5–6, 13–18, 21, 25–35, 40–1, 49–50, 52–6, 58–9, 64, 68–9, 87–8, 119, 147, 157, 200–1, 205n5 Pathological Society (London), 108, 110, 127–8, 130, 137 Peirce, Kimberly, 16 Penley, Constance, 78, 121, 210n14 Peucker, Brigitte, 192–3 Pfister, Joel, 126

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INDEX

The Piano (1999), 122 Pontalis, J.-B, 136 positron emission tomography (PET), 9, 86, 176 Powers of Horror (Kristeva), 115 psychic life, 1–5, 7, 9, 14, 18–19, 37, 46–7, 49–59, 62, 64–7, 73–5, 88, 93, 99, 104–5, 115, 123, 135–6, 139–40, 144, 146–8, 157–8, 160–1, 163, 166, 169, 178–9, 189–90, 197, 199, 200, 202, 207n2, 5 psychoanalytic theory, 1–2, 18, 54, 77 Pulse (2001) (Kurosawa), 199 Rachel (character) (The Ring), 49–50, 54–76, 79–83, 85, 90–1, 93–9, 146, 150, 199– 200 rage, 16, 126, 142, 200 Ramadanovic, Petar, 216n27 rationalism, 8, 82, 143, 152, 187–8, 201 Ray, Nicholas, 170 Readings, Bill, 7 Re-animator (1985), 1, 17, 26 Rear Window (1954) (Hitchcock), 34–5, 42, 57 Resnais, Alain, 186 Richard Morgan (character) (The Ring), 61–3, 65, 67–9, 83, 87, 90 Ricky Fitts (character) (American Beauty), 1, 5, 13, 15–31, 33–40, 42–7, 49, 59, 75, 201, 203 Ring (2004) (Suzuki), 49, 53, 103 The Ring (2002) (Verbinski), 3, 7–10, 45, 49–104, 105, 146, 150, 153, 157, 160, 189, 194, 199 and arts/technology, 50–3, 70, 72, 74–6, 80, 88–9, 93, 96–9, 105

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and atomic bombs, 99–103 and burning correspondences, 90–104 and the family, 53–69 and horses, 70–89 and incest, 49–51, 69 and interior of the body, 53, 56, 65, 80–8, 90, 92–3, 96–7, 105 lighthouse, 60, 71, 74–7, 79, 82, 96–9 and mother, 49–50, 54–76, 79–83, 85, 90–1, 93–9 and narcissism, 50, 62 and Otherness, 49, 51, 53–4, 56, 59, 61, 64, 67, 69–70, 73–4, 76, 79, 84–5, 88, 90, 99 and paternal function, 52–6, 58–9, 64, 68–9, 87–8 and photography, 50–3, 71–2, 74–81, 88–91, 93–6, 99–100, 102 and psychic life, 49–59, 62, 64–7, 73–5, 88, 93, 99, 104–5 and reproduction, 50–3, 69–70, 74, 79, 83 and “ruined family unit,” 55–8, 61 and sexual difference, 53 and thermography, 51–3, 67, 91–3, 95–7, 103 and trauma, 49, 51, 55–6, 59, 61, 65, 67–9, 74, 78 and video, 49–55, 57, 59, 60, 66–7, 69, 71, 74, 76–81, 87–90, 94–6 and X-ray, 50–3, 80–92, 97, 100, 103 The Ring (Verbinski) characters. See Adan; Anna Morgan; Becka; Katie; Noah; Rachel; Richard Morgan; Samara Ringu (1998) (Nakata), 49, 93, 96–7, 99–100, 103 Rontgen, Berthe, 81 Rontgen, Wilhelm, 81–3

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INDEX

Ropars, Marie-Claire, 170 Sam Farber (character) (Until the End of the World), 3, 157, 165–7, 171, 173–6, 178–88, 190, 192–4 Samara (character) (The Ring), 8, 49–54, 56–72, 74, 76–88, 90–9, 102–4, 146, 150, 199–203 same-sex relations, 6, 9, 14–16, 22, 29–31, 40–1, 53 Saunders, Justine, 160 “Sax and Violins” (song), 164, 169 Scharf, Inga, 159 Schindler, Stephen, 159 Screening the Body (Cartwright), 8 sideshows, 108–12, 121, 123–9, 131, 136, 144, 152 “Sign of the Times” (Carlyle), 142 Silverman, Kaja, 16, 22 Spacey, Kevin, 1, 13, 39, 208n15 Spector, Scott, 175 standardization, 3, 14, 18, 58, 72, 106, 200 Stewart, Garrett, 172 Stewart, Susan, 110–12 The Story the Biograph Told (1903), 36 superficial beauty, 1, 13, 19, 27 Suvari, Mena, 1, 13 Suzuki, Koji, 49, 53, 103 Syberberg, Hans-Jū rgen, 158 Symbolic, 2, 3, 6, 13–15, 19, 28, 34–5, 40, 43–4, 51, 53–6, 58, 62, 64, 66–9, 93, 105, 115, 135, 144–7, 150–1, 157, 161, 169, 177–9, 184, 196, 201–2, 205n5, 213n22 castration, 2, 6, 13–15, 28, 40, 49, 54 elaboration, 3, 50, 56 language, 2, 19 law, 13–14, 55 mediation, 2, 16, 35, 51, 53

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Talbot, William Henry Fox, 89 Talking Heads, 164, 170–1 Tamegaya, Hideichi, 192 Tavernier, Bertrand, 132, 136–7 Tennyson, Lord Alfred, 148, 153–4 thermography, 51–3, 67, 91–3, 95–7, 103 35mm film, 38, 47 Thoreau, Henry David, 177 Torr, Sam, 108 Tourneur, Claire. See Claire Tourneur trains, 10, 45, 72–3, 76, 131–6, 141, 146, 173–4, 190, 209n8, 216n27 trauma, 17, 19, 22, 43, 49, 51, 55–6, 59, 61, 67–9, 74, 78, 134–6, 146, 158–60, 166, 178–89, 202, 213n18, 214n4 Treves, Frederick (1853–1923), 106–123, 127, 137–8, 140, 144–5, 147 See also The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences Treves (character) (The Elephant Man), 123–30 Uganda for Holiday (1910), 109–10 the unconscious, 2, 8, 28, 77–8, 126, 134, 160, 164–6, 174, 182–3, 192 colonization of, 160, 164–6, 183 “optical,” 77–8 undead, 1–2, 17, 49, 51, 199–203 Until the End of the World (1991), 3, 6, 8–9, 157–97, 199 arts/technologies, 161, 165, 168, 170–2, 190–1 and boundaries, 159 and camera for the blind, 157–8 and colonization of the unconscious, 160, 164–6, 183 and dreaming, 160, 164–5, 169, 173–4, 182–5, 190, 192–4 and “equivalence,” 174

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INDEX

and globalization, 159–60, 164–5, 179, 181 and incest, 166, 182 and interior of the body, 160–3, 169, 171, 175–7, 192 and language, 166–7, 169, 171–5, 182, 184, 186, 189–92, 196 and mass media, 157–8, 165, 179–80, 189 and the mother, 157, 161, 166, 176, 178–9, 181, 189 and music, 164, 170–4 and Otherness, 157, 161, 167, 175–6, 178, 182, 189, 194, 196–7 and painting, 160–1, 181, 183, 192–7 still versus moving image, 160–1, 163, 166–7, 170, 186–7, 190–3 and video, 161, 164, 170–1, 176, 182, 185, 190–1, 196 See also Aboriginal Australians; Talking Heads Until the End of the World characters. See Aboriginal Australians; Claire; Dr. Henry Farber; Edith Farber; Eugene; Maisie; Mr. Mori; Sam; Winter Verbinski, Gore, 3, 8, 45, 49–104, 105–7, 132, 146–7, 157, 160–1, 190, 200

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See also The Ring Vermeer, Johannes, 193 Victorian sensibilities, 10–11, 77, 106, 110, 112, 116–17, 121, 124–6, 134, 138, 141–3, 148 Victorian women, 77, 116–17, 121, 124–6 “visual fluttering,” 171 The Vital Machine (1991) (Channel), 141 von Sydow, Max, 160 voyeurism, 1, 19, 23–4, 122, 182, 202 Walden (Thoreau), 177 Warhol, Andy, 192–3 Watts, Naomi, 49 Wenders, Wim, 3, 7–8, 10, 157–97 See also Until the End of the World West Germany, 159 Wings of Desire (1987) (Wenders), 180 Winter (character) (Until the End of the World), 191 Woolf, Virginia, 77, 117, 125 World War II, 10, 21–2, 158–60, 178 X-ray, 8–10, 50–3, 80–92, 97, 100, 103, 138–9, 160 zombies. See undead

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