Apocalypse-Cinema: 2012 and Other Ends of the World [1 ed.] 0823264815, 9780823264810

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A P O C A LY P S E - C I N E M A

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P E T E R S Z E N DY 2 0 1 2 A N D OT H E R E N D S OF THE WORLD

APOCALYPSECINEMA Translated by Will Bishop

F O R D H A M U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S ) ) N E W YO R K ) ) 2015

Copyright © 2015 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. his book was originally published in French as Peter Szendy, L’apocalypsecinéma: 2012 et autres in du monde © Capricci, 2012. his work, published as part of a program providing publication assistance, received inancial support from the French Ministry of Foreign Afairs, the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States, and FACE (French American Cultural Exchange). French Voices logo designed by Serge Bloch. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Visit us online at www.fordhampress.com. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Szendy, Peter. [Apocalypse-cinéma. English] Apocalypse-cinema : 2012 and other ends of the world / Peter Szendy ; translated by Will Bishop. — First edition. pages cm “his book was originally published in French as Peter Szendy, L’apocalypse-cinéma: 2012 et autres in du” — Title page verso Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8232-6480-3 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8232-6481-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Science iction ilms—History and criticism. 2. Apocalypse in motion pictures. I. Title. PN1995.9.S26S9413 2015 791.43'615—dc23 2014030503 Printed in the United States of America 17 16 15

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CO N T E N T S

Foreword: One Sun Too Many by Samuel Weber ix Chapter  Melancholia, or The After-All  Chapter  The Last Man on Earth, or Film as Countdown  Chapter  Cloverfield, or The Holocaust of the Date  Chapter  Terminator, or The Arche-Traveling Shot  Chapter  , or Pyrotechnics



Chapter  A.I., or The Freeze  Chapter  Pause, for Inventory (the “Apo”) 

Chapter  Watchmen, or The Layering of the Cineworld  Chapter  Sunshine, or The Black-and-White Radiography  Chapter  Blade Runner, or The Interworlds  Chapter  Twelve Monkeys, or The Pipes of the Apocalypse  Chapter  The Road, or The Language of a Drowned Era  Chapter  The Blob, or The Bubble  Postface Il n’y a pas de hors-film, or Cinema and Its Cinders Notes  Index of Films

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CONTENTS

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

FOREWORD: One Sun Too Many Samuel Weber

And truly, I saw something, the likes of which I never saw. —Friedrich Nietzsche, hus Spoke Zarathustra What in daguerreotype must have felt inhuman, not to say deadly, was the (moreover prolonged) looking into the camera, since the apparatus [Apparat] records the human image without returning its gaze. —Walter Benjamin, On Some Motifs in Baudelaire

he apocalypse is in fashion. Ever since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when it irst became evident that human beings had acquired the power to destroy life on earth, and to destroy it in a spectacular and rapid manner, apocalyptic thoughts and images have increasingly proliferated and, at least in certain parts of the world—a world soon to be “globalized”—progressively fascinated what was once called the popular imagination. No wonder, then, that the most popular medium of the post–Second World War period—cinema—and today its audiovisual successor should have become the vehicle for deploying visions of the end of all visibility and for providing material for imagining the unimaginable. In an essay that

takes up this tendency and examines it critically, and which also informs much of Peter Szendy’s remarkable construction of an Apocalypse-Cinema—namely “No Apocalypse— Not Now!”—Jacques Derrida argues that there exists a secret, more or less implicit, ainity between “literature” and the “nuclear referent” of apocalyptic self-destruction, since, precisely by virtue of its totality, the latter can be represented only via a certain ictionality and thus retains a literary quality. In Apocalypse-Cinema Peter Szendy argues that a similar ainity exists between the apocalypse and cinema—between anticipations, intimations, or representations of the end of the world and what could be called the initude of the ilm as a structure delimited in time—in short: between the end of the world and the end of the ilm. His emblem and experience of this apocalyptic end is the dark screen that separates the inal image of Lars von Trier’s Melancholia from its “credits”—a blackness that lasts somewhat more than ten seconds, in which von Trier’s ilm “is no longer really cinema any more” but rather “a cinema of the ater-all.” Szendy thus reminds us of an aspect of the “apocalypse” that is oten forgotten in its common usage. his usage generally relects two moments. First, as Szendy writes, “In Greek apocalypsis means revelation, unveiling, uncovering.” Revealing, unveiling, uncovering—these words indicate why a medium such as the cinema could stand in a privileged relation to the apocalypse. But the etymology of the Greek word also suggests something else: In order for something to be unveiled, uncovered, or revealed, it must in some sense or other have already been “there” all the time. It cannot simply be thought as the advent or announcement of something entirely new—even or especially if this newness involves the destruction of the existing world. Second, and no less important, is that the apocalyptic revelation—at least as it comes down to

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us from what is probably its most important textual articulation in the Book of Revelation of St. John, the book that concludes the New Testament—is not simply an uncovering of what has been but a manifestation of what will be: of what is to come, “ater all,” if we understand “all” here as applying to all previous life on earth. In short, the apocalypse involves a revelation both of the end of one world and the beginning of another. In the account of St. John, the one is essentially related to the other. What is to come involves the retribution and reward of what has been: the damnation of the sinful and the saving of the faithful. he apocalypse, at least in its Christian origins—and this still holds in diferent ways today, even in an apparently “secular” culture (which may or may not be speciic to those parts of the world informed by biblical traditions)—involves a violent, destructive but potentially— selectively—redemptive transition from one world to another, from one life—that limited by guilt, sin, and its consequence: mortality—to another and possibly better one. But in many of the ilms examined in this book, it is the end as such, the end itself, that tends to overshadow its aterefects: his is the ambiguity of what Szendy, playing on a French idiom, calls the “ater-all” (“après-tout”). If, ater all, there is only “the end,” then how is this end to be imagined, represented, depicted? Does the apocalypse entail the end of everything, everyone, or is it “just” the end of some one, anyone: the one required to experience something like an “end”? his is a question that Derrida, in the essay already mentioned, and which informs many of the arguments and interpretations elaborated in Apocalypse-Cinema, dares to address in what is perhaps one of the most provocative passages not just in this essay but in all of his writings:

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My own death, so to speak, as an individual can always be anticipated phantasmatically, symbolically too as a negativity at work. . . . Images, grief, all the resources of memory and tradition, can cushion the reality of that death, whose anticipation remains therefore interwoven with ictionality, or if you prefer, with literature; and this is so even if I live this anticipation in anguish, terror, despair, as a catastrophe that I have no reason not to equate with the annihilation of humanity as a whole; this catastrophe takes place with each individual death. here is no common measure able to persuade me that a personal mourning is less grave than a nuclear war. If Derrida can state that he—and with him, presumably any singular living being—has “no reason not to equate” the anticipated “catastrophe [that] takes place with each individual death” with “annihilation of humanity as a whole,” it is because the death of that singular being takes with it a world—which for that being was also the world. It is the point of view of such a singular living being that then becomes a condition for thinking, experiencing, and depicting involved in Apocalypse-Cinema. Each Time Unique, the End of the World is the English title of a collection of texts written by Derrida to commemorate the passing of friends and colleagues, and from which Peter Szendy quotes the following memorable passage: Death, writes Derrida—and not only the death of a human but that of “every living being (animal, human, or divine)”—“death declares each time the end of the world in totality, the end of every possible world, and each time the end of the world as unique totality, therefore irreplaceable and therefore ininite.”

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If Szendy also argues that “ilm (as) a Western invention . . . is no doubt profoundly Christian,” the contrast of Derrida’s linkage of the end of a singular life with the end of a unique world, with the Revelation of St. John the Divine, points to the force ield in which Apocalypse-Cinema plays itself out. he vision retold by John is both cosmic and judgmental: he apocalypse is also the scene of the Last Judgment, in which the guilty and the sinful will be punished and the virtuous and faithful rewarded—rewarded with that Eternal Life in a passage that Derrida cites without comment at the conclusion of his own essay: One day, a man came, he sent missives to the seven churches. People call this the Apocalypse. “Seized by the spirit,” the man had received the order: “What you see, write in a book and send it to the seven churches.” When the man turned around so as to know which voice was giving him this order, he saw in the middle of seven golden candlesticks, with seven stars in his right hand, someone from whose mouth emerged “a sharp double-edged sword,” and who told him, among other things, “I am the irst and the last.” “I was dead and here I am alive.” he apocalypse revealed to John, and that he then passes on to posterity, is thus repeated and recalled by the fourteen (2 × 7) chapters that compose Apocalypse-Cinema, but with a signiicant diference. he “I” who “was dead” and who can now say that “here I am alive”—the resurrected I of the Christian Gospel, here survives as the “cine-eye” that conditions the incinerating “cineication” of the representable world. Writing about photography, Walter Benjamin observed that what can be terrifying about the eye of the camera—the

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“apparatus” as he calls it—is that it does not return the glance of those it records. At the somewhat apocalyptic conclusion of Apocalypse-Cinema, Peter Szendy takes this thought one step further, in envisaging a world in which “I, a machine”— quoting Vertov—“am showing you the world as only I can see it.” But if this apocalyptic or postapocalyptic world is one in which sound has faded into “silence” and where “the view of the point of view” associated with a self-conscious I “has also burned in the holocaust of cineication,” what survives are the ashes of images that signify in “cinefying”—and which hold open the possibility of being read—even if there are no subjects let to do the reading. his is a chilling commentary on a process that Walter Benjamin already saw at work in the emergence of the nineteenth-century novel: “What draws the reader to a novel is the hope of warming his shivering life with a death he reads about.” But the incineration and ashes that traverse the ilms discussed in Apocalypse-Cinema throw out little warmth for their viewers. To be sure, this will not prevent viewers from seeking precisely to warm their frosty lives on the more or less spectacular end of the world that they can see and hear— and in that sense, provisionally survive. But Szendy’s readings and stagings of the ilms discussed in this book make clear just how tenuous and temporary such a consolation has to be. Apocalyptic cinema thus strives not merely to represent apocalypse, in whatever form, nor just to tell about it, but to enact it, with as great an immediacy as is possible for an audiovisual “medium.” For as such a medium, apocalypse-cinema is involved not just in representing the end of a world or of worlds, but in traversing them, cutting across their boundaries in search of its own enabling limits. Retracing this process, Szendy uncovers the cinematic consequences of the Nietzschean insight that “seeing” is always “seeing the abyss,” that discursive language is the attempt to xiv

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paper over the void, and that, therefore, music can cross over “the abyss of the interworlds” and become “the postapocalyptic marker par excellence.” If apocalyptic cinema is thus constantly striving “to test the limits of signiication,” this is nowhere more palpable than at the beginning and end of the ilm that, as already indicated, stands for Szendy as the “exemplary incarnation” of apocalypse-cinema: Melancholia. “Life and death, death and life of the ilmic image: Such is the story, the only story perhaps, that all apocalypses portrayed on screen tell. hey narrate the end of the cineworld.” he music that frames Melancholia, Wagner’s prelude to Tristan and Isolde, is clearly associated with that story, and even more, with its link to erotic yearning that ends in death. But what is striking is the contrast, especially in the prelude to the ilm, between Wagner’s prelude, a classical instance of what the composer called “unending melody,” and the images that it accompanies. Whereas one of the chief characteristics of the prelude’s “unending melody” is that it seems to progress in a continuous, uninterrupted low, the images that we see are anything but uninterrupted—until, of course, the inal scene, in which the swelling melody is brutally interrupted by a most nonmelodic explosion marking the fatal collision of Melancholia with the Earth, and the explosion of both sound and image, followed by the black screen and then by the end credits, allowing viewers to breathe more easily by recalling that “it was just a movie, ater all.” But Wagner’s unending melody inscribes everything visual and auditory that accompanies and follows it, into the context of a culture culminating in the idea of the Liebestod, where not just life and death, but love and death become gradually indistinguishable. Love as a possible solution to the conundrum of mortal life winds up not just conirming mortality but indeed accelerating it. Something related takes place in the irst actual scene of the ilm, ater the prelude, FOREWORD : ONE SUN TOO MANY

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which shows an elongated limousine winding its way up a mountain road taking a bride and groom to their wedding reception, and then, inexplicably, the limousine gets stuck trying to navigate a turn in the road. he car is too long, the driver too inexperienced, the road too unstable. he mismatch of personal, institutional, and social environment sets the scene in which “Melancholia” will not simply strike the planet from without but dominate it already from within, as it were. In one of the slow-motion images from the cinematic prelude, we see a tiny point of light, presumably Melancholia, either disappearing behind or entering into the large circular body of what again is presumably the Earth: preiguration of a contact already under way, long before the apocalyptic collision. he exteriority of bodies implied in every collision or contact is thus only half the story. As with the Liebestod, the earth can be seen as waiting, anxiously but also eagerly, for its meeting with Melancholia. What is characteristic, from a ilmic perspective, is the shit from the vertical to the horizontal: From the initial “bird’s-eye view” of the car, the camera abruptly descends to earth and into the vehicle—the handheld camera indicating how much in chaotic motion—how “cineied”—not just the scene is but also the perspective from which it has to be viewed. However, this descent is as discontinuous as the Wagnerian music is continuous. It is as if the idea of a Zukuntsmusik—a music of the future—which the notion of the “unending melody” was designed to announce, in fact prepares the way for something quite diferent: the end as brutal rupture, in which the hope of an ininite melody turns into the reality of an ininite interruption. But this interruption is “apocalyptic” in the literal sense of the Greek word, the “revelation” that uncovers what is already at hand rather than only heralds a radical change. xvi

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In short, if the catastrophe seems to come from without, and thus appears to be entirely aleatory, it is already going on “down below,” on earth. his is already made visible from the very irst images of the ilmic “prelude,” starting with the haggard, frozen face of Justine (Kirsten Dunst), around which ater a few moments dead birds slowly fall to earth. Writing about the transformation of allegory in the German baroque theater and the general post-Reformation period, Walter Benjamin emphasizes how melancholy emerges as a response to the loss of faith in the Christian salvational narrative. One of the results of this loss of faith is that nature is no longer seen as a condition of grace, but as one of eternal perdition. Nothing could depict this better than the slow-motion falling to earth of dead birds. Unredeemable life—that of “fallen” nature—is experienced as the “production of corpses.” he slowness of their fall only emphasizes its ineluctability. One of the most striking and enigmatic of those slow-motion images—cinematic variation of the eighteenth-century “tableaux vivants”—since they start out by being immobile and only slowly submit to the destructive force of time by beginning to move—is that in which Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) is shown carrying Leo, her son, in her arms, with her face turned skyward in anguish, while with each slow step forward her feet sink ever deeper—again in slow motion—into an earth no longer capable of supporting the weight of human bodies, much less bodies in movement. hat this earth is shown to be a “hole” in a golf course only emphasizes the futility and frivolity of human efort and social institutions. his frailty and indeed decomposition of the earth is related to the phenomenon of incineration that Szendy links to apocalypse-cinema in general and to this ilm in particular. he third image in the prelude gives us a long screen shot of Bruegel’s painting Hunters in the Snow, ater which the ends of the tableau begin to curl up as though they were FOREWORD : ONE SUN TOO MANY

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burning—another instance of all support—whether the canvas of the painting or the earth on the golf course—losing its ability to sustain whatever relies on it as well as itself. But before the painting begins to incinerate, it is once again traversed by falling dark objects, which already decompose the integrity of the image of the hunters and the winter scene, ashes avant la lettre. But the state of the world on the eve of its destruction is announced in a diferent and signiicant way in the second scene of the prelude, coming just ater the face of Justine and just before Hunters in the Snow. In it we see what irst looks like a perfectly arranged lawn of the chateau, stretching down to the sea, lined on each side by carefully and identically pruned trees. But there is a problem in this highly ordered, symmetrical image: he carefully arranged trees cast shadows in two diferent directions. his gives the shot an uncanny efect, for it indicates that there are two separate sources of light illuminating the scene and casting those shadows. his indication is then conirmed several shots later, when we see the three igures of Justine, Leo, and Claire standing still, this time in front of the same castle, while above them three sources of light are shining through the dark clouds. In short, what indicates the coming catastrophe is that the earth, as Hölderlin wrote of King Oedipus, has one “eye”— that is, source of light—“too many,” which in a monotheological culture can only call into question the unity of the world traditionally understood as the Creation of a single and universal Creator. If melancholy, as Benjamin analyzed it, emerges in response to an experience of time as “the implacable progression of each life toward death,” and if the only solution it can ofer to this conundrum is that of the contemplative spectator or scholar, it is no wonder that apocalyptic cinema in general should seek to propose a similar solace to the ilm viewer. But xviii

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Melancholia holds out the “generic” expectation of spectatorial distance only to collapse it, as much as any ilm can, not only through the brutal violence with which the visible, represented world is consumed by its condition of possibility— by light—but also by hyperbolically multiplying it. In so doing it brings the multiplicity of light sources—multiple suns, multiple gods—into conlict with its ostensibly realistic depiction, thereby demonstrating the complicity between such “reality” and the monotheological identity paradigm that continues to dominate Western culture. But its reairmation of that exclusivity is indeed “apocalyptic,” since it leaves the viewer with a conclusion that makes it diicult to ignore just how fragile it can be to outlast the end of the ilm, “ater all.” For ater all, Apocalypse-Cinema demonstrates how only the most impersonal of images can survive their autocineication: by signifying. Notes 1. Jacques Derrida, “No Apocalypse, Not Now,” in Psyche, ed. Peggy Kamuf and Elisabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 402–3. 2. Peter Szendy, Apocalypse-Cinema, chap. 10. Szendy quotes Jacques Derrida, Chaque fois unique, la in du monde (Paris: Galilée, 2003), 11, 9. he English is from J. Hillis Miller’s translation of these passages in For Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 96. 3. Derrida, “No Apocalypse, Not Now,” 409. 4. Szendy, Apocalypse-Cinema, Postface. 5. Ibid. 6. Walter Benjamin, “he Storyteller,” in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 3 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 156. 7. Szendy, Apocalypse-Cinema, chap. 12. 8. Ibid., chap. 6. 9. Richard Wagner, Zukunftsmusik, in Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen (Leipzig: Siegel, 1907) 7:130. FOREWORD : ONE SUN TOO MANY

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10. Szendy, Apocalypse-Cinema, chap. 1. 11. Wagner, Zukunftsmusik, 7:130. 12. Walter Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (Suhrkamp: Frankfurt am Main, 1978), 194. Mistranslated in Origin of the German Tragic Drama (London: Verso, 1998), 218. 13. Friedrich Hölderlin, “Der König Ödipus hat ein Auge zuviel vieleicht [sic],” in Friedrich Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Michael Franz and D. E. Sattler (Frankfurt: Roter Stern Verlag, 1953), 9:35. 14. Walter Benjamin, Origin of the German Tragic Drama (London: Verso, 1998), 151. 15. On the notion of a “monotheological identity paradigm” see: Samuel Weber, “West of Eden: Carrying On,” Tamkang Review 45, no. 1 (2014): 3–21.

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CHAPTER 

Melancholia, or The After-All

I am in front of the black screen. In the black screen. I disappeared at the same time the last image did. I melted into darkness. I, too, exploded, and my remains have been dispersed into the universal night. I am the darkness. I no longer am. his is what, speechless, I was saying to myself—this is what each one says to himself or herself, I think, without the words or breath to say so—in that ever so brief and yet ininitely distended instant that, at the end of Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2011), separates the last image from the credits. It is ten seconds, a tiny bit more, of total darkness. We irst hear the dissipation of the echo of the orchestral rocket ire from the prelude to Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde—that mesmerizing ascension, those incessant irruptions of sound that prepared and accompanied the catastrophe. he last trails of the sound of the planet’s explosion that just took place also die away; they expire bit by bit. And then there is silence. Silence and profound darkness, and they last. Never, to my knowledge, has a ilm so closely conformed to what would be the strictest law of the apocalyptic genre (if

indeed there is a genre): that the end of the world is the end of the movie. Or vice versa (because this terrifying equation of ilmic eschatology can be reversed without being changed in the slightest): he end of the movie is the end of the world. Never, then, in cinematic history had it been exposed in so drastically exact a way what an apocalyptic ilm worthy of this name should, in all rigorousness, be. In Melancholia, there is something like the strictest radiography of the skeleton of a genre, in other words that ineluctable and radical sign of the equality or coincidence of, on the one hand, the annihilation of the world, without anything remaining and, on the other hand, the inal point of the cinematic work that reaches its end. Melancholia will perhaps have been and may perhaps forever be the only ilm to respond so purely and absolutely to the demand that is proper to apocalypse-cinema: that the last image be the very last image, that is, the last of them all—of all past, present, or future images. For the same reason, never have the credits of a ilm seemed so reassuring: Ater these ten seconds of a darkness deafening in its silence, to see the name of Kirsten Dunst (Justine) appear, followed by that of Charlotte Gainsbourg (Claire), and then that of all the other actors, followed by the name of the director, to hear music also being quietly reborn means coming back to the world as if ater a fainting spell or general anesthetic. As you slowly gather your spirits, you tell yourself: It was just a movie; it was just a movie, ater all. And yet however much you minimize the impact of the cosmic detonation you have just witnessed, these words don’t really provide much reassurance; they continue secretly to tremble, as if within them were still echoing the explosion that has just taken everything away: When I attempt to con2

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vince myself that this was only a movie, ater all, I unavoidably hear that it is also a question of a cinema of the aterwards, of a cinema that comes ater it all, ater everything has disappeared. And that is certainly the case; you are convinced of it at the end of Melancholia. Nothing else remains. It is not only our planet that has just in efect exploded, it is not only life on Earth that was just annihilated (to Claire who suggested that “there may be life somewhere else,” Justine had abruptly answered, “But there isn’t”). What there isn’t anymore is the world. Not the mineral cosmos, but the world as world, the one that opens, as Schopenhauer said, with the “irst eye,” with the irst opened eyes. he dark ilm of these several seconds at the end of Melancholia is no longer really cinema anymore. Or if it is, it’s a cinema of the ater-all. By what rights and with what nerve can one state, as I just have, that Melancholia is and will remain the only rigorously apocalyptic ilm in the history of cinema? Clearly, there could be many others yet to come that will repeat this synchrony or superimposition of the two ends— that of the ilm and that of the world—thus retrospectively conirming Melancholia in its status as the exemplary incarnation of a generic formula, as its type or paradigm. But before Melancholia there were already movies in which the last still perfectly coincided with the annihilation of everything. I am thinking in particular of Ted Post’s Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970): As he lay dying, Taylor (Charlton Heston) murmurs with his last breath that the day of the last judgment has arrived (“it’s Doomsday”) before he collapses and sets of the atomic explosion that destroys the whole Earth. Over a white screen, the of-screen voice concludes, “In one of the countless galaxies in the universe lies a MELANCHOLIA, OR THE AFTERALL

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medium-sized star. And one of its satellites, a green and insigniicant planet, is now dead.” he fade to black concludes just as the two inal words are pronounced: “now dead.” Here too it would thus seem that the end of the ilm absolutely coincides with general extinction. And yet in Beneath the Planet of the Apes, there is a narrating voice that actually continues ater or over the inal image, that continues to recount, that becomes the huckster for a sequel that we obviously don’t see but that could still be shot someday: Not only does a continuation remain possible here in theory (and as a matter of fact, it actually exists and was shot in 1971 by Don Taylor under the title Escape from the Planet of the Apes, featuring three refugees who were able to lee before the cataclysm), but it is in a way contained or implicitly inscribed in the words that say something in spite of it all, in these sentences that call up in advance the script for future sequels. his is not the case with Melancholia. Until the inal credits begin to roll, there is at least the radical suspension of an absolute silence that, for a few moments, allows us to glimpse the possibility of an archi-fade to black, of a total erasure ater the ultimate image. he end of the ilm as end of the world would then also be the end of cinema itself. Acinema, inally, in the end.

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CHAPTER 

The Last Man on Earth, or Film as Countdown

I am writing these pages in the United States, certainly the biggest producer of apocalyptic images in the world. America is the place where the genre its French fans call “apo” has lourished. You can feel it on every street corner; imagery of the end is everywhere. Yesterday, February 13, 2012, I bought the most recent edition of that indescribable weekly rag called Sun Magazine (not to be confused with the respectable monthly he Sun). Under the gaudy name of the newspaper, if one gets close enough to make out the small print, one can read: “God Bless America®.” But what drew my attention as I was waiting in line at the supermarket cash register (oh, the supermarket! that postapocalyptic place par excellence, the topos of survival . . .) was the main headline on the irst page: “New Mayan Prophecies Reveal . . . End Times Begin On Valentine’s Day.” he apocalypse, as the reader I am is meant to deduce, is for tomorrow. Or rather, tomorrow, it will start being prepared. his extraordinary bit of news is developed over a doublespread inside page. Under a hill in Georgia, a team of archaeologists is said to have exhumed a Mayan pyramid on a site that is said to be that of the mythic city of Yupaha, the very

one the Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto was looking for in 1540. Sic. I rub my eyes. But wait, that’s nothing yet: In the pyramid has been found a stone calendar that measures time in long cycles of 63,123,288 years. Nothing less. And, get ready for it, a writer and explorer by the name of Beverly Neeson, who is interviewed in the article, explains that there is a mistake: he famous apocalyptic predictions for December 21, 2012, she says, are based on an erroneous interpretation of the Mayan calendar, for the engravings in the stone indicate that the End Times will begin . . . starting tomorrow, February 14, 2012. At which point we will see (citing randomly) that Iraq has nuclear weapons, that tsunamis will lood Japan and other countries in Asia, that extinct volcanos will erupt all over Europe, that ires will ravage Africa, that huge tornados will streak through the United States. But in the fall, Jesus will appear throughout the world to bring all this sufering to an end with his message of hope and salvation. I swear I have invented nothing; it’s all printed in black and white. And this kind of story populating the pages of celebrity and gossip magazines is also the matrix of blockbusters such as Roland Emmerich’s 2012, released in 2009. We need to pay particular attention to these “disaster movies,” a kind of attention they are not really paid when one stops with a gloss on the plot, the supposed ideology, distribution and reception, the box-oice returns . . . But before watching 2012 and other productions like it, let us lend an ear simply to that title. Let us try to hear what is housed in this date that, like so many dates, is part of the vast ilmic archive of the ends of the world: To mention only ilms I’ll be discussing, we might think of 2001 (Stanley Kubrick, 1968) and its sequel 2010 (Peter Hyams, 1984), of Escape from L.A. (John Carpenter, 1996; French release title Los Angeles 2013), A Boy and His Dog (L. Q. Jones, 1975; French release 6

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title Apocalypse 2024). . . . How many dates will have been inscribed onto the screen if we include all the ones that, without making it into the title, are embedded into the image over the course of the narration? “Early in the 21st century” are the irst words at the start of the scrolling text that opens Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982). And in the exposition that precedes the opening credits of 2012, one sees many inscriptions of place and date that note the signs from all over the globe that together announce the catastrophe: Copper mine in Naga Deng, India, 2009—Lincoln Plaza Hotel, Washington, 2009—G8 Summit, British Columbia, 2010—Cho Ming Valley, Tibet, 2010—Empire Grand Hotel, London, 2011— Louvre, Paris, 2011 . . . , a sequence that continues to accelerate right up until the moment when the title itself appears, 2012, but this time without any localization: 2012 is the date tout court, the nunc without hic, the fatal year. Finally, a reporter on TV explains that the huge collective suicide discovered in the ancient city of Tikal in Guatemala was motivated by faith in a Mayan prophecy that the world would end on December 12, 2012. 12–12–12: Here the date seems to be nothing more than its abyssal repetition. As we will see in a moment, a date is always carried away into its own commemorative whirlwind. his is why, in fact, a date remains essentially yet to come; it is that ininite approach to itself through which it tends to meet itself, to coincide with itself by going down in history [en faisant date]. In other words, a date is a countdown to the now it will always have been in advance. It’s a countdown apparatus like all the chronometers that measure the time that remains, starting with the Mayan calendar brought up to date through today’s fashion for the new age and ending with the Doomsday Clock, where the minutes separating us from the apocalypse—whether nuclear or otherwise—appear, and including THE L AST MAN ON EARTH, OR FILM AS COUNTDOWN

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millenarian countdowns like the one we see at the end of Strange Days (Kathryn Bigelow, 1995). Images of a deserted city scattered here and there with cadavers, on the sidewalks, in a doorway, on the stairs. he blackboard of a community church bearing the white letters of an inscription: “he end has come.” he camera enters through the broken window of the house of Doctor Morgan (Vincent Price). he alarm goes of. he doctor stretches and gets up—it’s the beginning of the story told by a voice-over. “Another day to live through. Better get started.” Ater a prelude that is silent until these two phrases are pronounced, the opening credits start to roll, and the narrative also seems to shake itself awake and stretch, with diiculty, as the protagonist drags himself, bent over and tired by his job as it starts up again, by the labor that consists merely in continuing to survive. We follow the doctor into the kitchen where he inds himself in front of the page of a calendar. “December 1965,” his voice comments, slowly. And the camera pans down the wall where we see other dates scribbled in, 1966, 1967, months, March, April, May, grids made up of squares checked of every day, day ater day. “It’s only been three years,” he continues, “since I inherited the world.” Another piece of the wall. 1968, January, February. . . . “It feels like a hundred million years.” He crosses of the square for September 5. He takes of the plank that locks the door from the inside. And goes out. he Last Man on Earth (Ubaldo Ragona and Sidney Salkow, 1964) is the irst ilm adaptation of Richard Matheson’s novel I Am Legend. Every day in it seems like every other, each night like each night. Passing time passes only like the needle of a phonograph that, in the morning, when the vampires have disappeared, skips and gets stuck in the last empty 8

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But it is a witness that can witness only if someone else in turn witnesses in some way for its testimony. In efect, it must be possible to repeat the date; it must be possible to cite, mention, celebrate, or commemorate it—and even remember it in advance—in order to make history [faire date]. hat is to inscribe its mark, which should nonetheless also be unrepeatable since it is supposed to attest to the singularity and incomparable uniqueness of an event that happened here and now and never anywhere else. Yet the testimonial structure of the date is also what, in the gap of the repetition that inhabits it, turns it into a holocaust. It is what burns it, the date and everything to which it testiies. It is what reduces it to ashes, as metonymy, as a part that is taken for the whole that has been settled into it through testament. For the date is as if destined to be lost: Either it remains faithful to the singularity of that of which it is the memory, and thus erases itself by becoming indecipherable, fading into the unique time it will have been; or else it returns and allows itself to be recounted, but in so doing it damages and ruins the uniqueness of what it marked. he unique date, condemned to be repeated and thus to annul itself as such in order to be a date—this is the drama that takes place in Cloverield. his is the holocaust that burns in the lames of the inal explosion where Rob and Beth, those last witnesses, end up dying. What actually happened? One has to rewind all the way to the beginning and remember that everything started with an image that jumps. Or more precisely (because it’s not exactly an image), with a black screen that seems to jump, as if it wanted to be detached or diferentiated from itself. What we see before anything else, at the very beginning of Cloverield, is this jolt of the camera that is not ilming anything yet. And this moment when the ilmic motor starts turning, but not without a slight 16

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jerk or hitch, that jerky moment when the image is lit up is the start of the very movement of the cinematography. Yet already in this archi-interval (a pure it jumps without anything yet leaping into our sight) we ind announced the gap that will inhabit each image of Cloverield insofar as it is dated, in other words already dug out by the gap between the image it is and its repetition yet to come. he moment of the end will of course not escape this rule; it will even be, as we shall see, the purest and clearest exposition of the testamentary structure of ilming. he (pen)ultimate images of the ilm do indeed show us Rob and Beth, who, getting ready to die, take shelter under the arch of a little bridge in Central Park. We drown in the deafening noise of their exhausted breathing, which is soon drowned out by the distant explosions of shots directed against the monster and by the sirens that announce the imminent bombing of the entire zone, that is to say the eradication of Manhattan. Rob and Beth know that they are living their last minutes or seconds. hat they are going to be annihilated, just like everything around them, in this moment of major cleanup. And this is the moment when Rob, as an ultimate witness (testis), pronounces or dictates the following cine-testament to the camera: My name is Robert Hawkins. It’s 6:42 a.m. on Saturday May 23. Approximately seven hours ago, something attacked the city. I don’t know what it is. If you found this tape, I mean: if you’re watching this right now, then you probably know more about it than I do. Rob then turns to Beth, and asks her to say something, too. She is crying, “I don’t know what to say.” He encourages her, “Just tell them who you are.” She says her name, “My name is Elizabeth McIntyre.” An explosion enlames the image, the CLOV ER FIELD, O R TH E H O LO C AUSE O F TH E DATE

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camera keeps ilming, and under the ruins, we hear Beth and Rob say they love each other, “I love you.” And it’s over. Or rather: It’s over for the irst time. Because the initial jump of the camera is repeated at the very end. In a spasm or shudder that we had already seen occur in the dark at the very beginning, the image freezes and trembles at the same time, as if seized by convulsions or cramps, before the recording of the day at Coney Island reappears. April 27 reemerges to the surface under May 23. he images of a lost world reemerge ater the end. And what do they show? What do they tell? Speaking to the camera in the amusement park at Coney Island, Rob declares— he is already saying, he is again saying, in a time where the already and the again switch places with one another in a dizzying oscillation—that there is not much time let: rob: All right, we’re almost out of tape; we’ve got like three seconds; what do you want to say? One last thing for the camera. beth: I had a good day. Everything relies on the gap between these two endings, the one from May 23 and the one from April 27. Two end points that repeat and haunt each other, the one calling the other to truly end, to testify to the end ater the end. To date the date so that the testament can go into efect. his testamentary structure of the image that appears at the end of Cloverield inhabits and interweaves each one of the ilm’s images. Every fraction of a second of the shooting is torn between the dated instant when it took place (on the night between May 22 and 23) and the past moment that accompanies it like its shadow, that April 27 that runs under 18

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each shot and is destined to reemerge, a date that thus remains yet to come. Yet to come, yes, but for whom? All of Cloverield is pervaded with an injunction: “Let’s just keep moving.” We hear it in the streets of Manhattan, broadcast over the army’s speakers that call for the evacuation of the city. We hear it pronounced by Rob when he and his wandering companions are struck by strange noises during their underground passage through the subway tunnels. Without hearing it, we think we see this imperative at work as we follow the strange apparition of a white carriage drawn by a white horse that, without any tourists, seems nonetheless unable to stop rolling through the deserted and devastated streets of New York: he apparatus for sightseeing continues; it rolls on all on its own. “Keep moving” is the very injunction of the cinematograph as a writer of movement. But in Cloverield it is as if kinetic writing were moving beyond itself, as if it were carrying itself beyond its cine-testamentary function, as dated documentary testimony addressed to future spectators, to pursue its recording without reason or destination: It’s rolling, stubbornly; it keeps on rolling and ilming when there is nothing and no one to see on the screen. hus when the monster strikes the helicopter that takes Beth, Rob, and Hud away to evacuate them, the camera’s fall is followed by a total freeze of the image. Ater the accident, nothing on the screen moves anymore, with the exception of the slight vibration of a thread that sticks out from the cloth of a gutted cushion. A fragile thread that oscillates like a remainder of movement when everything else is frozen. But the passengers have survived. We end up seeing them emerge painfully from the ruins. Hud retraces his footsteps to pick up the camera he forgot and inds himself face to face with the monster. A mortal face-of whose detail is beyond CLOV ER FIELD, O R TH E H O LO C AUSE O F TH E DATE

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us—the shooting is too chaotic—but that concludes with the fall irst of the camera and then of Hud’s inert body into the grass. In front of the dead man’s bloody face, in front of his closed eyes, the lens constantly performs an automatic focus, as if it were moved by a spasmodic or relex motion, like a body life has let but in which certain organic functions have not yet entirely been extinguished. he camera acts here as a very strange metonymy for Hud: It watches him, this thing that had been his gaze (and ours); it ilms him; it keeps running; but the regime of images it delivers is at the limits of testament.

Matt Reeves, dir., Cloverield, 2008 20

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hese shots no longer give anything to be seen or heard. hey are no longer captured by any witness at all; they transmit the testimony of no one. And yet the camera continues to record. And thus to testify, to “document,” as Hud says. If Cloverield is thus an ultratestamentary ilm, this is not the case for Melancholia. In Von Trier’s ilm, not only is there no longer any witness or testimony, but there is no longer anything recording either. No cine-bottle in the sea, no gaze yet to come for which the images could be said to be destined in spite of it all. In the aterwards of the ater-all, there are no longer any images or ilm at all. No all anymore at all.

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CHAPTER 

Terminator, or The ArcheTraveling Shot

All of it: his is no doubt what so many so-called apocalyptic ilms deal with, each in its own way. But they do so bit by bit, step by step. When destruction is propagated on screen like a wave that goes from thing to thing, what would like to appear, that which is seeking to lend itself to sight, is the way one thing refers to another. In other words, the interlacing of things, the fabric of their relations with and references to one another. In short, what we call a world. hat things hold onto one another, or thanks to one another, that they give one another support becomes clear when they start to collapse like a row of dominos. hus, in the famous cyclone sequence in Steamboat Bill, Jr. (Buster Keaton, 1928), we see not only one collapse ater the other, like a house of cards, but also the interlocking or the articulation that arranges beings among themselves. he blasting wind makes barrels roll and a whirlwind out of pieces of paper, bits of newspapers or torn-of posters that, unstuck from their original spot, get attached elsewhere, vibrant in the insistence of their will to be hooked onto something somewhere. he facade of a building crumbles and takes an electricity pole along with it, which itself stretches and

Charles Reisner and Buster Keaton, dirs., Steamboat Bill, Jr., 1928

extends the wire it is carrying, making it tremble and sway for a moment like a pure link, a pure relation waiting for its terms. People seek shelter in basements; the nurses and the sick lee the city’s hospital (the scene was shot in Sacramento, California), whose roof and walls ly away as if the lid of a pan were being taken of, uncovering the hero alone and surprised in his bed, where he was being treated for the blow he had taken to his head. Steamboat Bill, Jr., gets up, takes his jacket, and puts his hat on the hot-water bottle covering his skull while the public library caves in. He just barely misses being buried in the ruins and throws himself back into his bed, which at that point starts moving and takes him far away, but not without a brief stop in a stable among unblinking horses. It is at this point that Keaton’s no doubt most memorable trick takes place. He’s hidden under his bed, in the middle of the street, while the wind blows stronger than ever. he facade of the house in front of which he stands starts to crack; it slowly detaches itself. he bearded man living in the house 24

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jumps through the window and lands on a mattress that seems to have been placed there just to break his fall. And when the bedding also lies away in a gust of wind, Keaton stands up, shaken and bewildered by all this fury: He rubs his neck, shakes his head, and seems to take his time while the facade gains speed in its inexorable fall. But as it falls over him, at the last second, he escapes what seemed certain death by squashing: He was standing where the open window was placed. If this shot has remained famous, it is in part because it is said that Keaton risked his life when he ilmed it. But if I recall it here, it is instead to underline what it presents as the itting or mounting par excellence. he fact that, as one says in English, “it its.” he elements of the world—the hero and the facade with its windows cut out—are put together and match up with each other like brick and mortar. In short, it all links up. And this linkup is one of the constitutive characteristics of the being-world of the world. To analyze the worldliness of the world, Heidegger, in Being and Time, proposes that we start with the tool. With what makes a tool a tool, or with what we might call its ustensility [outilité]. Yet there is never one sole tool: “here is,” writes Heidegger, “no such thing as a utensil” (Being and Time, 64, translation modiied). A tool can be the tool that it is only because it participates in a system of tools. Because a tool is essentially in reference to, its ustensility already takes it to things other than itself. And its way of adjoining, assembling, or inserting itself into the network of ustensility is always to be in view of. his is in fact why the tool as such disappears; it melts and dissolves into the ininite reticulated references in the lacework of things. When it works, it goes unnoticed. TER MINATOR, O R TH E ARCH ETR AVELING SH OT

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Of the four episodes of the Terminator saga, it is perhaps in the third (Rise of the Machines, directed by Jonathan Mostow in 2003) that one inds the most striking images of this referring interlocking that constitutes the very structure of ustensility. he plot, as you know, is in a way suspended between the before and the ater, between the pre- and the postapocalyptic: From a future following the nuclear holocaust initiated by machines, these machines take the apocalypse backwards and send androids into the past preceding the catastrophe to destroy in advance the survivors who will remain and, led by John Connor (Nick Stahl), organize humanity’s resistance. Ater a prelude that is constantly crossing back and forth over this temporal limit, we see two Terminators arrive, one ater the other, stark naked and then covered in clothes. A T-X (Kristanna Loken) working for the Skynet artiicial intelligence network has been given the task of killing the future human rebels. he T-850 (Arnold Schwarzenegger) must protect them. his is the narrative backdrop or pretext onto which ininite visual variations will be projected concerning the cinematographic themes of itting, plugging in, and articulation, in short, of the abutment or the abutting of things. John Connor has just come across his childhood friend Kate Brewster (Claire Danes) in her veterinary clinic. All of a sudden, the T-X, who has located Kate, is, as a result, able to identify John. She is on the verge of iring directly at Kate to keep her from running away when the T-850, at the wheel of a pickup, speeds up to her and crashes into her, embedding her in a wall. Impassive, the T-580 emerges surrounded by ire. he T-X’s hand also emerges from the ruins, and under our very eyes, her liquid metal shield takes on the (cyber) organic appearance of human skin.

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Cinematography then becomes mechanography: Starting from now, we watch a gigantic mechanical construction kit that proceeds through numerous interlockings. John and Kate lee in the clinic’s pickup truck. he T-X takes a truck crane to chase them down, but not without having irst located the fugitives. And how does she go about doing this? Well, she opens the door of the cop car that had since arrived; her index inger turns into a inely pointed drill—she is a virtual toolbox, ustensility in person; her index inger dives down near the steering wheel until it reaches the integrated circuitry and the electronic chips that connect directly to the police’s telecommunications network. he chase can then begin. And it’s quite a chase that’s being prepared, with John and Kate at the head of a pack made up of the T-X’s crane-truck, which itself also remotely controls a driverless squad of two police cars with their sirens screaming and a ire truck, and, closing out this frenzied parade, the T-580 sent on their tracks on his motorcycle. here is no way to describe the amplitude of the damage, the monumental smashup, the immense dilapidation of the car bodies which this memorable machine chase produces on screen. In this sequence of pulverized metal that lasts almost ten minutes, I extract one incredible moment that could stand in for the whole in an exemplary way: the moment when, in the middle of the roaring motors, the T-X raises her truck’s crane. What we see at that moment goes far beyond the debauchery of special efects whose goal is, as we say, to give us an eyeful. Of course, the big metallic arm of the crane-truck, extended at a right angle to the direction of the chase, bumps up against and clears everything in its way: the cars parked along the sidewalk leap and explode one ater the other, as do the electrical and telephone poles, the stoplights. . . . For a brief interlude the fugitives’ pickup takes over and lays waste TER MINATOR, O R TH E ARCH ETR AVELING SH OT

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to the lawns of the houses along the road, and then we ind Schwarzie hanging on to the crane that, in the midst of the crash of broken glass and dented sheets of metal, sweeps up shipping crates, entire oices, pieces of warehouses, or bits of facades. What an expenditure! But in the middle of all the jumble and rubble, at the center of this general rockslide that comes close to threatening to bury sight itself under the ruins, we see something like a fantastic apparition emerge: All of a sudden, the crane seems to be a huge jib crane, like the ones used for shooting a ilm; all of a sudden, we watch it as it seems to be taken away along the rails of a frantic traveling shot, in a crazy recording, as if it had gone mad wanting to capture everything, swallowing up all the world’s props, all the Earth’s decors, to feed the insatiable image that keeps asking for more. Universal devastation’s cine-potlatch. Consummation and consumption of ilm and for ilm in an apocalyptic arche-traveling shot that leaves nothing untouched. As if it were a matter of unfurling and retracing the integrality of the relations between things, of experiencing their general interlacing through their very consumption. Long before the twists and turns of the narrative that lead to the inal holocaust, it is here, in this sequence that is not all that diferent from Buster Keaton’s house of cards, that the nuclear holocaust of the movie’s last images is being prepared. his holocaust, triggered by Skynet on July 25, 2004 (6:14 p.m.), really does nothing more than visually repeat the cine-mechanography of the propagation from thing to thing while extending it on a planetary scale. Indeed, it is from hundreds of points across the Earth’s surface that missiles are shot into the sky. heir trajectories arc, as we see one atomic mushroom cloud, then another, while the radius of the explosions expands and sweeps up everything in their path. Finally, the camera leaves the planet and rises into the extra-earthly 28

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Jonathan Mostow, dir., Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, 2003

atmosphere to show the paths of the missiles that cross each other’s trajectories and weave a veritable fabric around the Earth. his is the way the world’s chain-linking is sketched out, the way a net-world is woven, on the verge of tightening up in order to become embodied and gain consistency just before the fade to white brings us into the aterwards of the holocaust that has taken place. he world was very close to becoming present or totalized as such. But at this point there is nothing more than the gray ash that loats in the air around the still reddening eye of a Terminator who has died. he world is no longer. It almost was [Il a bien failli].

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CHAPTER 

, or Pyrotechnics

“Tools turn out to be damaged,” writes Heidegger in Being and Time (§16). Ater the scene of relentless wrecking that we just saw between Terminators and humans, I reread this sentence as euphemism and litotes. But it is precisely once it is kaput, Heidegger continues, that the tool is noticed as such (if it worked, it would on the contrary be forgotten; it would be perfectly transitive and thus transparent). When it doesn’t work, you can tell: “In a disruption of reference—in being unusable for . . . —the reference becomes explicit.” And what then starts blinking, what lights up, is the world as a “workshop,” as a totality of tools referring to one another: he context of utensils is lit up . . . as a totality that has continually been seen beforehand in our circumspection. But with this totality world makes itself known. (Being and Time, 70, translation modiied) he world lets itself be felt as world in or through this— remarked because prevented—reference of one thing to another. he interlacing or contexture of things that makes

the world: his is what starts to show through in this disturbance. And the Terminators are working on putting it all out of service, which tends toward bringing the world as such to be seen. But, writes Heidegger, this world is in this way only announced; it isn’t really presented. No doubt it would present itself, if it were possible, only in the paroxysmal instant of its end. Yet it is still the case, Heidegger says more or less, that the tool appears all the more clearly; it displays its ustensility all the better when it isn’t working. Or else when it is missing— when you need it but can’t ind it. And, inally, when it presents an obstacle, when it closes of the ield of the possible by saturating it. In these three ways it has of brushing up against appearance, the tool tends to refer to itself. We can see this in Steamboat Bill, Jr.’s disconnected electrical wire that seems to lead to nothing other than pure metonymic conduction: It is no longer a tie or a succession between two things; it stretches itself as the between itself, as such. Yet the logic of ustensility concerns not only the construction set of tools in the usual sense, from the drill to the truck crane. For Heidegger, “Signs are themselves initially utensils whose speciic character as utensils consists of indicating [Zeigen]” (Being and Time, 72, translation modiied). In other words, signs—and particularly the cinematographic signs constituted by images—are also things, thingies and machines, like the bumper cars and other smashed-up vehicles in all the diferent chase scenes that, for Hitchcock, compose the essence or heart of cinema. he image-sign is a machinetool; it’s a ustensilitarian vehicle. his means that we should say that all the chains of one by one destruction, all demolitions that spread like a house of cards or the fall of dominos are also ways for ilm to bring about the emergence and thematization of the dominant 32

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regime—which is also perhaps sovereign since it is uncontested—for the circulation of these signs. his regime is that of reference as a being-worth [valoir-pour]. his is what Lyotard, in “Acinema,” formulated in the following terms: Every movement put forward sends back to something else, is inscribed as a plus or minus on the ledger book which is the ilm, is valuable [vaut] because it returns to something else, because it is thus potential return and proit. he only genuine movement with which the cinema is written is that of value. One could not state more clearly that ilm’s economy is played out not only in production costs (almost $200 million, they say, for the third part of the Terminator trilogy) and box oice take but also in the traic, exchange, or potlatch of images and between images. While watching the universal grinding and pulverization of the Terminators, one inds oneself constantly wondering how much all this must have cost. But also and at the same time: When is it going to stop? When are the images going to stop following or chasing one another in their breathless pileup of sequences, in the ininite chain of consequences that carries them away . . . all the way to the end of the world? here is always something burlesque about blockbusters’ generalized pileup scenes. Every time, they recall Keaton’s cyclone, which brings the economy of images to its limit. Not only because shooting them involves ruinous production expenses but also because “pyrotechnics,” as Lyotard puts it, tends toward “the sterile consumption of energies in jouissance” (“Acinema,” 171): From within the most predictable mainstream, these ireworks of disintegration and atomization , OR PYROTECHNICS

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seem to point toward something beyond ilmic pleasure, toward an an-economy of acinema. Launched onto the world market in 2009 with an incredibly efective viral marketing plan, Roland Emmerich’s superproduction 2012 testiies to this abundantly, so to speak. On the one hand, the image, each second of image, each shot cost a fortune, so grandiloquent are the special efects. But on the other hand, the ilm’s characters, who are constantly just barely escaping the most colossal cataclysms of all time, end up giving us the impression of wanting to escape the image, of trying to end with it and lee the frame of the inlationist reel that seems destined to bury them at any moment under an avalanche of means. here is indeed something of Tex Avery in these scenes that recall the wolf in Dumb-Hounded (1943), the poor wolf who escaped from prison and is doing everything to lose Droopy, the bloodhound set slowly yet inexorably on a chase to get him. his poor wolf travels the whole world at a frantic pace until he is forced to traverse the ultimate limit of the ilm’s frame itself. he same is true in 2012 when Jackson Curtis (John Cusack) picks up his children, his ex-wife Kate (Amanda Peet), and her companion at the last minute in a limousine, when he tries to pull them away from the innumerable crevices opening in the earth’s crust and threatening to swallow them up; we rub our eyes and start to dream, to transigure the cinepyrotechnics of special efects. As it speeds by on screen, the car carrying the fugitives seems to be running away from the digital corrosion or burn that quickly gnaws away at the bottom of the image. Screeching its brakes, it swerves to avoid the edge of the frame, just like in Tex Avery’s cartoon. It crosses under a collapsing bridge, and now it’s the fall of the upper edge of the frame that it just barely dodges. Finally, when it throws itself under the pillars

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Tex Avery, dir., Dumb-Hounded, 1943

of the ground loor of a crumbling tower, it is as if it were plunging into the ever-shrinking space of a closing iris. Ater a brief interlude showing the geologist Adrian Helmsley (Chiwetel Ejiofor) as he follows the propagation of the devastating earthquake from afar, here we go again: his time the little extended family has arrived at the airport; we take of with them; and everything starts over. he old bird that takes them toward salvation is seen against collapsing highways and lying trains and cars that are projected over the abysses that are opening everywhere. Finally, when we barely make it

Roland Emmerich, dir., 2012, 2009

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groove of the record that the doctor, as he fell asleep, let turning around and around. “Another day,” he says to himself as he awakens yet another time, “another day to start all over again.” Every day, Robert Morgan, the last man on Earth, thus seems to put the counter back to the beginning. Every day, he does what in astronautics is called a count-up that starts from nothing. He has to start it over every time, as if the night had erased everything; he has to repeat the same ordeal of getting going again. Every aternoon, in fact, as the evening and sunset draw closer, the doctor’s time is counted. According to a countdown that in this case threatens to be fatal, since nighttime is the realm of the contaminated who are on a search for the last healthy representative of the human species. Yet the time of this countdown toward nightfall is also, quite precisely, cinema’s time. In the second adaptation of Matheson’s novel for the screen, he Omega Man (Boris Sagal, 1971), this is in efect the time that Colonel Robert Neville (Charlton Heston), the sole survivor of a bacteriological war, takes for himself. It is this counted time he gives or allows himself to take in a movie. Ater having driven through a Los Angeles that has turned into an urban desert, he thus stops at the end of the day in front of a theater that is advertising—and has been “for three straight years,” he mumbles—Woodstock, Michael Wadleigh’s 1970 documentary. He enters irst into the projection room where he has to start up the electric generator and then the projector before he can enjoy the show from a seat. He knows the songs and dialogue by heart, to the point that he repeats them, murmuring and whispering them in improvised and solitary dubbing. “Great show,” he had ironically said as he entered the movie theater. And before leaving the theater to go home as long as there’s daylight, “Yeah, they sure don’t make movies like that anymore.” THE L AST MAN ON EARTH, OR FILM AS COUNTDOWN

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to the ethereal heights necessary to enjoy this digital spectacle quietly with them, the huge tsunami that submerges the Paciic coast of the United States seems to sweep the screen away in a kind of general fade-out to gray-blue. Just as in many animated cartoons, here, too, in this cinema for which in extremis is the raison d’être, extreme speed tends to merge with extreme slowness. One character, chased by another or leeing some danger, gets up on his feet (or his paws or any other means) and runs, only to ind himself over some abyss or precipice: We know that scene, which is seen in so many animated ilms, where some poor guy runs in place in the air, suspended in his continued movement before he ends up falling; we know this typical situation very well, and we can never decide if the animal keeps himself suspended through the hypervelocity of his running or if he is so slow in becoming aware of the new state of things that he has to wait to fall. his is exactly what seems to happen in 2012, the paradigm of a movie genre or style that one would like to call extremological. In 2012, we indeed ind the merging of the “two directions” Lyotard imagined “for the conception (and production) of an object, and in particular, a cinematographic object, conforming to the pyrotechnical imperative”: hese two poles are immobility and excessive movement. In letting itself be drawn towards these antipodes, the cinema . . . produces true, that is, vain, simulacrums, blissful intensities, instead of productive/consumable objects. (“Acinema,” 171–72) As a cinema of consensus and of investment conscious of its efects, 2012 certainly perfectly incarnates the hyperproductive ilmic paradigm that Lyotard described as follows:

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“he ilm produced by the artist working in capitalist industry . . . springs from the efort to eliminate aberrant movements, useless expenditures, diferences of pure consumption” (172). But through the amplitude of its expenditure, however carefully calculated it may be, 2012, which can stand as exemplary of all ultraproductivist ilms, brings the ilmic machine to its burning point, leads it to the overheating of the overload, on the verge of imploding. he end of the world is announced in the equivalence between the overproduction and the recession of images. “Fast forward” and “slow motion” come down to the same thing. Economy and an-economy, investment with expectations of returns and pure expenditure are undecided and indistinguishable here, just like speed and slowness. Everything gets mixed up in 2012, a nihilist ilm par excellence, if we retain the best deinition of nihilism as this one, from Heidegger: “It’s all worth the same thing.” hus— one example among so many of an indiferent interchangeability—the time remaining for seduction or cruising is voluntarily superimposed with that of the apocalypse when— concerning Laura Wilson (handie Newton), the president’s daughter—the Secretary of State at the White House, Carl Anheuser (Oliver Platt) tells Adrian, “Pretty girl, huh? You better hurry, son, the end is near.” he vulgarity of this kind of dialogue is obviously calculated to inspire the cheap complicity of a smile from the male spectator, but also and above all to form a system with other moments of universal exchange or general equivalence. We see children playing hopscotch over little seismic faults that announce bigger ones still to come. On the radio, we hear a couple of announcers joke about the supericial cracks that plastic surgery will be able to ix, as if the Earth’s crevices were also a question of cosmetics.

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Later on, the irst deep breach in the terrestrial crust runs down the aisles of a supermarket where Kate and her boyfriend Gordon (homas McCarthy) are doing their shopping. “Honey, I just feel like there’s something between us,” says Gordon while the crevice quickly widens, swallowing their shopping cart, their cereal boxes, and then all the shelves of merchandise. he seismological issure of the anfractuosity suddenly appears as the dividing line of a fraction, like the line of an analogical calculation or of a quality-to-price ratio between family life and humanity’s survival, between the housewife’s cart and the planet’s destiny. “It’s all worth the same thing”: One could reformulate Heidegger’s formulation by simplifying it even more. About 2012 and, more generally, what Lyotard calls “the application of nihilism to movements” in ilm, one could say quite simply that it’s all worth. In efect, what does this “crack in the world,” to cite the title of a 1964 catastrophe movie by Andrew Marton that clearly inspired Roland Emmerich, come down to? For Emmerich, certainly the master of the globalized disaster movie, the global fracture [fracture] can in the end be converted into a universal invoice [facture], in other words a rescue plan that will be nothing more than a inancial arrangement to ensure the fabrication of future Noah’s Arks using the private funds stemming from the sale of tickets for this ultimate cruise of millionaire survivors. But if it’s all worth on board all these cinematic ships that carry humanity on its last journey, this is also and above all because the sign, as reference to, is irst of all and above all else value. Here we have to read Marx not only with Freud, as Lyotard does, but also with Heidegger and Saussure. All signifying economies, and the cinema’s is no exception, are economies of signs that point toward, that is to say are

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exchanged against, divert, or postpone in direction of. his circulation is that of value tout court. Which is always an equivalent-to and a worth-more (or less). In other words a debt [créance]. hus, the general cine-potlatch toward which ilms such as Terminator and 2012 strive is indeed on the one hand an accumulation that aims at bringing the system of referrals constituted by the world to appear through exhaustion or saturation. But it is also, on the other hand, a general expenditure that aims at paying of credit. Or else, taking apparent bankruptcy as its pretext, it is perhaps, it is rather contributing to the emergence of debt itself as the fundamental structure of the world. Universal indebtedness as generalized deferment and referring [report et renvoi]. Of course, one can always come across characters that seem to protest. his is what happens, for example, in When Worlds Collide (Rudolph Maté, 1951), a ilm of which 2012 seems in many ways to be the remake. he astronomer Emery Bronson (Hayden Rorke) orders the pilot David Randall (Richard Derr) to convey the results of his observations on the coming collision of the Earth with a new star named Bellus so that another eminent scientist can corroborate them. Without revealing anything about the coming apocalypse to Randall, Bronson nonetheless predicts to him that “the day may arrive when money won’t mean anything.” Randall, who at irst does not seem to grasp the importance of this prophecy, will remember it later on when he starts literally burning the bank notes on a neighboring table’s tea-light at a restaurant in order to light his cigarette. “his is the day,” he exclaims; “Money to burn,” while a fade causes the United Nations building in New York to appear. But the question, as you will have understood, is not simply the money-form or currency-form of worth in the wealth

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of nations. It is much rather the equivalent-to [valoir-pour] in general as a igure of signiicance. he signiicance of images as much as that of sounds or words. And it is thus the limits of signiication—or, as we will later say, of cineication—that apocalypse-cinema seems to want to test.

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CHAPTER 

A.I., or The Freeze

In the eighth episode of the ninth season of the famous animated series South Park, one inds an excellent algebraic formula for the narrative logic of disaster movies. Ater Stan and Cartman’s antics cause a lood by bursting a dam, global warming is blamed. An emergency meeting is called, over the course of which a scientist explains that “this is only the beginning.” And he is asked when the expected devastation will take place. “My colleagues in the scientiic community are still running tests but we think it may happen . . . the day ater tomorrow.” here are screams, panic, and objections from a skeptical Republican. he scientists of the aforementioned community come in; they’ve inished the tests. One of them steps forward to announce the result: “Global warming will hit two days before the day ater tomorrow.” Silence. he music—like that of a cataclysmic epic—grows more and more tense. “But that’s . . . today!” So it happens faster than was predicted (which is in fact the very formula of the disaster movie). Today, now, and right away, but starting from tomorrow, counting backwards on the basis of what we see coming: To state this distended regime of apocalyptic arrivance, the South Park episode alludes to another of Roland Emmerich’s superproductions,

he Day Ater Tomorrow, 2004, placed under the sign of a general freeze-over during a new glacial era. We will have to linger with this ilm for a bit in order to see the immobility at work in it, to see the solidiication of cinematic motion and emotion working at the very heart of the most apparently turbulent reels. By turning thus toward its other extremological pole—not the overheating of the pyrotechnical overdrive, but the frost of the frozen motor—cinema once again runs toward acinema, toward an escape (if there is one) outside the productive regime of the equivalent-to that governs cineication. he Day Ater Tomorrow opens with a long aerial traveling shot over the ice loe that ends up at the Larsen Ice Shelf in Antarctica where a small team led by the paleo-climatologist Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid) is drilling. Suddenly, it cracks, and a crevice appears that swallows the apparatuses and almost gets the men, too, by very quickly spreading. he tone is set: What we will see is an improbable superimposition of freezing and accelerated expansion, of crystallizing capture and rapid-ire radiation. he underlying scientiic pretext for the screenplay is, as Jack explains during a conference on global warming organized by the United Nations in New Delhi, that the general rise of temperatures could paradoxically lead to wide-scale cooling by disturbing the movement of the oceanic waters known as the North Atlantic Current (which is what guarantees the temperate nature of the climate in the northern hemisphere). Whatever the status of this climatological paradox, what interests us here is its cinematic fallout, which unfolds slowly but steadily in the ilm. To start with, it is snowing in New Delhi while the experts debate the environment. hen, buoys, ever more buoys for measuring, signal abnormal plunges in temperature pretty much everywhere. Hail as big as bricks creates panic in Tokyo. Huge cyclones 42

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form, and in their eye, the temperature falls to –65° C. Tornadoes devastate Los Angeles, erasing the capital letters of the Hollywood sign on Mount Lee on live television. In its own way, Emmerich’s cinema says that the end of the world will take place at the movies. But the ilm inds its own rhythm or temporality when little by little these planetary cataclysms stop and are paralyzed in an immobilization that, paradoxically, spreads ever faster. Ater the tsunami that washed over Manhattan, the cold becomes so extreme that the torrents of water that buried the city are soon crystallized as ice. And later on, when a few of the survivors, who have taken refuge in the New York Public Library, attempt to go out in search of medicine, the eye of a refrigerating cyclone tightens around them. he freeze’s metonymic propagation starts from up above with the antenna at the top of the Empire State Building. he camera descends down the skyscraper, following the grip of the glaciation that gains ground, cracking everything in its path, making windows burst, in short unleashing a kind of numb explosion. Unless it’s the other way around (but it comes down to the same thing): an explosive freeze. What then are these poor refugees—who include Jack’s son, Sam Hall (Jake Gyllenhaal)—running from as they now try to return to their refuge in the library? hey are running away from a surging immobility. A freezing necrosis that releases a kind of sped-up wave that transforms everything it meets into one big freeze-frame. he general freezing threatens to reach even the ilm reel itself. he ilm itself would thus tend to become a tableau vivant, a mere painting, barely alive. It lasts for about two minutes. Two minutes over the course of which he Day Ater Tomorrow maintains a suspense that is not the worn-out and overused suspense of threats, extreme dangers, and close calls, but the suspense of the A.I., OR THE FREEZE

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Roland Emmerich, dir., he Day Ater Tomorrow, 2004

image as such, the suspense of the cinematic that runs the risk of freezing by coagulating on screen. he kinetic paradox of a blockbuster movie that secretly seems to want to tend toward being integrally numbed can be found elsewhere in other stagings of the end of the world. For example, Danny Boyle’s Sunshine (2007) is a ilm that opens with words pronounced by an of-screen voice while we see a star fading in a dark sky: “Our sun is dying, and humanity may well die.” he Earth, we learn, is in efect “frozen by a solar winter,” whose efects will only be seen at the very end, when the atomic bomb capable of starting the helio-dynamic machinery back up again is successfully launched: On our white planet covered with a layer of snow, the daylight star will inally shine with a light worthy of the name. In Quintet (1979), Robert Altman goes so far as to smear the eye of the camera with Vaseline for the duration of the ilm in order to make the contours in the image look frozen or blurry as a way of reminding us in a redundant way of the glacial apocalypse through which the characters make their way. And in the entirely diferent horror genre, one thinks of the end of he Shining in 1980 where we see Jack Torrance 44

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(Jack Nicholson) lost in the snow-covered labyrinth where his son Danny (Danny Lloyd) was able to lose him: Kubrick irst shows him frozen outside in the glacial cold with his eyes wide open before the camera zooms in on an old photograph framed in the hotel’s vestibule where we recognize Jack, frozen for eternity as he smiles among the ballroom dancers of July 4, 1921. he shot stops on this date, which thus signals the end of the ilm: Cinematographic movement numbs and freezes into an immobile image. In Artiicial Intelligence: AI, directed by Spielberg in 2001 and based on a project Kubrick had started to work on in the 1970s, we watch a grand plotting of this same cinematographic gesture of freeze-framing as it unfurls into a large-scale narrative. Here, too, it all starts with an of-screen voice that, up against waves and masses of water in motion, tells a tale: hose were the years ater the ice caps had melted because of the greenhouse gases, and the oceans had risen to drown so many cities along all the shorelines of the world. Amsterdam. Venice. New York. . . . Forever lost. Millions of people were displaced, climate became chaotic. In this postapocalyptic era yet to come, pregnancies will be strictly controlled, and robots and androids tend to replace humans in most of their functions, including—it’s a very new invention—in their ilial role; Dave (Haley Joel Osment), a prototype created by the Cybertronics Company, will be capable of eternal love for the one who, by initializing him, becomes his mother, Monica Swinton (Frances O’Connor). But when Monica abandons him, Dave, ater a long journey that ends in New York, which is partially plunged under water, will transpose his undying attachment to a statue: On board his amphibious helicopter and accompanied by his faithful mechanical teddy bear, he inds himself face to face A.I., OR THE FREEZE

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When he leaves, it’s late. We can just barely make out the last rays of a setting sun. Robert Neville has probably not seen the ilm all the way to the end. And it’s a good thing, too, for if he had allowed himself to be taken away by the movies, if he had entered into the world of the screen, he would have truly run the risk of being given over to the vampires, the living dead who, at nightfall, wander through L.A. He barely escapes them on the way home. He is able to kill of a few and to defend himself from another’s assault. Going up in the elevator to his fortiied apartment, he remembers. He recalls the events that led to the end of the world. And what starts this other projection—his memory’s, the ilm of his memories—is his inger pressing the button for the top loor. he colonel’s index inger seems both to start the projector of images from the past and to launch the missiles, the bacteriological bombs of world conlict. It is said that the countdown was invented at the movies. By Fritz Lang in Woman in the Moon (1929). Before, the procedure happened in increasing order, as one sees in the famous launch staged by Jules Verne in 1865 in From the Earth to the Moon at the end of chapter XXVI called “Fire!” Only forty more seconds, and each one of them was like a century. At the twentieth second a quiver ran through the crowd and everyone realized that the daring explorers inside the projectile were also counting the terrible seconds. Isolated cries broke out: “hirty-ive! . . . hirty-six! . . . hirty-seven! . . . hirty-eight! . . . hirty-nine! . . . Forty! . . . Fire!!!” . . . Instantly there was a terrifying, fantastic, superhuman detonation which could not be compared to thunder or 10

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with a blue fairy out of Pinocchio who is standing erect in the former Coney Island amusement park that is drowning in the sea. At the controls of his helicopter, Dave draws closer. He stares intensely at the statue from his cockpit, a kind of transparent, submarine bubble that sustains his tireless scopic drive, preceded by the headlights of the amphibicopter. hrough the deep waters, it is their light that seems to break the path for seeing. he blue fairy looks at Dave, and Dave looks at the blue fairy. On the window’s surface, the face of the one is superimposed over the face of the other. For a brief moment, we no longer know who is who, who is staring into whose eyes. And this is when Dave’s odyssey ends. Not only because he inds himself stuck in his underwater optical vehicle because a Ferris wheel has fallen. But also and above all because he is captivated, captured by the image of the object of his transference. It matters not that Dave starts uninterruptedly repeating his wish (“Blue Fairy, please, make me into a real boy!”). It matters not that the little meca (the name the ilm gives to android robots) reiterates his sweet little mechanical desire to come to life over and over again. It matters not that the voice-over starts its interrupted tale again with tender solemnity while the camera slowly moves away from the face-toface confrontation and takes us through centuries with a few phrases: And David continued to pray to the Blue Fairy there before him. . . . He prayed as the ocean froze. . . . Eventually he never moved at all, but his eyes always stayed open, staring ahead forever all through the darkness of each night, and the next day . . . and the next day. . . . hus, 2000 years passed by. 46

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Steven Spielberg, dir., Artiicial Intelligence: AI, 2001

his narrative pretext that hopes to be a fairy tale for today or a Pinocchio for tomorrow matters little, for what happens is quite simply a freeze-frame that lasts for two thousand years. One understands and sees this when the robots of the new glacial age awaken Dave from his millennial hibernation. His eyes are still open. He is still staring at the Blue Fairy, which disintegrates when he touches her. he frozen image is thus broken when the thaw comes, but only to be better set back into motion and memory: When one of the mecas of the future brushes up against Dave’s forehead, we watch all the still pictures stocked in the archives of this little android boy go by, the last survivor to have frequented the living beings that we humans were. Dave, as we foresaw and as we now know, was nothing but a kind of digital camera. And what the automats of the future do is to read the ilm of his long mechanical life. His memories. Transixed and frozen, the ilmic low solidiies. It takes and crystallizes. And to unix it, its gangue of ice has to be broken. A.I., OR THE FREEZE

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Life and death, death and life of the ilmic image: Such is the story, the only story perhaps, that all apocalypses portrayed on screen tell. hey narrate the end of the cineworld. here are, however, some shots that are impossible to declare living or dead. Simply frozen or deinitively extinguished, numbed yet potentially mobile or petriied forever as bas-reliefs. hese shots seem to tremble with cold as they hesitate between the life and death of their movement; they are in a sense living-dead, that is to say spectral through their ilmic movement (and not through what they show), and the exemplary ones are the ones from the beginning of Melancholia. What do we see in this prelude that, realized through the extremely slowed-down technique of a thousand images per second (already used by Lars von Trier for Antichrist in 2009), exposes the themes that are destined to return throughout the ilm, a little like the way Wagner announced the themes of an opera? here is irst of all a close-up of Justine’s face, which is immobile but animated by an almost imperceptible vibration. A face that the extremely slow movement makes both unreal—as if it were stirred by a strange auratic iridescence— and nonetheless vibrating with a strange materiality, as if we could sense or make out the movement of the atoms composing it. Birds fall behind this face like dead leaves plunging with insane slowness, evoking many real or ictive scenes that we readily associate with precursory signs of the end, from the frogs that rain from the sky in Paul Anderson’s Magnolia (1999) to the recent bird precipitation in Arkansas (on December 31, 2011). here is then a huge sundial in a garden that has been compared to the one in Last Year at Marienbad. hen a shot of he Hunters in the Snow by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, as if to make even clearer that between the ancient chronometric 48

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Lars von Trier, dir., Melancholia, 2011

instrument and the icon par excellence of winter in the history of painting, things are going to freeze up, our time is counted, and the image, too, is dying. For Bruegel’s painting will burn, and pieces of its burntblack canvas will fall like the image’s dead scales. And soon the upper-right-hand corner buckles and folds; incandescence burns holes into the painting, which cedes its place to the next shot: he Earth, along with the glowing red point of the planet Melancholia, which, in the distance, seems to be coming closer. What a surprising prologue whose hallucinatory graphics conclude with the collision of two stars, Melancholia and the Earth, in their mutual inlammation, which is also their embrace or grasp until death, their lethal and cosmic kiss, followed by a black screen that already anticipates that of the end of the ilm-world. his prelude’s images are still lifes, frozen and chilling allegories. he viewer goes from the one to the other as one would leaf through a book. Page ater page, each page vibrating with a pure diferential vibration that keeps it at the threshold of the cinema. At the brink, at the dawn of a cineworld that is already experiencing its own announced disappearance.

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CHAPTER 

Pause, for Inventory (the “Apo”)

Nietzsche—whom, like Kant, we might sometimes read as a science-iction scriptwriter—also imagined a scene for the end of the world through glaciation: Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. hat was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of “world history,” but nevertheless, it was only a minute. Ater nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed [erstarrte das Gestirn], and the clever beasts had to die.—One might invent such a fable, and yet he still would not have adequately illustrated how miserable, how shadowy and transient, how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature. here were eternities during which it did not exist. And when it is all over with the human intellect, nothing will have happened. In this cosmological fable, we could play at giving variations on the causes of the end. And we would come up with the classiications that some think they are able to propose of

the species within the “apo” genre. he scholarly and stufy tone of one Guide, for example, is funny (and I will not resist the pleasure of citing this long passage): A basic deinition of apocalyptic cinema is a motion picture that depicts a credible threat to the continuing existence of humankind as a species or the existence of Earth as a planet capable of supporting human life. he genre of apocalyptic cinema is closely related to, yet distinct from, a similar genre primarily known as post-apocalyptic cinema, which concentrates on survivors of a catastrophic event struggling to reestablish a livable society. In order to be classiied as an apocalyptic ilm, the event threatening the extinction of humanity has to be presented within the story. If this catastrophe occurs prior to the events depicted on the screen, the ilm is post-apocalyptic. Naturally, there can be a blurring of the lines of these two genres, and a number of pictures can legitimately be labelled as both. . . . Apocalyptic ilms can be classiied into seven speciic categories: Religious or Supernatural; Celestial Collision; Solar or Orbital Disruption; Nuclear War and Radioactive Fallout; Germ Warfare or Pestilence; Alien Device or Invasion; and Scientiic Miscalculation. Playing at this clean-up game, some intelligent animals might be tempted to put Nietzsche in the category of “Solar or Orbital Disruption” alongside Robert Altman for Quintet, Steven Spielberg for AI, and Roland Emmerich for he Day Ater Tomorrow or 2012. Animals well versed in ilm studies and endowed with a historian’s penchant might want to superpose this reasoned classiication of species with other considerations of their evolution, which would sometimes lead them to apparently insoluble choices: In 1931 Abel Gance’s

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End of the World is said to be “the irst apocalyptic ilm in the history of the cinema” at the beginning of a monograph called Le Cinéma de science-iction, while ity pages later, “the irst ilm of this sub-genre [the “apocalyptic S-F ilm”] is Five” directed by Arch Oboler in 1951. hese dilemmas and housecleaning and tidying problems awaken the curiosity of the animal that I am. I’ll investigate a bit more. Apo or post-apo, as we say to keep it short. hus, among the blogs hosted by AlloCiné, a French ilm website, one inds a Petit blog du post-apo. he abbreviation allows for quicker and more eicient classiication as a way of ensuring generic enjoyment without losing too much time. When—as happens to us all from time to time—one is looking for cinematic pleasure that is generically guaranteed because it belongs to a genre. I imagine myself addressing some real or virtual salesperson to ask him, for tonight, about a good (post-)apo movie I can indulge in. I see myself explaining to him that I want to be able to take in and quietly savor the worst threats raining down on the world without the genericity of the scenes ever being called into question—yes, I tell him, I will all the more readily enjoy the general annihilation to come if the genre itself remains intact. What advice will he have for me? Blade Runner, perhaps, which, in a December 3, 2009, post on a blog hosted by the very serious Encyclopaedia Britannica, I ind classiied seventh in the genre’s hit parade—“#7, Blade Runner (Top 10 Post-Apocalyptic Films)”? With Blade Runner, and we’ll be returning to this, everything does indeed seem to be in place for enjoying a good old post-apo. Unless the genre’s simplicity is misleading, as the same blogger suggests a few lines further down, this

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time about John Carpenter’s hey Live. “Call it a pre-postapocalyptic movie, since it’s not clear, at the ilm’s end, whether earthlings or ETs will prevail.” Pre-post-apo, then? But doubt, I tell myself, would also be appropriate as far as Blade Runner is concerned, and today—thirty years ater its 1982 release—more than ever: Ater feverish debates nourished by the contradictory signs strewn from the irst version to the inal cut and including all of the director’s successive commentary, it would seem that many exegetes agree that the bounty hunter Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) is himself an android. If this were true, this would quietly shit Blade Runner’s plot to a kind of unavowed Terminator. What then is Blade Runner’s genre? Pre- or post-? Both at once, perhaps—prepost, if something like that is conceivable? Or why not quite simply apo, without any other preix? As soon as one starts to interrogate a genre, apo, which is constantly diversifying into pre- or post- or post- and pre-, which themselves subdivide into nuke or biological or naturalocatastrophic or extraterrestrial or something else, in short, as soon as one starts to grasp the apo as such, one is quickly led to a simple yet devastating question, an atomic one, if I may put it this way: Has there ever been a properly and literally apocalyptic ilm? It would seem, as I have already suggested, that the only veritable yet perhaps impossible law of the genre is as follows: he end of such a ilm will coincide with the end of the world. he inal fade-out is destined to be that of the end of everything, including of ilm, of that ilm we just saw. Which would end not only because there is nothing let to tell, but also and above all because its end includes—or is included in—general and generic disappearance. I must therefore repeat that I know of only one ilm that is worthy of this deinitively inal gesture that signs what is proper to the purely and absolutely apocalyptic genre: Lars 54

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von Trier’s Melancholia, a kind of hapax legomenon in ilm history that ends with this black screen where the inal point of the story afecting the characters and that of the universal history of humanity are mixed up at length and slowly but crazily exchanged—the one is constantly equivalent to the other in their mute oscillation. A hapax legomenon, really? Are not all ilms inhabited by the archi-fade-out of general annihilation? Every end of every ilm (not to mention the end of a series . . .) is no doubt the end of a world. And in this sense, cinema, ater all, is perhaps, each time unique, the apocalypse.

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any previously known sound, not even the eruption of a volcano. An immense spout of lame shot from the bowels of the earth as from a crater. he ground heaved, and only a few people caught a brief glimpse of the projectile victoriously cleaving the air amid clouds of glowing vapor. As far as Fritz Lang’s ilm is concerned, it is placed completely under the sign of the countdown, since it opens with this epigraph: “For the human mind, there is no never—at the most a not yet” (Es gibt für den menschlichen Geist kein Niemals, höchstens ein Noch nicht). But of course it’s for the scene when the rocket takes of that the director inaugurates the procedure that will leave such a major mark on so many ilms, apocalyptic or not. “Sixty more seconds,” announces an intertitle once everything for the launch is in place. Stretched out on their seats, the astronauts are waiting with a tense gaze, their hands ready to activate the control sticks. “Twenty more seconds,” “Ten more seconds.” . . . And then something incredible happens, something perhaps unique in silent ilm: he intertitle is animated: he frame of the sentence stays the same— “. . . more seconds!”—but the numbers inserted into it decrease as their size increases . . .

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CHAPTER 

Watchmen, or The Layering of the Cineworld

Let me start again. Before getting us lost in the drawers of the central iling system of genres and among all the categories in which ilms run and compete in their race to the end of the cineworld, we were fascinatedly watching the cosmic conlagration of two planets that closes the prologue to Melancholia. his collision was already seen in the 1951 When Worlds Collide. But in that ilm it was a version that now seems toned down, prodded toward a “happy ending,” since in the ilm humanity is able at the last minute to construct a spatial Noah’s Ark to conserve a few samples of so-called intelligent animals elsewhere than Earth. In addition, the image of the interplanetary crash is also diminished, as if it were put at a distance by the fact that it appears simply on the surveillance screen of the ship taking the survivors toward their future destiny. Juxtaposed with a shot of the rocket on its path toward the future, the lames of the apocalypse coming from interstellar telescoping are almost reduced to the little jets that decorate the plume projecting the refugees into the cosmos. Before Melancholia and When Worlds Collide, an analogous collision had come very close to happening in 1931, in

what is said to be the irst apocalyptic ilm in ilm history, Abel Gance’s End of the World. We expect it because the cosmic shock is constantly seen on the horizon as the comet gets closer to earth and we watch hurricanes and loods unleash while lost animals take light. In the end, the two celestial bodies just barely miss each other, but there has nonetheless been massive destruction. A few years ater he End of the World, the impact between the Earth and a wandering, “rogue planet” is also the motor for the plot of the irst episode of Flash Gordon, the series broadcast starting in 1936 and based on the eponymous comic strip. In fact, the ilm seems to keep the memory of the paper since the wipes of transition resemble either a page being torn or a magazine being leafed through. Ater the names of the producer (Henry MacRae) and director (Frederick Stephani), a bolt of lightning lacerates the screen, and underneath the layered thickness of a space that thus seems to be a pileup of images, the following shot appears: Buster Crabbe, credited in capital letters for the role of Flash Gordon, turns around and looks at us spectators directly in the eyes. A new rip, a new lightning bolt unveils yet another screen, each time drawing us one step further into the layers of the ilm: his time, it’s Jean Rogers in the role of Dale Arden; then Charles Middleton in the role of the Emperor Ming, and so on. From one lightning bolt to another we ind ourselves sent toward the irst chapter of the series, whose title is displayed (“he Planet of Peril”) while we see a sphere through the clouds that is supposed to be approaching Earth at high speed. Now we are in an observatory. An astronomer sitting behind his giant telescope turns toward Professor Gordon who has just come in (no, not Flash Gordon, not yet, for the moment it is just his scientist father): “We are doomed,” he tells him; “A planet is madly rushing toward the Earth and no 58

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human power will be able to stop it.” By telegram, the professor learns that there are scenes of panic all over the world. We see them in stock shots interspersed with captions—London, Rome, Paris, Shanghai, India, Africa, Arabia [sic—this is 1936]. . . . Another telegram brings the professor the news of the imminent arrival of his son Flash, who has come to join him, to be with him for the apocalypse. “He hopes to get here before it’s over.” It’s said in a tone of such banality that one gets the impression they are going to celebrate it together: hey are going to spend the end of the world with each other. And this time, it is not a lightning bolt that tears through the image, but another kind of wipe that lits up its lower-righthand corner to take us to the following shot of Flash’s plane on its way to his father. From one shot to the other, a page is turned. his is a comic-strip version of what we’ll see in 1951 at the beginning of When Worlds Collide when the holy Bible opens in front of our eyes to Genesis 6:12–13: And God looked upon the earth, and, behold, it was corrupt; for all lesh had corrupted his way upon the earth. And God said unto Noah, he end of all lesh is come before me; for the earth is illed with violence through them; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth. Here too, we are leaing through the pages of the Book. Why insist on the rhetorical artiices of cinematic narration found in these wipes? Apparently, in Flash Gordon, the ripping of a page is only there to remark and inscribe the superhero’s striking name into the image once again (the French versions of the comic strip published in the Journal de Mickey translated it as Guy L’Éclair). he procedure is somewhat cheap or—how to put WATCHMEN, O R TH E L AYER ING O F TH E CIN EWO R LD

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it?—lashy. In contrast, When Worlds Collide’s Holy Bible evokes the register of fables (here, that of the end of the world), that is to say that the verses from Genesis constitute a kind of moral exergue to the plot. Or perhaps leaing through the Book already announces the moment when the camera will go through the pages of all the books being microilmed in order to take them into the spatial Noah’s Ark: he traveling shot over the vertically arranged titles becomes a sample, like a drill core into the thickness of human knowledge (he Holy Bible, Anatomy of the Human Body, Practical Mathematics, Standard Agriculture, he Story of Mankind, Shakespeare’s Plays and Poems . . .). But beyond the aesthetic choices of the production or the narrative pretexts, these wipes are rooted further away, further back in ilm history. hey seem to bear within them the involuntary memory of an ancestor to ilm, the “lipbook,” which was also known as a kineograph in the version patented by John Barnes Linnett in 1868. Walter Benjamin ofered the following mention of it, with testamentary resonances, in the inal section of “Berlin Childhood”: I imagine that this “entire life” which people say lashes before the eyes of the dying is made up of pictures. . . . hey lash by at great speed, like the little books with tight bindings that were once the precursors of moving pictures. he thumb, pressing gently, would move across the side of the little books. hen, for a few seconds, pictures would appear which could not be distinguished from one another. As soon as it becomes a “whole life,” and in order to be one, a life would thus be a kind of ilm. But if it therefore is one life, that life that it will have been, this is also because it is considered from its end, like a stream of testamentary images

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that present themselves in the thickness of this leaingthrough [feuilleté] in which ilm is announced. By following the postapocalyptic plot of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, we will soon be wondering if death, the death of every living thing, is not every time an end of the world. Let us simply say for the moment, in a provisional way, that the instant of dying lends itself in an exemplary way to being represented as the recapitulation of a whole. And a whole that gives itself in its totality precisely to the extent that it is on the verge of no longer being. his is what we see in a sequence of Soylent Green (Richard Fleischer, 1973) that is both touching and irritating. Even before the credits, the ilm opens with the album of a disappeared world: an old family photo, an omnibus drawn by a horse, a trip into the mountains, a boy who is ishing; then, faster and faster, the irst accomplishments of aviation, cars, oil, consumption, and mass transportation; inally, detritus, waste, pollution, general congestion. . . . hen, ater the ilm’s title, one reads: “Year: 2022. Place: New York City. Population: 40,000,000.” It is in this overpopulated and sufocating universe that we discover horn (Charlton Heston) and Solomon (Edward G. Robinson) living in a tiny apartment they share. horn is a cop and Solomon is a “book.” In other words, according to a metonymy proper to the ilm’s lexicon, an old archivist who works for the police: “I am only an ordinary police book, not the Library of Congress,” answers Solomon (also called Sol) when horn chastises him for being too slow with his research. Yet behind what seemed to be a homicide related to nothing more than banal, ordinary criminality, Sol and horn have discovered a vast conspiracy destined to hide the intolerable truth: he nutritional wafers distributed by the Soylent Corporation are not made with plankton (which has long

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since disappeared from Earth), but with human cadavers. When Sol gets conirmation of this by speaking with other archivists, he decides he no longer wants to live now that he knows what he does. And the man-book he is makes his way to the ultramodern clinic where elderly people go to be euthanized. He chooses his favorite color (orange), his favorite kind of music (light classical), and signs ater double-checking that it really will last twenty whole minutes. And soon he is comfortably installed in a bed, enjoying archival images, stock footage of a world from before accompanied by the bucolic sounds of Beethoven’s Pastoral. It is as if we are watching a production of Disneynature with him. “Isn’t it beautiful?” he asks horn, who has come to join him. We are torn between being moved and annoyed as we see Charlton Heston’s tears fall while he watches the euthanasia of his old friend and the brief funeral ilm-oration for an Earth that is no longer. It is nonetheless still the case that the death of the manbook coincides with the act of leaing through the images of a lost cineworld. And this is what we must now interrogate: apocalypse-cinema as that structural moment of the ilm when it all, ater all, strips [s’efeuille]. To start to think of this stripping or this leaing, we now need to look at it very closely in the recent screen adaptation of another serial: Zack Snyder’s Watchmen (2009). Drawn from the series published monthly by DC Comics in 1986 and 1987, the ilm is immediately placed under the sign of an apocalyptic countdown. he context is that of the Cold War and its recurrent tensions. We hear a journalist who, on television, evokes a Soviet attack along the Afghan border and then a nuclear test in the Bering Sea not far from the Alaskan coast. And we learn that the Doomsday Clock that measures the risk of total atomic war was brought to ive 62

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minutes before midnight. he television show’s host asks one of his guests—Pat Buchanan, a conservative Republican and a Nixon adviser—what the chances are, on a scale from zero to ten, that the Russians will attack the United States. And the politician responds: “Zero. he Soviets would never risk going to war when we have a walking nuclear deterrent on our side.” his walking deterrent, of course, is Dr. Manhattan, one of the superheroes of the series, an atomic physicist who gained superpowers from an accident. We will have to return to this character, who, in Watchmen, combines various roles that are important to us: According to the logic of so-called deterrence, he incarnates the threat of the A-bomb at the same time as he incarnates protection against it; he is also the observer, the distant and clairvoyant watcher who adopts, like Voltaire’s Micromegas, what we know as the point of view of Sirius; inally, he is the one who presides over the countdown, he who is the son of a watchmaker and so loves watches. But there is another protagonist who is going to hold our attention irst of all: Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley), nicknamed ater the famous psychological diagnostic test conceived of by the Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach in 1921. In both the ilm and the comic strip, Rorschach’s face is almost always covered up with a piece of fabric on which forms and ink stains are constantly shiting and twisting as they pass from one into another in a permanent morphing. In short, Rorschach wears the image’s perpetuum mobile on himself: He is a walking screen on which are projected not a discrete series of stills (linked by what is called the phi phenomenon that is responsible for the illusion of movement in ilm), but absolute lux, the uninterrupted continuity of a luency, of a visual low without any break whatsoever. his is why, at the end of the ilm, Rorschach becomes quite simply the stubborn airmation that holds that there is WATCHMEN, O R TH E L AYER ING O F TH E CIN EWO R LD

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no solution of continuity, no intermittence or freeze-frame, no stasis, and especially not this irst or last stop, this archipause the end of time would be, once the needle on the Doomsday Clock inally arrives at midnight. Against all the countdowns running toward the extinction of movement, Rorschach is the stubbornness of the ininitely conluent luidity of contours; this is why he can declare against Dr. Manhattan, who, for him, incarnates the terminal zero of the A-bomb’s explosion: “Never compromise. Not even in the face of Armageddon.” In Anglo-Saxon culture, Armageddon (the place is named in Apocalypse 16:16) has become, no doubt through metonymy, a synonym for the Apocalypse itself. And what Rorschach thus represents is a principle of resistance, a force that defers the apocalyptic instant, pushing it away and putting it of for later. his force is what Paul, in his second epistle to the hessalonians, called katechon, in other words that which “restrains” (katechein, in Greek) the advent of the end of time, that which therefore postpones the parousia of full presence. And if the katechon thus delays the return of the Messiah or the Savior, it’s because, in a mediate way, it irst of all delays the coming of the Antichrist, which must necessarily, says Paul, precede that of the Christ: Now we beseech you, brethren, by the coming [tēs parousias] of our Lord Jesus Christ, and by our gathering together unto him, that ye be not soon shaken in mind, or be troubled, neither by spirit, nor by word, nor by letter as from us, as that the day of Christ is at hand. Let no man deceive you by any means: for that day shall not come, except there come a falling away irst, and that man of sin [tēs anomias: of the absence of law] be revealed [apokaluphthē], the son of perdition [tēs apōleias: of destruction]; who opposeth

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and exalteth himself above all that is called God, or that is worshipped; so that he as God sitteth in the temple of God, shewing himself that he is God [thus the Ante- or Antichrist]. Remember ye not, that, when I was yet with you, I told you these things? And now ye know what withholdeth [to katechon] that he might be revealed [apokaluphthēnai] in his time [en tōi autou kairōi]. For the mystery of iniquity [tēs anomias: of the absence of law] doth already work: only he who now letteth [hō katechōn] will let, until he be taken out of the way. And then shall that Wicked [ho anomos: the lawless] be revealed [apokaluphthēsetai], whom the Lord shall consume with the spirit of his mouth, and shall destroy with the brightness of his coming [tēi epiphaneiai tēs parousias autou: through the appearance of his presence]. Mutatis mutandis, Rorschach would be the one who does not want revelation, or ultimate brightness, or the inal advent into the blinding light of presence. No archi-pause for the glorious image, he says: Let us defer instead; let’s defer the end and the ends of the (cine)world, ininitely. Film is a Western invention and is no doubt profoundly Christian. And far beyond the innumerable Hollywood screenplay variations on today’s Christ-like igures (to stay in the “apo” genre, we could mention the character of Eli, portrayed with brio by Denzel Washington in the recent Book of Eli by the Hughes Brothers in 2010). Film is Christian because it is interwoven with theologico-iconic concepts, like those of apocalypse, epiphany, and parousia. Yet the case remains that in Rorschach’s gigantomachy against Dr. Manhattan, in the end it is the latter who seems to win, pulverizing Rorschach with a wave of the hand, turning him into a blood-red stain on the polar snow. A smudge that,

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. . . until what we see, in huge capital letters that ill the entire screen, is absolute presence, the parousia of the cinematographic event.

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inally, will no longer move, a stain whose contours are stable in the end since it has been printed to make an image. But things are a bit more complicated than this. hat is to say they are co-implicated, folded up onto one another or into one another. First of all because, if we think of it—as I do here—as a ilmic arch-interruption, as an absolute suspension (epochē), the apocalypse-cinema incarnated by the atomic Dr. Manhattan is inscribed over and over every time into the viscous thickness of the imaging luency that is Rorschach’s face. he ilm does not explicitly state it, but we can suppose that it implicitly counts on the plot of the comic strip, which, for its part, gives the mask with moving smears an explanation that can be summarized more or less as follows. At the age of sixteen, Walter Kovacs (Rorschach’s real name) leaves the children’s home to which he had been entrusted to protect him from his mother, a prostitute to whose violence he had been subjected. He becomes a worker in the clothing industry, and, in 1982, he receives a special order for a dress to be made from a new fabric that is presented as a spin-of of Dr. Manhattan. he client does not come to get her order. No one wants these black-and-white motifs that change shape without ever mixing into gray, these spatters that are produced by the shits of two viscous luids, immiscible like water and oil, between two layers of latex. Kovacs, who personally inds them “very beautiful,” takes the dress back home, learns to cut it (using instruments heated so as to reseal the layers of rubber), and then gets tired of it. It is while reading the sordid details of the rape and death of the client in the newspaper that he decides to go back to the remains of his undesired dress to make a face from it that he’ll be able to look at in the mirror.

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hus everything that is being constantly redrawn on Rorschach’s ilm-face bears the signature, or the patent, in a way, of Dr. Manhattan. And this trademark is also the radical break, the archi-cut that keeps the two liquids pure of any mixture in the thickness of the layers of latex. he luent and luid images Rorschach produces are possible only thanks to Dr. Manhattan’s principle of caesura which crosses through them by layering them, giving them a foliated or laminated structure. In other words: here is distinction and diferentiation at work in the low called Rorschach; there is something layered within him. One senses this, in fact, when he irst appears at the beginning of the ilm, given that he is accompanied by the sheets of newspapers lying around the street. We realize this even more clearly when he is arrested, that is to say when he inds himself in prison facing the on-duty psychologist, who, to help understand him, presents him with the plates . . . of the test that bears his name. But the most gripping moment in the ilm is probably the one where we watch the nuclear explosion that will destroy New York. his is a major moment of leaing and stripping. Not only does the impact of the shock wave expanding throughout the city’s streets make posters and newspaper pages ly. But above all, the psychologist’s briefcase opens under the efect of the electromagnetic impulsion, and we see all the Rorschach test plates scatter in a succession of discrete images, like the pages of a big lip-book quickly sliding by before general annihilation. Kineography, as Walter Benjamin sensed, is always leafed through on the threshold of the end of a world. In other words, from the perspective of the cinematic apocalypse to come.

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CHAPTER 

Sunshine, or The Black-and-White Radiography

When Dr. Manhattan is teleported into the studios of the show Face to Face, where he has been invited, the producer mumbles that “this blue is too light for television” but that there is, unfortunately, “not enough time for makeup.” Dr. Manhattan is in efect a kind of pop allegory for the blinding hypervisibility of nuclear energy. His name, as you know, is an allusion to the Manhattan Project, the American research program that made possible the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Over the course of the talk show, we learn that the nice azure-colored giant literally irradiates through his presence, given that those who have been in close contact with him sufer from cancer. We then follow him as he goes far back into his memories. He recounts his accident, his atomic disintegration, and his reconstruction, now that he has been given extraordinary capacities that turn him into a veritable ambulant bomb or nuclear power plant. He tells how Nixon personally asked him to intervene in Vietnam in January 1971. And this reminds us of a previous sequence, a kind of remake of the famous scene from Apocalypse Now, which showed him in action against the Vietcong, blithely scorching the communist enemy to the sounds of “he Ride of the Valkyries.”

he war-hawk rhetoric of the irradiated and irradiating doctor is clearly lacking in the dark humor of that other doctor, Strangelove, in Kubrick’s great Dr. Strangelove (1964). A ilm in which we discover, in burlesque tones, that the Soviets have constructed the “Doomsday Machine,” an underground complex of ity so-called “dirty” bombs, in other words bombs that are enriched with cobalt, which produces a “doomsday shroud,” a lethal, radioactive cloud that surrounds the Earth for ninety-three years. One of the ilm’s comic refrains is the ghost of the “gap,” of the fear of a break or of being late in the arms race. hus does the Soviet ambassador explain to the president of the United States that the USSR was even afraid of missing out on universal annihilation, of dragging their feet or dilly-dallying behind its opponent in the race to the apocalypse. He speaks of a “Doomsday gap,” as if it were a question of limping to catch up with the other in order to be perfectly synchronous on the Last Judgment’s inish line. Or of coming together, of having one last perfectly coordinated orgasm, so much does this ilm constantly superimpose the lexicon of war with that of sex. here has already been a irst big-little death when the H-bomb explodes, ridden as a phallus by Major T. J. “King” Kong (Slim Pickens), like a cowboy enjoying one last rodeo before the end of time. his fatal detonation in turn sets of the Doomsday Machine’s countdown, which will seal the end of the world and the end of the ilm through a series of successive delagrations. Kubrick uses stock footage showing diferent American atomic trials, starting with Trinity on July 16, 1945, in Alamogordo, New Mexico, and going through the tests on the Bikini atoll starting in 1946. his is all accompanied by Vera Lynn’s voice as she interprets “We’ll Meet Again,” a hit song from the Second World War. We’ll see each other again, yes, “don’t know where, don’t know when, but I know we’ll meet again. . . .” Who is the 70

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“you” the song is singing to here? Whom does it address by promising him or her a later meeting? And who is this “I” who speaks or sings like this? Perhaps it is quite simply the world. he world that calls and interpellates itself. he world that was and that hopes one day to be again, “some sunny day.” Unless this radiant day is precisely this one, jetzt, the great now of Doomsday, the parousia at the end of the countdown, the ultimate day of blinding apocalyptic clarity when the world appears fully to itself by disappearing. here have been a lot of these ilmic occurrences of atomic explosions. Each time, there is the same sequence of events, the same succession that is repeated and nonetheless continues to fascinate: white screen, ball of ire, mushroom cloud, and radioactive fallout on Earth. Or else there is a detonation

Stanley Kubrick, dir., Dr. Strangelove, 1964

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in extraterrestrial space, and we see an artiicial dawn beyond the atmosphere. . . . hese successions that give rhythm to the nuclear holocaust have been conjugated into every possible tone. Comic or burlesque in Kubrick. Heroico-lyric and wellmeaning, like at the end of Armageddon (Michael Bay, 1998), when Harry Stamper (Bruce Willis) sacriices himself to set of the bomb that will pulverize the giant asteroid heading toward Earth. Objective and documentary, as in he Day Ater (Nicholas Meyer, 1983), where, ater a zoom away that distances us from Kansas City, we see the screen turn white, the electrical blackout (in a movie theater, the projection stops), the motors of cars that don’t start, the lash, the image that moves into black and white and then into sepia, while in the background an orange-red mushroom cloud rises. And in particular, the dissolved bodies that are x-rayed in their bony and disintegrated skeletons. he light that radiates because it irradiates as no other does, nuclear radioluminescence, as blinding as it is lethal, annihilating in this way exactly that of which it produces the hypervision. Here, ilm

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goes up in lames, its power of scopic penetration reaches a burning point, and it becomes hyperbolic (we can even see through bodies) even as it cancels itself out in the fade to an overall whiteout. As Akira Mizuta Lippit writes in a remarkable essay devoted to the conjoint birth of the x-ray, ilm, and psychoanalysis: he extravisibility of the X-ray is an efect of its inlammatory force. X visuality. It sees by burning and destroying. An extravisuality that cineies. his cinefaction that would be the proper work of the atom should be understood along with the two possible readings of the preix “cine-,” linked as they are by a kind of secret homonymy that unites ash and movement, incineration and cinema. “To cinefy,” Lippit concludes, is both “to make move, to make cinema and to incinerate, to reduce to ashes.” We will have to take this term of cinefaction very seriously because, far more than a mere play on words, it may well be the knot where the themes and stakes of apocalypse-cinema are tied together. At issue is no more and no less than the way in which signs form a signifying regime in ilm, in other words what we will be calling cineication. I will return to this right away ater a detour through other black or white screens, the two extremes where, like a freeze’s slowness and pyrotechnical speed, ilm touches on its limits. On the acinema of the end of the (cine)world. Danny Boyle’s Sunshine opens onto a dark gray background where the weak light of a dying sun sickly trembles. And we learn that seven years earlier, under the code name Icarus I, a mission destined to restart our source of light and heat was sent into space. Unsuccessfully, for the team and the vessel have apparently gone lost in the cosmos. he ilm thus recounts S U N S H I N E , O R TH E B L ACKAN D WH ITE R AD I O GR APHY

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the odyssey of a second mission, Icarus II, over the course of which a group of astronauts will have to attempt to launch a huge, last-chance atomic bomb into the heart of the daylight star. “Our goal: to create a star within another star,” concludes the of-screen voice of Robert Capa (Cillian Murphy), the commander of Icarus II, while the shot approaches the paling sun that grows to ill the screen in a fade to white. But no, this is no longer the sun. he camera pulls back and starts a slow panoramic shot where little by little we discover the huge metal shield made up of countless pivoting panels that protects Icarus II against immediate annihilation, like its ancient ancestor whose wax wings melted under the efect of the heat. he panoramic shot concludes, and we are now behind it, on the nocturnal side of the protective screen, where the inhabited spatial vessel propelling it takes cover in the shade. Soon, as this cosmic parasol continues its route into the heart of the solar system, we see it surrounded by a growing and ever more blinding luminous aura. We get the impression that we are witnessing the formation of a fragile artiicial solar eclipse. Or else the slow contraction of a black pupil— Icarus—at the center of an iris of ire. Cut: Here we are in the spatial vessel’s “observation room” where Searle (Clif Curtis), the mission’s psychologist and doctor, is dazzled as he looks at the sun’s light. He speaks to the onboard computer; he would like to lower the degree of iltering as much as possible; he would apparently like to allow himself to be looded without limits by this radiance that is as fascinating as it is mortally wounding to the retina. For thirty seconds, he will be allowed to see only 3 percent of a full luminosity that would be immediately fatal for his eyes. But what seconds they are! Searle, who has put on his sunglasses, gropes around like a blind person with panting breath. Backlit, he appears to us, literally overexposed to this 74

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luminous low, on the point of being dissolved into its whiteness, like the bodies illuminated by nuclear delagration. Upon his return to the other members of the crew, Searle recounts that, according to the psychological studies he has read on the efects of sensory deprivation, total darkness is an element in which we loat but without dissolving into it: “You and darkness are distinct from one another.” But, he adds ater a pause, “Total light envelops you, it becomes you.” What Searle is describing ater his exposition to solar irradiation is thus the experience of a penetrating hypervisibility that, just like the x-rays discovered by Wilhelm Röntgen, provokes the collapse of the surface separating the inside from the outside: In the X-ray image . . . you are in the world, the world is in you. . . . One of Röntgen’s irst published X-ray photographs is of his wife’s let hand, which was taken in the inal months of 1895. . . . he image depicts Berthe’s skeletal structure and the bones that constitute her hand, but also the wedding ring that hovers on the surface, iniltrating her hand from the outside. In this image realized the very year that cinema was invented, the ring seals the alliance between the inside and the outside of the body, which inds itself leveled—exscribed, writes Lippit—onto a surface that nonetheless remains inhabited by a kind of spectral foliation. Of these bodies as they appear in the radiography or heliography that confuses their interior and their exterior, one cannot simply say that they are in the world. his is why, in the apocalyptic or revelatory moment of their dissolving overexposure, they are the site of a double eclipse. he eclipse through which they fugitively obfuscate the irradiating light S U N S H I N E , O R TH E B L ACKAN D WH ITE R AD I O GR APHY

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“Now,” says the ilm—and an intertitle has no doubt never been so simply, so extremely performative, even as it does nothing more than designate the moment: this one, this photogram. hat is to say the one that will immediately follow. Because this absolute deictic, like a stretched cinematographic index inger that aims at the pure presence to itself of the image on the screen, is at the same time the ilmic gap—however tiny it may be—between this image here and the other one. But it is not only in ilm that, starting with Fritz Lang, we count down this way: Another countdown inhabits and haunts the history of ilm, the one that happens each time before the ilm, as its preparation. he decreasing numbers— what Americans call the “academy leader” or the “countdown footage”—measure the time remaining before the ilm itself properly begins. Before the ilm and within the ilm, then, we count down. And once the end inally arrives, the parousia of the muchexpected great now (jetzt) immediately collapses into deferral, into the adjournment of the image to come, the following one, the next one. he distance that opens at the end of the countdown—but also, already, in each one of its digits, in each one of its stations—is the paradoxical time of apocalypse-cinema. he time, perhaps, of ilm itself, insofar as it could be said to be always on the threshold of its end.

THE L AST MAN ON EARTH, OR FILM AS COUNTDOWN

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is also the one that, at the same time, eclipses—perhaps permanently—the world that they carry and that carries them. In a July 2007 interview on the rottentomatoes.com website, a journalist says to Danny Boyle: “Everyone’s comparing Sunshine to 2010 and 2001 but I am always looking for lavors of Apocalypse Now.” And the director answers that Coppola’s masterpiece, freely adapted from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, is in efect his favorite ilm, with the starting point for Sunshine being a kind of “journey into the heart of lightness.” But Boyle immediately adds that, when you do a “space movie,” there are always ilms like 2001 and Alien that “hover over you the whole time.” One does indeed constantly have a sense of this ghost of 2001 haunting Sunshine. At the end of the movie, on the snowy expanse covering the Earth, there is even an explicit salute to Kubrick’s monolith: three black blocks that, because of their number, also recall the numeric multiplication and proliferation of this monolith in 2010, the sequel directed by Peter Hyams where the cosmos ends up being invaded by them. But above all, it is through the insistence of the visual motif of the eclipse that Sunshine inscribes itself into the tradition of 2001, where the black rectangle obfuscating the light can be read, not without Nietzschean resonances, as a reinscription onto the screen of what I have elsewhere called the ilmic gap, in other words, basically, editing as diférance. Yet as Searle explains at the beginning of the mission, fading into monolithic darkness and fading into solar whiteness are not the same things. here is a diference between these two indiferentiations, between these two acinematic limits of the cinema. And it’s because absolute darkness does not destroy or consume the gaze as the sun does in Sunshine at the moment of epiphanic bedazzlement. “hey had an epiphany; they saw the light,” says Searle when he discovers the 76

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remains of the Icarus I crew, annihilated by the sideration and cineration of the solar rays. he only properly apocalyptic ilmic moment (and let us not forget that in Greek, apokalupsis means revelation, unveiling, uncovering) would thus be the blinding white lash of luminous irradiation. Like the one we see, for example, when Searle, sacriicing himself to save his mission, rejoins the cadavers of Icarus I, waiting with them for the unfurling of the explosive wave of light that will dissolve him into whiteness. And in particular like the one we see when Capa is inally able to place the explosive charge the size of Manhattan into the heart of the sun: Insistently, a lood of ire surrounds the transigured face of the surviving hero for a long moment. his blinding clarity is what Lippit, playing with a capital A that is the very initial for the atom, calls A-visuality. A-visuality, like the way we speak of the A-bomb. And this is precisely what we ind once again in he War Game, a documentaryiction directed by Peter Watkins for the twentieth anniversary of Hiroshima in 1965 and censored by the BBC (“too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting,” said a station communiqué). In one of the most gripping scenes of this quasi reportage, we irst see a white screen, and then a child screaming in pain with his hands over his eyes. Implacable from the very beginning, the of-screen voice comments: At seven-tenths of a millisecond ater the explosion, and at a distance of 60 miles, the light from the ireball of a single megaton thermonuclear device is 30 times brighter than the midday sun. his little boy has received severe retinal burns from an explosion 27 miles away. he moment of radiographic or heliographic blinding can be found conjugated into all possible tones, oscillating between the extremes of documentary realism and futurist S U N S H I N E , O R TH E B L ACKAN D WH ITE R AD I O GR APHY

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iction. From Sunshine to he War Game, the apocalypse is white. Just as it also is, in fact, at the end of Melancholia, in the dazzling instant of the collision properly speaking, before the mute, black screen on which it all concludes. And just as it is yet again, very recently, in Abel Ferrara’s 4:44 Last Day on Earth (2012), where the intertwined bodies of Cisco (Willem Dafoe) and Skye (Shanyn Leigh) dissolve into brightness. In the whiteness of the inal holocaust, in the burning of everything that cauterizes even the gaze, we might say, taking up Derrida’s words on literature in the age of the atom and applying them to ilm: Nuclear war [or as was stated a few pages earlier, “total and remainderless destruction of the archive”] has not taken place; it is a speculation, an invention in the sense of a fable or an invention to be invented: to make it take place or to prevent it from taking place (as much invention is needed for the one as for the other), and for the moment all this is only literature [read: “ilm”]. he annihilation of the general explosion, we were saying in front of Melancholia, is just that: cinema ater all. And it is perhaps even cinema’s privileged place, there in any case where ilmic pyrotechnics is triumphant and taken to its heights as it unfurls in what are called “special efects” (even if they are actually the norm, starting with Méliès’s ilms), in the proliferation of these “visual efects” that the English language abbreviates VFX and which, like x-rays or solar rays, erase the image the better to efectuate it in its efectiveness: Are radiography or heliography not in efect—or, yes, in efects—the power par excellence for modifying the visible? Is this not, so to speak, the source of the cosmetic principle whose demonstration we watch in so many scenes of “radiation” (in the double sense of this horrible word)? 78

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Robert Wise, dir., he Day the Earth Stood Still, 1951

Gort, the hominoid robot from he Day the Earth Stood Still (Robert Wise, 1951), disintegrates the shotguns of soldiers with the blinding whiteness of his visual ray. In the same way, in Earth vs. Flying Saucers (Fred F. Sears, 1956), it is with an emission of white light that the Earth’s living beings and monuments are annihilated by extraterrestrial lying saucers that thus reorganize and partially erase newsreels from the Second World War (Orson Welles will cite these images as emblematic of the efectiveness of VFX in the 1974 F for Fake). In the same way once again, in he Core (Jon Amiel, 2003), lightning cracks over Rome due to the dysfunction of the Earth’s electromagnetic ield; and the so-called eternal city sees itself reduced to ashes, in other words redrawn, digitalized, and then erased, crossed of under our eyes and for our eyes. And so on and so forth, in countless sequences where we see the eclipse of a part of the image at work, in other words its alteration in action. All of these S U N S H I N E , O R TH E B L ACKAN D WH ITE R AD I O GR APHY

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images, as images, seem to be in fusion, in the midst of becoming liquid to become something else, to invent and reinvent themselves in the ictive efectiveness of their efects. And yet if we (ever so slightly) alter “No apocalypse, not now,” and yet and for these very reasons, the eictive iction of luminous and general holocaust should be, paradoxically, the only real of ilm: his absolute referent of all possible literature [read “of all possible cinema”] is on a par with the absolute efacement of any possible trace. It is thus the only inefaceable trace, as trace of the wholly other. he only “subject” of all possible literature [read “of all possible cinema”] . . . its only ultimate and a-symbolic referent, unsymbolizable, even unsigniiable, this is, if not the nuclear age, if not the nuclear catastrophe, at least that toward which nuclear discourse and the nuclear symbolic are still beckoning: the remainderless and a-symbolic destruction of literature [read: “of cinema”]. It is in this eictive space that cinema efectuates itself in efects. he space of its signs and of its ashes, the space of its cineication. Here and now, jetzt: acinema.

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CHAPTER 

Blade Runner, or The Interworlds

Let’s open an eye from the end of the world (of the ilm). Or rather: Let’s open it ater all, remembering that passage from he World as Will and Representation where Schopenhauer airms that “the suns and the planets without an eye to see them” are nothing, for “the existence of the whole world still remains dependent on the opening of that irst eye, even if it only belonged to an insect.” So the world would thus exist only when facing someone, only when it exists for a gaze that opens onto it or that opens it to itself? Could the world then exist, for example, in the way an insect’s eyes constitute it, like in the unforgettable subjective shot from he Fly (Kurt Neumann, 1958), where André sees the face of his wife, Helen, screaming in terror and difracted through his own eyes that have become the eyes of a ly? Would there be as many worlds as there are eyes? Or even, if it is true that every ilm constructs a gaze, as many worlds as there are visions or viewings? he world, Schopenhauer says in sum, was opened with the irst eye, whatever it may be, so much so that it will also close with it. But even more radically, we need to think that the world goes out, that it is the end of the world every time an eyelid closes forever, every time that the ultimate fade to

black takes place. Death, writes Derrida—and not only the death of a human but that of “every living being (animal, human, or divine)”—“death declares each time the end of the world in totality, the end of every possible world, and each time the end of the world as unique totality, therefore irreplaceable and therefore ininite.” In Blade Runner, the replicant Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) is neither animal nor human nor divine. Indeed. But he is nonetheless a mortal creature, and he even seems to have a certain access to his own mortality or initude, as is attested in these ultimate phrases addressed to Rick Deckard under a torrential rain that is soaking both of them: I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on ire of the shoulder of Orion. . . . All those moments will be lost in time like tears in rain. When Roy’s eye closes ater these words in a blink that the slight slowing or freezing of the shot underlines and discreetly prolongs, a world is thus lost. Drowned. A world that was not one world but indeed the world, given that it included all worlds: this one, the earthly one, where replicants are prohibited and persecuted; and the other ones, the ilm’s “of-worlds,” worlds in the margin or at the edge of the world that the advertising vessels suspended above the dystopic 2019 Los Angeles are constantly vaunting as new worlds where one can emigrate, where one can leave to restart and remake one’s life, leeing a planet Earth that has become uninhabitable. “A new life awaits you in the ofworld colonies—the chance to begin again,” a loudspeaker claims for the multicultural crowd in this earthly, all too earthly, megalopolis. Yet what is Roy’s world made of? Like the world of all the replicants—starting with Leon Kowalski (Brion James), the 82

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irst one we see being interrogated at the beginning of the ilm—his is also made of memories implanted by their constructor, the Tyrell Corporation. Montages of reminiscences, in sum, that also constitute the memory of Deckard himself, as Slavoj Žižek emphasizes in several admirable pages that he devotes to Blade Runner: he camera, he writes, “ofers a brief survey of his personal mythologies (old childhood pictures on the piano . . . ), with a clear implication that they also are fabricated.” Deckard’s images—his life, his world—lie around on the piano, scattered above sheet music, as if they were waiting for the music or the soundtrack that would allow for the audiovisual assemblage that would turn them into a movie—a movie about which Deckard could say: his is my movie, this movie that I am. In addition to the famous “I think, therefore I am” put into the mouth of Pris (Daryl Hannah), Žižek was right to note the assonance between Deckard’s name and Descartes’s. I am a ilm, therefore I am would be one way to state the pseudoCartesian formulation of these replicant androids that Blade Runner makes of us all. And this is why, when one of them dies—like Roy, who expires from a barely perceptible freezeframe under the pounding rain—it’s always the end of a ilm and the end of a world. So let’s open our eye back up ater the end of the world (of the ilm). Let’s watch it open back up when we watch the ilm again ater its end, from the initude that is counted down and in advance for us, as are the lives of Roy and the other replicants, as is the ilmic montage that they, and we, are. Los Angeles. November 2019. An urban landscape seen from above and from faraway. he city’s lights. Industrial smokestacks spit up lames; an airborne vessel passes by; lightning courses through the sky. BLADE RUNNER, OR THE INTERWORLDS

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Ridley Scott, dir., Blade Runner, 1982

A close-up of an eye. he camera lingers. We see little red veins in the white. Above all, we see the iris where what we had just been seeing is relected: the distribution of the starry spots in Los Angeles at night, the sparkling of this megalopolis coursed through with laming jets. We are now nearing a building in the shape of a pyramid; the air is still streaked with vessels that ly by in one direction and then in another. Once again, the eye, which ills the screen: once again, at the edge of the iris, at its border with the white of the ocular globe, the relection of the lames. he lames lick the inside of the eye, as if it were this eye itself that had to emerge from the infernal forge the Earth has become, as if in this vast planetary factory a new factory for the eyes was being prepared. We will not stop with the director’s commentary accompanying the ilm’s inal cut in 2007 (“he eyeball really was the symbol of the ever-watchful eye. . . . he eyeball represented that eye of Orwell”). We will not allow ourselves to be intimidated by this so-called authorized discourse of the author who, apparently, gives in to his own cliché when he watches his ilm and thinks he can ind Big Brother’s gaze relected in it. We will much rather remember another sequence, one of the innumerable sequences (one need only think of the red eyes of the replicants, of the test that examines their pupils, of Leon who tries to dig his ingers into Deckard’s eyes . . . ) 84

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where the optical and the ocular are visibly at stake. his unforgettable moment is in efect, once again, that of the construction—or better still: the grat—of the gaze. he two replicants, Roy and Leon, are able to ind the lab where Chew (James Hong) is making the most important of the spare parts that contribute to their android assemblage: the organ of their vision. he building is identiied from the street by a kind of glowing red globe, something like a sign in relief to one side of which we can make out the word “eye.” Roy and Leon go in. he next shot, inside the lab kept at a freezing temperature, shows Chew, who, with chopsticks, is taking an eyeball out of a liquid to put it under his microscope. Chew himself is wearing ocular prostheses on his forehead, magnifying glasses he is using for his job that look like antennae. Everything in the room is frozen: Only Chew’s face is uncovered while his entire body is protected by a heating suit. It is freezing in the place where it is not a pause in the sequence or a freeze-frame but what we might call a freeze eye that takes place. Roy and Leon come up to Chew from behind; they tear of his suit and thus expose him to the cold at the same time as they question him about the Tyrell Corporation. But Chew doesn’t know anything, or says he doesn’t know anything, nothing beyond what he deals with, eyes: “Don’t know, don’t know such stuf. I just do eyes. Just eyes . . . I design your eyes.” At which point Roy, looking straight into Chew’s eyes and antennae, gives him the following reply: “Chew, if only you could see what I’ve seen with your eyes,” says the replicant from another planet, if only you, the human, could see what I have seen with your eyes. It is impossible to decide if the eyes he is speaking of (“your eyes”) are the ones Chew has fabricated or if they are the eyes of Chew himself. If it is the eyes made by humans for the androids or if it is the eyes of the humans themselves. BLADE RUNNER, OR THE INTERWORLDS

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Ridley Scott, dir., Blade Runner, 1982

Condemned to this undecidability, I watch Roy and Chew look at each other, plunging their gaze into the other’s gaze, wholly other and yet so alike. And I wonder who is looking with the eyes of whom, who is looking into whose eyes through whose eyes. Suspended in these several seconds that seem to want to freeze before me into an eternity, I wonder in particular what happens in between their eyes that ixate upon each other like this. “When our eyes touch,” asked Derrida, “is it day or is it night?” And speaking of this impossible, unsustainable time when gazes go blind from looking at one another, he added: At this instant, here, is it daytime? And does this instant belong to time? To the time of the earth? To time tallied by this turning around the earth known as the inite course of a sun? Is it a day? Is it night? Appropriating an old word from ancient Epicurean philosophy, let us call this suspense of eyes in eyes an interworld. We will have to say—as you can no doubt sense—that in the interworlds as well, the end of the world, each time unique, also takes place.

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CHAPTER 

Twelve Monkeys, or The Pipes of the Apocalypse

“Between two worlds,” writes Cicero in his De divinatione (I, XVII): his is where, he says, Epicurus situated the house of the gods. And in Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laertius, practically the only ancient source through which Epicurus’s writings have survived for us, we ind a reproduction of his Letter to Pythocles, where we can read a deinition of a world (kosmos) and a hypothesis about its formation or birth: he world is a collection of things embraced by the heavens, containing the stars, the earth, and all visible objects [panta phainomena]. his collection, separated from the ininite [apo tou apeirou], is terminated by an extremity . . . and that such worlds are ininite in number is easily seen, and also that such a world can exist both in the world and in the interworlds [metakosmioi, with meta signifying here among, in the midst of . . . ], as we call the space between the worlds [metaxu kosmon diastema]. How should we understand that worlds are thus created in or among other worlds? And, in particular: How might this

idea of interworlds be brought back to life by bearing a way of thinking acinema or cinematic apocalypse? But this question is no doubt poorly posed. Because it is not a question of resuscitating and giving life back to an ancient concept by transplanting it from its original soil into the ield of ilm, as if it were possible to straddle more than two millennia like that. We must rather lend an ear to the way this concept has reverberated right up to today, through echoes that are certainly intermittent or diverted, but that also give it new resonances. In particular, we need to wonder: What relation, what splice is there between, on the one hand, a concept of the interworld that blinks, one might say, in an intermittent way in the history of philosophy and, on the other hand, the instant of the gazes crossing and being exchanged, like those of Ray and Chew in Blade Runner? We should also remember the ine sequence from the 1953 adaptation of he War of the Worlds by Byron Haskin where a man and a woman—Clayton Forrester (Gene Barry) and Sylvia Van Buren (Ann Robinson)—hide ater having miraculously escaped the general destruction set in place by the Martians who have come to Earth. When they ind themselves being hunted down by an extraterrestrial ocular tentacle—by an “electric eye” that, says Clayton, is “like a TV camera”—they hold their breath as they whisper: “It is looking for us.” his camera-eye is looking for us, they of course mean to say; this cinematic gaze noted on the screen is on the lookout for us. But it is impossible not to hear as well that it is looking for us, in place of or instead of us, as if Clayton, in his innermost self, were secretly imagining the insane visual transaction Roy is thinking of when he speaks out loud: “If only you could see what I’ve seen with your eyes.” What we need to grasp is thus what happens in the metacosmic interval, as Epicurus would say, when eyes touch and 88

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dream of replacing one another. What in efect happens when a pair of eyes brushes up against the gaze of the wholly other, of this wholly other that every other is? What happens, in sum, when the impossible and the unthinkable, in other words an exchange of views, is on the point of arriving? When the shock of worlds is announced between the subjective cameras or ilmic cuts that we are, as are Roy or Deckard? When, as Schopenhauer says, “the opening of that irst eye” encounters another archi-pupil, another iris, each one opening up and carrying a world? In this case, the interworld is then the place without place of an apocalyptic blindness (“Is it a day? Is it night?”) where the cineworld concludes. Not at its term or its end, though, not ater the countdown of the plot or the story, but in the middle, in the between that opens up in its own heart, that distends or tears it. Here, too, worlds collide. Here, too, there can be a issure and a crack in the world. hus are there slits and crevices along which the world moves away from itself. here are edits where the initude of the cineworld, the end, is reinscribed anew into the Rorschachian foliation, in between the lip-book’s pages and as if it were their very separation. If we enter into these cracks and try to stay there, to sojourn there for however small an amount of time (supposing that we can stay even for a moment there where only gods or ghosts survive), we are overtaken by vertigo. A dizzying and dazzling swirl both takes us to the opening breach, sucks us into the holes torn that never fail to split the world and turn it into the play of spacing and temporization that it is. By falling (whether from vertigo or sleep), we rush into a world that turns out, from end to end, to be nothing other than an interworld. Opening credits. T W E LV E M O N K E Y S , O R TH E PI PE S O F TH E A P O C A LY P SE

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A fractal image opens Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys (1995, based on Chris Marker’s 1962 “photo-roman,” La Jetée). Twelve ape-like forms cut out in black within a halo of red form a circle that is slowly turning clockwise. his circle contains another one that is identical and narrower and turns a little faster. his second circle contains another one, the same, and so on and so forth, with ever increasing speed. . . . he efect, of course, directly reminds us of the rotating disks from Saul Bass’s opening credits for Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). We plunge into the ape-like rings of this tunnel; crossing through the pipe or tube, they break open perpendicular to the screen’s surface and leading into its depth. To go where? To ind ourselves where? he tunnel leads to the title, Twelve Monkeys, we zoOM onto the O that, punctuated by a pistol shot, is doubled and difracted into two round pupils: the intense gaze and wide-open eyes of a child. By taking on this fascinated gaze, we witness a dazzling instant and a white apocalypse. Reverse shot: As in so many of the other radiant and irradiated images we have discussed, this image is overexposed, and it unfolds in slow motion, in suspension. In short, the scene tends toward the blinding parousia of a great now, of a jetzt on the verge of becoming still in the archi-freeze-frame of the end of time. Or rather, here, of the end of a life, in other words of the end of this cineworld, of this foliated kineograph James Cole (Bruce Willis) is, he whose story ends hic et nunc in this airport corridor. He whose story is also yet to come, since it provides the movie’s story line. James Cole, who sees himself die, who sees himself fall as an adult with his eyes of a child, is one of those beings who, like the gods or ghosts of Epicurus, inhabits the interworlds. He lives in the metacosmic space that opens in the very heart of the ilmic kosmos, as the gap between the ilm and itself. 90

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Terry Gilliam, dir., Twelve Monkeys, 1995

He is desperately looking for the ability to stay in the present, to hang on and keep himself there, as he says at the end of the story, before inding himself in the same airport corridor as at the beginning, but this time with other eyes, with the eyes of the man who collapses under the police oicer’s rounds of ire and under the watch of the child he was. In the bathroom, in front of the mirror where he looks at himself to put his fake mustache back on, Cole hears the voice that oten haunts and speaks to him; in a hoarse whisper, it tells him,

Terry Gilliam, dir., Twelve Monkeys, 1995 T W E LV E M O N K E Y S , O R TH E PI PE S O F TH E A P O C A LY P SE

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“You don’t belong here; it’s not permitted to let you stay.” To which Cole protests, in a tone of rising anger: “his is the present. his is not the past, not the future. his is right now!” Furious, he throws himself toward a stall’s door under which the camera has allowed us to see a pair of pants around shoes; he swings it open, and, inding a perfectly unknown person getting dressed, he screams in his face: “I’m staying. Got that?” Cole has entirely become the imperious and raging desire to be there, jetzt, presently, right now, to ind a way to anchor himself, here and now, somewhere, in a time and place worthy of that name, somewhere that is no longer in between. his is his drama and his cinematic allegory, he who has constantly moved through the passages and metacosmic pipes and conduits of time and space. First of all, space. Ater the prologue in the airport seen through the eyes of the child, we in efect discover Cole putting on a sealed latex suit and then a kind of clear spacesuit, a portable bubble in which he prepares to return to the surface of the Earth. He makes his way through an airlock that evokes the tubular corridor of a spaceship, he takes an elevator up toward the sewer, toward the reticulated system of piping that irrigates or drains what is let of Manhattan: a deserted city, as we learn by making our way with him into the world up above, where only insects (Cole takes a few samples of them) and a few animal species (we see a bear and a lion go by) survive; humanity has taken refuge underground ater the bacteriological catastrophe that devastated the planet in 1996. But this irst excursion by Cole, who turns out to be a prisoner used as a guinea pig for a series of medical experiments, is only a prelude to other missions that will take him elsewhere: He will be made to go back in time to try to ind the origin of the virus that exterminated ive billion people. Here, 92

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too, he will constantly be making his way through tunnels, bowels, corridors, istulae, and other cavities. his is how he ends up being sent back to 1990 by mistake, and when he disappears to return to the future he had let, the head doctor of the psychiatric hospital where he had found himself locked up looks perplexedly at the ceiling of his cell: “Are you trying to tell me,” he says to the nurses and Dr. Kathryn Railly (Madeleine Stowe), “that a fully sedated, fully restrained patient somehow slipped out that vent, replaced the grill behind him and that he’s wriggling through the ventilation system right now?” he tubular hole these stunned psychiatrists are looking at is an opening that is both intradiegetic (it is this aeration the characters are looking at in the world of the story being told) and metadiegetic (it corresponds to a leap in time, or to a gap in the way of telling this story). It is thus two holes in one with the narrated breach in a way remarking the narrative or narrating breach. In diferent terms, this is what we also mean when we say that an interworld opens in the world. 1990 was a mistake. he prisoner James Cole is given a second chance to redeem himself and diminish his sentence: He is sent back for a second journey to 1996. But this time, we see the journey back in time as such. Cole is naked, in a capsule made of translucent plastic, wrapped in electrodes and hooked up to wires. We don’t really know if we are getting ready to watch a surgical intervention or the launch of a human rocket. Against a backdrop of dystopic satire à la Brazil, a whistle sounds the signal of the departure of Cole’s propulsion into the past through one of the ilm’s innumerable pipelines. And what we then see is a brief procession of abstract forms in black and white. But T W E LV E M O N K E Y S , O R TH E PI PE S O F TH E A P O C A LY P SE

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wait, it all goes by so quickly, everything happens so fast, that I have to go back several times in order to watch these several seconds in slow motion. Yes, that is really what it is: his time travel, Cole’s temporal odyssey, is a kind of pure succession of vertical and horizontal lines, like a traveling shot along an endless barcode, as if backlit window frames were coming one ater the other, or as if we were watching the rapid procession of frames framing and separating images, in short, like a rewinding without anything really to rewind, a pure form of rewinding. And there Cole is sent . . . right back into the First World War. Wrong again. He hardly has the time to appear stark naked in a trench and for his leg to be wounded in the middle of the battle when he is sent back in the other direction, toward the future anterior of that year of 1996 that it certainly seems diicult to aim at with any precision. he same sequence of barcodes, window frames, or empty images goes by, this time in the other direction, fast-forwarding. Here we are now (at least if we can still maintain this word now [maintenant] here) in Baltimore, where Dr. Kathryn Railly is giving a conference with the title “Madness and Apocalyptic Visions.” he story’s rhythm seems crazed, as if the implicit spectator were getting carried away with his diegetic remote control in hand, jumping from trips out to trips back, swerving around in the narration. In a virtuosic way, Twelve Monkeys in efect generalizes and exploits what we might call the igure of the narratological rewind (and its symmetrical fastforward counterpart) as we can already ind it and as we will ind it once again in many other ilms in the apo or post-apo repertoire. I started to compile a list of them. As a good and conscientious remote controller-spectator of apocalypses, I wrote down my favorite moments gathered here and there, pellmell, before or ater Terry Gilliam’s fascinating ilm. 94

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Here are a few of them. In S. Darko (2009), the mediocre sequel to Donnie Darko directed by Chris Fisher and released directly to video, entire sequences are run on a fast rewind. he electronic clocks of the little city of Conejo Springs in Utah start turning backward, counting down the time let before the end of the world, whose exact moment was announced by Samantha (Daveigh Chase) in one of the ilm’s irst scenes: “In 4 days, 17 hours, 26 minutes, and 31 seconds, that’s when the world will end,” she had said to Justin (James Laferty) before plunging with him in a dream to one of the innumerable temporal corridors that dig their way through the story. S. Darko in fact pays explicit homage to Twelve Monkeys and Strange Days: here are posters advertising them at the movie theater Samantha passes in front of before her car accident. And later on we will see these same ilm titles read backward, as if seen in a mirror. In Crack in the World (1964), the Dr. Stephen Sorenson (Dana Andrews) tries to ind the precise cause for the huge crevice that has appeared in the earthly crust. he atomic explosion that he set of to dig into the deepest depths of our planet should have allowed him to reach the magma, a new hope in terms of energetic resources. But it ended up leading to a veritable catastrophe: he Earth cracks and is at the risk of annihilation. his is why the eminent scientist watches ilms from the archives in reverse, documentary footage on nuclear tests. To his colleague and rival in love, Ted Rampion (Kieron Moore), he explains that in his edit, all of the shots are slowed down a hundred times and read backward (“the action is reversed”) so as to make the moment of the explosion properly speaking appear at the end. he blinding lash thus becomes the culminating point of a strange process whereby we see a series of atomic mushroom clouds retreat into themselves to curl up and disappear in a fade to white. T W E LV E M O N K E Y S , O R TH E PI PE S O F TH E A P O C A LY P SE

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CHAPTER 

Cloverfield, or The Holocaust of the Date

An anthology of diferent ways of staging or showing the date stamps of ilmic images would have to give pride of place to Cloverield (Matt Reeves, 2008), from the many time-codes that are superimposed before the opening credits even roll— as if to mark in advance the palimpsestic nature of the ilm getting ready to start—to the embedding of the date and time (amateur video–style): APR 27 6:41 AM, we read as an electronic seal stamped onto the irst shots, when Rob (Michael Stahl-David) and Beth (Odette Yustman) wake up from the night they spent together and get ready to prolong their happiness at Coney Island. MAY 22 6:43 PM, in contrast, indicates the camera’s internal clock when it later ends up in the hands of Jason (Mike Vogel), Rob’s brother, who will pass it to Hud (T. J. Miller), who will continue to ilm until the movie is almost over. he testament that any date is thus sticks to the ilm’s skin. And it is therefore the recording as such, it is the moving images of the cinematography that, as such, display what is essentially their testamentary structure. What does this mean? A date, as Derrida has clearly shown, is in efect something that testiies (testis in Latin, which gives testamentum).

his palindrome is a strange ilm in the ilm. It is as if in its thirty seconds it condensed the dramatic motivation for so many stories of the end of the world: the struggle between the two forces constituted by the katechon, on the one hand, and the apocalypse, on the other, a struggle that is conjugated into an ininite number of deferred or reversed countdowns, redirected toward a past from before the advent of the catastrophe. his same palindromic structure dictates the general form of the plot in he Day the World Ended (Roger Corman, 1955): he ilm, sometimes with involuntary humor with its irradiated post-apo mutants, opens with the words the end: “Our story begins with . . . the end!” reads the opening credit with a drumroll in the background. Yet the story ends with the image of a happy couple of refugees leaving for new horizons, a postcard for the future, punctuated by the inscription “the beginning.” he same is true in he World, the Flesh, and the Devil (Ranald MacDougall, 1959), where three survivors—two men and a woman this time around—move of into the distance on a deserted New York avenue while these same two words are inscribed onto the screen. When the beginning is written at the end (or, in the opposite direction, when everything starts with the end), this provides the ilmic igure par excellence for what treatises in rhetoric call hysterology. his is what the protagonist of he Day the Earth Caught Fire seems to dream of out loud: Even before we discover that nuclear tests have shited the Earth’s axis, creating an unprecedented heat wave and threatening life on the planet, Peter Stenning (Edward Judd), a journalist at the Daily Express, is with his head editor and imagines a little trick ilm—“Yeah, you know, the mushroom goes back into the bomb, and the bomb goes up into the plane . . .”

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We, however, need to go back and return to Twelve Monkeys. Cole, who kidnapped the doctor Kathryn Railly ater her conference on apocalyptic visions, inds himself with her in a motel. A cartoon is playing on TV; it’s an episode of Woody Woodpecker called Prehistoric Super Salesman (1969), where we watch the workings of a “time tunnel” invented by Professor Grossenibber, a mad scientist. While the hilarious woodpecker is on the point of being sent back to the Stone Age, Cole is sleeping in the room. And he dreams; in his sleep he always goes back to the same dream, the airport, the woman, the child, the collapsing man, all bathed in overexposed whiteness. Cole wakes up in front of the television, but he hardly pays any attention to the temporal tribulations of Woody, his cartoon alter ego. Instead he turns toward Kathryn—who is attached to the bed—and tells her that, for the irst time, he recognized her in his dream. She was the woman in the airport. Intrigued, Kathryn asks him to describe the scene to her. And when Cole, while speaking, gets up to go into the

Terry Gilliam, dir., Twelve Monkeys, 1995

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bathroom, we see a division of the image in the shot: We see him on the right side washing up at the sink while to the let of the dividing line represented by the door frame we watch Woody on television in the midst of being transported into prehistory before inding himself surrounded by dinosaurs. Cole’s recurring dream, I was saying, is a crack that opens in the layers of the cineworld by separating it from itself or (what no doubt comes down to the same thing) by folding it in on itself. A split or a fold thanks to which Cole, in efect, inds himself facing himself eye to eye with the child he was and yet light-years away from what he was: Between the two of them, between himself and himself, there is the apocalypse, that end of the world that the 1996 pandemic was. It so happens that this diegetic crack or fold (whose cinematic mark was, don’t forget, the procession of lines, a kind of traveling shot along the frames of the shots), this “crack in the world” now seems to have excavated within the image itself the spacing of an intertext between Cole and Woody, his other double: We witness a kind of split screen in the shot; the ilm seems to be torn between the story it is telling and the cartoon it is citing. he world of Twelve Monkeys becomes an intercineworld: Other ilms insinuate themselves into the ilm thanks to the distance (diastēma, Epicurus would say) being dug out within it. When Cole, ater one of the twists of plot that I will not recount here, is sent a third time from the future toward that fateful year of 1996, he hides with Kathryn in a movie theater where they both put on makeup, wigs, and other accessories as a disguise to escape from the ones who have them under surveillance. Now playing: Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958): “I think I’ve seen this movie before. When I was a kid. It was on TV,” says Cole. We see the famous scene in Muir Woods where the black-gloved inger of Madeleine (Kim Novak) points to the date of her birth and then of her own death 98

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among the growth rings of a sequoia. “It’s just like what’s happening to us,” Cole comments while Kathryn tries to put false mustaches on him. “he movie never changes—it can’t change—but every time you see it, it seems to be diferent because you’re diferent. You notice diferent things.” How are we to understand these words from Cole, beyond their immediate sense, beyond the direct analogy they name between Madeleine-(Judy)-Scottie and James-Kathryn, between these two stories of disguises, doubles, and time travel? Is it a mere banal plea for the open multiplicity of interpretations of a ilm that is supposed to seem diferent every time we watch it? It could, of course, be this, if it weren’t that these phrases obviously also apply to this ilm, to Twelve Monkeys, to the ilm we are in the midst of watching. For what happens ater this declaration of a fairly sententious credo of ininite cinematic hermeneutics? Cole falls asleep in front of Vertigo. He has dreamed while dozing of in the movie theater. He had the same dream again; it’s always the same one. From which he awakens having become the spectator of another ilm—in the meantime, the ilm has ended and another has begun—and he now inds himself blinking his sleepy eyes in front of Hitchcock’s he Birds (1963). He is facing Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren) as she struggles with her lashlight in the middle of the fowl that have invaded the attic. While Cole, still sleepy, attempts to keep his eyes open, Kathryn’s face, which he has just dreamed about again, is for a moment superimposed on Melanie’s in the ilm. Cole’s dreams, those time tunnels that transport him through the interworlds, these metacosmic tubes or pipes, now bring him to zap from ilm to ilm in the vast cineworldly archive. Once he emerges from his dream, Cole realizes with horror that Kathryn is no longer at his side, and he runs out of the movie theater with his wig and fake mustaches. here, in T W E LV E M O N K E Y S , O R TH E PI PE S O F TH E A P O C A LY P SE

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the vestibule, Kathryn is waiting for him to the sound of Bernard Hermann’s tormenting score for Vertigo: She has been transformed into a blond and appears to him bathed in artiicial light, like the one coming from the neon sign that illuminates Scottie and Madeleine-Judy’s kiss in the hotel. Kathryn and Cole look at each other, and they, too, kiss. hey tell themselves they have recognized each other, that they have always known each other in the (cine)world of the dream. In their eyes, the eyes of the one in the eyes of the other, in their deeply moving love scene, one imagines at every moment the opening of the ilmic abyss dug out by the dream odysseys between times and places. So much so that what is announced here while their eyes touch is already the whiteness of the ending, the blinding apocalypse of the glance exchanged between Kathryn and the young James that spans the end of all time. Is it day, or is it night? Is this black, or is it white? Sunshine or Melancholia? Apocalypse-cinema is also this metacosmic reverse shot, this archi-splice between two gazes, each one carrying a world and interworlds.

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CHAPTER 

The Road, or The Language of a Drowned Era

In one of the irst postapocalyptic science-iction novels written by James Ballard, in the 1962 he Drowned World, Lieutenant Hardman undergoes strange experiments performed by Dr. Bodkin, who is working with Kerans, the protagonist, to study the slow regression of living beings toward the reptilian era of Trias. A stiling tropical climate in efect reigns over our entire planet. he big capitals, like London, are plunged underwater. And humans, when they dream, return toward what Ballard calls “the archeopsychic past,” in other words they move back through the layers of the “metabiological” unconscious, which has kept the memory of the evolution of the species on a scale of hundreds of millions of years. Bodkin plays Hardman some strange recordings: A faint scratching noise came from a portable record player on the loor at Bodkin’s feet, a single three-inch disc spinning on its turntable. Generated mechanically by the pick-up head, the almost imperceptible sounds of a deep slow drumming reached Kerans, lost as the record ended. . . . Shaking his head slowly, Hardman pulled of the head-

phones and handed them to Bodkin. “his is a waste of time, Doctor. hese records are insane, you can put any interpretation you like on them.” . . . Bodkin stood up and put the record player on his chair, wrapping the headphones around the case. “Perhaps that’s the point, Lieutenant—a sort of aural Rorschach. I think the last record was the most evocative, don’t you agree?” Hardman shrugged with studied vagueness. hese records that accompany Hardman in his Triassian regressions are in a way archi-hits: One can hear or project what one wants in them, and what is important is that they function like a temporal tunnel, like what Ballard calls an “amnionic corridor,” in short as a channel that allows someone a “neurophonic” return to previous eras (57). In this archeophonography, we can hear music’s ability to step across the apocalypse; thanks to its power of anamnesis, music is able to cross over the abyss of the interworlds to transfer and reinstall us with all our footing in what was annihilated or lost. his is what Nietzsche was so able to capture when he speaks of music as being the one who always comes late, every civilization’s latecomer (Spätling jeder Cultur): Of all the arts that grow up on a particular cultural soil under particular social and political conditions, music makes its appearance last, in the autumn and deliquescence of the culture to which it belongs: at a time when the irst signs and harbingers of a new spring are as a rule already perceptible; sometimes, indeed, music resounds into a new and astonished world like the language of an age that has vanished and arrives too late.

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Straddling the metacosmic cracks this way, throwing itself over all the fractures and “cracks in the world” as if the better to emphasize them, music is the postapocalyptic marker par excellence. his is so much the case that music can grow unbearable with nostalgia and pain, as it is, for example, to the ears of the father in the gray screen adaptation of he Road (John Hillcoat, 2009), based on the eponymous novel by Cormac McCarthy. In the book, the music makes only a few rare appearances, especially when the father remembers and daydreams as he walks and looks back: “He could remember everything of her save her scent. Seated in a theatre with her beside him leaning forward listening to the music.” Or a bit later on when he carves “a lute from a piece of roadside cane”: he boy took it wordlessly. Ater a while he fell back and ater a while the man could hear him playing. A formless music for the age to come. Or perhaps the last music on earth called up from out of the ashes of its ruin. hese passages are absent from the ilm, which does, however, invent a scene over the course of which the father (Viggo Mortensen) discovers a grand piano in the house he’s just entered with his son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) on their search for food. he instrument is protected by a piece of cloth that he moves over a bit, uncovering the lower half of the keyboard. We see him hesitate and look. He crouches down, caresses the wood frame covered in gray dust (this same monotonous gray, almost unbearable sometimes, that sticks to every object in every one of the ilm’s scenes, just like the ilm sticks to the novel that provides its inspiration). he father moans; he cries and then falls to his knees, visibly overtaken by intoler-

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able heartbreak. He hits his forehead against this cursed piano that, were one to caress only one or two of its keys, threatens to resuscitate a lost world that they are making such eforts to forget, a world that it is so diicult to grieve. It’s when he hears the voice of the child in the next room that the father pulls himself back together. Before covering the piano back up, he plays a few notes, hits a few harmonies: “Your mother played very well,” he tells the boy, who does not remember. “hat was . . . before.” Archeophonography draws its power from very little. A tune one whistles just like that, keys on a keyboard that one distractedly taps, almost by chance, in short, an aural Rorschach, as Ballard puts it in he Drowned World. Even nothing more than a mere sound can all of a sudden become the tubular umbilical cord down which we allow ourselves to be taken away and guided toward what was, to what was before the apocalypse. In A Boy and His Dog, a strange ilm directed in 1975 by the actor L. Q. Jones (the only feature-length ilm signed with his name), speakers thus propose “sound tours into the past” to survivors of a devastating hird World War, now condemned to inhabit an underground world. In the same way, in Beneath the Planet of the Apes, when Brent (James Franciscus) hides in a grotto with Nova (Linda Harrison) to escape the army of apes chasing them, he suddenly hears a hum that he decides to follow. It is thus a kind of low humming that leads the two humans through the galleries and conduits and in the underground passages of the “restricted zone” that was depopulated more than two thousand years earlier by a nuclear war. “Whoever or whatever it is, something is guiding us,” says Brent, without knowing

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whether the buzzing that clears the path for him is “a warning or a something to show us the way.” Whatever the case may be, it is that toward which he and Nova ind themselves drawn, humanity’s past: hey ind the ruins of the New York Public Library, the New York Stock Exchange, Radio City Music Hall . . . Oten, though, it is songs worthy of the name that take on the task of speaking, as Nietzsche says, the language of a drowned era. And one could compile a hit parade of postapocalyptic melodies that, ater the end, allow what is no longer to bloom once again for the ephemeral time of the refrain. In the Book of Eli (Hughes Brothers, 2010), the Christ-like hero incarnated by Denzel Washington carries an old iPod around with him as he crosses through a devastated America covered over with a monochrome gray. While sharing his meager roasted wildcat with a rat, he listens to Al Green sing “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart,” with its refrain in the form of a hypnotizing question as to “what makes the world go ‘round.” Eli must have fallen asleep to the music because in the morning, the dusty screen of his iPod indicates a “Low Battery.” And thus does he now miss a piece of the world, a part of it that stands for the whole, so prone is even the simplest melody to being condensed and carried metonymically within itself. In Twelve Monkeys, Cole is moved to tears when he hears the radio in Kathryn’s car. While she is concerned with inding out if he is really armed (ater all, he has just kidnapped her), he insists on turning the volume up. Fats Domino is singing “Blueberry Hill.” Cole cries and so does Kathryn, in silence. hen he exclaims, “I love twentiethcentury music!” Cole asks for more music; he doesn’t give a damn about the news on the radio. Kathryn changes the

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station. “hat’s good,” says Cole before closing his eyes for a nap: his time it’s Louis Armstrong, “What a Wonderful World.” his wonderful world the song sings (which will come back for the closing credits) is his lost world. For which it is the requiem or the posthumous hymn. Its posthymn.

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CHAPTER 

The Blob, or The Bubble

“Doom!” exclaims D. H. Lawrence when he inishes his mad reading of Melville’s novel Moby-Dick. he word returns two, three, four times in a row, like a death-knell for a drowned world: Doom! Doom! Doom! Something seems to whisper it in the very dark trees of America. Doom! (153) To read doom as loss, condemnation, or ruin would not be enough. he end of the world (doomsday) resonates in this dismal word: It’s the apocalypse. “Doom of what?” asks Lawrence. What is condemned? What is this world that is in the midst of inishing and being swallowed up by the whirlpool where the whaling ship is sinking in the epilogue to the chase for the white whale? he vessel that sinks through its bottom, carried away by the hunting madness of Captain Ahab, the Pequod, is a kind of preiguration of the Titanic. he Pequod went down. And the Pequod was the ship of the white American soul. She sank, taking with her negro and Indian and Polynesian, Asiatic and Quaker and good,

business-like Yankees and Ishmael; she sank all the lot of them. (147) Beyond the vocabulary of races and types that have become intolerable to our ears today (Lawrence’s text was written between 1918 and 1923), one must understand that what is sinking here is the West, launched at a frantic pace into a mad quest for self and taking the whole world away with it. What then, Lawrence wonders, is Moby-Dick? What is this whale as white as what he calls the “white race”? It is “us,” he answers: In this maniacal conscious hunt of ourselves we get dark races and pale to help us, red, yellow, and black, east and west, Quaker and ire-worshipper, we get them all to help us in this ghastly maniacal hunt which is our doom and our suicide. (146) “Boom!” exclaims Lawrence, as if he were punctuating his description of the general shipwreck with an onomatopoeic deformation of the end of the world (“doom”). It’s all over and consummated (“consummatum est!” he writes in Latin), it is all consumed; the only things let are a few scattered remains: Moby Dick was irst published in 1851. If the Great White Whale sank the ship of the Great White Soul in 1851, what’s been happening ever since? Post-mortem efects, presumably. It has, therefore, already taken place, this apocalypse to which Lawrence, before dying, will devote a posthumously published study in 1931. It has already happened. And we, whoever we are, are its fallout. 108

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his is a gripping vision, which nonetheless misses a crucial aspect of the end of the novel, and for good reason: he edition of Moby-Dick Lawrence seems to have used omitted the epilogue. hat is, the moment when, in the overall wreck of the ship-West, in the maelstrom that takes everything and everyone away, a bubble is created, a bubble as black as ink (“black bubble,” writes Melville), which by bursting liberates the buoy-coin thanks to which the narrator Ishmael will, like someone living dead, be able to survive and start to tell the story at the very moment it ends. In short, the inal catastrophe of Moby-Dick is, in the same double blow, both apocalyptic and postapocalyptic: What there is ater the end of the world (of the book) is still and more than ever before part of the book (of the world); the bubble of ink for which room is made in the writing bursts by opening onto an outside that is within, which is only a swelling, an internal bulging within the great whale-text. Whose world does not lead to any backworld or otherworld: Rather, it is constantly making room within itself for bubbling interworlds. Alongside John Huston’s 1956 adaptation, Moby-Dick does make several one-time appearances in the margins of apocalyptic ilms. I’m thinking in particular of 2012, where we get a glimpse of the book placed facedown to keep it open to the right page on the sofa in the room where Jackson Curtis wakes up late to go get the children, while the world starts to feel the irst seismic tremors announcing the end. In the same way, in Deep Impact (yet another variation on the theme of interplanetary collision orchestrated by Mimi Leder in 1998), the astronauts charged with the task of making the comet explode on its way to the Earth fail in their mission and, having lost all contact with our planet, pass the time by reading the famous incipit to Melville’s story (“Call me Ishmael”). THE BLOB, OR THE BUBBLE

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But you will have understood that it is not a matter of hunting down the literal occurrences of the novel on screen. he question that awaits us is, instead, what is the status of the bubble in ilm? Is there a cinematic place for this enclave that takes on the form of an internal swelling? In other words, even as the cineworld sinks itself, does it not reserve within itself a space where its end might be said, shown, and ilmed? In English, a “blob” is a synonym for a “bubble.” And this old onomatopoeic word—which according to the Oxford English Dictionary appeared in the iteenth century to express the action of lips that produce a bubble—is also the title of a cult ilm that was followed by two remakes: he Blob (Irvin Yeaworth, 1958), Beware! he Blob (Larry Hagman, 1972), and he Blob (Chuck Russell, 1988). he blob in question is a substance of extraterrestrial origin that develops, spreads, and grows by absorbing the living earthly beings whose path it crosses. It ends up being contained when the terrorized inhabitants of the little town where it started to run rampant discover that it cannot tolerate low temperatures. Add to this the fact that its gelatinous matter becomes increasingly red as it swallows a growing number of good Americans and you have all the ingredients to conclude that the plot is a metaphor for communism and its containment by the so-called Cold War. Whatever its necessity may be, it is not a sociohistorical reading like this one that will retain us here. What interests me is rather that, in the successive versions of its expansion, the blob always ends up happening, quite literally, to the movies. In the 1958 ilm, when Steve (Steve McQueen) and Jane (Aneta Corsaut) decide to ask for help in order to try to capture the formless monster that has just swallowed several of their fellow citizens, they go to ind their friends in a local theater where the movie Daughter of Horror is playing (the abridged version of Dementia, directed by John Parker in 110

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1953). he small group leaves the showing and sets of on a quest for the evil substance. Ater several twists of plot, including a memorable scene among the pieces of meat hanging in a supermarket freezer, the blob inds itself in the projection booth where the projectionist is reading while the projector hums. hrough the air grates, we glimpse something glowing, something moving. And then the viscous red paste is disgorging and slowly pouring itself out into the room, while the audience is having fun, captivated by the horror lick that keeps playing. he poor projectionist is swallowed up, and the reel stops. Perplexed, the spectators see a few strips of ilm and then ind themselves facing a white screen while the substance now seeps through the booth’s windows and little by little invades the theater. A sea of humanity then rushes out of the movie theater screaming with terror, soon followed by the blob itself, growing ever redder. And ever more enguling. In the 1988 remake, the blob—which this time is presented as a mutant virus, the fruit of an experiment in bacteriological warfare carried out by the United States in extraterrestrial space to ensure its military superiority over the Russians— also invades the movie theater where an (uncredited) horror

Irvin Yeaworth, dir., he Blob, 1958 THE BLOB, OR THE BUBBLE

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ilm is playing. Here too, it iniltrates through the channels of the air-conditioning system, devours the projectionist, and spreads from the booth into the theater. Screams emerge from all over; we no longer know if the shrieks come from the spectators or from the characters in the ilm within the ilm. hen the sound stops; the reel seems to be covered with white blisters before turning completely red. Once again, what the blob engulfs is cinema itself. he 1958 version ended with a traditional the end, whose white letters were nevertheless deformed to compose a menacing question mark, leaving doubt as to its veritable conclusion. To Lieutenant Dave (Earl Rowe), who was explaining that the hing was going to be sent to the North Pole and that it would be contained there even if it could not be eliminated, Steve had efectively just answered, “As long as the Arctic stays cold.” his is indeed the starting point for the 1972 remake, which, therefore, presents itself more as a sequel, since everything starts over again when a worker on an oil pipeline in a polar region returns home to Los Angeles with a sample of permafrost he is supposed to keep cold. He allows it to defrost, and here we go again: he blob is back; it snacks on a ly, a kitten, and then the negligent worker himself, while on television he is watching . . . the 1958 version of the ilm. It is the young Bobby (Robert Walker Jr.), who, at the end, will once again be able to contain the gelatinous expansion by activating the refrigeration mechanism of the ice-skating rink where he inds himself trapped. But when the local sherif, posing triumphantly on the frozen blob, gives an interview to a television crew, the spotlight lighting the ilming inadvertently heats up part of the snowy mass. A red trickle starts to ooze toward the boot of the one proudly speaking to the camera: “If we hadn’t stopped it, this blob could have devoured America, maybe even the whole planet,” he says, before the same fateful question from 1958 is displayed on the screen—the end? 112

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his is indeed what is at stake: It is indeed its end that, once again, cinema is interrogating by staging this matter whose consistency so resembles the melted reels of a ilm. Awakened from its numbness by the shooting lights, the blobulous bubble promises to engulf everything, to emblob the ilm itself. It is like a blister or swelling of the ilm, a vesicle secreted by the cineworld which, in return, threatens to cover it up, to enclose it by including it. In sum, the blob is this overlow, this toomuch of cinema that is unleashed in the movies where it appears like the excess of itself that prepares the blinding fusion of a general fade to red. If one looks closely enough, it is also a cinebubble, the same one but another, that is formed and bursts at the end of John Carpenter’s Escape from L.A. In the year 2000, recounts the of-screen voice of the prologue, an earthquake of unprecedented magnitude has separated L.A. from the rest of the continent, thus transforming what the American president (Clif Robertson) describes as the “city of sin” into an island to which criminals are being deported. Sixteen years ater his heroic intervention in Escape from New York—to which Escape from L.A. thus provides a sequel—Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell), described as the most famous outlaw in the history of the United States, receives a proposal for a pact that looks like blackmail: His crimes will be pardoned and he will escape certain death if he is able to ind the remote control seized by a terrorist organization that is preparing to activate the satellite defense system, allowing for the extinction of all the planet’s sources of energy. he exposition of the plot, the moment of the contract with the hero, comes dangerously—or ironically—close here to the worst jargon of futurist war, both naïve and tortuous. But this is not what is important. What must instead give us pause is irst of all the role holograms play in the ilm. When the president and the oicers from the army present THE BLOB, OR THE BUBBLE

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Plissken with the terms of his mission’s contract, which he will not be able to refuse, they do so in efect through the intermediary of their holographic projections. he hero notices this when he tries to attack them: He goes right through them, barely disturbing the emission of the video signal. But the holographics that protect the blackmailers will also protect Plissken, who inds himself bestowed with a camera with which he will be able to generate an image of himself. It can be used only once, he is told, so he will have to save his hologram of himself for the moment when he really needs it. Ater all these long preparations, Plissken is propelled into L.A. in a one-man submarine, a kind of ilmic capsule in which he enters the cinema-city par excellence. Ater many adventures that are oten open confrontations with the ilm industry, the hero ends up recovering the apocalypse’s remote control, the object capable of taking the Earth back several centuries, to before the invention of electricity. And of course also before the invention of holography or cinematography. To escape his execution by the president and his men (who apparently have no intention of respecting their contract), Plissken activates, for the irst and last time, his hologram. And during the respite provided by this ilmic double of himself, he starts up the apparatus that will bring the

John Carpenter, dir., Escape from L.A., 1996 114

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planet back to the Middle Ages. “He did it!” exclaims the president’s daughter; “he shut down the Earth!” Plissken’s hologram also shuts down, and everything is plunged into darkness. But before the end of the cineworld, the hero allows himself one last cigarette (brand: American Spirit). He lights it with a good old match, which becomes something like the last glint, a fragile light to guide us in the eternity of acinema. A close-up of the voluptuously exhaled smoke that emerges from his mouth and nose. Plissken looks at the lame. Looks at the camera. And breathes out. And now it’s dark. One might undertake the task of systematically noting and describing all the bubbles of light that, like the ones in Escape from L.A., hover for a moment between general darkness and inal extinction. All these enclaves of time and space where the cinema, barely surviving itself, exceeding itself, or engulfing itself within itself, reserves the possibility of ilming, in extremis, its apocalypse. To mention only one further and very beautiful one, remember how, in Stanley Kramer’s On the Beach (1959), it all keeps rolling even though everything is empty and shut down on earth. It all keeps on rolling on board the submarine of Captain Dwight Towers (Gregory Peck), which is roaming the seas of a planet devastated by the hird World War. We do indeed get the impression that the two periscopes of the submersible traveling near San Francisco are cameras that are shooting a ilm of the deserted city from the ephemeral point of view of the survivors of the nuclear holocaust. Overwhelming images of a world no one inhabits any more, seen through the equipped eyes of those who are contained in this air pocket that, for a little while longer still, protects them. In the epilogue, as mortal radiation draws close to Australia, the inhabitants of the last spared continent are now also getting ready to die. Captain Towers then decides to board THE BLOB, OR THE BUBBLE

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ship with his men, who want to end their lives at home, in America. Staying alone on the shore, his girlfriend Moira Davidson (Ava Gardner) watches the submarine go underwater. he camera also dives down, the image goes blurry from all the bubbles and, thanks to a gripping fade-out, we go from the bubbling sea to a sheet of newspaper as it lies away, taken up by the wind in Melbourne’s depopulated streets. All these bubble structures—the blob, the hologram, and the match, the submarine, but also the camera that falls to the ground and continues to ilm at the end of Cloverield or (we are getting there) the “magic cave” of the last moments of Melancholia: We see and read them on two levels at once. On the one hand, they appear in one form or another within the continuity of the plot. And, on the other hand, they constitute fragile ilmic enclaves within acinema, ephemeral shelters in the general explosion of the cineworld. When these two levels intersect, is it then a matter of seeing the replay in an apocalyptic mode of what Jacques Rancière has described as a “thwarted fable”? Is it a matter of watching the spectacle of a cinema that, by narrating the end of the world, tries to grasp itself as the cinema that it is? Cinema is, of course, constantly narrating itself and staging itself through the stories it tells. As Rancière also says, it is constantly “making a fable with another” and “making a ilm on the body of another” (5). And we have in efect explored the negative versions of these allegories or tautegories of cinema in cinema, those moments when the ilm seeks to abolish itself as if to get a better sense of its contours or its borders: the countdown, the freeze-frame, the cinepotlatch and pyrotechnics, the foliations of the lip-book, the archifade-out to black or white, x-rays, and heliographics, without forgetting the blob that covers the movie up with its emblobbing and self-consuming ilm. 116

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But by narrating and auscultating itself from the perspective of its disappearance, cinema touches on a limit that is diferent from the one that would place the image and the fable in opposition within it. At stake is what we have called its cineication: in other words the constitution of the cinema and of its signs propped up on or dependent on the ultimate reference of its cineration, its becoming ash. In other words: Cinema attempts to grasp itself not—or not only—by thwarting the stories it has to tell, but rather from the perspective of the end of ilm in general, in other words from the perspective of the radical initude of the cineworld. Yet this initude is not that of a mundus that disappears in order to reveal (apokaluptein) a backworld or an other(cine) world [outre-cinémonde]. No such beyond exists. Taking up a famous and oten misunderstood formulation by Derrida, we could say that there is nothing outside the ilm. here is nothing outside the ilm because the real to which we might want to oppose it already also has the structure of the cinema. his is in fact what the very concept of cineworld indicates: he world, “our world,” already counts the cinema “as one of its conditions of possibility.” In other words, the cinema is an “existential.” Or yet again, paraphrasing a certain Deckard, it’s because I am a ilm that I am. Apocalypse-cinema, we were saying, is, each time unique, the end of the world and the end of the ilm, both the one and the other [l’une comme l’autre], the one in the guise of the other. Yet since neither the one nor the other unveils a revealed otherworld, they thus open the world onto itself by bringing bubbles, fractures, and issures to emerge within it. Blobs and “cracks in the world,” in sum. his is in fact why cinema is not Plato’s cave and acinema’s blinding heliography is not that of ideas, the copies of whose THE BLOB, OR THE BUBBLE

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copies we would see on screen. And if the cineworld has the structure of a cave, it is much more that of the “magic cave” that Lars von Trier magniicently evokes in Melancholia. What in efect is this magic cave that is constantly coming up in the ilm’s dialogue before it bursts as its last bubble? What is this bubbling katechon that holds the ending back, but just barely, that defers and suspends it, but hardly at all? he cave is irst mentioned in the irst part of the diptych called “Justine,” which is devoted to the marriage of the eponymous character played by Kirsten Dunst. When her nephew, the little Leo (Cameron Spurr), starts to get sleepy during the party, Justine insists on putting him to bed herself. She cajoles him, makes sure he is comfortably settled in, while he asks her, “When are we going to build caves together?” hey are going to build “lots of caves,” she answers, “just not tonight.” At the beginning of the second section called “Claire” (which is the name of Justine’s sister, played by Charlotte Gainsbourg), the little Leo recalls the promise of his aunt, who has just got out of the cab: “When are we going to build those caves?” he asks her. But Justine, prostrate and plunged into a deep depression, remains mute. It’s Leo’s father, John (Kiefer Sutherland), who answers: “Not now, we’ll do it a little later on.” While the construction of the cave is being deferred like this, the planet Melancholia is drawing closer to the Earth. John, who refuses to believe in a collision, is nonetheless gathering provisions just in case the star does really come very close. And in fact, Melancholia is becoming an obsessive presence in the sky, with its blue halo of a gaseous giant to which Justine, ever more invigorated, exposes her nude body for nocturnal light bathing. For want of caverns, the little Leo has in the meantime built an observation instrument: He has put together a kind of 118

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Lars von Trier, dir., Melancholia, 2011

viewinder made out of an iron wire twisted into a circle and hanging from the end of a stick so as to measure Melancholia’s approach with the naked eye. Without his yet knowing it, the child holds in his hands an apparatus for counting down the time that remains: By framing the threatening planet with this rudimentary, apprentice astronomer’s toy, he creates a visual enclave within the ilm’s ield, where the cause of the coming end of the world is contained and enclosed. But the image in the hoop—that gigantic celestial sphere surrounded by a ridiculous skinny enclosure—will continue to grow, overlowing this frame within the frame where it is encircled. In other words, the astral globe’s blob swells up and bloats like an on-screen tumor. And it will pursue its dilation until the inal explosion. Until its luminescence, unfurling beyond every limit and every framing, produces a general fade to white followed by the darkness of the cineworld’s extinction. John cannot bear the discovery that Melancholia continues to draw closer this way, unlike the optimistic predictions of science. Before the apocalypse, anticipating the end, he kills himself, and the two sisters are alone as they wait with little Leo. Justine is calm, while Claire panics. She tries to run away with her son, but to go where? here are electric arcs that rise toward the sky from the roadside poles. It is hailing. THE BLOB, OR THE BUBBLE

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While Claire sobs, Justine comforts little Leo. “I’m scared the planet is going to hit us anyway,” he mumbles in his aunt’s arms. “Dad says there’s nothing to be done, nowhere to hide.” And Justine answers him: “If your father said that, it’s because he forgot something. He forgot the magic cave.” Here it is, then, the last bubble, more ridiculous and more moving than ever before. Because the famous “magic cave,” this insigniicant katechon, so pathetic in the face of the approaching cosmic power, is more or less nothing: a handful of branches gathered in a rush in the surrounding woods, propped up against one another to make the cone of a tepee. Leo, Justine, and Claire are sitting in it holding hands. And it’s a tepee without a canvas, without a wall. his tent is so diferent from all the ones we usually see at the movies. To stay within the apocalyptic repertoire, I am thinking in particular of the one in he Road, a shelter that was thrown together with random pieces of fabric under whose roof, in the evening, the father reads a story to his son by the trembling light of a gas lamp. Seen from the outside, the tent looks like a veil where the silhouette of the man bent over the book and turning the pages is projected. In another genre, I am also thinking of he Lost World, the irst sequel to Jurassic Park, directed by Steven Spielberg in 1997: Inside her tent, the paleontologist Sarah Harding (Julianne Moore), awakened by the thundering steps of a tyrannosaurus, sees the beast’s proile and jaw drawn in negative on the tent’s lining like a huge shadow puppet. In short, whether ilmed from one side or the other, from the inside or the outside, the tent’s canvas is generally staged as a screen that is reinscribed on screen. But in Melancholia, the tepee has no projection surface, as if it were the very apparatus of cinema that was dematerializing. Here, this magic cave, like the wire put together by Leo, is nothing other 120

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Lars von Trier, dir., Melancholia, 2011

than the pure diferential function of a frame that lasts long enough to make an image among the images, on the edge of acinema. Melancholia is so close now. Everything is bathing in its light, including the meager woody structure that stands out like a skeleton in the increasingly blinding whiteness. “Close your eyes,” Justine tells Leo. And while the insistent sound of cellos rises from the depths of Wagner’s prelude, as the low noise of the coming star rumbles, they wait among the branches in this shelter that shelters nothing but the mere bubble form of a possible cineworld, suspended on the limit of its end. hen the dazzling clarity comes. And then universal night.

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POSTFACE

Il n’y a pas de hors-film, or Cinema and Its Cinders

Finally, when man entirely appears, it’s the irst time we see him seen by an eye that is not, it too, the eye of a man. For me the place for thinking the most beloved living machine was that zone of almost absolute death that surrounded the irst craters one or two kilometers away. . . . I was lying down right in the cinders that were as warm and moving as a big beast’s fur. —Jean Epstein, Le cinématographe vu de l’Etna. [Translation mine.—Trans.]

“Il n’y a pas de hors-texte”: We know the fate and misfortune of this statement that appears under Derrida’s pen for the irst time in 1967 in De la grammatologie. And its irst English translation by Gayatri Spivak—“here is nothing outside the text”—probably did nothing to make things any easier. Why then run the risk of making things even worse by diverting this statement, which has almost become a bad sales pitch for deconstruction, toward the ilmic image? Why place an attempt to think cinema, or more generally ilm, under the sign of this formulation already overburdened with misunderstandings, ilm, a medium for which Derrida—

and I’ll be coming back to this—never hid his fascinated admiration nor his incompetence? here are many texts where Derrida protests against the misunderstandings or the unwarranted appropriations of this little phrase, “il n’y a pas de hors-texte,” which he sometimes mentions not without irritation, as if it has become foreign to him, as “a sort of slogan, in general so badly understood, of deconstruction.” In his 1988 postface to Limited Inc., he recalls that “the text is not the book,” that it is not “conined in a volume, itself conined to the library,” in short that “the concept of text” as he understands it “does not suspend reference—to history, to the world, to reality” (137). Keeping these misunderstandings and clariications in mind, how then should we understand that “there is no extrailm [il n’y a pas de hors-ilm]”? And what changes—if in fact, concesso non dato, something does—if we substitute ilm for text in the aforementioned slogan? hese are the questions I would like to begin to consider here, ater having dared, in the last pages of Apocalypse-Cinema, this formulation that may appear a bit nonchalant or sudden—“il n’y a pas de hors-ilm”—as if it were a question of awkwardly entering into competition with the most striking taglines in the history of Hollywood cinema (one might think in particular of the famous one from Alien: “In space no one can hear you scream”). But ater all, is it not Derrida himself who will have pointed out the importance of commercial and popular cinema as the site par excellence for ilmic experience? Even though he said he didn’t know anything about it, in an interview he gave to the Cahiers du cinéma he made it a point to emphasize the importance of the entertainment movie, its structural and constitutive importance, and not only its quantitative or economic one: 124

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It is . . . the only great popular art. And as a rather avid spectator, I remain and I even camp on the side of the popular: ilm is a major art of entertainment. We truly need to leave that to it. . . . It is not formulated in the vein of high or philosophical culture. Film remains for me a major hidden, secret, avid, gluttonous, and therefore infantile enjoyment. It must remain so. Yet just before this secret, before this avowal that is immediately converted into a necessity—I don’t know anything about it, I only enjoy the most spectacular kinds of spectacle, but that is how it must be—we encounter a phrase that, taken out of context and transformed into another tagline, could also be a prelude to all kinds of misunderstandings, dictating, for example, to readers who are in a hurry to ight it out the conviction that deconstruction decidedly has nothing to tell us about the ilmic image. Derrida in efect declares: “I have no memory for cinema. It is a form of culture that, in me, does not leave a trace” (76). Here, we need to resist the temptation, however great, to see cinema as a kind of blind spot or point: what the thinker of the trace was unable to think. For if we are willing to continue to read, a bit further on we come across another statement that considerably complicates the preceding declaration. Cinema, Derrida says, “recounts what we don’t get over, it recounts death for us”: It designates for us what should not leave a trace. It is therefore a trace twice over: a trace of the testimony itself, a trace of oblivion, a trace of absolute death, a trace of what is without trace. (80) How should we understand these two apparently contradictory statements (on the one hand, cinema is said not to POSTFACE: CINEMA AND ITS CINDERS

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leave a trace; on the other, cinema would in a way be the trace par excellence, the trace of the absence of trace)? How should we understand these two phrases that I am thus juxtaposing—or that are juxtaposed—while we read a text where, in a more direct way than elsewhere, Derrida speaks of his relation to cinema as a spectator? Here, we need to start again from cinder. From cinder as a trace that is such only if it can be completely erased. In Points . . . , we in efect ind this important clariication: he words I had somewhat privileged up until now, such as trace, writing, gramme, turned out to be better named by “cinder” for the following reason: Ashes or cinders are obviously traces—in general, the irst igure of the trace one thinks of is that of the step, along a path, the step that leaves a footprint, a trace, or a vestige; but “cinder” renders better what I meant to say with the name of trace, namely, something that remains without remaining, which is neither present nor absent, which destroys itself, which is totally consumed, which is a remainder without remainder. hat is, something which is not. . . . he cinder is not: his means that it testiies without testifying. It testiies to the disappearance of the witness. Cinder, then, provides a possible point of departure as we start or restart an elaboration of a deconstructive thinking of cinema and ilm. Let us take the anachronistic risk of taking a huge step backward. To ind a new point of departure in a very old text from an archive that speaks to us across an ininite distance, from which it nonetheless allows a question to resonate that seems to be asked in advance of cinema and its cinders. 126

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In Lucretius’s poem On the Nature of hings, we ind the following passage (III, 904f.) that echoes Epicurus’s wellknown argument according to which there is no reason to fear death; the lyrical “I” addresses the deceased in these terms: O even as here thou art, aslumber in death, So shalt thou slumber down the rest of time, Released from every harrying pang. But we, We have bewept thee with insatiate woe, Standing beside whilst on the awful pyre hou wert made ashes; and no day shall take For us the eternal sorrow from the breast. “Made ashes,” become cinders, or reduced to ashes: In Lucretius’s Latin, this is stated as cinefactus. “Cineied,” as we might also translate it, a translation that would open a space for a secret and anachronistic resonance between the two possible meanings of the root cine- that would thus oscillate between cinder and movement, from the Latin cinis to the Greek kinēma, from cineration to cinema. his is much more than a matter of simple homonymy that blithely spans the abyss of centuries or millennia in an ofhand way, from Lucretius to the Lumière brothers. For cinder belongs to cinema, kinēma and cinis belong to one another, so true is it that cinder is the name or the igure for what cinema shelters within itself structurally: the apocalyptic possibility I was able to describe as ultratestimonial: he camera is always already carried to the limit of all possible testimony or testament—“It testiies without testifying,” as Derrida says in Points . . . ; “It testiies to the disappearance of the witness.” he camera is structurally carried right up to the last border of testimoniality itself, since it includes in advance within itself the point of view of the ater-all, the point of view from POSTFACE: CINEMA AND ITS CINDERS

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ater the end of the world, in other words the point of view of no one. Many Hollywood superproductions endeavor to stage this cine-gaze where cinematography and incineration melt into each other; many apocalyptic blockbusters seek to show it, in their own way, as what comes ater the explosion of blinding whiteness,7 ater the fade to white of a general atomic radiography. Like in the closing credits of the second volume of the Terminator franchise (James Cameron, 1991), the camera pans over the desert of cinders the planet has become now that it has returned to the minerality of the cosmos. Does this mean that cinema is dedicated, structurally dedicated to archiving the unarchivable, to being transported in advance toward this place of the “outside-the-archive” that Derrida described as “impossible,” immediately adding that “the impossible is the afair of deconstruction”? his question does await us, but we need to make it wait a while longer. It will lead us to interrogate what a certain vein of speculative materialism would now like to call the “arche-fossil.” Dziga Vertov proposed the concept of a “cine-eye,” a “mechanical eye” that we might also understand as a gaze that is itself ashen or incinerated, in other words as the vision of this “eye of matter” Deleuze spoke of. And it is toward this point of view from ater humanity (or, actually, from before) that a ilmic history of cinder should take us. We might, of course, be tempted to undertake this cinehistory by irst of all mentioning the most spectacular and expected appearances of cinder on screen, in particular in what are called disaster movies, whose paradigm is conigured in 1974 by Towering Inferno (directed by John Guillermin and Irwin Allen), during a decade that continues to be considered the golden age of the genre. Since then, the dust 128

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and scoria of this huge Hollywood ire haunt the memory of more recent ilms, such as Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center (2006), where we ind ourselves under the rubble of the twin towers with two surviving cops, the police oicer Will Jimeno (Michael Peña) and the sergeant John McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage). he cinder that is thus ofered to our sight—and almost to our taste when one of the two senses it on his parched taste buds and tongue—this cinder appears as what remains of a major sacriicial incineration that the well-minded humanism of the ilm is constantly reappropriating according to a political trajectory we know all too well. We are supposed to cry, to let tears fall on this dust of the victims who then really do nothing more than nourish the heroism of a cheap defense of democracy and human rights. Let us therefore look rather to other cinders. For example, to the ones where Ingrid Bergman remains—whether lying down, sitting, or standing up—when she looks from the top of the Stromboli at the world of Sicilian ishermen she is leaving. hese ashes ilmed by Rossellini in 1950 do not seem to be appropriated by anyone; they accompany or rather ground the experience of radical alterity that the character of Karen undergoes, between earth and heaven, when she exclaims, “Oh God! What mystery! What beauty!” “No, I can’t go back,” says Karen. Earlier in the ilm she was indeed the one who seems to have started the light of the ashes: Her gesture of lighting the ire in the ireplace of the miserable house she was forced to share with Antonio (Mario Vitale) did indeed seem to extend to the sleeping volcano’s awakening. But what we clearly see in the overwhelming inal scene at the top of the volcano is that the eruption of cinder in cinema, cineruption, marks precisely the impossibility of any reappropriation, of any return to self and home. Here, cinders signify, they cinefy, if I may say so, the lack of any home to which one might return. In other words the POSTFACE: CINEMA AND ITS CINDERS

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absence of reversal, of katastrophē in the theatrical sense of a happy ending. In the register of comedy as well, there is cinder that remains without remaining. And it sometimes happens that these cinders—of the incinerated deceased, of the one who is cinefactus—mime their reappropriating return the better to pervert it. his is what we can see (if it is still a question of seeing, for the gaze itself here seems to have to be literally ashen) in the hilarious scene of dispersing the ashes of Donny (Steve Buscemi) at the end of he Big Lebowski by the Coen Brothers (1998). At the edge of a clif, the Vietnam War veteran Walter Sobchak (John Goodman) and Jef “he Dude” Lebowski (Jef Bridges) throw the remains of their deceased friend into the sea. And the gray dust that comes out of the can (a Folgers ground cofee can that serves as a happenstance urn), the cremation cinder carried by the wind is all over he Dude, clinging to him, sticking to his sunglasses, literally cinefying his eyes. It is, however, in Hiroshima mon amour (Alain Resnais, 1959) that cinder not only resists being catastrophically reversed, but also and more importantly ends up cinefying and reducing a cine-eye to ashes, an eye that is precisely no longer an eye since it has deinitively disappeared under the eyelid behind which it seemed to be sheltered as the promise of a gaze. he sequence is well known, but we must once again look at it and read its long “ilm-phrase” (as Vertov would have said). Immediately following the opening credits, there are irst of all the interlaced bodies, She and He (Emmanuelle Riva and Eiji Okada), covered up with a cinder that will soon also seem to sparkle like gold dust: he image’s extinction and brilliance, incineration and shimmering pass into one another and become confused. He says, “You saw nothing in Hiroshima. Nothing.” She answers, “I saw everything. Everything.” Not 130

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seeing anything and seeing everything, being extinguished and shining seem to come down to the same thing when it’s a question of cinder, when we look from beyond the catastrophe, there where nothing can be simply reversed any more. Very quickly, the ilm starts speaking of cinema. Ater this ultratestimonial overture in which blindness and hypervision collapse into one another, Hiroshima mon amour cites ilms while the voice-over comments on them. We irst see a sequence from Hideo Sekigawa’s Hiroshima from 1953. And She is the one who glosses, “he ilms have been made as authentically as possible. he illusion, it’s quite simple, the illusion is so perfect that the tourists cry” (18). hen, when the voice of He says “no,” there are images from “newsreels” going by, until the unforgettable one of a hospitalized woman’s eyelids that open onto an absent eye. he voice of She has just insisted on everything that has “risen again from the ashes,” on everything that will have survived overall cinefaction: “certain species of animals,” or else lowers, those “cornlowers and gladiolas . . . , morning glories and day lilies that rose again from the ashes.” But what remains in the inal count, what emerges at the end of the

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sequence is that eye that has become pure matter once again, that eye that vision has let: an eye from ater the general cremation, from ater the holocaust or the everything-burned, an eye that has been incinerated. his cinecinder that, from Resnais’s Hiroshima to all of Hollywood’s Terminators, haunts ilms that are so diferent from one other, this cinefaction or cineication is also a question that inhabits philosophy, in particular ater the Second World War. I am thinking not only, of course, of Günther Anders’s gripping Hiroshima Is Everywhere  (the irst part of which is the journal of his 1958 trip to Hiroshima), but also of a whole series of texts that will have envisaged “the hypothesis of total and remainder-less destruction of the archive,” as Derrida puts it in “No Apocalypse, Not Now,” or else the “end pure and simple of anything whatsoever,” as Lyotard writes in he Inhuman: he sun is getting older. It will explode in 4.5 billion years. . . . Ater the sun’s death there won’t be a thought to know that its death took place. hat, in my view, is the sole serious question to face humanity today. . . . With the disappearance of earth, thought will have stopped—leaving that disappearance absolutely unthought of. In this ultracastrophic philosophical landscape—one that projects us ater, or beyond the catastrophe—I would like to linger for a bit on one philosophy that seems to seek to singularize itself by breaking with the post-Kantian inheritance of modernity: I am thinking of the speculative materialism of Quentin Meillassoux, who, in Ater Finitude, attempts to “describe a world where humanity is absent; a world crammed with things and events that are not the correlates of any manifestation, a world that is not the correlate of a relation to the 132

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world.” For the problem of what Meillassoux calls the “arche-fossil”—in other words “materials indicating the existence of an ancestral reality or event; one that is anterior to terrestrial life” (10)—this problem is also, symmetrically, conceptualized as that of the beyond-catastrophe, in other words from the perspective yet to come of the disappearance of human thought and of earthly life in general: Closer inspection reveals that the problem of the archefossil is not conined to ancestral statements. For it concerns . . . thus, not only statements about events occurring prior to the emergence of humans, but also statements about possible events that are ulterior to the extinction of the human species. For the same problem arises when we try to determine the conditions of meaning for hypotheses about the climactic and geological consequences of a meteor impact extinguishing all life on earth. (112) In short, Meillassoux’s interrogation—and, more generally, that of a certain speculative realism seeking to become a reference point alongside him today—bears on the status of the truth of statements relative to events for which “the question of knowing whether they were witnessed or not” is of no importance whatsoever, since this “question of the witness” is in efect “indiferent to knowledge of the event” (116). At stake in this speculative realism is therefore very precisely what I have called the ultratestimonial. his is the point of departure for a critique of what Meillassoux names correlationism, “the central notion of modern philosophy since Kant,” according to which “we never grasp an object ‘in itself ’, in isolation from its relation to the subject” (5). Now this Kantian transcendental subject, the condition of possibility of all knowledge, is described by Meillassoux in a long addition to the English translation of his book as “a POSTFACE: CINEMA AND ITS CINDERS

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point of view on the world” (24). A concept—that of “point of view”—that appears only ater the fact in this English interpolation, as if to end with it all and subsume all postKantian correlationism in a general perspectivism. Like other contemporary traditions of thinking, speculative materialism thus also shares disaster movies’ concern with ultratestimoniality. But it seems to me that what escapes it is quite precisely what I am naming here, ater Vertov, a cine-eye, by attempting to allow what it necessarily bears as ashes to be heard. More precisely, what Meillassoux’s so-called realist philosophy is missing is this cineied point of view in which, through a cinematics that in advance reduces every subjective gaze to ashes, the real steps away from itself to make an image. A point of view in which it already or still gives itself to be seen, but without this donation implying some vision constituted in a subject: Every point in which the so-called real is redoubled and becomes repeatable (in other words also erasable), each one of these points of view is opened there where there is precisely no point  of view, none at all yet or already no longer. In his 1954–55 seminar, Lacan proposed the following “little apologue”: Suppose all men to have disappeared from the world. . . . What is let in the mirror? But let us take it to the point of supposing that all living beings have disappeared. here are only waterfalls and springs let—lightning and thunder, too. he image in the mirror, the image in the lake— do they still exist? It is quite obvious that they still exist. For one very simple reason—at the high point of civilization we have attained . . . we have manufactured instruments which, without in any way being audacious, we can imagine to be suiciently complicated to develop ilms themselves. . . . Despite all living beings having disap134

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peared, the camera [imagine a surveillance camera, for example, or the eye of a satellite] can nonetheless record the image of the mountain in the lake, or that of the Café de Flore crumbling away in total solitude. here is no one in Paris any more at the table in this Café de Flore where “I” am writing these lines—“I,” in other words, “I, a machine,” as Dziga Vertov put it, I who “am showing you the world as only I can see it.” Like in the cosmos of Alien, there is no ear at the bistro counter to hear you scream. Yet there where silence reigns, there where the view of the point of view has also burned in the holocaust of cineication, the image nonetheless remains and leaves a trace and a gap. And it is here, at this editing table where no one is seated, that resides the possibility of the cine-eye as the most proper place of the ilmic arche-trace.

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N OT E S

. Melancholia, or The After-All 1. Arthur Schopenhauer, he World as Will and Representation, trans. Judith Norman, Alistair Welchman, and Christopher Janaway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 53. 2. “Acinema” is, of course, the title of an article by Jean-François Lyotard (translated by Paisley N. Livingston and included in he Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin [Oxford: Blackwell, 1989], 169–80), to which I shall return.

. The Last Man on Earth, or Film as Countdown 1. See Paul Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992). 2. he French release titles sometimes add dates to the original English titles that do not have them. But, as we will see, the question of calendric inscription at the movies goes far beyond these titles and their translations. 3. See Robert K. Sitler, “he 2012 Phenomenon: New Age Appropriation of an Ancient Mayan Calendar,” in Nova Religio: he Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 9, no. 3 (2006): 24–38. he clock known as the “Doomsday clock” was conceived in 1947 by the atomic physicists gathered around the journal Bulletin of the Atomic

Scientists, published by the University of Chicago. Regularly repositioned because of the evolution of international relations and— more recently—climate change, its hands currently indicate ive minutes before midnight: in other words, ive—of course symbolic—minutes before the end of time. Another clock that was installed in Manhattan by the Deutsche Bank at the corner of 7th Avenue and 33rd Street counts the tons of greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere. he statistic (also visible on know-the-number. com) increases with such speed that when I stop in front of the Bank of America building under the counter, blinking my eyes, I can’t note any one number. 4. Speaking of the recent third adaptation of Matheson’s I Am Legend (Francis Lawrence, 2007) in Living in the End Times (London: Verso, 2010), Slavoj Žižek writes that “the ilm’s only interest resides in its comparative value: one of the best ways to detect shits in the ideological constellation is to compare consecutive remakes of the same story” (61). his is a bit unfair with a production that is far from being short on visual ideas (the deer hunt in deserted Manhattan), but it also reduces ilm to an epiphenomenon that is always interpretable in symptomatic terms. If one wants to reduce I Am Legend to its mere “comparative value” in relation to previous versions of the same plot, one would have to at least unfold the comparison on the ilmic level (and not only on an “ideological” one) by considering, for example, a scene like the one visibly inspired by he Omega Man where Robert Neville (Will Smith) watches the Shrek DVD with the little boy Ethan (Charlie Tahan): He knows all the dialogue by heart; like his homonym watching Woodstock, he has become a kind of professional dubber. And in fact, when Anna (Alice Braga) later talks to him about leaving Manhattan to escape, it’s his own character that Neville alias Smith is dubbing: his words—“I’m not leaving here, this is ground zero, it’s my site”—are the same ones he pronounced before the epidemiological catastrophe. 5. his is what Lotte Eisner notes in her Fritz Lang (London: Da Capo, 1976), 106. [Translation modiied for completeness.—Trans.]: “For the count to the moment when the rocket launched, Lang wanted to increase the suspense. Instead of counting up (where any number could indicate ignition), he invented the more dramatically eicient idea of ending with the number zero. his is how, instead of ending 138

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on the higher number, he invented the countdown from 6 to 1, which has remained the standard way of proceeding.” Fritz Lang’s credit as the father of the countdown is nonetheless not a myth only for ilm history. One inds this idea even in the very serious historical dictionary published by NASA (see the article “Countdown,” in Paul Dickson, A Dictionary of the Space Age [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009], with a preface by Steven J. Dick, “NASA’s Head Historian”). If then it is true that Fritz Lang invented this procedure, the name “countdown” seems to have been used for the irst time in the 1950s concerning nuclear tests in the Nevada desert (see Dictionary of the Space Age, 106, which cites its irst occurrence in a New York Times article, “Mightiest of Atom Blast of Tests Unleashed on Nevada Desert,” dated June 5, 1953. Information more or less in agreement with this can be found in the Oxford English Dictionary). In Earth versus Flying Saucers (Fred F. Sears, 1956), the countdown for the rockets—which are then destroyed by the extraterrestrial armada—is already an established igure. 6. Jules Verne, From the Earth to the Moon, trans. Lowell Bair (New York: Bantam, 1967), 204. 7. In Les ilms de science-iction (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 2009), Michel Chion writes, “As for the story . . . that claims that Fritz Lang invented the countdown for the rocket launch in he Woman in the Moon, this may just be a legend, but it is in such harmony with the physical nature of the cinematographic medium (a wound-up time whose end is already implicit) that it is emblematic” (104). [Translation mine.—Trans.] A history of countdowns in ilm should give pride of place to the epilogue of he Day the Earth Caught Fire (Val Guest, 1961) with its universal countdown that, at the threshold of the end of the world, seems to want to string together all the languages of the world one last time. But this history should also explore countdowns on the scale of a lifetime, as in Escape from L.A. or, more recently, in the disappointing ilm In Time (Andrew Niccol, 2011).

. Cloverfield, or The Holocaust of the Date 1. Jacques Derrida, “Shibboleth: For Paul Celan,” trans. Joshua Wilner, revised by homas Dutoit, in Sovereignties in Question: he Poetics N OT E S TO PA G E S 10 15

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of Paul Celan, ed. homas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 32. 2. Derrida does not hesitate to write (“Shibboleth,” 46): “Forgive me if I do not name, here, the holocaust, that is to say, literally, as I chose to call it elsewhere, the all-burning, except to say this: there is certainly today the date of that holocaust we know, the hell of our memory; but there is a holocaust for every date, and somewhere in the world at every hour. Every hour counts its holocaust.” 3. his piercing of the recorded past into the present tense of the shooting had already happened several times, but in a fugitive or ephemeral way. For example, when over the course of the goingaway party, Rob sees that Hud is ilming with his camera, he asks, “Did you switch the tape? I had a tape in there.” And there is a brief glimpse of a video from April 27. In the same way, when Rob and his friends leave the store where they had taken shelter ater the monster’s irst attack, Hud proposes that they rewind the tape to see what he had captured (“I have it on tape; let me rewind it”). But all that appears is once again the underlay or the ilmic hypotext of Beth as it was archived a month earlier. It’s enough to make you believe that the monster, the object par excellence of impossible monstration,is quite precisely the ilmic gap as such.

. Terminator, or The Arche-Traveling Shot 1. My friend Jean-Louis Leutrat, in the beautiful pages he devoted to this ilm (“Come le foglie al vento,” in Apocalisse e cinema, ed. Elio Girlanda and Carlo Tagliabuye [Rome: Centro Studi Cinematograici, 1997], 76–85) says that the cameraman preferred not to watch as this scene was being shot. It was only a matter of a few inches that kept Keaton from being killed. 2. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, §15. he French translation by Emmanuel Martineau (Authentica, 1985; noncommercialized edition available online at http://t.m.p.free.fr/textes/Heidegger_etre_et _temps.pdf) proposes “ustensilité” for Zeughatigkeit. [Joan Stambaugh’s English translation (Being and Time [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996], 64) proposes “usable material.”—Trans.] 3. We oscillate between the narrative of the hero who lives in hiding and erases all his traces in Los Angeles in 2004 and his dreams of a 140

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future when the devastated Earth is the theater of a ight to the death against the robots. Sitting on the edge of a bridge, John Connor tells his story: “I live of the grid. No telephone, no address. Nothing and no one can ind me. I have erased all my ties to the past. But no matter how hard I try, I can’t erase my dreams and nightmares.” With these words, the bottle of beer that Connor has just thrown from the bridge sinks into the river’s water where the camera inds human skulls and bones. And when it slowly rises and then breaks the surface again, we are ater the apocalypse, which took place on July 25, 2004: Huge lying machines and android armies are on the lookout for human survivors. One of the robots stops, freezes into a camera gaze whose countershot once again shows Connor in 2004, waking up from a bad dream, getting on his motorcycle and back into the race (“as fast as I can”) to escape the destiny that awaits him. 4. [Szendy’s French expression plays on the double meaning of faillir, which means both to almost do something and to fail.—Trans.]

. , or Pyrotechnics 1. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 68. 2. Emmanuel Martineau translates Aufsässigkeit by “saturation” (Être et temps, §16). he word usually means “insubordination.” Something “rebellious” or “recalcitrant” is aufsässig: the tool that blocks the way or bars access. [Stambaugh translates this term as “obstinacy.”— Trans.] 3. See Alfred Hitchcock, “Core of the Movie—he Chase” which appeared in the New York Times Magazine on October 29, 1950, before being republished in Hitchcock on Hitchcock: Selected Writings and Interviews (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 125. 4. François Lyotard, “Acinema,” trans. Paisley N. Livingston, in he Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 172. 5. In an interview granted to the magazine thewrap.com (“covering Hollywood” as they say) and put on line on November 6, 2009, Emmerich declares: “[the production budget] was around $200 million, which is huge, but it wasn’t a problem as people know there’s a big global market for ilms like this.” And when he is asked which NOTES TO PAGES 2634

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aspect of the production he prefers, he replies, “he most tedious part for me is all the visual efects. You have to be very patient. And we had over 1300.” In a ine article I discovered while I was writing these pages (“En pure perte: hantise, luxe et gravité,” Vertigo 43, June 2012), Hervé Aubron suggests we consider ilms such as James Cameron’s Titanic (1997) or Jean-Luc Godard’s Film socialism (2010) in the perspective of “universal waste,” the idea for which he borrows from Bataille. And he proposes “conceiving of ilm itself as . . . an expense that makes expenditure perceptible.” As if, he adds, “ilm were nothing more than an energy-consuming (and particularly human-consuming) machine.” [Translation mine.—Trans.] 6. “Alles ist gleichgültig.” [In Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. 1, trans. David Farrell Krell, 132, one inds the translation “All is indiferent,” which has the brevity of Heidegger’s expression without touching on the question of worth that one hears in the gültig of Heidegger’s German and in the French translation by Klossowski that Szendy gives: “Toutes choses se valent.”—Trans.] 7. See Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin (1959; New York: Columbia University Press, 2011): “Even outside language all values . . . are always composed: (1) of a dissimilar thing that can be exchanged for the thing of which the value is to be determined; and (2) of similar things that can be compared with the thing of which the value is to be determined. Both factors are necessary for the existence of a value. To determine what a ive-franc piece is worth one must therefore know: (1) that it can be exchanged for a ixed quantity of a diferent thing, e.g. bread; and (2) that it can be compared with a similar value of the same system, e.g. a one-franc piece, or with coins of another system (a dollar, etc.). In the same way a word can be exchanged for something dissimilar, an idea; besides, it can be compared with something of the same nature, another word. Its value is therefore not ixed so long as one simply states that it can be ‘exchanged’ for a given concept, i.e. that it has this or that signiication: one must also compare it with similar values, with other words that stand in opposition to it” (115). Commenting on this passage, Jean-Joseph Goux rightly speaks of a “banking” or “exchangist” theory of the sign (he Coiners of Language, trans. Jennifer Curtiss Gage [Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994], 140, 143). But this is obviously not one theory 142

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among others, adopted or abandoned for whatever contingent reason. At stake is what we no doubt still need to think under the name of nihilism. 8. Here, with a thought to all the debt crises we are experiencing today, one should reread the incredibly clairvoyant notes Benjamin consecrated in 1921 to “capitalism as religion” (Walter Benjamin, “Capitalism as Religion,” trans. Rodney Livingstone, in Selected Writings, vol. 1 [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996], 288–91). I gave a irst reading of this text in an essay on Michael Jackson, which appears as the inal chapter of Hits, trans. Will Bishop (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 141–57.

. A.I., or The Freeze 1. his was also the case in 2012: Charlie Frost (Woody Harrelson), the radio broadcaster Jackson meets during his trip with his children to Yellowstone Park, announces, “It’s all going to start in Hollywood.” But, adding our voice to the protagonist’s, one wonders, What is going to start? “he apocalypse,” he answers, “the day of Last Judgment, the end of the world.” 2. I am borrowing the concept of cineworld from Jean-Luc Nancy (“Cinéile et cinémonde,” Traic, no. 50 [Paris: P.O.L., May 2004]): “he cineworld is a world, our world, whose experience is given its schema—in the Kantian sense of the word, meaning made possible in its coniguration—through ilm. his does not mean our world answers only to this schematism, but it counts it among its conditions of possibility. When we look at a landscape from a train, plane, or car, or else when we suddenly stare at an object, a detail on a face, or else an insect with a certain movement of our gaze, when we discover a street’s perspective, when we appreciate an incredible, strange, surprising or worrisome situation but also while we drink a cofee or go down a staircase—these are all occasions that lead us to think or to say, ‘his is out of a movie.’ ” Nancy even goes so far as to say that the cinema is nothing less than an “‘existential’ in Heidegger’s sense of the term: a condition of possibility for existing.” [Translations mine.—Trans.] 3. Manohla Dargis, “his Is How the End Begins,” New York Times, December 30, 2011. Dargis’s ine analysis also suggests that the citation N OTES TO PAGES 3948

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of Bruegel’s painting is a kind of homage to Tarkovsky, who also cites the painting in Solaris.

. Pause, for Inventory (the “Apo”) 1. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in an Extramoral Sense,” in Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870s, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1979), 79. One inds the same passage a year earlier in Five Prefaces to Five Unwritten Books, trans. Bruce Armstrong, in Philosophical Writings: Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. Reinhold Grimm and Caroline Molina y Vedia (New York: Continuum, 1995), where this time it is attributed to the of-screen voice of a demon narrator: “Regarding what we, with proud metaphor, term ‘world history’ and ‘truth’ and ‘fame,’ an unfeeling demon might have nothing more to say than the following: ‘In some remote corner of the universe, which has been poured out glimmering in countless solar systems, there was once a planet on which clever animals [etc.]’ ” (86). On Kant and science iction, see Peter Szendy, Kant in the Land of Extraterrestrials, trans. Will Bishop (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013). 2. Charles P. Mitchell, A Guide to Apocalyptic Cinema (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001), xi. he author of this unforgettable classiication adds, not without unintended humor, “A few ilms, such as Virus (1980), combine elements from several categories.” 3. Eric Dufour, Le Cinéma de science-iction: Histoire et philosophie (Paris: Armand Colin, 2011), 26, 79. [Translation mine.—Trans.]

. Watchmen, or The Layering of the Cineworld 1. In Le Cinéma de science-iction (41–42), Eric Dufour observes that “T.V. serials like Flash Gordon . . . multiply ever more psychedelic wipes, like the bolt of lightning that seems to destroy the center of the image and from which the next image emerges.” Psychedelic is perhaps not the best word here since we are only in 1936. But the author is right to note that “the image ofers something like a sheet being torn, and the calmer lateral wipe comes of as a page being turned”: “By doing this, the serial shows that it belongs not to a cin144

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ematographic genre that does not yet exist (S-F), but to S-F literature and, more precisely, to the pulp novels where it comes from.” [Translation mine.—Trans.] 2. Walter Benjamin, “he Little Hunchback,” cited in Alexander Garcia Duttmann, he Git of Language: Memory and Promise in Adorno, Benjamin, Heidegger, and Rosenzweig, trans. Arline Lyons (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2001), 123. 3. 2 hess. 2:1–8. his is the King James Bible translation with indications of Paul’s Greek in parentheses. Giorgio Agamben gives a determinant interpretation of this passage in he Time hat Remains, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). Ater Agamben, Roberto Esposito (Immunitas: he Protection and Negation of Life, trans. Zakiya Hanai [Malden, Mass.: Polity Press, 2011]) and Paolo Virno (Multitude between Innovation and Negation [New York: Semiotext(e), 2006], 56f.) have made katechon a key notion in political philosophy, thus pursuing Carl Schmitt’s exhumation of the concept, particularly in Nomos of the Earth. It seems to me, however, that the equivalence Agamben proposes between Schmittean katechon and Derridean diférance is a misleading oversimpliication: “he Katechon, which suspends and retains the end, inaugurates a time in which nothing can truly arrive [nulla puo veramente avvenire], because the sense of historical becoming, which only inds its truth in the eschaton, is ininitely deferred. . . . Schmitt’s katechontic time is a blocked messianism but this blocked messianism turns out to be the theological paradigm in which we live, whose structure is none other than Derridean diférance.” (See Giorgio Agamben, introduction to Carl Schmitt, Un giurista davanti a se stresso: Saggi e interviste [Milan: Neri Pozza, Vicenza, 2005], 16–17. [Translation mine.—Trans.] hanks to my friend Simone Regazzoni for having brought this passage to my attention.) 4. See Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Watchmen (Hunt Valley, Md.: Diamond Comic Distributors, 2004), chap. 6, plate no. 10.

.

Sunshine, or The Black-and-White Radiography

1. As one example among many others, we might think of the scene where Miss Scott (Tracy Reed), the secretary to the well-named general Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott), lasciviously attempts to N O T E S T O P A G E S 5 870

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2. 3. 4.

5. 6. 7.

8.

prevent the general from leaving. And the belligerent stallion promises his doll he’ll be back very soon: “Tell you what you do. You just start your countdown and old Bucky’ll be back here before you can say: Blast of!”). Akira Mizuta Lippit, Atomic Light (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 50. Ibid., 33. Lippit’s logic is not very clear when he writes that the “x” of x-rays, in other words the x of “radioactive violence” in 1945 “eludes the economy of signiication” to the extent that it generates a “phantasmatic signiier without signiication or, conversely, a full signiication with no signiier” (ibid., 54). Or yet again when he considers this “x” as “the master signiier for no signiication, for deferred or postponed . . . signiication” (54). We might say with perhaps greater rigor that the apocalypse-cinema of nuclear parousia is the fantasy of a inally full and radiant signiication that would be equivalent to the perfect and blinding absence of sense that founds the sense of ilmic images. his is why it is surprising to see to what extent the stakes of Lyotard’s acinema is underestimated in the one quick note Lippit grants it: “Jean-François Lyotard invents this term, ‘acinema,’ to describe the general practice of ‘efacement and exclusion’ in ilmmaking that leads inevitably to abstraction” (190). What Lyotard is trying to think under the name of acinema is precisely an acinefying regime of ilmic signs, marks, or traces. And as Hélène Puiseux rightly puts it in L’Apocalypse nucléaire et son cinema, “Film can only take account of the extra-normal event of nuclear explosion through fadeouts, whether to black or to white” (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1987), 51. [Translation mine.—Trans.] Lippit, Atomic Light, 43–44. See Peter Szendy, “2001, Zarathustra et la cosmographie,” in Penser au cinéma, ed. Marc Goldschmit (Paris: Hermann, 2014). Jacques Derrida, “No Apocalypse, Not Now,” trans. Catherine Porter and Philip Lewis, in Psyche: Inventions of the Other (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 402. Ibid., 403. On the concept of eiction, see Peter Szendy, Phantom Limbs: On Musical Bodies, trans. Will Bishop (New York: Fordham University Press, forthcoming).

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.

Blade Runner, or The Interworlds

1. Arthur Schopenhauer, he World as Will and Representation, trans. Judith Norman, Alistair Welchman, and Christopher Janaway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 52. 2. Jacques Derrida, Chaque fois unique, la in du monde (Paris: Galilée, 2003), 11, 9. [I am citing J. Hillis Miller’s translation of these passages in For Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 96.— Trans.] 3. Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 11. 4. Another ine occurrence of this can be found in Sunshine when Harvey (Troy Garity) gets lost in space: His eyes freeze and become a brittle gray-white color. 5. Jacques Derrida, On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Christine Irizarry (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 2–3.

.

Twelve Monkeys, or The Pipes of the Apocalypse

1. he Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, trans. C. D. Yonge, modiied (London: Bohn, 1853), 456. 2. One does ind several leeting references to the term in Marx. In Capital, for example, particularly in the chapter titled “he Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret hereof ”: “Trading nations, properly so called, exist in the ancient world only in its interstices [nur in den Intermundien der alten Welt], like the gods of Epicurus in the interworlds, or like Jews in the pores of Polish society” (Karl Marx, Capital: A New Abridgement, ed. David McLellan [Oxford: Oxford University Press, Oxford World Classics, 1995], 49 [translation slightly modiied.—Trans.]). he idea of an interworld also emerges in a striking way over the course of a recent reading of Capital by Werner Hamacher (“Lingua Amissa: he Messianism of Commodity-Language and Derrida’s Specters of Marx,” in Ghostly Demarcations, ed. Michael Sprinker [London: Verso, 2008] 181): “Specters, parting from the departed and on the brink of becoming independent, consist of splits [and, to use vocabulary that comes from cinema, of splices], live in issures and joints, in intermundia,

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as Marx . . . says of Epicurus’ gods: they are monsters of diference. . . . he spectral . . . appears precisely in the open joint between future and past.” Specters, says Hamacher in sum, are interworldly beings that live in these interstices. 3. In Kant in the Land of Extraterrestrials (trans. Will Bishop [New York: Fordham University Press, 2013]), I alluded to this sentence by Derrida, “Every other (one) is every (bit) other” (“tout autre est tout autre”) that appears throughout the last chapter of he Git of Death (trans. David Wills [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007]). Ultimately, this sentence says that the other, to be and remain other, must be other because of a radical alterity, the other being especially not the alter ego, the similar, the proximate. “An entirely other, God, you or me,” Derrida writes in “Rams” (trans. homas Dutoit, in Sovereignties in Question: he Poetics of Paul Celan [New York: Fordham University Press, 2005], 147), while commenting on a poem by Celan (“Unlesbarkeit”). And in the inal pages of this essay that he devotes in particular to the phenomenological epochē as “the hypothesis of the annihilation of the world” (which is therefore apocalyptic or, as he says himself, “eschatological”), the end of the world opens, in an abyssal way, quite precisely between an “I” and a “you” entirely other for one another, the one facing the other: “I must carry the other, and carry you, the other must carry me . . . , even there where the world is no longer between us or beneath our feet, no longer ensuring mediation or reinforcing a foundation for us” (“Rams,” 161). In his own way, Cormac McCarthy says the same thing in he Road (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2006). On the one hand, the father and son, survivors ater the apocalypse, are “each the other’s world entire” (5). On the other hand, the father measures the abyss that separates him from his son: “He turned and looked at the boy. Maybe he understood for the irst time that to the boy he was himself an alien. A being from a planet that no longer existed. he tales of which were suspect . . . he could not enkindle in the heart of the child what was ashes in his own” (129–30). 4. See Jean-Luc Nancy, he Fall of Sleep, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 31: “It is a matter . . . of the initial beat between something and nothing, between the world and the void, which also means between the world and itself. It is a mat148

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ter of the space in between, without which no reality can take place and without which, accordingly, no reality is real without a connection to some other reality from which it is separated by the interval that distinguishes them and that links them together according to the very pulsation of their common nonorigin [inorigine].” During a screening of 4:44 Last Day on Earth at the Independent Film Center in New York on March 24, 2012, Abel Ferrara declared: “Every night you go to sleep, that’s the equivalent of the last day on earth.” In an interview with Jacques Mandelbaum (Le Monde, September 8, 2009), the cineaste also declared: “he end of the world is every day. We die every day.” [Translation mine.—Trans.] 5. In Faux raccords (Paris: Actes Sud, 2010) Elie During ofers a ine analysis of Vertigo based on the opening credits’ forms and the Möbius strips that, he says, we ind again throughout the ilm, regulating its diferent signiications. 6. Like Professor Challenger, who, in Arthur Conan Doyle’s lovely story “When the World Screamed” (1928), digs to the point where he arrives at the sensitive skin of the big organism of our planet. 7. Or hysteroproteron (from the Greek husteron, “what comes ater” and proteron, “what comes before), in other words the inversion of the purportedly expected chronological order. Virgil’s words in he Aeneid (II, 353) are generally cited as the classic example: “Moriamur et in media arma ruamus” (“Let us die and rush into the middle of battle”). A more trivial example of this way of starting with the end would be: Put your shoes and socks on. Among recent ilms, Contagion (Steven Soderbergh, 2011) is constructed on a narrative chiasmus like this: he zero case of infection is discovered at the end, when the epidemic is out of control and has become global.

.

The Road, or The Language of a Drowned Era

1. J. G. Ballard, he Drowned World (1962; New York: Liveright, 2012), 48–49. 2. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 252–53. 3. Cormac McCarthy, he Road (New York: Vintage, 2007), 77. 4. It is through a kind of antiphrasis that, in 2012, on the cruise liner where he hosts the parties, Adrian’s father, a pianist and jazz singer N OTE S TO PAGE S 89105

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named Harry (Blu Mankuma) sings the following song: “It ain’t the end of the world, it’s only the end of this song.” For us who know that California has just been erased from the map, we hear this as the globe’s swan song: Nestled in a couplet, the apocalypse is indeed on the horizon. 5. On music’s power of anamnesis, see my Hits: Philosophy in the Jukebox, trans. Will Bishop (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), where I called the sung homage obsessive melodies pay to the singular moments in the story of a life inthymns.

.

The Blob, or The Bubble

1. D. H. Lawrence, “Herman Melville’s Moby Dick,” in Studies in Classic American Literature (New York: Penguin, 1971), 153. 2. See D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation (New York: Penguin), 1995, particularly pages 69–71: he “work” of the Apocalypse, that hidden face of Christianity devoted to the destruction of power, “is nearly done,” in other words the nihilistic impoverishment of life “in all our modern democracies.” Gilles Deleuze gives a beautiful and profoundly Nietzschean reading of the Apocalypse according to Lawrence (“Nietzsche and Saint Paul, Lawrence and John of Patmos,” in Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997], 36–52). He too underlines the apocalyptic will “to destroy power” with “a counterpower, which is both a power of nooks and crannies and a power of the last men” (39). “he revenge and self-gloriication of the weak, says Lawrence-Nietzsche” (39), a revenge that will be “programmed down to the minute” (41) and become “the object of an unprecedented and maniacal programming” (40). his is in fact what makes the Apocalypse look like “a great spectacle,” in sum that which makes it an anticipated form of the blockbuster: “he Apocalypse is a great machinery, an already industrialized organization” (44). 3. I analyzed the “retroprophetic” structure of Moby-Dick in Prophecies of Leviathan: Reading Past Melville, trans. Gil Andijar (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010). On the editions used by Lawrence and his striking omission of the epilogue, see JoEllyn Clarey, “D. H.

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4.

5. 6.

7.

8.

Lawrence’s Moby-Dick: A Textual Note,” Modern Philology 84, no. 2 (1986): 191–95. “he Cold War writ small and literal,” jokes Jef Sharlet (he Family: he Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power [New York: Harper Perennial, 2009], 181). he author indicates that the director of the irst, 1958, version, Irvin Yeaworth, had until then shot ilms for Christian education and was seeking to “spread his message subliminally.” As it happens, the irst title imagined for the ilm was he Glob hat Girdled the Globe. hus during Plissken’s submarine odyssey, we move through Universal City with him, a metonymy for a Hollywood engulfed in water. Later on, the character incarnated by Steve Buscemi (“Map to the Stars Eddie”) gives Plissken a kind of audio-guide that will allow him to ind his way in the devastated megalopolis, where, says the recorded voice, the huge earthquake (“the big one”) wiped the entertainment industry of the map. In Beverly Hills, Plissken inds himself briely prisoner in an infernal clinic where bodies that have abused plastic surgery survive only thanks to new implants of fresh lesh. he triumph of a generalized cinecosmetics. In Jacques Rancière, Film Fables, trans. Emiliano Battista (Oxford: Bloomsbury Academic, 2006). See, in particular, page 6: “he fable that tells the truth of cinema is extracted from the stories narrated on its screens.” In other words, the cinema has a structural need for its other—the fable, the plot, the story being told—in order to be able to ind dialectically what Rancière seems to me to conceive of, in spite of all the precautions and complications he deploys, as its “essence” (5 and 14). Jean-Luc Nancy, “Cinéile et cinémonde.” “here is nothing outside the ilm [il n’y a pas de hors-ilm]” is of course the modiied citation of the formulation one can ind in On Grammatology (trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997], 158), “here is nothing outside the text [il n’y a pas de hors-texte].” [Here, I have based my translation on Spivak’s famous translation; Szendy returns to this matter more extensively in his postface.—Trans.]

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9. As Jean-Luc Nancy argues (he Evidence of Film [Paris: Yves Gevaert éditeur, 2001], 44, 46), “With ilm, the wall becomes an opening cut in the world onto this very world. his is why the recurring attempt to compare cinema with Plato’s cave is inaccurate: precisely, the depths of the cave attest to an outside of the world, but as a negative, and this sets up the discrediting of images, as we know, or it demands a consideration for images that are lotier and purer, named ‘ideas.’ Film works the opposite way: it does not relect an outside, it opens an inside onto itself.” On the analogy between the cave in Plato’s Republic and cinematography, see in particular JeanLouis Baudry, “Le dispositif: approches métapsychologiques de l’impression de réalité,” Communications, no. 23 (1975) (reprinted in L’Efet cinema [Paris: Albatros, 1978], 30–31): “Plato . . . imagines or has recourse to an apparatus that does more than evoke, that describes in a very precise way the apparatus of the cinema and the situation of the spectator in its principle.” [Translation mine.— Trans.] In ilm, too, cinema sometimes represents itself through analogy with the cave: I’m thinking of the scene in Bertolucci’s Conformista (1971, based on the novel by Alberto Moravia) where Clerici recites the allegory to his former professor, Quadry, who he is actually in the midst of betraying for the fascist cause. Quadry closes the window, and shadows appear on the wall. More recently, in Take Shelter (2011), Jef Nichols magniicently stages the methodical and laborious underground construction of a shelter that welcomes illusion and error—the insanity, one should say—of Curtis LaForche (Michael Shannon), who threatens to take his wife, Samantha (Jessica Chastain), and daughter, Hannah (Tova Stewart), away in his delirium. But if the emergence from the cave into the sun seems to put an end to Curtis’s mirages and hallucinations, the ilm’s epilogue places this in doubt once again: Perhaps he was right ater all? 10. And this is a screen that seems to renew with cinema’s prehistory, with the translucent canvas the Lumière brothers hung for their irst demonstrations of cinematography at the Société d’encouragement pour l’industrie nationale (the Society for the Encouragement of National Industry) starting on March 22, 1895. At that point, spectators were seated on both sides of the canvas which, as Akira Mizuta Lippit emphasizes, seemed almost x-rayed (Atomic Light, 55). It is 152

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only starting with the irst public and commercial projection (on December 28, 1895, at the Grand Café on the boulevard des Capucines) that the screen was ixed to the place we now know, with spectators seated facing the image. And if it is true that this is how “cinema begins” (Stephen Heath, Questions of Cinema [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981], 1), its apparatus has hardly been called into question since then, if one makes exception for certain abandoned projects by Eisenstein, Moholy-Nagy, and a few others (see Antonio Somaini, Ejzenstejn: Il cinema, le arti, il montaggio [Milan: Einaudi, 2011], 90, 100–1).

Postface: Il n’y a pas de hors-film, or Cinema and Its Cinders 1. Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967), 277; On Gramatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967), 158. he term “hors-texte,” which returns elsewhere under Derrida’s pen, is certainly better translated by “extratext.” See in particular La Dissémination (Paris: Seuil, 1972), 397: “S’il n’y a pas de hors-texte, c’est parce que le graphique généralisé a toujours déjà commencé, est toujours enté dans une écriture ‘antérieure’. . . . Il n’y a rien avant le texte, il n’y a pas de prétexte qui ne soit déjà un texte.” Barbara Johnson renders this passage as follows (Dissemination [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981], 328): “If there is no extratext, it is because the graphic—graphicity in general—has always already begun, is always implanted in ‘prior’ writing. . . . here is nothing before the text; there is no pretext that is not already a text.” 2. Jacques Derrida, Limited, Inc., trans. Jefrey Mehlman and Samuel Weber (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 136. 3. “Le cinéma et ses fantômes,” Cahiers du cinéma, no. 556 (April 2001): 76–77 (emphasis mine). [Translation mine.—Trans.] 4. Which does not seem to me to be the case, not as directly at any rate, in Tourner les mots—au bord d’un ilm with Safaa Fathy (Paris: Galilée, 2000) or in Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews with Bernard Stiegler, trans. Jennifer Bajorek (Cambridge: Polity, 2001). 5. Jacques Derrida, Points . . . : Interviews, 1974–1994, “here Is No One Narcissism (Autobiophotographies),” trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: N O T E S T O PA G E S 120 26

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6. 7.

8.

9.

10.

Stanford University Press, 1995), 208. See also on 209: “Cinder says very well that which in the trace in general, in writing in general, efaces what it inscribes. Efacement is not only the contrary of inscription. One writes with cinders on cinders.” Lucretius, On the Nature of hings, trans. William Ellery Leonard (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1921; Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 2004), 97. On cinema and explosion, or, even better: on cinema as explosion, see Laura Odello’s ine analysis, “Exploser les images: Gremlins et le sabotage de l’écran,” in Blockbusters: Philosophie et cinéma (Paris: Les Prairies ordinaires, 2013). Jacques Derrida, Resistances: Of Psychoanalysis, trans. Peggy Kamuf, Pascale-Anne Brault, and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 48. See Dziga Vertov, Kino-Eye: he Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson, trans. [slightly modiied] Kevin O’Brien (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 17: “I am cine-eye, I am a mechanical eye. I, a machine, show you the world as only I can see it.” Deleuze comments, “Vertov’s non-human eye, the cine-eye, is not the eye of a ly or of an eagle, the eye of another animal. . . . On the contrary, it is the eye of matter, the eye in matter” (Cinema 1. he Movement Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (Anthone Press), 1986], 81). On the history of catastrophe in the lexicon of the theater, see Catherine Ailloud-Nicolas, “Scènes de théâtre: Le tremblement de terre de Lisbonne (1755) and Le jugement dernier des rois (1793),” in L’invention de la catastrophe au XVIIIe siècle: Du châtiment divin au désastre naturel (Paris: Droz, 2008), 404 [Translation mine.— Trans.]: “In the history of classical theatrical terminology, catastrophe presented itself as competitive with dénouement before being distinguished from it. he word catastrophe does not appear in Aristotle’s Poetics. Catastrophe belongs to another Greek terminological system for which we have lost the original model that we do however know through two short treatises by Evanthius (4th century b.c.e.). When the Poetics was rediscovered in France, Evanthius’s system, through the intermediary of Donat (a considerable author of the Middle Ages), was in circulation. At the time, the erudite seemed to have had two preoccupations: making the two dramaturgic systems coincide, even making them amalgamate. . . . he 154

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11. 12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

consequences of this phenomenon were determinant in the history of theatrical terminology. (Aristotle’s) dénouement and (Donat’s) catastrophe became strictly equivalent. . . . Catastrophe become synonymous with end, incident, and dénouement.” Aristotle does indeed speak of desis and lusis (nouement, or knotting, and dénouement) whereas Evanthius (cited by Aelius Donatus in his De Comeodia, IV, 5) speaks of catastrophe (katastrophē in Greek): Catastrophe conuersio rerum ad iucundos exitus patefacta cunctis cognitione gestorum (“he catastrophe is the reversal of a situation until its happy resolution, once all the characters have gained access to knowledge of the events”). Marguerite Duras, Hiroshima mon amour, trans. Richard Seaver (New York: Grove, 1994), 15. Günther Anders, “Der Mann auf der Brücke: Tagebuch aus Hiroshima und Nagasaki (1958),” in Hiroshima ist überall (Munich: Beck, 1995). Jacques Derrida, “No Apocalypse, Not Now,” in Psyché, ed. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth G. Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 400. Jean-François Lyotard, “Can hought Go On without a Body,” in he Inhuman: Relections on Time, trans. Geofrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 8–9. For an overall view on this philosophical landscape from beyond-catastrophe, see Emily Apter, “Planetary Dysphoria,” in hird Text 27, no. 1 (2013), 131–40; republished in Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (London: Verso, 2013). Quentin Meillassoux, Ater Finitude: Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (London: Continuum, 2010), 26. his English translation includes one notable addition I will be discussing further on. In his generous aterword to my Prophecies of Leviathan (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), Gil Anidjar suggested parallels between what he calls my “ipsology” and Meillassoux’s essay. [Here, Szendy uses “ne . . . point,” a somewhat antiquated form of negation in French with clear resonance with the points and points of view that appear earlier in the sentence.—Trans.] Jacques Lacan, he Ego in Freud’s heory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955, he Seminar of Jacques Lacan Vol. II, N OTE S TO PAG E S 13035

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trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (New York: Norton, 1991), 46. It would also be necessary—but it will be for another time—to read closely the rest of this apologue and its dénouement, “I hope you’ll consider . . . consciousness to occur each time . . . there’s a surface such that it can produce what is called an image. hat is a materialist deinition. An image—that means the efects of energy starting from a given point of the real—think of them as being like light, since that is what most clearly evokes an image in our mind—are relected at some point on a surface, come to strike the corresponding same point in space. he surface of a lake might just as well be replaced by the area striata of the occipital lobe, for the area striata with its ibrillary layers is exactly like a mirror. In the same way as you don’t need the entire surface of a mirror . . . for you to be aware of the content of a ield or a room, in the same way as you obtain the same result by using a tiny little bit, so any small portion of the area striata can be put to the same use, and behaves like a mirror. All sorts of things in the world behave like mirrors” (49).

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INDEX OF FILMS

2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968), 6–7, 76 2010 (Peter Hyams, 1984), 6, 76 2012 (Roland Emmerich, 2009), 6, 34–39, 52, 143n1, 149n4 4:44 Last Day on Earth (Abel Ferrara, 2012), 78, 148n4 Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979), 76, 124, 135 Antichrist (Lars von Trier, 2009), 48 Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979), 69, 76 Armageddon (Michael Bay, 1998), 72 Artiicial Intelligence: AI (Steven Spielberg, 2001), 45–47, 52 Beneath the Planet of the Apes (Ted Post, 1970), 3–4, 104 Beware! he Blob (Larry Hagman, 1972), 110, 112 he Big Lebowski (Joel and Ethan Coen, 1998), 130

he Birds (Alfred Hitchcock, 1963), 99 Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982), 7, 53–54, 61, 82–86, 88–89 he Blob (Irvin Yeaworth, 1958), 110–12, 151n5 he Blob (Chuck Russell, 1988), 110–12 he Book of Eli (Albert and Allen Hughes, 2010), 65, 105 A Boy and His Dog (L. Q. Jones, 1975), 6, 104 Brazil (Terry Gilliam, 1985), 93 Cloverield (Matt Reeves, 2008), 15–21, 116, 140n3 he Conformist (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1971), 152n9 Contagion (Steven Soderbergh, 2011), 149n5 he Core (Jon Amiel, 2003), 79 Crack in the World (Andrew Marton, 1964), 38, 95

he Day Ater (Nicholas Meyer, 1983), 72–73 he Day Ater Tomorrow (Roland Emmerich, 2004), 42–43, 52 he Day the Earth Caught Fire (Val Guest, 1961), 96, 139n7 he Day the Earth Stood Still (Robert Wise, 1951), 79 he Day the World Ended (Roger Corman, 1955), 96 Deep Impact (Mimi Leder, 1998), 109 Dementia (John Parker, 1953), 110 Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Stanley Kubrick, 1964), 70–71, 145n1 Dumb-Hounded (Tex Avery, 1943), 34–35 Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (Fred F. Sears, 1956), 79, 139n End of the World (La Fin du monde; Abel Gance, 1931), 52–53, 58 Escape from L.A. (John Carpenter, 1996), 6, 113–15, 139n7, 151n6 Escape from New York (John Carpenter, 1981), 113 Escape from the Planet of the Apes (Don Taylor, 1971), 4 F for Fake (Orson Welles, 1974), 79 Film socialisme (Jean-Luc Godard, 2010), 142n5

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INDEX OF FILMS

Five (Arch Oboler, 1951), 53 he Fly (Kurt Neumann, 1958), 81 Hiroshima (Hideo Sekigawa, 1953), 131 Hiroshima Mon Amour (Alain Resnais, 1959), 130–32 I Am Legend (Francis Lawrence, 2007), 138n4 In Time (Andrew Niccol, 2011), 139n7 La Jetée (Chris Marker, 1962), 90 he Last Man on Earth (Ubaldo Ragona and Sidney Salkow, 1964), 8–9 Last Year at Marienbad (L’Année dernière à Marienbad; Alain Resnais, 1961), 48 he Lost World: Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1997), 120 Magnolia (Paul Anderson, 1999), 48 Melancholia (Lars von Trier, 2011), 1–4, 21, 48–49, 55, 57, 78, 100, 116, 118–21 Moby Dick (John Huston, 1956), 109 he Omega Man (Boris Sagal, 1971), 9–10, 138n4 On the Beach (Stanley Kramer, 1959), 115–16 he Planet of Peril, irst episode of Flash Gordon (Frederick

Stephani and Ray Taylor, 1936), 58–59 Prehistoric Super Salesman (Paul J. Smith, 1969), 97 Quintet (Robert Altman, 1979), 44, 52 he Road (John Hillcoat, 2009), 103, 120 S. Darko (Chris Fisher, 2009), 95 he Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980), 44 Solaris (Andreï Tarkovski, 1972), 142n3 Soylent Green (Richard Fleischer, 1973), 61–62 Steamboat Bill Jr. (Buster Keaton and Charles Reisner, 1928), 23–25, 140n1 Strange Days (Kathryn Bigelow, 1995), 8, 95 Stromboli (Roberto Rossellini, 1950), 129 Sunshine (Danny Boyle, 2007), 44, 73–78, 100, 147n4 Take Shelter (Jef Nichols, 2011), 152n9 Terminator 2: Judgment Day (James Cameron, 1991), 128 Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (Jonathan Mostow, 2003), 26–29, 39, 54, 140n3 hey Live (John Carpenter, 1988), 54

Titanic (James Cameron, 1997), 142n5 Towering Inferno (John Guillermin and Irwin Allen, 1974), 128 Twelve Monkeys (Terry Gilliam, 1995), 89–94, 97–100, 105–6 Two Days Before the Day Ater Tomorrow, eighth episode of the ninth season of South Park (Trey Parker, 2005), 41 Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958), 90, 98–99, 149n5 Virus (Kinji Fukasuku, 1980), 144n2 he War Game (Peter Watkins, 1965), 77–78 he War of the Worlds (Byron Haskin, 1953), 88 Watchmen (Zack Snyder, 2009), 62–67, 69 When Worlds Collide (Rudolph Maté, 1951), 39, 57, 59–60 Woman in the Moon (Frau im Mond; Fritz Lang, 1929), 10–12, 138n5, 139n7 Woodstock (Mike Wadleigh, 1970), 9, 138n4 he World, the Flesh, and the Devil (Ranald MacDougall, 1959), 96 World Trade Center (Oliver Stone, 2006), 129

INDEX OF FILMS

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