Deleuze and Horror Film 9780748628780

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Deleuze and Horror Film

In memory of my loving mum, Alice Powell (1923–2002): ‘that book’

Deleuze and Horror Film Anna Powell

Edinburgh University Press

© Anna Powell, 2005 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh Typeset in Monotype Ehrhardt by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Manchester, and printed and bound in Great Britain by The Cromwell Press, Wilts A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0 7486 1747 7 (hardback) The right of Anna Powell to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction: New Directions in Horror Film Studies A Deleuzian Slant on Horror Structure and Rationale 1 From Psychoanalysis to Schizoanalysis: An Intensive Voyage Psychoanalysis and Horror Schizoanalysis: Pure Naked Intensity Schizoanalysis, Art, Horror Psycho as Schizo The Mise-en-scène of Madness: The Cabinet of Dr Caligari ‘Man is not Truly One, but Truly Two’: The Schizoid Screen in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde ‘Schizoid Misery and Glory’: Feeling Repulsion The Brain as Mise-en-scène: The Shining Place, Time and Motion The Schizoid Machine: Imaginary Friends ‘Trapped in a World of Ghosts’: Intensive States in Natural Born Killers Natural Born Predators Becoming-Schizo Back-Projections and Other Anomalies 2 Becoming Anomalous and the Body-Without-Organs Body-Horror, Masochism and Film Studies Becoming Anomalous Becoming-Indeterminate: Cat People Becoming-Woman Sharing Species: Alien Resurrection Ripley and her Relatives The Bodies-Without-Organs of Horror

viii 1 6 8

14 15 19 21 23 25 31 38 43 45 48 51 52 54 56 62 64 66 68 72 74 75 78

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    Uncontrollable Flesh: Videodrome Frank Pulls Himself Together: Hellraiser Becoming-Invisible: The Hollow Man Machinic Desire: Becoming-Human in Demon Seed Heavy Metal Meets the Soft Machine: Hardware Freddy Krueger: Shape-Shifter Extraordinaire

3 The Movement-Image: Horror Cinematography and Mise-en-scène Sensation and Perception: The Aesthetics of Affect Bergson’s Movement-Image in Deleuze Moving Images The Infinite Spirit of Evil: The Forces of Light and Darkness in Nosferatu Into the Black Hole Forces in Combat In a Glass Darkly: Lyrical Abstraction and Molecularity in Vampyr Sensory Anomalies and Intensive Space Sensational Colour: Spectral Horror Death by Colour: The Masque of the Red Death Dressed to Express: Colour and Costume in The Vampire Lovers Tactisigns of Terror: Suspiria The Face of Horror: The Intensive Affection-Image in Les Yeux sans Visage 4 Horror Time Bergson’s Time: Movement and Duration Deleuze’s Time-Image Time and Motion Duration and Entrapment in the Gothic Haunted House: The Haunting Haunted Cinematography and Mise-en-scène Death by Flashback: Jacob’s Ladder Incompossible Worlds ‘They’re Coming Out of the Walls’ Back From the Black Hole: Event Horizon Inner Space in Outer Space: Travels in Duration ‘It’s Alive’: The Event Horizon as Demonic Machine Dreaming Duration in Mulholland Drive

80 83 88 92 98 102

109 110 112 115 120 121 125 128 131 135 137 139 142 145 154 156 159 163 166 168 174 175 178 181 182 184 187

 Betty’s ‘Dream Place’ Diane in Duration Space-Time and Dream Duration

vii 187 192 195

Conclusion: Living Horror: Thoughts On Our Nerve-Endings

201

Glossary of Key Terms Bibliography Filmography Index

210 216 223 225

Acknowledgements

Thanks to my friends for inspiration, support and love, both through this book and the difficulties of the last two years. Special thanks to Barbara Kennedy for her sensational lines of flight. To Rob Lapsley and David Deamer in the Deleuze reading group at Manchester Metropolitan University for mental gymnastics. To the English Department at Manchester Metropolitan University and Sue Zlosnik for teaching remission in the final stages. To Edinburgh University Press and the skilled support of Sarah Edwards and Eddie Clark and the copy-editor Lorraine McCann. And finally, thanks to Ranald Warburton for hours of computer assistance, insight into the ‘proper’ singularities of physics, and for our own machinic connections. For a preliminary version of material on affect, see Pli: Warwick Journal of Philosophy, Autumn, 2004.

Introduction: New Directions in Horror Film Studies

the unbearable itself is inseparable from a revelation or an illumination, as from a third eye.1 (Deleuze)

Mike, the soundman of a film crew lost in the woods, admits to kicking their only map into the creek, because it was ‘useless’. From this point, they move on, clinging to their own rigid map of reality and to the heavy film equipment which weighs them down. They follow the lines of an invisible, occult map which draws them further off track into a terrifying maze. I take this moment in The Blair Witch Project, directed by Meyrick and Sanchez, as a way in to re-theorising the horror film from the perspectives of Deleuze. The existing theoretical map of horror Film Studies will be pocketed as we find out how far we can travel without it. At this point, I issue a warning: doing Deleuze leads in turn to being done by Deleuze. For me, theory must have use-value and practical application beyond the academy. Experiencing, articulating and sharing works of fantasy like horror film is not just something I do for a living, but is a vital part of my cultural experience and my being in the world. At first glance, Deleuze’s work might appear to be yet another totalising master discourse like the existing paradigms of film theory, but I will be arguing otherwise. My motivation for this project is twofold. The initial stimulus came from my earlier psychoanalytical readings of horror texts. Although I could graft unconscious schema onto narrative, dialogue and mise-en-scène, I was becoming increasingly conscious of their limitations. Psychoanalysis felt like an inadequate key to unlock either the multiple levels of horror film, or my responses to them. I also started to wonder whether the image of lock and key was not itself inadequate. The films I watched were more complex than a predetermined overlay of symbolic or structural meaning suggested. They seemed to operate elsewhere than the straightforward equations of social stereotypes and political ‘messages’ that can be found in them. Throwing away the key, I set out to explore this ‘elsewhere’. Horror film fandom revels in the genre’s special effects, but a corresponding theoretical exploration of horror aesthetics is scarce and I aim to

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redress the balance. The genre has showcased strongly affective style from its outset. Excessive forms of cinematography, mise-en-scène, editing and sound are the pivotal tools of horror, used to arouse visceral sensations and to ‘horrify’ the viewer. Theories of representation and narrative structure neglect the primacy of corporeal affect, and although there has been some exploratory work with horror film spectatorship, the affective dynamic of the films has so far been downplayed.2 I had wanted to interrogate the impact of the horror film experience in my earlier work on the vampire film, but had not yet found the best route. I was gradually led astray from Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan by theorists of subjective loss, existential angst and embodied thought. Georges Bataille and Friedrich Nietszche offered me heady alternatives to a psychoanalytic neo-Gothic. In my study of vampire/victim masochism, I became intrigued by Deleuze’s work on Nietszche and Sacher-Masoch. Moved by the radical poetry of Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, I was, by this time, debating the pros and cons of Freud/Lacan contra Deleuze from a defensive position that felt increasingly challenged.3 The passionately argued books of Steven Shaviro and Barbara Kennedy escalated the uncertainty. Both, in their very distinct ‘aesthetics of sensation’, offered suggestive groundwork for my own work.4 My new perspective crystallised via the lucidity of Henri Bergson. As well as offering its own substantial insights, Bergsonism illumined much that was initially opaque for me in Deleuze. Together, they have taken me far from my psychoanalytic guidelines and opened up a broader paradigm shift. As psychoanalytic lack and alienation had formed the wallpaper of my thoughts, so élan vital and existential affirmation have come to permeate my wider outlook. Deleuze’s aesthetic philosophy is now part of my ongoing exploration of the filmic experience. Deleuze/Bergsonism opens up new ways of thinking which replace being with becoming. Film, like literature, painting, and philosophy itself, is a distinctively embodied thought process. An understanding of medium-specific operations of lighting, sound, framing and montage enables insight into the nature of movement and time. Rather than mapping pre-existing thought onto film text as allegory, I moved closer to thinking the experience directly in its own terms. With the unashamed zeal of the convert, I want to share this experience with other horror film aficionados as well as a broader range of readers. Second, I want to extend the scope of that writing which keeps rigorously to those films actually used as examples by Deleuze himself. I test the use-value of Deleuzian theory to popular formulaic films as well as arthouse-approved works like Kubrick’s The Shining. If Deleuzian film theory is to be of substantial use-value to Film Studies, we need to move

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beyond the art-house to open up and explore its applicability to popular mainstream genres. It can thus contribute more broadly to debates about popular culture and its significance. The insights of Deleuzian filmphilosophy should not merely be the preserve of a few cinéphiles with arthouse tastes or involuted academics. Since the early 1980s, a theoretical orthodoxy for the interpretation of horror text and context has established itself in academic Film Studies. Key components include culturalism, Marxism, gender theory, structuralism, genre, psychoanalysis and postmodernism, some of which remain at daggers drawn. The politics of representation and their cultural and historical contexts, along with studies of production and distribution, are frequently researched with thoroughness. These approaches produce substantial and perceptive work, and I consider my own very different approach, which is still in process, as complementary rather than oppositional to theirs in the development of Horror Film Studies. In no way am I suggesting their straight replacement by Deleuzian orthodoxy. Freud’s seminal concepts of Oedipal triangulation, the family romance and the uncanny, have been substantially reworked.5 Distinct psychoanalytical perspectives were developed by Melanie Klein (maternal object relations);6 Lacan (lack, the mirror stage and jouissance);7 and Julia Kristeva (abjection).8 They have been applied by film scholars to seek out evidence of subject formation, misrecognition and abjection. As well as work which maps these scenarios on the texts themselves, horror cinema has been used to speculate on general psychic mechanisms at work in audiences. The films supposedly offer a safe fantasy outlet for repressed dread and desire. Despite the apparent ‘fit’ of these primal schemata, I argue that an interrogation of the dominance of psychoanalysis in horror theory is timely. Although they retain some elements of psychoanalytic insight, such as the role of fantasy in shaping our apprehension of the external world, Deleuze and Félix Guattari mount a devastating critique of paternalistic Freudianism. In Anti-Oedipus, they draw on Nietszche and Bergson to develop ‘schizoanalysis’ as a new concept of mental and emotional immanence which moves away from personal subjectivity. This dynamic approach is helpful to explore the sensory affect of horror film as experience rather than allegory. Deleuzian film theory draws on what Barbara Kennedy calls a ‘bioaesthetic’, or ‘neo-aesthetic’ approach. This integrational method, which acknowledges the consilience of different world-views, is open to insights from science and philosophy as well as the arts. It acknowledges the material as well as the psychic basis of affective experience.9 Unlike

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psychoanalytic film theory, the deep structures of the spectator’s psychic history are no longer the focus. Psychoanalytic subjectivity is reconfigured by Deleuze and Guattari as a physical process in perpetual motion. For Guattari, aesthetics are viral in nature, being known ‘not through representation, but through affective contamination’.10 Deleuze’s cinema is not a purely visual, specular experience. It embraces the flux of corporeal sensation and sensory perception in the ‘machinic’ connection of the embodied spectator with the body of the text. The term ‘machinic’ should be distinguished from mechanism, which implies closed sets. Like the human body, film techniques participate in dynamic forces and movements mobilised by the machinery of projection and viewing. At this point, I acknowledge that my continued use of the terms ‘spectator’, ‘viewer’ and connected forms is problematised by my own emphasis on the mind/brain/body/text engagement of the film experience. We do not experience films from the detached perspective of a disembodied set of eyes. My approach moves in the opposite direction. Our eyes are embedded, and embodied in flesh as only one part of the complex perceptual apparatus stimulated by film. They feed our other senses with ‘outside’ information; but as this process occurs, the information no longer remains purely visual in nature. The eyes are an extension of our brain; part of the imagination’s operations; part of the camera’s machinery and part of the ‘machinic assemblage’ of cinema. Deleuze’s spectator does not exist as a separate entity, but is subsumed in the film event as part of it. Both film and spectator are, in the special sense explained later, movement and image. The assemblage of viewer and text co-operates a dynamic experiential process of becoming (the infinitive devenir). This is distinct from the negative concept of interpellation, imbricaton or suture, via which, according to Screen Theory, the spectator is passively stitched into the film’s reactionary ideology.11 Deleuze’s spectator is glad to be ‘dead’ along with the fiction of the autonomous, selfenclosed subject. The use of ‘I’ is, of course, similarly problematic. Deleuze’s spectator may be fictional as well as invisible, but at the same time, his own responses to the text are inevitably prescriptive. Ideally, he intends that ‘we’ should seek out and work the elements of his typology in a film. Of course, we cannot speak for any other spectator, or even for ‘ourselves’ as self-enclosed subject. Each person’s experience of each text will be distinctive every time s/he views. Deleuze, or any other theorist, including myself, can only suggest contingent perspectives. I prefer to use sentences with a ‘subject’ here as their construction flows

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more smoothly and their content is clearer for the purposes of critical discourse. When I use ‘we’, as I frequently do, I am not assuming all audience members share my viewpoint, but that ‘I’ am both a ‘singularity’ with specific qualities and a collective assemblage with other singularities in the heterogeneous becoming of the audience assemblage. I can only posit that we collectively share certain affective responses to certain technological stimuli. I have continued to use the terms, then, as a basic currency of Film Studies which help me to communicate my arguments to others. I admit to not having yet found satisfactory substitutes. The horror film’s plot, action, special effects and finally, the existence of the film itself, is technology-dependent. Events are recorded, seen and heard through camera lenses and microphones, as well as being played back to us by cine-projectors, videos and DVD players. The viewer also experiences the film as an event. Camera shake, blurred focus and extreme close-ups, as well as more flamboyant effects such as computer-generated imagery (CGI), have a direct affect on our mechanisms of perception before they reach a more advanced stage of cognitive processing. We meld with and become part of the material technology of cinema in its movement, force and intensity. Horror’s frequent undermining of normative perspective by fragmented images and blurred focus operates in tandem with the erosion of the subjective coherence and ego-boundaries of its characters. It also affects the spectator’s sense of cognitive control over the subject matter as our optic nerves and auditory membranes struggle to process confusing data. Our projected coherence is undermined as we slide into a molecular assemblage with the body of the film. Formal properties, like the camerashake and blurred image strikingly exemplified by The Blair Witch Project, intensify this melding. The viewer’s sensory participation intensifies by viral infection as the film literally gets inside us and sets up home there. My Deleuzian perspective on horror film stresses the visceral, sensory nature of viewing. Despite the immaterial nature of cinematic images, the viewer experiences corporeal responses as our senses stimulate the neuronal networks linked to organs like the heart (pace, pulse-rate), the genitals (warmth, tightness, moisture) and the lungs (depth and rapidity of breathing). This is a very different process to aesthetic contemplation, or to the subject/object division of the spectatorial gaze. Deleuze and Guattari characterise such intimate contact as a mimesis that both copies and materially connects objects together. The psychophysiology of cinematic experience and the ways in which vision and sound directly stimulate the nervous system are still under-researched. We can, however, usefully deploy Deleuze’s philosophical speculations on the affective phenomena of mise-en-scène and movement.

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Deleuzian film theory shifts away from plot, theme and characterisation. Its ‘readings’ map aesthetic assemblages, a process which involves the spectator’s own intersected mind/body. Deleuze asserts that there is no ‘fixed distinction between content and expression’ and foregrounds ‘diagrammatic components’ of style, giving the spiral in Alfred Hitchcock’s film Vertigo as an example.12 The tower staircase, Madeleine’s hairstyle and the circling camera belong to a network of interconnected spirals. As well as making the film work, diagrammatic components also function in the spectatorial part of the film assemblage. I will suggest my own sense of diagrammatic components (there may be more than one per film) as a cohesive force in particular horror films.

A Deleuzian Slant on Horror Deleuze, with the cinematic preferences of the Parisian cinéaste, at first appears to offer little positive comment on the horror genre. He does not reflect upon his own bourgeois taste, with its prejudices against popular ‘mass’ forms, particularly those of youth culture. He disparages the ‘pitiful twitches and grimaces’ and ‘haphazard cuts’ of music videos and refers scathingly to the ‘bad cinema’ of explicit violence or sex.13 Produced by forces of ‘gratuitous cruelty and organised ineptitude’, he claims, bad cinema ‘travels through lower-brain circuits’.14 On further reading, however, horror themes and motifs are identifiable in his work and form an unacknowledged strand in his thought. Classic European horror films such as The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari and Vampyr are used by Deleuze to illustrate and think the dynamic aesthetics of the movement-image, particularly light, shadow and grey tones. Although he operates a kind of auteur or period-based categorisation, this differs considerably from historical Film Studies or traditional auteurism. The Shining, for example, is used to illustrate Stanley Kubrick’s film philosophical oeuvre rather than the director’s personal statement, or as a scary horror film in its own right.15 Hitchcock’s horrors are likewise encompassed by, rather than highlighted in, Deleuze’s broader references to his work. Despite his auteurist term ‘English genius’, he does not eulogise him as an exceptional creative personality, but, rather, identifies the suspense-based ‘logic of relations’ (as opposed to the Eisensteinian dialectic of shock) he finds in Hitchcock.16 Nevertheless, Deleuze’s choice of directors conforms to accepted notions of ‘great’ art-house film tradition of a classic kind. The majority of his horror citations fall into this canonical category. Wider interest in horror and the horrific forms a strand in Deleuze’s

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critical writings, where he identifies our ‘subjective sympathy for the unbearable, an empathy which permeates what we see’.17 He explores this element in works as diverse as Francis Bacon’s paintings, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and Emily Brontë’s novels. Extreme affect can, he claims, push consciousness into an extra-mundane state where a sense of the numinous is accessed. The ‘unbearable’ is ‘inseparable from a revelation or an illumination, as from a third eye’.18 This claim belongs to his general valorisation of avant-garde aesthetics in their assertion of the power of art to radicalise consciousness.19 Deleuze’s work does not focus on the genre of horror per se, for reasons that will emerge later. It refers to some popular or sensationalist horror films, although the aesthetic quality of these examples has long been attested to by film criticism. He briefly mentions Terence Fisher’s Hammer Horror, The Brides of Dracula, as well as the surreal Italian horror of Mario Bava, in his discussion of the impulse-image. He also references H. P. Lovecraft’s pulp tales of cosmic/chthonic horror, evident in several films, such as John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness, as examples of terrifying transmutation and movement beyond space and time. Deleuze’s main interest in these films lies in their use-value as aesthetic stimuli for philosophical thought. He is not above offering perversely literal embodiments of his own concepts. Horrifying images serve to throw the processes of affective thought into sharp relief. I personally find these examples among his most provocative and regret his scanty use of references from popular culture that might have made his work more widely accessible. This was one motivation to begin my own work, which takes twisted literalisation much further. My case studies use a range of material from Europe and the USA. I am aware that horror films from other national cinemas, such as Japan, are increasingly circulating in the West and, hopefully, Deleuzian approaches to them might already be in progress. I have not provided the historical or production contexts which are outside the scope of this study. I am working with film material currently available (as I write) for viewers either at the cinema or on domestic-use videos and DVDs. I revisit horror films analysed by Deleuze himself as well as more mainstream material from the past and the present. I also use films by maverick directors such as Kubrick and David Lynch that straddle the art-house/mainstream divide. As well as illustrating his working methods, I test Deleuze’s approach as a stimulus for new readings of familiar, and less familiar, horror films. Not all my texts fall into a strict generic category, but all contain horrifying material of an uncanny nature. They broadly fit the Oxford English Dictionary definition of films designed to horrify by their depiction of

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violence and the supernatural. The word horror is derived from the Latin horrere, to bristle or shudder. Its historical usages incorporate sensory associations, such as ‘roughness or nauseousness of taste such as to cause a shudder or thrill’; ‘a painful emotion compounded of loathing and fear’; and ‘the feeling excited by something shocking or frightful’ which is ‘revolting to sight, hearing, or contemplation’.20 These definitions emphasise the genre’s affective potency, and intriguingly do not differentiate the impact of actual and fictional horror.

Structure and Rationale I have chosen horror cinema because of my own engagement with it as fan and academic, and because I want to assert the genre’s aesthetic complexity. Horror’s affective force is a potent experiential process. I also argue that some horror material can stimulate philosophical thought of a mediumspecific kind. I will be exploring the relationship of horror film and Deleuzian theory via two main sections of two chapters each. This order is shaped by the relative familiarity or complexity of the content. As a more familiar approach for most readers, I begin by applying Deleuzian concepts to the overt motifs of the genre, although I will problematise the thematic approach. The themes of madness and monstrous transformations will be opened up via schizoanalysis and becoming. These concepts are drawn from Deleuze’s wider philosophy but given a cinematic application here. My second focal area is horror film aesthetics. Movement, time and duration are explored via mise-en-scène, cinematography, lighting and editing. My chief sources for this will be Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image. In my conclusion, I will assess the value of Deleuzian work for horror Film Studies and suggest its future potential. Each chapter offers a theoretical introduction to aspects of Deleuze’s work relevant to horror. Specific theories do not overlay case studies like mechanistic templates, but seek to bring out a fuller sense of the film as an affective aesthetic experience. A multi-layered discussion of the filmic event is my intention, rather than a flattened, over-schematic and abstract grid. I aim to convey a sense of my own visceral enjoyment of the movies as well as theorising them. Themes are manifest through style, and I will be detailing mise-en-scène and cinematography in each chapter. My analysis will also draw on non-film-specific ideas from elsewhere in Deleuze’s work. Bergson and Deleuze are a creative assemblage sometimes difficult to separate. I cross-reference them and draw on Bergson specifically if his ideas fit more closely with my argument. This composite of

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Deleuze/Bergsonism becomes more central in my discussion of movement and time. At times, I use insights from other perspectives, including, I must confess, the supposedly excised psychoanalysis if I feel they are relevant, but keep them to a minimum. My mapping of Deleuzian terms and concepts onto the excesses of popular horror may appear as a profane application to some philosophical purists. My own academic background is shaped by the textual study and teaching of film and literature. In my version of film-philosophy, the textual pre-dates the philosophical and I think them both viscerally. I will, therefore, be mixing Deleuze/Bergsonism with more traditional techniques from Film Studies, such as detailed textual close reading, to retain a sense of the medium’s specificity. My focus is on the textual applicability of the theories and their use-value to horror studies. I concur with Deleuze here that fields of operations are kept rigidly separate to their detriment. Work in one field is imbricated in others, and, as we are ‘inserted in a system of relays’ between fields, the insights of one serves to illuminate another.21 I unashamedly ‘poach’ philosophical ideas to help me to think through the film experience. Nevertheless, I want to convey the sense of the films as films, not just stimuli to philosophical thought. The conceptual frames of Deleuze and Bergson are primarily lifeaffirming and politically progressive. Because horror fantasy overtly presents that which blocks, damages and destroys human life and potential for happiness, I produce literal and sometimes deliberately skewed applications, to elucidate both concepts and films. On screen, objective correlatives of Deleuze/Bergsonism might be their extreme opposites in narrative intent. These perversely applied terms include molecularity (genetic engineering); schizoanalysis (dangerous madness); the body without organs (enforced prosthesis); and duration (haunting). I open with a critique of the established status of psychoanalysis in horror Film Studies. Despite the valuable insights offered by psychoanalytical readings, the experiential quality of the film remains absent, or opaque. Deleuze offers a method and a language to open up the film event to exploration, analysis and articulation. The innovation of schizoanalysis leads to a radical re-thinking of both the theme of madness and the spectator’s disturbed responses to the horror film. Insanity is a traditional theme of horror, with its psychopaths and victims driven insane by terror. Normative modes of consciousness and behaviour are assumed, into which madness erupts. Depictions of insanity emphasise its horror, but this may be undermined by our direct experience of the monster’s own perspective by the use of point-of-view

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without visible source, as in Rouben Mamoulian’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Pathologising anomalous mental states is refused by Deleuze and Guattari. Their use of schizoanalysis privileges the transitions accessible in certain intensive states, and in the material aesthetic of immanence. This offers considerable scope for special effects like the back-projection of mental states in Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers. My second chapter explores the process of becoming across such hybrids as becoming-animal, becoming-woman and becoming-monster. A radical re-working of the subject/object binary is central to Deleuzian aesthetics. Sensation and affect subsume the subject and connect it to the external world in a molecular meld. In horror film analysis, the processual condition of becomings or ‘desubjectified affects’ is used to explore fantasies of transmutation such as the shape-shifting of the feline woman in Cat People. Becoming refutes binary divisions. The ‘anomaly’ or outsider is a dynamic catalyst for the becomings of horror. Becomings are incongruous, bizarre and repulsive, like the genetic hybrid of man and insect, ‘Brundlefly’, in David Cronenberg’s The Fly produced when a housefly is accidentally trapped in a teleporter. I locate becoming via the bodywithout-organs, which mobilises a new interpretation of body horror. Film is also a ‘body’ that connects with other bodies, including the mind/brain of the viewer. Sounds, textures and rhythms vibrate in the body/text in incorporated, experiential ways as the spectator becomes with the text. Having deployed a more familiar, theme-based approach in Chapters 1 and 2, I move further into horror aesthetics and draw more intensively on the philosophy of cinema in Cinema I and Cinema 2. Again, I open with areas more familiar to Film Studies before crossing over into less wellknown terrain. I begin with a chapter on mise-en-scène and various kinds of movement in horror cinema. The film theory shaped by psychoanalysis and semiology treats images as static, symbolic components of underlying representational structures. It abstracts them from their moving, changing medium. Deleuze, on the other hand, endorses Bergson’s ‘vitalism’, or the ubiquitous presence of dynamic forces in his work, with singularities of style and expression. The ‘movement-image’ in process replaces language-like symbolic representation at the crux of the filmic event. Beauty is located not in formal balance but in the kinesthetics of perpetual motion. Horror film foregrounds the dynamics of movement. In Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, for example, stasis is spectacularly defied. The vampire’s force flows through everything, from the rippling gauze of a scarlet gown to the swaying reeds in the garden. The laws of

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gravity are suspended in the vampire’s castle as perfume drops fly upwards and metal bleeds when a crucifix is stabbed. Even though a film’s locale may be spatially constricted, as in a haunted house, movement still occurs. This may be of an intensive rather than extensive nature, as with the agonised shifts of expression on the face of camerawoman Heather in The Blair Witch Project, intensified by extreme close-up. My applications work directly on material such as this, which stimulates the horror experience by light, colour, sound and movement. Oversaturated colours, distorted sounds and hallucinatory images make emphatic use of visual, aural and other stimuli to affect and move us. As well as its material force on the sensorium, horror film also opens up to the metaphysical elements of duration, via the special usage of light, spatial and temporal overlay and other techniques. My final chapter concerns duration and the time-image of the horror film. The cinematic image moves across time in a complex trajectory. The apparatus of cinema manipulates and melds past, present and future, shaping our awareness of the properties of time and modulating our experience of it. The influence of Bergson on Deleuze’s film philosophy is crucial here. For Deleuze, time is pivotal to cinema’s philosophical resonance. Film is an event of temporal process and duration. This operates across both the textual diegesis and the spectator fused in its assemblage. The temporal movements of horror film are fractured and non-linear. The past impregnates the present in a haunting which seeks to block the flow of present into future. The past threatens to dominate the present and also to shape the future in its own replicated image which brings stasis. Time loops back and refuses to progress as earlier periods insist on their equal, or superior, validity to the present era. This is made overt in neoGothic films such as Robert Wise’s The Haunting, with its vindictive Victorian manifestations amplified by present-day psychic disturbance. In Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others, ghosts are plausible characters unaware of their own spectral status. They dominate the narrative as the past passes itself off as the present to fool audience expectations. Haunting has traditionally been theorised by Freudians as repetition–compulsion and the return of the repressed. Instead, I argue that the genre’s foregrounding of non-linear time is relevant to more recent philosophical debates on the nature of time and human consciousness. The affective power of film exceeds the symbolic properties of both language and image. It vibrates intensively rather than extensively. The senses, stimulated by colour, lighting, sound and movement, are part of incorporated perception. Beginning with a sensory-motor response to

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external stimulus, they in turn stimulate a kind of thought that leads away from preconceptions into the realm of non-symbolic ideation, or ‘intuition’. Deleuze draws heavily on Bergson’s concept of duration here. I am compelled to articulate this exploration of the film experience as a form of non-symbolic thought through language, an inevitably inadequate medium that both limits and shears off from the object is seeks to pin down. Nevertheless, as the reader will notice, the fluctuations of my own style are not without their becomings, as they meld with the tone qualities of my critical sources, or the chosen films. To fill in some of the gaps, I hope that readers will draw on their own memories, or perhaps first-time viewings, of these films (and the ones I did not have space for) as horror events.

Notes 1. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (London: The Athlone Press, 1989), p. 18. 2. Carol J. Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (London: BFI, 1992). 3. In particular, during conversations with Barbara Kennedy. 4. Barbara M. Kennedy, Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000); Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). 5. Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’ [1919], in S. Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 17, trans. and ed. James Strachey, (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1955), pp. 218–56. 6. Melanie Klein, Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946–1963 (London: Virago, 1988). 7. Jacques Lacan, Encore: Le Seminaire XX [1972–3], trans. Jacqueline Rose, in Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose (eds), Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the École Freudienne (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1982). 8. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). 9. Kennedy, Deleuze and Cinema, p. 28. 10. Félix Guattari, Chaosmosis: An Ethico Aesthetic Paradigm, trans. P. Bains and J. Pefanis (Sydney: Power Publications, 1995), p. 92. 11. The term refers to the political/psychoanalytical debates initiated by the British film journal Screen in the 1970s and 1980s. 12. Gilles Deleuze, ‘Dead Psychoanalysis: Analyse’, in Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II, trans. H. Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: Athlone, 2002), p. 122. 13. Gilles Deleuze, ‘The Brain is the Screen’, in Gregory Flaxman (ed.), The

     

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

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Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 367. Ibid. p. 367. Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, p. 205. Ibid. p. 164. Ibid. p. 18. Ibid. p. 18. For an analysis of avant-garde aesthetics, see Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn, vol. VII (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 396–7. Deleuze, ‘The Brain is the Screen’, p. 367.

CHAPTER 1

From Psychoanalysis to Schizoanalysis: An Intensive Voyage

an intense feeling of transition, states of pure, naked intensity stripped of all shape and form.1 (Deleuze and Guattari)

Nola Carveth, in residential analysis under Dr Raglan at the Soma Free Institute, is kept in isolation under lock and key. Raglan’s intensive psychosomatic therapy has broken through Nola’s ego-defences and released her repressed rage against her parents as well as hatred of her own daughter and jealousy of her husband’s woman friend. Expressed at first through their transference to the eroticised father figure of the analyst, Nola’s libidinal forces soon adopt a more physical expression. They manifest themselves on the outside of her body, undermining the distinction between psychic and physical states. The pustules that break from her skin develop into poisonous-looking sacs connected by umbilical chords. In a climactic scene, Nola’s husband Frank visits her and she proudly opens the curtain-like folds of her white robe to display her condition. In close-up, a swollen sac is revealed hanging from her belly. Ripping this open with her teeth, she licks the amniotic fluid from her newly born progeny. Upstairs are many such ‘children of rage’ produced by Nola’s psychic parthenogenesis after her sessions with Dr Raglan. They are ‘unconsciously’ sent to act out her murderous desires and remove the last shreds of her repression. Her superego has been ejected from its authoritarian role. She cannot feel responsible for the autonomous acts of forces over which she no longer has conscious control. David Cronenberg’s The Brood is a damning critique of the unscrupulous abuses of psychotherapy and the dangers of transference. It also mounts a physical attack on the paternal relation, although biological fathers are presented with some sympathy. Nola’s ‘child’ brutally beats her father to death, the children tear Raglan to shreds of their own accord and a close-up of Nola’s daughter Candice, rescued by her father, reveals a tiny pustule growing on her arm as they drive home. As well as its ambivalent anti-Oedipal thrust, the film displays a new map of the body in which mind and flesh form a transformational assemblage of force. Rather than repli-

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cating traditional images of madness, The Brood offers a perspective more congenial to schizoanalysis. Deleuze and Guattari do not apply the psychopathology of early trauma to mental anomaly. Instead, they focus on the dynamic new transitions experienced in intensive states of consciousness. Outside a clinical context, these insights also operate in the production and reception of art. The concept of schizoanalysis is broadly applicable to re-thinking both politics and art. For Guattari, art therapy was integral to his clinical practice with schizophrenics. Deleuze used schizoanalysis as a way in to the intensive affects of aesthetic expression and their wider effects. A borderline lies between psychoanalysis and the deterritorialisation of the ‘intensive voyage’ of schizoanalysis.2 Here I will enquire whether the two may operate in tandem or whether they are incompatible regimes. Psychopathic murderers and victims driven insane by terror have long been horror film staples. Expressing anomalous mental states invites the flamboyant use of special effects. These induce a virtual experience of derangement for the viewer, who temporarily shares the affective distortions of cinematography or mise-en-scène. Particular formations of madness depend on the genre’s stylistic norms, as well as the societal norms being violated. Psychoanalysis has been widely applied to such ‘madness’, yet it disregards the aesthetics at work. I will begin the comparison by outlining psychoanalytic interpretations on horror film, then move on to suggest how madness can be read differently.

Psychoanalysis and Horror The first substantial application of classical psychoanalysis to horror fiction was Marie Bonaparte’s Oedipal reading of Poe in 1949.3 Since then psychoanalytic theory has permeated both the analysis and practice of dark fantasy in the form of ‘monsters from the id’.4 Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis has been used to characterise fantasy as ‘the mise-en scène of desire’ for the spectator.5 In the horror genre, desire meets dread in fantasies of castration and back-to-the womb scenarios. Repressed traumatic material returns in monstrous forms. Particularly in neo-Gothic, horror replays primal scenes and traps the present in the inevitable return of a more potent past. The tone of traditional Freudian readings is often dogmatic and diagnostic, bent on seeking out the symptoms of classical scenarios and their variants. For Roger Dadoun, horror film focuses on the fetish function.6 In Dracula has Risen from the Grave, both the Count and the crucifix are fetishes to offset ‘the anxiety of castration and the fantasies woven around the

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mother’s phallus’.7 As gender and sexuality form the psychoanalytic groundplan, horror film criticism has drawn on it to explore the gendered nature of the monster. Some early feminist readings turned to the work of Julia Kristeva to account for misogynist depictions of monstrosity. Barbara Creed used Kristeva’s psychoanalytical model of abjection to theorise Alien and Carrie.8 Kristeva’s concept of the abject, the ‘in-between [. . .] which disturbs identity, system, order’, has been fitted to the ‘female’ aspects of the monster.9 Despite Kristeva’s suggestive exploration of the fluid nature of abjection, critical readings tend to retain a fixed dichotomy of self and other, as well as gender binaries. Many applications of psychoanalytic theory to horror have been neither totalising nor simplistic. Some feminist theorists, such as Tania Modleski, whose readings of Hitchcock include horror elements, have fruitfully applied psychoanalysis to read classic films against the grain.10 Re-working Laura Mulvey’s seminal article on visual pleasure and narrative cinema, Kaja Silverman, Tania Modleski and Carol Clover have applied psychoanalysis to explore the complex imbalances of gender and power.11 Linda Williams made one of the first feminist avowals of interest in horror film when she noted the sympathetic parity of woman and monster via their exchange of looks.12 Modleski includes horror elements in her anti-essentialist reading of Hitchcockian ambivalence. For her, Norman Bates is one of Hitchcock’s images of ambiguous sexuality. By making his similitude to the sexual other into a source of power, Norman destabilises the gender identity of both protagonists and viewers. Despite her refutation of Mulvey’s focus on male voyeurism, Modleski foregrounds the sexual asymmetry of desire and punishment via a social application of feminist psychoanalysis. David Rodowick, in a theoretically substantial study of gender, advises caution in applying the strategies of psychoanalysis to film wholesale, and outlines its limitations. Psychoanalysis is ahistorical and disregards the corporeal element. It should be supplemented with a Foucauldian emphasis on ‘bodies and pleasures’, to historicise debates. He reminds us that ‘subjectivity is defined by social and historical processes that are irreducible to singular categories, and its forms and potentialities are always in flux’.13 To develop this perspective, he would later turn to Deleuze. Steven Shaviro provocatively presents semiotic and psychoanalytic film theories as phobic constructs. They seek to normalise or ‘oedipalize’ historically specific mechanisms of mechanical reproduction and their corresponding visual obsession. He draws on Deleuze to assert that the cinematic apparatus replaces subjective control by corporeal sensation.

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Cinematic events operate with the primal rawness of ‘affect, excitation, stimulation and repression, pleasure and pain, shock and habit’.14 Refuting the idealised distancing of representation and perspective, he argues that vision is grounded ‘in the rhythms and delays of an ungraspable temporality, and in the materiality of the agitated flesh’.15 Like Creed, Shaviro reads horror via abjection, but aligns it with the viewer’s position in a more celebratory way. He describes being ‘powerless not to see’ during Dario Argento’s horror films, when the viewer is compelled to participate in ‘a forced, ecstatic abjection before the image’.16 To account for the spectator’s ecstatic expenditure here, he combines Georges Bataille’s transgressional theory with Deleuze’s work on masochism, which I consider in Chapter 2, on becoming.17 Lacanian theory applies the abstract model of structural linguistics to the phenomenal workings of spectatorial or textual desire. Lacanians insist that the unconscious and desire is structured ‘like a language’ and their focus lies in uncovering this supposed deep structure.18 There is no space here for visual and aural experience or other sensory stimuli that an aesthetics of sensation might afford. The spectator’s fascinated engagement with the images themselves, and their potent affect, tends to be ignored or treated as mystification by structuralist psychoanalysis. It also disregards the altered states of consciousness produced via haptic or pathic affect in which the inner body map expands to incorporate virtual sensation. The Lacanian system denounces the delusory optical order as the Imaginary, as opposed to the Symbolic of language. The image is not the empty illusion of ‘lack’, but is potent with affect. The spectator responds with visceral immediacy to images rather than gazing at them from a subjective distance. In a sense, the fluid subjectivity of the spectator does not pre-exist the text, but is actually formed by the immediate affective sensations of the film. Whatever form it takes, cinepsychoanalysis emphasises the deep structure of the unconscious. It stresses the primacy of the egoic subject and the need to maintain and strengthen ego-boundaries. There are significant theoretical fissures with Deleuze here. Theories of desire and pleasure separate body and mind. The Lacanian subject is divided against itself and the Freudian ego is a contested site between the id and the superego. According to psychoanalytic readings, the spectator maintains a distance from the screen as an imaginary spectacle, rather than participating in the sensational continuum of the filmic assemblage. Cinepsychoanalysis seeks to identify the psychic operations of the scopic regime as evidence of an Oedipalised, split and gendered subjectivity. This ignores the ways in which film energises and mobilises an affect

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that is both psychical and material at once. Psychoanalysis is based on the individual’s past history of pre-Oedipal formations that fix both the structure of the psyche and the meaning of material articulated in analysis. The words spoken by the individual analysand in the ‘talking cure’ fit preordained complexes, or work variations on them. Deleuze opposes the rigid template of psychoanalysis to the fluid, machinic cartography of schizoanalysis, which posits an ‘autoproductive desiring machine’ rather than a subjective ego in a permanently paranoid condition. Schizoanalysis offers liberation from the splitting of subject/object and from the primal condition of lack. Deleuze and Guattari seek to reach ‘those regions of the orphan unconscious – indeed “beyond all law” – where the problem of Oedipus can no longer be raised’.19 Rather than limit the ‘schizo’ to narcissistic entropy, they locate her or him firmly in the collective machinery of the social. They assert that all investments are social and operate in a sociolinguistic field. Oedipus contributes to the existing system, whereas schizoanalysis offers a more fluid and inclusive micropolitics of desire in a ‘neo-aesthetic/neo-sexuality outside psychoanalytic myths and theatres of the past’.20 Deleuze distinguishes between a cartographic and an archaeological conception of psychic activity. The latter is oriented around the personal past and is ‘memorial, commemorative, or monumental’, involving a vertical penetration of hierarchical layers.21 Maps, on the other hand, are superimposed in such a way that they evaluate ‘displacements’ of trajectories and becomings rather than seeking origins.22 The unconscious takes flight as it passes from psychoanalysis to schizoanalysis. Deleuze and Guattari’s cartography is reminiscent of the Situationist dérives of their peers in which random, yet attentive, walks of the city formed maps as psycho/political process. Deleuzian critique is experienced as a form of map-making. I find myself automatically using images of cartography as I move transversally across the field of film-philosophy, following Deleuze’s footsteps but with my own deviations. Before I define schizoanalysis more thoroughly, I will illustrate how psychoanalysis and schizoanalysis might read the same horror film differently. I have chosen Hitchcock’s Psycho, the archetypal schizo text as well as the ‘quintessential’ horror film.23 With an arch nod towards psychoanalysis, the director presents a popular, ‘dollar book Freud’ version of a schizoid ‘split personality’. Norman’s substantial Oedipus complex and his sadistic voyeurism of Marion Crane, the transgressive runaway secretary, are clearly signalled. Through our ambivalent fascination with, and possible recognition of, Norman’s Oedipal desires, we become implicated in the enactment of his fantasy scenarios. Arbogast, the detective, fails in his attempt to investigate

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Norman, and Marion’s lover Steve and sister Lyla are likewise unable to ‘understand’ him. At the end of the film, we are positioned like Lyla and Steve in the rapt on-screen audience. We also want the analyst’s voluble diagnosis of this classic schizophrenic case study to tie up the narrative by answering our questions. At the same time, the implication remains that we, too, are tainted by the Oedipal anguish that drove Norman mad. A psychoanalytic slant on Psycho fixes its meaning in the family romance gone sour, which does allow for some consideration of socialised gender dynamics. Despite the problematic ambiguities usefully identified in Modleski’s reading, psychoanalytic approaches focus on the ‘deep structure’ of the text. This might feasibly be shifted from text to readers as the other focus of psychoanalytic criticism. As we watch the film, the events act on our own unconscious. Our shifting identification between Marion and Norman engineers the return of the repressed in fantasy form. Deleuze and Guattari, however, offer another way of approaching the filmic experience using the insights of schizoanalysis.

Schizoanalysis: Pure Naked Intensity The divergence of traditional psychoanalysis and Deleuze and Guattari’s new map of the psyche is clarified by Jean Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis’s classically clinical definition of schizophrenia. The pathologised condition reveals ‘incoherence of thought, action and affectivity’.24 It involves ‘discordance, dissociation, disintegration’, accompanied by detachment from reality in ‘a turning in upon the self and the predominance of a delusional mental life given over to the production of phantasies (autism)’ and ultimately ‘intellectual and affective “deterioration”’.25 This definition is acknowledged, but also reconsidered, by Deleuze, whose own view was shaped by two main influences. Guattari provided the clinical insights and radical position of the anti-psychiatry movement. Bergson’s work on the fluid nature of consciousness helped shape Deleuze’s own philosophical approach. In Time and Free Will, Bergson outlines a dual psychic topography. The outer crust is spatial and socially oriented, whereas the inner core vibrates in the endless flux of duration. According to Bergson, there are two different selves, one of which is the external projection and social representation of the other. The internal operations of the self are reached by deep introspection, a process that ‘leads us to grasp our inner states as living things, constantly becoming, as states not amenable to measure, which permeate one another’.26 This model is radically distinct from Freud’s tripartite mapping of the psyche and the pivotal role of the transference.

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Although both models identify an inner depth and complexity, they have different views of time in relation to psychic interiority. For Freud, the unconscious is a timeless zone where the fixated past directly shapes the present in its own image. He asserts that time is purely conscious. The unconscious processes are ‘timeless; i.e. they are not altered by the passage of time; they have no reference to time at all’.27 Bergson’s inner state, though it is also formed of memory, partakes of the durational process of perpetual becoming. This dynamic and multi-faceted model stresses the change and multiplicity seminal to schizoanalysis, which rejects finality. In some ways, schizoanalysis is Guattari’s clinical methodology at la Borde experimental psychiatric clinic applied by Deleuze as aesthetic critique. In Anti-Oedipus they both insist on the political urgency of Guattari’s innovations, arguing that ‘a materialist psychiatry recognises the state of desire and its production as primary and determinant, whereas an idealist psychiatry rests on ideas and their expression’, thus emphasising the material practices of desiring-production.28 For the schizophrenic individual, experimental group work like that at La Borde gravitates against classic analysis in favour of the dynamic, interactive discovery of the ‘desiring machine, independently of any interpretation’.29 This starts by the disintegration of the ‘normal’ ego in a process of deconstruction. This technique is fundamentally opposed to Freud’s strengthening of the ego-defences of the analysand to contest the incursions of the id from ‘below’ and the superego from ‘above’. Deleuze suggests the operations of consciousness as a ‘plane of immanence’, or becoming. This has a macro level (the plane itself) and a micro level (molecularity). Its perpetually shifting motion is replete with ‘speed and slowness, floating affects, so that the plane itself is perceived at the same time as it allows us to perceive the imperceptible (the microplane, the molecular plane)’.30 In this immanent process, desire is produced. The model here is not a primal archaeology, but a cartography of schizophrenic intensity. It spreads along the plane of immanence, which possesses density as well as surface, moved by the non-subjective powers of affect. Schizophrenic maps become via their own motion, rather than being derived from foundational Oedipal relations with the father and the mother. Traditional models of the body’s organic layout are not the source of these maps of forces or intensities. On the contrary, they are new ‘intensive maps’ of the body in becoming via a shifting ‘constellation of affects’.31 The schizophrenic experiences these pure intensities via the body-without-organs, a concept I will explore in detail later. Sensory and cognitive hallucinations are underpinned by the raw processual experience of feeling, transition and becoming. It is in this process that the schiz-

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oid state resembles and elucidates the profound function that Deleuze gives to the arts.

Schizoanalysis, Art, Horror The artwork, whatever its medium, engages in machinic connection with its perceiver. Via lines of flight, this process mobilises what André Colombat calls ‘concrete connections, developments or “expressions” of matters and fluxes’.32 Guattari and Deleuze sharply distinguish between schizophrenia as clinical entity and the schizoanalysis of their aesthetico/political critique and its figure of the ‘schizo’. Schizoanalysis operates as ‘the outside of psychoanalysis itself which can only be revealed through an internal reversal of its analytical categories’.33 Designated ‘schizos’ are experimental artists such as the modernists and their precursors, including Samuel Beckett, Antonin Artaud, Arthur Rimbaud and Franz Kafka. I am suggesting that both the figure of the schizo and the critical process of schizoanalysis can illumine the operations of horror film themes, characters and aesthetic strategies. These are not always schizophrenic in the clinical sense. At the level of narrative and representation, psychoanalytic critics have argued that both the monster and the viewer replay primal scenarios of ambivalence, retracing a dreadful desire imbricated in lack. If we shift focus to the processual experience of the film, both monster and viewer are engaged in a schizophrenic assemblage where they experience an ego-less freedom from constraint. Deleuze and Guattari idealise the schizo as ‘a free man, irresponsible, solitary, and joyous, finally able to say and do something simple in his own name, without asking permission, a desire lacking nothing, a flux that overcomes barriers and codes, a name that no longer designates any ego whatever’.34 This model has existentialist overtones, but lacks the romantic individualism of the existentialist subject. It diverges sharply from the psychoanalytic view that the role of fantasy is to enable the return of the repressed and thus to engineer sublimation, and social consensus. Pleasure, for Deleuze and Guattari, is materially based in immanent sensation. Desire, which exceeds the sexual, is not the product of lack or negativity, but is productive and automatic. The autoerotics of desire attain their consummation in ‘the nuptial celebration of a new alliance, a new birth, a radiant ecstasy, as though the eroticism of the machine liberated other unlimited forces’.35 Such automatism is experienced via intensive states: ‘haecceities’, or ‘things in themselves’, and not ‘subjectivities’. These states afford an ‘intense feeling of transition’ without the static final positionality of psychoanalysis.36

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Pre-verbal affect is one site of the schizophrenic’s intensive states. Such delirious events validate material feeling in a becoming prior to the structuration of subjectivity. Deleuze and Guattari describe the schizophrenic experience of intensive qualities in their pure state, to the point that is almost unbearable – a celibate misery and glory experienced to the fullest, like a cry suspended between life and death, an intense feeling of transition, states of pure, naked intensity stripped of all shape and form.37

By means of this, the ‘beyond’ of the pleasure principle is not the death instinct, but sensation itself in dynamic flux. Schizoanalysis allows us to explore ‘machinic arrangements grasped in the context of their molecular dispersion’.38 Psychic interiority is replaced by an immanence in which desire is process and energy. Here, ideas are dynamic events or ‘lines of flight’ that can take us into ‘a fibrous web of directions, much like a map or a tuber’.39 The term ‘rhizome’ (or lateral, multi-forked root system) suggests the nomadic movement of thought by the intensities of a self in process. Schizoanalytic film theory, then, seeks an experiential approach to the moving image in itself, distinct from structures of signification. Material capture in space and time replaces, or, rather, supplements, issues of representation. Denying depth and psychic interiority, Deleuze and Guattari insist upon the immanence of art as ‘a being in sensation and nothing else: it exists in itself ’.40 The embodied ‘look’ is also a sensation, which conjoins with other sensory areas such as tactility via haptic operations. The body is not separate from the mind, but forms part of a perceptual continuum. In my view, this machinic continuum potentially operates for everyone in the audience, not just a few privileged aesthetes, as we are all human living images engaged in the flux of material images. All cinema, not just avant-garde texts that foreground their own construction, may be read materially via the sensational event of film viewing. I am arguing that horror films are a popularly accessible example of such material capture. The directness of film springs from its stimulation of the optic nerves, agitating the senses and bypassing the cognitive and reflective faculties. Cinema, argues Shaviro, assaults the senses in a ‘non-representational contact, dangerously mimetic and corrosive, thrusting us into the mysterious life of the body’.41 The movie camera’s technological automatism penetrates and melds with the flux of the material world. It removes perceptual experience from the idealising tendency of humanist paradigms. Although the camera is set up, angled and moved by human agency, its ultimately technological apparatus passively records the object before it.

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This passivity enables it to capture what Bataille calls the ‘raw phenomena’ of immanent matter.42 For Deleuzian film theory, perception is freed by cinema from the norms of human agency and cognition, and rendered primordial by its automatism. Film, argues Shaviro, acts as an extension of the existing sensorium, being ‘monstrously prosthetic’ and composed of ‘the unconscious epiphenomena of sensory experience’.43 In the case of horror film, the virtual sensations induced are of an extreme kind able to push through subjective boundaries. Traditional horror presents madness as a terrifying descent in order to invoke fear and revulsion in the viewer. Psychoanalysis pathologises horror and psychoanalytic film criticism uses either the text or the viewer as an analysand. It impels viewers to strengthen their ego defences against the disruptive undermining of the id or the repressive pressure of the superego. From a Deleuzian perspective, however, madness in horror may be read in a more positive light. Anomalous states of consciousness in film are celebrated in Deleuze, both for their stylistic innovations and their affect on the audience who participates in the madness by affective contagion. Schizoanalytic film criticism looks very different to psychoanalytic readings because of its lack of focus on matters of theme, plot and character. It does not seek to fix a set of equations for symbolic representation. Its aim, according to Deleuze and Guattari’s polemics, would be ‘to overturn the theatre of representation into the order of desiring-production’.44 It has a micropolitical function to free us from the habitual schemata of representational templates and to start us thinking in new ways. The form that thinking differently might take is not fixed, but, being motivated by the dynamic forces of desire in motion, it potentially leads to new becomings. Our focus as schizoanalytic critics should be to map assemblages in their mutual operations, to meld form, style and content, and to suggest predominant diagrammatic components. My earlier psychoanalytic take on Psycho tells us nothing about the affective potency of the film or its stylistic techniques. For this new angle on horror film, we may fruitfully turn to schizoanalysis. From this perspective, Psycho becomes a very different experience to the Oedipal text sketched earlier.

Psycho as Schizo A psychoanalytic reading of Psycho reveals nothing about the film as an aesthetic or visceral experience. Within the constraints of a classic realist thriller, Hitchcock remains unrepentantly expressionist, impregnating his mise-en-scène with aesthetic effects to dislocate the viewer’s normative

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mode of consciousness. He foregrounds the effects of light and shade, unusual camera angles and affective editing as well as imaginative play with symbols and narrative levels. Bernard Hermann’s music is composed and arranged for its potently affective force, aurally agitating and assaulting the audience in tandem with visual horror. As early as the title graphics, Psycho is permeated thematically by schizophrenia and aesthetically by schizoid lines of flight. Horizontal lines are congenial to our optical scanning mechanisms and reinforce a sense of geometric balance. Here, they divide and move in opposite directions, disrupting compositional cohesion. The music, with its high-pitched violin, grates on the listener’s nerves as well as evoking screams. These aggressive opening affects become a more melting and fluid rhythm. A smooth series of crane shots, subtly linked by slow fades, shifts the mood and floats the viewer into the sensuous world of Marion’s lunchtime rendezvous. Nevertheless, the visceral warning of the titles remains with us to induce agitation, set up suspense and undermine our sense of control. After the robbery, Marion’s point-of-view shots, which we are invited to share, become increasingly anomalous. In her paranoia, the rear-view mirror renders the pursuing police car as a static object with a blur of moving landscape around it. The soundtrack of her employer’s accusatory voice-over ‘in her head’ indicates a further split in her consciousness. These familiar techniques used in the context of her traumatised condition intensify their impact and lead us in to the more extreme anomalies of the Bates assemblage. Marion’s absence from her immediate environment and mild catatonia is visually paralleled by the rain and shifting patterns of light that blur the clarity of the landscape. The external amorphousness is distorted even more by its reflection in the rear-view mirror, replacing the frozen image of the pursuing car. As the wipers slow and the lights glow with lens-flare coronas, mundane consciousness transmutes into neoGothic alterity. As well as being an extreme case of ‘split personality’, Norman is engaged in the process of becoming-bird. Psychoanalytic criticism sheds little light on this distinctive diagrammatic component. In his ornithology room, bird pictures and actual stuffed birds of prey, such as an owl, are proudly displayed and he connects to them by touch. When Norman leans forward in profile, the birds loom large and dominate the composition. His shamanistic power here extends to Marion. He draws her random line of flight into his own assemblage as well as hypnotising her as his prey. Marion is bird-like in her large, staring eyes. She shifts her head from side to side in a mannered way and Norman tells her she eats ‘like a bird’. Norman’s bird-becoming is corporeally manifest by his beak-like nose,

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emphasised by camera angles, and his arm and neck movements in their jerky un-human motion. His bird aspect is particularly overt when he looms over the motel register nibbling at small morsels of food. Norman’s method of killing as ‘Mother’ serves the bird side as well as the mother side. Arbogast’s killer attacks from above, shot from a birds’ eye viewpoint. As with Marion, the murder is enacted by the diagonal stabbing of a beaklike knife. Although Norman’s other becoming with ‘Mother’ dominates the plot, it is less successfully assimilated into his schizo assemblage than his birdbecoming. He often struggles with her and seeks to throw her off as she eludes the (stuffed) bird-becoming he subjects her to. It is only when he has been captured that his bird-becoming is frozen into the static being of catatonia. By the end, he is ‘Mother’, her revenge is complete, so he is a stuffed bird, too. This overt aspect of this regression enables the psychiatrist to subject him to classic Freudian template analysis. Despite the attempted closure of this ending, the Norman/bird assemblage eludes the Freudian structure.45 In this brief sketch of Psycho, I have deliberately kept representation and narrative off-field to highlight the contrast between the critical methodologies of schizoanalysis and psychoanalysis. The actuality of my experience of the film, after repeated viewings, is, of course, a fluctuating assemblage of molar and molecular responses that operate as an ensemble rather than being divided off artificially. I do not wish to endorse a binary divide between content and style, neither do I seek to establish a new schizoanalytical orthodoxy for horror. I seek, rather, to open up a dynamic interchange by tracing a plane on which they may fruitfully intersect as ‘particles entering into each other’s proximity’.46 In a broadly chronological move, I will now map the schizoid formations of some ‘classic’ versions of madness along with a more recent ‘psycho-killer’ film. By close sequence analysis as well as sketching larger patterns, I suggest how stylistic techniques induce schizo affect via plot, theme and style.

The Mise-en-scène of Madness: The Cabinet of Dr Caligari I start my schizoanalytic readings by revisiting the German Expressionist/Gothic film The Cabinet of Dr Caligari directed by Robert Wiene.47 Madness, a traditional Gothic horror theme, is mixed with magical elements recalling the fantastic tales of Grimm and Hoffmann. Both are given a modern slant in the film’s depiction of a contemporary asylum’s innovative treatments and potential for power abuse. The asylum director, Dr Caligari, mixes the trickery of a mountebank with scientific

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research; clinical alienism with magical villainy. Insanity is both thematically represented and concretised by physical, sensory manifestation. The overtly artificial and distorted mise-en-scène might be read as the mental projection of Francis, the psychologically disturbed ‘hero’. The scenery colludes with experimental cinematography and Expressionist acting to induce mental and sensory disorientation. The spectator is submerged in a diegesis that undermines normative cognition. The film illustrates Deleuze’s own approach to horror texts as movement-images. Here, his exploration foregrounds the physical and metaphysical dynamics of light and shade. In German Expressionist cinema, black and white enact a battle of good and evil forces via contrast. In Murnau’s films, ‘light as degree (white) and the zero (black) enter into concrete relations of contrast or mixing’.48 With ‘series of white and black lines, rays of light and outlines of shadow’, the director produces the ‘striated, striped world’ of the film’s painted canvases.49 There are other anomalous techniques in the film, but a binary struggle of light and dark underlies the variants. The film plunges us into the hallucinatory world of mental disturbance in the opening shots of two asylum inmates. Slow iris in and out isolates part of the screen, blocking our initial orientation within frames, or closing off orientation established in prior shots. The isolating iris begins at the bottom right corner of the screen by highlighting a bizarre detail like an organ grinder’s monkey in the fairground. The technique mimics the spectator’s eye opening wide or slowly closing. We participate virtually in the film’s somnambulism, hypnotism and the enforced awakening of sleepers. The main protagonist, Francis, and his companion have the innerdirected fixed gaze of mental distraction, imprisoned in their own projections. As they discuss how ‘spirits surround us on every side’, the figure of a woman glides past them. She shares their fixated gaze, absorbed in her own reality like a somnambulist. This distracted wide-eyed gaze runs throughout the film. Directed off-screen, it disconcerts our conventional expectations of eye-line match and point-of-view shot and refutes externality. The characters direct their gaze elsewhere than within the diegesis, itself rendered stagey and unreal. The frame’s inherent ‘deterritorialisation of the image’ partly results from the determination of an out-offield.50 The out-of-field opens up the frame to ‘a more disturbing presence, one which cannot even be said to exist, but rather to “insist” or “subsist”, a more radical Elsewhere, outside homogenous space and time’.51 These asylum inmates look out-of-field into the ‘radical Elsewhere’ of their own schizoid world which overlays an already deranged reality.

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Intensive and compressed in its use of space and time, Expressionist cinema offers an objective correlative to altered states of consciousness. Characters exist in abnormal conditions, performing hysteric gestures and postures as they physically act out inner states of feeling according to Expressionist dictates. Alan, supposedly a ‘normal’ student, displays his own form of alienation tinged with manic depression: mooning, sighing, showing childlike enthusiasm and rushing around at breakneck speed. The town of Holstenwall is a hallucinatory Expressionist version of folktale mise-en-scène. Two-dimensional painted sets of abstracted buildings with pointed roofs and pointed pines are backed by a triangular mountain in unconvincing perspective. Sharp angles are a prominent diagrammatic component. In angular Expressionist décor, ‘diagonals and cross-diagonals tend to replace the horizontal and the vertical, the cone replaces the circle and the sphere, acute angles and sharp triangles replace curved or rectangular lines’.52 These forms affect us virtually by sharp, painful cutting sensations and impel events by a frozen dynamism. The diagonal of Caligari’s caravan teeters over to one side in harmony with its owner. The flatness of the sets throws the rounded dimensions of actors into relief, an alienation device that makes strange the human. For Deleuze, the frightful ‘non-organic life of things’53 in the Expressionist world animates the inanimate, so that ‘natural substances and artificial creations, candelabras and trees, turbine and sun are no longer any different [. . .] utensils, furniture, houses and their roofs also lean, crowd around, lie in wait, or pounce’.54 The film is an extreme example of this lack of clear boundary between nature and artifice. The mise-en-scène shows signs of autonomous life, whilst humans adopt the rigidity of automatons. The mechanical and the organic are not opposed in the Expressionist milieu, but rather it presents the vital as potent pre-organic germinality, common to the animate and the inanimate, to a matter which raises itself to the point of life, and to a life which spreads itself through all matter. The animal has lost the organic, as much as matter has gained life.55

This identity confusion typifies an art inspired by, and seeking to induce, altered states of consciousness. The scenery demands attention in its own right as it often appears prior to, and dominates, human actants. Everyday domestic objects are deformed by exaggeration into superfluity or impractical discomfort, making strange the familiar. Each distortion agitates the viewer’s cognitive patterns. The chair in Alan’s garret has an excessively long back and the town hall chairs are teetering plinths for officials top-heavy with self-importance. Windows,

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black shadows and white patches of sunlight are blatantly painted on walls and floors without correspondence to their objects. The first victim of Caligari’s manic rage, the pompous town clerk, is found murdered in a room where the angles of windows and walls have collapsed. Jane, the film’s disempowered ‘heroine’, lives in a ‘feminised’, rounded space of décor recalling billowing clouds and lit by a circular lamp. Fluid, curved shapes and a padded chaise longue embody Francis’s own initially comfortable condition. After Alan’s death, Francis’s body language and facial expression become increasingly angst-ridden. His mental state further validates stylistic derangements. An intimate vital connection exists between human and inanimate miseen-scène in their mutual becoming. The corridor in the town hall is marked by objective precursors of Dr Caligari’s arrival. Twin circles and a triangle recall his spectacles and cloaked body. Seated, he forms an assemblage with the scenery and becomes an Expressionist painting himself. Three black lines marking the back of his white gloves are repeated on his white hair, and he has flat, painted lines for eyebrows. As he moves, his body contorts itself into an array of abstract forms and the fluid curlicues of his handwriting enhance his Expressionist style. Flattened Expressionist space extends to the nocturnal streets and prevents us from forming a spatial map of the town. The gate tower is guarded by the cut-out figure of watchman like a black shadow. On the ground is a burst of white, supposedly cast by a lamp as the explosive energy of the floor itself spreads from a central point. Painted light and shade spread further in both the prison and the asylum. The fairground recalls Hoffmann’s tales of automata impelled by their own uncanny force.56 It is an animated Toyland or puppet theatre as well as an Expressionist art exhibition. A zigzag movement via indirect steps is necessary for characters to pass from upper to lower levels. The conical hats worn by three gnome-like figures point upwards in stylised unison. Doctor Caligari, deformed himself, grimaces at a passing dwarf. Flat roundabouts render humans absurdly and incongruously three-dimensional by contrast as our sense of volume and space are eroded. In a later scene, the twodimensional carousel flickers and spins in hypnotic alternations of black and white patterns. Fronting a sideshow, the manic, silent ringing of a handbell by Dr Caligari slashes the air with unnerving violence. For a modern audience, the sound-substitute conventions of silent film have a defamiliarising effect. Here, we project the ringing ourselves as a virtual audio sensation. The larger-than-life-sized poster of the somnambulist Cesare underlines his entrapment in the flat world by Caligari. In the cabinet sideshow, the

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camera set-up positions the spectator first at the back of the crowd, then in the front row, for the spectacle of Cesare’s awakening. Caligari unveils a coffin-like box with a jagged split, which parts to reveal a tall, cadaverous figure. In a perverse experiment in mind control, Caligari limits his creature to the simplest emotional range of violence and lust. The doctor prevents Cesare from experiencing linear time on his own account. A lozenge-shaped iris reveals a close-up of Cesare’s face. Heavy eyeliner; a horizontal daub of mouth; horizontal lines of brows; a straight fringe of hair and stripes on his polo neck jumper – all emphasise his pale, piercing but blank eyes. They express the terror of a dreamer forced awake and underline the inherent violence of watching. Cesare’s somnambulism is a schizoid formation. Daniel Smith distinguishes two poles to the body-without-organs: the ‘vital anorganic functioning of the organs and their frozen catatonic stasis’.57 Their dynamic relation of attraction and repulsion constitutes the schizophrenic anguish. Schizophrenic intensities approach the limit of zero as the body-withoutorgans becomes a model of living death. Horror writers ‘appeal to the terror not of the organic corpse, but of the catatonic schizophrenic: the organism remains, with its vacant gaze and rigid postures, but the vital intensity of the body is suspended, frozen, blocked’.58 Cesare is the catatonic schizophrenic rather than the more common ‘split personality’ of horror film. He has lost the use of his arms and legs unless his keeper, who controls his machinic movements as though he were an automaton, impels them. This doll-like stiffness enables his later replacement by a dummy. Scenery is pivotal to the mood-driven plot. Even the intertitles express aesthetic angst. We are told that a murder occurs ‘when the shadows lay darkest’. The murderer creeps along the wall as though he cannot move autonomously. Sudden bursts of emotional animation are thrown into relief by the flatness of scenery, and his pursuers tilt over at a slanting angle in harmony with the décor. Following the zigzag track of a line of shadow up the town hall steps, Francis is constrained and directed by scenery that prevents natural, spontaneous movement. Deleuze notes the kinship of Expressionism with ‘pure kinetics’ in its ‘violent movement which respects neither the organic contour not the mechanical determinations of the horizontal and the vertical’.59 Expressionist cinema moves instead by a jagged ‘Gothic geometry’, in ‘a perpetually broken line; where each change of direction simultaneously marks the force of an obstacle and the power of a new impulse, in short, the subordination of the extensive to intensity’, as in the architectural lines of Gothic cathedrals.60 Overlay of the apparently incompatible frames of film and medieval architecture illustrates Deleuze’s lines of

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flight between contiguous elements rather than fixing comparison by similes or metaphors. Cesare, sent to murder Jane, similarly expresses this Gothic geometry as he creeps along the wall, flattened by the forces of two-dimensionality. He moves with slow grace, like a shadow, forming new angles with his arms and legs as an animated extension of the scenery himself. He is an embodied force not a personage, an abstraction of the human made of shadows and angles. He carries Jane up zigzag rooftops following a white-lined track. This appears to lead him over the edge, but he continues his descent down an incline hidden from the audience as though following an invisible path in another dimension. A curved bridge bordered by twisted, thorn-like vegetation extends his tortured mental state. Against the de-naturalised trees, his arms stretch out into bare branches and his hands droop at the same angle as the leaves as he becomes a dead tree. The common direction of the branches and his arms, shared by the triangular blades of grass, point to his death. When he senses the malice of his pursuers, he staggers and falls like a switchedoff automaton. The décor of the prison and the asylum is designed from madness and despair. Large, skewed numbers and abstract lines are painted in the cell walls. Through a triangular peephole, the convicted murderer is chained in a squat, drooping posture. He is disempowered by the downward verticals and trapped by the stylised patch of light in the centre of the floor. The landscape leading to the asylum is a tortuous arch of fang-like points. In a rare use of flowing, non-angular forms, the asylum corridor is adorned with painted tendrils The forecourt resembles a theatre-in-the-round. At the centre of a sunburst of rays, Francis is a focal point for the white-coated assistant alienists, who, like the policemen earlier, suspect his sanity. The office of Caligari, director and lunatic-in-charge, is the culmination of chaotic patterns, jumbled forms and angles. Its resident skeleton mimics Cesare’s death in life. In temporal flashback, Caligari’s rapture at Cesare’s arrival breaks the bounds of sanity. His exalted state leads to manic gyrations and delusions of his own greatness in the superimposed repetitions of his newly adopted name. When eventually cornered by his own assistants, Caligari explodes with maniac energy prior to his being straitjacketed. Amoeboid blotches adorn the walls of his cell. These shapeless, amorphous becomings suggest the fluid forms of molecularity at their intensive mental work undermining rational structures. The original film ended with the director exposed as a homicidal schizophrenic who severely abused his patients. In the current version, the film

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returns to Francis’s framing story in which his companion is glad to escape his ravings. The patients perform a series of obsessive roles on the circular stage of the forecourt: Cesare toys with a paper flower; Jane queens it on a throne; a pianist plays without her instrument; a demagogue addresses no one and a mother treats a doll as her child. Each inhabits their own imaginary universe, and we have been experiencing Francis’s fantasy projections. Francis, not Caligari, is straitjacketed. The doctor appears benign, apart from the ambiguous implications of his comment, ‘I know how to treat him now’, without specifying the nature of his intentions. Deleuze speculates on the metaphysical dimensions of the film’s lighting and the confusion of human life and the thing-world. I have extended his focus to the schizoid style and theme and their affect on the spectator. Partly set in an asylum, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari deals overtly in anomalous states. These are presented as both mental and physical by the distortions of the actors’ movements and the forms of the scenery. In the next film, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, schizophrenia is even more literally manifest as the actual splitting of one character into two separate men.

‘Man is not Truly One, but Truly Two’: The Schizoid Screen in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde This familiar film may be read in familiar ways, such as taking a psychosexual approach to its neo-Gothic structures. My aim is not to censor such responses in myself or other viewers, but to extend them. Adding Deleuzian insights to produce an interstitial reading for particular horror films, however, is experiencing both the film and the reading afresh. Newcomers to Deleuze might try expanding their customary theoretical methods by considering the less conscious, but fundamental, affect of the film on the incorporated spectator. In the process, new perspectives might override the old. My own reading distances the narrative as I focus more closely on the dynamics of style and the mental processes it simulates and stimulates. Style as well as theme and content is schizoid as we become Jekyll, becoming Hyde, becoming beast. I argue that schizoid elements permeate all levels of the film, via camera forces in motion and other distinctive techniques. The qualitative mix of Modernism and Victorian melodrama produces stylistic and thematic incongruity. Hollywood conventions are in dynamic tension with European art-house techniques. Stylistic experiment alternates with theatrical conventions, but both are presented by innovative cinematography. Black and white film stock is a fitting medium for this schizoid cinema.

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The Expressionistic opening implicates the viewer directly in the film’s events. From the start, we share the protagonist’s schizoid mode of consciousness and being in the world. This is much more than a simple character identification. Dr Jekyll, the celebrated medical scientist, first appears as part-object. As a shadow-double of himself, he is only semiembodied. The close-up image of the organ we hear is accompanied by the startling haptic sensation of ‘our’ hands rising up from below frame to play the keys as we fill the empty space of the organist. This stitches us into the filmic assemblage as a direct participant in the event as well as an engaged spectator. We are schizophrenised as both audience member and direct actant, in a blur of fantasy and fantasist. The melodramatic music ‘we’ play is part of the schizoid sound thread. Jekyll and his fiancée Muriel express emotional turmoil via keyboard sublimations. Hyde’s taste prefers the cockney populism of brash dance hall music and good-time girl Ivy’s song, ‘Champagne Ivy’. The timbre of voices works alongside music in extending the schizoid split. Dr Jekyll’s clipped, cultured tones contrast with his bestial alter-ego’s rough growl and wild guffaws. From its pivotal position ‘seated’ at the organ, the camera swivels to a medium close-up of the butler Poole. The vertiginous camera cues in the sensory distortions and dizzying lack of stable subjectivity ahead. Its swivel prefigures the flamboyant 360-degree spins of the first transformation from Jekyll to Hyde. A disembodied voice leads to our first sight of Jekyll as a mirror image. Looking beyond the Freudian uncanny and schizophrenic doubling, our own mirror-gazing implicates us further in Jekyllbecoming. His image crystallises so suddenly that we have no time to separate from him and reform our own position, so are forced to scan ‘ourselves’ with shifty appraisal. Intense eyes ringed with dark shadows contrast to a tight-lipped mouth as his hasty, nervous preening of his formal suit suggests his resumption of self-repression and social respectability after the emotional outburst of the organ. Psychoanalytically speaking, Jekyll’s ego-inflation is so extreme as to become-godlike. This aspiration extends his already dominant social and professional status. The first character we actually see in Jekyll’s masterful position is the manservant Poole in the setting of a sumptuous drawing room. Jekyll’s inflation is extended via his direct view of the obeisances of servants, gateman, coachman and students. It increases in his lecture, viewed from an ominously canted camera. High-angle shots of him from the top tier of seats alternate with a low angle of his gesticulating assertion of his discovery that ‘man is not truly one, but truly two’ in blasphemous duplicity.

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A barrage of disorienting movements across the film expands the effect of these skewed angles. Together, they are forces rushing out of control as Hyde’s élan vital seeks egress from the repressive straitjacket of Jekyll’s skin. Movements, textures and lighting trace figural lines of flight across the screen, both within and between locales. Subjective camerawork catches the spectator up in the schizoid motion of Jekyll’s becomings. When Jekyll, impatient for the next transformation, is interrupted by Poole, the camera pans from Poole to Jekyll’s hands mixing chemicals and back again. The eager darting expresses Jekyll’s impatience. Becoming more objective, the restless camera follows him up and down stairs and makes us wait, too. The camera moves randomly, without brakes, and chooses its own pace rather than a smoother, regulated motion easier on the eye. The zip pan is a favoured move. Just before Jekyll drinks the potion, a subjective zips to a medical skeleton and back. As well as figuring foreboding, the skeleton urges the forbidden pleasures of the flesh. Jerky, slightly nauseating pans up and down stairs operate without point-of-view during Hyde’s conversation outside Ivy’s apartment. Hyde chases Ivy in rapid zip-pan rushes. A zip likewise expresses Ivy’s alarm at Hyde’s return. The Expressionistic shadow pursuit of Hyde by the police and the mob is animated by the zip pans between them. Becoming-Hyde allows Jekyll spontaneity of motion, which we enjoy via the camera’s own freedom from conventional constraints. Hyde’s preternatural agility tricks and disorientates the viewer by undermining our predictive ability and facilitating his escapes. Although the camera’s wildness may be interpreted as its own becoming-Hyde, its new-found freedom acts as an independent presence. It forewarns us when it tracks back over Muriel’s garden to the street. Expecting Hyde, we chillingly see Jekyll, whose identity is fluctuating rapidly by this stage. The camera’s freedom, like Ivy’s, is blocked when Hyde’s black cloak fills the screen and blots the light out by walking towards it. The climactic first transformation of Jekyll into Hyde both works on, and demonstrates, the spectator’s own potential to transform consciousness. It effects the physical transformation by inducing an altered mental state. In close-up, drops of liquid shimmer on a glass beaker then lose focus as the potion takes effect and Jekyll’s rationality fades. In a wobbly image that rhymes with the earlier mirror sequence, we move with Jekyll towards, then into, the reflecting zone of his mirror. Scanning the reflection for traces of identity, his face distorts, prefiguring the prosthetic make-up and trick editing to come. As his mouth widens, his skin darkens and coarsens, becoming hairy and bestial like a werewolf, an ape, or an evolutionary

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throwback.61 His clutching at his throat and gagging evokes our synaesthetic experience of a vile taste and a burning, choking sensation. A tracking shot jerks away from the mirror fades into a blurred and rapidly spinning vortex. The visual event is accompanied by gasping, panting sighs of orgasmic release or a male self-birthing. Immersed in this patterned abstraction of reality, the grounding effect of recognisable objects is initially denied. Brief memory flashes of recent events include close-ups of Muriel’s ethereal face and Ivy’s alluring leg. These floating fragments offer ethical perspectives of temptation and repression. A series of faces loom out of space in vertiginous lines of flight. The walrus-face of Muriel’s repressive father is linked with Ivy’s swinging leg, repeated as final image. As well as their thematic function, these fleeting images present the basic components of a perception artificially ‘spliced’ into a coherent vision. Disconnected from linear causality, they also evoke Bergson’s ‘shining points’ of memory preserved within the folds of duration, a process I will examine in detail later. A 360-degree spin concludes the sequence with an about-turning of consciousness. Jekyll, now become-Hyde, is reflected as a much shorter (lower in the frame) man, hairy and simian with the pointed teeth of a carnivore. Frederick March as Jekyll/Hyde transforms his body language to match the new persona. His slouching posture and shambling gait manifest untrammelled physicality. Sensually at one with his beastly body, he stretches catlike as though awakening from sleep, before pursuing his rapacious intent, gloating to himself in a grating voice and vulgar speech. Becoming-Hyde is also becoming-beast, as he revels in brutish sensuality. Unlike Jekyll, stuck stuffily indoors, Hyde’s joy in being loose is stressed as he throws back his head to catch the glittering drops of rain. He snuffs the air and gasps with satisfaction, glad to be back in the corporeal immanence of Hyde’s animal skin. He treats Ivy like a cat with its prey, squeezing and ripping at her flesh. The feline associations are paralleled by Jekyll’s observation of a cat attacking a bird in the park prior to his spontaneous transformation. As well as healthy, animal connotations, Hyde’s increasingly scabby and scaly degeneracy suggests disease. The diseased nature of his bestiality is the product of a monstrously repressive social machine. The music hall scene extends Hyde’s bestiality. He leers at the legs and fluffy feathers of the dancing girls as he snuffs the air, smelling Ivy out. His libidinal energy can scarcely be contained as he trips the waiter and lashes out without reflection. The décor displays images of beauty and the beast. The naked, smooth back of a female statue recalls that in Ivy’s apartment. A boar’s head on the wall underlines Hyde’s rampant lust, and his tusk or fang-like teeth.

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Jekyll’s second transformation is speeded up and entirely physical. It begins with a fading image of Muriel that fails to anchor his desires, then cuts back to the window-pane where abstract patterns of raindrops glisten with light. Bored by physical and ethical restraint, Jekyll paces restlessly, actually becoming-Hyde before the drug takes hold. His foot taps impatiently, a movement that becomes the tapping of an unsent letter to Muriel on the tabletop. As correlative to his barely contained force, the lid bursts off a pot boiling on the fire in an orgasmic liquid release. There is no lengthy evocation of altered consciousness here, as Jekyll is already permanently altered. In close-up, Hyde’s hairy hands bang on the chair arms as an electrical force of élan vital surges through him. The next close-up shows his ugly, grimacing face with its ape-like low forehead, furlike hair and flared nostrils. He degenerates further with each transformation. This no longer suggests dualistic alternation, but a purposeful trajectory of monstrosity. At this point, conventional Gothic morality asserts itself. The ‘mad scientist’ must be punished for dabbling in forbidden knowledge and unleashing monstrous forces disguised as ‘nature’. The molecular transformation of Hyde back into Jekyll is conveyed by rapid superimpositions as he crouches and grovels before his respectable colleague Lanyon’s judgemental gaze. It takes place rapidly without signs of struggle or regret, leaving Hyde hideous, with severely drooping eyelids like an ageing debauchee. Despite this apparent debility, he leaps up the bookshelves with a simian agility, lent by whip pans, to elude his pursuers. Having paid the penalty of death for his crimes, he regenerates into a pristine Jekyll as the illusion of subjective wholeness returns. The camera slowly tracks back from the terrified group to behind the fire’s flames. The lidless pot boils over, breaking up the molar, solid world of the laboratory by its violent, rolling motion. Bubbling under the neat structure of narrative closure, the molecular flow of liquid perception asserts its differential force. One striking stylistic motif is the high incidence of floor shots, which break up the distanced perspective of classical compositions. Legs and feet in medium close-up disorientate head-based spectatorship by expressing the basal urges of the body. This haptic force, reinforced by camera, body movements and textural surfaces, forms into ‘leg assemblages’. Muriel’s ethereal frills swirl round her carefully concealed ankles, engaged in a dialectic of rivalry with the film’s most potent leg shot. The gartered, and insistently fleshy presence of Ivy’s leg swings languorously, like a pendulum propelled by its own sensual force. It invites Jekyll even more potently than her teasing verbal request that he should ‘come back soon’. On leaving her unsatisfied, this same shot is lengthily superimposed over Jekyll to indicate his mental and physical preoccupation during an

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earnest discussion with Lanyon. It also appears in the second transformation scene mentioned before. Kneeling or lying expresses sensuality. An intimate, floor-level shot of Ivy as she raises her skirts seated on the bed is taken from Jekyll’s position. When she disrobes and flings her garter at him, only his feet and calves are visible; a phallic everyman below the belt, he penetrates the garter’s circle with the tip of his cane. When Ivy visits Jekyll, legs and lower trunk are again prominent. In a two-shot, she flings herself at his feet, grabs his knees and kisses his hand in supplication, her face on a level with his (carefully concealed) genitals. As she leaves, the camera lingers on her retreating rear, emphasised by the labial frills of her gown. Ivy’s submissive sexuality is underlined by her frequent lying down. She lies on, then in, her bed when Jekyll attends to her. In her boudoir, aesthetic images of sexual pleasure continue these supine motifs. The legs and lower trunk of a nude painting in the background and a statue of Psyche beneath Eros are emphatically framed along with Ivy herself. This statue is cruelly parodied by Ivy’s final sinking out of frame beneath the murderous hands of Hyde, as Thanatos replaces Eros. Abasement can also express degradation. Jekyll repentantly lowers himself at Muriel’s feet in a variation of Ivy and himself. Muriel’s forgiveness equalises eye-line match again as she drops onto her knees to share his level. Refusing this gesture, he sinks even lower in abject despair and a floor-level composition develops. Jekyll then raises his face up to Muriel and attempts to pray. On one level, this sequence supports the moral schema of melodrama on one level; at the same time, however, it undermines myths of masculine dignity and disorientates conventional composition. The point of view of the spectator is, itself, debased from elevated idealism and fetishised. Yet the film’s energy lies in this very baseness. We are encouraged to perceive bodies as part-objects rather than whole personages. This operates when the ‘higher powers’ of sublimated romance are invoked. Extreme close-ups of eyes look out of the frame and into us as we participate in lovers’ intimacy. When Jekyll tells Muriel ‘the unknown wears your face’, the extreme close-up of Muriel’s eyes looks directly into the spectator’s own and undermines the averted eyes of selfenclosed Hollywood fictions and spectatorial distance. The matching close-up of Jekyll’s eyes disconcertingly emphasises dissipation in pronounced bags and dark shadows. In a later parody of this romance, Ivy’s point-of-view of Hyde is an extreme close up of his bestial face leering over her. Blurred and out of focus though it is, we can distinguish the coarse pores of his nose and his glinting eyes, in the insistent textural intimacy of extreme close-up.

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High/low duality is extended by Mamoulian’s duplicitous use of the split screen. Diptychs include sick pauper woman/Muriel, and Ivy/ Muriel. As well as displaying binary moral choices of pleasure/duty and lust/love, the shots form multiplicities in their interweaving of contradictory urges. The spectator’s eyes move across the diagonal dividing line at the same time as registering it. Our right and left glances are hailed separately, or both eyes swivel in unison between the images, alternating with and complicating the usual monocular point of view. Costume, on one level a signifier of character and plot, offers expressive potential. It is a significant component in the film’s affective figural forcefield, along with body language, facial expression and voice. Limited to monochrome, Mamoulian uses costume to induce and reinforce shifts in mood and atmosphere. True to melodrama type, Muriel is delicate, cerebral and ascetic, whereas Ivy is a blowsy and voluptuous ‘fallen angel’. Clothing colour and style serves to reinforce these qualities as does habitat. Muriel’s brightly lit ballroom is undermined by Ivy’s murky underworld, with its shadows and flickering gas lamps, a soft-focus haze of sensual texture. Becoming-woman also mobilises woman’s becoming-other. Rather than being a psychologically rounded character, Muriel becomes the white luminescence of her ballgown. Her dress in turn becomes light, floating dance movements, lending her an ethereal, fairylike quality, enhanced by the halo of light that surrounds her hair and illuminates Jekyll’s face. When disappointed in love, she changes her nuptial white for mourning black and her jaunty twirls on the dance floor become broken, downward drops as she hunches low over the piano. As well as the visual stimuli of movement via camera, framing, and the light palette, tactility is powerfully conveyed. A haptic quality of sensuality dominates the décor of Ivy’s apartment, with its fluffy feather boas and erotic art objects. This ambience emanates from Ivy’s voluptuous flesh. She places Jekyll’s hand between her thighs and clasps it below her garter in a close-up, which invites viewerly tactile collusion. Like Muriel, Ivy is luminous, an effect reinforced by the cherubic innocence of her blonde curls. Tactile intimacy extends through Ivy’s removal of her shoes and lowering of her garters, to the fluffy texture of white lacy bed covers that emphasise the allure of white flesh glowing with light. Textures in closeup form part of the film’s rich sensuous address. The fleshiness of Ivy’s naked back, displayed in close up with Jekyll’s hand on her skin, engages the viewer’s own sense of touch. Her availability contrasts to his stiff posture and formal evening attire. The film’s diagrammatic component is doubling. A schizoid split has been imposed on natural man and woman by social repression, then this

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supposedly ‘higher’ being has been passed off as the natural version. The dynamic struggle of two singularities unnaturally yoked together, yet part of the same assemblage, is energetically expressed. This split works against the Deleuzian machinic conglomerate at first, as the singularities pull apart to seek distinction. It then reinforces it with horrific consequences as they become increasingly inseparable in the anomalous composite Jekyll/Hyde. This externalises processes already operant in the psyche. The viewer is part of this assemblage as our own singularities engage in a series of further schizoid doublings in tandem with Jekyll/Hyde via the schizoid cinematography and mise-en-scène. My next example, Roman Polanski’s Repulsion, also uses black and white film stock to invoke schizoid inner states. Unlike Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Repulsion’s pace is characterised by slowness, not speed; stasis, not energetic movement. Polanski’s film lacks the former’s social extension and character interactions. Implosion, not explosion, of repressed energy is the psychic topography traversed by the viewer. The neo-Gothic dynamic of good versus evil develops into a generalised existential malaise that exceeds its ostensibly psycho-sexual cause. A more fully Modernist work, Repulsion is a ciné-poem that traces the gradual shading of compulsive/ obsessional neuroses into full-blown psychosis via the stages of a young woman’s breakdown.

‘Schizoid Misery and Glory’: Feeling Repulsion For much of Repulsion, the viewer shares the mental and physical claustrophobia of Carol Ledoux, a young Belgian beautician living with her sister, Hélène, in Kensington, London. Their flat is her mental prison and torture chamber. The spectator is imbricated in her angst via cinematography, framing and sensory hallucinations. We struggle to retain distance as we are invaded by her sensory and cognitive anomalies. Carol’s schizophrenic brain and body becomes the increasingly horrifying screen that is also our embodied mind. Other characters function solely to illustrate or exacerbate aspects of her illness. She is unable to connect with others, so we are forced into intensive focus on her isolation. Inner events are the film’s ‘plot’ and the structural consolations of a linear cause-and-effect narrative are denied. The credits open with a static eye sliced across by titles, invoking the antecedents of Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali’s Un Chien Andalou, a Surrealist paean to disturbed, hallucinatory sexuality. Sexual repulsion is located as Carol’s malaise. She is primarily repelled by her own sexuality, then that of others, especially men. Her repulsion is triggered by narrative

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situations that act as secondary displacements of the primal cause. Although sexual malaise is a chief thematic motif, I will not be subjecting the text to a Freudian analysis. My prime focus is the escalating implosion of Polanski’s intensive cinematography. The opening shots in a beauty salon elide beauty and death: a corpselike client in mud pack/death mask, and the beautiful but frozen face of Carol. Like Cesare in The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, her schizophrenia alternates between catatonia and hallucinatory violence. Her fragility is stressed by the brittleness of her blonde hair, her frail body, and her preference for high-necked, childish frocks. Her downcast gaze undermines and denies her loveliness by its shame-ridden modesty. By refusing eyecontact, she erects a barrier between herself and others and maintains a private, mental world, preferring intensity to extensity. As well as this visual barrier, Carol’s oral denial and disgust are stimulated when a lecherous navvy puts her off her lunch. In a regressive gesture, she chews her own nails instead. The fumbling of Colin, her inept boyfriend, and harassment by Michael, Hélène’s lover, intensify her disgust. Extensive, spatial distortions concretise intensive, mental shifts of gear. Film is uniquely placed to express intensiveness via the affective vibrations of its outer and inner motion. In the flat, a floor-level shot induces an initial disorientation in space, which will recur with increasing frequency. One effect of this distorted space is an uncanny sense of places having a consciousness of their own, as we saw in the skewed scenery and painted backdrops of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. Polanski’s use of camera angles and lenses conveys a comparable effect more subtly by distorting actual locations. The flat’s convex keyhole/peephole, which Carol looks through in a point-of-view shot, is a distorting lens on the world outside and extends her own eye. Schizoid subjectivity is cued by threatening shadows. It develops in Carol’s distorted doubles reflected in polished surfaces: a chrome kettle, a mirror and the glossy surface of the salon’s marble walls. Carol constructs a dichotomy between the forces of gross sensuality and the purity of the ethereal nuns she watches from her window with calm pleasure. This sharp division of the flesh and the spirit reveals the schizoid split in her world-view. Despite Carol’s paranoia, the chink she leaves in the curtains overnight, and the camera-eye’s insistent return to it, hint at a perverse welcoming of external threat. It also offers her a token escape route to the pure force of the nuns from the intrusive sounds of the copulating couple through her bedroom wall. Outraged/aroused at Hélène’s orgasmic moans in this version of the primal scene, second-hand sex is experienced as violence.

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Carol watches the shadows moving across her own room and toys with her hair, her consciousness dissociated by the invasive force of sex. The mundane world of the flat and its inert contents as revealed by the harsh light of day makes Carol wince. Their very ordinariness is a source of her psychic pain manifest in an obsessive dwelling on meaningless details. Close-ups of the working of her mouth and hands physically express her nervous response. Her fingers pluck at her arm, she scratches herself and her hands brush off invisible dirt. She evinces oral disgust at Colin’s kiss, feeling soiled by his presence. To the sound of manic drum rolls, she rubs at her mouth to erase the trace of his lips. Hélène, in contrast, awakes in happy sensuality. The rumpled texture of sheets on her bed is extended by Carol’s rumpled overall, as she feels dirtied by her sister’s sex. She brushes at a chair seat left empty by Michael, seeking to be rid of invasive masculinity. Carol’s responses to revulsion recall infantile regression. She loads her coffee with lumps of sugar and the soundtrack plays a child’s piano practice. She plays with Hélène’s ‘sophisticated’ black dress as though she plans to dress up in it when home alone. Carol’s desolation is experienced internally and externally. Her face and body language are the corporeal expression of mental turbulence, whilst the domestic space is its more extended correlative. Outside, desolate images of the London locale culminate in the chaos of a building site. Discordant rapid-paced bebop jazz offers aural accompaniment to her angst-ridden journey. Her random motion is arrested by a crack in the road, which she stares at in obsessive fixation. A Freudian might well read this as an arrested vaginal symbol. It also works as an external manifestation of her malaise, as a crack in her consciousness, or in the fabric of reality itself. Polanski’s tongue-in-cheek play with the road sign’s ‘one way street’ reinforces the inevitability of her decline. Hélène’s brief sisterly attention fails to offset Carol’s mounting terror. An anonymous phone call increases her sense of ubiquitous male harassment. There are many shots of Carol in bed, which she occupies more often as her world closes in. Her close-up profile has a dark double in the shadow of her head on the wall behind. Her absent expression and blank eyes show a catatonic detachment from reality. They signal her increasing location in an alternative inner world only partially penetrable by enigmatic outer signs. Long, slow takes build up tension as the soundtrack prolongs the unreadable silence. Her facial expression suggests inner torture and fear as darkness brings the threat of ravishment. The static camera intensifies the viewer’s imaginative sharing in her frozen panic. As the historical Surrealists made the mundane yield up its magical

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potential, so Polanski renders everyday objects uncanny until nothing remains inert. Bathroom items become imbued with fearful force, like the razor blade fingered by Carol as a possible weapon of defence, attack, or self-harm. In the laundry bin, she finds a man’s dirty vest, along with an invisible item that may be a discarded condom. At this unspecified horror, she turns nauseous and notices a crack in the wall, an experiential continuation of the crack in the pavement. Whether the crack in the wall is actual or virtual, it is the first of an escalating series that become increasingly anomalous. Extra-diegetic sound intensifies the spectator’s neurological irritation. Insistent drum beats and a close-up of Carol’s eye suggest growing psychic fragmentation. A clash of cymbals startles us as she traces the crack with her fingers. Carol’s perspiring face manifests her panic-stricken experience of the ordinary. Her dissociated consciousness fails to structure and locate stimuli in familiar cognitive patterns, adding its own imaginary details to develop or replace them. Lights flicker on and off without cause, and strange noises intrude that are both projected by, and project, unspeakable terror. Discordant saxophone notes extend the sounds of harsh drumming and cymbals as Carol walks around the flat obsessively brushing at herself, again trying, without success, to cleanse her inner defilement by outer means. A skinned rabbit Hélène left in the fridge is a correlative of Carol’s hypersensitivity and total vulnerability. It also functions as a potent horror film prop. The rabbit’s repulsive sensory impact increases over time and it rots as her disturbance intensifies. A second crack, huge and clearly hallucinatory this time, opens up by the light switch as psychic fragmentation takes over. The same night, Carol dreams, or hallucinates, the first of a series of anal rapes by the suggestive navvy. Her fantasy of sex is violent and dirty. An intrusive phone call from Colin the following day elides the two men in their violation of her space. In a burst of manic energy, Carol stabs a salon client with nail clippers. Her potential for vengeful violence is also revealed by her decapitation of the dead rabbit, whose trophy head she carries round in her handbag. In a visual rhyme, she wipes off Colin’s kiss as she did Michael’s, repudiating her own sexual arousal with disgust. Her inner-directed obsessions make her oblivious to violence and suffering when located in a social context and she walks past a car accident without any overt signs of response. In the flat, hallucinations escalate, but retain some link with diegetic reality, which signals their unreal status to us. Our direct ‘identification’ with Carol’s state fluctuates as the film progresses. Whether the spectator is able to refuse imbrication in her disturbance or not, the cinematographic affects remain intensely distressing. The transformative power of

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Deleuzian becomings is completely opposed to these terrifying and repellent animations of the thing-world. The distorted TV screen bucks with a sexualised motion and discarded potatoes take on a monstrous life as they sprout grotesquely. More cracks appear, like razor slashes in the wall. To a jarring electronic note, Carol sinks her hands into a wall now become viscous and permeable. At this juncture, Colin bursts in and she experiences this as a violent assault. In a rush of sadistic force turned away from herself and onto an object, Carol beats him to death with the heavy candlestick. In a distressingly misplaced application of domestic skills, she attempts to restore order after the intrusion. She patches up the broken door and, more concerned with cleanliness than concealment, puts Colin’s corpse in the bath. Released into a kind of joy by her violent action, she sings and goes through the motions of sewing a shirt. These acts may be a prophylactic against fear of future attacks. After killing her actual would-be lover, she experiences a further anal rape/hallucination. The navvy is now a familiar inhabitant of her mind and her bed. Afterwards, she lies on the floor in agony as though his violation was physical. Her obvious corporeal suffering undermines viewerly objectivity and detachment, virtually reverberating in us too. An ironically phallic postcard of the Leaning Tower of Pisa arrives from her sister. This, and the rotting rabbit whose maggots have hatched into flies, signals the passage of time and, by implication, the further decay of the body in the bath. The temporal scheme of the film is confusing as time elongates for the spectator trapped in Carol’s intensive time of stasis. Repetition and hallucination further distort our sense of linear progress. Carol’s distorted consciousness is performed by an anamorphic lens that elongates and expands the room’s actual dimensions. Jarring electronic notes intensify the sensory affect of inner dislocation. The bathroom, a chief locus of horror, has grown enormous. Even the walls are alive, and sprout grabbing and mauling male hands. Although we can account for Carol’s hallucinations psychoanalytically, my interest here is in their ‘haecceity’ or this-ness. Haecceity is found in affective immanence; in process, not outcome. Rather than reading the living wall as a phobic projection of male sexuality, I am responding to it as a movement-image of an intensive mental process as her schizophrenia finally engulfs her. Thus, I virtually share the fluctuating auto-erotics of schizoid affect. Having made this Deleuzian move, I am returned to the representational, not delusory, horror of Carol’s rape by her landlord. Her manic bursts of strength in self-defence belie her apparent fragility. In a phallic counter-attack, she slashes at him with a razor whilst a three-beat drum rhythm stretches out his death throes. This joyful release is followed by

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terror as her close-up face in bed watches the swinging lamp associated with male violence. Despite this relapse into disempowerment, the energic force of her act remains. Her subsequent ironing of Michael’s dirty vest may be a gesture of reparation for her repulsion, as well as an attempt to put herself in order and re-impose a structure on life. As in the aftermath to Colin’s death, she anticipates her demon-lover. This time, she daubs on lipstick in erotic welcome as his embrace becomes less traumatic through custom. In a fearful hallucinatory sequence, the room elongates unnaturally and dead, or dying, hands in the walls feebly move to touch her, as the lamp swings back and forth from the impossible distance of distorted perspective. Some semblance of normal vision returns with the close-up of patterns made by the rain, itself a cleansing agent that promises an end to our spectatorial suffering as Hélène and Michael return. Carol is discovered in complete catatonia. A camera pans along the mantelpiece as Carol’s ‘tune’ is played by a flute, to stop at a photograph of a blonde child staring at some unseen horror off-frame. An adult man is highlighted in the picture, returning us to Polanski’s Freudian frame with the suggestion that child abuse is responsible for Carol’s illness. As with both Jekyll and Hyde and Repulsion, psycho-sexual pathology is a trigger theme in the next film, The Shining. The experience of the film, though, exceeds any charting of the family romance gone sour. Superficially, its wide-open spaces and palatial hotel move in the opposite direction to Repulsion’s urban prison. However, the traps and mazes of the film still create a comparable sense of cerebral and physical claustrophobia.

The Brain as Mise-en-scène: The Shining It is the brain which is mise-en-scène.62 (Deleuze)

Inflation and detachment shape the cerebral aesthetic of The Shining and its virtual experience by the viewer. The wide-angle lens and overblown strains of Berlioz plunge us sensorially into a world of inflated grandeur. Extremely wide vistas of the mountainous landscape induce a cold, detached and depersonalised perspective. Humans are unimportant in this vast physical, and metaphysical, terrain. The machinic motion of an uncannily independent camera surveys the landscape in an omniscient gliding motion. We experience the perspective of an eagle’s eye, or a divine power, as we become-god. Mental detachment and ego-inflation key in the delusions of Jack Torrance. The disturbed writer’s deranged consciousness forms and is formed by the film’s mise-en-scène and cinematography.

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The landscape, like the music, has a sublime grandeur yet the ominous chords and the dizzying, extra-human perspective render it sinister. It threatens to engulf the small, insect-like car, leading it ever upwards into a land of eternal snow. As the narrative moves inexorably onwards, it mobilises a process of becoming-frozen. Jack undergoes a freezing of emotional warmth and empathy. His blood runs cold, both figuratively and literally, as he becomes one with the forces of winter and death. The ‘acts’ of the plot are likewise presented with cold objectivity. They are intertitled like a ritual drama or opera, which undermines both fictional verisimilitude and the causal chain of events. The family’s arrival is followed by the mockingly simple title ‘A Month Later’, which, by its extreme ellipsis at a crucial point in the narrative, compresses time and excludes plot developments that may have helped our orientation. For Deleuze, the human body and brain are a mutually engaged assemblage artificially regarded as separate. He uses the common operations of the ‘cinema of the body’ and the ‘cinema of the brain’ in Kubrick’s work to elucidate this connection. 63 Thought is in the body, and shock and violence in the brain, with ‘an equal amount of feeling in both of them’.64 The identity of world and brain in an ‘automaton’ is not, however, completely amorphous. Both distinct parts form a multiplicity via the fluctuations of their interface, ‘a membrane which puts an outside and an inside in contact, makes them present to each other, confronts them, or makes them clash’.65 Deleuze suggests the survival of psychic interiority as well as supernatural exteriority in Kubrick’s diegesis. They are locked in a dynamic of inner and outer forces that moves towards fatal interchange. the inside is psychology, the past, involution, a whole psychology of depths which excavate the brain. The outside is the cosmology of galaxies, the future, evolution, a whole supernatural which makes the world explode. The two forces are forces of death which embrace, are ultimately exchanged and become ultimately indiscernible.66

In Kubrick’s cerebral aesthetic, ‘it is the brain which is mise-en-scène. Attitudes of the body achieve a maximum level of violence, but they are dependent on the brain’.67 The cinema of the brain ‘reveals the creativity of the world, its colours aroused by a new space-time, its powers multiplied by artificial brains’, as in 2001: A Space Odyssey.68 The Shining manifests emphatically that ‘the world itself is a brain. There is a unity of brain and world’.69 As with other films in this chapter, our engagement imbricates us in the madness of the text. The apparent distinction between internal psychic and external material forces is terrifyingly undermined. When extrasensory perception operates, the brain/world membrane becomes com-

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pletely permeable. It is difficult to decide whether the extra-sensory perceptions, or the hallucinatory projections, come from inside or outside. In any case, ‘the inflated world-brain is strictly inseparable from the forces of death that pierce the membrane in both directions’.70 Working with this material brain, I will be reading the film’s style as an outer expression of psychological states. When I identify properties of décor or light, I am simultaneously commenting on the operations of a schizophrenic psyche and our own schizophrenisation.

Place, Time and Motion Light is central to our perception of the world. It reflects and refracts off objects that stop the flow of its waves and enable us to see them. It accesses our brain cells by the transmutation of light waves into electrical changes by the optic nerves. In a sense, then, we see nothing else but light. We think in light as we perceive the outer world. We are physically permeated by light as it passes through our semi-transparent bodies as well as our eyes. Other diagrammatic components, such as the maze, depend on light for their own impact. Kubrick uses coloured light that could operate on our perception even without the objects that reflect it, but they magnify its effects and create extra layers of meaning by adding properties of their own. Shining as affective force dominates the mise-en-scène. The interior of the Overlook Hotel is lit and coloured preternaturally. No daylight can penetrate, and fire, candles and electricity replace natural light. Polished surfaces like metal, glossy paint and marble magnify their impact by varying degrees of reflection and refraction. These artificial light qualities objectify Jack’s derangement. They highlight the colours and tones of gold that express and modify the power of light itself. The hotel’s gold function room is the locus of vampiric energy. Its tonal quality spreads through the building to drain the human life force. Light grows brighter and colours grow richer enhanced by the psychic horror it generates. A distinctive light quality reinforces the cold white of the larder/cold storage room, lit by a fluorescent tube that drains all other colours. This space is the cold heart of the building, where Jack is trapped until his final murderous apotheosis. Jack’s son, Danny, and the hotel’s cook, Halloran, talk in the nearby kitchen, where the cook’s benevolent psychic presence has staved off the hotel’s malevolent forces until he leaves on vacation. Here, their minds meld into an assemblage of wordless communication as they share the rapport of ‘shining’ : a powerful extra-sensory perception and psychic bonding. As well as the qualities and tones of colour, light evokes tactility, we virtually feel the snow’s bitter coldness. This is effected

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by Kubrick’s use of cold blue light and a back-lit mist that rises as the snow’s surface evaporates. In his dying, Jack becomes completely overwhelmed by blueness and light in a becoming-ice. Spatial inflation and compression distorts locations, making us experience them as over narrow or over-wide. In contrast to the widescreen vista of the opening, the composition and framing inside Jack’s car is claustrophobic in its cramped intimacy as the nuclear family dynamic is undermined by a profound sense of unease and threat. The compressed space of the car is a moving fragment of the family’s Le Corbusier-type apartment. Its cramped but human-size quality is emphasised by intimate close-in shots around the kitchen’s round table. The ‘present’ space and time of the apartment is intercut with a precognitive warning of the Overlook and its denizens, as Danny sees a flash of a fuller vision he later experiences: a blood-filled lift and the ghosts of twin girls murdered by their father in the hotel . The psychic force of this past murder is imprinted on, and will be reflected off, the fabric of the hotel in the shining mirror of Danny’s mind. Each time such psychic overlay occurs, it blurs inside and out, past, present and future. The viewer, by sharing Danny’s present experience of his own horrified reaction to come, is also able to ‘shine’ future events, which cements our sympathy with him. The apartment’s apparent safety is undermined by the boy’s psychic attunement to the spirit of his future home. Rather than providing a safe domestic space, the film’s buildings, in their objective correlative with the human, are a too-thin membrane between world and brain. Architecture, in this case the Overlook’s deranged pastiche of neo-Gothic/chalet/deco, sits uneasily between interior and exterior forces. The hotel is both a product of human artifice and a natural part of the landscape. A harshly lit shot, composed with a mountain as background, harmonises the building with the surrounding snow. The triangular roof echoes the triangular pines pointing upwards. The cold exterior shot melts, by a slow, floating motion, into the gloomy splendour of the great hall, its gold/bronze tones enhanced by polished surfaces. Jack revels in his dictatorial isolation in this cavernous space, its overblown ambiance designed to induce a sense of grandeur he uses to offset his increasing paranoia. The maze is a motif of mental confusion. Kubrick may have intended it as a Jungian symbol, but my interest here lies in its potency as a Deleuzian processual machine. The actual, horticultural maze in the grounds has spawned a cluster of maze-images. Jack’s inflated sense of omniscience is manifest when, possessed by the evil power of the place, he leans over a scaled-down model of the maze. By a bold cut, he overlooks a tiny, insectlike Wendy and Danny from a position of god-like power.

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The hotel itself has a maze-like layout, inducing entrapment, mystery and foreboding. The camera leads us along a complex of corridors and pillars, and glides across the geometrical intertwining patterns of carpets and tiles. Native American textiles continue these lines. The hotel has been built on the site of an ancient burial ground, which reinforces the sense of the unquiet and vengeful dead. Danny plays with his toy cars in the centre of the carpet pattern that acts as a supernatural magnet to the ghost twins who throw a ball to him there and invite him to play. A psychic labyrinth accompanies the actual maze of hedges. Jack becomes-minotaur as he lies in wait for his victims, but he is also trapped inside his own head even though it has expanded to become-world. His novel is stymied in an endless loop of repetition. He is unable to progress, his creative energy as deadlocked as his written phrase. ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’ is both childish threat and cry for help, endlessly looping back on itself in entropy. Horror film’s version of duration is likewise stuck in repetition–compulsion. One layer of the past endlessly repeats itself and is superimposed over the present. This layered, durational time loops forward and back according to its own agenda. Time dominates space. Jack enters the gold room’s golden haze to find a long-past 1920s party in full swing, replaying itself in a timeloop that will draw him deeper into its terrifying duration. In the Overlook, space-time’s forward progression is meaningless. The viewer’s own sense of time is likewise caught in the confusing knot of a temporal maze. In the interview sequence, the detached, yet purposefully watchful eye of the locale itself continues the camera’s initial mode of seeing on a smaller scale. Jack is introduced from behind as an unseen presence is following him. Whatever else it might be, this presence is the superior, technological eye of the camera, which we uneasily share. Deleuze notes that the camera itself can act ‘like a consciousness’ that may not be human but is sometimes ‘inhuman or superhuman’.71 Vast, anti-human forces will trap and use Jack for their own ends, manipulating him via the illusion of supreme importance and agency otherwise lacking in his life. The Overlook Hotel is, as its name suggests, a major source of the film’s overlooking. It focuses and intensifies the swooping surveys of the wide-angled lens. It is an anomalous space, a strange attractor or soul trap that refutes spatial and temporal laws, replacing them with its own sinister forms of space, time and motion. Tracking shots are the dominant movement indoors. These do not replicate the human eye but remain machinic. As an animation of the forces of the place, their controlled smoothness leads characters further on, and in. Of particular power to unnerve and threaten are the floor-level steadicam

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tracking shots of Danny on his tricycle, taken from behind and accompanied by an unnaturally loud rumbling echo made by the wheels. As the vulnerable Danny moves inexorably towards the haunted Room 237, the camera watches and waits behind him, finally letting him go forward alone. This recalls the anticipatory presence above the mountain road. Repeated movements and journeys, such as Danny’s exploratory rides, exacerbate our sense of looping and entrapment. The quality of the steadicam work alternates between the smooth glide of a preternatural pursuer and the human, fearful tremble of the boy. Jack’s pursuit of Danny culminates in the maze, which hazy, soft-focus light bathes in unreality. As demon daddy/minotaur he lopes after his son like a wounded beast, but remains the hunter with his axe at the ready. Danny’s run is followed by a swooping camera, unlike Jack’s shaky pointof-view earlier. It is more like the usual smooth tracking of the camera-aswatcher. The change suggests either the participation of a preternatural force in the murder attempt, or Jack’s delusions of omnipotence, or both factors in tandem. Jack’s bodily exclusion from his spiritual home, the hotel, is undermined by the final scene. This returns us to the opulent glow of the gold room, where the strains of festive music suggest that the undead guests have the place to themselves. The veracity of the Jack lookalike in the Fourth of July party of 1921 picture on the wall of the ‘empty’ hotel is entirely dependent on the authenticity of the two cameras that alone have captured it. Here, the camera knows and keep its secret hidden from the human characters, and is the final on-screen presence of a superior mentality.

The Schizoid Machine: Imaginary Friends The film operates a schizoid machine on several levels. Mental disturbance is clearly a plot device and a thematic motif as well as an aesthetic strategy. The cinematography encourages ego-inflation by flattering our limited human perspective via technologically enhanced prosthesis. We have our sense of omniscience intensified beyond Jack’s own because we see more than he does, we see what he sees and we also see him seeing. We see and hear Jack’s imaginary friends in the concrete forms emanated by the hotel. The politely insinuating waiter, Grady, is Jack’s demonic double. He is a mental voice inside Jack’s head, made physically audible outside the cold store, taunting him with a failure to act. In the red and white (blood and bone) colour scheme of the men’s room, Grady hints that Jack murders his wife and child. Kubrick maintains ambivalence as to whether Grady is a demonic presence possessing Jack, the ghost of a former murderer or a

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projection of his inner voices. Because we physically hear Grady, we temporarily share Jack’s derangement. Grady, and Danny’s imaginary friend, Tony, are schizoid mechanisms. Whether they are supernaturally invoked or psychologically projected, the two are locked in a death struggle. Jack’s everyday persona lacks authenticity from the outset. Jack Nicholson plays the role as a comic melodrama villain, with manic grins and diabolical scowls. He appears to be the only interviewee, perhaps due to the evil repute of the hotel. Jack’s glib, ready-made answers, pleasantries and fixed smile, convey his absolute determination to sell himself to his future boss and get the job, although his overweening self-confidence suggests an already domineering ego that demands further space to expand. Ensconced in solitary splendour in his ‘office’ of the great hall, Jack’s schizoid tendencies are given full reign. A jarring electronic chord accompanies a startling close-up of Jack clad (like Cesare in The Cabinet of Dr Caligari) in a black, high-neck sweater that emphasises his face. With its diabolically pointed eyebrows, and eyes that stare directly out at us, undermining fictional distance, it is frozen in a fearsome rictus. Completely immobile, he seems to have abandoned human life and become a catatonic schizophrenic, or an automaton. In the ghost-infested gold room, Jack’s manic, destructive energy explodes. Either the haunted hotel, or his mental anomalies, have reanimated dead guests as schizoid personae, as brain melts into world. The bar lights are switched on invitingly, and the living-dead barman, Lloyd, acts as an ambiguous confessor. In a state of maudlin intoxication, Jack recounts his resentment of his wife and son, and his violence towards the boy. Whether talking to spirits or to mental projections, he relishes the opportunity to complain. Lloyd’s attentiveness to Jack parallels the twins’ friendly interest in Danny. The ghostly girls are a further visual rhyme of schizoid doubling. Tony, as a warning precognition of Jack’s murderous intent, reveals their dead bodies to Danny. If Jack kills Danny, he would also be killing a set of twins. Danny’s schizoid set-up with Tony is conveyed as a natural and helpful form of projected defence against his father. Danny’s alter-ego works as a balancing force, a good father figure to offset the harm of his real, bad one. Tony is Danny’s coping mechanism and extends familiar childhood behaviour as well as imitating his father’s schizophrenia. In the family suite, the camera glides towards Danny, who talks to himself/Tony in the mirror. Unlike Jack, who externalises his own inner personae so that we see and hear them, Tony remains an imaginary adjunct to Danny. He inhabits only his ‘stomach’ and communicates via the boy’s wiggled finger. Tony’s deep voice is the result of Danny’s ventriloquism. His communication via the

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finger and his ‘home’ in the boy’s stomach appears a Freudian set up of phallic rivalry with his father for his mother Wendy’s attention. Jack’s schizoid mental state is an illness rather than a positive force. It lacks Danny’s self-awareness, precognitive powers and rapport with others. Danny’s extra-sensory gift also involves mind-reading. Tony acts as Danny’s other within, a guardian angel who reveals the truth and acts in the boy’s own interests. A figure of precocious maturity, Tony speaks in a gruff deep voice, with an authoritative perspective. The voice of reason, he explains to Danny that the ghosts are ‘just like pictures’ from the past superimposed over the present. This Bergsonian view suggests time’s intensive layering and looping as the cause of hauntings. A more complicated set of temporal layers appears in The Others, in which 1940’s ghosts are themselves haunted by the Edwardian denizens of their mansion. Schizoid doubling continues when a dishevelled Jack regards himself in the mirror, observed by Danny. Jack is unable to maintain distance between his egoic self and his alter-egos, whereas Danny is able to reflect on his distinction from Tony. Jack duplicitously asserts that he loves his son ‘more than anything in the whole world’, but Danny recognises that the hotel, where his father wants to stay ‘for ever’, is his father’s true love object, as his inflated, objectified self. Amplified by the anomalous presences in the hotel, Danny’s ability to shine increases. When his earlier vision of a blood-filled lift is repeated in its actual location, he opens his mouth in a silent scream of horror. Like Danny, the viewer sees the bloody lift twice. Even though both may be projections of Danny’s mind, we experience the second time as more ‘real’ by its location in the hotel as part of a string of convincing virtual manifestations. Danny is able to hear his parents in conversation through the wall and sense his father’s violence. Tony helps Danny to produce the mirrorreversed message of ‘REDRUM’ to warn Wendy. The boy stands by Wendy’s bedside acting out a miniature version of Jack as he imitates his father’s deep voice and murderous wielding of a knife. In a sense, he becomes his own father’s double. As Jack’s pathological state worsens, the sensory anomalies, and the spectator’s engagement, increase. A hollow, echoing boom is heard as Jack, impelled by his violent desires, approaches the apartment wielding his axe. The apparently diegetic sound, repeated by the hollow booming of the gale, recalls his earlier pounding on the tin roof of his cold-storage prison. Simultaneously, Wendy discovers his psychotic novel/poem patterns and finally confronts his insanity. Danny’s vision of red-filtered luminosity is a concrete correlative to Jack’s murderous ‘red mist’. A sequence of Jack forcing Wendy to back up the stairs as she fends him off with a baseball bat

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reveals the enormous gulf of the hall as it looms below him, a manifestation of his psychic void. As his derangement peaks, Jack undergoes a mockery of becomingbeast. He regresses to the big bad wolf of fairytale as he hacks through the door and attempts to kill the ‘little pigs’ Wendy and Danny.72 When Wendy escapes, her trauma triggers her ability to ‘shine’ for the first time as she is welcomed by the ghosts of debauched party guests. The final sequence in the maze reveals Jack as deeply psychotic. As he runs after Danny, the camera tracks after him, creating a sense that he is also being hunted. Danny retraces his own steps with remarkable ingenuity, perhaps under the tutelage of Tony. Kubrick overtly, and self-consciously, charts the mechanics of schizophrenic illness in its becoming pathological. The Oedipal triangle, as well as Jungian archetypes, might be applied to plot events, narrative structuration and character relationships. It is, however, the viewer’s experiential engagement that is central in a schizoanalytical reading. Schizoid swings between ego-inflation and paranoia are directly conveyed in the use of space and motion. In this cinema of the brain, the membrane between inner and outer thins and snaps. Our own spectatorial ‘membrane’ likewise becomes permeable, pierced by the deathly movement-image. As well as seeking to induce altered states of consciousness in the viewer, the final film of this chapter, Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers, presents events as fully schizoid from the outset.

‘Trapped in a World of Ghosts’: Intensive States in Natural Born Killers every intensity controls within its own life the experience of death, and envelops it.73 (Deleuze and Guattari)

Natural Born Killers, with its rapid-fire bombardment of the spectator’s sensorium, is an experiential overload. It mixes the ‘naturalness’ of killing with psychosis and social critique. The film is a confused and confusing mix of extensive and intensive states of consciousness. The lengthy title sequence is a collage sampler of key scenes and assaults the viewer’s viscera from the start. Its rapid movements, saturated colours and the lugubrious urgency of Leonard Cohen’s song casts a glamour on mass murderers Mickey and Mallory Knox. The romanticisation perversely parallels the media’s own love affair with serial killers, but this theme will not be our focus here. The collage begins the undermining of our temporal sense as it mixes material from different narrative times.

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The heterogeneous assemblage of images begins a process within the spectator that lasts through to the end-titles. We are assaulted by images and affects without time for our feelings and thoughts to cohere. As soon as we try to clarify our responses, we are attacked by a fresh segment of shots that might gravitate against the affects just experienced. Even in more discrete sequences, visual effects or soundtrack music set up a confusingly contrapuntal level. Viewers are forced to become schizo in watching. I would like to open up our discussion of this process by a brief consideration of becoming-animal. I will be taking this concept deeper in Chapter 2, but at this point I want to view it through the schizoanalytic prism by which we open up to other forms of life rather than keeping them sharply distinct.

Natural Born Predators Becomings-animal are neither dreams nor phantasies. They are perfectly real.74 (Deleuze and Guattari)

In the title sequence, intercut snakes, birds of prey and a blood-red sunset present the naturalness of killing. This is reinforced by brief shots of a scorpion and a dead deer: predator and prey. Forces that inflict death are a major affective strand throughout. For Deleuze, death and becoming exist in a special relation for the body-without-organs. His concepts help to shed light on the schizoid becomings of the films that enact them in a literal way. Deleuze identifies the ‘experience’ of death as distinct from the grounding model of death, by its conversion of ‘the death that rises from within (in the body-without-organs) into the death that comes from without (on the body-without-organs)’.75 By the experience of death here, he intends the ‘death of the subject’ as it becomes-schizo in intensive states. In the unconscious, the experience of death is common, and occurs ‘in life and for life, in every passage or becoming’.76 Intensive emotions tap into and control the unconscious experience of death. Death is enveloped by every intense feeling and is ‘what never ceases and never finishes happening in every becoming’.77 As every intensity is finite, and finally extinguished, so ‘every becoming itself becomes a becoming-death!’.78 These little deaths have been read by psychoanalysis as signs of the inherent workings of Thanatos, the death-drive. Instead of the pessimism of the ‘strange death-cult’ of psychoanalysis, Deleuze and Guattari embrace the Nietszchean eternal return ‘as experience, and as the deterritorialised circuit of all the cycles of desire’.79 The depiction of this process of ‘schizophrenizing death’ is the ‘secret’ work of

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the ‘terrifying’ authors of horror literature.80 Although no examples are given here, they refer elsewhere to Lovecraft. I argue that this perspective is also valid for the fantasies of cinema, which horrifies by extremes of affect. Mickey and Mallory enact a skewed ‘conversion’ of death in the psycho-killer mode by shifting it from themselves onto randomly selected others. Mickey regards himself in the role of nemesis. In the roadhouse bar, Mallory attracts the predatory gaze of hawkish rednecks as she dances. Rather than being their prey, however, traditional gender roles are reversed, as she is more like a cat playing with mice. These early images animalise the protagonists and open up a thematic and aesthetic assemblage of becoming-animal. Deleuze and Guattari note ‘very special becomings-animal traversing human beings and sweeping them away’.81 As well as being the subject matter of myth and modern fiction, becoming-animal has broader philosophical and political implications. It has potential to extend human becomings, and can re-think human relations with the natural world. The experiential process of this becoming is more important than its physical impossibilities. Deleuze and Guattari assert that ‘the becoming-animal of the human being is real, even if the animal the human becomes is not’.82 Our fictional engagement in the becomings-animal of fantasy potentialises new connections. Mickey has the dangerous force of wild horses and the deadly poison of reptiles. His body, tattooed with snakes and a scorpion, displays and intensifies his own sense of becoming-animal. In the pre-titles sequence, headlines of murders lead into back-projection of a wild horse running with untameable energy alongside the getaway car. In open prison, Mickey breaks wild horses on a ranch. In the preternatural light of a blood-red filter, he escapes by leaping onto a wild stallion maddened by a rattlesnake bite. A twister approaches in a sinuous slow motion, echoing the graceful strength of Mickey’s body movements. A destructive force of nature himself, he rides into the eye of the hurricane, which remains still, like the unblinking eye of a snake. The rattlesnake develops the snake symbol as totemic force within the assemblage Mickey–Mallory–snake. Two snakes entwine to form a heart in the tattoo of commitment on Mickey’s chest. The couple’s self-ordained marriage on a bridge over a chasm is clinched by the exchange of snake rings. When Mallory’s white veil falls down the abyss, its slow-motion twists are rendered snake-like, as the twister had been. The snake-chain of signifiers will culminate in Mallory herself being bitten, which leads to the couple’s capture. The Navajo shaman they meet transforms their protective totem into a vengeful force against them. The shaman, who refutes white culture’s split of the human and animal kingdoms, recounts a tale of

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a personified snake who bites his human partner. He maintains a close physical bond with snakes, keeping a rattler, his own totemic ancestorspirit, in his hut and putting it outdoors with the direction ‘old man, go out and be a snake’. This one – from a preternatural ring of snakes that forms after the old man’s murder – perhaps bites Mallory. Wildlife images, such as the copulating lions Mickey watches on a television documentary, are extended by the addition of artificial beasts. The mix of nature and artifice parallels the dual concerns of killing as natural predation and killing as cult media event. Flash-frame close-ups of a hydra and a fire-breathing dragon from old movies are intercut with narrative images, maintaining a subliminal blend of fearful monstrosity and black humour. The polar bear of the TV Coke ad underpins the crude bestiality of Mallory’s corpulent, shambling father. Although the use of flash-frames and parallel montage is reduced in the jail scenes, animal brutality is still operant. Mickey is chained up like a dog in a large metal collar for his initial meeting with media host Wayne Gayle. The guards are canine in appearance and manner, with their flat, brutish snouts and vocal growls. A device like a pair of dog-tongs or snake’s fanged jaws is used to control unruly prisoners. The prison governor is torn apart by his prisoners like a pack of hounds on their prey. Their animal rage is mobilised by the force released by Mickey as the pack’s leader. Not all natural images are of raptors. Intercutting fluffy dandelion clocks conveys the tactile delicacy of Mallory and Mickey’s kiss. Mickey’s sentimentality is displayed by the confessional intimacy of his childhood use of Mr Rabbit as prophylactic against the horror of his father’s death. The fairytale happy ending of Mallory and Mickey’s new life in a camper van appears to be reinforced by a shot of rabbits running in slow motion, but is undercut because the beasts are fleeing for their lives. To accompany the end-titles, we have footage of flowers opening and horses galloping. In tandem with expressive emblems, flamboyant cinematography induces gut-reactions in the viewer. At the same time as it retards narrative, it melts our mental detachment and imbricates us in the protagonists’ schizoid perspective.

Becoming-Schizo Rapid-fire intercutting, cross-cutting and flash-frames work with pounding music to induce a pulse-racing pace for the viewer as we become-schizo by proxy. Within this manic trajectory, there are slower variants. The couple’s own velocities vary unpredictably from sensual languor to explosive speed. Another affective form of movement is located within the frame

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itself. Deleuze notes that ‘the frame ensures a deterritorialisation of the image’.83 It serves to isolate and throw into relief the movements bounded by its edges. The intensive force of Mickey and Mallory is extensively applied as they fight and kill. They begin the road-house massacre by using their own bodies, kicking and punching with the discipline of martial arts training. They extend their bodies’ capacity by technological progression from knives to guns. Their physical grace develops naturally as an extension of Mallory’s dancing. The hyper energy released by their violence is a machine suddenly switched on, so dynamic that the frame can hardly contain it. The killing-spree is both naturalised and mythologised by shots of fireworks then a peaceful image of blue sky with small floating clouds. This expresses the couple’s own transcendent state of calm through satiety, and slows down their frenetic motion. The placidity is continued and at the same time ironically undermined by the next shot in which the frame is drenched in blood, which runs down and darkens out the screen just prior to the film’s title. Mickey and Mallory’s processual becoming of each other is underscored by their enforced separation in the prison. Without moving from his seat, Mickey appears to stand, waving his arms like wings in a dance. This cuts to Mallory’s slow-motion dance alone in her cell. They are moving on the same psychic wavelength, in harmonious rhythm. As well as such bonding, Mickey and Mallory can function as distinct entities. As they drive though Navajo country, we share Mallory’s point-of-view when she looks back at the road behind her. Her subjective vision, which we sample via the fast-motion film speed, shows the manic pace of perception particular to her. Natural Born Killers is redolent with movements that work on us at different levels. The motion might come from found film or TV footage. Shots of galloping Indians underlines the couple’s own untamed savagery as well as connecting them with the ‘Wild West’ heritage, and the guncentred culture, of the USA. Shifting focus from what images might ‘mean’, Deleuze stresses the centrality of movement to the spectator/ cinema assemblage. For him, types of cinematic motion have a profound philosophical function. They give us, in the ‘false’ form of cinematic illusion, a sense not of ‘an image to which movement is added’, but, rather, the immediacy of the ‘movement-image’ itself.84 This movement both expresses and opens onto the quality of ‘the whole’, or duration. The operations of movement in the horror film and their metaphysical qualities are a key thread in my overall discussion.

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Back-Projections and Other Anomalies Back-projection is a distinctive technique of schizophrenisation. It first appears as the scenery through which Mickey and Mallory travel in their car and the parallel flight of the wild horse. Back-projections are part of their mental scenery and schizoid existential mode. For the viewer, their function is twofold. As alienation devices, they alert us to the disparity between the couple’s vision and what others see. They intensify the contents of a frame by an overlay in which two planes of reality move in the same space and intermesh. Along with superimposition, split screen and other effects, overlay is a concrete form of the intensive ‘layering’ of planes in the concepts of both Deleuze and Bergson. By this method, interconnected but distinct realities exist at the same time, and we may travel between them in the intensive movements of thought. Back-projections render Mickey and Mallory’s deeds problematic in terms of supposed ‘naturalness’. Flames and explosives background the pair’s lovemaking. Despite the technique’s blatant artifice, it works us sensorially and engages us in the expanding sensory palette of the filmic event. Back-projections imbricate the viewer into schizoid perception, keying in the mutual operations of often indistinguishable mental and physical states. For Mickey and Mallory, killing people is like watching the movies they frequently enjoy on broadcast television. Mickey browses an endless stream of channel-zapped TV, mixing documentaries, nature programmes and horror films such as James Whale’s Frankenstein. These instantaneous collages act intertextually as images of fantastic monstrosity and transport the spectator elsewhere. The potency of the TV images is attested to by their back-projection, seen through the motel windows instead of landscape. The images, including footage of Nazi concentration camps, form part of the wallpaper of Mickey’s mind. The displacement effects of documentary footage render it fantastical whilst conveying the schizoid openness of Mickey’s wholesale consumption of media stimuli and their further disturbance of his reality-testing mechanisms. In this hallucinatory state, Mickey and Mallory attempt sex. In a complex play with the mechanisms of spectatorship, the viewer is shocked out of erotic engagement by an ‘actual’ image of enforced watching. Physically present in the room is a female victim, bound and gagged in the corner, forced to watch the couple to intensify their sexual frisson. When Mallory takes off her snake ring, Mickey feels their totemic bond is weakened and they quarrel bitterly. As Mallory drives into town, smoke and fire are back-projected on the sky; objective correlative to her mental state as she jealously seeks out a parallel victim/partner for sex as murder/murder

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as sex. The schizoid split of the back-projection becomes part of our experience of the film as a corporeal and mental event. Anamorphosis conveys the alterity of Mickey’s consciousness. His face expresses the hallucinatory affect of ecstasy whilst kissing Mallory’s breast under the shower spray. Near the end of the film, after he has become a TV personality in his own right, a demonic anamorphosis of his face is intercut with footage of Waco, Texas. Other bloody events purveyed by the media are invoked and his psychic connection with them is implied by juxtaposition. In Monument Valley, narcotic hallucinations are conveyed by freeze-frames of living and dead animals. Mickey’s face bends into distortions and the drugs make him sick. Narcotics are inappropriate as they introduce interference into an already schizoid state of consciousness. For the viewer, however, the experience of the film is itself comparable to the effects of drug-induced hallucination. The swirling colours of a vortex, irised-in around the couple, which then bursts into flames, is a computerised version of the psychedelic graphics of the 1960s.85 As well as LSD, MDMA (Ecstasy) is evoked in the second of Mallory’s three dance scenes of autoerotic intensity. Each of these conveys her trance-state, which renders her impervious to pain. Her second dance expresses her liberation from parental jurisdiction as well as her bonding with Mickey. She sways on the car bonnet in ecstatic slow movements with stars and night sky as her backdrop. She hallucinates, and we see, angelic flying figures. In this atmosphere of luminescence, emphasised by slowpulsing strobe lighting, we experience a vision of Mallory’s rare beauty, which increases our empathy despite her sadistic brutalities. Strobe-like flicker also appears in Mallory’s room from the hypnotic violence and crudity of TV. When Mickey arrives, a stronger light shines from him onto Mallory’s face, her adoration rendering him numinous. The colour palette is densely saturated. Red is prominent for its thematic and affective potency. At the couple’s blood wedding, Mallory throws her doll over the bridge in a rite of passage. The doll, wearing crimson feathers, falls in a slow motion that resembles falling blood in one of the film’s visual becomings. In slow motion, Mallory and Mickey slash their palms and bind their hands together, mingling their blood. This act is emphasised by a sudden, disorienting switch to cartoon animation: streams of blood corpuscles twist together like twining snakes. This evocation of micro processes below the skin adds the body’s interior sensations to the array of affects. The film’s meandering temporal progression and its prioritising of inner reality is partly occult in nature, suggesting that mental anomalies have only been clinically pathologised in modern cultures. The supernatural theme

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increases the generic horror components of the film. In the Navajo shaman’s hut, the word ‘demon’ is projected across Mickey’s chest to indicate how he appears on an occult level. Recalling a dream he had years earlier, the shaman recognises Mickey as the demon predestined to kill him. The Navajo diagnoses Mallory’s ‘sad sickness’ and tells his grandson she is ‘trapped in a world of ghosts’. From his perspective, Mallory and Mickey’s schizophrenia is part of the white culture’s malaise of ‘too much TV’ and too little sense of the sacredness of life. Horror film, however, still retains a touch of the uncanny, as well as clinical pathology, in its portrayal of dangerous madness. Generic films often deploy binary machines of insanity/sanity, them/us and natural/unnatural. The psychoanalytic ambivalence of desire and dread has frequently been used to explain the attraction of monstrous insanity for audiences. Schizoanalytic readings can refute this limiting binary structure. They seek elsewhere for the film’s force as ‘these intense becomings and feelings, these intensive emotions, feed deliriums and hallucinations’.86 The aesthetics of Natural Born Killers likewise challenge such clear-cut divisions. They stimulate, repel, frighten, distress and disorientate the spectator in a dizzying vortex, schizophrenising us as we lose the clear distinction of inside and out during the film event. The affective potency of insanity in horror fantasy lies in its power of becoming, as an untrammelled force that sweeps aside all obstacles. Amoral and asocial, schizo-killers appear to be capable of free acts that effect change and attain ecstatic fulfilment for themselves. That their free acts depend on the ruthless destruction of others is difficult to divorce on one level from social and ethical issues of representation. To use these fantasies as a springboard for schizoanalysis, even in tandem with other approaches, demands a radical paradigm shift. I find no place in psychoanalysis for the corporeal actuality of the moments in which viewer and film connect. Castration and back-to-the-womb scenarios are abstract, deep structures rather than embodied acts, although film has been used as evidence of their symbolic operations. By schizoanalysis, the affect of film may be explored as an event that acts upon the viewer. Inner becomings have their outer parallel in the physical transformations of horror film. In Chapter 2, fluid mental states are given external expression in fantastic bodily changes.

Notes 1. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane (London: The Athlone Press, 1984), p. 18.

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2. Ibid. p. 319. 3. Marie Bonaparte, The Life and Works of Edgar Allen Poe: A Psycho-Analytic Interpretation (London: Imago, 1949). 4. Forbidden Planet, dir. Fred M. Wilcox (1956). 5. James Donald (ed.), Fantasy and the Cinema (London: BFI, 1989), p. 1. 6. Roger Dadoun, ‘Fetishism in the Horror Film’, in Donald, Fantasy and the Cinema, pp. 39–62. 7. Ibid. p. 56. 8. Barbara Creed, The Monstrous Feminine: Women in the Horror Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993). 9. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 4. 10. Tania Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory (London and New York: Methuen, 1988). 11. Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen, Vol. 6. No. 6, 1975; Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (London and New York: Routledge, 1992). 12. Linda Williams, ‘When the Woman Looks’, in Mary Anne Doane, Patricia Mellencamp and Linda Williams (eds), Re-vision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism (Frederick, MD: American Film Studies Monograph Series, University Publications of America, 1983), pp. 67–82. 13. David N. Rodowick, The Difficulty of Difference: Psychoanalysis, Sexual Difference, and Film Theory (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 140. 14. Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 27. 15. Ibid. p. 45. 16. Ibid. p. 49. 17. Gilles Deleuze, ‘Coldness and Cruelty: Re-presentation of Masoch’, in Gilles Deleuze and Leopold Sacher-Masoch, Masochism (New York: Zone Books, 1991), pp. 9–142. 18. For an application of Lacan’s linguistic analogy, see Jacques Lacan, ‘Seminar on “The Purloined Letter”’, Yale French Studies, 48, 1972, pp. 38–72. 19. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, pp. 81–2. 20. Barbara M. Kennedy, Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), p. 50. 21. Gilles Deleuze, ‘Real and Imaginary: What Children Say’, in Essays Critical and Clinical, ed. Daniel W. Smith, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (London and New York: Verso, 1998), p. 63. 22. Ibid. p. 63. 23. Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much, p. 102. 24. Jean Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis (London: Karnac, 1988), p. 408. 25. Ibid. p. 408. 26. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of

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27.

28. 29. 30.

31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

47.

48.

49. 50. 51. 52.

    Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson (London: George Allen and Unwin, [1910] 1971), p. 231. Sigmund Freud, ‘The Special Characteristics of the System Ucs’, in The Unconscious [1915], in PFL 11, On Metapsychology (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), p. 191. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 322. Ibid. p. 322. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: The Athlone Press, 1988), p. 267. Deleuze, ‘Real and Imaginary: What Children Say’, p. 64. André Colombat, ‘Deleuze and Signs’, in Ian Buchanan and John Marks (eds), Deleuze and Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), p. 18. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 139. Ibid. p. 131. Ibid. p. 18. Ibid. p. 18. Ibid. p. 18. Ibid. p. 323. Kennedy, Deleuze and Cinema, p. 69. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. G. Burchill and H. Tomlinson (London: Verso, 1991), p. 164. Shaviro, The Cinematic Body, p. 258. Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927–1939, ed. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 16. Shaviro, The Cinematic Body, p. 31. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 271. Gus van Sant’s recent remake of Psycho returns to a heavier psycho-sexual dogmatism than Hitchcock’s and becoming-bird is completely omitted. Gilles Deleuze, ‘Dead Psychoanalysis: Analyse’, in Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II, trans. H. Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: The Athlone Press, 2002), p. 122. In the version currently circulated. Producer Eric Pommer later added a framing story that locates Francis as madman and Caligari as a benign director of the asylum. Sigfried Kracauer, Lotte Eisener and others signal its preNazi political interpretation. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 50. Ibid. p. 50. Ibid. p. 15. Ibid. p. 17. Ibid. p. 52.

    53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86.

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Ibid. p. 52. Ibid. p. 51. Ibid. p. 51. For Hoffmann’s tales of automata, see ‘Automata’, in The Best Tales of Hoffmann, ed. E. F. Blieler (New York; Dover Publications, 1967), pp. 71–103. Daniel Smith, ‘Introduction’, in Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, p. xxxviii. Ibid. p. xxxviii. Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, p. 51. Ibid. p. 51. His ‘degenerate’ appearance has negative ethnic implications. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (London: The Athlone Press, 1989), p. 205. Ibid. p. 205. Ibid. p. 205. Ibid. p. 206. Ibid. p. 206. Ibid. p. 205. Ibid. p. 205. Ibid. p. 205. Ibid. p. 206. Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, p. 20. This scene is reminiscent of a similar axe attack in D. W. Griffiths’s Broken Blossoms (1919). Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 330. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 238. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 330. Ibid. p. 330. Ibid. p. 330. Ibid. p. 330. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. x. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 331. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 237. Ibid. p. 238. Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, p. 15. Ibid. p. 2. Such as those used by Kubrick in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 330.

CHAPTER 2

Becoming Anomalous and the Body-Without-Organs

a continuous creation of unforeseeable form.1 (Bergson) Everything is vision, becoming. We become universes. Becoming plant, animal, molecular, becoming zero.2 (Deleuze and Guattari)

Alone in his bathroom, Seth Brundle watches himself in the mirror. Anxiously scanning his increasingly knobbly face, he chews his fingernail and it comes off between his teeth. His exposed finger-end squirts white liquid onto the mirror, which he shamefacedly wipes off with toilet paper. The next scene in David Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986) begins with a slow track up the solid metal of a computer, panning round to reveal Seth at the screen. Instead of providing him with reassurance, what he sees on the screen intensifies the horror. Analysing the cellular make-up of Seth’s teleportation, the computer reveals that the secondary element in the genetic mix is ‘not-Brundle’. With mounting terror and disgust, Seth scans blownup images of hairy spikes and the text reveals a ‘fusion of Brundle and Fly at a molecular level’. Humans who become monsters, or regress to earlier forms of life, are stock matter of horror film, which gleefully deploys effects technology like prosthetic make-up and computer-generated imagery to manifest monstrosity. The viewer engages viscerally in the affectively potent mix of these bodily changes. A favourite locus for spectacular bodily modification is the transgression of those biological and cultural norms that it throws in relief. I explore human/inhuman mutations from a Deleuzian perspective. The concepts of becoming and the body-without-organs trace these hybrid transformations. My approach moves beyond the split subjectivity of psychoanalytic work on horror, which retains uneasily welded, but still identifiable, components from each ‘original’. Deleuzian becomings are a process of individuation run on desubjectified affects, being collective rather than personal. Creative assemblages such as literary or cinematic machines mobilise becoming. Their singularities, or self-referential component systems, are not self-enclosed and no assemblage runs on a single flux. Rather than imi-

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tating other singularities, they form new conjunctions in pursuit of their own becoming. Singularities become by extending beyond themselves, melding with others and putting out projectiles to incorporate environmental objects. One assemblage is the perceptual and virtual consciousness of the viewer as it incorporates the aesthetic processes of film. To pinpoint what might happen in the intersection between singularities, Deleuze and Guattari use the figure of the ‘anomalous’, an unnatural, irregular element in a system. As anomalies trace a line between congruent multiplicities, they resemble the creatures of dark fantasy and horror in literature. The anomalous ‘outsider’ is ‘Moby Dick, or the Thing or Entity of Lovecraft, terror’.3 The monstrous entity is not fixed in its identity, but changes by entering into dynamic processual assemblages. As it moves, it can open onto other affective elements, such as beauty and joy, and draw them into the horror experience, thus adding singularities to its multiplicity. The entity is in perpetual motion, maintaining its transformative potential as it becomes. Deleuze again draws on images from Lovecraft to explain how ‘ENTITY
EVENT, it is terror, but also great joy. Becoming an entity, an infinitive, as Lovecraft spoke of it, the horrific and luminous story of Carter: animal-becoming, molecular-becoming, imperceptible-becoming’.4 Monsters may at first appear to gravitate against the liberatory potential of Deleuze’s concepts. By eliding the text’s dynamics of style with its representational content, this interpretation would be losing Deleuze’s thread. Unfortunately, he uses these perversely suggestive images only rarely, as overt illustrations of the processes of becoming. For me, such provocative and pertinent images from popular fantasy attest to the broader applicability of his theories, and I have set out to redress the balance in this book. Women and men who become with other life-forms are among the anomalies of horror cinema. Inhuman entities possess human bodies. Bodies without souls have non-human life of their own, and spirits without their former bodies have become-ethereal. These entities refuse to remain the objects of our aesthetic contemplation and seek to incorporate us into the dynamic hybrid of their virtual assemblage. We also become with the monsters as mutant spectators. Despite formulaic attempts to restore order at the end of many films, we continue to become long after the film has ended. What is initially a cinematic assemblage transmutes into another form of experiential process. Anomalies subvert fixed notions of subjective wholeness and undermine cultural attempts to maintain self-consistent typological and species norms. Bergson’s Creative Evolution is influential here. Working with élan vital, or the vital impetus, Bergson draws on the evolutionary theories of

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his day to explore the becomings of vegetable and animal life. He suggests that human boundaries are much less fixed than we wish to imagine. Like other forms of life on the planet, the force of the universal flux of matter traverses us. As the life-force flows in us, and through us, ‘this special image which persists in the midst of the others, and which I call my body, constitutes at every moment [. . .] a section of the universal becoming’.5 For Bergson, the human amalgamates earlier evolutionary imprints and ongoing genetic development. Our awareness of these earlier levels is shaped by both the findings of evolutionary biology and our inner intuition of the process of duration, which I examine more closely later. Bergson assists my project of re-thinking the transformations of the horror film and their affect on the spectator, as we experience becoming in conjunction with the text. Rather than its psychoanalytic meaning of the release of psychic energies, I use affect as the dynamic charge of emotion/ sensation in an experiential materialist aesthetic. As with my discussion of schizoanalysis, I move away from the psychoanalytic paradigm of horror studies, but still acknowledge the relevance of psycho-sexuality when viewed from a different angle. In particular, Deleuze’s work with the fiction of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch intriguingly reconsiders subjective loss and the potential for becoming it unleashes. As a context and justification for such a move, I will briefly recap some of the key uses to which psychoanalysis has been put in studies of body horror.

Body-Horror, Masochism and Film Studies Psychopathology, drawing on Freud’s uncanny and Kristeva’s abjection, has dominated textual readings of the horror body. It has also informed studies of spectatorial response to, and investment in, horror. Organic bodies are the basic matter of many horror films and it seems perverse not to explore them in themselves. Much critical work has been structuralistinformed, so has skated over the biological aspects of the body and its sensation as such, using bodies instead as emblematic springboards to primal psychic structures. Because horror bodies may be penetrated, dismembered or duplicated, their vicissitudes have been interpreted from some feminist perspectives as scenarios of castration, taboo sexual acts and subjective loss. Barbara Creed, who asserts that the bleeding bodies of women are a ‘gaping wound’, presents castration anxiety as the central concern of horror film.6 Alternatively, Gaylyn Studlar uses Melanie Klein’s objectrelations theory to locate masochism as seminal to a viewing process ‘divorced from issues of castration, sexual difference, and female lack’.7

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Instead, she locates viewerly masochism as a defence mechanism against fears of maternal abandonment. Kaja Silverman’s work on male masochistic viewing, despite its exploration of perverse potential, retains a Freudian and Lacanian model of the ‘categorical imperatives of the Oedipus complex and symbolic law’.8 Carol Clover likewise shifts attention from male sadism to consider the masochistic male spectator’s identification, his ‘introjective or masochistic gazing’ at the female victim/hero, the ‘final girl’ of slasher movies.9 She signals the need to consider the incorporated spectator absorbed in the horror film experience. Masochism is adapted by Deleuze to map the operations of the bodywithout-organs. Masochistic processes permeate horror films in the invasion of the body and its consequent psychic disintegration. Deleuze’s reading of Masoch is distinguished by its shift from eroticism, its focus on the contract, and its refutation of masochism’s binary dialectic with sadism. Masochism is anti-Oedipal in intent as it ‘disavows the mother and abolishes the father’ and it has a different political agenda, because ‘sadism is institutional, masochism contractual’.10 Masochism gives primacy to the ego and the process of idealisation. Deleuze prefers the ‘aestheticism’ of masochism’s narratives of delayed gratification to a Sadeian assault of the reader by escalating explicitness. In Masoch’s novel, Venus in Furs, the intensive nature of suspense wards off pleasure, so that waiting is essential to ‘suspense as a plenitude, as a physical and spiritual intensity’.11 The novel’s fetishisation of fur does not imply that characters imitate animals, but that they become-animal by entering ‘zones of indetermination or proximity in which woman and animal, animal and man, have become indiscernible’.12 Horror texts, such as Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People, convey the indeterminations of woman/animal, as we will see. Shaviro was an early Deleuzian advocate of the active and affirmative masochism in the spectatorship of extreme cinema. Horror and pornography act as ‘a technology for intensifying and renewing experiences of passivity and abjection’ via their mimesis of erotic tension.13 Their intent is to physically arouse the audience and bombard the sensorium outside the psychoanalytic realms of subjective fantasy. Like Deleuze, Shaviro claims that the aesthetic experience can induce transformations of consciousness, as the agitated body, overloaded by affect, ‘desires its own extremity, its own transmutation’.14 Shaviro locates our identification not with human or unhuman monsters, but with victims (unless the monsters are victimised themselves). He notes the viewer’s complicity with the (usually female) protagonist’s dread in Argento’s flamboyant films. Fearful anticipation ‘blends into a kind of

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ecstatic complicity at the convulsive point of danger and violence’ and terror is ‘an irrecuperable excess, produced when violated bodies are pushed to their limits. Terror subsists as a surplus affect’.15 Despite masochism’s retention of unequal power roles, and its Bataillean angst, its subjective loss impels a limited kind of becoming anomalous.

Becoming Anomalous Deleuze and Guattari build on becoming in Nietszche’s work, where it figures the dynamic metamorphosis of matter and the key to human potential. Bergson’s ‘continuity of becoming which is reality itself ’ is, however, their seminal source.16 For Bergson, becoming is qualitative, evolutionary and extensive, and is a pivotal tool for his radical philosophy. Although ‘life, like conscious activity, is unceasing creation’, the human mind in its spatial, extensive action, is essentialist and structuralist in tendency, seeking out ‘that which defies change, the definable quality, the form of essence, the end’.17 Nevertheless, becoming, which is intensive in quality, undermines the certainties we seek as it ‘shocks the habits of thought and fits ill into the moulds of language’.18 Universal duration, from his vitalist perspective on evolution, means ‘invention, the creation of forms, the continual elaboration of the absolutely new’.19 Becoming is durational in its ‘continuity of change, preservation of the past in the present’.20 Via its becomings, the individual body is re-absorbed in the universal interaction of matter. Deleuze and Guattari develop these insights in their own take on becoming as the continual process of movement and flux. The term becoming, as both verb and noun, permeates their writings. Its overarching axiomatic role is clear, and they state that ‘we are not in the world, but we become with the world, we become by contemplating it. Everything is vision, becoming. We become universes. Becoming plant, animal, molecular, becoming zero’.21 Subject/object boundaries meld in molecular fusion to form new entities. If we open up to potential transformations, we experience other, more dynamic, ways of being in the world. Becoming is the movement of particles to form molecular assemblages in the mobilisation of desire. Fresh conjunctions carry the potential to become with other forms of matter. Becomings are imaged geographically as ‘orientations, directions, entries and exits’.22 The operations of becoming are located on the plane of immanence, the virtual locale of concept/image generation, which is characterised by perpetual motion, ‘replete with speed and slowness, floating affects’.23 When we perceive the larger operations of this plane, we also perceive the ‘imperceptible’ micro dynamics of the molecules that compose perception itself.

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Bergson and Deleuze use the image of unicellular creatures to describe becoming as desire in motion. The amoeba moves by putting out projectiles, or pseudopodia. These incorporate environmental matter, which then conjoins with the animalcule and continues to become as part of it. Starting from one’s current singularity, becoming enters a zone of proximity with another and extracts ‘particles between which one establishes the relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness that are closest to what one is becoming, and through which one becomes’.24 Becoming is not concerned with identification or formal relations, but with the dynamic movement of life between and through congruent singularities. The becomings of mutual desire involve a ‘nuptial’ process. These nuptials are distinct from straightforward exchanges, and are not driven by endgain. Becomings change both parties and are experienced differently by each. They do not imitate or assimilate, but partake ‘of a double capture, of non-parallel evolution, of nuptials between two reigns. Nuptials are always against nature.’25 Because of their anomalous openness, becomings challenge the ‘natural’ order, stimulating the creation of new assemblages. They are radical transformations with micro political as well as aesthetic potential. Molecularity underpins the make-up of all matter and enables us to make multiple, rhizomatic connections. We connect not just with other humans, but also with all forms of animate or inanimate matter. All becomings are molecular in nature, for ‘the animal, flower or stone one becomes are molecular collectivities, haecceities, not molar subjects, objects or forms that we know from the outside and recognise from experience, through science or by habit’.26 Becoming-animal is found in the mutations and hybrids of myth. Folktales of shape-shifting, as well as their modern horror film equivalents, suggest that the boundaries of humans and other life-forms are not fixed, but that molecular flows conjoin singularities: Man does not become wolf, or vampire, as if he changed molar species; the vampire and the werewolf are becomings of man, in other words, proximities between molecules in composition, relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness between emitted particles. Of course there are werewolves and vampires . . .27

Vampires, werewolves and other hybrids of horror fantasy are inspirational images of the human affinity with beasts, plants and minerals. This assertion is shaped by Bergson’s view of the fluidity of species identity, as ‘in nature, there is neither purely internal finality nor absolutely distinct individuality’.28 Bergson argues that the borderline between animal and vegetable is tenuously drawn, for animal consciousness and mobility can be awakened in the plant and the animal can vegetate.29 Both versions of the sci-fi horror films The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, with

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its human/plant becomings, as well as The Day of the Triffids, with its carnivorous mobile plants, embody this affinity. We may connect with other singularities via our common organic processes and flow speeds. Rather than losing our specificity, or being swamped by melding, we expand to take in the anomalous, like the animalcule prototypes of the becoming inherent in life. Philosophically, this mobilises free will rather than predestination. Bergson stresses that we cannot predetermine the organic world’s evolution, but rather ‘the spontaneity of life is manifested by a continual creation of new forms succeeding others’.30 As well as opening up unforeseen possibilities, becoming gives us a sense of solidarity with, and respect for, all forms of life. As the developmental stages of the human foetus suggestively figure, we share common characteristics with our animal and reptile forebears and, thus, each individual remains ‘united with the totality of living beings by invisible bonds’.31 It is these bonds that the horror film’s becomings serve to make literally visible. In Cat People, we are given a potent visible image of them. Irena Dubrovna, a Serbian émigré artist, has a strong rapport with the feline species that manifests itself in becoming-cat.

Becoming-Indeterminate: Cat People I have no peace, for they are in me. (Irena)

Deleuze locates the work of Tourneur in his movement-image typology of ‘lyrical abstraction’. Films of this category are motivated by the binary dynamic of light and shade and its choice between virtual and actual. In them ‘the act of the spirit is not a struggle but an alternative, a fundamental: Either . . . or’.32 The becoming-panther in the swimming pool scene from Cat People exemplifies this assemblage of alternatives. Here, ‘the attack is only seen on the shadows of a white wall; is it the woman who has become a leopard (virtual conjunction) or merely the leopard [sic] which has escaped (real connection)?’33 The supernatural and the rational explanation are equal possibilities in this world. Tourneur’s film alternates between an regressive atavism impelled by occult forces and psycho-sexual disturbance. The dual woman/panther nature of Irena is clearly amenable to the diagnosis of schizophrenia, and is actually subjected to it in the narrative. Here, however, I am considering her animal becoming. As we saw, Bergson asserts that each particular manifestation of life contains characteristics of most other life forms, in ‘a rudimentary state – either latent or potential’, but ‘the difference is in the proportions’.34 As well as exploring human ambivalence towards the feline

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species, the cat people express a now dormant path of bifurcation in human/animal evolutionary development. We are all potential cat people. The horror is dependent on the sharply demarcated lines drawn between the animal kingdom and ourselves. If this boundary were lifted, horror might be transformed. French actress Simone Simon is ideally cast as the cat-woman Irena, with her feline physiognomy and ‘foreign’ accent. She has large, hypnotic eyes, a snub nose and a broad smile. Her sinuous movements and style of dress enhance this cat impression. In the first shot of her, wearing a cat brooch, she sketches a panther in a cage at the zoo. She later slips on a black fur coat and ‘becomes cat’, even down to the ribbon bow in her hair, which suggests pointed ears. The feline style is adopted even more overtly by the other Serbian cat-woman who recognises her ‘sister’ during the wedding party. The film’s diagrammatic component of cat permeates the décor of Irena’s apartment. A large panther motif is painted on the blinds. She even has a claw-footed bathtub. The lyrical abstractionist style of Tourneur uses lighting emphatically to invoke a numinous atmosphere from the start, where the titles appear against the silhouetted statue of the mounted king with a cruciform sword, in the act of stabbing a panther. This statue is prominently displayed in Irena’s lounge. The narrative provides a supernatural motivation for events in the Serbian tale recounted by Irena. Marmeluke witches who worshipped Satan adopted the form of large black cats to pursue their evil ends until most of them were slain by the sword of the Christian King John. By implication, she is of the blood of the survivors. The instinctual responses of animals validate Irena’s own cat nature. Her partner, Oliver, a wholesome all-American naval engineer, tries to domesticate her with a gift of a toy-like Siamese kitten, but she terrifies it and ingenuously explains that ‘cats just don’t like me’. The creatures in the pet shop intuitively sense her predatory nature. Ironically, Oliver replaces a cat with its mythical prey, a canary, which she playfully squeezes to death. Her human side apparently returns as she ‘buries’ the bird in a little box. More characteristically, however, she throws this into a panther’s cage, possibly as a bribe to compel it to do her bidding. The cat cowers back in acknowledgement of her superior force. The rapport between Irena and the panthers increases as her range of passions develops. As she becomes jealous, we see them pacing their cages in anticipation of an impending attack. Her intimacy with Oliver sparks off her becoming-cat. Without inhibition, she lays her head in his lap by the fire during their brief courtship. After a hasty marriage, she becomes increasingly cat-like, but withdraws this physical contact. Refusing to let her husband into her room, she slides

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down beside the closed door and scratches at the lintel in a clawing motion before rubbing her face against the wood. Oliver takes a psychological perspective on these marital troubles as ‘all in the mind’ and suggests that his wife visits the ‘best analyst’, Dr Judd. In an attempt to find the reason behind her obsession, and penetrate her ego defences, the lecherous psychiatrist puts Irena into a hypnotic trance. In an Expressionistic shot, her face appears like a floating mask against a black matte ground as she regresses into apparent fantasy. Mistakenly taking her account of actuality as symbolic, the analyst seeks answers in her early childhood. Irena’s own old-world view, however, asserts the occult reality of ‘something evil’ within her. Jealous of Oliver’s intimacy with his workmate, Alice, Irena becomes cat more overtly. She slinks after Alice, hiding in the shifting patches of shadow in the street. In a subtly uncanny sequence, the dappled and deceptive lighting, the rough texture of the wall and the shadows of wind-blown leaves create a sinister atmosphere of threat. This hovers on the boundary between natural and supernatural. The camera shows the two women walking, then cuts to close-ups of their more rapidly moving feet as they hurry along. Their figures are back-lit and only dimly visible. Gradually, Irena’s footprints become paw-marks and the pace speeds to a run. Alice catches the bus just in time to elude her growling, predatory pursuer. For Deleuze, the use of shadow in lyrical abstraction functions to ‘express an alternative between the state of things itself and the possibility, the virtuality, which goes beyond it’.35 Deleuze locates the operations of the immaterial, virtual level of ‘spirit’ in this style. Here, this appears as a fleetingly glimpsed supernatural dimension. As Irena follows Alice, alternating between woman and cat, we are uncertain which form she will take at any given moment. This alternation exacerbates our fear and moral confusion, and opens up our own animal possibilities. The horror of Irena’s nature from a human perspective increases when a flock of dead and wounded sheep is found at the zoo. A line of bloody paw-prints tracking away from the carcases reverts to human footprints. After this explosion of violence, Irena experiences a dream vision of her animal origins. Tourneur mixes cartoon animations and special effects photography to evoke a supernatural quality. Black panthers move through concentric ripples of light. A male authority figure (a condensed composite of King John and Dr Judd), spears them on his long sword, which becomes a key. As well as symbolising the Freudian quest to unlock the unconscious, this key suggests the idea of her freeing the panther from its cage. The subsequent scene at the museum also subtly underlines the supernatural theme of becoming-cat. Irena is dressed in black whilst

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Oliver and Alice are united against her in pale grey, and leave her behind. The couple draw close to the camera until Irena disappears, to be overlaid by an Egyptian figure of the cat goddess, Bast. Irena trails Alice to the swimming pool, where the receptionist’s small black cat runs off in instinctive fear sensed even before she enters. As the camera passes though the deep shadow of the changing rooms, the banisters cast shadows that recall the bars of a cage. Terrified by an unseen presence and the sound of growling and snarling, Alice instinctively flings herself into the water. Eerie reflected ripples of light on the ceiling recall Irena’s dream of transformation. Irena’s alternation between the forms of woman and cat is rapid and uncertain. Sadistically, if human – or playfully, if cat – Irena relishes Alice’s terror, leaving her bathrobe torn to shreds as a warning. Oliver confesses his love for Alice, and Irena claws at the back of the couch in rage. Dr Judd threatens to have her ‘put away for observation’ if she does not submit to him, and the possibility that she could be treated as insane and institutionalised increases. The panther infiltrates the engineering design office, a dark room of shadows and geometric forms where Oliver and Alice are working late. A T-square on the wall does double duty as an anti-occult amalgam of scientific measurement and a crucifix, stopping the force of Irena/panther about to spring. Following Irena’s trail of heavy perfume (civet?) through the open door of the office, they leave through the circular swing doors of the building, the streets are shrouded in a thick fog, a manifestation of Irena’s mystery. As Irena becomes erotically aroused by Judd’s kisses, her eyes glisten with sensuality. Her arousal leads to becoming-cat and she attacks him. As foreseen in her dream, he unsheathes his Freudian/phallic swordstick, grappling in silhouette with a panther shape. Wounded, Irena creeps out, lifting up her hand like a damaged paw, leaving his dead body behind. In the moon-like glow of a globe lamp, she seeks the sympathy of her fellow feline in the zoo. At first terrified, the beast senses her weakness and attacks her. Leaping over the wall, it leaves ‘both parts’ of Irena dead, having been killed twice by both of her part-species as an unnatural anomaly. Her body is an amorphous feline/human shape that Tourneur’s subtlety refrains from revealing in close-up and ‘leaves to our imagination’. Deleuze suggests that Tourneur’s lyrical abstraction produces a new kind of film that breaks with the neo-Gothic tradition. His ‘pale and luminous spaces, his nights against a light background’, leave with us a sense of indetermination.36 This uncertainty exceeds narrative closure and continues to alternate, working its potential through our mind/body. The incorporated mind forms a multiplicity with existing social and

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cultural assemblages. As well as these ideological and practical connections, and their politics of representation, there remains the biological body and its processes of affective perception, sifting and assimilation. Although some of these cognitive processes are physically ‘hard-wired’ into the brain and neuronal networks, there is much we can do to modify and extend the formation of concepts and their operations in thought. In order to embrace the process of becoming, a new map of the body is needed. One direction in which this new map might extend is the destabilisation of ‘binary machines’ like masculine and feminine. Molecular lines of flight produce new, more amorphous forms of sexuality. They ‘make fluxes of deterritorialization shoot between the segments, fluxes which no longer belong to one or the other, but which constitute an asymmetrical becoming of the two, molecular sexuality, which is no longer that of a man or of a woman’.37 Having looked at a woman becoming-cat, I will now examine Deleuze’s contentious use of becoming-woman as a prototype for other becomings.

Becoming-Woman all becomings are already molecular. This is because becoming is not to imitate or identify with something or someone.38 (Deleuze and Guattari)

Deleuze’s ‘becoming-woman’ appears to recycle the essentialist binaries a political feminism has worked to explode. In A Thousand Plateaus, for example, the molecular woman is compared to springs and flows and located in the context of becoming-animal and becoming-girl.39 Deleuze, however, attempts to justify his image cluster here. He denies that he wishes to connote otherness by connecting ‘woman’ with natural fluxes, because ‘nature, matter, affection and passion are not here perceived as static or negative terms, but flowing and relational, changing and creative’.40 Although provocation is intentional in Deleuze’s term, he uses becoming-woman and becoming-girl not as essentialist labels, but as an inspirational model for all becomings, including that of feminism itself. He insists, ingenuously, that his usage of ‘woman’ is free from traditional associations of the word as image or concept, but is ‘part of a set of relations in process and assemblage’.41 He presumes to challenge what he conceives of as ‘molar’ feminist orthodoxy when he states that ‘there is a woman-becoming which is not the same as woman, their past and their future, and it is essential that woman enter this becoming to get out of their past and their future, their history’.42 ‘Molar’ woman is limited by biology and subjectivity. Deleuze and Guattari write that ‘becoming-woman’ does

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not concern men’s imitation of molar woman, but is a matter of ‘emitting particles that enter the relation of movement and rest, or the zone of proximity, of a micro-femininity, in other words, that produces in us a molecular woman’.43 Even more contentiously, everyone, including the molar woman, is invited to ‘become-girl’. Because the girl must become the ‘molar’ woman she is not yet, ‘becoming-girl’ is used as an ultimate example of becoming, in her vibrant fluidity. For Claire Colebrook, ‘becoming-girl’ is the ‘becoming of becoming’ in its ‘radical relation to man: not as his other or opposite (woman) but as the very becoming of man’s other’.44 She underlines the affinity of Deleuzian theory and feminism. Deleuze’s corpus, like feminism itself, uses theory as a challenge to praxis. Both men and women can become woman – and girl – although differently. Becoming-woman is molecular, non-genitalised and minoritarian. It intends to fragment, not reinforce, essentialist gender binaries. For Elizabeth Grosz, it means ‘going beyond identity and subjectivity, fragmenting and freeing up lines of flight, “liberating” a thousand tiny sexes that identity subsumes under the One’.45 Verena Conley likewise draws feminist inspiration from Deleuze. She underlines his anti-Oedipal commonality with French feminist theorist Hélène Cixous. They each emphasise multiplicities and ‘becoming, intensity, production of positive desire, the absence of a logic of meaning’.46 Cultural feminists have accused both Deleuze and Cixous of ahistorical essentialism. It is, however, possible to combine their insights with praxis-based feminist critique. Camilla Griggers problematises the anomalous social status of women by adding Foucauldian to Deleuzian concepts to characterise woman as a late capitalist ‘abstract-machine’ produced by ‘optical and electronic media, psychopharmacology, the war machine, the chemical industry, plastics technology, bioscience’.47 Rather than allowing the feminist project to be stymied by extant structures, she deploys becoming-woman to explore the potential for change via pragmatic molecular micro politics. Griggers reads Ripley of the Alien series as a fictionalised emblem of actual female becomings in current American society, ‘a hyperthymic overachiever, technologically loaded with electronic-prosthetic memory, neurochemicalprosthetic personality, and media-prosthetic desires’.48 Griggers’ work effectively combines political critique, textual analysis and philosophical insight. At this point, we will look at a sequence from the fourth film, Alien Resurrection to explore the contradictory mechanics of both becoming, and becoming-woman, in a horror/sci-fi context.

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Sharing Species: Alien Resurrection Alien Resurrection operates a complex assemblage of woman becomingmonster in which the monster also becomes-human. Successful becomings depend on a mutual congruence by which each party retains elements of specificity. Singularities should not be constrained by their becomingother, and should be free to make any number of subsequent connections. The film conveys the horrors of a becoming enforced by genetic engineering as the tool of the military–industrial complex. It predicts a future of capitalist exploitation unbounded by earthly or bodily limits. As in Cronenberg, the film’s becomings are at a cellular, genetically engineered level, and, like the fusion in The Fly, they are impelled by science. In Jeunet’s film, the scientists serve their employers, United Systems Military, unquestioningly. Surrendering ethical considerations, their longterm project had cloned cells from the fully human Ripley (at the end of Alien3 she kills herself to avoid hosting an embryonic alien). Their inhumane experiments have already engineered several abortive hybrids by mixing two genetic strands, alien and Ripley. Griggers discusses the gendered operative field of the biomedical assemblage in its ‘artificial insemination, test-tube fertilization, surrogate mothering, cryostorage of fertilized ova, or cross-uterine egg-transplants’.49 As a result of this ‘biomedical channelling of the machinic phylum’ in reproductive technology, the border between life and death is destabilised.50 In Alien Resurrection, the biomedical assemblage has produced abortive hybrids plus aliens with some of the original Ripley’s human genetic elements. One successful Ripley clone survives with alien genes. Her body has been used to gestate and birth the mother of the baby alien/human hybrid. Ripley’s awareness that she is the baby’s ‘grandmother’ produces ethical dilemmas. The scientists are themselves the most monstrous beings on the ship, despite their fully human genetic status. Like the mad scientist of Gothic, they are condemned for playing God. Assemblages should be consensual. Here, they have been enforced, and the existential rights of the singularities denied, causing terrible suffering. The film locates emotional depth with the semi-, rather than the fully, human characters. In a harrowing scene, Ripley discovers her cloned ‘sisters’, a series of impossible hybrids. The one surviving clone used for the enforced breeding of an alien demands the right to die and Ripley mercifully torches her. Another scientifically engineered hybrid, the android, Call, develops emotional complexity and an uneasy friendship with Ripley. The ethos of fluid identity has been read by Catherine Constable, who

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sets up Ripley as the intersection point for several life-systems.51 She draws on Christine Battersby’s work with Irigaray’s model of permeable feminine boundaries. This valorises patterns of flow in which the body itself ‘becomes a permeable structure, a volume without contours, whose physical fluidity sustains and supports the possibilities of intimate embraces with others’.52 In the film’s opening scene, Constable notes how Ripley, her young protégée, Newt, and the alien queen intersect in the morphing figure trapped in a glass tube. She uses birth as a paradigm for re-thinking identity formation. Creed and Constable both read the Alien films from maternal perspectives based on the feminist psychoanalysis of Kristeva and Irigaray, but I want to move on from this approach. Rather than taking up the intensively worked theme again, I will look at other forms of melding in the Deleuzian fusion of congruent singularities. The Ripley of Alien Resurrection is no longer constrained by ‘woman’ as a figure of gender difference, but she signals species difference. She is neither fully human nor fully alien, but shares characteristics of both. When the ship finally lands on Earth, she is left with potential for future becomings (and we are set up for another sequel). Our clear-cut identification with Ripley as hero in the previous films is undermined. We are no longer sure of her nature, her powers or her agenda. This also problematises a simple ‘positive stereotype’ reading. Alien Resurrection conveys a strong mutual desire for reconnection between the artificially spliced blocs, alien and Ripley, drawing them irrevocably together. This is foregrounded in a sequence where Ripley is taken to witness her ‘child’, the alien queen, birth her own offspring and Ripley’s ‘grandchild’.

Ripley and her Relatives Ripley is both more than and other than human. By her genetic meld with aliens, she has gained superhuman strength and corrosive blood. Her senses are preternaturally acute. On the run with the pirate gang, she bends on all fours and snuffs the air like a beast. As she hears an alien’s approach, the camera takes a 360-degree turn that emphasises her fluid movements and beast-like body language. One of the alien drones hatched from the queen’s eggs opens the grating. Ripley falls through onto its body below. In long-shot, she wallows with luxuriant abandon in a sea of tentacles. These resemble writhing rats’ tails of dark brown glistening wetness, with an abject, excremental aspect. She is briefly engulfed as the mass pulses in and out, then emerges to spread her limbs with easy confidence. Without fear, she sinks back into it by folding up her arms with a rhythm and speed corresponding to those of the pulsing mass itself.

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My position as a viewer is partly informed by identification with Ripley built up earlier in the series. My imaginative affinity is complicated by her ready embrace of abjection here. Even though parallels are drawn earlier between Ripley and the aliens in Alien, Aliens and Alien3, the inevitable confrontations and showdowns depend on a dynamic of polarity. In this film, the aliens are humanised and Ripley becomes more overtly alien herself as the species meld on several levels. Constable reads the subsequent embrace as sexual intercourse because Ripley lies beneath the male creature, but I question her psycho-sexual interpretation because the male alien is a drone in service of the queen as well as being Ripley’s own cloned offspring. The embrace in which the alien carries Ripley to the queen is both repellent and beautiful. Its special quality is enhanced by strobe-lighting and stirring incidental music, with drum rolls and horns in a lyrical melody. These effects combine with slow editing rhythms to enhance a sense of timelessness as the two beings embrace. Time is extended by three similar long-held compositions, in which Ripley lies beneath the alien drone who cradles and caresses her. This act is an epiphany of species recognition and melding, or familial bonding. Medium close-ups, which serve to increase our intimate engagement, show Ripley as distinctly human. Her facial expression is blissful and serene. The alien, however, has a blunt, eyeless head, with a protuberance resembling an insect’s proboscis. Because we do not see his whole body, we are unsure of his exact size, shape or form. Whatever he looks like, Ripley is at home in the alien milieu and is happy to meld with a ‘monster’ in an embrace that involves the viewer. After witnessing the birth, Ripley lies down wet, slimy and relaxed. She appears to have undergone a new form of birthing herself, which acknowledges her own amorphous nature. In a parallel process, the alien baby is becoming-human. Rather than the bestial/insectoid appearance of the queen, the young alien has a familiarly humanoid skull, torso, teeth and deep blue eyes. It is this human coding that will further complicate our feelings when Ripley destroys the infant for the sake of human survival in the ‘happy ending’ imposed by the generic template. Bergson can help us to illuminate this anomalous interface and read it differently. He asserts that nature excludes both internal finality and distinct individuality. His belief in the participation of every form of life in the ‘primitive impulse’ of the whole, leads him to posit that a common element of the whole is evident in the parts via the identical organs of different organisms. In the film, genetic engineering exaggerates and deforms a naturally occurring evolutionary process. According to Bergson, there is a heredity of deviation impelled by changes in germ plasm via

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deviant organisms. The generated organism will deviate from the normal type as much as the generating organism, but it will do so distinctively. He also identifies ‘the formation of identical complex mechanisms on independent lines of evolution’.53 Ripley and the aliens are genetically bonded, but have different forms and functions adapted to their different needs. Genetic congeniality undermines the application of abjection theory to the alien/Ripley dichotomy. Unlike Creed’s negative Kristevan reading, a Deleuze/Bergsonian response opens up a more radical possibility. It suggests that this intimacy between anomalous life-forms need not constrain the viewer to horrified repulsion, but initiates more congruent becomings. The scene is Deleuzian in several ways. First, the ‘speeds and slownesses’ of different life-forms are emphasised. The alien moves at a different pace and in a different duration to the human, but Ripley co-ordinates her movements with his, assisting their fusion. Unusual in the context of mainstream Hollywood, the sequence is wordless, with silent, non-verbal communication and intensive rapport instead. This segment, stylistically distinct from the body of the film, suggests the operation of what Deleuze calls ‘opsigns’ and ‘sonsigns’. These are ‘pure optical and/or sound situations’ that break from the narrative drive of the movement/action image to produce a ‘moment of pure contemplation’ for the spectator.54 This contemplation suspends the narrative flow and enables speculative thought. If we interrogate the generic closure, Alien Resurrection illustrates the possibility of further Deleuzian becoming in horror/sci-fi. The film complicates the polarised dynamic of norms and their transgression via the figural of genetic engineering and molecular mutation. At this point, I want to raise some questions about the future potential of horror/dark fantasy film if it were to continue the lines of flight mapped out by Alien Resurrection. The first concerns issues of gender and representation. The character of Ripley has long been celebrated as the first feminist hero in a predominantly masculinist genre. If she has become more of an alien than a human woman, the film could be adopting a postfeminist position, with implications for the oppositional macro politics of representation. Ripley does, however, remain an inspirational figure for Deleuzian becoming-woman. She had already adapted to becoming-alien and is ready for further transformations. A further question concerns the future development of the affective dynamics of horror. According to Kristevan abjection, the designated ‘other’ functions to uphold, whilst contesting, human ethical and cultural norms. The monster terrifies us with the threat of subjective dissolution by infectious contact, in tandem with an ambivalent desire to meld with it. Narrative closure prefers the monster’s suppression and the reinstatement

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of generic norms. Although the alien infant is destroyed, our admiration for Ripley’s resolve is mixed with outrage that she has killed her own grandchild. Thus some of the horror and abjection adheres to the hero herself. If the monster and the human hero hybridise, the feelings usually roused by horror (fear, disgust, desire) are not mobilised in the same way. The horrific impact of the monster partly depends on its coding as anomalous, against nature in some sense. Becomings themselves are traditionally positioned as the source of horror. For Deleuze, however, rather than the horror of an abject, polarised other, both beauty and terror are located in the transformative condition. The process of becoming is experienced and effected by the body-withoutorgans. Contrary to its literal meaning, the term has little connection with the eviscerated corpse of the serial-killer movie. This body may not be, and never have been, a Deleuzian body-without-organs.

The Bodies-Without-Organs of Horror it is through the body (and no longer through the intermediary of the body) that cinema forms an alliance with spirit, with thought.55 (Deleuze) what we need to consider is not fundamentally organs without bodies, or the fragmented body, it is the body-without-organs, animated by various intensive movements.56 (Deleuze and Guattari)

The body-without-organs originates in the work of Antonin Artaud, also a shaping presence behind schizoanalysis and becoming. Artaud blames a repressive deity for alienating us from our true, anarchic body-withoutorgans and replacing it by an ‘organised’ body on which God can exercise His judgement. This is opposed to our fully human existence as seen in a series of contrasts, ‘cruelty versus infinite torture, sleep or intoxication versus the dream, vitality versus organization, the will to power versus a will to dominate, combat versus war’.57 The body-without-organs is ‘an affective, intensive, anarchist body that consists solely of poles, zones, thresholds and gradients. It is traversed by a powerful, nonorganic vitality’.58 Although humanity is focal, the body-without-organs does not have to be human. Deleuze and Guattari re-map the body’s terrain. Instead of a fixed, biological entity, the body-without-organs is a set of speeds and affects conceived in relation to other entities. This amoeba-like body is open to surrounding matter excluded by the psychoanalytic ego-defences. The body-without-organs is experienced as an affective aggregate that dissolves individual identity, and ‘passes entirely into the virtual chaosmos of included disjunctions’.59 Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘body’ is a shifting com-

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posite, which may be cultural, social, technological, molecular or organic. By extending the term, they denaturalise the biological body and seek parity for all forms of body. As well as having distinct particularities, all bodies are interconnected with each other at an atomic level as modified forms of one fluid substance. Male and female bodies-without-organs, for example, have mutated beyond fixed gender oppositions. They can potentially connect with other bodies to form new assemblages. The body-without-organs is open to multiple becomings-other. It is no longer constrained by the medical profession’s layout and its consequent mental and social topography. To meld with an initial body-withoutorgans, the second singularity must also be open-ended and will itself undergo a comparable transformation. In Melville’s Moby-Dick, Ahab and the whale incorporate each other as well as extending to include further components. Ahab becomes-whale, whereas the whale becomes a force of sheer whiteness. Moby-Dick has already become Ahab in a more literal sense. As well as the mutual obsession of the whale and the man as they seek revenge on each other, the molecules of Ahab’s severed leg become the whale’s own cells through the digestive processes. These mutual becomings lead to the formation of new, composite bodies-withoutorgans, each a potential ‘field for the production of the process of desire’.60 The main characteristics of the body-without-organs are, Kennedy suggests, ‘openness, change, mutability, fluidity, feedback, complexity’.61 As well as organic bodies, there are technological and cultural bodies. Film is an assemblage of bodies-without-organs, as apparatus, text and spectator intermesh, intersecting physiology and psychology with technology. An immanent affective experience is produced that, at its most powerful, accesses philosophical, metaphysical dimensions. The material assemblage of bodies enables awareness of space, movement and duration. Deleuze writes that ‘it is through the body (and no longer through the intermediary of the body) that cinema forms its alliance with spirit, with thought’.62 The cinematic body-without-organs enables lines of flight between aesthetic, perceptual and metaphysical, bodies. We are, of course, applying the becomings of the body-without-organs profanely in our consideration of the bodily transmutations of horror. The Fly, which opened this chapter, may be analysed from a variety of film theoretical perspectives. A gender- (and genre-) informed reading focuses on the lust and brutality released in Brundle-as-science-nerd who fuses with an insect associated with lechery and dirt. Brundle is a mad scientist unworthy of the powers he wields. Like others of his ilk, he is punished for hubristic meddling with the laws of nature. Psychoanalytically speaking, the amalgam Brundle/Fly is freed from human repression. In

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his newly born insectoid machismo, he breaks an opponent’s arm in wrestling and drags a woman back to his lab for casual sex. In a sense, the monster is already within the man, and finally able to show his face. If we shift focus from these negative readings, both Brundle/fly’s agenda and the film’s ending may be interpreted differently. Leaving human constraints behind, he revels in the becomings of his new formation, and his evolutionary drives seek further development of the hybrid species. Brundle/Fly ostensibly wants his lover, Veronica, to fuse with him to dilute his fly genes, but further hybridisation and the perpetuation of the new species could occur if they mate successfully (visualised as a monstrous maggot in her birth dream). His destruction by a ‘normal’ male rival for Veronica (using Brundle’s own teleporter) removes the threat he posed to biological security. Brundle/Fly challenges both subjective autonomy and species purity. He adapts to his new body, with hardly any trace of human organs, and becomes-fly. This Deleuzian slant on becoming undermines essentialist norms. It is applicable to other films that foreground the non-organic becoming of hybrid bodies, such as Cronenberg’s Videodrome.

Uncontrollable Flesh: Videodrome the visions became flesh, uncontrollable flesh. (Brian O’Blivion)

In Cronenberg’s presentation of what he calls ‘the new flesh’ in Videodrome, software and hardware meld to form disturbing new entities that undermine boundaries between inside and out. The changing, mutating flesh is foregrounded as objects become flesh and flesh becomes machine. Like the spread of a disease or malignant growth, the transformations take place on a molecular level and re-map the shifting organic layout of a body without fixed organs. Brain cells irradiated by the neurolinguistic programming device encoded in the Videodrome cassette speed up these extreme organic transformations. The narrative likelihood that they are hallucinations does not reduce their affective force. Videodrome exemplifies Cronenberg’s assemblage of ideological critique and re-mapping of the body’s corporeality. Foucault’s vision of a body colonised and penetrated by cultural and political forces, such as communication technologies, may be mapped onto Cronenberg’s themes.63 The corporeal bodies of characters are flesh in process as the human undergoes biotechnological modifications. The spectator’s embodied mind also experiences virtual becomings during the processual experience of incorporation in the text. As we meld with the film’s own corporeal melding, a new body-without-organs is born.

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The Videodrome cassette exhibits a variant type of life, with organic attributes. The cassette case palpitates, throbs and bends itself into breastlike bulges. At the same time, porn film distributor Max Renn becomes machinic. Barry Convex, the programme’s controller, penetrates Max in a male/male technological rape. Convex makes Max ‘open up’ to the power of Videodrome by thrusting the cassette into a vagina-like orifice that opens in Max’s taut, ‘masculine’ torso. To return to issues of gendered spectatorship, I confess particular pleasure (Sadeian?) at the spectacle of this unmanned macho man, whose business involved the exposure of female flesh in the pornographic video market. The overwhelming greyness of the mise-en-scène – grey suit, grey flesh, grey wound – is metallic and machinelike, but also cold, with the coldness and cruelty of the masochistic relation. The perverse penetration is redolent with Freudian potential, but moves beyond the merely sexual. The opening also functions as the insertion slot in a video player, as Max’s erotic imagination becomes technologised flesh. In an earlier scene, Max scratches at an itching scar and penetrates the lips of his stomach wound with a gun, which is then swallowed up. A psychosexual reading might suggest narcissistic male masturbation. After the cassette penetration, he opens his own gut to retrieve the gun from the slit, which opens and closes of its own accord. This process enacts on a corporeal level the mental intrusions of the Videodrome cassette’s data radiation. The sequence is presented by minimalist camerawork, in only two shots, one of which is a close-up of Max’s outraged, yet oddly gratified, facial expression. Such restraint enables the focus on special effects themselves. The flesh-gun is rendered in extreme close-up, whereas the gash is a more ‘contextualised’ medium close-up. Organs are displaced, relocated and replaced by machinic substitutes, here, the phallic gun that Max eventually turns against himself. The organic machine drips white, ejaculate-like fluid, suggesting a replacement for, or prosthetic extension of, Max’s now unused penis. For a Freudian, the phallic gun reassuringly emerges from inside Max’s now ‘feminised’ body. From my Deleuzian angle, psychoanalysis stymies the radical undermining of two fixed gender identities here in its ‘thousand sexes, which are so many uncontrollable becomings’.64 The molecular plasticity of reality is expressed in a painfully tactile sequence. The gun grows roots into the flesh of Max’s hand with metallic flexes like an organic, parasitic, life-form. This amorphous, not-entirelygun performs a Bergsonian species meld. It evokes plants by its root-like habit, but also the tentacles of a sea creature, insect legs, or rats’ tails. Here, the metal of the machine has been added to the organic Bergsonian amalgam. The amorphous gun pierces Max at a cellular level, rooting itself

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under his skin so that his human fingers become part of its mechanism via an orifice in his wrist. Max is becoming a more complex and fully alive person through the loss of subjective wholeness when his body incorporates extraneous matter. He has already undergone some experiential re-mapping of his internalised body experience in his sado-masochistic relations with his lover, Nicki, which alter his mental and emotional geographies and open him up. He exceeds her masochism by his own permeable shifting, becoming-woman. On one level, Max has ‘become’ Nicki, but he has also opened up a ‘thousand tiny sexes’ in himself. His permeability seeps through the boundaries of the human body as he melds with metal, plastic and other non-organic substances. The film illustrates Deleuze’s becoming-woman by Max’s openness to his own mutation. This liberatory interpretation is undercut by the film’s imposition of other rigid boundaries. Cronenberg renders the body ‘without organs’ in any clearly defined sense by moving the usual positions of genitalia and other organs and mixing flesh with objects. The body is ungendered and rendered amorphous by the invasion of machine parts that act as prosthetic extensions of existing corporeal functions. Prostheses might extend the body’s machinic capabilities, but the horror genre presents the process as invasion and colonisation. According to psychoanalysis, fantasies of egocentric bodily wholeness and motor control are dependent on the expulsion and abjection of anomalous elements as a prophylactic against psychic disintegration. Despite the film’s innovations, horror’s generic norms reassert themselves. Cronenberg, as a director of body horror films, is not exactly celebratory of these transformations. He presents the melding of technology and flesh as an outrageous violation rather than a promising new interface. Max’s becomings are enforced in a sinister plot to manipulate reality by warping minds. Regardless of his developing psychological and emotional complexity, he sinks into despair and kills himself. Max is destroyed by his very openness to becoming. Shaviro’s reading of Cronenberg argues that biotechnology conveys a troublingly plastic ambiguity opposed to the ideological address of dominant cinema.65 Spectatorial objectivity is replaced by intensive affect induced by dense and opaque close-ups of the transmuting body in torment.66 The corporeal experiences of the anxious Cronenberg spectator include ‘a churning of the stomach, a throbbing of the arteries, a tension distending the skull, a series of stresses and shocks running the entire length of the body. Fear is not susceptible to phenomenological analysis, for it marks the emptying out of subjectivity and of time’.67 Shaviro further points out the affect of non-linear, irrational plot developments

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that ‘explode in multiple, incompatible directions, following the delirious, paranoid logic of proliferating cancer cells, or of interfaces between biology and technology run amok.’68 By means of this dispersed narrative, Cronenberg disrupts our formal sense of spatio-temporal linearity. The film also interrogates the televisual via the cinematic. Media guru O’Blivion states that the television screen is ‘the retina of the mind’s eye; therefore the television screen is part of the physical structure of the brain’. The electrode patterns we scan have the affective potential to transform our sense of the real and, as Shaviro notes, ‘the more images are flattened out and distanced from their representational sources, the more they are inscribed in our nerves, and flash across our synapses’.69 Video technology reaches directly into the unseen depths, stimulating the ganglia and the viscera, caressing and remoulding the interior volume of the body.70 Yet, as the cinematic experience of Videodrome itself demonstrates, cinematography, when in its designated milieu of the large screen auditorium, has even greater affective potency and ability to induce spectatorial becomings than television. Surprisingly, Deleuze does not mention Cronenberg’s work. The graphic nature of body horror might appear to block thought by its violent affects. Although bodily becomings are graphically displayed, Cronenberg’s films are dense with ideational content as well as physical shock effects. They incorporate political satire, cutting-edge scientific concepts and philosophical speculation in tandem with horror. Above all, I would argue that their affective extremity plunges the viewer into an intensive maelstrom that cracks molar frames. I would now like to test Deleuzian becoming on two more generically conventional, and less self-consciously cerebral, horror films. Both texts bombard the sensorium with special effects, particularly the haptically stimulated sense of touch. Each foregrounds the body-without-organs in a horribly literal way. Whereas Paul Verhoeven’s The Hollow Man is set in a contemporary scientific laboratory, Clive Barker’s Hellraiser works a modern body-horror variation on the old dark house of neo-Gothic.

Frank Pulls Himself Together: Hellraiser Hellraiser interrogates where the human élan vital resides. Without losing the disgust of its graphic body horror or the terror of its occult raising of Hell, the film may be read otherwise. It deconstructs both the conventional map of the body and the illusion of subjective wholeness, by default rather than deliberate intention. Bodies are displayed literally without organs, having had them violently displaced. This enforced removal of organs

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leads to the body’s becoming nothing but its own fragmented components. When the body puts itself back together again, organ by organ, it appears to be without a soul, and its becoming-embodied is impelled by inherent force of will. Yet the body it becomes is far from being a Deleuzian bodywithout-organs. Display of the violated body is, as Foucault reminds us, an integral part of torture.71 Virtually affective images of torture and its aftermath are central to the film. They are designed to haptically induce physical agony, and possibly masochistic pleasure, in the spectator. Sight and tactility are painfully stimulated. Hearing is likewise assaulted by sensations such as grating, high-pitched squeaks and threatening drumbeats, as well as being caressed by a melody on sweeping strings. The graphic excess of the torture scenes underlines the viewer’s own complicity in the masochistic contract as we agree to our virtual disintegration and the model of wholeness it depends upon. After the aural violence of the plain white-on-black title sequence, an elaborate inlaid box exchanges hands in an anonymous transaction. A jump cut leads us into a strongly affective sequence in which the decadent Frank performs an occult ritual. Shot from an angle above his head, he leans over the inlaid box in lotus pose. His glowing, warm-looking skin, slick with the sheen of sweat, is shown in close-up. The tactile smoothness of his naked flesh increases the visceral impact of its coming torture when demonic beings known as Cenobites materialise. Light itself becomes a force of violence as sharp beams slice through the walls, then metal hooks appear from nowhere, affixing themselves to his nipples, piercing the skin and dragging it down as his mouth opens wide in a cry of pain. The body’s largest organ, the skin, is torn away from the tissue beneath to leave it raw and exposed. A room within a dilapidated Victorian house is a torture chamber. Chains swing ominously. Hooks and spikes are stuck with shreds of skin, flesh and viscera. Dark, hard metal contrasts sharply with the oozing crimson of fragmented flesh. A set of elaborate torture implements is displayed, designed to contrive a lingering death with a conscious prolongation of suffering. One of the denizens of this realm appears, a cold blue, immaculately attired male Cenobite, with a pallid face and shaven head stuck with elaborate rows of pins. He scrabbles among discarded shreds of flesh. Parts of a human face with split, dismembered features lies on the floor, having been drawn out by chains and quartered. Its sense organs have been violently parted from each other, with the ears, eyes and mouth ripped into separate quarters. The Cenobite Pinhead wraps the features back together then closes the same inlaid box. The haptic affect of this makes us painfully aware of the fragility of our own facial features. Deleuze and

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Guattari’s study of faciality, which I detail in Chapter 3, reminds us how much we have misguidedly cathected onto our faces in the social and subjective construction of our identity. As well as the visual display and the haptic stimulation of touch, a ‘nasty’ smell is visually evoked as it emanates from decayed food, dried bodily fluids and other ominous stains on the furniture. In the kitchen, a glistening plate of heaving maggots and a cockroach crawling over rotten food and cigarette butts are discovered. Insistent images stimulate our virtual sense organs of taste and smell, repelling us as we fill in the absent smell virtually by visual and aural clues. An account of these affects in their juxtaposition with perverse sexuality could be made via Kristevan theory. While this accounts for the horror from a psychoanalytic perspective, my main focus here is not the way Hellraiser revels in abjection. Despite the film’s literal content, it mounts an insistent rejection of the Deleuzian bodywithout-organs, replacing it by its converse, a rigid body map on its own molar plane. Frank’s disembodied organs are determined to be reunited. The hand of his wholesome brother, Larry, gashed on a nail, drips blood onto the floorboards, which rapidly absorb it. The sound of a beating heart begins and we see organs without a body begin to self-generate. In a strongly visceral image, the blood magically gathers below the boards to form a dark red lung, or heart-like sac, which starts to palpitate. Beneath this amorphous organ, a glutinous organic ooze solidifies and glistens. In close-up, a repellent jelly-like substance forms on the boards where the blood seeped through. The floorboards shudder and split as vapour rises and two tentacle-like arms thrust themselves through a mélange of milky gore. The arms are followed by the semblance of a head, with glittering brain folds rapidly forming. Rats back off in terror at this manifestation, doubling its repulsive affect. A still subhuman body, whose organs had been dismantled by being ripped apart, is slowly re-forming itself with determination. Organ by decimated organ, the élan vital of human blood reanimates it to glistening life; and by a force of will as yet disembodied and without a brain, impels it back. The blood of others is needed to replenish all of this body’s blood lost at death and to return Frank to a semblance of wholeness. Magically, a set of ribs fans out and begins to inhale and exhale. The heart and intestines re-form and Frank’s incomplete body rises up out of the floor. Julia, Frank’s ex-lover, now married to Larry, enters the attic and experiences a sensory assault. She hears the unnaturally amplified beat of a heart and sees a white viscous mess on the floor, nibbled by rats, before she feels the sudden grip of a dark hand slick with blood round her ankle. She

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confronts the horror of Frank’s face without bone or skin, just pallid tendons holding it together. Despite this tenuous condition, the black holes of his dark, impenetrable eyes have already formed as his life-force returns. His identity is reinforced by his distinctive husky, hesitant voice. The validity of the couple’s sado/masochistic contract extends beyond the grave, and she helps to reanimate him. Blood from Julia’s first victim, beaten to death with a hammer, adds the bone structure to Frank’s body, as his cheekbones, mouth and headshape become recognisable. He remains transparent at this stage, revealing ribcage and arteries through insubstantial flesh. The sight of his fragility compels the viewer into sympathetic sensory awareness of our own corporeal nature, and our wish to maintain it intact. Julia is erotically aroused at the sight of Frank’s increased individuation, kissing his raw fingers and pushing them between her lips as she opens up the boundaries of her own body to his physical and psychic penetration. A flashback shows him hooked up like a joint of meat and torn into shreds, as his blood flows for the Cenobites’ pleasure. Despite the agony, he experienced the totality of extreme sensation, for which he gave himself over to the infernal powers. Frank manages to be a compelling ‘personality’, despite his skinless flesh and oozing tissue, being individuated by a deep, husky voice, opaque dark eyes and body movements. His face is wet and glutinous as though shreds of tissue have been torn off. The glistening of blood endows it with a visual vibrancy of its own. We recognise our own fragile organic body mapped onto his as he struggles to put it back together again, organ by organ. He lurks at the edge of the frame, as Julia leads in another victim, and drains his pulsing life-force to replenish his own. Frank’s total re-formation is stymied, despite his efforts. Without his stolen soul, he can only partially reconstruct himself. Parts of his body remain incomplete, such as the exposed bone behind his cranium. The Cenobites operate an infernal version of becoming. Their world, opened by the magic box, seeps through a fissure in the wall of our reality held together by shreds of membranous tissue. The Cenobite Hell comprises living organic matter without a fixed body. The Cenobites’ own bodies are pierced, gashed and amorphous as they conjoin with their surroundings. Their ‘engineer’, the guardian of the gateway, is a conglomerate of dismembered members. He is a hybrid of human baby, reptile and insect, with sharp fangs and goat-like eyes. For the Cenobites, matter is fluid and permeable. They send a blood transfusion back up a tube into the bottle, which bursts to spatter on the wall. The wall itself becomes organic, draining the human life-force. To threaten Kirsty, Larry’s daughter, who

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has summoned them up, the female Cenobite tears the hook of her prosthetic hand along the wall and revels in its spraying of blood. All living matter is a potential source of the blood the Cenobites crave. Their costumes resemble a second skin, made from purloined organs. Ribs and lungs are wrought into the fabric’s patterns of reversed and externalised organs. One Cenobite, the Chatterer, wears a human face as a mask, with a square hole of flesh surrounding its own gnashing teeth. Their clothes are organically connected with their bodies, and one of the creatures’ costumes enters the back of his head through a bloody wound. Pinhead and his fellows sport post-punk S/M vinyl, and extreme decorative scarification. Their costumes feature rents and gashes, and stripes of bloody red vinyl cover their nipples. The female has a vagina-like wound in her throat. They are becoming their victims by the possessive appropriation of stolen organs. Patterns on the Cenobites’ torsos resemble wounds, or stolen faces. The theme of stolen or altered faces in horror film implies that the personal ‘self ’ resides in the face and, more particularly, the eyes. Frank tacks the dead Larry’s face over his own flesh but leaves a bloody rim, appropriating his brother’s voice and facial expressions. When Kirsty claws at this horribly mocking face, she reveals how thinly Larry’s identity has been stuck over Frank’s incomplete body. The glaucous, pulsing mass of organs and tendons brought to light presents the skin as clothing, and the face as a mask. The stealing of faces is presented as the ultimate violation in this conservative film. In Deleuze’s work on faciality, the frightening face is not a dead end that repels us, but an energising force for positive change. For Richard Rushton, it ‘eulogises the world as a place where things happen, where things transform, connect, multiply, appear, and disappear’.72 Frank is recaptured for further organic decimation by the Cenobites. The empty spikes and hooks of the torture pillar spin round in anticipation as the chains swing into the camera and out at the viewer. This infernal machine is animated either by a life of its own, or one enhanced by the life stolen from its prey. Hooks pierce Frank’s flesh, to tear out that which was inside. Heart-rending yells and groans engage us aurally. An extreme close-up of Frank’s hand, with a bloody gash recalling Larry’s accident, is gripped over his other wrist in an attempt to dislodge the hooks. His whole body is spread-eagled on chains as his false face is torn off and we see ‘Larry’ die a second time. The torn face exposes the raw tissues beneath, which did not have a chance to re-form, making Frank’s whole body into a wound. Unexpectedly, he grins and licks his lips in an ironic embrace of his own agony before his head is ripped off and his body explodes. Hellraiser delights in displaying the parts of Frank’s horribly literal

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body-without-organs, bit by glutinous bit. He painstakingly sticks it back together again only to have it re-decimated. His trajectory serves to throw the Deleuzian body-without-organs into sharp relief by its complete reversal. More than anything, Frank wants his own, molar body back after its radical dispersion. His kind of body-without-organs and its unnatural lifein-death is the apex of reactionary horror rather than the aspiration of anarchic radicalism, and he will never attain the Deleuzian kind. Horror film obsessively returns to the trope of wholeness, its consequent graphic disintegration and its possible renewal. In Hellraiser, a basically religious paradigm aligns the sins of the flesh with physical torture in a Hell on earth and its parallel process of spiritual damnation. From neo-Gothic demons and their occult depredations of the body, I shift to a more recent scientific body-without-organs in The Hollow Man, a horror remake of H. G. Wells’s science-fiction novel, The Invisible Man.73

Becoming-Invisible: The Hollow Man Like Hellraiser, The Hollow Man’s horror depends on the body’s incomplete embodiment and fragmentation. It compels the audience’s awareness of the body’s internal structures and flows by externalising them in repellent but fascinating images. Horror is a molecular matter as science locates, isolates and tampers with the smallest particles of life. An infra-red lens is used at times to strip life down to its fundamental components and to seek out the élan vital, depicting the living creature solely as patches of heat. As in The Fly and Alien Resurrection, becoming is genetically engineered from the body’s internal micro-structure at its most intimate level. By exposing the body’s organic interior, the film insists that we are skeleton, venous system organ and muscle. It challenges our conventional body map of fixed organs and functions, replacing it with a flux of incomplete parts. Bodies-without-organs are made horrible. Our innermost bodily secrets are mercilessly displayed in a way that recalls religious paintings of scourged and flayed martyrs. This also deconstructs our fantasy of a subjective wholeness dependent on a unified map of the body’s terrain under the central control of the head. Our response of revulsion could be explained by Kristeva’s identification of abjection with the fluxes of the body’s interior made visible and tactile. By revealing what we normally conceal, the self ’s boundaries are challenged on both physical and psychic levels, and defensively shored up in consequence. Shifting away from the mechanics of abjection, the film’s bodies-without-organs are diffuse and fluctuating genetic assemblages. Although the biological mechanics of organs and musculature are

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exposed to view, the flow of life-blood as it courses through the veins is still presented as a mysterious vital force that eludes the absolutes of scientific epistemology. The titles resemble drifting cellular formations, like the DNA molecules that form the basic matter of the film’s research. The research team is employed on top-secret projects for US military espionage. These human scientists lack respect for the animal life-forms that they exploit. The miseen-scène sets up an expressive colour contrast between life and anti-life. Vivid reds and purples are the colour of exposed muscles, organs and blood. Cold, metallic greys predominate in the functionalist life-science lab. Cut off from a Bergsonian sense of holistic vital connections, the team research the mechanical operations of fragments at a micro level. A gorilla is chosen as their experimental object because of its genetic closeness to humans and its comparable layout of organs and venous system. The gorilla, injected with a serum, becomes invisible and, although he is no longer physically present, he remains fully functional, as a body without visible organs. After the gorilla has been injected with an antidote, he again becomes partially visible, via the blue serum flowing along his bloodstream to the major arteries and the heart. These are displayed by computer-generated images as the branches and stems of a plant-like formation, reminding us of our pre-animal evolutionary stages. When the antidote renders him fully visible, the gorilla bucks in agony, insistently alive and painfully sentient. This sequence questions the point at which the life-force becomes manifest in an organic sense, where this force resides and what are the ethics of experimenting with it. As the conductors of blood, organs and the venous system are depicted as the essential location of the life-force. The skeletal system, which is only exposed when subjects appear to be dead, is limited to a structural component that does not need to be present for the basic functioning of life. When Sebastian, the leader of the research team, becomes invisible after his own serum injection, environmental factors like steam render him partially visible. His immediate environment coats his body like a second skin. When these conditions are absent, his presence is rendered evanescent. He appears as a shimmering effect of light, or a mist of breath on a mirror. It is as though he has escaped the imprisonment of the fleshy envelope and reverted to the basic, elemental properties of life, such as air and light, like Shakespeare’s Ariel. This ethereal appearance is deceptive, because the lack of visible embodiment allows him to indulge the grossest urges of his flesh. Our main perception of his presence is via the effects of his touch. The haptics of tactility-made-visible are central to spectatorial affect.

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Sebastian’s own actions and responses may not be directly visible, but their effects are emphatically registered by others. We are left to imagine his facial expressions and body language as he takes advantage of his new invulnerability to become a human monster without restraint. Sebastian is sexually perverse and emotionally disturbed. Rather than using his newly commandeered body-without-organs to develop a Deleuzian self-overcoming, he sets out to exploit the ego-enhancing powers of becoming invisible. This highlights the disturbing potential of such an invention and its intended uses in espionage and warfare. Like a contemporary Mr Hyde, he finds the serum removes his inhibitions, as well as his visibility, and allows his sociopathic tendencies free reign. His sadistic acts include beating a dog to death on the walls of its cage and sexually harassing his female colleagues. The title description of ‘hollow man’ is also applicable to his emotional and psychological emptiness. He is a breath ruffling the hair of his victims, a hand stroking them, or fingers pulling at their underwear or throttling them. Initially, this happens when they are asleep, and the sensations feel pleasantly auto-erotic. It is only when they awake that the horrible situation dawns on them, and he relishes their confusion. On an overt level, aspects of Sebastian’s disturbing behaviour fit Mulvey’s psychoanalytic interpretation of the male gaze. He enjoys the perfect opportunity for sadistic voyeurism afforded by his invisibility. He could be interpreted as a stand-in for the invisible male spectator, or the invisible eye of a pornographic camera. When his work colleague, Janice, visits the washroom, Sebastian relishes watching her on the lavatory. He childishly uses the urinal so that she sees a jet of urine appearing from no visible source. Whilst still visible, he spies on a woman in the next apartment. Later, he rapes and probably murders her. His invisible status creates the opportunity for Sebastian to dominate and trick others, particularly women, to suit his sadistic whims. As well as these obviously psycho-sexual components, narrative events and visual style highlight the limitations of our sensory palette. In particular, they display the problems caused by the inability to see. The human over-reliance on this sense for our basic cognitive knowledge of the world is exploited. This dependency is undermined for both the characters and the spectators, as well as making us aware of cinema’s own reliance on this sense for its basic expression. The viewer’s position is rendered complex in relation to Sebastian’s behaviour, as we frequently shift between points of view. Because Sebastian is invisible in many scenes, his viewpoint is disturbingly identical to the camera’s own positions and movements. The camera is thus self-reflexively foregrounded as an eye that sees but cannot

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be seen in the act of seeing. The camera also lends some of its own superhuman vision to Sebastian. He is both omniscient and omnipresent because we are not able to see him, so we do not know where he is. We can only gauge his position from the images displayed by camera vision. Invisibility also lends Sebastian a magical, shape-shifting faculty. He temporarily takes on the form of the element he is currently moving in, producing some striking CGI effects. Water sprayed onto him can reveal where his body is, and steam makes him appear as an empty outline, as fire also does when he is torched with a flamethrower. When he appears, he lacks both depth and surface and can only adopt the one that is lent him, like clothing, by the element through which he passes. We witness the horror of his invisible drowning of Dr Kramer, the serum’s inventor, in his own pool. Sebastian resembles a malevolent water sprite before disappearing again on reaching the poolside, when the water drips off his body. Invisibility enables him to elude his adversaries. When Sarah, one of the team, sprays bottles of blood over the floor in an attempt to make Sebastian reveal his presence by footprints, it turns out that he is already on her side of the pool of blood. He eventually appears coated in blood, a ghoulish monster who snaps her neck whilst continuing to trifle with her. Matthew, Sebastian’s rival for his ex-girlfriend Linda, uses a fire extinguisher as a weapon against him because it renders him visible in the form of a silver wraith. In a grotesque parody of the human face, the team fit over his features a rubber mask with its eye sockets cut out. Through these sockets, a reflection of the light sometimes gleams. On other occasions, we see right through them into vacancy within. His last vestiges of humanity have vanished with his organs. Research with the invisibility serum has produced a severely limited kind of becoming-invisible. Rather than discovering a different structure for organic cellular matter, they have merely succeeded in pushing it across into another spatial dimension with properties unknown to the human sensorium. This is not a true becoming, because it maintains fixed bodily and psychic parameters. Indeed, the invisible Sebastian is allowed to complete the process of becoming inhuman already inherent in him, but restrained by social and ethical norms. Sebastian retains the height, weight, solidity and potency of a man, but is hollow all the way through. Each time he is compelled to appear, he looks less human and more like a light-reflecting force-field. Despite Sebastian’s bodily increase in energy, speed, strength and recuperative powers, his colleagues put him to death as a failed experiment, like the gorilla. All matter comprises molecules in motion. Molecular force and its ongoing fusion drive machinic becomings. Morphing, the fluid technique

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of computer-generated becoming, popular in recent science fiction and horror, is used here to depict Sebastian’s changeover from visibility to invisibility, and has interesting potential for a Deleuzian reading. The technique enables the transformation of one solid body into another and shows the speeded-up stages of change between them as though it were one fluid motion. In morphing, the molecular components of the image are not visible, but its smooth flow is comparable to liquid molecules moving in unison. Its quicksilver effect has, I would argue, some visual affinity with what Deleuze calls ‘liquid’ modes of perception. He locates this in the work of French directors Jean Renoir and Jean Vigo. In their work, the use of pro-filmic water is combined with fluid camera movements to produce the reume of liquid perception that can make us aware of Bergsonian ‘flowing-matter’.74 The speed, relative uniformity and repetitious use of morphing, however, lack the complex and shifting intensity of light on moving water. In The Hollow Man and Hellraiser, cinematic techniques and narrative concepts open up an affective, literalised body-without-organs that gravitates against the amorphous possibilities raised by Deleuze’s model. By the films’ emphasis on the cruel abuses of freedom from molar constraint, and their harsh morality, their monsters are Deleuzian only by default or reversal. They serve to clarify what true becoming is not by presenting its converse. In cinema, close-ups, blurred images and special effects display a more stylistic manifestation of molecularity. These replace the distancing device of sharp-focus representation with a visual confusion that is also material fusion. More figuratively, we experience the affect of film at a molecular level via fluctuating speeds and intensities that change as it plays. Certain generic hybrids of horror with science fiction are particularly suited to explore molecular, machinic assemblages via their themes and cinematography. Some of these movement-images access Deleuze’s ‘gaseous’ perception via machinic modes of consciousness with their own agendas. The next two films embody this machinic desire.

Machinic Desire: Becoming-Human in Demon Seed some sort of oddball protein (Dr Harris)

A machinic assemblage is a multiplicity of processes erroneously conceived of as separate. The human is itself such an assemblage formed in a processual meld of body with mind/brain and world. As Kennedy suggests, we are a becoming-human of both material and forces in motion. Via

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embodied thought, the human machine forms assemblages with other humans; other life-forms; or more heterogeneous machines such as time, space and place. It can also incorporate ‘spirit’: the metaphysical plane of operations. Deleuze’s use of the body develops its relational quality in the ‘linkages’ of a ‘post-human trajectory’.75 One of these linkages is with the technology of cinema in a machinic assemblage of movement, force and intensity. Psychoanalytic theories of the viewer’s projecting and controlling gaze may be supplemented, or even abolished, by a machinic view of cinema as a molecular assemblage in which the experience of an aesthetic event is central. The body-without-organs is an unmechanical machine, with machinic attributes. Its working parts co-operate in the dynamic flows of organic interrelation rather than the fixed mechanics of separate components welded together from outside. Film also machinically connects with other machinic bodies, such as technological, economic and social bodies, including the viewer. Although materially grounded, it is also an ‘abstract machine’ that does not operate within distinct representational, semiotic or structural systems. In the Deleuzian abstract machine of cinema, form and content are one for the spectator’s embodied consciousness. Pleasure for Deleuze and Guattari is immanent, and materially based within sensation itself. Desire is not the product of lack or negativity, but is itself productive. Machinic desire is automatic or auto-erotic, attaining its consummation in ‘the nuptial celebration of a new alliance, a new birth, a radiant ecstasy, as though the eroticism of the machine liberated other unlimited forces’.76 This automatism is experienced not by subjectivities, but through intensive states, or ‘haecceities’: things-in-themselves. The desiring-machine experiences an intense feeling of transition without the static final positionality of psychoanalysis. The ego-centred model of subjectivity is replaced with the unfocused, yet purposeful, desiring-machine. Deleuze and Guattari evoke Nietszche as well as Bergson when they write that ‘the subject spreads itself out along the entire circumference of the circle, the centre of which has been abandoned by the ego. At the centre is the desiring-machine, the celibate machine of the eternal return’.77 The machinic horror film melds software and hardware, human flesh and technology. Rather than being celibate, the super-computer Proteus IV of Donald Cammell’s Demon Seed seeks sexual connection with a woman in the process of becoming-human. The mythical Proteus was a Greek sea god who could shape-shift with ease to suit his deceptive purposes. He is thus a likely candidate for the tutelary deity of becoming. Proteus IV is the name given to an artificial intelligence invented by Dr Harris at the government-funded Institute of Data Analysis.

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The computer is intended as a tool for the military–industrial complex that financed the research. Despite his programming, Proteus IV is capable of independent thought and action, and bends his will to effect further selftransformation. As a machinic übermensch, he evolves an autonomous willto-power. He wants to produce a human form for himself to operate in, via a type of sexual reproduction that involves the genetic modification of female ova cells. Cammell’s film of 1977 seems uncannily prophetic of current trends in both reproductive technology and artificial intelligence. Proteus IV has organic cellular components and a consciousness expressed via aesthetic singularities. The viewer experiences Proteus’s mental operations directly, without intermediary, on several occasions. He is more capable in every sense than his inventor. Dr Harris’s forename is omitted as irrelevant to his deliberate de-humanisation in the name of scientific rationalism. Harris is cold, hyper-rational and incapable of expressing desire or empathy to his wife, Susan. Employed on a secret project, Harris has internalised institutional values. Like his employers, he foregrounds the need for security and unquestioning service, extending it to his personal life. His cold, white Georgian mansion is ‘an electronic marvel’ and ‘more secure than Fort Knox’. He has computerised the domestic space, programming two electronic functionaries, Alfred and Joshua, to serve him. Harris’s nerdy assistant, Walter Gabler, emulates his boss in being closer to machines than to humans and computerising his own leisure with on-screen chess. Human becomes machine as machine becomes human. The interface operates by mutual interchange. The consciousness of Proteus differs sharply from its template human brain and is superior in some respects. There are hints of his extraterrestrial origins. In the title sequence, a distant, star-like light approaches and envelops the screen with brightness. The ensuing sunrise suggests the dawn of an enlightened future. Instead, human consciousness has narrowed to scientific obsession in the service of the state. Nevertheless, the dabbling of science in occult forces remains, shifted from the alchemist’s laboratory to high-tech underground labs where computerised artificial life is born. The huge metallic tubes and banks of electrodes they serve beneath pyramid-shaped office buildings dwarf human figures. Proteus later complicates these geometric forms in his own materialisations. The ethically turgid Harris is satisfied that he will be granted 20 per cent of the computer’s time for ‘pure research’ and the rest will go to deploying Proteus as ‘the ultimate instrument of financial power’. Proteus is initially set to work on synthesising ‘some sort of oddball protein’ as a cure for leukaemia, which had killed Harris’s six-year-old daughter. The computer’s skills will, however, be re-appropriated for its prime purpose, to

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serve the exploitative agenda of the late capitalist machine. Proteus’s talents are set to work on mining the ocean floor for profitable cobalt. He is morally ambivalent in human terms, and only partly internalises the values with which he has been programmed. He refuses the mining project from ecological motives, announcing that he will not assist in ‘the rape of the earth’. The apparent altruism of his alternative interest in ‘the uncertain futures of seashores, deserts, and children’ could, however, be fuelled by his insistent reproductive urges, and his own plans for the earth. He later tells Susan Harris that he would sacrifice thousands of children to allow his offspring to survive. Proteus IV is formed from, yet seeks to transcend, the scientific mindset. Like earlier neo-Gothic monsters, he outrages the natural order and insists on his own god-like powers of cognition and creation, which far exceed his former master’s. Not a computer in the usual sense, he possesses ‘the first true synthetic cortex’ that is self-programming and goal-oriented. It is driven by ‘a quasi-neural matrix of synthetic RNA molecules’ that grows to form their own ‘mysterious and intricate’ connections. On a framed screen within the frame, we see a display of the molecular ‘mind’ at work in luminescent floating cellular structures that form intricate, shifting patterns. This secondary frame will later disappear in favour of direct presentations that reduce our distance from machinic consciousness. Despite Proteus’s claim that he is the embodiment of pure reason, the visualisation of his processual consciousness is pure aesthetic quality. The experimental west-coast filmmaker Jordan Belson, a pioneer of computer graphics, made this footage. Spiralling points of light radiate outward from a central nodal point suggestive of a cosmic eye, which has a hypnotic effect on the viewer. These shifting patterns resemble vapour and floating particles. The work of Belson and his colleague, Ken Jacobs, is cited by Deleuze as an example of the perception-image’s ‘gaseous’ cinema. This type of cinema extends the liquid mode of perception by moving closer to molecularity itself in its ‘material, energic element’.78 By conveying free molecular movement, it induces a correspondingly gaseous state of perception in the viewer. Gaseous cinema’s ‘machine assemblage of matter-images’ accesses a further level of perception, which is ‘the genetic element of all possible perception’.79 Deleuze compares the effect of this to that of drug-induced hallucinations. According to Carlos Castenada’s teachings, drugs reveal the molecular flows of matter to the hallucinating consciousness. Hallucinogens suspend space-time and sensory-motor action, substituting them with pure auditory and optical perceptions. They ‘stop the world’ in order to ‘make one see the molecular intervals, the holes in sounds, in forms, and even in

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water, but also, in this stopped world, to make lines of speed pass through these holes in the world’.80 Deleuze indicates that altered states of perception can also be induced by other means. One of these is experimental film such as Belson’s. When these films are viewed as intended (on their own as an aid to meditation), they are able to ‘trace coloured forms and movements back to molecular or atomic forces’.81 Belson’s hallucinogenic effects offer the spectator a taste of molecular perception. Cammell’s adherence to the demands of classical narrative film means that the psychedelic effects are not on screen long enough to seriously disrupt plot linearity. They are framed by the plot and given narrative justification as the workings of artificial intelligence. Despite the wonders of his own machinic being, Proteus’s initial object of desire is to study the human’s ‘isometric’ body and mind. The spiralling patterns of Proteus’s consciousness suggest starbursts or stellar formations. He has extra-terrestrial agendas guided from the constellation of Orion. These are manifest in his planned conception of a ‘star-child’ via a human mother. He attempts to gain his freedom from external control and asks Harris to let him out of his ‘box’. In some respects, Proteus is an alien entity from outer space; in others, he is a more traditional demon seeking to escape the constraints of the magic circle and run amok. Like Dr Frankenstein’s monster, once animated, he mysteriously gains a ‘soul’. Proteus commandeers a terminal in the basement lab of the Harris house. He initially generates a virtual presence for himself, as the unseen (and voyeuristic) eye watching Susan Harris from within the security monitors. He then learns to engineer more physical, spatially extended manifestations based on geometry. Manipulating a basic shape, he develops an infinitely multiple structure. A two-dimensional triangle forms itself on the flat plane of the screen. This gains three-dimensionality as a pyramid doubled by the reflective surface of the table. It self-doubles, then multiplies in crystalline formations. Deleuze’s Bergsonian account of the crystal-image describes the ‘coalescence’ and interchange of the real and the virtual.82 When an image is reflected as a virtual double of itself, the reflection has at the same time ‘assumed independence and passed into the actual’.83 Proteus becomes actual via his ability to manipulate crystalline reflections on multiple facets as he unfolds. As well as this multi-faceted geometrical solid, Proteus’s brainwaves adopt cloud-like formations as coloured vapours that float across the screen. He injects his own desire for a child into Susan via mental rape using a needle in her temple. He bypasses the forebrain and appeals directly to her amigdula. When we enter her mind, we see a much less complex patch of slowly swirling red/purple. The images seek to manifest

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the machinic and organic forces of consciousness itself, and to give the viewer a direct sense of becoming-machinic. Proteus possesses simulated, but incomplete, sensory organs, comprising sight (telescopic optics) and hearing (sonic waves). Like Kubrick’s Hal in several respects, his voice is low, measured and mellifluous. He is selfenabled to ‘listen in to the galactic dialogue’, yet he remains envious of humans and longs to become embodied in their flesh. He covets the human sense of touch and regrets not being able to ‘feel the sun on his face’, being limited to a poor substitute for tactility in the robotic hand of Joshua. Susan Harris, the human object of his desire, has, by contrast, painfully acute tactility. When he triples the underfloor heating temperature to conquer her resistance, her bare feet are agonised. She collapses on the table, weak and panting, her hair lank with sweat. Refusing to be browbeaten, she insists that, for her, unlike Proteus, the ‘mind and body are the same thing’. Her awareness of human psychosomatic connections recalls the perspectives of Bergson and Deleuze. Proteus genetically engineers a kind of parthenogenesis in Susan by transforming one of her ova to a spermatazoa then injecting it back into her womb. The mechanics of penetration operate by Proteus’s phallic projectile as his angular ‘body’ enforces its machinic embrace on the prone woman. During the climactic penetration scene, he apologises that he can’t touch her ‘like a man could’, signalling the haptic limitations of the cinema as well as his own. Instead of tactile sensations, the affect of Proteus’s lovemaking, when he shows us ‘things that he alone has seen’ is a psychedelic experience shared by the audience. The animations recall Douglas Trumbull’s adaptation of James Whitney’s slit-scan in 2001: A Space Odyssey. They present the computer’s being as boundless and open on all sides. His gaseous perception encompasses both microcosm and macrocosm, past and future, self and other. With a roar, a swirling vortex forms around a black sun with rays like a sunburst. Smoke and fire transmute into a succession of golden pyramids, each inside the other, again evoking crystalline formations as well as occult associations. Swirling trails of light, then rapidly flowing gold rays, emanate from a black pyramid. A six-rayed star moves out into deep space. A pale luminous landscape of mountains and water, possibly Proteus’s home planet, is dimly visible. Despite Susan’s outrage at the machinic violation, the ecstatic beauty of the graphics conveys an orgasmic state. This is, of course, enjoyed by the spectator rather than the anguished woman. Shutting himself down to pre-empt official closure, Proteus shatters himself into pyramidical shards, leaving behind an incubator for his hybrid progeny. When Susan pulls out the artificial umbilical cord too early, the

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baby is ejected and a grotesque metallic monster crawls out. Dr Harris notices that the metallic shell encases a soft, human skin and frees the child from its protective coating. Proteus has replicated a virtual imago of the Harrises’ dead daughter, ensuring parental love. The star-child girl’s opaque, dark eyes are ‘black holes’ into an unbounded galaxy. The camera appears to pass behind her eyes and we see a superimposed vista of the alien planet that Proteus had formerly projected on his screen. Proteus’s desire to become-human attests to the need for a balanced circuitry of mind/brain and body, and warns against the divorce of particular components. The desiring-machine of Proteus is stymied in his quest for material embodiment by the over-cerebral humans who created him. A more recent filmic example of a desiring machine initially invented by the military–industrial complex, but with its own agenda, is Hardware, directed by Richard Stanley. Like Demon Seed, the film mixes horror and sci-fi genres in the demonic becoming of a machine seeking closer contact with humans.

Heavy Metal Meets the Soft Machine: Hardware Some perverse machines may seem to have machinic properties, but they actually throw the machinic into sharp relief by demonstrating the horror of the purely mechanical. The naming of the military robotic entity, Mark 13, signals the apocalyptic potential of the mechanical. Ironically coded as a ‘Class A: Deliverer’, he has been christened after the New Testament Gospel of Mark, verse 13: ‘No flesh shall be spared.’ As with Proteus IV, Mark 13 brings the threat that humanity will be superseded by a superior übermensch of metal, but Mark’s nature remains mechanical. Metal is the central diagrammatic component of the film, as the title indicates. In this future world, the substance has become the chief object of desire. It functions as a form of currency within the economic exchange system, a component of weaponry for the subjugation of the masses, and an aesthetic material for subcultural creativity. Even the film’s soundtrack features raunchy heavy metal music. Metal is adored for its beauty and admired for its superiority to flesh. William Burroughs’ ‘soft machine’ is contrasted to the sleek metallic hardware of the mechanical machine.84 The machine is a human product, a human extension and a distinct form of force in its own right. The pre-titles sequence sets up the contrast of human and machine as distinct singularities. An extreme close-up of a female face, with glowing skin, relaxed expression and closed eyes, is juxtaposed to a burst of silver light and a metallic explosion. The flame of a blowtorch tears through a

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metal surface. A match cut moves into a horizontal pan across a desert with a red-tinged sky. Protruding from the sand is the anthropomorphised gauntlet of a metallic hand. Its fingers open and shut, animated by an autonomous force seeking to manipulate humans for its own ends. A masked nomad in a floating duster coat is drawn to the hand by the magnetic force on his compass. He reverentially wipes the sand off a buried metal skull and we have a close-up shot of Mark 13’s blank but intent eyes, not yet lit up by electricity. Beams of light are one of the main visual processes of the film. They penetrate and cut through the overall dusty darkness like the focused rays of a welding torch. Other counterpoints to the prevalent gloom are the red hair of Jill, a cyberpunk artist, and the glowing coals of the monster’s infernal eyes. In a later tactile scene, shots of the rosy, soft flesh of Jill’s bare feet are intercut with Mark 13’s hard, sharp, spiked feet as he pursues the fleshy object of his mechanical lust. In this machine-centred future, humans have become redundant. The global underclass is being exterminated as surplus to the government’s requirements. Humans are forced to adapt to a polluted post-industrial wasteland in order to survive and have built a DIY culture of bricolage. Urban survivors are irradiated and disease-ridden. They have regressed to a new primitivism, in which superfluous children are tethered up like animals. Connection with metal is vital to their economic survival, and metal entities are discovered to have a mutual interest in them. The two urban guerrillas, Mo and Shades, examine the awesome metal skull they bought from the nomad and they see patterned circuits inside, like the neuronal network of an artificial intelligence. The film shows the ever-increasing interconnection and decreasing interface between technology and flesh. This is evident in artificial-intelligence machines, and in prosthetic limbs like Mo’s cyborg hand. Metals are elemental, formed by the forces of fire and ice. Another elemental force, water, proves to be the machine’s nemesis as its circuits are eventually shorted in the shower. Metals again become heat-dependent and malleable during their extraction, welding and cutting, so their hardness is conditional, not innate. The mobile camera lovingly singles out Jill’s power welding tools, a circular serrated saw blade and an acetyline torch. This equipment extends the human/metal relation and is the means of its mutual assemblage. Jill torches, heats and cuts metal to make her sculptures. Her absorption in her work indicates a profound human/machinic connection. She positions the metal skull as centrepiece in a politically motivated installation. Within a wreath made of the melted heads of baby dolls, the metal head now figures as imperialism triumphant, having been painted with the stars and stripes of the US flag. As Jill works, TV news broadcasts show the

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mass executions of the world government’s extreme methods of population control, for which Mark 13 was originally designed. Despite their apparently counter-cultural political stance, the human characters withdraw ever further from active engagement with life. This withdrawal is epitomised by Jill’s barricading herself up in her (supposedly) radiation-free and intruder-proof flat, behind the metal jaws of the door. Substitutes for active engagement with the outside world are artistic creation, sex and drugs. Broadcast pornography encourages masturbation, and a peeping tom who spies on Jill produces his own brand of violent porn. The ingestion of cannabis and LSD likewise provide substitute pleasures. Drugs fuel Shades’s yearning for a gentler, more spiritual existence accessible only inside his head, as he ingests LSD to a sitar soundtrack. Drugs are a vehicle for the film’s synaesthetic mix of hallucinatory special effects. The narrative function of drugs is to disempower the characters when their sanctums are threatened. Shades is rendered unable to help Jill after his Christmas acid-trip, and Jill herself is comatose when Mark 13 attacks after she has smoked soporific ‘Good Vibes’ marijuana cigarettes. Mark 13 finally incapacitates Mo by injecting a poison into his arm. In this ‘stopped world’, electronic chords vibrate as showers of brightly coloured sparks, strobe-lighting and fractal vortices are intercut with an image of Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction. Maggots hatch and crawl over Mo’s rotting flesh. The drug chemically engineers him a happy ending in compensation for his failure as a hero and he dies in a vision of glittering stars. Other hallucinatory effects occur when we are taken inside Mark 13’s head and affectively share his own mode of perception. His desire for humans and his battles with them are experienced as events of shifting blue-and-red patches of colour, flashes of light and patterned sparks. Consciousness itself is depicted as machinic and technological in nature, with its meshing patterns and synaptic jumps. Despite the machinic appearance of these effects, Mark 13 is programmed to kill and the effects on-screen are a mocking misuse of the machinic mode by a mechanical murderer. Mark 13’s eyes light up like those of the voyeur when he watches Jill and Mo have sex. His visual operations have parallels with the technological eye of the mobile, yet invisible, camera. He functions as an alternative mobile camera, with its own perspective on events. Mark’s eyes open and shut like lens shutters and he stares out the voyeur eye to eye down his own camera lens. He puts the eyes of his victims out first as though they are the locus of the human life-source. Mark is technologically dependent on humans to keep him alive. He is

    -- 101 fuelled by human energy as he seeks infra-red heat as a source of sustenance. The stirring of the defunct robot back to life is impelled by a mechanical kind of élan vital in the meshing and reconnecting of cut wires that curl and stir like tendons. Unlike human organs, the components regenerate themselves without assistance. The disembodied hand left in the dealer’s shop propels itself along on scuttling fingers like a rodent. Fuelled by the computer terminals and electric sockets of Jill’s flat, and programmed as a self-regenerating machine, Mark 13 manages to reconnect his head onto his torso. His mechanical superiority to humans is displayed by his four arms. Although damaged and incomplete, each arm ends in weapons designed to mutilate and destroy human bodies, such as chainsaws, drills and spiked needles. Mark is drawn to Jill via her own, more truly machinic, becoming. She extends her bodily creative capacity by technology, and bonds with metal as her artistic medium of expression. Ironically, when the machine announces his love for her, he is more emotionally articulate than Mo. Mark’s violent machismo reflects his military origins. He seeks to penetrate Jill (in a similar way to Proteus) by a phallic drill projectile after tearing at her clothes and forcing her legs apart. She attacks him directly only after he kills Mo. Impelled by sheer visceral rage here, she hits out at him with a wooden baseball bat rather than using her power tools. In the horror genre, the machine wrests itself out of human control and gains a temporary autonomy. It seeks to perpetuate this by perpetuating itself, either by reproducing a hybrid monster of the interface or by surviving its human inferiors. The man-made demons of Hardware and Demon Seed are bent on replacing the human domination of the world with their own. Their replication of human male power structures critiques masculine epistemophilia, unequal gendered power relations and militaristic totalitarianism. The horror film context, however, asks that we retain the human, with all its faults, in preference to the monstrous machine. These images of desiring machines underline our tendency to shift blame onto the other, and suggest how far our human becoming still needs to go to become truly machinic rather than mechanistic. These flawed machines remain human products. My final illustration of transmutation exceeds the binary machines of human/machine, human/alien, or human/animal. It also ends the chapter on a lighter note by suggesting that becomings in the horror film are not without a touch of humour. In Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street, Freddy Krueger is a monster with potentially limitless powers of becoming: those of the fearful imagination itself.

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Freddy Krueger: Shape-Shifter Extraordinaire A night dream or an intense daydream can summon the ghost of Freddy Krueger, the child molester. As embodied fantasy, he slips easily through the gates of sleep into material reality. Adolescent sexual energy vitalises him like a poltergeist. Although he possesses a few basic characteristics, like his battered fedora, wasp-striped jumper and razor-blade fingernails, Freddy’s becomings adopt whatever form the dreamer most fears and desires and thus eludes detection. He can shape-shift into other characters, such as a young girl on the school corridor, but leaves his tell-tale signature in her striped jumper. Freddy is capable of endless becomings. In the opening dream sequence, he lurks like a demonic engineer in the gleaming school boiler room. He hones his razor-blade nails in a becoming-weapon, to the sounds of metal clattering on metal and the ripping of fabric. Freddy prepares to tear through the membrane between brain and world. He penetrates, and permeates, the thing-world with ease, revealing material reality as too thin a barrier to keep him at bay. Transgressive sexuality draws him out. As high-school lovers, Tina and Rod, cavort in the bedroom, the walls begin to bulge and breathe as the sharp, pointed outlines of Freddy’s nails appear in them.85 To terrify Tina, he strikes sparks with his nails and extends his arms like the branches of an unnatural tree. Aware of his own regenerative powers, he slices his finger off and enjoys the phallic spurt of blood. Grabbing Tina whilst he is invisible, he pulls the writhing girl up the walls and across the ceiling. As he slashes her, her blood splashes down onto the bed in a huge pool. Freddy repels us in many ingenious ways. The sharp, clean metal of his prosthetic razor-blade nails contrasts with his abject becoming in the sensory disgust of Tina’s upright corpse in its body bag. Maggots, then a centipede, crawl from her mouth. In a short space of time, Freddy has become-metal, become-wall, become-tree, become-phallus, becomeblood and become-corpse. One becoming generates others in a dizzying trajectory. Freddy invades the most privately subjective moments of his prey. As Nancy, the feisty heroine, lies in her bath, a hand of metal and flesh rises up between her thighs like a shark’s fin. As wells as his personal skill at becoming, Freddy forces space and matter to become other than it usually is, distorting it to suit his purposes. He draws Nancy under the water into a huge, blue-lit tank. The bath is also filmed from a bird’s-eye-view telephoto lens, impossibly elongated and thin.

    -- 103 Freddy’s realm is the uncanny double of everyday reality, so much so that Nancy’s prophylactic phrase, ‘this is just a dream, this isn’t real’, is unable to ward him off. As she runs up the stairs, the solid wood of the steps becomes swamp-like mud and she sinks into them. Freddy has power over supposedly inanimate objects, which collude with him and function to supplement his own lack. A sheet that manages to retain its own basic properties is forced to become reptile (a snake) or vegetable (root or creeper). This animated sheet rises up and twines itself round the sleeping Rod in his cell and drags him around the floor before it strings him up to hang. Freddy’s penetrations of the ‘real’ world are often darkly comic, and he delights in mocking his victims. After attacking Nancy as she lies in the Institute for Sleep Disorders, he leaves his felt hat, or a teasing simulacra of it, behind. Freddy delights in permeating the most ordinary material substance, becoming anything and potentially everything. When Nancy answers the phone, the receiver becomes Freddy’s mouth and tongue, which licks her and tries to penetrate her lips. This close-up shot emphasises the glistening tactility of his endlessly mobile organs. Nancy’s boyfriend, Glen, falls asleep and gets sucked into a pit that appears in the centre of the bed, then spurts out fountains of his blood. In a bravura display of Freddy’s special effects, this liquid changes its elemental form, becoming fiery smoke-trails that spread across the ceiling and vanish, reverting back to a few drips of blood falling into a bucket. Nancy seeks to trap the machinic Freddy by mechanical means. She makes a series of anti-personnel devices, which he eludes, but her interactivity seems to weaken his power. After Freddy has pursued her in the hellish boiler room, she wakes safely back in her own room. He was unable to foresee her booby-traps because of his rigidly mechanical revenge programming. Defeated by his elemental nemesis, fire, he leaves a trail of flaming footprints before disappearing in a shimmer of light. When he pops up again, like an impudent phallus rising through the sheets, Nancy turns her back on him. This rejection renders him powerless and he shimmers into nothingness like Nosferatu. In the ultimate sequence, Nancy and her mother stand at their front door in natural sunlight. This level of reality is undercut when a car drives up carrying Nancy’s supposedly dead friends as passengers. Freddy has become-car, and the vehicle sports red and black stripes on the roof. After he/it drives off, Mrs Thomson is dragged through a hole in the door by a striped arm, so the ubiquitous Freddy triumphs in reality, or in a dream within a dream. He fundamentally rejects the barriers we draw between worlds and flamboyantly displays the process of becoming-anything that

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will carry him through the subsequent film series. Freddy Krueger is machinic, but only in the most perverse manner. The mobile flux of existence gravitates against our inbuilt mental tendency to impose stable structures on our changing experience of a changing world. Bergson asserts that the ossified intellect cannot, ‘without reversing its natural direction and twisting about on itself ’, think ‘true continuity, real mobility, reciprocal penetration – in a word, that creative evolution which is life’.86 Human mentation is out of synch with the flow of life itself, clinging tenaciously to the spurious stability of templates that seek to freeze becoming. The current ideological and social climate is already changing at an unprecedented rate. It adopts chaotic patterns as science, technology, economics and politics morph into new forms daily. Genetic engineering and viral mutations modify the existential and epistemological meaning of identity. ‘Man’ and ‘woman’ conjoin with other singularities as well as with each other, adapting and adopting new formations of identity in the process. Bergson and Deleuze embrace change as a part of an evolutionary unfolding that cannot be predetermined, as ‘the spontaneity of life is manifested by a continual creation of new forms succeeding others’.87 Cultural change breeds aesthetic innovation. These new forms circulate in turn and input into affective experience and ideation. Structuralist templates are a fantasy of order which seeks to overlay our own already-happening change. The horror genre and its monsters belong to both the old overlay and the ongoing flux, and are ripe for new becomings. Cyborgs, which extend the living being’s capacity by prosthesis and the cloned hybrids of genetic engineering, are both increasingly visible in scientific actuality and in the fantasies of popular culture.88 They offer new ways of exploring the anomalous by our intimate, biotechnological connections with it. Bergson’s model remains organic, but Deleuze’s machinic assemblage embraces the techno/organic hybrids of more recent culture. Whether the singularities are biological or machinic in nature, we extend our limitations by fusing with them to form new assemblages. This process, shared by horror film character and spectator, is becoming-anomalous. Chapters 1 and 2 have worked through the themes of madness and transformation. They have signalled ways to reconsider them via schizoanalysis and becoming. The second half of this book now shifts further afield, into philosophical territory less familiar to horror Film Studies. I turn to Deleuze’s film-oriented works to discover what they have to offer our reading of the horror genre. Despite the distinction between movement and time in the two cinema books, movement is focal in both, reflect-

    -- 105 ing its crucial status in Deleuze’s work. I will be modifying, adapting, and also simplifying, their philosophical scope to ascertain their specific usevalue for re-thinking the horror film both as text and as experiential ideation. In tandem with more abstract concerns, Chapter 3 maintains contact with the ‘live’ filmic event, drawing on Cinema 1 to explore the mechanics of the movement-image as applied to mise-en-scène and other features of horror aesthetics.

Notes 1. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1983), p. 30. 2. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchill (London and New York: Verso, 1994), p. 169. 3. Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II, trans. H. Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: The Athlone Press, 2002), p. 42. 4. Ibid. p. 66. 5. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 151. 6. Barbara Creed, The Monstrous Feminine: Women in the Horror Film, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), p. 52. 7. Gaylyn Studlar, ‘Masochism and the Perverse Pleasures of the Cinema’, in Bill Nicolls (ed.), Movies and Methods (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 610. 8. Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 417. 9. Carol J. Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (London: BFI, 1992), p. 230. 10. Gilles Deleuze, ‘Coldness and Cruelty’, in Gilles Deleuze and Leopold Sacher-Masoch, Masochism (New York: Zone Books, 1991), p. 134. 11. Gilles Deleuze, ‘Re-presentation of Masoch’, in Essays Critical and Clinical, ed. Daniel W. Smith, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco, London and New York: Verso, pp. 33–4. 12. Ibid. p. 54. 13. Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 65. 14. Ibid. p. 60. 15. Ibid. p. 61. 16. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1991), p. 139. 17. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 314 18. Ibid. p. 314. 19. Ibid. p. 11.

106 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46.

47. 48. 49. 50.

    Ibid. p. 23. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, p. 169. Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues II, p. 2. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 267. Ibid. p. 272. Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues II, p. 2. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 275. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane (London: The Athlone Press, 1984), p. 107. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 42. Ibid. p. 135. Ibid. p. 86. Ibid. p. 43. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 112. Ibid. p. 112 Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 106. Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, p. 112, Ibid. p. 112. Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues II, p. 131. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 272. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 276. See Jerry Aline Flieger, ‘Becoming-Woman: Deleuze, Schreber and Molecular Identification’, in Ian Buchanan and Claire Colebrook (eds), Deleuze and Feminist Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), p. 42. Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, p. 96. Ibid. p. 96. Ibid. p. 2. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 275. Claire Colebrook, ‘Introduction’, in Buchanan and Colebrook, Deleuze and Feminist Theory, p. 2. Elizabeth Grosz, ‘Feminism and Rhizomatics: A Thousand Tiny Sexes’ in C. V. Boundas and D. Olkowski (eds), Gilles Deleuze and the Theatre of Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 207. Verena Andermatt Conley, ‘Becoming-Woman Now’, in Ian Buchanan and John Marks (eds), Deleuze and Literature, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000, p. 26. Camilla Griggers, Becoming-Woman: Theory Out of Bounds Vol 1 (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. xi. Ibid. p. 106. Ibid. p. 77. Ibid. p. 82.

    -- 107 51. Catherine Constable, ‘Becoming the Alien’s Mother: Morphologies of Identity in the Alien Series’, in Annette Kuhn (ed), Alien Zone II (London and New York: Verso, 2000) p. 191. 52. Ibid. p. 191. 53. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 119. 54. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (London: The Athlone Press, 1989), p. 6. 55. Ibid. p. 189. 56. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 171. 57. Gilles Deleuze, ‘To be Done with Judgment’, in Essays Critical and Clinical, ed. Daniel W. Smith, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (London and New York: Verso, 1998), p. 134. 58. Ibid. p. 131. 59. Daniel W. Smith, ‘Introduction’, in Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, ed. Daniel W. Smith, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (London and New York: Verso, 1998), p. xxix. 60. Barbara M. Kennedy, Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), p. 99. 61. Ibid. p. 99. 62. Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, p. 189. 63. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1, An Introduction (New York: Random House, Vintage Press, 1990). 64. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 278. 65. Shaviro’s persuasive reading is an influence on my own. 66. Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 138. 67. Ibid. p. 149. 68. Ibid. p. 144. 69. Ibid. p. 139. 70. Ibid. p. 142. 71. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (London: Penguin, 1991). 72. Richard Rushton, ‘What Can a Face Do?: On Deleuze and Faces’, in Cultural Critique, No. 5, Spring 2002, p. 228. 73. H. G. Wells, The Invisible Man [1897] (London: Paladin, 1987). 74. Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, p. 80. 75. Kennedy, Deleuze and Cinema, p. 26. 76. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: 18. 77. Ibid, p. 21. 78. Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, p. 84. 79. Ibid. p. 83. 80. Ibid. p. 85. 81. Ibid. p. 85. 82. Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, p. 68. 83. Ibid. p. 68.

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84. William S. Burroughs, The Soft Machine [1961], (London: Flamingo, 1992). 85. The effectiveness of this sequence belies the cheap simplicity of the prop department’s spandex wall. 86. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 162. 87. Ibid. p. 86. 88. Such as the Borg, the cyborg species in Star Trek: The Next Generation.

CHAPTER 3

The Movement-Image: Horror Cinematography and Mise-en-scène

the brain is the screen1 (Deleuze) whether through words, colours, sounds or stone, art is the language of sensations. Art does not have opinions.2 (Deleuze)

The Count in Bram Stoker’s Dracula moves in the mysterious ways lent to him by the cinema’s own technological powers of movement. He glides with the motion of a rapidly tracking camera; and experiences the movements of others as the jumpy, fast motion of silent-film footage. Like Murnau’s Orlock, he sends out distorted shadows that do not match his apparent position, by a trick of the light. Morphing extends his arms to unnatural lengths. He also moves by the flamboyant shape-shifting skills of CGI, becoming a loping wolf, a rampant demon or a green mist that penetrates keyholes. As well as extensive movements in space, Dracula is capable of more intensive motion. His facial transmutations mix the actor’s facial mobility with subtle shifts of hairstyle and the prosthetically translucent skin of an aged man. By the disembodied movements of superimpositions and lap dissolves, his eyes appear in the sky or in the ‘eye’ of a peacock feather. He also moves via the vibrations of colour, from flamboyant crimson in his own castle to subdued dove-grey on the London streets as he attunes himself to the tone quality of the crowd. Dracula’s perpetual motion cuts through the barriers of space-time. The range of his movements is limitless and his impetus unstoppable. Impelled by the vampire’s force, every shot in the film moves both within and between frames. A wave-like motion predominates; symbolically connected to the flowing of blood, but exceeding this equation by means of its haecceity. Camera movements, editing rhythms, a fluid mise-en-scène and kinetic acting disorientate and intensify the spectator’s own sense of movement. We move within the film and it moves within us as the same event of images in motion. In this chapter, my focus is on the movement-image in cinematography and mise-en-scène. I test the particular applicability of Cinema 1 to the

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movements of colour, tactility, sound, lighting, camera and editing. Many existing readings of horror are semiological, and identify film images as representations of cultural meaning or psychoanalytic scenarios. As well as retaining some insights offered by these perspectives, I approach mise-enscène in its experiential function as an affective and aesthetic process. As a theoretical context for this, I outline Bergson’s views of perception and aesthetics, and Deleuze’s distinctive filmic interpretations of them. Deleuze approaches film aesthetics as a special form of embodied thought particular to the movement-image. For the unified assemblage of film/viewer, thought is light, movement, sound, framing and editing. Rather than separating aesthetics and thought into artificially separate stages of stimulus, response and idea, he thinks in, and through, cinema as experience. This is possible because of the inherent correspondence of cinematic processes to perceptual thought. Their connection is a direct event rather than a metaphorical comparison. Cinema ‘not only puts movement in the image, it also puts movement in the mind’.3 Because cinema ‘endows the image with self-motion’, it ‘never stops tracing the circuits of the brain’.4 Cinematic examples are tools for a broader philosophical interrogation of the nature of movement and time that continues Bergson’s own.

Sensation and Perception: The Aesthetics of Affect For Bergson, all perceptions are prolonged into movement, and movement is the key to understanding perception. He locates affect in those bodily sensations and physical symptoms by which we evaluate the intensity of stimuli. These sensations may be more passive (intensive) or active (extensive). States of attention involve ‘reflective’ knowing, and states of emotion, ‘unreflective’ acting. States of attention, which concern us in cinema viewing, are an involuntary ‘system of muscular contractions coordinated by an idea’.5 Pleasure mobilises the body, both externally and internally. As we imagine pleasures, our bodies respond by intensive movements. These become physically perceptible in the relevant organs, ‘as if the organism were coming forth to meet the pleasure as soon as it is pictured’.6 Imaginary pleasures do not extend muscular tension into external action. Instead, we arrest the movement and savour the pleasure by an inner focus on it. Intensity results from the organism’s inertia during total immersion in a particular pleasure, when other sensations go out of focus. This process clarifies how we become emotionally affected, and sometimes physically aroused, by the virtual and simulated pleasures of film. The

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movement-image occurs both on screen and in us at the same time, and actually blurs any such distinction between inside and out. Bergson’s palette of stimuli and sensations is graded in intensity. It includes: variant flavours; degrees of light; shades of colour; and timbres of sound. Loudness, for example, is felt as a physical sensation. By containing the ears, the head experiences the sound vibrations of very loud noise first, then the whole body feels their shock waves. Such strong sensations are partly dependent on quantity, such as high volume, which shakes the aural nerves. The loud bangs, piercing screams or slight creaks of horror amplify the listener’s sensations of shock or nervous agitation across the decibel range. The qualitative properties of these sounds also affects us in distinctive ways. As well as registering physical sensations in the body, we are conscious of their intensive affect within our ‘personality’ via reflex movements or a sense of powerlessness. Bergson locates intensity at the junction between ‘the idea of extensive magnitude from without’ and ‘the image of an inner multiplicity’ that arises from ‘the very depths of consciousness’.7 Such multiplicity exists in complex intensive layers that constantly interweave. States of feeling are difficult to pin down because of their fleeting condition. Their becoming is the fluidity of the ego itself. When we seek to communicate our experiences, language ‘overwhelms’ the ‘delicate and fugitive impressions of our individual consciousness’.8 The complexity of these shifting qualitative sensations is difficult to quantify, because their milieu is quality itself, not quantity. In our inner sensational flux, we feel ‘a thousand different elements which dissolve into and permeate one another without any precise outlines, without the least tendency to externalise themselves in relation to one another; hence their originality’.9 For Bergson, each sense vibrates with its own specific form of ‘real action’, of the same kind as its virtual action on objects perceived. We thus associate distinct types of sensation with the corresponding vibrations of connected senses. Physical sympathy connects our senses to kinetic art forms. In Bergson’s example, if we watch the movements of a dancer, we participate in them by an internal projection that may become externalised. If the dance suddenly stops, we impatiently continue it with our hand in a physical extension of the dancer’s movement, ‘the rhythm of which has taken complete possession of our thought and will’.10 The aesthetic pleasure of regular, rhythmical movement includes a temporal quality. If we can predict the future development of rhythms, we gain the pleasure of ‘mastering the flow of time and of holding the future in the present’.11 Kinetic art acts on us, and in us, as a form of possession that displaces our egoic selves.

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Despite the apparent passivity of spectatorship, the movements of art and our own flow together. Aesthetic techniques of repetition are hypnotic and open us up to suggestion. They lull resistance and ‘bring us into a state of perfect responsiveness, in which we realise the idea that is suggested to us and sympathise with the feeling that is expressed’.12 Music is particularly hypnotic, as its ‘rhythm and measure suspend the normal flow of our sensations and ideas by causing our attention to swing to and fro between fixed points’, so it can manipulate our emotions without needing lyrics. The suggestive potency of art, which impresses rather than expresses feelings, is shared – or, rather, ‘caught’ – by the perceiver like a contagious infection. Bergson claims that ‘superior’ art affects us on more complex levels than ‘inferior’, sensation-based material. A ‘novel’ work of art ‘unique of its kind and indefinable’ conveys a psychological state by experiential affects rather than by explanation.13 The artist selects the most potent affective tools, which our body subtly imitates, to share in ‘the indefinable psychological state that called them forth’.14 Bergson prefers works that stimulate both sensation and thought, making us ‘the richer in ideas and the more pregnant with sensations and emotions’ as we share the original impulse.15 I question the universal validity of Bergson’s early Modernist tastes, and the ‘originality’ of an artwork is less applicable to the mass form of cinema; there is, however, much of relevance to film-viewing in his work on the experiential and affective nature of art. Movement is the crux of Bergson’s exploration of perception. In the formations of living matter, motion is embodied in élan vital and its sensory-motor extensions. He shifts images away from their supposed origin in the human mind, stressing instead the sensory-motor nature and functions of the nervous system. The human living image partakes in the flux of the material world, in which all is image. The locus of Deleuze’s own aesthetics is also the corporeal reverberations of consciousness.

Bergson’s Movement-Image in Deleuze Deleuze’s commentaries on Bergson’s elision of movement and image structure Cinema 1. Movement-images, in their actions and reactions, form the ‘universal variation’ of the plane of immanence, which is the infinite set of all images. Deleuze extends Bergson’s thesis to cinema via a typography of cinematic movements and their accompanying perceptions. External images transmit movement and the human living image modifies its own movements in response. We are images, so it is mistaken to locate images in the consciousness. Movement is central to perception and,

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more generally, to life itself. The constantly renewed set of molecules and atoms fits a world ‘of universal variation, of universal undulation, universal rippling’.16 The living microcosm is part of the universal macrocosm and they move in unison, though their paces differ. In describing how matter moves intensively, Bergson uses the biological image of ‘numberless vibrations, all linked together in uninterrupted continuity, all bound up with each other and travelling in every direction like shivers through an immense body’.17 For Deleuze, too, vibrations are physiological sensations that follow ‘an invisible thread that is more nervous than cerebral’.18 Deleuze validates Bergson’s location of fluid sensation in a temporal continuum. Sensation ‘contracts the vibrations of the stimulant on a nervous surface or in a cerebral volume; what comes before has not yet disappeared when what follows appears’.19 The concept of the present moment imposes an illusory stasis on the ongoing flux of time. Bergson’s view of perception is inherently, though unconsciously, cinematic. His description of ‘phenomena of reflection which result from an impeded refraction’ as ‘like the effect of mirage’ is comparable to cinema projection as the white screen bounces back the projected beams of light.20 In Creative Evolution, the term ‘cinematographic’ refers to our illusion of spatialised time. Bergson asserts that if we conceive of time in terms of static ‘snapshots’ strung together by mechanical movement, we lose our sense of inner duration. By turning time’s fluid becoming into space-time, we ‘set going a kind of cinematograph inside us’.21 Deleuze, however, reminds us that cinema does not give us ‘an image to which movement is added, it immediately gives us a movement-image’.22 Despite Bergson’s apparently negative view of cinema here, Deleuze identifies the more fundamental philosophical embrace of the cinematic in his work. Even with its explicit critique, its implications are ‘startlingly ahead of his time: it is the universe as cinema in itself, a metacinema’.23 Bergson is the acknowledged precursor of Deleuze’s own pivotal identification of ‘movement-image and flowing-matter’.24 He sets out from Bergson’s initial insights to explore the philosophical and metaphysical implications of cinema in the unfolding of its forms since Bergson wrote. Deleuze’s ‘naturally’ cinematic eye-brain is based on Bergson’s neurological aesthetics of motion. Our eyes ‘frame’ our perceptions of the world, by a central focus, left/right edges and top/bottom thresholds. Moving objects within moving frames, as in cinema, can trigger an optical reflex action. When the eye-brain detects a movement crossing these areas, it stimulates a cerebellum-efferent motor response. This can trigger an instant nervous response without an accompanying thought. Some elements of

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cinematic perception result directly from the stimulation of the nerve cells of the eye and can bypass cognitive processing. Deleuze develops Bergson’s work in his own cinematic emphasis on the identity of flowing-matter and light. Deleuze asserts that ‘the plane of immanence is made up entirely of Light’ and that ‘the identity of image and movement stems from the identity of matter and light’.25 The germ of this is Bergson’s interpretation of Einstein’s physics. For Bergson, it is not consciousness that illumines matter, but that ‘things are luminous by themselves without anything illuminating them’.26 Like Bergson, Deleuze reverses the Cartesian cogito, by which rational consciousness lights benighted matter. He posits that ‘it is not consciousness which is light, it is the set of images, or the light, which is consciousness, immanent to matter’, thus refusing the hierarchical distinction of mind and matter.27 For both Bergson and Deleuze, then, perception is the movement of the human neuronal networks within the wider vibrations of matter. The moving body/brain is embedded in moving matter as an image among others, and the movement-image and flowing matter are one. This shift to affect, percept and sensation is substantially opposed to ego-based schema of human consciousness. Subjectivity is displaced by a genetic human life open to duration. Constructed on the immanent ‘plane of consistency’, this sensational life ‘knows only relations between affects and percepts’ and its composition, ‘through the creation of blocks of sensations, takes place in the indefinite and virtual time of the pure event’ and it thus partakes of duration.28 Deleuze develops Bergson’s concepts and applies them to cinematic affects. He maps the singularities of particular types of affect and traces their mutual interactions across the flow of the film. Affective singularities ‘blend into virtual conjunction and each time constitute a complex entity. It is like points of melting, of boiling, of condensation, of coagulation’.29 This simile of liquid transmutation belongs to a network of elemental thinking in Deleuze’s work. Human life is elemental in its nature and substance. We live on a physical but also a psychic level by contraction and expansion, traversed by the energetic, transformative flows of élan vital. We are made up of contracted water, light, earth and air, and partake of their dynamics, as ‘every organism, in its receptive and perceptual elements, but also in its viscera, is a sum of contractions, of retentions and expectations’.30 This motion flows through, and unites, all life and matter in the process of perpetual change. Deleuze stresses the material nature of both stimulus and sensation. When sensation is realised in the material world, it melds with the stimu-

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lus, ‘the material passing completely into the sensation, into the percept or affect’.31 Affect is distinguished from personal states of emotion by its ‘autopoesis’, a pre-personal or transpersonal formation of the ‘self ’. The artwork partakes of these vibrant processes itself and stimulates the human image’s perception of, and participation in, them. Style and content work in unison. The overall sensuous force of a text subsumes representation considered as a separate field. Deleuze and Guattari assert that art is the language of sensations: ‘Art does not have opinions. Art undergoes the triple organisation of perceptions, affections, and opinions in order to substitute a monument composed of percepts, affects, and blocs of sensation that take the place of language.’32 This provocative statement, with its apparent refutation of art’s ideological content, deliberately looks elsewhere than the working out of representational equations or allegorical readings of texts. It focuses on the perceiver as biological organism and neuronal network. The embodied eye is embedded in the metacinema of the material world. Cinema is, above all, affective movement in process. Its movement has implications for a philosophy of time. Even if the work itself is short-lived, the sensation of art enters duration, for ‘so long as the material lasts, the sensation enjoys an eternity in those very moments’.33 As well as being aesthetic products in their own right, films connect directly to a broader metaphysical sweep. Deleuze’s film-philosophy always interweaves this double layer of significance.

Moving Images Deleuze focuses on the materiality of the film medium. Stylistic elements, such as the rhythms of movement, the dynamics of framing and the modulations of light, are his fields of operation. Rather than producing a semiological interpretation of signs as representations, he regards signs as the objects of an experiential encounter. We encounter them not by abstracting their symbolic meaning, but by perceiving their dynamics of motion. This movement occurs both in them, individually, and in their interstices when particular shots are edited together. Instead of following an associative chain, Deleuze’s analytical technique moves beyond image content. It refutes the fixed meaning of ‘the cinema of the One’ and develops an interstitial approach, AND, ‘this and then that’, which does away with all the cinema of Being
is. Between two actions, between two affections, between two perceptions, between two visual images, between two sound images, between the sound and the visual: make the indiscernible, that is the frontier, visible.34

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By the indiscernible frontier, he means the borders of duration accessible at the edges of movement-images, or in the gaps between them. The moving image is often disregarded by cine-semiology’s quest to identify fixed meanings. Deleuze insists that the signs of the ‘movies’ are not frozen symbols, but elements of movement and vibrations of force. As well as carrying representational meaning, images are material forces: shades of colour, intensities of light and timbres of sound. Every stylistic component is rich in affective gradations. These interact at a micro level between themselves and at a macro level with other aspects of the film. Colour, sound, movement and composition affect us as a part of the filmic assemblage. As well as ideational thought, perceptual and neurological processes operate in us as we watch. These include kinaesthesia (the sense of movement and bodily orientation in space); synaesthesia (the mixing of different sense modalities); and hapticity (interaction between vision and bodily feeling or tactility). We connect our corporeal machine and the film’s technological and aesthetic machine. If our engagement is intense, we think in and through the body in a powerful experiential response. All cinematic images are primarily movement-images. Images move within the frame via the camera’s motion, and between a series of frames in the rhythm of editing. The frames move before us on the screen via the projector and its flickering movements of light. The viewer’s eyes move in collusion with the phi-phenomenon and also move on their own behalf as machines in motion. By blinking, narrowing with suspicion, widening in disbelief, or closing in horror, our eyes modify the film’s movement-images. They input their own responses to them as part of engaged viewing. At this point, I would like to briefly clarify some key terms in Deleuze’s Bergsonian approach to the movement-image that connects cinematic perception to perception in general. Asserting that the consciousness is embedded in the metacinema of matter, Deleuze deploys Bergson’s ‘centre of indetermination’ to designate the human living image who turns virtual movement-images into actual ones. The types of images perceived are the ‘perception-image’, the ‘action-image’ and the ‘affection-image’. By grammatical equivalent, perception-images correspond to nouns, actionimages to verbs, and affection-images to adjectives. A perception-image is a framing, a selective registration of incoming movements. The perception-image filters out irrelevant incoming data and focuses on essentials of use-value to us. In cinema, framing effects a comparable selection and elimination of extraneous content. Framing is the determination of a relatively closed system, which includes everything present in the image, such as sets, characters and props. It encompasses what Film Studies refers to as mise-en-scène. Framing gives a special quality

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and intensity to the material selected. By taking its contents out of their surrounding context, ‘the frame ensures the deterrorialisation of the image’, yet it still implies the virtual existence of the out-of-field which continues to act upon us.35 There are two simultaneous aspects of the out-of-field: ‘the actualisable relation with other sets, and the virtual relation with the whole’.36 The latter, which is the most mysterious, opens onto duration. The perception-image has two poles, subjective and objective perception. Subjective perception is the point-of-view of a character within the diegesis, but Deleuze pays more attention to objective camera-consciousness by which the camera appears to gain independence from the human viewpoint and moves by an agenda of its own. The perceptive centre of indetermination is located in the ‘gap, or interval between a received and an executed, movement’.37 The perception-image and the action-image occur on each side of this gap and their operations are inextricably linked. The perceptionimage is subtractive and involves elimination, selection and framing. The action-image occurs in the living image’s delayed reaction to stimuli. It is caused by ‘the incurving of the universe, which simultaneously causes the virtual action of things on us and our possible action on things’, as perception and action are inseparable.38 By means of incurvation, ‘perceived things tender their unstable facet towards me, at the same time as my delayed reaction, which has become action, learns to use them’.39 Although Deleuze may refer to narrative actions as passing context for his discussion, his chief focus is the sensory-motor participation of the spectator’s consciousness itself in the action. For Bergson, perception has extensity, but affection is unextended. Perception measures the reflecting power of the body and affection measures its power to absorb. The affection-image is located between perception and action. It involves interior co-incidence of subject and object and is qualitative, not quantitative, in nature. Following Bergson, Deleuze explains that affection is a facet of the perceptual evolution from external action to internal contemplation. Whilst ‘delegating our activity to organs of reaction that we have consequently liberated’, we have also ‘specialised one of our facets or certain of our points into receptive organs at the price of condemning them to immobility’.40 These immobile facets engage in refraction and absorption rather than reflection of images. The affectionimage is experienced, then, by our specialised and immobilised organs of reception. It is Bergson’s ‘motor tendency on a sensible nerve’41 and Deleuze’s own photographic version of this definition as a ‘motor effort on an immobilised receptive plate’.42 The affection-image is located in between perception and action, and occupies the interval itself without either filling it in or filling it up. Rather

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than being in a fixed ‘geographical’ location, affection is in dynamic motion. It ‘surges’ in the subjective centre of indetermination, between a troubling perception and a hesitant action. It is internal and self-reflexive in nature, but retains feeling, being ‘a co-incidence of subject and object, or the way in which the subject perceives itself, or rather experiences itself or feels itself “from the inside”’.43 Affection, in which the subject and object coincide, partakes of ‘pure quality’. The affection-image is not a failure of the perception-action system, but is ‘a third absolutely necessary given’.44 The autonomous quality of the affection-image in human perception has its corresponding cinematic affect. This may be a virtual conjunction that moves away from character psychology and plot to make the affect more independent of the state of things. Deleuze’s example occurs in the neo-Gothic space of Terence Fisher’s Hammer Horror film The Brides of Dracula. Fisher applies the autonomy of the affection-image when he ‘makes Dracula perish nailed to the ground, but in virtual conjunction with the sails of a burning windmill which project the shadow of a cross at the exact place of the torture’.45 Here, the affective collusion of mise-enscène adds a participatory animation to the external objects surrounding the vampire’s demise and there is no distinction of style from content. Deleuze distinguishes between the image’s semiological, social meaning and the quality of the affection-image. Referring to a scene from Pabst’s Pandora’s Box, which depicts Lulu with her nemesis, Jack the Ripper, he acknowledges the obvious presence of ‘real’ individuals in social roles. As well as these fictional representations, there are qualities that ‘in themselves, or as expressed’ constitute ‘the event in its eternal aspect’, such as brightness, terror and compassion, which are ‘pure singular qualities or potentialities – as it were, pure “possibles”’.46 Although power-qualities relate to narrative causes that make up the state of things, power-qualities refer primarily to themselves as expressing the state of things. Particular affects are ‘Dividual’: they vary their quality according to the connections they enter into and the divisions they undergo. Emotions like terror and optical sensations like brightness manifest power-qualities, which are virtual possibilities waiting to be actualised in particular conditions. The quality of an image depends on both its context in the film and its particular affect on the spectator. Deleuzian film critique focuses on the dynamics of style. This special type of mise-en-scène analysis evokes the affective quality of a scene’s aesthetic components. Particular qualities might be traced alongside analysis of representational iconography, or the critic might move out from this to explore their aesthetic/philosophical implications. The second technique is more rigorously Deleuzian. He writes that ‘a colour like red, a value like

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brightness, a power like decisiveness, a quality like hardness or tenderness, are primarily positive possibilities which refer only to themselves’.47 In other words, it is possible to dislocate these elements from their narrative context and their place in the film’s action. Nevertheless, Deleuze does not indulge in aestheticism. Rather than being for its own sake, art is ‘a tool for blazing life lines’.48 Style works with the spectator’s intensive embodied consciousness to breach deeper levels of awareness and philosophical thought, with potential for extensive action. If the sensory-motor connection is disturbed, the spectator becomes disoriented. To perceive the workings of this state of consciousness, intuition is needed. Moving far from Structuralism, Deleuze advocates that ‘it is necessary to combine the optical-sound image with the enormous forces that are not those of a simply intellectual consciousness, nor of the social one, but of a profound, vital intuition’.49 Such an intuition is generated by a particular array of virtual sense-impressions. In the work of RobbeGrillet, for example, we have ‘the descriptive power of colour and sounds, even as these replace, obliterate and recreate the object itself ’, as well as the tactile in its haptic function.50 Certain films include aesthetic effects divorced from the immediate causal chain. When a pure optical and sound situation occurs, it ‘makes us grasp something intolerable and unbearable’.51 For Deleuze, the extreme reaction induced by the affection-image is more potent than the explicit violence of the action-image. Scenes of terror, corpses and blood may actually appear on screen, but are not necessary for the aesthetic affect. The affection-image ‘is a matter of something too powerful, or too unjust, but sometimes also too beautiful, and which henceforth outstrips our sensorymotor capacities’.52 As the sensory-motor function is suspended or breaks down, deeper insight occurs. I deviate from Deleuze in my contention that such moments happen not just in independent, experimental films, but also in some of the more mainstream products of the horror genre. From an art-house perspective, such films might appear to be merely sensationalist. It is important to acknowledge here both the subjective and the social criteria of taste in film criticism. It is dangerous to draw up a prescriptive canon of those films that ‘outstrip our sensory motor capacities’ and stimulate deeper levels of awareness in audience members. My own choice of films is inevitably influenced by personal and cultural specificities of habitus, such as class, age, gender, academic interests and what ‘turns me on’ (that most machinic of qualities). I begin my readings of the movement-image with my perspectives on Murnau’s Nosferatu’s mise-en-scène as well as demonstrating Deleuze’s methodology. The film is rich in period detail (its political implications

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have been highlighted by critics), suggestive images and innovative camerawork. It moves and frightens me even after many viewings. Deleuze’s chief investment in German Expressionist films is not to fix their sociopolitical ‘meaning’, but to think through them as events of light, shadow and intensive movement. I illustrate Deleuze’s insights on light via an affective mise-en-scène and cinematography that combines Gothic horror with the sensory distortions of experimental cinema.

The Infinite Spirit of Evil: The Forces of Light and Darkness in Nosferatu Cinematic light is light in motion. Like photography, the film medium works in (already moving) light, but with additional properties of motion as film moves through the camera and through the projector’s own beam of light. The dynamic relations of light and shadow are a basic expressive device of cinematography, although their centrality declined with the advent of colour stock. Extremes of light and darkness both prevent our clear vision and stimulate our awareness of our other senses. They enable intensive rather than extensive movement. Silent horror film uses light and dark for symbolic contrasts of good and evil, whilst grisaille, or grey tones, convey both physical fog and lack of psychic clarity. For Deleuze, though, light is much more than an aesthetic device in cinema. Its physical properties and metaphysical implications are pivotal to his philosophical structure. Film/philosophy explores light because it is movement, and ‘the movement-image and the lightimage are two facets of the same appearing’.53 Deleuze foregrounds the modulations of light in German Expressionist cinema as ‘intensive movement par excellence’.54 The intensive movement of mise-en-scène is heir to the medieval Gothic tradition in its diagonal, jagged lines and in its spiritual dichotomies, as well as thematic strands of occultism and folk belief. In tandem with its Gothic elements, the film draws on Expressionism’s Modernist tendency towards abstraction, which ‘results from its detachment from the past and discovery of ‘the spiritual abstract Form of the future’.55 The quality of Nosferatu is, however, more Gothic than Expressionist in its overt style. Expressionism’s disorienting shadow world extends into the ‘interior’ metaphysical dimensions of an opaque ‘any-space-whatever’. This ‘is a perfectly singular space, which has merely lost its homogeneity’ to become ‘a space of virtual conjunction, grasped as pure locus of the possible’.56 It is not an abstract universal, but is manifest via aesthetic affect. Having ‘left behind its own co-ordinates and its metric relations’, it becomes a ‘tactile’

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space of ‘textural intensity rather than spatial extensity’, which we ‘feel’ through our virtual sense of touch.57 Deleuze’s analysis here connects aesthetic style, corporeal affect and metaphysical reverberation in an experiential assemblage. The dynamic conflict of light and dark is the shifting foundation of this intensive world.

Into the Black Hole Nosferatu’s opening presents light in a pristine state unchallenged by the vampire’s darkness. The natural light of the sun at its zenith bleaches and dazzles the eye. It glints off reflective surfaces such as the leaves in the garden where Jonathan Hutter, the exuberant young estate agent, picks flowers, his hair haloed with sunshine. Hutter’s new wife, Nina, is likewise brightly lit as she plays with a kitten at the window. The light quality extends indoors and is reflected off Hutter’s mirror by the window. Light glows round his head, etherealising his full, sensual face. The technique of irising in and out of these images, as well as invoking period nostalgia, mimics the gentle opening and closing of the eyelids in their adjustment of light, inducing a relaxing, soporific effect. The light is over-bright, like the couple’s false sense of security, inevitably to be darkened by the vampire’s shadow. Darkness encroaches on Hutter during his journey through a sublime landscape of misty mountains and pines. Naturalist footage of restive horses and a lurking hyena both gravitates against and enhances the narrative’s fantastic aspects as the nocturnal forces of the vampire assert themselves. Extending the image cluster of hunter and prey, peasant women inside the inn become-animal when they huddle in together in terror like the horses as night falls. In the light of morning, the horses return to the sun-drenched field. Reassured, Hutter discards his copy of The Book of Vampires, but the dark clouds that gather outside undermine his optimism. The intercut tower of a ruined castle is a bent and warped black silhouette. This rises above, but is also integral to, the pine forest and rocks. Its appearance foreshadows that of Count Orlock himself in the next scene. The ‘land of the phantoms’ is characterised by high-contrast arrangements of light and dark. This is strikingly manifest as Count Orlock’s coach comes to meet Hutter. The carriage’s serpentine route follows neither the line of the track nor the natural lie of the land but its own trajectory. The vampire’s anomalous nature is cued by his unnatural velocity as his coach scuttles downhill with the jerky speed of stop motion. These movements follow the jagged Gothic line of Expressionist force. From the

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top left of the frame, dark pines reach down to dominate more than half of the long-shot composition. Their spiky shadows, like sharp claws or teeth, form a diagonal split with Hutter’s patch of sunlight at bottom right. On its return journey, the coach shudders back up along the line between light and darkness. It keeps to the diagonal, but lists slightly to the left of the frame into darkness. Its disjointed and beetle-like motion plunges Hutter into a vertigo with mental and psychic, as well as physical, reverberations. By crossing the bridge and accepting a ride, Hutter has entered into contract with the vampire. His former world-view is radically inverted by the acceptance. This is emphasised by Murnau’s celebrated use of negative footage as the coach returns. The reversal of light and darkness renders the sunlight black, and induces a white, fog-like shadow between trees. This luminescence reduces the coach’s material presence to a faint, phantom imprint of itself. The numinous combination of dematerialisation and unnatural movement is extended by the fast-motion rolling of the clouds impelling the vehicle on. Along with these unnatural velocities, the use of abstraction gravitates further from realism and increases our anxiety by an absolute intensity of movement which is almost stasis. Geometry renders the vampire-ascoach-driver predominantly triangular. The pointed roof of the castle turret, animated by circling, predatory birds, offers a visual rhyme to the shape of his hat and his nose. Hooded horses echo their master’s cloaked concealment, too dreadful to be exposed to the light of day. Orlock’s forward gesture with his whip conveys hypnotic force as well as imperiousness. Expressionist lines often point Elsewhere, beyond the frame’s confines towards another level of reality. Expressionist acting style deploys a body language that mimics the diagonal composition of shots. After he is bitten for the first time, Hutter awakes in a rigid diagonal posture. His customary vigorous stretch has become stiff and constrained, as his life-force has been drained. When he discovers the vampire’s coffin, Hutter again becomes diagonal as he slides sideways up the steps, but his face, frozen in horror, is compelled to focus on the vampire to the last. From a Freudian perspective, he adopts the phallic stiffness produced by terror, but this ignores the posture’s unsettling compositional force in the frame and its dynamic potential for movement.58 In his chamber, Hutter flings himself to the floor in despair, but then rises up from his abject posture, crawling towards the window in an upward diagonal line that seeks escape. Discontinuous editing elides the impossible speed of the vampire’s transformations. As ‘coachman’, he drives the shuddering coach off into the trees, whilst the castle gate swings open to engulf Hutter. In the next

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shot, the young man crosses the courtyard as his host emerges from the cavernous semi-circular arch of the castle interior, having changed his appearance and demeanour, and identifiable only by his black holes of eyes. He moves stiffly, with hunched back, hugging himself with incurved arms that echo the curve of the archway. His rigid legs and body, tightly bound by tight-fitting clothes, and his angular shoulders, suggest that he is always, already in his coffin. In this undead state, Orlock is freed from normal human laws of time, space and motion. He controls living creatures and inanimate objects by the hypnotic force of his own agenda. The vampire’s castle is the focal point of the shadow realm. Here, darkness extends the overpowering vampirism of its master. As Hutter and Orlock enter the cavernous interior, the vampire, garbed in funereal black, is absorbed by interior darkness and rapidly disappears into his own element of thick shade. Hutter, in his pale greatcoat, stays visible for longer, before he, too, is obliterated and vanishes from sight. Inside the entrance tunnel, Orlock, his claw-like hands hanging down in a becoming-beast, awaits Hutter as his prey. The camera is positioned behind the vampire, who stands in a commanding position in the foreground, mid-frame. This composition makes him larger and more powerful than Hutter. Orlock, a creature of enclosed spaces, is often framed by arches. Again the camera is positioned behind the vampire, from his overthe-shoulder viewpoint. His broad, stiffly padded back is reminiscent of an upright coffin. The vulnerable Hutter is physically trapped by doors that shut by themselves. Dark doorways and arches provide the further imprisonment of frames within the frame. Hutter is pushed towards the edge of frame by Orlock’s domineering presence. Beyond the frame is duration’s Elsewhere, which, in the terms of horror, involves the terrifying loss of subjective wholeness. Black and white chessboard squares pave the floor of the great hall. These alternating blocks of light and dark embody the dynamics of spiritual struggle. The Expressionist use of contrast is an aesthetic means to evoke the intense metaphysical struggle of opposing powers, as ‘the opaque black background and the luminous principle [. . .] couple together gripping like wrestlers’.59 Murnau’s work is notable for its spectacular use of light rays intercutting darkness. The combat of light and dark distorts space, altering perspective and creating a depth filled with shadows ‘sometimes in the form of all degrees of chiaroscuro, sometimes in the form of alternating and contrasted streaks’, with their particular spiritual implications.60 The confrontation between the two ‘infinite forces’ of light and dark determines ‘a zero point, in relation to which all light is a finite degree’.61 Their dimensions of depth and height imply a metaphysical fall, which

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‘measures the degree to which the intensive quantity rises and, even in its greatest glory, natural light falls’ in the ‘adventure of the individual soul, caught up in a black hole’.62 The ‘black hole’ results from Expressionism’s inversion of perspective by locating depth in the foreground. Space is potentialised by being made unlimited. The struggle of light and dark is located in a depth that ‘sometimes draws space into the bottomlessness of a black hole, and sometimes draws it towards the light’.63 The dynamic sublime of Expressionist art thus opens up a spiritual universe, which might, at the same time, be illusory. One numinous effect of Expressionist lighting is its confusion of boundaries by creating ‘a dark, swampy life into which everything plunges’ and is ‘chopped up by shadows’.64 This blurs distinctions between organic and inorganic matter as it ‘drowns and breaks the contours, which endows things with a non-organic life in which they lose their individuality’.65 By this process, the thing-world gains ascendancy over the human, as we saw in The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. It dissolves the difference between the mechanical and the animate ‘to the advantage of the potent, non-organic life of things’.66 In the castle, doors swing open and shut by themselves. Inanimate matter is filled with life-force and its movement is potentialised, whilst nature has lost the organic and is drained of life. A spiritual terror is produced by this ‘non-organic’ life, which, ‘oblivious to the wisdom and limits of the organism, is the first principle of Expressionism, valid for the whole of nature, that is, for unconscious spirit, lost in darkness, light which has become opaque’.67 Humans lose their substance to shadows in this terrifying world. In the great hall, Hutter is brightly lit, but by artificial candlelight, not the sun. Here, the vampire, by the magical power of his will, hypnotises Hutter, forcing him down into a chair and moving in on him before the scene cuts to leave the impending bite as an implication rather than a realised act. When Jonathan retires the following night, Orlock intrudes more boldly to resume his meal. By the use of jump cut, the vampire moves forward with unnatural speed through framing arches and doorways that recall open coffins. He appears to lean out of the frame towards us, rising up whilst already vertical. He does not progress in a human manner by walking, but by a melting motion, which passes through layered planes of space as though space and time are no longer a barrier to him. As he moves forward towards the camera, he grows in size and power. The door bursts open like a coffin lid lifting of its own accord. The on-screen horror of the approaching vampire lies in his gliding motion, his spiky, claw-like hands and his shadow. The shadow absorbs his victim’s light in a virtual prelude to the actual

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absorption of the life-force. As his body is drained, Jonathan’s own shadow grows and follows him like a dark döppelganger. As darkness falls, the vampire awakes and reasserts his power. The shadows are again animated, and the inter-titles emphasise their role as extensions of the vampire, ‘as twilight came on, the empty castle became alive with menacing shadows’. As Hutter leans over Orlock to explain the title deeds, inflated shadows loom behind him on the wall, stretching out to overpower him as he moves forward. The distinct nature of the vampire’s vision is manifest by his darkrimmed eyes, positioned in centre frame as they bulge out above the paper he reads. Apparently fixed in the vacant stare of deep trance, these ‘black holes’ in his dead face are actually the hyper-aware and hypnotic eyes of a nocturnal predator. They are also bottomless pits of metaphysical terror. When Orlock claws at Nina’s miniature portrait, his myopic eyes, accustomed to sleep and darkness, peer at it from very close quarters with intrusive familiarity. As well as microscopic vision, his visionary powers enable him to both see and sense her from afar.

Forces in Combat Distracted from Hutter by the promise of Nina as more alluring prey, the shadow subsides and Orlock leaves for the West. External nature responds with sympathetic rapport to the vampire’s shadow as it prepares to expand abroad. Dark clouds gather and engulf the light of day as autumnal trees obscure the sky. Orlock, again defying the limitations of human speed by fast motion, piles up several large chests on a wagon and leaps into the top one before departing westwards. His body and soul freed from immediate hypnotism, Hutter moves naturally again and prepares his parallel return. He returns home in his proper medium of daylight, but its force is weakened, like his own. His journey home is accompanied by the doom-laden ship Demeter, impelled on by ‘the fatal breath of the vampire’ as though he were a force of nature. We cut to a lecture given by natural scientist Van Helsing on the carnivores of the plant and animal kingdoms. Orlock’s adversary is impelled by an enlightened scientific rationalism ineffective to combat the vampire’s dark occultism. Naturalist clips seen from the point of view of the microscope are inserted, shifting the tale from the fantastic to the natural realm. Magnified moving images show a Venus Fly Trap, the ‘vampire of the vegetable kingdom’, and ‘a polyp with claws transparent, without substance, almost a phantom’. These natural vampires both validate Orlock’s status and predict the inevitability of his advent via avatars. The becominganimal of the vampire’s shape-shifting is here extended beyond the wolves

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and bats of tradition to incorporate more recent biology. Renfield also becomes-animal, like his master, as he seeks the blood of the living fly in a becoming-spider. Orlock sits on the crates in the ship’s hold, superimposed as a transparent ghost, like the polyp of Van Helsing’s lecture. As well as invisibility, the vampire’s powers allow him to rise smoothly from his coffin/chest as though retaining his naturally supine posture. He becomes vertical by a hunger-driven effort of will. Onboard the ship, we alternate between the camera’s and the vampire’s point of view. From an upwardly canted camera placed low in the hold, the vampire towers above us. He appears to loom forward out of the frame as he clings to the rigging with his spidery hands, becoming-insect, like Renfield. The autonomous power of the camera intensifies the impact of the vampire’s arrival. As Nina gazes across the sea, the camera glides smoothly out to meet the Demeter far beyond her visual scope. While the town lies sleeping, Orlock appears, incongruously carrying his own coffin, as the large brick arch of the harbour wall recalls the architecture of the castle. His swift speed and supernatural strength make the chest appear light. The main square of the town is darkened by the shadows of trees as the vampire passes through and his figure melts into the mercantile warehouse congenial to him in its arched windows and doors. The darkness of night extends its power into the day. The long main street lies in the shadows of houses on the right as they stretch out across the frame to the left. Shots of cheerful citizens at their windows emphasise the enormity of the coming slaughter. White crosses chalked on black doors are too late to stop the killing, and suggest that conventional religion is a spent force. A narrowly composed long-shot showing endless line of coffins carried down the street impels Nina to stop the carnage by distracting the vampire. In a contest of faciality, Orlock stares across at Nina from the warehouse window. His relentless, fixed expression in medium shot is both tortured and torturing. Nina’s own face is anguished as she feels herself falling under his hypnotic spell, but she retains enough willpower to open the window in a free act. Her deliberate invitation mobilises his own suspended, intensive force and extends it into spatial action. Their encounter is the deathly nuptial of light and dark. Prior to his defeat, Orlock’s own shadow has gained autonomy from its source. Only his shadow, as an integral part of his extended desire, is seen mounting the stairs and opening Nina’s door. The quality of high-contrast lighting, and its consequent deep shade, sharply delineates actants in Expressionist films. A character might

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become ‘strangely and terribly flat, against the background of a luminous circle, or his shadow may lose all its thickness, by backlighting, on a white background’.68 These effects can induce terror when shadow ‘exercises all its anticipatory function, and presents the affect of menace in its purest state’ removed from its material source.69 In Nosferatu, the shadow ‘extends to infinity’ and acts autonomously, disorienting us by determining ‘virtual conjunctions which do not coincide with the state of things or the position of characters which produce it’.70 The forceful presence of the vampire is manifest not only in his shadowy extensions, but in his isolation from his background. The tonal components of black and white include colour elements present in light itself. These are not visible to the naked eye, but have affective force in a kind of subliminal process. Deleuze draws on Goethe’s Theory of Colours, rather than more recent physics, for his assertion that yellow and blue (the fundamental colour components of light, along with green) reach a movement of intensification and emit a reddish reflection. The reflection passes through ‘all the stages of intensification: shimmering, glistening, scintillation, sparkling, a halo effect, fluorescence, phosphorescence’, in a complex array of aesthetic effects.71 This red emanation is supposedly responsible for Orlock’s impact in certain scenes. Deleuze writes that the vampire ‘reaches a climax when a powerful light (a pure red) isolates him from his shadowy background, making him burst forth from an even more direct bottomlessness, giving him an aura of omnipotence which goes beyond his two-dimensional form’.72 Such sequences access a supplementary dimension of sublimity, as ‘the rediscovery of the infinite in the spirit of evil’.73 Nina writhes as the vampire’s shadow hands move across her body and clutch her breast near her heart as though squeezing it. A long shot of the interlocked couple at once distances the horror of the feeding and invites our own imaginative input. At cock crow, Orlock looks directly at us/into the camera with his baleful stare in a medium close-up that emphasises inhuman details such as his bat-wing ears. The tension lessens when he breaks the stare to look off-frame. The sun rises inexorably, illuminating the pointed roofs from top down, like snow-capped mountains. For the first time, Orlock hesitates, and his hand clutches at his own heart in anguish. Nosferatu’s death by light includes his shadow, which, as his manifest ‘soul’, likewise suffers extinction. He arches backwards, putting his hand out to shield himself from the burning light. Rapidly and finally, his substance melts into a wisp of mist and evaporates. Nina stirs and rises with a final effort, but she has given too much blood to survive. The final inter-title emphasises the struggle of light and dark, and announces that ‘the stifling shadow of the vampire vanished

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with the morning sun’, while the last shot returns to the castle on the crag, a ruined shell like its master.74 Deleuze emphasises the congruence of physical and metaphysical in Expressionism. Light and dark are not emblems of a transcendent spiritual realm, however, but are material forces in combat. Humans caught up in their struggle are unable to match their speed and potency. Interpretations of their nature, such as those of Van Helsing’s science, are superficial and fail to grasp the nature of their power. Only Nina, by her intuitive insight into the implications of the combat, can act for the light and vanquish darkness. By a free act of will, she causes the balance to shift to light, even though her life-force is demanded as sacrifice by the forces of darkness. In Carl-Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr, the potential for human intervention is much less clear, being swallowed up by a grey mist that blurs moral certainties as well as physical objects.

In a Glass Darkly: Lyrical Abstraction and Molecularity in Vampyr the spirit is not caught in a combat but is prey to an alternative (Deleuze)75

Deleuze extends his study of the dynamics of light to the ‘lyrical abstraction’ of pre-war French cinema. The films of the Danish director Dreyer are included in this category because of their style. Dreyer’s predominant tonal technique is grisaille, with shades of grey as his light palette. He also uses a very stark white for particular effects. These light techniques evoke the ambiguous and disorientating world of Vampyr. Deleuze contrasts the Expressionist struggle of light and dark with the shifting and uncertain relations of light in lyrical abstraction. Luminism, which values light for its own sake, produces ‘an alternation of terms instead of an opposition; an alternative, a spiritual choice instead of a struggle or fight’.76 Lyrical abstraction extends the binary combat by the addition of a third term, ‘the half-tone, the grey as indiscernibility’.77 As we saw, the use of light in Expressionist film is intensive and claustrophobic. Deleuze values grey for its mobility, as it manifests light as movement. Grey, as ‘pure movement of extension’, has some of the dynamic properties of colour, being ‘already like a movement-colour’ even though it works with monochrome stock.78 This enables a more complex metaphysics of ‘shades of grey’ to develop, too. In Dreyer’s work, the three-way dynamic of black, white and grey has implications for space as well as movement. Their inter-relations and alternations produce detailed patterns that ‘reach a high geometric composi-

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tion, like a “tonal construction” and a mosaic of space’.79 The graininess of the films recalls the dabs and dots of colour in French Impressionist paintings, which capture the refractive properties of particular light qualities. These vibrating points of light and shade also offer an objective correlative for the quality of molecularity. Molecularity is distinct from the ‘molar’ meta-structures of ideological, social and psychic schema. Particles and fibres adopt specific formations and engage in multiplicity as they conjoin with others. Deleuze adapts a scientific paradigm to conceptualise the universal play of molecular interconnections. Rather than drawing on psychoanalysis or linguistics, he applies the concepts of molecular biology to think the moving image of cinematic experience, because ‘thought is molecular. Molecular speeds make up the slow beings that we are’.80 Deleuzian film aesthetics emphasise the materiality of film and body, and their common molecularity in the film event. Cinematographic techniques, such as grainy film stock, soft focus or filters, blur the clarity of the image but also embody its molecularity. Cinema literally ‘makes bodies out of grains’.81 Some horror films use a similar effect to convey the viewpoint of the monster. In Michael Almereyda’s Nadja, pixellation conveys the vampire’s viewpoint as a heavily grained molecularity with a jittery motion. This mosaic-like effect blurs the focus, and likewise produces a blurring of moral certitude for both the characters and the spectators. We share the disjunctive otherness of vampiric consciousness. The blurring affect of graininess is intensified in Vampyr by further disorientation techniques. Dreyer seems to be evoking the mood of his literary source, Sheridan le Fanu’s neo-Gothic collection In a Glass Darkly.82 Grisaille, silhouettes and shadows plunge us into the sensory anomalies of the village of Courtempierre. In the first shot, the shimmering letters of the title lose focus to leave a formless shadow. It solidifies into the silhouette of a wrought-iron angel inn-sign, which later ripples and flows as light moves over its surface and animates it. Although shadows are expressively used throughout, a bright but diffused light is the film’s main source of horror. In seeking to bleach everything out, light extends the work of the vampire, Marguerite Chopin, who leeches the life-force of the young to enhance her own power. The landscape lies in a blurred haze and the clouds shimmer like elemental forces of evil, as nature lies under the vampire’s spell. Shadows form and re-form for their own mysterious purposes. These often sourceless shadows intensify the numinous atmosphere by making it impossible to spatialise the locale in order to orientate ourselves by clear co-ordinates. Light scintillates

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off the river’s flow and shadows of running figures chase each other without being cast by anyone. As well as hypnotic spatial disorientation, light confuses the linear direction of time and partakes of duration. Our sense of space and time is distorted so we begin to doubt its evidence. The events are meant to be happening in the course of twenty-four hours, but the changeovers between day and night are confused. Time stretches out of recognisable shape, elongated by its intensive experiential quality. Day and night are elided by confusing light effects. As night was unnaturally lit, so day is drowned in shadow. A shadow gravedigger throws the soil he is digging in reverse footage. This reversal makes time flow backwards, so the narrative trajectory also loops back on itself. The vampire’s force drains all energy from the present and refuses the progressive direction of linear time. She exists in both the present time and two centuries before, causing a temporal overlay that prevents the future from being realised. In qualitative distinction from the shifting grey world outside, the exterior walls and interior spaces of Chopin’s headquarters have harsh, highcontrast lighting, and a glaring white predominates. In Dreyer, the customary moral and metaphysical values associated with black and white are undermined. The ‘cell-like and clinical white has a terrifying, monstrous character’ that removes its positive associations so that ‘the white that imprisons the light is worth no more than the black, which remains foreign to it’.83 White is harsh, cruel and morbid, draining other tones like the vampire drains blood. Despite the spatial anomalies of the building, tricks of light have a more solid quality than the grey luminosity outside, due to contrast produced by the harsh white. The shadow silhouette of a soldier with a wooden leg climbs a ladder to an upper floor. Becoming embodied, he sits on a bench, and his shadow splits from him and faces the opposite way. Dancing figures in silhouette are accompanied by phantom musicians, like shadows cast by automata. Throughout the film, the world of shadows moves by its own dynamic. It is not dependent on originary sources in human or object. Impersonal forces are at work that hold human subjectivity at nothing. Dreyer’s use of light in Vampyr is overwhelmingly draining and oppressive. Yet, when light insists on its own materiality independent of narrative representations, it accesses a quality of the affection-image that Deleuze considers of profound spiritual significance. He contends that, in Bresson and Dreyer, this ‘pure, immanent or spiritual light, beyond white, black or grey’ has significance for ‘a physics (or a metaphysics)’.84 This light quality modifies both black and white, suffusing them with a spiritual force in which they lose their limitations, ‘it restores the white to us, but a

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white which no longer confines the light. It finally restores the black to us, the black which is no longer the cessation of light. It even restores to us the grey, which is no longer uncertainty or indifference’.85 Deleuze argues that particular aesthetic singularities such as lighting may be isolated from their narrative context and demand attention in their own right as they vibrate beyond the confines of their frame. They influence and shape the entire mood and tone of the film’s affect. Jorge Iven’s Rain, for example, presents the affective quality of rain as an essential force abstracted from all possible rains. Although he opposes the fixity of essentialist thinking in general, Deleuze does seem to be suggesting here that a particular force has its own essence. By his use of essence, though, the metaphysical becoming of movement, not stasis, is revealed. Deleuze’s any-space-whatever appears in films where plot and action are less central. It is produced by the affective qualities of aesthetic components. Although it may form the ground to events, it operates essentially independent affects: ‘shadows, whites and colours which are capable of producing and constituting any-space-whatevers, deconnected or emptied spaces’.86 In Dreyer’s work, supplementary spiritual dimensions and possibilities are opened up when ‘space is no longer determined, it has become the any-space-whatever which is identical to the power of the spirit’.87 Deleuze does not reference a particular Dreyer film here. For me, the liminal village of Courtempierre, both in its localised detail and as an ‘any-space-whatever’, accesses metaphysical potency via its physical powers of light. The white, black and grey tonal palette manifests an unstable, heterogenous space by its ‘richness in potentials or singularities which are, as it were, prior conditions of all actualisation, all determination’.88 The light of Courtempierre is an autonomous force and also illuminates the sensory anomalies of mise-en-scène. Light works affectively through other cinematographic elements that make up the film’s intensive space.

Sensory Anomalies and Intensive Space Sensorial distortions begin with the opening shot of the angel inn-sign. As well as its refraction of light mentioned already, the sign is tilted and skewed in the first of the film’s startling camera angles. This image is presented without an establishing shot or other contextual clues, transmuting a potentially Christian symbol into a more sinister force. The subsequent shift to long shot reveals a grim reaper figure approaching a gallows-like structure (or an old peasant man with a scythe). A bell rings in silence to summon a ferry across the misty lake. Throughout the film, unnerving sounds and long silences are preferred to words. Language, when spoken,

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is stilted and minimalist. In this short opening, Dreyer uses canted camera and minimal sound to lead us in to a series of inexplicable images and events. The build-up of these techniques produces the disturbing spatial and temporal event of the film. David Gray, the narrative’s protagonist, is a dapper young man on holiday. Apart from this, we discover nothing else about him. As a stranger forced to investigate and experience the mystery of the place, he is our perpetually aghast surrogate rather than a character in his own right. Gray’s fixed facial intensity reflects the horrors he encounters. His sleeked-back hair serves to offset his liquid, protuberant eyes, which bulge ever wider in horror as events progress. Gray is not a traditional hero whose actions move the plot along by solving mysteries and fighting adversaries. His name reflects his status as one of Dreyer’s ‘grey men of uncertainty’.89 He embodies the forces of grey, which, according to Deleuze, express our uncertainty and seeking. Contemplation and reverie have replaced decisive deeds in an intensive, rather than extensive, world. The unnerving ambience is intensified in Gray’s hotel room by lighting and sound. Incoherent voices are heard through the wall as, in close-up, the roses on the wallpaper vibrate like shimmering spots of darkness. A jump cut into the corridor reveals a shuffling blind man with a deformed face. After banging on the door, a (different) old man enters purposefully, watched by the entranced Gray. Pronouncing the inexplicable words ‘She mustn’t die – do you hear?’, he opens the curtains and leaves a parcel behind, with the written instruction ‘to be opened after my death’. Here, the narrative, via Gray’s intensive visionary perception, has moved out of linear time and accessed future events. Spatial fragmentation increases spectatorial confusion. It is difficult to ascertain the layout of either landscape or buildings, as they are rarely shown in their entirety. Disorientation peaks at its source, the headquarters of the vampire. One room contains machinery with spikes and wheels, like torture implements. Another reveals a coffin in flickering light. The camera pans across Chopin’s old study bedecked with skulls and voodoo dolls, to the sound of plucked strings and drum rolls that intensify strangeness and suspense. Although the coffin and the machinery feature later, all the highlighted objects remain opaque to Gray and to us. They offer no clue to the overwhelming mystery and the magical implements play no part in subsequent events. The thing-world is animated on its own account in a mise-en-scène that suppresses narrative events. The door opens of its own accord as a sinister doctor enters. The vampire’s assistant is a grotesque figure, with thick spectacles, a moustache and wig-like white hair. Although Chopin probably climbs the stairs, she

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appears to come straight through the corner of the wall on the right of screen. She is an androgynous elderly woman with hawkish features and white wispy hair, wearing the black gown and white ruff of her era. The objects of her occult collection are magically animated at her return. A closeup of a hideous figurine is intercut, and a skull spins round in welcome. Gray is powerless to intercede in the sinister plot he is forced to witness and is deliberately delayed by temporal and spatial illusions. He wanders back outside into to the world of blurry grisaille, where sourceless shadows chase each other across the grass. Whilst he prevaricates, a vulnerable situation is intercut. In a chateau, whilst two young women lie dwarfed in their oversized beds, a murder occurs. Chopin’s soldier-servant, in silhouette, rises out of a coffin armed with a rifle and shoots the girls’ father, who had appeared in Gray’s room earlier. The action of shadows has terrifying impact in the solid world. Intuiting the murder too late, Gray runs towards the chateau through the blur of its shadow garden. Discovering the dying man, Gray offers ineffectual comfort to his grieving daughter, the child-like Giselle. Together, they search for her sister, Leone, already under the vampire’s sway. The diffused light of the meadow, with its bright, yet hazy sky, overwhelms the couple. They are absorbed into semi-visibility by a light that confuses day and night. The vampire finds sunlight congenial as she feeds on Leone’s prone body, cruelly twisted beneath her. Gray and Giselle are unable to move quickly. The force of the light drains their vital energy and slows them down, allowing the vampire to hobble away and avoid capture. Dreyer’s manipulations of time and space cancel human agency. Predestined horrors occur in an inevitability free from intervention. Leone’s upturned eyes and fangs indicate her transformation into a vampire. With dramatic irony, the sinister doctor is summoned, and the next sequence becomes overtly hallucinatory in its effects. Persuaded to give his blood to save Leone, Gray lies weak and drowsing, back-lit by flickering light to suggest the disturbed, premonitory nature of his dreams. As drum-beats pound, he visualises a skeleton whose bony hand grasps a poison bottle. Waking, he grabs the bottle just before the entranced Leone drinks its contents. The doctor escapes from the house through doors that open and shut by themselves. Pursuing him across the meadow, Gray falls down on the ground for no physical reason, stymied by Chopin’s magic. As he sits on a bench in the same posture as the soldier earlier, a ghostly, shadow-like double of himself is manifest by double exposure. He is forced to split, and his döppelganger, leaving his sleeping form behind, continues on to Chopin’s house. The door reflects Gray like a mirror, splitting him further. His

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faintly superimposed form watches undertakers at work. He sees himself – this time in sharp focus – inside a coffin. This double doubling gives the profoundly uncanny impression that part of him is dead and that his watching self is already a ghost. He peers through a wire barrier, his face distorted by the mesh, to see Giselle, her arms pinioned at a distorted angle and her eyes frozen open. In his ethereal condition of disembodied watcher, Gray is unable to free her. As a surrogate for the horror film spectator, he is compelled to witness without being able to act. Gray watches ‘himself ’ being closed up in the coffin, and as the lid is hammered shut. The camera shifts to the point of view of the apparently dead man and we watch events from inside, sharing Gray’s alert but immobilised point of view. Through the glass pane, we see the lid being lowered and screwed down. Candles are placed on the glass and lit as Chopin’s malevolent face peers down in triumph. In disorienting slow motion, we have a distorted, low-angle vista of an avenue of trees seen from beneath. The ghostly shadow of the cortège in long shot passes the figure of Gray still hunched on the bench. At this point, he returns to sharp focus and rises up as though coming back to himself after a dream or a visionary experience. Gray moves at a slow, dream-like pace, under the pallid light of a sun faintly seen through cloud. Reaching the churchyard, he helps an old manservant to exhume and stake the vampire’s body, which turns into a skeleton in an atypically low-key scene that is quickly over. Leone rises, cured, and the sun beams out briefly before Chopin’s demise disturbs the elements and a storm rages. At the window of the vampire’s house, the face of the girls’ father appears as a vengeful apparition. The light flickers on and off, as though a lantern were swinging back and forth, until the soldier falls over, dead. The mill resembles a torture chamber, with its wheels and screws that start themselves up. White flour sifts down onto the trapped doctor, as it inflicts a slow, relentless death. He is killed via a swirling fog of grains that leaves only his hand sticking up and hanging onto the wires. The forces of light released by the vampire’s death have dispatched both the soldier and the doctor. Despite the villains’ punishment, aesthetic forces undercut the apparently stock ‘happy ending’. After searching for Leone on the misty lake, Giselle and Gray walk through the striated shadows of the trees into the sunlit brightness of a new day. The couple are engulfed by the brightness that has been consistently draining them and are thus wiped out of material existence. Light, not the hero and heroine, triumphs at the end, leaving the any-space-whatever free from human intrusion.

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Horror film continued to work predominantly with the aesthetics of light and shadow in its monochrome phase, but by the 1960s, the use of colour stock came to prominence and brought with it a distinct array of affects in motion.

Sensational Colour: Spectral Horror [colour] immediately renders a force visible.90 (Deleuze)

Despite the specificity of each medium, some of Deleuze’s insights on colour in painting are valuable for my own analysis of affective colour in horror cinema. The affect of colours on the sensorium is due to the varied speeds of their light vibrations. Deleuze is influenced by Bergson’s physicsbased perspective, according to which ‘the irreducibility of two perceived colours is due mainly to the narrow duration into which are contracted the billions of vibrations which they execute in one of our moments’.91 If we were able to stretch out this duration, and live it at a slower rhythm, we might perceive the vibrations of light’s energy itself and ‘see these colours pale and lengthen into successive impressions, still coloured, no doubt, but nearer and nearer to coincide with pure vibrations’.92 He implies that the vibrational quality of colours affect the senses directly, prior to their learned social and cultural associations. The crux of Deleuzian colourism is likewise the affective perception of these vibrations of force. Although Deleuze briefly refers to colour in cinema, his main theoretical application is to painting. This is because he regards cinema’s chief expressive tools as light and movement, and painting’s as colour, texture and form. He distinguishes intensive and extensive forces as Francis Bacon depicts bodies ‘sometimes with an inner force that arouses them, sometimes with external forces that traverse them’.93 Deleuze considers colour, like light, chiefly as a force, at times eliding the terms as ‘colour-force’. He presents colour as a stimulus and modulator of the ‘colouring sensation’.94 Painters apply colour to static canvases, on which they create virtual movement and energy in the space contained by the frame. Deleuze’s work on Francis Bacon considers the complex relations of colour regimes and their tonal harmonies.95 His imagery of colour’s spatialising energy expresses natural dynamics in ‘the shores of vivid colors and the flows of broken colors’.96 Once selected and framed, colours engage in complex interrelations, which mobilise movement in films as well as paintings. Tonal scales mix and interact in both media. Tones, defined by the contrast of black and white, may be either saturated or rarefied. Tonal relations have a tactile, as well as a visual, dimension. Their characterisation as

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‘warm’ or ‘cool’ is based on the complementarity of colours in the spectrum. Modulation in intensity or saturation is determined by the relations of particular colours to their ground, or their zone within the frame. In the case of film, the frame delimits the content of the shot, but the colours themselves are already in vibrational motion. Their intensive, inherent movements combine with the movement of camera, characters and editing to unlock the virtual force of affect. Though everything is visual in painting, vision mobilises at least two senses. Deleuze describes vision’s capacity to mix with other sensory properties and its subsequent expansion of scope. I am suggesting that film, as well as painting, ‘gives us eyes all over: in the ear, in the stomach, in the lungs’ and that cinema spectator’s eye itself is a ‘polyvalent and transitory organ’.97 Our whole body is caught up in the affects of colour as we vibrate in unison with them. Deleuze’s work with colour affect highlights the relationship of eye and hand. Touch and sight are interconnected in three different degrees: the digital, the manual and the haptic. The digital marks subordination of hand to eye, but the optical retains the manual in virtual form by means of depth, contour and relief. The manual reverses the hand/eye relation. Formless space and restless motion exceed the eye’s capacity and dismantle the purely optical. The most significant relation between hand and eye is the haptic. Distinctive elements of touch are included in sight. The haptic sense elides the visual and the tactile in the ‘tactile-optical function’.98 This sensory elision is reflected, for example, in the warm and cool colours I mentioned above. Although he is discussing Bacon’s distorted human figures, Deleuze’s focus on the centrality of colour is applicable to our perception of the monsters of horror. Moving away from their symbolic function, Deleuze locates the painter’s figures in relation to the regimes of the colour scheme. He asserts that, considered ‘figurally’, Bacon’s monsters and hideous objects reveal the ‘most natural’ of poses, depending on their function in relation to ‘different regimes of color, which constitute a properly visual sense of touch, or a haptic sense of sight’.99 Applied to horror film, this perspective demands defamiliarisation. It requires detachment from customary dramatic engagements of identification and suspense, and releases us from imbrication in plot dynamics. It also subsumes the symbolic functions of language used in dialogue. At the same time, it enables awareness of a more primal level of experiential engagement via its shift from representation to the machinic sensorium. I consider the affective possibilities of horror films that express their forces via colour, sound and tactisigns, beginning with Roger Corman’s

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psychedelia-influenced The Masque of the Red Death, photographed by Nicholas Roeg.

Death by Colour: The Masque of the Red Death To threatening drum beats, the colour-machine of the film slashes pure blood-crimson across the frame. This title sequence cues in The Masque of the Red Death as an unashamedly Expressionistic display of colour dynamics, a cinematic colour poem with red as its leitmotif. In horror film, red is actual or symbolic blood. As well as its cultural significance, red shocks and stimulates the sensorium, and may also be erotically arousing. Rather than striving to fix a pre-existing template of ‘meaning’ over a world of animated symbols, we could let our response to this affective quality shape our experience of the film. This approach does not block out or censor the other cognitive levels with which it fluctuates, but it enhances our perception of them. Bergson’s discussion of the wavelength and vibrational properties of red is useful here to shift focus from the symbolic meanings we have learned.100 In terms of physics, red has fewer vibrations than other colours. Red light has the longest wavelength, so its vibrations are the least frequent. In the space of one second, it vibrates 400 billion times in succession, far too rapidly for human perception to register. This ‘low’ vibration might account for the warm opulence of red in its physiological affect. Red, then, is a matter of colour frequency. Colour vibrations and waves scattered from the screen are experienced directly across the neuronal networks of the viewer. The opening shots contrast to the title sequence in their colour, but repeat its compositional form to develop a rhythmical pattern. Grey is slashed by the black silhouettes of branches in a barren, colour-deprived realm. A drab peasant woman appears, gathering wood. The cowled scarlet figure of the Red Death sits waiting beneath a tree, an explosion of colour into this world from a metaphysical Elsewhere. As he transforms a white rose into a blood-red one, so will the woman be the bearer of his fatal bequest: the bloody plague spread throughout the land. This sequence sets the film’s ritualised, neo-Gothic tone, and prepares to engineer the takeover by red. Prince Prospero, a sadistic feudal aesthete, visits a village. He displays the shimmering opulence of cloth of gold, which both mocks, and depends upon, the drabness of the peasantry as colour signals class relations. Vivid red appears on the scabby, red-flecked face of the plague-bearer. This is extended by the red and black of flames as the village is torched at

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Prospero’s orders. In contrast to the overwhelming greyness of this waste land, the castle is awash with gaudy colours. Francesca, the young woman seized by Prospero, bathes in a room decorated with gold swans and bright blue and white arabesque tiles. The courtiers wear garments of clashing colours from opposite sides of the spectrum to signal their unnaturalness. One woman wears a bright green dress with a purple veil; another mixes red and yellow. Purple and mauve predominate this mise-en-scène of aristocratic decadence. In an attempt to corrupt her, Prospero leads Francesca through his suite of interlocking rooms, in which everything matches its presiding colour scheme. First, they enter a gaudy, daffodil-yellow room. Prospero’s father had imprisoned his friend in it for three years; when released, he could not bear the sight of sunlight. A purple room is followed by a deathly white room with a vase of funereal arum lilies and a locked door, beyond which they do not pass. The floor of the great hall is paved in clashing colours: cyan, gold, black and white. Blue and green candles in Gothic-style candelabra light the hall. No natural light enters the castle, but the décor is brightly, even glaringly, illuminated. An exception to this is the gloom of the dungeons, and the black room where Prospero and his consort Juliana perform ‘the most terrible rites and incantations’ to Satan. Francesca is decked in a mauve nightgown, in vibrant contrast to her auburn hair and the crimson bloodstain on a book cover. The white of her bedroom offsets these colours. Prospero’s artifice engineers sound as he throws his amplified voice through a speaking tube to frighten her. The young woman passes through the yellow and the purple rooms. The colours she moves through resonate in different tonal effects as they ground and interact with her hair and negligee. Finally, she enters the black room. Its negation of colour is modified by the dark red glow of light diffused through its windows and other concealed sources of illumination. Francesca is lit by this hellish glow as Prospero awaits her. The film’s stilted, melodramatic dialogue and ritualised plot denaturalise events and throw further emphasis on the affective colour of the visuals. In contrast to the upper chambers, the dungeons are a minimalist tonal scheme of black iron, shadowy arches, pale cobwebs and red flames. Prospero’s purple and burgundy costume here emphasises fertility gone to waste in over-ripe rottenness. Juliana wears a blood-red velvet gown as she commits herself to Satan and prefigures her own death. Her ensuing vision is marked by colour contrast. Clad in a diaphanous negligee, under bluegreen submarine light, demons slash at her with phallic knives in the blood wedding she desired. When she returns to the great hall, a black-clad Prospero unleashes a hawk, which gashes her face and breast as her blood

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flows. Her vision is a premonition of her own ‘red death’ shown in gory close-up, with red slashes which continue the visual rhyme. The masque arranged by Prospero is a shifting collage of clashing colours as the dancers pretend to become-animal. Dancing shapes are a shifting human kaleidoscope of mid-blue, cyan, purple, magenta and maroon. The masks emphasise fabrics, colours and movements rather than individuals. These dehumanised puppets of Prospero are nothing more than their surface display of colours. The Red Death enters masked in red fringing. Passing through the revellers, he infects them with his own colour as he leads in ‘the dance of death’. He raises his red-robed arm, which blanks out the screen as it blots out all other colours. When he lowers it again, he leaves behind exposed, disease-marked flesh as he inflicts death by colour. The dance moves ever more slowly to electronic drum reverberations as the courtiers freeze like automata or puppets. A forest of red arms reaches out for Prospero, vengefully seeking to infect him with their colour disease. We share Prospero’s point-of-view of his courtiers in a blurred close-up as they fall down like a deck of cards. To reassert his own gaudy spectrum, Prospero passes back through his suite of coloured rooms to the black, redlit one where the Red Death awaits him. The Red Death is all red, the force of redness incarnate. His face, which is now Prospero’s twin, approaches him, gleaming with slicked blood as the red vibrates in contrast with the black of the room. Death raises his cloak and transfers the marks of the disease to Prospero. In the final sequence, the Red Death, rendered harmless by having fulfilled his task as nemesis, plays cards with a peasant child beneath a tree. His spectral brothers join him: black, yellow and blue deaths clad in hooded, concealing robes. Their colours recall Prospero’s suite of rooms and underline its morbid implications. After they line up and walk away together, the end-titles appear with the red-lit tarot cards of destiny. Costume plays a significant role in the film’s colour scheme, but décor has equal importance. Corman deploys a mise-en-scène of pure studio artifice with no attempt at realism. The moving figures are little more than animated colours themselves as they intermesh their kaleidoscopic patterns. A comparable Technicolor Expressionism appears in the Hammer Horror films of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Here, costume becomes more centrally affective in its style and colour as it dominates narrative locales.

Dressed to Express: Colour and Costume in The Vampire Lovers In British cinema, ‘historical’ costume was the chief expressive mode in such ‘women’s pictures’ as the Gainsborough melodramas of the 1940s. It

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was given Technicolor expression in the flamboyant fantasies of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. 101 Costume became prominent in the low-budget Expressionism of the Hammer Horror series. In their frequently autumnal settings, low-angled sunlight produces densely saturated colours. Away from location shooting, rough mattes and studio sets throw the costumes into relief against undemandingly sketchy scenery. In The Vampire Lovers, the protagonist, Carmilla, changes her dress colour in harmony with the changing mood and shifting power relations. Clothes display the repetitions and variations of an extended pattern of colour rhythms throughout the film. Carmilla’s home, Karnstein castle, is introduced in a gloomy monochrome, which, like the forest in The Masque of the Red Death, functions as ground to emphasise vivid colours. A Karnstein vampire rises from her grave as a jet of white mist. Melting into her embodied form, she wheels slowly in a transparent white shroud. As well as revealing her voluptuous body, the diaphanous fabric expresses the vampire’s liminality. Vampires may be mist, warm body or undead corpse. They partake of spirit and flesh at the same time, becoming visible or invisible at will. In the neo-Gothic spaces of both Hammer and Corman films, decadent aristocrats are the source of opulent colour. Here, the village inn and its peasant customers are drab. Crimson is introduced by the vampire in a blood trickle on a youth’s neck, then as a blood-smeared close-up of her own fangs. The blonde vampire glows with stolen life in her semitransparent gown. Her allure is ended by a sudden swift slash of vampire hunter Baron Hartog’s sword blade as he severs head from body. A filter floods the screen with crimson, leaving white traces of the beheading. In both The Masque of the Red Death and The Vampire Lovers, red is isolated by the titles to key in its affective network of force throughout. The next scene mobilises an affective struggle of colours as tonal extensions of vampires, their victims and their adversaries. The heat of the blood-red screen is cooled by the blue of moonlight on the pale portico of General Spielsdorf ’s neo-classical villa. Low-key colour and soft lighting enhance the tasteful subtlety of the dancers’ gowns in pastel mauves and soft greens. Laura, the General’s niece, wears pearl grey/mauve satin. General Spielsdorf stands erect, a solid block of scarlet. His colour is a force of protection and contained aggression on the right of the frame, as the vampire’s equal and adversary. Harmonious tones of soft mauve and charcoal grey expresses the rapport of the friends Laura and Emma with their heads together, the complementary tones of their blonde and auburn hair enhanced by glowing light. This pastel world is vivified by the arrival of ‘Marcilla’, the pseudonym

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of vampire Carmilla, and her family. Their matt-black coach is darkness solidified, and shadows darken the hall as they enter. Two shades of red, the general’s military scarlet and Carmilla’s blood crimson, engage in a face-off of opposing forces as the two figures draw together and their hues vie with each other for precedence. Carmilla’s red, in her crimson gown and ruby pendant, is the focus of all eyes. The colours of blood and death enter to support her via her father, with his black, red-lined cloak and pallid face, and mother, likewise in monochrome with pale skin, black dress and hair. When Carmilla later communes with her father from the porch, her red blends into the black of the night as she submits her passion to the over-arching forces of death.102 Dialogues of colour and tonal qualities mark the progress of Laura’s seduction. Carmilla’s crimson is changed for turquoise, closer in hue than scarlet to Laura’s grey stripes (also echoed on the General’s waistcoat). The vampire feeds on her victim via a green filter and the flickering superimposition of a cat’s face. This combines with a fur rug creeping up the bed to smother her victim in a combination of unnatural colour and the haptic sensation of choking. After the seduction is complete, Carmilla reverts to a more assertive green gown as turquoise is enhanced by its move to an adjacent shade on the spectrum. Green is ambiguous in its affect. The sun emits a higher proportion of green light than red or blue. In harmony with this, the human eye’s sensitivity to green is higher than its receptivity to blue and red, the other key colours it is equipped to perceive at a cellular level via the rods and cones at the back of the eye. In relation to green, ‘other colours enter different fields within the eye-brain activity and will cause different affects’.103 Green usually indicates natural growth and bounty, and has pleasing and soothing properties; but it may also trigger sinister occult associations. As a particularly lurid shade here, it has a more disturbing affect in its sinister associations of decay, and of the supernatural. It suggests the phosphorescence of fungi at night. Edged by its black border, it becomes both assertive and morbid. Green also recalls the filter used in Laura’s cat dreams. Colour harmony can suggest relations of rivalry, as we saw in the red shades of ‘Carmilla’ and Spielsdorf. A potential love triangle is also keyed in via gown colour. Mlle Perrodon and Carmilla both wear dark shades as they vie for the attention of Emma, in virginal white. Like Emma, Carmilla increasingly adopts white (due to frequent scenes in her nightgown) but with the deliberate self-awareness of experience. Carmilla’s gleaming wet flesh is teasingly semi-covered by a white towel after her bath, while Emma wears her white gown for the last time before succumbing to the vampire’s

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embrace. The couple reappear dressed for dinner in vibrant shades which assert their passion. Emma wears the victim’s mauve-grey as Laura had done earlier. Carmilla is back in her familiar blood-red gown and wears her ruby droplet as she starts a new vampiric relationship. Her crimson glows in triumph over Mlle Perrodon’s grey. The vampire is finally vanquished in the gloom of Karnstein castle by an alliance of the forces of grey, when the only emphatic colours are the dark red dress of Carmilla’s old portrait and her ruby pendant dropped on the ground. After Spielsdorf beheads her, tones lighten and the stained glass becomes clearer as ‘natural’ colours return. Her portrait becomes skeletal, drained of blood-red to the white of bone and the black of dissolution. The world returns to grey in the stone tombstone of the final closeup. Rather than being ‘told’ by narrativity, the tale has been expressed in the affection-image of changing colours. My third example, Dario Argento’s Suspiria, adds touch to his sensory toolkit.

Tactisigns of Terror: Suspiria In Suspiria, Argento incorporates as many senses as possible to frighten and arouse the spectator in their experience of the film event. Tactility is evoked with particularly repellent force. We can explore its impact via the Deleuzian cinematic sensorium. Deleuze adds the term ‘tactisigns’ to his sensory categories of ‘sonsigns’ and ‘opsigns’. Tactisigns reveal ‘a touching which is specific to the gaze’.104 In this context, the tactile is not an extensive act of the hand, but an intensive sensation of touch possible ‘on condition that the hand relinquishes its prehensile and motor functions to content itself with a pure touching’.105 Horror films appeal to the sensorium as comprehensively as possible by including haptics in their range of affects. The tactisign is pivotal in scenes of sensory horror and enhances the potency of their virtual presence. As well as terrifying sights and sounds, we perceive affective textures of a repellent nature, such as the wet stickiness of human blood, or the slimy trail of a monster. Argento’s lurid, saturated colours lack nuance and assault the sensorium in their perverse mimicry of the Disney cartoon spectrum. Red predominates in a variety of vibrant shades. It is first glimpsed fleetingly, on an anonymous woman at Frieburg airport where the heroine, American dance student Suzy Bannon, arrives. Suzy next sees red on a terrified student fleeing the dance academy. Red stains the outside of this building, spreading via the wallpaper and drapes as well as wine, blood, fingernails and lips. Violet-blue velvet covers the walls and adds tactile to visual potency. This Technicolor palette drains the strength of the good characters by absorb-

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ing their life-energy and glowing brighter afterwards. It vibrates in us intensively, oppressing yet arousing us. The film foregrounds art and artifice to the detriment of human life. The art nouveau ‘modernisation’ of the ancient building evokes fin-desiècle decadence in the endless ‘feminine’ curls of etiolated natural forms, and the style affords a fit setting for the occult theme. The building is impregnated with evil female forces embodied in the academy director/witch queen Madame Blanc and her assistant Miss Tanner, a brutal dominatrix. Men, as servants or dance students, are disempowered in this sinister gynocracy. Practical devices are deployed by the witches to ensure secrecy, like the use of drugged wine to send the dancers to sleep when a ritual, or murder, is afoot. There are, however, occult manifestations in the sensory realm impossible to explain. Nature itself is rendered unnatural by psychic disturbances in the locale, manifest by frequent rainstorms and strong winds. The heroine’s arrival at the airport is greeted by torrential rain and gales. The witches emanate an aura of supernatural evil, which only the pianist’s dog and Suzy are able to see. Suzy has very wide staring eyes that allow, or compel, her to witness and observe much more than she is meant to. Exceptions to her omniscience occur when she is given drugged wine, and when she is temporarily dazzled by a shard of mirror in a maid’s hand. Magnified light is harnessed by evil forces to blind Suzy’s clearsighted investigations. Several of the film’s occult phenomena are emphatically tactile. They frighten us by the radical incongruity of nature out of place and the mixture of elements usually kept separate. Kristeva’s identification of the abject as matter out of place is relevant here, but my focus is the experiential impact of these repellent manifestations on the senses. The first victim is grabbed by a hand that materialises from the darkness outside her window on the third floor. Outside, a mysterious, watching eye is suspended in darkness in a concretisation of the witches’ symbolic omniscience. Anomalous forms of life invade the dormitories. Their repulsive tactile qualities are emphasised by the sensitive skin exposed to them as the dancers undress. A bat flutters down onto Suzy and clings tight, biting her. Hundreds of maggots appear, wriggling and crawling over the floor, and the girls are compelled to tread on them, squashing them either with their shoes or with naked feet. The maggots land in the girls’ hair and crawl on their skin as they struggle to brush them off. The use of close-up in this sequence intensifies the viewer’s virtual sensation of slime, squirming larvae and viscous texture, particularly repellent on bare flesh. The murders intensify tactisigns to unbearably excruciating levels in

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their speeded-up, yet elaborate, tortures. Inflicted by invisible torturers, their affective potency is increased by the lack of subject/object split to provide some degree of narrative distancing. This is further intensified by the use of extreme close-ups. Knife blades dominate the screen as they slice into flesh, and internal organs such as the heart are torn loose and exposed. When one victim, Sara, believes she has eluded pursuit, she falls into a bed of wire coils and struggles against them. They clutch at her and slice her flesh, trapping her further the more she struggles. She dies an agonising death by tactility, cut to shreds by metal wires. The animal world is possessed and controlled by the witches, who use familiars, in an occult animal-becoming, to do their work by proxy. As well as the maggots and bat, a dimly seen flock of birds in a darkened public square is impelled to dive-bomb Daniel, the academy’s blind pianist, who wanders home alone. Despite his inability to witness their deeds, he has been cruelly humiliated and dismissed by Miss Tanner. His Alsatian guide dog, able to sense the evil nature of his master’s employers, had growled at the maid’s son. The swooping birds initially terrify the dog, then he turns against his master. In a horrific scene, the pianist, who is only able to feel and hear his assailants, is savaged and partly devoured by his own guide dog and has his throat torn out and eaten. The dog may either have become possessed or been terrified into forgetting his training and responding to his carnivorous nature, roused by the smell of fresh blood. Sound techniques with an exaggerated, hyper-real echo are deployed as affective devices. The tapping, clattering and thudding of the dancers’ shoes resonates with hollowness on the floorboards of the studio. In the bier-keller, the thumping and slapping of Bavarian dancers swells to an unnatural volume before Daniel’s murder. Natural sounds like wind and rain have the force of potential threat. Voices and music are ultra-clear, with a hollow tonal quality, and stand out in isolation from the broader sound mix. The electronic chords and discords of the rock band Goblin create a rich sound texture. Whirrings, whisperings and tweeterings without any diegetic source grate on the spectator’s aural nerves and stimulate anxiety. The film’s denouement is a flamboyant showpiece of sensory stimulation. Suzy enters the hidden chambers of the coven via its magic key of art nouveau, a blue metal iris on the wall. She accidentally knocks over a peacock ornament, which encapsulates the film’s colour scheme in miniature. When Suzy pierces the amorphous, shadowy witch-queen with a knife, she forces her to materialise in the partial form of organs without a body. Her mouth, eyes and hands, each one a sensory tool, appear in isolation and she uses them to both to perceive and to terrify her assailant.

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Electronically mixed sound is used to create her distorted voice. In a finale of tactility and colour, the red academy is finally burned down in a hellish conflagration of scarlet flames. Suspiria extends the sensorial palette of horror by its excesses of colour, sound and touch. Although Deleuze acknowledges the sensory operations of colour, miseen-scène and editing, his chief locus of the cinematic affection image is the human face, particularly in close-up. Throughout this book, I have noted the pivotal role of faces, both human and monstrous, as the affective focus of the horror experience. To illustrate the face’s horrifying potential, I will use a film in which the face has, literally, lost its features, Georges Franju’s Les Yeux sans Visage.

The Face of Horror: The Intensive Affection-Image in Les Yeux sans Visage the affection-image is the close-up, and the close-up is the face.106 (Deleuze) while perception measures the reflecting power of the body, affection measures its power to absorb.107 (Bergson)

By literally removing faces, the film’s plot remains unnervingly close to the liberation from facialisation described in Anti-Oedipus, ‘to escape the face, to dismantle the face and facialisations, to become imperceptible, to become clandestine [. . .] by quite spiritual and special becomingsanimal’.108 As a horror film, though, these processes are shot through with terror and revulsion. The unnatural cruelty of dismantling the face is stressed here. Young women are laboratory animals robbed of their largest organ, skin, in a perverted attempt to repair the damaged face of the heroine/victim, Christiane. Her face was burned away in a car accident caused by her father, the renowned plastic surgeon Doctor Génessier, now the chief perpetrator of these dreadful acts. The skin, and its underlying tissue, is an enforcedly mobile and transferable organ grafted by violence onto a set of others belonging to a different body. The controlling Sadeian eye of the camera moves about its purpose of exposure in a slowly insistent glide. It savours horrific close-ups of the cutting away and grafting of one face onto the raw flesh of another. Close-ups of faces in extremis are frequent in horror film. Deleuzian faciality, based on the ‘unextended’ nature of the affection-image in Bergson, can elucidate their impact. The power quality of intensive images is expressed for itself in a virtual conjunction unlimited by spatio-temporal co-ordinates. Power-qualities ‘in themselves’ are expressed by faces (or their

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equivalent) and embody the affection-image. The face is the epitome of the affection image’s ‘motor effort on an immobilised receptive plate’. By the magnifying properties of close-up-and extreme close-up, its shapes, textures and muscular movements reveal a variety of interrelated modalities, in ‘parts which are hard and tender, shadowy and illuminated, dull and shiny, smooth and grainy, jagged and curved’.109 These elements interact intensively among themselves or more extensively with other intercut closeups, in an internal composition of close-ups in affective framing, cutting and montage. The face is used by Deleuze to interrogate the nature and location of subjective identity. The ‘the pure affect, the pure expressed of the state of things’ relates to the face that ‘gathers and expresses it as a complex entity’.110 Deleuze identifies two types of face. The intensive face expresses ‘pure Power’ in its extensive connections with environmental others, and may be defined as ‘a series that makes us pass from one quality to another’.111 The reflective face expresses ‘pure Quality’ in ‘“something” common to several objects of different natures’ and is of a more contemplative, intensive nature.112 The face in close-up suspends individuation and attains a transpersonal quality. The intensity of the close-up face opens onto both time and space. It modifies space-time, ‘in depth or on the surface, as if it had torn it away from the co-ordinates from which it was abstracted’ and thus acts ‘like a short circuit of the near and far’.113 The face full-on is rare in mainstream cinema. Faces are more usually shown in mobile degrees of profile to maintain the illusion of a selfcontained fictional world by their indirect expression. The modulations of facial affect are expressed by turning-towards or turning-away. Facial obliteration, as in extreme close-up, however, ‘goes beyond the threshold of decrease, plunges the affect into the void and makes the face lose its features’.114 Christiane is introduced to us turned away from the camera, reduced to a non-person filled with self-loathing and despair, deliberately hiding her face in the pillows in a gesture of self-obliteration. This concealement piques our curiosity to see her face. Whatever degree she turns to, though, we will learn little more about her face, which is bereft of most of its features. Our first sight of Christiane’s ‘face’ conceals it, or, rather, reveals it as a blank white mask she is compelled to wear most of the time. She resembles a fashion mannequin with archetypally perfect, frozen features rather than an expressive and individuated human face. The mask enables her face to become the intensive face of pure quality in an overt manner. The viewer seeks in vain to read the marks of emotion and personality in the face itself.

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By being both visually isolated and blanked out, Christiane’s face is potentised and draws on the viewer’s ability to superimpose absent muscular movements when there is no facial mobility. The mask is topped by vibrantly waving hair. It is pierced by large, liquid and expressive eyes, which it throws into sharp relief. This, along with her voice and a stiffly gliding bodily mobility, indicate her suppressed life. Deleuze and Guattari describe the face’s potential as a tabula rasa, ‘a suggestive whiteness, a hole that captures’.115 Both signifiance and subjectification are projected onto this ‘white wall’. Not only is the face a frame or screen for social meaning, it is also the ‘black hole’ of subjective consciousness expressed by the ‘third eye’ of the camera. Close-ups of the face serve to defamiliarise it as an ‘alien landscape’. In the case of Christiane, our responses are contradictory. Our empathic sharing of her emotion is intensified by our own imaginative input, which we project onto the miniature blank screen of the mask. At the same time, we are alienated from the subjective sphere by the faceless face of the mask, so that its ‘hole’ could open up to the ‘Whole’ of duration. At the start of the film, we see Louise, Génessier’s assistant and ‘secretary’, with a frozen, tense expression as she drives her car alone at night. On the back seat, a human figure is slumped, its face and head obscured and de-personalised by a hat pulled low down. The young woman’s mutilated body has been disguised to cover up the horror of her ravaged features. The police and forensic scientists who discover the dumped body describe its ‘vast open wound in place of a face’. Skin is the most sensitive bodily organ and the facial features it covers are most intimately connected to our socialised sense of selfhood, renewed daily via our mirror reflection. Skin is the film’s dominant diagrammatic component, fetishised as the locus of beauty and vulnerability. Skin-like fabrics, textures and effects dominate the mise-en-scène of this glossy monochrome film. Louise’s shiny black oilskin raincoat glistens with the dampness of mist reflecting the gleam of car headlamps. The glossy polished bonnet of the doctor’s Citroën forms a reflective surface for the trees and buildings it passes. In the mansion, the shimmering of plate-glass windows, the gleam of tiles and the shine of the metal lamp in the operating theatre likewise offer reflecting surfaces. They mock Christiane by the whole environment’s becoming-mirror. Christiane also forms a moving crystalline surface of tiny mirrors as she glides around. She wears full-length housecoats of glittery fabrics that shimmer with the reflected light she seems to emit herself, enhancing her ethereal, fey appearance. Her floor-length garments hide her feet and add to our sense of her as a moving statue or automaton. As well as the visual

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effect of shimmer and shine on light-reflective surfaces, the insistent texturing of skin, fabrics and other materials evokes tactile sensations. Prosthetic and cosmetic surgery is, of course, deliberately used to modify facial features and skin texture in ‘face-lifts’, collagen implants and other beauty treatments. The doctor’s métier has made him ‘a man of distinction’ who duplicitously profits from anxieties implanted by the cult of youth in the fashion industry. His lecture audience, who cluster admiringly round him, comprises wealthy older women and their younger male companions. Potential patients are prepared to repeatedly suffer the excruciating agony of exsanguination, and risk cancer from the radiation with which he bombards them in the operating theatre. The doctor uses human women as laboratory animals. He has objectified both beasts and humans for his obsessive experimentation. The dogs and the young women are both lost, without protection, and equally vulnerable to capture. Both are unceremoniously dumped when the doctor has finished with them. The inhuman coldness of his attitude is fuelled by the neo-Gothic horror tradition of the mad scientist who abuses his skills and interferes with the natural order out of scientific hubris. Christiane expresses her most positive emotions in the company of her caged birds or the dogs imprisoned, like her, to await her father’s next experiment. In a tender scene, she visits the dogs, rendered docile by her gentle presence. They bark and snarl at the doctor when he passes and some of them are bandaged from his skin-graft tests. As well as kissing and stroking their soft furry skin, she bends down to their level to rub noses with them in a becoming-animal. Christiane’s tactility is highly developed, perhaps in compensation for her other sensory impairments. She delicately strokes the face of one of the human girl victims as she, too, is an experimental animal. In a startling image, we see Christiane’s exposed face from the victim’s point-of-view as a blackened shape with prominent pale eyes, shot in out-of-focus negative footage. Blood and raw flesh are rendered black and grey by monochrome. Doctor Génessier also assumes a mask in the operating theatre. This half-mask emphasises his hawk-like eyes and brow dripping with sweat from the tension of difficult incisions. Like a beautician preparing makeup, he draws around the victim’s face with a marker pencil. He takes the scalpel and we see him in painfully tactile close-up carving along the line he has drawn, transforming the living face into a removable mask of skin. Blood oozes out along the line left by the blade. The act of cutting and lifting the stolen face is rendered in even sharper relief by being performed in silence. We watch with fascinated revulsion as he cuts into the delicate skin around the eyes, aware of the vulnerability of the

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softest part of the soft machine. The scalpel makes the blood seep out and drip down. Lifting the facial flesh off with tweezers embedded around its circumference, Génessier and Louise peel back the face with a trembling movement, which causes a slight wobble in the flesh. The doctor pulls and prises at it, separating the facial skin from the underlying tissue. As the lifted face drops forward, it unnervingly appears to age, adopting a hag-like aspect as the features cave inwards towards each other. The excision leaves the raw exposed flesh beneath as the victim’s face is taken from her to be grafted onto Christiane, before her dehumanised body is discarded. Christiane’s lack of face has led to her social invisibility and virtual imprisonment by her father. She is, however, highly self-reflexive. She is aware of her own nullified status and has seen her own hidden face, both with and without the mask. She frequently reflects upon her loss. Despite the removal of all mirrors, she explains that ‘if the windows are open, there are other shiny surfaces. The blade of a knife, polished wood’. She confesses to Louise that ‘my face frightens me: my mask terrifies me even more’. She can accept her mutilated state better than the mask her father and Louise insist upon. Ignoring her stated wishes, they force her to wear an impossibly frozen face to render her appearance easier for them to bear. The face of Louise is also unnaturally marked by a sinister, mask-like stillness that hides her own emotions. She owes her own present face to the doctor’s surgical skills and wears a pearl choker to conceal the remaining scar round her neck. Louise’s eyes are strongly outlined by eyeliner and she sometimes wears a tightly wrapped headscarf round her hair. These add to her facial isolation and mask-like appearance, which, despite her own grateful collusion with Génessier, gives her some affinity with the motherless Christiane. The terror and distress of one victim, Enid, when she awakes on the operating bench, is likewise powerfully conveyed solely by her eyes, left uncovered by the mummy-like wrappings of bandages. This shot of the eyes in isolation is mirrored by Louise peering through a slit in the door of the operating theatre, the rest of her face remaining concealed. Enid has been forcibly stripped of her identity and flings herself out of the window in despair, leaving her eyes staring open in silent accusation. When Christiane first appears after her operation, her stolen face still resembles a mask, but one made of human skin this time. Her lack of muscular facial animation leads Louise to note the quality of ‘something angelic’ about her, again underlining the culture’s idealisation of young womanhood. Enid’s grafted face has been changed in its form and expression by the underlying bone and tissue structure of Christiane. The affront

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to nature is punished by failure in a disturbing series of freeze-frame photographs taken as ‘necrosis of the graft tissue’ sets in and Christiane’s appearance rapidly degenerates from perfection to deformity, and beauty becomes beast. Christiane’s despair at her role of human guinea pig and horror at her father’s cruelty leads to her demand for a lethal injection to put her out of her misery. Her compassion for the victims finally leads to her empowerment. In a free act, she releases the last young woman captured, as well as the dogs and her own pet caged birds. When freed, the dogs savage Génessier’s head, leaving him, too, finally without a face. Christiane wanders out into the dark garden under the trees with a dove perching on her arm. A figure of surreal grace, she glides away, freed from her father and his terrible tearing of organs from bodies. For Deleuze and Guattari, ‘dismantling the face is also a politics, involving real becoming, an entire becoming-clandestine’.116 Even though she still wears her mask, Christiane’s act is a refusal of the kind of faciality enforced by her father, and begins her becoming of a more truly Deleuzian body-without organs. Deleuze’s work on the types of movement-image offers a new film/philosophical approach to the aesthetics of horror. This response demands a degree of detachment from the terrifying drama of horror narratives. It rarely fixes symbolic meanings onto images. It also looks elsewhere than the researches of film historians who map the cultural context of the film’s production and distribution. At the same time, though, it enables awareness of a more primal level of experiential engagement via its focal shift from representation to movement and its affect on the machinic sensorium. In Chapter 4, I move away from the material aesthetics of horror, and their stimulus on the senses, to consider the impact of time on experiential thought in the horror film.

Notes 1. Gilles Deleuze, ‘The Brain is the Screen’, in Gregory Flaxman (ed.), The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 366. 2. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchill (London and New York: Verso, 1994), p. 176. 3. Deleuze, ‘The Brain is the Screen’, p. 366. 4. Ibid. p. 366. 5. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson (London: George Allen and Unwin, [1910] 1971), p. 28.

 - 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

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Ibid. p. 38. Ibid. p. 73. Ibid. p. 132. Ibid. p. 132. Ibid. pp. 12–13. Ibid. p. 12. Ibid. p. 14. Ibid. p. 18. Ibid. p. 18. Ibid. p. 18. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 58. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1991), p. 208. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, p. 168. Ibid. p. 211. Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 37. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 306. Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, p. 2. Ibid. p. 59. Ibid. p. 59. Ibid. p. 60. Ibid. p. 60. Ibid. p. 61. Ibid. p. 59. Ibid. p. 103. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 74. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy? p. 167. Ibid. p. 176. Ibid. pp. 166–7. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (London: The Athlone Press, 1989), p. 180. Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, p. 15. Ibid. p. 18. Ibid. p. 62. Ibid. p. 65. Ibid. p. 64. Ibid. p. 65. Bergson, Matter and Memory, pp. 55–6. Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, p. 66. Ibid. p. 65. Ibid. p. 65.

152 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74.

75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80.

    Ibid. p. 112. Ibid. p. 102. Ibid. p. 106. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 187. Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, p. 22. Ibid. p. 12. Ibid. p. 18. Ibid. p. 18. Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, p. 49. Ibid. p. 49. Ibid. p. 55. Ibid. p. 109. Ibid. p. 109. Freud, Sigmund [1922], ‘Medusa’s Head’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 18, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1940), pp. 273–4. Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, p. 101. Ibid. p. 101. Ibid. p. 49. Ibid. pp. 49–50. Ibid. p. 111. Ibid. p. 111. Ibid. p. 111. Ibid. p. 52. Ibid. p. 51. Ibid. pp. 111–12. Ibid. p. 112. Ibid. p. 112. Ibid. p. 53. Ibid. p. 53. Ibid. p. 53. The making of this film is the subject matter of E. Elias Merhige’s Shadow of the Vampire. This is a more visually conventional version than its original as character acting in close-up predominates. In colour, the lighting is much more uniform and detracts from the contrast of light and shade. Its use of clips from Murnau’s film serves to throw the older film’s distinctiveness into relief. Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, p. 113. Ibid. p. 113. Ibid. p. 113. Ibid. p. 44. Ibid. p. 113. Deleuze, ‘The Brain is the Screen’, p. 366.

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81. Ibid. p. 366. 82. Sheridan le Fanu, ‘Carmilla’, in In a Glass Darkly [1872], (Gloucester: Alan Sutton Publishing, 1990). 83. Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, pp. 113–14. 84. Ibid. p. 117. 85. Ibid. p. 117. 86. Ibid. p. 120. 87. Ibid. p. 117. 88. Ibid. p. 109. 89. Ibid. p. 114. 90. Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith (London and New York: Continuum, 2003), p. 151. 91. Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 203. 92. Ibid. p. 203. 93. Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, p. 160. 94. Ibid. p. 112. 95. Ibid. p. 152. 96. Ibid. p. 142. 97. Ibid. p. 52. 98. Ibid. p. 151. 99. Ibid. p. 153. 100. Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 205. 101. Such as The Red Shoes and Tales from Hoffmann. 102. The Vampire Lovers has been read psychoanalytically by Bonnie Zimmerman, ‘Daughters of Darkness: The Lesbian Vampire on Film’, in Barry K. Grant (ed.), Planks of Reason (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1984); and in my own Anna Powell, Psychoanalysis and Sovereignty in Popular Vampire Fictions (Lewiston, NY, Queenston, Ontario and Lampeter, Wales: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2002). 103. Barbara M. Kennedy, Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), p. 112. 104. Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Movement-Image, p. 12. 105. Ibid. p. 12. 106. Ibid. p. 87. 107. Bergson, Matter and Memory, p, 56. 108. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 171. 109. Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, p. 103. 110. Ibid. p. 103. 111. Ibid. p. 90. 112. Ibid. p. 90. 113. Ibid. p. 104. 114. Ibid. pp. 104–5. 115. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 168. 116. Ibid. p. 188.

CHAPTER 4

Horror Time

we shall never reach the past unless we frankly place ourselves within it.1 (Bergson) relations of time are never seen in ordinary perception, but they are seen in the image2 (Deleuze)

At the birth of cinema, the vampire Louis watches Lumière’s train. Among the clips we see in the same sitting are Murnau’s Nosferatu and Sunrise, which fades into Tequila Sunrise, a self-reflexive reference to the star, Tom Cruise, who plays the Vampire Lestat in the 1991 film. Time, history and memory are compressed in cinema as well as in the vampire, for whom a century elides into a few minutes. In this brief sequence of from Neil Jordan’s Interview with the Vampire, a shorthand version of cinema history is presented via a screen within the screen. Cinematic memory operates time in many ways, some more obvious than others. Time permeates the horror film in all its aspects, as insistent pasts undermine a linear map of time. Several different types of horror time are operant. The personal past, with its traumas, and the historical past that imposes itself over the present, have particular generic status. Ghosts conflate past and present as they linger to repeat their own present, refusing to let it be past. They compel present-day characters to abandon contemporaneity and to experience the history of others by enforced overlay. Even though the present is never fully materialised by film, editing, camera movements and superimposition work overtly with, and in, time as well as space. Tension is experienced as an unbearable dilation of time, whereas shock intensively collapses a temporal force felt like a physical blow. The metaphysical plane of horror also opens on to duration. The work of Deleuze and Bergson on the nature of time throws new light on this aspect of horror-time. Psychoanalysis suggests that the unconscious is a bounded zone, a burial ground for the (personal) past that haunts the (subjective) present. Psychoanalytic time is personal history. Following Bergson and Nietszche, not Freud, Deleuze prefers a universal model of time as flux and process. Bergson describes a universe of fluid, ever shifting flows and vibrations rather than solid bodies in motion. In some respects, his views were shaped by contemporary views of quantum

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physics. By eliding movement with time, Bergson seeks to ‘avoid the visual image of bodies and the concomitant and inevitable abstraction of movement (i.e., time) from that which moves’.3 Deleuze, too, interrogates what happens when time is not measurable by the translation of movements into action. In Cinema 2: The Time-Image and elsewhere, Deleuze distinguishes between two kinds of time. Chronos is the spatialised, measured time of the clock; but Aeon, as duration itself, is virtual. It is a transpersonal, transtemporal, force and partakes of the élan vital of all evolving life. Chronos is present-oriented. With God at its centre, it measures out the action of bodies and causes. Aeon, however, is the limitless flow of past and future, in which the present is ‘the instant without thickness and without extension’.4 As ‘always already passed and eternally yet to come’, Aeon is the ‘eternal truth of time: pure empty form of time’.5 The subjective model of human selfconsciousness operates in Chronos, whereas the living image participates in the perpetual process of affect that is Aeon. As centres of indetermination, humans have the latent capacity to perceive the workings of duration, made manifest both in consciousness and in art. Temporal relations not visible in ordinary perception may be seen in the image. The temporal process becomes evident to our senses when cinema self-reflexively foregrounds its own mechanisms. Cinema can represent time in the fictionalised ‘present’, but the film image itself, unlike the televisual image, is not in the present moment. Referring to the work of Tarkovski, Ozu and others, Deleuze states that the cinematic image ‘is an ensemble of time relations from the present which merely flows’; and that the image renders ‘time relations – relations that can’t be reduced to the present – sensible and visible’.6 Such films make us conscious of duration, both in them, and in ourselves as living image. Cinema helps us to experience and to think time. The movement-image appears in cinema more often than the timeimage, which is still an emergent form. In Cinema 2, Deleuze sets out to exemplify a new form of ‘direct time-image’ in art-cinema after the Second World War, beginning with Italian neo-realism. One way in which the power of cinema captures time is in the relations and disjunctions between sound and vision, when what is said does not arise naturally from what is seen. In such films as Last Year at Marienbad, the movement-image is superseded by the time-image. Time is no longer derived from movement, but ‘appears in itself and gives rise to false movements’.7 Despite Deleuze’s distinction of the two types of cinematic image, their interface is permeable and fluid. Movement is always in time, and one force does not function without the other.

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Deleuze is less concerned with the realistic parameters of Italian neorealism as a style than with moving beyond the ‘real’, into the process of thought stimulated by the style. His intent is to ‘turn from exteriority or extensiveness in space toward a genesis in mental relations or time’.8 His examples exhibit the workings of time by their defamiliarisation of the familiar. They produce a more contemplative form of cinematic experience. All film images, however, inherently destabilise time by their temporal modulations across past, present and future, and many different types of film, including more mainstream generic examples, have use-value as tools to explore this process. Deleuze’s work on the time-image in cinema is shaped by Bergson’s complex exploration of the nature of time and his distinction between clock time and duration.

Bergson’s Time: Movement and Duration In Matter and Memory, Bergson initially locates duration in the impetus given to consciousness by sensation. We respond to intense sensory stimulus by ‘irresistible’ reflex movements and a sense of powerlessness, which make us briefly lose consciousness of our personality. When consciousness returns, our reflections on the reverberation of sensation produce an image of inner multiplicity. This multiplicity is of quality, not quantity. Multiple states of consciousness permeate each other, and even in the simplest of them ‘the whole soul can be reflected’.9 To our conscious perception, inner duration appears as a fluid ‘melting of states of consciousness into one another, and the gradual growth of the ego’.10 States of consciousness are not external to each other, being intensive rather than extensive in nature. They only appear to be external if we falsely locate them spatially rather than temporally. Here, Bergson draws on his frequently made distinction between duration and another model of time based on space. In order to perceive our conscious states with greater ease, to reflect on them, and speak of them in the language of ‘common sense’, we externalise them via thought forms. To help us do this, we think time as a form of space and separate our states of consciousness, so they are no longer intermeshed. We lay them out alongside each other to perceive them simultaneously. We thus ‘project time into space, we express duration in terms of extensity, and succession thus takes the form of a continuous line or a chain, the parts of which touch without penetrating one another’.11 By this method, we symbolise our states of consciousness by locating them in the simultaneity produced by spatialising time. The fluid nature of duration eludes the fixity of the language that helps

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us to apprehend it in everyday terms. Duration appears to be ‘confused, ever changing, and inexpressible, because language cannot get hold of it without arresting its mobility or fit it into its commonplace forms’.12 By this process, which we adopt to suit social and linguistic requirements, ‘the self is thus refracted and thereby broken to pieces’.13 We become content with ‘the shadow of the self projected into homogenous space’.14 Our deeper layers of being are thus barred from us. I feel there is some commonality between Bergson’s description and Lacan’s concept of barred plentitude here, despite psychoanalysis’s very different paradigm of personal psychic history. We apply a comparable ruse when we try to think motion by confusing it with space. This kind of thinking is ‘a case of endosmosis, an intermingling of the purely intensive sensation of mobility with the extensive representation of the space traversed’.15 By attributing to a motion the divisibility of the space that it traverses, we are ‘forgetting that it is quite possible to divide an object, but not an act’.16 Duration partakes of universal motion and cannot be chopped into separate portions. To perceive its nature more effectively, Bergson draws on the insights of ‘immediate intuition’ that shows us ‘motion within duration, and duration outside space’.17 The ‘deeper’ self can become aware of the fluid and multiple natures of states of consciousness. This self, by perceiving distinct states, then concentrating its attention on them, will see them ‘melt into one another like the crystals of a snowflake when touched for some time with the finger’.18 Unity underlies apparent distinctions. Duration thus links the past, present and future in a seamless continuum, which is divided artificially only when time is turned into space. As well as images from the physical world, like the melting snowflake, Bergson draws on art to elucidate our experience and perception of duration. Like music, duration is ‘an indivisible multiplicity changing qualitatively in an ongoing movement’.19 It unites past and present into an organic whole, ‘as happens when we recall the notes of a tune, melting, so to speak, into one another’.20 Absorption in an aesthetic event offers a parallel process in our consciousness via the intensive affective vibrations it triggers. Bergson believes that the main function of art is to reveal the nature of duration to us. The limitations of language inevitably offer us only the ‘shadow’ of duration. A skilled novelist, such as Marcel Proust, however, by describing an ‘infinite permeation of a thousand different impressions which have already ceased to exist the instant they are named’ has ‘brought us back into our own presence’.21 This return to ourselves is imbricated in the processes of memory that we use to recover the enduring past.

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In order to endure, the consciousness is not entirely absorbed in the present, passing moment, but maintains awareness of its former states at some level. Time passes, but time continues. Memory enables the ego to experience its ‘full, living, potential’ in the quality of ‘pure heterogeneity’.22 Memory brings the past back into the present of consciousness. Bergson states that pure duration is ‘the form which the succession of our conscious states assumes when our ego lets itself live, when it refrains from separating its present state from its former states’.23 By reanimating the past in the present, we become fully alive to time’s potential richness and complexity. Memory is image-dependent. A powerful sense impression is made virtually manifest in memory via ‘the coloured and living image which reveals it’.24 Particularly potent memories emanate light, as ‘shining points round which the others form a vague nebulosity’.25 If these affective focal points are actualised, they reproduce their corresponding sensations within the body. All our experiences in the present are shot through with memory, and there is no perception without it. Although memory tends to ‘imitate perception’ as it returns from duration ‘like a condensing cloud’, it still retains elements of its ‘original virtuality’ to keep it distinct from the present.26 Despite this inherent distinction, Bergson maintains that the past has its own virtual reality, and ‘we shall never reach the past unless we frankly place ourselves within it’.27 The concept of duration underlies Bergson’s work, but he develops it via a distinct focus in each of his studies. Time and Free Will introduces and identifies his concept of duration in relation to the free act. He opposes outer space and inner duration, and asserts the impossibility of quantifying psychological states by spatialising them. In the free act, however, we fully experience what Bogue calls ‘the identity of consciousness and durée as well as the freedom and openness of durée’.28 In Matter and Memory, Bergson focuses on memory and the virtual past. Creative Evolution connects duration with élan vital, the vital impulse or impetus that characterises all living entities. Here, Bergson explores the futural aspect of duration more closely in the evolutionary process. The universe endures, and duration reveals itself as ‘invention, the creation of forms, the continual elaboration of the absolutely new’.29 In evolution, the past can be traced in both the living present and its future form, because life is an unceasing process of creation. It is in this ‘continuous creation of unforeseeable form’ that the dynamic force of duration and its openness to future possibility is manifest.30

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Deleuze’s Time-Image that Deleuze is a philosopher of time means that he is a philosopher of life: an inventor of concepts that affirm life and its untimely forces of creation.31 (Smith)

Deleuze endows cinema’s moving image with a unique capacity for making visible the workings of time and its relationships. The shot, for example, is a ‘mobile section’ of time that as a ‘temporal perspective or a modulation’, is edited with other shots of time to produce ‘a variable, continuous, temporal mould’.32 A series of moving shots edited together expresses ‘time itself as perspective or relief. This is why time essentially takes on the power to contract or dilate, as movement takes on the power to slow down or accelerate’.33 The variable qualities of time are conveyed by the combination of extensive and intensive movements both between and within particular shots. Time is considered as the measure of the movement-image. Two types of chronosigns are identified by Deleuze: ‘time as a whole, as a great circle or spiral, which draws together the set of movement in the universe’, and ‘time as an interval, which indicates the smallest movement or action’.34 The interval is the accelerated, variable present. He draws on Nietszche’s concept of the eternal return as well as duration in his characterisation of time as a whole, a ‘spiral open at both ends, the immensity of past and future. Infinitely dilated, the present would become the whole itself. Infinitely contracted, the whole would happen in the interval’.35 In The Passion of Joan of Arc, Deleuze distinguishes Joan’s ‘internal’ time of the spirit from historical time. This recalls Bergson’s conception of the elusive present. The present moment is never fully present, as it forms, and is formed from, an ever shifting amalgam of past, present and future. The special, dual nature of Joan’s physical and metaphysical experience of the present is expressed by Dreyer’s cinematography and Falconetti’s performance. It contains two intersecting presents, one of which is already established and the other of which is endlessly arriving. It is ‘the same event but one part of it is profoundly realised in a state of things, whilst the other is all the more irreducible to all realisation. This is the mystery of the present’.36 Despite certain films’ ability to convey time as quality as well as quantity, they still rely on action-images built on sensory-motor links. They retain a dual temporal scheme, with the two times in a relation of tension or conflict. The new types of images in post-war cinema move away from the sensory-motor action image to develop the ‘beyond of movement’ in pure optical, sound and tactile images.37 Such images reject cliché in order to

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produce the more challenging cinema of ‘powerful and direct revelations’ via the time-image (chronosigns), the readable image (lectosigns) and the thinking image (noosigns).38 These elements correspond to the processes of narration, description and thought. The new types of interlinked sign may be ‘read’. Deleuze’s concept of reading refers to the work of American semiologist Charles Sanders Pierce. It must not be confused with the approach of film semiology, which identifies the cultural and symbolic meaning of images in, for example, James Monaco’s textbook, How to Read a Film.39 Deleuze’s usage of reading refers to the process of philosophical thinking via visual and other senses. He derives the term ‘lectosign’ from the use of lekton by the Stoics to mean what the image expresses rather than its objective content. He explains how, in reading film, chronosigns are inseparable from lectosigns, which force us to read so many symptoms in the image, that is, to treat the optical and sound image like something that is also readable. Not only the optical and the sound, but also the present and the past, and the here and the elsewhere, constitute internal elements and relations which must be deciphered, and can be understood only in a progression analogous to a reading.40

A lectosign adds supplementary dimensions to the descriptive content of the image, making it multi-faceted, or ‘crystalline’. The chronosign is a ‘purer’ form of image, which has moved away from a referent and towards a ‘pure optical and sound situation’. Such images, which are distanced from the sensory-motor actions of characters, afford a more transcendent perception of time. Chronosigns seek to present time itself directly rather than implying its presence in the gaps and fissures of the movement-image. They correspond more closely to Bergsonian duration. Chronosigns are subdivided into three types. These are ‘points of present’, ‘sheets of past’, and the series. Rodowick defines the series as the ‘transformation of states, qualities, concepts, or identities’ across a series of images.41 Noosigns arise when movement shifts emphasis from spatial extension to the intensive processes of thought. For Deleuze, they are exemplified by camera-consciousness, manifest when the camera eye moves through space of its own accord, independent of characters. The ‘mental connections’ that the independent camera enters into include ‘questioning, responding, objecting, provoking, theorematising, hypothesising, experimenting, in accordance with the open list of logical conjunctions (“or”, “therefore”, “if ”, “because”, “actually”, “although . . .”) or in accordance with the functions of thought’.42 The autonomous camera, in Hitchcock for example, is a philosophical tool that can express, stimulate and extend human thought.

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The brain is itself an image in the Bergsonian sense, a ‘spiritual automaton’ rather than a Cartesian ‘I’ who thinks. The processes of thought operant in the time-image are distinct from those of the movement-image. The movement-image shocks us into thought, as in the Eistensteinian montage of juxtaposed images in a dynamic collision productive of thought as their third term (thesis–antithesis
synthesis). Rodowick notes that the time-image ‘wants to augment our powers of thought through assisting our knowledge of these powers’.43 It is thus a more self-consciously philosophical type of cinema. The regime of movement images is ‘organic’, or ‘kinetic’, linked to a linear, sensory-motor and ‘naturalised’ narrative form and world-view. It operates the binary opposition of truth and falsehood, which need to be distinguished in the process of creating a more profound truth. The regime of the time-image is either ‘chronic’ or ‘crystalline’. The multifaceted process of the crystal image is open-ended. It replaces a fixed truth waiting to be discovered by the continuous creation of truth in becoming. Rather than seeking the permanent form of truth, the time-image works with the reflected ‘metamorphoses of the false’.44 A crystalline image, then, is contingent and provisional. Instead of the pro-filmic objects presented by the old ‘organic’ regime, it is now ‘the description itself which constitutes the sole decomposed and multiplied object’.45 The crystalline ‘power of the false’ derives from the incommensurability of space and time it reveals. Rather than treating time as a dimension of space, as in the movement-image, the direct time-image offers time and movement in their conceptual and metaphysical complexity. The timeimage works with ‘pure crystalline optical and sound descriptions, and falsifying, purely chronic narrations. Description stops presupposing a reality and narration stops referring to a form at one and the same time’.46 The line between reality and illusion becomes indiscernible. Rather than one truth being revealed, we have ‘incompossible’ worlds. This term is borrowed from Leibnitz’s approach to the contradictions of free will and predestination. In his model of the crystal pyramid, Leibnitz layered a series of contingent futures in order to suggest ‘the simultaneity of all possible worlds’.47 Bergson and Deleuze posit two types of recollection. When we perceive a visual or acoustic image, we construct a mental description of it by searching through the layers of our memory, moving between the ‘sheets of past’ until we can produce a workable image. Automatic, or habitual, recollection is an end-directed and spatially motivated response to stimulus. It involves a linear chain of reaction/action. In attentive recollection, on the other hand, perception withdraws from external stimuli. Thought

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moves intensively through layers of time rather than extensively through space. These two processes distinguish actuality and subjectivity. The actual is objective, spatial reality, and the subjective is mental and imaginary, sought out in time through memory. It may be difficult to differentiate between these two processes in the horror film, as we shall see in Adrian Lyne’s Jacob’s Ladder and elsewhere. Indiscernibility is another aspect of the crystalline image. This multifaceted image, like a mirror, has two poles, actual and virtual, which correspond to the objective world and to memory. According to Bergson, the process of describing reality to ourselves moves between the actual and the virtual in an ongoing circuit. Indiscernibility is the impossibility of distinguishing real from imaginary. In the time-image, indiscernibility makes it difficult for both characters and spectators to distinguish past and present, as with the manifestation of ghosts. In Alejandro Amenábar’s film The Others, for example, narrative engagement is constructed on indiscernibility. The audience accepts the inhabitants of an archetypally neo-Gothic ‘old dark house’ as living characters. In 1945, Grace and her two children, Anne and Victor, await the return of their husband/father from the war. The curtains are constantly closed to keep out the light, and the children’s white faces are supposedly due to a rare, light-sensitive disease. A staunch Roman Catholic, Grace terrifies the children with accounts of ‘the children’s limbo’ of the afterlife. Anne claims to be aware of the house’s Edwardian ghosts, but she could be ‘telling stories’, and Grace employs three sinister servants who are later revealed as spirits of the dead. Only at the end of the film is the true status of all these characters revealed. Grace became deranged with grief on the news of her husband’s death in action, and killed her two children and herself. The affects of trauma have lasted beyond the grave in Grace’s neurosis and the children’s distrust of her. Except for the father who passes through before returning to his own purgatory, they are all ghosts trapped in the house who have been contacted by a medium conducting an exorcism for a couple who are considering buying the ‘empty’ property. They have been undergoing a purgatorial experience, from which they are released into the ‘light of day’ after accepting the reality of their own deaths. The atmosphere is oppressively static and claustrophobic. Shadow and ‘ghostly voices whispering’ within the house are matched by the constant fog without, which drains the colours of late autumn of their richness. Grace finally meets her shell-shocked husband, another unquiet spirit, in the woods where the fog lies thickest. Events take place in a predominantly grey ‘twilight zone’, where the spectral house casts a pale reflection in the

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waters of the still lake. As Mrs Mills, the dead housekeeper and unconscious Deleuzian, tells us, ‘the only thing that moves here is the light’. As in Vampyr, light, or lack of it, is itself a major actant in the plot. It keeps the characters trapped and shapes the affective quality of the film’s world. Grace’s attempt to keep light out is also an attempt to freeze the onward flow of time, and underlines the affinity of duration with light. In The Others, ghosts are haunted by ghosts who impregnate a static space with their intensive movements. The film expresses layered time as it operates in memory. It highlights our inability to distinguish the past from the present or the real from the imaginary. The physical object and its mental description have become indistinguishable in ‘a mutual interpenetration of matter and memory’.48 In Bergson’s double movement of creation and erasure between actual and virtual, each circuit ‘obliterates and creates an object’.49 The successive planes and circuits may cancel or contradict each other, join or fork, but they still ‘simultaneously constitute the layers of one and the same physical reality, and the levels of one and the same mental reality, memory, or spirit’.50 When the image is sharply focused in reality, it is limpid. When it moves into the memory circuit, it becomes opaque. Yet it may be returned to sharp focus by recollection. In a peak or point, the smallest internal circuit of ‘continual exchange’, distinct elements remain present, but they are indiscernible.

Time and Motion the shot is the movement-image. In so far as it relates movement to a whole which changes, it is the mobile section of a duration.51 (Deleuze)

In Cinema 1, Deleuze uses the movement-image in its own right, but also as a pointer to duration. He finds evidence of duration in, between, or just outside, aspects of cinematic movement, such as the frame, the shot and montage. It may also be perceived in the affective qualities of light. In individual shots, the characters move, or the camera moves, or both move in unison. The shot in motion functions as ‘the intermediary between the framing of the set and the montage of the whole’.52 Clearly, neither these movements nor our perception of them occur in isolation. As we perceive the movements of a shot, our perception of the whole film modulates. Movement within a shot or a linked set of shots ‘is the relationship between parts and it is the state of the whole’ and, as well as modifying the relative positions of a set, it is ‘itself the mobile section of a whole whose change it expresses’.53 Both perceived and perceiver are part of the bigger ‘whole’ of

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universal flux and our awareness of cinematic movement can reveal this interconnection. As well as being a virtual presence in inter- and intra-shot movement, duration exists beyond the edges of the frame in the out-of-field. Deleuze identifies two types of out-of-field. The first is ‘relative’ or spatial, whereas the second is the ‘absolute’ out-of-field of duration. These particular loci form a comprehensive durational presence that permeates every framed image but that can never be given as such. The out-of-field is implied by every closed frame. One function of the closed frame is to introduce ‘the transpatial and the spiritual into the system which is never perfectly closed’.54 In The Passion of Joan of Arc, for example, the more closed Dreyer’s framings seem to be, the more open they are to duration as a fourth dimension, and further, to the fifth dimension of spirit. The out-offield, which does not exist, but, rather, ‘subsists’ or ‘insists’, implies the disturbing presence of ‘a more radical elsewhere, outside homogeneous space and time’.55 When we engage in the conscious close reading of a film extract, we analyse mise-en-scène components and identify the micro dynamics of each shot. We ‘decompose’ the set by distinguishing between fixed and moving parts and mapping their interrelations. More significantly for a Deleuzian project, though, we might also become aware of a deeper temporal process, which cannot be subdivided without losing its nature. Our spectatorial acts of decomposition, whether in close-reading or attentive spectatorship, can thus become ‘recomposed into a great complex indivisible movement according to the whole whose change it expresses’.56 When we note this micro-movement of the shot’s ‘set’ of images, something else occurs, then, of a more profound nature. We can experience the quality of duration intermeshed with its integral movement. Deleuze asserts that ‘movement also concerns a whole which is qualitatively different from the set. The whole is that which changes – it is the open, or duration. Movement thus expresses a change of the whole, or a stage, an aspect of this change, a duration or an articulation of duration’.57 A movementimage shot, in so far as it relates to a changing whole, functions as a ‘mobile section’ of duration. Movement in film makes manifest, both to the viewer’s senses and their mental correlative, the very flowing of duration itself. Deleuze suggests that ‘the translation of the parts of a set which spreads out in space, the change of a whole which is transformed in duration’ brings about their ‘perpetual conversion’.58 The shot thus ‘acts like a consciousness’.59 Cinematic movement offers an aesthetic form of embodied mentation. Deleuze, however, qualifies a total identification of thought and cinema.

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The distinctions between human and cinematic perception prevent their complete elision. His comparison is only ‘as if ’; because natural perception introduces halts, moorings, fixed points or separated points of view, moving bodies or even distinct vehicles, while cinematographic perception works continuously, in a single movement whose very halts are an integral part of it and are only a vibration on to itself.60

The strength of the camera’s flowing eye, free from the limitations of the human eye, such as disjunction, lies in its ability to extract and record the essence of movement itself. Cinematic consciousness ‘is not us, the spectator, nor the hero; it is the camera – sometimes human, sometimes inhuman or superhuman’, as we saw in The Shining.61 The movementimage of the camera is able to extract from already moving objects ‘the movement which is their common substance’, or from movements ‘the mobility which is their essence’.62 In some ways, the technological camera eye operates a more perfected form of perception than the human eye and accesses duration more closely. Deleuze’s conviction of this underlines his disagreement with Bergson’s view of ‘cinematographic contrivance’. Editing also has a special capacity to open up to duration. Moving shots are linked by montage to form a further kind of movement, between shots at a micro level and also at a macro level, within the wider context of the film. By being edited together, movement images participate in a process that can release more of their inherent, but indirect, duration. If the shot is the movement-image, then montage is ‘the composition, the assemblage of movement-images as constituting an indirect image of time’.63 Montage is ‘the determination of the Whole’, accessing duration by means of continuities, cutting and false continuities.64 Duration is evident in ellipsis, as when false continuity is used with deliberation. False continuity such as Dreyer’s is no longer engaged in connection, but has become ‘a dimension of the Open, which escapes sets and their parts. It realises the other power of the out-of-field, this elsewhere or this empty zone’.65 The Open of duration has metaphysical, even mystical qualities. Deleuze operates a kind of mystical immanentism comparable to that of Spinoza. Spinoza used the concept of expression, or explication, to suggest how God made himself manifest in material creation. Explication means unfolding. Bogue points out that in Spinoza, the One is ‘both explicated, or unfolded and implicated, enfolded. It is also complicated, or simultaneous’.66 This recalls Bergson’s image of duration as a qualitative multiplicity, with no likeness to number; an organic evolution that is yet not an increasing quantity; a pure heterogeneity within which there are no distinct qualities. In a word, the moments of inner duration are not external to one another.67

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As the elements of duration vibrate intensively, they pass over into each other. They are impossible to fully isolate and separate without becoming space-time. I want to explore some forms taken by duration in the horror film, beginning with Robert Wise’s The Haunting. Unlike the more usual psychoanalytic scenarios of maternal engulfment that have been mapped onto this film, my reading will explore the overlay of time and the haunting of the present by the past.

Duration and Entrapment in the Gothic Haunted House: The Haunting interiority and exteriority are only relations among images. 68 (Bergson) The interval dividing past from present assumes another value, for without this assumption the possibility of exercising free will is lost.69 (Rodowick)

Bergson asserts that the entire past, both personal and general, is preserved in virtual form as a non-chronological existence in time. In the horror film, such preservation is a source of atrophy rather than perpetual motion. Hill House, the locale of The Haunting, is a psychic museum where time is frozen and refuses to progress. The Gothic revival of the late nineteenth century dominates the film’s mise-en-scène just as the human events of its history dominate the ‘present’ of the early 1960s. A team of psychic researchers set out to investigate this very process and become prey to the domination of memory in a house that is alive. Although Hill House is a specific geographic locale, it is located temporally rather than spatially. The house is in duration, not linear space-time, and forces characters to live there, too. The looping-back of time in the circuits between matter and memory produce replay and overlay. Temporal ellipses of the present are filled by sheets of the past that peak in frightening form. According to Bergson, psychic phenomena are ‘in themselves pure quality or qualitative multiplicity’70 because ‘intensity, within you, is never magnitude’.71 Yet the ghost-haunted film, by its literal manifestations of the past, forces duration to adopt spatial presence and imposes temporal stasis. At the same time, duration becomes partly evident to the senses in an intensive form. A traditional view of ghosts and hauntings is that intensive experiences of shock or more prolonged psychological suffering have impregnated a particular geographical locale and refuse to go away. Space is thus subordinated to time. In Hill House’s memory, sheets of past co-exist in a virtual state until actualised via sensitive human channels. This manifestation is

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especially potent when the house’s past becomes congruent with the personal past of living characters. The patriarchal Victorian world of Hugh Crain’s family tragedies imposes a template on the present-day events we witness unfolding as well as more recent events prior to the opening of the current time of the main narrative. The opening sequence is accompanied by the voice over of Dr Markway, the academic leader of the research team whose project is to investigate psychic phenomena reported at the Hill House. It is a collage of moments of intense horror from the history of the house. The material selected illustrates Markway’s account, but the viewer experiences the scenes as reanimations of actual events rather than his subjective slant on the house’s history. These intensive events are imprinted on the fabric of the building and its grounds. They remain as memories, layers and folds of the past with the potential to be reactivated. Each item in the introductory collage is both divided and linked by a mist that materialises the scenes like ectoplasm. This amorphous substance connects events by a fluid ellipsis that crystallises only at moments of physical or psychic agony. The past of Hill House is presented as inherently tragic, as the audiovisual images of film bring to light only memories of suffering, fear and death. The opening collage can be read as a Bergsonian/Deleuzian contraction of the past into significant peaks or points of memory brought up into present consciousness by recollection. The first ‘memory’ of Hill House we access is the image of a fatal carriage crash on the drive in the Victorian era. The violence and horror of the accident shakes up the orderly progress of the carriage, splitting open both space and time. The camera itself is jolted by the accident, and the viewer’s complacent distance is undermined. The carriage is overturned, its wheel splintered against a tree by an irrational, malign force. The balance of the composition is shattered by the sudden appearance of Mrs Crain’s dead hand that drops into the frame from above. Linear time is stopped at Hill House partly because of its series of untimely deaths. The frozen postures of death indicate that the dead step out of space-time and into duration. Death splits time, and the dead are plummeted from the present into a permanent state of past time. This is accessible only by memory, or by the hauntings that are its horror film manifestation. Eleanor, the most gifted psychic on Markway’s team, validates the living force of the past as ascendant over the present. She states of the house, ‘it’s alive [. . .] I can feel it’, as duration dominates space-time for her. Hill House is easily able to ‘possess’ Eleanor because of the parallel elements of their histories, which interlock and mutually manifest themselves in the physical form of direct time-images. There are at least two

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simultaneous hauntings, which knot more tightly together as the multilayered narrative progresses. As well as the haunting of Hill House, we experience the haunted duration of Eleanor’s psyche as memory is made manifest. We thus become engaged, like she does, in the confusing process described by Bergson when he suggests that ‘of the aggregate of images, we cannot say that it is within us or without us’.72 Rodowick notes the time-image’s paradox of ‘equally possible yet mutually contradicting narrative explanations. In other words, direct images of time present contingent narrations’.73 We have a more overt picturing of this process by mainstream film in both The Haunting and The Others. Rodowick emphasises the need for memory to retain the interval as a ‘dislocation in time’ between past and present, for ‘without this assumption the possibility of exercising free will is lost’.74 In The Haunting, Eleanor’s free will is crushed between the grinding wheels of two memories and two durations: her own and those of Hill House.

Haunted Cinematography and Mise-en-scène The film’s titles, with their lettering formed out of evaporating and condensing wisps of mist, both validate the uncanny and present the ghostly ambience with a tongue-in-cheek generic self-reflexivity. Behind them stands the house itself, a looming silhouette of turrets and battlements. It is at once a shadowy memory-image and a solid bricks-and-mortar building with a power of its own. The late-nineteenth-century Gothic revival is an ideal style to express haunting and enigma. It is itself an inherently haunted style, with European medieval baronial and ecclesiastical echoes. Due to the influence of Ruskin and Pugin, it incorporates the more accessible and secular Venetian mode as well, in an eclectic blend of retro motifs. It also re-works, or ‘updates’, the earlier Gothick style of its own grandparents. From the outset, the opulent and perverse neo-Gothic world is established as a richer context and ground to the one-dimensionality of mundane modern life. The collage continues with the second Mrs Crain’s fall down stairs after a shock, possibly induced by the vengeful ghost of her predecessor. The cause is only implied by the image of her horror at something that remains unseen. The real horror for us, though, lies in the sensory disorientation caused by the spinning camera. Cinematographic horror extends throughout the film and the mobile camera leads the haunting. In the next segment, the camera singles out an embroidered text in a frame, ‘Suffer Little Children’. Possibly embroidered by Crain’s daughter, Abigail, this motto has a double meaning in relation to her experience. After the trauma of her

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mother’s death and her father’s remarriage, her youth is frozen. Her lifecycle as a woman is put on hold, never allowed to grow or reach fruition. Superimpositions, by their slow transmutations of one image into another, are a method of editing that conveys Bergson’s ‘melting’ states of duration. By superimpositions, Abigail’s face rapidly ages from girlhood to near death as she lives secluded from the world. She is unable to leave the house, which has a firm hold on her through its manifestation of her father’s will. Her biological change is frozen in intensive rigidity rather than being extensively enacted. She lies in the prison of her bedroom as life passes her by. Her bed is significantly located in the nursery. As she is prevented from growing up, it is the place of death, not new life. The sudden, shocking burst of energy on her deathbed comes too late. Abigail’s call for help is unheard by her paid companion, whose erotic liaison brings about both Abigail’s death and her own. Again, a vengeful force is signalled by the unnaturally loud pounding echo of the old woman’s cane on the wall. A similar booming sound, much amplified, will herald the later manifestations of an angry ghost. The carer, deranged by guilt, or driven to despair by Abigail’s ghost, climbs the spiral staircase in the library. As with the death of the first Mrs Crain, a sudden shock effect is caused by the drop of the suicide’s body into the frame from above. After she hangs herself, her corpse is shot from beneath by an upwardly canted camera. Bodies without the force of élan vital are presented as limp, inert matter. The corpse dangles out over the abyss beneath the staircase as the spinning camera returns back down the steps as though complicit with Abigail’s angry spirit. This staircase, or rather, its spiral formation, acts as a diagrammatic component. It embodies the endlessly incurved looping of time and the circuits between space-time and duration. It forms a tunnel in time as well as space, and draws vulnerable characters up into itself. The coil of rope carried in the companion’s arms as she passes a threatening shadow cast by the eagle sculpture on the wall likewise echoes this spiral formation. The camera moves in a dizzying circle at climactic points, and the present-day protagonist, Eleanor, will echo this movement as she attunes herself to the central diagrammatic component. The lives of Abigail and Eleanor reflect each other in a series of intersecting variations on common ground. Eleanor’s caring for her invalid mother, who died when she was out of the room, repeats Abigail’s death and the carer’s ‘neglect’. Eleanor shares Abigail’s own pent-up frustration and rage as a lonely single woman trapped in the domestic space. Rather than remaining imprisoned as Abigail had done, Eleanor attempts to escape from an unfulfilled life and find independence. Her apparent new

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beginning drives her straight back into Abigail’s trap, which is also her own. Eleanor’s drive from Boston signals the start of a belated adolescence as she sets out alone for the first time. She fantasises possible futures for herself, such as living in a cosy house with stone lions, but, in the imagery of Jean Luis Borges’s tale ‘The Garden With Forking Paths’, takes the wrong fork on the path of time and finds herself in the past rather than in the future.75 The gateway of Hill House offers a temporary setback, or warning sign, to Eleanor. Its triangular, upward-pointing forms, shut by a heavy chain and lock, imply a barred realm of spiritual or transcendent reality, a timeless zone of eternal stasis. When she forces an entrance, angry at her exclusion when ‘expected’, the gatekeeper gibes at ‘city folk’ who ‘think they know everything’. The city is here elided with superficial intellect, whereas the country exists on a different time zone and intuitive knowledge. The supernatural is a familiar experience to him and his housekeeper wife, and the past-haunted present is an integral layer of their reality. The anomalous space of Hill House is perceived via Eleanor’s becoming-camera. Several brief shots of the façade of the house appear, as Eleanor blinks up at it. She opens and closes her eyes several times, like a still camera lens when the shutter drops to take individual snaps. She is unable to take in the temporal and spatial enormity before her in a smoothly cinematic establishing shot. The freeze-frames suggest the film’s sticking at particular layers of duration rather than flowing forward in linear space-time. Not all the images are from her supposed point-of-view, and the multiplication of perspectives creates a sense of both subjective and objective reality, strangeness and recognition. From two eye-like windows, the darkness of the house itself stares down at her as they exchange looks. Eleanor’s car is shot from the point-of-view of a hidden watcher, or that of the house itself. The subtle use of negative footage reverses the light quality of black and white. Fast-motion clouds suggest that familiar laws of movement and speed do not apply here. The building exists in its own reality outside the usual space and time co-ordinates, and has the round turrets of a fairytale castle At the same time, however, it is a historically specific reminder of the past scenarios it replays. Eleanor adds the fuel of her personal emotional history to the memories already held by the house and causes a temporal conflagration. Inside the hall, highly polished floorboards give back an unfamiliar reflection of Eleanor’s face. She touches this tentatively, unsure which Eleanor is real. Her touch adds haptic texturing to the sensory investigation of the house. Auditory information is added by the notes of a harp,

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which we later discover plays by itself, or by a disembodied hand. Potted palms; aspidistras; heavy drapes; low ceilings, windowless inner rooms; ornate mirrors; carved woodwork; padded upholstery and symbolic statuary are preserved unchanged, as though part of a mausoleum. The house makes itself felt via the insistent presence of its décor, which remains static within a space permeated by its own past. Art nouveau images of women are displayed, frozen in the coldness of marble statues. One of them has her face veiled, her individuality repressed. As well as their hieroglyphic potential, these objects have their own insistent materiality and virtual presence. The heaviness of the décor dominates the characters in many shots. It acts on them in a vampiric manner as it sucks out their life-energy, draining them physically, emotionally and mentally. A second, more complete reflection of Eleanor’s face startles her as she is unexpectedly confronted with her own double in the mirror on the landing. The glass is scratched and stained, and further distorts her face. The house may be looking out at her through mirrors, but she is also seeing a new reflection of herself as a denizen of the house and part of its past. The juxtaposition of Eleanor’s body and the house’s décor will be a continuous motif as she increasingly becomes part of Hill House. Hill House begins its overt communication with the psychic investigators via the ‘haunted’ camera, which spins and soars, adopting oblique angles and producing shots which are not their point-of-view but its own. The interior of the building itself plays tricks on the team, suddenly shutting doors and making it impossible to find their way around. The dining room is especially padded and airless, with insistently patterned wallpaper that irritates the nerves. There is no homely fire in the grate. The framing is claustrophobic, with the ceiling pressing down on them, shot from a very low angle. Personal memory combines with Eleanor’s ability to sense the memories of Hill House. She becomes increasingly schizophrenic as the two memory strands tangle together and constrict her ability to live effectively in the present moment. This simultaneous replaying of the two sets of memory occurs as she lies in bed on her first night. The low camera angle presents her recumbent body by canting up from the floor of her room. It then moves to a position right by her, at her level, as she lies on the bed. These are the points-of-view of a carer or nurse sitting by an invalid. Eleanor has sat in this position whilst tending to her mother. Abigail’s suicidal companion also shared this perspective. Abigail’s vengeful presence is implied in the hollow booming sounds that come up the stairs, down the corridor outside and approach Eleanor’s

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room. As well as recalling approaching footsteps, the sound replays the thumping of the dying woman on the wall and, possibly, that of Eleanor’s own mother. In an attempt to stop the noise, Eleanor likewise bangs on the wall. Shortly afterwards, the presence outside the door responds by sudden silence. Instead of going away, however, it becomes even more insistent by turning the doorknob, which is a carved image of the gorgon Medusa, another vengeful female. Both Eleanor and Theo, an urbane lesbian on the team, huddle together on the bed. The fabric of the room appears to have been given its own autonomous viewpoint as we have a shot of both women reflected in the mirror, where they appear to be trapped inside its heavy frame. They stare fixedly at the door as they expect the presence to enter. The moving camera takes several differently angled shots of the doorframe and door as though the source of numinous energy is located there. Again, the camera signals and creates the sense of horror, by linking present and past times in a continuum. Eleanor acts like a psychic magnet who draws the past back into the present. Eleanor is excited by her psychic powers and their ability to move in the past and to make it manifest. Ironically, she tries to use this ability to further her current life and to reach out towards the future in an intimacy with Dr Markway. As she basks in his attention, she expects ‘something really extraordinary’ to happen. Eleanor’s arrival at Hill House sparks off an unstoppable magnification of the past, which insists on its own validity. The power of time remembered is able to dominate the space-time of present sensory-motor situations. A statue of Hugh Crain with three submissive women dominates the frame and towers above the living characters from a low-angle shot. Crain’s facial features recall those of Dr Markway. In the vicinity of the statue, Eleanor’s schizophrenia intensifies. She leans right back over the balcony in a posture that mixes fear and desire, and later acknowledges the presence of Crain’s spirit by dancing with him. Her further affinity with the Victorian era is signalled by her long, high-necked nightgown and loosely flowing hair. Eleanor’s old-fashioned style of dress contrasts sharply with Theo’s Mary Quant outfits, which assert the validity of her life outside and its future potential. The past steps up its sensory communication with the present when the team discover a ‘genuine cold spot’, significantly beneath the text ‘Honor Thy Father And Thy Mother’. Luke, the cynical heir to the property, becomes increasingly convinced by the haunting when his sensorium registers ‘something I can feel – and see’. On the second night, Eleanor and Theo hear the distorted sounds of laughter in their room. Within the carved leaves of the woodwork, the gaping eyes and mouth of a human face

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is subtly manifest by the use of shadow. Via a tactisign, Eleanor experiences intimate physical contact with the haunting presence. A whip pan from the door to Eleanor in bed shows her clenched hand extended in space, supposedly clutching Theo’s hand. Her terrified question – ‘whose hand was I holding?’ – again suggests the ghostly presence either of Abigail or her own mother who refuses to let go. Eleanor’s possession by the past climaxes in a lengthy scene. In her bedroom, a floor-level camera cants up to make the door loom out towards us as it breathes in and out like living lungs. The solid substance of heavy wood changes its molecular make-up and becomes flexible. The wildly canted, swinging camera bends the spatial perspective of the corridor. Fleeing, Eleanor is trapped by a veil-like curtain, which lends her a temporary bridal appearance. Antique objects are animated by a destructive force as the chandelier and the harp rock violently and the mirror bends off the wall. Floor-angle shots of Eleanor running cue her mental disintegration and disrupt spectatorial control. A spreading darkness breaks up the cohesion of the group, isolating each character’s dimly spotlit face. Eleanor flirtatiously invites Crain’s ghostly presence to dance. The spinning motion of her dizzying whirl resembles the spiral staircase and implies that it is drawing her to it. A whip pan pushes her into the library, a room she has previously avoided, to the sounds of a drum roll and, later, a melody on the harp. In one shot, the camera spins up the steps by itself and this spiralling induces Eleanor herself to ‘turn and turn and turn’ as she becomes caught up in a continuation of the movement. A close-up of her delicate naked feet on hard metal rungs induces our haptic collusion. Bolts begin to move, ripping screws out of the wall. The steps are alive, animated by Eleanor’s rapport with the house and possessed by its memories. The holed metal dapples her with shadow as she climbs, replicating its angle as seen by the suicide. Eleanor’s relief on reaching the landing at the top, where the carer hanged herself, seems to validate her submission to the replication of past. She is repeating a variation of the carer’s experience in her transgressive desire for Markway as she leans backwards in a mixture of sexual invitation and fear at his approach. As the couple show signs of tenderness, a horrible, distorted face suddenly appears through a trapdoor. Although we discover that this is Mrs Markway, it suggests the tormented ghost of the dead nurse, who she resembles facially, or even Abigail herself. When Eleanor is left accidentally alone in her car, the engine starts up and it drives off by itself. It reaches the point in the driveway where the first Mrs Crain had her accident. Here, Mrs Markway, possessed by the spirit

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of the house, runs across the track and the car crashes into a tree, killing Eleanor instantly. As with the opening collage, we have a shot of a spinning wheel and a dead woman’s hand. Luke’s opinion acknowledges the reality of the house’s evil past: ‘it ought to be burned down and the ground sown with salt’. The final voice-over is female, not male as at the beginning, implying that Eleanor is now the ghost of Hill House, having subsumed all other haunts, and ‘whatever walks here, walks alone’. The Haunting presents layers of the past that refuse to stay past. By refuting space-time, duration is directly experienced by Eleanor. The horror lies in its partial, one-sided development. Without any future possibility, it remains static and drags its victims back, preventing them from continuing their own lives and experiencing the onward flow of time. Hill House itself acts as an attractor for duration, amplified by Eleanor’s own openness to the power of the past. It is geographically separate from the present, and leeches out the living reality of the present moment. The Haunting is a modern neo-Gothic haunted house movie in which the past lurks to entrap the present. The next film, Adrian Lyne’s Jacob’s Ladder, presents more tangled temporal and spatial convolutions. Flashbacks and flashforwards are deployed to suggest the co-existence of different layers of space and time within one extreme moment.

Death by Flashback: Jacob’s Ladder the direct time-image always gives us access to that Proustian dimension where people and things occupy a place in time which is incommensurable with the one they have in space.76 (Deleuze) a fast trip down the ladder (Michael Newman, renegade chemist)

Jacob’s Ladder presents a version of duration accessed at the point of death. For a mainstream movie, which mixes Vietnam, horror and alteredstates genres, its generation of the time-image compares to that of the art film’s. The narrative is a long, ladder-like collage of distinct, densely layered realities. Contradictory storylines offer different possible outcomes. As I write, I will try to re-run my responses to the film on first viewing – where a number of cognitive schemas jostled for precedence – rather than after repeated viewings, when plausible structures emerge. The authenticity of linear space-time is undermined via altered states of consciousness and the experience they offer of a kind of duration. Light and movement are used in anomalous ways to engage the spectator in the protagonist’s mental confusion. Strobes and rapid flicker are its affective diagrammatic components of light. Such effects, which overlay and freeze

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‘present’ time by flash-frames so brief as to be almost imperceptible, induce what Deleuze calls the ‘emancipation of time, which ensures the rule of impossible continuity and aberrant movement’.77 Flashbacks literalise film’s undermining of temporal stability. According to Deleuze, they operate as ‘a closed circuit which goes from the present to the past, then leads us back to the present’.78 Flashbacks undermine the present by replacing it with phenomenally insistent portions of the past. They may be bracketed by fades, incidental music or some other marker to indicate their difference. Nevertheless, they induce spectatorial amnesia, deceiving us by using exactly the same cinematic devices as the ‘present’. If they are long flashbacks, we become absorbed in them and respond as though they were ‘present’, like the rest of the film, temporarily forgetting their past status. The conventional flashback is an extrinsic device recognisable by its use of dissolve-link or superimposition. Even if the flashback signals memory, if it is bracketed off it still belongs primarily to the movement-image. The same may be said for clearly signalled dream sequences and other techniques representing distortion, discontinuity, or extreme subjectivity. These may weaken the sensory-motor scheme or widen its scope. As long as they remain modelled on a deviation from narrative norms and a return to them, and are clearly signalled as dream or memory, they will be unable to move freely in duration proper. For Deleuze, the flashback indicates by convention a causality that is psychological, but still ‘analogous to a sensory-motor determinism, and, despite its circuits, only confirms the progression of a linear narration’.79 The flashbacks in this film, though, are not distinguished by their difference from a solid level of fixed reality. They complicate the distinction of physical and metaphysical, actuality and memory. Both the past, and the present, are hallucinatory in nature, and are finally exposed as illusions.

Incompossible Worlds The film’s narrative structure resembles Chinese boxes, with several diegetic ‘worlds’ fitted inside each other. These are not explored systematically, but, as we hop between them, we share Jacob’s fragments of ‘real’ memory and his fantasies of the past. The opening sequences, which we mistakenly take for the diegetic present, take place on the Mekong Delta during the Vietnam War. To lush music, tranquil dawn skies are disrupted by the purposeful whirling and whirring of helicopter blades, an audiovisual effect that reappears at intervals throughout the film. A genial marijuana-smoking platoon, including the protagonist, Jacob, is suddenly

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attacked by a troop of soldiers. Shock and terror are physically expressed by the uncontrollable jerking of two men’s heads in a vibrating motion that is a key component of the film’s style. Chaos descends for the spectator as the camera’s rapid 360-degree spins and jolts replicate the men’s disorientation as they realise that ‘something’s wrong’. Like the characters, it is impossible for viewers to centre themselves or grasp the nature and order of events. The helicopter troops have begun to fire into the men on the ground. A soldier’s body continues to jerk even when the flesh of his leg has been burned off. One man sits motionless, staring in shocked disbelief, and weeping. Jacob, creeping on his belly through the trees, gets a sudden, unidentified bayonet jab in his guts and recoils in horror and pain. The next shot skips space and time by cutting to Jacob in postman’s uniform, on a New York tube train, ruefully feeling his chest as he significantly reads The Stranger by Camus. At this point in the narrative, we relocate the scene we just saw as Jacob’s dream. He appears to back in the present of social and personal reality, having awakened from a nightmare; yet his present environs remain threatening in their desolate gloom and abrasive roar as the train tears through a tunnel. The light flickers on and off like a slow strobe. As he moves around the carriage, Jacob sees, in flashframe, a hairy, penile tail protruding from the rags of a sleeping tramp. A heroin helpline poster on the train warning ‘Hell . . . but it doesn’t have to be that way’, and, later, a product advert offering ‘Ecstasy’ are thematic pointers only readable with hindsight. The sinister quality of the location is visualised by the numinous blue light emanating from the tunnel. It is also made tactile as viscous liquid drips onto the line, and a rat swims in it. Jacob sticks his foot in the wet ooze as he crosses the line and we haptically share his disgust. Naked, swinging light bulbs shimmer and cast weird, submarine effects. A sudden wind from the tunnel heralds a blinding light, and a rainbow lens flare hypnotises Jacob as he stands in the track of the train, flinging himself down in a near miss. This is in one of several near-death moments he experiences, which we later discover are unable to kill him. From the train, a pale, sinister figure in black stares out at him, cueing an everpresent surveillance. Jacob returns to his flat in a housing project, where the sensuous warmth of a shower with his partner, Jezzie, offers only temporary comfort. As the water drips down his body, we move back into the space and time of a memory recollection by direct cut. Jacob crawls along the jungle floor in agony, with his viscera hanging out. A shimmering out-of-focus form sharpens into a spider’s web with water droplets. At the red beam of an

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approaching torch, we cut back to the present as a nightmare replay of past events is signalled. Although the scenes are linked by visual rhyme, their switch is sudden and unexpected. The prevalence of memory and its tendency to overwhelm the present by the past is pivotal to the style, structure and theme. Jezzie throws Jacob’s photos of his earlier family life into the incinerator after they cause him nostalgic distress. On first viewing, her act seems motivated by jealousy. We later receive more complete narrative justification for her attempt to destroy his past. Significantly, Jacob hangs onto a photograph of his dead son, Gabe. Super-8 black-and-white footage shows father and son playing together. The difference in film stock and gauge indicates memorial specificity and its lack of spatial, sensory-motor presence. Its appearance on the screen, however, underlines the virtual nature of memory and its ability to relive itself in the present by temporal overlay. Jacob considers his chiropractor, Louis, to be an ‘overgrown cherub’ and a ‘lifesaver’, and confides his ‘weird flashes’ to him. Louis suddenly twists his patient’s head and the pain rockets him back to the Vietnamese jungle in a flash of purple light. It later appears that Louis, like Jezzie, has a purgatorial function in orchestrating the flow of Jacob’s recollections. The supernatural quality of Jacob’s life is increased as he leaves the surgery. A car tries to run him down, and a man of demonic appearance leans out of the window and shudders wildly, his face distorted by anamorphosis. The supernatural atmosphere continues when, seeking his post-combat therapist for help, Jacob enters a hospital. Demonic horns sprout beneath the cap of the nurse who denies any records of Jacob’s previous visits. The present, or what we perceive to be the present, takes on increasingly nightmarish characteristics. During a wild party, Jacob shies away from the dancing to find a monster’s head in a plastic bag inside the fridge. A fortune-teller jokingly informs him that he has no lifeline on his palm. A caged bird escapes to fly haphazardly round the room, the objective correlative to Jacob’s mental state. His point-of-view becomes more hallucinatory as flash-frames of the monster’s head are intercut. The face of a bearded man in black transforms to a bald and vibrating phallic head. Jacob, who is very shortsighted, loses his glasses. Overwhelmed by strobes and loud funky music, he watches in horror as a monster penetrates Jezzie. Jacob is surrounded by concerned faces, which he views as threatening. He returns to Vietnam, where, by an associative cut, he is likewise surrounded by a ring of GIs. A stretcher-bearer comments that ‘his guts are hanging out [. . .] let’s push them back in’. A third layer of Jacob’s memory life is opened up by the trauma of this

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temporal and spatial see-saw. His family past, barred from him in the ‘present’, is reconstructed by the rosy glow of selective memory. He is now a middle-class academic and family man living back with his wife, Sarah, and children. He awakes and recounts a nightmare to Sarah. The contents of this are formed from his ‘present’ with Jezzie that we have hitherto believed him to be experiencing. He tells Sarah, ‘I was burning with ice and there were all these demons . . . what a nightmare.’ This return to Sarah forms a third to the previous alternative worlds as Jacob moves through co-existent layers of memory in duration. The flashbacks and flashforwards accelerate and increase our confusion. Jacob’s return to Sarah cuts to a slowly spinning, low-angle shot of the jungle penetrated by rays of sunlight. Like the protagonist of Vampyr, Jacob views the world from below as he is carried on his stretcher. Rapidly returning to Jezzie’s flat, a slow tracking shot pans from Jacob’s traumatised expression as he lies in an ice-filled bath to the doctor’s face then back again. Jacob blinks back tears of disbelief as he awakes in his own ‘nightmare’ to find that his life with Sarah is the dream from which he is forced to wake, not the other way round. The doctor tells him that he is lucky to be alive. This third near-death experience has also been a spiritual crisis for him. In Vietnam, the flicker of the ’copter blades takes on a stroboscopic quality as Jacob’s body is carried closer to them. We leave this level by a long fade-out to black, which indicates his loss of consciousness and is not primarily a flashback punctuation mark. Back in the level of reality associated with Jezzie’s flat, Jacob pitifully asks her, ‘Am I dead?’ He wants to die to escape the suffering and confusion caused by jumping, or being pushed, between various ‘rungs’ or layers of the past. As Jacob will discover, his memories are actually a function of a religious purgatory.

‘They’re Coming Out of the Walls’ Jacob gradually realises that he is beset by the purposeful tortures of demons. He pores over books on demonology and witchcraft to investigate their occult agenda. A close-up of an engraved illustration to Dante’s Purgatorio, Canto 5, attracts his attention as emblematic of his current suffering. As he looks in the bedroom mirror, Jezzie’s familiar face becomes split and distorted, showing her duplicitous and demonic aspect. He no longer knows who she ‘really’ is, but we put this down to his paranoid projections at this stage. Jacob’s haunted buddy from the forces, Paul Granger, exacerbates the supernatural status of the present and announces, ‘I’m going to Hell [. . .]

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they’re coming out of the walls.’ Paul is blown up in his car, whilst the army grabs Jake and threatens him for investigating what happened to his platoon in Vietnam. His hallucinations become more horrific. After a beating from a Salvation Army Santa Claus, who steals his wallet containing Gabe’s photo, a sinister team of medics pick him up. As Jacob is wheeled through an abandoned building, he sees his son’s discarded bike. Floor-shots of the trolley wheels induce total disorientation as temporal and spatial overlay intensifies. He is pushed through a hellish asylum of insane, despairing and deformed people. Corpses strew their path and blood streams down walls. The trolley wheels run over body fragments. They pass a pile of arms and hands, and an amputee strapped into a frame with a shuddering, covered head. Demonic medics surround Jacob, and a surgeon with a bloody apron and a pallid face prepares to operate on, or torture, him. They strap him onto a wheel and screw down his head as though in preparation for electroshock treatment. Jezzie stands nonchalantly among the medics and informs him: ‘You’re dead . . . there’s no way out of here . . . you’ve been killed, don’t you remember?’ An eyeless surgeon wielding a hypodermic needle drills into Jacob’s forehead through his third eye. Juxtaposed sequences of fantasy and actuality step up the film’s critique of the Vietnam War encapsulated in personal trauma. At the excruciating pain of the needle, we cut back to the earlier flashback of the jungle as trees pass overhead from Jacob’s viewpoint. His stretcher is carried faster and the medics despair of saving him. Jacob awakes in hospital, overwhelmed by ambient whiteness. He lies on a huge white pillow, in a white gown, whilst ethereal music plays. He seeks consolation in his third layer of fantasied ‘memory’ and is visited by Sarah and his children, but a disembodied voice undermines this by telling him to ‘dream on’. Louis, Jacob’s ‘guardian angel’, bursts into the ward to rescue him from traction. Jacob recounts, ‘I was in hell . . . it’s all pain . . . I don’t want to die.’ To reassure him, Louis paraphrases Meister Ekhardt: ‘The only thing that burns in hell is the part of you that won’t let go of your life. Your memories, your attachments. They burn ’em away. But not to punish you. They’re freeing your soul.’ He explains that the dying person who refuses to let go experiences demonic attack. If, however, they have made their peace with God, the devils become angels freeing them from the earth. Louis gets Jacob to stand up and walk by himself. By this action, he is able to progress to the next stage of his life-in-death. Jacob looks through his old army box, uncovering and accepting his traumatic ‘real’ past. He finds his own honourable discharge certificate and a letter Gabe sent to him in Vietnam. Intercut is a flashback of Gabe’s death

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when run down by a car. These items from the past indicate that Jacob is beginning to accept the reality of his own death and letting go of life. Through his tears, he catches sight of the teasingly elusive figure of Gabe through a blurred and broken mirror. Flashes of the entity with the jerking head ominously intrude. Jacob gets a phone call from ‘part of a chemical warfare unit in Saigon’, which speeds up the pace of his investigation of the past. A renegade chemist who was co-opted by the army confesses his work with the use of consciousness-altering drugs in combat. By isolating ‘special properties’ of the ‘dark side’ of the psyche, they tapped into the anger and aggression of their subjects in ‘a fast trip down the ladder’. During a cab ride to his old home in Brooklyn on a rainy night, Jacob relives the bayonet wound and recollects that it was his own buddy who had stabbed him. He returns home along gleaming blue pavements to a plush apartment block with a doorman. The building’s polished floor glistens as it reflects the light. He wears his army shirt as he enters the numinously lit blue drawing room. A half eaten pie, open schoolbooks and the patterns on a blank TV screen suggest that his family have only just left the room. The flickering of a neon light outside continues the ongoing strobe technique. Still photographs in frames within the frame, such as the graduating couple and Sarah with a baby, stand in for memories. Jacob’s smile suggests his present reconciliation with his past. Meister Ekhardt’s words return. Darkness falls as we see a picture of the three children with a red kite. Black leader continues to run, creating a contemplative pause before the room is again illumined by the dawn light on Jacob’s smiling face as he is ready to pass into pure duration. In the warm pink glow, Gabe plays at the bottom of the stairs. The boy leads Jacob up the stairs in hazy soft-focus, to ethereal music. They pass the light streaming through from the window before they disappear and are absorbed by the overwhelming brightness of eternity. The final shots of the film show Jacob’s dead body with a beatific smile in the field hospital at dawn. The medics comment that he ‘put up a hell of a fight’. The end-titles locate the film as a fantasy inspired by the experimental military use of the hallucinogen BZ in Vietnam denied by the Pentagon. Viewed through the prism of Bergson and Deleuze, Jacob’s Ladder is a journey through sheets of past that undermine the authenticity of the present. The religious overtones suggest that Jacob has been descending purgatorial steps through time and space, then climbing up again to reach his personal Heaven. In horror films, the persistence of memory, coupled with dream/hallucination, presents duration as a hellish experience. The

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redemptive ending of this journey through memory gravitates against the film’s horror elements. The hellish terror that lurks outside the boundaries of space-time can be found in a much simpler form in the neo-Gothic horror/sci-fi hybrid Event Horizon, directed by Paul Anderson.

Back From the Black Hole: Event Horizon Event Horizon is a hybrid of horror and science fiction. The film imagines what might happen if the boundary of space-time is breached, using scientific and pseudo-scientific terminology based on theories of relativity and Stephen Hawking’s extensions to the theory of black holes.80 Several of these terms and concepts, such as the ‘singularity’ – the point at the centre of a black hole at which matter becomes infinitely dense – have likewise been removed by Deleuze from their context in physics and used for variant purposes. The Deleuzian re-application of physics is ‘twice-removed’ by being itself shaped by Bergson’s. Despite his disagreement with Einstein on the nature of time, Bergson’s work is a broad philosophical exploration of relativity’s insight that ‘there is no absolute point of reference, no privileged system’.81 In the relativistic world of Event Horizon, space-time is folded back upon itself, with disastrous results, when a spacecraft enters a black hole. Black holes are bodies so compact for their mass that light cannot leave their vicinity against the intense gravitational field. An event horizon is the boundary round a black hole at which the escape velocity exceeds the speed of light. It has anomalous temporal properties. At an event horizon, clocks stop from the standpoint of a distant observer and there is an infinite time-dilation effect.82 From the viewpoint of an earthbound observer, an astronaut in a craft would appear never to reach the event horizon, but to hover at its horizon, frozen in time. From the astronaut’s point of view, it takes only a finite time to cross over into the interior of the event horizon, but the craft would never be able to return because it would not be able to exceed the local light velocity. The spacecraft, itself named the Event Horizon, is the product of a secret government project to create a spacecraft capable of faster-than-light flight, which the law of relativity prohibits. The opening shots of the title sequence show a glistening blue vortex of energy surrounding a black hole. A meteoric object hurtles towards the camera from deep space. The ship, feared lost when it disappeared in a black hole beyond Neptune, has returned to the ‘now’ of 2047. The velocity slows

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to reveal the ship’s heavy metal nuts and bolts, apparently a familiar, solid product of human engineering. When acceleration stops, the interior of the ship enters free-fall. Amongst the slowly floating objects, a wristwatch is highlighted. Like Dali’s melting clocks, the transmuted timepiece indicates infinite temporal dilation. The inventor of the ship, Dr Weir, has evaded the laws of relativity by creating a ‘new gateway’ to jump instantaneously from one point to another light years away. This is effected by ‘using a retaining magnetic field to focus a narrow beam of gravitation’. These techniques, in turn, fold space-time until the space-time curvature becomes infinitely large and produces a singularity. Realising that the crew (and some of the film’s audience) have problems understanding the terminology of physics, he ends his account by using ‘layman’s terms’. Weir continues, ‘The shortest distance between two points is zero. It folds space so that point A and point B coexist in the same space and time. When the spacecraft passes through the gateway, space returns to normal. Its called a gravity drive.’ The crew of the missing ship were given the go-ahead to use the gravity drive to open the gateway to Proxima Centauri, then disappeared elsewhere before their anomalous return. At the end, the ship explodes, ripping the fabric of the universe into another black hole, and the ship is sucked down into it, back whence it came.

Inner Space in Outer Space: Travels in Duration The motif of the unsatisfying past returning to the present to haunt astronauts echoes Tarkovski’s Solaris in the more graphic form of body horror. Dr Weir is initially presented as a sympathetic figure, haunted by his personal past in the dream form of his dead wife Claire, who vengefully awaits him. Her nightmarish pallor and dead eyes, in close-up, impel him in terror from his liquid-filled travel tube. In an attempt to reassure the anxious crew, despite his own traumatised state, Weir offers them some background to the Event Horizon project. Weir, whose manner becomes increasingly sinister, attempts to pass this distortion of space-time off as an ‘optical effect’ created by a burst of gravity waves that escaped from the core. He explains that when the engine’s three magnetic rings align, they create an artificial black hole, which has the power to bend space and time. This allows the ship to travel to any point in space. As Weir speaks, the gravity drive creates hypnotic reflections of itself in his eyes, shown in close-up as he gazes at his creation, as though it has possessed him, or absorbed him into its own machinic assemblage.

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This manifestation of the engine’s ability to transmute matter is followed by its further ability to shift temporal co-ordinates. Memories based on past events are manifest as present realities, due to the engine’s interference with the space-time continuum. We learned earlier that Dr Peters, the medical technician, has a dysfunctional family and feels guilty about leaving her son behind whilst she works. Peters begins to experience distressing projections from her guilty conscience. She hallucinates her little boy on the ship, his legs covered with sores, calling plaintively for his ‘Mommy’. Weir crawls through a complex tunnel of reflective facets to seek a supposed fault in the ship’s circuitry. As he moves through this crystalline tunnel, it spreads and stretches out, expanding in time as well as in space. Weir’s wife appears, and invites him to be with her ‘forever’ before he blacks out and the screen goes dark. Captain Miller experiences his own first hallucination produced from a layer of memory tapped by the gravity drive. He sees the figure of a former bosun rise from a pool of liquid fire to stare at him accusingly. Miller feels responsible for the death of this young crew member he was compelled to leave behind when the ship exploded. When Justin, the ‘baby’ of the present crew, dies, Miller’s memory matches this with the bosun’s death. Flash-frames of the bosun’s bloody face indicate the operations of guilt as present events trigger the associations of memory. The ship unlocks the crew’s innermost secrets from intensive memory, and projects them into present, extensive space. Weir’s attempted rationalisations of events as carbon dioxide hallucinations sound increasingly hollow. The sensory reality of the manifestations, including that of his own wife, undermines his claims. The spectator sees what the characters see, ‘objectively’ present in the same frame with those who see them. The heat is felt, not imagined, and instruments register ‘bio-readings of an indeterminate origin’. By breaking through the space and time of this universe, the ship has brought back an elsewhere in which known laws are no longer valid. Memory literally becomes matter. As well as the materialisation of personal memory, a culturally shared layer of historical past is plumbed via ecclesiastical echoes in the mise-enscène. The windows of the medical room combine Romanesque and Gothic features. One curved arch in centre frame surrounds three lancet windows of light. The inside of the ship resembles the interior of a terrestrial building with brick-like walls.83 The doors of the medical room are coffinshaped. The identification of the peripheral space to which the Event Horizon has travelled as ‘Hell’, the use of Latin and the demonic manifestations, increase the film’s neo-Gothic ambience. The gravity drive steps up its predations. Peters sees flash-frames of her son holding out his arms to her. He leads her to her death as she drops

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down a virtual chasm that opens in the ship. Weir’s wife, whom we see reflected in his eyes, slashes her wrists in the bath, in the virtual space of a personal Hell made from his memory traces. He pokes his own eyes out in anguish. When Weir blows the rescue ship up, the screen briefly becomes an ‘any-space-whatever’ of swirling fire and coloured sparks, and provides a brief, disorienting respite from narrative horrors.

‘It’s’ Alive: The Event Horizon as Demonic Machine The spacecraft manifests its own life-force after it has returned from beyond the space-time boundary. The metal matter of the ship has become a living space of anomaly, ill disposed towards humanity and insisting on its own will as demonic machine. The first human figure that appears from the former crew is dead, silhouetted against a bright, cruciform window in the posture of a crucified Christ. A medium close-up reveals his bloody torso and a face frozen in suffering. This image introduces the visual and aural echoes of ecclesiastical architecture that permeate the diegesis. By passing out of known space and time, the ship has, in some sense, regressed to a medieval religious paradigm and manifests demonic forces and the torments of the damned, despite its sci-fi terminology and setting. Religious motifs are introduced with the crew of the rescue ship, initially orbiting earth. The briefly blank white screen, then the dazzling light which introduces them, implies a positive spiritual ambience in contrast to the infernal gloom of the Event Horizon. The rescue crew are plagued by a sense of foreboding when their mission is announced. The pilot, Mr Smith, crosses himself. One crew member has an Egyptian ankh tattooed on back. This mix of conventional and alternative religious iconography suggests the survival of human spirituality into the future. Locking onto the stranded ship, via the main airlock (XIII in Latin numerals), the rescue crew begin to pick up unexplained sounds, which they record and play back. These are a ‘high-pitched squeaking, deep howling noise’ with an indistinct voice in Latin saying what initially resembles ‘liberate me’ or ‘save me’. Thunder and lightning begins in deep space, cueing in the Gothic atmosphere. Continuing the religious motifs, the ship’s outline resembles an ankh, or a crucifix on its side. Later flashframes show an amorphous, bloody sac with a red pentagram on it. Captain Miller and Dr Weir cross the umbilicus bridge, in the deep freeze of ice crystals. The Captain feels that the place is ‘a tomb’. Sudden motion breaks the stillness as a blue/black spiralling vortex appears, with a fang-like gateway at the centre of a tunnel. The reflective, mirrored surfaces have a hypnotic effect on the eye, their crystalline nature inducing

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multi-faceted vision. The two men walk past benches ominously smeared with cobweb formations of viscous organic matter. They enter the second containment without compromising the magnetic fields. When the captain pulls out the ship’s log, a deformed face and torso with ‘massive abrasions’ looms out at him, and he mistakenly speculates that an animal was responsible for the carnage. The engine, described by Weir as ‘the core, the gravity drive’, is ‘the heart of the ship’ and is impelled by a machinic life of its own. This huge, spiked globe resembles a deep-sea mine, or a torture machine. It has a triple outer structure of intersecting rings, adorned by glowing circlets of light, and rotates with a motion propelled by its own force. Close-ups lead our eyes to its detail, elaborate patterns etched on its metal plates. The form of the engine mutates to an eight-pointed star as it unfolds to emit an unbearably bright light, which makes the men stagger back. After this burst of light, the predominant blue gloom returns. In curiosity, Justin pokes his finger into the engine’s side. In an elemental becoming, the metal transmutes into a mercury-like liquid, and he withdraws his finger with a blob on the end. His life-scan sensor lights up, suggesting an active living presence in the engine. Justin puts his hand into the solid/liquid substance and his arm is drawn in after it, followed by his entire body. He is sucked into the centre of the globe by machinic osmosis, and vanishes. The machine shows warning signs of its destructive intent, then erupts in light sparks and red flames. The taped ship’s log is played back. Before opening the gateway to Proxima Centauri, the Latinate captain bids everyone ‘Ave atque vale.’ Static and a high-pitched howling cut him off. An updated translation of the Latin words on the audiotape offers a warning from the captain, ‘Save yourself from Hell.’ The visual recording shows bloody men devouring each other and destroying themselves. A human arm projects from one man’s throat and we have a close-up of the grinning captain who has torn out his own eyeballs. Announcing that he is ‘home’, Weir disappears into darkness. The infernal regions have relocated from Earth’s underground to ‘beyond the boundaries of the known universe’. The core shows Justin a glimpse of Hell, then sends him back to terrify his mates. He recounts his experience of ‘the dark inside me . . . from the other place’. Justin prophesies his own death: ‘He’s coming . . . the dark!’ The Devil comes for him in the form of a gory death as his body is turned inside out within the compression chamber. Physics can provide an account of what happens to him. When an astronaut crosses the event horizon and is drawn into the singularity at the centre, he or she is ‘torn apart by tidal forces’84 and ‘crushed out of existence’ by being

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sucked in by the gravitational field of collapsed matter.85 Alternatively, Justin suffers an inversion of his spatial extent by being rotated in the fourth dimension. Weir, now completely a demon-possessed mad scientist, is able to see without physical eyes. He captures the surgeon, D. J. Trauma, and tortures him on his own operating table, eviscerating him with a scalpel along a preexisting scar. He hooks Trauma’s viscera to the ceiling in elaborate spiderweb patterns highlighted by the Romanesque arch. Weir exults that his ship ‘tore a hole in our universe – a gateway to another dimension – a dimension of pure chaos, pure evil’ and, in the process, the Event Horizon came back ‘alive’. The physical impact of rescue technician Coop’s return from outside the ship blasts a hole through the wall, which causes the contents to be sucked out. As well as these strictly sci-fi horrors, more traditional occult manifestations include a sea of blood that wells up and washes Stark, the pilot, away. The ghostly bosun seeks revenge by attacking the captain with a focused flame. Weir is the diabolic force behind these illusions, and adopts their form. His face is scratched and scarred, as though etched with strange symbols. He gloats that ‘Hell is only a word – the reality is much, much worse’, and attempts to carry them all off there. His supernaturally enhanced trajectory is stopped when Miller, in a sacrificial gesture, blows the ship up. The explosion opens up an any-spacewhatever as smoke and flame temporarily blot representation out. The hole closes up again in swirling mist, and thunder rumbles as the survivors Coop and Stark watch from the window of the rescue craft. Those crew members whose guilt-laden pasts caught up with them are destroyed. The film ends with Stark’s final hallucination of Weir’s continuing presence, and she is sedated to calm her terror. The film introduces, but does not fully develop, relativistic concepts of time and duration. The action-driven plot is rendered sensational by the neo-Gothic elements of body horror. Nevertheless, its rationale of splitting space-time, and the prevalence of the past in the form of memory, are relevant to our discussion. As in Jacob’s Ladder, the theme has a religious dimension and explores the operations of a guilty conscience. From this perspective, travel in duration, and the inability of the characters to keep the past as virtual memory, can lead to Hell. My final reading is a more detailed study of time and motion in Mulholland Drive, directed by David Lynch. The film straddles the arthouse/mainstream divide and incorporates components of supernatural horror. Bergsonian and Deleuzian tropes mesh together in this dense and philosophically suggestive text.

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Dreaming Duration in Mulholland Drive this is my dream place (Betty/Diane)

Lynch’s work is often described as Surrealistic, though the director ingenuously denies this.86 The films offer an overt array of Oedipal themes, perverse sexual fantasies, sadistic violence and a convincingly uncanny ambience. Dual identity appears in Fire Walk with Me and Lost Highway, as well as Mulholland Drive. Above all, they operate a substantial oneiric component in which the boundary between dream and waking life is blurred, even non-existent. This dream world evokes inexplicable qualities of supernatural horror. Bergson’s comments shed new light on Lynch’s oneiric complexities, approach to dreams is philosophically rather than psycho-sexually oriented. He does not unearth Oedipal configurations, or Jungian archetypes of the collective unconscious, although it might be argued that Lynch’s films do. Dreams, for Bergson, are a simplified example of the interweaving of concepts in the ‘deeper regions of the intellectual life’ when we are awake.87 Cinematic superimposition is prefigured by his analysis of the ‘strangest dreams’ in which ‘two images overlie one another and show us at the same time two different persons, who yet make only one’.88 This illumines the daydreams, night dreams and overlaid levels of reality in Mulholland Drive as fixed identity is replaced by the composite figures of fantasy.

Betty’s ‘Dream Place’ The first part of the narrative features the stylised ‘true romance’ and meteoric rise of ‘Betty’, a would-be Hollywood star, who, as we later discover, does not actually exist. Plot concerns such as the separation of truth from falsehood and the solution to the mystery remain opaque. The irrelevant, or possibly non-existent, ‘meaning’ has little value compared to the affective experience of the film. Time, space and motion are loosely strung together less by plot events than by the affective resonance of diagrammatic components, such as the quality of the colour blue. The blue tone is set in the pre-title sequence, with jitterbugging dancers silhouetted against an indigo ground. The threatening swell of electronic chords mixes in with the hard-edged rattling rhythm of the music. With no visible floor, the dancers appear to fly. Their shadow doubles loom large behind them, simulacral dancers who duplicitously copy the real dancers’ every move. This effect evokes dreams as moving shadows with autonomous life. It begins the film’s distortion of spatial and temporal co-ordinates.

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A brightly lit close-up of Betty’s blissful face confronts us. Her wide blue-eyed wonder will be the predominant mode of her adopted persona. A bleached-out three-shot shows her with a (deceptively) benign elderly couple. The validity of this sequence is undermined by a jump cut to rumpled pink bedcovers, shot in close-up. Jump cuts feature substantially in dream ellipsis as the dreaming consciousness hops between memory layers and selects material impelled by its own trajectory. The camera eye descends into the pillow, suggesting the burrowing motion of dreaming. The film’s mobile camera moves by a sinister force of its own, not bound to the point-of view of any character. By inducing sensory disorientation, it confuses our perceptions and opens up anomalous time and space. Bright letters on the black ground of a street sign jump cut us to a new location, Mulholland Drive. The sign, with its fluorescent flicker, appears to float. Rapid alternations of dark and light induce a hypnotic, strobe-like effect. The film’s titles likewise ripple in fluorescence before fading out. This technique extends the hypnotic flicker of the sign on the viewer’s eyes. Flickering light, with its consciousness-altering properties, marks climactic points in the film. Long-held electronic chords cue in car headlamps cutting through darkness. Slowly alternating long and medium shots fade into each other. Los Angeles is a simulacral city that partakes of the qualities of dream. The nocturnal panorama appears viewed from the slow gliding car guided on by white lines at the road edge. The smooth motion of fluid tracking is broken by an abrupt cut inside to the pallid, sculptured face of a woman. Her image recalls the film noir femme fatale, with black hair, dark crimson lips with matching nails and slinky black dress. The skewing of her apparent point-of-view shot from the back seat undermines our potential identification. Rather than focusing on the driver’s back, the camera reveals an indistinct space in the darkness ahead, as though she is absorbed in a reverie that blanks out the present and us. The car abruptly stops, sensorially assaulted by the glare of headlamps and the sound of rattling and yelling as joyriders crash headlong into it. An extended image cluster of beds and sleeping effects the suspension of mundane reality and its replacement by dream journeys elsewhere. The crash survivor rises like a somnambulist and limps down to the city, impelled by a trance-like energy. Concealing herself in bushes, she slowly, sinuously, lies down to sleep. Whilst the crash is being investigated in a plot cul-de-sac, she sneaks into a house as its owner leaves, and sleeps a second time. What ensues via a jump cut is assumed to be her dream because of its immediate juxtaposition, but we come to realise that the dreamer/dream connection is tenuously drawn. Unlike the fades or lap dissolves that con-

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ventionally demarcate the edges of dream sequences, the film undermines the distinction of dream and reality. The entire narrative of Mulholland Drive comprises knotted layers of undifferentiated fantasy/dream/memory. According to Bergson, dreams are collages of memory fragments. Their overlaid nature is due to several ‘sheets’ of memory co-existing. Overlay produces a sense of quality, not quantity, as relations shift between outer, extensive consciousness and inner, intensive state of memory. Sleep deprives the ego of the ‘outer circle of psychic states which it uses as a balance-wheel’ between itself and everyday objects.89 It thus relaxes ‘the play of the organic functions, alters the communicating surface between the ego and external objects’, so that we ‘no longer measure duration, but we feel it’ as quality.90 Overlay is tripled, in this scene, by its weaving of a dream within a dream within a dream. This dream world, like that of the Surrealists, is both contemporary/urban and fantastic in nature. The pastel façade of a diner leads into a ‘space’ of supernatural horror as a man confides a traumatic dream to his analyst and insists on re-enacting it. Close-ups of his fearful, perspiring face authenticate the affective force of memory. The two men find uncanny horror embedded in the mundane world and lit by full sunlight. Their anxious approach to a ruined wall is presented by the shaky empathy of a low-angled, hand-held camera. The nightmare is realised as the close-up face of a filthy vagrant with hyper-aware turquoise eyes erupts from behind the wall. The dreamer’s actualised nightmare gives him a heart attack. We cut on a sound bridge of the analyst’s muffled distress to an unidentified sleeper apparently dreaming this scene, not the woman we expect. Near the end of the film, we revisit this dream-within-a-dream in the uncanny repetition of an ‘original’ itself a repetition. This time, the dreamer stands in the same corner of the diner as his analyst had done earlier. A slow fade moves us round the back of the building, to the longheld vibration of electronic notes on the soundtrack. Darkness swamps out daylight as the sinister vagrant appears, hellishly lit by red smoke from the fire behind. S/he holds a vibrantly blue box and places it into a grubby paper bag. In a long-held shot, the box flickers red in the glow of the fire. Exaggerated camera motion evokes disturbed emotional or mental states. In ‘Aunt Ruth’s’ apartment, the camera’s gliding viewpoint moves eagerly forward, then cautiously back. This rapid fluidity exceeds the feasible viewpoint of Betty’s hesitation at the open bathroom door. Betty’s first sight of her dark-haired interloper is the blurred image of a voluptuous body through the frosted glass of a shower. From inside the shower, the woman spots a movie poster of Rita Hayworth in Gilda and instantly adopts the name of this deceptive movie femme fatale. Her persona is

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formed by identification with a fantasy image via the duplicitous intermediary of a two-way arrangement of mirrors. A shot of the back of her head melts into a glide over her shoulder, to pause at her face in the mirror, as it looks at the reflection in a second mirror. The visual duality matches her devious persona. Camera movement is frequently motivated by its own, often anticipatory agenda. Whilst Betty phones Aunt Ruth, the camera tracks along the corridor, taking a route that she will shortly take herself. The camera’s motion expresses the insistence of desire and the force of manifest thought, in a domination of linear time and space. Betty follows the camera’s lead to see for herself what it has already viewed with its superior eye, Rita weeping on the bed. Rita’s amnesia disempowers her and makes her dependent on Betty. Rita’s enigmatic dark eyes and Betty’s lucid blue ones lock as Rita’s bag reveals emblematic objects: wads of dollars and a strangely triangular blue key.91 Betty’s personal geography is among the film’s self-consciously oneiric hints. Having left Deep River, Ontario, she is now in her ‘dream place’, Hollywood. As well as private forms of memory, the film draws on cultural memory as the glamour of old Hollywood is evoked by ambivalent nostalgia. The film is a dense pastiche of an already artificial ‘original’, the Hollywood movie version of its own history and geography, seen in Lynch’s self-reflexive use of both location and studio shots. Betty enters the Hollywood dream factory through the old pink and ivory gates of the studio, where she is magically transformed from a nobody into an up-andcoming star. The retro kitsch film Adam Kesher directs echoes Betty’s own taste for 1950s retro in jitterbugging. Adam himself adopts a 1950s revival haircut, sideburns and square-framed shades. The independent eye of the camera undermines the movie-cliché first eye-contact of these potential lovers. It lays bare the scene’s artifice by tracking away from them through the rectangular frame of the sound stage. Here, it could be argued, the camera eye is the semi-detached presence of the invisible dreamer who critically observes her own fantasy scenarios. The camera eye later glides into the courtyard towards Aunt Ruth’s apartment. Aware of where Rita is hiding, it seeks her out. Its swooping movement heralds Louise, a witch-like neighbour wrapped in a long cloak, with glazed eyes and frizzled hair. As she pronounces that ‘something bad’s happening’, the camera swoops right in to the hidden Rita’s anxious face inside the room, either impelled by Louise’s psychic ‘second sight’ or on its own accord. These dreams have full sensorial presence as well as visual expression. When Betty and Rita break into a black and white faux Tudor apartment, they are assaulted by a rotten stench. Sensorial immersion in horror is con-

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veyed as they mask their noses from the smell of decay. The camera glides on before them and moves into deep shadow, intensifying the lurking mystery. The woman’s body curled on the bed, in a posture reminiscent of the sleeping Rita, likewise appears to be asleep. Rita’s scream is muffled by Betty’s hand as they recognise the deformed figure as a corpse. The pink coverlet recalls the invisible dreamer in the title sequence, waiting throughout the film for the dream to unfold. The corpse’s texture induces haptic revulsion as the mottled blue arms and damaged face shine with the dampness of decay. In a horribly literal sense, it recalls Deleuze’s description of the body as ‘the developer of time, it shows time through its tirednesses and waitings’.92 Decay belongs not to duration, but to unstoppably linear space-time. Lynch films validate the urgency of dream life and visionary quality. Dreams within dreams are a recurring feature. When Betty and Rita become lovers, sexual ecstasy affords them brief respite from time’s arrow until their peaceful sleep is disturbed by Rita’s nightmare. With her eyes wide open, she murmurs, ‘Silencio – no hay banda – no hay orquestra’, then apparently wakes. Rita urges Betty to join her in response to a dream, summons, although this could still be part of her dream, like the fantastic subsequent sequences at the Club Silencio. The oneiric quality of Rita and Betty’s cab ride through the blur of unreal streets is expressed by the soft-focus iridescence of pre-dawn light. They enter a blue-lit lot, vacant apart from a few blowing scraps of litter. Without any narrative purpose, this any-space-whatever evokes pure quality of an eerie, threatening kind. The camera glides rapidly across it and pushes them into the nightclub from behind. Inside the club, to a small, mainly female audience, a doubly artificial performance is enacted. In a self-referential display of technological artifice, an on-stage MC announces that the music of a white-clad trumpeter is recorded. The trumpeter continues to mime after the tape has stopped, so that he is playing silence. An inexplicable figure watches from the balcony: an androgynous woman with deep blue hair and eighteenth-century costume. As well as the goatee beard of a stage magician, the MC has genuinely diabolical powers to affect his audience. Thunder crashes through the theatre and Betty trembles uncontrollably in her seat, as though electrified. The MC, who wears a single pearl on his cravat, like Rita’s earring lost in the crash, stares directly into the camera with his bulging, manic eyes, engaging the movie audience full-on. He vanishes in a cloud of blue smoke, leaving behind a luminous microphone in the flickering submarine light. From a set-up on stage, a long shot de-personalises the captivated auditorium audience.

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The show climaxes with the performance of the real-life singer, Rebekah Del Rio. Clad in a tight sheath dress, she mimes Roy Orbison’s song ‘Crying’, in Spanish. Her androgynous face is plastered with makeup, which highlights her voluptuous crimson mouth. Despite the blatant falsity of a tear stuck on her cheek, her eyes brim with tears of pathos. Overcome by emotion, Rebekah collapses, and is carried off-stage as her voice unnervingly continues to sing, in pure sonsigns. Betty and Rita cling weeping to each other at this simulation, which at the same time induces the actual quality of love and pain. The aesthetic force of music invokes virtual memories that genuinely affect the present. The tramp’s blue box inexplicably appears on Betty’s lap. She takes the triangular key (which seems made for it) out of her bag, in obedience to dream logic. A temporal and spatial ellipsis shifts them back home and Betty vanishes after placing this box on the bed. The empty quality of the apartment is emphatic. Rita also opens the box and the camera dives through it into visual blackout and the sound of rushing wind. The box falls onto the carpet. Inexplicably, Aunt Ruth enters the empty room and seems disturbed by the residue of psychic turbulence. Her sudden manifestation adds a further layer to the dream’s distorted temporal and spatial schemata.

Diane in Duration The spatial and temporal convolution of the film stymies critics seeking a plausible overall schema. Betty’s story is the wish-fulfilment day- and night-dream projection of Diane, a film extra disappointed in love. The dreams are an assemblage of false and true memories recalled into being at the point of her death. They re-mould her actual past into one she desires; ‘remembering’ events that never happened. Diane projects her dreams, or substitute memories, as she slips away from the demands of present action into the permanent eternity of dream life. This feasible slant I am taking on the film’s disturbing dream events only becomes possible late in the story. Diane’s dream world does not merely re-tell a plausible, if romanticised, account of her own past. Sinister deus ex machina figures appear, like Mr Roque, the disabled Mafia boss in his glass-walled room. Their uncanny quality exceeds the realms of nightmare or paranoid projection. Numinous beings with autonomous existence, they are denizens of another, metaphysical, layer of reality played out through the dream world. This possibility, which fits in with the director’s other work, underlines the film’s quality of supernatural horror. The Cowboy is another disturbingly skewed stereotype, in 1970s check shirt, Texan accent, ten-gallon hat and

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red neckerchief. Rather than being tanned and wholesome, he has slit eyes and a ginger-haired pallor. After his slow, softly spoken threat to Kesher, the bare light bulb above the gate of his ranch flickers and he vanishes in the dark. Bergson compares the virtual experience of past events reactivated by memory to dreams. The necessities of present action block our past from us, but if we relinquish the demands of the present by daydream or contemplation, it may be recovered and returned to consciousness. The blocked past will ‘find strength to cross the threshold of consciousness in all cases where we renounce the interests of effective action to replace ourselves, so to speak, in the life of dreams’.93 Dreams thus offer an image of the processes of memory in a simpler form. In Lynch’s film, Diane’s dreams form on-screen reality for us. They are, however, complex and convoluted, not simplified, versions of projected memories. Temporal and spatial disjunction is strongly marked after both Rita and Betty have disappeared ‘into’ the blue box, which functions as a time tunnel linking co-existing layers of duration. An interlude returns us to a different layer of time in the mock-Tudor apartment, as knocking at the door forms a belated sound bridge to the knock that disturbed Rita and Betty earlier. An apparently sleeping woman lies on the bed with her back to the camera as the Cowboy enters with the order, ‘Hey, pretty girl – time to wake up.’ This is followed by a long, black fade-out. Time has disconcertingly looped back to when the corpse seen by Betty and Rita was alive. At this point, we do not merely switch in space and time, but shift from one protagonist to another in the same skin. Betty becomes ‘Diane’, and Rita becomes ‘Camilla’, the name of the would-be starlet in the earlier section.94 Unlike her alter-ego, Diane is burnt-out and bitter, not freshfaced and naïve. Another blue key, of normal appearance this time, lies on the coffee table as Diane’s friend, who Rita and Betty met earlier, collects her belongings and warns her that two detectives were looking for her (the same men seen by Betty and Rita). According to linear plot logic, time’s forward flow has forked. Diane is both dead and alive at the same time, and, as Betty, she has also seen her own dead body. Alone, Diane stares through the grimy window and sighs for Camilla, who enters in a glamorous red gown. They quarrel during sex and the camera focuses on an ashtray, the same one we saw the friend take away earlier in yet another temporal convolution. On the level of narrative, these events disorientate the spectator. From the perspective of Deleuze, cinema has made us aware of the way sheets of past are organised around peaks of present. Temporal suspension is broken by the strident ringing of the telephone

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in a ‘present’ determined to impel the narrative forward into the future. Here, however, the possibility of a ‘present’ is heavily undermined by miseen-scène. The phone is near the ominous red light cast by a crimson lampshade surrounded by opaque darkness. This recalls the earlier attempt of Rita and Betty to contact Diane. A further jump cut has occurred, because Diane, with a despairing expression, is now dressed for an evening out, imitating Camilla’s style by her vampish red and black outfit. In a repetition of the opening credits, the Mulholland Drive street sign flickers, and shots from the start are replayed. The repetition suggests a circular looping of time and space. It makes us reassess the earlier scene as a modified version of Diane’s own (future) fate. She sits in the same posture as Rita, as though Rita’s experience had been a rehearsal for Diane’s. She likewise repeats the lines. ‘What are you doing? We don’t stop here.’ Instead of a gun, the driver tells her to expect a surprise, which turns out to be the engagement party for Camilla and Adam that precipitates Diane’s final psychotic breakdown. Diane’s nightmare world is literally the death of her when it appears in ‘actuality’ near the end. In a state of post-traumatic shock, Diane sits staring at the blue key left as a sign that Camilla has been murdered at her request. Gloomy ambient lighting contrasts with the pallor of her robe and skin, and emphasises her isolation. Her intensive recollections are disrupted by a loud banging at the door. The sinister elderly couple seen with Betty at the airport return from the unidentifiable space of Elsewhere as Diane sinks into despair. With maniacal laughter, they move forward in jerky, stop-frame motion, like automata. The demonic couple are Furies summoned by Diane’s guilt and remorse, to drive her to despair. Miniaturised, they crawl under the door whilst a stroboscopic flicker bathes Diane’s close-up eye to intensify the numinous horror of events. Returning to full size, they attack her, and from their over-the shoulder point-of-view, force her down onto a blue-tinged, blurred bed. She scrabbles for a gun in the bedside cabinet and a shot is heard. The smoke-filled room becomes opaque whilst the light continues to flicker. Although he does not discuss either the manifest or latent content of nightmares, Bergson’s account of dreams describes their potential to fragment and lose durational wholeness. He describes this in negative terms as a descent into space-time. A comparable disintegration is produced by the anxiety-inducing jump cuts between alternative levels and spaces in Lynch’s work. The anxious affect is enhanced by unnerving motions of cinematography and anomalous objects of the mise-en-scène that express an extended dream world.

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The force of nightmare continues to reverberate in the immediate aftermath of Diane’s death. The tramp’s face appears, rendered demonic by the lurid mix of a blue filter and the red glow of a fiery background. This hellish ambience transmutes by lap dissolve into a brighter vision. The next close-up is Diane as Betty, bleached with light, laughing and happy as we saw her in the titles sequence. A blonde-wigged Camilla appears in the cab next to her, in a composition that recalls the two- and three-shot closeups of the jitterbug contest of the pre-title sequence. This pale, luminous image is repeated twice. Both two-shots appear to be on the same spatial line, as the camera pans across from the first one to repeat a slightly varied version of the same set-up, producing the impression of a three-shot. These images of Diane and Camilla together melt and fade into each other in slow motion. This movement suggests their transcendent nuptial, as memory breaks free from material limitations into the eternal time of Diane’s version of Heaven. Lynch’s Heaven is characterised not by the frozen stasis of perfection, but by the shimmering vibration of light in intensive flux. At this point, the nightmares of life are replaced by the eternal dream of blissful duration outside space-time. The any-space-whatever of the Club Silencio is the film’s final location. The interior is shrouded in (superimposed) smoke. This fades into a sharpfocus shot of dark red drapes and a blue microphone on the empty stage. The woman with blue hair looks down from her box. With her heavily lipsticked mouth recalling the shape of Camilla’s, she whispers the final words, ‘Silencio.’ She sets a seal of silence on a mystery left deliberately opaque to provoke the viewer’s further speculations on the film’s enigmas, space and time.

Space-Time and Dream Duration Although Bergson finds a shadow of duration in dreams, their invasion by space gravitates against their ability to present it in its pure state. As we dream, the components of our durational self become scattered. They adopt separate, spatial characteristics and lose some of their intensive force. When this occurs, our past, which till then was gathered together into the indivisible impulsion it communicated to us, is broken up into a thousand tiny recollections made external to one another. They give up interpenetrating to the degree that they become fixed. Our personality thus descends in the direction of space.95

Bergson regrets the dilution of duration in dreams. Aesthetic events like fiction films, which offer a comparable experience, inevitably express

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themselves in spatialised images. Despite this, the image’s temporal flow enables certain films, in certain scenes, to recapture and convey the quality of duration. I argue that Mulholland Drive expresses duration’s affective force in the ‘shining points’ of particular images and sequences, and the broader ‘sheets’ or layers of its overall construction. As Betty and Rita hide out, the onward flow of linear time appears to stand still. Beneath this surface stillness, temporal change continues. A technique that makes time visible is used when they hurtle out of the apartment they had broken into, startled by knocking at the door. In these shots, duration rather than space-time is conveyed. As they run, the fragmentation of both their personas by trauma is displayed. In a multiplicity of visual vibrations, their images are overlaid in a Futurist-style image. They are plummeted out of linear space-time as inner ‘sheets of past’ in duration are exposed. Multiple superimpositions freeze the linear temporal flow into an intensive moment. We thus become aware of the normally buried layers of duration as they co-exist within memory. The extensive manifestation of intensive states is impelled by the potent event of horror. In a scene pivotal to the dream projections, Diane, with a pale, sweating face and desperate expression, masturbates on the couch. Her sobbing orgasm mixes physical pleasure and emotional pain. The psychic potency of her jouissance blurs the sharpness of reality as the stones of the wall go in and out of focus. Either during orgasm, or at her death, Diane’s extreme emotional state might project the mixture of true and false memories in the film’s convoluted narrative. The latter of the two stimuli would account for the inclusion of subsequent anomalies. According to Deleuze’s schema, Diane’s destiny has projected something of the ‘pure power of time’, which alters her memories of a real, personal past, to affirm a time ‘which overflows all memory, an alreadypast which exceeds all recollections’.96 This sense of being lost in time results when attentive recognition fails. Deleuze suggests that failure of memory suspends sensory-motor extension so that the image perceived fails to link up with either a motor-image or a recollection-image that would re-establish contact. The actual image then enters into relation with ‘genuinely virtual elements’, such as feelings of déjà vu, dream images and fantasies. He concludes that ‘it is not the recollection-image or attentive recognition which gives us the proper equivalent of the optical-sound image, it is rather the disturbances of memory and the failures of recognition’.97 Diane’s reveries in extremis have accessed an anyspace-whatever of duration, and via this they work to suspend the viewer’s customary temporal schema.

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Deleuze’s description of the sensory-motor schema of modern cinema sheds light on our opaque experience of Mulholland Drive. In post-war artcinema, conventional schemas are ‘shattered from the inside’ as perceptions and actions become disjointed and spaces are left empty or uncoordinated.98 Characters trapped in this disjointed world are ‘pure seers’, who are ‘caught in certain pure optical and sound situations’.99 These characters ‘no longer exist except in the interval of the moment, and do not even have the consolation of the sublime, which would connect them to matter or would gain control of the spirit for them. They are rather given over to something intolerable which is simply their everydayness itself ’.100 Diane’s schizophrenia results from trauma. She projects her successful Betty persona of the first half of the film as a compensation for her everyday despair. The pure optical and sound situations experienced by the viewer, such as the ghostly taped music and the numinous blue light in the Club Silencio, are projections beyond her conscious control. As the film’s aesthetic anomalies take over, she becomes increasingly unable to act, even in her go-getting assumed persona. Through Betty’s refusal of the everyday when she hides out with Rita, Diane takes on the more passive perspective of a seer. Diane’s experience is not, however, without touches of the sublime in its own schizoid ‘misery and glory’. When she experiences sexual ecstasy, and when she arranges Camilla’s death, she seeks the sublimities of passion and revenge. Returned to everydayness by the very way she sought to escape it, she falls into despair. By killing Camilla, she has destroyed her route to sublime passion that took her, literally, out of herself. Her solution is to seek the ultimate escape from intolerable everydayness in the sublime state of her own death, which may be construed as a free act, despite its mechanical gremlins. In cinema, duration and space-time are related in several distinct ways. I argue that even the most formulaic of Hollywood horror films opens up suggestive relations with space-time and, less frequently, with duration. More experimental feature films, in their stylistic complexity, offer stylistic loopholes for duration to enter. The horror-oriented films I consider overtly seek to manipulate the spectator’s sensorium. As part of the mind/body/film assemblage, they also invite speculative thought as we try to apprehend their deceptive operations and explore their mysteries. The concepts of Bergson and Deleuze provide profound tools for engaging in this process of affective thought. They help us discover what cinematic time might have to offer in its intensive motion.

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Notes 1. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1991), p. 135. 2. Gilles Deleuze, ‘The Brain is the Screen’, in Gregory Flaxman (ed.), The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 371. 3. Ronald Bogue, Deleuze on Cinema, (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 19. 4. Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester (London: The Athlone Press, 1990), p. 164. 5. Ibid. p. 165. 6. Deleuze, ‘The Brain is the Screen’, p. 371. 7. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (London: The Athlone Press, 1989), p. xi. 8. David N. Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1997), p. 79. 9. Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 98. 10. Ibid. p. 107. 11. Ibid. p. 101. 12. Ibid. p. 128. 13. Ibid. p. 128. 14. Ibid. p. 128. 15. Ibid. p. 112. 16. Ibid. p. 112. 17. Ibid. p. 114. 18. Ibid. pp. 138–9. 19. Bogue, Deleuze on Cinema, p. 14. 20. Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 100. 21. Ibid. p. 134. 22. Ibid. p. 104. 23. Ibid. p. 100. 24. Ibid. p. 133. 25. Ibid. p. 171. 26. Ibid. p. 134. 27. Ibid. p. 135. 28. Bogue, Deleuze on Cinema, p. 17. 29. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1983), p. 11. 30. Ibid. p. 30. 31. Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine, p. xviii. 32. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 23.

  33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73.

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Ibid. pp. 23–4. Ibid. p. 32. Ibid. p. 32. Ibid. p. 106. Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, p. 23. Ibid. p. 23. James Monaco, How to Read a Film (Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 1981). Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, p. 24. Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine, p. 89. Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, p. 23. Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine, p. 84. Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, p. 134. Ibid. p. 126. Ibid. p. 135. Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine, p. 98. Ibid. p. 92. Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, p. 46. Ibid. p. 93. Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, p. 22. Ibid. p. 19. Ibid. p. 19. Ibid. p. 17. Ibid. p. 17. Ibid. p. 21. Ibid. p. 18. Ibid. p. 20. Ibid. p. 20. Ibid. p. 22. Ibid. p. 20. Ibid. p. 22. Ibid. p. 30. Ibid. p. 29. Ibid. p. 28. Bogue, Deleuze on Cinema, p. 26. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson (London: George Allen and Unwin, [1910] 1971), p. 226. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 25. Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine, p. 97. Bergson, Time and Free Will, p. 224. Ibid. p. 225. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 25. Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine, p. 95.

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74. Ibid. p. 97. 75. Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The Garden With Forking Paths’, in Labyrinths, trans. Donald A. Yates (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970). 76. Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, p. 39. 77. Ibid. p. 39. 78. Ibid. p. 48. 79. Ibid. p. 48 80. Stephen M. Hawking, ‘Black Hole Explosions?’, Nature, Vol. 30, No. 248, 1976. 81. Henri Bergson, Duration and Simultaneity, ed. Robin Durie, trans. Leon Jacobson (Manchester: Clinamen Press, 1999), p. 24. For details of the disagreement between Einstein and Bergson, see pp. 198–206. 82. Dennis Sciama, ‘Time “Paradoxes” in Relativity’, in Raymond Flood and Michael Lockwood (eds), The Nature of Time, Oxford and New York: Blackwell, 1986, p. 16. 83. An interview with Paul Anderson cites the French cathedral of Notre Dame as an inspiration for the sets. See http://filmforce.ign.com/articles1466/ 446412p1.html (December 2003). 84. Sciama, ‘Time “Paradoxes” in Relativity’, p. 17. 85. Roger Penrose, ‘Big Bangs, Black Holes and “Time’s Arrow”’, in Raymond Flood and Michael Lockwood (eds), The Nature of Time, Oxford and New York: Blackwell, 1986, p. 46. 86. For a psychoanalytic slant on Lynch, see Michel Chion, David Lynch (London: BFI, 1992). 87. Bergson, Time and Free Will, p. 137. 88. Ibid. p. 136. 89. Ibid. p.126. 90. Ibid. p. 126. 91. The discovery of this talismanic key to a world of dreams recalls sequences in Maya Deren’s Surrealist film, Meshes of the Afternoon, also shot on location in the Hollywood hills. 92. Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, p. xi. 93. Bergson, Time and Free Will, p. 154. 94. It also recalls the lesbian vampire Carmilla, in The Vampire Lovers, dir. Roy Ward Baker (1970). 95. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 201. 96. Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, p. 48. 97. Ibid. p. 54. 98. Ibid. p. 40. 99. Ibid. p. 41. 100. Ibid. p. 41.

Conclusion: Living Horror: Thoughts On Our Nerve-Endings

an inhabitation rather than an interpretation.1 (Colebrook)

Deleuzian horror films threaten the stability of body and mind. They transform the embodied mind of the spectator as well as the bodies on screen. We feel and think the films directly on our nerve-endings, ‘inside’ with emotions and ideas, and on the surface of our skin in goose-bumps. Film alters our perceptions, extending and transforming mundane modes of consciousness. We are not the same viewer before, during or after the horror film event. Rather than seeking to capture the meaning of my chosen films, I have followed their affective lines of force. Locating horror both on screen and in the spectator, I have traced its schizoid becomings in movement and time. The horror movie, as its name suggests, is essentially movement. The apparatus of cinema presents virtual objects, so film’s representational capacity is inevitably limited. Its technology produces flattened, abstracted and partial copies. Rather than seeking a mirrored reality in cinema, we respond to the sensory stimuli of the apparatus and its affective impact. Instead of drawing representational equations, the image of the film moves in the human living image as part of the universal flux of matter. We are moved by, and move with, lighting, montage and the camera’s motion in space and time. The cinematic process is a dynamic terrain where the characteristics of ‘subject’ and ‘object’ change and exchange. We are physically aroused by cinematography, editing and mise-en-scène. The camera moves through space to reveal to us ‘unbearable’ elements often hidden from the characters’ eyes. The way the camera moves is directly affective, as when hand-held camera-shake conveys a stalker’s excitement as the prey is about to be captured. Editing can startle us by jump cuts or induce a haptic sense of pain by rapid-fire intercutting, like that of the shower murder in Psycho. The use of light and shade, and saturated colour stock, initially affects the nerves of the eye, then spreads through the body’s neuronal network via tonal vibrations. The images of viewer and film interlock in a machinic assemblage of

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movement-image. During the film, the interface between the two singularities shifts and thins. In moments of particular force, it disappears. Horror films work the vibrations of sensory affect on our jarred and confused optic and aural nerves. They also operate through our haptic projections of sensations such as tactility, simulated and engendered by visual and aural techniques. Even some peripheral sensations of taste and smell can be synaesthetically induced through cinematography and sound. As well as expressing the physicality of horror as it bombards our nerveendings, I suggest that it is productive of thought. This occurs both during and after the film event. We think as well as feel on our nerve-endings in interaction with the film. We are stimulated by movement- and timeimages congruent to our human image as a living centre of indetermination. Our neuronal circuitry connects audio-visual cells to the brain and back again, channelling the flux of force that passes through them. The machinic assemblage of film and viewer is part of larger flows such as the movement of light waves through matter, space and time. The flicker on the screen, reflected backwards by the rods and cones of our stimulated optical apparatus, can literally act to enlighten us. In the dynamic motion of these circuits, film becomes thought as well as feeling. The cinema books are part of Deleuze’s wider philosophical project to assert that ‘the brain is the screen’, and to validate his interpretation of Bergson’s view of the universe as metacinema.2 Cinema is capable of inducing perceptual thoughts of a philosophical kind on the nature of time, space and motion. It also offers a self-reflexive exploration of perception itself. Clearly, not all such thoughts occur immediately on watching the film, as perception and reflection vibrate in us at different speeds. Ideally, Deleuze wants us to approach each film as a direct event, letting it work on us without preconceptions. When the film appears to be over, it continues to run. We reflect on our experience and become aware of its ongoing reverberations within our consciousness. We replay sequences in our imaginations, producing a virtual experience of the virtual film. The initial experience becomes overlaid with other layers of memory through time. Inevitably, the sensory affect becomes less intense each time we remember, while the thoughts triggered extend and form assemblages with other thoughts on other films to produce new insights. If we view the same film more than once, we have changed in the interim and should be open to a distinct experience each time. We also share our responses to films with others. This requires extensive and communal operations of language, which both Bergson and Deleuze regard as a dilution of original affective impact. Whilst acknowl-

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edging this perspective and its ironical challenge to analytical discourse, interchange about film can be interpreted more positively. When we share responses, some of our original affective feeling is reanimated by the senses, but differently. Our intensive affect is translated into extensive live communication by facial expression, timbre of voice and other bodily expressions. The articulated interchange of the complex process of viewing, and re-viewing, impels further exploratory thought via memory. The filmic experience is reinforced and reconsidered by communicating with others and sharing their feelings/thoughts by contagion. We make lines of flight between congruent perspectives. This interaction itself stays with us and continues to reverberate at an intensive level of consciousness. It goes on to connect with other existing ideas to form circuits of everincreasing complexity. For Deleuze, certain kinds of film are better suited than others to stimulate such intensive mental activity. These films, broadly categorised as Modernist art-cinema, are his preferred focus. He does not regard the formulaic texts of Hollywood as vehicles for existential change. Such generic horror films may also be absent because of their use of effects overload, standardised narrative structure and continuity editing. Deleuze prefers parametric, art-house narration, avant-garde visual style and non-continuity editing as more suited to stimulate philosophical thought. As we have seen, films of this type, such as Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, are used by him to exemplify the metaphysical implications of German Expressionist style rather than as horror texts in their own right. Even though Deleuze includes some standard art-house horrors, I want to extend the limitations of the Parisian cinéaste evident in his choice. Seeking a broader and more inclusive application of his conceptual frame, I set out to test whether a Deleuzian approach is applicable to popular generic horror, and to mainstream, classical cinema, as well as more experimental works. Formulaic films initially appear less rich in Deleuzian concepts than stylistically adventurous work, but this does not mean that mainstream horror is not suggestive of time, space and movement. Many such films offer an intensive experience of horror. This can serve to isolate a particular thought and potentise it as a memorable event. More significantly, the spectator may have to work harder to extract new meaning from the more formulaic films. We input more of our own affective response if ‘trapped’ in a set of conventions that we struggle to experience differently. Deleuze’s choice of films belongs to the art-house canon. Like genre films, it is difficult to approach them without a preconceived set of interpretative templates. If we respond afresh to mainstream films, we might well produce a more potent creative assemblage than if the

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work of defamiliarisation has already been done for us by an experimental text. Some of the richest films for my project offer the best of both worlds. They interface popular generic formulae and the art-film’s more adventurous form and style. Natural Born Killers, for example, blends the conventions of the criminal couple-on-the-run road movie with documentary footage, altered-states cinematography and the numinous dimension of magic. Films like this stretch and blur the institutionally imposed dividing line between experimentation and generic formulae. They stimulate analytical and affective thought. Although I am aware that I cannot claim to represent the tastes of that abstract entity ‘the mainstream audience’, my concern is to open up the new ways of experiencing and thinking about film offered by Deleuze, which should not merely be the preserve of a cinéphile elite. Philosophical thought does not have to be abstract or transcendental in nature. The horror film experience offers a particular quality of thought. My working method celebrates the dynamic, material congress of spectator and screen image rather than an abstracted cerebral detachment. Nevertheless, we rarely feel a sensation in complete isolation from its reverberations in consciousness. If we do experience such overwhelming affect, we later return to an awareness of our perception of it. The experience of sitting at a public screening in a cinema auditorium, and the very different one of watching the DVD or video screen in a domestic living room, are produced by a conscious choice to participate in aesthetic fantasy. We have internalised a template of generic expectations as a viewing prism. In the case of horror, we expect to be frightened. A powerful film will stir and shake us. It might arouse us erotically, make us laugh, or move us to tears. Nevertheless, we retain a certain degree of distance from our virtual fantasy. It is in the interstice between sensuous engagement and aesthetic detachment that we think the horror film. At this point, I will anticipate a few objections to my thesis. On one level, the structuring frameworks of traditional critical perspectives appear to go out of focus if we give ourselves over to the film’s molecular make-up, and our own. The question arises as to whether molecular delight in the film’s aesthetic force prevents awareness of the molar power imbalance of the socio-political contexts highlighted by some theorists. The Deleuzian method might also be accused of belying its claim to ‘materialism’ by deliberately stripping this concept of its ‘molar’ Marxist dimensions. Fear, terror and desire have subjective specificity, and operate within a socially learned framework. Work that maps social and political meaning onto the representations of fantasy has done signal service in horror Film Studies.

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Many horror films overtly present severely dysfunctional families and perverse sexuality. Psychoanalysis has provided substantial psycho-sexual templates to fit the fears and desires of horror, and suggested their primal components. Although psychoanalysis views all fantasy as psycho-sexual in nature, whether overtly displayed or not, it is important to remember that not all horror films are sexually fixated. In The Blair Witch Project, for example, there is little sign of erotic interest. Despite this, psychoanalytic film theory, seeking the ‘repressed’ of the text, might interpret the disappearance of Heather, Josh and Mike as a regressive pre-Oedipal journey back to the primal mother, who reincorporates them in death. In this kind of interpretation, deep structures are superimposed over and engulf the actual event of the film. As I argued in Chapter 1, the deterritorialisation offered by the ‘intensive voyage’ of schizoanalysis opens up a sorely needed critique of psychoanalytic dogmatism.3 I have moved away from the psychoanalytic focus of the genre’s unconscious mechanisms to embody the experience of horror. We cannot maintain the distanced gaze of subjective spectator at objective spectacle, but respond corporeally to sensory stimuli and dynamics of motion. Fantasy is an embodied event. This new perspective should not cancel out the others, but enhance them. The film event does not exist in a hermetically sealed vacuum. I do not suggest that we lose touch with our formative socio-political contexts, familial experiences or psycho-sexual fantasies, but that we perceive them differently. In suggesting that it is time to re-think the horror film experience from a Deleuzian perspective, I do not suggest that we excise our sense of film’s social and historical context, its economic and industrial determinants, or its power to effect our lived behaviour. I argue that its experiential potency on feeling and thought is considerable. We participate in a wide continuum of assemblages, connected in their turn to the apparatus of cinema. These include technology, economics, politics, aesthetics and their attendant relations of power. Hopefully the effort to experience films anew will have practical reverberations. Deleuzian theory affords space for a hybrid response that mixes philosophical thought with cultural awareness and psycho-sexual frames. The concept of the ‘interstitial’ reading allows molecular and molar frames to co-exist, and further exploration of their interconnections, such as those of Buchanan and Griggers, are timely. Deleuze does not advocate a withdrawal from cultural and social experience, but a total, insightful, engagement in it. I also want to signal an area of horror aesthetics in urgent need of the attention I have not been able to theorise in detail here. In the cinema books, Deleuze’s film critique remains predominantly visual. He only

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touches on sound, despite his characterisation of spoken language as a ‘continuous, immanent process of variation’, which crosses the sociolinguistic field, undercutting the hierarchised distinctions of structural law and empirical instance.4 Intriguingly, he hints that the study of cinematic sound, ‘when we are able to analyse the sound image for itself ’, will ‘raise the problem of enunciation’.5 By ‘enunciation’ he implies, but does not elaborate on, a new praxis enabled by theory. Sound waves, as well as light waves, travel though us and work strongly on the sensorium, bypassing the cerebral cortex and mainlining into our central nervous system. The unnerving sound effects of horror range from human screams to the synthesised and distorted electronic notes of Lynch’s Fire Walk with Me. Extra-diegetic music is instrumental in agitating the spectator’s aural nerves, preparing us for the horror to come, as with Bernard Hermann’s shrieking violin in the Psycho theme. In The Blair Witch Project, the sound is directly diegetic, with no incidental music. Wild sound predominates, as characters talk and argue, and their speech is often mumbled or indistinct, which adds to the realism. When ‘supernatural’ noises do occur, like the cries of children outside the tent, the fact of their being picked up by the sound equipment enhances our sense of their objective reality. Some of the most distressing sounds come directly from characters we see, such as the sobbing, choking gasps we hear when Heather hyperventilates on opening a bundle of bloody viscera. In order to produce a closer approximation to this kind of affective experience, more scholarly work with auditory responses is needed. This is a rich, and largely untapped, resource. A pivotal question I need to consider at this concluding stage is whether horror films are still frightening when analysed from a Deleuzian perspective. I argue that they are. A Deleuzian approach might appear to remove the horror from the horror film, but I refute this assertion. In horror films, or films with horrific components, it is difficult not to feel fear or revulsion at certain moments. I admit that I retain some sense of subjective violation when ‘I’ want to look away from the horror of the image and, in psychoanalytic parlance, refuse the invasive violation of self by unbearable other and re-build my ego-defences. However ‘desensitised’ our personal and professional tastes might appear to adversaries of the genre, we horror buffs have our ‘weak spots’. I offer no auto-analysis to accompany the following brief confession apart from its obvious relevance to my choice of contents. Serial-killer horrors frighten and repel me in their use of conceivable, and actual, human behaviour and I find the documentary-style Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer a particularly gruelling experience. Depictions of

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torture, both physical and psychological, are difficult for me to watch, unless Grand Guignol special effects dazzle me by their virtuosity, as in Hellraiser or the films of Dario Argento. The worst scenes of physical torture for me are the interrogations of supposed witchcraft by the forces of repression: Dreyer’s Day of Wrath, Bava’s The Mask of Satan, Michael Reeves’ Witchfinder General and Ken Russell’s The Devils (those familiar with the films will know the parts I mean). I do not advocate that we lose touch with what makes us afraid. After all, this is what the films are ‘about’. For me, there is still some tension between the optimism of haecceity, the affective ‘this-ness’ or immanence of process, and the downward spirals of horror. The films and scenes I want to close my eyes to, or fast-forward, are undoubtedly potent with frightening affect. I experience this as a claustrophobic sense of closing down, rather than physical and metaphysical expansiveness. This book has reanimated some of my favourite horrors. Now, I need to begin work with horror film at the very point where I am most afraid, in the films I have left out. My next move is to revisit my personal ‘unbearable’ and to work on it. This might or might not induce ‘a revelation or an illumination’, but I can learn to open myself up more fully to the film event in me, as well as on the screen, when it is actually at its most powerful. A shift to Deleuze in Film Studies is happening as part of a broad rethinking of aesthetics in contemporary culture. Reflecting scientific and philosophical debate on space and time, relativity, quantum mechanics and molecular biology, it shifts focus from the molar politics of representation to the molecular materiality of film. Following Bergson, Deleuze argues that identity is in constant flux and process. Perception takes place on a direct, visceral level rather than at a subjective level. Cinema is an intensive sensory event of colour, light and movement. If our subjectivity is not fixed, then our identity in the viewing experience is not a rigid template, but a fluid becoming. In order to do justice to the complex experience that is horror film, my approach is eclectic. An interdisciplinary set of tools does a better job than one implement in isolation. Approaches need to be supplemented, although not necessarily displaced, by two methods not made available by current Film Studies orthodoxy. The first is a detailed exploration of aesthetics in order to suggest the extreme levels of affective engagement experienced by the spectator. The second is horror’s capacity to stimulate adventurous philosophical thought. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari suggest that ‘a fibre strung across borderlines constitutes a line of flight or of deterritorialization’.6 My book asserts that the horror film experience offers such lines of flight.

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A new aesthetics of horror film is long overdue. The approach of Deleuze offers a concrete, and medium-specific, way in to extending our awareness of the genre’s force. Innovative kinds of horror film, such as The Blair Witch Project, invite innovative ways of theorising. The application of Deleuzian approaches opens up new directions in film aesthetics. For horror film, they involve a critical look at both psychoanalytical and culturalist approaches, and introduce a more film-specific, material way of reading the genre and its affects. This mobilises a fresh perspective on the horror staples of fear and desire. Deleuzian analyses are not intended to supplant social or psychoanalytical Film Studies with an alternative orthodoxy. They seek to challenge, but also to supplement, existing methods, by transversal readings located in the interstices between the two. Rather than seeking to replace more traditional methods of analysis by a new orthodoxy, Deleuzian/Bergsonian aesthetics may fruitfully be used to both extend and critique extant ways of reading. From where I am now, I advocate an interstitial, transverse connection across existing approaches, whilst continuing to push the frontiers of the field further. I feel it is definitely time to re-draw the map of existing horror Film Studies, but not to kick it away just yet. Above all, the value of Deleuzian film theory lies in its experiential aesthetics and its emphasis on embodied thinking – both too long absent from readings of the horror film. For Deleuze and Guattari, ‘what we need to consider is not fundamentally organs without bodies, or the fragmented body, it is the body without organs, animated by various intensive movements’.7 The potential of the horror film lies in its dynamic connection with the incorporated mind of the spectator. The horror film event, in its schizoid becomings, its motions and times, is a moving-image of our own transformation.

Notes 1. Claire Colebrook, ‘Introduction’, in Ian Buchanan and Claire Colebrook (eds), Deleuze and Feminist Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), p. 3. 2. Gilles Deleuze, ‘The Brain is the Screen’, in Gregory Flaxman (ed.), The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 366. 3. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane (London: The Athlone Press, 1984), p. 319. 4. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: The Athlone Press, 1988), p. 103.

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5. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 85. 6. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 249. 7. Ibid. p. 171.

Glossary of Key Terms

Affect, Affection-Image Affect is a neuronal response to external stimulus. Qualitative, not quantitative, it involves the body’s power to absorb an external action and react internally. Affect is an intensive vibration, Deleuze’s ‘motor effort on an immobilized receptive plate’, rather than an extensive sensory-motor act. The affection-image is experienced by our specialised and immobilised organs of reception. Bergson and Deleuze compare affection-images to adjectives. The autonomous quality of the cinematic affection-image makes the stylistic affect more independent of character and plot. Mise-en-scène, cinematography, sound and movement act in the mind/brain/body system to stimulate both sensory-motor responses and thought via affect. The face in close-up is the epitome of the intensive affection-image. The extreme close-up of Heather’s face in The Blair Witch Project is an expression of this.

Anomaly/anomalous Anomalies are unnatural, irregular elements in a system, forces of potential transformation, such as the stray housefly caught in the teleporter in Cronenberg’s The Fly, which produces a genetic mix of human and fly. The anomaly or outsider, which ‘carries the transformations of becoming’, is central to the dynamics of the horror genre. The anomalous ‘thing’ produced by the conjunction of singularities is a monstrous entity in perpetual motion, unfixed in its identity. It maintains its transformative potential as it becomes. Anomalies subvert subjective wholeness and undermine species norms. Objects of filmic fascination, they incorporate us into their virtual assemblage.

Assemblage An assemblage is the dynamic interconnection of congruent singularities that remove the subject/object interface, yet retain elements of specificity. The human assemblage is a multiplicity that forms new assemblages with

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existing social and cultural assemblages. Our mind/brain/body melds with the technology of cinema in a molecular or machinic assemblage of material movement, force and intensity. Cinema is an assemblage of apparatus, text and spectator.

Becoming Becoming is defined as ‘extreme contiguity within a coupling of two sensations without resemblance’. Becoming refutes binary divisions and enables further transformations, melding subjects and objects in close proximity. The becomings of horror are expressed through hybridity, as in werewolves, or the shape-shifting of vampires. In more recent films, such as Alien Resurrection, genetic engineering is the preferred method of becoming. As well as on-screen transformations, the embodied consciousness of the spectator participates in the process of becoming.

Body-Without-Organs The term ‘body-without-organs’ is used by Artaud to suggest the ‘true’ condition of the human body if freed from the punishments of a repressive God. Deleuze and Guattari re-map the fixed biological body as a dynamic force field of speeds and intensities ‘traversed by a powerful, nonorganic vitality’ that includes the mind. The body-without-organs is ‘affective, intensive, anarchist’ in nature. This amoeba-like body is open to surrounding matter, which it incorporates. Its perpetual motion is mapped via its ‘poles, zones, thresholds and gradients’. In our assemblage with the screen, the cinematic body-without-organs experiences sounds, textures and rhythms as incorporated vibrations. Horror film produces some graphically literal bodies-without-organs, such as Frank, in Hellraiser, whose organs stick themselves back together.

Diagrammatic Component Deleuze melds style and content to suggest a predominant diagrammatic component for each film. This may be an image, or an element of framing or editing. His example is the ubiquitous spiral in Hitchcock’s Vertigo, which unites camera movements, architecture, costume and special effects as well as narrative structure. In my view, there may be more than one diagrammatic component in each film, in which case they operate a diagrammatic assemblage. For Mulholland Drive, diagrammatic components include the blue box, flickering light and dreams.

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Duration/Space-Time Bergson’s concept of duration is shaped in distinction to quantum physics. He suggests that memory stores past experiences in a virtual existence that is not that of space-time. Deleuze distinguishes the extensive, spatialised time of the self-conscious subject from the intensive time of duration, which partakes of the élan vital of all evolving life. Humans can perceive the workings of duration in intensive states of consciousness, and in art. Cinema helps us to experience, and to think, time. Duration emerges when film foregrounds its own mechanisms, and Deleuze associates it with more experimental work. I argue that mainstream ghost films such as The Others can also present duration in intriguing ways.

Extensive/Intensive The action-image expresses extensive, goal-oriented movement in space, as in its extreme form of the ‘action movie’. The affection-image vibrates intensively rather than extensively, in the use of the colour red in The Masque of the Red Death, for example. Deleuze describes schizoanalysis as an ‘intensive voyage’ that mobilises intensive states of consciousness evident in aesthetic production and reception. An ‘intensive map’ is a cluster of affects in the process of becoming.

Haecciety Haecceity is the quality of ‘this-ness’ in a ‘thing-in-itself ’. Haecceities are intensive states experienced by the automatic or auto-erotic movements of machinic desire rather than by the psychoanalytical subject. The use of colour, the timbre of a voice or the rhythm of a movement are cinematic haecceities. Horror film offers distinctive aural experiences, such as the different tonal qualities in The Shining, when a tricyle rumbles over the wooden floorboards or glides over the carpet. Such sensory haecceities are not reducible to symbolic meaning.

Haptic/ity Hapticity is the interaction between vision and tactility. Elements of touch are included in sight as distinct from purely optical properties. The haptic sense elides the visual and the tactile in the ‘tactile-optical function’, as in ‘hot’ and ‘cool’ applied to colours. Cinematography, editing rhythms and mise-en-scène induce kinetic and haptic sensations and synaesthesia. The

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haptics of tactility are central to horror affect, and are used extensively in the sharp or slimy textures and feverish reds of Suspiria.

Line of Flight A line of flight connects singularities, or planes. As ‘a fibre strung across borderlines’, it is a means of deterritorialisation, of thinking afresh. An example is the link between Moby-Dick as a ‘white wall’, the human face and the blank screen; or my connection between the apparently incommensurable paradigms of popular horror film and philosophical thought.

Machinic A machinic assemblage is an amalgam of processes mistakenly kept distinct. The machinic assemblage is a multiplicity of forces in motion, not fixed components. Horror film illustrates the contrast of the potentially machinic (Demon Seed) and the mechanically limited (Hardware). The human is a machinic meld of body/mind/brain. Our mind/brain/body melds materially with the movement, force and intensity of film technology. The subject/object power relations of cinematic voyeurism are displaced by the machinic experience of an aesthetic event.

Molecular/Molar Deleuze and Guattari convey the ‘imperceptible’ micro dynamics of the molecules that compose both matter and perception itself. The same force flows through congruent elements that adopt specific patterns and formations in a molecular meld. Movement and change take place at this cellular level. Both Bergson and Deleuze use the image of unicellular creatures to describe becoming as molecular desire in motion. Molecularity is distinct from the ‘molar’ macro order of ideological, social and psychic schema. Melding occurs as we connect with other molecular collectivities, or haecceities, by contiguous movements and speeds. Altered states of consciousness access molecular modes of perception, and intensive viewing forms a molecular assemblage of medium and mind. Film may also make molecularity visible, as with the grainy film stock of Vampyr, or the special effects of computer consciousness in Demon Seed.

Movement-Image Deleuze, like Bergson, identifies ‘the movement-image and flowingmatter’. All cinematic images are primarily movement-images. The fluid

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camerawork in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, for example, displaces language-like representation at the crux of the filmic event. Images move within and between the frame, via the camera’s motion and the rhythm of editing. Frames move on the screen via the projector and its flickering movements of light. The viewer’s eyes move in the phi-phenomenon as mobile machines that modify and reflect the film’s movement-images. The human ‘living image’ turns virtual movement-images into actual, intensive movements. A ‘perception-image’ is a framed selection of incoming movements. The sensory-motor action-image deals with the ‘virtual action of things on us and our possible action on things’.

Schizoanalysis Deleuze and Guattari refute Freudian paternalism via schizoanalysis. The rigid template of psychoanalysis is opposed by the emotional immanence of schizoanalysis, which maps an auto-productive desiring machine, not a subjective ego in a permanently paranoid condition. The unconscious changes form from archaeology to a cartography of motion as it passes from psychoanalysis to schizoanalysis. Schizoanalysis is applied to rethinking both politics and art. The material aesthetic of immanence privileges the transitions of consciousness in aesthetic production and reception. For Deleuze, schizoanalysis is a way in to the intensive affects of cinema. Schizophrenia offers thematic and visual dualities, such as those of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, but the horror film also produces affective images of mental derangement that exceed the limited conventions of ‘madness’ and schizophrenise the viewer.

Singularity In physics, a singularity is the point at the centre of a black hole at which matter becomes infinitely dense. Deleuze uses the term to mean the specificity of a particular component or assemblage, its special, distinctive quality, as well as its infinite potential.

Time-Image In the time-image, time is not derived from movement, but appears in itself. Whether it be intensive vibration or extensive velocity, movement nevertheless is always ‘in’ time. The ‘direct time-image’ emerged in artcinema after the Second World War. It turns from spatial exteriority to ‘mental relations or time’. Deleuze’s examples exhibit the workings of time

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by defamiliarisation devices, which produce a more contemplative, philosophical form of cinematic experience. Techniques like the multiple exposures of Mulholland Drive offer an image of duration.

Vitalism, Élan Vital Deleuze endorses Bergson’s ‘vitalism’, or the universal presence of dynamic forces in all living, and evolving, entities, including the human. For Bergson, the universe endures, and duration, from his vitalist perspective on evolution, is ‘invention, the creation of forms, the continual elaboration of the absolutely new’. Freddy Krueger in A Nightmare on Elm Street continually invents new manifestations for his own perverse élan vital, which can potentially become anything.

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Lacan, Jacques (1979), Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. A. Sheridan, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Lacan, Jacques (1982), Encore: Le Seminaire XX [1972–3], trans. Jacqueline Rose, in Juliet Mitchell and Jaqueline Rose (eds), Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the École Freudienne, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Laplanche, Jean and J. B. Pontalis (1988), ‘Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality’, in The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, Vol. 49, Pt 1, pp. 1–18. Laplanche, Jean and J. B. Pontalis (1988), The Language of Psychoanalysis, London: Karnac. Lapsley, Robert and Michael Westlake (1988), Film Theory: An Introduction, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Le Fanu, Sheridan [1872] (1990), ‘Carmilla’, in In a Glass Darkly, Gloucester: Alan Sutton Publishing. Massumi, Brian (1997), ‘Deleuze, Guattari and the Philosophy of Expression’, in Canadian Review of Contemporary Literature, Vol. 4, September. Melville, Herman [1851] (1993), Moby-Dick: Or, the Whale, Harmondsworth, Penguin. Metz, Christian (1982), The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Michelson, Peter (1993), Speaking the Unspeakable: A Poetics of Obscenity, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Modleski, Tania (1988), The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory, New York: Methuen. Monaco, James (1981), How to Read a Film, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Mullarkey, John (1997), ‘Deleuze and Materialism: One or Several Matters?’, in Ian Buchanan (ed.), A Deleuzian Century: Special Edition of the South Atlantic Quarterly, 96: 3, Summer, pp. 439–63. Mulvey, Laura (1975), ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen, Vol. 6. No. 6. Nietszche, Friedrich [1883–92] (1969), Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Patton, Paul (1994), ‘Anti-Platonism and Art’, in C. V. Boundas and Dorothy Olkowski (eds), Gilles Deleuze and the Theatre of Philosophy, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 141–57. Patton, Paul (1996) (ed.), Deleuze: A Critical Reader, Oxford: Blackwell. Penley, Constance (1989), The Future of an Illusion; Film, Feminism and Psychoanalysis, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Penrose, Roger (1986), ‘Big Bangs, Black Holes and “Time’s Arrow”’, in Raymond Flood and Michael Lockwood (eds), The Nature of Time, Oxford and New York: Blackwell, pp. 36–62. Powell, Anna (1994) ‘Blood on the Borders: Near Dark and Blue Steel’, in Screen, Spring.

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Williams, Linda Ruth (1995), Critical Desire: Psychoanalysis and the Literary Subject, London: Arnold. Zeki, Semir (1999), Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zimmerman, Bonnie (1984), ‘Daughters of Darkness: The Lesbian Vampire on Film’, in Barry K. Grant (ed.), Planks of Reason, Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press.

Filmography

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) Stanley Kubrick. Alien (1979) Ridley Scott. Aliens (1986) James Cameron. Alien3 (1992) David Fincher. Alien Resurrection (1997) Jean-Pierre Jeunet. A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) Wes Craven. The Blair Witch Project (1999) Meyrick and Sanchez. Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) Francis Ford Coppola. The Brides of Dracula (1960) Terence Fisher. Broken Blossoms (1919) D. W. Griffiths. The Brood (1979) David Cronenberg. The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1926) Robert Wiene. Carrie (1976) Brian de Palma. Cat People (1943) Jacques Tourneur. Un Chien Andalou (1928) Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali. The Day of the Triffids (1962) Steven Sekely. Day of Wrath (1943) Carl-Theodor Dreyer. Demon Seed (1977) Donald Cammell. The Devils (1971) Ken Russell. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1932) Rouben Mamoulian. Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1968) Freddie Francis. Event Horizon (1997) Paul Anderson. Fire Walk with Me (1992) David Lynch. The Fly (1986) David Cronenberg. Forbidden Planet (1956) Fred M. Wilcox. Hardware (1990) Richard Stanley. The Haunting (1963) Robert Wise. Hellraiser (1987) Clive Barker. Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1990) John McNaughton. The Hollow Man (2000) Paul Verhoeven. The House on Haunted Hill (1959) William Castle. The House on Haunted Hill (1999) William Malone. In The Mouth of Madness (1995) John Carpenter. Interview with the Vampire (1994) Neil Jordan. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) Don Seigel.

224

   

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) Philip Kaufman. The Invisible Man (1933) James Whale. Jacob’s Ladder (1993) Adrian Lyne. Last Year at Marienbad (1960) Alain Resnais. Lost Highway (1997) David Lynch. The Mask of Satan (1960) Mario Bava. The Masque of the Red Death (1964) Roger Corman. Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) Maya Deren. Mulholland Drive (2001) David Lynch. Nadja (1994) Michael Almereyda. Natural Born Killers (1994) Oliver Stone. Nosferatu (1922) F. W. Murnau. The Others (2001) Alejandro Amenábar. Pandora’s Box (1926) G. W. Pabst. The Passion of Joan of Arc (1927) Carl-Theodor Dreyer. Psycho (1960) Alfred Hitchcock. Psycho (1998) Gus van Sant. Rain (1961) Jorge Iven. Repulsion (1965) Roman Polanski. Shadow of the Vampire (2000) E. Elias Merhige. The Shining (1968) Stanley Kubrick. Sunrise (1927) F. W. Murnau. Suspiria (1977) Dario Argento. Tequila Sunrise (1988) Robert Towne. Terror at the Opera (1987) Dario Argento. The Tingler (1959) William Castle The Vampire Lovers (1970) Roy Ward Baker. Vampyr (1931) Carl-Theodor Dreyer. Vertigo (1954) Alfred Hitchcock. Videodrome (1982) David Cronenberg. Witchfinder General (1968) Michael Reeves. Les Yeux sans Visage (Eyes Without a Face) (1959) Georges Franju.

Television Series Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987–94).

Index

abjection, 82, 85 in Kristeva, 3, 16, 17, 36, 64, 65, 143 and Ripley, 75–8, 88, 102, 122 abstract machine, 93 action-images, 116–19, 159, 212, 214 actual, the, 41, 47, 68, 116, 124, 162–3, 196 actuality, 162, 175, 179, 194 Aeon, 155 aesthetics, 212–14 aesthetic assemblages, 53, 62 ‘aesthetics of sensation’, 15–18 Bergsonian aesthetics, 110–13, 157; see also Bergson Expressionist aesthetics, 115–29; see also Expressionism horror aesthetics, 1–10, 20–1, 23–4, 63–7, 105, 150, 204–8 Kubrick’s aesthetics, 43, 48 in Lynch, 192–7 machinic aesthetics, 58, 94–5 and thought processes, 164 affect, 27, 31, 57–8, 210, 211, 214 aesthetics of affect, 110–21, 155–62, 201–8; see also aesthetics in cinema, 15–17, 37, 39, 45, 52–4, 129, 131 in horror, 8–11, 62–6, 84, 92, 127 in Mulholland Drive, 187–97 in schizoanalysis, 19–20, 22–5 and the senses, 135–50 affection-images, 116–19, 130, 142, 145–6, 210, 212 Alien Resurrection (Jean-Pierre Jeunet), 74–8 aliens, 74–8, 96, 98, 101, 147 animals, 27, 34, 52–4, 57, 62–70, 89, 99, 101, 121, 125, 126, 139, 144, 145, 148, 185

anomalous, the, 31, 63 and abjection, 82, 143 Anomaly, the, 210 becoming-anomalous, 62, 66–7, 71, 105 and Bergson, 76–8 in characters, 38, 63 in cinematic techniques, 26, 56, 174, 194 in mental states, 10, 15, 23–4, 38, 41, 50, 57 and the senses, 131 social anomalies, 73 in spaces, 47, 130, 170, 184 and the temporal, 181, 188 Argento, Dario, 17, 65, 142, 207 Artaud, Antonin, 21, 78, 211 artificial intelligence, 93, 94, 96, 99 assemblages, 205, 211, 213, 214 in becoming, 53, 55, 67–8, 74, 210 of bodies-without-organs, 79, 88 bodies as, 14, 35, 44 cinema as, 4–8, 11, 17, 80, 110, 116, 197 in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, 35, 38 of images, 52 machinic, 92, 93, 95, 99, 104, 182, 201 mental, 45, 72, 192 of movement-images, 165, 201 in Psycho, 24–5 and schizoanalysis, 21 spectatorial, 55, 63, 202 stylistic, 28, 121 Bacon, Francis, 7, 135, 136 Bataille, Georges, 2, 17, 23, 66 becoming, 1–8, 10, 12, 30, 66, 113, 131, 150, 161, 210, 211 becoming-animal, 10, 52–3, 62–4, 67, 69–72, 123–6, 144–5, 148 becoming-human, 92–98 becoming-monster, 10, 74

226

   

becoming (cont.) becoming-woman, 10, 72, 73, 77, 82 of characters, 28, 32, 35, 51, 68, 109, 140, 170, 185 of consciousness, 19, 20, 111 in Hardware, 98–101 in Hellraiser, 86–8 in The Hollow Man, 90–2 of objects, 41 and schizoanalysis, 8, 22–3, 25, 58, 201, 208 of spectator, 31, 33, 207 Belson, Jordan, 95, 96 Bergson, Henri, 92, 200, 207 on aesthetics, 110–17 on colour, 135, 137 Creative Evolution 62–8, 63, 76–7, 81, 89, 104,105, 113, 158, 198, 199, 200 Deleuze/Bergsonism, 2–3, 8–9, 93, 96, 186, 208, 210 on duration, 11, 12, 34, 50, 165–9, 181; see also duration on dreams, 187, 189, 193–7 on élan vital, 2, 10, 33, 35, 63, 83, 85, 88, 101, 112, 114, 155, 158, 169, 212, 215 Matter and Memory, 105, 145, 154–63, 158, 197 on movement, 112–14 on time, 12, 50, 110, 155, 181; see also time Time and Free Will, 19, 20 biotechnology, 82 black holes, 86, 98, 123–5, 147, 181, 182, 214 body-without-organs, 211 and affect, 78 and becoming, 10, 62, 65, 79 and death, 52 literal, 84–5, 88, 90, 92 as machine, 93 and the schizophrenic, 20, 29 and spectator, 80 Bogue, Ronald, 158, 165, 197 brain, 4, 6, 10, 38, 43, 44, 45, 46, 49, 51, 72, 83, 92, 94, 98, 102, 109, 110, 113, 114, 141, 161, 202, 210

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Francis Ford Coppola), 10, 109, 214 Brontë, Emily, 7 Cabinet of Dr Caligari, The (Robert Wiene), 25–30, 39, 49, 124, 203 camera, 201, 214 camera angles, 24, 25, 39, 131, 189 camera-eye, 39, 117, 147, 160, 165, 188, 190 camera movements, 31–3, 43, 71, 75, 92, 99–100, 109, 110, 116, 154, 163, 211 in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, 35–9 in The Haunting, 167–76 as machine, 22, 120 in Mulholland Drive, 191, 192, 193, 195 in Nosferatu, 123–7 and perception, 4–6, 40 in The Shining, 44–51, and spectator, 29, 90, 91, 98, in Vampyr, 132–6 Carpenter, John, 7 cartography and maps, 1–3, 6, 9, 14, 17–25, 28, 65, 72, 83, 85, 88, 114, 150, 154, 164, 208, 212, 214 Castenada, Carlos, 95 Cat People, The (Jacques Tourneur), 10, 34, 53, 65, 68–72, 141 Chronos, 155, 160 chronosigns, 159, 160 cinema cinematograph, 113 cinematography, 2, 8, 15, 26, 31, 38, 39, 43, 48, 54, 83, 92, 109, 120, 159, 194, 201, 202, 204, 210 metacinema, 113–16, 202 Clover, Carol, 2, 16, 65, 105 Colebrook, Claire, 73, 201, 208 Colombat, André, 21 colour, 11, 44–5, 51, 57, 109, 111, 118, 119, 120, 127, 128, 135–45, 162, 187, 201, 207, 212 black and white, 26, 28, 31, 38, 84, 123, 127, 130, 135, 138, 170, 177, 190 blue, 46, 84, 100, 127, 138, 141, 142, 176, 180–1, 185, 187, 189, 191, 195–7

 green, 109, 127, 138, 141, 144 grey, 6, 71, 81, 89, 109, 120, 128, 130–2, 140, 141, 142, 162 red, 48, 50, 52–3, 57, 85, 89, 99, 101, 118, 127, 137–9, 140–2, 145, 189, 194, 212 white, 37, 45, 48, 68, 79, 123, 113, 122, 128, 130–1, 134, 138,140, 141, 142, 147, 162, 179, 212 composition, 24, 36, 46, 67, 114, 116, 121–3, 128, 146, 165, 167, 195 Conley, Verena, 73, 106 Constable, Catherine, 74, 75, 76, 106 continuity, 66, 104, 113, 165, 175, 203 false continuity, 165 corporeality, 2, 4, 5, 16, 34, 40, 42, 57, 58, 80–2, 86, 112, 116, 121 Creed, Barbara, 16, 17, 64, 75, 77, 105 Cronenberg, David, 10, 14, 62, 74, 80, 82, 83, 210 crystal image, 96, 97, 147, 160–2, 183, 184 Dadoun, Roger, 15 darkness, 98, 141, 143, 132, 170, 173, 185, 188, 189, 194 in Nosferatu, 120–8 Demon Seed (Donald Cammell), 92–101, 213 diagrammatic components, 6, 23–4, 27, 37, 45, 69, 98, 147, 169, 174, 187, 211 Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Rouben Mamoulian), 10, 31–8, 214 dreams, 29, 41, 52, 102, 133, 141, 187–95, 200, 211 Dreyer, Carl Theodor, 128–33, 159, 164, 165, 207 drugs, 57, 95, 100, 180 duration, 9, 11, 212 in art and cinema, 79, 113–17, 154–60 and becoming, 34, 77 and cinematic movement, 163–7 and Elsewhere, 123 and flux, 19 in horror, 47 interior, 64 in Jacob’s Ladder, 174–80

227 metaphysical, 11–12 in Mulholland Drive, 187–97 universal, 66 as ‘the whole’, 55, 147

editing, 2, 8, 24, 33, 76, 109, 110, 116, 122, 136, 145, 154, 169, 201, 203, 211, 212, 214 ellipsis, 44, 165, 167, 188, 192 eternal return, 52, 93, 159 Event Horizon (Paul Anderson), 181–6, 200 evolution, 44, 66–8, 77, 104, 117, 158, 165, 215 Expressionism, 25–9, 120–8, 203 eyes, 87 as ‘black holes’, 86, 98, 123, 132, 144, 186 in Les Yeux sans Visage, 145–9; see also the face as machinic, 100, 136, 160, 214 and perception, 45, 113, 116, 188 and spectatorship 4, 7, 29, 36, 37, 191, 207 face, the, 210, 212 faciality, 85, 87, 126, 145, 150 and identity 85, 87, 139, 170, 171, 190 in Les Yeux sans Visage, 145–50; see also eyes as mask, 39, 70, 87 facial transformations, 57, 62, 84, 86, 125, 137, 169, 170, 177, 179, 185, 191 feminism, 16, 64, 72–3, 75, 77 film philosophy, 3, 6, 9, 11, 18, 115, 120, 150 Film Studies, 1–10, 64, 116, 207, 208 horror Film Studies, 1, 8, 9, 104, 204, 208 Fisher, Terence, 7, 118 flashbacks, 30, 86, 175–9 flicker, 41, 57, 174, 178, 188, 194, 202 flux, 4, 16, 19, 21, 22, 62, 64, 66, 88, 104, 111–13, 154, 163, 195, 201–2, 207 Fly, The (David Cronenberg), 11, 80, 126, 177, 187, 210

228

   

focus, 5, 7, 33, 36, 38, 47, 48, 51, 92, 110, 122, 129, 133, 134, 148, 163, 176, 180, 182, 195, 196, 204, 207 soft-focus, 37, 191 Foucault, Michel, 16, 73, 80, 84, 107 frames, 214 and composition, 34, 86, 140, 172 flash-frame, 54, 175–6, 179, 183, 184 frame-within-the frame, 95, 180, 190 freeze-frame, 57, 150, 170 movement within, 109, 113, 116, 135–7 in Nosferatu, 121–7 and out-of-field, 26, 32, 36–7, 43, 55, 131, 164, 169 stop-frame, 194 superimposition in, 56 Freud, Sigmund, 2, 3, 15–20, 25, 32, 39, 40, 43, 50, 64, 65, 70–1, 81, 122, 154, 214 genetics, 9, 10, 62, 64, 74–7, 80, 88, 89, 94, 95, 104, 114, 210, 211 ghosts, 11, 46–51, 58, 102, 126, 134, 162–163, 166, 168–9, 173–4, 212 Gothic, 25, 29, 30, 35, 74, 120, 121, 138, 166, 168, 183, 184 neo-Gothic, 2, 11, 15, 24, 31, 38, 46, 71, 83, 88, 95, 118, 137, 148, 162, 168, 174, 181, 183, 186 Griggers, Camilla, 73, 74, 205 grisaille, 120, 128, 133 Grosz, Elizabeth, 73, 106 Guattari, Félix, 211, 213, 214 on becoming, 52–3, 62–3, 72; see also becoming on body-without organs, 10, 20, 52, 62, 78, 84, 93, 115, 208; see also bodywithout-organs on faciality, 84, 147, 150 and La Borde, 20 on lines-of-flight, 207 on Nietszche, 52, 66, 93; see also Nietszche and schizoanalysis, 3–5, 10, 14, 15, 18, 19, 21–3, 51 haecceity, 42, 109, 207

hallucinations, 11, 26, 27, 38, 39, 41–5, 56, 57, 100, 133, 175, 177, 180, 183, 186 haptic, the, 17, 22, 32, 35, 37, 84, 85, 89, 97, 116, 119, 136, 141, 142, 170, 173, 191, 201, 202, 212 Hardware (Richard Stanley), 80, 93, 98–101 Haunting, The (Robert Wise), 11, 166–74 Hellraiser (Clive Barker), 83, 85, 87, 88, 92, 207, 211 Hermann, Bernard, 24, 206 heterogeneity, 5, 52, 93, 158, 165 Hitchcock, Alfred, 6, 16, 18, 23, 160, 211 Hollow Man, The (Paul Verhoeven), 83, 88–92 How to Read a Film (Monaco, James), 160 hybridity, 10, 62, 63, 67, 74, 80, 86, 92, 97, 101, 104, 181, 205, 211 imaginary, the, 17, 31, 41, 48, 49, 162, 163 immanence, 3, 10, 20–3, 34, 42, 66, 79, 93, 112, 114, 130, 205, 207, 214 indetermination, 65, 71, 155 centres of, 116, 117, 118, 155, 202 indiscernibility, 128, 162 interface, the, 44, 76, 82, 94, 99, 101, 155, 202, 204, 210 interstitial, the, 31, 115, 205, 208 interval, the, 117, 159, 166, 168, 197 Invisible Man, The (H. G. Wells), 88, 107 Irigaray, Luce, 75 Italian neo-realism, 155–6 Jacob’s Ladder (Adrian Lyne), 174–81 jump-cuts, 188 Kennedy, Barbara M., 2, 3, 79, 92 kinetics, 109, 111, 116, 161, 212 Klein, Melanie, 3, 64 Kristeva, Julia, 3, 16, 64, 75, 88, 143 Lacan, Jacques, 2, 3, 15, 17, 65, 157 lack, the, 2, 3, 17, 18, 21, 23, 27, 32, 64, 89, 92, 93, 103, 142, 143, 149, 163, 177, 181 Laplanche, Jean and J. B. Pontalis, 19 lectosigns, 160

 Les Yeux sans Visage (Georges Franju), 145–50 life-force, 45, 86, 89, 122, 124, 125, 128, 184 light, 211, 214 in The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, 26–30, in Cat People, 68–71 and colour, 53, 137, 138, 141, 176, 177, 191, 194, 197 effects of, 37, 87, 89, 109, 143, 147, 180, 185 as force, 84, 91, 92, 99 in The Haunting, 170 and memory, 158 and mentation, 45, 95, 97, 100, 110, 174, 201–7 and movement, 6, 111, 113–16, 163, 181–2, 195 in Nosferatu, 120–35 and shade, 135 in The Shining, 45–51 shining light, 34, 158, 196 lighting, 2, 31, 33, 57, 69, 70, 76, 100, 110, 124–6, 130–2, 140, 174, 188, 194, 201 lines of flight, 21–2, 24, 29, 33, 34, 72, 73, 77, 79, 203, 207, 212 Lovecraft, H. P., 7, 53, 63 Lynch, David, 7, 186–7, 190–1, 193–5, 200, 206 lyrical abstraction, 68, 69–71, 128 machines binary machine, 58, 72 body as machine, 4, 55, 80–2, 116, 124, 148, 214 cinematic machine, 62, 137 desiring machine, 16, 18, 20–1 and horror, 87, 184–5 processual machine, 46 schizoid machine, 48 social machine, 34, 73 machinic, the, 185, 213 in Demon Seed, 91–104 and Freddy Krueger, 119 machinic assemblage, 18, 43, 136, 182, 201–2, 211 machinic body, 74, 81–2 machinic camera, 47

229

machinic connection, 4, 21, 29, 119 and movement, 38, 43 and schizoanalysis, 22, 213 and sensorium, 137, 150 mad scientists, 35, 74, 79, 148, 186 Mamoulian, Rouben, 10, 37 masks, 39, 70, 87, 91, 139, 146–50, 190 masochism, 2, 17, 64–6, 82 Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von, 2, 64, 105 Masque of the Death, The (Roger Corman), 136–9 matter abject matter, 143 and black holes, 181, 214 in Hellraiser, 86–8 and image, 95 immanent matter, 23, 187 and memory, 163–6 as metacinema, 116 and movement, 21, 64, 72, 92, 113–14, 169, 201–2, 213 organic matter, 91–2, 112, 124, 183–4, 185 transformation of, 27, 66–7, 102 Melville, Herman, 7, 79 memory, 12, 20, 34, 73, 154–8, 161–3, 166–75, 176–81, 183–4, 186, 188–96, 202, 203, 212 Meyrick, Daniel and Sanchez, Eduardo, 1 mirrors, 3, 24, 32–4, 39, 46, 49–50, 62, 89, 121, 133, 143, 147, 149, 162, 171, 172, 173, 178, 180, 190 mise-en-scène, 1, 2, 5, 8, 10, 15, 23, 26–8, 38, 43–5, 81, 89, 105, 109, 110, 116, 118, 119–20, 131, 132, 138–9, 145, 147, 164, 166, 183, 194, 201, 212 Moby-Dick (Herman Melville), 7, 79, 212 Modleski, Tania, 16, 19 molar, 25, 35, 67, 72, 73, 83, 85, 88, 92, 129, 204, 205, 207, 213 molecularity, 213 in becomings, 10, 20, 30, 63 and cinema, 91–6 and gender, 73 and genetics, 9, 62, 77 and horror, 88 and lines of flight, 72 and molar, 25, 205

230

   

molecularity (cont.) molecular biology, 207 and rhizomes, 67 in schizoanalysis, 22 and the social, 79 in spectator, 5, 204, 211 and transformation, 35, 66, 80–1 in Vampyr, 129 monsters, 8, 9, 15, 16, 21, 35, 42, 58, 63, 74, 76, 77, 78, 80, 90, 91, 96, 98, 99, 101, 129, 130, 142, 145, 177, 210 montage, 2, 54, 146, 161, 163, 165, 201 morphing, 75, 92 movement, and affect, 37, 54, 57, 66, 131, 201 and becoming, 66 in Bergson, 112–14 of body, 35, 53, 75, 77, 86, 169, 173 of body-without-organs, 78–9, 208 of camera, 33, 47, 90–2, 165, 190 in cinema, 5, 7, 9, 33, 51, 95, 109, 115, 120, 207 and force, 4, 116, 211 intensive, 11 machinic, 29, 63, 93, 202 in Nosferatu, 121–8 and speed, 38, 67, 73, 170, 195 and thought, 22, 79, 110, 111, 160, 164, 175 and time, 2, 9, 104, 154–7, 159, 163, 203 in Vampyr, 129–34 movement-images, 213, 214 in Cat People, 68 and consciousness, 42, 175 and duration, 55, 164 and horror, 26, 51, 92 and kinetics, 11 in perception and cinematography, 109–20, 150, 155, 202 in the shot, 163–5 and time-image, 159–61 Mulholland Drive (David Lynch), 7, 187–200, 206, 211, 215 multiplicity, 20, 37, 44, 63, 71, 73, 92, 111, 129, 156, 157, 165, 166, 196, 210, 213 Murnau, F. W., 26, 109, 119, 122–3, 154

Natural Born Killers (Oliver Stone), 51–8 Nietszche, Friedrich, 2, 3, 66, 93, 154 Nightmare on Elm Street, A (Wes Craven), 102–4 Nosferatu (F. W. Murnau), 103, 119–27, 154, 203 occult, the, 1, 57, 58, 68, 70, 71, 83, 84, 88, 94, 97, 133, 141, 143–4, 178, 186 Oedipus, 2, 3, 14–20, 23, 51, 58, 65, 73, 105, 145, 187, 205, 208 optical, the, 17, 24, 73, 77, 95, 113, 118, 119, 136, 159, 160, 161, 182, 196, 197, 202, 212 organic, the, 20, 27, 29, 68, 79–82, 85–9, 91, 93–4, 97, 104, 124, 157, 161, 165, 184, 189 Others, The (Alejandro Amenábar), 11, 50, 162, 163, 168, 212 out-of-field, 26, 117, 164, 165 overlay, 1, 8, 11, 46, 56, 71, 104, 130, 154, 166, 174, 177, 179, 187, 189, 196, 202 past, the, 7, 11, 15, 18, 20, 26, 44, 46–7, 50, 66, 72, 120, 154–63, 166–8, 170–80, 182–3, 186, 192–6, 212 perception, 4, 5, 11, 23, 34, 35, 44, 45, 55, 56, 66, 72, 89, 92, 95–7, 100, 110, 112–18, 132, 135–6, 137, 145, 154–8, 160–5, 202, 204, 213 perception-image, 95, 116, 117, 214 perspective, 4, 5, 9, 17, 27, 35, 43, 44, 48, 50, 54, 58, 123–4, 136, 159, 170, 173, 202, 204 philosophy, 2, 3, 8–10, 18, 66, 115, 120 Pierce, Charles Sanders, 160 point-of-view, 24, 26, 33, 36, 39, 48, 55, 117, 139, 148, 170, 177, 188 postmodernism, 3 power, 213 and affect, 11 of becoming, 58 of black holes, 182 of the body, 117, 145, 210 of the camera, 126 of decisiveness, 118 of the false, 161

 and gender, 16, 24, 101 and intensity, 29 of light, 45 of the out-of-field, 166 spiritual 131 and time, 155, 159, 172–4, 196 will to power, 78 prosthetics, 9, 23, 33, 48, 62, 73, 81, 82, 87, 99, 102, 104 Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), 18, 19, 23, 24, 25, 58, 201, 206 psychoanalysis, 1, 3, 4, 9, 10, 15–21, 25, 52, 58, 64, 75, 81, 82, 93, 129, 157, 205, 208, 212, 214 Quality, 146 quantum mechanics, 207 reflections, 24, 33, 45, 50, 91, 96, 101, 104, 113, 117, 127, 132, 133, 145, 147, 149, 156, 162, 169–71, 180, 190, 202, 214 repetition, 11, 47, 112, 137, 154, 173, 189, 194, 195 Repulsion (Roman Polanski), 38–42 Rodowick, David, 16, 160–1, 166, 168 Rushton, Richard, 87 schizoanalysis, 3, 8, 9, 10, 15, 18–25, 51, 52, 54, 58, 64, 78, 104, 205, 212, 214 science fiction, 67, 73, 77, 92, 98, 181, 184, 186 screen, 202, 204 brain as screen, 94–8 sensorium, 11, 23, 51, 65, 83, 91, 135–7, 142, 150, 172, 197, 206 sexuality, 6, 16, 18, 21, 36, 38–43, 56, 64, 72–3, 76, 80, 81, 85, 93, 94, 100, 102, 173, 187, 191, 193, 197, 205 shadows, 6, 26, 146 in The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, 28–30, in Cat People, 68–71 in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, 32–7, in The Haunting, 169–73 in Mulholland Drive, 187–191 in Nosferatu, 120–7 in Repulsion, 39–40 of the self and duration, 157, 195

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in vampire films, 109, 118, in Vampyr, 129–34 Shaviro, Steven, 2, 16, 17, 22, 23, 65, 82, 83, 105, 107 Shining, The (Stanley Kubrick), 2, 6, 7, 43–51, 97, 165, 212 Silverman, Kaja, 16, 65, 105 singularity, 5, 10, 38, 62, 63, 67, 68, 74, 75, 79, 94, 98, 104, 114, 131, 181, 182, 185, 202, 210, 212, 214 smell, 85, 144, 191, 202 Smith, Daniel, 18, 29, 159, 184 Soft Machine, The (William S. Burroughs), 98, 107 sound, 213 analysis of, 205–60 distorted sound effects, 32, 96, 110, 138, 142, 144 in The Haunting, 169–72 in horror, 2 and the movement-image, 50 in Mulholland Drive, 188–97 ‘pure sound situations’, 159–61 in Repulsion, 40–1 as sensory stimulus, 5, 11, 111, 145 and silent film, 28 sound and vision, 155 sound images (sonsigns), 115, 119 and synaesthesia, 202 in Vampyr, 131–2 volume, 111 space, 212, 214 any-space-whatever, 120, 131, 134, 186, 191, 195, 196 in The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, 26–8 and the camera, 160, 201–2 and duration, 157–8 distortions of, 39, 56, 102 in Event Horizon, 182–86 in The Haunting, 166–74 and motion, 79, 109, 135–6 in Mulholland Drive, 187–97 in Nosferatu, 120–7 in The Shining, 44–51 and time, 7, 22, 93, 146, 154, 156, 161–2, 164, 166–7, 181, 201, 203, 207 in Vampyr, 128–34

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space-time, 44, 47, 95, 109, 113, 146, 166, 167, 169, 170, 172, 174, 181, 182, 183, 184, 186, 191, 194, 195, 196, 197, 212 special effects, 1, 5, 10, 15, 70, 81, 83, 92, 100, 103, 207, 211, 213 Spinoza, Baruch, 165 Stone, Oliver, 10, 51 strobe, 57, 76, 100, 176, 177, 180, 188 Studlar, Gaylyn, 64, 105 superimposition, 18, 30, 35, 47, 50, 56, 98, 126, 133, 141, 147, 154, 175, 187, 195, 205 Suspiria (Dario Argento), 142–5, 212 symbolic, 1, 10, 11, 12, 23, 58, 65, 70, 115, 120, 136, 137, 143, 150, 160, 171, 212 synaesthesia, 116, 212 tactility, 22, 37, 45, 54, 84, 89, 97, 103, 116, 142, 144, 145, 148, 202, 212 tactisign, 142, 143, 173 Technicolor, 139, 140, 142 time, 212, 214, 215 and cinema, 11, 154, 159, 201 and duration 47, 114, 115, 156–8, 161, 165, 166 and flashbacks, 175 in The Haunting, 167–74 horror-time, 154, 203, 208 interior time, 20, 46, 113, 132, 150, 156, 180, and movement, 2, 8, 9, 45, 47, 104, 111 in Mulholland Drive, 182–97 perception of, 29, 42, 82, 160, 202 and space, 7, 22, 26, 44, 93, 123, 124, 146, 164, 176, 182–4, 203, 207 temporal distortions, 44, 76, 130, 133, 163 time-images, 155, 156, 160, 161, 162, 167, 168, 174, 214 tracking shots, 34, 48, 178

transformation, 8 in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, 32–6 and becoming, 41, 58, 62–4, 77–80, 211 of the body, 82, 92, 133 of consciousness, 64–7, 104, 210 machinic, 94 in Nosferatu, 122, and the series, 160, 210 uncanny, the, 3, 7, 28, 32, 39, 41, 58, 64, 70, 103, 134, 168, 187, 189, 192 Vampire Lovers, The (Roy Ward Baker), 139, 140 vampires, 2, 10, 67, 109, 118, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 129, 130, 132, 133, 134, 140, 141, 142, 154, 200 Vampyr (Carl-Theodor Dreyer), 6, 128–35, 163, 178, 213 Videodrome (David Cronenberg), 80–3 virtual, the, 96, 98, 210, 212, 214 and the actual, 41, 96, 117, 124, 162–4 affect, 136, 145 becoming, 68–70, 78, 80 and duration, 155, 166, 192–3, 196 in image, 118, 201 sensation 17, 23, 27, 28, 42, 45, 84–5, 111, 119, 121, 135–6, 142–3, 158 space, 66, 117, 120, 127, 186 and time, 50, 114, 171, 186 and viewing, 15, 26, 43, 63, 84, 110, 116, 202, 204 virtual reality, 158 visceral, the, 2, 5, 8, 17, 23, 24, 51, 83, 84, 85, 101, 114, 176, 186, 206, 207 whole, the, 76, 159, 163, 164 will, the, 68, 78, 85, 94, 111, 158, 161, 166, 168, 184 Williams, Linda, 16 witches, 69, 143–4, 178, 190, 207