Apocalypse-Cinema: 2012 and Other Ends of the World 9780823264834

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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. This book was originally published in French as Peter Szendy, L’apocalypsecinéma: 2012 et autres fin du monde © Capricci, 2012. This work, published as part of a program providing publication assistance, received financial support from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 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 “This book was originally published in French as Peter Szendy, L’apocalypse-cinéma: 2012 et autres fin 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 fiction films—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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FOR GIL ANIDJAR

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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

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Chapter  Terminator, or The Arche-Traveling Shot  Chapter  , or Pyrotechnics

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

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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, Thus 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

The apocalypse is in fashion. Ever since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when it first 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, affinity 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 fictionality and thus retains a literary quality. In Apocalypse-Cinema Peter Szendy argues that a similar affinity exists between the apocalypse and cinema—between anticipations, intimations, or representations of the end of the world and what could be called the finitude of the film as a structure delimited in time—in short: between the end of the world and the end of the film. His emblem and experience of this apocalyptic end is the dark screen that separates the final image of Lars von Trier’s Melancholia from its “credits”—a blackness that lasts somewhat more than ten seconds, in which von Trier’s film “is no longer really cinema any more” but rather “a cinema of the after-all.” Szendy thus reminds us of an aspect of the “apocalypse” that is often forgotten in its common usage. This usage generally reflects 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, “after 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. The apocalypse, at least in its Christian origins—and this still holds in different ways today, even in an apparently “secular” culture (which may or may not be specific 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 films examined in this book, it is the end as such, the end itself, that tends to overshadow its aftereffects: This is the ambiguity of what Szendy, playing on a French idiom, calls the “after-all” (“après-tout”). If, after 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”? This 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 fictionality, 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. There 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 infinite.”

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If Szendy also argues that “film (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 field in which Apocalypse-Cinema plays itself out. The vision retold by John is both cosmic and judgmental: The 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 first and the last.” “I was dead and here I am alive.” The 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 significant difference. The “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 “cinefication” 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 cinefication,” 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 left to do the reading. This 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 films 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 films 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 signification,” this is nowhere more palpable than at the beginning and end of the film that, as already indicated, stands for Szendy as the “exemplary incarnation” of apocalypse-cinema: Melancholia. “Life and death, death and life of the filmic image: Such is the story, the only story perhaps, that all apocalypses portrayed on screen tell. They narrate the end of the cineworld.” The 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 film, 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 flow, the images that we see are anything but uninterrupted—until, of course, the final 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, after 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 confirming mortality but indeed accelerating it. Something related takes place in the first actual scene of the film, after 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. The car is too long, the driver too inexperienced, the road too unstable. The 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: prefiguration of a contact already under way, long before the apocalyptic collision. The 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 filmic perspective, is the shift 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 “cinefied”—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 Zukunftsmusik—a music of the future—which the notion of the “unending melody” was designed to announce, in fact prepares the way for something quite different: the end as brutal rupture, in which the hope of an infinite melody turns into the reality of an infinite 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. This is already made visible from the very first images of the filmic “prelude,” starting with the haggard, frozen face of Justine (Kirsten Dunst), around which after 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.” The 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. That this earth is shown to be a “hole” in a golf course only emphasizes the futility and frivolity of human effort and social institutions. This 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 film in particular. The third image in the prelude gives us a long screen shot of Bruegel’s painting Hunters in the Snow, after 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 different and significant way in the second scene of the prelude, coming just after the face of Justine and just before Hunters in the Snow. In it we see what first 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: The carefully arranged trees cast shadows in two different directions. This gives the shot an uncanny effect, for it indicates that there are two separate sources of light illuminating the scene and casting those shadows. This indication is then confirmed several shots later, when we see the three figures 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 offer 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 film viewer. But xviii

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Melancholia holds out the “generic” expectation of spectatorial distance only to collapse it, as much as any film 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 conflict 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 reaffirmation of that exclusivity is indeed “apocalyptic,” since it leaves the viewer with a conclusion that makes it difficult to ignore just how fragile it can be to outlast the end of the film, “after all.” For after all, Apocalypse-Cinema demonstrates how only the most impersonal of images can survive their autocinefication: 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 fin du monde (Paris: Galilée, 2003), 11, 9. The 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, “The 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. This 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 infinitely 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 first hear the dissipation of the echo of the orchestral rocket fire from the prelude to Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde—that mesmerizing ascension, those incessant irruptions of sound that prepared and accompanied the catastrophe. The 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 film 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 filmic eschatology can be reversed without being changed in the slightest): The 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 film 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 final point of the cinematic work that reaches its end. Melancholia will perhaps have been and may perhaps forever be the only film 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 film seemed so reassuring: After 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 after 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, after 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, after all, I unavoidably hear that it is also a question of a cinema of the afterwards, of a cinema that comes after it all, after 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 effect 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 “first eye,” with the first opened eyes. The dark film 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 after-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 film 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 film and that of the world—thus retrospectively confirming 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 off the atomic explosion that destroys the whole Earth. Over a white screen, the off-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 insignificant planet, is now dead.” The fade to black concludes just as the two final words are pronounced: “now dead.” Here too it would thus seem that the end of the film absolutely coincides with general extinction. And yet in Beneath the Planet of the Apes, there is a narrating voice that actually continues after or over the final 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 flee 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. This is not the case with Melancholia. Until the final 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 after the ultimate image. The end of the film as end of the world would then also be the end of cinema itself. Acinema, finally, 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 flourished. 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 The 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 first page: “New Mayan Prophecies Reveal . . . End Times Begin On Valentine’s Day.” The apocalypse, as the reader I am is meant to deduce, is for tomorrow. Or rather, tomorrow, it will start being prepared. This 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: The 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 flood Japan and other countries in Asia, that extinct volcanos will erupt all over Europe, that fires 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 suffering 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-office 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 filmic archive of the ends of the world: To mention only films 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 first 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. This is why, in fact, a date remains essentially yet to come; it is that infinite 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. The blackboard of a community church bearing the white letters of an inscription: “The end has come.” The camera enters through the broken window of the house of Doctor Morgan (Vincent Price). The alarm goes off. The 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.” After 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 difficulty, 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 finds 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 off every day, day after 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 off the square for September 5. He takes off the plank that locks the door from the inside. And goes out. The Last Man on Earth (Ubaldo Ragona and Sidney Salkow, 1964) is the first film 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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groove of the record that the doctor, as he fell asleep, left 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 afternoon, 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, The Omega Man (Boris Sagal, 1971), this is in effect 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. After 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 first 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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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 film 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 off a few and to defend himself from another’s assault. Going up in the elevator to his fortified 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 film of his memories—is his finger pressing the button for the top floor. The colonel’s index finger seems both to start the projector of images from the past and to launch the missiles, the bacteriological bombs of world conflict. 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: “Thirty-five! . . . Thirty-six! . . . Thirty-seven! . . . Thirty-eight! . . . Thirty-nine! . . . Forty! . . . Fire!!!” . . . Instantly there was a terrifying, fantastic, superhuman detonation which could not be compared to thunder or 10

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any previously known sound, not even the eruption of a volcano. An immense spout of flame shot from the bowels of the earth as from a crater. The 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 film 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 off that the director inaugurates the procedure that will leave such a major mark on so many films, 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 film: The intertitle is animated: The frame of the sentence stays the same— “. . . more seconds!”—but the numbers inserted into it decrease as their size increases . . .

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

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“Now,” says the film—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. That is to say the one that will immediately follow. Because this absolute deictic, like a stretched cinematographic index finger that aims at the pure presence to itself of the image on the screen, is at the same time the filmic gap—however tiny it may be—between this image here and the other one. But it is not only in film that, starting with Fritz Lang, we count down this way: Another countdown inhabits and haunts the history of film, the one that happens each time before the film, as its preparation. The decreasing numbers— what Americans call the “academy leader” or the “countdown footage”—measure the time remaining before the film itself properly begins. Before the film and within the film, then, we count down. And once the end finally 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. The 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. The time, perhaps, of film itself, insofar as it could be said to be always on the threshold of its end.

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CHAPTER 

Cloverfield, or The Holocaust of the Date

An anthology of different ways of staging or showing the date stamps of filmic images would have to give pride of place to Cloverfield (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 film 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 first 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 film until the movie is almost over. The testament that any date is thus sticks to the film’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 effect something that testifies (testis in Latin, which gives testamentum).

But it is a witness that can witness only if someone else in turn witnesses in some way for its testimony. In effect, 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]. That 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 testifies. 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. The 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 Cloverfield. This is the holocaust that burns in the flames of the final 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 differentiated from itself. What we see before anything else, at the very beginning of Cloverfield, is this jolt of the camera that is not filming anything yet. And this moment when the filmic 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 find announced the gap that will inhabit each image of Cloverfield 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. The 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 filming. The (pen)ultimate images of the film 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. That 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 enflames 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 filming, 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 first 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. The images of a lost world reemerge after 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 left: 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 after the end. To date the date so that the testament can go into effect. This testamentary structure of the image that appears at the end of Cloverfield inhabits and interweaves each one of the film’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 Cloverfield 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: The 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 Cloverfield 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 filming when there is nothing and no one to see on the screen. Thus 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. After 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 finds himself face to face with the monster. A mortal face-off 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 first 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 reflex motion, like a body life has left but in which certain organic functions have not yet entirely been extinguished. The camera acts here as a very strange metonymy for Hud: It watches him, this thing that had been his gaze (and ours); it films him; it keeps running; but the regime of images it delivers is at the limits of testament.

Matt Reeves, dir., Cloverfield, 2008 20

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These shots no longer give anything to be seen or heard. They 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 Cloverfield is thus an ultratestamentary film, this is not the case for Melancholia. In Von Trier’s film, 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 afterwards of the after-all, there are no longer any images or film at all. No all anymore at all.

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CHAPTER 

Terminator, or The ArcheTraveling Shot

All of it: This is no doubt what so many so-called apocalyptic films 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. That 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. Thus, in the famous cyclone sequence in Steamboat Bill, Jr. (Buster Keaton, 1928), we see not only one collapse after the other, like a house of cards, but also the interlocking or the articulation that arranges beings among themselves. The blasting wind makes barrels roll and a whirlwind out of pieces of paper, bits of newspapers or torn-off posters that, unstuck from their original spot, get attached elsewhere, vibrant in the insistence of their will to be hooked onto something somewhere. The 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 flee the city’s hospital (the scene was shot in Sacramento, California), whose roof and walls fly away as if the lid of a pan were being taken off, 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. The facade of the house in front of which he stands starts to crack; it slowly detaches itself. The 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 flies 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 filmed it. But if I recall it here, it is instead to underline what it presents as the fitting or mounting par excellence. The fact that, as one says in English, “it fits.” The 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: “There is,” writes Heidegger, “no such thing as a utensil” (Being and Time, 64, translation modified). 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. This is in fact why the tool as such disappears; it melts and dissolves into the infinite 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 finds the most striking images of this referring interlocking that constitutes the very structure of ustensility. The plot, as you know, is in a way suspended between the before and the after, 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. After a prelude that is constantly crossing back and forth over this temporal limit, we see two Terminators arrive, one after the other, stark naked and then covered in clothes. A T-X (Kristanna Loken) working for the Skynet artificial intelligence network has been given the task of killing the future human rebels. The T-850 (Arnold Schwarzenegger) must protect them. This is the narrative backdrop or pretext onto which infinite visual variations will be projected concerning the cinematographic themes of fitting, 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 firing 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 fire. The 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 flee in the clinic’s pickup truck. The T-X takes a truck crane to chase them down, but not without having first 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 finger turns into a finely pointed drill—she is a virtual toolbox, ustensility in person; her index finger 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. The 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 fire truck, and, closing out this frenzied parade, the T-580 sent on their tracks on his motorcycle. There 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 effects 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 after 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 find 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 offices, 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 film; 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 film and for film 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 final holocaust, it is here, in this sequence that is not all that different from Buster Keaton’s house of cards, that the nuclear holocaust of the movie’s last images is being prepared. This 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. Their 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. This 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 afterwards of the holocaust that has taken place. The world was very close to becoming present or totalized as such. But at this point there is nothing more than the gray ash that floats in the air around the still reddening eye of a Terminator who has died. The 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). After 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: The 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 modified) The world lets itself be felt as world in or through this— remarked because prevented—reference of one thing to another. The interlacing or contexture of things that makes

the world: This 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 find it. And, finally, when it presents an obstacle, when it closes off the field 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 specific character as utensils consists of indicating [Zeigen]” (Being and Time, 72, translation modified). 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 different chase scenes that, for Hitchcock, compose the essence or heart of cinema. The image-sign is a machinetool; it’s a ustensilitarian vehicle. This 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 film 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. This regime is that of reference as a being-worth [valoir-pour]. This 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 film, is valuable [vaut] because it returns to something else, because it is thus potential return and profit. The only genuine movement with which the cinema is written is that of value. One could not state more clearly that film’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 office take but also in the traffic, exchange, or potlatch of images and between images. While watching the universal grinding and pulverization of the Terminators, one finds 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 infinite chain of consequences that carries them away . . . all the way to the end of the world? There 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 fireworks of disintegration and atomization 2012, OR PYROTECHNICS

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seem to point toward something beyond filmic pleasure, toward an an-economy of acinema. Launched onto the world market in 2009 with an incredibly effective viral marketing plan, Roland Emmerich’s superproduction 2012 testifies 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 effects. But on the other hand, the film’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 flee the frame of the inflationist reel that seems destined to bury them at any moment under an avalanche of means. There 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. This poor wolf travels the whole world at a frantic pace until he is forced to traverse the ultimate limit of the film’s frame itself. The 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 transfigure the cinepyrotechnics of special effects. 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 floor of a crumbling tower, it is as if it were plunging into the ever-shrinking space of a closing iris. After 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: This time the little extended family has arrived at the airport; we take off with them; and everything starts over. The old bird that takes them toward salvation is seen against collapsing highways and flying 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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to the ethereal heights necessary to enjoy this digital spectacle quietly with them, the huge tsunami that submerges the Pacific 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 fleeing some danger, gets up on his feet (or his paws or any other means) and runs, only to find himself over some abyss or precipice: We know that scene, which is seen in so many animated films, 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. This 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 find 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”: These 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 effects, 2012 certainly perfectly incarnates the hyperproductive filmic paradigm that Lyotard described as follows:

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“The film produced by the artist working in capitalist industry . . . springs from the effort to eliminate aberrant movements, useless expenditures, differences 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 films, brings the filmic machine to its burning point, leads it to the overheating of the overload, on the verge of imploding. The 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 film par excellence, if we retain the best definition of nihilism as this one, from Heidegger: “It’s all worth the same thing.” Thus— one example among so many of an indifferent interchangeability—the time remaining for seduction or cruising is voluntarily superimposed with that of the apocalypse when— concerning Laura Wilson (Thandie 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.” The 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 superficial cracks that plastic surgery will be able to fix, as if the Earth’s crevices were also a question of cosmetics.

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Later on, the first deep breach in the terrestrial crust runs down the aisles of a supermarket where Kate and her boyfriend Gordon (Thomas 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. The seismological fissure 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 film, one could say quite simply that it’s all worth. In effect, 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 financial 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 first 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. This 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]. Thus, the general cine-potlatch toward which films 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 off 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. This is what happens, for example, in When Worlds Collide (Rudolph Maté, 1951), a film of which 2012 seems in many ways to be the remake. The 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 first 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. “This 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 figure of significance. The significance of images as much as that of sounds or words. And it is thus the limits of signification—or, as we will later say, of cinefication—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 finds an excellent algebraic formula for the narrative logic of disaster movies. After Stan and Cartman’s antics cause a flood 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 scientific community are still running tests but we think it may happen . . . the day after tomorrow.” There are screams, panic, and objections from a skeptical Republican. The scientists of the aforementioned community come in; they’ve finished the tests. One of them steps forward to announce the result: “Global warming will hit two days before the day after tomorrow.” Silence. The 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,

The Day After Tomorrow, 2004, placed under the sign of a general freeze-over during a new glacial era. We will have to linger with this film for a bit in order to see the immobility at work in it, to see the solidification 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 cinefication. The Day After Tomorrow opens with a long aerial traveling shot over the ice floe 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. The tone is set: What we will see is an improbable superimposition of freezing and accelerated expansion, of crystallizing capture and rapid-fire radiation. The underlying scientific 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 film. To start with, it is snowing in New Delhi while the experts debate the environment. Then, 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 film finds its own rhythm or temporality when little by little these planetary cataclysms stop and are paralyzed in an immobilization that, paradoxically, spreads ever faster. After 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. The freeze’s metonymic propagation starts from up above with the antenna at the top of the Empire State Building. The 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? They 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. The general freezing threatens to reach even the film reel itself. The film 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 The Day After 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., The Day After Tomorrow, 2004

image as such, the suspense of the cinematic that runs the risk of freezing by coagulating on screen. The 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 film that opens with words pronounced by an off-screen voice while we see a star fading in a dark sky: “Our sun is dying, and humanity may well die.” The Earth, we learn, is in effect “frozen by a solar winter,” whose effects 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 finally 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 film 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 different horror genre, one thinks of the end of The 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 first 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. The shot stops on this date, which thus signals the end of the film: Cinematographic movement numbs and freezes into an immobile image. In Artificial 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 off-screen voice that, up against waves and masses of water in motion, tells a tale: Those were the years after 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 filial 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, after 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 finds himself face to face A.I., OR THE FREEZE

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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. Through the deep waters, it is their light that seems to break the path for seeing. The 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 finds 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 film 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. . . . Thus, 2000 years passed by. 46

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

This 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. The 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 film of his long mechanical life. His memories. Transfixed and frozen, the filmic flow solidifies. It takes and crystallizes. And to unfix 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 filmic image: Such is the story, the only story perhaps, that all apocalypses portrayed on screen tell. They narrate the end of the cineworld. There are, however, some shots that are impossible to declare living or dead. Simply frozen or definitively extinguished, numbed yet potentially mobile or petrified forever as bas-reliefs. These 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 filmic 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 film, a little like the way Wagner announced the themes of an opera? There is first 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 fictive 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). There is then a huge sundial in a garden that has been compared to the one in Last Year at Marienbad. Then a shot of The 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: The 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 inflammation, 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 film-world. This prelude’s images are still lifes, frozen and chilling allegories. The viewer goes from the one to the other as one would leaf through a book. Page after page, each page vibrating with a pure differential 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-fiction 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. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of “world history,” but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After 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. There 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 classifications that some think they are able to propose of

the species within the “apo” genre. The scholarly and stuffy tone of one Guide, for example, is funny (and I will not resist the pleasure of citing this long passage): A basic definition 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. The 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 classified as an apocalyptic film, 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 film 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 films can be classified into seven specific categories: Religious or Supernatural; Celestial Collision; Solar or Orbital Disruption; Nuclear War and Radioactive Fallout; Germ Warfare or Pestilence; Alien Device or Invasion; and Scientific 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 The Day After Tomorrow or 2012. Animals well versed in film studies and endowed with a historian’s penchant might want to superpose this reasoned classification 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 first apocalyptic film in the history of the cinema” at the beginning of a monograph called Le Cinéma de science-fiction, while fifty pages later, “the first film of this sub-genre [the “apocalyptic S-F film”] is Five” directed by Arch Oboler in 1951. These 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. Thus, among the blogs hosted by AlloCiné, a French film website, one finds a Petit blog du post-apo. The abbreviation allows for quicker and more efficient classification 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 find classified 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 They Live. “Call it a pre-postapocalyptic movie, since it’s not clear, at the film’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 after its 1982 release—more than ever: After feverish debates nourished by the contradictory signs strewn from the first version to the final 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 shift 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 prefix? 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 film? It would seem, as I have already suggested, that the only veritable yet perhaps impossible law of the genre is as follows: The end of such a film will coincide with the end of the world. The final fade-out is destined to be that of the end of everything, including of film, of that film we just saw. Which would end not only because there is nothing left 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 film that is worthy of this definitively final 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 film history that ends with this black screen where the final point of the story affecting 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 films inhabited by the archi-fade-out of general annihilation? Every end of every film (not to mention the end of a series . . .) is no doubt the end of a world. And in this sense, cinema, after all, is perhaps, each time unique, the apocalypse.

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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 filing system of genres and among all the categories in which films run and compete in their race to the end of the cineworld, we were fascinatedly watching the cosmic conflagration of two planets that closes the prologue to Melancholia. This collision was already seen in the 1951 When Worlds Collide. But in that film it was a version that now seems toned down, prodded toward a “happy ending,” since in the film 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 flames 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 first apocalyptic film in film 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 floods unleash while lost animals take flight. In the end, the two celestial bodies just barely miss each other, but there has nonetheless been massive destruction. A few years after The End of the World, the impact between the Earth and a wandering, “rogue planet” is also the motor for the plot of the first episode of Flash Gordon, the series broadcast starting in 1936 and based on the eponymous comic strip. In fact, the film 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. After 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 film: This 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 find ourselves sent toward the first chapter of the series, whose title is displayed (“The 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: They 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 lifts 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. This 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 flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth. And God said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth. Here too, we are leafing through the pages of the Book. Why insist on the rhetorical artifices 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). The 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?—flashy. 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 leafing through the Book already announces the moment when the camera will go through the pages of all the books being microfilmed in order to take them into the spatial Noah’s Ark: The traveling shot over the vertically arranged titles becomes a sample, like a drill core into the thickness of human knowledge (The Holy Bible, Anatomy of the Human Body, Practical Mathematics, Standard Agriculture, The 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 film history. They seem to bear within them the involuntary memory of an ancestor to film, the “flipbook,” which was also known as a kineograph in the version patented by John Barnes Linnett in 1868. Walter Benjamin offered the following mention of it, with testamentary resonances, in the final section of “Berlin Childhood”: I imagine that this “entire life” which people say flashes before the eyes of the dying is made up of pictures. . . . They flash by at great speed, like the little books with tight bindings that were once the precursors of moving pictures. The thumb, pressing gently, would move across the side of the little books. Then, 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 film. 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 leafingthrough [feuilleté] in which film 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. This is what we see in a sequence of Soylent Green (Richard Fleischer, 1973) that is both touching and irritating. Even before the credits, the film 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 fishing; then, faster and faster, the first accomplishments of aviation, cars, oil, consumption, and mass transportation; finally, detritus, waste, pollution, general congestion. . . . Then, after the film’s title, one reads: “Year: 2022. Place: New York City. Population: 40,000,000.” It is in this overpopulated and suffocating universe that we discover Thorn (Charlton Heston) and Solomon (Edward G. Robinson) living in a tiny apartment they share. Thorn is a cop and Solomon is a “book.” In other words, according to a metonymy proper to the film’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 Thorn 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 Thorn have discovered a vast conspiracy destined to hide the intolerable truth: The 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 confirmation 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 after 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 Thorn, 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 film-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 leafing through the images of a lost cineworld. And this is what we must now interrogate: apocalypse-cinema as that structural moment of the film when it all, after all, strips [s’effeuille]. To start to think of this stripping or this leafing, 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 film is immediately placed under the sign of an apocalyptic countdown. The 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 five 62

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minutes before midnight. The 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. The Soviets would never risk going to war when we have a walking nuclear deterrent on our side.” This 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; finally, 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 first of all: Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley), nicknamed after the famous psychological diagnostic test conceived of by the Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach in 1921. In both the film 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 shifting 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 film), but absolute flux, the uninterrupted continuity of a fluency, of a visual flow without any break whatsoever. This is why, at the end of the film, Rorschach becomes quite simply the stubborn affirmation 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 first or last stop, this archipause the end of time would be, once the needle on the Doomsday Clock finally arrives at midnight. Against all the countdowns running toward the extinction of movement, Rorschach is the stubbornness of the infinitely confluent fluidity 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 off for later. This force is what Paul, in his second epistle to the Thessalonians, 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 first 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 first, 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 final 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, infinitely. Film is a Western invention and is no doubt profoundly Christian. And far beyond the innumerable Hollywood screenplay variations on today’s Christ-like figures (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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finally, 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. That 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 filmic 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 fluency that is Rorschach’s face. The film 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-off of Dr. Manhattan. The 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 shifts of two viscous fluids, immiscible like water and oil, between two layers of latex. Kovacs, who personally finds 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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Thus everything that is being constantly redrawn on Rorschach’s film-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. The fluent and fluid 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: There is distinction and differentiation at work in the flow called Rorschach; there is something layered within him. One senses this, in fact, when he first appears at the beginning of the film, given that he is accompanied by the sheets of newspapers flying around the street. We realize this even more clearly when he is arrested, that is to say when he finds 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 film is probably the one where we watch the nuclear explosion that will destroy New York. This is a major moment of leafing and stripping. Not only does the impact of the shock wave expanding throughout the city’s streets make posters and newspaper pages fly. But above all, the psychologist’s briefcase opens under the effect 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 flip-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 effect 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 suffer 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 “The Ride of the Valkyries.”

The 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 film in which we discover, in burlesque tones, that the Soviets have constructed the “Doomsday Machine,” an underground complex of fifty 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 film’s comic refrains is the ghost of the “gap,” of the fear of a break or of being late in the arms race. Thus 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 finish line. Or of coming together, of having one last perfectly coordinated orgasm, so much does this film constantly superimpose the lexicon of war with that of sex. There has already been a first 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. This fatal detonation in turn sets off the Doomsday Machine’s countdown, which will seal the end of the world and the end of the film through a series of successive deflagrations. Kubrick uses stock footage showing different 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. This 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. The world that calls and interpellates itself. The 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. There have been a lot of these filmic 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 fire, 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 artificial dawn beyond the atmosphere. . . . These 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) sacrifices himself to set off the bomb that will pulverize the giant asteroid heading toward Earth. Objective and documentary, as in The Day After (Nicholas Meyer, 1983), where, after 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 flash, 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. The 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, film

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goes up in flames, 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, film, and psychoanalysis: The extravisibility of the X-ray is an effect of its inflammatory force. X visuality. It sees by burning and destroying. An extravisuality that cinefies. This cinefaction that would be the proper work of the atom should be understood along with the two possible readings of the prefix “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 film, in other words what we will be calling cinefication. I will return to this right away after a detour through other black or white screens, the two extremes where, like a freeze’s slowness and pyrotechnical speed, film 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. The film 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 off-screen voice of Robert Capa (Cillian Murphy), the commander of Icarus II, while the shot approaches the paling sun that grows to fill the screen in a fade to white. But no, this is no longer the sun. The 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 effect of the heat. The 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 artificial solar eclipse. Or else the slow contraction of a black pupil— Icarus—at the center of an iris of fire. Cut: Here we are in the spatial vessel’s “observation room” where Searle (Cliff 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 filtering as much as possible; he would apparently like to allow himself to be flooded 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 flow, on the point of being dissolved into its whiteness, like the bodies illuminated by nuclear deflagration. Upon his return to the other members of the crew, Searle recounts that, according to the psychological studies he has read on the effects of sensory deprivation, total darkness is an element in which we float but without dissolving into it: “You and darkness are distinct from one another.” But, he adds after a pause, “Total light envelops you, it becomes you.” What Searle is describing after 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 first published X-ray photographs is of his wife’s left hand, which was taken in the final months of 1895. . . . The image depicts Berthe’s skeletal structure and the bones that constitute her hand, but also the wedding ring that hovers on the surface, infiltrating 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 finds 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. This is why, in the apocalyptic or revelatory moment of their dissolving overexposure, they are the site of a double eclipse. The 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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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 flavors of Apocalypse Now.” And the director answers that Coppola’s masterpiece, freely adapted from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, is in effect his favorite film, 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 films 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 filmic gap, in other words, basically, editing as différance. Yet as Searle explains at the beginning of the mission, fading into monolithic darkness and fading into solar whiteness are not the same things. There is a difference between these two indifferentiations, 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. “They 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. The only properly apocalyptic filmic moment (and let us not forget that in Greek, apokalupsis means revelation, unveiling, uncovering) would thus be the blinding white flash of luminous irradiation. Like the one we see, for example, when Searle, sacrificing 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 finally able to place the explosive charge the size of Manhattan into the heart of the sun: Insistently, a flood of fire surrounds the transfigured face of the surviving hero for a long moment. This 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 find once again in The War Game, a documentaryfiction 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 first see a white screen, and then a child screaming in pain with his hands over his eyes. Implacable from the very beginning, the off-screen voice comments: At seven-tenths of a millisecond after the explosion, and at a distance of 60 miles, the light from the fireball of a single megaton thermonuclear device is 30 times brighter than the midday sun. This little boy has received severe retinal burns from an explosion 27 miles away. The 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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fiction. From Sunshine to The 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 final 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 film: 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: “film”]. The annihilation of the general explosion, we were saying in front of Melancholia, is just that: cinema after all. And it is perhaps even cinema’s privileged place, there in any case where filmic pyrotechnics is triumphant and taken to its heights as it unfurls in what are called “special effects” (even if they are actually the norm, starting with Méliès’s films), in the proliferation of these “visual effects” that the English language abbreviates VFX and which, like x-rays or solar rays, erase the image the better to effectuate it in its effectiveness: Are radiography or heliography not in effect—or, yes, in effects—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., The Day the Earth Stood Still, 1951

Gort, the hominoid robot from The 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 flying saucers that thus reorganize and partially erase newsreels from the Second World War (Orson Welles will cite these images as emblematic of the effectiveness of VFX in the 1974 F for Fake). In the same way once again, in The Core (Jon Amiel, 2003), lightning cracks over Rome due to the dysfunction of the Earth’s electromagnetic field; and the so-called eternal city sees itself reduced to ashes, in other words redrawn, digitalized, and then erased, crossed off 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 fictive effectiveness of their effects. And yet if we (ever so slightly) alter “No apocalypse, not now,” and yet and for these very reasons, the effictive fiction of luminous and general holocaust should be, paradoxically, the only real of film: This absolute referent of all possible literature [read “of all possible cinema”] is on a par with the absolute effacement of any possible trace. It is thus the only ineffaceable trace, as trace of the wholly other. The only “subject” of all possible literature [read “of all possible cinema”] . . . its only ultimate and a-symbolic referent, unsymbolizable, even unsignifiable, 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 effictive space that cinema effectuates itself in effects. The space of its signs and of its ashes, the space of its cinefication. 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 film). Or rather: Let’s open it after all, remembering that passage from The World as Will and Representation where Schopenhauer affirms 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 first 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 The Fly (Kurt Neumann, 1958), where André sees the face of his wife, Helen, screaming in terror and diffracted through his own eyes that have become the eyes of a fly? Would there be as many worlds as there are eyes? Or even, if it is true that every film constructs a gaze, as many worlds as there are visions or viewings? The world, Schopenhauer says in sum, was opened with the first 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 infinite.” 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 finitude, 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 fire off the shoulder of Orion. . . . All those moments will be lost in time like tears in rain. When Roy’s eye closes after 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 film’s “off-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, fleeing a planet Earth that has become uninhabitable. “A new life awaits you in the offworld 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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first one we see being interrogated at the beginning of the film—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: The camera, he writes, “offers 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: This 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 film, 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 film and the end of a world. So let’s open our eye back up after the end of the world (of the film). Let’s watch it open back up when we watch the film again after its end, from the finitude that is counted down and in advance for us, as are the lives of Roy and the other replicants, as is the filmic montage that they, and we, are. Los Angeles. November 2019. An urban landscape seen from above and from faraway. The city’s lights. Industrial smokestacks spit up flames; 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. The camera lingers. We see little red veins in the white. Above all, we see the iris where what we had just been seeing is reflected: the distribution of the starry spots in Los Angeles at night, the sparkling of this megalopolis coursed through with flaming jets. We are now nearing a building in the shape of a pyramid; the air is still streaked with vessels that fly by in one direction and then in another. Once again, the eye, which fills the screen: once again, at the edge of the iris, at its border with the white of the ocular globe, the reflection of the flames. The flames 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 film’s final cut in 2007 (“The eyeball really was the symbol of the ever-watchful eye. . . . The 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 film and thinks he can find Big Brother’s gaze reflected 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 fingers into Deckard’s eyes . . . ) 84

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where the optical and the ocular are visibly at stake. This unforgettable moment is in effect, once again, that of the construction—or better still: the graft—of the gaze. The two replicants, Roy and Leon, are able to find 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. The building is identified 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. The 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 off 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 stuff. 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 fixate 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 finite 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): This 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 find a reproduction of his Letter to Pythocles, where we can read a definition of a world (kosmos) and a hypothesis about its formation or birth: The world is a collection of things embraced by the heavens, containing the stars, the earth, and all visible objects [panta phainomena]. This collection, separated from the infinite [apo tou apeirou], is terminated by an extremity . . . and that such worlds are infinite 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 field of film, 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 fine sequence from the 1953 adaptation of The War of the Worlds by Byron Haskin where a man and a woman—Clayton Forrester (Gene Barry) and Sylvia Van Buren (Ann Robinson)—hide after having miraculously escaped the general destruction set in place by the Martians who have come to Earth. When they find 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.” This 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 effect 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 filmic cuts that we are, as are Roy or Deckard? When, as Schopenhauer says, “the opening of that first 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 after 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 fissure and a crack in the world. Thus are there slits and crevices along which the world moves away from itself. There are edits where the finitude of the cineworld, the end, is reinscribed anew into the Rorschachian foliation, in between the flip-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. This circle contains another one that is identical and narrower and turns a little faster. This second circle contains another one, the same, and so on and so forth, with ever increasing speed. . . . The effect, 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 find ourselves where? The tunnel leads to the title, Twelve Monkeys, we zoOM onto the O that, punctuated by a pistol shot, is doubled and diffracted 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 filmic kosmos, as the gap between the film 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 finding 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 officer’s rounds of fire 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 often 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: “This is the present. This is not the past, not the future. This 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, finding 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 find 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. This 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. After the prologue in the airport seen through the eyes of the child, we in effect 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 left 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 after the bacteriological catastrophe that devastated the planet in 1996. But this first 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 find the origin of the virus that exterminated five billion people. Here, 92

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too, he will constantly be making his way through tunnels, bowels, corridors, fistulae, and other cavities. This is how he ends up being sent back to 1990 by mistake, and when he disappears to return to the future he had left, 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?” The 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 different terms, this is what we also mean when we say that an interworld opens in the world. 1990 was a mistake. The 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 film’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: This 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 after 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 difficult to aim at with any precision. The 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.” The 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 effect generalizes and exploits what we might call the figure of the narratological rewind (and its symmetrical fastforward counterpart) as we can already find it and as we will find it once again in many other films 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 after Terry Gilliam’s fascinating film. 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. The electronic clocks of the little city of Conejo Springs in Utah start turning backward, counting down the time left before the end of the world, whose exact moment was announced by Samantha (Daveigh Chase) in one of the film’s first scenes: “In 4 days, 17 hours, 26 minutes, and 31 seconds, that’s when the world will end,” she had said to Justin (James Lafferty) 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: There 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 film titles read backward, as if seen in a mirror. In Crack in the World (1964), the Dr. Stephen Sorenson (Dana Andrews) tries to find the precise cause for the huge crevice that has appeared in the earthly crust. The atomic explosion that he set off 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: The Earth cracks and is at the risk of annihilation. This is why the eminent scientist watches films 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. The blinding flash 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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This palindrome is a strange film in the film. 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 infinite number of deferred or reversed countdowns, redirected toward a past from before the advent of the catastrophe. This same palindromic structure dictates the general form of the plot in The Day the World Ended (Roger Corman, 1955): The film, 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.” The same is true in The World, the Flesh, and the Devil (Ranald MacDougall, 1959), where three survivors—two men and a woman this time around—move off 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 filmic figure par excellence for what treatises in rhetoric call hysterology. This is what the protagonist of The Day the Earth Caught Fire seems to dream of out loud: Even before we discover that nuclear tests have shifted 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 film—“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 after her conference on apocalyptic visions, finds 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 Grossenfibber, 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 first 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 left of the dividing line represented by the door frame we watch Woody on television in the midst of being transported into prehistory before finding 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 effect, finds 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 film seems to be torn between the story it is telling and the cartoon it is citing. The world of Twelve Monkeys becomes an intercineworld: Other films insinuate themselves into the film thanks to the distance (diastēma, Epicurus would say) being dug out within it. When Cole, after 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 finger 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. “The movie never changes—it can’t change—but every time you see it, it seems to be different because you’re different. You notice different 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 film that is supposed to seem different every time we watch it? It could, of course, be this, if it weren’t that these phrases obviously also apply to this film, to Twelve Monkeys, to the film we are in the midst of watching. For what happens after this declaration of a fairly sententious credo of infinite cinematic hermeneutics? Cole falls asleep in front of Vertigo. He has dreamed while dozing off 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 film—in the meantime, the film has ended and another has begun—and he now finds himself blinking his sleepy eyes in front of Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963). He is facing Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren) as she struggles with her flashlight 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 film. Cole’s dreams, those time tunnels that transport him through the interworlds, these metacosmic tubes or pipes, now bring him to zap from film to film 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. There, 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 artificial 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. They 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 filmic 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 first postapocalyptic science-fiction novels written by James Ballard, in the 1962 The 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 stifling tropical climate in effect reigns over our entire planet. The 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 floor 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 off the head-

phones and handed them to Bodkin. “This is a waste of time, Doctor. These 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. These 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. This 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 first 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. This 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 The 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 flute from a piece of roadside cane”: The boy took it wordlessly. After a while he fell back and after 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. These passages are absent from the film, 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. The 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 film’s scenes, just like the film sticks to the novel that provides its inspiration). The 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 efforts to forget, a world that it is so difficult 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. “That 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 The 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 film directed in 1975 by the actor L. Q. Jones (the only feature-length film signed with his name), speakers thus propose “sound tours into the past” to survivors of a devastating Third 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 find themselves drawn, humanity’s past: They find the ruins of the New York Public Library, the New York Stock Exchange, Radio City Music Hall . . . Often, 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, after 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 finding out if he is really armed (after 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. Then 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. “That’s good,” says Cole before closing his eyes for a nap: This time it’s Louis Armstrong, “What a Wonderful World.” This 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 finishes his mad reading of Melville’s novel Moby-Dick. The 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. The 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 finishing and being swallowed up by the whirlpool where the whaling ship is sinking in the epilogue to the chase for the white whale? The vessel that sinks through its bottom, carried away by the hunting madness of Captain Ahab, the Pequod, is a kind of prefiguration of the Titanic. The 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 fire-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 left are a few scattered remains: Moby Dick was first 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 effects, 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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This is a gripping vision, which nonetheless misses a crucial aspect of the end of the novel, and for good reason: The edition of Moby-Dick Lawrence seems to have used omitted the epilogue. That 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-coffin 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 final catastrophe of Moby-Dick is, in the same double blow, both apocalyptic and postapocalyptic: What there is after 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 films. 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 first 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. The question that awaits us is, instead, what is the status of the bubble in film? 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 filmed? 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 fifteenth century to express the action of lips that produce a bubble—is also the title of a cult film that was followed by two remakes: The Blob (Irvin Yeaworth, 1958), Beware! The Blob (Larry Hagman, 1972), and The Blob (Chuck Russell, 1988). The 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 film, 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 find 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). The small group leaves the showing and sets off on a quest for the evil substance. After several twists of plot, including a memorable scene among the pieces of meat hanging in a supermarket freezer, the blob finds itself in the projection booth where the projectionist is reading while the projector hums. Through 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 flick that keeps playing. The poor projectionist is swallowed up, and the reel stops. Perplexed, the spectators see a few strips of film and then find 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 engulfing. 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., The Blob, 1958 THE BLOB, OR THE BUBBLE

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film is playing. Here too, it infiltrates 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 film within the film. Then 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. The 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 Thing 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 effectively just answered, “As long as the Arctic stays cold.” This 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: The blob is back; it snacks on a fly, a kitten, and then the negligent worker himself, while on television he is watching . . . the 1958 version of the film. 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 finds himself trapped. But when the local sheriff, posing triumphantly on the frozen blob, gives an interview to a television crew, the spotlight lighting the filming 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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This 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 film. Awakened from its numbness by the shooting lights, the blobulous bubble promises to engulf everything, to emblob the film itself. It is like a blister or swelling of the film, 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 overflow, 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 off-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 (Cliff Robertson) describes as the “city of sin” into an island to which criminals are being deported. Sixteen years after 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 find 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. The 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 first of all the role holograms play in the film. When the president and the officers 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 effect through the intermediary of their holographic projections. The 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 finds 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. After all these long preparations, Plissken is propelled into L.A. in a one-man submarine, a kind of filmic capsule in which he enters the cinema-city par excellence. After many adventures that are often open confrontations with the film 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 first and last time, his hologram. And during the respite provided by this filmic 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 flame. 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 final 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 filming, 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 Third 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 film 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. The 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 flies 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 film at the end of Cloverfield 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 filmic 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 film on the body of another” (5). And we have in effect explored the negative versions of these allegories or tautegories of cinema in cinema, those moments when the film 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 flip-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 film. 116

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But by narrating and auscultating itself from the perspective of its disappearance, cinema touches on a limit that is different from the one that would place the image and the fable in opposition within it. At stake is what we have called its cinefication: 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 film in general, in other words from the perspective of the radical finitude of the cineworld. Yet this finitude 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 often misunderstood formulation by Derrida, we could say that there is nothing outside the film. There is nothing outside the film because the real to which we might want to oppose it already also has the structure of the cinema. This is in fact what the very concept of cineworld indicates: The 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 film that I am. Apocalypse-cinema, we were saying, is, each time unique, the end of the world and the end of the film, 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 fissures to emerge within it. Blobs and “cracks in the world,” in sum. This 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 magnificently evokes in Melancholia. What in effect is this magic cave that is constantly coming up in the film’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? The cave is first mentioned in the first 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?” They 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

viewfinder 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 film’s field, 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, overflowing 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 final 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? There 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 insignificant 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. This tent is so different 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 The 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 The Lost World, the first 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 profile and jaw drawn in negative on the tent’s lining like a huge shadow puppet. In short, whether filmed 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 differential 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. Then 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 first 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 first 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 first time in 1967 in De la grammatologie. And its first English translation by Gayatri Spivak—“There 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 filmic image? Why place an attempt to think cinema, or more generally film, under the sign of this formulation already overburdened with misunderstandings, film, a medium for which Derrida—

and I’ll be coming back to this—never hid his fascinated admiration nor his incompetence? There 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 “confined in a volume, itself confined 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 clarifications in mind, how then should we understand that “there is no extrafilm [il n’y a pas de hors-film]”? And what changes—if in fact, concesso non dato, something does—if we substitute film for text in the aforementioned slogan? These are the questions I would like to begin to consider here, after 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-film”—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 after all, is it not Derrida himself who will have pointed out the importance of commercial and popular cinema as the site par excellence for filmic 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: film 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 fight it out the conviction that deconstruction decidedly has nothing to tell us about the filmic image. Derrida in effect 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 effect find this important clarification: The 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 first figure 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. That is, something which is not. . . . The cinder is not: This means that it testifies without testifying. It testifies 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 film. Let us take the anachronistic risk of taking a huge step backward. To find a new point of departure in a very old text from an archive that speaks to us across an infinite 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 Things, we find the following passage (III, 904ff.) 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 Thou 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. “Cinefied,” 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. This is much more than a matter of simple homonymy that blithely spans the abyss of centuries or millennia in an offhand 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 figure for what cinema shelters within itself structurally: the apocalyptic possibility I was able to describe as ultratestimonial: The camera is always already carried to the limit of all possible testimony or testament—“It testifies without testifying,” as Derrida says in Points . . . ; “It testifies to the disappearance of the witness.” The 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 after-all, the point of view from POSTFACE: CINEMA AND ITS CINDERS

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after 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 after the explosion of blinding whiteness,7 after 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 affair of deconstruction”? This 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 after humanity (or, actually, from before) that a filmic history of cinder should take us. We might, of course, be tempted to undertake this cinehistory by first of all mentioning the most spectacular and expected appearances of cinder on screen, in particular in what are called disaster movies, whose paradigm is configured 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 fire haunt the memory of more recent films, such as Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center (2006), where we find ourselves under the rubble of the twin towers with two surviving cops, the police officer Will Jimeno (Michael Peña) and the sergeant John McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage). The cinder that is thus offered 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 sacrificial incineration that the well-minded humanism of the film 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 fishermen she is leaving. These ashes filmed 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 film she was indeed the one who seems to have started the flight of the ashes: Her gesture of lighting the fire in the fireplace 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 final 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. This 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 The Big Lebowski by the Coen Brothers (1998). At the edge of a cliff, the Vietnam War veteran Walter Sobchak (John Goodman) and Jeff “The Dude” Lebowski (Jeff Bridges) throw the remains of their deceased friend into the sea. And the gray dust that comes out of the can (a Folgers ground coffee can that serves as a happenstance urn), the cremation cinder carried by the wind is all over The 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 definitively disappeared under the eyelid behind which it seemed to be sheltered as the promise of a gaze. The sequence is well known, but we must once again look at it and read its long “film-phrase” (as Vertov would have said). Immediately following the opening credits, there are first 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: The 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 film starts speaking of cinema. After this ultratestimonial overture in which blindness and hypervision collapse into one another, Hiroshima mon amour cites films while the voice-over comments on them. We first see a sequence from Hideo Sekigawa’s Hiroshima from 1953. And She is the one who glosses, “The films have been made as authentically as possible. The illusion, it’s quite simple, the illusion is so perfect that the tourists cry” (18). Then, 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. The 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 flowers, those “cornflowers and gladiolas . . . , morning glories and day lilies that rose again from the ashes.” But what remains in the final count, what emerges at the end of the

Alain Resnais, dir., Hiroshima mon amour, 1959 POSTFACE: CINEMA AND ITS CINDERS

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sequence is that eye that has become pure matter once again, that eye that vision has left: an eye from after the general cremation, from after the holocaust or the everything-burned, an eye that has been incinerated. This cinecinder that, from Resnais’s Hiroshima to all of Hollywood’s Terminators, haunts films that are so different from one other, this cinefaction or cinefication is also a question that inhabits philosophy, in particular after the Second World War. I am thinking not only, of course, of Günther Anders’s gripping Hiroshima Is Everywhere  (the first 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 The Inhuman: The sun is getting older. It will explode in 4.5 billion years. . . . After the sun’s death there won’t be a thought to know that its death took place. That, 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 after, 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 After 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 confined 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 effect “indifferent to knowledge of the event” (116). At stake in this speculative realism is therefore very precisely what I have called the ultratestimonial. This 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 after 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, after 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 cinefied 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 left in the mirror? But let us take it to the point of supposing that all living beings have disappeared. There are only waterfalls and springs left—lightning and thunder, too. The 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 sufficiently complicated to develop films 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. There 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 cinefication, 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 filmic arche-trace.

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N OT E S

. Melancholia, or The After-All 1. Arthur Schopenhauer, The 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 The 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. The 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, “The 2012 Phenomenon: New Age Appropriation of an Ancient Mayan Calendar,” in Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 9, no. 3 (2006): 24–38. The 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 five minutes before midnight: in other words, five—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. The 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 film’s only interest resides in its comparative value: one of the best ways to detect shifts in the ideological constellation is to compare consecutive remakes of the same story” (61). This 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 film 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 filmic level (and not only on an “ideological” one) by considering, for example, a scene like the one visibly inspired by The 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. This is what Lotte Eisner notes in her Fritz Lang (London: Da Capo, 1976), 106. [Translation modified 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 efficient idea of ending with the number zero. This 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 film history. One finds 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 first time in the 1950s concerning nuclear tests in the Nevada desert (see Dictionary of the Space Age, 106, which cites its first 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 figure. 6. Jules Verne, From the Earth to the Moon, trans. Lowell Bair (New York: Bantam, 1967), 204. 7. In Les films de science-fiction (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 The 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 film should give pride of place to the epilogue of The 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 film In Time (Andrew Niccol, 2011).

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

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of Paul Celan, ed. Thomas 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. This 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 filming 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 after the monster’s first 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 filmic 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 filmic gap as such.

. Terminator, or The Arche-Traveling Shot 1. My friend Jean-Louis Leutrat, in the beautiful pages he devoted to this film (“Come le foglie al vento,” in Apocalisse e cinema, ed. Elio Girlanda and Carlo Tagliabuye [Rome: Centro Studi Cinematografici, 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. The 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 Zeughaftigkeit. [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 fight to the death against the robots. Sitting on the edge of a bridge, John Connor tells his story: “I live off the grid. No telephone, no address. Nothing and no one can find 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 finds human skulls and bones. And when it slowly rises and then breaks the surface again, we are after the apocalypse, which took place on July 25, 2004: Huge flying 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). The 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—The 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 The 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 films 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, “The most tedious part for me is all the visual effects. You have to be very patient. And we had over 1300.” In a fine 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 films 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 film itself as . . . an expense that makes expenditure perceptible.” As if, he adds, “film 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 finds the translation “All is indifferent,” 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 five-franc piece is worth one must therefore know: (1) that it can be exchanged for a fixed quantity of a different 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 fixed so long as one simply states that it can be ‘exchanged’ for a given concept, i.e. that it has this or that signification: 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 (The 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 first reading of this text in an essay on Michael Jackson, which appears as the final chapter of Hits, trans. Will Bishop (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 141–57.

. A.I., or The Freeze 1. This 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? “The 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 (“Cinéfile et cinémonde,” Trafic, no. 50 [Paris: P.O.L., May 2004]): “The cineworld is a world, our world, whose experience is given its schema—in the Kantian sense of the word, meaning made possible in its configuration—through film. This 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 coffee or go down a staircase—these are all occasions that lead us to think or to say, ‘This 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, “This Is How the End Begins,” New York Times, December 30, 2011. Dargis’s fine 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 finds 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 off-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 fiction, 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. The author of this unforgettable classification adds, not without unintended humor, “A few films, such as Virus (1980), combine elements from several categories.” 3. Eric Dufour, Le Cinéma de science-fiction: 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-fiction (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 offers something like a sheet being torn, and the calmer lateral wipe comes off 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, “The Little Hunchback,” cited in Alexander Garcia Duttmann, The Gift of Language: Memory and Promise in Adorno, Benjamin, Heidegger, and Rosenzweig, trans. Arline Lyons (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2001), 123. 3. 2 Thess. 2:1–8. This is the King James Bible translation with indications of Paul’s Greek in parentheses. Giorgio Agamben gives a determinant interpretation of this passage in The Time That Remains, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). After Agamben, Roberto Esposito (Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life, trans. Zakiya Hanafi [Malden, Mass.: Polity Press, 2011]) and Paolo Virno (Multitude between Innovation and Negation [New York: Semiotext(e), 2006], 56ff.) 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 différance is a misleading oversimplification: “The 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 finds its truth in the eschaton, is infinitely 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 différance.” (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.] Thanks 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 off!”). 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 signification” to the extent that it generates a “phantasmatic signifier without signification or, conversely, a full signification with no signifier” (ibid., 54). Or yet again when he considers this “x” as “the master signifier for no signification, for deferred or postponed . . . signification” (54). We might say with perhaps greater rigor that the apocalypse-cinema of nuclear parousia is the fantasy of a finally full and radiant signification that would be equivalent to the perfect and blinding absence of sense that founds the sense of filmic images. This 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 ‘effacement and exclusion’ in filmmaking that leads inevitably to abstraction” (190). What Lyotard is trying to think under the name of acinema is precisely an acinefying regime of filmic 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 effiction, 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, The 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 fin 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 fine 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. The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, trans. C. D. Yonge, modified (London: Bohn, 1853), 456. 2. One does find several fleeting references to the term in Marx. In Capital, for example, particularly in the chapter titled “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof ”: “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 modified.—Trans.]). The idea of an interworld also emerges in a striking way over the course of a recent reading of Capital by Werner Hamacher (“Lingua Amissa: The 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 fissures and joints, in intermundia,

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as Marx . . . says of Epicurus’ gods: they are monsters of difference. . . . The 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 The Gift 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. Thomas Dutoit, in Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan [New York: Fordham University Press, 2005], 147), while commenting on a poem by Celan (“Unlesbarkeit”). And in the final 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 The Road (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2006). On the one hand, the father and son, survivors after 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 first time that to the boy he was himself an alien. A being from a planet that no longer existed. The 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, The 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: “The end of the world is every day. We die every day.” [Translation mine.—Trans.] 5. In Faux raccords (Paris: Actes Sud, 2010) Elie During offers a fine analysis of Vertigo based on the opening credits’ forms and the Möbius strips that, he says, we find again throughout the film, regulating its different significations. 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 after” and proteron, “what comes before), in other words the inversion of the purportedly expected chronological order. Virgil’s words in The 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 films, Contagion (Steven Soderbergh, 2011) is constructed on a narrative chiasmus like this: The 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, The 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, The 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: The “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). “The revenge and self-glorification 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). This is in fact what makes the Apocalypse look like “a great spectacle,” in sum that which makes it an anticipated form of the blockbuster: “The 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. “The Cold War writ small and literal,” jokes Jeff Sharlet (The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power [New York: Harper Perennial, 2009], 181). The author indicates that the director of the first, 1958, version, Irvin Yeaworth, had until then shot films for Christian education and was seeking to “spread his message subliminally.” As it happens, the first title imagined for the film was The Glob That Girdled the Globe. Thus 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 find his way in the devastated megalopolis, where, says the recorded voice, the huge earthquake (“the big one”) wiped the entertainment industry off the map. In Beverly Hills, Plissken finds himself briefly prisoner in an infernal clinic where bodies that have abused plastic surgery survive only thanks to new implants of fresh flesh. The triumph of a generalized cinecosmetics. In Jacques Rancière, Film Fables, trans. Emiliano Battista (Oxford: Bloomsbury Academic, 2006). See, in particular, page 6: “The 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 find 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, “Cinéfile et cinémonde.” “There is nothing outside the film [il n’y a pas de hors-film]” is of course the modified citation of the formulation one can find in On Grammatology (trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997], 158), “There 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 (The Evidence of Film [Paris: Yves Gevaert éditeur, 2001], 44, 46), “With film, the wall becomes an opening cut in the world onto this very world. This 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 loftier and purer, named ‘ideas.’ Film works the opposite way: it does not reflect 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’Effet 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 film, 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), Jeff Nichols magnificently 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 film’s epilogue places this in doubt once again: Perhaps he was right after 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 first 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 first public and commercial projection (on December 28, 1895, at the Grand Café on the boulevard des Capucines) that the screen was fixed 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. The 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. . . . There is nothing before the text; there is no pretext that is not already a text.” 2. Jacques Derrida, Limited, Inc., trans. Jeffrey 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 film 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, “There 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, effaces what it inscribes. Effacement is not only the contrary of inscription. One writes with cinders on cinders.” Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, 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 fine 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: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson, trans. [slightly modified] 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 fly or of an eagle, the eye of another animal. . . . On the contrary, it is the eye of matter, the eye in matter” (Cinema 1. The 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. The 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. . . . The 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 (“The 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 Thought Go On without a Body,” in The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey 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 Third Text 27, no. 1 (2013), 131–40; republished in Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (London: Verso, 2013). Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (London: Continuum, 2010), 26. This English translation includes one notable addition I will be discussing further on. In his generous afterword 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, The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Vol. II,

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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. That is a materialist definition. An image—that means the effects 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 reflected at some point on a surface, come to strike the corresponding same point in space. The surface of a lake might just as well be replaced by the area striata of the occipital lobe, for the area striata with its fibrillary 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 field 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 Artificial Intelligence: AI (Steven Spielberg, 2001), 45–47, 52 Beneath the Planet of the Apes (Ted Post, 1970), 3–4, 104 Beware! The Blob (Larry Hagman, 1972), 110, 112 The Big Lebowski (Joel and Ethan Coen, 1998), 130

The Birds (Alfred Hitchcock, 1963), 99 Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982), 7, 53–54, 61, 82–86, 88–89 The Blob (Irvin Yeaworth, 1958), 110–12, 151n5 The Blob (Chuck Russell, 1988), 110–12 The 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 Cloverfield (Matt Reeves, 2008), 15–21, 116, 140n3 The Conformist (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1971), 152n9 Contagion (Steven Soderbergh, 2011), 149n5 The Core (Jon Amiel, 2003), 79 Crack in the World (Andrew Marton, 1964), 38, 95

The Day After (Nicholas Meyer, 1983), 72–73 The Day After Tomorrow (Roland Emmerich, 2004), 42–43, 52 The Day the Earth Caught Fire (Val Guest, 1961), 96, 139n7 The Day the Earth Stood Still (Robert Wise, 1951), 79 The 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 The 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 The 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 The 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 The Omega Man (Boris Sagal, 1971), 9–10, 138n4 On the Beach (Stanley Kramer, 1959), 115–16 The Planet of Peril, first 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 The Road (John Hillcoat, 2009), 103, 120 S. Darko (Chris Fisher, 2009), 95 The 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 (Jeff 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 They 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 After 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 The War Game (Peter Watkins, 1965), 77–78 The 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 The World, the Flesh, and the Devil (Ranald MacDougall, 1959), 96 World Trade Center (Oliver Stone, 2006), 129

INDEX OF FILMS

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